Ironbark

by Jay Carmichael

  Georges grabs him, draws him close, like chest to chest. And there, in between their faces, he hears air whistle through Georges’s nostrils. Georges. Markus doesn’t want to be let go. He wants the chest, the heartbeat beating against his own. He listens to Georges. Warm. He listens to the air whistling in each of Georges’s nostrils again and watches his eyeballs slide from side to side to side to side. Alive. There is a silent moment no longer than a second in which he wants their lips to press hard against each other. Present—

  Markus cums. Their lips do not touch.

  He knocks his kneecap into the glass shower screen, and that sound — the very disjunction and the little bit of pain in his patella — shatters the imagery.

  Rene keeps four hanging baskets along the front veranda. In each he grows a single succulent, which, he could’ve once told Markus, is called a donkey tail (Sedum morganianum). Long lime-green tendrils of clustered claws escape the red dirt their roots are confined to. In a light breeze, even if you just breathe out nearby, these tendrils sway like horizontal ripples on a body of water. Too much. If you pull back on imagination, as Rene does, these hangers are embellishments that take the eye away from flaking weatherboards and a rusting bullnose. The recent storm knocked each of the four hangers down. They’ve lain smashed and spreadeagled on the brickwork pavement since. Rene’s cleaning them this evening. The straw broom brushing outside distracts Markus because its sound mimics that of rain. He rolls over. Breathes in and out of his nose to calm his irritation — well, at least that’s what he wants to believe it is. His stomach has begun strangling itself. He slides his window open as Rene scrapes the broom, sweeping the last of the first pot’s dirt away. A phone call interrupts Markus: Cecily. Again. He ignores and deletes the message she’s left.

  It isn’t pleasurable for him to wake early. Today, he starts the apprenticeship he was meant to a few weeks back. Dark outside.

  His father comes in and turns the light on. Markus covers his face. Rene pulls the doona off. In the kitchen, Rene’s made him toast and packed him a lunch box for the day. He hands him a mug of coffee. Markus chews a mess of toast he doesn’t want and chases it with the last of the coffee. Rene takes him into town because Markus is bringing his faulty motorbike. At Brute Burrows’ Mechanics, his father helps him heave the metal carcass out of the ute’s tray and then heads off. Markus wheels his bike into the garage, stands straight and kicks the bike’s stand down.

  The garage smells of oil and is cold; it would feel almost clinical if it weren’t for the pot-belly fire crackling. Smoky scent fills the room.

  Brute holds out his hand.

  Markus clears his throat and puts his shoulders back. He shakes with Brute. Not long ago, he’d slung this elephantine body up against the pub’s brick wall, because it’d threatened him. That’s irrelevant now. Forget it. Markus doesn’t need a tour. Brute says, Yer’ve been here enough with me son that this place should be like a second home.

  A few galahs (Eolophus roseicapillus) burst out from a stand of thick melaleuca across the road. They chirrup and screak and swoop up and over the garage’s entrance.

  Brute gets to work on the motorbike. Bent down beside the bike, he sucks his bottom lip. He asks, Who did the shoddy cover-up job?

  Buff.

  Brute asks for the spanner.

  Markus reaches around to the bench behind them, steps a little. His shoe, one of the orange Vans, stubs and his fingertips knock the spanner. It scrapes over the bench’s edge, drops. A dull light reflects off it before its head hits the concrete floor. The noise slows, echoing in his mind even after the spanner rests. Markus hands Brute the spanner. Brute discards it and grabs lock-grip pliers instead.

  At lunch, Brute says he has to pop down the street. Yer want anythin’?

  Markus shows him the lunch Rene made.

  Brute sniffs and turns away.

  The day continues in a quick rhythm.

  Brute says, Yer motorbike won’t ever go properly. He’s interrupted by an older man dropping his car by, telling them to fix it up quick.

  Brute remains silent as a ghoul. A sullen face indicating leave it with me, and again to a woman, and again to the youngest Drumanure boy, whose pushbike’s spokes are done for. Brute tells Markus to leave at about three o’clock. I’ll have a chat this evenin’ with Ren, mate.

