A tremor against his hand: the huntsman’s creeping away. Markus makes a fist and brings it down onto the spider’s back. It’d make Grayson proud. What on earth could his father have meant by that? Grayson is dead and incapable of pride. It’s not even that — it’s that Rene had had no interest in Grayson even when Grayson had been able to be proud. The pleasurable satisfaction from an act, possession, quality, or relationship by which you measure your stature or self-worth: proud. A relationship … could Rene ever be proud of Markus?
In his room, Markus pulls the sewing needle out. It’d make Grayson proud. When the needle pinches and enters his flesh, he doesn’t react. And when he begins to bleed, he does not react. He’s surprised at how the blood rises out of the wound, like a balloon being inflated by a breath within his thigh. Pleasure derives from this balloon growing and stopping, the glistening bead waiting for the pulsation of his vein. It breaks, or bursts, and spreads over the skin of his thigh as a wet pinkish film, matting the hair near it. He can see a tiny, darker scar left from the first cut he’d made, wriggling on his thigh around the edge and out of sight. He tries to make himself receptive. The needle tears and jabs. His scratches form black calluses on his arm and crystallise like bark. He punches his thigh. It bruises. He drifts.
Rene tells him to get ready for the practice charity football match. A week until the real thing, though the way his father says it sounds like reel thin.
Markus prepares himself, i.e. footy gear etc. As he does, a twisting feeling forms in his stomach. He drinks water and vomits it into the toilet. Rene, with Elba in the passenger seat, drives Markus to the oval. While sitting in the backseat of Elba’s insurance-Jeep (the one that they gave her after Markus crashed her old one), Markus is thinking that it doesn’t matter what you do to try and stop something; it will happen, or won’t, depending on heaps-many things not under human control or within human comprehension. Epictetus, which he’d read before Grayson had given him Plato to read. Markus rekindles this Epictetian attitude, words it up to make it sound more profound than the simple Fuck it the boys say.
At the footy oval, he finds himself in the toilet. Each of the four cubicles is occupied, and he does not want to piss into the urinal, where the stream will splash onto his shoes as it hits the tray; he’ll get stage fright. So, he waits. Each of the four cubicle doors remains open. Men with hands around their fronts train their gazes on their piss. Markus hears the piss spray. His bladder is at the point of being painful. He waits by the wall, pretending to text. The four men finish and are replaced by another four. It’s not until this four falls by two that Markus takes up a free cubicle. He locks the cubicle door. Talks himself into trying to piss. His bladder won’t release. It seems like ten minutes of pushing before a weak stream starts. He flushes. The toilets are now empty; the practice game about to start.
Fuck it.
Any other Sunday, he’d’ve gone with Grayson and got a sausage roll in a roll with tomato sauce, which would ooze out the sides and drop on his palms. Thinking of licking the tangy sauce is better than if he actually ate. He moves his tongue around his empty mouth, pushing it against the places where bubbles of cask wine would fizz, between his teeth, against his lips, on his gums — if it were any other Sunday before. It was better before, because he didn’t have to think or reflect. It’s all consuming and overwhelming now. You see, before = with. It meant there was no space to fill, because there was walking, and Grayson bringing the cask, and gasping to cool the volcanic mouthful of half-mushed sausage roll.
Markus leaves the room and, in the kitchen, fills the kettle. Boiling water hisses like the kazillion cicadas on hot nights when Grayson and he had gone camping. They’d set out with a two-man tent and fishing rods. That was year eight or nine. They stayed wide-eyed to the break of dawn.
Markus hears a thunk and then another. He sees through the kitchen window, standing outside Rene’s shed, Buff Burrows.
Buff has a yet untouched slab of round wood, a rope tied over its middle, at his feet. He’s wearing a long-sleeved red-checked flannel shirt, its front buttons undone, even in this cold, to reveal a tight-white singlet underneath. He’s wearing his footy shorts from yesterday’s practice match and has changed his footy boots for Blundstones. Buff raises the maul, its blade glinting.
