Tarcutta Wake (5 page)

Swan dive

All those mornings, our bodies slicked with a sugary sweat. Pure alcohol.You could've tasted the night before just by licking our wrists. Stella arcing back so the girls could do body shots from between her perfect breasts. The men drinking and watching,
You're a flexible little thing, aren't you sweetheart?

We were inexhaustible in those final few months, throwing ourselves around every chance we got. Our heads might've rolled off and we wouldn't have noticed. Mine probably did. Amanda and Stella started dancing at the Foxhouse two or three nights a week because the money was good and our rent was insane. Then it was three or four nights. They'd show up at the studio in the morning still smelling of tipping dollars. It's okay if you're smart about it, they said, stretching at the barre. If you don't hate it enough to start looking for ways to forget about it.

You should think on it, said Stella, who was spending half the week as Lola.

That accent. They'd eat it up. Amanda was Ruby from Thursday to Saturday.

A swan dive, I guess you could call it.

Sometimes I want to tell you about this, but I won't. How the hours slammed up against each other. I'd never seen so many sunrises. We'd peel away our damp costumes and step straight into three-dollar g-strings that were only good for a few nights, until the lace was discoloured with sweat. The other girls at the club told us we should stick to darker colours; black, navy, even red. Then we wouldn't be going through so many pairs. But we knew what we were doing. Pale blue. Sugar pink. White, white, white. Let them think we were angelic. We knew how to be angelic.

Hotels

They live in hotels for a while, after he does that to her face. Not real bad, but bad enough for them to leave the same night. Frantically packing the car as though hoping to outrun some unknowable natural disaster. There's sand in the bed, Baby, he's saying. Back at the house, a million years ago in the suburbs. And she won't tell him why. She's letting him believe things. There's sand in the bed, and they are a long way from the ocean.

He tucks a blanket around her shoulders and they drive three hours, past the bedroom communities in the west, his hand on her thigh and the radio on. When he speaks it's as though he were speaking to a child he hopes to befriend, and she answers as a child might, imagining her child-self running down the dark stretch of highway alongside the passenger window of their white Hyundai. Pushing her breath out ahead of her, never tiring. Never turning her head to meet the eyes of the passenger, who is unravelling a loose thread from her skirt and saying, No, I don't suppose work would miss me for a little while.

At the first hotel she waits in the car while he speaks with the concierge. On the radio the Mills Brothers are singing about Sadie Green. Twee twee twee twah twah, and she falls asleep briefly, jerking awake when he comes back for her and the bags. She follows him through the hotel foyer to the lift, her hair pulled down over one side of her face.

They drink steadily in the first few days. Glasses stationed around the room with dried half-moons of lime in the bottom. So hot out that the tint is blistering off the windows of cars in the street. But that is out in the great, dusty world that they are not a part of for the moment. The insides of the hotels are cool and stark, and there is nothing to remind them of themselves. Their luggage lost in the mirrored halls of wardrobes. The bed a vast white plane where nothing terrible has ever happened, where they lie naked on the bright sheets and he tries to lift the bruises from her face with remedies he has heard or read about. Butter, honey, kaffir lime. And although she knows none of it will work, she smiles and lets him. The bruise remains and blackens, but they wake each morning to clean light with only the slightest recollection of the dreams they have climbed out of.

When he goes out for fresh limes, for fresh bottles of gin and soda water, she watches his back as he moves across the car park. Already sweating, looking back at the hotel every now and then, although it's obvious he can't tell which window she's standing behind, which room is theirs.

A playground, she thinks, or a building site – she knows she could have said anything about the sand. That he wanted to believe her. Disasters with egg timers, he would have believed even that. But she'd panicked and said nothing, and he'd taken hold of her shoulders and shook her, hard, so that her head nodded loosely on her neck as he shouted Why? Why? Why?

Now they are here, and his brother is looking after their dog.