  The land between town and Markus’s father’s house stretches wide, flat, and forever. And it makes him feel like he’s flying upside-down.

  The way Brute had held his body when he’d undone and rolled down the top half of his jumpsuit was forceful. It had revealed a grey singlet and, dangling in the low-cut neckline, a gold neck chain with a crucifix attached, which had swung side to side as he moved. Brute’s son, Buff, wears one similar. As does Elmyra, Markus’s oldest friend, who says she got her crucifix from the two-dollar shop, off a rack that has plastic skull-rings and peace-symbol earrings; says that because she paid no more than half the price of a cup of tea, she may as well’ve stolen it.

  Why’s the focus on that gold cross? Some things are better left unsaid, even if they say you can say anything in the confessional. The stained glass, the statues looking down at him when he’d gone to church in primary school: these were enough to make him internalise everything. I farted on my father’s pillow was always good to tell the priest each Friday. Father’d once said, You’d best get off to the doctor, sort that out. Father’s dead now, one of them at least. Markus had gone through the Catholic primary school, and the fates of the other Fathers were and still are irrelevant. Sometimes in the afternoon, when the sky’s looking deep, he wishes he could throw a stone right up at it and smash it. Watch the shards of blue fall into the Depression. He’d smashed with rail stones, back whenever it was, the church’s stained-glass depiction of Jesus and John. And since then it has pissed him off that from the outside, where he had thrown the stone, he couldn’t see how the coloured glass must’ve fallen on the crimson carpet inside. He keeps walking, hands in his pocket. A throw to smash the heavens now from him would fall away, harmless.

  The house is empty. He wakes sometime later to the sound of clanging pots: Elba cooking. His bedroom seems smaller. He could use a rail stone, maybe piff it at the window and let the twilight in. Rising and no release. Wanting to break. Abstaining.

  He can’t.

  This method he hardly knows.

  He takes the needle he’s snuck from Elba’s sewing kit and places its sharp, thin point against the skin of his leg. On the inside of his thigh, closer to his groin, he begins to move it back and forth. His skin reddens and tears and bleeds. He pushes harder. When the blood beads and wriggles away from the imperfect gash, threatening to drip to the floor, he stops. He pokes the needle into the side of his mattress. He wipes the blood on his finger and licks it off.

  In the shower, he lets the hot water stream onto the wound and the stinging makes his leg shake. He clenches into the fading bruise on his bicep. Numbness.

  At dinner, with a hand under the table, he touches the covered abrasion on his leg. Pain.

  Rene’s concerned. That face ya makin’.

  Markus nods and says, The potatoes are too hot.

  Elba’s on the couch, watching The Great Outdoors. She says, It’s the potatoes’ way of telling you not to eat them because they’re bad for you. She sighs, as if the world’s an irritating speck of dust she’s directing away. She becomes Elmyra, whom Markus has suddenly remembered, and whom he silently promises to text.

  His promise is intercepted by Rene’s wink. His father’s calloused hand slides the latest Leader; his thick forefinger points at a headline. There’s a charity football match, he says.

  The picture his father’s pointing at is of Buff in his footy kit, leaning against a goalpost. Markus stuffs a forkful of potato in his mouth, blowing through his open mouth as the heat sears the roof of his mouth.

  His fath
er wakes him by torchlight on the weekend. He touches Markus’s foot. I need a hand, one a the heifers is calvin’, he says.

  Markus follows without complaint because his father’s eyes are wide.

  Out and down a track, he lags behind. When Rene looks back, Markus nods. He’s pretending the bucket’s thin metal handle in his hand isn’t there. It may as well be slicing him open. A clean slice. The cold, the early dawn, the stars out — all that’s meant to be romantic. The chain and jack Rene holds clink together in a steady rhythm. The crispness biting the tip of Markus’s nose and the lobes of his ears spreads itself out like freezing pools of water. His breath is dark matter drifting through deep space. Rene turns the torch on him and even though Markus squints, he catches the dark matter turn to silver and the silver go white before it disappears again when Rene flicks the beam away. His father pulls out a handkerchief and hands it to him. The material’s warm. Markus wipes his nose. He hears a rustling nearby. Rabbits skitter in the reedy wild oats (Avena fatua).

