Tony is waiting for her to ask him again. But she will not. She nods at the plastic bag, says, ‘Great. I’ll tell her.’
He is still intrigued by Geoff’s head. He takes a step to look past her, to inspect it.
‘He’s not gunna last, is he,’ he says then, slowly. He draws out the vowel: laast.
And now Mandy is free to hate him. She looks him in the eye for one long second and then away, staring at the floor, breathing deeply. She feels the tips of her fingers pressing into the cool metal of the bars. Then Tony suddenly steps back, grabbing the drip stand in one hand, expertly spinning it on its wheels.
‘You’ll remember,’ he says in a firm, sullen voice. Without waiting for her reply he stalks off, rattling the drip stand before him.
Mandy stands there, gripping the bars of the bed, waiting until the blue of his overalls has gone completely from her peripheral vision before she can exhale and let her grip relax.
Inhale, exhale. The maggots and their glistening sound.
A SMELL—floral, or appleish, but with a surgical chemical undertone—emanated from the floor as Chris and Margaret walked along the new corridor with its bright lights and its shining, speckled grey linoleum. Margaret had felt her shoes pressing her weight into the new lino. Soon it would look like the rest of the hospital’s floors, she supposed, dreary with age and the foot-trafficked burden of sickness.
‘I’ll drive,’ Chris said, and Margaret gratefully handed him the keys.
Now they’ve had coffee and are standing in the gloom of Macquarie Hardware before a slanting wall of coloured cards. As Margaret peers around, it seems they are almost alone in the enormous cave of the building. Off in the timber section she can hear heavy things being moved but can’t see anyone. Nearer by, at the paint counter, a young man in a dark green apron stands peering down at a paint tin, glancing over at Margaret and Chris now and then but making no move toward them. Margaret is thankful. Talking to strangers seems to take such an enormous effort. Although this young fellow, she thinks, might be one of Alan Gutteridge’s sons—he has the same narrow forehead and sagging pouches beneath the eyes—and therefore is not quite a stranger.
‘What about Promised Land?’ Chris proffers her a little piece of cream-painted cardboard, his head cocked in concentration as he frowns down at it.
Margaret holds a fan of the little pieces in her hand already. They have narrowed it down to Clouded Pearl 2, Frayed Hessian, Cracked Clay and Twisted Bamboo 9. Chris has patiently explained the difference between Fresh Neutrals and Warm Neutrals, and now without irony he holds out the Promised Land with a hopeful expression.
On the way here, stopped in the car at the traffic lights, Margaret had looked out at the caged magazine and newspaper headlines in their frames on the footpath, propped in a row against the dingy blue-tiled wall of the newsagent. Summer Super Food Ideas. Four Marines Dead in Roadside Bomb Attack. Find out what Inspires Simone Warne and Bill Granger. At the door of the newsagent one of the Barron girls struggled to push a stroller over the step. Then the lights turned green, and Chris turned the car left. Margaret had said then, ‘Mandy is right, isn’t she, about not being on holidays.’
Chris had kept looking at the road, annoyance crossing his face.
‘It’s got nothing to do with holidays.’
He brought the car to a stop at the next corner, hunching forward, looking past Margaret for oncoming cars. He glanced at her, then past her again, and said in a firm, meaningful voice, ‘I think it’s a lovely idea. It can be a surprise for Geoff.’
Margaret felt the tears of gratitude spring to her eyes as they coasted out onto Monarch Street and were carried across town towards the hardware store, towards this pearly new possibility, of Geoff’s homecoming.
But now, standing here in the muggy warehouse with the paint strips in her hand, the whirring fans high above making no difference to the prickling of sweat at her brow, Margaret is drenched with a sudden and complete exhaustion.
‘I don’t know . . .’ she says in a small voice.
Chris looks up from the paint swatches.
‘It’s okay,’ he says, taking the fan of cardboard strips from her hand and putting them in his pocket. ‘We can do it later.’
And he puts his arm about his mother-in-law’s bony, narrow shoulders and guides her past the rows of tins, past the dump bins of brooms and cheap drill bits, back out into the shock of sunlight in the car park. Once inside the car he watches Margaret allow herself to fall back into the comfort of the passenger seat and close her eyes.
