Lightning flashes. Or a streetlight’s globe blew.
She says, If he comes before … She looks up into his face before she turns to look into the darkness.
Stop pretendin’ like we’re everyone else, El. A swell in his chest and a salty burn in his eyes, either for the truth she spat or because he resents her as much as he depends on her.
She moves away from him. Light dapples her body. The wind blows the hem of her skirt and, looking down the road for distant headlights, she pats the material against her skin.
Dust, it must’ve been dust blowing into his eyes. Oh, we forgot ya present, he says. We’ll be late to ya partay. He turns and spits into the wirilda (Acacia retinodes) growing near the pub’s door.
Thunder.
Inside, Markus scans the floor for Grayson and sees him near the fireplace, smiling as he checks Brute Burrows on the chin. Markus hurries over.
Brute sniggers, the fat about his neck wobbles like a proud cock’s wattles, and he says, Do that ahgen, mate. Brute sits his half-sunk pot on the fireplace opposite the bar, straightens his body and becomes elephantine.
The other boozers, with dirty unshaven faces, exchange eye-jabs.
Markus is sweaty-palmed. How the fuck did this happen?
Some of the elders laugh or breathe heavier with nervousness, passing this teeny confrontation off as light-heartedness. Juss a blue b’tween mates.
No harm, ay. No harm done, says Grayson.
Behind, the bartender cuffs a pot on the wooden bar top.
Grayson turns.
The bartender nods and crosses his arms and says, Youse fellas get ya shit together or get out.
Tell this shithead to fucken piss orf, says Brute, stepping a little forward and yelling to be heard.
Grayson laughs; short like ha ha and inflected on the end, posing a profound question.
Brute blocks the light from the doorway between the bar and dining room. He raises his hands and his body seems to speak. His body tells the tale of the country he’s from. I come from a country where Ned Kelly’s king. I’ll king-hit this li’l’ derro — nah! King-hit’s a coward punch. King Coward. No. Two, maybe three or more punches on the chin. I’ll be the talk of the town if I bring this larrikin down.
Markus acts. He pushes Brute, follows him into the dining room. Move. Move fast, take the cunt by surprise. Move. Move fast because Grayson might be hurt. Brute grunts.
On ya toes, someone shouts.
Markus takes Brute by the collar, jumper-punches him, and his heaviness aches in Markus’s knuckles. He swings the weight around. Pushes Brute back toward the wall beside the door. Huffs.
Righto fellas, stop ya rot, the bartender yells.
In the dining room, Markus steers Brute again at the wall so his back cracks against it. Pulls him away, pulling a stubborn anchor. Spittle from both their mouths. Brute bends a little, the fat on his stomach stops him from going double-over. Move. Move. Taking his strength to heave this rock, Markus pushes it forward. Lets go. Brute’s head arches, conks on the brickwork — Fucken ’ell, he pants. The elder men gather at the door, none enter. And surely, beyond the barricade of age, the young lads dance regardless.
The bartender throws Markus out. He stumbles into the night, which is pouring with rain. Elmyra is gone. Markus drives Cecily back to her house because she says she’s too crook to go to El’s. After they drop Cecily off, Grayson says, She’s not sick. We had a fight before gettin’ to the pub.
What’s that? Markus is driving the short distance to Gray’s place.
She’s at me to leave IGA — she says it’s not proper work — an’ she’s at me to give up giggin’ to get some bullshit apprenticeship.
The car pulls up in the drive. Markus says, You need to do what’s best for you.
Grayson hums. I just need to forget it for the moment, he says, there’s always tomorrow.
It’s raining harder, and the boys dash through the front yard and around the back of the house. Grayson stretches up to the rafters of the back patio and pulls down a key to the back door. He replaces the key in the rafters and heads inside. He opens a bottle of vodka in the kitchen. It’s semi-dark and cold, and Grayson’s smiling as he reads the vodka’s label. Espresso — eee-yuck. Can ya pour this? He hands the bottle to Markus and then wanders into the lounge.
Mixer? Markus pours a standard measure and a little bit over into two glasses.