After several days there is hair in the sink, stains on the sheets. Unwashed clothes piling up on the floor. This grittiness an emissary from their life before the hotels, threatening the equilibrium he has charged to the joint account. At these first traces of disarray they move on, him packing their belongings with the same urgency as when leaving the house, only to arrive at another version of the first hotel. Only to fall onto another bed where no smell or stain of either of them is held in the memory of its sheets. These rooms so sterile that nothing could fester. Though nothing could possibly grow, she thinks. She is inside a parenthesis, where nothing matters yet, no decisions need to be made. But she is always thirsty in these places, each night waking sticky-mouthed and sliding from beneath his outflung arm. Each night drinking from her cupped hands and watching her reflection in the bathroom mirror, sometimes dabbing at her cheekbone with wet fingertips. Under the halogen lights the bruise looks like bad theatrical make-up; two weeks now and it hasn't rubbed away, and she's lost count of the places they've stayed in. This could be the fourth or the fifth. The hotels fit neatly inside each other like matryoshka dolls. Halfsized, quarter-sized. The first hotel turned from a single piece of wood, solid as a nut and sealed up tight.

She saw a quarter-sized hotel once; public art at the side of a freeway somewhere south of here. She had wanted to pull over, to crawl in there on her hands and knees and lay her head on one of the scaled-down beds. To sleep for a long time, dreamless and alone, in a place where no one would find her.

If she could get back there. Take the keys from his jacket while he sleeps, and head south. Inside the quarter-sized hotel it would be empty, just bracing and wires for the neon lights, but it wouldn't matter. She could drive all night and be there by late morning. She would begin to remember. It would be as simple as that.

Heart of gold

Lana drove all four of us out to the desert just so she could toss her shoes up into a tree. It took her three goes –
hah. hah. hah!
– and by the third try she was crying hard.

Why'd you do that, said Mira. Those shoes are too good for that tree.

We looked up into the branches slung with old running shoes and scuffed-up boots, and down where some of them lay in the dust beneath the tree, their laces frayed where they'd snapped. Mira was right; Lana's shoes didn't belong there. But she just ran her skinny wrist under her nose and said, Let's go back now, okay? She walked shoeless back to the car and got in on the driver's side. On the trip back we kept schtum, avoiding her sooty eyes in the rearview mirror. We watched her bare feet working the accelerator and clutch. When we stopped for fuel we watched her stand barefoot on the grease-stained concrete while she filled the tank, then we watched her dance barefoot down the service station aisles. Heart of Gold was playing over the loudspeakers as she swung slow and sad past the confectionary, past the ice-cream freezer. We watched the soles of her feet get blacker and blacker, picking up grime from the tiled floor. We tried our best to make sense of it.

Raising the wreck

They're raising the wreck. After so many years of it brooding innocuously beneath the surface, some idiot's jet ski collided with it at low tide last September. Thao would be devastated. All morning people have been gathering on the beach to watch. Some have come prepared with picnics, cameras, binoculars, beer. Others are empty-handed passersby, joggers and intended swimmers who were turned back from the water. A few small-time journos are mooching through the crowd, interviewing locals about their memories of scrabbling onto the stern when it was still jutting out above the water. Of slipping and lacerating their arm or their foot on the mussel shells. Rolling back a sleeve, Here, here's the scar.

David sits beside me on the sand, lounging back against the dinged-up esky that is holding cold chicken sandwiches and a few bottles of pale ale. His white linen shirt is unbuttoned and flapping loose, but who's looking. He leafs through the first few scenes of the play, deciphering my furious little squiggles.

Would you say, he asks, that this … infatuation? Okay, this
interest
that he had, would you say it came from him feeling like something of an outsider?

Divers are surfacing beside the salvage vessel, then disappearing again, trailing cables down to the seabed to snake around the ruined hull.

I'm sure he'd be thrilled for us to think so. Do you think those beers are cold yet?

When they brought him in from casting. Holy cats. They'd brought in a lot of guys who looked like Thao, but they didn't speak or move like Thao. This kid even smelled like Thao. When I shook his hand there was a whiff of smoke and dry grass.
You smell like an arsonist,
I told Thao once. And he'd given me that grin, parenthesised by the lines around his mouth. Like a hammock strung between two young birches who were leaning under its weight. The same as this kid was giving me, still holding onto my hand.

