Breaking Up
Two days after the windows imploded, the first cracks appeared in the walls. We had taped up the glassless windows with gaffer and cardboard and at night the wind moaned as it nudged the torn edges of cardboard, trying to get in. The sky was a murky grey but electricity still coursed through the powerlines. I peeked out the front door. All the houses in the street were lit up like casinos. A neighbour I’d abused for letting his dog shit on our lawn crouched on his roof hammering something down. He saw me looking at him and he waved but I stepped back inside and closed the door. This was no time for socialising. My husband, Mattie, lay on the couch, exhausted from gathering shards of glass and heaping them into empty suitcases.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘Just trying to keep things together,’ he muttered before he nodded off.
We collected all our foodstuffs and laid them out on the benchtop in the kitchen.
‘Why did you buy so many tins of tomatoes?’ Mattie asked as he stacked the tins in a small mountain to the left of the coconut milk and the baby corn. ‘And how many smoked mussels did you think we could eat?’
The next day rats and cockroaches and ants and spiders fled the house. They gathered in a lumpy carpet on the roadway and started moving toward the sea. Cockroaches rode the humped backs of rats while spiders climbed over each other in their hurry to escape. Our dog roamed the neighbourhood, baying and howling. He raided the neighbour’s rubbish bins and brought back their tax returns.
‘I hate knowing this much about them,’ I said to Mattie.
‘Too much. We know too much about each other,’ he replied.
Before long the cornices tumbled from the walls and the doors refused to shut. Amazingly, power still travelled through the wires and we watched movies to try to bring back the good old days. Mattie chose The Towering Inferno and I thought he was joking but we sat through the whole thing laughing because it was so bad. Then I picked The Poseidon Adventure but we didn’t laugh anymore and I knew I’d gone too far.
‘You always go too far,’ Mattie said, knocking back another glass of the Grange we’d hoarded for fourteen years. He fell asleep, drunk, and I made a fruit cake.
‘We should call people,’ I said, so we called everyone we knew. Every day. We tried to think of new conversations to keep them liking us. Maybe we tried too hard. Maybe we smelled desperate. They stopped answering our calls, so we stopped answering theirs. We picked up the phone to shout into it. ‘Breaking up. Can’t hear you. Breaking up.’ I added a few crackling noises.
I tried looking on the internet for recipes with tinned tomatoes. The page stalled when I got to casseroles. A message told me the server had crashed under an unusually high load. Then one of the walls groaned and the bookcase fell on the computer so it didn’t matter anyway.
When a brown goo began to seep through the floorboards it stuck to our shoes like tar and walking became difficult. I tried scraping it up to fill the cracks in the plaster. It worked for a while, then the goo dried and crusted over and fell off like scabs.
We were playing our favourite old music now. I danced to ‘If You Could Read My Mind’ and I shimmied up and down the stairs until the banister came away in my hand and I toppled onto the couch beneath the staircase.
‘Soft landing – it’s your lucky day,’ Mattie shouted. ‘Maybe we do have a chance! Let’s open a bottle of champagne.’
I was tired of shifting furniture to cover the holes that had appeared in the walls, and the roof had fallen into the bedroom, so I lay under the kitchen table for a nap. The brown goo tar was comfortingly warm. Mattie passed me down a plate of crackers and the last of the smoked mussels and a glass of Dom.
‘To us!’ we toasted as the light fittings shattered and the fridge powered down. We couldn’t light the candles because we’d given up cigarettes years ago. The evening wind carried a giddy sweet-smelling gas and soon afterward the distant wailing of sirens ceased and there was no more sound except the hiss and rend of our marital home folding inward.
Recreation
So the text message came at lunchtime and I went to the hole in the wall and got out cash. You don’t know it’s happening until the day. A text message arrives on your phone, giving you the location and the hour. They don’t take credit cards yet but they’re so organised I wouldn’t be surprised to see one of them whip out a machine sometime soon. Thirty bucks to get in, minimum bet is twenty. There are blokes who lose a thousand a night. I take along a hundred bucks or so. I win, I lose, it’s no big deal.