He starts the ignition, easing the Corolla out of the parking spot. He too is exhausted. By watching Margaret for signs of collapse, by the monstrous mess of his father-in-law’s body. By trying to keep at bay a cold, looming acceptance—of the thing he sees he has for years been turning away from—that Mandy is finally almost completely transformed from the person she once was.
Margaret’s frightened face in the hardware shop had caused him to hurtle back into a memory of Mandy, on one of her first trips home from Bosnia.
They were buying the papers in a Rose Bay newsagent and she said, ‘I need a pen.’ He’d waited at the door for long minutes before going to look for her. He had found her hunched in front of a rack of pens—crying, noiseless but unstoppable, into the wet privacy of her hands. He had taken a minute to realise that what had triggered this was the shock—of a homecoming to a rich, peaceful country, all injustice suddenly crystallising in the obscenity of too many pens, too easily gotten. But today, as Chris drives along the hot dry streets of her childhood town and recalls her hardened face in the hospital ward, the cold monotone in which she speaks to her mother, he cannot imagine Mandy ever softening to the point of tears again.
MANDY LIFTS her father’s hand, lays it down again on the white cotton blanket. She has been here an hour, perhaps two. Someone raised the head of the bed when she went to the toilet. The ventilator pushes the air in, out. The monitors beep and sing but nobody takes any notice; in here these are only the sounds of existence, not of alarm. There is some sort of staff meeting going on at the end of the ward; the nurses stand at a whiteboard marked with the few patients’ names, talking in a group.
All this waiting is unbearable. She sits down again.
Three beds along, the television comes to life. The young man with the amputation lies holding the remote control against his bare chest, watching the screen sleepily. A young woman—girlfriend, or sister, scrawny with the same neglected look as his—spent most of yesterday and today sitting there with him, but she has gone. A plastic shopping bag and a motorbike helmet are on the tray table. Then Mandy hears the television voice say ‘Luke Russell, familiar to many of you—’ Startled, she leans to see the picture. The presenter is saying ‘BBC reports from political hotspots like Africa and Iraq,’ and then the picture changes to a satellite feed, a man sitting in a chair with a nightscape of blocky buildings behind him. He holds a book in his hands. Then the screen flicks to another scene, Cate Blanchett talking with cameras flashing about her, and then the station’s promotional logo appears before an ad for carpet cleaning comes on.
Luke Russell.
A nurse has broken away from the group and is walking past the young man’s bed. He appears to have fallen asleep. She takes the remote control from his chest, snaps the television off. He doesn’t wake.
All the correspondents Luke Russell’s age had eventually merged, for Mandy, into one sort of Luke: the carefully tousled hair, the British public school voice, the cheekbones, hints of a drug-troubled past, the expensive shoes battered into war chic. In her early days she had slept with too many of them. Out of fear, out of loneliness, from boredom or exhaustion. Or to protect herself from the crashing noise of mortar fire, from nightmares.
All through her high school and university years Mandy had been sexually cautious—the idea then of a one-night stand was unbearable. Having a boyfriend, even, was horrifying if she let herself think of it. To sleep naked wi
th someone else, someone who knew how she looked, smelt, tasted. Occasionally she has wondered if she married Chris so early simply to get it over with, to reduce the number of people through her life who could possibly know these things about her.
But once you had seen a woman’s opened head. Once you had heard the fifteen-year-old Kosovar girls’ toneless horror stories (the bloodstained mattresses, they rubbed me with body lotion first) and smelt the graves, crouched watching with your hands over your nose and mouth, not moving lest you lose your footing and begin a madwoman’s screaming as you fell. Once you’d knelt in your jeans on a dry road with your hands clasped like prayer over the back of your head and felt the gun tip at your neck, tasted the dust of stones in your mouth and heard your own hoarse voice calling Ani Sahafiya, Ani Sahafiya, I am a journalist over and over into the dirt, smelt your own shit squirting out.
