The Rest is Weight

by Jennifer Mills

  After an hour I’m stiff from crouching. I move my legs to stretch them, feeling the tautness built into the muscle from cycling. I suppose I’m getting fit from riding to work and back. I cradle one of my calves in my hand. It’s gone hard, like frozen meat.

  Something moves in the shadows on the other side of the basement. My eyes can’t settle on it but I feel my body shift gear. Heart rate increases. Breathing tightens. Crouch becomes a wound spring.

  It is enormous, but moves with careful stealth. It turns in a tight curve and out of sight. The meat lies untouched on the concrete before me. I realise with a dreadful shudder that I am probably a tastier option. What was I thinking?

  I must have been working in the supermarket too long. I am so used to packets arriving on pallets, I’ve forgotten I’m in somebody’s food chain. Do we still count as prey? Is it in our genes to want to be devoured? In my head I can see old documentaries: antelope shredded in open jaws. My ears make a low kind of hum.

  Under the hum I hear a voice, just a whisper.

  It says, ‘Milk, puss. Milk, puss.’

  I duck behind the fire door and stare through the crack at its hinges.

  Soon I hear the zimzim of an electric scooter. It is edging across the floor towards my hunk of meat. A yellow shape sits on the scooter, in a dress like a billowing parachute. The fat lady’s arms rest against her body like two gracious cats.

  She pauses at the meat. Her head bends towards it. She glances up, alert and puzzled, then lifts herself out of the scooter and balances against it, arms swinging. She bends down to pick up the meat in her bare hands. Again a look of puzzlement, directed towards my stairwell. I lean back into the shadows, silent, not even breathing.

  The lady cradles the meat in her arms. She sniffs it and her mouth twitches. She arches her eyebrows and peers into the darkness beyond my hiding place.

  She climbs back onto her throne with the meat in one hand. She’s an unsteady weight with a wobbling grace. She sits up straight, the half-sheep resting in her generous lap, and zimzims away.

  On the other side of the basement there are shadows. There’s another exit over that side: a ramp up to the car park, and a boom gate that should be locked. I can feel the chill night air crawling down towards me. I can see small shapes moving over there. They might be cats. I might be sleep-deprived. The fat lady disappears into the darkness.

  I listen to the electric drone move away. As it shrinks, there is another sound. A sort of snarling yawn, without aggression: the voice of a satisfied animal, patiently licking its lips. It compels me to make some kind of answer, creature to creature, in this jungle of cold pipes.

  ‘Get out,’ I say. ‘Go on. Go.’

  The opposite of peace

  Dear Miles,

  By the time you read this, your father and I should be well on our way to the other place. It’s not personal, darl. Would you let Katie know that we wanted to see her before we left but your father was too tired. He’s sick of being sick. ‘I’m sick of being sick’ he says. We realise there are all sorts of rules against it these days but figure they’re not going to catch us – burn this and tell them it was an accident, there’s a dear. Tell them it was the dementia, stirring the wrong thing into our tea. Oops-a-daisy, as they say.

  All our love,

  Mum and Dad

  ps. The safe key’s on top of the fridge, under the mug tree.

  When I find the note, my parents are still breathing, though very shallowly. They are lying on the ground with teacups in their hands, arranged as for a film, their fragile bodies almost translucent against the carpet. I stand over them, frozen for a minute, holding the note, my keys and a bag of groceries in my other hand. I put the keys and the plastic bag down on the bench before I ring the paramedics. Then I ring Katie in Perth.

  ‘I’ve just rung the paramedics. Mum and Dad have both collapsed,’ I say.

  Katie says ‘Both of them?’ as if I’ve done something. I don’t have time to explain.

  ‘They’re okay. I have to get off the phone,’ I say.

  ‘I’ll call you back in a minute.’

