by Sarah Hall
‘Yum,’ said George, absently.
The funny thing about the bar, which was only just dawning on George, was that it was entirely free of people. And deadly silent. Out the window was a view of the city he’d never seen. Whenever he looked up he had the sensation that he was somewhere else. In Europe. In the past. On a film set. Asleep. Every now and then a young woman crept out from behind a curtain to touch Pattern on the wrist, moving her finger back and forth. Pattern would smell her wrist, make a face, and say something unintelligible.
But here she was, his very own sister. It was like looking at his mother and his father and himself, but refined, the damaged cells burned off. The best parts of them, contained in this one person.
‘First of all, George,’ Pattern said. ‘Dad’s girlfriend? Really?’
‘Trish?’
‘What a total pig you are. Does this woman need to be abused and neglected by two generations of our family?’
‘How could you know anything about that?’
‘Oh cut it out. It astonishes me when I meet people who still think they have secrets. It’s so quaint! You understand that even with your doors closed and lights out . . . Please tell me you understand. I couldn’t bear it if you were that naive. My own brother.’
‘I understand, I think.’
‘That man you pay to watch you while you’re cleaning the house? On your laptop screen?’
‘Guy Fox.’
‘Oh, George, you are a funny young man.’
‘That’s actually a fairly mainstream habit, to have a watcher.’
‘Right, George, it’s happening all over the Middle East, too. A worldwide craze. In Poland they do it live. It’s called a peeping Tom. But who cares. Baby brother is a very strange bird.
‘So,’ she said, scooting closer to him and giving him a luxurious hug. ‘Mom and Dad never told you, huh?’
‘Told me what?’
‘They really never told you?’
‘I’m listening.’
‘I’m just not sure it’s for me to say. Mom and Dad talked about it kind of a lot, I mean we all did. I just figured they’d told you.’
‘What already, Jesus. There’s no one else left to tell me.’
‘You were adopted. That’s actually not the right word. Dad got in trouble at work and his boss forced him to take you home and raise you. You were born out of a donkey’s ass. Am I remembering correctly? That doesn’t sound right. From the ass of an ass.’
He tried to smile.
‘I’m just kidding, George, Jesus. What is wrong with people?’
‘Oh my god, right?’ said George. ‘Why can’t people entertain more stupid jokes at their own expense? Je-sus. It’s so frustrating! When, like, my world view isn’t supported by all the little people beneath me? And I can’t demean people and get an easy laugh? It’s so not fair!’
‘Oh fuck off, George.’
They smiled. It felt really good. This was just tremendously nice.
‘You don’t understand,’ he said, trying harder than usual to be serious. ‘Mom punted so long ago I can’t even remember her smell. And Dad was just a stranger, you know? He was so formal, so polite. I always felt like I was meeting him for the first time.’
He tried to sound like his father, like any father: ‘Hello, George, how are you? How was your flight? Well that’s grand. What’s your life like these days?’
Pattern stared at him.
‘Honestly,’ said George. ‘I can’t stand making small talk with people who have seen me naked. Or who fed me. Or spanked me. I mean once you spank someone, you owe them a nickname. Was that just me or were Mom and Dad like completely opposed to nicknames? Or even just Honey or Sweetie or any of that.’
‘Jesus, George, what do you want from people? You have some kind of intimacy fantasy. Do you think other people go around hugging each other and holding hands, mainlining secrets and confessions into each other’s veins?’
‘I have accepted the fact of strangers,’ said George. ‘After some struggle. But it’s harder when they are in your own family.’
‘Violin music for you,’ said Pattern, and she snapped her fingers.
He looked up, perked his ears, expecting to hear music.
‘Wow,’ she marvelled. ‘You think I’m very powerful, don’t you?’
‘Honestly, I don’t know. I have no idea. Are you in trouble? Everything I read is so scary.’
