A Lovely and Terrible Thing Read online

  I straightened up and lit a cigarette. A breeze ruffled my hair and chilled the sweat on my neck. On it came the smell of diesel fumes from Alexandra Parade. Eli was nowhere to be seen and I doubted I would be able to figure out the stupid tarpaulin mechanism. The whole swimming thing was losing its appeal. ‘Eli,’ I hissed. ‘Eli.’ No answer. Fuck. Where was she? I searched the shapes and shadows of the darkness.

  The tarpaulin buckled around the centre of the 50-metre pool. I squatted down and looked across the plastic surface, which shimmered slightly in the moonlight in a parody of water. Another movement. A muffled cry. Her voice. Eli’s voice. Shit. She was in the pool. She’d gone swimming under the tarpaulin. There’s no way she could find her way out from under there, under-fifteen swimming champion or not. Especially drunk and stoned. Shit. I ran back and forth at the deep end, calling to her, thinking I could at least guide her towards the shallow end. I stepped onto the raised edge, then off. Sweat salted into my eyes. I barked my shin against a banana lounge. Should I go in? Again the lumpy punch from beneath the tarpaulin, this time at least a little closer to the edge. I called out her name, told her to keep going in the same direction. What a disaster. I imagined the police, the headlines, jail, my entire life telescoped into a single idiotic point.

  Then there she was, barely a metre away, peering out from beneath a cowl of blue plastic. She was laughing and motioning me to be quiet. ‘There’s no fucking water.’ She raised the tarpaulin high over her head to show me. Sure enough, a square cave, its neon-blue floor bruised here and there with middens of leaves.

  ‘Jesus. I thought you’d gone swimming under there,’ I said.

  ‘You think I’m an idiot?’

  ‘You scared the crap out of me.’

  She scratched her nose and looked behind her. ‘You get that tarp thing working?’

  ‘But there’s no water.’

  Eli stared at me as if measuring me for something. Beads of sweat had formed on her forehead and I could feel her breath on my knee. She held out her hand and I helped her from the shallow end. Together we figured out the tarpaulin mechanism, which wasn’t so complicated, and rolled it back, releasing the perfume of warm plastic and old chlorine trapped in there for God knows how long, distilled from a thousand summer days. Neither of us spoke as we bent to the task, which was curiously satisfying, a sort of double-handed rolling. Eli didn’t say anything the whole time. She was filled with a weird energy all of a sudden, like she was on a mission.

  When we had finished, she strolled the length of the pool, stooping here and there to trail her fingers in the imaginary water, shaking her hand dry each time, and when she got to the shallow end she shrugged off her white shirt, stepped from her jeans and stood there in her underwear. It wasn’t fancy underwear like I thought she would wear – swiped, no doubt, from David Jones – but plain blue underwear, practical, like from a Target catalogue. She stood there, skin glowing, rubbing one hand over the opposite arm. After a few minutes she approached the curved metal ladder, turned around and stepped backwards, rung by rung, into the pool.

  ‘You going to join me?’ She made a whooshing sound with her mouth as she breast-stroked around the shallow end. ‘It’s nice when you get used to it.’ And laughed with the ridiculousness of it, that thing people say to encourage their friends to join them in water.

  Unsure of what exactly I was doing, I wandered down to the shallow end and sat on the lip of the pool. Eli watched me from the corner of her eye as she swam. Finally, I swung around and dangled my feet into the pool.

  ‘Careful,’ she said. ‘You’ll get your shoes wet. Don’t want wet shoes, you’ll catch your death. You can’t swim in your clothes, everyone knows that. You’ll drown.’

  I hesitated, about to say how unlikely that was, when she came up beside me and rested on the edge, elbows winged on either side of her. ‘Come on,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll give you those lessons. But we’d better stay in the shallow end. After all that drinking, and if you’re not such a good swimmer and all.’

  By the time I’d taken off my jeans and t-shirt and kicked off my shoes, it didn’t seem so foolish to be swimming around with Eli in Fitzroy Pool in the middle of the night. She stood beside me with one hand cupped under my chest and observed my freestyle with a professional eye. ‘No. Your arm is going way too loose coming out of the water. All over the place. Try and drag your fingertips along the surface of the water – the hand that’s coming around – so you get that clean action, like this, see? Be with the water. That’s it. Yes. Nice and tight. Feel that weightlessness? That’s what you want.’

