Emily Maguire is the author of three novels – Smoke in the Room, The Gospel According to Luke and Taming the Beast – and Princesses & Pornstars, a work of non-fiction. Her articles and essays on sex, religion, culture and literature have been published widely, including in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Observer.

Also by Emily Maguire

Fiction
The Gospel According to Luke
Taming the Beast

Non-fiction
Princesses & Pornstars

EMILY MAGUIRE

SMOKE
IN
THE
ROOM

First published 2009 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney

Copyright © Emily Maguire 2009

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Maguire, Emily, 1976–

Smoke in the room / Emily Maguire.

9780330424820 (pbk.)

A823.4

Typeset in 12.5/17pt Minion by Midland Typesetters, Australia
Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group

Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

These electronic editions published in 2009 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd
1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

Smoke in the Room

Emily Maguire

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Is there smoke in the room? If it is slight, I remain.
If it is grievous, I quit it.
For you must remember this and hold it fast,
that the door stands open.

EPICTETUS

1.

Katie’s last flatmate was taken away by ambulance at the end of November and, despite a Sydney-wide housing shortage, the spare room stayed empty until the first week of January. Katie was irritated by her grandmother’s assertion that it was worth going without rent for awhile if it meant finding the right tenant. As though it had been the past tenants who had mucked everything up for Katie and not the other way around. Katie knew that Gran’s re-writing of history came from love, but it frustrated her all the same. Blind love was one thing, being seen and loved another.

She watched from the window as the chosen one came up the front path. He wore a long-sleeved business shirt even though it was beach weather and Saturday. The shirt was tucked into dark blue jeans which had creases ironed down the front of each leg. A child’s yellow backpack bounced on his shoulders as he walked.

‘So what’s wrong with him?’ Katie asked her grandmother as the man disappeared into the foyer below. ‘Is he autistic or something?’

‘For god’s sake. There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s American.’

‘He doesn’t look American. Unless . . . Gran, he’s not a Mormon, is he?’

‘I didn’t ask him his religion, Katherine. If you’d met some of the weirdos who applied for the room . . . Believe me, this bloke is a prize. Steady job in a shoe shop. Doesn’t drink or smoke –’

‘Oh, god.’

‘And he looks fit. Strong. I worry about you here alone. There are some real boofheads in this building.’

‘Harmless boofheads. Anyway, I’m safer with boofheads down the hall than some religious nut-job muscle man in the flat with me.’

‘He’s not a nut-job. He’s a nice, quiet bloke who wants a nice, quiet place to live. I’ve got a really good feeling about him. I think he’ll be good for you.’ Gran reached for the door handle. ‘So, please try to be nice, okay?’

Up close he was no more attractive, although he was more interesting. His teeth were toothpaste-ad-white but his eyes belonged to a man in a drink-driving commercial. White scar tissue squiggled down past his left ear ending with a pea-sized blob on his chin. His sandy hair was slicked back with enough oil to fry a bag of potatoes, and its ends kicked out over his buttoned-down collar. When he wriggled his backpack off, his shirt threatened to tear across his chest and around his biceps.

‘You must be Katherine.’ He flashed his big smile, placed his cardboardy suitcase on the floor and extended his hand. ‘I’m Adam.’

Katie glanced at his smooth, pink nails and clasped her own hands behind her back. ‘How did ya get the scar?’

‘Katherine!’

‘This?’ He covered it with his palm.

‘I’m sorry,’ Gran said, picking up his suitcase. ‘Excuse my granddaughter.’

Gran took off down the hallway towards his room and the American skittered along behind her saying It’s fine and I can take that and Please, Ma’am and It’s heavy.

Katie followed them and stood in the doorway of his bedroom as Gran demonstrated how to operate the venetian blinds, ceiling fan and window locks, as if these were high-tech devices he would never figure out all on his own. He said Mmm and I see and Well, thank you which made Katie wonder whether he was stupid or just a big suck-up.

‘Out of the way, Katherine. Let me show Adam the rest of the place.’

Gran backtracked through the living room to show him the kitchen and bathroom, and then returned to the hallway to point out the door to Katie’s room. As they walked in single file towards the study, unused since Katie had dropped out of secretarial college two years ago, she placed her hands on Adam’s arse.

He spun around. ‘What are –?’

‘What’s wrong?’ said Gran from the doorway of the study.

Adam looked as though his lunch had been ground into the dirt by a bully’s heel.

‘Sorry,’ Katie said, feeling like both the bully and the sandwich.

He smiled like he was about to break bad news. ‘It’s fine.’

‘What’s fine? What happened?’

‘Nothing. Just a little collision,’ he said. But she knew it wasn’t nothing. That look in his eyes: like she’d hurt him very, very badly. Like he wouldn’t recover from this terrible injury for a long time.

But maybe she hadn’t hurt him, maybe he was already hurt, but super good at covering it and her touch had caught him off guard. That look probably had nothing to do with her at all. Most things didn’t have anything to do with her. This was something she needed to remind herself of often.

Gran narrowed her eyes. ‘This is the study, Adam. Come on in and have a look.’

‘What are you studying?’ Adam asked.

‘Nothing,’ Gran said. ‘This room is wasted.’ She gave Adam an apologetic smile. ‘I’m planning to turn it back into a bedroom. I did mention there’ll be another tenant moving in, didn’t I?’

‘Maybe, uh, I don’t remember. It’s fine. I keep mostly to myself, anyways. Speaking of which, I might go and . . .’ He gestured vaguely in the direction of his room.

‘Yes, go on and get settled,’ Gran said. ‘I’m leaving in a sec, but give me a call if you have any problems. My number’s on the fridge.’

‘Another tenant?’ Katie asked when he was gone.

‘Yep.’ Gran had already started clearing the piles of old magazines off the desk and placing them by the door.

‘What? You just decided, did you? I suppose I don’t get a say at all? I’m the one who has to live here.’

‘Yes, and I’m the one who has to pay. It’s not just the mortgage, either. Council rates and utilities keep going up. Everything keeps going up. It’s not easy doing it all on my own. It wouldn’t kill you to show a bit of gratitude.’

Katie stepped in between Gran and the doorway. ‘And it wouldn’t kill you to let me have some say over who lives here.’

‘You know Josie from work? Her husband’s an estate agent and he says I could be renting this place out to a family for five hundred a week. Maybe five-fifty. Reckons I’m mad not to.’

‘So go ahead and rent it out. I can find somewhere else.’

Gran dropped a stack of magazines onto the floor at Katie’s feet. ‘Your name’s magically off the rental blacklist now, is it? Or were you thinking of going back to one of those junkie slums without running water? Maybe you could find a nice little out-of-the-way bridge to sleep under? Should be comfy enough, at least until autumn.’

Katie wanted to get up and go and not look back, but she was old enough now to see the future as a real thing that must be protected against. She was frightened of ending up shoeless and mindless, picking cigarette butts out of gutters and shouting at people on buses. She felt in her pocket for her smokes, then, not finding them, she took a deep drag of the study’s stale air instead.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be ungrateful. I was just surprised.’

Gran twisted her thick black hair up in a bun, held it there for a second and then let it fall over her shoulders. ‘The other solution – money wise – is to sell my place at Bondi. I could move up north. I never see Sue anymore and your brother must be –’

‘Half-brother. Gran, come on. Mum doesn’t need you; I do.’

‘I’d still pay the bills, don’t worry. You can do all that over the internet now, you know.’

‘That’s not why I need you.’ Katie put her arms around her grandmother and pressed her cheek against her neck. It smelt like backstage at a school play. ‘I need you for lots of things.’

‘Such as?’

‘You know, all the things people mean when they go on about family being important.’

‘Silly girl.’ Gran shook free, crossed her arms and looked around the room. ‘I’m going to have to invest in some new furniture. A bed and lamp table, at least. Curtains, too. The view from in here’s awful, if I remember right.’ She went to the window and leant out, her hands on the sill, her masseuse sandals barely touching the floor, denim shorts riding up her thighs. From the back, and ignoring the chunky purple veins clustered behind the knees and dripping down the calves, the body hanging out the window could have belonged to a teenager.

Katie stood behind Gran and looked down at the car park of the building next door. ‘Could be worse,’ she said. ‘The bathroom has a view of the bins.’

Gran sighed and leant back into Katie. ‘Guess I should get started on this mess.’

‘You’ve got enough to do, Gran. Leave it to me.’

Gran saw the magazines as garbage and wanted Katie to put them in garbage bags, whereas Katie thought of them as historical records and real-time accounts of unfolding lives. She’d tried to explain this to Gran once, but she called her silly and sentimental, which was funny coming from a woman whose house was stuffed with wedding invitations, theatre programs, birthday cards, dinner menus, newspaper clippings, faded holiday snaps from the sixties and baby pictures of every member of the extended family, most of whom Katie had never even heard of.

Funny, too, that Gran nagged about the magazines even as she tried to turn Katie into a ‘reader’ by bringing around novels and short story collections and dragging her down to Glebe Library to sign up for a card. Katie had tried Gran’s books and a few others that different flatmates had left around. She enjoyed the reading part but hated the way they ended. She hated that they ended at all. People got married or divorced, they arrested the killer or they died of a terrible disease; they won the race or bought the house or moved to France and then nothing else ever happened or if it did no one ever knew.

But magazines – Who and Celebrity and Famous and New Weekly – followed the story for as long as something was happening. Weddings were followed by babies and divorces and second or third weddings, and the babies grew up and got in trouble with the police and then fell in love and had babies themselves. Illnesses went on for years or got cured and then came back, but even when someone died it wasn’t over, because someone else had set up a charitable fund or climbed a mountain and the memory of the person was reignited. The biggest star with the greatest happiness would soon enough be down-and-out scrounging for work and love; the D-list starlet whose sex tape had made her an international joke would, in time, have a hit movie and three adorable adopted babies. Nobody was safe and nobody was doomed.

Katie’s phone beeped and she glanced at the screen. Gran. How’s the clean-up going? She looked around the room which seemed messier than it had been an hour ago. Almost done she replied. Taking bins out now.

She carried armfuls of magazines into her room and stacked them inside the walk-in wardrobe. She had to take out most of her clothes and all of her shoes, but the clothes were easily heaped on top of the dresser and the shoes piled on the floor under the window.

She closed the wardrobe doors feeling fizzy with accomplishment. Next, she would drag the old desk and bookshelf out of the study and vacuum the carpet using that vanilla powder from under the sink. She would clean the windows with Windex and the sills with Mr Sheen. She would wipe down the furniture and put it back in place. She would make the room so clean that Gran would slap a hand over her mouth and say, Katherine! You’ve outdone yourself! and would not think to ask about the magazines and whether they had taken up all the room in the wheelie bin.

2.

It took Adam barely ten minutes to unpack: five shirts, three pairs of long pants, a couple of T-shirts, underwear, socks. He carried his toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream, razor and deodorant down the hall to the bathroom and placed them on the shelf he guessed had been left clear for him. Above sat a bottle of Dove moisturiser, an open packet of disposable razors, a tube of Clearasil and a jar of hair gel. The shelf below his held antiseptic cream, cotton balls, more hair gel and a supersize bottle of Brut aftershave. On the edge of the basin was a green toothbrush, its bristles worn down to a single mat. The antiseptic and bleach in the air made his eyes water.

Back in his room, he crawled under the bed and placed the yellow backpack up against the wall, under where his head would be each night. Then he lay down and listened to what might have been furniture being dragged down the hallway until he fell asleep.

He woke in silent darkness. Sitting up, his head met wood and his heart slammed in his chest, his throat closed over. He forced a breath and remembered the new flat, reached behind and felt the soft fuzz of his backpack. He lay back down until his breathing slowed, then rolled out into the room.

He rocked back and forth on his heels, one hand on the door frame. His new flatmate was two quick steps away, scrunched into the corner of a rust-coloured sofa, a magazine in front of her face. Her pale, skinny legs were bare, a tiny denim skirt just covered her arse. The pink tank top with a rainbow across the chest was something his ten-year-old cousin would wear.

More magazines were scattered over the white laminex coffee table and piled up on the lamp table next to the armchair. A game show played silently on the TV behind the girl’s head. There were no books or photos; the only thing on the pale peach walls was a framed watercolour print of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. If not for the haze of cigarette smoke, he could have been in a doctor’s waiting room.

‘Ah, hi,’ he said.

The girl sighed and tucked her feet up under her thighs. Adam swayed in the doorway to the count of three and then cast himself across the room, landing on the edge of the armchair across from her. He was close enough to see the blonde down on her forearms and the stiff, tiny hairs sprouting on her calves, but still she did not look up.

‘Um, hi, Katherine, do you have a minute?’

She snorted and flipped the page of her magazine. NICOLE’S SHOCK WEIGHT LOSS said the headline. The woman in the pictures was insect-thin. If her blonde hair was a little longer and her nose a little narrower she would look just like Eugenie. He half-closed his eyes, blurring the picture, scraping a nail over his scabby heart.

The girl across from him clicked her tongue.

‘Ah, I . . .’ Adam waited for her to look at him. When she didn’t, he cleared his throat. ‘I just wondered if you knew of anywhere around here I might find, ah, some work?’

She slammed her magazine closed as though it were a hard-covered book. ‘I thought you sold shoes. Gran said you sold shoes. She said you wouldn’t be around in the daytime. You’re supposed to be selling shoes.’

‘Yeah, I used to, but . . . but I don’t right now.’

‘You’re telling me you lied to Gran?’

‘I needed someplace to stay.’

She picked up her magazine. ‘So go back to the shoe store.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why?’ She flicked a page over. ‘Did you get fired?’

‘No, I . . . the shoe store is in San Francisco.’

‘So go back to San Francisco.’

‘Listen, Katherine –’

‘It’s Katie.’

‘Katie, I –’

‘Not because we’re friends.’

‘What?’

She tossed the magazine on the ground and leant forward. Her small dark eyes met his and she sighed. ‘You’ve got a look on your face like we’re friends. Katie is my name. For everyone except my grandma and the government. It’s not like, “Oh, call me Katie, all my friends do.” It’s just my name.’

Adam took a breath. ‘Katie. I’m sorry I lied. I need a place to stay while I earn enough money to get back to the States. If you know of anyone who might need, like, a kitchen hand or janitor or something, then I would be grateful for the information. If not, I’m sorry to have bothered you. I’ll understand if you feel the need to tell your grandma that I’m not working. I hope you won’t but I surely do understand if you –’

‘Yeah, yeah, that’s enough. I won’t dob on you if you don’t dob on me, all right?’

I’ll dob, Eugenie had said to him that very first day. She caught him stealing a chocolate chip cookie from the mailroom tea table. You’ll do what? Adam had asked. That was the start.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Um, if you mean before, when you – you know, in the hall –’

‘Oh, that! That was just me stuffing around.’ She winked. ‘I’m always misbehaving. You’ll see.’ She grabbed his hand in both of hers and smiled widely, revealing a mouth full of baby teeth. ‘So you’re alone in a strange land, hardly any luggage, unemployed, lying to old ladies. Are you on the run, or what?’

‘Of course not.’ He looked at her red knuckles and inflamed nail beds, confused by the softness of the skin wrapped around his cold hand.

‘So what then?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘Fine, be mysterious.’

Adam flexed his hand, but she held tight. ‘Um, so, do you know . . .’

She stood up, pulling him with her. ‘Come on.’

‘Where?’

‘Trust me.’

The building’s elevator was plastered with posters for open mic nights, sex clubs, dollar drinks and dating hotlines. The NO BILLS POSTED sign was partially obscured by postcards advertising SWEET ASIAN PRINCESS, MAN TO MAN EROTIC MASSAGE and SWEDISH TWINS WHO WANT TO MAKE YOU SMILE. If this was San Francisco, Adam might assume the posters were an artwork commenting on the dehumanising effects of advertising: a cartoon barmaid showed through the white space between a lingerie model’s open legs; a stripper’s torso was torn down the middle revealing a hot pink microphone which seemed to be melting into a glass of pale yellow beer. The centrepiece was a still-glossy poster featuring a collage of shiny tanned body parts. Basketball tits held in red-taloned hands, oiled thighs with muscles straining, two pairs of red lips smashed together, an armless hand squeezing a bodiless arse cheek. NUDE GIRLS LIVE! was printed top and bottom.

Katie nudged him. ‘In my head I always read LIVE so it sounds like liv. Makes that poster kind of funny. Like they cut the nude girls into all those parts and still they live.’

Adam felt faint. He felt he’d been in here for hours. He undid his top button and concentrated on the light above the door that told him they were moving towards the open air.

‘One second,’ Katie said when they reached the ground floor. She jogged across to the door opposite the elevator and rapped three times. Adam peered at his distorted reflection in the elevator’s shiny silver doors, smoothing down his hair and straightening his collar. He didn’t need a mirror to tell him his skin was pale and his eyes puffy. He blinked and slapped his cheeks to create the appearance at least, of a wide-awake, eager employee. The door creaked open and he turned towards it with a smile, vowing to accept whatever the inhabitant had to offer.

An ancient woman, wrapped in what looked like a grey sleeping bag and bent almost double at the waist, peered out. ‘Oh, it’s you, love. I thought it was those bloody phone company people again. I had my stick ready.’

‘They’re persistent, aren’t they?’ Katie said. ‘I just pretend I don’t understand English.’

‘Sometimes I wonder if they understand it. Don’t understand “piss off” anyway. Oh, hello.’ The woman nodded at Adam. ‘You new?’

‘Um, yeah.’ He quickstepped to Katie’s side. ‘I’m Adam. I’m, ah, after some work.’

The woman looked him over, head to toe and back again. ‘Hmm. Let’s see. My bunions need filing. That’ll be a few hours right there. Then I s’pose you could help me with my bath. So many bits I can’t reach these days. Christ knows they need a good scrubbing.’

‘Phyl!’ Katie said. ‘You’ll scare him back to America.’ She squeezed Adam’s arm. ‘How about you wait for me out the front? I’ll just be a minute.’

Adam hurried outside and sat on the low brick wall housing the building’s mailboxes. Within seconds, his neck was damp with sweat. From the colour of the sky he guessed it was after six, yet the sun had all the heat of noon. Each day he expected this place to feel less alien and for minutes, even hours, at a time it did, and then . . . Then this, this wave of breathless, stomach-clenching disorientation. He closed his eyes and began to count backwards from one hundred.

At twenty-two he felt a slap on the arm. ‘Hey. You meditating or something?’

He opened his eyes and slid off the wall. His skull felt tight and overcooked but his breathing was regular again. ‘No. Hi.’

‘Sorry about that. I just like to check in with Phyl from time to time. She’s on her own since her – uh, her wife, I guess, although she wouldn’t use the word, she’d just say “Carol” – anyway, since she died last year, Phyl’s on her own.’ Katie hooked her arm through Adam’s and began to walk. ‘She’s super with-it still – mentally, I mean – but the old body’s going to shit, as she’d say, so I just give her a howdy-do now and then to make sure she’s not lying on the bathroom floor with her knickers around her ankles calling for help.’

‘That’s nice of you. Did you know her, um, her wife?’

‘Oh, yeah. She was fierce.’ Katie brought them to a stop at the traffic lights and danced from foot to foot. ‘Carol was like the door bitch for the whole building. She’d sit out the front – right where you were a minute ago – and give the stink-eye to anyone she didn’t recognise. She was always giving me advice, too. Like how to deal with dead-end dudes and nosy cops and empty pockets. Come on, let’s go.’ She tugged his arm, pulling him into the intersection packed with cars moving at an inch a minute.

‘Nosy cops?’ he asked when they reached the other side.

‘Yeah, Carol was tops with them. Hey, so here we are.’

Gold lettering over the dark wood double doors said KING’S TAVERN. Above the tarnished gold doorknob a sticker promised he could WIN UP TO $100,000 WITH DAILY KENO.

‘They’re hiring here?’

‘Probably not. They just laid off two barmen last week.’

‘Look, I really need –’

‘Adam!’ Katie unhooked her arm from his and placed both hands on her hips. ‘Relax, okay? Have a drink with me. Then we’ll talk employment options.’

The pub was dark and musty with gold chandeliers overhead and poker machines lining the walls. They sat on wobbly stools, their forearms resting on a wood laminate bar sticky with long ago spilt beer. She ordered schooners of Victoria Bitter and whisky chasers.

‘So, the last tenant before you was – ugh, actually let’s not talk about him. Let’s pretend he never happened. So, before him there was Carrie who worked at the Golden Cat – that’s a brothel if you didn’t know – but Gran thought she was a nurse, which she was studying to be and when she graduated we had this party and she wore the slutty-nurse outfit from work which was pretty funny. Before her was Ken, he was a student, too, but not a part-time hooker student like Carrie, just a regular one. There have been a few international students. Japanese, Norwegian, English. When I first moved in, there was this Spanish girl, Marie, and she was so sweet, she was like a big bag of fairy floss. I was sad when she left. Hey, you’re lagging. Drink up!’

Adam took a large gulp of beer. It tasted like chilled vinegar but with every mouthful he could feel his chest relaxing a little more. Swallow by swallow his sense of displacement eased. He knocked back the whisky in front of him and when the burning in his throat subsided he felt almost good.

‘All right! Now we’re grooving.’ Katie drained her whisky and motioned to the bartender for two more. ‘So, Adam, you have the privilege of being my first Seppo.’

‘Your first what?’

‘Seppo. You’ve gotta learn to speak Aussie, man. You’re a Yank, so –’

‘No, not a Yankee. I’m from –’

‘The You Ess Ay. Makes you a Yank. Yank rhymes with septic tank. But we like to shorten names and then add an O at the end – but only if we like you. So Yank is kind of neutral. Septic tank is rude. But Seppo, well, it’s affectionate. Get it?’

‘No.’ Adam drank more beer. It was starting to taste pretty good.

‘You’re so quiet. I didn’t expect that.’ Katie slid around on her stool so she was facing his right side. ‘I don’t mean that as an insult or anything. I just kind of thought all Americans were loud and arrogant. And I bet –’ she kicked his calf with her steel-toed boot ‘– I bet you expected Aussie girls to be all easy-breezy, sun-loving, beach-ball-bouncing, sweetie-pies.’

‘No.’

‘Because that’s not true. I, for instance, avoid the daylight. And the beach.’ She waved a stumpy-nailed hand in front of her face. ‘I am easy, though. Ha. Let’s do a shot. Tequila or sambuca?’

‘Neither.’

‘Nonsense. Joey!’ She raised her arms and clapped until the bartender turned their way. ‘Two sambucas, black.’ She slapped a twenty on the bar. ‘Oh, and another coupla whiskies.’ She turned back to Adam. ‘I suppose you think I drink too much, but if you stick around awhile you’ll see that everybody in Australia drinks this much or more. Sometimes lots more.’

‘Now, I know from personal experience that that’s not true.’

‘Personal experience, eh? Do tell.’

Adam looked at the cluster of glasses in front of him. He picked up the closest and tossed its contents down. Molten liquorice filled his throat and brought tears to his eyes. ‘I think I better go home.’

‘Not yet.’ She leant in, grasping his upper-arm for balance, and kissed his neck just below his ear.

He shrugged her off. ‘Cut it out.’

She grabbed his wrist. ‘I was hoping I’d be your first Australian, Adam.’

‘My first Australian what?’

‘Friend.’

‘We’re not friends, remember? Katherine.’

She sank her nails into the soft skin of his wrist. His arm shot out, sending her toppling off her stool. ‘Woo!’ She righted herself and stood behind him, wrapping her arms around his chest. ‘You’re really sexy for a Mormon.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

She bit his ear. Not in a sexy way. More like she was testing the firmness of his earlobe. Like she needed to know how much pressure could be applied.

‘I have to go,’ Adam said, standing.

His sudden movement threw her off balance again and she skittled to the side, knocking over a nearby stool. She latched onto his arm and said, ‘Stay, stay.’ He moved steadily towards the exit, dragging her behind him. Someone shouted taxi as he pushed open the door.

The street was dim and cool. Everything smelt like whisky. He stumbled past several closed shops and across a mercifully clear street to what appeared to be a small public park. ‘Where we going?’ Katie said, still clinging to his arm. He shook her off, and sank to his knees, then his side, grateful for the soft, cool grass under his cheek.

‘Oh, no.’ Katie sat beside him and pinched his ear. ‘No sleeping, Adam. Not here and not yet. Come on. Get up!’

He swatted at her hand. ‘Lemme rest a minute.’

‘Geez, what a lightweight.’ She rolled him onto his back and kneeled over him, one leg either side of his thighs, and put her hands inside his pants.

‘Hey, no, no. Don’t.’

She stopped mid-tug. ‘Oh, shit. You’re not actually a Mormon, are you? Man, I was kidding!’

‘What? No, no. I . . . Just don’t, okay.’

She sighed and placed her palms flat on his belly. ‘I thought we were on the same wavelength, you know? Have a drink, a laugh, maybe a tumble in the grass. I guess I read you all wrong. But maybe . . .’ She slid one hand into his underwear and began to stroke him. ‘Maybe if you lie back and relax, maybe you’ll change your mind?’

He looked up at her hovering over him. Her face and torso were in shadow; the street lights fell across her lower body, streaking her inner thighs with fine lines. Her skirt was scrunched around her hips and he could see her underpants, bright pink and so tiny she might as well have not been wearing them at all. The grass was cool and her hands were smooth and his head was heavy and a motorbike roared past and his life was behind him and everything smelt like whisky. He heard himself moan.

‘That feels good, huh?’

‘Yeah. Yeah. But, Kay-ah, Katie, I drank too much. I don’t think I can.’

‘Maybe not, but I can. I definitely can.’ She kept stroking him with one hand, while she pulled her underpants to the side with the other. ‘Just let me do my thing, Yankee Doodle. Just let me have my Yankee Doodle Dandy.’

He had not had sex since Eugenie, and he had not missed it. But the girl was warm and the motion calming. His body rocked with the rolling of her hips and the steady beat of her breathing. He closed his eyes.

He drifted in and out, with little idea of how much time was passing. At some point he became aware of a desperate need for it to be finished. He reached for her hips urging them to move faster and with more force. She was panting hard, slowing down and he said come on come on and she said okay yes and moved faster for him, with him, until he came with a jolt and a groan and she laughed and said something he didn’t hear because he was already falling asleep.

‘Get up you filthy buggers!’

Something hard poked him awake. White birds with yellow crowns streaked across the pale grey sky overhead. Katie was half on top of him, her head on his chest and her leg over his groin which was cold and damp. The man standing above them wore a leather apron and rubber boots to his knees. The broom he shoved at Adam felt like a dog’s head and stank of fish. Adam closed his eyes again thinking he may have dreamt himself into a Dickens novel.

‘Filthy scum. This is a public park.’ The man jabbed him to full consciousness, then stalked across the street and stood watching from the doorway of a shuttered fish shop. Katie stood and patted down her skirt. She grabbed Adam’s hand and pulled him up, then across the street, as he tried to button his pants with one hand. He tripped on the gutter and fell to one knee, pulling Katie half the way down with him. She cackled and a jogger on the other side of the road stopped for a few seconds and watched them get up.

‘What a night, eh?’ she said four or five times during the slow, sick-making elevator ride.

Back inside the flat she led him to her bedroom.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘I need to shower, sleep.’

‘Okay. We’ll shower. Let me . . .’ She unbuttoned his shirt and slid it over his shoulders, moving around to his back as she tugged the sleeves off his arms. ‘Oh!’ she said, her hands moving quickly over the skin of his back. ‘Wow.’

‘I have tattoos,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘Yeah. I noticed.’

Dreams were unreliable. Some allowed Adam to spend the night buried in Eugenie, his hands on her waist, his mouth moving over her collarbone. Or they let him lie with her on the beach, tracing dirty words on her back. Waking after a dream like that, Adam burrowed further into the blankets, knees tucked into his chest, replaying each moment, pushing the day and its dreadful knowledge away for as long as he could. Other nights the dreams were cruel: Eugenie was drowning in the ocean and the harder Adam swam, the further away she got. Or she was being sucked into a pit of mud and when Adam grabbed her arm it came off in his hand. After a dream like that, he hurled himself into the waking world. Cold shower, loud music, breakfast TV, kick the wall, slap his face.

This morning he lay in bed waiting for the warmth or the horror, but nothing came. No dream. No Eugenie. So there was something worse than a nightmare.

He blinked at the purple wall, remembered he’d moved into a new flat yesterday and then that he’d gone drinking last night. Alcohol killed dreams, or maybe only the memory of dreams. The relief this realisation brought had an anaesthetising effect, allowing him to climb out of bed and make it halfway down the hallway before noticing that he was naked and monstrously hung-over. He steadied himself against the wall with one hand and took several deep breaths to ward off the nausea. Through the open door to his right he saw a neatly made single bed. The room he’d woken up in was not the same one he had moved into yesterday.

He grabbed underwear, pants and a T-shirt before continuing to the bathroom where he locked the door, pissed, showered and brushed his teeth. As he dressed, he could hear someone moving around but this place was still too unfamiliar for him to recognise its aural signals.

He found Katie lying on her back on the sofa, smoking. She was wearing his good blue shirt, the tails of it tucked between her thighs. The sense of regret that had gnawed at him since he woke bit down hard at the sight of her reddened knees.

‘Smoke?’ she said when he sat on the chair across from her.

He shook his head. His throat felt raw from cigarettes he didn’t remember smoking. ‘Listen, Katie, I want to apologise.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘For?’

‘Last night. Taking advantage of you.’

She turned a fraction of an inch towards him. Her eyebrows shot up again and stayed arched. ‘Um, I don’t know what you think happened, but you could hardly hold yourself upright last night. Like, I’m really sorry to bust your macho fantasy or whatever, but you couldn’t have taken advantage of a newborn baby.’

‘Right, okay, I just . . .’ He tried to read her expression. Amused? Angry? Possibly disinterested. The eyebrow thing was a put-on, he figured that much. But her eyes were too squinty to read clearly, and her mouth stayed puckered to receive the cigarette. ‘I just wanted you to know I’m not in a position to start any kind of relationship right now. It’s nothing personal, I just have some issues that I need to settle and I don’t think getting involved with you – with anyone – is a great idea.’

She smoked. Her expression did not change. Adam’s T-shirt was plastered to his back with detoxifying sweat. He needed good coffee and fresh air. He needed to not be stared at by this inscrutable rat-faced girl.

‘Okay, so, um, are we cool?’

‘I am.’ She lowered her hand to the floor, dropping her cigarette into an abandoned Pepsi can. ‘You, on the other hand, are like the – the – fuck, what’s the word? Antith-something? Means opposite sort of?’

‘Antithesis?’

‘Yes! That’s what you are: the antithesis of cool. You’re like the tensest person alive. It’s probably why you have erection difficulties. Maybe if you relaxed a little you’d be able to keep it up.’

‘Christ.’ Adam stood. ‘Forget I spoke.’

‘Geez Louise, take a joke, huh?’

‘Yeah, whatever. See you round.’

‘Wait.’ She pulled herself up. ‘Look, I’m sorry. We had fun last night, you know, taking the piss. I thought you were okay with it. I didn’t know that sober you’d be all serious and sensitive.’

‘I’m not, I’m just . . . I was trying to clear the air – be mature.’

Katie lit another cigarette. ‘I don’t get why people are always going on about maturity like it’s a great achievement. I think mature people are kind of shallow. They never let anything affect them.’ She took a deep drag and exhaled loudly. ‘They just nod and say a few solemn words and get on with their dead-hearted, responsible, mature lives. Not me. I let things get to me. I react. I overreact.’ She took another deep drag. ‘What’s the point of doing anything if you’re going to mature it all away? It just makes stuff not mean anything.’

‘You’re dropping ash all over your shirt,’ he said. ‘All over my shirt, actually.’

She looked down and brushed the ash off her chest. ‘See, that’s an example.’

‘What is?’

‘Me wearing your shirt. When I got out of the shower this morning I saw your shirt lying on the floor. I picked it up and I thought how I’d love to put it on, but I shouldn’t because you’d freak out and think I was besotted with you or something and then I thought, well, hell, I am besotted and why shouldn’t I be and why shouldn’t he know it? So there.’

‘Katie, listen –’ He stopped, noticing the thin white lines on the inside of her thighs. Not a trick of light as he’d thought last night, but a ladder of scars starting a few inches above her knees and climbing to the hem of her man-style grey boxer shorts.

‘Motorbike accident.’ She shifted, pressing her thighs together, leaning over and resting her elbows on her knees. ‘Hey, you never told me how you got your scar.’

‘What? Oh, car crash. Slippery road, hit a tree. Cracked a rib and cut my face a little.’

‘Anyone die?’

‘No. I was alone. Listen, I think you’re –’

‘You ever been in gaol?’

‘What? No. Look –’

‘You’ve got heaps of tatts for someone who hasn’t done time. My mate Robbie told me that the reason people get tatts in gaol is because they want to show they own their own body. I don’t know if that’s true, but it sounds good, huh?’

‘Um, yeah. Katie –’

‘Did you really used to work in a shoe shop?’

‘What? Oh, yeah. Kind of. My friend made these, ah, you’d say thongs – out of woven hemp, and um, I was front of house. It was more a stall than –’

‘Right.’ She sat bolt upright and clapped her hands. ‘So you got plans for today?’

As it happened, he didn’t.

3.

Accustomed as he was to real estate agents who called a tin shanty a classic Australian abode, Graeme was concerned when Mrs Lewis described her Broadway flat as nothing fancy, but in a good possie. This meant, he guessed, uncovered concrete floors, boarded windows, a fist hole in at least one wall, but right next to a bus stop.

When he saw that the place (which was, indeed, a couple of feet from a bus stop) was perfectly liveable, he found himself gushing that it was wonderful, it was lovely.

‘You reckon?’ said Mrs Lewis’s granddaughter. She had been charged with showing him around since the landlady herself worked weeknights. The pair stood side by side and surveyed the living room: a burnt orange lounge suite, a white laminated coffee table on which sat a full ashtray, and a matching card table on which there were two smudged wine glasses. There were magazines on the lounge, on the floor and on both tables. An old-fashioned dial phone sat on an armchair, its receiver dangling over the side. The charcoal carpet looked clean and the walls were unmarked. Not lovely at all, but not as terrible as Mrs Lewis’s nothing fancy had suggested.

‘You don’t have to say you like it just to be nice.’

‘But I do. It’s big and in much better nick than a lot of places I’ve seen.’

‘Yeah. Gran’s pretty fussy about maintenance and stuff. Oh, hey, your room – well, your potential room – is in even better nick, because almost everything is brand spanking new. Come on.’ The girl led Graeme down a hallway.

‘Voila!’ she said, opening the door at the end of the hallway and sweeping her arm out. The room was just as Mrs Lewis had described: small, clean and furnished. There was a desk of unstained timber against the wall on his left, and a matching bookshelf, which held The Macquarie Dictionary, Anne of Green Gables and Touch Typing in Ten Lessons. A faded world map, with a lone pin in the middle of the Tasman Sea, hung over the desk. Under the window was a single bed, and beside it was a lamp table covered in cloth the same pale green as the bedspread and curtains. Graeme palmed the inside of the door and was relieved to feel the cold steel of a slide-lock.

The girl hovered near the bed. ‘It’s kind of poky, I know, but Gran made it look all right. The bed and that little table are brand new. The other stuff’s from when it was a study. Not that I ever used it as that. It was more of a junk room. Although I was studying for a while, secretarial course. God, that was boring, but Gran had signed me up and paid and everything so I stuck it out awhile. Never did the homework in here, though, because of course it had to be done on computer and I don’t have one, so I usually ended up at the library and – well, that’s beside the point, which is that the room is yours if you think you can put up with sharing a flat with me.’

‘Is there a lot to put up with?’ he asked, trying for the affectionate, teasing tone he heard his colleagues use.

‘Oh, no.’ She shook her head and opened her watery brown eyes wide. ‘I’m not, like, a party animal or anything. I know I seem a bit hyper, but I’m actually very dull. I hardly ever party and when I do I’m really, really quiet, not like that metal head next door. He plays his try-hard, baby-thrash crap at all hours of the – oh, but not every day or even close to it and you can hardly hear it from back here, seriously. Hey, forget the neighbour, you should meet Adam.’

Graeme followed her back up the hallway, wondering how many potential tenants Mrs Lewis had lost by allowing this buzzy little bee to play tour guide.

She stopped outside a closed door and stood on her tiptoes to whisper in Graeme’s ear. ‘I’ll warn you now, he’s a Yank, but don’t let that put you off. He’s nice enough and you get used to the accent.’

‘I’m not bothered by –’ he started, before seeing the tightness at the corners of her mouth. He smiled to show he was in on what she apparently thought was a joke.

‘Adam?’ She knocked and entered without waiting for an answer. Graeme heard what could have been a wet snore and glimpsed a hairy, tattooed leg hanging over the edge of a bed.

He backed away. ‘We can meet later.’

‘Don’t be silly. Come on.’

He peered around the edge of the doorway. The man in the bed was sitting up, rubbing his eyes. He appeared to be naked, his tattooed legs and torso broken up by a swathe of pink sheets.

‘Graeme, this is Adam,’ the girl said, with the same gesture she’d used to introduce each room of the flat. She stepped across to the bed and touched the man lightly on the shoulder, smiling with what Graeme suspected was pride. He saw that her awkward, chatty openness could be a selling point rather than a turn-off, and that although she was not pretty, she was young and well-proportioned and this combined with her vulnerability and warmth would be more than enough for a certain kind of man.

‘Hey,’ said the man in the bed, nodding once.

‘G’day. Sorry to bother you, mate.’

‘You didn’t. So, you moving in?’

Graeme looked at Katie. ‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘Geez,’ she said, coming over and punching him on the arm. ‘Don’t sound so excited.’

It was only a twenty-minute walk from the hotel to work, but this morning Graeme had two suitcases as well as his briefcase so he took a taxi. He arrived at the Wattle Street office just after 7.30 am, and although he’d never seen anyone else here before quarter to nine, he aimed to stash the bags before eight just in case.

The Refugee Assistance Foundation had purchased the single-storey terrace five years ago. There’d been no money left for renovation, so it remained in its original configuration. The only additions were a small sign on the door and a wheelchair ramp where the six front steps used to be. The living room was now the reception and waiting area, the first bedroom was Graeme’s office, the second was Jenny’s and the third was shared by the three caseworkers. There was one bathroom, a small kitchen and an even smaller covered courtyard out the back. Filing cabinets and archive boxes were crammed into every available space. Finding a hiding place for two suitcases wasn’t easy.

Finally, at around 8.05 am, Graeme realised he could simply put them behind his desk. They’d only be spotted if someone came around his side and he could not recall that happening in the last five years.

Bags safely out of sight, he headed to the bathroom, removed his shirt, splashed his face with cold water and used antiseptic hand wipes from the medicine cabinet to wipe the sweat from his underarms. Every January was longer than the last. He was tired of the sting of sunburn and the smell of greasy, skin-suffocating sunscreen. He was tired of having to wash his face ten times a day, of resisting the urge to scratch the skin prickling beneath the hair on his chest and of waking each morning to the itch of new mosquito bites on his ankles.

The front door jangled open. ‘Is anyone here?’ Jenny called.

‘Just me,’ Graeme called back, buttoning his shirt. He checked himself in the mirror over the sink. Despite the cold water, his cheeks were flushed and his thinning brown hair stuck to his head as though slathered with oil. His blue eyes, which used to inspire gasps and giggles in Africa and Asia, looked almost colourless, the lids above them droopy and the skin below bruised purple.