‘I am in a little bit of trouble, yes. But don’t worry. It’s nothing. And you. You seem so sad to me,’ Pattern said. ‘Such a sad, sad young man.’ She stroked his face, and it felt ridiculously, treacherously comforting.
George waved this off, insisted that he wasn’t. He just wanted to know about her. He really did. Who knew where she’d vanish to after this, and he genuinely wanted to know what her life was like, where she lived. Was she married? Had she gotten married in secret or something?
‘I don’t get to act interested and really mean it,’ George explained. ‘I mean ever, so please tell me who you are. It’s kind of a selfish question, because I can’t figure some things out about myself, so maybe if I hear about you, something will click.’
‘Me? I tend to date the house husband type. Self-effacing, generous, asexual. Which is something I’m really attracted to, I should say. Men with low T, who go to bed in a full rack of pyjamas. That’s my thing. I don’t go for the super-carnal hetero men; they seem like zoo animals. Those guys who know what they want, and have weird and highly developed skills as lovers, invariably have the worst possible taste – we’re supposed to congratulate them for knowing that they like to lick butter right off the stick. What a nightmare, to be subject to someone else’s expertise. The guys I tend to date, at first, are out to prove that they endorse equality, that my career matters, that my interests are primary – they make really extravagant displays of selflessness, burying all of their own needs. I go along with it, and over time I watch them deflate and lose all reason to live, by which point I have steadily lost all of my attraction for them. I imagine something like that is mirrored in the animal kingdom, but honestly that’s not my specialty. I should have an air gun in my home so I could put these guys out of their misery. Or a time-lapse video documenting the slow and steady loss of self-respect they go through. It’s a turn-off, but, you know, it’s my turn-off. Part of what initially arouses me is the feeling that I am about to mate with someone who will soon be ineffectual and powerless. I’ve come to rely on the arc. It’s part of my process.’
‘You think these guys don’t mean it that they believe in equality?’
‘No, I think they do, and that it has a kind of cost. They just distort themselves so much trying to do the right thing that there’s nothing left.’
‘And you enjoy that?’
‘Well, they enjoy that. They’re driven to it. I’m just a bystander to their quest. And I enjoy that. It’s old-school, but I like to watch.’
‘So you are basically fun times to date.’
‘I pull my weight, romantically. I’m not stingy. I supply locations. I supply funding. Transportation. I’m kind of an executive producer. I can greenlight stuff.’
‘Nobody cums unless you say so, right?’
‘That’s not real power,’ she said, as if such a thing was actually under her control. She frowned. ‘That’s bookkeeping. Not my thing at all. Anyway, I think the romantic phase of my life is probably over now. My options won’t be the same. Freedom.’
‘Jail time?’ asked George.
‘It’s not exactly jail for someone like me. But it’s fine if you imagined it that way. That would be nice.’
George hated to do it. They were having such a good time, and she must get this a lot, but he was her last living blood relative and didn’t he merit some consideration over all the hangers-on who no doubt lived pretty well by buzzing around in her orbit?
‘All right, so, I mean, you’re rich, right? Like insanely so?’
Pattern nodded carefully.
‘My money is tied up in money,’ Pattern said. ‘It’s hard to explain. You get to a point where a big sadness and fatigue takes over.’
‘Not me,’ said George. ‘I don’t. Anyway, I mean, it wouldn’t even make a dent for you to, you know, solve my life financially. Just fucking solve it. Right?’
Pattern smiled at him, a little too gently, he thought. It seemed like a bad news smile.
‘You know the studies, right?’
Dear god Jesus. ‘What studies?’
‘About what happens when people are given a lot of money. People like you, with the brain and appetites of an eleven-year-old.’ ‘Tell me.’ He’d let the rest of the comment go.
‘It’s not good.’
‘Well I don’t fucking want it to be good. I want it to be fun.’
‘I don’t think it’s very fun, either, I’m afraid.’
‘Don’t be afraid, Pattern. Leave that to me. I will be very afraid, I will be afraid for two, and never have to worry about money again. Depraved, sordid, painful. I’ll go for those. Let me worry about how it will feel.’
