Minimum of Two Read online

  Rachel turned with a sigh. He lifted the blind again. The faint light showed him her face. It was so familiar it might have been his own. He felt her breath on him. The house creaked. He knew where he was. The Bulgarian’s dog barked. A Volkswagen pulled in next door. He even knew the time by that; it was four o’clock. A rooster crowed. Something receded in him.

  At dawn he took Sam in his arms out to the toilet. The grass was cold. Sam pissed on the seat. The homely, ammoniac smell made Nilsam grin. He hoisted the sleeping boy onto his shoulder and took him across the dewy lawn towards the house. Sun moved across the rooftops. A phrase of music came to him, something fresh which made his heart tic. This afternoon he would go and see his mother. Today he would do many things. He took the boy inside, put him in bed beside Rachel and climbed in. Sleep came to him and he was not afraid.

  The Water Was Dark

  and It Went Forever Down

  THE GIRL LEFT her mother in the rented cottage with all the shades drawn and went down to the packed white sand of the beach. She passed the jetty with its whirling braid of gulls and followed the line of the bay. She was tall for her age, but years of training in the pool had taken lankiness from her. Her hair was cropped close. In the summer sun her big nose had gone scabby. She just wished her mother would put the bottles away, raise the blinds, and come outside into the world again, but the girl knew she had a better chance of making the Olympics than changing her mother.

  Eight years ago, when the girl was six years old and her father had been gone a year, her mother had a terrible accident. Depressed and drunk, she passed out while smoking in bed and woke in flames. Her nylon nightie crackled and hissed. She beat herself out on the floor and threw a jug of water over the bed, but she did not call out to the girl across the hall. She sat shaking in the dark with a bottle of sherry until dawn when she phoned an ambulance. Because she waited, her scars were hideous. Years later, she told the girl she hadn’t wanted to alarm her by shrieking and waking her in the middle of the night looking the way she did, like a charred side of beef. From that moment the girl was convinced that her mother was either stupid or sick.

  Down the front of her bikini, the girl saw her tiny breasts and was grateful that her own body was unblemished. Even these days, the sight of her mother caused her teeth to clench. She kicked up a string of kelp and watched it settle back on the sand. This holiday was so boring. There was no one her age. Already she’d run out of books. It was no different to home.

  Following the curve of the bay, she saw the small island offshore – low, rocky, spotted with vegetation – and she wondered how far out it was.

  She knew her mother was sick and bitter and afraid. She just wished she could pull herself out of it, get a job, stay out of mental hospitals, save for some special surgery, find a man. God, to be normal!

  All those stupid, recurring statements ran through her head. ‘All a person needs is a bit of a land,’ her mother would say, ‘that’s what makes the difference.’ ‘Men hate us. They hate our bodies.’ ‘God has been cruel to me.’ ‘Your father never loved you.’ These came up during TV programmes, at meals; the girl heard them shouted in the night, heard them screeched from their sixth floor window as she slunk home from training. Over and over.

  A hot breeze blew off the land, from where the colossal white backs of dunes humped at the edge of town, threatening the place with their shifting weight.

  She’s gonna send me crazy, she thought.

  Every night after school, the girl trained in the swimming squad. It was three hours of blind, busting effort, away from home, and though she didn’t love it the way the others did, she knew she couldn’t be without it.

  The girl stopped walking. It was stupid to walk, she knew. Walking made you think. What she needed was a swim; to be an engine.

  By now the island was directly out from her. Crayboats passed it, their motors coming from weird directions in the wind.

  An old man on a sailboard skimmed past with a ludicrous smile on his face. With a grunt, she ran to the water and speared into the channel and swam.

  She had good style. Her breathing was metrical. She was tuned for it. She swam and thought the thoughts of a machine.

  Out in the centre of the channel the water was dark and it went forever down. The island seemed no closer.

  She moved all her parts. Everything did its task. She was not tired.

  When the water suddenly became warmer, she knew she was there. Standing in the shallows, just out from a little sandy beach, she saw a cloud of birds and heard the blood chug in her ears.

  ‘All a person needs is a bit of land,’ she said aloud. She laughed and it wasn’t all derision.

