She’d known the daughter, of course. Emily. Hair short and soft and black as cat’s fur. And her teeth when she laughed were like a cat’s, small and sharp. The two had clattered over the town’s corrugated dirt streets on boys’ bicycles. Tearing pages out of Great-grandmother’s leather-bound King James and daring each other to eat them.
And the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the sound of the bird …
Was that it? His mother had shivered, out there above the town. Em said Ecclesiastes tasted best.
He has come with no water, no food. An ache in his fillings for the store-bought cake his mother took out to the lake each year; fake cream, icing shiny and hard like a beetle’s back. Nothing close to what she could have made herself, but she thought it bad luck for a person to bake their own birthday cake, and his efforts would have been a clotted mess. They would take their sandwich crusts and empty drink bottles home with them, but they’d crumble up some of the cake and scatter it over the side like rice at a wedding. Watch the white sugary sponge dissolve into the lake water, splashing away any fish or ducks who tried to paddle in and eat it.
Not for you. Not for you.
This is what he remembers, looking towards the smooth trunks of ghost gums at the lake’s edge, hoping for something familiar, something that might act as a point of reference. There is no such thing. Even the boat shed is gone from sight, and there is nothing to indicate whether or not this is the right place. The lake tells him little, dumbly reflecting back the deepening sky. Cristian takes the lid from the biscuit tin, sees the powder and bone gravel, and cannot do it. He gives himself a minute to recover his nerve, thinks he could maybe drop the entire tin over the side. But this is worse somehow—he can’t explain it, even to himself—like burying someone alive.
Cricket, can you just do as you’re asked?
But alone on the lake he feels helpless. Stranded. He opens and closes the tin, unable to look at its contents. He opens and closes his fists. From a great distance he watches his trembling, overscrubbed hands fumble the lid off the tin. Okay, he says to the hands. Okay. But they scramble to close it up again.
Her body was tiny when she finally slipped out of it. When he’d gone to collect the ashes, he had thought there must have been a mistake, because what they gave him couldn’t have filled a coffee jar. But she’d always been a little thing; where was there room for a tumor? No one knew how her body had hidden it, a growth the size of a clementine. Kept it secret until it was too late.
Why do they always measure cancer by fruit, she’d wanted to know. Why always citrus?
Well. Orange you glad it wasn’t a grapefruit?
It had exhausted him to even think it, let alone say it aloud, but there was the sound of her laugh, her real laugh with the huskiness it had acquired since she’d started therapy. They were in her backyard that afternoon, under the loquat tree, the fallen fruit soft and rotting under their shoes. The air was boozy with ferment, and the effects of the chemo weren’t yet too visible. She sat in a dining chair, a blue towel draped around her shoulders. It might have been a moment in which to pretend things were otherwise. But she’d seen the other patients around the ward, their hair falling out in great drifts, and decided that wasn’t for her.
You’ll do it? she’d asked. I’m tired of all these strangers touching me. I just don’t have the patience for it anymore. I’ve never really had the patience for anyone else, but now I’m excused from pretending.
She had held her hand out for the clippers and adjusted the setting, then handed them back to him. Just give me a number three. It’s all going to go anyway.
He’d started underneath, at her nape, so if she changed her mind they could rescue it to something less drastic. But she stared straight ahead as the shoulder-length tresses of copper blond fell into the grass around their feet. He was thinking that he should save some, remembering the envelopes of baby curls she’d kept, the date and his age in months noted in blue biro. But that kind of keepsaking didn’t belong to the deep end of life. It would look morbid. Unhopeful. He left the hair where it fell, two inches of pale gray already showing at the roots. Two inches, what did that amount to in weeks? Five or six? That was how long ago she’d given up on hair dye. She put her hand up to check his progress, brushing fingertips over the soft stubble.
Isn’t it funny, she said. It’s what I used to give you.