‘Morning,’ Jenny said when he emerged. She stood in the hallway, flipping through a pile of mail, looking fresh and cool in a knee-length tropical print sundress, her thick red hair tied in a ponytail. Jenny was in her late forties, but looked and sounded years younger – an advantage, Graeme supposed, when dealing with young arrivals, but not when arguing with detention centre administrators and guards.

‘Boy, I love this time of year,’ she said, glancing up from the mail and smiling. ‘The streets are practically empty. Halves my commuting time. You too, huh?’

‘Mmm. Traffic is nice and light at the moment.’ He headed past her to his office.

‘I got a fright when I found the door unlocked. Your car’s not out front.’

Graeme paused and turned. ‘It’s at the mechanic’s. Since last week, actually.’

She blinked at him. ‘I hadn’t noticed it missing. So much for my brilliant observational skills!’ She stepped towards him. ‘Anything serious?’

‘I hope not.’

‘So expensive, aren’t they? Cars. Wish I could do without one.’

‘Yeah.’ Graeme went into his office and closed the door before she could speak again. Behind his desk, the suitcases pressed into his legs and his face burned. The absurdity of it. A middle-aged man sneaking around, hiding bags, telling petty lies. But he couldn’t see any other way. First it would be why had he sold his car, then why had he moved from his Paddington terrace, then why only two suitcases and why a share-flat in backpacker territory, then the questions would get more general, the suspicion and supposition throbbing through the words. Relationship trouble? Money problems? Anything you need to talk about, Graeme, anything at all? Jenny a psychiatrist and the others social workers. Who knows how far they’d push?

As manager, he had a copy of everyone’s daily out-call schedules and so could be reasonably sure of their movements. He timed his visits to the kitchen or bathroom to minimise the likelihood of running into anyone, but stood with his ear to the door for a few seconds before he stepped out just to be sure. He used his intercom to speak to Sherry at the front desk and did so in a short, sharp manner that suggested busyness.

Not that the busyness wasn’t genuine. The government-led xenophobia that had swept the country in the first years of the new century had passed, but the refugees stewing in detention centres were not much better off being ignored rather than detested. As the outrage of dissenters subsided, so did donations and bequests, and the Foundation’s permanent staff was now half the size of that Graeme had inherited.

He spent the morning completing the social workers’ admin: typing up and collating reports, faxing off visitation requests and searching out the contact details of in-country relatives. At 2 pm, he got to item one on his own to-do list: a funding application due that day. He copied the bulk of the proposal from the last, failed application, inserted details of several recent interventions, updated the costings, proofread the document and emailed it through four minutes before deadline.

After the last shout of goodnight had echoed through the building, Graeme spent half an hour making notes about eco refugees for a submission to the senate inquiry on carbon emissions trading. It was enough time to ensure none of his colleagues would be still dawdling out the front. He slid his suitcases out from behind the desk and headed off to his new home.

Graeme felt like an intruder as he let himself in. He called out hello but there was no reply. A haze hung over the living room. He put down his bags and picked up the ashtray on the coffee table to check that a cigarette had not been left burning. It was overfull and ash spilt out the second he moved it. He carried it through to the kitchen and emptied it into the garbage bin, then rinsed it in the sink and set it to drain on the windowsill. As he left the kitchen he heard a low moan from the other side of the wall.

Back in the living room, he opened the window and stood for a minute watching the street below. He knew that come late February, the area would be infested with uni students, but for now the footpaths were quiet. A woman in a post office uniform sat at the bus stop, a phone to her ear. Across the road, two teenage boys lounged against the wall outside the kebab shop, drinking from giant Coca-Cola cups. An old man walked past them, a small white dog trailing behind him.

The road was busier – a bus or delivery van or 4WD passed every few seconds – but it wasn’t as congested as it would be in a few weeks’ time when the suburbanites returned to their city jobs and the school buses re-started for the year.

He shivered as another moan – louder and longer this time – sounded. He could make out rustling and urgent murmurs. He crept down the hallway, stopping outside the door on the right. After years of accessing sex only through the simulations of paid performers, he was surprised at how moving the sound of real lovemaking could be. Eyes closed, his forehead against the doorframe, sweat trickling down his neck, he could have been twenty-five again, in some African backwater listening through paper-thin walls or hastily hung curtains as new recruits screwed loudly and indiscriminately, desperate to drown out the sounds and stench of death.

This place did not smell of death, but neither was it suffused with the freshness and energy one might expect of a lovers’ retreat. It was as musty with defeat and apathy as an old-aged home. Still, it was better than the other places in this price range he’d looked at. At least here, he’d have a room to himself and an indoor toilet.

Graeme did not see his new flatmates that night. After unpacking, he checked the kitchen but found only a cask of moselle, a jar of vegemite and container of margarine. He went to the 7–11 across the road and bought bread, cheese, coffee, milk and orange juice. When he came back, the flat was silent. He ate a cheese sandwich in front of the late news and then went to bed.

Some hours later he woke to footsteps thundering past the bedroom door. I’m gunna be sick someone choked out. There was the sound of glass breaking, a thump on the wall by his bed, then a cry that could have been pain or ecstasy. Graeme covered his head with a pillow and reminded himself he’d been in far less comfortable waiting rooms than this one.

4.

In the five days since he’d moved into the flat, Adam had slept twelve or thirteen hours a day. Katie had asked him if he was still jetlagged or if he felt sick, but he just rolled over and said that he was tired. He rarely answered her questions and so she didn’t know much more about him than she had the day he moved in. She’d found, though, that he loosened up after he came; and for the ten minutes or so before he fell asleep again he spoke to her as though they were friends.

As dawn broke through the blinds in her bedroom on Thursday morning, Adam seized Katie’s hips and held her still. She had been bouncing up there for what felt like hours and her thighs and lower back ached, but that sound he made, like a sigh that came from deep in his belly, and the way his forehead smoothed out and his mouth fell open made it worth the effort.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘Please, like I’m doing you a favour.’

She went to climb off him but he held her steady. ‘What is that?’ he asked, running his finger over the tattoo on her right hip. ‘A cockroach or something?’

‘It’s a fairy!’ A muscle in the back of her left thigh twitched. She resisted the urge to stretch. ‘Geez, when have you ever seen a hot pink cockroach?’

He almost smiled. ‘Why a fairy?’

‘Dunno. I don’t even remember getting it. I just woke up one morning about three years ago with blood under my nails and this itchy, scabby mess on my hip. Once I realised what it was I tried to pumice it off, but no luck, obviously.’

‘Mmm. Colour’s really strong still. Good quality work.’

‘Yeah. Pity it’s a bloody fairy.’ Katie shifted her hips forward to stretch her lower back and felt Adam slip out of her. ‘Do you regret any of your tatts?’

‘Hang on.’ Adam reached between their legs and removed the condom that Katie had, for once, remembered to put on him. ‘All my tattoos are significant.’ He tied the condom and wrapped it in a tissue from the box on the bedside table. ‘They’re like a diary. Even when I’ve moved on from the moment that inspired them, it’s good to remember the intensity of the feeling.’

‘Ooh, that’s smart. From now on I can say that although the fairy is meaningless I remember the intensity of the alcohol-induced blackout I was in when I – shit, that doesn’t work, does it?’ She sighed and pointed to the ivy climbing up his ribs. ‘So, what inspired this one?’

‘Ivy is a symbol of strength. When I was seventeen, I thought I needed a little extra.’

‘What happened?’

‘This one,’ Adam said, touching the red star under his collarbone, ‘I got before I went travelling for the first time. It’s like the stars sailors used to find their way home.’

‘Nice. But I want to know why you needed strength when –’

‘These Chinese characters –’ he pointed his chin in the direction of his left bicep ‘– say “Love begets love” and the ones on my right arm say “Justice for all”.’

‘Like the Metallica song? God, that’s way lamer than a pink fairy.’

‘No. It’s got nothing to do with Metallica.’ He made a jerking motion with his head. ‘Get off me. My legs are going numb.’

Katie lay on her back beside him and pulled her legs up against her body, stretching the overworked thigh muscles. ‘What’s the significance, then?’

Adam made a noise that was the closest to a laugh Katie had heard from him in five days. ‘They’re a reminder of how crazy love can make a person. When I got them, they were proof that I was sufficiently committed to my girlfriend to have her favourite quotes tattooed on my body using her favourite language.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Yeah. She was a force of nature. I was in awe. It’s a good thing tattoos are all she asked of me. There’s not much I wouldn’t have done for her. The feeling was not, unfortunately, mutual.’ He sighed. ‘And that’s what happened when I was seventeen.’

Katie turned the image over in her mind: the clean-skinned teenager gritting and clenching in the tattooist’s chair; the magnificent girlfriend standing over him, her interest already waning. She sat up, cross-legged. On his chest was a silver scythe, its twin blades arcing over each nipple. ‘Did she design this one, too?’

‘Nah. I got that one a couple of years ago in Thailand.’

‘God, this is recent? You were a fully mature adult of sound mind when you chose this? Ugh. It’s so violent.’

‘It’s not violent. It’s a traditional harvesting tool. It symbolises the natural life-cycle of all living things. It’s beautiful.’

She poked his chest. ‘Trust me, that thing coming at my face while you were pounding me, I wasn’t thinking beautiful. I was thinking serial killer.’

‘Pounding you? Real nice, Katie.’

She shivered at the way he said her name, like it was two separate words: Kay Tea. He made it sound like something refreshing he wanted to drink. She bent and kissed his closed mouth and then the tip of his nose. His eyes were shut; she kissed his eyelids, then three places on his forehead. He seemed neither to enjoy nor be disturbed by her kissing. She understood he would not resist her advances but neither would he make any move to touch her or know her. She was a puppy and he was a Persian cat.

Katie moved down the bed, clasped his left ankle in one hand, and swung his leg across her lap. ‘This one is beautiful,’ she said, smoothing her palm over the blue-red fire that raged up his left leg from ankle to thigh.

‘The legs go together,’ Adam said, allowing her to pull him down the bed and position his calves so that the flames sizzled against the blue-green water flowing from a fountain on his right hip. ‘It’s about balancing the elements. Fire and water. Masculine and feminine. Spiritual and material. Never allowing one aspect to overpower the other.’

‘Wow. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds very, ah, Californian.’ She lifted his legs, squirmed between them, lay on her stomach and kissed the peacock feather floating below his navel. ‘I can guess what this one means, you kinky bastard.’

‘After a peacock sheds its feathers, new ones grow back brighter and more beautiful.’ His voice was flat. ‘So the tattoo is a reminder that loss is not only natural but necessary.’

‘That’s really beautiful.’

‘I thought so when I was your age, too. I found the idea comforting then. Now it’s . . . it’s a reminder of youth, I suppose. Of innocence.’

‘Oh, sad, wise old man.’

‘Tired old man, actually. Let me go to sleep.’

‘But this is fun. One more, huh?’ Katie kissed up the trail of hair to the entwined gold crowns over his bellybutton. ‘I love this one. What’s it mean?’

He was quiet a moment. Katie rested her face on his belly, rose and fell with his breath.

‘It means I’m king of the world.’

‘No it doesn’t. Tell me really.’

He put his hands in her hair, urged her down. ‘Really. I’m the king. Gotta be served.’

His tone was jokey, but the pressure on her head was not. She was grateful he had initiated something but surprised that it was this, now. He wasn’t even slightly hard. She started sucking anyway, wanting him to know that he was as capable of inspiring unquestioning submission as that girlfriend of long ago, wanting him to know she found him magnificent.

When his cock began to stiffen he released her head, and said, ‘No, no, hey, you don’t have to.’ She felt a surge of pity that he thought she wouldn’t want this. She tried to keep going but he wrenched his hips to the side and curled himself into a ball.

She stroked his back, kissing the eyes and lips of the gaudy goddess tattoo. After several minutes his breathing slowed and Katie smiled at the gentle gurgle he made in his sleep. She slid out of bed, got dressed, then bent over and kissed the back of his neck. ‘Beautiful man,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll be back before you wake.’

The government paid Katie’s pension into her bank account every second Thursday. It had been Gran’s idea that Katie should make her fortnightly doctor’s appointment on the same day so she wouldn’t forget it, and the plan had worked well so far; she hadn’t missed an appointment in months. Still, Gran’s text arrived at 8 am, just as Katie was lacing her boots. Remember doc @ 9. Call me after.

On my way worrywart she sent back.

Passing the mailboxes out the front, she noticed that Phyl’s was stuffed with envelopes and made a mental note to check in on her when she returned. She noticed too that the weeds around the mailboxes were at ankle height and tried to remember whose job it was to clear them. Carol used to do it, but someone must have taken over after she died. Katie was sure she’d never seen the weeds so long before.

At the bus stop two women in business suits sat reading magazines. The glamorous blonde on the beer ad behind them had furry black eyebrows, a cigar hanging from her lips and a dick the size of her arm. ‘Okay,’ Katie said. ‘’Fess up. Which one of you did that?’

The woman closest to Katie looked up at her and then twisted to see the poster. ‘School holidays,’ she said. ‘Kids with too much time on their hands.’

‘They’ve done a good job, though. Kind of makes me want to drink that overpriced watery shit she’s holding. Who wouldn’t rather party with that hairy, cigar-smoking she-male than the sulky waif underneath?’

The woman smiled but lifted her magazine in front of her face. THE SECRET SEX MOVE HE WISHES YOU’D TRY it said.

‘Hey, sorry. I know you’re reading, but I have to know. What’s the secret sex move?’

The woman raised her eyebrows.

‘On the cover,’ Katie said.

‘Oh.’ The woman glanced at the cover, sighed and began flicking through the pages. ‘Um, it’s . . . Here.’ She held the open magazine out to Katie.

She scanned the text and started to laugh. ‘Stick a finger up his arse? That’s a secret? Even a two year old can figure out that holes like to be filled.’

The second woman made a tutting sound. Katie looked up from the magazine and saw the women making the face at each other. That face people made when they didn’t want to talk or hear or notice you and they wanted other people to know they didn’t want to talk or hear or notice.

‘Thanks,’ Katie said and handed the magazine back. She stepped a few paces out of the shelter and stood watching the road. She checked the time on her phone. Bus was due exactly now.

A girl of six or seven wearing a yellow swimsuit and denim shorts ran towards the bus stop from the direction of the UniLodge Hotel. Behind her trudged a pale man in board shorts and a woman in an enormous sunhat.

‘Off to the beach?’ Katie said as the girl skidded to a halt beside her.

‘Yep, I’ve never been to an Australian beach,’ the girl said with an English accent. ‘Dad says they’re different to English beaches. He said there’ll be lots of yellow sand.’

‘He’s right, there will be. What are the beaches in England like?’

The girl shrugged. ‘Just normal.’

Katie laughed and turned to the women on the seat but they were busy not hearing.

‘I’ve told you before not to run ahead like that, Sal,’ the girl’s father said, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand.

‘Sal was just telling me that the beaches in England are different to here,’ Katie said to him. ‘That the ones you have are normal.’

The man nodded at her with a tight smile, then turned to his wife who was a few steps behind him. ‘This is our bus now. Just made it.’

The women on the seat stood as the 440 approached. Katie shuffled towards the gutter, feeling in her pocket for her transport card. Behind her she heard the Englishman say in a low, angry tone, ‘How many times, Sal? Don’t run ahead and don’t talk to strangers.’

Katie looked back over her shoulder – the girl was staring at the footpath, biting her lip. ‘It was my fault,’ Katie said. ‘I asked her a question. She was just being polite by answering it.’

‘Well.’ The man looked at his wife. ‘She should know better.’

‘Just being friendly. It wasn’t like I was asking for her address and a spare set of house keys.’

‘Come on,’ the man said and walked past Katie. She watched as the two women and the family boarded the bus, none of them speaking or looking back. A fluttering started in her chest; she couldn’t bear to sit on the bus with them all not looking and not speaking.

She stepped into the shelter, sat on the empty seat and lit a cigarette. There would be another bus soon. She had plenty of time before her appointment.

A few seconds after the bus pulled away a grey-haired bloke in jeans and a faded U2 T-shirt sat on the other end of the seat. ‘Um, excuse me,’ he said.

Katie smiled. ‘Yeah?’

‘Can you smoke somewhere else? It’s blowing right in my face.’

Katie kept smiling. ‘Yep,’ she said, standing up. ‘No problem.’

She walked quickly, past the kebab shop and 7–11, to the ATM, where she withdrew her fortnightly pension. She doubled back behind the bus stop, paused and crushed out her cigarette before continuing on to the Liquorland at the end of the block. She bought a bottle of bourbon, a six-pack of Coke and two packets of cigarettes. At the newsagency next door she bought the week’s magazines, The Sydney Morning Herald and a jumbo bag of salt and vinegar chips.

She checked her phone; if she ran all the way, she could drop this stuff home and still make it back in time for the 8.35 am, which would get her to the doc’s office only five minutes late.

Back at her building, panting hard, she rapped on Phyl’s door. ‘Just me, Phyl,’ she yelled. ‘Brought you the paper. Got your mail, too.’ After a few seconds she heard an odd metallic clunk from inside, followed by a shuffling sound. Another clunk, another shuffle. And again.

The door opened a crack, then there was more shuffling and a thump, before it opened wide enough for Katie to see Phyl bent over a metal walking frame. There was a yellow bruise on her left cheek and a bandaid under her eye.

‘Bloody hell! What happened?’

‘Not as bad as it looks, love. Tripped over my own feet, knocked my face on the corner of the telly. This enormous bloody thing is to stop it happening again. Doctor threatened to have Aged Services swoop in if I didn’t agree to use it.’

‘You should’ve called me.’

‘What for? I’m fine. You’re the one needs worrying about. How you going up there with the new bloke?’

‘Fantastic. He is, just –’ Katie kissed her fingertips. ‘Yummy.’

‘Why your grandmother keeps renting to single young men, I’ll never know.’

‘Speaking of single men – not young, though – Gran’s renting out the third bedroom. This old guy moved in, um, I don’t know, three days ago or something. I haven’t seen much of him.’ She leant forward and grinned. ‘Me and Adam have hardly left my bed all week.’

‘Oh, Katie. You just throw yourself right in, don’t you? I thought after the last –’

‘Ugh, let’s not talk about that. Adam is totally different.’

‘I’m sure he is, love, but you’re –’

‘I’m still me. Yeah, thanks, I know.’

Phyl sighed. ‘Just go easy, eh? Take your time. Life’s long.’

Katie laughed. ‘Everyone else says it’s short.’

‘Everyone else is an idiot.’ Phyl sighed again. ‘Feel like a cuppa?’

Katie glanced at her phone. If she ran all the way and didn’t have to wait for the lights . . . ‘About time you offered.’

At 9.45 am Katie went back out to the street and called Gran.

‘Calling to report mission completed.’

‘Good girl. Same doctor as last time?’

‘Yep.’

‘And he’s still happy with your dosage?’

‘Yep.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

‘Nope.’

‘And you’re feeling okay?’

‘Yep.’

‘How are the new tenants working out?’

‘Good. Gran, I’ve got to go, the bus is coming. Love ya, bye.’

Katie was lying on her bedroom floor reading about a British singer’s drunken rampage through her recording studio when Adam finally woke.

‘What time is it?’ he asked.

‘Almost three.’

‘Shit. Shit.’ He coughed. ‘I’ve gotta stop this. I’ve gotta find some work. Tomorrow morning, early, I’ll hit the streets.’

Katie climbed onto the bed and rested a hand on the lump of his covered feet. It was, she knew, as much contact as she could get away with this early in his day. ‘No point looking tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Who’s going to hire you on a Friday? Wait ’til Monday.’

‘I’m nearly out of money.’

‘Yeah, well, I have some influence with the landlady. You won’t end up on the street if you get a little behind with the rent, I promise.’

‘It’s not just the rent.’

‘No, I know. You need drinking money. Well, check it out!’ She whipped the freshly withdrawn cash from her pocket and fanned his face with it.

‘I could swear you spent your last ten dollars on cigarettes around two this morning.’

‘I know, but do you think I can find them anywhere? I had to go out and buy some more already.’

‘With the money you found since two this morning.’

‘Exactly.’

Adam yawned and rolled towards the wall, tucking his feet up away from her hand. ‘What is it that you do, anyway?’

‘Huh?’

‘For money.’

‘Oh. Well, the standard stuff. Hand jobs, oral, full sex, but only if –’

‘Right. Whatever.’

Katie thought about kicking him as hard as she could and wondered if he’d even flinch. ‘I don’t do anything for money, okay? I’ve tried, but it happens that I’m crap at pretty much everything. Which is fine, actually. I’m comfortable living off the taxpayer.’

Adam yawned again. ‘Terrific. Not an option for me, though. I need to earn money.’

‘So you’ll get a job. I’ll help you. Next week.’

‘Monday,’ he said. ‘Definitely.’

As they stood at the traffic lights waiting to cross Broadway, they were passed by a semitrailer with WALKERFARMS written in green letters as tall as Katie and pictures of kitten-sized cows dancing down its side.

‘Déjà vu,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’ She had a clear memory of standing here, watching the dancing cows go by. The moment felt important, like she was supposed to pay attention, remember all the particulars. She concentrated as they crossed the road, counting the steps to the centre lane. How long would it take the semitrailer to stop once the driver saw a person standing in the middle of the road? She needed to know all the variables: time, distance, speed. Was there something she was forgetting?

In the back bar of the Lansborough, Dom was slumped in a corner booth, his long black hair half-covering the bottle of red in front of him, his imaginary drumsticks failing to keep time with the Eagles ballad blasting out of the jukebox.

‘Drinking alone, mate?’ Katie said, sliding in beside him.

‘Knew someone’d come along sooner or later. It’s government handout day. Who you got here?’

‘Hi, I’m –’

‘This is Adam. New flattie.’

‘Yeah? What happened to the old one?’

‘He’s gone.’ She turned to Adam, who was standing awkwardly beside the table, and handed him a fifty. ‘Get us some beers, hey?’

‘Pretty damn hot, don’t you reckon?’ Katie said when Adam was gone.

‘Your taste in men, Katie. Jesus.’

‘You should see him with his gear off. Covered in tatts, got a cute little story about all of them. Like, on his back there’s this purple and gold bare-breasted woman with pink hair and her arms are spread out. Apparently it’s Lilith, Adam’s first wife.’

‘Fuck. His naked ex is on his back?’

‘Nah, the wife of Adam in the Bible. Lilith. She refused to lie beneath him or follow his orders and so he pissed off and married Eve. Adam – the one I’ve been shagging, not the Bible one – he reckons that the tattoo is a reminder of the power and agency of women.’

‘What a load of shit. Is he a poof or what?’

Katie shrugged. The semitrailer was on a loop in her mind. The speed limit of that road was sixty, but it seemed the semi was going faster. She once knew something about how long a car going at eighty takes to stop, but the harder she tried to dredge it up, the faster her brain kept showing her those little dancing cows. She wondered if she should go back out to the street and wait until another semi came along so she could think semi without thinking cows.

‘Are you even listening to me?’

‘I’m trying, Dom. It’s this music. Makes me want to kill myself.’

‘Everything makes you want to kill yourself. You’re one of them, um, watcha call it? Emo. Saw a whole thing on 60 Minutes. These kids all mopey, talking about necking themselves. Reminded me of you, Katie, for real.’

‘Says the old drunk with dyed black hair and smudged mascara.’

‘I had this look before those brats were born. I pioneered this fucking look.’ He adjusted the collar on his burgundy-coloured shirt.

Adam was shuffling towards them, eyes on the floor, each hand pressing a beer to his chest.

‘So,’ said Dom as Adam sat down, ‘you’re into the Bible, huh?’

‘What?’ Adam looked at Katie.

‘I was telling Dom about Lilith.’

‘Oh, right. That’s not from the Bible. It’s a Jewish myth.’

‘So, you’re into Jewish myths, huh?’

Katie let the conversation drift over her head. She drank the beer Adam had bought and wondered about visibility. Fog or rain would make a difference, of course. And what if the person in the middle of the road was wearing dark clothing, hair dyed as black as Dom’s, skin covered with boot polish? Wouldn’t that mean the rest didn’t matter? If visibility was almost zero, speed, distance, time would be irrelevant.

‘Katie! Babe!’ The voice belonged to Marly, a 45-year-old pisshead who thought Katie was her best friend just because they’d shared a cab home from the Cross one night. Her open-toed stilettos clacked across the tiles as she approached the table with wide open arms. ‘I was hoping you’d be here. I’ve been so worried about you, mate. How’re you doing?’

Katie accepted a slimy lipsticked kiss. ‘Fine.’

‘You’re very naughty not to call me.’ Marly dropped to her knees, resting her elbows and tits on the tabletop. ‘Your grandma said she’d get you to call me soon as you were out. Or, no, she said as soon as you were feeling yourself again. But it’s been months, babe. And you look good. Normal, I mean.’

‘What are you on about?’ Dom asked.

Marly turned to Dom. ‘Thought you two were mates. Little K’s been in hospital, you dick.’

‘No, she hasn’t.’ Dom flicked his hair in Katie’s face. ‘She hasn’t been anywhere. She’s always here.’

‘You were in hospital?’ said Adam.

‘It was nothing,’ Katie said.

‘Hello,’ Marly said, half-standing, shoving her freckled cleavage in Adam’s face. ‘You’re the rebound shag, eh?’

‘I don’t know what –’

‘Lay off, Marly. Adam’s my new flattie.’

‘So were you or were you not in hospital?’ asked Dom.

‘For, like, five minutes months and months ago. I’d forgotten all about it.’

‘I haven’t! And I bet that pretty boy you nearly killed hasn’t, either. Your poor grandma’s face –’

‘We have to go now.’ Katie stood and held out her hand to Adam. He didn’t take it, but he did get up and when she started walking, he followed her.

‘Come on. Don’t leave,’ Marly called. ‘I’ll stop talking about it if you want. Didn’t know you’d be so sensitive.’

‘See ya, Katie,’ yelled Dom. ‘Don’t worry about telling me what happened. I’ll get Marly to fill me in.’

‘Yeah, I will. Hey, Adam, doncha wanna stay and hear what happened to the bloke before you?’

Stepping out of the pub was like opening an oven door. The sun was long set but the wind packed heavy heat. The light from the pub’s neon sign showed swirling street grime and Adam standing still, blinking into the dust.

‘Sorry about that,’ Katie said. ‘I wasn’t expecting her to be here. She usually drinks at the Crown, which is why I don’t go near the place anymore. Like an ambush, wasn’t it?’

Adam opened then closed his mouth, turned on his heels and began walking fast down Broadway, tapping his hands at his side. Katie had to trot to keep up.

‘It wasn’t nearly as bad as she was making out. There was this bloke. He had your old room. We weren’t really together. It was just . . . I mean, you know, when you live with someone and you’re both –’

‘Yes, obviously.’

‘Right, so, we had a fight one night. We ended up on the street somehow and some nosy bastard called the cops and . . . things got out of hand. And then that old trashbag was stumbling home from the pub, butted in and, well, that’s it really.’

Adam’s pace slowed. ‘Did this guy hurt you?’

‘We were drunk.’

‘But you injured him?’

‘A little. I was trying to go somewhere and he didn’t want me to. Or maybe it was the other way around. Look, he was an arsehole and things just got out of hand. Couple of bruises here, couple of bruises there. He moved out, I moved on. No biggie.’

‘Your friend seemed to think it was.’

‘She’s not my friend. She’s just a drunk.’

‘Hmm,’ he said, nodding as he walked. ‘Drunk. Sounds good. Sounds like a plan.’ Katie felt slapped with happiness.

They went to the Courthouse, where they slammed tequila and were booted for being out of order, which apparently meant singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’, or maybe it meant telling the bar dude he was unAustralian for telling people who were singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ to keep it down. Anyway, Katie finished teaching Adam the first verse as they made their way up City Road, collecting the voices of several bus-waiters and beggars as they passed.

The next pub refused them entry because of Adam’s shirt which had ripped sometime earlier. He roared and beat his chest with his fists, and yelled, ‘You’ll never catch me alive!’ and ran so fast Katie thought she’d lose him. In a bar somewhere past Central, he was sick under the table. Nobody seemed to notice, but the stink was awful. They bought a bottle of merlot to go and fled to Belmore Park.

‘Tell me everything,’ Katie said.

‘Everything.’ He stretched his arms over his head, let her grab and fumble at him.

‘Come on, I want to know. What’s your favourite band? Who’s your best friend? What did you want to be when you grew up? Why are you here? What do you think about when you’re alone? Who are you? Oh, that’s the only question, really, isn’t it? I don’t know anything about you, if you even like me or any of the things I do. You’re an, um, an enigma, aren’t you? Adam, Adam, Adam, what do you want most in the world?’

‘I don’t know. Jesus. What do you want?’

‘You. I want you.’

‘Hush.’ He closed his eyes and tugged up her T-shirt.

‘I love you,’ Katie said, kissing his bristly cheek. ‘I mean, I really fucking love you.’

‘You’re insane.’

‘I know. And I love you, insanely.’ She licked his chin, tugged at his stubble with her teeth, massaged his balls through his jeans. She climbed onto his lap and flattened her hands across his chest. ‘People think you can’t love someone unless you’ve known them a long time, but that isn’t true. You either love them right away or you never will. Every person I’ve ever loved, I’ve loved right away.’

Adam reached between them and unbuttoned his jeans. ‘Me too,’ he said. ‘I mean, with Genie that’s how it was. I loved her in . . . what do you call it? A nanosecond. That’s how fast it was.’

Katie was not hurt. Love happened or it didn’t; it wasn’t his fault for not feeling it or hers for not earning it. If he’d lied or equivocated she would have hated him. As it was, he’d told the truth and had revealed another shadow from his past. She felt complimented and proud. And curious. ‘Genie?’

‘Eugenie. My wife,’ he said, guiding Katie’s head to his groin.

She opened her mouth wide and let him thrust into the back of her throat. His hands behind her ears set the pace. A wife. She had known something must have busted him up. An undamaged person would not be so easily dragged down.

5.

Graeme barely saw his new flatmates, although he heard their late night mumbling and moaning. The mornings were so still and quiet that if not for the full ashtrays and empty bottles in the living room and kitchen, he might have forgotten he was not alone in the flat. He rose at 7.45 am, showered, shaved and dressed, ate a slice of toast with vegemite, drank a cup of coffee and was on his way by 8.20 am, which he suspected was a good four or five hours before Adam and Katie got out of bed.

On a Thursday, a few days after he’d moved in, he was waiting to cross Broadway when a hand – the two middle fingers stained nicotine-yellow, the nails with white ridges and ragged edges – gripped his forearm. He looked down, then up at the man’s saggy grey face.

‘Help me out, mate? I jus’ need me bus fare. Jus’ a coupla bucks, eh?’

Graeme shook off the man’s hand and stepped from the curb and into the unmoving, peak-hour traffic. On the corner of Broadway and Wattle, a boy of seventeen or so in a red tracksuit appeared at the doorway of a closed liquor store. He had been there yesterday. Same tracksuit, same question. ‘Got any spare change, mate?’ Graeme shook his head and walked quickly on.

He turned on to Wattle Street and passed the silent TAFE workshops and the deserted main campus where he’d taken a night course in nature photography the year before last. That same year he’d taken Open University classes on existential philosophy and comparative religion, started jogging and tried to teach himself guitar. He thought of that year now the way he thought of his first year as an aid worker: a time of open-hearted, wide-eyed, deeply naïve hopefulness.

Past the TAFE was a small park favoured by the local homeless for its covered climbing fort and extra long picnic table. As he drew near, Graeme saw the lump at the table rise up and unfold into a vaguely human shape. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets and picked up his pace, his teeth gritting at the third encounter of one short walk. He began to map out possible alternative routes between the flat and work so he wouldn’t have to endure this –

He couldn’t complete the thought. Endure what? Endure striding past people? Endure saying no? He stopped and watched the blanketed lump move steadily towards him. Feeling annoyed was a habit. No was a habit, too.

But habits had to start somewhere. There must have once been a why. He thought it through: donations to emergency shelters, food banks and long-term training and housing projects were better ways to solve the homeless problem. Addicts should be helped to reform, not paid to continue their addiction. If he handed money to one he’d have to give it to all of them, and if he gave some to all of them today, there’d be more of them waiting tomorrow.

The blanketed lump was close enough that Graeme could see it was a middle-aged woman with a shiny red nose and long, tangled blonde hair. ‘Can you help me?’ she said. ‘I need to buy a train ticket to Wollongong. I’ve got family there. Just need to get the money together for the ticket. If you had a couple of dollars . . .’

Graeme opened his wallet and counted his cash. He slipped three dollars – enough for a latte – into his pocket, then handed the other forty-four dollars and fifty-five cents to the woman. He walked away as quickly as he could and arrived at work panting.

When he entered the work kitchen, he was surprised to see Jenny, Mike and Sherry huddled around the kettle. He had not heard anybody speaking when he paused to the left of the doorway and listened just a moment ago. He had thought it safe to enter.

None of them was speaking now, either, just standing in a tight circle, Jenny looking at Mike, Mike looking at the floor, Sherry looking at the doorway and at Graeme standing in it.

‘Good morning,’ he said.

Mike nodded, then turned and began fussing with the tea canisters. The sight of his soft, pale hands lifting first one canister then the next, holding them up and pretending to read labels he must have read thirty times before, made Graeme’s jaw clench.

‘Just the man we need,’ Jenny said, walking towards him. ‘We were talking about Jaswinda.’

‘Oh?’

‘We think you should give her some time off,’ said Mike, still worrying over the tea canisters as though his ostentatiously healthy body would be affected differently by black, green, white or bloody chai.

‘What? Why?’

Jenny blinked. ‘Why?’

‘Yes.’

‘Graeme, her mother died on the weekend. You didn’t know?’

‘No.’ Half a week of interactions with Jaswinda ran through his head. ‘What happened? Was she ill?’

‘She’s been dying for six months,’ Sherry said and gave him a weird, twisted smile. ‘You know her father is sick, too? That she’s spent the last year caring for them both in between work and the kids and everything else?’

‘I had no idea,’ Graeme said. ‘She never told me.’

‘She talks about her parents all the time,’ Mike said.

Jenny gave Graeme an apologetic smile. ‘Well. Anyway. She’s an absolute mess, but she won’t ask for time off because she thinks we can’t do without her.’

‘We can’t.’

‘I told you,’ Mike said.

‘Well, can we?’ Graeme said.

Sherry shook her head at nobody in particular and went to fill the kettle. Mike opened his palms to Jenny who gave him a look Graeme could not interpret.

‘The thing is, Graeme,’ Jenny said, ‘you’ll have to do without her for an awfully long time while she’s recovering from the stroke she’s due to have any day.’

‘She’s attending a visa hearing this morning. I’ll talk to her when she gets back.’ Graeme turned and left the room, wondering if he should go up the road for a coffee or wait a few minutes and try the break room again.

Just after noon, Sherry buzzed Graeme to tell him Jaswinda was in the kitchen. ‘And Graeme,’ she said, ‘try and remember that her mother just died.’

‘Isn’t that the reason behind this whole thing?’

‘Yeah, I just meant, try and be . . . you know.’

She meant he should be warmer. He knew this because it was what people always meant when they told him how to be. And he knew – because gossip always got back to the person concerned, even when the person was as out of the social loop as Graeme – that he had a reputation as a cold fish. It had always perplexed him. The ability to keep his cool had served him well over thirty-plus years in the field, but being calm in a crisis did not make one cold and so there must be something else about him. Something which, despite his lifelong dedication to helping others, marked him out as lacking warmth.

Jaswinda was standing at the sink, stirring sugar into a mug of black coffee.

‘I’m so sorry about your mother,’ Graeme said.

She kept stirring. ‘Thank you.’

‘I’m sorry for not saying anything sooner. I only just heard.’

She nodded at her coffee.

‘It might be a good idea for you to take some time off.’

Jaswinda laughed, short and loud. ‘And who will take over my cases?’

‘I’ll find someone.’

Her eyes were swollen and her nostrils chapped. ‘If there was anyone else I wouldn’t already be doing the work of two.’

Graeme shrugged. ‘We’ll cope.’

‘I doubt it.’ Jaswinda rinsed her spoon and placed it on the draining tray. Threw the paper sugar packet in the bin under the sink.

‘Everybody is concerned about you, Jaswinda.’

‘I know.’ She held her coffee mug in front of her with both hands. ‘But it is good for me to come to work. Routine is comforting, I find. Or maybe just distracting. Whatever, I’d rather be here than at home.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ she said, walking past him and out of the room.

Late that night, he thought of Jaswinda as he sat in front of the news nursing a mug of weak tea. He admired her strength and thought her approach to grief wise, but mostly he envied her. He longed for a specific grief and for something to do to distract from it.

‘War should always be a last resort,’ the pubescent talking head on the TV said, as if he knew anything about it, as if war was a stand-off between a recalcitrant child and a kind father at the end of his tether, rather than something that happened because the child has no food and the father has no hope and there is no kindness or tether or attention being paid.

Footage showed French soldiers leaning against a wire fence on what the voiceover said was the Chad–Sudan border but which, with its bitumen ground cover and hulking gunmetal sheds, could have been any airbase in the world. The scene changed and Graeme had the familiar sensation of seeing his memories played back in front of him: the endless procession of Somalis using the dry river bed as a track, their faces wrapped in grimy rags to protect against the dusty air.

Graeme’s nostrils twitched at the remembered stench of diarrhoea and decaying animals. The roar of a Land-Cruiser, the screaming of women and grunts of militia men drowned out the reporter’s voice and he was again watching from the passenger seat of the supply truck as the wadi turned from dry land to a stream and then the stream to an overflowing river. He heard the rushing water and the roaring engines louder and closer and the screaming women and his driver saying three months; felt the ache of not moving while radio messages told of infections taking hold and bodies piling up.

He closed his eyes and let the sounds and smells work their way over and through him. He counted his breaths until the only smell was stale cigarette smoke, the only sound a British girl talking about topless photos of a minor royal. He finished his tea and watched the end of the news and went to bed.

He was woken around 3 am by the sound of his flatmates. He lay in the dark listening as it went on and on. What did they think they were doing? To what possible end all that screwing and shouting?

6.

Adam woke feeling like he’d aged thirty years overnight. He remembered climbing a fence, falling on his butt, hitting his head. He remembered swimming in a lake or possibly a pool, getting chased by a dog, screwing clumsily on wet grass. He knew none of these things happened in a dream, because Eugenie had not been there.

He used to wake up like this often. A room full of stale air, a stranger’s limbs stuck to his skin, pain behind his eyes, stomach swirling with bile. Occasionally he’d stick with a stranger long enough that she wasn’t one anymore, and every few months he’d stop drinking for a week or two and think about going back to college and getting his teaching certificate. Several times he took off to the furthest country he could afford to fly to, but wherever he was he woke the same way, with the same feeling of helpless boredom.

And then a few days after his thirtieth birthday, he’d shared a laugh with the new mailroom girl and, caught by her accent and swishy blonde ponytail, he asked her to lunch. They ate takeaway Greek salad on a park bench and by the end of the hour agreed that this was very strange. This being the unspoken but unquestionable fact that they would be together. It was too obvious to need saying. It would have been like saying I have skin and a heart that beats.

‘Aaaadam, I’m starved.’ Katie hovered above him, her hair falling in greasy clumps around her shiny face.

He covered his nose from her rotten breath, closed his eyes to her cracked lips. She straddled him and squeezed his ribs between her thighs. ‘Come on, I’m going to die if I don’t eat. Get up. Get up, get upgetupgetupgetup.’

He kept his hand over his face. She thumped his chest and began to bounce. The movement started a wave of nausea in him. It moved up from his guts and broke in his throat. The inside of his mouth tasted as rancid as her breath smelt.

‘Cut it out. I feel sick.’

