After the Carnage

by Tara June Winch

  The dinner carried on, and he held on throughout, past the aperitifs, amuse-bouches, starters, mains, salads, desserts. There were new plates for every course, matching glasses, ceramic dishes, heavy silver serving spoons. The walls were covered with art in glass frames, the colours matching the furniture. Toward the end of dessert, some of the siblings left. They kissed Vincent on the cheek awkwardly, hugged their mother enthusiastically. Their mother laughed, handed them leftovers, hugged them tight. She told them to come back soon, that she loved them. He’d never seen a mother like this. Whether it was real or feigned, he couldn’t tell.

  Eventually it was just her and Vincent and Chloe, who ate slowly and was only now serving herself a conscientious sliver of dessert. The mother filled their glasses from a new bottle of wine, which she’d insisted on getting from the cellar. She’d held her apron in one hand and kicked the rug aside with her kitten-heeled toe to reveal the hidden door. Vincent offered to help her get the wine: ‘What’s down there anyway?’ he asked, absentmindedly. She glanced up at him and half-smiled, raising her eyebrows slowly. And then a flash of something else.

  He felt punctured with paranoia for watching it all. Had she considered him, for a moment, to be a potential thief? He wasn’t going to break into her house, he would never do that, but he already felt guilty for it. Kept the wineglass at his face.

  He’d met that look before – how is it that only mothers can look at young men this way? He saw his own mother in it, the look of feeling nothing for a person. She hadn’t been thinking he was a thief, he realised; she thought he was the opposite of a thief – he could take nothing, because he was nothing.

  Chloe’s mother put music on the stereo, settled down at the head of the table. Close to them.

  ‘So, Vincent,’ she said, ‘obviously you’re busy training with running now – have you had any wins lately?’

  He set his glass down. ‘Not lately, no.’

  ‘Where did you grow up? Is there a local university there? Might you go back to school?’

  ‘Down the coast, about an hour out. I don’t know about school. Isn’t really what I’m thinking about.’

  ‘Well, will they remember the man or the run, Vincent?’

  He started. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Ah, what do I mean? Let’s talk about it. Mmm, this music, for instance’ – she was almost shouting over the sound – ‘do you think an artwork like this can exist alone, or must the artist be judged also?’

  He started to panic again. What? he thought. He poured himself more wine and looked at Chloe, wanting her to catch the baton her mother had flung. And so she did, speaking on and on, intelligently but almost angrily, flapping her hands about. They kept on like this, the two of them, faintly yelling at each other with a strange affection. He thought about the question. He guessed that they couldn’t be separated, the doer and the deed; he thought about all the interviews he’d done about running, how the journalists from the papers had always asked where he was from, what he was. They didn’t ask him to summarise his running style, his training schedule.

  She was exposing him, he realised. He imagined her saying to her daughter, later, See? There’s nothing there. Say something, he thought to himself. Say something so she knows you’re here.

  Vincent could feel things leaping up in his throat. Before he could control them, before he could prevent himself from diving off the river bridge, he spoke, already too loud.

  ‘Of course an artwork can’t be judged by itself!’

  Chloe’s mother turned to him. ‘Why do you believe that, Vincent?’

  ‘Because people are interested in the story behind the art, or whatever.’

  ‘What artists are you referring to, Vincent? Can you name one?’

  He scrambled. ‘That Van Go guy. He cut off his ear. If I saw his paintings, I’d be thinking about this guy cutting off his ear.’ He searched for Chloe’s eyes. I’m here.

  ‘Van Gogh,’ Chloe said the name in a guttural way he’d never heard before.

  Her mother smiled. ‘What about Wagner? He was an anti-Semite, but he was still considered a genius. The person was very much separate from his creation.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure he was judged for that, too, when people listened to his music.’

  Chloe’s mother smiled at him now, smiled at the performance of disappearing him. ‘No, Vincent, he wasn’t.’

  ‘I’m sure he was.’

  Chloe interjected.

  ‘I don’t think you understand, Vinnie.’