  I don’t know how long we spent paddling about in that damn pool, grinning like seals, kicking up the swirls of leaves, but it was the most fun I’d had in years – made sweeter, of course, by the fact that I knew it couldn’t last. I felt I was somehow unbound from myself. Eventually we scrambled out of the pool and, suddenly shy, stepped into our street clothes, into the other, public versions of ourselves, before climbing back over the fence into the adjacent parkland.

  We wandered back to her squat on Queens Parade, which smelled of sour milk. She had the front room. We smoked for a while in the sallow glow from the streetlights outside before falling asleep fully clothed as trucks lumbered past. In the night I felt her childish breath against my neck and finally woke late in the morning to find myself alone. It was already hot and when I staggered into the sunlit kitchen, it reeked of heroin. Eli sat in a wooden chair with one arm folded back hard against her chest. She wore jeans and a white singlet. Her neck was sweaty, her eyes post-coital and her belt was looped on the table; she’d obviously just had a hit.

  ‘Hi there,’ she said.

  A cat purred and squirmed around my legs. I eyed the spoon on the table. ‘Morning.’

  ‘I saved you a taste,’ she said in a thick voice and nodded towards the crooked spoon. It wasn’t a gift, not exactly, because junkies never give gifts – especially not of drugs – but rather a conclusion of events. ‘Thanks for last night,’ she said. ‘It was fun.’

  I was surprised, but knew right then and there that I would remember all this, the night and its subsequent morning, the girl in the kitchen like some creature raked from the sea: that it would be a memory to sing across the years to me among so many unremembered nights and days. And so, I guess, it has been.

  I mumbled something and set about having a hit, fiddling with a glass of water and a spoon.

  The Very Edge of Things

  So I’m lying in the darkness staring into space, listening to the crickets outside and trucks passing on the highway and Julia breathing beside me when it comes to me what I got to do. Fuck this, I think. I’m leaving. She breathes so loudly. I hate her ability to sleep through anything, even what we’re going through today. The woman is like a corpse after dark. It isn’t only the breathing, of course. It’s a bunch of things, wearing me down like water on a rock. But the breathing always gets to me.

  It’s past 2 am and I feel, believe it or not, even shittier than usual. I’m forty-seven, more than halfway there, probably three-quarters, taking all the variables into account, and we’re on our way to visit my brother in Adelaide who’s dying from cancer. Barry is four years younger than me and has always been as strong as an ox, but I guess there’s not a lot you can do when the Spanish dancer moves in. After all, she got our father as well. The room is stifling, so I slip out of the sagging motel bed and fumble into trousers and a shirt before creeping across the thin carpet.

  Friend of mine left his wife a few years ago and said you got to do it before you think too much about it, so maybe I’m taking his advice because it seemed he had a good time after that, aside from those legal difficulties, but that was nothing to do with being a bachelor, that was just bad luck. That, and the thing with the bottle of massage oil and the ‘nurse’, but that could happen to anyone. Wouldn’t happen to me – not that I got anything against that ty
pe of behaviour – but, you know, horses for courses. What do you expect, name like Lionel.

  Coins and car keys jangle in my trouser pocket.

  ‘Are you coming back?’

  It’s Julia, of course – poor Julia, my wife of a thousand years. Sometimes she scares the hell out of me with what she knows: things I don’t even know myself. Although I can’t quite see, I imagine her bleary eyes and long hair like seaweed over the pillow. It’s a reasonable question, considering everything that’s happening, and I pause for a moment with the frayed edge of the wooden door in my sweaty palm. ‘Go to sleep,’ I tell her after a while – because what else do you say? – and slip out, easing the door shut behind me.

