Ironbark

by Jay Carmichael

  She scoffs, spilling a scolding of embarrassment over his skin. It’s too late for that, she says. She hitches up her duffel bag once more and goes to step around him.

  He touches her elbow and says, I love him.

  She might have blinked, long and slow, before she answers. So do I. She removes herself from his touch and heads down the empty street, searching for a different pool to swim in.

  Feeling defeated, and without any water to hold him afloat, his days are disposed of by doing very little. Blue seeps into his mind, perhaps because of the heat, the absence of water. Blue light in stained-glass. He catches sight of it out the corner of his eye. Reflective blue, sky-high soaring blue, deep blue. Blue eyes. He can never focus on it, but he can’t escape it either. Recently, it’s been getting closer to ceremonious blue, the colour of regret.

  Or the violet-blue shade of the official flower of Derby Day at far-off Flemington — cornflower (Centaurea cyanus): that flower, on purpose, conflicts with the upcoming yellow-gold rose of Tuesday’s grander Cup. Rene’s betting two bucks each way on each race; he sips mineral waters on ice, with a slice of lemon. Elba’s done a platter of tonally different cheeses, cured meats and fruit, and one or two dips of questionable colour. Markus drops a grand on the nose of the clear favourite, but he loses it all when some 100–1 shot cuts through the pack to claim the win.

  Despite the work he’s doing for the farm’s books, right through to Christmas Rene is at him. Ya need a proper job. Markus is surprised his father doesn’t count the bookwork and money-finding as proper work. The north winds get drier, hotter, stronger. Good washing days, Markus says to Elba. She looks at him, smiles and says, Well, we best get to it.

  On Boxing Day, Rene makes him play backyard cricket. The kerbside bin’s the stumps. Rene bowls from near the house. Six and out, no LBs, auto wikie. The radio’s crackling. The Test at the ’G is almost understandable. Elba sits under the shade of a few stray oleanders, which Rene’s yet to remove and poison.

  At the end of the week, Rene and Elba go into town on New Year’s Eve. No fireworks: total fire ban. Markus says he’ll stay home. No point without fireworks. He watches Round The Twist and drinks beer.

  And in time, Markus’s twentieth birthday passes in the form of a chocolate mud-cake from the IGA and home-brand fizzy drink. Rene’s working hard, and comes in from the land at nine or ten pm to say, Thistles’ve blown in from the next property over — ’bout a k ’way. Took longer than expected to chip them out.

  By mid-February, Rene’s at it again. Ya need a proper job.

  Where in this desolation? Markus, instead, keeps to his father’s farm’s books. The money trouble doesn’t worsen or improve.

  And then autumn’s mid-way through its moods. Outside, none of the leaves drop: the trees keep hold of them as if pulling a woolly jumper tighter around their branches. The grass begins to green. A fake green that’ll turn yellow with the faintest lick of heat.

  Winter’s darkness rises at six in the evening. Days shorten. When not filled with cloud or fog, the sky’s heavy. He wants it to fall to the earth and fill the Depression to the brim.

  Markus looks at the weave in the carpet. The fibres bind themselves up with one another. He attempts to unpick them: Platonic union will always end in undoing. An hour later, he’s showered and dressed. It’s not much. It’s enough. Black and grey, as if for a funeral. The suit’s tight over his chest and pinches a little under his arms.

  Rene says, Shirt looks better tucked in.

  It’s otherworldly. A court appearance is otherworldly. A world of murder in dank alleys and drug busts in ghettos. Somehow, Markus has fallen to the other side of the tracks. You don’t have to deal with that side unless you do something otherworldly. He gets a waft of new-leather from his shoes. Their stiff heels bite into his ankle’s soft flesh. The mirror shows him his own blank eyes, which say he’s not ready.

