So Evie had stayed home to look after her. She’d finished year twelve, and her HSC results were barely passable. Besides she had no idea what to do. Tending to a sick mother seemed like the natural progression for her.
She hung around the house and watched old movies with Lilly. Changed her clothes. Remade the bed when it was soiled. Administered small doses of morphine to keep her comfortable. Went to the shops to get groceries. Kept the house clean. That was it.
She was a ghost.
Her life had ended before it had begun.
Towards the end her mum had repeatedly watched Gone with the Wind. Evie had wondered if there was an underlying message to it all, but she concluded that there was none. The cancer was taking over her mind then and she wasn’t completely lucid. Perhaps there was something familiar about the movie that made her feel secure.
That afternoon she’d been watching it again.
She was in the lounge room, propped up on the couch, with a lilac scarf woven around her head.
Evie had been in the kitchen making tea. She had stared out into the backyard absently. It was overgrown, a scrap yard of things. Like everything around here, unkempt or dead. She felt darkness within her. She didn’t think it would ever go away. The kettle gurgled merrily and switched off.
“Mum,” she called. “Do you want a tea?”
No answer.
She headed round to the couch to ask her again. Lilly was staring at the television in a trance. Her face sagged. Her shoulders sagged, but her stomach was round. Like she was pregnant. But there was no new life there. Just fluids. The doctors would have to drain them later that week.
“Mum, would you like a tea?” she said again.
Her mum looked up quickly, her pupils struggling to fix on one spot. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they did but she didn’t recognise Evie. Sometimes she was fine.
“No darling,” she responded. Like today, she was fine.
“Okay, but I’ll have to move you soon to the bedroom. Dad will be home,” she added, glancing up at the clock, it was almost five o’clock. “He doesn’t like seeing you out here.”
He didn’t have any mercy. He would whale on her even when she was this sick. Last week, he’d thrown a punch. Evie had struggled to explain the mark away to the doctor. She’d slipped in the shower, she’d said. He didn’t seem convinced. But he’d looked at her with tired eyes, like they were too far gone in this game of concealment for him to care.
“You remind me of Vivien Leigh, you know darling,” her mother had said with a smile, her eyes shining, like she wasn’t sick at all.
“Why?” Evie had laughed. “We don’t look anything alike. She’s a brunette in this,” she added.
“There’s something about her fine features that are just like yours ... and that haunted look you have.”
“I don’t have a haunted look,” Evie said and rolled her eyes.
“Yes, you do. It’s my favourite thing about you. When I close my eyes, I see you with that expression. Your brother had the same one,” she added.
Evie gulped and headed into the kitchen. She wasn’t used to her mother mentioning Benny. She rarely spoke about him. She hadn’t even turned up at the funeral.
“Are you walking away from me because I mentioned him?” she seemed to shadow her thoughts, but in a different light.
She froze for a second. Hands paused between the kettle and cup.
Should she respond?
“Evie, did you hear me?” Lilly called.
She walked back to her mother. “I heard you,” she said simply. Her voice cold. Her tone stale.
“You never want to talk about Ben,” she repeated. Her mother’s eyes were fixed on hers. Watching her reaction carefully.
“That’s not the case, Mum,” she responded coldly.
“It’s like we can never say his name in this home,” her mother continued.
“I’m not stopping you,” Evie said, her voice foreign to her.
“You walk away every time I talk about him. You change the subject. I know you loved him Evie, but he was my son.” Her blue eyes were strangely direct. She’d never seen her mother like this before. She didn’t want to deal with this change. It was too late.
“I know he was.”
Her mother sighed loudly. “Why, Evie? Is it because it hurts too much to talk about him, or is it something else?” She bit her lower lip like she didn’t want to hear the response.
Evie stared at her mother. Her grey complexion, her skin pulled taut against her heavy features. She was like a walking corpse, all that was left of her was that belly – and now this random thought.
She wished she’d never vocalised it.
It hurt to talk about Benny, that’s right. But her mum was also correct in assuming there was something more to it. She wanted to tell her the truth. She wanted to say to her, I think you killed him Mum. It was Dad mostly, but it was you too. You never helped. Not even close. You made it unsafe for him to come home – not you, per se – but by concealing what was going on with Dad. You made him feel like he wasn’t enough. Like he was a piece of shit. Worse than that. Like there was no reason for him to keep on living. You did that.
That’s why I can’t talk to you about him – because it was your fault.
It was your fucking fault. You weak little idiot.
Why didn’t you leave him? Why didn’t you leave that maggot of a man? Why did you let him hurt Benny over and over again?
Was it love? Did you love him? Is that why you couldn’t leave?
She couldn’t imagine that was the case. That couldn’t be love. It was something like Stockholm syndrome. Her mother had come to sympathise with her aggressor.
Her mother sympathised with that vile brute.
Together they’d killed her brother. Together.
She bit her tongue. So hard she tasted blood in her mouth. She couldn’t say those words – not even close.
“It’s because it hurts Mum,” she responded instead. Keep her eyes fixed on her like it wasn’t a lie at all.