Bounce. Bounce. Thump. Stomach acid and disgust swirled in him.

‘I mean it, Katie. Just stop it.’

‘Or what? You’ll go back to Eugenie?’

He grabbed at her, caught her arms, threw her off. He heard the oomph as she hit the floor.

‘Fuck you, arsehole. That hurt!’ She stood and rubbed her arm. ‘What’s your problem? Aren’t I allowed to say her name? Eugenie, Eugenie, Eugenie.’

‘How do you know . . . ?’ Adam pressed both hands to his stomach, covering the crowns, taking breaths.

‘You told me, idiot. Last night, you told me about your wife, how you loved her right away.’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Yeah, probably because I was sucking you off at the time. Distracting, right? So? Are you going to tell me about her? Did she leave you or what? Is she still in America? Are you going back? I mean, this –’, she waved her arm about, pointing to the bed, the bottles, the two of them. ‘Are you getting even or moving on?’

He rolled upright, stood, pulled on his underpants and jeans, then sat and let his swimming head settle.

‘Adam! Talk! You’re going back to her, aren’t you? Aren’t you?’

‘She’s dead,’ he told her, hearing for the first time the blandness of the word. It conveyed none of the disorienting horror of it all. There were other words for that. Ungainly, tangled words he knew would forever trip off his tongue. Histopathologic. Debulking. Laparotomy. Salpingo-oophorectomy. Recurrent–Epithelial. Metastasis.

Katie was talking. She was sorry. It was too much to take.

‘I’ve gotta go.’ He slid into his flip-flops and put on a shirt on his way out the door.

Before they came here, Eugenie told him Sydney was just like San Francisco. The light, she told him, the air, the water, the bridge, the vibe. But it was winter when they arrived and the light, the air, the water, the bridge and most certainly the vibe were grey. Not grey like the cottony fog that hangs over the bay in the morning and lifts to reveal the sparkling colour beneath. Sydney was grey like ashes, like arsenic.

He buried her in her hometown of Newcastle on a sweltering morning in the first week of December and spent the rest of the month and most of his savings in a hotel behind Central station. He slept, watched TV and ate potato chips and candy from a machine in the foyer, kept the curtains closed and the air-conditioning on and paid no attention to the digital clock beside the bed. When he began to smell sour he washed and changed his clothes. His beard grew in and his stomach turned to flab while his legs and arms became thin.

Sky News told him that outside of his dim, cool room bushfires raged and men stabbed each other through the guts. Adam became convinced that the land itself was murderous. Its thick, ashy air swallowed whole towns and incited men to violence. Its parched earth starved sheep and ruined farmers and smothered the dead with layers of dust. If he opened his window he heard screams, sirens, screeching brakes. He dug his travel documents out of the bottom of Eugenie’s backpack and discovered that his visa had expired weeks ago and, if he stayed in this hotel room, his cash would be gone in a fortnight.

In the first week of January, he went searching the hung-over, streamer and beer bottle strewn city for cheaper accommodation. He told himself that moving into the Broadway flat was the first step in getting his life back together, but now walking those same streets, he saw he had only sunk further into the pit that had opened beneath him when Eugenie died.

Looking up out of it for the first time in months, he saw the light had changed overhead. It wasn’t grey now; it was white. It hurt to focus on anything. He kept his eyes half-shut and moved from bright spot to bright spot without relief. Every office block had been constructed out of reflective glass and sparkling granite. He felt he had stumbled onto the set of a sci-fi movie. He looked for shade or shadows but saw only light reflecting light. Women wearing yellow, citrus orange and white, white, white swarmed around him. Men in dark suits fired lethal rays as they flipped open their silver phones.

Adam tried to imagine Eugenie walking these streets. He saw her skin crack and peel, her pale hair sparking and burning like straw.

He squeezed his eyes closed but the white light assaulted him in sharp tiny bursts. He opened them again and spotted the entrance to Town Hall station. He lurched towards the darkness, bumping against hot skin and angry voices until he was on the escalator. Asian teenagers clustered on the steps below him and he blinked into their black hair until his vision cleared.

Underground, Sydney was cool and dim. He had expected to see trains and tracks but instead there were hole-in-the-wall stores selling fresh juice or coffee, offering boot repair or suit cleaning. He followed the teenagers for several minutes through the subterranean maze, past newsstands, ice-cream stalls, coffee counters, a rare coin collector, a pharmacy, a florist. They stopped at an internet café and Adam followed them, then stood dazed in the doorway. His mother didn’t know about Eugenie. Breaking the news in an email would be cruel, but so too would be her reaction. The pain would still be his.

He left the café and re-entered the maze, choosing direction instinctively, taking an escalator to a sub-level of this underground metropolis, buying a Coke at McDonald’s, listening to the thrum of invisible trains, the murmur of traffic, wondering how he had been in Sydney so long without knowing about this other city thriving below.

Returning to the flat and the girl seemed impossible. Stepping back out onto that bright, loud Sydney street was unthinkable. Sitting in the middle of a cavernous food-court sipping flat, watery Coke was manageable. He wondered if Eugenie had ever been here, ever sat in this space, at this pen-knife scarred table. The thought he would ask her occurred simultaneously with the thought that he wouldn’t.

Since she died his brain had been performing this neat trick of delivering up concurrent contradictory thoughts. Like it knew he couldn’t keep going unless he believed she was coming back but that he wouldn’t find a way to keep going if he didn’t admit she wasn’t. He guessed most sane people thought that way about their own deaths: you will never die so live as though the future matters/you could drop dead any minute so live for the now.

Adam knew he used to think that way himself, but now death had stopped being abstract. It had become personal and in the past tense; not a future event to hold off as long as possible, but a recent trauma his wife had endured. To worry about the inevitability of death was ridiculous. Death had already happened.

But he could imagine that it hadn’t, that he could charge up into the cruel light and push through the crowds, peering into shady doorways and through shop windows, grabbing shoulders and spinning blonde-haired strangers until he found her, red-faced and wide-eyed and sweating and she wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and pressed her forehead to his and smiled while she kissed his smile and said I got so lost. Then, then, he would carry her down here to the tiled, fluorescent-lit cave and place her on this orange plastic seat so she could feel the carved vows of love on the back of her thighs and he would buy her a Coke and they would tell each other all the things that had happened and all the silly fears they had had while they were apart.

7.

Katie’s heart sped up when Adam walked through the front door. She’d been waiting on the couch, her hair brushed and lips painted pink, a cask of red wine and two glasses on the table in front of her.

‘I don’t want to talk,’ he said and walked past without even glancing in her direction.

She listened to his feet pound along the hallway and flinched when she heard the lock of his door slide closed. She sat in the living room, trying not to breathe too loudly, trying to interpret the sounds from his room. Itching, she shuffled down the hall, leant against his door, imagined him leaning against the other side, wanting her to call out to him, wanting her to hold him and kiss his face and tell him it would all be fine.

Then she heard what sounded like a burbling snore and stepped back. ‘Fuck you, then.’

Dom was sitting exactly as he had been the last time Katie had been here: slumped in his corner booth, hair hanging over his face.

‘Anyway, I was thinking,’ he said, as if she’d just returned from the dunny. ‘Sitting here and getting pissed all the time.’ He tapped the bottle in front of him. ‘What’s the point?’

She took a swig of her beer. ‘So do something else if you don’t like it.’

‘Like what? Put on a suit, sit behind a desk, pound away at a keyboard all day?’ His hands reared up in front of her face, fingers twitching.

‘Or play the piano,’ said Katie, but he was too busy typing on his invisible, absurdly long keyboard to notice. ‘I’m thinking of getting a job, actually. In a clothes shop. I’d be good at it, I reckon. Helping people choose outfits, telling them how marvellous they look. Wrapping up their purchases in tissue paper with a big ribbon.’

Dom snorted. ‘Bowing and scraping to materialistic bastards all day. Selling doctors’ wives five-hundred-buck T-shirts made by starving kids in the Third World.’

‘Yep, exactly that, Dom. Exactly. Jesus.’

‘Just telling it like it is, girl.’

‘You being an expert on how it is.’

He slid forward, resting his tilted-back head on the top of the bench seat. ‘You’re young. You’ll learn.’

‘What will I learn?’

Dom’s eyes were closed and his mouth open. Katie leant in and put her ear close to his mouth; his breath came soft and slow. The angle of his neck was all wrong; she wished he would shift his body and let his head fall on her shoulder. She finished her beer and his wine, the side of her body pressed hopefully against his.

When she got home, Adam was in her bed. ‘Sorry,’ he said, rolling over to face the wall. ‘The sun comes in my window in the afternoon. I couldn’t sleep.’

‘It’s fine. Sun’s down now, though. If you want to go back.’ She held her breath, waiting, but he didn’t move or answer and, after a minute or so, she lay down on the bed, careful not to touch him.

‘I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I just wanted to say that I’m sorry. I can’t imagine what it feels like.’

He swallowed loudly. ‘It feels unreal.’

‘Was it sudden?’

‘No. Yes. I mean, it’s why we came here. She said she’d feel better at home and we both pretended that meant she’d get better once we were here. Even in the hospice . . . I mean, it’s crazy. I remember thinking, Jesus, thirty-five years old and I never realised there were whole buildings set aside for people waiting to die. I remember her saying “a good rest is just what I need” and this nurse giving me this sad smile, like we were united in pity over Genie’s delusion. I remember thinking “Fuck you, it might be true,” and then realised that every second person in this place is thinking the same thing. I remember thinking all that and still – still – being surprised when it happened.’

‘Katherine. I’ve been calling since I got in from work. Is your phone broken?’

Katie imagined Gran sitting in her navy work shirt and the pink pyjama shorts she changed into as soon as she got home. She would be holding a can of Diet Coke, looking out the side window onto the council park, shaking her head at the take-away chicken containers and cigarette packets abandoned on the single graffiti-splattered bench. Tapping the cane phone table in frustration as the phone rang out again and again.

‘Battery went flat without me noticing.’

‘Is everything okay there? How’s Graeme working out?’

‘Oh, fine.’ Katie propped the phone under her chin so she could refill her glass. The wine dribbled out, reminding her that this was the last cask and she was out of cash again. ‘Hardly know he’s here.’

‘And Adam?’

‘He’s asleep,’ Katie said. ‘He sleeps a lot.’

‘Does he?’

‘Mmm. Hey, did you know he’s a widower?’

‘What? No.’

‘His wife was called Eugenie. It’s so sad. I can hardly stand it.’

‘Oh, Katherine, darling. You’re not getting involved with him, are you?’

‘Jesus. I just told you the man’s wife died.’

‘And you sound very upset about it.’

‘Yes, I am. Because it’s upsetting.’ Katie slugged some wine. ‘Don’t you think it’s upsetting, Gran?’

‘Of course it is . . . Listen, darling, I’m sending you a brochure I picked up about a childcare course running at the TAFE up the road.’

‘Childcare, Gran? Really?’

‘Well, why not? You’re energetic and –’

‘And unstable and irresponsible, not to mention –’

‘You’re talking yourself out of it before you’ve even given the idea a chance.’

‘But being responsible for children, Gran!’

Gran sighed. ‘Just have a read of it, okay?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And Katherine, the American . . .’

‘What about him?’

‘Just try not to . . . Try not to take on all his problems. Try not to get too . . . invested.’

‘Right.’ Katie wished she had a temazapam to go with the last of the wine. She wished she hadn’t wasted all that money on drinks that Adam either threw up or slept off. She wished she hadn’t answered the phone or told Gran about Eugenie or been so transparent.

The conversation had left Katie feeling jittery, fragmented. The guilt of her teenage years – the suspicion that she was coddling herself, cultivating this wacky but fragile persona just to avoid facing up to reality – returned.

She searched the flat for forgotten supplies of alcohol, smoked her last cigarette, kissed and poked Adam who refused to wake. She sat on the floor under the window and counted her breaths the way she’d once been taught, but Adam’s snoring interrupted her rhythm. She tried counting his breaths but every one made her teeth clench tighter.

A noise from the living room sent a caffeine bullet to her heart. Her speeding heart sent a memo to her brain which told her legs to move. She ran towards the noise without pausing to consider if running away from it would be wiser.

It was just the TV, switched on by the man she had forgotten lived here.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Sorry, is it too loud?’

‘No, no. I just . . . I forgot there was anyone else here and I heard it go on and . . .’ She was stunned by the shrill, bright, stinking room. Her heart raced. A film of sweat prickled her forehead. She steadied herself with two hands on the back of the armchair. Calm down, everything’s fine she told herself, told her body, but even as the words formed in her brain, she doubted them. Why believe that her mind knew better than her body? This mind that told her body to speed towards danger, told her a television was a threat.

‘Late night news. Bit of a habit. But I don’t have to. If it’s going to disturb you, I mean.’

‘I’m not disturbed.’ Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Nothing’s the matter. An ordinary conversation. Breathe and speak. Air in, words out. ‘I don’t know how you can stand to watch that stuff. Depresses the hell out of me.’

‘It can be depressing, yes. But there’s always some good news in there, too. A new cancer treatment or the end of capital punishment somewhere or other.’ He spoke softly and slowly, the way you would to an orphaned child carrying a gun. ‘Even the bad things are often signs of progress. War, for example. Now when one country invades another the rest of the world pays attention. Protests or observes, holds soldiers and their commanders to account. There are rules of engagement. Geneva conventions. Once upon a time leaders would just sweep into neighbouring lands and massacre every man, woman and child in their way.’

Her eyes stung and although she concentrated on in and out she could not get her breathing right. She couldn’t remember how this man came to be here.

‘I mean, as brutal as the world can seem, when you take an historical perspective it really isn’t so bad. Think of all the dreadful things that used to be tolerated: human sacrifice, gladiatorial circuses, crucifixion, witch burning, the torture of religious dissenters –’

‘Yes,’ Katie said. The man said something else, but she was already at the front door, then in the hallway, the door closed behind her, her hand on her belly, her body shaking. She ran to the lift and pressed the call button. She stood and listened, thought she could hear the mechanical whirr starting up far below.

‘Fuck this.’ She ran to the end of the hallway and threw open the fire door. For a second she stood trapped in silent darkness, then the automatic light flickered on and she could see the slanted roof overhead, the scratched grey paint of the railing, the concrete steps spiralling down. She leant over the edge of the railing and blinked into the tunnel of light at the checked tiles of the front lobby fourteen floors below. All she needed to do was put one foot down on the first step and then the next down after it. She practised in her head, but kept tripping and falling. She reached backwards and found the wall, slid down it, breathed in, breathed out. The concrete was cold beneath her bare feet. She sat there until her chest was still and her head was clear.

It had been a while since her body had misfired like that, sending her into an adrenaline spin. She thought of the missed doctor’s appointment, the unfilled prescription. It was too soon for that to have made a difference, she was sure. This was a random instance and she had breathed her way through it on her own, without alcohol or restraints or phone calls to Gran. She had panicked and recovered and best of all she knew that was what had happened which meant she was much better than before. It meant she was fine.

She got up and went back through the fire door and down the hallway and into her flat which was quiet and warm and safe.

8.

The flat’s kitchen reminded Graeme of a kitchen of his childhood, the one in Parramatta that belonged, as far as he could recall, to his second foster family, the one with the father who got up at first light and made fried eggs and vegemite toast for whoever was able to drag themself out of bed in time. That kitchen table was, like this one, an aluminium and plastic fold-out with matching moulded plastic chairs, and it was positioned, like this one, so that the sun came from the window over the sink and warmed the back of your neck. Every morning felt like the first day of a camping trip back then.

One Wednesday, as he sat in his usual chair drinking his coffee, the American came and sat down across from him. He was wearing jeans, but no shirt. His eyes were bloodshot and his skin blotchy. Up close and in the sunlight, Graeme saw that Adam was at least a decade older than he’d first guessed. Considerably older than the girl who looked to be barely out of her teens.

‘Hey, you’re up early,’ Adam said, stretching his arms over his head, cracking his neck from side to side.

‘I’m always up at this time. I start work at eight-thirty.’

‘Oh, right. Yeah.’ Adam yawned.

‘Late night?’

‘Yeah.’ He ran his hands over his stubble. ‘I hope we didn’t disturb you.’

‘Last night? No, no. Barely heard you.’

‘Oh, good. Good. I mean, Katie can be . . . kind of loud.’ He chuckled unconvincingly. ‘When she drinks, you know.’

Graeme took a sip of coffee. ‘Yes.’

‘But I’m putting a stop to all that, anyway.’

‘To her drinking?’

‘No, I mean . . . The late nights and all that. I need to get out there. Look for a job.’

Graeme put the last morsel of toast in his mouth, chewed and swallowed, while Adam tapped the table with his fingertips and bit his lip.

‘What kind of job?’ Graeme asked.

‘I don’t care. I just need to earn some cash, get out of here, you know?’ He jerked his head towards the door. ‘What about you? What are your plans?’

‘For what?’

‘Getting out of here.’

Graeme took a large gulp of coffee. Stinging heat ran up the back of his throat and into his nostrils. He coughed and squeezed the bridge of his nose. ‘Sorry,’ he said, and Adam flicked the word away. ‘I don’t have any plans. I’m happy here. It’s close to work, cheap.’

‘Really?’ Adam leant forward. ‘I just assumed you were in the same situation as me. Not exactly the same, obviously. But here for the same basic reason, you know – to get your shit together.’

Graeme shrugged. ‘I suppose my shit is already together.’

‘Well,’ Adam said. ‘Well, that’s great.’ He tapped the table three times and stood up. ‘I’ve never known anyone who had his shit together.’ He laughed, shook his head. ‘Good for you. I’ll see you later, man.’

Graeme finished his coffee, rinsed and dried his plate and coffee mug. He went to his bedroom to collect his briefcase; on the way back up the hall, he paused outside Katie’s room, his ear close to the door. He thought he heard that awful phrase – shit together – repeated, and cringed.

He walked to work fast. What’s so funny about having it together? he thought, as he handed a twenty-dollar note to the red-tracksuited junkie outside the liquor store. What would a man like that know, anyway? Spoiled, lazy, tattooed nomad, killing time with whatever young chicky he could talk into bed, living as though AIDS and child armies and dignity-smashing poverty did not exist.

Graeme knew these things existed. His final, total acceptance of them was what allowed him to be so settled, to have his shit so very together. He knew and accepted also, that past horrors could decay your insides without your knowledge, that you could wake one day and find that an axe you thought was securely stowed has fallen and split your mind clear in two. He accepted this, too. He accepted it all and that was why he had moved into the flat and why he had no intention of leaving.

9.

Adam’s newest discovery, which now sat alongside the harsh light, the wetness of the heat and the existence of a secret underground civilisation on the list of things Eugenie had not told him about Sydney, was the flies. It was like a biblical plague had descended, so loud you heard them buzzing from across a busy road, so fat you felt heavier when they landed on the top of your head. He hadn’t noticed them until this week, but whether that was because there weren’t any or because he had spent the daylight hours in darkened rooms, he did not know. They were worse, according to Katie, when it was humid, and this week had been so humid that Adam was soaked before he’d finished towelling off after a cold shower.

‘However hot it gets,’ Katie said, ‘Sydney flies aren’t so bad.’ In the time it took her to say it Adam brushed three from his face. ‘In Darwin, they’re like a rippling wall you have to sort of swat your way through.’ She showed him how it was done, stomping and swiping with her arms, fighting the air, as though it were a jungle.

‘I’ll be sure to never go to Darwin, then.’

‘Don’t let me put you off. I’m only guessing about the flies. I’ve never been near the place. I’ve never been anywhere.’

They pushed on through the flies and the heat. They were going ‘shopping’ – Katie did the air quotes when she said it – at the ‘garbage-market’. Adam was surprised when she suggested it. He’d known people who dived for dinner every night. He’d even joined them himself a couple of times. But that was in San Francisco, where anti-consumerist freegans shared the dumpster spoils with hungry winos and crackheads. Here in Sydney where the few who weren’t auditioning for Wall Street in the Antipodes still lived comfortably thanks to the social-security-welfare-safety-net, the idea of eating garbage was shocking.

‘I think you need to update your guidebook,’ Katie said. ‘You seem to think it’s 1989.’

Adam counted back; she was right. Everything he thought he knew about this place had come from Eugenie, but she hadn’t lived here for over a decade. She was as American as Adam, really, except for the accent. There was something else, too: a belief in the power of Australia to heal its own; a deadly romanticism.

They’d arrived at the concrete lot behind the Broadway shopping mall. Half-a-dozen blue-steel industrial dumpsters swarmed with fruit flies as well as the fat, buzzing common variety. ‘I’ll go in; you check the goods,’ Katie said. ‘Boost me.’

Adam knelt down so she could climb onto his shoulders. ‘We could be anywhere in the world,’ he said.

‘Sure, anywhere people chuck out enough food to feed the Chinese army every night.’

‘Yeah, no, I mean . . . Not doing this, just . . . Eugenie wanted so much to come back here, like it was magical. But it’s the same as everywhere else. I don’t think she knew that.’ And the thought was treacherous, as if he’d said I don’t think she knew much at all.

‘Tell me about her. Was she beautiful?’ Katie asked, her head just visible over the top of the dumpster. It was impossible to know if her dusky halo was a lighting effect courtesy of the setting sun, or a cloud of food dust and grime rising up from beneath her.

‘No,’ Adam said. He pushed away the image of Eugenie kneeling in front of the toilet, spitting blood, and focused instead on the way she was that first day in the park: her jerky walk, talcum smell, gooseflesh skin. ‘Not beautiful. Lovely.’

‘Lovely,’ Katie echoed, handing him a dusty flour sack. ‘Give these a try.’

Adam sniffed the contents, then took a couple of items out and squeezed. ‘Donuts, some bagels. Fresh enough.’

‘I thought she must have been beautiful, you know, to be with you. I imagined her as super glamorous, some sexy Amazon with glossy hair, big tits, big lips.’ She threw a leg over the rim of the dumpster.

‘You think that’s my type?’ Adam helped her out. Over her shoulder, he saw a trio of women with shaved heads and facial jewellery walking towards them.

‘Next dumpster?’

‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘People coming.’

Katie turned to see. ‘Nah, they won’t care.’ She waved at the women. ‘Hey! Do you want some donuts? Plenty to go around.’ The women – girls, he saw, now they were closer – looked at each other and giggled. ‘Skank!’ one of them yelled, and they all started walking faster.

‘God, you don’t have to run away. Just being friendly. I wasn’t going to force you or anything.’ Katie turned to Adam. ‘More for us, hey. Boost me again?’

He helped her into the next dumpster and watched the girls disappear into the shopping mall. All three wore denim cut-offs and combat boots; the tallest wore a chocolate brown string-bikini top, showing off an impressive array of body art for someone who couldn’t have been more than eighteen.

‘Oi!’ Katie hit him on the head with something hard in a plastic bag. ‘So that’s your type, eh? Try-hard punk girls. Shaved head, tatts, nipple rings, bad attitude.’

‘Actually, yeah. I guess it is. Or was, anyway. Before . . . Christ, it stinks.’ He looked into the bag Katie had thrown down: several blackening bananas and a loaf of white sandwich bread. ‘We done you think?’

‘Yeah. We’ll hit the bakery on Glebe Point Road tomorrow. You’ve got to get there right on six if you want the good stuff. I got a vegetable curry pie there once. Best meal I had in my life.’

‘One time back home, I got a whole roast chicken, stuffing and everything. I went back every night but never saw so much as a wing in there again.’

‘God, I’d kill for some chicken. Wouldn’t risk dumpster meat on a day like this, but. Asking for a hospital trip.’

‘We’ve got some decent stuff here. We’ll have mashed banana bagels with donuts for dessert.’

‘Bernaana. So cute.’

‘It’s not nice to make fun of minorities, Katie.’

‘Ha! Middle-class, white American male. Some minority.’

‘Here it is. This place is lousy with Brits and Kiwis but none of my people,’ Adam said. ‘I should call my mom. She loves minorities.’

‘Ooh, he mentioned a mother!’ She sprang in front of him, flinging her arms around, walking backwards. ‘I want to know about the mother. Who is this woman? What did she do to you? Tell me, Adam; tell me about your mom.’

‘She’s not your typical suburban mom, but that’s cool.’

‘Not typical how?’

‘She’s real political, an activist. Most of my childhood we lived in this old mansion owned by this crazy old hippy. It was a sort of an open home for radicals and their kids. Everything belonged to everybody and all the moms took responsibility for all the kids.’

‘That sounds awesome. Was it?’

‘It was okay. It seemed normal to me.’

‘And your dad?’

‘Never knew him. The story goes that my mom, having made the decision to become a mother, went to this herbalist-slash-witchdoctor and got a potion guaranteed to produce a girl. But the unsuspecting sperm donor – my dad – was real sweaty and the potion washed away while they were boning.’

‘Bullshit,’ said Katie, falling into step, snaking an arm around his back.

‘Probably. My mom and her friends are expert at creating personal mythologies. So, naturally, the story of my creation is all about what an amazing humanitarian she is. The way she tells it, she was bummed when she discovered she had a boy-child, but she decided to keep me, anyway.’

‘You’re exaggerating. You’re too sweet to have been raised by some rabid man-hater.’

‘She doesn’t hate men. She distrusts them – us – especially those of us who are able-bodied, straight and white. You know, we have unearnt authority, unearnt opportunity, no awareness of our privilege. She says she almost feels sorry for us because our status means we can never really know what it is to struggle and so can never know how good it feels to overcome adversity. The “almost” is important here: she made sure I never forgot for one moment that the last person she could ever feel sorry for was me.’

‘Honey, you are breaking my heart.’

‘I’m not telling you anything else.’

‘Oh, come on,’ Katie said. ‘My dad took off before I was born and my mum left me with my grandparents when I was thirteen because she couldn’t handle my moods now that she had a new husband and baby to take care of. I can boo-hoo at you, if I want. Continue!’

‘All right. Same as any other kid, I wanted my mom to love me. I was always trying to find ways to please her. I couldn’t help being white, but I had lots of black and Latino friends, which was good. Being able-bodied was another flaw . . .’

‘You inherited that self-mythologising thing, huh? For real, man, if you’d wanted to lose an arm you would have found a way. I’ve never heard such a load of shit.’

Adam knew Katie was right, sort of. It wasn’t like he’d seriously gone out to get hurt. But he did consciously try to make his mom worry, subconsciously wishing for permanent harm. That was Eugenie’s explanation of his behaviour, too.

‘Anyway, when I was sixteen I hit on the perfect solution: I decided to be gay.’

‘Oh my lord, this is good.’ They had reached their building. Katie took the box from Adam’s arms and placed it on the ground. ‘If we go in you won’t finish.’ She pushed him onto the front step and sat beside him. ‘Go on.’

The stone griffins guarding the entrance to the shopping mall scowled down at him from across the street. Who puts griffins over the entry to a mall? Not even shopping obsessed Sydneysiders would consider a mall worthy of supernatural protection. No, it must have been the other way around: the griffins were supposed to be guarding something else, something precious and important, but they slacked off and the precious, important thing was stolen from beneath their lazy eyes and replaced with racks of jeans and piles of bath towels.

‘What used to be in there? Before it was a mall?’

‘What? I don’t know. Who cares? I want to know about when you were a shirt-lifter.’

‘Right. Well, my mom was proud – she took me to PFLAG events and even set me up with guys she knew from the neighbourhood. And it was great, really. I liked the guys I dated: they took me to all these cool clubs, gave me awesome drugs. I was comfortable with them, they had all this anger and pride – it was what I’d been raised with. I know it’s a tiny, rarefied world, the scene I grew up in, but it seemed like the way to be happy.’

‘But you couldn’t drive stick?’

‘No, I could. I did. I was sixteen – I had a boner all the time, anyway; it wasn’t hard to pretend it was directed at a guy. And man, did those guys know what they were doing. The sex was way better than anything I would’ve been having with girls my age. But I felt bad. I really liked the guys I dated. I couldn’t keep lying to them, pretending I was jerking off over Judd Nelson rather than Molly Ringwald.’

‘So you came out, again.’ Katie laughed.

‘Broke Mom’s heart. Made slightly better by the fact that the next girl I dated was a Chinese punk rocker. Disappointed her all over again when I married Eugenie, of course.’

‘She didn’t like her?’

‘She didn’t know her. She didn’t like the idea of her, I think.’

‘That’s sad. I love the idea of her. I wish I met her.’

‘Me too,’ Adam said. It was just a reflex.

10.

While Adam slept, Katie decided to shave her head. First, she hacked at it with kitchen scissors, then trimmed it close with nail scissors. She lathered her head with soap and began to scrape a razor over it, but the blade kept getting stuck. At one point she pressed too hard and blood dribbled into her ear. She balanced a hand mirror on the toilet cistern and twisted so the back of her head was reflected in the medicine cabinet, but when she swivelled she lost sight of the mirror. She tried to do without the reflection but nicked herself again, and swore loudly, kicking the wall until she remembered this was supposed to be a surprise and so she should take care not to wake Adam until she was done. ‘Fuckity, fuck, fuck fuck,’ she whispered, pressing wadded toilet paper to the back of her head. ‘Fuck, diddly, fuck sticks.’

‘Are you all right in there?’ It was Graeme. ‘I heard banging. Are you hurt?’

She opened the door, pulled him in, and shut it again. ‘Sshh! Adam’s sleeping.’

He looked down at his blue-striped pyjamas. ‘So was I.’

‘Sorry! I just –’ She bent to show him the back of her head. ‘I cut myself.’

‘Yes.’ He took the wadded paper away. ‘Do you mind if I . . . ?’ He pointed between the sink and the back of her head.

‘Okay.’ Katie realised as she said it that she didn’t really know what it was he was asking and she was consenting to. She remembered feeling afraid of him that night in front of the TV, but couldn’t remember why.

Graeme took a silver tin from the shelf over the sink and pulled out a cluster of multi-coloured cotton balls. He wet several under the cold tap and dabbed at the cuts. Katie winced, more for effect than out of real pain.

‘Okay.’ Graeme tossed the cotton balls in the bin. ‘Bleeding’s stopped. I think you’ll survive.’

Katie looked in the mirror. ‘I look like that little swan. You know, in that story. I look like the swan before he knew he was a swan, when he thought he was a duck and all the other cuter ducklings were mean to him. That’s me.’

‘If I remember correctly, the ugly duckling had “feathers all ruffled and brown”. You have no feathers at all. Just a few little tufts. More like a plucked chicken than a baby swan, I think.’

Katie punched him on the arm. ‘That was mean. But I’ll let you make it up to me.’

‘How kind of you. What can I do?’

She pointed at her head, then at the razor on the sink. ‘Fix it.’

Graeme hesitated. Katie hadn’t considered until now how gross it would be to pick up something covered in someone else’s blood. Plus dangerous. Even she couldn’t be sure she wasn’t infected with something. She was about to reach around him and push the nasty thing into the bin when he picked it up and held it to the light, turning it around. ‘Skin stuck in this one,’ he said. He tossed it in the bin and then washed his hands. If Katie were him she would be scrubbing the skin with a nail brush and soaking her hands in Dettol. But he just soaped and rinsed for a few seconds, then grabbed the hand towel and, still drying, opened the door. ‘Wait here.’

She sat on the toilet, facing the mirror. She had never noticed how small her ears were. They were like dried apricots. Her nose was small, too. All her features were. She looked like a baby pig. She opened her eyes as wide as they would go but that only made her look murderous.

Graeme came back carrying an electric shaver. ‘Okay. Sit still now.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Katie made herself stiff. She was sick of her own face and so she watched him in the mirror as he worked. He had almost as little hair as she did, just a few light brown patches over his ears. Gran said he was a lawyer but he looked more like a gardener. The skin on the back of his hands and face had that mottled look that pale men get after years spent outdoors, and although he was skinny, the muscles in his forearms rippled as he manoeuvred the shaver. His fingertips, when he pressed against her skull and pulled the skin taut, were soft and cool.

‘Right. You’re ready for . . . well, you’re done, anyway.’

‘Think Adam will like it?’

Graeme met her eyes in the mirror, then looked away. ‘This is for him?’

‘Yeah.’ There was an almost empty bottle of baby oil beside the sink. She poured some on her hands and rubbed them together to warm it. ‘He told me the girls he used to go out with – before he got married – those girls had shaved heads. Some of them, anyway. So I thought . . . He’ll probably laugh, but that’s okay. It’s nice for him to have something to laugh at, I think. And if he reckons it’s, you know, sexy or whatever, then that’s good, too.’

Graeme began cleaning his shaver with a small brush. ‘I didn’t know he was married.’

‘No, no. She died. It’s why he’s . . . well, the way he is.’ Katie rubbed oil into her scalp. It stung a bit where she’d cut herself. ‘God, his wife’s dead and I shave my head. Real helpful, Katie. Jesus.’

‘You know in many cultures it’s common for people to change their appearance when someone dies. Women wear black. Men grow their beards. Some cut their hair. It’s a way to show that things have changed.’

‘I like that idea. It makes sense. But it doesn’t apply.’ Katie wiped her oily hands on the front of her T-shirt. ‘Adam’s the one in mourning and this was just a whim. I do stuff like this all the time. It doesn’t ever mean anything. I’m not that deep, if you want to know the truth.’

‘Well,’ Graeme said. ‘I better get back to bed. I need to leave for work in a couple of hours.’

‘We haven’t had a chance to get to know each other properly, have we? You’re a lawyer, right? Must be so interesting.’

‘No, actually. It’s very dull.’

‘I bet it isn’t. Most people’s jobs are fascinating if you really get into the detail of it. Gran works in a tollbooth, and you wouldn’t believe the stuff she sees. The things people do and wear in the privacy of their cars not thinking some old lady in a tollbooth is going to be able to look right down and see! And then tell everyone and his dog, of course. I reckon a lawyer is like a tollbooth attendant, because people do all this weird embarrassing stuff not thinking anyone will ever know, but then suddenly something happens and there’s a lawyer looking right inside of what they thought was a private place. Man, you must have some stories. Tomorrow when you get home you can tell me some. Don’t worry – I’ll keep it confidential. Maybe I’ll make dinner or something.’ She touched her head. ‘To thank you.’

He smiled. ‘Goodnight, Katie.’

‘Goodnight.’ She kissed his cheek. He flinched as though stung. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Sorry, I just . . .’

He smiled again, but it was a funny kind of smile. It reminded her of the smile her mother gave when she was telling her she’d be living with her grandmother for just a little while, until we’re better settled.

‘Sorry,’ she said again, but he was gone.

Katie sat in front of the muted TV and smoked. There were infomercials on all three commercial channels and soccer on SBS. She didn’t try the ABC because all it ever showed was news and documentaries about Hitler or brain cancer. She settled on a skincare infomercial because the presenter on the soft rock one looked like he was about to rip open the last three buttons of his shirt and growl (who wants to see that at three in the morning?) and the presenter on the Pilates one looked like a newborn foal. Every time she bent backwards Katie felt her bones snap.

She liked the presenter in the skincare infomercial. She had bouncy auburn hair and large white teeth and her cheeks were rosy. She was talking to a bunch of teenagers, who were nodding seriously, then smiling, then nodding again. If she had turned the sound up she knew she would hear about cleanser and toner, so she left it muted and imagined the rosy-cheeked girl was giving the teenagers advice about life. Be brave, she was saying, be wild. Pretend you’re a bear or a Tasmanian devil. Roll in the mud and dig up food with your hands. Climb trees and throw rocks and fight anyone who tries to take what’s yours. Forage and scavenge and scream. The girls nod and smile. One leans forward and asks a question. The presenter touches her face and replies, My rosy cheeks? A result of drinking the blood of cosmetic peddlers. How do I keep my teeth so strong and white? I grind the bones of bullies and wowsers and then polish with vodka.

Katie remembered that another girl used to do these. Or maybe it was a different skincare range? Anyway, it was an American singer with long blonde hair and a Southern accent and she used to say how her skin was real bad until she tried this product and now look how purty she was. And she was, Katie thought, even after she shaved off all her hair. She’d been on the cover of all the magazines and they wrote like it was some big tragedy but Katie had thought yes. Like the girl was finally saying fuck you to the people who needed her to be pretty so she could sell their anti-acne crap.

She had never considered that the singer may have shaved her head because she was sick like the magazines said. It had seemed such a strong and powerful thing to do. But Graeme had made her wonder about shaved heads and the reasons behind them. She ran her hand over her own baldness. She had done things before, thinking it was for one reason and then found out later it was for another altogether. But she felt happy without hair. She wished the bald singer was talking to those teenagers instead of the rosy-cheeked girl. She was sure the bald singer would say the things Katie imagined and she would mean them.

11.

Adam dreamt he was sitting on Eugenie’s back, pressing her face into a puddle of mud. They were in the street outside their old apartment building and the neighbour’s kids were peeking through the curtains, giggling. Eugenie did not struggle and Adam held her there for a long time. When he stood up she stayed where she was and he felt impatient and frustrated. He kicked her in the ribs and walked away.

He ran the dream over in his mind, trying to recapture the feeling of Eugenie’s head under his hands, the look of her freckled shoulder blades flaring like wings. He was disappointed to not have dreamt of her face or voice and wondered when he’d see her eyes or hear her laugh again.

It was several moments before he noticed the shiny skull on the pillow beside him. ‘Katie, what did you do?’ She rolled over, smiled, snuggled into his chest. ‘You cut yourself.’ He fingered the small scabs: one near her left ear, several above the wrinkle where her skull fused with her neck. ‘When did this happen?’

‘While you were asleep.’

‘You never sleep. Are you a vampire, or what?’

‘I was sleeping just now,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think you’re mad,’ he said, and kissed her on the forehead so she wouldn’t know how ugly he found her. She sighed and a sickly familiar sense of protectiveness surged through him. It was this feeling that had made the years of casual sex before Eugenie so unpleasant. He’d see a former one-night stand at a club or on the street and he’d remember unevenly sized breasts or a pimply back and he’d know that other people had seen those flaws and judged them. He felt sure only he could see the beauty in those bodies. He felt sure he had let his lovers down by allowing them to expose themselves to the scorn and derision of others. He’d tried to explain this to his mom once and she had called him egomaniacal. He still didn’t know if that was true or whether he had just explained himself badly.

He had sworn again last night that he would end this, but now pity kept him lying still as Katie kissed and rubbed him. She worked until he was hard and then climbed on top, all without him moving or making a sound. It was as though he was her job. With his eyes closed and his hands behind his head he tried to imagine the light, jerky girl on top of him was his dead wife. His stomach seized up with panic.

‘Hey, come down here.’ He eased her onto her side and entered her from behind. He held on to her bony hips and kept his eyes on the back of her head. ‘Katie, Katie, Katie,’ he said. He concentrated on the flat sound of her moans, reached around to grasp her small, high breasts, said her name over and over.

It was no good.

He rolled over on top, pulled her up to her knees and pushed the top half of her body into the mattress. He closed his eyes, imagined the feeling of his hips slapping Eugenie’s arse, sensing the movement of her breasts, her nipples chafing against the bed sheets. He gripped the bed board with both hands, pushing deep inside, his eyes still closed so he could see the way her soft blonde hair was tangled about her face.

Katie moaned and said his name.

‘Sshh,’ he said, and pushed his fingers into her mouth. She sucked on them and he thought about the first time Eugenie let him kiss her properly, the way her mouth had frozen when he slipped his tongue between her lips and then she all at once opened up and kissed him back and how fast her tongue moved and the way she moved her hips into him when they kissed and the colour in her cheeks and chest when she was excited and how good it was to feel her climax while his tongue and fingers were up inside her.

When he came, Katie bit down on his fingers. Before he’d even pulled his hand all the way free she said, ‘I love you so fucking much.’