  I wander across the parking lot and stand beside the fence of the crappy swimming pool, which is large enough that the motel owners can advertise a pool but not big enough to actually do anything in, unless you’re a child. Beetles are paddling on the blue water, which is lit by underwater lights that throw rippling patterns across the childproof fence. Almost looks beautiful. A gritty wind brings the smell of hot asphalt and the promise of other, better places. It has been a bad day and I’m pretty sure things are only going to get worse over the next week. A bird hoots out in the desert beyond the glow of the pool lights and the motel’s neon sign. I look behind, half expecting to see Julia padding across the concrete, but there is nothing, no one. She would be staring at the ceiling of our room, chewing her lip, waiting for me to do whatever the hell it was I was going to do.

  I pause beside the car. Where do you go after twenty-three years? The car keys are sweaty in my hand and I am about to get in and drive away from everything when I hear music, and there is something about it, a quality that makes me stop. I follow the music around the back of the Desert View until I find myself standing in the doorway of a room.

  Inside are a man and woman maybe in their fifties. Both have seen better days, although they have probably seen worse. They pause in their conversation to consider me, a stranger at their door, a man who has also, frankly, seen better days. A radio murmurs a country and western tune. It seems they were sharing a joke but now, keeping her eyes on me, the woman reaches down and fumbles about on the floor for a shot glass, which she refills from a bottle.

  But it’s the man who speaks. ‘Are we too loud?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I was just . . . It’s too hot to sleep. I was taking a walk.’

  The man nods. He has a wolfish look about him, with bristling sideburns and upper teeth that protrude slightly over his bottom lip. With a toss of his head he indicates the darkness behind me. ‘Well, you want to take care walking around here in the middle of the night.’

  I’m not sure if this is a threat. ‘Why is that?’

  He throws back his drink and crunches on a piece of ice that sounds like a chicken bone, then points over my shoulder with a knobbly finger. ‘Go too far that way and we’ll never see you again. This is the desert. The very edge of things. Shitload of nothing out there. Place is littered with old mine shafts, apart from anything else.’

  He says all this like a tour guide listing the attractions and I don’t care for his manner. Falling into an abandoned shaft almost sounds like an appealing thought, however, and I look behind me. There is very little to be seen, but, after a few seconds, I can make out the dark bulk of an abandoned bus Julia and I noticed when we drove in a few hours earlier. Otherwise, the old guy is right: shitload of nothing.

  ‘Want a drink, then?’

  I turn back to them. The woman is younger than him but looks like an air stewardess, you know, the older ones who realise simultaneously the job they chose was not so glamorous and it’s too late to do anything better than fly around serving coffee at high altitude getting deep vein whatever-the-hell-it-is? Then I notice the couple are sitting in canvas deck chairs and that the room doesn’t appear to be a motel room like the one Julia and I are staying in but more like an abandoned staff quarters. There are a couple of camp beds, an esky and what looks like an old school desk arranged haphazardly in the small space. It’s late. I don’t really want to have a drink but I’m not in a hurry, so I shrug and step inside the room. ‘Sure.’

  The burning chill of the whiskey is actually very refreshing and I sit there with two complete strangers as the alcohol squirms into the furthest corners of my body. The room smells like an op shop, although it could be one of the pair; up close, they are more decrepit than I first thought.

  ‘So what brings you out this way?’ the man asks.

  I take a slug of whiskey, unsure how much I want to let on. It’s almost impossible for me to talk about my brother right now so I tell them I’m only passing through.

  The woman guffaws into her blouse, then follows it up with a thin smile. She sips from her drink and lights up a cigarette, sucking on it with a kind of venom. She’s obviously smoked so many of the damn things in her life that her mouth is pursed as a cat’s arse. Already, before she’s even said a word, I know I don’t like her – although, to be fair, I doubt I would like many people in the mood I’m in.

  The man shoots her a look, then turns his peepers onto me. He seems to be pondering something and I don’t feel so comfortable sitting there, being inspected by some old guy out here in the back of a motel in the middle of nowhere. One drink, I think, and I’m out of here.

  But then, still looking at me like he’s never actually seen another white man before, he says: ‘Are you okay?’

  It’s one hell of a question. Does he mean in the head or does he mean am I, you know, above board? ‘Am I okay?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Just a question.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I want to know.’

