I got you a gift. Elba produces a copper-coloured rock inside a plastic zip-lock bag.
What is it?
Ayers Rock, she says.
Markus sighs. Uluru.
Elba gives him a blank look as she swirls away into the nearby kitchen for a tray of cold meat sangas and a bottle of home-brand fizzy drink to clear their throats.
Buff hogs his share; his fingers wriggle in a proud way. Strangling the bread, which he kinda shoves at his lips before they’re opened. White crumbs hang on his short moustache. Markus selects the pickles and ham triangles from the platter. Elba sips her drink, a triangle of sandwich untouched on her plate. Everybody in town knows she’s really Samantha. This random correction filters through Markus, unspoken, of course, yet regularly enough that it reaffirms the truth and breaks him out of the fantasy.
After lunch, he and Buff head to the front entry.
Markus says, Thanks for the bike, the help and all. He turns to a fish tank sitting on a side table. Fish darts around the plastic plant inside.
Buff knocks into the wall as he slides his boots on, ticking his tongue again. Who owns that?
Me.
Buff scratches his chin. He says, D’fishes come up for air? He clears his throat. Up to the surface.
Markus says, Fish are made of water, I don’t think—
Fish breaks the surface.
Buff flicks on his childish smile. He did it.
So he did.
Buff says, Water looks dirty.
I forget he’s up here, Markus says.
Can’t blame ya. Buff bends his nose to the glass and taps his finger beside it. Shame about the water. Kinda waste, what with the drought.
It’s only a fishbowl full, says Markus.
Buff snorts a glob of mucous into his mouth. He swallows. Dad’s pretty much given up on the sheep. Sold three quarters last week.
Sorry to hear.
Nah. Because of those cunts upstream. They oughta be sorry. Dad says they’ve kept heaps a water back for those fucken wetlands. Birds or some shit, endangered. Shoot the fucken lotta ’em, if y’ask me. He sniffs. You’ll be right at the mechanics. Don’t need much water for that, ay. Laughs a bit. How’s y’old man doin’? He wouldn’t say before.
Markus talks about how Rene has that native grass in, seems robust, and the beef cattle are good.
Fucken smart bloke, he is. Too bad he’s a Greenie. I’d like to use some a’ them for target practice. Don’t y’reckon?
Yair nah, he wouldn’t like that.
Kiddin’, Bellos.
Markus places his hands in his pockets and finds and fiddles with a grass seed at the corner of one. He looks down into Fish’s tank. Perhaps it’s stagnant in there. Maybe Buff is right; maybe Fish needs to break the surface sometimes. He bends and flicks a switch. A gentle gurgle sounds in the entry: Fish’s filter. Some movement to tell Fish that there’s movement beyond what it’s made of.
If Grayson knew Buff was here he’d be shitty, but Grayson doesn’t need to know. And it’s not like Buff’s going to tell because Buff doesn’t consider the emotions of a situation. Except sometimes he does get a squint around his eyes, which makes you think he’s second-guessing his interior.
Buff thrusts a hand down the front of his footy shorts, readjusts. Catch ya at footy soon, mate.
Markus lies across his bed. Brings Grayson’s name up in his phone.
Markus: Hey.
Grayson: Hey.
Markus: Get the stuff organised?
Grayson: Nahh having a sleep.
Markus: Did I wake you?
Grayson: Yeppp gunna go back to sleep.
Markus: My bad. Sleep well.
Grayson: Argh my cousin pinned me down tickled me I was laughing loud bloody hell.
Markus: Hahahha that’s cute.
Grayson: Omg I nearly peed haha.
Markus: I was gunna ask that. I was like, What if he did.
Grayson: Hahah I was stop stop and swore and yelled and She stopped haha.
Markus: That’s like tickle rape.
Grayson: Yep.
Markus: She’s funny haha.
Grayson: yah man.
Markus: Wanna chat I’m soooo bored.
Grayson: Im guuna go mowing the lawns.
Markus: Aw that’s okay.
Grayson: Sorry will do when I finish.