The tenant was in the kitchen, gazing out the window, sipping from a novelty Christmas mug. He turned and smiled when the pair entered. ‘Ah, the swan is up early today.’

‘I’m a swan now?’ Katie jabbed Graeme in the arm. ‘Last night I was a plucked chicken.’

Adam felt disoriented, unsure as to why he was standing in his underwear in a sea-green kitchen in Sydney watching a middle-aged man and a bald-headed girl tease each other. He fought the urge to back out of the room, to leave these strangers to their morning intimacies.

Graeme rinsed his mug and placed it on the draining tray. ‘I’m off,’ he said.

‘Righto. What time can I expect you home?’

‘Er, six or thereabouts. Is there something . . . ?’

‘I’m cooking you dinner, remember?’

‘Right, yes.’ Graeme glanced at Adam. ‘See you then.’

Adam waited until he heard the front door click closed. ‘What was that all about?’

‘What was what all about?’ She spooned Nescafé into the freshly washed mug Graeme had left behind and took a second mug from the overhead cupboard.

‘All that chicken and swan stuff,’ Adam said.

‘He helped me last night. With my head.’

‘He didn’t do a very good job. You’re cut all over.’

‘I cut myself. Don’t blame him.’ Katie handed him one of the mugs; he set it down on the table without looking at it.

‘I didn’t think you knew him that well.’ Adam walked back a few steps to escape the Nescafé steam. ‘Well enough to trust with a razor to your head, I mean. In the middle of the night and all.’

‘Are you jealous?’

‘Because he shaved your head? Ah, no.’

Katie danced over to him and wiggled her hips. ‘What then? You’re grumpy!’

‘I’m not. I just don’t think it’s a good idea to let a strange old man cut you.’

‘Who should I let cut me, Adam?’ He pushed her away. She stepped in front of him. ‘You? Because if that’s what you want I’m happy to oblige. Come on, cut me, Adam. I’ll get the razor.’

‘You’re insane.’

‘Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. Why do you keep saying that? It’s like your only response. Be original!’

‘Fine. You’re a crazy bitch.’

She swung out and caught him on the nose with her closed fist. Before he could recover and block her she reared up and head-butted his chest. He fell to the floor and she was on him, pounding his face with rigid little hands. ‘Yeah!’ she hollered. ‘Crazy, that’s me. I’m the crazy bitch. How crazy is this, huh? Insane, right? I’m fucking insane.’

He grabbed both her wrists and threw her off. She skidded on her back a few feet then leapt up and ran from the kitchen. Adam lay still, breathing hard. ‘Katie,’ he said, but not loud. ‘Insane bitch,’ he said, louder.

Rage throbbed through his body, hotter and more insistent than lust. He sat up and pounded the floor with both fists, then stood and kicked a chair, which slid harmlessly across the floor. He felt the muscles in his legs would break through the skin if he didn’t kick and kick; kick something hard – a thick glass pane, a wooden plank, a skull. He stalked to his bedroom and threw on a shirt and a pair of sneakers. He could hear Katie sobbing through the wall. He kicked it hard.

Out on the street, he walked in the direction of the city. Anger propelled him past the bus stop and then past one, two, three pubs and a backpacker hostel. He could not stop or slow or even shout. He avoided people walking ahead by taking the far edge of the sidewalk, dropping down into the gutter now and again, moving towards the oncoming traffic. Stepping back onto the sidewalk when a truck or bus got close.

At Railway Square the foot traffic thickened and he was forced to slow his pace. He heaved air into his lungs and a stitch pricked his right side. He doubled over, but kept walking. He noticed he was soaked through with sweat. When the stitch passed, he straightened and walked as fast as he could, glad that anyone who met his eye looked away quickly and got out of his way.

Adam walked through Chinatown and into the CBD, past the Town Hall and Queen Victoria Building, the sidewalk slanting ever slightly downhill, past office blocks and stores selling fluffy koalas and green and gold baseball caps, more offices and pubs and then the high-end stores and expensive hotels, on past Circular Quay and then into the Rocks and he remembered this from his former life, remembered walking this cobbled path late at night, walking up onto the grassy hill at its end, gazing out at the black water and the Opera House and then lying on the grass and looking up at the famous bridge and she was there with him, so proud of the damn city you’d have thought she built it herself.

He collapsed onto the grass and sucked air into his lungs. A light breeze kicked off the water and over his burning skin. As he watched the water, a Japanese bride in an enormous white puff of a dress floated past on board a candy pink barge. Just before she floated from view, a man in a tuxedo appeared behind her and covered her eyes with his hands.

Nothing has changed. The thought hit him like a stroke. He’d chosen a course that took him far from all that he’d been raised to follow, and then life – or death, actually – had spun him around and dumped him right back where he was before. It was as though the whole thing, from the first smile to the garden wedding to the hospice, was another of his extended vacations and now he was back to his real life, ready to drift on to whatever came next.

The rage surged, filling his belly and chest. It was so unfair. When you take a stand, when you make a conscious, committed, passionate choice, then you should have to live with it. You should be allowed to live with it. Forever.

Forever was the point, wasn’t it? That’s why you got married or, as in the case of almost everyone he knew, that was why you didn’t. In his childhood home, marriage was considered to be akin to slavery or prostitution, but that belief did not hold up past his mid-teens. He understood that the oppression his mother and her friends described was real, but not for them or for any woman he had ever met. Their idea of marriage was as hyperbolic and inane as that of the great American novelists whose wives were always shrews with ever-expanding arses and ever-shortening apron-strings drawing them away from life, trapping them in the small and domestic. Adam saw marriage as something entirely changed. Something unnecessary, but harmless.

As for love, he hoped to find a woman who he wanted to hang out with after sex. Someone who, after the kissing and caressing and an orgasm or two, would have something to say that interested him. He thought this was what people meant by love: good conversation with someone you liked to fuck.

But then, Eugenie. Almost immediately he understood that everything he’d ever thought about love was rubbish. His view of marriage as unnecessary was strengthened; nothing external to the two of them could make the slightest difference. Except, Eugenie cared so much about being married that rejection of the institution would have constituted a rejection of her. And so he became a husband and then, in time, the unimagined widower.

The thought of being identified in this way was comforting. He saw the years unfurling ahead of him, and he was always married to her. Not unchanged then, not entirely.

He stood and felt, for the first time in months, ravenously hungry. He hadn’t grabbed his wallet when he fled the flat so he walked back through the Rocks and turned left past Circular Quay train station to the tourist strip he remembered from his last visit. There, past the postcard booths and boomerang vendors were the golden arches. He’d learnt as a young backpacker that he could get by in any city in the world without a penny as long as there were dumpsters and McDonald’s.

Inside, he spotted a vacant booth which had not yet been cleared. He sat, and picked up the empty coffee cup, holding it close to his face as though about to take a sip. The discarded newspaper in front of him shouted about dead Palestinian children. Adam flipped the pages, keeping an eye on the counter. When all the servers were busy, he sidled up and filled the cup with hot coffee from the refill station.

As he headed back to his table, a toddler threw herself in front of him, kicking her legs and screaming. The mother, with barely a sigh, hauled the child onto her shoulder and trudged out of the restaurant. The kid had left behind three chicken nuggets and half a serve of fries. Adam scooped them up.

He thought about his friend James who was going to be a pilot but who got hooked on crack a month before he graduated from high school. Within weeks he went from being the smartest, most driven guy Adam knew to being a shuddering mess who’d steal your wallet even as he begged you to give him a cigarette. He spent most of his days harassing the tourists who took a wrong turn and found themselves in the Tenderloin, and most of his nights blowing slightly less messed-up crack-heads for a share of their stuff.

Adam had never been able to understand what had happened to James. He always assumed there was some trauma in his past, something that ate away at him and caused his eventual downfall. It just wasn’t possible, Adam had thought, for a person’s entire sense of self to disintegrate in just four weeks.

Now he understood that it takes far less than that. It takes an instant. One moment in time, during which you wonder what the point of it all is, and allow despair to take control, and that’s it. You lose the ability to imagine the future and if you can’t imagine the future then there’s no harm in anything.

The cold chicken and hot coffee calmed him. He would find a washroom, clean up as best he could. When he got back, Katie would be sober since there was no booze left in the house and she was out of money. He would talk to her, tell her he appreciated how good she’d been to him but he needed to get his act together. He would sleep in his own room tonight. He would lock the door and not come out until morning. He would spend the time planning the next day, and the next day he would spend preparing for the one after that.

Katie heard the front door slam. She held her breath and listened to the apartment. Adam was gone. She got up from her bed, sat at the dresser and stared at herself in the mirror. She grabbed her cigarette lighter and held it on until the safety override kicked in and the flame flickered out. Fast, before the metal cooled, she pressed it to her left cheekbone. Her hand shook; she held firm. She counted to sixty then dropped the lighter. Tears spilled down her face, stinging the fresh welt. She flicked the lighter on again and repeated the process on her right side. Her resolve failed before the sixty seconds were up, but it was enough. The skin puckered and shone.

Her face looked almost right. Lumpy, scabby skull, branded cheeks, swollen eyes. The forehead, smooth and pale, didn’t belong. Her hands were shaking. She couldn’t hold the lighter catch down. She tried half-a-dozen times, then drove the warmed metal into her forehead again and again until the skin broke. She pressed her hand to the bloody spot and breathed in out in out in out.

She was aware of her slowing pulse, her clearing head. Aware that her brain was processing what had happened, being reasonable, speaking to her through her nerve endings saying, you’re out-of-control you burnt your face it hurts and what have you achieved only hurt and people will ask what happened and you will tell the truth or you will lie and it will still hurt and they’ll still think you’re crazy except look how rational you are not crazy at all but acting out to get your own way get rid of the man get rid of the people who expect you to work and clean up after yourself and act like an adult it hurts goddamn you – Katie told her brain to shut the fuck up.

She rose shakily and dug the portable stereo out from underneath a pile of clothes in the corner of her room. She found a Sonic Youth CD in the jumble on her dresser. She turned the volume up all the way, until the air was as jagged as her insides.

She rummaged through her drawers and found a tube of anaesthetic cream that, according to the label, had been prescribed for her in December last year. She picked the crust from the lid and smeared the cream over her burns then danced to the kitchen and washed down three aspirins with a mug of water.

The music and the aspirin and cream worked enough to allow her to dab foundation over the burns without too much pain. She wrote a list and mentally mapped out her path. She remembered to put on running shoes and clothes from the dirty laundry basket and to take a green canvas shopping bag. She strode out into the bright and exciting morning and felt organised and purposeful and sane.

12.

A madman haunted Harris Street. He had thick white hair and a matching handlebar moustache. He usually wore a grey three-piece suit, but Graeme had also seen him dressed in beige slacks and a navy blazer. The madman waited in bus shelters and when someone drew level he yelled and swung his walking stick out in front, barely missing the skull or arm or pram of the passer-by. Sometimes he took up a post at the pedestrian crossing near the TAFE and shook his stick at the passing cars, shouting all the while. Graeme had passed him countless times over the past few years, but had never been able to make out the man’s words.

Today, when Graeme saw the madman hovering at the bus shelter at the top of the street, it struck him as intolerable. He approached with a smile on his face and hands raised in surrender. ‘Oi!’ he said. ‘Can I speak to you?’

The madman sucked in his breath and looked around furtively.

‘I heard you calling out, but couldn’t make out what you were saying. I’d like to know what it is.’

‘And why would I tell you?’

‘I don’t know. I’m sorry. Ah, who are you speaking to?’

‘They know.’ The man nodded. ‘They hear me, but they pretend they don’t. Always rushing about. Ungrateful buggers.’

‘Maybe I could –’

‘No! I can’t help you. I’ve got enough to do as it is.’ The man pounded the ground with his stick. ‘Stop bothering me now.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Graeme said, and walked on.

Katie greeted him at the door with a glass of white wine. In the background a girl croaked out ‘King of the Road’ like it was a dirge.

‘Welcome home,’ she said. ‘Dinner will be served in half an hour.’

‘Your face.’ Graeme peered at it.

Blisters on each cheek stretched with the tension of her grin. An oversized sticky plaster on her forehead warned of worse.

‘It’s nothing.’ She forced the wine glass into his free hand. ‘Now, you relax, put your feet up. Leave everything to me.’

Graeme watched as she skipped back to the kitchen. She was wearing a red dress of a style Graeme recognised from his youth, and she had a navy and white polka-dotted apron tied around her waist. The effect when combined with her shaved head and bare feet was comical – as long as you couldn’t see her injured face.

He headed to his room and placed his briefcase on the desk. There were things he needed to do. Reading to get through, decisions to be made.

‘Graaaaeme.’

He carried a clean shirt into the bathroom and wiped his underarms, neck and chest with a washcloth. He put on the clean shirt, placed the dirty one in his laundry bag and then returned to the living room.

The coffee table was set with four white dinner plates, four champagne flutes, silver cutlery, burgundy-coloured candles and matching napkins. A cask of chardonnay sat beside a sparkling clean ashtray. Katie hovered, watching him, so he smiled and took a sip of the wine. It was warm. ‘Looks lovely,’ he said.

Katie beamed. ‘A man deserves to come home to a well-set table and a hot dinner after a hard day at work.’

‘Katie, as nice as this is, it’s not necessary. I usually eat in my room. Catch up on paperwork.’

Her eyes and smile widened. Stretch marks appeared on the sticking plaster on her forehead. ‘Fine, fine. No problem. Don’t feel you need to eat out here on my account. It’s your home, too. Whatever you like. I’ll just serve up and if you want to eat it in your room, or not at all, that’s okay.’

‘No, of course I want to eat dinner with you. I was only saying you needn’t make a fuss for me. I’m not used to it.’

‘Well, get used to it, Mister.’

She bustled off to the kitchen, humming a different tune to that coming from the stereo. The room smelt sweet, like freshly cut apples. He noticed that the magazines had been stacked in three neat piles and placed on the floor under the lamp table. The carpet bore faint track marks from a vacuum cleaner.

Katie returned holding a large platter over her head. ‘Ta da! Hope you like steak and kidney pie?’

‘Love it.’

She served them each a slice with a scoop of grey mashed potato. Graeme had to bend at the waist and slump his shoulders to reach the low table. After an awkward minute of trying to cut a bite-sized chunk from the pie, he gave up and raised the entire slice to his mouth.

It was rubbery. It was also filled with curried chicken. He chewed as normally as he could, aware that Katie was watching him with wide, tired eyes. ‘Mmm,’ he said, cringing at the way it came out, like a parent pretending to enjoy a toddler’s mudpie. He risked a spoonful of potato. It was lukewarm and lumpy. He swallowed without chewing and smiled at her rather than risk another patronising comment.

‘More?’ she offered, when he had managed to get down half his serve. She had eaten only a smidgen of potato herself. Her wine glass was empty.

‘Not yet. Um, will Adam be joining us?’

She filled her glass and topped up his. ‘Who the hell knows.’

‘Maybe we should save some for him?’

Katie pushed her plate to the far end of the table. She dug around in the folds of her skirt and produced a cigarette. ‘If you want.’

The croaky-voiced girl on the CD had switched to punk and it took Graeme a moment to identify ‘Tears on my Pillow’.

‘You must enjoy living here,’ he said, too loudly. ‘So close to everything.’

‘It’s okay. Gran lets me stay free, so I’m not complaining.’

‘That’s generous of her.’

‘She feels responsible for me, I guess.’

Graeme nudged his plate away. ‘Why is that?’

‘Because her daughter ditched me when I was thirteen.’

‘Your mother?’

‘If you want to call her that. I can count on two fingers the number of times she made even the slightest effort to be worthy of the name.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘It’s not like she was abusive or anything. She was always just trying to fix me.’

‘Fix you how?’

‘Oh, you know, I didn’t talk much, stayed away from people as much as I could. I wasn’t, like, bookish or anything – I just didn’t get other people. I didn’t know how to talk to them; I’d always say something and freak them out. My Year Six teacher told my mum I had a negative effect on my classmates and she decided it was her fault. Reckoned she’d stuffed everything up, didn’t know what she was doing and how could she be expected to since she was only sixteen when she had me. Gran got really pissed when she said that, because she was only seventeen when she had Mum. Anyway, I guess Mum thought that she could make up for it by giving me extra attention, coaching me and stuff before I started high school. It didn’t work, though. I think it made me worse.’

‘What do you mean? How was it supposed to work?’

Katie picked up her fork and stirred the potato on her plate. ‘I had this notebook and I wrote down all the things Mum told me. “Show an interest in other people.” “Be generous with compliments.” “Always have three topics of conversation prepared in case of silence.” But I don’t know how to ask questions without being pushy or when to stop with the compliments. I came across as insincere or inappropriate or just bloody insane. I went from being a silent freak to a chattering one. And you know, even though I can, like, analyse the way I was as a kid, I’m still that way. I see it but I can’t stop it.’

You’re still a kid, Graeme was going to say. It’s normal at your age, the doubt, the self-consciousness. But she tilted her head and the light caught the shiny blister on her cheekbone and his words fell away. ‘Still what way, Katie?’

She stuck out her tongue and panted. ‘Like a puppy. I feel myself doing it and I can’t help it. I can’t see until later where the place was that I should’ve stopped. Like last night, I don’t know why I kissed you. I saw straightaway it wasn’t the right thing.’

‘It was fine.’

‘But it wasn’t really, was it?’ She drained her glass. ‘The kiss, this dinner. It’s too much. The thing with Adam . . .’

‘Did Adam hurt you?’

‘Only here.’ She touched her chest, her hand spread wide. ‘Not . . .’ Her hand flickered over her face. ‘He didn’t do this.’

‘How did . . . ?’

‘Cigarette lighter. I don’t know why. He walked out of here and I felt so fucking angry. See, I go too far and I know right away when I have and then it’s just . . .’ She closed her eyes; put her head back on the couch. ‘It’s embarrassing.’

‘Katie? I wonder . . . Have you considered seeing a doctor? About this, hurting yourself?’

She smiled sadly. ‘Yeah, yeah, I am. Don’t worry.’

The front door opened and Adam walked in. His clothes and face were covered in grey powder.

‘What happened to you?’ Katie asked, standing up.

‘A job.’ Adam walked up to Katie until their bodies were almost touching. ‘What happened to you?’

‘Nothing.’

He touched her cheek with a dusty finger and she flinched. ‘Did you do this to yourself?’

‘Look –’ She pointed at the table. ‘Steak and kidney pie and mashed potatoes. I made it.’

‘You made it? Out of what?’

Katie shrugged, picking up the pie. ‘If you don’t want any.’

‘I want some. Just let me clean up.’

‘He’ll be gone soon,’ Katie said after Adam had left the room. ‘Soon as he’s got enough money he’ll be gone.’

Graeme took the pie from her. ‘I’ll put this in the oven. Heat it up for him.’ When he returned, Adam and Katie were sitting across from each other. Graeme cut a large slice of pie and put it on Adam’s plate and then filled each of their wine glasses.

‘Damn.’ Adam spat half-chewed pie into his hand and poked it with his finger. ‘What the . . .’ He sniffed it before taking another bite. He chewed slowly, exaggeratedly, his eyes widening.

Katie’s hands twisted in her lap.

Adam took another bite, chewed, swallowed, laughed softly, shaking his head. ‘Thank you, Katie, for the very, ah, interesting meal.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You said you’d made steak and kidney pie.’

‘So?’

‘So . . .’ Adam laughed. ‘So, it’s chicken. You’re so out of it you can’t tell bird from cow!’

Katie looked at Graeme. ‘But you didn’t say anything! You sat and ate it and didn’t say a word!’

‘It wasn’t important. You’d gone to so much trouble.’

‘Gone to trouble?’ Adam slapped his thighs. ‘It’s not so hard to sort through a couple of trash cans, right, Katie?’

Katie stood with hands on hips, her flippy dress kicking at an odd angle where she’d been sitting on it. ‘For your information, the pie was still in its cellophane wrapper. It said “Steak and Kidney Pie – Baked Fresh”. I have the wrapper. I can show you if you don’t believe me.’

‘Maybe,’ Graeme said, stepping between the two. ‘Maybe, someone made a mistake in the packaging and that’s why it was discarded?’

Katie’s hand shot out and grabbed his. ‘Yes! That’s what happened. Ha!’

‘You still served your friend here a dumpster dinner.’

‘Why are you being like this? I tried to do something nice.’

‘Oh, you did. Look how nice.’ He gestured to the table, stopped suddenly and acted out counting the plates. ‘Oh, wait? Is someone else coming? Is this meant to be a double date?’

Katie turned to Graeme. ‘I thought it looked better with four. It looked nicer. You know?’

‘Yes. It looks neater,’ he told her. ‘Two each side.’

She smiled at him and touched his arm.

‘If you two want to be alone . . .’

‘Thanks for dinner,’ Graeme said, smiling. ‘I’m going to turn in.’

‘No!’ Adam said. ‘Come on, man. Stay, drink, eat some more garbage.’

‘Yes,’ Katie said. ‘Stay. I’m going to bed. Goodnight, Graeme.’ She turned and stalked down the hall.

Adam drank from his glass. ‘Not bad for something out of a box. Thanks, man.’

‘I didn’t buy it. She did.’

‘She doesn’t have a cent. Jesus, you’d think if she was going to steal she could have taken some decent food while she was at it.’

‘She did go to some effort.’

‘The effort wasn’t for me, dude.’

‘Of course it was. The hair, the food, the dress. It’s all for you. I just happened to walk in to the middle of this little drama and so she gave me a part. She’ll be in there now, waiting for you to make up.’

Graeme carried Adam’s empty plate into the kitchen along with the remaining cutlery and glasses. When he came back to the living room, Adam was staring straight ahead, biting his lip. Graeme took the ashtray, emptied it into the kitchen bin, rinsed and dried it and placed it back on the coffee table.

‘I don’t – I don’t know what’s going on with her, with me,’ Adam said. ‘She made me so angry today. I felt like I could . . . I can’t even remember what started it.’

‘Maybe,’ Graeme said, ‘maybe your anger isn’t really to do with her.’

‘So Katie told you . . . of course she did. Jesus. One of the stages of grief, right? Yeah, could be, could be. I don’t know. It feels like it’s Katie, though. She’s just so –’ He clenched his fists. ‘I don’t know. I need to get out of here.’

‘You have work now,’ Graeme reminded him. ‘You’ll be able to go home soon.’

Adam shook his head. ‘I had work. I had ten hours of shifting bricks and then I had fifty bucks put in my hand. Dodgy asshole.’

‘You can report him. There are laws.’

‘Yeah and I’m the one breaking them. I don’t have a work visa. I’m not even supposed to be in the country. I never sorted all that stuff out. I never thought I’d be here so long. I just . . . I stopped thinking about anything else the minute I found out my life had cancer.’

The slip up was so obvious, so bluntly Freudian, that Graeme wondered for a moment if it had been intentional, a maudlin play on words.

But then Adam said, ‘She was the one who organised everything for our trip here. She – we – didn’t think of me here without her. We should have left months ago.’

‘As it happens, I know something about this immigration stuff. You’re an overstayer, which is bad, but not as bad as if you’d never had legal entry in the first place. You can apply for a bridging visa, which would give you time to get yourself organised legally. That’s a little risky, though, since you’ve overstayed by more than a month they could decide to repatriate you on the spot. Possibly put you in immigration detention until they can be bothered flying you out. Plus you’ll be slapped with an exclusion order.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It means you won’t be allowed back in for at least three years. And even then only after you’ve repaid the government for your detention and repatriation.’

Adam chewed his lip. ‘I can’t risk that. Eugenie is . . . I used to think people who visited cemeteries, took flowers, were ridiculous . . . But now . . . Even though I know it’s just a hunk of stone, a patch of grass . . .’

‘Look, I can lend you the money to get home. The exclusion order might still be imposed but at least you won’t have a debt to the government.’

‘I’d have a debt to you.’

‘There’d be no rush.’

‘No, no, there’s no way, man. Thanks, but no. I’ll figure it out.’

‘Think about it. You could be home by the weekend.’

Adam held up two hands and cringed at the floor and Graeme saw, for an instant, a refugee, yearning for a place that no longer exists.

‘Hey, now.’ Adam chuckled. ‘You’re pretty keen to get me out of the country. You sure there’s nothing brewing between you and Katie?’

‘If I was twenty years younger . . .’

Adam was quiet a while. ‘Her face,’ he said, touching his own. ‘Did she do that because of me?’

‘The fight probably sparked it, but I think . . . she’s probably got a history of this kind of thing.’

‘Shit. Yeah, you know, when I think about it . . . Down at the pub these friends of hers told me that she’d . . .’ Adam closed his eyes. ‘And she has these lines on her thighs, real straight. Motorbike accident, she said. But her face. That’s so extreme.’

‘It’s obviously important to her that others see how much pain she’s in.’

Adam rubbed his face with both hands. ‘Shit. I never would’ve . . . Shit. I suppose I should go talk to her.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Right.’ Adam stood slowly, nodded at Graeme. ‘Night.’

‘Goodnight.’ He washed and dried up the dinner plates and glasses, took the garbage out to the street bin and then swept the kitchen floor.

As he passed Katie’s room on the way to his own he heard her voice. I fucking love you so much. He paused to hear the reply, but none came. There was only the sound of a bed thumping the wall and the girl’s declarations, over and over.

13.

Adam rolled off and fell asleep within seconds of coming. Katie wondered if he even noticed whether she came or not. She lay there for a few minutes, torn between the desire to press against him and finish herself off, and the urge to slap him awake and insist he do it for her. He began to snore.

She got out of bed, pulled on her underpants and one of Adam’s T-shirts. She yawned and, as her skin stretched, the burns on her face smarted. She grabbed the anaesthetic cream and went to the bathroom. ‘Idiot,’ she said to her reflection, dabbing the cream on her forehead and cheeks. No wonder Adam kept his eyes closed while they were screwing. No wonder he turned away and slept the minute it was done.

Back in the hallway, Katie noticed faint light coming from under Graeme’s door. He had shown her kindness and affection tonight and even – maybe she imagined it, but she didn’t think so – recognition. Graeme had looked at her, for a second at least, the way she’d hoped Adam would when he saw what she had done to her face.

‘Graeme? It’s me.’ She knocked once and then pushed the door open.

‘What’s wrong?’ Graeme was sitting at his desk, wearing blue and white striped pyjama pants and a white T-shirt. His arms were folded, covering something.

‘Nothing. I saw your light. Adam’s asleep already and I’m –’ Graeme slid a book off the desktop and into the top drawer. ‘Sorry, I didn’t think you’d be busy. I just barged in.’

‘It’s fine.’ He stood and smiled. ‘Have a seat.’

‘I can’t sit. That’s the problem. Can’t sleep, can’t sit.’ She jogged on the spot, twirled her arms. ‘I feel all tight. My muscles. They’re scrunched up. You know what I’d love? Two big strong men to pick me up, one on each end, and just pull like they were in a tug-of-war. Stretch me right out.’

Graeme sat down on the edge of the bed. He glanced at her bare legs, then away to the floor. ‘Have you taken something tonight, Katie?’

She rose up on her toes, flexed her fingers. ‘Nope. I’m all natural.’

‘I used to use, you know. Speed, mostly, but other stuff, too.’

His tone reminded her of a high school guidance counsellor. ‘I’m not speeding, dude. I just get like this sometimes at night. Especially after . . . well, you know.’ She sprang onto the bed and bounced up and down on the balls of her feet. ‘I did try speed one time, but it made me crazy. I was jumping out of my skin.’ Her left knee knocked his shoulder. ‘So why’d you stop taking it?’

‘I don’t know.’ He inched away from her, moving towards the bedhead. ‘Seemed the thing to do. I took some risks when I was younger and at some point I realised I had survived them all and perhaps better stop pushing my luck.’

‘Can’t imagine you as a risk-taker. No offence. I just mean, you’re so . . .’ She plonked down beside him. The bed springs squealed in protest. ‘You’re a very relaxing person, you know that?’

‘You haven’t stopped moving since you came in here.’

‘Yeah, but imagine what I’d be like if I wasn’t talking to you.’

‘I really can’t.’

Katie slid from the bed and hopped from foot to foot. ‘Don’t you ever get that feeling like you want to go for a run, but not for exercise, just for the hell of it? Just to be moving? I get that a lot this time of night. Like, soon after midnight, everyone else is crashed out and I’m suddenly all peppery.’

‘Do you mean peppy?’

‘Nope. Peppery. Think about it, it’s exactly the right word.’ She spun on her heels and danced to the desk, leaning over and peering at the map hanging on the wall above. She put her right hand on the desk drawer knob but before she could open it she heard the bed springs and Graeme’s feet padding fast across the carpet.

‘Have you travelled much?’ he asked, standing so close she could smell his minty toothpaste.

‘Nah. Up and down the coast a bit, that’s all. I’d like to go to India. That’d be cool.’ She let go of the drawer and squinted at the Atlantic Ocean. She sensed Graeme moving behind her and held her breath.

‘I spent some time working in India,’ he said. ‘Years ago. Different place now. The scenes from Mumbai on the news . . . I didn’t recognise it. Not only that it had become a war zone, but – why do you want to go there?’

Katie traced the outline of the subcontinent with her finger, balancing her weight on one hand. ‘This girl I knew once had been there and she said it was awesome. She said it was like, chaos, just people and cows and chickens and cars and food and streamers and dirt and flowers everywhere. She said you could do anything. Seriously anything. Like sprint to the next corner and then sing “Locomotion” or get so drunk you fall asleep in the middle of a road or wear so many ribbons in your hair your neck nearly breaks. Just anything at all and people just keep moving around you. Nobody stops and asks if you’re okay, ever.’

‘Your friend may have –’

‘She wasn’t my friend. I just knew her from around. She probably made it all up.’ Katie straightened, stepped back and turned so quickly she was almost kissing Graeme’s chin. ‘You have a great voice, you know. I guess you get told that heaps.’

Graeme took a step backwards, and cleared his throat. ‘Would you believe never?’

‘Don’t believe it. It’s one of the best voices I’ve ever heard. Deep and smooth but not too loud.’ She moved towards him. He looked her right in the eye and with the tiniest of movements shook his head. Katie wanted to hug him and thank him, but instead she sank into the desk chair and stretched her legs out in front. ‘God, I can’t listen to people with loud voices. I knew this bloke once and his voice was like BOOM, you know? It was like being lectured by God! Plus he was super tall. Give you a sore neck and a headache. I had to stop seeing him.’

‘I’m sorry for him.’

Katie smiled. ‘I’ll leave you alone,’ she said, standing up. ‘You have work tomorrow.’ She darted forward and kissed his cheek. ‘Sorry, can’t help myself. Night, Graeme.’

The next morning, after she heard Graeme leave for work, Katie went straight to his room and opened the desk drawer. It was empty. She checked the wardrobe and under the bed and behind the bookshelf. She lay down and then, remembering the diary she’d kept when she was ten, reached under his pillow. There it was. She knew, as she rolled onto her stomach, that Graeme wanted her to read it. He knew she saw him with it last night and knew she noticed his anxiety, and yet he’d left it practically out in the open. He’d left it because there were things he wanted her to know, but he was too humble or shy or awkward to sit her down and tell her straight.

The cover was black leather. A white sticky label, brown around the edges said Field Notes: 1981, 2 of 3. Katie read the first page: it was a list of unfamiliar words with dates and times next to each one. The page had been crossed through with a single red diagonal line. A few entries on the next page, which had also been crossed with a red line, made a little more sense: Safe house 12miles east C/ville and Med supplies from Charles Fukaar and 12/3 Meeting with elder council agreed on terms for clinic, see file.

Katie flicked through the diary; every page was filled with black scrawl and most pages had been run through with a single red line. A few bore a large cross. She stopped at one of these and read:

TL village, third house, girls clean, over 16.

NT village, green door, ‘Sally’

CL township, 12 Hende, clean + powder & leaf

She flicked through thirty or so pages with single or double red lines and stopped when she came to an uncrossed section.

19/4 Incident in TL village. Girl of ten or eleven managed to get into the car, hiding herself under tarp. Discovered her when arrived at camp base, 3 hrs out of village limits. Too dark to turn back, risk of bandits & running off road. Fed & put her to sleep in camp bed. I slept in car. In morning she cried & begged to stay with me. No English, but I got the idea she was promised in marriage to a man she was afraid of. Followed protocol on interaction with locals & returned her to village at daybreak.

Postscript: 5/10 Stationed in GR, visit from Mick J, who’s come from TL. Told of a young girl who drowned herself after being gang raped by some local men. Apparently the girl’s prospective husband had rejected her and her family had thrown her on to the street because she had spent a night with a white man who had discarded her after only one use.

Then in red pen: Relevant. File under child welfare, dealing with local customs

Depersonalise. Rewrite in third person? Anonymous report from rookie field officer? Yes.

Katie closed the diary and put it back under his pillow.

She wandered back to her room. Adam was still sleeping. She curled into a ball behind him, holding her muscles as tightly as she could, and sobbed noiselessly until she, too, fell asleep.

She went to Graeme’s room again that night. This time she knocked and waited for his ‘Come in’. He was sitting at his desk, a red ballpoint pen in his hand. The desk was clear.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Feeling peppery again?’

‘No, not tonight.’ Katie sat on the edge of his bed. ‘What kind of lawyer are you?’

Graeme swung the chair around so he was facing her. ‘Hmm?’

‘Do you defend murderers or do tax stuff or what?’

‘Actually . . .’ He rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘Can you keep a secret?’

‘Jesus. You lied about having a job, too? Gran’s going to have to start asking for paystubs or something.’

‘I do have a job. I lied about . . . I tell people I’m a lawyer because it’s easier. It saves me having to explain . . .’ He sighed, then opened his palms towards her. ‘I’m operations manager of a refugee assistance foundation, and that confused look on your face right now is exactly why I don’t like telling people because then I have to explain and that’s . . .’ He sighed again. ‘Very often asylum seekers and refugees arrive here with nothing and with little idea of how to navigate the legal, medical and social service systems. We have people who meet with new arrivals, find out what they need – lawyer, doctor, trauma counselling, English lessons, housing, whatever – and then we try to make sure they get it.’

‘Why wouldn’t you want to tell people that? That’s so wonderful, Graeme.’

‘Again,’ he said, ‘because of that look you have on your face right now. Like I’m a saint. I’m not, Katie, and I’m not just being humble. My staff do all the real work. I just sort of manage their diaries, sign off on their reports and make sure the bills are paid.’

The mention of diaries reminded her of why she’d suspected him. ‘How long have you been doing this?’

‘Five years.’

‘And before?’

‘I was an aid worker. I travelled to war zones and disaster areas and I found out what people needed and then found a way to get it to them. It sounds like what I do here, I suppose but . . . it was very different. I was right there. I was part of it.’

Katie felt tears welling up. ‘You loved it, didn’t you?’

He gave a small shrug. ‘All good things must come to an end.’

‘God, I hate that saying! It doesn’t even mean anything really. I mean, everything must come to an end, good and bad and in between. Why state the obvious as if it’s comforting wisdom or something?’ Her voice broke.

Graeme leant forward in his chair, frowning. ‘Did something happen today, Katie? Did you and Adam have another fight?’

‘No, no.’ She touched the scab on her forehead. ‘But I am worried about him. I don’t think it’s safe to be as sad as he is. I’m not sure a person can keep on living being so sad.’

‘You don’t think he’d . . . do something silly?’

‘Oh, no. I didn’t mean that. God, no, not him.’

Graeme sat back, a hand over his stomach. ‘Oh.’

She pulled her legs up and sat cross-legged. ‘I watch him sleep. Sometimes he actually smiles but mostly he just looks really peaceful. Then I watch him wake and I can see the exact moment when he remembers she’s dead. I see his heart break all over again every day. And then he kind of steels himself –’ she braced her arms against her sides and made her face stern ‘– and goes on with his day but I can still see it, that brand new grief.’

‘His loss is pretty recent . . . Besides, you watch him sleep, you watch him wake, you watch him all the time. Most of us, were we observed so closely, would appear to be burdened with something at least once a day.’

‘He isn’t burdened by anything. That’s the problem.’ The tears prickled her eyes again. ‘He really doesn’t have any reason to wake up each day. That’s what scares me. What if his subconscious or whatever figures it out and holds him in his dreams?’

‘I don’t think that’s possible, Katie.’

‘You hear all the time about people dying of broken hearts.’

‘It’s not meant literally. Listen, if you’re really worried maybe you could suggest grief counselling for him. I know he doesn’t have Medicare, but perhaps we could –’

‘Please.’ Katie climbed off the bed. ‘Grief counselling is such bullshit. If I knew I had to go to one of those dudes I’d tell my subconscious to not wake me up for sure.’ She stretched her arms up to the ceiling.

‘You’ve been to grief counselling?’

‘I’ve been to every kind of counselling. You?’

‘No.’

‘See. You’ve managed okay all these years.’

He smiled. Katie walked across and put her hands on his shoulders. She moved slowly, giving him time to pull away. He didn’t though and she stood on her toes and kissed his bristled cheek. ‘Goodnight,’ she said.

14.

Katie’s grandmother was in the kitchen fixing lunch. Katie said she did this from time to time, particularly when there were new tenants. ‘Says she wants to cook me a Sunday roast, like when I was a kid, but I don’t remember ever having a cooked Sunday lunch as a kid. Sundays were vegemite and lettuce on white bread, like every other day. You know, I’m pretty sure I never ate a roast at all until I moved in here and Gran started needing a reason to crash the place regularly. So stay alert.’ The smell of roasting fat from the kitchen added to the fug of living room air. ‘She’ll start off real casual and friendly, get you talking about your family and where you grew up, and then – bam! – before you know it you’ll be telling her how much you enjoyed doing me in the arse.’

‘I can guarantee you I won’t be telling her that,’ Adam said.

‘You don’t know what she’s like. She has ways of making you talk.’

‘What about the old man? Have you warned him? He could say anything.’

‘He’s not eating with us. He’s got stuff to do, he said.’

Adam leant in close. ‘What does he do in there all the time? He’s so damn secretive.’

‘Leave him alone. He just likes his privacy. Not everybody grew up in a hippy commune examining each others’ stool samples each morning.’

‘I’m going to see if your grandmother would like some help. At least she won’t taunt me about my abusive childhood.’

Within seconds of entering the kitchen, Adam’s shirt was stuck to his back. Mrs Lewis was bent over the stove top, stirring. She was dressed in an orange tank top and jean shorts. Every few seconds she stopped stirring and leant towards the window. There was no breeze at all.

‘Can I help?’

She looked over her shoulder, wiped her forehead with one hand while continuing to stir with the other. ‘All under control in here. You can let Graeme know I’m about to serve up, if you don’t mind.’

‘Katie said he wasn’t –’

‘Katherine!’ Mrs Lewis took the pot off the stove, wiped her forehead with her hand, then her hand with a tea towel. ‘Katherine! In here please!’ She opened the fridge, and grabbed a bottle of VB, which she handed to Adam. ‘There wasn’t a need to dress up, you know,’ she said. ‘We’re very casual around here. Too hot to stand on ceremony.’

‘Yeah, what?’

‘Katherine, Adam tells me Graeme isn’t joining us?’

‘Nah. Busy. Gran, don’t sigh like that. It makes me worry you’re going to faint dead away, expelling so much breath at once.’

‘I bet you didn’t even ask him. People don’t stop wanting to make friends just because they’re over fifty, you know.’

‘I did ask,’ Katie said, but her grandmother had already gone. ‘Poor Graeme. She’s going to make him come out here.’

‘Why not poor Adam? I have to be out here.’

‘Poor Adam. Man, you’re sweating like a pig. Put a singlet on or something.’

