‘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.’