See what’s in the fridge.
Where’s your mum?
Not here, Grayson replies.
When’s she back? Markus decides on Coke Zero. He tops the glasses. Hazy eyed, he’s glad this place has the same layout as his.
Grayson’s bending to the fireplace in the lounge and fiddling with a match. He drops it. Don’t break li’l’ guy, he says. The match head ignites and lights the kindling fire. Closing its door, he asks if they’re heading out to Elmyra’s.
I guess, says Markus as he sits on the couch. He feels guilty. He hands the second drink to his mate, who sits beside him.
Fark, Grayson says after a sip. How much vodka d’ya put?
Markus says he needs it.
Grayson sips. S’alright, he says. I forgive ya.
For what? Markus laughs.
For being you.
Markus coughs. There’s been one other time that Grayson said he forgave Markus — for being you. Though the first time, he’d phrased it differently. It’s just you. On that camping trip, year eight or nine, the night Buff had stayed and said he was texting some girl. Buff said, Shit my rufus is hard. Idiot. Anyway, Gray had laughed and asked a question Markus hadn’t heard. It was then that Buff turned to Markus and asked,You listenin’? Yes. Yes, because Markus knew the bastard was texting Elmyra — always had been. What of it? Buff scoffed. Nothing, just don’t fuck her over. And there was a pause before Buff said, I reckon there’ll be some fucking. He laughed. Grayson laughed. Markus had waited until they’d finished and said, You’re both feral pigs.
You’ve said that once before, Markus says. Remember?
Nah, cunt.
When we went camping and Buff came along. And you said, carn, Markus, it’s just you. It’s just nothing. It’s not me.
I didn’t mean it as a bad thing. Grayson sips the drink; his face scrunches as he swallows. He says, It is just you. He puts his glass down on the coffee table, springs up and goes to his bedroom, quick-shuffling down the hall and yelling, Gotta charge me phone.
The night is fragmented, and Markus wants to say, Slow down so I can follow. He wants to stay stretching across the couch and talking shit with Gray till they both pass out. Instead, he pours Grayson’s vodka down the kitchen sink. They’ve both had enough. The fridge door has a few pictures on it. One is held up with a magnet from the Big Strawberry. It’s of two boys: the first, Grayson, lays belly-down on a skateboard, his arms stretched out in front, and the second, Markus, lays legs-forward on his back on top of Gray. They’re smiling and their hair’s captured in a perpetual wave. They must’ve come down the skate ramp.
The photo peeks out from under a calendar. Grayson’s mother’s schedule scrawled in tiny handwriting, smudged in places, to fit it all in. AM shift, PM shift, PM, PM, AM, AM, AM, PM, written on the days of the week. AM highlighted in yellow with a smiling sun beside it and PM highlighted in blue with a crescent moon beside it. There’re hair appointments wedged between the days, too, as well as when pay is expected, and Grayson’s shifts at the supermarket, his gigs at the pubs, his own hair appointments, a dental appointment. One Sunday, at the end of this month, the words Mum & son day? are pencilled in.
Markus heads down the hallway.
Grayson’s on his bed with his smartphone over his face, humming a melody.
You didn’t get to play your gig, says Markus.
Grayson laughs. Fuckers don’t deserve it.
What about your gear?
Ay?
Guitar an’ that.
Gray shrugs. Get it tomorrow.
Markus shivers again, like that saying someone’s walked over his grave, and says, Can I borrow a jumper?
Grayson rolls off the bed. What d’ya say? He bends forward and puckers his lips.
Fuck off. Markus opens the wardrobe door and takes out a hoodie.
Grayson walks around the bed. Look here, he says at the condensation on the bedroom window. Started earlier an’ that’s why I was late to the pub an’ that somehow started Cecily off … I just wanted t’ watch it. Must be cause of how cold it is. Global warmin’ an’ crazy weather. He’s talking as if a child dreaming. Can you even think what it’ll be like in fifty years?
We’ll probably all be dead, Gray.
Why’s that?
No bees left in Narioka.
So?