Mrs Lewis marched in, Graeme dragging behind her. ‘I told you he’d want lunch.’

‘So, Graeme,’ Mrs Lewis said when they were all seated around the table. ‘How’re you settling in?’

‘Fine. It’s nice to be able to walk to the office, not have to sit in traffic and find a parking space and all that.’

‘I bet. It’s why I like the night shift. Peak hour traffic drives me mad. The other day I had to go into Surry Hills for an appointment. Nine o’clock it was and . . .’

Adam tuned her out as easily as if she were his own mother. He ate slowly, stopping after every few mouthfuls to drink some water and wipe his forehead with a paper napkin. Now and again Katie nudged him and rolled her eyes or grinned.

As Adam was mopping up the remaining gravy with a slice of white bread, he became aware that the conversation had moved on. Mrs Lewis’s voice had become softer, less confident. Adam tuned in just in time to hear Graeme say, ‘No, no, I missed out. Luck of the draw.’

‘That’s all it was, though,’ Mrs Lewis said. ‘Good luck or bad luck in the draw, then good or bad luck over there. Ron said he couldn’t complain about the first bit of bad luck, because compared to some other buggers he saw, he had damn good luck over there.’

‘Luckiest man alive, he always said.’ Katie turned to Adam. ‘He wasn’t really that lucky. Teenage dad and then his daughter a teenage mum. He just used to say it to compliment us. Me and Gran and my mum.’

‘He meant it,’ Mrs Lewis said. ‘’Course he meant it.’

‘Oh, Gran.’ Katie patted her arm.

‘When did –’ Graeme began.

‘Who’s for dessert?’ Mrs Lewis got up from the table.

‘Four years ago,’ Katie said.

A slice of steaming apple pie was placed in front of Adam. He waited for Katie to comment, but she was crouched next to Graeme, whispering in his ear.

‘And how about you, Adam?’ Mrs Lewis asked.

‘How about . . . ?’

‘How’s the shoe business?’

‘Fine, fine.’ He met Graeme’s eyes. ‘Always busy.’

‘Mmm. I bet it’s hard to get enough staff, isn’t it? My friend Bridget works at Myer in town and she says it’s impossible to keep good staff.’

Adam ignored Katie’s under-table shin kicks. ‘Yeah, it’s tough, all right.’

Mrs Lewis spooned custard onto their apple pie. ‘Here’s a thought,’ she said and Katie kicked Adam hard. ‘What if Katherine came and worked with you?’

Kick, kick, kick. ‘It’s not really up to me.’

‘No, but you’d have some influence, surely. You could talk to the manager.’

‘I don’t know. I mean . . .’ Adam looked to Katie for help, but she was digging a hole in her pie. ‘Katie – Katherine, here, I don’t know she’d be right for our store. I mean, I don’t think she even likes shoes.’

‘Ha!’ said Katie.

‘I know she doesn’t present as an ideal shop assistant, but perhaps in a few weeks when her hair’s grown back and those, er, tribal markings have worn off . . .’

‘Gran, I told you, they’re permanent. What would be the point of tribal branding if it wore off in a few weeks?’

Mrs Lewis pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Katherine, you are not an Aborigine.’

‘I’m not? Really, Gran? You’re just telling me this now?’

Gran stuck her tongue out at Katie who winked at her. Adam wondered why no one else seemed bothered by the heat and lack of air. Why did no one suggest a fan or some iced water?

‘What about at your office, Graeme? I don’t suppose you have any positions vacant? Front desk or filing or something? Katherine did a course in word processing and she can type.’

‘She’s sitting right here.’

Graeme smiled. ‘No jobs at the moment, I’m afraid.’

‘Well maybe – if you have time, of course – maybe you could help her put together a resumé. I mean, you’d know better than me what employers are looking for.’

‘Great idea!’ Katie thumped her palms on the tabletop. ‘Let’s start now. Better grab a pen, Graeme, there’s a lot to get down. So, right, education: um, passed all my subjects in Year Ten at Bondi High on only my second try. That’ll impress ’em, right? What else? I’ve got extensive experience in medical administration – filled out lots and lots of forms. That goes for social security, too. I’m an expert on all aspects of applying for the disability pension and unemployment benefits. And what about all the time I’ve spent in court and juvie? We could write experience navigating the juvenile justice system.’

‘All right, Katherine.’

Katie’s face was reddening, she blinked fast. ‘What else? Oh, I know. Drug knowledge. I could write a book on the effects of SSRIs, anti-psychotics, tranquilisers, and especially their interactions with each other and with alcohol.’ She stood up suddenly; her chair skidded back. ‘Alcohol! Make sure you include that, too. I’m a fucking specialist. Oh! Oh! A fucking specialist. Yes, yes. Something else I can do. Wait, I don’t think I need a resumé for that, do I? I could probably just head on down the street and –’

‘Katie,’ Graeme said, softly. He stood and took hold of her upper arm.

She turned to him and smiled brightly. ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Just making a point.’

Mrs Lewis sat very still, sweat dripped from her hairline. ‘Okay, sweetheart. We all get it. You can sit down now.’

‘Can I? I don’t know, Gran.’ Katie was vibrating on the spot, Graeme’s hand still on her arm. ‘I really don’t know if I can.’

Graeme said, ‘Would you like to come for a walk? A wander through Victoria Park?’

‘No.’ Katie held his gaze. ‘Sorry, I’m fine.’ She took a deep breath and sat down. She smiled at each of them.

Mrs Lewis gathered up the plates and cutlery and carried them to the sink. Graeme picked up the water glasses and followed her. As Mrs Lewis scraped plates into the garbage, Graeme said something Adam could not make out.

‘With respect, Graeme,’ she said, plonking the dishes into the sink, ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about. The last thing Katherine needs is another well-meaning stranger trying to help her.’

Katie was smiling brightly but her eyes were wet and wide, her hands twisting on the table in front of her.

‘Katie,’ Adam said, reaching for her hand. ‘You okay?’

She pulled her cigarettes from her pocket, lit one and inhaled deeply. ‘That’s better,’ she said.

Graeme mumbled something else Adam couldn’t hear and Mrs Lewis exploded. ‘Well, it seems she is being watched. It seems you, Mr Reynolds, have managed in less than a fortnight to analyse my granddaughter’s history and behaviour, diagnose her with one or another condition and appoint yourself her guardian.’ She wiped her hands on a tea towel and picked up her handbag from the counter. ‘I’m just the silly old lady who’s kept her alive and off the streets for the last decade. What would I know?’

‘Mrs Lewis, I –’

‘Didn’t take you long, did it?’ Mrs Lewis said to Adam, gesturing at his hand on top of Katie’s. ‘Katherine, I’ll call you during the week.’ She bent and kissed her granddaughter on the forehead. ‘Take care of yourself.’

‘You too, Gran. Thanks for lunch.’ Katie followed her grandmother as far as the front door, Graeme and Adam trailing behind her. ‘I love you, Gran,’ she called. ‘Love you to bits and pieces.’

She turned from the door and placed a hand on Adam’s chest. ‘So,’ she said, blowing smoke in his face. ‘Guess Gran knows we’re shagging now.’

‘I guess.’

‘And yet,’ she smiled, ‘you still end up looking like the good tenant!’

‘I’m sorry for upsetting your grandmother,’ Graeme said.

‘She’ll be fine.’ Katie smiled up at Adam.

‘Yes, but I’m not sure you will be,’ Graeme said.

Katie’s smile tightened; she lifted her hand and tickled the nape of Adam’s neck. ‘Hey, can you get me a beer? Gran left some in the fridge.’

As Adam stepped into the kitchen he heard Katie say Graeme, you’re such a sweet bloke, but –. He opened the fridge and leant into it, feeling the sweat on his forehead evaporating, listening intently to the hum of the motor. He had a perfect memory of doing exactly this, of leaning into the fridge and sighing with relief as the chilled air hit his face and forearms. That had been last summer, the northern summer, July, eight months ago. He was reaching for ice water, not beer. The fridge motor almost covered the sound of Eugenie crying in the next room.

‘Forget the beer.’ Katie came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist, pulling him back into the heat. ‘Let’s go out. The pub in Camperdown with two dollar beers on Sunday arvos.’

‘I don’t know. I was thinking . . . um, maybe all this drinking isn’t good?’

‘Bah!’ She lifted his shirt and planted a raspberry on his spine. She followed up with her tongue, darting over his lower back. ‘Guess what my tongue just wrote?’

‘I’m serious.’

‘Wrong!’ Another raspberry. ‘I wrote Adam is a boring old fart.’

‘If I’m so boring, why do you want me to come out with you? Why don’t you ask Graeme?’

‘I did ask him, Mr Smarty Pants, and he said the same thing as you. “Katie Lewis is not allowed to have any fun, ever again, so say all the boring old farts of the world.’”

Adam pressed his head against the fridge door. ‘Maybe, he’s right, though. You seem to be –’

‘Shhh!’ She nipped at his ear. ‘Listen. He means well, but Gran’s right. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ She spun him around and began unbuttoning his shirt. ‘Come on, let’s get you out of this ridiculous shirt, then – oh, there’s that chest!’ She kissed his breastbone. ‘Then, we’ll go and sit in some nice air-conditioning and drink cheap beer and just chill out. Okay?’

With Matty and Carl and Trick, Adam had gone to sports bars. With Jo and Ray he went to places with no sign out the front and no way of telling which of the waifs slumped over the bar were staff and which were customers. On his own, he went to an English pub where he was certain he wouldn’t bump into anyone he knew. When he met Eugenie, he stopped going to bars and when the box of wine in his fridge ran out he did not replace it. His friends called him pussy-whipped and he let them. It would’ve been mean to tell them that he had found something better than drinking, found someone better than them.

Sitting in this concrete bunker, the electronic bells of the slot machines bouncing off the bare walls interrupted only by sporadic shouts or guffaws from one or other of the far, dim corners, Adam noticed a single strand coming loose from the mass of grief and loneliness. He missed his old friends. It was a tiny thing, but he stretched it out in his mind, amazed at finding it at all. This thread of loss related to the living.

‘Hey, what are they staring at?’

Adam followed Katie’s gaze. Three men with ZZ Top beards were looking right back at him. A woman in a tartan mini-skirt and matching cap was talking into one of the men’s ears and pointing at Katie.

‘You want something or you just having a perve?’ Katie called out.

The woman raised her middle finger. One of the men said something Adam couldn’t hear and the others nodded. He was aware, suddenly, of Katie’s bald head, scarred face and combat boots.

‘Let’s go home, hey? There’s plenty of beer in the fridge.’

Katie shook her head, smiling at the group across the floor. ‘I like it here. But I reckon the fat one has the hots for me. Probably thinks he could bend me over and have his way before I managed to squeak. Goddamn bully, he’ll get a shock, I tell you. Oh, goody, here he comes!’

The man walked towards their table slowly, his legs splayed, his groin thrusting with each step. He nodded at Adam and Adam nodded back. He wasn’t sure what this meant. He hoped it meant everything’s cool, but he felt like maybe it meant I’m gonna kick your ass. He had never been in a fight. He had never so much as thrown a punch. He didn’t think being half-wasted with a bald, deranged mouse on his arm was a good starting position, but by the speed with which the nodding man was coming towards him he thought he may not have any choice.

‘What the fuck are you supposed to be?’ The man had what Adam used to think of as an Aussie accent. Since coming here he had only heard accents like this on the television, usually from someone wrestling a crocodile. But the accent was beside the point. The dude was leaning over Katie and he was clearly pissed.

Adam stood, relieved to find he had the advantage of height. ‘Listen –’

‘That’s a deep question.’ Katie stood and stepped forward until her forehead was level with the top of the man’s beard. ‘I’ve been asking myself that for years. At one point I thought I was supposed to be the Messiah, but turns out I was delusional. What about you? What are you supposed to be?’

‘Me mates and me been making some bets.’ The man stroked his beard. ‘The boys reckon you’re a dyke, but Mel and me think you gotta be one of them skinheads. Little Miss Nazi, or something, eh?’

‘Listen, buddy. She’s just –’

‘Hush!’ Katie clamped her hand over Adam’s mouth. She laughed. ‘I got in an accident. See the scars?’ She stood on her toes and tilted her face up as though inviting the thug to kiss her goodnight. ‘Motorbike crash. Burnt my face and legs and smashed my skull. They had to shave my noggin before the surgery.’ She made a slow turn, showing off the scabby back of her head, before looking up again with an apologetic smile. ‘Skinhead only in the most literal sense, see?’

The man stepped back. He nodded at Adam without looking away from Katie. ‘This your old man?’

‘Nah, Adam here’s my buddy. He’s a Yank, but don’t hold that against him.’

‘So he won’t mind if his buddy hangs out with me and mine then?’ The man moved in closer again, put one hand on Katie’s waist, the other a finger’s width above her arse.

Adam looked across at the bar; the girl behind it was intent on wiping the counter. He glanced around the room, but the only eyes watching them were from the meathead’s table. ‘Look, we were just –’

‘Yeah?’ said the man, pulling Katie’s body against him, her face forced into the drum of his chest.

‘Steady on, dude,’ Katie said, ducking out of his grasp.

‘Me mates were right, then? You’re a fuckin’ dyke.’

‘Nah, just not in the mood for a random grope, if you don’t mind.’

‘Yeah?’ He reached out with one hand and squeezed her left breast, grimaced and shook his head, then turned and stalked back to his mates.

Katie grabbed Adam’s arm, pulled him down to sit beside her. ‘Did ya see how yellow his teeth were? And that feral beard? God, as if, right?’

Adam watched as the men leant into each other, beards blending into beards. He watched the blonde woman roll her eyes and light a cigarette. He watched the four of them get caught up in a game of darts at the back of the pub. The adrenaline that had flooded his body at the man’s approach was bubbling in his veins. His hands made fists and so did his chest and stomach. ‘I should’ve done something.’

‘Like what?’

‘Defended you.’

She snorted and took a swig of beer.

‘What? You don’t think I could?’

She touched his face, smiled. ‘Sure you could. But I didn’t need defending, did I?’

Adam knew what men like that saw when they looked at a girl who advertised her damage with shiny scabs. His rushing blood filled with knowledge of what could happen with a girl like her and a table of men like that and a pub where nobody paid attention.

‘Come here.’ He pulled her to him, kissed her on the mouth, slid a hand up her skirt and ran his fingers under the leg of her underwear. She pulled back, emitted a whoop, her eyes shining white in the gloom. She blinked, looked over her shoulder at the man who had groped her, smiled painfully at Adam and leapt at him with more passion than he could ever pretend.

15.

‘Ouch! Fuck, Katie.’ Adam jerked his hand back. His elbow hit the edge of the kitchen table and he swore again.

‘Sorry.’ Katie was on her knees in front of him; water seeped out of the cotton balls onto her bare legs. It was hard to be gentle; her blood was on fire. She would have done him in the pub car park and to hell with the police, but he’d mewled like a child, and insisted on coming home. She was anxious to get him cleaned up, into the bedroom, out of his clothes.

‘What happened?’ Graeme was in the doorway dressed in his stripy pyjamas.

‘Oh my god, Graeme! You should’ve seen it! It was awesome. Adam was awesome.’

‘Fight?’ Graeme asked Adam.

‘Yeah.’

‘Bad?’

Adam nodded and closed his eyes.

Katie stood and kissed the top of his head. ‘It wasn’t that bad. On a scale of one to ten, where one is, I don’t know, a kick in the shins with a high-heeled sandal and ten is, like, a pool cue through your liver, this was only a four or five. For a minute there I thought it might spike up to an eight or nine but the bar chick yelled that she’d called the cops and the bikie dudes scuttled.’

‘Bikies?’

‘There were three of them. Huge, right? And some skanky girl who was only as big as me, but the bitch broke a glass and started like –’ Katie held her hand out in front and jabbed the air. ‘But that was right at the end. At the start it was just Adam and this gross pig who was giving me shit. I told him to piss off basically and then Adam and me were kissing and the dude was all urgh, how about sharing Yank and Adam was all – bam ! Right in his face. And the dude hit back and Adam – oh my god – Adam didn’t even flinch, I swear. He just swung back and pounded this guy. And then this second biker came running at him, and Adam – it was like he had eyes in the back of his head – he just turned and pow right in the mouth. And this big tough fucker, right, his tooth came flying out and –’

‘Bullshit,’ Adam spat. ‘I hardly touched that other guy. And no one lost a tooth. Jesus.’

‘I saw way more than you,’ Katie reminded him, although already the sequence of events, the layout of the room and the faces of the men were becoming blurry. ‘I saw everything. It was like something out of a movie! You were this total kickarse movie hero. God, I just wanted to –’

‘Will you shut up? My head’s killing me.’

‘Got some swelling happening there,’ Graeme said. ‘Do you want me to . . . ?’ He gestured to his own face. ‘I can check if anything’s broken?’

Adam nodded and Graeme crouched in front of him. He pressed Adam’s nose and cheekbones, then lifted his hands and ran his fingers over the knuckles. Katie wished she had a camera. She wanted to always remember how beautiful they both looked in that moment.

‘No breaks. You’ll be black and blue for a few days, though, I expect. And if that headache doesn’t go away or if you feel dizzy, go to the hospital. Could be a concussion.’

Adam grunted his thanks.

‘How about you?’ Graeme said to Katie. ‘You hurt?’

‘Not at all. I feel great.’

Graeme nodded towards Adam who was staring at the floor. ‘You should put something on those cuts of his.’

‘Yep, I know. Look.’ She pointed to the table. ‘Mercurochrome, cotton wool, bandaids, got it all here.’

‘Okay. Take care, Adam. Goodnight.’

‘Night, Graeme. Thanks heaps.’ Katie squatted in front of Adam. ‘How you feeling, Rocky?’

‘I feel sick,’ he said. ‘I’ve never hit anyone before.’

‘Never would’ve guessed.’ She dabbed mercurochrome-soaked cotton balls over his face. ‘The way you went for him! It was brilliant.’

‘Katie, no. It wasn’t. God, how can I . . . ? Listen, there’s this tattoo artist back home with a head like yours, all shaved I mean, and on the back of it he’s had a bear’s face tattooed and his shoulders and neck and back are inked up like a bear, too. He’d do this thing to new people in the shop – he’d strip off his shirt and hat and lunge backwards at them. Now that in itself wasn’t so scary, not past the first second when you figured out what it was you were looking at. But his sincerity, you know . . . It was frightening.’

‘Sincerity is disturbing, it’s true. Here, let me put some of this on your knuckles.’

‘No, no, listen to me.’ Adam held his hands palm out. His eyes were bloodshot but he sat steadily. ‘I spent hours with this dude while he did my back piece. He used to go on and on about how important his bear art was. He said he was descended from Berserkers, these Norse warriors who wore chopped-off bear heads into battle. Everyone was terrified of them because the masks allowed them to almost become animals, to forget they were human. They had no mercy and no sense; they loved inflicting pain and never seemed to feel any themselves. They ripped flesh from bone with their teeth. They mutilated while they raped and took baths in blood. They –’

‘They were brutal, I get it. God, you’re as bad as Graeme with all your massacres and rapes and mutilations.’

‘Graeme? What? No, look, these Berserkers, right? People who’d seen what they could do said they must be half-god, but they were just men who’d given themselves permission to be monsters.’

‘Yeah, and?’

‘And . . . and . . .’ Adam clutched at the air. ‘I don’t know, Katie. I don’t know.’

‘I do. You’re doing that self-mythologising thing again. It was only a bar fight, man. You hit someone and it felt good. Accept it and move on.’

‘You think I’m talking about me?’ Adam looked like he wanted to spit. ‘Jesus.’ He snatched the pack of bandaids from her, got up and left the room.

16.

‘Graeme. Can I get in? I’m cold.’

Graeme blinked at the floating red numbers: 3:19. ‘Katie?’ She was in bed beside him. The white of her T-shirt curved away; he sensed her buttocks an inch from his belly. ‘Why are you here?’

‘I was lonely. I didn’t think you’d mind.’

‘Where’s Adam?’

‘In his room. So, do you?’

‘Do I what?’

‘Mind?’

He wasn’t even sure he understood the question.

‘I know you were sleeping, but I really need some company. Adam won’t speak to me. He went off on some rant about Norse warriors going crazy in battle then locked himself in his room. Drama queen.’ She rolled onto her back and stretched her arms over her head. ‘Leaves me all worked up.’

Graeme closed his eyes. He ran her words through his mind, grappling to make sense of them. Her breath was loud beside him. ‘Er, the Norse . . . Was it, um, was he talking about the fey?’

‘Don’t think so. Maybe. Were they the dudes who wore bear heads?’

‘No, no. Fey was a word the Norse used. It meant doomed.’ He yawned. ‘If a warrior got into a fey mindset he lost all fear, became crazy-brave or just stupid and reckless because he knew it didn’t matter what he did, he’d die anyway. Now if you called a soldier “fey”, people would think you were calling him weak or effeminate or something, but I’ve never come across a better word to describe it. It’s something we still see sometimes in refugees from war zones, child soldiers, especially. Feyness.’

‘I think you may be the smartest person I ever met. How do you know all this stuff?’

He laughed. ‘I read a lot.’

‘You don’t have any books.’

‘I used to,’ he said. ‘I gave most of them away.’

‘God, this place is too small for you, isn’t it?’ She rolled over, facing him. ‘You can store stuff in my room if you want or in Adam’s. He’s never in there, anyway. Just, please don’t move out. I like having you here.’ She flopped onto her back and Graeme let out the breath he’d been holding.

‘It’s so nice to have someone to do this with,’ she went on. ‘Lie in the dark and talk, like little children. Not that I ever did this. Mum went apeshit if I breathed too loud in the night. I was so jealous of the kids at school who had brothers and sisters. I imagined they cuddled up in bed at night and whispered secrets to each other. Did you ever do that?’

‘No.’

‘Were you an only child or were your olds really strict?’

‘I had a brother,’ he said, feeling even as he said it that it was not true, that he was inventing a brother the way he used to invent parents to describe to his classmates. He could not conjure up a face or a voice to identify his brother from all the other boys he’d known as a child. ‘I didn’t really know him. I mostly grew up in foster homes. There were lots of kids around.’

‘Gran used to threaten me with foster care. What was it like?’

‘Have you read Lord of the Flies?’

‘Nah. Not really into books.’

‘There was a film.’

‘I’m not much of a movie watcher, either. Too hard to stay still. Any good?’

‘I suppose it is, but I asked because . . .’ He shifted onto his back. His erection pushed at his pyjama pants. ‘It’s about a group of kids stranded on an island with no adults. They turn feral, wild. Devise all kinds of cruelties and tortures.’

‘And that’s what foster care was like?’ Katie slithered down the bed and hooked her legs back so her smooth, cool feet touched his rough, warm ones.

‘Yes. No. I’m being dramatic. Some of the foster families were perfectly nice, but some weren’t. Some of the kids had been treated cruelly, had dreadful things happen to them, or in front of them. Sometimes they acted these things out. It’s not unusual, victims becoming perpetrators. Brutality breeding brutality.’

‘Like in that prison in Iraq. The soldiers went all terrorist on the terrorists. You know the one? Front page of all the newspapers, on every channel. Naked pyramids and growly dogs. Thumbs up and smiles. Electrocuted if you fall.’

‘Abu Ghraib.’

‘Yeah. Man, those pictures scared me. I couldn’t get them out of my head, but then I thought, Jesus, Katie, this is so not about you. Like there’s this war and all this death and pain and I was safe in bed feeling sorry for myself because the photos upset me. Self-absorbed or what?’

He sensed she was becoming agitated again. ‘That’s normal,’ he said, speaking low and slow. ‘When something like Abu Ghraib, the war, wars . . . when something like that happens there’s more than enough pain and fear to go round. We all get our share. There’s no shame in feeling horrified, even if the horror is for yourself. Better that than apathy.’

‘One time,’ she said, her feet dancing over his. ‘I saw this bloke on the bus and he was so fat he couldn’t sit down. He had to stand in the aisle – right up front where it’s wide, where the wheelchairs and prams go – and when new people got on they’d have to squeeze by him and they all pulled a face like ugh, disgusting. I started feeling bad for him, thinking he must be a really sad person with no one to talk to and no one to cuddle and kids shouting lard arse when he goes by.’ She took a loud, quivering breath. ‘But then I thought, Don’t take on other people’s pain, so I looked out the window and thought about what I’d ask Gran to get me for Christmas. I didn’t even notice where he got off, which was like, hooray for me. But in bed that night I started bawling: maybe I was the only person in the universe who bothered to worry about that man and now that I had stopped there would be no one.’ She exhaled heavily and then sucked her breath in again.

Graeme pulled himself up on one elbow and inched forward. He placed his palm on the back of her stubbly head and her shoulders heaved. He lay down behind her and rubbed her back the way he’d seen mothers rub the backs of crying infants, with long, firm strokes from the shoulder blades to the tailbone and back again. She gradually quietened. When her body was still and her breathing slow, he let his hands drop. A minute passed and then another one. ‘I better let you go to sleep,’ she said, finally, slipping out of bed. She bent and kissed his forehead and then padded lightly out of his room.

Graeme closed his eyes and saw the back of Katie’s neck as clearly as if she was still lying next to him. More clearly, in fact, since the room had been too dark to see much detail. Behind his eyelids the image was sharp: the ridge protruding at the top of her backbone, the unbroken arc of her neck.

No – it was another girl he was remembering. She lay just like that – on her side, head bowed, arms wrapped around her knees. She was young – they both were – and he’d thought they were in love. He’d thought she would be impressed by his decisiveness, his refusal to take no for an answer, his gallant acceptance of responsibility. No, that’s what he told himself afterwards. Truth was he hadn’t thought of her reaction at all. He’d just felt and acted and then lay foggy and sated until the realisation seeped in and the rationalisations began.

Poor kid, he thought now. Poor kids.

17.

As the night paled, Katie curled herself around Adam. The blankets puddled at his feet. He got feverish-hot when he slept, and so she did not need blankets either when she was pressed against him. He made her hot when he was awake, but that was just sexual. When he slept, his heat was calming, nourishing. Katie kissed the goddess, reached around and stroked his chest fuzz, circled his belly-button, followed the trail to his penis. She cradled it in her palm and closed her gritty eyes.

She liked to imagine how he was before she knew him, when he was a love-sick young husband sleeping beside his lovely wife. She imagined he never let Eugenie go; even in his sleep he gripped her hand or circled her waist. If she rolled over, he moved with her. If she got up, he awoke with a start and called her name. In the mornings he trailed her to the bathroom, his hands on her hips, his steps comically small. If they had to part, he would kiss her face all over and make her promise to think of him every minute. If Katie had danced naked in front of him he would not have seen her. He would be looking over her shoulder, waiting for Eugenie to reappear.

She was sick with tiredness but the humming in her brain made sleep impossible. Her hands felt arthritic, tiny bombs exploded in her calves and something in her throat bubbled when she swallowed. She counted her breaths and then woke with a jolt, feeling that she was flying fast into the ceiling.

Nights and dawns were only endurable if she distracted herself with thoughts like what CDs she wanted or how to find the money for more grog. Sex and shops and food and TV commercials. A sad man and his corny tattoos. The stuff of life was all distraction, and distraction allowed her to get on with the stuff of life. But nobody stays distracted. The song ends and the man sleeps and the alcohol wears off and there it is; the window, the truck, the bread knife in its stay-sharp sheath.

18.

Graeme said hello to the madman with the stick whenever he passed. The man had never responded with more than an outraged glance, but this morning he said, ‘Careful, careful, son.’

‘Careful of what?’

The man tapped his stick against the side of the bus shelter. ‘What a question! You’ve been here long enough, you should know where the traps lie by now.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m a slow learner.’

‘Lucky you’ve still got the top of your head!’

‘Yes.’ The man’s beige pants were splattered with dark spots and his thick white hair was flat with grease. ‘Do you live nearby?’

The man stared straight past him. ‘They pretend not to hear. Hey!’ He darted past Graeme, and ran with surprisingly long and fast strides to the traffic lights down the road. He stopped and leant on his stick, then stood straight and shook his stick at an oncoming bus.

‘Poor old bugger.’

Graeme turned to the woman who’d spoken. She was Katie’s age, but dressed like a little girl, in a short dress and knee socks. She wore a backpack and held a laminated student card in one hand; the other hand jiggled loose change.

‘I see him here a lot. He was in a war, he told me. Not sure which one. It’s hard to talk to him. He comes in and out.’

‘Do you know if he lives around here? If he’s alone?’

‘Dunno.’ She craned her neck, signalled the approaching bus. ‘Hope not. Too sad otherwise, isn’t it?’

Graeme watched the girl mount the steps of the bus and pay the driver. When she disappeared from view he turned his attention back to the old man, who was shaking and shouting now at nothing at all. Two suits walked past, swerving together to the far edge of the footpath without seeming to have noticed him at all. As they approached Graeme a sharp pain in his head screamed Kick their feet from under them. Grab their neat heads and spit into their smug mouths. Make them pay some goddamn attention.

The rage dissipated as soon as he acknowledged it.

He waited for the suits to pass and then fell into step behind them. He walked past the office and bought a coffee at the corner shop, exchanging lifted eyebrows with the bloke behind the counter who knew without being told that Graeme wanted a latte with two sugars. He unlocked the office and walked through the empty reception area, listened to the others arrive as he drank his coffee. He thought about asking Sherry and Mike if they’d seen the madman with the stick, if they knew what his story was, but they’d think his joining their morning chat odd. He imagined the faces they’d pull at each other. Talk about a madman, Mike would say.

It was one week into February and it seemed that after a solid month of unrelieved humidity, there would finally be rain. The air, as Graeme walked home, was electric. The streets bristled as wind kicked up dried-out leaves, faded chip wrappers, disintegrating cigarette butts. People walked fast, looking up at the sky. Graeme walked slowly, hoping to feel the first drops.

As he crossed Broadway he considered detouring around the block before going home, but Mrs Lewis was standing by the mailboxes watching him approach.

‘Mrs Lewis, hello.’

She smiled. ‘I’m sure I’ve told you to call me Ann.’

‘Okay, Ann.’ He nodded towards the entrance. ‘On your way up?’

She shook her head. ‘No. I’ve just come down. I was going to call you later on, but then I saw you coming and so . . .’

‘I’m sorry for the other day at lunch, I –’

She waved a peach-nailed hand at him. ‘It’s fine. Actually, it’s why I’m . . . I need to ask you a favour and I wouldn’t bother you with it except the other day you showed such concern over Katherine and . . .’ She put her hands on the low brick wall behind her and pulled herself up, motioning to Graeme to join her.

He shook his head, held his ground. ‘What is it you’d like me to do?’

She sighed. ‘I need to go away for a few weeks. My daughter – Katherine’s mother – broke her leg and she needs help with the house and everything. But I’m anxious, you know, about Katherine. Like you said on Sunday – someone needs to be watching her.’

‘You should ask Adam. He’s much closer to her than me.’

‘No. He’s . . . He’s a disappointment, to be honest. When I met him he seemed so decent, so mature. I couldn’t imagine him taking up with a kid like Katherine. Oh, not that I don’t think she’s loveable – I know she is – only that she’s so young and so obviously vulnerable and I thought he was the kind of man who wouldn’t take advantage.’

Graeme pictured Katie wriggling half-dressed into his bed; how differently that would have ended twenty years ago. He swallowed dry air and said nothing.

‘Anyway,’ Ann continued, ‘I was wrong about him, but I don’t think I’m wrong about you. I think you’re a decent man, that you wouldn’t take advantage of her or turn a blind eye if something was wrong.’ Her eyes had the same shiny, guileless intensity as Katie’s. ‘Am I wrong, Graeme? Am I wrong to trust you with her?’

‘Of course you can trust me, but I’m not sure what you’re asking.’

‘Maybe nothing. Maybe a hell of a lot.’ She smiled as thunder cracked in the distance. ‘Katherine’s like the weather, you know, it’s possible she’ll be fine, better than fine. She can be so lovely, Graeme. Bright and funny and . . .’ She sighed. ‘But if she’s not, if she starts getting dark, you need to take note. If she stops eating, stops going out, stops . . . stops being Katherine, then call me – you have my mobile. And especially if – and this probably won’t happen – if she gets violent –’

‘Violent how?’

‘You’ve seen what she did to her face. We both know they’re not bloody tribal markings.’ Ann squeezed the bridge of her nose. ‘If she hurts herself again call me. It’s usually nothing to worry about – god, what a thing to say, right?’ She jumped down from the wall and took hold of his arm. ‘You understand why I reacted the way I did the other day? I’ve had years of this, Graeme. Years. It’s got so a couple of burns are no big deal. Just Katherine blowing off steam. It’s got so the things that used to terrify me now make me just slightly more watchful for a week or so. And when an outsider comes in and acts like I’m not taking care of her . . .’ She let go of his arm, held her palms up to the sky. ‘Fussing about, hovering over her – it doesn’t work. I lost her once. Eight months and I didn’t have a clue where she was, if she was sick or in pain or worse. I learnt that I have to give her as much independence as I can stand. I have to choose my battles carefully or I’ll lose her altogether.’

‘Okay,’ Graeme said, as another clap of thunder sounded. ‘You want me to watch from afar, not interfere, call you if she seems to be slipping or if she hurts herself.’

Ann reached into her bag and pulled out a business card. ‘Her doctor. She goes every second Thursday. I’ll text to remind her so you don’t have to worry about remembering. But that’s the number of his office and his emergency service, just in case you can’t reach me.’

A drop of rain slid down the back of his neck. He tucked the card into his shirt pocket. ‘Okay.’

‘Okay.’ She smiled, biting her lip. ‘I’m sure she’ll be fine.’

‘Yes. Me too. We should get inside.’

‘I have to go. I have work.’ She nodded and patted his forearm. ‘Don’t tell her I asked you to do this, okay? She’ll feel humiliated.’

‘Sure.’ A sheet of lighting flashed overhead and the gentle rain became a sudden torrent. Ann laughed and tucked her handbag into her side. ‘Safe trip,’ Graeme yelled over the roar. She raised a hand, mouthed thank you, turned and ran fast down the street.

19.

Adam found a job washing dishes at an Indian restaurant on Glebe Point Road. The money wasn’t great – sixty bucks for eight hours’ work – but it was cash in hand, no questions asked, and he got a hot meal of dhal and roti every shift. He figured that if he paid for nothing but rent and an occasional sandwich to keep him going between shifts, he’d be home in less than two months.

He forgot that mindless work encouraged thinking. There at the sink, rinsing, scrubbing, passing, drying, carrying, the thoughts he’d avoided for the last few months made their way forward. His mind spooled back through all Eugenie’s weird aches and pains, the swollen stomach, the way she started leaving a third, then half, then almost all of her dinner on the plate. He tried driving the memories away by concentrating on the restaurant music, but the lyrics were in Hindi and his brain began throwing up long-forgotten scenes, early moments when he teased her about her fear of doctors, then later, when he urged her to get over her childish dread and get a damn check-up. He replayed the arguments again and again, furious at how ineffectual he’d been, how easily he’d given in. If there had ever been a time for forcefulness . . .

He scrubbed bright orange stains off the thali bowls and thought about her joking that it was just her luck to finally have a fashionable shape and be too sick to go shopping. He carried a tray of clean bowls to the preparation bench and picked up a tray of dirty ones on his way back to the sink. He emptied the sink, wiped down the sides, and refilled it with hot water. He heard her crying and holding his hands.

He asked his fellow dishpig Arj to turn the radio to a news station, and told Arj’s uncle that he was willing to work any extra shifts that were available. He asked the men to explain to him again the rules of cricket and half-listened to them while he tried to remember the sound of Eugenie’s laugh. He asked intentionally stupid questions about innings and underarm bowling, dhal recipes and spice suppliers. He wondered how it was possible to miss a scattering of fragments so much.

He walked home from work along glistening streets. The air was cool and damp. Twigs were scattered over the clean sidewalk. It had rained at last and he had missed it.

When he reached the humid, smoky flat, Katie was waiting for him. ‘You must need a drink,’ she said, handing him a beer.

‘What I need is a shower.’ He sat down in his stinking kitchen clothes and drank the beer while Katie rubbed the back of his neck.

‘Gran came around before. I told her where you were and she got all suspicious. Doesn’t know why you’d wash dishes when you’re already working in a shoe shop. Said you’re probably out dealing drugs or picking up girls.’

Adam held up his wrinkled hands. ‘I wish.’

‘Ha, I know. She came over because my mum broke her leg and needs help with the housework and cooking for the husband and kid.’

‘So you’ll be spending some time with your mom. That’s great.’

‘God, no. I’d be in a locked ward by the end of the week.’ Katie chopped her hands across his shoulders. ‘Gran’s going; flying up to Rockie in the morning. But like, five minutes after she left I went down to check on Phyl. I was standing at the window over her sink rinsing tea cups and I see Gran and bloody Graeme having a big D and M out by the mailboxes.’

‘D and M?’

‘Deep and meaningful. You know, huddled together nodding and patting arms and shit.’ Katie stopped chopping his shoulders, draped herself over them instead. ‘The rain started and Phyl hollered that all her windows were open so I had to bolt around closing them and when I get back, I see Graeme jogging up the walkway to the foyer, dripping wet. So I told Phyl I had to go and I charged out and caught the bugger just as he was getting into the lift.’

Adam yawned. ‘And?’

Katie slapped his arm. ‘And I asked him what the story was and at first he was all “Story? What story?” you know, but I just asked him straight out then – because I know Gran, right – I just asked straight out if she’d told him to keep tabs on me while she’s away and he couldn’t deny it. He said he’d agreed just to set her mind at rest, but that I shouldn’t worry because he had no intention of keeping more of an eye on me than I wanted him to.’

Adam craned his head to look at her. ‘What does that mean? Why would you want his eyes on you at all?’

‘He didn’t mean it like that,’ Katie said. ‘He just meant he’s on my side.’

After his second night of work at the Indian restaurant, Adam came home and found Katie and Graeme on the sofa together, her legs on his lap, wine glasses in their hands.

‘Good night, babe?’ Katie asked.

‘Fine. How was yours?’

‘Quiet.’

‘How about you, Graeme? Good night? Cosy?’

‘Mmm, past my bedtime, though.’ Graeme lifted Katie’s legs, nodded at Adam and scurried from the room.

A couple of nights later, they were there again. This time, Katie was lying down with her feet on Graeme’s thighs. They both looked up at Adam, and then, when Katie began to speak, Graeme’s eyes returned to her face.

‘Adam, did you know Graeme’s a war hero? You should hear the stories.’

‘Really? What war? Because I remember you saying you weren’t in Vietnam.’

‘Right,’ Graeme said, without looking up. ‘I’ve never fought in a war. I was only talking about my aid work.’

‘Only! You should hear the stuff he’s done. It’s not just like Angelina Jolie or Bono or someone popping in to say hi, Graeme lived in these amazing, dangerous, scary places for months and years and –’

‘Sounds fascinating,’ Adam said.

‘Oh, it is. Graeme, tell him about the little boy in Somalia!’

Adam leant against the front door, arms folded.

‘Another time. It’s late.’ Graeme squeezed Katie’s foot, a signal, evidently, to allow his escape.

Adam didn’t think Katie and Graeme were sleeping together and wouldn’t have cared if they had been. He would have been relieved to have less of Katie’s attention. She told him constantly that she loved him and then rushed to add that she knew he didn’t love her and that was fine and she was just happy he let her love him. She was still as aggressively sexual as she had been the night he met her. If he was too tired or drunk she’d go ahead and get herself off using whatever bit of his body she could take hold of. When he was up for it she was embarrassingly generous. If not for her lack of skill and grace he would have thought she had been trained as an elite callgirl so tireless and cheerful was her dedication to his orgasm. Regardless of his intentions at the beginning of the night, he always ended up saturated with her.

