Tarcutta Wake Read online

  Josephine Rowe was born in 1984 and lives in Melbourne. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Meanjin, Overland, The Best Australian Stories, The Best Australian Poems, The Iowa Review, Griffith Review, and Australian Book Review, among others, and have been reinterpreted as short films, performance pieces and broadcast on radio. Her collection of short stories How a Moth Becomes a Boat was published in 2010 (Hunter), and she attended the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in 2011.

  To Patrick

  Contents

  Brisbane

  The tank

  Adeline

  Cotton

  All you really have to do is be here

  In the mornings we would sometimes hear him singing

  The taxidermist’s wife

  Vending machine at the end of the world

  Dixieland

  Belonging to Sonja

  Suitable for a lampshade

  Treacherous

  View

  Swan dive

  Hotels

  Heart of gold

  Raising the wreck

  Repairs

  House

  Into the arms of the parade

  Souvenirs

  Scar from a trick with a knife

  Sometimes beautiful, sometimes magical

  St Leonards Avenue

  Tarcutta wake

  Acknowledgments

  —for time is the longest distance between two places.

  TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

  Brisbane

  And she had this way of swivelling her head round, like an owl to talk to you as she drove, except not like an owl because the skin of her neck creased up in folds and she looked so old when that happened, though she wasn’t, not then, and Luke would lean over and say, Watch the road, Mum.

  And what I’ll remember of this time is split vinyl and continental breakfasts, fights about who gets the passenger seat, a wallaby cracked over the head with the jack handle and none of us talking till Lismore even though we know she’s done the right thing.

  We pull in silent to the motel, a low, sandy-brick L shape, with all the doors facing onto the car park and the car park mostly empty, mostly dark. Our room is No. 17 and there is a tv that only gets two stations and one double bed which my brother and I fall into fully clothed with only our shoes kicked off. But something wakes me a few hours later and I panic, forgetting where I am. I go over to the window on shaky legs and see her from the back, standing out by the road. A blonde in denim pedal pushers and white tennis shoes, standing in the light of the motel sign, like the ghost of 1967. Ghost of her younger self, holding a slim beer bottle down by her hip, fingers round its throat like she wants to swing it at something.

  In the dark of the room I find the bar fridge, take a bottle of cola from inside the door. Luke lifts his head from the pillow and says, Eli, don’t you drink that. Those cost like four times as much as they do in the shops, and I say, Shut up I’m not going to, and I go back to the window. Try to stand the way she does, the bottle dangling loose from my fingertips. Like I don’t care if I drop it. Like I don’t care about anything. She stands like that for a long time, just looking out at the road like she’s waiting for someone to come pick her up.

  In the morning there are flecks of rust-coloured hair dye in the bathroom sink, and Luke takes one look at her and says, That’s not going to change anything, Mum, because he’s older and sharper than I am but he still gets a slap for it, so we’re all silent in the car again, all morning, and I wish the radio still worked.

  When we get to Brisbane, she’s telling us, you won’t even remember. And I don’t know if she’s talking about Dad or the slap, or the wallaby or Victoria or that she was ever a blonde, but in any case I know she’s lying, cause she’s got her lips pressed into a pale line and her eyes fixed hard on the road.

  The tank

  It feels good to have the sun on him. To press his body into the sand, the hot wind across his bare skin finally drying out the open sores across his back, and across the backs of his arms and his legs.

  He stretches his arms out ahead of him and kneads lazy fistfuls of the sand. Breathes its baked salt smell through the damp shirt, which he’d taken off and folded to lay his head on, avoiding the constellations of dried blood. He lets out a low moan. Muffled by the shirt it sounds almost sexual, but there is no one close enough to hear. The tourist season has been over for a month, the nightclub closed and the long bronze girls gone, and he had not been embarrassed to peel his clothes away from the damaged skin.

  The sores appeared a day or two after he got out of the tank, and were still weeping when he came back east. The medics didn’t know what to tell him. A reaction to the chemicals and salts they used to keep the water clean, maybe. They’d never seen anything like it. He’d been told it was better not to dress them, and the fabric of the long-sleeve shirts that he wore to hide them stuck to the broken skin. Coming back, he had steeled himself for the questions. First there would be How? and then, almost certainly, Why? Why would you put yourself through that? Are you fucking crazy?

  The questions would come mostly from Ella’s friends. They were all like that, her friends. Quick to slag off the adf; quicker still to scrabble for any gory morsel he might throw them. They wanted waterboarding, starvation, dogs. They wanted to tell him how barbaric it all was.

  Yeah, well, he’d tell them. They’re not prepping us for a crafternoon.

  He’d stopped trying to explain the how and the why; they would always twist it somehow, use it against him. Use it to turn Ella against him. Ella used to call them off, change the subject. Talk about the Rilke quotes that cluttered his letters from Afghanistan. Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror … But these days she just watched to see what he’d say. To see how long it took him to stand up, drain his beer and throw her the keys to his car. Might see you back at the ranch, El, and he’d barrel home through the night air, walking beside the rail lines with his hands balled up in his pockets and the sound of the freight trains humming through the tracks. He knew how they talked about him when he was out of the room. Thought he was violent, that he had to be, to have been where he’d been.