Her mum wheezed a tiny sigh. Like she had suddenly been pardoned.
“I know it does darling. But if we can’t talk about him, it’s like he’s really gone,” she said.
“He is gone, Mum.”
He was dead. Cold. In the ground. At this point in time worms were eating his very flesh. Her beautiful, ridiculous, big brother. Her Benny.
Not her mother’s. Her Benny.
“Not in our minds he’s not,” her voice trembled slightly when she said the words, and her expression softened, like she might cry.
But Evie didn’t want to cry with her. No. She turned on her heels and headed to the kitchen to make the tea.
Her hands shook slightly as she poured the boiling water into the cup.
“Are you sure you don’t want tea Mum?” she called.
There was a pause, and then her mother’s voice rose.
“I changed my mind. Milk and a sugar please darling.”
30
I wanted to see you
(2017, Redfern)
He was standing out the front of her house that evening. Hands shoved deep in his pockets. Face turned towards the ground, but she knew him from a distance. Her heart soared at the sight of him. A solitary figure, the traffic of Elizabeth Street whizzing past him, a symphony of lights and noise. She had just dropped Tilley off at Chris’s house for the evening – she wondered if he knew that she would be alone. She was reading into it, she told herself. He looked up at her when she was only a few metres away, recognition washing across his face, and then a smile. She knew she was grinning in return.
He leant in to kiss her on the cheek. He smelt fresh and clean that evening. Nothing but soap and skin.
“What are you doing here?” she asked as he pulled away from her, fumbling for her keys in her bag.
“I wanted to see you,” he said, hands still in his pockets. There was something school boyish about him that day – not as sure of him
self as usual. Perhaps it was the declaration. She liked it, and she blushed. It was the one that she wished she had uttered the other week instead of a fiction.
“That’s nice to hear,” she said, heading passed him towards the door, so he couldn’t see the red hue gathering on her neck and sweeping up her cheeks and face. How old was she already?
“You’ll come in then?” she asked, face still turned towards the blue door, concealing that red spray of emotion on her face.
“Sure,” he responded from behind her.
She hoped the house wasn’t a mess. She couldn’t quite remember how she had left it this morning. It was the first time he’d been inside her place. She wanted it to leave a good impression. She wanted it to fit the picture of her that he might have in his mind. She wasn’t sure what that was exactly ... she hoped it was down-to-earth, interesting, kind – not a basket case. She worried that the place reflected basket case.
She flicked the light on in the corridor. Clean, tidy, but unremarkable.
Always unremarkable, she thought.
“So, this is my place,” she said waving a hand about, and looking back to catch his eye.
He was peeking about the place curiously. Nothing said more about you than your home, she thought.
“Nice,” he said with a smile. She liked when he smiled in that tight-lipped manner, his cheeks rose, chipmunk like in style, and his eyes became half crescent moons. She liked to remember him like that.
“Will you have a coffee or a tea, or even a beer?” she asked leading him into the kitchen. “Actually scrap that, I don’t have beer. Maybe a wine? I have red and white actually ...” She was babbling now. She caught herself and paused, trying to recollect herself. He was just a friend, yes, a friend who had kissed her, and he was in her home. Relax.
“Red will be fine,” he said, tight-lipped smile again. The one she just couldn’t resist.
She put her handbag down on the table and headed to the pantry. She had been saving a bottle of red for months now. Not for any occasion in particular, just an occasion. This seemed to be one.
She collected it from the pantry. It had a cork. She wasn’t good with corks. They always seemed like such an enterprise. She found the corkscrew in the cutlery draw and tried to steady her hands. You’ve got this Evie, you’re a bloody grown woman, stop acting like a teenager. When you were a teenager you didn’t even act like a teenager!
The difference was, she liked this guy, and the impact of that emotion was having all sorts of unnecessary effects on her. From the blushing, to the babbling, to the shaking hands... Keep it together! Take a breath, and will yourself to act like a normal person.
“How have you been?” she asked, even though only a few days had transpired since their kiss. How much could have occurred?
“Good,” he responded. “You thought about seeing your dad again?” he asked.
“No, I can only take him in small doses. Usually on a weekly basis. Twice a week might throw me right off the edge,” she fumbled with the cork screw. It unlodged itself from the cork and skidded downwards, almost slicing open her hand.
“Here,” he said, “I’ll do it. You get the glasses.”
He took the cork screw from her, and held a warm hand to her back as if to steady her. It did. She nodded and smiled at him.
She produced two wine glasses, which hadn’t been used as a pair for almost an eternity, by which time he had already smoothly unscrewed the bottle. It made a gentle popping sound. He shrugged his shoulders at her and added, “Lots of practise I guess.
He poured two glasses of the crimson liquid with a fluid hand. They were super-sized.
“Thanks,” she said, grasping a glass quickly.
She needed a drink to steady her nerves.
“Cheers,” he said leaning towards her, and they clinked glasses. She lost herself in those dark eyes for a moment.
