Elmyra, who has followed him, sinks into the couch.
He sits back where he began, spine turned against the window. He watches her.
She looks at the roof and drinks.
Why did you give up Marilyn?
She scoffs. I didn’t give her up.
You’re not dressing as her.
She sighs. Says, It seems like too much effort, all things considered. By all things she could mean anything: her mother, Grayson, Burrows, himself.
What’s Buff reckon?
He didn’t say anything. She wiggles in the couch. He just helped me pack away Marilyn’s things.
I could’ve helped with that.
I know, she says, but you’ve got your own shit happening. And anyway, she takes a mouthful of beer, Buff’s so … immovable. He takes everything I throw at him. No questions.
Elmyra believes she’s right when she says Buff’s immovable. No questions. But she can’t feel what moves boys when they’re undressing beside each other in a stuffy change room.
It had happened in PE class. Individual Activities: Grayson, Markus, Buff, and about five or six other boys, all at different stages of puberty, each one of them self-conscious, anxious, and shouting as they walked down Melville Street, sweating under the bitch of burning sun. Subconsciously aware of all that skin around them, beside them. That week they were doing water aerobics at the local outdoor swimming pool. Teacher said to shower in the change rooms before getting in the pool.
The change rooms at the pool had hot, moist concrete underfoot, no roof overhead, and a weathered wooden bench running down the middle. Only two showers at the back. The first two boys ran to get out of the sun and under the shower, to feel a cool rush of water before being allowed out into the big pool. The other boys, including Markus, Buff, and Gray, dropped their bags along the wooden bench and began to get changed.
Most of them wore their togs under their uniform — or, on that particular day, as uniform — but one of the boys got completely starkers. Another boy slapped him on the arse with the back of his hand, saying something like, Geez, yer’d blind us with yer skin if it was any whiter.
Fuck off cunt, said the naked one, least it’d stop yer from checking out me arse.
Not me yer needa worry about, the slapper said, and he seemed to wink and nod, briefly, in Markus’s direction. Equally, he could’ve been flicking a lock of his long, greasy hair from his eyes.
What’s that mean? Gray said. He hitched down his school shorts to reveal bright-yellow board shorts.
The slapper flicked his head round again. None yer fucken business, mate.
I’m not yer mate, mate, Gray returned. He took off his shirt.
Too fucken right, said the slapper. He stood up and took off his shirt, too.
Out of nowhere, Buff laughed, loud and short, as he pulled up beside the boys and took a seat in between the slapper and Grayson. He said, Sometimes in the footy showers, yer get these queer fucks looking sideways at yer wang.
Yer’d lap that shit up, Burrows, said the naked boy, who was now in his own pair of board shorts. Tattered at the waistline, faded blue to violet down the sides.
Nah fuck off, said Buff, it makes me all weird. He mock-shivered. I don’t know whether to shove me cock down his throat or smash his pimply fucken face in.
Why the fuck would yer want him to suck yer off? the slapper said in all seriousness, the faux-credulity with which he’d initially addressed Buff gone.
Buff shrugged and stood. He grabbed his crotch. Free blowie in the shower block, mate, he said. Just close me eyes — and he did, right there in the middle of the open-roofed change room, with his hands now behind his head and his groin pointed out — and picture Elmyra between me legs.
Markus says now, No questions?
Elmyra shrugs.
And you like that? Markus drinks the amber, warm, and finds it pleasant.
She concedes, finishes her stubby, and gets them both another. She peels the beer bottle’s label. Yes, it would be easier if he played along, but their conversation has little life, or at least none that either wishes to acknowledge, and they finish off these beers. The sun has gone. Elmyra lights a candle because, she says, The label says Honeysuckle & Lemon Myrtle. She’s started listening to Cold War Kids on repeat. The smell, she says, honeysuckle and lemon myrtle, reminds me of them.
How so?
She sits the candle on the coffee table. The flame casts long shadows over Juan and over her — both now far across the room, in the dimness. She says, I’ve been listening to the one song, over and over on repeat.
What’s that?
She hums a melody. Asks, Has Cecily got a hold of you? She’s been trying to call.
He says, as he’s getting up, Not heard a word.