  She stretched her arms. She noticed that she’d left her watch on. It had stopped. She guessed the swim had taken her fifteen minutes. The easterly was drying her already, leaving streaks of salt on her flesh.

  The island was a bird sanctuary. There were signs and warnings. It wasn’t a big island. Maybe ten hectares she guessed, or less. She climbed up from the beach and wandered across the island’s humpbacked plateau. Seabirds filled the sky; they nested in holes in the ground and limestone nooks; they chased each other in territorial battles and shrieked from places unseen. On the packed sand, scrub and limestone monoliths offered little shelter. The tracks of birds peppered every soft surface. The whole place smelt birdy. On the seaward side surf creased across reefs, and small, sunken lagoons and potholes stood still and full. From the low cliff she could see fish down in the water with birds diving on them. Underfoot, wherever she went, broken eggshells mashed and blew. As she walked, a murmur grew and birds fled before her. One ran blindly from its hole and skidded off her shin. Thousands, thousands of black birds.

  In their midst, in the centre of the island, the girl sat down to watch them soar and stitch about her. She wondered why they thrived so. She thought of Biol. class and tried to think. There seemed to be plenty of fish for them to eat. No predators that she could see – no sign of snakes. Just birds, and she didn’t even know what kind. Hatching, growing, hunting, mating, dying. There was something relentlessly single-minded about the whole business.

  After a time, she stood up and more birds rose with her, taking their atonal music with them. By her foot, she saw the carcase of a small bird. All over the island she found dead birds: whole, mutilated, broken. And shells and feathers. And shit. A constant layer of debris. She felt within the grasp of something important, something she might understand. From Biol. What did that skinny teacher with the tobacco breath call it? That was it – the web of life. She saw it all before her. The sick and the weak died and the young and the strong lived and thrived. It’s the way things are, she thought. You need to just go, that was it; survive, win.

  All you need is a bit of land . . . something solid under you. Ah, what rubbish, especially from her mother. Something solid, and there she was all day in the dark, drinking. A life of fluids. A whole ocean she must have drunk by now and she talked about land! Bird sanctuary for a lame duck. She was tired of fighting it all, always always swimming over the top of that sea of grog. Maybe that’s why I started swimming, she thought, to stop her drowning me.

  She went back down to the sandy beach and she took off her watch and bikini and lay in the sun. Her body was strong and hard. She was young. There was no more room, she decided, for feeling sorry for dead things and dying things and sick things; for her mother or even herself. Now there was only time to live, to survive. Live. Survive. They’re the same thing, she told herself quickly. No difference.

  She got up and saw that she had left her perfect shape in the sand, and then she cried out in triumph and ran naked down to the water and pierced it and began to swim.

  Be an engine. Don’t complain. Don’t ask. Don’t hesitate. Swim, don’t think.

  Pushing out, she knew that as soon as she was old enough she would leave her mother. There was no room. She had to look after herself, leave her mother to the web. There wasn’t time enou
gh anymore for all this swimming through craziness and ugliness and dumbness, sherry, beer, scotch, gin.

  Be an engine.

  But she faltered.

  Don’t think, breathe!

  She moved her parts. Swimming machine.

  Think.

  No, you old bitch. I can swim.

  She cut through the water and filled up cold with anger and went harder.

  I can be a machine. Like a fish, you old bitch. I can swim away.

  Harder.

  Go.

  Do.

  Cut.

  Harder.

  That body thrashed and whitened the water, throttling out, vibrating, parts shearing away, roaring white hot, and all the way down she felt young and strong and perfect in the cold darkness.

  Nilsam’s Friend

  for Galloway and Chambers

  LOOKING UP FROM the page Nilsam saw his friend come up the path, distorted in the gentle convexities of the leadlight window. He stood and the chair crashed into the wall. The window shrieked as he opened it.

  ‘Well, butter my bread,’ Nilsam said with his head stuck out.

  His friend looked up with a grin. His hair was thick and his beard was long and lustrous in the creamy sunlight. He was thin and barefoot as usual, but hair and beard formed such a magnificent mane that it made him seem bigger, thicker.