  Narioka’s courthouse is a solid red-brick structure. It holds a single courtroom surrounded on three sides by offices. The façade is elaborate, flanked by timber and a cast-iron bullnose veranda. The ridged slate roof is decorated with railings and finials. The gable reaches an interesting culmination, though none can actually see the culmination because it reaches too high for prying eyes — passers-by just assume it’s interesting. When judges are not using the rooms — which they do just once a month — local growers use them to sell produce from. The judge, in gown and cap, sits behind a wooden desk, which is too elaborate for this rurality. The judge is small, and appears lost in the elongated grain and tight knots and growth rings and burls and slubs. Most of the room’s interior is composed of wood: it is as if Markus has been transported inside the trunk of a giant eucalypt, like a bardi grub under instruction from the barrister he has met today. He, or rather the pro bono barrister, pleads guilty to one count of dangerous driving. Evidence is presented, questions asked, points contested, flipped, proven, shushed-up. Markus watches, through the windows, the blue sky outside and some cockatoos flapping past.

  No rain falls. They say the drought’s broken in the city — a pipeline is their saviour. Yet, it’s hard to keep the city’s reservoirs full when they’re thirty-two per cent, slowly falling, and there’s no water left here in the Depression for them to pipe away.

  In bed, Markus rolls over to his stomach. The new position draws out stiffness in his lower back. Waking in the same room that he fell asleep in isn’t enough. As he clamps shut his eyes, he wishes he’d remained asleep.

  A day after his sentencing, Markus is the same.

  He’d gotten home the previous night and cried in the bottom of the shower. No release, just salty water running in with the clean and washing away down the drain. He’d used Elba’s sewing needle to cut open his skin. No release, just stinging in the shower and even that, the pain, no longer calmed him. What he assumes the judicial system intends as a release — the sentence — is rather anticlimactic. As far as the judge is concerned, the case is finished, and in a fortnight, Markus will begin community service as a council worker, weeding at the side of the road, marking lines in the middle of it, mowing the lawn beside the public swimming pool. Wearing a high-visibility vest won’t make the deceased visible.

  It was the farmer first on scene who’d stuck more than anything else.

  The farmer had asked, You okay?

  Markus nodded. Just a little tired, he said.

  Stay awake and count for me.

  One two three four …

  You the only one in the car? the farmer asked.

  No, Markus said.

  Was there two of ya, son? More?

  Markus nodded. Two. But I don’t know where he is now.

  Help’ll be here soon, the farmer said.

  Can you help me find him?

  I don’t think we will.

  How can you know that?

  The farmer patted Markus’s shoulder. Are ya right? the farmer asked.

  Markus nodded. It could be worse.

  You’re alive, aren’t ya.

  Yair.

  Son, the farmer said, ya need to sit down for a minute.

  But what about my friend?

  Sit on the grass, the farmer said. The ambos are here.

  Can you get my friend?

  The ambos want to look ya over.

  Where’s Grayson?

  C’mon, son, the farmer said.

  You know where Grayson is, don’t you?

  The farmer nodded.

  Please tell me?

  Afterward, the local sergeant said, We’ll be in contact soon.

  Rene drove Markus home from the scene, and neither of them said a word. It was a long while ago if counting the days chronologically and rather inadequate if measuring by your own peculiar sense of time. They’d pulled up out back of Rene’s as the sun began to raise its golden head: a sleepy teenager yaw
ning through fairy-floss pink clouds and breaking the robin-egg blue. Last night’s violent storm was nothing more than the four smashed hanging pots lying on the veranda’s brickwork. Markus looked at the mud on his hands, under his nails, the redder stuff up his arms; he looked at his torn jeans and punctured shirt. Inside the house, he’d stripped to his undies and slipped beneath the cold doona. Tears came. Kept coming and he gasped. When he could no longer hear the sounds of Rene or Elba, he took his swimming bag and left the house. The distinct claustrophobia of safety was too much. He walked out into a high sun. He walked the back roads. He walked to the public pool (which had still had water in it). It was empty of people.

  Didn’t reckon we’d be seeing you this morning, said Youarang, who stood in the dim entry room with the ice-creams and packet chips and Python snakes, wearing his glary yellow YMCA lifesaver t-shirt.

  Markus went there to feel exhausted, to feel his body burn and burst, just like most other mornings; however, this morning, he contemplated letting the water extinguish him.