At eight thirty I headed off in the good car, the 1970 Torana I restored myself. Born the same year as me but in much better shape. One day I’m going to compete the hill climbs in that baby.
I told the wife I was going to the pub. She’s called me on the mobile a couple of times during a fight and asked what the shouting’s about. Drawing the meat-tray raffle, I tell her. She can’t hear the animals in the ring because they’re too busy surviving to make noise.
First time I went I was nervous. I thought the place would be full of thugs with knuckledusters in their pockets. Once I got inside I felt better. The blokes might have knuckledusters in their pockets but most of them looking after the gig are kind of weedy and smaller than me, so I reckon I could take on one or two if anything started. Not that I’m any great shakes as a fighter, but I learned basic street fighting with the Broadie Boys when I was a kid, and I’m pretty sure it would come back to me. We had some real bust-ups back then. Makes my teeth ache to think about them. I can’t remember much except running down the street with blood pouring out of my mouth or my forehead while the hard kids stayed behind to finish it.
I never see those guys anymore. A couple of them are inside. The smart ones like Matt are in real estate. We see him drive through my estate in his Mercedes coupe and my wife asks me where I went wrong. She’s only kidding. Me and my good mates ended up in trades and physical work. I could have been a plumber, but I got one sniff of the dunny pipes and gave up.
Funny – what I’m doing now probably stinks just as bad but it only earns a quarter of what a plumber gets. Still, it’s the kind of job that doesn’t stretch the mind. It pays the bills, and I don’t spend nights worrying about work or doing the books. The money appears in my account every fortnight, and nights and weekends are for me and the family. I’ve got a wife, two girls and a dog of my own. He’s a nice dog, a heeler. The big thing in his life is a walk in the park, rounding up his dinner and then a lie-down on the couch.
Those animals in the ring, they’re something else. They’re not like any dog I’ve ever known. It’s obvious they don’t think about about chasing a ball or begging for food. They’d take out your throat before they’d beg. That’s one of the things I admire about them. They’re all pride and power. The way they surge into the ring, eyeball the opponent while the handlers are doing their best to hold them back. There’s a bloke at my work in the factory-cleaning business, Vic, he reminds me of those dogs. Vic looks at you as if you’re some kind of inferior being. He takes no shit at all from the boss who’s this puny kid, the son of the owner, university degree in management. University degree in poncing about, Vic calls it.
Last week we’re scrubbing ceilings caked with three years of gunk, the shit raining down on us, and ponce boy calls out, ‘Don’t forget the vents, guys!’ I ignore him the way I usually do, but not Vic. Vic puts down his long-handled scrubber real slow, then he goes down the ladder off the scaffold and he turns around, smooth and tense, a hunter stalking his prey. Ponce boy’s shitting himself. Even from up on the scaffolding you can see his Adam’s apple charging up and down his throat. He starts to edge backward but the wall’s in the way and he puts his hands up to say stop. He makes me think of a guy in a movie facing a gun. The only gun here is Vic. He’s a loaded gun, and we’re all waiting for him to go off.
As he gets within a few feet of ponce boy, Vic does a strange kind of a
skip. If you were standing in front of him, you might have thought when he flexed his legs that he was going to spring on you. Ponce boy does this weird whistle from his throat as he opens his mouth as if he’s going to say something, then Vic laughs and swings around and climbs straight back up the scaffolding. We’re all staring at him. ‘Don’t forget the vents, guys,’ he calls out to us in a high-pitched whiny voice and we all crack up. Haven’t laughed that much in years. Ponce boy disappeared for an hour or two. Probably went home to change his trousers. The other blokes laughed as hard as me. They’re good blokes, most of them, except a couple I wouldn’t want to see too much outside of work. You can tell those two would be nasty drunks.
