After the Carnage

by Tara June Winch

  ‘A crockpot,’ Proust offered.

  ‘Yes, that.’

  ‘That’s a lovely memory, Butterfly.’ Barcry was almost in tears.

  ‘I’ve got a proposition. Do either of you have to go, do you have a job?’ Proust asked them both. ‘I don’t, so no judgement here.’

  ‘I did,’ Barcry said.

  ‘I do, I’m a tattoo artist,’ Butterfly81 said.

  ‘Tattoos! Wonderful!’ Proust said, sincerely delighted. ‘And you, Barcry, what did you do before?’

  ‘I sold green paint.’

  Proust squinted at Barcry. ‘Why only green?’

  ‘You know, all airplanes, all aircraft in the world, all over the world, under the topcoat, whatever colour it is, there is always a special type of green paint beneath.’

  ‘No!’ Butterfly81 said, before adding, ‘Why?’

  ‘You guys are really interested in this?’

  ‘Of course we are – who fucking knew!?’

  ‘It’s a primer, it’s a chemical compound really, to prevent corrosion.’

  ‘That makes sense, what shade of green?’

  ‘Sort of avocado.’

  ‘I would never have known that.’

  ‘Yes, it’s true not many people know what’s going on underneath. I don’t think people think about how things are put together much anymore.’

  ‘I think you’re right.’ Proust was feeling as if he’d found his long-lost children. He was at ease with these people. He felt the taps start to turn off inside him, the sun rise up and peer in through the attic windows.

  ‘What time do you start work, Butterfly?’

  ‘Midnight.’

  ‘Perfect! Let’s go,’ Proust said. ‘We can get some stewed potatoes, I know a place, buy some hotdogs, day-old baguettes; oh, and another for me is flowers: lilies of the valley and dog-roses.’

  ‘Labour Day flowers?’

  ‘I guess I felt envious of the blue collar – it’s another story, kids. Let’s get some supplies and walk to the cemetery.’

  ‘Cemetery?’

  ‘The Père Lachaise cemetery – the real Proust is there, and a lot of other folks too. Let’s toast them.’

  ‘Toast the dead?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘That sounds good. I’m hungry, I like that,’ Butterfly81 said as she stood up, joining Proust at their terrace table.

  ‘Okay, I’ll come too,’ Barcry said, not feeling as if he were on the edge of tears for the first time in a long time.

  Proust fixed the bill, took the remainder of the sugar sachets and placed them into Butterfly81’s hand.

  They were zipping their coats when Ultramarathoner appeared at the edge of the terrace: he was hunched over a railing, vomiting and choking and panicking all at once. He managed to swing himself onto the pavement, holding onto the rail with one arm and mouthing the diagnosis: ‘ART ATTACK.’

  Proust dialled an ambulance, and within minutes a siren could be heard hurtling toward the group and the now gathering crowd of patrons.

  ‘Lie on your back!’ Barcry stood on a chair and threw in his two cents’ worth.

  ‘Not on his fucking back, he’ll choke on his tongue!’ Butterfly81 was down on her knees, turning Ultramarathoner, who by this stage was blue-faced, onto his side.

  ‘Raise his legs.’ Proust had no idea what to do, although he should have, at his age. He bent down, hoisting Ultramarathoner’s legs in his armpits and holding them as high as he could with his torso twisting.

  ‘Start CPR!’ Barcry was back on the verge of tears and rushed down to Ultramarathoner’s chest, flipped him onto his back, raised two hands above his own head and focused all his energy on the space between Ultramarathoner’s nipples, readying himself for a sort of Heimlich manoeuvre, when an ambulance officer grabbed his balled fists.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing, stand back!’ screamed the officer in his high-vis orange suit. He pushed Barcry backwards, where he proceeded to stand up and begin silently crying.

  The ambulance officer lifted Ultramarathoner’s shirt and cleared his airway and began CPR as the other officer prepared a suitcase and an airbag and shoved the pipe into Ultramarathoner’s blue mouth, which turned pink within seconds.

  ‘What’s the patient’s name?’ the officer asked the three of them.

  Proust spoke. ‘Err, we don’t know.’

  ‘It’s Ultramarathoner!’ Butterfly81 screamed.

  ‘He’s Ultramarathoner!’ Barcry, who had now finished crying, chorused.