Markus heads out there. He drags his feet a few times in the sandy yard and sits down on a spare chopping block. Nearby is a small pile of wood Buff’s already cut.
Markus says, Who sent you around?
Thunk: the maul’s blade hits the centre of the wood. A crack appears.
Buff says, What happened there? He nods to where Markus’s motorbike used to stand. Buff’s biceps kind of tense when the maul’s above his head and then ripple when the blade cuts into the timber. Rigid, controlled momentum paired with strength.
Still fucked, Markus says.
Thunk: hits the log at a small angle from the first cut to make a wedge of wood.
Fucken unreliable.
Markus plays with his leg hair. What are you doing here?
I told y’at footy.
Markus doesn’t recall.
Said I’d come t’ help you an’ Ren out.
Thunk: working clockwise around the log, cutting cake wedges. The rope around the middle keeps each wedge placed even as he slices the log itself apart.
Markus moves to the prep table pushed up against the wall inside Rene’s shed. On the table, small plastic pots: rows of geranium and eucalyptus. Of the latter, he’d felled a fully-grown specimen back in the summer, the same wood Buff’s now slicing. Markus picks one of the seedlings up. Its leaves move in similar rhythms to a butterfly’s wings.
Buff asks if he’s heard from Cecily. He’s surely after something — why else would he be here of his own accord? To chop wood? Bullshit.
Bellos, Buff huffs.
Markus replaces the pot. He hoicks onto the shed’s floor.
You’re a shit bloke, Buff says, puffy and husky, his words like dirty coal from a mine.
Markus watches Buff pull the maul’s blade from the wood. Elmyra was here the other day, he says.
She told me.
No Marilyn.
Would it’ve been different if she was? Buff’s a mostly harmless mosquito, silently landing and putting his own saliva, laced with anti-coagulant, into your veins before drawing back your blood. Give and take. Blond hair and marble skin as threateningly incendiary as the sun. Elmyra’s intoxicated with him.
Probably not, says Markus, but quiet enough that only he can hear.
At some point, Markus, too, had almost succumbed to the same heady, deadened masculinity Buff Burrows spreads about him. When Buff first appeared in the area, armoured in dark Ray-Bans and unflattering beige cargo shorts. At football training. Buff had said he’s a wingman. Markus, as then-captain, said, We’ll put you in mid-field. Wings are useless. Fully prepared to go the distance, Markus had made him vice-captain. And, in line with his responsibilities, Buff spoke out at anyone who spoke out at Markus.
But none of that really matters now — not footy, not Buff, not captains and vices, not speaking out or staying silent.
Markus worries that the pressure he feels inside himself — if released — will rip through his entire body like a white-head pustule on his late-pubescent face. He says, Leave you to it then. And as he walks away from Buff, he tells himself he’s prevented someone else from having to clean his blood-pus mess off the mirror.
Patchy sky of grey clouds. Some holes where the blue sky can be seen: a broken mosaic. Or a whole mosaic? Whatever. Sunbeams don’t shine on him or near the ground around him; rather, the beams make landfall beyond his sight, on distant countryside. Other mornings, the sun’s rays hit a paddock a few hundred metres away. And on these mornings, it’s as if he and the room he stands in are a far too shadowed place within his subconscious. Forever out of his way. Like Byron’
s estrella de la mañana de la memoria. Spanish sticks, as does the recollection of the accent Grayson would do to keep them going through the double periods before lunch. For a week or so now, Markus has been trying to dissect the language, which at school he never had, but which Grayson spoke so finely. Is it de la recuerdo instead?
¿Puedo ir al baño? Grayson would rub his jumper where his bladder might’ve been. He pointed at the door.
Sólo si realmente eres, Teacher replied.
Grayson laughed and then said, Donde voy no es nada para usted preocuparse.
Teacher smiled, Hazlo rápido, niño descarado.