Rene says it’s right for small producers to hand-pollinate, but what about those massive wheat runs in New South?
We’ll all starve.
Plus the drought and no jobs.
An’ them extremists.
Markus sniffs. World’s fucked.
Grayson has, the whole conversation, kept his eyes on the condensation forming on the window. The lamplight casts moody shadows around him.
Yes. He is magnificent.
What can we do, but?
Markus tries to form a reply, but can only shrug.
Grayson starts to write in the condensation. His shirtless torso stretches across the corner of the mattress, his jean’s fly undone. He mutters. It’s quiet enough to be cryptic. He takes his finger away. His nail’s chewed back almost to a painful shortness. With the pad of his finger, he’s written in the water perder nuestras mentes and underneath mi compañeros.
I don’t know what that means. Markus draws a cock and balls beneath it.
Grayson dons a new shirt and jumper. My colour? He spins and falls back on the bed. We could stay, he says. The fire’s blazin’.
Markus can’t say anything. It’s billowing inside and too big to fit out his mouth.
It’s raining. Grayson closes his eyes, rests his palms over the material covering his belly. He looks asleep. He breathes out a word, Elmyra. He stands up and roughs his hair, looking at his reflection in the glass of a picture frame.
Fuck me dead, says Markus as he jitters the gear stick.
They’ve taken Elba’s Jeep. It’s struggling in the cold, the storm.
Pick a gear an’ she’ll go. Grayson lifts Markus’s hand away and with his own shifts the stick into place. The Jeep resumes. Music full. The vodka’s awoken Grayson, where the beer had dulled him. He beats.
Markus begins driving, a tingle in his hands and a blur in his eyes. Vodka’s had the opposite effect on him. It’s vanquished him, and he’s numb under its influence. He attaches his sight on Grayson.
It happens quick.
The fuck y’doin? Markus yells.
Grayson casts away the efforts to stop him. He’s climbing out the passenger window. He’s sitting very far forward on the window’s ledge.
The steering wheel wobbles, the car follows.
Markus ducks down near the gears and can see Gray’s face outside through the windscreen. Markus hears himself yell, Get the fuck in.
The road speeds and the accelerator drops further to the floor. With his head and torso hanging outside the vehicle, Grayson closes his eyes. Doesn’t hear. Raindrops gather on his face. Slippy skin.
Back.
Grayson doesn’t register.
Come back.
The vehicle moves on to the wrong side of the road. Sways back to the left. Speed because fear. Trying to fix this makes Markus afraid. Grayson yells, valiant as a screeching cockatoo, his voice velvet and rounded in the night. Upward to the stars he calls, hunting or chasing them down. The car moves further left onto the brittle gravel edge. Sways back to the centre of the bitumen. Markus reaches out, touches Gray’s legs inside the car. Grayson wobbles. His eyes flick open. He latches onto the Jesus bar. Smiles and pushes Markus’s hand away with a clumsy foot. Markus hears the rushing tyres. The car slides and its side takes out several guide posts. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Dips into the table drain. Rolls. Slides. Screeches. Rolls another half. Lurches. And lands upturned on its dented, buckled roof. The headlights flicker on a paddock of yellow grass.
III.
The flood
We were born toward the end of last century, so we saw the Lake the one time it filled, which was several years back. At the same time it froze, and then broke up and overflowed. An ‘ephemeral lake’ — also seasonal, intermittent, episodic, temporary — is a watercourse that doesn’t have water flow for the entire year or for many years. Some might flow for more than six months each year while others flow every six years, sixty years, etc. Water sources for ephemeral lakes can be groundwater or surface run-off. Agricultural developments and construction work can alter the water flow and cause an ephemeral system’s flow to be disturbed, declined, or even disrupt its very ephemerality. When the Lake filled, it filled from excess groundwater captured on the Plain. The Plain’s unwanted water was released from the otherwise overregulated system up there, flowed toward the lip of the cliffs and poured down into the Depression, filling the Lake and the tributary creek that cuts through the middle of Narioka.
Narioka’s nickname, Noaks, first appeared to my ears during high school. Someone said, There’s not a lot of opportunity in Noaks for the young.