  Proust turned his lips upside down as if he tasted something sour and led his two new friends away.

  ‘Sorry, we don’t know his name,’ Proust added as they walked away from Ultramarathoner, who was carried on a stretcher in the arms of the competent.

  ‘We can’t help,’ Proust told them.

  ‘Why not?’ Barcry had started the waterworks again.

  ‘Because we don’t know him, what are we going to do, go to the hospital, his wife or kids or someone will turn up and we’ll be like Hello! We are your father or husband’s junkie friends, pleased to meet you! – Oh you didn’t know he was a drug addict? No, we don’t get into other people’s business.’

  ‘I mean, he didn’t look much like an ultra-marathon runner, did he?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. But, it was still weird, seeing someone change colour like a newborn baby does.’

  ‘You got kids, Barcry?’

  ‘Yes, just the two boys, they live with their mother, just outside the city.’

  ‘Very nice to hear, how old?’ Proust was trying to lighten the mood.

  ‘Nine and twelve.’

  ‘Cute!’ Butterfly81 was becoming chirpy again as she dumped sachets of white sugar into her mouth, agape.

  Proust walked with his two new friends. He guessed it would take them fifteen minutes to reach the cemetery. He wanted, he’d realised only then, to take a lot longer to meet himself there.

  A Late Netting

  If we had been drawn down a river, at least that knowing river would’ve taken us toward its mouth; a city might have invited us in and set us onto the certainty of a bank. Here, though, all those odds had fallen against us in a panic of horizon. For eleven days not a scrap of land had appeared. I didn’t have the empty resolve to know my fate – it seemed a pointless want – but I would have been more at ease for seeing the edges of possibility. Whereas there on the boat, we were anchored only to the name of ocean, bound to too much. All I knew was that the Pacific was endless, and the Wildflower and we were estranged from shore.

  Maurice and his wife had taken me on as their deckhand, for two hundred dollars, the passage to New Zealand and a contact for a job by a mountain range where cherry farmers hankered for workers. I’d quickly assumed the idea and the life of a drifter, imagining more sailing and fruit picking, scouring maps by torchlight for elsewheres at night, and growing a beard perhaps. I was twenty, unusually large-handed, with a movie-star jawline, so they said, but the bare legs of a milk boy. Teeth set wide as a child’s, on their way to sitting straight in my mouth, but never. I had a mess of thick hair and muscled arms but a sunken boy chest; like Sagittarius, I was neither one nor the other. I was odd to look at, I knew that; I knew when people stared in the street that they did so with indifference, and not with a leaning toward affection.

  I had met Maurice and his wife at a restaurant at the boatsheds in Sausalito. I was waiting their table in the California heat when Juliette had touched my hand. My hand startled her, intrigued her – she was so tired, she’d said later, that she was unaware of her manners – she drew breath and reached over, dropping her palm on the top of my hand as I set their meals down. She had apologised to me, and glanced with an almost guilty look to her husband, seeking judgement, but Maurice kept his eyes on my hands instead, he asked if I liked boats. I sa
id that I did, that I couldn’t sail but I intended to build one someday. He said I had sailor’s hands, which I should teach to control a boat before tackling the wood to make one.

  By day four Maurice had made me first hand, in replacement for Juliette; he’d done this in an unspoken way, but it had been unconcealed to the three of us. He and Juliette had fought bitterly whenever a bridle or bimini needed catching, or the canary-yellow mainsheet on the boom needed tightening or letting go. The fights played out in French, incandescent, almost black and white, big and furious bodies contrasted against the muted, empty seas. The insults were foreign to me, yet the body language entirely familiar. It had become obvious that they’d led themselves into a life of apathy for each other, that they had reason for punishing each other. I wondered what it had been or if there was reason at all – I guessed it had flowered, formless at first but there, as if they’d had depression tuck them into their wedding bed, as if they’d called out to her to draw the curtains and keep them company. Juliette’s sadness made it difficult to imagine their stories of the ocean, how single-handedly Maurice and the Wildflower had spent two weeks in the Pacific Gyre cataloguing ocean life and plastic trash. It had made him a minor face of conservation and gained the attention of the French college student and Greenpeace activist. How they’d both been seasonal circus acts on cruise liners for the first three years. He was a human-pyramid man painted gold, while Juliette was a dancer.