And Grayson leant to Markus and whispered, Me estoy saliendo, amigo. Tu elección si quieres venir.
How can it be that Markus is heading forward and at the same time going back? Disassociating from the present, i.e., not in the so-called now, as he used to be. He’s associated in the reality of memory and imagination.
A week. A week. His room is lived in, smells lived-in, too. He opens the curtains. On the floor, sunlight falls. He thinks of Moses and the Israelites. Purple linen, censers and scents, glints of tabernacle gold — alpha chi rho omega make the phrase I Rule. What does discovering any of that mean to him?
Rene calls him. Over the phone, he tells Markus to be ready when he gets home because today is the actual charity football match.
Back at the bedroom window, Markus sees it has light streaks across it because of the angle the sun’s coming at it. The pane shakes from the wind. The bright, slim streaks, three or four of them, slant in front of his face. He peers between two of the lines to the yard beyond. He raises his fist, pushes it toward the glass. Stops. He tips his fist and taps on the glass with his knuckles. Pulls away and thrusts his fist back again. Stops. Lowers his fist and rests his forehead on the window.
Rene’s ute comes up the driveway.
Markus switches the bathroom’s radio on and is greeted by Lewis McKirdy’s voice. He waits for the music. Lewis is going on, getting annoying. Fuck. Markus switches the radio off and puts his iPod into the dock. When he’s dried and re-underweared, he watches himself in the mirror as he slides his razor over his neck, past his Adam’s apple. When he’s done he washes the excess shaving foam away, and, with drips off his chin and dribbles on his cheek, Markus pummels his reflection with both his fists. He dresses in trackies, a blue shirt, and a white hoodie with a print of LSP saying, ‘What the lump?’ Footy stuff and other shit together, he heads to the open-plan area.
I’m not magnificent. I’m not magnificent, special, happy, or light. I’m dark. Sunken. An unseen iceberg in the Southern Ocean: grey-white, bobbing and spumeless. I’ll melt away because of rising sea temperatures and become water, rain, and salt to taint freshwater supplies. I’ll be the drought.
Markus’s breath forms a grey patch on the ute’s window as the vehicle turns into the footy ground.
Rene drops him out back of the change rooms.
The shower room is a large sandstone cube that acts as a small divider, built in the middle of the change room’s tin outer. The shower block has two entries: one for the home team and one for the away team (home: those living in Narioka; away: those from the farmlands). These entries oppose each other, and through each is the respective change room. Markus used to tell everyone the sandstone was asbestos, and he’d throw little chunks that had fallen from the edges at his teammates, at their feet as they showered, in their hair as they dressed, into their bags. Today, he prefers the soft crunching of the fallen-away chunks as he steps on them.
His duffel bag slaps on the polished concrete floor.
Buff stands beside him, naked from a pre-game shower. His pink junk. His firm muscles. He’s mostly firm. And yet, where there are fine blond hairs coating his thighs and arse, these limbs, especially his arse, quiver each time he steps around. He’s starting to dress: pulling up jocks, the black and red footy shorts over the top, a Guernsey. The quiver in his looser areas is slight, and makes the built-up areas seem to be hiding his self beneath, as if his self begs on hands and knees to be noticed at all.
Markus shrugs. He pulls on the red-and-black Guernsey, like Essendon, he’d once thought. It puffs against his skin. Whiffs of athletic rub come in draughts: hot-cutting and comforting before play. The grassy oval will be dew and frost. The wind driving down centre field will be shards of ice. Coldness makes cracking his fingers painful. He disbelieves that cracking knuckles causes arthritis. Keeping the joints uncracked hurts more. He takes each finger, bent over, and presses it down into itself. It may crack. It may not. Sitting on the low wood bench along the dim change room’s wall, he does this to his fingers. One doesn’t get the pain and the release. He stretches out the uncracked finger, an index finger, to see if it needs warming up, then presses it down again. It doesn’t crack. He pushes harder. The knuckle turns white and the creases go deep red, like they’re going to split his skin open.