I've read your book, he said. Three times now. Feels almost like I know you.

If you could spend some time with him, Georgia had asked before introducing me to David. Tell him how things were for the two of you. Be honest with him.

And without knowing what a unique form of torture it would be, I said yes.

Good, Georgia said. So much gets lost in translation, don't you think? Just reading the book, I mean.

What about the person playing me, do I sit down with them too?

We haven't found a ‘you' yet, Alex. But yes, that would be very helpful.

Georgia never passes on an opportunity to remind me how lucky I am to be involved in the production, that writers are typically considered nuisances at this stage of development and are only to be consulted as to the filling of plot holes and the ironing out of other minor dilemmas. Chandler's Law, Chekhov's Gun and what have you. I never pass on an opportunity to remind Georgia that she is twenty-fucking-six, and greener than her Green Room Award. Still has that Melbourne smugness wavering about her like heat haze. In any case, there are no men bursting into rooms with loaded revolvers and double entendres in my book. No Lauren Bacall trying to hold up her unsteady head. Just Thao and my life with him, at least a version of it. Of our life together, until the night he swam out, drunk, to the wreck.

It wasn't so long ago that the wreckage could be seen at low tide, just the tip of it sticking out of the water, a long way from shore. But it had collapsed in on itself in the early thousands, collapsed or shifted position, rolling over like a dog wanting to have its belly scratched, and it was no longer visible from the beach. The idea of swimming out to it always terrified me. I justified this terror with common sense; riptides, inevitable fatigue. I was – I am – no great swimmer. But it was never the fear of drowning that stopped me, rather the thought of the wreck itself, the rusting barnacled hull, all the unknowable things it was harbouring. Dark thoughts of a shape that I couldn't fit words to.

But I would watch Thao, from the safety of our sandy chequered rug, and I would watch the other beachgoers and the tourists watching him, the children who paddled behind him like dolphins in the wake of a ship before they grew tired or fearful or their parents called them back in. Thao had been swimming out to it since he was a child, and could always find it, no matter the conditions. In the water he was a beautiful machine, hardly turning his head from the water to breathe.

He'd come back when he was ready, to stand over the rug, chest heaving, his hammock-shaped smile. I always wanted to pull him down onto me, taste the salt on him. But he was so discreet in public. He'd fall onto the rug, bat my hands away.

Tell me something, Thao.

Six deaths a year are caused by rabbits.

That's fascinating. Please, go on.

Thao's parents, who did not speak to me when Thao was alive, continued to not speak to me after his death. I don't know if they have ever read the book, whether they avoided bookstore window displays for the few weeks that it occupied space there. They had wanted many things for Thao, and I was not one of them.

A man, his mother had said. A man is one thing. But an old man? Your father and I do not deserve this.

I see his father's picture in the paper sometimes. I look for the signs of loss in his face. A volcanologist, he is consulted mostly during times of disaster. Yet he has not aged as I have aged, these past eight years.

After I found out Thao was dead I packed all of his things into a box, thinking somebody was going to come and collect them, and when no one did I unpacked them again. I returned his shirts to the wardrobe, his jeans and socks and underwear to the drawers I had hesitantly cleared for him two years earlier.

When David wants to know something, he doesn't hesitate. He has read the book, and it's all in there, I remind myself. It's all for show, doesn't belong to anybody anymore. David asks how Thao would stand if he were waiting for something. Whether he was a loud talker or a soft talker. Whether he ate with his hands. The shape his mouth made when he came. Most things I don't have an answer for. Most things I have to make up.