After these things, then ‘reputation’, ‘marriage’—these words were only some distant, formless haze. Every part of you was risk, every taste adrenaline. So for a time she lived as they all did; she unshackled herself from fear. It no longer existed. At the end of assignment in some destroyed city, the reporters’ parties took on a raucous, savage abandon. Once she had returned to a room to see one of the correspondents mimicking fucking her against a wall, imitating the sound she made. It was as though all their lost adolescence was being called up, and they hurled themselves into it—the drinking, the drugs, the desperate sex, to obliterate the months of what they had smelt, what they had seen.
On the trip home from Bosnia the first time, this adolescence subsided, and she stepped out of the plane’s captured air to resume her old life. But something had changed. She found she could no longer move easily through familiar rooms or streets; she felt a layer of something impenetrable—some thick, elastic membrane—between herself and her ordinary life. The scenes, sensations she had cried for, imagined so desperately while she was away—a walk in the botanic gardens by the harbour, while she watched a dog in Sarajevo devouring a human hand; a glass of cold wine on the jasmine-scented balcony in Rose Bay, as she had shuddered freezing and boneshaken in a Bosnian army truck—these homecoming experiences had somehow shrivelled, become joyless. And she was shocked to hear, repeated in her head, something one of the journalists had said to her before she left, grinning drunkenly out of the dark in a bar in Split. Admit it, he had said. War is fun. It sickened her, but the notion lay in her mind, half-submerged like the latticed bones of a dead baby whale she had seen once dredged up on a beach. And as soon as she came home she found that she wanted to go back.
War is fun.
Mandy hears a noise behind her here in the ward, feels herself jump.
It’s Stephen. He falls into the chair beside her, tossing his car keys from hand to hand.
‘D’you think he hears anything?’ he says after a minute, watching their father’s body.
Mandy shrugs, shakes her head. They look at Geoff, say nothing. After a minute Stephen leans down to fossick in his backpack on the floor.
Mandy drags her chair forward again to the bed, reaches to pick up her father’s hand, holds it in hers. Its corpse’s weight.
She sits cradling his hand once more and goes back to thinking of Luke, with his long limbs and his rich-boy’s wide, marble-carved lips. The way he hung himself off chairs, slouching so low that he always seemed louche and decadent, no matter what fleapit hotel or hole in the ground they inhabited. Luke, who spoke to her directly, asked her opinion in tricky moments, looked her in the eye. Who loved his sister, whose parents were normal. Who said the thing he hated most about this job was the vanity, the memoirs with their sarcastic one-liners and the insiders’ nicknames for every fucking thing—Baggers, Dixie— the boring, insistent I was there, I was there, I was there. She bites her lip. A moment ago on the television Luke had been holding a book with his own face on the cover.
In Sarajevo once they’d stayed in the small fifth-floor apartment of an old woman named Hana. She spoke no English, but as she ushered them in she spoke in a constant stream of Bosnian, occasionally pausing to repeat a word, emphasising some point they did not understand.
‘Take your shoes off,’ Mandy had murmured to Luke in the dark entranceway. She eased her own off as she spoke, pushing them with her foot to join the little collection of worn shoes next to the wall, but then Hana saw Luke bending to untie his laces.
‘No, no . . .’ The old woman waved a hand, smiling, to show she didn’t mind. He stopped.
‘Go on,’ said Mandy, but Luke straightened. ‘She doesn’t care,’ he said, and trudged into the next room in his filthy boots, dipping his head low under the ceilings.
Hana’s apartment had a window looking out onto a vacant block. There used to be trees, she indicated with some gestures. The city was framed in the window, bare and gritty. This, her living room, was where they would sleep. It was large by Sarajevo standards, carpeted with thick shag pile in swirling caramel. How, without electricity, did Hana manage to keep her house so clean? Mandy looked again at Luke’s encrusted boots.
The beds were two couches, on opposite sides of the room. They had told her they were married. The back cushions of the couches had been removed and the makeshift beds were already made up with clean flannelette sheets. The pillows were pillowcases stuffed with clothes.
As they put down their bags Hana babbled in a questioning voice, repeating a word again and again. Mandy smiled helplessly, shaking her head and raising her hands. Hana disappeared and then appeared again in the doorway, holding a dzezva, a small Turkish coffee pot. ‘Ah!’ Mandy said.