Hmm, strange. She swears she has.
I bet, he says. He gets, from his bedroom wardrobe, the bottle of absinthe Rene gave him for his eighteenth and which he’d wanted to share with Grayson. The green liquid goes opaque when he adds iced water to it, and she says, It looks like mucous. By the second, they’re drinking the firewater (she says, Is this lighter fluid?) straight from shot glasses.
Halfway through her second, Elmyra says, Drinking this makes my throat peel. And as if the layer the liquid has softened her, she says, I miss Grayson — his smile and his laugh.
Markus tilts his head. He intends it to prompt her to explain herself, and to make him believe her.
She doesn’t see. She sips her shot and takes the glass from her lips, where it hovers. She leans its rim back to her mouth and pours more of its contents down her throat. She takes it away before it’s all gone.
Markus thinks that by focussing on a single part, you might lose the overall hang of Grayson, so he says, I miss him.
Her head rolls over the pillow and looks across to Markus.
Markus runs his finger around the rim of the shot glass; his finger slips in. He licks the absinthe from it. Georges said we shouldn’t speak of him in the past tense.
But Grayson is gone, Markie. Elmyra downs the small pool of liquid left in her shot. Pours herself another.
Markus doesn’t want to drink the remaining absinthe in his glass. Grayson’s a part of our existence, he says.
You’ve had too much, she says.
Do you remember the first time you met him?
She shakes her head. You?
He says, Yes. At that drought fundraiser in the skate park — he got up, remember, and sang. Markus closes his eyes and arches his head back, as if floating on top of unseen water.
They finish their drinks and leave the candle going.
Elmyra says, I need a moment.
Markus goes into his room, strips naked, and then puts a pair of red undies on. He’s struggling to get his legs into a pair of blue chequered PJ pants.
She comes in. Pushes him on the bed and pulls the pants on for him before falling into place beside him.
He rests his head on the pillow, and its cool cotton soothes his burning cheek. He closes his eyes as the mattress beneath him shifts, rocks a little like the ripples made in a puddle. She moves behind him, curls her body into his shape. Her arm around his waist. She touches her nose into the nape of his neck and breathes out down his back. Her leg weaves through his and her toes rest by his. She wriggles them. She pulls the blanket over them, right up to their necks, and pats it flat. She replaces her arm over his waist and hugs him.
What would they say if they could see us now?
She lowers her voice to mock those boys, and says, Give her a squeeze for me.
Markus’s laugh bubbles over.
I never took what they said seriously. We knew what was what.
And what was that?
I have no idea, she whispers slowly. But they don’t need to know that.
When he wakes ne
xt, the moon’s lit the room. Elmyra’s staring at the roof.
Hi.
Her head lolls to him, her lips kiss the tip of his nose. She says, What’s the roof made of?
He looks up. He wants to say I love you, yet like most of his words, they don’t surface. Stramit, I think it’s called; lots and lots and lots of tiny little pieces of straw pushed together.
She says, I’d like to think that the little pieces stick together because they want to. Y’know — good things fall apart so better things can fall together.
That’s so Hollywood, he says.
It’s nice to imagine.
You’re drunk.
She holds his hand. We’re both drunk, Markie.
A neighbour’s dog barks, the sound heavy and low through the night.
In the morning, she says, Thanks.
For what?
She shrugs. For being okay. For you.
He squints. Can’t really be anyone else.
She appears to say something, or at least attempt to, but then doesn’t. And he can’t hold her to account for not saying what she wanted to: she’s probably seen him do that to her more times than she wants to remember. She leaves just as Georges had, and Markus watches her fade down the track from view.
He sits down on the couch where Elmyra had lain last night. He has a pen, holds it between his index and middle fingers in front of his face. Makes it tilt up and down. He shivers, not because of the cold … just because. Cat’s back legs press into his thigh, the place he’d first torn his flesh with Elba’s sewing needle. He’s taken the bandage off now. The wound’s finished its scabbiness. He plays Cold War Kids. He’s begun dreaming that Grayson’s real again, and when he wakes, he wants to go back to sleep. A total cliché, y’know, for real. Like: to go back again to peaceful summer evenings, their lethargy, when flies rest and everything holds its breath waiting for nightfall and a temperature drop.