  When Markus was a boy, the man had taken him hunting, perhaps for distant relatives of these same rabbits. It was at dusk, when the strong, slender animals bounded across wheat-stubbled paddocks. Rene had caught them in the spotlight while Markus stood in the ute’s tray.

  Have a shot, bud, his father had said, trying to hand him the shotgun.

  Markus’d shaken his head at the smooth wood and matte metal shining in front of him.

  Rene hadn’t wasted any time — he’d aimed at one of the rabbits, which had stopped and perked up to look right at him, and pulled the trigger. A spray of pellets must’ve caught the rabbit in the head, because its body had flicked backward, spun round, and landed, back legs kicking, on the soil.

  This morning, though, his father’s occupied with just the opposite: a louder sound follows, hugging the ground. Rene points the torch to where the sound has come from. Markus puts his free hand in the water in the old white horse-feed bucket he’s carrying. Some of its contents splash over the edge with the motion. His flesh is too numb to register the temperature. He licks the residue from the tip of his finger. Rene turns left and wades through the wild oats growing beside the track. At the fence line, he turns the torch back on Markus. Rene takes the bucket from him, lifts it over the fence, and sets it down over the other side. He opens a horizontal gap between wires, and once both men are through, Rene locates the cow.

  Markus holds the torch.

  His father stands behind the prostrate cow, pumping the jack. The chain moves along the rig’s pole and away from the cow as it brings out the calf. The mother groans. It’s too slow, and the calf’s feet are unmoving. Rene huffs and Markus stands near, not knowing what to do. After a few minutes, Rene pulls the black calf away from the mother and begins to wipe the mucous out of its mouth. Markus rests the torch on the ground; its beam partially illuminates the scene. He pulls at his father’s shoulder. Rene moves away, and Markus tips the bucket of water over the calf’s head. The mother moos and steam comes from her mouth. The calf remains still. Rene grabs the calf’s forelegs; Markus grabs the hind. His father looks at the calf’s head, at his hands grasping, at Markus’s hands around the hind, and then at his son. They lift it into the air and its head is limp over the soil. They begin to swing it back and forth. Mucous dangles from its mouth. They put it down. Red dirt sticks to its body, to its eyelids. Rene wipes mucous from its face, and he strokes his hand along its throat, back and forth, slow and gentle. The calf coughs, shifting the phlegm from its throat. Its eyes open and roll in its head and it makes a guttural sound.

  Persisting with, starting anew, starting same, forgetting about the wound on his leg, a run perhaps, walk … Persisting isn’t quite the right word; a word, though, suited enough to the way the Depression is drifting around Markus. Persisting isn’t about forgetting the scabby-red wound on his thigh or the bruise that’s now faded from his shoulder. Telling people that he’s persisting masks what drifts inside him. Smoke haze makes the eucalypts grey and half put together. He recalls those damned rabbits by the Lake as he fiddles with the pen in his pocket. Persisting’s pooling his thoughts, making them shallow, making them reflect the things above with wavy iridescence. Some ‘thing’ stronger is breaking through the surface. Yes. There it is, coming in like a hefty breaker: he’d missed the funeral.

  Had said to Rene that he could not go. Rene’d tried to push the bedroom door open. Markus had dug his feet into the carpet and pushed back. Because of that sickness growing in his stomach, which he gets most days (today, it is quiet). Gnarled, solid nausea. It had started after the accident — amidst the dark and beneath the cold falling rain — and grown larger and larger until, in the half hour before Grayson was going to be buried, it had incapacitated Markus. Miss it, Rene had said as he’d thumped his fist on the other side of the door, the force of which had made Markus jolt. Markus spied, from the gap in his bedroom curtains, Rene drive away to town, to the funeral. He’d sat down on his bed, again leaving the drapes unopened, the door closed. There, in the dimness, the outside light had been threatening. Thirteen days it took him to open those damned drapes, as violent as tearing paper.