  Standing in the mid-section of the public pool, the water was ice-blue cool on Markus’s skin. A car hushed past on Melville Street. Gone before he saw it. He looked at the replica steam-train in the rose gardens beside the empty creek before he sank beneath the water. He let his back touch the bottom. He couldn’t decide where the surface ended and the sky began. He screamed into the water. What he screamed was an attempt to push the crushing weight suffocating his chest out of him. The air bubbles from his lungs rattled the water, rushing to the surface as if his scream had boiled it. When there was no air left in him, he considered breathing in. Instead, he put his feet on the semi-slimy bottom and followed his bubbles upward, onward. He swashed the mud and dried blood from his body until he was clean. Picking out the same stuff stuck under his fingernails took the longest. He swam next. Lap after lap of breaststroke, kicking against the water, splitting it and dragging it behind him with his palms. Lap after lap, until he was dry-retching above the overflow drain that runs around the rim of the pool.

  At home, he’d made his way to the bathroom. Put the radio on. He’d looked at himself in the mirror for a long time and had clenched at the pain in his shoulder — he could remember that side of his body hitting the driver’s door when the car flipped. He hoped it’d bruise. He let go of the shoulder. Clenched again.

  He found the traces that Grayson had left behind after he had stayed over two nights ago, after Markus’s eighteenth birthday. There was an un-hung towel and the Vegemite jar out on the bench, with further evidence of its use — a dirty knife and plate — in the sink. These traces annoyed Markus as he followed them around the house, because he was the one who had to clean them up and it was like Grayson was dying again. But touching them, picking them up — running his fingers over the dried-out towel — he realised that these things were some of the last things Grayson had touched. And this made Markus appreciate them. These traces of Grayson were a strange currency that Markus felt comfortable using in the days following Grayson’s death. An economy he used to buy the next day, and the next. Even after the towel had been hung out on the line, smelling of rosy fabric softener. Even after the plate and knife were put away, sparkling.

  Elba was on the couch, her auburn hair black in the dim room, her dress lying against her skin as if it were a blanket. Her damp hair hung off her forehead. The plastic blinds drawn over the lounge room’s windows clacked against the sill. Markus imagined blowing Elba’s dress away, as he would a tissue from the bench into the bin. She snored. The telly was playing a repeat of Seinfeld. He decided it wasn’t funny, turned it over to The Amazing World Of Gumball. It wasn’t any funnier, but it made him forget the world for the show’s duration.

  He woke when it was dark.

  Rene’d replaced Elba on the couch, and the telly had Seinfeld back. Rene told him, We’re gunna have a bonfire out back.

  Markus said, I’ll be right.

  Rene said, It’s for you.

  And Markus had agreed. Too tired to argue or, rather, too light — there it was again: light. He said, I can’t stay up too late, my apprenticeship starts tomorrow.

  Nah, bud. It’s sorted. I spoke with Brute. Says start when y’ready.

  While Markus waited for the fire, he deleted all the apps from his phone. Facebook, Snapchat, Insta, Words with Friends. He took the battery and SIM out. Tried to stop anyone from getting in his head. He placed his mobile in the same snap-lock plastic bag Elba had presented a rock from Uluru to him in only a few days ago. He put the bag under his bed. He got his laptop and disconnected from the internet, returned the laptop to its satchel and put it on the floor inside his wardrobe. He turned off the power points in his room, except for his bedside lamp. He gathered his shoes and put them in a garbage bag, ready to burn on the bonfire. Outside, he felt frost forming on the grass between his toes and he felt the dampness soaking into the hems of his jeans. He looked into the fire.

  ’Nother log’ll do ’er, Rene said.

  Markus said he’d get it.

  Y’got no shoes on.

  S’alright.

  Elba said, Let him be, Ren. The sangria stuck to her cheeks when she said, Shoes make no difference now. Markus felt more strongly than ever the desire to lose himself in an alternative identity, just as she had. Rene, his face shadowy from the flickering flame, smiled tight and walked away to get another log for the fire. Markus began burning all his shoes, starting with his Blundstones.