Pattern laughed into her drink.
‘Sweet, sweet Georgie,’ she said.
It was getting late, and the whispering interruptions had increased, Pattern’s harried staff scurrying around them, no doubt plotting the extraction. An older gentleman in a tuxedo came out to their couch and held up a piece of paper for Pattern, at eye level, which, to George, sitting right next to her, looked perfectly blank.
Pattern studied it, squinting, and sighed. She shifted in her seat.
‘Armageddon,’ said George. ‘Time to wash my drones with my drone towel!’
Pattern didn’t smile.
‘I hate to say it, little George, but I think I’m going to have to break this up.’
He didn’t like this world, standing up, having to leave. Everything had seemed fine back on the couch.
‘Here,’ Pattern said, giving him a card. ‘Send your bills to William.’
‘Ha ha.’
‘What?’
‘Your joke. That you obviously don’t even know you just made.’
She was checking her phone, not listening.
On the street they hugged for a little while and tried to say goodbye. A blue light glowed from the back seat of Pattern’s car. George had no idea who she was, what she really did, or when he would ever see her again.
‘Do you think I can be in your life?’ George asked. ‘I’m not sure why but it feels scary to ask you that.’
He tried to laugh.
‘Oh, you are, George,’ said Pattern. ‘Here you are. In my life right now. Closer to me than anyone else on the planet.’
‘You know what I mean. How can I reach you?’ He didn’t particularly want to say goodbye to her.
‘I always know where you are, Georgie. I do. Trust me.’
‘But I don’t know that. I don’t really feel that. It doesn’t feel like you’re even out there. When you’re not here it’s like you never were here at all.’
‘No, no,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t believe that. That’s not true.’
‘Is something going to happen to you? I don’t know what to believe.’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Something already has. Something has happened to all of us, right?’
‘Please don’t make a joke or be clever, Elizabeth. I can’t stand it. There’s nobody left but you. What if I don’t see you again? What will I do?’
‘Oh Georgie, I am right here. I am right here with you now.’
*
George kept quiet about his sister in therapy. He talked about everything else. But sometimes he’d catch Dr Graco studying him, and he’d think that perhaps she knew. She didn’t need to be told. She might not grasp the specific details, the bare facts – who and when and what and all those things that did not matter – but it seemed to George that she could see, or was starting to, that someone out there was seeing him, watching him. That someone really knew him and that, whatever else you could say about him, it was clear that he was no longer really alone.
At home George listened, and hoped, and waited, but his phone never made the strange tone again. He found nothing on his sister in the news, though he looked. Whoever had been calling for her blood had gone quiet. And here George couldn’t decide if their silence meant that they’d lost interest, or that they had her, they got her, and Pattern was gone.
One night it was late and he’d let his uncertainty overpower him. It had been a year since he’d seen her. Where was she? How could she just disappear? He’d been saving up his idea for a moment just like this one, so he sat down at his desk and wrote his sister an email.
Elizabeth –
Is it just me now, or are you still out there? Don’t write back. I cannot imagine how busy you must be! There is a lot that I cannot imagine. But that’s okay, right? You’re out there looking, I know. I am waving at you, wherever you are. I am down here saying hello. I love you very much.
Your brother,
George
FIXATIONS
Ceridwen Dovey
As is the way of the body, when things are going right, we are allowed to remain blissfully unaware of the fact that we are housed in sheaths of flesh. When things go wrong, however, worse than the pain, worse even than the shame, is no longer being able to ignore the body’s relentless systems of audit and account: things go in, things come out, things go in, things come out, over and over and over until we die. Selene lay awake at night between feeds, fantasising about how she was going to take her body for granted again when this was all over – she was going to abuse the hell out of it, eat trans fat galore, drink buckets of booze, show her body who was boss, that it had no right to hold her hostage like this.