To fill in the time while he’s waiting, Markus walks down the hallway and removes his shirt. The warm cotton catches on his ears. He tugs and the garment comes away. He switches on the radio in the bathroom. He looks at his so-called mouse-brown ear-length hair in the narrow mirror. I like it like that, Elmyra had said. He begins shaving. Foaming. Slicing through the layer. Silence slips away from him like the cream he shaves from his skin, and a turbulent roar swashes inside his head.
Grayson’s been here a kazillion times before and it has felt homely; this morning, his presence had felt like that of an old guest meeting someone new. When Gray had showered this morning, the water had rushed like riptides inside the house’s copper veins. Markus’d listened to Grayson’s showering at the pool’s change room, mistaking, or not, the water’s slapping on the concrete floor in the stall beside him for Grayson jacking his junk.
Markus swishes the last of the white shaving foam into the basin, washes the residue from his chin and cheeks and neck. He looks into the mirror at his face, chest, shoulders, biceps. Markus’s ribcage could burst outward with all the things he could’ve ever said to Grayson and never has. Near-combustion, near-expulsion, and frustration swell in his chest. He’s frightened that he’ll take the razor and shear into the spaces between his ribs to release its pressure. Markus drops it into the bottom drawer of the vanity, right at the back, behind disused deodorants and aftershaves. He’s looking back into the eyes looking out at him from inside the mirror.
Markus is angry with Grayson: for leaving him, for not saying what he wanted to hear. He’s angry with Buff for not knowing what he’s talking about. He’s not quite angry, rather somewhat irritated, with the guilt Elmyra provokes in him for choosing Grayson over her. And angry with himself for choosing Grayson over everyone. No. He’s angry with Grayson for being fucken oblivious. Markus undresses and contemplates his junk hanging limp between his legs. Pubes spread, a thinning bush over his stomach and down the inside of his thighs. He imagines he’s someone else inside. This is not his mind. This is not his want. If it’s his body on the outside and within it’s not his body, it makes it easier to touch, to love. If it’s someone else on the inside. If his mind becomes someone else’s mind. And anyway, the heat calls for this release. The rain won’t come. Each encounter has pushed to this. The man’s tickle on his groin, flesh-on-flesh, blood swell. To close his eyes and go back to when the axe bit the ironbark, to when the grass was an electric brush, when Fish broke surface tension, when rough palms shook and mice shook.
He begins with a naked man wearing orange undies. Goes on with this, pretends it’s wrong with self-loathing, etc. Too late now, I’m close. Goes on with the man, strips him naked and begins making love with him on a Sunday on the floor beside the open window. The amber curtains snap, and he smells marigolds, sweet sweat, fresh cut grass, and musk. Autumn, and the man’s hand touching, the man holding him down, laughing into his chest, and the man’s heavy, husky, warm breathing on … He spoons him; they’re in bed, are not quite sleeping, and are whispering between the words of Cold War Kids. A little fun for my friend, Grayson says. What are you going to do? Markus says. Whatever you’ll let me do. Grayson shifts his hands over Markus’s chest, down to his belly and onto his underwear. How’s that?
Markus cums.
He showers with Lewis McKirdy. He likes Lewis. Likes the stream slashing down into his hair and on his neck and back, and Lewis’s smooth voice coming in between the rushing. He can f
orget everything else; he’s flying high and the right way up. Three minutes, he hears Rene’s voice. Three minutes an’ don’t let it run while ya scrubbin’ y’teeth. He wants to say, Tight-arse. It’s not about the money, though, and Markus knows it. It’s hard, when he can recall days as a small child when he’d run through a garden sprinkler. Out of the shower, Markus is flying upside down once more. The mirror’s misted over, and so he wipes it away, but the condensation recovers as soon as he wipes. There’s no face now, which he prefers. A crash inside him, coming down, and heat pricking his body as the radio chants Cold War Kids. Back in his own room, with faded Aquaman posters tacked to walls and small pillars of poetry piled at the bed’s foot, he closes the door and opens the robe. He dresses in grey jeans and a peach-toned t-shirt. Sprays Joop.