  Then, how together they had sailed the Wildflower to the Caribbean, and through the cool of Alaskan waters; how they had passed the pirates of the Miami coastline. I could see Juliette as the young art student, my age, with flushed cheeks. One could see what she used to be, in her still half-lit eyes, in the navy coat she wore in the evenings, tailored in at the waist, though the girl who rode her bicycle at each port, who swam in the cold water, had disappeared; another woman stooped below deck.

  The storm came. It was night. It had been expected, swift but expected. The GPS had been clear for days before the weather screen had turned green with alarm; the waves on the elevation indicator had risen quickly. Juliette hurried to secure our things below and keep safe. Maurice said we must anticipate what it would be like; he put the second reef in so we’d still make headway but not be blown off course. He marked the deck with steady feet, purposefully checking each rope and pulley, fixing his sailing legs in the torrent. I caught his face before going below: he was stern, his eyes focused in the distance. Maybe it was his life out in the middle of nowhere, or the reality of having our lives out there too.

  Below, the smell was comforting, dried seawater and the tangy scent of warming rust from the travel heater. With the hatch closed, the smell began to steep and deepen. Juliette was preparing food; she’d strapped herself against the bench with a fixture she had made. She said seasickness was easy to take while standing; she said lying down was like being open to it, letting it possess you. I disagreed, and would take myself to the keel, lie face down, trying to get as close as humanly possible to the bottom of the ocean.

  The walls in the galley were cherry wood coated in clear fibreglass; it was a grand, if miniature, scene. Juliette was cutting cheese from a semi-frozen bag and I sawed some bread before I had to lay myself out against the keel. The Velcro fixture was pulled in around her arse, and made the flesh push out from the edges. She looked young from behind, or sexy; I didn’t know the difference. When I looked away, to her face, she was staring at me. I darted my eyes, and then, not knowing where to look, shut them tight. I heard the Velcro rip apart, the resting of the heavy knife against the bench, her shoes moving toward me. I thought I heard the deck above creak. Then I felt the entire weight of her body against my back, her breasts, her hipbones, and the faint smell of bitter chocolate from her warm breath on my face.

  Just then, the beat of Maurice’s boot against the hatch. ‘Heave to,’ he screamed. ‘Heave to.’

  I climbed up the gangway, tried opening the hatch carefully but it flung itself backwards against the deck. I hauled myself up and fastened the hatch behind me against the wind. We dropped the sails quickly and without fuss, and pulled the covers over and knotted each end. The winds were pulling up thirty-five knots, fifty knots. We weren’t in a position to try to make way or move; as the sails fell completely down, the boat spun. I moved to go below but Maurice called me back to watch. Had he seen us moments before? I held on to the base of the middle mast. The boat spun off the height of a wave and rode against the gale, and then again as we involuntarily changed direction, and again. Each time a wall of water appeared and then dropped, wind lashed at our exposed skin. We sat up there, under the low of a blackened sky, the freezing whip of wind, for maybe ten minutes, ten hellish minutes, while the sea tore its fingers at us, spitting fury. It was a feeling of not being allowed there, that we were being mocked away – perhaps it was just me being mocked. I vomited onto my knees, a small amount that grazed my throat. Maurice laughed, his head thrown back.

  When the boat had spun once more and levelled itself on the top of a thick rise, I moved to the hatch and let myself down. Maurice followed. We sat together, the three of us in a silence, a shot of whiskey each in the soft light. I tried not to look at Juliette. The only thing to do, Maurice said, was to wait it out, sleep and not get too drunk; we might have to change sails during the night. I lay down in the cavern in the bow of the boat. When the sickness was too much, I got up and passed Juliette, to lie in the dark against the salt-crusted keel again. Juliette laughed. Maurice was sleeping. (Later I would watch him holding her head down and fucking her in the half-light.) The boat rocked, and then spun, without making ground. As I lay there, eyes closed, long-suffering, with Juliette laughing, I thought of land, I thought of a foundation, of a cement block being poured for a home, feet unmoving in a flat clearing. Then the ocean would rock again, cups would sway and bang on their hangings, and I would imagine us sliding from the ocean, Juliette dancing, a merry-go-round, a spinning top, basketballs beings thrown into hoops, everything spun and in motion. Then calm again, slow rises, falls. I heard the Velcro as Juliette unstrapped herself from the bench again.