She slurped at her wine.
“Where’s Tilley?” he asked. She wondered what the question meant. Was he playing dumb about knowing that she was at Chris’s? Was he trying to suss out her where-abouts for the same reason she was glad to see him? Or was he simply being nice?
Christ! And what was the reason Evie? Sex. That was the reason. She knew full well what being alone in your home with a man that you were attracted to meant. She just hadn’t thought about sex in such a long time. Sex was something to be endured. A means to an end. And a few years ago, she had decided to give it up altogether. What was the point? There had been few men since Tilley’s dad. There was a distance between her and the physicality of sex – like there was a distance between her and touching. She didn’t do either for pleasure – and yet here she was, a woman suddenly desiring both. She wasn’t even sure how to do either properly.
“Are you okay?” she heard him saying in the background, the sound drowning behind her thoughts.
She shook her head, like she was shaking water from her ears.
“She’s at Chris’s place,” she responded.
“Ahhh ... I see,” he arched his eyebrows upwards, like he appreciated the significance of it. “Those two are as thick as thieves,” he added.
She took another gulp of wine and nodded.
She was a complete amateur when he came to things of the heart. Maybe it was easier to admit as much rather than blunder ahead – him wondering if she’d had a minor stroke, and her overthinking every minute detail.
“I’m really not very good at these things,” she managed.
“What do you mean?” he asked, looking puzzled.
“This,” she gestured between the two of them, hoping he would interpret her sign language. He didn’t, he still looked bemused.
“Whatever is going on between the two of us,” she said.
He smiled and looked down. “Don’t worry, neither am I.”
“I’m surprised by that,” she said. Her heart swelling at the idea that he might be experiencing a similar emotion.
“Why do you say that?” he asked.
“You seem so calm,” she added. Another sip of wine. Her head was already starting to spin pleasantly – but she willed herself to slow down, lest this turn into another disaster.
“I’m sweating bullets,” he rolled his eyes.
She sighed. How had things become so complex? Something that should be so easy, so natural, was having a ghastly impact on their minds.
“How can we make it easy then?” she asked, trying to figure out a circuit breaker. Something that would set them both at ease.
“I think I have a solution,” he said.
She wondered what it might be. He set his glass down on the table, like he needed both hands. She waited, holding her hands.
“Let me try this,” he said. He cupped her face with both hands, swiftly, before she had a chance to object, or to pull back, and kissed her. His lips her warm and soft on hers. His hands covered her entire face. She melted into him. She felt his tongue pursue hers. He explored her mouth softly. She liked it. It warmed her from the inside.
His hands pulled away from her face, and slowly found their way down her back, and pressed firmly against the small of her back. She pushed her breasts against him, and the rest of her body too. Lost in that sudden and overwhelming embrace.
Her skin came to life under his touch. Suddenly she realised it was a living and breathing thing. Tremendously capable of feeling. It was like every nerve ending throughout her body came to life. She longed for his touch. Elsewhere. Everywhere.
He pulled away from her, and stared at her with those dark eyes. There was a hair’s breadth between them, their noses almost touched.
“How was that?” he asked. How was that as a circuit breaker? It was everything. But she couldn’t let on as much.
“It was a start,” she said instead.
She pressed a hand to his chest, and felt the steady rhythm of his heart beneath it. A drumbeat.
He laughed suddenly. That bright, all-encompassing laugh. The one he reserved for when he was
really lost in the moment. His teeth flashed, and his eyes danced, and suddenly she felt privileged to be in such close proximity. To experience that laughter as part of it. To have moved him in that way.
When his laughed dried up, he said,
“Well, I can try again?” He flashed that tight-lipped smile that lit up her heart.
She nodded her head. “Mmmm-hmmm,” she murmured. Her eyes drifting down to those beautiful lips.
He most certainly could.
He most definitely needed to.
31
A fierceness
(2017, Redfern)
They lay in bed together in darkness in the small hours of the morning. The room was lit from the lights of Elizabeth Street. Evie had often wished she’d bought blockout blinds. The constant subtle light annoyed her late at night, in between those sheets, when she couldn’t get an hour of rest. Now she was quietly pleased with her decision. She wanted to examine him closely, every square inch of that beautiful body.
Now, in the sweet silence and intimacy that came hours after coming to know someone so closely, she could inspect him, she could scrutinise him, and his black and gold skin, and the dark tattoos that traced lines across his shoulders, and torso, and even, she discovered, his thighs.
She turned him over now, and ran her index fingers across the tribal tattoos on his shoulders. He lay on his stomach, laughing gently.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice muffled by the pillow.
“I’m examining your tattoos,” she responded.
He squirmed under her touch. “You’re tickling me.”
“I’m not intending to. There are so many of them ... what do they all mean?” She moved her hand down to the small of his back, to a series of numbers. A date to be precise.
4.5.2011.
“What’s this one? This date?” she asked, drawing a finger across the two ones that stood side by side.
“That was the date of my last professional fight,” he responded, quietly.
“Has it been that long?” she asked.
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