He had turned off the clippers, leaving her with a fine, fox-silver fuzz that rubbed away over the following weeks, until she was a vulnerable, newborn-looking creature, but with sharpened, haunted features. She lived long enough to see it grow back, a darker gray, in tight, dense curls. Then something had gotten into her chest, fluid on the lungs, and she didn’t have the strength left to fight it off.
He’s late bringing the boat back, the unemptied biscuit tin balanced on his knees. As he rows into shore he can see the blue doors of the boat shed have been pulled closed, the buckets of live bait gone from the jetty. He docks and bangs a few times, openhanded, on the side of the shed. Inside there is radio noise, talk at commentary speed, but he can’t make out the sport. Something from the daylit side of the globe.
Then the sound of a bolt sliding, and the boatman opens the door, chest hair sprouting from the low neck of his navy singlet.
I’m sorry, Cristian says. Late.
I see that. He looks Cristian up and down, for the second time that day, his eyes coming to rest on the biscuit tin tucked under Cristian’s arm. Hopeful, maybe, for the offer of a Monte Carlo.
Cristian starts to explain but the man just nods like he’s seen it all before. Putting it all together—the good shoes, the absence of fishing gear—placing him. The younger man feels more grateful than he’d care to admit, being placed.
How’d you go, then, get everyone home?
Cristian shakes his head. I owe you extra, he offers. I was out there another hour, at least.
Nah you don’t. Not for you and she. You come in here for a tic.
He leads Cristian into the boat shed, under low-hanging bulbs in safety cages and past the rows of upturned boats in hibernation, awaiting trout season.
The man doesn’t give his name and Cristian doesn’t ask it, but he accepts a sweating can of beer and lowers himself into a folding chair. The surrounding walls are lined with shelves, and these are buckling with their load of old manuals and fishing guides, pages crenulated and thickening in the damp, and with rusty souvenirs dredged up from the old town.
Some years earlier a drought sucked half the lake away, and the town rose right up out of the mud like a sludgy, shipwormed beast. Former residents returned to tread gingerly across the lakebed, old shoes breaking through the thin, brittle layer baked over the softer, rich mud. From this they unearthed the detritus of their own histories. Things not worth the taking three decades earlier had appreciated down there in the silt, and people fished out bicycle parts, letter boxes, typewriter keys, the iron frame of an upright piano. Then the rains came back and the town was swallowed again.
Here are the photographs and newspaper clippings, tacked along the boat shed wall, mildew blooming under the glass frames. The height of the drought, the townspeople picking over the lakebed like prospectors.
His mother is there amongst them. Like all the rest she’d put on old shoes and walked right out over the cracked mud, across the not-lake. Right up to the empty windows of that too-awful house to see if the table was still set. All she saw, she said, was a roomful of rocks.
Come on, then, the boatman says—Are we going? Are we all set?—and Cristian hauls himself up from the chair to follow. Outside the air is cool and heavy, the viscosity of water, and it can no longer be said where the lake and the night divide, moon slapping boat flank as if to say Go on go on go on. Here is a charge now, a change in the air. A resonance. Whatever comes after a bell has rung out and the sound has drifted away.
Post-Structuralism for Beginners
It’s not something they always do, not as if they can’t get anywhere without watching it. Months might pass without any mention of the tape. But then it will appear again. Like the weights set or the pantry moths, it’s seasonal. The pattern and duration of these seasons typically determined by Aland, with the latest being particularly lengthy. The Seven-Month Winter of the Tape. He hauled the VCR out of the cupboard while the boys were away over Easter, and it still hasn’t gone back. School camps, football camps, sleepovers, grandparent visits—whenever Josh and Avery are out of the house overnight, Johanna can sense the tape lying in wait. Just the sight of the boys’ overnight kit waiting in the hallway conjures a strange cocktail of dread and sexual guilt.
Across the hall, she can hear Aland dragging furniture around in the bedroom, setting up. Deck chairs on the Titanic, she thinks, bracing herself for the timid knock against her study door. There.