Vic’s the hardest man I know. He doesn’t get excited. He’d have no interest in the dog fights, where we’re crammed together in a pack and the minute we see the blood a howl goes up, while the dogs, those incredible machines, are grunting and maybe growling a little, but pretty much they’re silent. One rips a piece of flesh off the other, you can see the raw wound, the blood welling up like an oil strike, and the dog doesn’t make a sound but half the men around the ring are crazy screaming soldiers.
Last night the location was outdoors, miles away from anywhere in an industrial estate, stacked containers looming over us, a few empty sheds, huge pieces of machinery parked along the roadside. It’s always way out – Dandenong or Laverton or some new suburb I’ve never heard of.
The first fight was over in minutes and one of the dogs retreated with a torn-up leg. The next two came out. When they exploded out of their harnesses you could see this was a fight of champions. The man next to me threw back his head and made a gurgling, crying noise. He sounded as if his throat had been cut. I had to look sideways and check he was all right. Then the yelling started up and everyone was shouting and screaming and the dogs took it to the end. They don’t always let them do that.
It was a clear night. The moon looked like someone had been at it with a pick and shovel. I stared at the moon and for a minute I wondered what I was doing there. I’m not a screamer. I don’t usually bet a lot of money. But it’s the feeling. That’s what I realised. When the dogs are at it I’m so keyed up I can feel every muscle in my body pumped and ready for action. My whole body is one great big throbbing cock.
After the fight finished, the screaming tailed off and blokes swore and punched each other in the arms and shoulders as if they’d won the match themselves. As the trainer of the winning dog raised his arm in a victory salute, the other one walked out of the ring carrying his dead dog in his arms. I felt bad seeing the man with his dead dog, until he reached the cages where the dogs were waiting, leaned over and spat, and tossed the carcass aside like a side of beef. It sent the same thrill through me as when I’m watching a porno and the action gets a bit rough.
The third fight was different. We were drunk on the smell of blood. I couldn’t stand still. No one could. My legs were twitchy and hard and I kept needing to shift from one leg to the other, do a quick jog on the spot. I’d lost fifty on the last fight but I thought just this once I’d go over my limit, put two hundred on the next one. Holiday pay was coming up in a fortnight. And the dog I was backing was superb. It waited beside its owner outside the ring, brindle, mad-eyed, foaming at the mouth. Probably drugged, but I’d heard most of them were. I ran to the bookie and threw my cash at him. Shitty odds – by that stage I didn’t care.
The caller shouted to release the dogs and the crowd pressed into the ring. We were breathing hard and elbowing each other to try to get closer. The brindle stalked on stiff legs toward the other dog, a sorry-looking mutt with pink half-healed scars along its flank. It was taking too long. They should have charged at each other but as the brindle inched forward, the mutt began to back away. Its owner stepped in, picked it up and threw it toward the brindle. When it landed on four paws, nose to nose with the brindle, it lowered its bullish head, looked away, licked its chops. Cowered. Backed off again, belly to the ground. Useless.
‘Stupid fucking mongrel,’ the owner shouted, his voice barely rising above the noise of the men in the crowd, who were urging the animal on or booing or cursing at no one in particular. The owner grasped the dog under its armpits and dragged it forward until it was only a head away from the brindle. ‘Fight, you cunt!’
I shouldered my way to the front of the crowd, the blokes around me swearing and telling me to fuck off as I pushed past. By the time I got to the rope, the champion dog had the other down. The one underneath was bleeding from a gash on its head and the champion was braced on those stiff legs, fangs bared, daring it to get up. It wasn’t getting up. Its owner waited till the champion had been pulled off, then grabbed the dog by its hind legs and dragged it out of the ring. ‘He can still breed from it,’ a bloke next to me said to his mate. ‘No he can’t,’ the other said. ‘You don’t breed from losers.’
I could never tell the wife about what I do on these nights. She’s an animal lover. Gives money to the animal protection society. On the way home last night I stopped the car near the lake on our estate. I got out, drank a couple of beers and smoked a couple of cigarettes and stared at the water until my heart slowed down. I saw a dog loping past, some suburban mutt on a night prowl looking for cats or possums. It would never catch anything. My heeler’s the same. Maybe he’s descended from wolves but now all he’s good for is lying around and eating tinned muck.