It wasn’t the baby – though of course that had been the ultimate proof of the nature of how things go in and then come out – nor was it the breastfeeding. These processes were celebrations of the body, or at least celebrations of the higher functions of the body.
The crude bodily problem keeping her awake most nights, and in agony at least once a day, was not directly related to birthing a baby, though nobody seemed to believe her when she said that the birth itself had been a piece of cake, relaxed, downright enjoyable, compared to this. She could no longer go to the toilet – pass a bowel motion, was how her GP liked to put it – without being in excruciating pain from the delightfully named anal fissure that had made its presence known when her baby was two weeks old.
If Selene had to summarise what she had learned so far from the experience of the fissure (as she and her husband referred to it, so often that it was like the third partner in their marriage), it would be this. That the ultimate taboo, perhaps the only one still remaining in modern Australian culture, was to talk openly about your toilet life. Toilet humour was okay, in certain prescribed situations. But the moment Selene began to share the real, lived experience of her current toilet issues with close friends – helplessly, because she didn’t really want to be sharing these details, yet she was so consumed by them that she felt inauthentic in her friendships if she didn’t – she could see the desperate look in her friends’ eyes as they pretended it was normal, while silently willing her to stop. It seemed to her no coincidence that it was Captain Cook who had introduced the word ‘taboo’ into modern English usage, stealing it, along with much else, from the Tongans, whose word tabu had indicated something set apart, forbidden.
How could it be that this minuscule split in a fibre of her body to which she’d never given much thought could set her apart from the rest of the teeming human life on the planet? Even from her husband, who had been nothing but compassionate. She could not help resenting his carefree attitude, disappearing into the bathroom for five tranquil minutes before leaving for work, not paying any more heed to this act of emptying his bowels than to any of his other ablutions.
It was a new low point when she said to him one morning as
he exited the bathroom, the flush audible, ‘I’m so jealous of you.’ What on earth did she expect, for him to make the sacrificial offering of a live animal to the toilet each time in acknowledgement of his body’s privilege in being free of pain?
He embraced her in sympathy, kissed the sleeping baby and left their flat to jog for the bus. Selene was left standing outside the bathroom looking with dread at the still warm toilet seat, knowing she had to face the day’s first anguish. Time slowed. At least the baby was asleep, she counselled herself. Once before she had endured the agony with him strapped to her chest in the Bjorn, her tears of pain – and every time, there were tears – dropping onto his pulsing fontanelle.
Afterwards, she sat in a hot bath, and then applied the battery of useless creams whose names left nothing to the imagination (Proctosedyl, Rectinol) that she was using in a last-ditch attempt to avoid some kind of surgical intervention. The day before, at her appointment with the specialist, after she had curled up on her side on the examining table, he’d announced apologetically that the Botox injection hadn’t worked to release the muscle spasm. It was a pity about the taboo, which she was trying harder to observe after one too many pleading looks from interlocutors, because ever since she’d had the Botox injected she’d been coming up with great one-liners she couldn’t use: ‘You think my forehead looks good? You should see my sphincter!’ Thank the Pope the injection had been covered by the public hospital or it would have cost thousands to render her anus wrinkle-free. And it hadn’t even done the trick.
The specialist had said she would need to have a lateral sphincterotomy under general anaesthetic within a few weeks if there was no improvement. She’d come home straight away and Googled it, and discovered that, for some bizarre reason, which not even medical professionals could explain, if you made a second cut in the internal sphincter – which had gone into spasm because of the fissure – it sometimes released, and solved the problem. In his consulting rooms, she had asked the specialist what the side effects of such an operation might be, and he’d paused and gazed out the windows at his view spreading all the way to the line of blue water at Bondi. There were helium balloons – ‘It’s a girl!’ – weighted down on his desk with a bag of fluorescent lollies. His own daughter had been born a few days previously, and he had enthusiastically told Selene that his wife wanted another baby ‘immediately’. This was right before he’d looked at the rack and ruin of her bum.