  Her mother hummed in agreement. And then it happened. Hands wrapped around his neck, closing in. He pushed away the plates at the table, and everything else within reach. He felt stifled by the utensils. By Chloe calling him Vinnie when he wasn’t anymore, when he tried so hard not to be.

  ‘NO, I DON’T FUCKING UNDERSTAND!’

  He kicked his chair out from under him, stepped from it as it slammed against the wood floors, said the words clear again, though with an unsure mouth, and tried one last time to find Chloe with his eyes. She only looked through him. His head bowed, dismissed, he grabbed his wallet and phone and darted across the dining room, sprinter’s hands already chopping at the air. When he reached the front door he slung it open and bolted through like a leaping cat.

  Through the city park, along the main streets, past the girls and the guards and the nightclub lines, out toward the beginning of the airport highway. Vincent ran and ran, only giving thought to his technique. He ran until he broke a sweat, then threw away his denim jacket, let it balloon from an overpass down onto a lower freeway. He was making good time, he thought, considering the dinner shoes. After another few miles he ran all the way back to get his car. When he started the engine, Chloe strutted past the headlights and slipped into the passenger seat.

  A few silent streets away she snapped at him, the girl he thought he might love. She angled her body, stretched out the seatbelt, to allow herself to face him, and began to tell him how rude he’d been, how crazy it was to run away for two hours, how her mother had made them a lovely dinner, who Wagner was, what she and her mother had been trying to say, that he should drop her home, that she would get someone to pick up her things. That he could do the same. His head boiled. His legs cramped.

  She kept at him. Why did you do that, why? Just tell me why. She shouldn’t have let him drink so much. Shouldn’t have thought he would fit in. The runner or the man, the run or the runner. What did it mean? He yelped, then, and cried out, ‘It’s too difficult to explain’ – ‘What’s so difficult to explain?’ she said. And then an impulse came to swerve at speed, to make the car uncontrollable, to let her know something. That he was uncontrollable? That he was still there? Who could know? But he did it. Driving a straight line between kerb and white-flanked barrier, he accelerated, didn’t break at the turn – that’s how it was put formally.

  What was left was invisible. The bruise on her leg that wouldn’t bloom for a day, the small bone fracture, the dented car, written off, that would reappear as part engine, part spares. What was visible was the unseen unlove. The bit that undoes the entire seam, the loose thread. He regretted it. He was sorry. Something opened, spilled over.

  This time would become two years of falling. Staying over on the spare bed as a favour, and then overstaying. Losing friends. Wasting time, watching the muscles fade, eating a donated meal followed by a borrowed one. He could not reach the wall.

  Coach, when he stopped turning up for training and his remaining sponsor dropped him, said, ‘You know this has a title, your life. Success and failure. You did this, Vincent.’

  It was true. He knew that he’d done it. He didn’t know how, exactly, but he realised that he had. He had run, had won medals, had met all sorts of people. He had loved someone. It had been there, a glimmer. The runner and the run. He leant over the communal computer and printed out another hundred copies of
the flyer. During the city’s lunch hour he stood in the street, clad in a past season’s line of Adidas and handed out the flyers framed with dollar signs. After some time the block became quiet again. Vincent stood in the cool winter air and felt content for that moment. It felt good to be someone who didn’t have the things he needed.

  Mosquito

  For my nineteenth birthday I got a single-parent pension card and a bassinet. He was gone before the first ultrasound.

  I crack the plastic casing off the birthday cake. I used to make them myself, but James doesn’t care anymore and I’m not trying to win any prizes. I’ve been waiting for this day for 676 weeks; for almost half that time, every alternating week, I’ve wanted to die. I know all the ways, all the easy ways, but in my mind it always looks like this, in the kitchen. I’m dressed in my sweater, a light sweater, it’s autumn perhaps and I’m washing dishes with the sleeves pulled up, and I take the knife, slash straight down both forearms and stand that way with my arms outstretched, bleeding. I didn’t ever do it though, just dreamt of it. But I won’t think like that anymore. It’s my son’s thirteenth birthday today. He gets to choose where he wants to live. We spoke to the lawyer this morning; the paperwork will be through this week. I feel like it’s my own birthday today.