When she goes in, he’s already sitting at the end of the bed, shuffling off his jeans. Two glasses of scotch wait dumbly on the bedside tables. She drops down next to her husband, unbuttoning her shirt as the VCR swallows the tape. There is the machine shudder, the awful grinding noise, and there she is. Ta-da. Cheekbones like a straight-edge razor and a degree in cultural studies that will not arm her for the world in the way she hopes it might.
On tape, she is twenty-three and he is just about to turn twenty-six. She has shocking tan lines from a week on Great Keppel Island, the outline of her bikini bottoms stark and sharp as if marked out by painters’ tape. He has them too, encircling his thighs and hips, but they don’t look as ridiculous against his darker skin, and in any case she has the lion’s share of screen time. Alone at first, bending over that ostentatious desk he used to work from. Then he’s there, or at least his hands are, spreading her legs wider for the camera, toying with the zoom. All of this happens silently. The camera was new then, a wedding gift sent from his uncle in Soweto. Aland couldn’t get the sound to work, and she can’t remember what they might have said to each other in those first few years. Sometimes she imagines her own soundtrack:
How’s that? You like that?
Yes.
Yes?
Yes.
She is really much better at smuggling post-structuralism into real estate listings.
Johanna wonders if she should feel flattered, relieved. There is something almost faithful about it, the way he returns to this snowy anachronism when the internet is a glut of high-definition eighteen-year-olds with vaginas like baci di dama, rose macarons.
The original Beta cassette had been labeled “Home Maintenance Tips,” to preemptively bore potential browsers, but also as a nod to the use of electrical tape. God alone knows where that copy is now. The VHS recording is labeled “Post-Structuralism for Beginners,” in the hope that if their sons ever find its hiding place (camouflaged with some old textbooks in a box at the top of the wardrobe) while in search of Christmas presents or cigarettes, they won’t be remotely tempted to watch. Would they even recognize these mute amateurs as their mother and father? They would, yes. Behind the unsettling boxcar mustache, beneath the boho-rococo hair and makeup, she and Aland are clearly, indefensibly themselves.
Despite the care at concealment, she knows the boys will likely find and watch the tape anyway, just as she had found and watched her own parents’ pornography. This was the natural order of things. Although the videos Johanna and her sister discovered had mercifully featured actors, who were beautiful and experienced and, more important, were not their parents. That was in the eighties, before hate-sex was invented, when porn stars still had pubic hair and even double penetration appeared affectionate.
She worries for her boys, growing up with the internet, the unreasonable promises it makes. The axing of plot lines, however—the disappearance of cruise ships and card games and pool cleaners—she envies them that much.
Aland finishes before the tape does, and they lie there together, Johanna tracing pragmatic circles to bring herself unceremoniously across the line while the last several minutes of footage grind along. The racier parts have been rewound so many times that her orgasm happens in a soundless blizzard.
We should really get this digitized, Aland says. Before it gets any worse.
Sure. We’ll just drop it off at the lab where Michelle’s son works.
Hah, he says. The sound of a laugh but it isn’t, really. Over the past few years it’s as if he’s been slowly smuggling himself into his work, away from her. The harder she looks at him, the less she recognizes. She imagines him leaving the house each morning with pieces of himself hidden in his shoes, his coat lining, folded up small between the pages of his lecture notes and macroeconomics textbooks. Quietly liberating his humor, his intuition, his capacity for real discussion. She wonders where he’s hoarding it all. At faculty functions she’s watched the undergraduates, sooty eyes and lamé tights, turning their delicate wrists towards her husband. When had macroeconomics students become so desirable, so female? She listens to them soft-soaping Aland with questions about Bitcoin mining and the cost of Peugeots in Cuba, trying to detect whether there’s some kind of cute sexual undercurrent.
She’d been around that age, an undergraduate when they met. But politically oblivious, dumb as carpet. Someone else—some marketing reptile—was trying to get her hammered on Compound Fractures at the Union. But it was Aland she stalked around the bar, backed by the volatile concoction of brandy and champagne, an idiot for his accent. Effrica? Come on, tell me something else about Effrica, till he banged down his pint and said he’d had quite enough of that. She could either kiss him or kiss off.