  The next morning, the bonfire was smouldering and its streaky-white smoke sailed upward into the ironbark canopies above the driveway. There were galahs squabbling over roosting room in the branches, or perhaps the birds were complaining at the smoke. Beneath them, Rene and Markus re-laid straw and replaced geraniums — the first of his father’s attempts to return to normal, though these actions would slowly become an invisible leash to keep Markus close. Rene showed Markus how the geraniums flowered: the unassuming flower heads broke open to reveal a delicate flesh-pink flower, which would deepen to a tangerine.

  The depth of winter shallows into summer. Markus goes for a walk, passing by his old high school. The tall gum trees around frame it. And standing before that place, he feels he’s grown, not up, but away. And not away from that place mentally, but rather away from place physically. This place: Narioka.

  In year eight or nine his then PE class, called Individual Activities, spent four weeks of first term doing water sports. That means we piss on each other, one of the boys said, and the whole group had laughed. Where’s Georges, said another of the boys, he’d be a slut for it. They laughed again, one of them mimicking holding his cock and pretending to piss into the water. Grayson said, Water aerobics is old people’s swimming. He’d been standing erect, hands on his hips and a dip in his back: a dip that urged Markus to sink his head in its cradle (like when Grayson would lie down beside the footy oval and rest his head on his arms and his body looked as if it were the perfect place to sleep). Markus watched Grayson watch the water, and saw the crystal-blue reflection dancing in Grayson’s brown eyes. Markus stops himself there, aware of the potential disaster of fairy-tale happiness. Cut. Cut. Cut back to the core.

  When he gets home from this walk, the ABC is playing reruns of the first season of Dance Academy. He has watched it each week previous and now he watches each episode again. Rene and Elba have left him quite alone since his sentencing — they’re waiting for the legal papers to come back to see where they’ve set up his community service. While they wait, one’s working and the other is lunching with the girls. At dinner the other night, there was some talk of his twenty-first birthday: his plans, their plans etc. Markus had said nothing. A birthday’s not what it once was. For now, he settles in on the couch, blanket over him. Tells himself he has a dancer’s body and that this body can leap and soar.

  The Leader’s on the coffee table. He’d stopped reading the articles about the railway constructi
on saga when the editor had started placing them beyond the crossword. The latest edition reports that due to financial difficulties elicited by drought, the rail project is on hold, of course. Drought this and drought that. It isn’t only the absence of water; it sucks life not only out of the land but also from opportunity.

  Cat’s sitting on the windowsill scratching at the glass, which distracts Markus. Cat meows and starts scratching its claw harder. Markus groans, rolls off the couch, and sways over on all fours. He catches sight of a blur outside, rubs an eye, and when it refocuses he sees a slim, brown-fur cat slink away into the plains-grass paddock. Cat turns its head up, meows. Markus pats it. Cat purrs and slumps off.

  After he’s folded the blanket over the back of the couch, Markus finds Cat in his bedroom, sleeping on top of the poetry piled at the foot of the bed. Markus taps on his lamp. The light’s beautiful and enough. He strips his bed sheets and moves the things that’ll get in the way, like his pedestal fan. He vacuums his mattress and his bedside table and the floor and the curtains and the roof. When he’s done, he gets a bucket of steaming water. Washes the walls and the door and the window. Goes out the front door and splashes the dirty water into a wild-looking geranium. The liquid drips off the leaves. He remakes his bed. He puts his four pillows in pairs, diagonally beside each other, at the top of the bed. He replaces the pedestal fan. He takes down from the walls the faded Aquaman posters. Opens the curtains, and a cool breeze puffs the lace behind the curtains into his body. It’s a little before six — the sky is cyan, pink clouds, and a tinge yellow-green.

  Elmyra opens the door to her house. She’d called him up while he was contemplating the clouds. She’d asked him over. Her shoulders curl inward when she sees him.

  He didn’t bring anything — no gift, no card, no flowers — because, as he was rushing out the door to come over here, a vague thought had crossed his mind: sentimental gestures won’t close this gap.

  They’d found Mrs Robinson, dead, sitting in the front seat of her old Falcon. Apparently, she’d driven through the Country Club to the back of the faux island, along its jutting mass, down the bank, and out into the middle of the empty Lake. She’d parked there. Exposed. And hot, very hot inside a closed-up car. The engine was running, and by now there was a hose taped to the exhaust.