  We tried to leave once before, after he broke his rib. James was three, coming home for the week on the afternoon of his birthday. He was bending down holding James on each of his shoulders. ‘Look at me and say you love your dad, say you love Daddy.’ James must have mumbled something as instructed. He picked James up and sat him on the bonnet of his car and began whispering in his ear.

  ‘Alright, I’ve got to go,’ I said, my top and bottom teeth grinding against each other, as they did.

  ‘Say I love you Dad!’

  ‘He said it,’ I pleaded.

  ‘He didn’t say it clearly.’ He turned back to James. ‘James, it’s so important to love your dad, do you understand?’

  James nodded; I pushed my teeth together hard, tried not to cry.

  ‘Alright, mate, you can climb in Mummy’s car, buddy.’ I spoke a few octaves higher than I had for a while. James slid down the side of the bonnet and ran to the open backdoor I stood beside.

  ‘Hold on, mate’ – that’s when he reached for James’s overnight bag from his own car, books mostly, large, flat hardcovers, and walked over to, or so I thought, click in his belt and place the bag at James’s feet.

  I opened the driver’s door, sat inside and reached for the seatbelt.

  The arsehole pushed his finger into James’s stomach, and he squirmed down the booster seat.

  ‘Please say it for Dad.’

  ‘Come on, just leave it be,’ I tried.

  ‘You don’t want to tell Dad? After everything I’ve done for you this week?’

  James squirmed, squeaked in the way he did when he wanted something to stop – broccoli coming toward his mouth, seagulls too close to his French fries, a boy kicking dirt behind him on the walk home from the crèche.

  ‘Fine, mate, here’s ya shit.’

  From the front seat I watched him whack James across the chest with the overnight bag twice, thwack, thwack, then fling the heavy bag onto the back seat.

  I screamed, James was silent, everything else was silent, the street, the whole beachside town.

  I reached to grab his arm to stop it, but it was over just as fast and the coward ran to his own car and started it, drove off without another word, nothing. I think I was in shock – I came out of the driver’s seat, came around the car and scooped James into my arms; he cried a little, but the way a naughty dog might, as if he was used to being smacked with a newspaper but still didn’t like the scolding.

  ‘I’m so sorry, my baby, my darling great boy, are you okay? You’re safe now, I’m here, honey.’

  I was there. I was there, I am here, and this was our lives; every alternating week I couldn’t breathe properly, I couldn’t eat (what was James eating?), I couldn’t sleep (where was James sleeping?), I could drink (but I didn’t want to drink). I didn’t know what went on there; all I knew was our lives were out of my control and twenty-six weeks a year I wanted to die.

  Later in the afternoon, after James and I had gone to the ocean pools and walked along the beach collecting shells, and popping sand bubbles with our fingers and trying to be bright and be gentle, he had still been in pain. We’d gone to the hospital, got the X-ray – broken rib. Broken Rib. Back then they didn’t grill you at the hospital, didn’t grill you in the courts. I knew what would happen – we’d go to court to apply for an apprehended violence order, try again to get custody; in the meantime James would be forced to go to his father’s, and his father would be even more pissed off that I threatened to take James away from him. And God knows what would have happened to James then. After I’d put him to bed that night with a wheat pack and baby Panadol, I’d gone to the bathroom, rolled out a ball of toilet paper, held it over my nose and mouth and cried; while I cried I made a plan. I’d organise a girls’ week to Bali, take James, promise I’d have him back for his father’s week. I’d ring him the next day, not mention the X-ray, just say don’t worry about yesterday, sometimes it’s frustrating and exhausting after a week, I get it. Ask him how he is. Stroke his ego, tell him James said he’d had a great birthday week with him. Feed him some necessary lies.