  Being in that bedroom or being out here — there’s no difference. It isn’t the light that’s threatening. Absence produces a vacuum so powerful that any words spoken in it are torn apart.

  On the afternoons when Markus is alone and not working (though he doubts Brute will want him back), when Rene and Elba are out shopping or dining or at whatever appointment they keep to themselves, he stays to the lounge. He opens up the curtains and lets the sinking sun come in and lay across the floor. He opens the windows even if it’s cold, and he gets himself a beer and sits on the carpet with his back against the low windowsill. On such afternoons he reads. Hates that he reads because it seems useless. It calms his mind, though. He reads volumes from the smallish piles of poetry stacked at the foot of his bed. He’s read Thomas, Rimbaud, Cummings, Whitman, and Gunn.

  But today, on this specific afternoon, with its specific anticipatory silence, he waits for Elmyra. Where is she anyway? Walking about, most likely, in the shops down the street. He knows whatever it is he knows, i.e., she must have ignored his text.

  By five-thirty, he’s had two beers. He gets another book of poetry from his room, doesn’t even check who wrote the stanzas inside. Beer in hand and book in the other, he sits at the window and sips the ale. Putting that aside, he opens the book. Don Juan. Longing and distance and death and breathing. Elmyra’s reading it, too. He saw a copy of Byron in her bag. Perhaps that’s where she is, unweaving rainbows and clipping an angel’s wings. No, that’s Keats. Too late for Keats: Elmyra is Hermes, threatening to find a nymph and disappear to the woods forever. Or Demeter.

  There’s a gentle knock at the door.

  Elmyra. The wind blows her hair. She’s not dressed-up today. She’s been dressing as Marilyn Monroe for ages. She stopped when Grayson died. Here, now, there’s an occult partition between her current plainness and the times before, when he’d watch her pat her skirt, run her fingers through her Monroe fringe, glide pink wax over her lips, and pencil black near her eyes.

  He says, You aren’t Marilyn.

  She doesn’t answer.

  I love Marilyn, he says.

  That’s why, she says. She’s like a speck caught in a shaft of sunlight, suspended in the atmosphere, shifting side to side, floating into view, out of view. She’s never in the centre long enough to see her from every angle.

  She asks for beer.

  He nods.

  She removes her shoes and places them inside the door. She walks toward the hall and turns in the direction of his room.

  He skids on his socks at her and takes hold of her arm, turns her to the open-plan area.

  She looks that way, then back to him. Says, Okay, and walks to get a beer. At the bench, she twists the cap of a Dry. In her black woollen trench coat, with her da
rk hair, she is beautiful. Where Marilyn gives him confidence and makes him safe, Elmyra as she is challenges him to confront what is between them. Marilyn’s like playing games; Elmyra’s like playing at life. He doesn’t confront it, though. She swigs and turns to him, saying, They’re fucked without you.

  He raises an eyebrow.

  The footy team for the charity match.

  Burrows will have it.

  Buff? She laughs. Buff Burrows has the least idea of anyone — remember when he first joined and thought wings were still needed?

  I trust him.

  You say that about everyone.

  People are good.

  She shakes her head. Only my mother would say that.

  That mythical mother, Mrs Robinson: in bed with the blinds drawn and the window open. He’d followed Elmyra in once to see her so-called crazy mother. A summer breeze had made the plastic blinds clack against the window’s frame. Mrs Robinson was unmoving, except for her chest rising and falling under the golden sheet, her eyes on him while he’d looked at her forehead and her damp hair hanging over the side of the bed.

  Markus hates that of all the rules he tries to live by, this one, believing in the inherent goodness in people, is the one he cannot break.

  Buff wouldn’t know the word ‘charity’ if you showed it to him in the dictionary, Elmyra says.

  Something must be wrong with him.

  Elmyra leans against the kitchen bench. She looks defeated.

  Markus walks into the lounge to his beer, which is where he left it, sitting on the carpet in the sunlight.