  The note is on apricot stationery. I am reminded, with the reflux of unbidden memories, of trying to copy my mother’s handwriting to get out of sports days, forty years ago. Her signature hasn’t changed. When the doorbell rings I fold the note into a tight square and push it into a pocket of my trousers. I’m covering the pocket with my hand while the uniforms take over, as if they can see through the fabric. As if they care.

  There is no room for me in the ambulance. I ask which hospital and tell them I have to lock up. Then I start putting the groceries away.

  Katie rings back. I put her on speaker so I can read her the note while I restock the fridge with milk, six eggs, and twelve individually wrapped Lite cheese slices. The old don’t seem to eat.

  ‘Don’t burn it, whatever you do,’ she says. Then, ‘I thought something was up. What’s in the safe?’

  ‘I haven’t looked.’

  I pull the old milk out, shake it, drop the carton in the now empty plastic bag and hang it from a door handle. On top of the fridge I find the key under the mug tree, which holds some of Aunt Holly’s dusty pottery. My mother’s sister has been dead for ten years, but my mother never throws anything away. The clutter in the house has always irritated me, my mother’s weakness for gifts and trinkets.

  ‘Are you still there?’

  ‘Hang on. I’m taking you off speaker,’ I say.

  The safe referred to in the note is not a safe but a toolbox kept under the stairs; the key is to a padlock threaded through holes drilled in the galvanised steel. My father made a point of reminding me of it only two or three months ago. But I didn’t see this coming. My hands are shaking faintly as I fit the key, opening the box with the phone cradled in my ear. I can hear Katie breathing and my ear warms as though her breath is right there.

  ‘What’s in the safe?’ she says again.

  ‘Nothing.’ There is an envelope, an off-white, A5 envelope tied with a white cotton thread. Inside there is a will.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘There’s just a will.’ I meant, the fallen surprise in my voice meant, there is nothing personal – no photographs, no mementos or precious trinkets. Inside the safe is an empty space my father has carved away from his wife’s hoardings. Inside the envelope are also the deeds to the house. I don’t read the will. I know they are giving Katie and me everything, fifty-fifty. My father showed me this two years ago, when he was diagnosed. It’s not the sort of thing you forget.

  ‘Thank Christ,’ Katie says. ‘They haven’t changed it, have they?’ she adds.

  ‘No. Listen, I have to go to the hospital –’

  ‘I’ll call you back.’

  I stand in the middle of the room. I put my hand against my side but can feel it drawn to the note in the pocket, its shape pressing into my groin. I feel horribly abandoned and yet close, as though nothing separates me from my mother and father. As though nothing of significance has happened to me except being born, and anything I might have achieved since was just a form of suckling.

  At the hospital I am told that both of my parents will live. They have ingested something that can be pumped from them. Unlike the cancers that are eating at my father’s organs, the poison can be flushed out with a little warm water. Medicine seems so primitive up close.

  They are being held in separate wards, which seems like a schoolroom punishment. My mother wakes first. I am at my father’s side when a nurse comes to tell me she is conscious. I follow the nurse down the corridor, past the hand-washing station, to the zone of old women.

  My mother blinks her frail eyelids a few times and then squeezes my hand. The woman is usually unbearably upbeat – she wrote oops-a-daisy in her final note, for crying out loud – but now she looks disappointe
d. Her cake has been ruined.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says.

  I just pat her hand and offer my feeble relief.

  The nurse puts her head inside the curtain and calls me by my full name. She herds me into the hallway, carrying my parents’ charts.

  We go through the medications they are already on and the allergies. They know my father’s case well but my mother hasn’t been ill much at all. The nurse writes all this information down. I am alarmed that it fits on two pages. At the bottom of the second page her pen pauses. She makes a professional attempt to meet my eyes.

  ‘I have to ask you . . . Were your parents depressed?’

  I look at the wall behind her. There’s a bright sign giving hand-washing instructions.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. It hollows me, the little I know of their feelings. It should be obvious, the desire to live. But I don’t know this for certain about myself, or most of the people I love, and the answer makes no difference. What you want is immaterial. Especially to a man like my father who has already set a date with death. All he’s done is rearrange his schedule.