  I had two weeks to do it – I went to the library at nights, traced the islands with my finger: up, up, up through the continent. I read up on the Hague Convention, looked for English-language schools, I found a place called The Earth School in Vietnam (hippy stuff, raising a resident water buffalo, tending rice fields, no walls in the classrooms), and what would I do? I’d still take photos, try to keep publishing them in the rags here, I had a vague idea, but for that moment it had seemed like it could be enough. I had savings, enough for the first year or two in Asia at a guess. It was easy to get my girlfriends to go, it was low season, they had bar jobs mostly, Bali was cheap, they’d go and drink and fuck some tourists, have their hair corn-braided, sunburn, and I’d skip out on the flight home, never meet them again. It was as much of a plan as I could hatch within the fortnight. I told one person about it, just a friend, one of the girls from high school, someone to tell. She’d taken it in fine; understood, she said. I’d told her then I just needed to tell someone, I’d send her a postcard every month from different names, just to say hi; I told her if she didn’t get a postcard for six months then to contact the police, but only then. She promised.

  The night before the departure I organised James’s baby stuff. Folded his lovely first winter jumpsuit, powder blue, size six months, with a white silk pageboy collar. I tied up in parchment all the journals I kept from his first three years, then vacuum sealed them to keep the mildew out. His first leather-soled booties, first walkers, wool-trimmed. That piece of ribbon he reached out for and took as I bought fabric, I’d discovered it as I went to ease him from my tired hips into the stroller, a ruler-length of white ribbon with gold lettering that repeated I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU. I’d slipped a dollar onto the counter of the store and my heart, silly and young and passionate, burst. I put all the things together and took them to the safe deposit at the bank. Locked our history away for some safer day, when I figured we could bear it.

  I couldn’t sleep, Kristie had called to confirm the time the shuttle was taking us all to the airport. She didn’t mention the plan, neither did I. I called the arsehole in the morning and coaxed James into saying ‘See you in a week, Dad!’ and I squeezed his hand gently and mouthed the words ‘love you’ so he’d follow; he didn’t though, he just said, ‘Think Mum wants you.’

  I placed our boarding passes on the counter at the gate; the woman smiled and double-checked it all and said ‘welcome aboard’. We walked down the detachable bridge, and Deb, one of the girls, pinched James and said, ‘Excited, little mate?’ I remember that. Then we
were seated, idling, the pilot’s voice came over the speakers to explain, ‘Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, it will be a few more minutes as we wait for a clear runway for take-off.’

  That’s when the two federal police came in, unbuckled my seatbelt, took my handbag and James and led me off. The plan was thwarted, they’d taken me off right away since Indonesia didn’t have the Hague Convention and it was more convenient, the lawyer explained later at ninety dollars an hour, to just take me then instead of send the Indonesian police out if I followed through with my plan. I was thinking we didn’t even get a swim in the hotel pool.

  The following months had been hell. At home they’d found printed material for the school in Vietnam, and the rental agency confirmed I’d given notice. After five years of court cases I finally got James back to shared custody. It was the lowest point I’d ventured to in my journey as a young, then ageing, single parent. I never spoke to those girls again.

  I’ve invited Kristie tonight, though; I want to tell her something. But first I take the cake out to the boys, they’ve been playing UNO, nice boys, I don’t do candles or sing happy birthday, I just put the cake down on the coffee table and some cutlery and a stack of plates. ‘Happy birthday, James,’ I announce. He smiles at me in such a kind way, a way to say thanks for not embarrassing me in front of my friends. I love that smile, I’ve done right. I take a glass of courage wine to my bedroom, drink the whole glass in one swift gulp. I dial the number. He answers.

  ‘Hi, James is having cake with his friends, I just wanted to call and tell you something I’ve been meaning to say …’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘For the last thirteen years I’ve been lying.’

  ‘He’s my kid, he better be my kid.’

  I take a breath and speak clearly, but fast, fast enough to get it out and finish what I want to say.

  ‘Oh yes, he’s yours, yet thankfully he is nothing like you. He is just wonderful. You, on the other hand, are the worst person I have ever known, and I have pretended to understand you, pretended to be civil at least, even nice, I reckon. But I have hated you every single day, I’ve hated you completely and I would like to say goodbye and good luck and I hope I never have to see your rotten face again.’