Frost treats pine-wood farm posts with a bluish damp, as it does to the bottoms of trousers. The wattle’s (genus Acacia) gold sparkles Spartan-like and agrestic, as if he’s in another country. Midwinter, the sun is meek, as it’s mostly been since April — what, with the lingering clouds and the smoke haze from burnings off. Narioka breathes out a cold fog, left behind by the cold nights, from treetops and swirls it into the space of the Depression. It must creep over the cliffs and into the spare fields of the Plain above. It binds. Unlike the heat of summer, which is restless, this becomes what everyone wishes would go.
It’s beginning to fall away. Not the memory — Grayson is falling away. April’s gone, May and June. Time becomes impractical, and in each of its moments he understands that another second, minute, hour disappears since the last time he saw mi compañero. Even though Grayson is absent, Markus detects him here, physically. And perhaps that’s why men believe in gods and goddesses, with their marble-white togas and wreaths of olive in their long flowy hair. Why is it we’re told they’re very beautiful but they’re always out of view? Markus has read some Plato — a gift from Grayson — and he’d got the impression that Ancient Greeks didn’t quite believe that Eros existed as a figure; rather, they believed that two people loving one another was Eros embodied, which would go a long way to explaining the exploding in Markus’s chest.
Markus’s mind is an indissoluble veil of foreign language. Maybe one day it’ll make sense. One day. Mi compañero. He’s not heard that tongue for a while. Out the front window, he watches the evening settle, and ignores twilight’s tweak against his skin. The fire’s unlit. He puts the pen down to hold his belly. He tries to appease the choppy swell that’s threatening to turn his insides into fierce waterspouts, to drown him and make his body bloated and blue.
In the middle of night, a stammered scream bursts up from the middle of his chest. He thrusts his limbs out of his bed and runs to escape down the hallway. He pants, though not from running, rather from the fear of what he’s running from. He mistakes his heart for the thump the front door makes when he tosses it open. The sand and stones of the driveway are smooth and cool on the bottoms of his bare feet. He’s in his underwear. Sweaty hair sticks to his skin and catches between his eyelids. He subsides. He’s been running from a rhythm and now it’s caught him up; it’s buried itself deep, skirting the boundary of his mind. He’s been ignoring its gentle throb. It’s pulsing now and he has to let it out. He hears Grayson’s voice ascending the dissonance of the pub before he’d been killed.
Mate. It’s Rene.
A blanket covers Markus’s body. He opens his eyes. They close when the dawn-light enters.
He assumes he sleeps, because the next time he wakes is in the early afternoon. Rene’s gone to and from town; groceries packed into green bags sit in the ute’s tray. He tells Markus to come help.
Lowering two bags to the ground, his father says, A water main burst in town. The roads were blocked.
Markus takes another two bags and begins walking inside. Rene catches him up. Glass condiment bottles tink together in the bags he’s carrying. Markus shrugs and puts the two bags into one hand and opens the laundry door. They’re pretending nothing mid-night occurred. They dump the bags on the bench and head back out. Markus looks around at the paddocks.
Yer wanna give us a hand with the garden down front? Rene says.
Markus shrugs. Yair. He isn’t morally opposed to work that involves his hands, he’s just never thought himself good at it. Ever since he can remember, his father’s taught him about the land they live in. Scientific names cascaded from Rene’s lips as if ancient spells. Microlaena stipoides; Dacelo novaeguineae; Ornithorhynchus anatinus. One time, early on, Rene told him about hemlock (Conium maculatum) — the memory now is sticky-opaque, like the milky poison in the leaves. He only ever absorbed the lines of genus and species and sub-species, but their distinct, overlapping places in the landscape, and how they all fit together — how they all work — never quite clicked. He follows his father, like the hopeless apprentice only in for a dollar, to the shed to collect a sapling, then down the drive to the garden at the front.
Rene says, You know that cricketer hit by a ball?
Markus doesn’t know more than a whisper he’s heard from wherever.
He died. Rene bends over to the soil. Young, too.
Yair.
Y’know the charity footy game?