He wasn’t jealous, but his discomfort grew. On a Saturday at the end of his second work week, he woke early to an empty bed – not an unusual event given how little Katie slept. He went to the bathroom and then to the kitchen for a drink of water. It wasn’t until he was climbing back into bed that he realised he had walked the length of the apartment without seeing her.

He checked the apartment again, then went to the living room window, last night’s korma bubbling in his gut. There was nothing to see – a sidewalk under a grey dawn sky. He remembered Graeme and jogged down the hall, threw the man’s door open and flicked on the light. Katie’s stubbled head appeared from behind the bulk of her bedmate whose pin-prick eyes blinked fast.

‘You’re awake,’ Katie said.

‘Obviously. What’s going on?’

‘Nothing, babe. Just chatting.’

‘Hello,’ Graeme said, sitting up. He was wearing a blue striped pyjama shirt like someone out of a child’s story book.

Adam pictured the striped pants scrunched at the bottom of the bed. ‘I’m not like judging or anything,’ he said. ‘You can do whatever you like, really, I don’t care. But I’d just like to be, you know, in the loop. So if it’s not too much trouble could you tell me what the fuck you two are doing?’

‘Chatting, like I said.’ Katie slithered from the bed and came to his side. She was wearing sweatpants and one of Adam’s T-shirts. ‘Come on, let’s get you back to bed.’

Adam looked at Graeme who was covering his mouth with his hands. ‘Is something funny?’

Graeme shook his head.

‘Babe, you’re naked,’ Katie said softly.

‘You’re pissed off at me,’ Katie said, closing Adam’s door a few minutes later.

Adam yanked the sheet over his groin. ‘No. Katie, I couldn’t find you. Then I found you in there and I don’t know what’s going on.’

‘Nothing’s going on.’ Katie lay beside him and closed her eyes. ‘It’s nice to have someone to talk to.’

‘What’s wrong with talking to me?’

‘Nothing. Just . . .’ She squeezed his arm and sighed.

‘Yeah? Just?’

‘When I’m with you I feel like nothing will ever be wrong again.’ Her eyes fluttered open. ‘But there are things I can’t say to you.’

‘What kind of things?’

‘The kind of things that would make you pity me. Like you’d want to follow up by saying, Oh, honey-pie, you can still live a satisfying and fruitful life.’ Her accent was obnoxiously American. ‘You wouldn’t get it and I don’t want you to. I just want us to have fun together. You need fun, Adam, for real.’ Her skin had a yellow tint, except under her eyes where it was dark amber. The three burn scars were, in mocking contrast, a glowing, healthy pink.

‘You look so tired. Do you think you can sleep now?’

‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead,’ she said and, just like that, she was up and moving towards the door. ‘I’m going to have a shower. Get dressed. I want to take you somewhere different.’

While she was in the bathroom, Adam put on some clothes and went to Graeme’s room. He was sitting up in bed, his briefcase open across his knees. Adam stood in the doorway so he could hear when the shower stopped running.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if I went off before. It’s just kind of weird.’

‘Is it?’

‘Well, yeah, she’s much younger than you for a start.’

‘She’s quite a bit younger than you, too.’

‘Not young enough to be my daughter.’

‘Fair enough,’ Graeme said. ‘But I’m not sleeping with her and I don’t want to, either, in case you were wondering. I don’t see the problem.’

‘That’s it, sort of. If you were sleeping with her it would be creepy, right, but understandable. But as it is . . . I mean, I think you’re a nice guy and you seem smart, well-travelled. And she’s . . .’

‘What?’

Adam didn’t know how to say it without sounding nasty. Katie talked all the way through the evening news, because – Adam suspected – she didn’t understand most of what was said. She read Famous magazine but not the newspaper. She hardly showered and seemed to think that resting your clothes on the floor for a couple of days was as good as washing them. She was comfortable climbing into bins and eating whatever decaying crap she pulled out even though she had never heard of freeganism or the Wasteless Society Movement.

‘She’s young,’ he said finally.

‘Yeah,’ Graeme said. ‘We covered that already.’

Adam crossed his arms. ‘I don’t understand what’s in it for you.’

Graeme closed his briefcase. ‘In what?’

‘This . . . this . . . whatever it is with her. What are you getting out of it?’

‘Out of the friendship? Is that the word you’re looking for?’ He put his briefcase on the floor, swinging his legs out after it. ‘If you tried talking to her instead of just, well, doing what it is that you do, then you’d find the answer to your question.’

‘I’ve talked to her plenty. That’s my point. She’s not exactly the world’s most erudite –’

‘Erudite!’ Graeme stood up and waved his hand at Adam. ‘Listen, mate, if you’ve spent time talking to her and still don’t get why someone would want her as a friend, then she isn’t the one with the problem.’

The shower had stopped running. The sound of Katie’s Courtney Love impersonation echoed down the hallway. Adam turned and walked out, closing the door behind him.

20.

The bus was crammed with teenagers in beach gear and tourists with burnt noses and clumsily-folded maps. Adam and Katie stood near the back, swaying into each other with every turn. There was not enough air and too much sound. It was not even 9 am and already Adam was tired of the day.

‘Our stop,’ Katie said at last, jostling him towards the door and out into the fresher hot air of the street.

Adam scanned the shopfronts: greengrocer, sushi, juice bar. ‘I need coffee.’

‘Not here. Come on.’ Katie led him down the street to a schoolyard dotted with market stalls. They weaved through clusters of bony girls in face-swamping sunglasses and squeezed past prams so large that the hipsters pushing them could easily have snuggled up beside their babies for a nap.

‘Paddington Markets,’ Katie said. ‘La-di-da as hell, but heaps of free food if you don’t mind mixing and matching.’

Within ten minutes they’d assembled breakfast: shots of thick black coffee, a dish of Greek yoghurt, a handful of macadamias and another of raisins, a slice of Turkish bread, a chunk of cheese and a morsel of Moroccan-spiced lamb. After they’d eaten, Adam bought beers with his illegally earned dollars and they drank them sitting on a park bench, watching the weird and beautiful parade down Oxford Street.

‘Okay, so that woman there – the one with the orange skin – she was on this reality show, Bondi to Bourke, and all these la-la posh chicks had to survive in the bush and she was this total – Oh, wait, that bloke in the black hat – you recognise him? From that movie, you know? The one with Nicole Kidman. And that girl with the backless dress is the girlfriend of the singer from Tradge, this awful emo band but the singer is gorgeous and so all the fans hate her which is so unfair, because I think she must be a really, really kind and patient person to be with someone so angsty.’

Through the crowd of fake-tans and giant sunglasses Adam spotted an elderly man with no legs propped up in a trolley. Not just no legs, no body from the waist down. He was a head and torso with arms, but he looked happy talking with the woman pushing him along. As the trolley passed, Adam saw the Veterans’ Association sticker on the back of it. A war injury, then, which meant the man might have lived like that for years. Adam thought that when it happened, the man would have been younger than he was now. He would have been fit and strong, tough as nails. But then he would have woken up one day in some overcrowded, understaffed field hospital, the sounds of screams in his ears, and he would have taken a breath of fetid air and praised God he was still alive. They would have told him he was only half a man, and he would have wished they had let him die. He would have thought first of his farm back home, how it would have to be sold, then wondered how a man could live with the shame of being taken care of every minute. He would have thought of his sweetheart, waiting for him to return and marry her. She wouldn’t want him now, and he would always regret that he did not push harder for her to let him have his way with her before he left.

Katie chatted on beside him as the afternoon sweltered by. He had never seen her in such direct, startling light; her spiky hair was fairer than he’d thought, more milk chocolate than black, and the skin covering her skull was almost translucent. A royal blue vein pulsed delicately over her left ear. Her freshly shaved legs were speckled pink and her chest and neck were flushed from the heat and beer. He felt his own skin burning and thought about moving to a shadier spot, but couldn’t summon the will to speak, let alone move.

Katie pointed out a former starlet and her tennis player husband and then a reality TV contestant who had posed for Playboy. She passed cheerful judgment on almost everyone who walked by – that dress was the most beautiful she’d ever seen, those shoes were incredible, that man’s hair was an amazing colour, that baby had such gorgeous brown eyes. Adam wished the war vet would come back. He wondered whether the woman pushing him was his wife, what she had given up for him.

It was Adam’s night off and Katie had a pocket full of fresh government-issued cash, so they decided to walk home, stopping at every pub on the way. At William Street, Katie persuaded Adam to go into a gay bar and although they were underdressed and already half-drunk it was early enough that the bouncer let them in. An Italian guy who insisted he was slurring at four in the afternoon because he was still on Roma time bought them sour-apple cocktails and a packet of cigarettes. ‘Please excuse,’ he said to Katie and pulled Adam onto the empty dance floor.

Nineties house music thudded. The guy danced Adam into an unlit corner and kissed him hard. There was a numbing familiarity to it all: the rasp of stubble against stubble, the rough hands on his stomach, the hard-on pressed against his hip. In the dark, the guy revealed himself to be less drunk and less Italian than he’d let on. He opened his pants and in fast, Aussie-accented English, begged Adam to bring him off.

This was like the old days, too: the sense of power and obligation that came with wanting nothing from a desperate man. Keeping an eye on the distant figure at the bar, Adam gripped the offered cock in his right hand and pumped fast. The man moaned and dug his fingers into the flesh above Adam’s hips. After a minute, the man said, ‘Lift your shirt. Quick.’ Adam jerked away and the guy dropped to his knees, juddering into his own hands.

Adam bolted for the door yelling for Katie to follow.

‘What? What happened?’

‘In a sec. Come on.’ He ran as fast as he could, feeling the concrete through the soles of his shoes, the shock of impact up through his spine, the slap of air in his face. He stopped to allow Katie to catch up, grabbed her hand and forced her to keep his pace. His legs felt obscenely strong. People grunted or swore as he knocked against and past them, and this made him run faster. He felt infected by the guy in the bar and by the arms and shoulders and swinging handbags of the people walking so slowly and mindlessly along Oxford Street. The dying heat of the day, the stickiness of Katie’s hand, the yoghurt and cheese and cocktails churning in his stomach, the picture of a legless, helpless, breathing Eugenie made him feel woozy and unhinged.

‘Adam, stop!’ Katie yanked his arm hard and he fell against a wall, rolled across its surface and stopped, gasping in an alleyway with a derelict warehouse at the end and faded newspapers, split garbage bags and what may have once been a cat lining its sides.

‘My lungs are gonna explode. What’s wrong? Why are we running?’

Adam felt the tightness in his chest and thighs, but still he could have run all the way home. ‘I jerked him off,’ he said.

Katie pushed him with an open palm. ‘You dirty slut! Are you turning queer again? For real? How was it?’

Adam had an erection the size of the Centrepoint Tower. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ he said, opening his jeans with one hand and urging Katie to the ground with the other. He yanked down her shorts and underpants and opened her with his fingers. She was dry and tight, but she said it was okay and hooked her legs around his hips as he pushed inside her. He thought about the Italian guy pumping into his fist, and then his own cock rolling between Eugenie’s hands, and then the way she would whimper when he bit her nipples, the way her face looked in the seconds after they first made love. He found that the look in Katie’s upturned eyes – serious and focused and calmly confident, like she was performing open-heart surgery – made everything else fade. It didn’t matter to her that his desire was, and would only ever be, for a dead woman. He held her gaze and came hard. The sinking sun gave even the filthy Kings Cross bricks a pinkish glow.

In Victoria Park by the old Gothic university they lay beneath an ancient Moreton Bay fig tree which seemed to bristle with anger, shaking its branches, shooting soft bullets at their heads.

‘What the hell? There’s not even a breeze tonight.’

‘It’s only bats,’ said Katie, flicking a pellet of crap off Adam’s shoulder.

‘You serious?’ He looked up and heard the twittering, then saw the hundreds of waxy wings. ‘Why are there bats?’

‘They live in most of the parks around here.’ Katie continued brushing his shoulder even though there was nothing there. ‘You must’ve seen them before. Don’t you ever look up?’

‘I guess I mustn’t. Are we safe here?’

‘Yeah. They’re harmless unless you, like, try to catch one or something. Then they’re all bitey-scratchy, like angry kittens.’

‘This is the strangest city. No one here seems to know that.’

‘Because it isn’t strange to us. It’s just where we are.’

Adam sank his fingers into the grass. It was so soft it was like grass in a dream. During the weeks he spent in the hotel he’d heard about the drought at least nine times a day. Nobody seemed to have told the groundskeeper here about it, though. This was probably the nicest grass Adam had ever seen and touched in his life. He wondered if it had something to do with the nutrients in the bat droppings. He looked up at the branches overhead and was caught by the stripes of pink and gold peeping through.

‘Check out at that sky, will you. It’s so beautiful.’

‘No, it’s not,’ Katie said. ‘It’s actually the most awful thing. Everybody says it’s beautiful so they don’t have to really look at it or think about it. Because if you do, if you think about it, god, it’s petrifying.’

‘What is?’

‘That we’re specks. Specks on an unimaginably large, fatally hot rock hurtling through space at terrifying speed. I remember learning that when I was in primary school and I’ve never forgotten it. I can’t believe they tell it to little kids. What we see when we look at the night sky is dead light and deadly space. It’s the most awful thing in the world. I hate it.’

Adam thought of Katie’s always-open, bloodshot eyes and felt the space open up inside him. He took her face in his hands and rolled her head towards him. ‘So stop looking at it. Look at me.’

‘Where do you think we go, Adam? After, I mean?’

‘I used to think heaven, until I found out there were a hundred versions of that to choose from and any one of them could be the right one, or none of them maybe. And then I met Eugenie and she had this amazing faith. She talked about heaven like it was a place she’d actually been. Conviction like that, especially coming from someone you . . . it’s contagious. I started to believe, too.’

‘But you don’t anymore?’

‘I don’t know. At the time, my mom thought I was faking it, said it was too perfect. Like something out of a Christian romance novel, you know? Love converting the sinner into a cookie-cutter godly husband, but . . . it felt real. I felt God in her, in us.’

‘And now there’s no her, there’s no God?’

‘The only time I’ve ever seriously wanted to kill someone was after her funeral, when this ring-in of a minister said that my grief showed a lack of faith. He said Eugenie was in a better place and it was selfish of those of us left behind to begrudge her that.’

‘How do you know it isn’t true?’

‘It might be. I hope it is. But I can’t believe it. Her death was not peaceful or happy. It was brutal. If that was some last trial before bliss . . . I wish that was true.’

Katie inched her face closer and touched his nose with hers. ‘I wish we could know for sure. I don’t believe in heaven or any of that Sunday school crap, but when I think that it’s just nothing . . . It can’t just be nothing, can it?’

‘You could never be nothing.’

‘I don’t mean that.’

‘I don’t mean that, either. Genie, me, Napoleon, Cobain, Hitler, whoever – we can’t unexist. We can’t just not be real because this pissy little pump –’ he placed his palm over her heart ‘– stops beating. There’s this question Buddhists ask: when does a seed become a sapling and a sapling a tree? You know, when did baby Katherine become little kid Katherine and when did she become this Katie, here, now? That baby girl was you but you’re not her. That’s how I think death is. It’s just another transition. I think Eugenie exists but her form is different. I don’t mean she’s a spirit or anything, just that her energy isn’t gone from the world – it’s dispersed, spread around.’

‘Dude, you are such a hippy.’

‘Yeah, well, there was never much chance I’d be anything else.’

Later, sleepless, Katie took Adam’s wallet from the drawer beside her bed. She carried it to the living room and slid out the photo of Eugenie she knew he kept hidden behind his Californian driver’s licence. The woman in the picture had pale hair and brown shoulders and a gappy smile. Katie knew, looking at the photo with its ragged, finger-smudged edges, that Adam was full of shit. He was also full of kindness. He must know, every time he looked at this photo, that dispersed energy is the same as nothing. It has no mouth to kiss, no wind-tangled hair to smooth or eyes to see the smile you make just for her. Energy can’t feel soft grass and night breezes or hear bats and stories about Buddhists and seeds and trees.

21.

Jaswinda had done what Jenny and the others had been urging her to, and put in for four weeks’ compassionate leave. A major donor had written to express regret that ‘due to internal operational considerations’ it could no longer contribute to the Foundation’s work. Just before six, news came through that a Chinese dissident who was deported after his asylum claim was refused had been taken into custody as he disembarked from his plane.

‘I don’t know why we bother,’ said Sherry, who had worked on the legal appeal.

‘Masochism?’ said Jaswinda.

Mike slung an arm over Sherry’s shoulder. ‘Nah, masochists actually enjoy getting belted up. We’re just pathetic time-wasting losers, I’m afraid.’

‘Hey,’ Graeme said. ‘We can’t win them all. Besides, we don’t do it to win. We do it because it’s worth doing. Right?’

‘Right,’ said Sherry. Jaswinda and Mike exchanged glances. ‘So what do you reckon, gang – happy hour at Swinson’s or proper cocktails at the Roto Room?’

‘Both,’ said Mike. ‘You in, Jas?’

‘God, yes. Let’s go.’

For a moment, Graeme considered joining them. He imagined sitting at a low pub table, sipping some red wine and . . . And what? They wouldn’t want to talk about work. What else was there he could discuss? He couldn’t tell them about the project that had consumed his spare time for the past few months: reading through eight shoe-boxes full of scribbled notebooks representing thirty years in the field, copying out the useful information to be typed up, indexed and cross-referenced, then destroying the original books with their juvenile poetry, boastful notes on women he’d slept with and the names and addresses of dealers and brothels. And he certainly couldn’t talk to his colleagues about the warm, wriggly girl who slid into his bed at night and hypnotised him with her looping, leaping narratives.

‘I need to stay back and finish up a few things,’ he said.

‘Oh, too bad,’ Sherry said, in a way that made it clear she’d never considered the possibility that he would come. The others added their auto-commiserations for his heavy workload and threw him weak but sincerely attempted looks of admiration as they left. It had been years since anyone had directly invited him out or objected when he refused. On his good days he thought his colleagues saw him as too busy for socialising, too preoccupied with saving the world to make small talk. On his bad days he thought they saw him for what he was.

Today, what they thought of him was of no interest. As soon as his mind had alighted on the things he couldn’t talk about – the ragged notebooks, the squirmy girl – those things began to call him home. He sat behind his desk and tried to care about the pile of correspondence accumulating there. After five minutes, he set the security alarm and turned out the lights.

Walking home, a block or so from the office, Graeme noticed the university footpath advertising had begun. UTS CAMPUS CHRISTIANS MEET-UP, COUNCOURSE CAFE 2–4 FRIDAY was neatly printed in blue chalk. Half a block on, USYD ATHEIST SOCIETY INFO NIGHT, THURS, 7PM, MANNING BAR was scrawled in red and white.

A breeze caught a cloud of chalk dust and a plane roared overhead. Graeme stopped, closed his eyes and he was there in the desert, the wind a howling beast pushing ochre dust over around through everything, the air turned solid, he staggered between tents flapping and lifting and falling and children with their hands over their eyes and the dust spitting into the bleeding cracks around their tiny nails and their cries unheard over the roar of the wind and the slap of useless canvas and Graeme tasted dirt, felt the grit stick to his gums.

He concentrated on the ground beneath his feet, the ground which was concrete and unmoving, multi-coloured sneakers and black high heels and orange thongs rushing past, a voice saying mate, you right? the hydraulic sigh of a city bus, the voice again you okay? hey, hey is he okay, you reckon? the stench of exhaust, you wanna sit down a minute? the ground which was solid and smooth and grey, a voice again leave him mate, some people don’t wanna be helped and then that sound again tearing through him like a bullet and he looked up at the light pole and the University of Sydney flag being whipped and snapped by the wind.

He began to walk again, breathing deeply, intentionally. Summer was almost over. He’d be finished transcribing the notebooks within a week or two. Ann Lewis should be back by the end of March. He ran through the things he had to do before then, estimating time frames, prioritising. He nodded to the junkie waiting outside the liquor store, emptied his wallet into the shaky hands, then walked on over pink chalk screaming NO WISDOM IN CLASSROOMS DONT BE A SHEEP THINK FOR YOURSELF!!!

He worked on the notebooks until ten then went to bed, leaving his door open just a crack to ensure he would hear when they came home. Around one he woke to the sound of drunken laughter and lay awake listening to Katie’s high, stagey wailing and the rarer, more sincere guttural groans from Adam. He masturbated quickly, more to prepare for her visit than out of any real desire, and then cleaned himself with the antiseptic wipes he now kept by the bed. After the noise stopped, he dozed for another hour or so, stirring again as Katie whispered his name into the air above his ear.

She slid into the space he had left for her. ‘I feel so terrible. I realised today I’ve been an awful friend to you. All I do is talk about my shit and – you know what I remembered today? This thing you said ages ago, about growing up in a foster home and I was just la, la, la, me, me, me. I never even asked what happened to you, where your parents are. I’m so self-absorbed.’

‘Please,’ he said. He lay on his back but turned his head towards her, smelling sex and beer and cigarettes. ‘Nothing to feel bad about.’

‘But I do.’ Katie lay on her back, too, her left arm pressed up against his right. ‘Tell me about your family. Please, Graeme. It’ll make me feel better. God, still all about me, isn’t it?’

Graeme ran through several phrasings in his mind before settling on the right one. ‘My mother died when I was four. When I was six, my brother and I were taken from our father and put into separate foster homes. I don’t know why. I lost touch with both my father and brother when I was a teenager.’

Katie threw her right arm over his chest, her body half on his. She squeezed him to her. ‘Graeme. I’m sorry. That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.’

He lay still. ‘Then you’ve only ever met very fortunate people.’

‘I wish.’ She pressed her face into his neck for a short, lovely moment. ‘Every person I’ve ever known has had an unbearably sad story to tell. I don’t know if that says something about me or about the world.’

‘The world is full of sad stories and happy stories and some people are better at noticing one type and some are better at noticing the other.’

‘Mmm.’ She rolled off him. ‘Gran says I poison myself with negativity; I think she lives with her head in rose-coloured clouds.’ She sighed. ‘What about you? Are you rosy clouds or poison?’

‘Oh, poison, I suppose, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing, psychologically speaking.’

Katie poked him in the ribs.

‘What was that for?’

‘I’m sick of prodding you. From now on I’m just going to poke you when you need to talk.’

‘Poking could be considered prodding, actually. Ow! Fine, what did you want me to talk about again?’

‘Explain your last comment, please. About how poisoning yourself with negativity is a good thing?’

‘I was thinking about what a miserable kid I was. When I signed up for my first aid mission I was eighteen. I was marinating in anger at how badly life had treated me when I saw an ad for this NGO that provided aid in war zones and disaster sites, which I didn’t care about particularly, but it promised an overseas trip within three months and I was desperate to get out of the country. I signed up and did the training, thinking the whole time about how I’d find a real job wherever I ended up and then I’d never have to come back.

‘I got sent on my first mission and suddenly my childish, pointless rage became something else. I was still angry, but now there were things to be angry at, things to fight: starvation, epidemics, corrupt government officials. My self-pity evaporated. I knew that I could randomly pick any one of the thousands of refugees or disaster victims I worked with and tell them my mother was dead and I had no idea what became of my father and brother. And they would have said Me too, and continued scooping food from their bowl or water from the well.’

Katie was quiet for a minute. ‘That all makes sense and sounds so . . . I don’t know, mature and noble, but if I had said it – if I’d done the things you had and then talked about them that way – I’d be in for it, I swear. I can just see the psychologist’s report: avoidance, repression, denial, martyrdom, seeks out extreme situations, expressions of self-loathing, rationalisation of risk-taking behaviour blah blah blah.’ She grabbed his hand. ‘I bet there are a lot of mentals in your line of work.’

Graeme laughed. ‘There may be. I’m fairly sure we’re not supposed to call them that, though.’

‘You’re not supposed to. But I can. It’s like fag or bitch. It’s a reclaiming.’

‘Mad pride?’

‘Sure, why not. Tell me something else.’

‘Like what?’

‘Anything. I just want to lie here and listen to your voice.’ She made a show of settling into the bed, pulling the sheet up to her chin and adjusting the angle of the pillow. ‘Okay, go.’

Graeme told her about the Chinese dissident arrested that day and then about other deportees whose stories ended badly: the political prisoners, the stateless wanderers, the disappeared, the assassinated.

‘In a way,’ Katie said, ‘– and this sounds awful, Graeme, I know – but in a way I’m jealous of people like that. Not of them, exactly. It’s not like I want to be locked in a rat infested prison or dragged in front of a firing squad. It’s just that their deaths mean something, don’t they? People like you or even, like, prime ministers and other important people pay attention. Most people don’t get that. Most people just die – drinking coffee at their desk, watching the news, asleep in their beds – most people have no chance to make it mean something. They’re just there and then they’re not.’

‘Better to die unnoticed with a cup of coffee in your hand than to spend weeks being tortured and get a paragraph on page nine of some politician’s weekly briefing notes. Besides, most of the deaths I hear about are ignored by the world at large; by anyone with the power to make a difference. Even when the person has chosen death, it’s rarely intended as a grand political protest. The Iranian man who set himself on fire in front of Parliament House when he discovered his family had been denied entry to Australia; the Thai woman who’d been kept as a sex slave in a Sydney brothel, who jumped out of a thirtieth floor window when told she’d be deported; the man from West Papua who shot himself three days after being returned home – they were driven by despair, not activism.’

‘Why not both?’

Graeme tucked the blanket around Katie’s shoulders. ‘I think you need hope to be an activist. And despair is a loss of hope.’

‘Mmm. I don’t think I really get that, actually. The times I’ve thought about ending it, I’ve been sort of hyper-hopeful. I’ve felt that killing myself is the ultimate solution. Delusional, obviously, but that’s my point. I didn’t feel despair; I felt in control. And that’s saved me, I think. Because I can lie in bed feeling so bloody terrible and be thinking, hey, it’s okay: as soon as you get a little more energy you can haul yourself to the window and chuck yourself out. So don’t bother doing some half-arsed job with razors or sleeping pills. Just wait it out and you can do it properly. And then, of course, by the time I get enough energy to do that I don’t want to anymore.’

Katie’s skull was inches from Graeme’s nose. He closed his eyes against its egg-like fragility and was assaulted by a vision of it cracking open on the pavement outside his window. Incredible that all the things she knew and thought were contained in a mass of protein-rich jelly trapped in a fuzzy shell. That her misconceptions about India, her preference for bourbon and her love for her grandmother would invisibly splatter over the footpath, unseen by the police investigators, untouched by the biohazard clean-up chemicals.

Graeme rose early on Sunday and called Ann Lewis. He assured her there was no crisis and apologised for waking her, then told her what he wanted to do. After repeated assurances that Katie was fine and that it was only a precaution, she agreed and thanked him. He walked to the hardware store on City Road, where he paid extra to have a storeman drive him home with his purchases.

Back at the flat, he was grateful, for once, for the early morning Metallica concert coming from next door. By the time the lovers emerged he had security bars installed on all the windows except the one in Katie’s bedroom.

Katie stopped in the middle of the kitchen and dropped Adam’s arm. ‘Oh,’ she said, her glance flying over Graeme before returning to the window.

‘What’s the deal?’ Adam asked.

Katie shook her head, still looking at the window.

Graeme walked towards her. ‘Listen, I –’

‘Fuck you.’ She walked to the window and wrapped a hand around the centre bar, then turned and ran. A second later there was the sound of something crashing into the bars in the living room. There were more footsteps and another fuck you from somewhere down the hall.

‘I thought it better to be safe than sorry,’ Graeme said.

Fuck you fuck you fuck you came from the front of the house, followed by the sound of the front door slamming.

Adam went to the kitchen window and gripped the bars. He leant into them, pulled back, shook them. ‘Good job,’ he said. He patted Graeme’s back on his way out of the room.

‘Wait.’

‘Yeah?’ He did not turn around.

‘Katie’s room isn’t –’

Adam nodded at the kitchen door. ‘I’ll keep her out of the way.’

22.

Katie wished old Carol was still around to see her stomping over to the wall beside the mailboxes wearing a pair of men’s boxer shorts and a T-shirt with no bra. Typical Katie, Carol would cackle, her chins jiggling, and Katie would laugh with her, safe in the knowledge that if anyone else dared to even look at her disrespectfully, Carol would go feral on their arse.

Without her champion, she sat hunched over, facing the block of flats, hoping no one on the street would notice how she was dressed. In her hand was a letter she’d just pulled out of the mailbox. It said she was no longer eligible for the disability support pension as she had discontinued supplying the Department with periodical medical reports. She tried to remember the last time that blank-faced doctor had signed her form, but couldn’t. She crumpled the letter and its envelope and shoved the paper ball back in the mailbox.

Adam came out of the building, dressed in jeans, a button-down shirt and sneakers. He put his arms on her shoulders. ‘Whatcha doing out here?’

‘I’m not going back in until that interfering, creepy old bastard is gone.’

‘Okay, okay. You don’t have to go in. But listen, you know he was just trying to help. He’s worried that –’

‘Gah!’ She threw his hands off. ‘I know. I know what he’s worried about, what you and Gran and every other condescending bastard who’s talked to me for three seconds is worried about. Jesus!’

Adam held her jiggling legs. A hand for each leg, just above the knee. ‘Stop that,’ he said.

‘Why?’ She jiggled his hands away.

‘Tell me what you need? Apart from sleep, I mean. The way you are at the moment . . .’

‘How am I, Adam?’

He made a frustrated noise with his throat and nose. ‘You haven’t slept properly for a week, longer probably. Your legs never stop moving. The only time you’re not trying to wriggle out of your skin is when you’re drunk.’

‘No one is forcing you to hang around.’

‘That’s not . . .’ He squatted in front of her, his hands above her knees again. ‘Listen to me. You keep spinning faster and faster and I’m worried what will happen if you don’t stop. I only want to –’

‘Help me?’

‘Yeah. Please let me help you.’

‘Adam. Darling. If you say one more word about wanting to help me or being worried about me I will rip your head off. That is not a figure of speech, by the way. I’ll murder you.’ Adam flinched, but continued to look her in the eye. ‘If, however,’ she continued, ‘you can accept that this is a part of my personality, if you can relax your facial muscles and hands and sphincter and just go with it, then you might find that hanging with someone spinning faster and faster is fun.’

‘But, Katie, I –’

‘You. Can’t. Save. Me.’ She kissed him hard on the lips, knocking him off balance and almost sending them both to the concrete. ‘You can’t. Let it go.’

He pulled her onto his lap. This time they did fall to the ground but it wasn’t far. They kissed there awhile. Katie felt herself getting smooth and soft.

‘Take it inside, will ya!’

She jolted and jumped to her feet. A man in a navy suit was at the bus stop, gawking. His gaping mouth got bigger very fast and his sneering eyes got wide and scared. Katie was a swinging fist away when Adam picked her up and carried her backwards. She watched the mouth get small and smirky, but the eyes stayed scared which was some satisfaction.

‘Jesus,’ Adam said putting her back on her feet by the mailboxes. ‘This is what I’m talking about. You can’t just attack people like that. You’ll get hurt. I know you don’t believe it right now, I know you feel invincible, but trust me on this, you’re as breakable as anyone.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, which was like saying nothing. What she would have said if there’d been even the tiniest chance he’d listen, is that she had never felt less invincible in her whole uninvincible life. She would have said that the man at the bus stop had made her blood so hot she felt she might be boiled to death from the inside out. She would say that her heart was breaking because she was sure she would never again feel as safe as she did a moment ago with the concrete cool and strong beneath her and Adam warm and heavy above her and what was the point in preserving your physical health or staying out of gaol or anything at all, when you understand that as good as it gets has gone forever and even if you did manage to find something that felt so good again, not the exact same thing of course because it was gone forever, but something just as good, then anyone can take it from you at any time? A man at a bus stop can just snatch everything away, making even your body turn against you.

Dom was in his booth at the back of the pub. His face looked more yellow than usual, but it might have been the pre-noon light coming through the window overhead. In the relative brightness, Katie noticed that shallow, elbow-shaped ruts were worn into the dark wood tabletop. How many years had that taken, she wondered. How many hours of leaning?

‘Katie. Long time no talk.’ Dom signalled to the barman for a glass. ‘I was getting worried. Thought you’d –’

‘Jesus! Why does everyone think I’m going to off myself?

‘I was going to say that I thought you’d followed your stud back to America.’

Katie took the glass from the barman and poured herself some wine. ‘I can’t believe you’re drinking at this hour.’

‘I always drink at this hour. What’s your story?’

She took a sip: it was warm and smooth on her throat. ‘How do you afford such good wine? You must go through crates of it. Your dad a billionaire or something?’

‘In all the time we’ve been drinking together you’ve never once asked me anything about myself.’

‘Please, you’re an alcoholic. You wouldn’t know what I’ve asked you.’

‘Yeah, but since you’re a complete narcissist it seems pretty unlikely you would have. Besides which, you’re pretty soused most of the time yourself, not to mention the fits of delusional psychosis. So don’t talk to me about memory, you crazy bitch.’

‘You’re a real bastard in the morning, you know.’

Dom filled her glass. ‘According to the wife I’m a real bastard all the time.’

‘You have a wife?’

He held up the wine bottle. ‘Now you know how I afford such good wine.’

‘You have a wife who pays for you to sit in a pub and get blotto every day?’

‘Wouldn’t you if you were married to me?’

‘I’m shocked. How didn’t I know this?’

‘Like I said, you’re a narcissist.’ Dom twisted his hair around one wrist. ‘Plus, I don’t advertise the fact. Ruin my reputation as a ladies’ man.’

‘Yeah right. You’ve never made a move on me.’

‘You’re not a lady.’

‘Ha, ha.’

‘Anyway, I like pretty girls.’

‘Arsehole. God, I can’t believe you’re not allowed to smoke in here.’ Katie took another gulp of wine. ‘So, talking of arseholes, this bloke I’m living with installed bars on all the windows.’

‘I knew that dude wasn’t right in the head soon as you told me about the frigging Bible tattoos.’

‘What? No, not Adam. The tenant, Graeme. He put bars on the windows ’cause he thinks I’m going to jump.’

Dom shrugged. ‘Not an unreasonable supposition.’

Katie put her head in her hands and inhaled the smell of cigarettes. She wasn’t used to drinking so early in the day. She dug her thumbnails into the space below her cheekbones and clamped her teeth down on the tip of her tongue.

‘What does the Yank think about all this? Or is he out of the picture?’

‘He’s still around. God knows why.’ Dom’s face swam and she dropped her chin onto her hands. ‘I mean, it’s all about his dead wife, obviously. But I can’t figure out if he’s trying to ease his survivor guilt by saving me, or if he thinks my mystical crazy girl energy will heal his broken spirit.’

Dom snorted. ‘Nothing in this world I hate more than losers who think the meaning of life is hidden inside drunks and nut-jobs.’

Katie closed her eyes. ‘Yeah, well I don’t hate Adam. I’m just tired of people treating me like a puzzle. Decode Katie: peace and happiness will be yours.’

‘Last woman who tried that shit with me ended up with a broken jaw.’

Katie opened her eyes. Dom was smiling into his glass. She picked up the wine bottle and left.

23.

The waitress with short black hair and a tattoo of a dove on her forearm stopped him as he was leaving work. She put her hand on his arm and smiled. ‘I was thinking we should go and get a drink.’

Her name was Rosa. Adam had never spoken to her, except for excuse me when they met in the narrow space between the walk-in fridge and the sinks, or coming up when she yelled for clean water glasses.

‘Thanks, but I, ah –’

She tugged his arm, leading him down the two back steps and out to the parking lot. ‘Come on, one drink. It’ll be fun.’

‘I’m married.’

She let go of his arm and took a step back. ‘You don’t wear a ring.’

‘No. We – ah –’ He pulled his shirt up, showing her the entwined crowns above his navel. ‘We got these instead.’

Rosa gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘That is so romantic.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Does your wife have as many tatts as you, then?’

‘Nah, she hated them. Really hated them. Early on she wanted me to get rid of them. A couple of days after I proposed, we were supposed to be going shopping for a ring and instead she gets in my car and hands me this drawing she’s done. And she says, “Promise you won’t tease me if I pass out.”’

‘Wow. And did she?’

‘Nope. Hardly even winced.’

‘She sounds cool.’

‘She was.’

Rosa frowned and Adam inhaled spiced lamb and rotting garbage. ‘Was, yeah. So . . . she died, actually. I should have said, at the start. I was married. She was very cool.’

They had a drink at a bar across the street from the restaurant, and then another at Rosa’s apartment. She talked about her love of travel, the trip to Russia she was planning and the one to Sri Lanka she had just returned from. He told her about his time backpacking through Indochina the summer before he met Eugenie. They kissed for a while, but when she started undoing his belt, he stopped her.

‘I can’t get into a relationship right now.’

‘Sure. I understand. You’re grieving.’

‘No, I mean, yes, I am. But that’s not . . . Things are complicated. I know that’s a cliché, but it’s true. I’m involved with this other – god, involved isn’t even the word. And I have some legal issues and financial stuff and once all that’s sorted, well, I’m going back home.’

‘Right.’ Rosa sat back and closed her eyes.

‘We could still . . . As long as you know that it’s not going to be anything more than –’

‘Yeah. I’m sort of over the one-night stand thing, actually.’

‘Okay. Sure. I understand. I mean, me too.’

‘So why did you come back here?’

He paused. ‘You asked me.’

‘Do you do everything someone asks you?’

‘Pretty much, yeah.’

She stood up, took his hand and led him to the door. ‘Go and sort your shit out, man. Then next time someone asks you out, you won’t be such a dick about it.’

He gazed down at her neatly painted red nails, her glossy hair and healthy pink skin, at her clean white sofa and vacuumed carpet and shelves crammed with art books and novels. He imagined her bedroom: a brightly coloured quilt and cool, fresh-smelling sheets, a line of cosmetics running across the back of a solid dresser, more shelves with more books.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Can we start over? I’d really like –’

Rosa smiled, baring her straight, white teeth. ‘See you at work, Adam.’

When he got home, Katie was sitting on the bathroom floor with her back against the vanity, her blood streaked legs stretched out in front. By her side was a packet of bandaids, a box of tissues and a small bottle of mercurochrome. When she looked up and smiled he noticed the streak of red across her cheek.

‘Don’t look so terrified. I fell down some stairs. There was broken glass on the ground. My phone smashed, but I’m fine.’

Adam crouched down beside her. The blood was mostly dry and none of the scratches looked deep. ‘What stairs?’

She dabbed at her legs with a mercurochrome-soaked tissue, wincing. ‘Train station. I think it was Town Hall. Somewhere in the city, anyway. How was your night?’

‘Fine. Seriously, sure you’re okay?’

‘Yep.’ She sat staring at her legs. ‘Actually, no. I’m not okay. No.’

‘What do you need?’

She bent at the waist and fanned her shins with both hands. ‘I saw these girls tonight, on the train. They were sixteen, I guess, so pretty. Their skin looked all shiny and they had this sparkly stuff on their eyelids and they both wore these teeny little dresses and enormous, clunky shoes. Then this bloke got on. About your age, nicely dressed, and he sat across from them and started talking. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I knew it was sleazy because of the way he was leaning towards them and mumbling his words. I wondered if I should move closer, but these girls – god, they were wonderful – they told that creep where to go and they did it so powerfully, you know? I was scared of them! I just sat back and smiled and smiled and then I started thinking about this thing that happened when I was young. Young like them, I mean. I was at this party and feeling like those girls must have felt tonight: like I was everything anyone could want in the world; like there was no one who wouldn’t kneel at my feet and lick my boots if I asked them to. And I remember meeting this bloke who acted just like I expected him to – like he was drunk from looking at me. I spoke to him like those girls spoke to the man on the train and he stepped back, he told me I was incredible, strong. He called me a goddess. Then later, when we were alone, he almost choked me to death.