‘We haven’t got time,’ Luke muttered to her, fiddling with the sat phone.
She murmured in reply, ‘Yes we have,’ and nodded, smiling at Hana. ‘Yes! Thank you!’
In a minute Hana returned, gesturing with her bony hands for them to follow her into the kitchen. In the middle of this tiny room, jammed between the window and the fridge, was a red plush velvet sofa, firmly upholstered, with delicately turned wooden legs. It was spotless.
Mandy hesitated, but Hana pointed, and Luke sat heavily down. Mandy watched the sofa take his weight and then lowered herself to perch on the edge. She gestured to Hana, patting its cushioned arm: ‘Beautiful.’
Hana smiled wide, showing her yellowed teeth. As she passed them each a tiny, bird’s-egg-blue coffee cup she put out her own fingers to the sofa’s velvet, stroking it with a single fingertip, as gently as she would a newborn baby’s head. The skin on her wrists and forearms was fretted with fine, dry lines, like fibreglass. But so frail and fine, her skin seemed, a simple jolt against a table corner might tear it open.
Hana began talking, gesturing again. Her voice was high and childish, and now and then she whimpered and crooned as she indicated how the mortars came, how she and the rest of the apartment block dwellers had to sleep in the basement; how three people—she held up her bony fingers—in the block had been killed. She showed them how she had cried—rocking, mewling rhythmically, hroo, hroo, tracing tears down her face with her index fingers as she acted—and then she got up from her chair, and cowered near the stove—boom, boom—and drew her own arms around her shoulders, crying again. They nodded and listened, and Mandy thought of this old woman struggling in her nightclothes down the concrete stairs to a dirty basement to sleep on the hard floor with men and children and other women in the cold and dark.
After the coffee, as they left for the day, through the kitchen doorway Mandy saw Hana bent lovingly over her couch, smoothing the nap of the velvet with the flat of her hand.
That night Mandy had listened to the mortars across the city, lying in the dark, watching the window glow now and then. Then there was a louder one, near the apartment. ‘Christ,’ she had whispered to the ceiling.
‘Are you okay?’ Luke whispered back. She had got out of her bed and went to his, and lay with her back against him, watching the space of the window, listening. As the noises grew louder, the sky brighter, Luke pulled he
r closer, nuzzling her neck, his hand reaching her breast. She could feel his erection, and she closed her eyes, allowed herself to be drawn in, and the more the air cracked and the louder the threat, the more urgent came Luke’s breath, and behind her closed eyes the city exploded, again and again.
When she woke in the morning Luke was already up; she dressed and grabbed her toothbrush. Hana had shown Mandy a pair of faded slippers for indoor wear, and she put them on, repelled by the greasy intimacy of the concaves worn by Hana’s feet. Mandy shuffled in the slippers to the bathroom, passing the kitchen, and through the crack in the door she heard Hana’s high voice and saw Luke slouched across the sofa, one of the little blue coffee cups in its saucer on his knee.
Soon afterward they left the apartment, squeezing past Hana in the tiny vestibule, Luke shouting their thanks and shoving a handful of US dollars at her. She seemed distressed, repeating something in her crooning, whiny voice, but they were in a rush. It was only as they turned out of the front door that Mandy caught sight of Hana through the doorway again, scrubbing and scrubbing with a soapy cloth at a coffee stain on the sofa.
AT ONE o’clock Stephen is still sitting in the plastic chair, one ankle resting across his other knee, and picking at a frayed piece of rubber on his sneaker. ‘I’ll drop you home,’ he says.
Their mother is waiting at the house to serve lunch.
‘Why, where are you going?’ asks Mandy as she gathers up her book and bag.
‘Hardware. For kite stuff,’ he says, still picking at his shoe. Then he looks at her. ‘I’m going to make a kite.’ He stands up and leans over the railings of their father’s bed. Mandy can’t see his face.
‘What for?’ she says. ‘You don’t think he’s going to see it, do you?’
Stephen is holding Geoff’s thick, meaty hand now. Mandy thinks, if he presses too hard on the swollen pad of the palm it might burst, pale and wet as a plum.
‘He won’t, you know,’ she says.
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