  When he came back from selection she was waiting in the kitchen of his flat. He set his gear down on the floor and she stood up.

  So that’s it then?

  That’s it for now.

  But you said if you failed …

  I didn’t fail, I just didn’t pass. Medical release, he said, unbuttoning his shirt to show her.

  My god, Laith. You let them do that to you?

  It just happened. It’s no one’s fault. I can apply again next year.

  No. I mean, yes, you can, you can do whatever you want. But I’m not going to wait for you next time.

  It was his turn to say something but there wasn’t anything. A freight train screamed past, and the building shuddered as though it might shake apart. He counted the shipping containers. Thought about the stories friends had told him about riding them, not caring where they were headed, strapping themselves to the ladder rails so they didn’t roll off while they slept.

  After Ella walked out he drove seven hours down to Rosslyn Bay, and stood waiting at the pier until the first ferry arrived.

  *

  His father had brought him here when he was seven or eight. The most beautiful place in the country, he’d said. You catch a glass-bottom boat across and you can ride in the boom nets. But the island wasn’t the way his father remembered it. There was something pretend about the place, Laith knew, and they spent the day hiding their disappointment from each other as they moved among the throngs of sunburnt Brits. Lunch was fish and chips eaten wordlessly in the glare of white plastic furniture, the families around them squealing, scolding, hi
s father’s enthusiasm slipping into something tight-jawed and desperate. Another thing he’d planned for, saved up for, that had fallen on its face. Laith wanted to tell him it was okay, but he didn’t know how. Later he’d sliced his foot open on an oyster rock while snorkelling. His father picked the pieces of shell out of the cut with a pair of borrowed tweezers, and somehow things had become easier after that. On the way back to the mainland the boat passed over a fever of stingrays, and the sight of them through the glass was enough to colour everything else and outstrip it.

  It was something he’d remembered while inside the tank. Remembered or dreamed it; after the first day or so there was less and less difference between the two. He knew he’d have time to think about a lot of things inside the tank, and he’d saved them up in the months prior to selection. Someone had said it would feel like weeks in there, that blokes who’d nailed all the physical stuff – the twenty clicker and the retraining sessions – were tapping out before the end of the second day, signing their Withdrawal at Own Request forms while their hands were still wet. Laith slipped into the blood-warm water and they closed the lid on him.

  The door of the tank would not be locked. They had been emphatic about that. He could climb out whenever he wanted, though he knew that would mean going home early. If he climbed out to piss, he’d be going home early. They would open the tank – this happened eight times, though he could not tell if there was any regularity to it – and when they did he would be overwhelmed by the smell of their skin and their breath. They checked his eyes and asked whether he’d had enough yet, before closing the lid on him again. They never told him how long it had been, though once they gave him water and he figured he must be halfway through.

  It wasn’t cold in the tank. It wasn’t anything. Just black and silent, and he was alone with the aching for rest he’d had since he got there. He’d kept a mental list of things that needed sorting out. But it was his son who kept returning; a recurrence that seemed measured, as though he were walking up and down a small rise, coming in and out of view. He would be five now, nearly six. She’d called him Oscar, and some nights Laith would stay up online and look through Angela’s Facebook albums while Ella was sleeping. No birthday cards, Angela had told him, her arm across her swollen belly. No phone calls, nothing at all. But she hadn’t hidden him away. Here were the birthday parties, the trips to the snow. The everyday snapshots with dogs and bicycles. Laith had watched him grow up from behind one-way glass.

  I won’t ask you for anything, ever, she said. And I won’t make him hate you. But I don’t want him to have what I had. What both of us had.

  I didn’t mind it. It didn’t do me any harm.

  You did. And it did.

  What are you going to tell him?

  I’ll tell him the truth.

  And the truth is?

  That I thought it was for the best.

  Ange … this is stupid. We can fix this.

  She’d closed her eyes then. Other people are going to have to make up for all the wrong we’ve done to each other, she said, her voice steady and her palms flat against the table.

  But no one had, at least not for him. No one had made up for any of it. When they finally let him out of the tank he stood naked on shaky legs and knew all of it for what it was.

  The breeze coming off the ocean has cooled when he lifts himself out of the groove he has made in the sand. Every part of him still aching from the fourteen days out west. In the lodge he takes the towels from the bathroom and spreads them across the bedsheets before lying down. Just make the last thing right, his father had told him as they watched the stingrays through the glass floor of the boat. You get the last thing right, and the rest of it doesn’t matter so much.

  Adeline

  In the middle of December the roof caved in. It had been the wettest spring for many years and everything had been quietly mouldering away up there for months. Then the sudden seam that appeared in the ceiling above my bed; the covers drenched in stale water, smattered with broken plaster. The sheets clung to my legs and a clump of sodden insulation batting lay across my chest like a dead wet cat. Everything was coated in a sticky white-grey dust. Colour of dirty goose feathers, city snow.