I invite him home to show him Thao's clothes and his trashy thrillers that had wriggled their way into my bookshelves. I show him the grey earth in the back garden, from which Thao had coaxed basil, parsley, the feathery gills of dill, coriander that he replanted every fortnight in summer, as it went to seed so quickly. On the kitchen table I smooth out brittle newspaper clippings of the World War II naval mine Thao had found almost thirty years ago, massive and urcheonlike amongst the coral. He had known that it was very old –
tired,
he said, from drifting around the Pacific for so many years, broken free from the chain which had once anchored it to the sea floor.
Itinerant,
was another word that he used, which always brought to my mind the addition of a battered leather suitcase and a waterlogged bowler hat, though I never joked about this with Thao. He'd swum out to meet it every day for a week before finally telling his father, a fervent alerter of proper authorities. The mine was carefully extracted from the reef, and detonated offshore a week later. Thao, who had never been allowed pets, recalled this incident in the manner that others recall euthanised animals sent to fictitious farms.

Must you befriend all the salty old ruins? I asked him.

Georgia is ambivalent when it comes to the subject of the mine.

I mean, how do you stage that? How do you stage it without ruining it? She shakes her head. I don't want it to look like a high school production.

I can see him clearly, skinny arms around his bony knees, conversing silently with the mine beneath the surface of the water.

It's already been ruined, George. I ruined it by writing it. Thao ruined it by telling me. It might as well be ruined some more.

Alex. Georgia looks into my face. You are a sad, sad man. Anyway, I don't think it's in the budget. Maybe we'll just have Thao talk about it.

You mean David.

I mean Thao, who is being played by David. Are you getting precious?

Right. No, I'm not precious.

There are things I want to ask David. There are moments when I think he will be able to answer. I want to ask him what Thao saw, whether it was bright enough for him to see anything at all, there in the oil-black water. Whether it calmed him, laying his hands against the great hull of the dead ship. Feeling something like a heartbeat as the tide pulsed inside it. I know he might not have made it out that far. I like to think that he did, though I'm not sure why it matters, either way. He washed up on some doctor's private beach. Or what some doctor thought of as her private beach. I had to read about it.

Onstage, Alex is demolishing the fourth wall. I've decided that I don't much like Alex. Everything he says sounds pantomimic. It's all I can do to not shout out, He's behind you, you fool!

It was not a compulsion, he tells the audience, which just now consists of Georgia and myself. Not a need that I had for sexual conquest or variety. Just a fundamental interest in other people's lives, and how they lived them. The stories they told themselves through the photographs and possessions they chose to display. I wanted the kind of insight that came with nights spent awake in strangers' houses …

Georgia hollers down at the stage every now and then, I want to see more regret there. Again please, and can we have a longer pause this time?

I sit beside her with a printout of the script, making a shuddery little mark at every point that I fail to conceal a bodily cringe.

Our final argument is being staged in a lounge room. For reasons pertaining to aesthetics, the lounge room looks nothing like my lounge room, despite the images I sent through. Not really cluttery enough for a writer, was the logic.

For reasons pertaining to dramatic structure, we are having a final argument.

In truth, there was no final argument. I did not come home, and then Thao did not come home. When I slept my dreams were of massive ships being launched from slipways, listing dangerously before righting themselves like toys. I took it as a good omen. Three days later, after a few dozen unanswered phone calls and text messages, the reply crashed into the gardenias along with the Saturday supplements.

Thao sways out from the shadows. You, he says, are a fucking scavenger. Chewing pieces out of other people's lives. You know what good writers do? They make shit up. They use their imagination.

At the word imagination, Thao jams his index finger against my temple. Holds it there like a pistol while I say, No. All writers are scavengers. The good and the bad.

Perhaps it would have been better like this.

Georgia turns to me in the dark. Is there anything you'd like to add, Alex?

Nothing, I tell her. Thank you.

David takes two beers from the esky, uncaps the first with the second and hands it to me, then paws around in the ice for the bottle opener. He rakes his hair back with wet fingers, shades his eyes from the glare coming off the water.

Out there, the stern is once again visible. Then the keel, and the hull, water gushing from the damage. They haul it up until it hangs in the air, glistening and terrible. I get a good look at it then; draped with weed, armoured in limpet.
The thing itself and not the myth.

Then a cable breaks, and the whole twisted mess of it crashes back into the water.