  ‘Did they mention anything to you about plans? Any self-harming?’

  I snort and try to make it look like a sob. I have imagined my cheerful mother conducting teenage bleeds in her yellow bathroom. My phone’s insistent ringtone has never been so welcome. More welcome still, the nurse moves silently away, signalling that she has finished with me.

  ‘Katie,’ I say.

  ‘Are they okay?’

  ‘They’ll live, apparently. Mum’s awake, do you want to speak to her?’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Weak, but – you know. Mum.’ We both expel a small packet of air.

  ‘All right, put her on.’

  But when I go back to the room, my mother is not in her bed.

  I glance towards the bathroom, which is open and empty. Then I swear into the phone and walk into the corridor, disoriented for a second as to which way to run. Towards the hand-washing station and then left, into the men’s zone. I am still holding the phone to my ear and can hear Katie huffing and puffing as if she’s the one who’s running into our father’s room.

  ‘Miles! What’s happened?’

  ‘No,’ I say. My mother is standing over the bed. Her hands are on my father’s face. My instinct is to back away and void my guts. I feel like I’m witnessing the primal scene again.

  ‘Miles, if it’s not a good time . . .’ runs Katie’s voice.

  ‘Mum,’ I manage, and hold the phone out. My mother is pale; light seems to shine through her like an x-ray, emphasising the bone. She lifts her face to mine and the eyes are bare, scraped out by suffering. But her mouth is set with will. The woman has been stripped down to a basic form.

  It’s my father’s sunken skull that is frail. When death happens slowly you don’t see it coming. His breaths are ragged and strained. Even though he’s sleeping, his breathing is the opposite of peace.

  ‘It’s Katie,’ I say, and press the phone into my mother’s hand.

  She gives me a look I hope is grateful and murmurs into the handset. ‘He’s right here,’ she says. She holds the phone to my father’s ear and nods as Kate’s tiny, captured voice speaks. Then she ends the call and gives the phone back to me. We make the formation we always make here, the hospital shape with my father’s body between us and no words. My father breathes and pauses. He doesn’t wake.

  My mother holds her breath. She holds until he exhales, then exhales with him, drawing the sound out to its full extent.

  The woman who can’t throw anything away waits, and breathes again. And I am lost, a small boy full up with the bitterness of separation.

  Architecture

  I have a layover in Shanghai for a night, which I mainly spend getting on and off the metro and walking, sweating in crowds, buffeted by warm bodies. I sleep in a pleasant, air-conditioned hotel room and leave mid-morning. The airport bus goes past the dead Expo site and I regret only catching glimpses of the space. My flight to Hohhot is uneventful, half full of silent businessmen and businesswomen, half empty.

  I have no idea why Mr Wang has invited me to redesign his city. I am twenty-three, only a couple of years out of Honours. After an internship, I started my own company and have done a couple of renovation jobs for parents of friends, the odd work for the local council. I filled out the tender as an exercise, really. It was a surprise when contracts, visa forms and flight details began to arrive in my inbox.

  When I get off the plane in Hohhot there is a man there to greet me, not Mr Wang but a man who works for him, and this man rolls my suitcase to a black car. ‘Welcome, Miss Bourne,’ the man says. His suit is not a uniform, but something about him gives me the impression he’s a security guard. He smiles at my questions, but doesn’t answer any of them as he drives me to the city.

  The city is four hours from the capital. Four hours of empty grass plains, a lawn-ish wilderness that fades to brown and grey. When I look out at the plains I think about dust storms moving in, about desertification. The city isn’t signposted. It has no name as yet.