As I was starting up the engine to go home, a passing car gave a blast of the horn. I stuck my hand out the window with a thumbs up. Blokes around here love my car. Vic offered to buy it from me. As if I’d sell. Only other car guys understand. When I curl my fingers around the original leather steering wheel I bought at a swap meet last year and I rev the engine and worry about an oil leak I noticed on the cracked cement of the garage, it’s like the car is alive and I’m looking out for it like a man should with his mates.
You’ve got to look out for your mates, I know that. But some of those guys at work, they get a few drinks in them, I wouldn’t feel a hundred per cent safe.
Serenity Prayer
In the make-up room, a woman with hair dyed black and glossy as a crow pushed tan foundation into Carly’s pores as if she was puttying a cracked wall. She had already whipped Carly’s hair into a concoction the shape of a soft-serve ice-cream. Now she coloured Carly’s eyebrows mahogany and her eyelids wine-grape purple.
‘The studio lights bleach colours,’ the woman had said. ‘If I don’t do this you’ll look like a ghost.’
Carly closed her eyes as a tissue was pasted to her face. When the make-up woman peeled away the tissue, the imprint of a colourful clown came away with it.
‘All done. Enjoy the show.’
She unclipped the napkin from Carly’s neck and stood back, waiting with her hands on her hips, while Carly gathered her handbag and coat and tried to get up from the chair without seeing her gaudy make-up again in the mirror.
Next room down the hall was the Green Room.
It is exactly where she knows it will be. A table beside the door is loaded with plates of half-eaten crusty old sandwiches and limp slivers of canteloupe and honeydew melon. A grey-haired man sits in the far corner of the room tapping on a laptop. He is probably an actor or director Virginia worked with at the Queens Theatre.
‘Hi,’ Carly says, not too loudly, but loudly enough for an older man to hear.
He looks up.
‘I was just going to introduce myself. I’m Virginia’s sister. We might have met?’
‘Virginia?’ His fingers are still tracing along the trackpad as though his brain has gone on worrying at a problem while he gazes blankly at Carly. He could be a fixture of the room, an automaton. He’ll be working at that computer into eternity as other guests come and go, as programs rise and fall in the ratings, as television itself disappears into electronic obscurity.
‘Virginia Sherman. Who the show’s about today.’
The door swings open, knocking Carly further into the room.
‘Jesus, sorry! Are you all right?’ A young man presses his hands gently on different parts of her body as if he is checking for broken bones.
Without warning Carly wants to cry.
This is what she expected to happen. She would walk into a television studio and tell a funny story about her talented movie-star sister to a crowd of adoring fans. Next week this scene would be broadcast to a national audience in the millions. Carly’s painted face, her cone hair, would be splashed across the nation while she relived the nightmare on the couch in her lounge room as the hard drive recorded her for posterity. She’d push aside the comforting arms of her husband and cry in jags and sob about having been born the dumpy, awkward sister, the plain one, the failure. This is what would happen when she stepped onto the stage of This Is Your Life. Her resentment, her jealousy, rolling across the screen for the entertainment of friends, enemies and strangers. What could be worse?
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she told the young man, slipping back into her usual acquiescent self. ‘Let’s get this over with.’
‘I’ll take you to the side of the stage. You’ll be able to hear yourself being introduced. Step onto the white marker tape at the edge of the stage and wait till your eyes adjust to the studio lights. Then you’ll hear Mac ask you to come on stage. Someone will escort you to your seat.’ He was saying all this as they wound their way through dark corridors that smelled like old cheese.
‘I’ll never find my way back,’ she joked, but it wasn’t a joke. She thought of poor lost Persephone. When she taught the Year Tens the Persephone story, one boy told her it was no big deal to live half the year in hell. ‘We already do, miss,’ he said. ‘It’s called school.’
Peripheral Vision Page 11