What’s your name then? Johanna? Hah. The town where I was born …
Who remembers what else was said, and it’s likely better not—what did she even know about South Africa, at that age, save Fraser handing Mandela a Bradman-signed cricket bat? And a boy at high school who’d informed her that, Back There, if someone hurts an animal or a woman, they place a tire around his neck. And then they burn the tire.
She hadn’t even known enough to ask who “they” were.
Aland had been, all considered, very patient with her.
Just lucky you’re beautiful, he’d say, when she’d said or done something dim. Though not in recent memory. And she had never looked like these girls, like his students.
Johanna rolls off the bed, trapping the thought like a spider under an upturned glass. Leaving it there to deal with later, when she’s built up enough nerve to either stomp on the thing or release it, depending on how dangerous she decides it might be.
Aland has fallen asleep, or fallen silent, as he so often does after sex, a forearm blocking his eyes from light.
She steals the top sheet away and wraps it around herself, and goes back to her study to read over a draft for a listing:
If we tear down a haunted building, are its ghosts dispatched with it? And if so, at what point during renovations might we encounter the divergence of the two, of these concrete and spectral histories? This former deviation heterotopia exemplifies an harmonious conversion from the institutional to the domestic; a wholly inhabitable space which remains architecturally sympathetic to the original structure and its prominence in Australian cultural mythology.
It had been suggested Johanna “play down the whole former-prison thing,” and she’d obliged, despite realizing years ago that the sub-editors at The Leader never actually read her real estate features. That probably no one read her real estate features; they just scanned the number of bedrooms and bathrooms and otherwise referred to the photographs, if not the internet. This had become apparent while she was carrying Josh—a troublingly synesthetic pregnancy, the likely spark for a tangential article about the taste and mouthfeel of Usonian architecture: a slightly scorched, malty characteristic with lingering notes of tobacco and undertones of nutmeg and poached pome fruit. It ran, and the house sold at 200K above estimate, which may have had something or nothing at all to do with Johanna’s culinary digress
ion. The listings have become her own feeble joke with herself, a way of keeping her hand in. As long as she sticks to word count and conjures a woeful pun in reference to the street name, she has free artistic license to poach liberally from De Certeau and Foucault, to weave in knowledge she no longer has any practical use for. (Secretly, she hopes that somewhere out there, in a cultural backwater not so very far away, some retired semiotics professor is at least getting a kick out of them.)
Johanna saves the article as Your Big Break? and shuts her laptop.
Then she opens it again. What does she even mean by wholly inhabitable?
In the morning she wakes cotton-mouthed, wet light sluicing through the blinds. Aland hours gone. Down the length of her body, past the rumpled lenticular of the bed linen, there’s the blank gray face of the television, VCR beneath it, tape poking out like a tongue.
Does she hate the tape? She hates the tape. She sometimes fantasizes about the tape’s destruction, at her own hands or at the hands of fate. Watching it seems a grim suburban cousin to the ouroboric punishments dealt out in Greek mythologies. There are accidents she might orchestrate, catastrophes that could conceivably befall the tape. It could simply go missing; Aland might presume it was the boys and be too embarrassed to ask them. The content could be buried irretrievably beneath layers of Winter Olympic curling highlights and sub-Saharan carnivore documentaries. Or she could just forget the subterfuge and gut the thing, crack it open and unravel its innards. Wind the slick black ribbons around the bedposts and wait for him to say something. She has even considered a new tape, them as they are now, but is haunted off such a plaintive attempt at lust revival by a scene in a novel read two decades ago—Edith(?) covered top to toe in red greasepaint, lying naked on the lounge room floor and imploring the protagonist: Let’s pretend we’re other people. It does not go very well, or sexily. After being rebuffed, Edith(?) curls up in the bottom of an elevator shaft and is crushed to death.
Here Until August Page 6