Ya gunna break it off, Coach yells.
Markus rests his hands between his legs.
Buff says, Fucken spastic.
The coach gives a pre-game speech: grit, determination, teamwork. An’ piss orf if yer not up fer it! The team, two by two, leaves the shed and heads out onto the foggy field. The silence has a sound: hushed static, as if tuning in for signs of life. The fog means most can’t see the scratches running tracks up Markus’s arms or the callouses from the sewing needle criss-crossing his thighs. No doubt, someone caught sight of them back in the change room. None said a word. The skimpy footy outfit tells the story; walking in the fog is like walking through cottonwool. Filling up his ribcage: the siren. Young men’s reckless bodies thud to the earth and the ump’s whistle is shrill. Markus can’t see where the bodies collide or where words from restless mouths shout at him to run left. Left he goes. Through a stretching hole in the fog a red Sherrin pirouettes and drops into his hands. Thoof. He spins, boots it out of sight. Cheers. Car horns. Noise rises up into his ears. Snap of the goalkeeper’s flags. A whistle. He focuses on his thumping heart. It’s aural, internal. Echoing. He punches himself in the gut, and its contents spill out, yellow frothy bile, onto the field.
You right? It’s the Youarang kid come running over. His hand’s on Markus’s back.
Markus nods, stands up and says, Yair. He wipes the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand.
Youarang sniffs a laugh and says, Nah, mate. He whacks Markus gently on the shoulder. Why don’t you head back to the rooms — foggy as all get out here, Coach won’t even notice one less. Youarang whacks him once more. Go.
Markus crumples onto the yellowish tiles inside the shower block. His shins are bruised and his silky shorts stained by grass and mud. His hair drips murky water. There’s no one else here. Hot water from the showerhead above hisses and slaps against Markus and the tiles he’s sitting on. The noises outside are deadened by the chamber of sandstone. He disregards those things he cannot see. Almost, for there’s always one thing he can’t escape. This thing has been split up as many things. Now, the splits forge, and the gap between the things he can’t see and can’t touch closes and joins into the singular thing they’ve always been. Just now, in this shower block, they come into involuntary, premature realisation. Knees drawn to his chest, arms hugging his legs, head hung in the hissing water — he can feel himself as if he’s beating with clenched fists on Grayson’s grave.
You in here, Bellos? The tacks on the bottoms of Buff’s boots crunch over the concrete, making it sound like a thick layer of gravel. The athletic rub scent wavers in the air. Buff leans against the door’s jamb and says, You’rang said y’chucked on field.
Markus looks at the tiles near his toes and says, It was behind play.
Buff starts to untie his boots. Why?
Because.
’Cause why?
Because.
You sick? Buff takes his first boot off.
Markus
doesn’t reply.
Buff begins wrestling the second sodden boot. His arm’s skin is white, exposed and even; with his bulging biceps and square-set shoulders, he is buried inside the Guernsey. Or perhaps it’s burying itself into him, an entire sporting code seeping from the dyed cotton through his white skin and into his healthy veins. Buff Burrows. He is … what? Small. He’s taking the other boot off, throwing it behind him into the change room. He’s playing with the fluff on the tips of his footy socks. His shorts are too short, and from the way he’s sitting, Markus can see his yellow underwear and the outline of his junk.
Another update on the railway appears in the Leader: a tradie injures himself while attending the construction site. He, along with his colleagues, had resumed work when he slipped on loose earth and broke his arm. Inquiries, investigations, paperwork will hold up construction.
Markus is standing beside the kitchen table. Through the glass door, he sees his father in one of the veggie patches out back. Rene has a tiny paintbrush in one hand, which he’s using to transfer pollen from one flower to the stamen of a flower of the same species. The bees who used to pollinate the crops all over Narioka stopped arriving a year or so back. Markus closes the newspaper. Takes his coffee in his hands. He closes his eyes.
Ironbark Page 4