A cht-cht chtt sound, followed by mewing. A wail for, say, a lost love … He finds Cat in the laundry. Its paw digs the unused kitty litter. There’s no shit, no piss: Cat’s scraping the little white stones into a neat pile. He grabs the trembling feline, who bites the palm of his hand hard. Markus has to wrestle to get himself free. A few deep cuts on his palm draw a steady stream of blood. He goes to the kitchen and fills a cake tin with water and Dettol, soaks the sliced skin for a few moments. Stinging runs to the tips under his nails. He bandages the wound, overcompensating as he gazes into the lounge. Grayson’s not there. Markus slaps the bitten palm into his hip.
Is that you, Mark? Elba rises from the couch and comes toward him. Your hand. She takes his bitten hand and rubs the bandage.
Cat, he says.
It bit you because it’s off the street.
It’s not Cat’s fault.
She dusts her hands, saying, Suit yourself, and then leans them on the kitchen bench across from him. Have you seen your father?
He shakes his head.
She says, You have to go up and finish off some tree. I don’t know how you finish off a tree, but … She pushes tendrils of hair from the side of her face.
Markus says, I have to go out now.
Her hand stops somewhere at the back of her head. She closes her eyes and says, Just do it. She heads back to the couch. Stop arguing and do it.
There’s a swell in Markus’s chest.
From inside the shed he takes up metho and a battery-operated drill. The motorbike will be lucky to get there; he knows this as he rides it up the paddock. Nothing has fixed it yet, so he doesn’t expect whatever it was that Buff’s done to fix it either. Markus’ll have to take it to Brute’s in the next week sometime. He winds through nodding heads of grass, their florets filled with muted afternoon sunshine. The thrumming motor is incongruous as it nears the tree that he, with the help of Rene, had felled this morning. The wood is fresh and scented sweet, earthy and virginal, swathed in deep bark that’s impregnated with kino. The drill’s cutting piece twirls into the heart, draws up sawdust. He takes the methylated poison, sunlight glistening at the edges of its plastic bottle. He fills five drill holes. Strange to kill the thing Rene’s obsessed with. But Rene says, and what Rene says, goes. He straightens the bottle, recaps. He sits back beside the stump.
There’re more clouds in the sky; they cast purple shadows over the vast flatness. Maybe the vapour will break, maybe it will rain upon the land, stir the dust, twist and straighten and twist like awns. He slides a piece of Wrigley’s out of its foil and begins chewing the minty flesh. The taste crisps within him, freshens his perspective. He lies on his stomach. Cocks his head to the side and selects a single stem of plains grass. He’s careful of the grass’s yellow spikelet as he traces his thumb and forefinger down to the waxy base. Pulls. It squeaks and plucks away. He waves it in front of him, strokes the seed head over his cheek, down his jaw, onto his neck, and closes his eyes.
At a certain time this morning, sunlight had purled through drawn lace curtains to gather, sleek, on Markus’s bedroom floor. Its presence had made him think of Grayson. In the extended moments before arising to Rene’s call, Markus, being naked and in bed, stroked his hand down his chest and over his cock, fingering the hair on his thigh. Most mornings, as if it’ll stop him, he pictures behind closed eyes a decaying animal, like a dried-out fox carcass hanging on a fence. This morning, he knew from the moment he saw the sunlight on his floor that picturing decay would be futile. His cock swelled and his foreskin retracted. The decaying-animal image failed to fill his entire mind and instead it zoomorphised into the figure of Grayson asleep in his house. While Grayson in his entirety is not a simple sexual object, there is a part of him that serves as an object for exploring what Markus is feeling towards him. So, with semen spurted on his belly, Markus had dropped his foot over the side of the bed and made his toes make shadows in the streaks of sun.
One eye opens. Markus says, Fuck.
I wish I could suspend this moment, place it in the heart of the grass seeds, and that the seeds would blow away to a remote part of the country. What if those seeds took root and grew and existed forever? The creation of my own world.
Halfway home the motorbike’s engine sputters, conks out.
He dismounts, kicks the front wheel, which dully resounds. The handlebars try to pivot when he curses and kicks the wheel again; pivot, say, as if to get away from him. He decides to push the bike the rest of the way. Little clouds of dust rise into the air with each step. A Murray Grey moos from the paddock beside the track and knocks its thick skull against a fence post. Haze made of a thousand and more tiny insects swarm Markus’s head. He sputters their tiny bodies stuck on his lips. The motorbike will be fixed. One day. He doesn’t know which. He discards the bike in Rene’s shed.