  I should have gotten up then, walked to a safer part of the house and called the real estate to tell them what had happened, and that it hadn’t been my fault. But I’d been dreaming about Adeline, and I was so sure that if I woke up properly, there’d be the news that there was nothing they could do for her, that they’d had to turn her off. So I tried to ignore the hole in the roof, to find my way back to the old house where Adeline still sits waiting on the back veranda, her dark hair knotted at the back of her neck and everything steeped in the medicinal smell of her skin.

  Even here, it is raining. The backyard is cluttered with cardboard boxes going soft in the rain. Adeline takes a draw on her damp cigarette and says, Well, what do you think?

  The sides of the boxes are disintegrating and things are starting to spill out, gimcracks and books, clothes with patterns that I recognise right away.

  Is this everything? I ask.

  It’s everything, she says.

  Okay then. Alright. Good.

  And down in the old garage the girl we tried to share – the girl we tried to share, and could not share – is teaching you to play guitar, and the band of light that comes from beneath the door is the colour of dirty goose feathers, the colour of city snow. I go down and I bang on the door for a while but she just plucks harder at the cheap nylon strings saying, This is A, this is G, this is F, her voice like a cracked porcelain dish spilling over, This is B, this is E, and eventually I walk away.

  Cotton

  You could tell just by how clean her hair was, someone told the papers afterwards. You could tell she had money, that she was somebody. Had been somebody.

  On the morning we found out, we didn’t say very much. We smoked a lot and passed the papers around the table, comparing the stories in the tabloids with the stories in the broadsheets.

  Somewhere there was a matchbox, her baby teeth nestled into cotton wool. Somewhere the bronzed baby shoes, the envelope of feathery blonde curls, kept safe.

  All you really have to do is be here

  Someone set fire to the place a couple of years ago, and one of the back rooms was left badly damaged. Roscoe just cleared out what was left of the furniture, swept up the shards from the petrol bomb and locked the door.

  Wasn’t much took place in there anyway, he told her when she started.

  Who did it, do you think?

  Just bored kids, probably. Nothing for them to do out here.

  I suppose fire’s thrilling when you’re a kid.

  Stays thrilling to some people, he says.You’ll be okay till the end of July?

  That’s fine. I’m not going anywhere.

  She’d seen the film when she was young, a wartime drama that had bored her to sleep on the green chevron couch. Slow, saturated yellows of the 1970s, and the kind of ending her mother cried at, though that wasn’t saying much. It wasn’t until she moved out here that she remembered, driving past the heaped stone wall and beyond it, the greying weatherboard farmhouse, the surrounding paddocks dotted with the hulking frames of ruined machinery. A peeling sign read Open to visitors, Sat & Sun, and beneath that, Short Term Help Required.

  Roscoe was silver and wiry, the lines of his face resembling animal tracks over dusty ground. When she asked about what kind of help was required he smiled, broad and askew.

  Tell you the truth, love, all you really have to do is be here. Eleven a.m. till five p.m., both days. My sister’s chemo sessions start in Sydney next week, and I’m getting a bit desperate.

  She followed him through the house, purpose built and furnished for the film and unchanged in the four decades since. A dvd of the film played on continuous loop on a flat screen in one corner of the living area. Everything else looked makeshift, salvaged, fashioned from packing crates and produce boxes.


  Austerity measures, said Roscoe, and flipped through a stack of ration cards. Try to make sure these don’t go missing. They’re worth a packet these days. Ironic, eh?

  He gave her a wink then, and handed her a cluster of rusty keys.

  There’s a folder in the top drawer of the bureau with all the information you’ll need. Names and dates. Trivia and such. You’ll get the odd smartarse that just wants you to know how much they know. But if there’s anyone you get a bad feeling about, you call Dave. Number’s written there in the folder. Film creeps are the worst creeps, I can tell you.

  On the outside wall there is still a black smoke smear climbing up from the window, the window itself covered over with a raw sheet of plywood. On slow days she’ll unlock the door of the burnt-out room, where the walls and ceiling have not been repainted, and the damp charry scent of the ruined floorboards reminds her of camping in winter, of sleeping in her clothes and conversations beneath a ruined rail bridge. Some afternoons she scrapes one of the dining chairs into the room and closes the door behind her. Sits and tries to read, her hand on her belly, waiting to feel something kick. Though it’s too soon. She knows that much.

  All the other rooms were repainted and reopened to the public within two months of the fire, Roscoe’s little laminated notices reinstated: This is where such and such happened. This is where whatsherface said or did or broke this. She comes in at 10.45 to set up the dvd and murmurs along with it while rearranging the rack of dusty souvenir postcards. Darcy? He’s over in Katoomba working on the funicular …

  Visitors pay five dollars to walk around the farmhouse, sliding their fingers over everything and waiting for something to happen. They pick up the ancient flipside toaster like it’s magic. This is where so and so made toast, she thinks, and asks them to please not disturb anything. To please get out of the bed, the bathtub, et cetera, that they can re-enact their favourite scenes when they get home.