  ‘You look like a lion.’

  Nilsam’s friend stopped below the window. The air was congested with the sounds of birds and cicadas. A dog barked. It was spring in Perth. Nilsam’s friend wore the tiger-striped calico pants his girlfriend had made, and a black tee-shirt bearing the words SURFERS AGAINST NUCLEAR DESTRUCTION. He squinted in the sun.

  ‘Got in last night.’

  ‘You’re early.’

  ‘Ran out of money in Athens.’

  Nilsam shook his head. ‘Athens.’

  Both of them broke into laughter.

  Nilsam left the window and went through the house to the front door. It was cool in here. The dark boards croaked as he went. So the old romantic is back, he thought; the perpetual adolescent. He wondered for how long. Nilsam’s friend could not decide whether or not to marry. He embarked upon trips to ‘get his head together’ but a decision was never forthcoming. There were always stories; he brought back atmosphere by the suitcase, but never a solution to his dilemma. At least this time he looks well, Nilsam thought. Last time he looked like something out of Belsen.

  ‘The boy asleep?’ Nilsam’s friend asked as they embraced at the door.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I bet he’s twice the size.’

  ‘He’s learnt to say shit.’

  ‘I turned thirty in a monastery.’

  ‘Good grief, let’s get some food and go out into the sun.’

  In the kitchen, Nilsam pulled the cork from a bottle of wine and he gave his friend a salami and a cheese with a little knife in it.

  ‘Thirty.’

  They sat out on the back lawn which was strewn with bright plastic toys. They ate and drank. Nilsam’s friend looked hard and wiry. His eyes looked good and clear. He told Nilsam stories about the crazy Greek peasants living in the old church, about the lump on his girlfriend’s breast they’d flown to London to have removed; about the airlessness of the English; about Greece again and the tavernas and the white light and the donkeys; about the surf in Spain and the ecumenical monastery in France where he’d arrived sick and been taken to the infirmary like a medieval pilgrim; about the icons; about the things that happened in him that he couldn’t explain properly, and Nilsam listened and felt overweight, sluggish, ignorant and still a little disdainful. He was working. He had a son to look after, and a wife to consider. He didn’t have time for romantic jaunts. He didn’t have the money or the hide. And, dammit, he didn’t want to go.

  ‘I wished you were there, sometimes, you and Rache and the Terror.’

  ‘We’d have slowed you down,’ Nilsam said. He poured some more wine. It was thick and red against the liverish grass.

  ‘Well, I missed you all like hell anyway. Greece, mate, you’d love it.’

  ‘Greece? I’ve got most of it in this neighbourhood.’

  ‘But the retsina, the tavernas, the light, the colour of the ocean.’

  ‘People say the light, the sea, the . . . well, it’s the same as here.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Yeah, it’s a lot like here. But it’s not here.’

  Nilsam shrugged. It always came to this.

  The back door opened. Nilsam’s son, rumpled and squinty from sleep, toddled out into the sun and fell into his lap.

  ‘He has grown.’

  ‘He’s crapped himself, too,’ Nilsam said with a smile, and he put his lips to the child’s hay-smelling hair.

  ‘You’re good with him.’

  Nilsam shrugged. He felt dowdy. He was a man and he felt dowdy like women were supposed to feel dowdy.

  ‘Did you see the rooster?’ He pointed up the back.

  ‘What’s it, a leghorn-emu cross?’

  ‘Biggest rooster in the world.’

  Nilsam’s friend laughed.

  ‘Reminds me,’ Nilsam said. ‘A little girl bumped into me coming out of a record shop yesterday while I was riding past. She must have been eight or so and she’d dropped her Bach record. I asked her about it. She looked at me and said: ‘Bach was the greatest composer in the world. So was Handel.’ I had to ride a whole block before I could laugh without a conscience. Nearly fell off me bike.’

  The child rolled over in his lap and reached for the knife on the grass.

  ‘Ta? Ta?’

  ‘No, not for boys.’

  The child turned over and began to cry.

  ‘I’m winding down,’ Nilsam’s friend said. ‘Got in at four this morning.’