  I take a squiz at the woman, who is watching all this with interest, sucking every now and then on her fag. She’s giving nothing away. The whole scene is like some art film Julia made me watch once. Thing was supposed to be packed full of meaning but made no sense from go to whoa. There’s a mechanical cough, and a bar fridge I hadn’t noticed before shudders into life.

  The old guy picks his teeth with a match. ‘What do you call a cowboy with no legs?’

  The stewardess snickers, but me, I don’t say anything. I got no head for jokes at the best of times, let alone right now. But the old guy, his eyes are popping out of his head like he’s about to reveal the punchline to the funniest joke in history. Then he says, wheezing all the while, barely able to contain himself, ‘A low. Down. Bum!’

  The stewardess snorts like a pig. I rustle up a smile and sip my drink, suddenly wishing I was somewhere far away and didn’t have to worry about anything.

  Nobody says a word for a few minutes until the old guy pipes up and says, to nobody in particular, ‘I left my wife once,’ and I’m about to ask how he knows anything about me leaving Julia and what the hell business is it of his but the woman beats me to it. She chucks down her fag and leaps out of her camp chair and has suddenly gathered all her things together – handbag and coat and smokes – and says, ‘Jesus, Frank, not this again. How many times do I have to listen to this story? You left your wife. Get over it.’ And so on and so on along these lines for more than a minute, while Frank sits in his low-slung camp chair looking the other way. This is probably some sort of long-practised marriage routine. Believe me, we all have them; it comes with the territory.

  I figure I’ll take advantage of the commotion to get away from these creeps and their art-movie thing but the woman has blocked the door with her arse so I stay put, meek as a little lamb, trying to figure out where to dump my drink because the whiskey is not agreeing with me, and then suddenly – bam – the woman is gone, leaving me alone with old Frankie, who, I gather, is most certainly not her husband. A door slams somewhere and that’s it. Now all I can hear is the radio pl
aying ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’ by Glen Campbell and I realise that was probably what triggered old Frank about his wife – by the time I get to somewhere or other, whatever the stupid lyrics are. And she’ll cry, blah blah blah. Enough to make you kill yourself.

  And then before I can offer excuses and leave, Frank starts up again, almost as if nothing has happened. ‘Actually,’ he says in his old man’s whine, ‘it was a night very similar to this. Summer, you know. And I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep so I went outside. The house was boiling hot, no air. We were living in Sydney then. In Randwick. And, I don’t know why, I got into the car, just a whim. And found myself driving away. And it was so nice to be in the car alone, me and the road. There is, I think, a special appeal there – a man alone at night with his means of escape. You know what I’m saying? And I drove until I came to a beach and I walked on the sand for a while, staring out at the dark water and wondering about faraway places and then, I don’t know, I got the urge to go swimming. So. I take off my clothes. Hot night. And walk into the water.’

  Frank speaks in a manner that doesn’t leave much in the way of spaces between the words so it’s hard to butt in, but right then I slap my hands down on my knees like we’ve come to an agreement out here in the bloody back of beyond.

  I talk fast. ‘Well. Thanks for the drink, but I’d really better be going.’

  But Frankie pauses, turns to me and takes another sip. He’s got a fleck of white spittle on his lower lip and his scrawny neck shines with sweat and he says, real serious, ‘You need to listen to me.’

  By now the guy is really giving me the shits. ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  He’s right, of course, about me hearing him, although I’m pretty sure I don’t need to listen to anything, especially not this crap. He has a desperate whiff about him. Anyway, he takes my silence as agreement and lets loose again.

  ‘Stone-cold sober, I was. And I walked into the water, past the waves until I . . . lifted off the sand, was lifted off the actual earth, can you imagine? It was wonderful because I had been so long stuck to the ground and here I was like a balloon being set free. The ground – the shells and sand – who knows how far beneath me. Because that’s what happens at the beach. You lift off the actual earth. And I floated there in complete darkness, at the mercy of the ocean and all the creatures that live in there, the sharks and who knows what. Amazing. And I could hear my breathing, the loudest thing in the ocean. The loudest thing. And I floated there, rising and falling, rising and falling. And I thought: “Well, if the ocean wants me, it can take me.” And I’m listening to my breathing getting louder and louder and I realise that I’ve drifted right out past everything. In a rip, you see.’