I’d often stare at my naked body in the mirror, thinking of this statement and thinking about the hair coming out like shag carpet in my armpits and crotch, thinning over my chest and showing itself on my legs, on my arse. This puberty thing is misshapen for such a long time. In the shower, on any given morning, I shampoo my pubes and become hard. I shoot my load at the tiled wall and wash the silky white cum away.
The school bus picks me up from out the front of an old church. The building itself is no larger than a standard bedroom, which is why the townspeople way back when decided to disuse it and build five more in the township of Narioka, all under different denominations. This old church waits for a Catholic congregation. Wispy strands of native grasses grow nestled against its cream-coloured render, which has crumbled away in some places. For a church, you’d expect to see a steeple and a stained-glass window; this building has neither. I’m thankful for it, because at least its inset doorway provides shelter when it’s raining. Some mornings on the bus into school, and when the rain is falling, I watch the rainfall patter against the glass pane and trickle down. The droplets become sperm gametes — semen, spoof, sprog, spunk, splooge, scum, seed. Become the cream of some young guy careening to somewhere out of sight. One droplet pauses and through it, I see the landscape made miniature, as if inside a crystal ball. Your bluish shadow grows more vibrant as you run up your drive to the bus’s door. But there is no you this morning. The bus rocks onward past your place without even slowing.
I sink into the leather seat and hide my eyes from the glare off the side of the road; the corrugation rattles the vehicle and, in turn, shifts my junk. The head of my cock starts brushing against the cotton of my underwear. Boner. Bummer.
Fuck you, puberty.
I put my bag on my lap before I get up, and one of the Drumanure boys across from me says, You got a stiffy?
I say, Nah, I’m getting this. And pull the rotting sandwich from my bag and piff it at him.
When I break free from the stuffy interior of the bus, I wander across the bus shelter to the dusty oval beside. It has yellow-brown clumps of grass. Those boys pass a faded red leather Sherrin to-and-fro, thudding it with their heavy feet through the chipped white goal posts. Under the sky, the boys are dampened gold as the grass itself, yet unlike the grass, the boys are vivid, moving, and alive. Ancient predat
ors that toss and wrestle and watch for the opposition. Even on a winter morning such as this, their bodies are gently grunting and pretty.
Teacher says, Be careful, because as first aid officer I don’t want to have to give someone CPR and call ahead for an ambulance. What terrible news to deliver to a mother.
Watching the boys’ bodies, I have to turn away. I meet up with Elmyra on the sideline. I lay down on my back, on the damp grass, with my knees bent, feet on the ground. I breathe in the cool morning air deep, moisture underneath, and look up into the infinite sky-blue space. I cover my eyes. The thudding football and the chorusing chants of footy lingo, strangely religious, tumble into my mind. I breathe out.
What are you thinking? Elmyra says. She’s sitting on her folded-up waterproof parker.
I want to tell her little stories of my internal made-up world. The words are bigger than my throat and can’t escape. She’ll only hear the faintness, with no trace of meaning.
Nothing.
Why don’t you play?
I couldn’t.
It’s just a game. It’s not serious.
I repeat myself.
Go on. She sits up.
El, no. I don’t like the game.
She pushes my side, as if trying to roll me over. I swipe her hand away, sit up, stand, and walk back through the school buildings.
Terracotta-coloured foliage crumples in the corners of the locker bay; light ambers intensified by the sunlight contrasting against the blue paint of the lockers. Compulsory chip wrappers — pink and green — twist themselves in, as do fewer Ducat’s OJ bottles, drunk dry at lunchtime yesterday. The rows are each three individual lockers high — totally un-American, even though the young adults who occupy them speak American idiom, idly and ignorantly. You and I included. Mine’s a middle locker at the end of the row, where the main pathways into the school buildings intersect. I have no other reason to have come here than to escape from Elmyra, from the football players. I brush some crumbs, with a single index finger, from the inside of my locker; they are like grains of sand dislocated from a distant shore. I thump the locker door shut and shackle it with a brass padlock.
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