Elba’s snoring on the couch. A repeat of the Spanish version of Pride and Prejudice is playing on the telly’s screen; its subtitles are in English.
He moves over to her and contemplates spitting in her semi-open mouth, not because he wants to or because he dislikes her. She’s okay. She’s there. Her mouth is open, asking for it. Kinda. He decides not to; that it would wake her. He came back inside for one thing. He takes up the keys for her Jeep from the kitchen table.
Markus, in Elba’s Jeep, flies past Rene’s ute on its way back home. Nevermind. In town, he goes around to Elmyra’s like he said he would. She’s home. He imagines how Buff might turn and hold her around the waist, kiss her cheek like a child might. She’d squeak and giggle and say, You’ll wake Mum up. He’d whisper onto her warm neck, Sorry. With gossip running amok, Markus wonders if this hearsay will actually bring Buff and Elmyra together. Not under rose bushes or beneath geraniums but in public. Maybe at the pool, getting cherry ice-creams. Markus would like to see Elmyra happy, to see her caring for someone in a different way to how she cares for her mother, or even him. He thumps the front door shut behind him as he enters, and looks back to see if the stained-glass motif’s intact. In the entry of her house, as he’s removing his boots, he wishes her a happy b’day.
She asks if he’d enjoyed his own birthday party last night. I lost you, she says. I was looking for you before I left.
He could tell her that he and Grayson had broken into the public pool and gone swimming. He doesn’t, because the next thing she asks is if his hand, the one Cat’s bit, is okay. He listens to his woollen sock as the second leather boot slides away from his foot; the sound is a quiet exhalation. He rubs the dirt that has fallen from the bottoms of his Blundstones into the carpet. There’s a buzz within his toes from static electricity.
She says, Why are you so dressed up?
He says, For Grayson’s gig at the pub.
Oh, that, she says. I saw that on Facebook.
Elmyra’s giggly and says she must come to have a few drinks before her party. She asks about Buff Burrows as she leads Markus down to her bedroom. Her room is as it’s always been. A four-poster bed, and, at its foot against the wall, a sassafras dresser with a tri-fold mirror that reflects bed and room. There’s a rug striped with shades of grenadine
spread flat against the timber floorboards. Music comes from her iPod dock. She adjusts the music’s volume low. Markie. Buff, how was he?
As always, Markus says. He lies on her bed and looks to its muted floral canopy. Indecorous.
What?
He was as Buff always is. Markus sits up.
Elmyra’s at her dresser with her back to him.
Why Buff? he says.
What do you mean?
Buff doesn’t have the greatest track record of, ah, tolerance. It’s pretty much his way or the highway. Markus thinks first of the things Buff’s said about Youarang, and then Georges.
Elmyra says, People are complicated.
Markus sees, in the mirror, her eyes and tight lips; sees her mother, almost.
The mother he’s heard more about than he’s seen. He’s going off what he’s created. Mrs Robinson keeps to her room. Elmyra has said before that she hardly sees her dad. His truck’s had more whores than cargo while tripping to and fro the continent, or so Mrs Robinson says to Elmyra after a wine or two. Her dad works with his friend Ned, and Elmyra has never seen them apart. When her dad comes home, Ned’s always with him. They get drunk and whisper at strange hours. They’re best friends. They make each other happy. Markus watches as Elmyra pats her skirt and runs her fingers through her fringe, leans forward and picks the spaces between her teeth with a painted fingernail. Maybe she finds him frat/paternal. After all, her father’s absent and her own brother had escaped to the city as soon as he could. No one says much about him. The silence on the absent brother is self-preservation: remembering his beaten face would be too much. This truth presses on Elmyra like the pink wax she glides over her lips and the black she pencils near her eyes.
Elmyra smiles at Markus’s reflections. She says, Buff says I should’ve been alive in the forties. She wobbles her head to the music. She pouts and puts her fingers at the base of her head, strokes her hair outward.
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