‘So I was thinking about that and then I noticed the train had stopped and the girls had gotten off and so I jumped up and bolted for the doors, made the platform just as they closed. I heard the girls at the bottom of the stairs and I ran to catch them. I needed to tell them how important it is that they stay fierce.’ She sat upright, took another bandaid from the box and peeled off the backing paper. ‘I needed to tell them that they should always carry a knife and that if any man tried to make them feel scared and small they shouldn’t hesitate to cut the bastard’s throat.’

‘Katie.’

‘But I fell and when I got up I was bleeding and the girls were gone. Who knows what’ll happen to them now?’

The afternoons were the worst. The pubs didn’t feel safe anymore, not in the daytime, anyway. It was too frightening to be around men who had given up even trying to get through the day in their right minds. A few times she walked with Adam to work, but the sun was so harsh at that time and the streets so busy.

Inside was better but not good. The flat was uglier when the late afternoon sun beat through the windows and she could see the cigarette dust and wine rings on the table. Everything she did – making a coffee, flipping through her CDs, lighting a smoke – was loud.

Squaw from outside and her heart was going deadly fast before the magpie even finished its call. Not just fast but loud and hard. She ran and shut the window with too much force, slammed the heel of her hand into the sill. The first time her heart had done this she’d thought she was dying. Even now, even with all she knew about heightened sensitivity and exaggerated startle response and panic attacks, it was hard to believe she would survive this. The bird squawked again. It was only a bird on a tree calling its babies home for the night. She leant on the windowsill and breathed in, out, in, out; just a bird, nothing wrong, just a bird, in, out, in, out; breathe because it’s all good, it’s all fine.

24.

Adam found Katie sitting in her underpants on the bed with a pile of papers in front of her. ‘Let me guess. You got a job as a stripper but are having trouble with the paperwork?’

‘Huh?’ She frowned, then looked down at her bare breasts. ‘Oh. I got hot. My shirt’s on the chair over there.’ She reached towards it.

‘Don’t get dressed on my account.’ He bent and touched her forehead. Her skin was damp. He blew cool air on her face. ‘Maybe you’re getting sick. It’s kinda cool out, tonight.’

She continued frowning over the papers in front of her.

‘What you up to?’

‘The old creep came home from work early and then he went out again but he didn’t take his briefcase. So I cracked the lock.’

‘That was not a good –’

‘C’mon, as if you don’t want to know what I found.’

Adam shrugged and lay back so his head was in her lap. He stunk of dishwater and ghee but she stunk of cigarette smoke and whisky-sweat. ‘Okay, tell me what you found, Detective.’

‘Not much so far. But I do know he’s cashed up.’

‘Is he? What’s he living here for?’

‘He must be involved in something dodgy, so he moves around a lot, stays in places no one would expect. I can’t see him as a drug king-pin, so I’m thinking maybe slave trade. He’s always going on about all those poor countries he’s been to – I bet he goes to pick out little kids to sell to brothels.’

‘Do you have any actual evidence of this? Photos of him bundling Thai virgins into the back of a van, say?’

Katie jerked her knees, causing his head to slide off on to the bed. ‘Explain this then!’ She shoved a document into his hands. ‘Five hundred grand transferred into his bank account in one hit. And then –’ she thrust another piece of paper at him – ‘then a week later, the same amount of money transferred to a different bank. See! He’s trying to muddy the trail. And who receives huge wads of dollars and then moves them around to avoid detection? Drug dealers and slave traders, right? Right?’

Adam started to point out that keeping the records neatly filed in a briefcase defeated the purpose of transferring money to muddy the trail, but then he noticed something odd. He held a hand up to Katie to shush her and examined the second statement. Although Graeme’s name was on the top, the account into which the money had been transferred was the Refugee Assistance Foundation.

‘What?’ She leant over his shoulder, her damp cheek against his. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? He’s laundering money!’

‘No, he’s giving it away. All that dough? He donated it to a charity.’ Adam compared the statements again. ‘Left himself with barely a thousand bucks.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah. This first one is his personal account. The second one is a notice of transfer. It’s not his account and it’s not his money anymore. He gave it all away.’ Adam waited for Katie to make some crack about how the old man could have given her some since he was throwing it around, but she remained still and silent.

‘What?’

‘He’s going to die.’

‘What?’ Adam looked down at the papers then back at her face. ‘Because of this? No, come on.’

She lay face down on the bed, kicking papers off to make room for her legs. Adam gathered the documents up and placed them on the bedside table.

‘Have you noticed him being sick? Because if it’s something terminal there’d be symptoms.’

‘I don’t think he’s sick.’

‘You don’t? So . . . ?’

‘God, it’s so obvious. He’s in love with death.’ Her voice was muffled by the pillow. ‘He wants to talk about it all the time. I thought – ha! Stupid – I thought we were talking about me.’

‘Is he . . .’ Adam didn’t even know what the question should be. ‘Why?’ he asked finally.

Katie snorted. ‘Does it matter?’

‘No, I guess not. I just . . . I don’t understand why he would want to . . . if he even does. I don’t get why you’re so sure and I’m . . . I’m lost. It doesn’t make sense.’

She sat up and crossed her arms over her bare chest, looking around the room and blinking as though she had just woken. ‘Not to you. You have no idea what the world looks like to someone like him, like me.’

‘Then tell me. What does it look like?’

‘Bleak. Intensely, endlessly bleak and then you realise there is, well, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. And the trick is that the light switch is right there.’ She stroked the air in front of her. ‘And once you know it’s there, that you can flick the switch at any time, well, it’s all you can think about.’

‘No.’ Adam grabbed a pillow, squeezed it hard. ‘No. I watched my wife . . . I understand bleak, Katie, but I still don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.’

‘I know, but listen . . .’ She put her hand on his arm, and leant forward so their foreheads were almost touching. ‘Think of it from Graeme’s point of view. He’s been to all these horrible places, right? Fed some starving babies in this place, helped build a hospital for people with AIDS in another. And now every day he deals with people who’ve done everything to get here. They’ve eaten grass and dirt and rotting animals, brought up their kids in tent-cities and refugee camps, spent months at sea worried the whole time that the boat’ll sink. They’ve been raped, tortured, watched everyone they love get murdered and they keep smiling and giving birth and kissing each other goodnight and begging to be allowed to stay here and clean our offices, drive our taxis.’

Katie’s grip tightened, her eyes were wet and unfocused. ‘And then one day Graeme wakes up, right, and realises that even if he fixed it so no person would ever go hungry, that there’ll never be another war, that no baby will ever get AIDS – even if he could cure that damned disease and all the other ones – even then it wouldn’t matter because all of those saved would die in the end, same as him.’

‘Katie, calm down for a minute.’ Adam spoke loudly, trying to break through the miasma. ‘Has he said anything like this to you? Maybe you’re projecting.’ He was looking into her eyes, but there was no connection.

‘Awhile back I found this book, diary, whatever, and this thing about a little girl who was raped and drowned and he was – god, he was trying to make it right, of course. Make it mean something . . . And all those red crosses and notes about what was useful and what . . .’ Her focus returned and she blinked into his eyes. ‘All this time, he’s been preparing, see? I’m so dense. So self-absorbed. Everything he’s ever said and done and –’ She leapt off the bed. ‘Did you take my shirt?’

‘What? No, it’s right –’

But she was already pulling it over her head. ‘I have to go out.’ She pulled on a pair of tracksuit bottoms and ran her fingers through her spikes. ‘I’ll see you later, okay?’

Adam rubbed the half-moons her nails had imprinted on his forearm. Deep grooves for someone with short, bitten nails. Like marks on the wall of a cell. The front door slammed and a second later his body reacted. ‘Katie!’ He bolted down the hall, through the living room and wrenched open the door. The outside hallway was empty. He pressed the call button on the lift wondering if it would be quicker to take the fire stairs than wait for the lift to come back up – but the doors slid open immediately.

He stood stunned for a moment, then charged down the hall and yanked open the heavy red fire door.

‘Katie!’

Her neck was bent, the top of her head flush against the slanted roof. Her two bare feet gripped the steel rail, like a bird on a wire, over the open pyramid of the stairwell. The door slammed behind Adam and she flinched.

He lunged, wrapped his arms around her knees, pulled against the force of her stumble. For a vertiginous second he felt himself moving forward with her, but the low roof worked as a brake. Katie cried out as her neck was wrenched backward then forward again and the top of her head scraped along the rough concrete.

Several steps back from the rail, Adam released her legs. She crumpled at his feet. She rubbed her scalp and patches of bright blood appeared beneath the bristles. ‘Ouch,’ she said. ‘You could have broken my neck.’

Adam leant against the cool cement wall, waiting for his vision to clear and for the dizziness to pass. If she made a run for it now, he’d have no hope of stopping her. He watched her and breathed and thought about the wall behind him, the solidity of it.

When he felt steadier he took a careful step forward and reassured himself that he would not faint or stumble. ‘Tomorrow morning, first thing. I’m taking you to a doctor.’

She blinked up at him. ‘I’m sorry I scared you, but I’m fine. Snapped right out of it. It happens like that sometimes.’

‘No. No more of this embracing madness bullshit. No more bullshit about survivors and light switches. I’ve had it. It stops, okay?’

She grabbed the bars with both hands and pulled herself up. In the second between releasing the bars and grabbing the rail, Adam saw that her hands were shaking. ‘Not up to you, mate.’

He stepped forward with his arms outstretched. She let go of the rail and put all her weight on his chest. He held her a moment and then hauled her up, over his shoulder. She began to kick. She kicked all the way down the hallway and when he dropped her on the living room sofa she reared up and punched him in the face. ‘Fuck you.’

Adam swung out and pulled back almost in the same instant. His knuckles connected with her cheekbone but there was no force behind it. Before she could react, he took hold of her shoulders, pushed her onto her back and straddled her.

‘You listen to me.’ His own voice sounded hoarse, unfamiliar. ‘I will sit on you all night if I have to. I will tie you up and carry you into the doctor’s office. I don’t care if you hate me. I will call the police, social services, whoever I have to, to force you to get help.’

Katie went limp. Adam’s heart was beating so fast he thought he might pass out. Never had he used force to get his own way; never had he used threats. If he’d known how effective it would be, he would have done it years ago.

25.

The day after he installed the security bars on the flat’s windows, Graeme phoned Bushland Burials, a Central Coast business whose ad he’d clipped from a newspaper six months ago. The woman who answered invited him to come up to the site the following Monday. When he asked if he could come tomorrow afternoon instead, she paused.

‘It’s just that . . .’ He squeezed the chair arm with his free hand. ‘I don’t know if I’ll be up to the trip by next week.’

‘That bad, eh? Well, sure, come tomorrow. Whatever time you like.’ She gave him the directions and, before hanging up, added, ‘I’ll keep an eye out for you, love.’

He left work early the next day, his prepared excuse of a dentist appointment unused. After stopping in at the flat to change clothes, he caught the train up the coast and then a taxi to the site, which looked from the road like a thinned-out rainforest with a small timber hut at the entrance.

A stocky woman wearing grey coveralls and gumboots answered the door and introduced herself as Dot. Graeme put her at around forty-five, until she mentioned that the hut was usually manned by her twenty-year-old granddaughter. He took a decade off his own age when she asked.

Dot locked the hut door and led him through the bluegums. Half a kilometre or so in, he noticed the discreet plaques bearing names and dates. ‘Timber,’ she said when he bent down to touch Marcella Tripodi. ‘Ronnie, my eldest, does the carving himself. When my dad died ten years ago we buried him under a truckload of concrete in some soulless, heartless mass cemetery in the suburbs. He was a farmer, a rider. The original outdoor Aussie bloke and there was nothing we could do except cover him in concrete or turn him into ash. And cremation is a dreadful thing to do to the world. You know how much crap gets released into the atmosphere from one body? Carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, sulphur oxide, dioxin, mercury: nice parting gift for the grandkids.’

‘I’ve always thought there should be a better way,’ Graeme said. ‘A way to just sort of . . . vaporise. Not leave a trace.’ Then, seeing her frown he added, ‘I just don’t want to leave the place any worse off than it was when I got here.’

‘Exactly. That’s exactly what I thought. So even though Dad was already buried, I kept researching alternatives. I came across this thing they do in Tibet, called a sky burial. They cut the body into pieces and grind the bones to dust, then leave it all on a mountain for the vultures. The idea of becoming part of the food chain appealed to me. I’m real spiritual – not that you’d tell – but I am, I believe in the circle of life, the divinity of nature. Anyway, long story short: we don’t have vultures here, there are laws against leaving bodies lying around and my kids didn’t speak to me for days after I said I wanted them to chop me into bird feed.’

Graeme chuckled in the hope that Dot would think he too had loved ones who’d be appalled at such a grisly suggestion.

‘So I realised I should be thinking about them, the people left behind. I should be trying to find something they could feel at peace with. Because that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it, Graeme? Consolation for the living?’

Graeme shivered. The rustle of the trees and the dead beneath his feet like in the forest outside Murambi, but there were no tasteful timber plaques there. Fifty thousand slaughtered, no one left to need consolation. He felt himself fading and shoved the heels of his hands into his eyes, breathed deeply and the smell of the eucalypt meant he was nowhere else but here.

‘Sorry, love. Do you need to stop for a minute?’

He shook his head clear, shook his head no. ‘Please,’ he said, motioning for her to go on.

‘Anyway, eventually I came across a mob of hippies in the UK doing forest burials and then found there was a whole international eco-burial movement using biodegradable cardboard coffins that could be buried in a forest or the bush. Cardboard breaks down, body decomposes, trees get yummy nutrients. Circle of life. I gathered the info, made a nuisance of myself to every regulatory body in the nation and here we are.’ She smiled, spreading her arms out wide. ‘It’s not a vulture feedlot but it’s nice just the same.’

The train would have gotten him home by midnight, but at the last minute he decided not to take it. He’d not slept well for three nights, stirring at every noise, straining to hear footsteps when there were none. Better to stay at the motor inn by the station, sleep undisturbed by hope.

Except that sleep wouldn’t come to him here, either. For almost an hour he lay in the double bed, held stiff by the tightly tucked sheets, listening to strangers through the wall fight about the cost of dinner. He got up and went to the glass shelf labelled MINI BAR, opened a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels and drank it in two shots. He looked at the receipt sitting on top of the television set, the Bush Burials letterhead with its cartoon trees and bush critters crawling across the top, and his chest heaved.

He found a half-full plastic ice-tray, and slammed it against the mini bar shelf until it gave up its cubes. He filled a water tumbler with ice and poured a second bottle of whisky over it. Only days ago he’d caught himself thinking how wonderful it was that the universe had thrown Katie in his path, that her small, eager hands had gripped his unwilling ones and dragged him into the future. He’d been in the shower when that image came to him and the adolescent soppiness of it made him snort hot water. Laughably sentimental as it was, he didn’t doubt that there was truth in it.

But as it turned out, the gripping and dragging were temporary. He’d seen Katie take a tentative step towards the edge of the path and clumsily dropped her hand in order to construct a safety barrier. And now she would not take him up again. She would not take herself up again. She was standing in place and he was moving again, outward not forward.

Graeme opened both tiny bottles of vodka and poured them over the melting, whisky-stained ice. He listened to the trains passing two hundred metres from his window. He could leave right now. Five minutes and it would be done. There were two notebooks left to be transcribed and destroyed, but what did it matter? Twenty-year-old information on the location of safe houses in Angola would not make the slightest bit of difference. None of it, he knew, would make the slightest bit of difference. It was pure vanity. Vanity and procrastination.

He drained the glass, his eyes watering. Now there was her. Not a reason to stay, as he’d thought, but a reason to take care with the leaving. To – what had he said to Dot earlier? – to not leave things worse off than he’d found them.

The alcohol had worked to make his head and eyelids heavy. He slid between the sheets and closed his eyes. Funny how the trains sounded just like crashing waves. Or perhaps, he thought, drifting off, perhaps he was closer to the beach than he’d realised.

The next morning, he caught the 7 am train back to Central and decided to go home and shower before going to work. He would be two, two-and-a-half hours late, but he doubted they would notice and if they did there was always the dentist excuse he hadn’t had to give them yesterday.

When he walked into the flat, Adam was stretched out on the living room floor, a book open in front of him.

‘Hey,’ he said without looking up. ‘Katie’s sleeping so keep it down.’

‘Right, I’ll cancel my drum lesson, then.’

‘Is that a joke?’

‘Apparently not a good one. Has something happened?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Can I help?’

‘Sure. How about you go and curl up in bed with her and talk about war and torture and gruesome death? That seems like a helpful thing to do with a fucking manic depressive, don’t you think?’

Graeme sat on the couch, his shaking hands under his thighs. ‘Our conversations weren’t harmful to her. I would never have let them continue if they were. It helped her a little, I thought, to talk about her darker thoughts.’

Adam turned a page, although his eyes seemed to be focused an inch or so past the book. ‘It was all about helping her, was it?’

‘She came to me, I listened and where I thought I could help, I did. I’m the one who put these bars up, remember.’

Adam snapped the book closed and jumped to his feet. He walked to the window and bent forward, his forehead resting against the bars. ‘Listen, I’m too tired and too stressed to bullshit you. Katie went through your stuff. She thinks you’re going to top yourself.’

Graeme barely heard the end of Adam’s accusation; he was already heading for his room. He slid the lock and sat on his bed staring at the door until his heartbeat slowed. When he unlocked the door, Adam was standing in front of it, his hand poised to knock. He stepped back and raised his hands. ‘Look, man, I –’

‘Come in.’

Adam perched on the edge of Graeme’s desk, resting his bare feet on the chair.

‘Listen to me,’ Graeme said. ‘Katie cannot believe I intend to kill myself.’

‘She does believe that.’

‘Why?’

‘She found your bank statements, transfers to the refugee foundation. She said getting rid of all your possessions, all your money, is a suicidal thing.’

‘Yes. Yes. Of course that’s what she’d think. Poor Katie.’ Graeme trained his gaze on Adam’s feet. The skin was shockingly white after the lurid tattooed colours of his lower legs. ‘You need to explain to her that I sold up everything because I had a spiritual epiphany. You need to tell her I decided it was hypocritical to work for social justice while living in an expensive house and surrounding myself with expensive things. Tell her I have decided to live simply, like a monk.’

‘Why don’t you tell her?’

‘I’ll try, but last I checked she wasn’t speaking to me.’

‘Man.’ It was more a sigh than a word.

Graeme noticed Adam’s hooded eyes and lined forehead, his young man’s hands on the end of those defeated sailor arms. Pity lurched up in him. ‘This shouldn’t be your problem,’ he said. ‘You’ve enough to deal with. I’ll call her grandma. I need to anyway. I told her I’d –’

‘No, wait.’ Adam held up his hand. ‘I promised I wouldn’t involve her gran.’

‘I promised that I would.’

Adam stared blankly for a few seconds and then his face crumpled and his upper body spasmed like he’d been thumped in the back. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Damn.’

‘Calm down. It’ll be fine. I’ll call Ann and –’

Adam hit the desk with his open palm. ‘She almost died! She tried to. Understand? I got to her in time, but . . .’

‘Is she –’ Graeme started, but his voice came out too low.

‘If I tell her grandma, she’ll run. That’s what she said and I believe her.’ He crossed his arms, held his shoulders. ‘She said she’ll let me help her, that she’ll do what I tell her as long as I don’t . . . She won’t let her gran go through this again, she’ll disappear first. She’s capable of anything after last night.’

‘I have a number for her doctor,’ Graeme said. ‘How about I –’

‘The guy in Surry Hills? Yeah, I got his details from an old prescription in her wallet. He said she’d missed the last four appointments so he wasn’t surprised she’d had an episode. Said I should take her to the emergency room if I was worried. Then he put me through to the receptionist, offered an appointment in three weeks.’

Graeme clenched his fists by his sides. ‘Okay, I have a colleague. A psychiatrist. I’ll talk to her today. See if she can help.’

Adam exhaled. ‘Okay. Good. Thanks.’ He slid from the desk, took a step towards the door, stopped and turned back to Graeme. ‘What about you, though? Are you . . . I mean, should I be calling someone to help you?’

‘No.’ He barely got the word out.

‘Because to be honest I’m so thrown right now that I don’t know which way’s up. I’m trying to do the right thing but I have no idea what that is. I mean, should I get tough with you? Should I be holding you down like I did Katie? Should I be going through all your stuff looking for proof ? Do I need to be watching you as well as her? I can’t decide if you’re –’

‘Adam, stop.’ Graeme pressed his nails into his palms as hard as he could. ‘What you need to do, in my opinion, is beg or borrow the money for a plane ticket, pack your gear and go home. Hug your mum. Go drinking with your friends.’

‘You’re avoid –’

‘Have a garage sale,’ Graeme said and felt a sick rush of elation at Adam’s recoil. ‘Sorry, yard sale you’d probably say. Or just give it all away to charity. Silly to hang around here going through all this just because you’re afraid of dealing with all her stuff.’

Adam’s jaw stiffened. ‘I can’t leave Katie alone like this. Especially if what she says about you is true. Tempting as it is right now, I can’t just leave you both here to –’

‘Mate! If you’re determined to be her saviour, you need to bloody well start acting like a sane and reasonable adult. Stop the drunken, maudlin screwing, the adolescent angsty crap. She’s not a seer or a mad genius or a wild grief-curing nymph. She doesn’t have any special insights or super suicide prediction powers. She’s a sick, lonely kid. Help her or get out of the way so the real grown-ups can.’ Graeme went to the door and opened it. He did not look at Adam. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I have to get ready for work.’

There was a knock and then Jenny’s head appeared around his office door. ‘Sherry said you were looking for me?’

‘Yeah, do you have a minute?’

‘For you, Graeme? Always.’ She stepped into the room and shut the door behind her. ‘I actually beat you here this morning, I think. Had a sleep-in?’

‘I wish. Dentist.’

‘Mmm.’ Jenny rubbed her eyes, yawned. ‘Sorry. I’m stuck on the idea of a sleep-in now. One of these days I’m going to stay in bed until midday. I really am.’ She shook her head briskly. ‘Right. So, what’s up?’

Graeme held a pen in his right hand, as though this was work. ‘Have you much experience with manic depression?’

Jenny groaned. ‘Graeme, please don’t tell me there’s a bipolar arrival.’

‘No, sorry, ah, this is actually a . . . a personal matter.’

Jenny blinked and leant back in her chair. ‘Oh?’

‘I have a friend. She’s in a bad way. She needs a good doctor.’

‘What does in a bad way mean?’

Graeme described what he knew of Katie’s history and current state. Jenny agreed – albeit with a mouthful of disclaimers and cautions and equivocations – with his amateur diagnosis of bipolar, and agreed, with no equivocation at all, that professional intervention was called for.

‘You want me to recommend someone?’

Graeme blinked back at her.

‘Shit. You don’t want me to recommend someone, do you?’

‘I hoped you could come and meet her and then if you . . . I understand if you can’t spare the time. I know how hard you work, but that’s the thing . . . why I wanted you to . . . because I know you’re a good doctor, I know you’d never fob a patient off with a wad of scripts. I know you take care.’

‘Ah, flattery. How do you know this kid?’

Graeme hesitated. ‘She’s my flatmate.’

‘I didn’t know you had a flatmate.’ She frowned. ‘I didn’t know you had a flat. Wait. What happened to your place in Paddington?’

Graeme twirled the pen in his fingers, casual. ‘I sold it. Decided to downsize. I’m living just up the road now.’

Jenny stared. ‘Wow. That amazing house. I’ve been coveting that place ever since I saw it. The view from the upstairs windows and that organic grocer right across the street. And those ceilings!’

The memory of a night several years ago, back when he still thought he might make a life here, appeared. Jenny had come for dinner. They’d talked shop and she’d commented on the height of his ceilings, the delicate plaster work of the cornices. He’d wanted, for a while, to take things further, but couldn’t figure out how it was done. At what point to do you halt the discussion of immigration policy and put your tongue in her mouth? How do you even begin the transition from standing by her side admiring plasterwork to lying on top of her sweating into her skin?

She left soon after dinner and he’d never asked her over again. After a few months he’d stopped thinking about the night and what went wrong. He went back to the tough, bossy ‘independent contractors’ in the eastern suburbs. Women in their mid-to-late thirties who’d have the condom unrolled within a minute of stashing their cash in the toe of a high-heeled shoe.

He waved Jenny’s words away. ‘Like I said, I decided to downsize. Simplify my life.’

‘Graeme, that place must have been worth what? Six hundred thousand? More? You must have a hell of an investment portfolio.’

He shrugged and, thinking of Katie’s eggshell skull, he pressed on. ‘So what do you say, Jenny? Will you at least come and meet her? Tell me what you think?’

Jenny chewed her bottom lip. He saw she wanted to ask more about his move, understood that her curiosity would not allow her to say no to him now. She arched her arms over her head and cracked her neck from side to side. She blew air out between her lips. ‘Righto,’ she said. ‘Where and when do you want me?’

26.

After he pulled her off the stair rail, Adam told Katie he wouldn’t let her out of his sight. He was worried, he said, that she would ‘suddenly decide’ to try again. She told him that it wasn’t sudden and it wasn’t a decision. She tried to explain, so that he would ease off, stop hovering, but she couldn’t think of the right words. He stroked her head until she fell asleep and when she woke again the room was bright and he was snoring beside her.

She pulled herself up and went to the bathroom, then went to the kitchen and grabbed a beer. She lay on the couch and turned on the TV. She watched part of a documentary about animal attacks and wondered why bears never clawed out their own hearts. Why did horses never throw themselves over cliffs?

She watched Oprah, Judge Judy, Dr Phil and Deal or No Deal. When the news came on, she turned the TV off. She couldn’t cope with the shouting of red-faced men in grey suits or the close-ups of blood-stained driveways and sheet-shrouded bodies. She didn’t want to deal with the feeling that the camera crew was right outside her window, the arresting officer about to bust through her door.

She crept through to Adam’s empty room and grabbed a navy windbreaker from his cupboard, pulled it on over her T-shirt and shorts. She slid into a pair of thongs she’d left in the bathroom, pocketed her lighter and smokes and left the flat.

The dusk was shockingly bright. The sky was pink and orange where it should have been charcoal. A trio of students in pastel shorts and halter tops stopped talking as they passed her. She stared straight ahead, hands deep in the plastic pockets. She wished she had glasses and a hat. She wished she had a beard. She walked carefully, making sure the entire front foot – heel to toe – was down before she lifted the back foot and brought it to the front. Each time her heel connected with the ground she said to herself see it’s fine but her body knew her mind was not to be trusted.

‘It’s like this,’ she imagined telling someone. ‘You’re alone in a skyscraper. You sense a presence somewhere in the building but it’s very far away, probably on the ground floor while you’re up on the fifty-fifth. As time passes, you sense the presence moving closer. You try and distract yourself with work, phone calls, running up and down the corridors. There’s a rustling noise that won’t go away. Is it at the fifty-third floor already? The rustling becomes a roar. You turn your stereo up as loud as it will go, dance faster, count backwards from one thousand, try and remember the names of all your teachers from kindergarten onwards. You realise that if you’d evacuated back when it was a whisper you would be safe by now. As it is, the noise and all it threatens to bring with it is in the elevator. And then it’s there and you can’t breathe or see or imagine that anyone will find you and you stumble to the window and you have a moment of clarity, understand how easy it is to jump from a burning building.’

Loony tunes, someone said and she realised she’d been speaking aloud. She was at the bus stop and there were faces red with laughing or with the effort not to. She tried to get away, tripped on something invisible and fell down hard on her palms and knees. Taxi! someone called. She got up and moved away from the laughter, saw ahead not home but the King’s Tavern which was at least dark.

Inside, she blinked until the brightness was gone. She heard her name and walked towards it, saw Dom and sat beside him, held up her palms with their white grazes and tiny spots of blood.

He took her wrists, held her hands up to the light. ‘What happened?’

‘Fell.’ He let go of her wrists, touched the top of her head and she winced away from him. ‘Fell on the top of your head?’

‘No, that was the . . . the other thing. Now just my . . . my hands and –’ She remembered her knees, pulled them up in front of her, hitting the table, tears leaking out. ‘My knees, too.’

‘Jesus, kid,’ Dom said, pushing her legs down, looking over her shoulder. ‘You on your own?’

‘There were some people.’ Again she saw their red faces. ‘They laughed.’

‘Yeah, ’course they did.’ Dom held out his glass, kept a hand around the stem as she guided it to her mouth and took a gulp of smoky wine. ‘This is the way the world will be destroyed,’ he muttered, ‘amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it’s all a joke.’

‘That’s true.’ Katie felt the tears running down her face. ‘Dom, that’s true, isn’t it?’

‘I dunno. It’s Kierkegaard, so probably true, yeah.’ He nudged her chin up, motioned to the door. ‘Look, you’re safe. Captain America’s here.’

She turned, saw Adam and slumped in the seat.

Back in her room she went to the wardrobe, raked out magazines with both arms, tore pages out at random, pain building in her chest. Pretty women crying and smooth-faced men shouting and scared eyes and shaved heads and scars and pale inner thighs with the unspeakable between them blurred out while the unspeakable in the girl’s eyes was right there for everyone to see.

‘Katie, darlin’.’ Adam was beside her, holding her hands still. ‘Hey, calm down. What is it?’

‘It’s true, what Dom said. Half of us falling and the other half laughing their heads off. It’s all coming apart and they think it’s a joke.’ But she knew she wasn’t saying it right, couldn’t expect Adam to understand. She let him help her into bed and wipe her palms and knees with wet, warm cotton wool. She watched through stinging eyes as he filled green garbage bags with magazines, hurling each full bag into the hallway out of her sight.

Time stretched out ahead of her like a race she was too tired to run. She craved sleep but her body confused it with death. She would begin to drift off only to have her heart and lungs jolt her upright, slamming into overdrive the way they’d done when she’d tried to die. Adam hovered over her, but he wasn’t in the pain with her like Gran would be. Her sleeping or not, getting up or not, eating or not, crying or not would not tear shreds off his heart, make him older and sadder and thinner. He was here for his own reasons and would get from her what he needed.

She used to think despair was contagious, but she understood now it was magnetic.

In the three days since falling over at the bus stop, Katie had barely left her bed. Adam brought her bowls of soup and slices of cheese on toast and refused to give her any beer until she’d eaten half. He tidied her room, hanging her clothes in the empty wardrobe, cleaning the windows with Windex and newspaper, and vacuuming the carpet. He bustled her out to the couch so he could change the sheets, then bustled her back in when he was done. He asked her if she was okay so often she wanted to rip his tongue out.

She woke to late afternoon sun and Adam leaning over her. The room smelt of vanilla.

‘Hey, sleepy. Come on out to the living room. Someone’s here to talk to you.’

‘I don’t want to see anyone.’

Adam placed his hands under her arms and dragged her up the bed. ‘I know that, but you have to anyway. She’s a really good doctor. A friend of Graeme’s.’

‘Graeme has a friend?’

‘Come on. She’s here on her own time just to see you.’ He pulled the quilt off her.

‘No point.’

‘Of course there’s a point. She might help you feel like yourself again.’

‘This is myself, Adam. That’s the thing. She can drug me up, talk me round, whatever. Sooner or later I’ll be back here. I always end up back here.’ She lay down and noticed the lower windowsill had split halfway to the floor at the entry point of the fourth of five bars. She closed her eyes.

‘I need for you to do this, Katie. If you love me as much as –’

‘Love is just brain chemistry. Mine has altered recently, in case you didn’t notice.’

She waited for what felt a long time and then opened her eyes. Adam stood straight, watching her, gripping the quilt in his two giant fists. ‘Bastard,’ she said. Her back ached. She sat up.

The doctor was so small and nervy Katie could’ve sworn she was a fellow mental case – anxiety disorder or anorexia, maybe. She sat in the armchair with her legs tucked up under her, swallowed her tea in large gulps and blinked her bulgy eyes incessantly. She told Katie to call her Jenny, then took down what Katie could remember of her medical history.

‘Okay, so I need to ask, have you ever attempted suicide?’

Katie suspected Adam and Graeme were in the hallway or kitchen straining to hear every word. She cleared her throat and spoke loudly. ‘You know I have. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Because the old man dobbed on me?’

Jenny shrugged. ‘I’m here to talk to you. I’m not interested in anyone else’s version of your experiences.’

‘Fine, yes, I tried to jump down the stairs the other night. It was an impulse and the impulse was gone as soon as Adam crash-tackled me.’

‘Any attempts before that?’

She paused, lowered her voice. ‘Yeah. Um, two, I guess.’

‘How long ago?’

Katie sighed. ‘When I was fourteen and then, I don’t know, three years ago maybe?’

‘Can you tell me about them?’

‘I can but I don’t see the point.’ She was almost whispering now. ‘They were both like this time, just a sudden impulse, really strong so no other thought can get through, then straight afterwards all this confusion.’

Jenny nodded. ‘Apart from these sudden impulses, do you ever think about killing yourself?’

‘Sure.’

‘How often?’

‘All the time.’

‘Do you think in specifics? Make plans?’

‘Sure, but they’re not plans in the way you mean,’ Katie said, keeping her voice low. ‘It’s a comfort thing. I’m scared that one of those impulses will come again, but if it does, I don’t want . . . There are things I wouldn’t want to survive, you know? So I’m always thinking – without even meaning to, it’s like a survival, anti-survival instinct or something – always thinking of things that would definitely work. If that moment comes again, I hope my, um, subconscious? No, my . . . I don’t know the word. I hope that even though I’m not thinking straight, the part of my brain where the sure things are stored will make sure I do it right.’

‘Do it right? Die, you mean?’

‘No one understands how risky it is. I keep thinking: what if Adam hadn’t stopped me the other night, and I’d jumped, but something caught me on the way down. Maybe my shirt got stuck on a railing, broke my fall. So I wake up – yay, alive, but oh, shit, paralysed for life. Or I step in front of a truck but it’s not going fast enough or it bounces me instead of crushing me and I wake up alive and with a nurse changing my nappy.’ Her stomach contracted. She pressed her hands to it, wished she had grabbed a beer before starting this. ‘The thinking, the planning, it’s just a precaution, see? So I can feel safer.’

Jenny nodded. Katie waited for her to speak but the quiet went on and on.

‘Listen, I’m being honest with you. I don’t want to die and even if I did I don’t have the energy to do anything about it.’

The doctor leant forward. ‘Can you tell me how you felt the other night? Before you tried to jump? How was that different to how you feel now?’

Katie remembered coming up with the perfect description of what it was like. Was that yesterday? Two days ago? The bus stop, the falling. ‘I don’t know how to describe it, but believe me, I’m a universe away from that right now.’

Another long pause. Katie lay back on the sofa, resting her eyes. Finally, Jenny said, ‘So you’re having thoughts about suicide but you have no plans to carry them out?’

Katie yawned. ‘Mostly my thoughts are about sleeping.’

‘I need a straight answer from you. Are you planning to harm or kill yourself?’

‘No.’ Katie opened her eyes, sat up straighter, raised her voice again. ‘Your friend, Graeme, on the other hand, now he is making final preparations.’

‘You think Graeme is suicidal?’

‘I know he is.’

‘Has it occurred to you that your own morbid state of mind might cause you to interpret information in a particular way?’

‘Has it occurred to you that phrasing a statement as a question is obnoxious and patronising?’

The doctor smiled. ‘Okay, I’ll be straight with you. Graeme told me you had gone through his stuff and come up with this theory to explain certain choices he’s made recently. But you must know that his financial decisions have charitable motives.’

Katie rolled her eyes. ‘How stupid do you think I am?’

‘I don’t think you’re stupid. But I do think you are viewing the world and other people through a filter. If that filter was removed, then you might see it for what it really is: an act that is logical and consistent for a man who has spent his whole life giving up comfort and security to help others.’

Katie lit a cigarette and sucked back. The smoke tickled her throat and she coughed. ‘Or, depressed people are the ones with the realistic view of the world. It’s the rest of you that have filters. Soft filters that make everything seem nicer and easier than it really is. Maybe that’s all depression is: life without a filter.’

‘You know, there is something in what you say, but I still think you’re wrong about Graeme. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt, though. I’m going to keep a closer eye on him, see if I can get him to talk about what his plans are. But I’m going to ask you to do something for me in return, okay? Take the meds I prescribe for you, have a chat with me once a week, call me if you feel dramatically better or worse or different in between our meetings. Do this for me and we’ll see whether we can’t get that filter working again.’

‘What if I don’t want the filter? What if I don’t want to see the world through a medicated fog?’

‘Oh, please,’ the doctor said, taking one of Katie’s cigarettes and lighting it. ‘If we all decided to do without our filters the whole bloody world would stop turning.’

Jenny called Adam into the living room and he came immediately and sat by Katie’s side, his hand on her leg, his eyes never leaving the doctor’s face. Katie couldn’t look at him, couldn’t bear the mad hope in his expression.

‘Katie seems to be suffering what we call rapid cycling, which means she experiences episodes of mania and depression in fast succession, sometimes switching from one state to the other within a space of days, or even hours,’ Jenny said to Adam. ‘In addition, she has a history of mixed states, which is when depression and mania occur simultaneously. Obviously, this is very dangerous and it’s what seems to have been going on the other night when –’

Katie drifted off. She knew the drill. There’d be different medication to try and instructions to keep careful watch while they waited to see what effect they’d have. There was a chance they’d make things worse or that nothing would change or that she’d feel better and then in a year or two her brain would find a way to outsmart the drugs and she’d be back where she was. She felt like she’d been listening to this speech for years.

And Adam sitting there like a ghost re-enacting the moment of his death.

27.

When Adam got home from work in the early hours of the morning, he would sit on the low brick wall out the front and smoke. Inside, Katie would be sleeping and so, presumably, would Graeme. Katie never went into Graeme’s room at night anymore; she hadn’t forgiven him for putting up the bars and for, as far as she was concerned, plotting his own death. Adam had stuck to the line about Graeme being a charitable old ascetic, but Katie was unconvinced.

Initially, Adam had been doubtful, too; afraid each night that he’d come home and find a bled-out corpse. But every time Graeme sought him out to enquire after Katie, he relaxed a little more. There would be no body swinging from the light socket or turning blue on the bathroom floor. If Graeme did plan on dying – and Adam’s doubt increased with each day – there would be no big scene, just an absence that seemed normal until enough time passed for it to be suspicious.

He finished his cigarette, and stubbed it out on the bricks. He noticed bright orange stains around his fingernails, realising as he did that there was more light out here than usual. He craned his neck and saw that it came from the front window of Phyl’s place. A shadow passed over his hands. He was in a scene from a B-grade horror movie; bats the size of eagles streaking overhead then circling the snarling griffins atop the shopping mall. He saw bats everywhere now. By day they hung like bloated, rotten fruits from the branches of the fig trees in Victoria Park. On moonlit nights you could see the detail of their wings, the translucent skin stretched over bones. He even noticed one hanging from a power line over the restaurant car park. A pink doggy-tongue hung from its vampiric mouth; its grey pug-nosed face framed by an outrageous collar of orange fuzz. ‘Been there a week at least,’ Rosa told him. ‘Their talons don’t let go even when they’re shot through with 40,000 volts.’