  We enter from an eight-lane overpass, sweep through some gracefully curved freeway exits, into the empty cbd. There is a good park with a lake. I can see swans, or maybe geese, floating on the lake. They might be plastic. We pull up at the glass and brass of a five-star hotel, my accommodation for the duration of my contract. Mr Wang’s employee doesn’t get out of the car. A member of the hotel’s staff takes my bags, pours tea, escorts me in the elevator to my suite on the eleventh floor. It has a good view over the curved urban streetscape. Between tall apartment buildings I can see through to the fine symmetry of the surrounding city, and then beyond to its edges, where it dissolves into empty plains.

  I applied for the job of building a city, but the city is already here. Actually I am the thirteenth architect to come to work on the city as a whole, not counting the many others who have designed various individual buildings, parks and streets. Mr Wang insists it is not finished, though he tells me that his office is bombarded with enquiries from real estate investors every day. He isn’t ready to sell anything just yet. He wants the place to be perfect. Billions are at stake. Perfecting it is in my hands. He makes this introductory speech over the phone shortly after I arrive and it turns out to be as voluble as he gets.

  Initially I am daunted by the responsibility, but excited by the challenge too. I work long hours alone in the hotel room. When I am hungry I ring downstairs for sandwiches. That’s all they have, sandwiches. In the evenings I Skype or Facebook my friends back home – the hotel has a foreign ip to dodge the firewall – or read up on feng shui and local weather patterns. Mr Wang calls me every Friday afternoon to check on my progress. I am very grateful to have this job, I tell him, expecting another speech.

  ‘Australia,’ he says, ‘good universities, good architects.’

  I have the impression that Mr Wang is the director of a Hong Kong company with several government contracts for this kind of thing, or possibly a government official who orders such contracts from an office in Hong Kong, but I’m not sure and I don’t ask. He almost always calls from Hong Kong. He doesn’t seem to have many spare hours to fly up here. But given that he is in charge of so much future, he must be a Party official too. I don’t enquire too deeply. From what I’ve read, relationships here are often vague.

  When I need a break I walk around the empty streets, finding disconnects and flaws. There are some good buildings here, some exciting new work. There’s an opera house in the shape of an egg with its top cracked off, a winding artificial river that culminates in the lake, an elegant mall set back in carefully cultivated gardens. Automated streetlights go on and off to guide my way. It is only a small city, intended for a population of about five million. Enough for a small public transport system – there is a fine elevated
network of electric trains, which don’t run yet, though I like the way the rail sweeps between the buildings. It is quite futuristic in design, even avant-garde in places, with a nod to the classical European styles of some of the buildings I saw in Shanghai. The integration could be better. There are a few Dutch-looking clock towers that should really go.

  Back in the office that I have made out of one half of my suite, I pore over the plans. Since I don’t read Chinese, I have had to ask for English versions to be made up for me. Until then I look at the overall patterns, the arches and circles, sort through the symmetries, trying to identify areas where the flow of the place might be perfected.

  The English plans take a few weeks to arrive. My Friday conversations with Mr Wang are somewhat stilted; I am working fourteen-hour days, but I don’t feel busy enough. When the concierge downstairs hands me the postal roll I am happy, thinking my real work can now begin. Back upstairs, I take a can of coffee from the restocked fridge and open the roll.

  The plans are identical, apart from the copy. I spread them out on my light box and set about transferring some of my ideas onto new sheets, tracing over the Chinese and English cities. I sketch roughly at first and then concentrate on the finer details. When I do I begin to notice that some of the names on the plans are familiar. There are signatures on several of the buildings. Curious, I start to look up some of the names. It seems the cracked-egg opera house was designed by someone I knew at university, a star student who transferred to the States in third year. It’s an uncanny coincidence, I think. Then I see another familiar name. The artificial river was built by an engineering firm that belongs to my high school boyfriend’s father. I believe he works there now, though we haven’t spoken since we dated. And the elevated railway is by the woman who taught me Civil in third year. I eat a Snickers from the minibar and sleep on these coincidences.

  On Friday afternoon the phone rings, and I answer it.

  ‘Mr Wang, how are you?’