Markus doesn’t speak.
They’re gunna give half the money to the family.
What if the family doesn’t want it?
Someone else will.
Father and son are on the stretch of land running the length of the drive. Markus imagines that Rene told him to help so as to keep him on an invisible leash, what with last night’s antics. Rene also said that Brute said Markus isn’t quite right for a mechanic’s work.
They’re expecting you.
Who?
The coach. The team.
I haven’t played a game in years.
They want you to captain, an’ it’d make Grayson proud.
Markus scoffs.
Just go to the practice match.
Nah.
I’m not asking you. Rene begins clearing a patch of ground.
Markus shifts the bagged sapling standing between them. The bag’s black plastic protects the roots of a red ironbark. They’re planting it because it’ll provide a good home for bats (various) and boobooks (Ninox novaeseelandiae) and, when it’s big, some shade for the Murray Greys … according to his father. Two years full maturity in ideal conditions, his father’d also said. Sky’s blue and the sun’s harsh, even though it’s still winter. Markus has sweat prickle on his back and forehead. Too many clothes. When he woke, it’d been overcast.
Rene says, Fuck, yer’d think it’s summer. Drought’ll never break in this.
Markus has forgotten about the previous summer’s heat. And the drought. The dust, the rabbit
s, the Burrows’ slaughtered livestock and the brittle grass. With the cooler nights of this winter, the idea that the land could be so devoid as to be dead is impossible. Markus says, How do you know?
It’s what they say, y’know.
Markus says, It can’t be good for the tree, no water and drought.
S’alright, too much’ll kill it. Rene takes his eyes out to an unseen place. The blokes over north’ve gotten rid a trees. Y’know that matchstick tree farm? Work the land too much. He slides his thumb and index finger over a blade of nearby plains grass (Austrostipa aristiglumis). An’ the soil’ll slide right out under ’em. The grass disintegrates as he rolls it between his fingers. Rene stands and shovels a hole, shin-deep to himself and as wide as his own forearm from wrist to elbow. He starts with ease, but each time the blade slices deeper into the soil, Rene grows more tired and more sweaty and more breathless.
A magpie (Cracticus tibicen) warbles.
A good tree needs firm roots, healthy soil, nutrition an’ water. If the balance is right, bud, the tree’ll pay back tenfold. Rene unties the rope binding the black bag around the ironbark’s roots, and pulls the plastic away.
The roots are neat, dark in colour, and they lighten as the soil on them air-dries. Smell earthy. There are a number of other, very mature ironbarks lining the driveway with thick-looking bark, gnarled and black, like rot.
When they’re done, Rene has to go into town. Order out some business.
Markus, inside the house, sits down in the lounge.
Elba’s out selling Herbalife.
There’s a huntsman spider (family Sparassidae) on the lounge-room floor. Markus keeps it near him by tapping the ground in front of it whenever it turns to scamper away. It’s facing him, raising its front legs in the air.
When Markus was younger, he’d sit and watch rainfall pattering against the glass panes and trickling down. As he grew older, the water wriggling over the window made him think of sex education. The droplets became sperm gametes careening to somewhere out of sight — useless and expired ejaculate. If he were out in the rain, he’d stop and stand and get soaked. Sometimes, he and Grayson came home from school in the rain. After Grayson had left for his own house, Markus’d wait at the driveway. He’d see Grayson’s bluish shadow get lighter and lighter the further he went into the grey rain-haze. When Grayson was gone, Markus would watch the water flow down the furrows in the bark of the towering eucalypts in the driveway. Raindrops collected on the leaves of the geraniums below the canopy. The water re-formed at the geranium’s leaf tips and dripped onto the greying straw that was spread on the garden beds. He’d rub his face with his palms and then look up at the sky, leaving his mouth open, and squinting because he wanted to be able to see. He’d run up and down the driveway and jump into puddles. His shoes would fill with cold water and his socks, when he took them off later, would smell like wet dog. He did this on the afternoons of rain when Rene wasn’t home. He did this then because it was Rene who’d made him, when he was younger, sit in the lounge and watch the rain fall against the glass panes, when all along Markus had wanted to wriggle free.
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