With or without the bats, Sydney’s sky made him queasy. He could no longer look at it without thinking about how small the earth was – a marble compared to the basketball sun, and how the sun was just one of the 100 billion or so stars in the galaxy, and a distant one at that, and how this tiny earth which was home to every person he loved and hated and didn’t even know existed; home to skyscrapers and jungles and deserts and oceans; home to giant squid and kittens and deadly snakes and orangutans and tigers and . . . All of this on a speck which is dependent on the energy of another speck which is part of a galaxy itself only one of 130 billion existing galaxies.

And here, these vain, blind creatures stumbling about thinking the whole thing should scream to a halt because a heart stopped beating. Insanity to think Eugenie’s death would cause the universe to take so much as an extra breath before carrying on. Insanity to think it mattered whether Katie threw herself from a window; whether Graeme shot himself; whether a different kind of madman flew a plane into an office block; whether a thousand planes dropped ten thousand bombs and destroyed an entire civilisation. None of it merited even a pause.

And yet, there’s me, he thought. I can pause. I can notice. I can pay attention though the universe does not.

He stood and walked into the building, hesitating in front of Phyl’s door, then knocked hard and loud. A shuffle came from within and he winced, sensing he should’ve waited until morning to come down and check on her.

‘Who’s there?’

‘It’s Adam from upstairs. Katie’s flatmate.’

The door creaked open and the old woman peered up at him. ‘Gawd. What’s she done?’

He held his hands up. ‘She’s okay. Well, no she’s not, actually, but that’s not why . . . I saw your light on and thought I’d –’

‘Check up on me?’

‘It’s just very late for your light to be on.’

‘Didn’t know there was a curfew.’

‘Sorry. You must think I’m a lunatic.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I’ll leave you alone.’

She waved a hand at him. ‘Stay a minute. Tell me what’s going on with that poor kid.’

‘She, ah –’

‘Wait, wait. Come on in. Have a nip of port with me.’ She shuffled back from the door so he could enter. ‘I’ll warn you, though; I only drink the stuff because it helps me sleep, so if I drop off mid-sentence you’ll have to let yourself out.’

It was almost two when Phyl yawned and told him she had to get to bed. Adam was feeling tired but noble and generous, sure he’d done her a kindness. She stopped him at the door and handed him a tissue. ‘Give your nose a good blow before you go upstairs, love. And listen, pop in anytime you need to talk. I know how it is. There are some things only another widower can understand.’

28.

‘Tell me a bit about your relationship with Adam,’ Jenny said on her sixth or seventh visit.

‘One-night stand that carried on too long.’

‘Really? Because from what I’ve seen and what you’ve told me, he’s pretty devoted.’

‘It’s nothing personal. He needs to save someone. If I wasn’t such a mess he would’ve moved on ages ago, found a different damsel.’ Katie took a swig from the hot pink one-litre water bottle Adam had bought her only hours after she complained that the new meds were making her thirsty. ‘His motivation is no mystery. I wonder about yours, though.’

Jenny tilted her head and frowned.

‘I mean, what’s in this for you? I’m not paying you.’

‘None of my patients pay me.’

‘But you get paid when you see them. It’s part of your job. Not me, though.’

‘No.’

‘So why do you come?’

‘Well, I came because Graeme asked me to assess you, and my assessment was that you needed professional help.’

‘So you’re doing this because Graeme asked you? Are you hot for him or something?’

‘Why is it important to you to understand my motivation for being here?’

‘It isn’t important. I just wondered.’

Jenny smiled. ‘Curiosity. That’s a positive sign.’

‘Mmm. So, are you hot for him?’

‘No, Katie. Are you?’

‘I hate him.’

‘Why?’

Katie lit a cigarette and lay back on the sofa.

‘Why do you feel so angry at him?’

‘He’s a hypocrite. He’s done all this to stop me maybe getting suicidal and meanwhile he’s planning to off himself.’

‘That’s one perspective. Here’s another: he’s the opposite of a hypocrite. He believes in social justice and has made big changes in his lifestyle in order to practise what he preaches. He thinks every person deserves a chance at a good life and so he took steps to ensure a young woman he knows has that chance.’

‘God, the way you talk. Like he’s a bloody saint. He isn’t. He’s a suicidal, sad old loser. If you can’t see that, you’re either a crap psych or blind in love with him. Or both.’ She drew back on her cigarette. ‘And you know, it pisses me off that everyone thinks he’s such a hero when all he’s done is drag you in here to work for free. And he’s only done that to distract you from his own screwed-up mental state.’

‘Here’s a thought.’ Jenny leant forward, her bony hands clasping her knees. ‘Maybe the reason people are helping you is that they think you’re worth helping.’

‘No. Not to sound self-pitying, but I know that’s not true.’ Katie stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette and drank some more water. ‘There are so many people more deserving of help. You know what I think about all those hours just lying in bed not being able to make myself get up? I think about these Sudanese refugees Graeme told me about. An eight-year-old girl whose eyes had been gouged out by soldiers and her twelve-year-old brother who had lost his mind and voice that same night. Their mother who carried her broken children across continents, hated and spat on and starved nearly to death, had to spend a whole year in that desert detention centre once she got here. She deserves to be helped. Her children deserve help. Me?’ She thumped her chest with a fist. ‘Depression. Jesus. You know what? I’m not even sure it’s real. My moods, my symptoms, they’re textbook, right? Straight out of a psychiatric manual. I don’t think real illness would be so predictable. I really don’t. I think this is all plastic. And it’s an insult to all the people really suffering.’

Jenny’s voice was, soft, coaxing. ‘Katie, can you look at me?’

Katie looked up, met Jenny’s pale eyes.

‘You do realise that everything you’ve just said is also textbook? Feeling undeserving, thinking that other people in your situation would just pull themselves up and get on with it? That’s all part of it. And it’s not true, it’s really not.’

Katie shook her head. ‘No, no, hang on. Remember you agreed with me that day when I said that depression is life without filters? You agreed that maybe I was the one who saw things properly. I’m the only one who knows the truth about myself.’

‘No, you’re not. If there’s one thing almost all people with depressive illnesses have in common it’s a tendency to personalise things that actually have nothing to do with them. You’re right that the world is full of pain and tragedy, but you mistakenly take it personally. You feel like it’s somehow your fault, or it’s a reflection on you. You feel guilty for feeling bad, because you believe that any sympathy or compassion you draw will reduce the pool available for others. Truth is, whether you suffer or not, whether you live or die in fact, will have no effect on the world at large. You’re just not that important.’

Katie upended her water bottle, catching three or four drops on her tongue. ‘You know what’s funny? Or not funny really, but, anyway – say Graeme was depressed. Say –’

‘I’m here to talk about you, not Graeme.’

‘I know, but listen. Say he was like me, but instead of trying to live a normal life in suburbia, he becomes a sort of superhero. And the things that would mark him as mental in the everyday world are camouflaged because he’s in extreme situations and so extreme behaviour is expected. Some of it’s even really useful – like over empathising or physical fearlessness, say. And the thing you were just talking about, the personalisation, well, it is justified for him, isn’t it? People have lived or died based on his ability to get off his arse and do something. Suffering has been lessened – or hell, maybe, increased – due to his decisions, his say-so.’

‘What does this have to do with you?’

‘Nothing. It’s just . . . Wouldn’t actually putting your life on the line to help others stave off the sense that you’re unworthy? I mean, no matter how delusional or whatever it is to feel responsible for the world’s pain, wouldn’t it lessen the guilt, if you could act to relieve some of that pain?’

Jenny shrugged. ‘I don’t know. There’s no simple answer.’

‘I know, but think about it. If it did help, if it staved off this, this, self-loathing, this despair, then that’s great, right, because you’re helping yourself and helping the world. But it’d also mean you could never stop, because as soon as you did you’d feel worse than ever because it’s already personal, isn’t it? The depression has hardly any work to do at all.’

Jenny stretched her arms over her head, rubbed her eyes, cracked her knuckles. Finally, she smiled. ‘You’re making such great progress. Rational thinking, clarity of expression. Enthusiastic discussion. It’s all good stuff.’

Katie sighed. ‘Rational thinking.’

Jenny’s smile slipped. ‘We’ll talk again on Monday, okay?’

Since the incident in the stairwell, Adam had been working fewer hours, waiting until Graeme got home from work before leaving. But Jenny must have said something, because – after checking that she didn’t mind and making her swear to call him at the restaurant if she felt the slightest bit distressed – Adam had left for work at 3 pm.

She stood inside the front door, waiting to hear the elevator bell and then the hum of its descent, and then went to Graeme’s room. As tidy and characterless as the day he moved in, the room was nevertheless filled with what she had lost. She opened the wardrobe. The business shirts and pants smelt like the seventy-cent detergent from the laundromat down the road. She tried to recall the last time she had sat on the counter, drinking Pepsi and flirting with old Marco while her clothes were tossed clean. She felt the vinegar stink of her T-shirt and shorts seeping out. She imagined Graeme sniffing at the collar of tomorrow’s shirt, wondering how it had become infected with Katie’s stench.

She opened the top drawer and examined each piece of underwear: eight pairs of Y-fronts and a pair of sky-blue silk boxers. She pressed the shorts to her face and was thumped with regret. All those nights and never knowing he was a man who owned underwear softer and more delicate than any she had touched. A man who must have had lovers and heartbreaks and memories of fingertips slipping beneath the waistband of soft, soft silk. Talking and talking, breathing into his clean, smooth neck, never wondering how he liked to be touched or who he loved or if anyone had ever loved him.

‘So, I was wondering, have you ever heard Graeme talk about a girlfriend or boyfriend or, you know, any kind of friend?’

Jenny narrowed her eyes. ‘Back to Graeme again. Why?’

‘God, can’t you even answer one question?’

Jenny was impassive.

‘Right. Fine. I went through his stuff yesterday. I thought I might find an address book or some letters or a birthday card or . . . something to show he, you know, knows people. But there was nothing.’

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Because I thought if there was someone – even a past someone – who cared about him, then I could find them and let them know what’s going on. He mentioned a brother. And he must have been married or whatever at some point, right? I mean, he’s okay looking, nice to talk to, cool job . . .’

Jenny let out a small, gruff laugh.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Sorry. What was it you wanted to tell this person you didn’t find?’

Katie smiled, shook her head. ‘Oh, just how much of a saint he is. How selfless and shit.’

‘Katie.’

‘If someone who knows him tells me that he’s only living his values or whatever, then, okay. I’ll accept I’m the delusional one.’

Jenny sighed. ‘I know Graeme. I’ve told you –’

‘Knows him properly. Someone who knows him properly.’

29.

Now she was getting better, Katie looked terminally ill. She slumped rather than sat and fell asleep in the space between a question and its answer. She slurred her words and drool slid out of the left-hand corner of her mouth. Random tremors resulted in permanently food-stained clothes. Her face became bloated while her legs and arms remained as skinny as ever.

‘Fucking meds,’ she said at least five times a day, but Adam no longer had to force her to take them at night, although occasionally, on the nights she vomited, he had to coax her into taking a second dose.

One night Adam went to check on her before he turned in and found she had kicked off her covers; her skin was cold and wet, as was the sheet below her. He woke her, carried her to the beanbag in the corner of the room and got her a glass of water. ‘Rehydrate. I’ll get some clean sheets.’

He threw the sheets onto the bathroom floor; the laundry basket was already overflowing. The last sheet in the hallway closet smelt like it had been in there for a decade. Adam shook it out and almost gagged on its mustiness. He returned to the bathroom, stepping over the sheets and towels on the floor, and grabbed a can of spray deodorant from the vanity. He held the sheet out at arm’s-length and spritzed, then shook it again.

Katie was where he left her, the overturned glass at her feet, a dark patch spreading on the carpet. ‘They say not to operate heavy machinery, but they never warn you about trying to drink water.’

‘I’ll make the bed then get you another one.’

‘Jenny says the side effects will lessen. Bloody hope so. This keeps up you’ll be putting me in a nursing home and jumping the next plane home.’

Jumping the next plane home was all he thought about lately, but something in the way she’d said it, or maybe just the word plane coming in the midst of another nursing task, made his mind crash. He leant over the bed as though he was fixing the far corner, although it was already tucked in. The plane on the way over here, Eugenie dry retching, the flight attendant’s flashing teeth as she explained they were being moved to a different part of the cabin as several passengers had complained about the noise.

Katie murmured something and he straightened up. Her chin had dropped, her eyes fluttered at him. ‘Yadonhavtadooallvis.’

‘Shh. Come on. Bed’s ready.’ Adam held her under her arms and pulled her to her feet. She shuffled to the bed, backwards, her upper body weight in his hands.

‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to do . . .’

Adam covered her with a light cotton throw and turned out the lamp.

30.

Katie hadn’t said a word to Graeme since he installed the bars and Adam gave him only the briefest updates on her progress. Frustratingly, for the past month, Jenny had also shut down, speaking to him only about work matters and then with an uncharacteristic brusqueness. When Ann Lewis called to say her daughter needed her another month, but that she’d only stay if Katie was coping all right, Graeme told her the truth. ‘She seems fine. But to be honest, she and I don’t have much to do with each other so there’s very little I can tell you. You should call Adam. He seems to be looking out for her pretty well.’

Finally, on a Wednesday afternoon, seven weeks after Katie’s suicide attempt, Graeme called Jenny into his office. She sat down across from him and crossed her arms. ‘You know I can’t talk to you about her, so if that’s why you’ve called me in –’

‘I know you can’t give me specifics, but surely you can tell me, generally, how she’s going.’

‘You live with her. How do you think she’s going?’

‘That’s the thing – she doesn’t speak to me, leaves the room if I come into it. Adam tells me she’s calmer and certainly the flat is quieter, but that doesn’t tell me anything except she’s not manic. Depression is quiet, isn’t it?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Come on, give me something, Jenny.’

She bit her lower lip. ‘You know, I don’t think you ever told me: what is your relationship with her?’

‘We share a flat.’

‘Because you sold your house and gave all your money away?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It seems odd.’

He held her gaze. ‘Does it?’

‘A bit. Not just the money part, but the whole thing with Katie.’

‘There is no thing with Katie.’

‘Come on, Graeme. Snuggling up, sharing confessions every night. The frankly wounded way she speaks about you, and the intense interest you show in her wellbeing. It all adds up to something more than just flatmates.’

‘Like what? Lovers?’

Jenny shrugged. ‘Well.’

‘Jesus, she’s a 23-year-old manic depressive. What can you think of me if you think that I’d –’

‘Sorry, sorry.’ She held her hands up. ‘Of course, your behaviour has been unimpeachable. Your intentions are pure. They always are.’ Her hands dropped in a gesture of defeat. ‘You know, we mere mortals ascribe our own low motives to others and are usually kind of right, but with someone like you . . . You must feel misunderstood a lot.’

‘I certainly feel misunderstood right now.’

‘I want to understand you, but you don’t give anything away. You don’t let people in.’

Graeme resisted the urge to get up and open the window. He forced himself to speak. ‘What do you want to know, Jenny? You already know where I live and who I live with. You know why I live there. You know what I do every day. You know that I’m single and childless, that I’m an aid work lifer. I mean, what else is there? What is it that I’m not giving away, as you put it?’

‘I’m not talking about . . .’ She rubbed her eyes. ‘It’s just that the way you talk about yourself, your life, it’s so . . . so bloodless.’

‘That’s me. A bloodless saint.’ He remembered another woman saying it many years ago, back when such words had the power to hurt him.

‘I didn’t say that. I worry about you. It’s not healthy to be so detached.’ She swept her arm out across the office. ‘All the stuff you’ve seen, the bloody Sisyphean job you do here – it must get to you. But it never shows. You’re like a machine.’

Machine. Bloodless. Detached. Yes, all right. Good.

He gripped the arms of his chair under the desk, out of sight. ‘I only wanted to know if Katie was getting better,’ he said.

‘I know. I’m sorry. Bad week, letting out my own issues.’ She bent her lips into a small smile. ‘It takes time, you know. But I think, yes. I think she’s improving.’

After Jenny left, Graeme sat with both hands flat on his desk, staring at the closed door, waiting for the tremor to pass. This feeling – like being seven years old, alone in a house full of strangers who know more about your life than you do, the feeling that an answer you give may cause terrible trouble although you thought at the time it was exactly right, that people whose existence you’re barely aware of might suddenly smash lamps or cry or talk of broken hearts because of something you’ve done or said or been.

By the time the anxiety passed it was 5.45. He checked to make sure everyone else had left, made a cup of coffee and went back to his desk. He opened up the internet browser and navigated his way into the corners of cyberspace populated by the fetishists who got off on swapping stories of survival and near-misses. People with little grasp of the social world but with encyclopaedic knowledge of pharmaceuticals, firearms and physiology. Pornographers who collected photos of death scenes and suicide notes, who regurgitated existential despair in between gorging themselves on suffering.

Repulsive though they were to him, Graeme sought them out because it was important that he did this right.

As he read through the bulletin boards and forums, it was impossible for him not to recall all the fast, easy deaths he’d witnessed or avoided. A nail bomb, a poisoned water supply, a speeding car around a blind bend, an ancient helicopter, a gangrenous leg wound, a single incident of unprotected sex, a midnight walk alone. Mosquitoes, parasites, cancers. Children with machetes, starving men with guns, teenagers with homemade explosive vests. Droughts, floods, earthquakes. So easy to kill and be killed; so very difficult and expensive to stay alive, to keep others alive. A lifetime’s work doing just that. And yet, these online ghouls made it sound so complicated. They created spreadsheets and graphs; formulas to determine the probability of paralysis or brain damage.

Jumping from a height into deep water seemed to be the most reliable. You have the fall and then the impact with a back-up of drowning. Unlike with pills or razors, second thoughts are useless. Once you make it over the edge, there’s minimal risk of interruption and resuscitation. Jumpers from the world’s most popular suicide bridge – San Francisco’s Golden Gate – had a ninety-eight per cent success rate.

Graeme studied the stories of those who survived there and elsewhere. Legendary among the online obsessives was the paraplegic bloke who drove off Beachy Head, the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain. The man fell 250 feet before getting caught on a line of trees. He survived with only superficial injuries.

But those cases were rare. The most likely scenario was this: assuming a free fall from a great enough height – 300 feet to be sure – the body would weigh, at the moment of breaking the water’s surface, around 7500 times its usual weight. The ribs would snap, their shards piercing the lungs, spleen and anything else in their way. The blood vessels would burst and the aorta would tear free of the heart.

If by some cruel miracle you survived the impact, your body would spasm, thrusting towards the sky, instinctively trying to stay above water as though drowning were the real threat. Drowning was likely, of course; the lungs would already be flooded. But before you asphyxiated, even as your nose expelled frothy saltwater, the internal bleeding would end your body’s struggle.

It was said that no matter how unafraid you are, imminent death causes the body to go into shock and the mind to scream with terror. The second after you jump, everything that makes you human rises up and protests. No fear ever experienced in life can compare to the panic that grips you as you hurtle towards the bone-cracking, internal organ-splitting water.

He armed the security system and stepped out into the street. It had been taken over by a team of child cricketers. He smiled his thanks to the dusty faced girl who’d called a halt to the game to let him cross the road. As he reached the other side he heard game on and looked back over his shoulder to watch for a moment the skinny arms arcing, hands catching, bare feet dancing on the hot asphalt.

The sun was bright but low. The breeze was spirited enough to press his shirt to his chest, but not – as summer breezes so often did – to throw up leaves and grit into his face. It was the nicest evening they’d had, he thought, since the beginning of summer. He decided to walk home the long way.

Two minutes after he’d closed his bedroom door, there was a knock, and for the second before he opened the door he let himself hope. But it was Adam, looking as serious as ever. He stepped back, let him enter.

‘I was wondering,’ Adam said, leaning back on the desk, ‘what your long-term plans are? I mean, I have to go home eventually and I need to know if anyone will be around to watch out for Katie.’

‘She won’t need taking care of soon. She’s doing so well. Isn’t she?’

‘She’ll need someone to make sure she takes her medication and doesn’t drink too much.’

‘You should call her grandmother. Find out when she’ll be back in Sydney. Or else you won’t ever be able to leave her side.’

Adam sighed and stood up straight. ‘Listen, man, is there anything in particular that’s troubling you? Anything I could maybe help you sort out?’

‘Nothing at all,’ he said. ‘In fact, you’re the one who has some problems that need sorting out. Visa issues.’

‘I don’t know why I bother,’ Adam said and left.

Graeme knew why. Adam bothered for the same reason people made doctors’ appointments and bought birthday presents and took their kids to the park and volunteered at soup kitchens and put photos in albums and painted their walls and quit smoking and took up tai chi. Bothering was what people did. When you stopped bothering, you stopped altogether.

31.

Adam opened his eyes and waited for the memory to come. It was a Thursday and, from the bright bleached light coming through the closed curtains, he guessed it was around noon. He had to accept that a fifth consecutive night had passed without dreams of Eugenie.

The honk of an aggressively-blown nose came from down the hallway and his legs swung out of bed and propelled him across the room. His body, at least, accepted the new reality – caring for Katie, washing dishes, sleeping without solace.

He found Katie sitting in front of the TV, a box of tissues on her left, a pile of scrunched tissues on her right. He sat next to the box. ‘How are you?’

‘Good.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

He muted the TV. ‘Because you look kind of –’

‘I look kind of upset. I am. I’ve been crying. It’s because I’m feeling better. I can think clearly and remember things and that makes me . . . You know how when you wake up after a really big night and you can’t remember much but what you can is awful? I’m waking up from a big night that lasted years. All I can remember are things like . . . The nasty stuff. I can’t remember anything good and I don’t know if that’s because my memory is stuffed or because there really was nothing good.’

‘Maybe –’

‘See, you don’t know me. I’m twenty-three years old and I’ve never achieved anything. Never held a job for more than a month. Never finished high school. Never had a real relationship. Lost friends as quickly as I made them. I don’t own anything or belong to anyone. I was thinking about my mum, about how she made so much effort with me and I never saw it. Everything she did looked like rejection. I lost her. I don’t even know my little brother. Gran’s stubborn, thank god. You too, for some weird reason. But it is stubbornness, I know. It’s not love or even like. It’s not because I’m so charming or brilliant or anything that you’d think it important I stay in the world. I’m nothing because I’ve had years of learning nothing, doing nothing.

‘I sound self-pitying but I’m not. I’m just seeing clearly for the first time in a long time. I am getting better. Healthier. This is not depression talking, just grief.’

Adam pushed the box of tissues to the floor and took her hand. ‘And grief is survivable.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Mom, it’s me.’

‘Adam! Where are you? Are you okay?’

‘I’m still in Sydney. I’m fine.’

‘Addy, when I heard – I tried to find you. I called everyone I could think of. Eugenie’s people, too. I was getting ready to alert the embassy, put out a missing person alert. Why didn’t you call me? Call anyone?’

‘I’m sorry. I needed to . . .’ He went from calm to sobbing in less time than it took for her to say, ‘Oh, sweetheart.’ The sobbing stung his throat. His stomach cramped up and he had to press his knees to his chest to calm the spasms. ‘Mom?’

‘I’m here.’ Her voice was softer than he remembered it. ‘I can be there in, I don’t know, however long it takes to get to the airport and fly to Australia. That’s when I can be there. Where are you staying?’

‘With a friend, but I’m okay. I’d rather see you at home. I’m coming soon.’

‘Are you sure? Because I don’t mind. Even if I’m just there to share a cab back to the airport with you and sit next to you on the plane. I can do that.’

‘No. Really. I need to take care of a few things here and then I’ll be home.’

‘Okay. But if you need me, you call. You have to promise.’

‘Yes, yes, I will. Thanks, Mom.’

‘Addy, I know I didn’t . . . I know how much you– I wish I knew her better.’ She sucked in her breath. ‘I love you.’

‘I know. I love you, too.’

32.

Katie put on her favourite chequered sundress and white stilettos. She went into the bathroom and leant in close to the mirror. The burn marks had faded enough that after ten minutes’ work with concealer and foundation, they looked like old acne scars. She applied a coat of black mascara and a slick of raspberry lip gloss and smoothed down the front of her hair with wax so it looked sleek rather than punk. She smiled at her reflection to check for lip gloss on her teeth and then taped a note to the centre of the mirror: Adam, Visiting a friend, back by noon. Katie xxx

She caught the 8.15 bus, which would get her to the city with fifteen minutes to spare before the interview. She hadn’t told anyone she was doing this; partly because she liked the idea of surprising Adam and Gran, partly because she dreaded disappointing them if it didn’t work out, and partly because she just felt, lately, like a bit of privacy was a good thing.

The man sitting beside her sneezed, and Katie’s Bless you was, unexpectedly, part of a chorus. When she had taken the bus with Adam he had been amused by the way everybody thanked the driver as they got off, even the schoolkids with their straw hats and knee socks. He had never known people to be so polite to each other on public transportation, he said. She made a mental note to tell him about the bless yous.

She got off at Town Hall and slipped into the stream of people heading to Pitt Street. Another stream moved towards her but she did not feel, as she had in the past, overwhelmed. She found the rhythm easily, striding between the suits and uniforms, looking ahead to the next street corner rather than at the back of the person in front of her.

She arrived at Shoebee Doo at ten to nine and stood in the mall smoking a cigarette. The sound of locks being turned and security doors being rolled up surrounded her. Heels clicked on the cobblestones. A fat man with red curls sat on a bench and began to unpack a crate of newspapers.

This was the everyday world. This – the shoes clicking, doors opening, people coughing, taxis honking – was life. She felt the coffee she’d drunk this morning percolating in her stomach. It was so simple. Every part of it, from making the application phone call to finding clean underwear to getting to the bus stop on time.

She dropped the cigarette; ground it out with her heel. Maybe the interview would go badly. Maybe she would not get this job or any other. Maybe this morning would be a one-off; a glimpse into the world before she receded again. The percolating subsided.

When she got home Adam was on his way out the door. ‘After work, we’re celebrating,’ he said when she told him the news. ‘So wait up for me or I’ll be forced to drag you outta bed.’

She poured herself a glass of red and called Gran, not expecting her to be as thrilled as Adam. Gran had seen her start too many jobs over the years to allow herself to become excited at the prospect of another.

‘I really felt,’ Katie said, ‘that I belonged there. It’s hard to describe, but I sort of understood how it is people manage to do all this and felt like I can do it, too.’

‘Of course you can,’ said Gran. ‘I’ve been telling you for years.’

‘Yes, but that’s what I’m saying, Gran. I felt it. It didn’t matter whether anyone told me I could do it or not, today I felt I could.’

‘Well, you’ve always been hard to get through to, you stubborn little bugger. Anyway, how’s our American friend? Are you two still knocking boots?’

‘Gran, I gotta go. Talk to you soon.’ She hung up before her grandmother heard her crying.

Graeme hovered in the kitchen doorway. Katie was sitting at the table, her eyes red and swollen. Her wine glass was empty; he could not tell if the bottle beside her was as well. She was wearing a pink and white chequered sundress that looked brand new even though the left shoulder seam was unravelling.

She looked up and smiled. ‘Hey, it’s my sworn protector. Have a drink with me?’ She slid the bottle across the table.

Graeme put his briefcase down, got a glass from the sink drainer, poured some wine and sat across from her.

‘Have you ever been to gaol?’ she said, wiping her cheeks.

He shook his head.

‘Me neither. Well, an hour in a cop shop here and there, but never gaol. My friend Robbie got sent up for a robbery he didn’t do. I know he didn’t, because he was with another friend of mine when it happened, but he wasn’t a reliable witness because he was a junkie. Anyway, after a while the bloke who had done it got caught for something else, ended up confessing to the other one, and, just like that, Robbie’s out.’

‘It must have been overwhelming, seeing him again.’

‘I guess. I don’t really remember. It was ages ago.’

‘Oh. So –’

‘Bet you really missed my rambling, pointless stories, huh?’

He reached across and touched the back of her hand. She turned it over, grasped him, let their hands fall together to the tabletop.

‘So, anyway, I had a good day today. Nothing out of this world, but I felt good about being here. The thought of all these days and weeks and months unfolding in front of me made me feel kind of excited instead of panicky and that’s . . . well, actually that is out of this world. So I was just thinking this is how Robbie must have felt. Grateful and happy and wanting to seize the moment and all that, but angry, too, because he never should have been locked away in the first place. It’s like I’ve been pardoned for something I didn’t do.

‘On the bus today there were all these schoolkids and I was thinking what if I had been able to finish school? What if I had made and kept even one friend? Silly to be jealous of little kids . . . I have all these memories and they’ll jump out at me, from nowhere. Well, no, that’s stupid, isn’t it? They’re not from nowhere, they’re from in me. But they seem to be from nowhere because they’re things I haven’t thought of since they happened, things that I barely believe happened. They jump into my mind and I think – how the hell did I survive that?’

‘Have you talked to Jenny about this?’

Katie retrieved her hand and picked up her cigarettes. She lit one and sipped some wine. Said nothing.

‘It sounds like post-traumatic stress. Many people who’ve experienced –’

‘Have you ever in your life had a friend?’ She looked directly at him. ‘Because you are the coldest bastard I’ve ever known.’

‘I have tried to be a friend to you and I have failed. I don’t know how I failed, but I know I did and I am sorry.’

‘When are you planning to do it?’

He scrunched his face as though he didn’t understand.

She didn’t even blink. ‘See? You don’t give me anything. Not even a tiny, tiny bit of credit. That’s why you’re not my friend.’

He held her gaze and then her eyes filled up. She leant in close, her voice low, urgent. ‘Graeme. Please.’

He felt the pull, moved with it for a second, moved towards her and the promise of affection, then he pulled himself back. He lifted his shoulders, let them fall. ‘There’s nothing for me to tell you.’

Her disappointment barely showed. Just a series of fast blinks and then she was up, walking away from the table.

33.

A trio of Japanese tourists and a single middle-aged man got off the bus at the top of Military Road. The man stood a moment at the beginning of the coastal path, getting his bearings. The Harbour Bridge was dead centre, Centrepoint Tower to the left in the background, incongruously jagged bushland in the foreground and the famed harbour in between. City, sea, bush.

Sandstone cliffs extended as far as he could see in both directions, as did a safety fence. The fence was hip height at most. He started along the trail to the left, nodding at the tourists who smiled and lowered their cameras as he passed. When the path widened he stepped up to the fence and leant in to the sea breeze. A couple in sneakers and knee-length shorts stopped alongside him and sighed. ‘Oh,’ the man said. ‘Oh,’ the woman replied. ‘Yes. But what if they didn’t have a phone on them?’ They both sighed again and set off.

A plaque engraved with phone numbers for Lifeline and the Salvation Army was bolted to the fence. On the other side of the rail, the cliff was wide and flat enough to accommodate a three-man tent, and every couple of feet, an iron rescue hook was affixed to the rock.

The man followed the trail to the left, stopping to read the signs about shrubs and flowers and Aboriginal history. After several minutes of walking he noticed the fence changing from wood to steel mesh, the sweet smell of rotting vegetation, the stillness of the air.

At the next tourist-friendly flat spot he sat on a boulder to catch his breath. ‘Oh, look, honey,’ said a woman, and he looked to the dead bouquets that had been poked through the holes in the mesh. A man went to the woman and placed his hand on her back, guiding her away from the memorial. They passed by, whispering, just as another couple approached the flowers.

The man took the trail winding upwards. Within minutes there was no sound but the wind and the leaves. Not even a bird. The track was barely wide enough for two people, then barely wide enough for one. The rotting smell grew stronger as the bush pressed in on him from the left. On his right was the fence. He held it as he walked.

When eventually the path widened again, he stopped. The fence was level with his thighs. He stood stock-still and listened. No footsteps or branches snapping down the trail. No voices on the wind. No helicopters hovering or speed boats approaching.

He cleared the fence easily. There was space on the other side for him to take two, maybe three big steps. He took one and then got to his knees, crawling to the edge. There were no crags or spikes beneath, no shrubs to catch his clothes, only clear air and then the water, astonishingly blue. Thirty feet to the left, branches protruded from the rock face and below them, the water lapped at a cluster of boulders jutting into the sea. He crawled to the right, peered over the edge; saw only blue. He stood, stepped back to the fence, and then he ran.

In the millisecond it took for him to register that he was still upright, speed, like a cold meaty hand, spun him and spun him and spun him again so he did not know which way was up and which way down but he knew he was alive and conscious, falling and flying at the same time. He braced to hit now now now and then he was under. There was no time for terror during the fall but now it flooded him, a freezing gas in his mouth and nose and lungs and ears and eyes.

He was still falling and this was shock and freezing gas and salt and regret so sharp it was like pain, and this was pain jagged sharp pain icy and so sharp. Falling deeper and deeper and he’d never expected this, to taste the salt and feel the weed slap his face and his lungs cold and burning, never expected to know what a shattered spine felt like.

He stopped falling. For a moment, everything around him was still and quiet. The pain was so intense that he wished for death and in the moment of wishing for it his body rejected it, pushing up towards the surface. As he broke it from below he marvelled that seconds ago this nothingness parting before him had been bone-smashingly solid. Air and then the understanding it was now an enemy, assaulting his lungs, pushing his pain past what any person could survive. Light and the sight of low, dry boulders not ten feet away.

I have travelled thirty times that this very minute. It is nothing and I will reach it and I will tell the starved and scarred children that I understand about survival and it is only ten feet and I will tell Katie that I understand regret but it’s better, better to feel it, only ten feet but I don’t remember how to move towards the thing that is there no memory of moving towards something and the sea is warm and my lungs are healed and I have no memory of how to do this thing, how to keep a dead body afloat.

34.

It was late morning and Adam and Katie were in bed, having spent the night together for the first time in months. They’d crashed out drunk on champagne – it only took her a glass and a half nowadays – and he’d woken to her lips on his stomach and been surprised at how much he wanted to make love. Afterwards, he told her he was glad of the night and the morning, that he felt something special, and now she was pulling the hairs on his chest and teasing him that his fit of sentimentality meant it must have been a farewell bonk.

‘How would you feel about that, about me leaving?’

‘Don’t get all Oprah on me, dude.’

‘I’m not. If I was getting Oprah on you I’d be making you read some life-affirming novel and then talk to me about how it made you understand how precious every day is and how you need to make the most of every minute.’

‘Except for the reading part, that sounds like a typical conversation for you.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Again?’

‘Seriously, though.’

‘Seriously, though.’

‘Katie.’

‘Adam.’

‘I need to know if you’ll be okay if – when – I go home.’

‘Duh.’ She butted his arm with her head.

‘What does that mean?’

‘God, you’re a tool. I survived all these years without you. I’m sure I’ll remember how to boil water and wipe my arse once you’re gone. Maybe,’ she added, ‘you won’t survive without me.’

‘Right, I’m going to miss all the hangovers and insults and bruises.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘Yes, I am.’ He kissed her. ‘I was thinking of taking a trip up north next week. Go see Eugenie. Do you want to come? I don’t mean for you to visit her – that’s something I need to do myself. But if you want to come for the trip, I’d love the company.’

‘Mmm. Gotta work next week, remember? Besides, you’ll be all introspective and I’ll get bored.’

‘Thanks a lot. It’s just that it’s sort of the last thing I have to do before I go.’

She yawned. ‘So go, kiss the dirt, catch your plane, send me a postcard wishing I was there.’

‘You’ll be okay?’

Katie rolled away from him. ‘Get over yourself right now or I’m leaving this bed.’

‘That’s meant to be a threat?’

‘Dick.’ She climbed out of bed and pulled on her underwear. ‘I’m hungry, anyway. Let’s go out for brekky. My shout, now I’m a working girl, well almo– Was that the door?’

Adam shrugged and reached for his shorts.

Rap rap, then louder, rap rap rap.

‘I’ll get it.’

‘But I’m dressed and you’re –’

‘Just let me, okay.’ He pulled on jeans and a shirt while the knocking continued.

The officer was sorry to have to break this news. A couple taking a stroll along the Watson’s Bay coastal track saw a man running towards the edge. They called out but the man was already in free fall. The body was recovered within an hour and a half of the report, but there was no wallet or note. This morning the police received a call from a receptionist at the Ultimo office of a refugee assistance charity. Someone had sent her what appeared to be funeral arrangements for her boss, Graeme Reynolds. She had tried his mobile, but it was switched off. She told the police it was probably only a sick joke or a mix-up, but she thought she should call them just in case.

Two hours later Jenny Uton identified the body. The police had spoken to the company identified on the documents received by the receptionist and had confirmed the arrangements were made by the deceased. Ms Uton was in contact with the company and would be ensuring Mr Reynolds’s wishes were carried out. The officer was, again, sorry to have to break this news. Did Adam know of any family who should be informed?

Katie was sitting on the bed, smoking. Adam sat down on the bed and said, ‘I’m sorry.’

‘That bastard.’ She started to cry.

Katie, Adam and Jenny stood together in the flat’s living room, Jenny dressed in a black suit, Adam in dark pants and a navy shirt. Katie felt sorry for them both, but sure of herself in this.

‘It’s important to have closure,’ said Jenny. ‘To be able to say goodbye properly.’

‘He didn’t think it was important,’ Katie said. She turned to Jenny whose face was sunken with grief and guilt. ‘He had every opportunity to let us in. He didn’t want it.’

‘As in life, so in death,’ Jenny said.

‘Katie, darlin’,’ Adam said. ‘I would find it easier to get through if you were there.’

‘I’m sorry. I wish I could help you, but I can’t. Anyway, I have work. I can’t take time off in my first week.’

‘Maybe if I called the shop, as your doctor?’ Jenny offered.

‘Listen to me. You know how when someone dies people say that stupid thing – He would have wanted this – but it’s only ever a way to justify doing whatever the hell you want anyway? In this case I think it’s true. He wanted me to get better and to work and to not worry about him. So that’s what I’m doing. What he would have wanted.’

‘I hear you,’ Adam said. ‘It’s what I want for you, too, but is it what you want?’

Katie felt strong and sad and wise. ‘It’s what I want and what I need.’

After they left, she stood by the living room window. A bottle-green Mini on the road below caught her eye. Now that she would be earning a regular income she could think about taking driving lessons and saving for a car. But first she needed to buy some new clothes for work. New shoes, too, but she could get them cheap with her staff discount. And she wanted to save for a trip. Go see if India was what she thought it was, visit Adam and see if his mother was as nutso as he made out, maybe, maybe stop in on Mum and the kid on the way back.

First of all, though, she thought, watching the cars and the buses and trucks, the schoolkids walking in huddles and tourists slouching under their backpacks and a stray dog darting between cyclists and the mothers pushing prams, first of all, she would pay someone to remove the security bars and repair the frames. She wondered if it would cost much to install a window seat. It would be nice, she thought, to sit up here on warm nights, share a bottle of wine with a friend, a kiss with a sweet man. Or just sit alone, close her eyes and listen to life.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The first draft of Smoke in the Room was written during a residency in Hobart in 2006, as part of the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre’s Island of Residencies Program, which is assisted by Arts Tasmania and Hobart City Council. Three years later, the book was finished during a stay at the Djerassi Resident Artists’ Program in California.

Of the many books on depression and suicide I consulted, I am particularly indebted to Kay Redfield Jamison’s Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, Lisa Lieberman’s Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide and A Alvarez’s The Savage God. Graeme’s ideas about feyness and war were inspired by Lee Sandlin’s 1997 Chicago Reader essay ‘Losing the War’.

I am deeply grateful for the enthusiasm, commitment and editorial guidance I received from my publisher Rod Morrison, editor Emma Rafferty and agent Charlie Viney. Thanks also to Judith Lukin–Amundsen and Melanie Ostell for their perceptive and inspiring editorial advice.

Thanks to the Weedy gang for cheers, commiserations and perspective; to Rebecca for carrying more than her fair share of the load; and to Jeff for all of the above and so much more.