  ‘I’m going to bed. Bonne nuit, Phillip.’

  ‘Bonne nuit, Juliette,’ I said in a pained voice.

  I couldn’t understand them. How they were, together or apart. I dreamt of land and fell asleep.

  Breaking the still the next morning was the sudden sound of gravel below – we’d hit something. The hull slammed from a lull, we woke, and Maurice and I climbed the gangway to see.

  Shore wasn’t far off. But it was catching the sun: it was in the west. We had gone off course, Maurice said. He dropped down below to check and came up again, raising the mast against a twenty-knot wind.

  ‘Australie,’ he said.

  *

  We arrived at the docklands, a spare and industrial sailing port, with plywood-clad homes and powdery paint-flecked sheds, a few planted palm trees and a flat of bitumen. We pulled up against the smaller boats. Maurice practised saying we were thirty-five foot when we were forty-two. It was cheaper, he boasted. Juliette and I both climbed off and roped the boat up. The docks had the appeal of abandonment – as if one could come or go with no rigmarole or sentiment. It was early morning and there was a young girl with too long hair, a metallic bikini and ripped shorts, polishing the stainless-steel rails on the yacht next to us. When she saw us I noticed she contorted herself to appear more alluring and sucked her stomach in. I wasn’t really looking at her – I wasn’t admiring her – it was just a strange thing for someone to be on display so early in the day. I turned away and tried to find Juliette’s eyes; they only scanned me, bemused or sad. Maurice took our papers, our passports and his wallet and left the boat to order a rudder and find out about visas. Juliette put a pot of coffee on and lit a cigarette.

  I hated this weather. It was thick and made the once-clean smell of the ocean seem foul. I wanted to vomit and to kiss her at once
. I leant by the starboard rail close to her. We were alone on the boat for the first time. We stared out into the morning – away from the sheds and the young girl – and watched a trawler, with Brisbane City Fish Markets painted on its side, pull up a late netting of fish. The net was huge. The fish pounded and writhed chaotically in the loose cage. Grey and useless.

  ‘Luckily the ones in the middle will suffocate fast,’ Juliette said, exhaling smoke.

  ‘You mean hopefully?’ I asked.

  ‘No, luckily – it’s a certain death,’ she corrected me.

  I put my hand beside hers, stretched my smallest finger out, and tried to touch hers. She took her hand off the railing, stubbed her cigarette out in a film canister. And I knew she wouldn’t leave him. That the paradise was lost and found. That she had been aged by a man and an ocean, and she couldn’t go back to the life of the stories or her young French skin. A late netting. Suffocated.

  That day I would leave them both. And walk from the station, into the savage heat of a city. And I would find that imagined river, and sit by her bank and watch the dark water flow gently, back to the Pacific.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you for everything – Michelle Martin, Matthew Winch, Felix Riebl, Jenny Longrigg, Gideon Haigh, Clare Wright, Madonna Duffy, Ian See, Ros Reines, Aviva Tuffield, Wole Soyinka, Marie-Laure Chapier, Boris Barbat, Frank Moorhouse, Elsie Martin and the late Alwyn Martin, and my entire family. Also: Philip Kiep, Nick Powell, Gavin Pryke, Adediji Mola, Scott Sayare, Stanislas Degroote, Shanaka Fernando, Josh Ross, Allison Rhoner, Dan Barron, Dan Kelly, Rhoda Yusuf, Zuhour Flowers, Emad Karim, Raphaelle Aubert, Ming Fung, Aaron Hughes, Claire Hickson, Jeremy Morse, Cristen Maroney, Ash Powell, Jessamy McCarthy, Carl Routhier, CJ Camerieri, Aiko Fujino, Angelo V Suarez, Fatima Zaidi, Fatima Bhutto, Larissa Martel, Annie Macnamara, the Fishers, the Havarts, the Harts, the McCoys, the Strichers, the Paulsons. And so many others that kept me writing, especially Rebecca Sparrow, Nick Earls, Van Badham, Melissa Lucashenko, Omar Musa, Tony Birch, Steve Kinnane, Steve Toltz, Anita Heiss, Nam Le, Sue Abbey, Ellen van Neerven, Miles Allinson, Jaya Savige and Lila – always for you. Special thank you to Rolex, UQP, the Australia Council for the Arts, Varuna – The Writers House, and Booranga Writers’ Centre.