  ‘Go home and get some sleep,’ Nilsam said, grappling with the child.

  ‘Yeah.’

  They walked through the house to the front door and on the verandah they stood in the noonday shade and looked out across the suburb with its close-set houses and smudges of smoke from the spring burn-off.

  ‘By the way,’ Nilsam said, ‘what’s the verdict?’

  ‘I turned thirty. It put me out of kilter. Couldn’t decide.’

  Nilsam smiled and his friend went down the steps.

  In the afternoon he sat out there as the sun ate into the shade. He watched his son climb the steps with fierce concentration as he waited for his wife to get home from work, and he caught himself wondering what it was like to see the same creamy light, the same blue eye of the ocean, the same sky-colours somewhere else.

  Minimum of Two

  I FELT GRETA in the dark and her buttocks were cool as honeydew. She stirred. Her breasts came my way and puckered against my face. I hoped to God she would stay asleep. I ached with my own blood. Gently, I squared her hips to me, displaced a bent knee and settled in between her legs. Her fine hair fell across my mouth. She breathed her sweet melon smell. I felt the curve of jaw, line of neck, heard the satin whisper of a shifting thigh and all the caution went out of me as I pushed her back, writhed up into her, levering on my toes until I prised her open. She gave a little cry. Her knees locked me at the hips. I scrambled and shunted with my head blank. Greta, my wife, began to scream. Her nails lifted buds of flesh from my back. She head-butted me and I yawed off her, spilling across the bed into the cold. There was a small silence before a car started up across the street and Greta began to make broken noises that might have been retching or weeping, though I couldn’t tell because I got the hell out.

  Among the sawdust drifts in my workshop, I threw tools at the wall and kicked drums, lurching in a sweat from one end to the other until I could barely breathe anymore and I fell in a corner against an old chest full of bolts and brackets. The fluorescent light made me feel puny. I was still naked. I smelt of Greta. I was ashamed. That hatred came back and I got frightened of myself.

  I thought of that bastard Blakey cornering her in the dungeon-shad
ows of the carpark, and of the features of her face collapsing as she backed against a fender, then a pillar, then a wall. The things he did to her, those details that everyone heard at the trial, the things he said, the things I listened to her say in a dead tone. I thought of her quiet on the piss-smelling concrete and her blood on his business suit; now in my mind I couldn’t stop from seeing her pulling her clothes together as he showed her to her car and strapped her in and sent her on her way to be on her best behaviour. The look of her when she came into the house that night nearly three years ago made me want to die.

  She was like a ghost for two weeks. I couldn’t get a word out of her but I heard her crying in the bathroom at night. When I found the bruises on her I forced it out of her. I took her to the police. A week or so after that, she thawed a little and I knew she was coping. Her big laugh came back and the softness in her eyes. There was a rash on her chest sometimes that came and went but she seemed okay. After my first rage I put it all to the back of my mind. I told myself that what was important was getting Greta back into herself. I wanted to give her all the time she needed.

  It was some time before she could be touched, but she softened up. We stayed home, felt intimate again. I was frightened to even suggest sex, but it was her idea in the end. We decided to have a baby. Big and round and rich, Greta never looked better. Seeing her pregnant made me happy and I knew it was all right with us again.

  Blakey was Greta’s senior in the Department. She took too long to act. The jury procrastinated as though maybe the whole thing was Greta’s fault, but Blakey got five years with a minimum before parole of two. We sat like wood in the courtroom, Greta and me. The lawyer was smug. There were photographers. They begged us to smile.

  After the trial, I stopped work for a few weeks. The house was quiet. Greta went back to what she was like the months after it first happened; it was like a relapse. She cried a lot, moved potted plants from place to place around the house, smoked three packs a day, had nightmares, wouldn’t talk about it. A few weeks passed. I took her out for a game of tennis; she wore a tracksuit even though there was sun. We drove up into the hills. Had big dinners at home and got drunk and slept well. I’d worked hard on the house ever since the first night she came home like a ghost and now it was good to be in. Winter was coming. Greta stayed around the house. Because it was cosy, she said. I knew I was helping.