She drives up the mountain; the ocean at her back. On tight turns she feels the rainforest clutch at their old car, scratching along the paintwork, but the sky is still open; she can still see the stars.
When she pulls into the yard and opens the rear door for him, Bagel leaps from the car, pushing her aside in his eagerness to reach the house. It looks empty, dark. Bagel circles the house, barking at the windows and doors. He pushes between her legs when she unlocks the door, almost toppling her across the threshold. She follows him into the kitchen, where he snuffles at the chairs before dashing off. She hears him searching their little weekend retreat: lounge, study, bathroom, bedroom, the closed-in front porch with its desk and daybed.
It was habit to come into the kitchen, though she has nothing to do there. She has brought no supplies to unpack, there is no kettle to boil, no meal to make. In her hand are the car keys and a paper bag with the long rope of her lover’s hair curled inside it like a queer snake.
She puts food in Bagel’s bowl and he comes, reluctantly, eyes the food without appetite. She senses, again, that he is disappointed. What have you done with her?
“Stupid dog,” she says. “Don’t you know what dead means?”
He tilts his head, considering. She wants to bury her face in his fur, feel his animal warmth, but instead she opens the back door to let him out. Her lover’s shoes lean there, waiting. The press of their emptiness horrifies her: the soiled socks shoved carelessly in their throats. Bagel sniffs them. She’s here! She’s here! he pants. Let’s go into the forest; let’s find her.
At the end of the garden – beyond the tangled, unkempt rags of mint and woody basil, lettuces gone to seed and tomatoes slumped across the straw, fallen lemons rotting in overgrown grass – the forest whispers. They used to sit on the step at night, lights out, watching the possums and bush turkeys and beetles scramble through the underbrush. The trees, wound in vines, whispered to one another of comfort, of long, strangling embraces. The mountain bulked beneath them. The red soil fed the trees that threw down leaves to rot beneath their feet. The stars burned and burned. The sky was so clear they believed they could see to the end of seasons, the limits of time, watch the stars burn out and die and fall into their open hearts.
She goes inside, closes the door. “Stupid dog,” she says as he follows her into the kitchen.
She gets the wine from the car and pours herself a glass, takes the opened bottle and sits in the lounge room, on the lounge that is too big for just her and a dog. Bagel curls at her feet. She can feel him breathing, feel his soft heart beating evenly against her sole. The wine loosens the pain under her ribs, swirls it inside her. She pulls threads from the hank of her lover’s hair and idly plaits them into a bracelet that she ties around her wrist.
The pain spreads inside her like a cancer until she cannot think. Cannot stop thinking. She drinks more, hoping to drown the world inside her, knowing it’s hopeless, that the world inside her is greater than the world outside.
In the morning, a faint blue circle has stained her wrist, as if blue is the colour of memory, death, and grief. Fine hairs have lodged themselves in her skin, like the brittle ends of chicken feathers, half-plucked, broken off in the flesh. She scratches at them idly as she walks through the house. She finds Bagel at the back door again, waiting for her. She fills his bowl with water, but there is no food in the house. She pulls a shirt over her head and slips her feet into her lover’s shoes. “Come on,” she says, clipping the lead onto his collar.
They stop at the supermarket to buy dog food and coffee. She wanders the aisles with a plastic basket on her arm, unable to fill it. They go to the grocer’s and she wanders, aimlessly, among the artichokes and bananas, the nectarines and mangoes. A year ago she and her lover would have been eager for mangoes: would have ordered ahead, keen to taste the first fruit of the season. She would have left her lover sleeping to come here, early and without a hangover, to buy fresh bread, tomatoes, red wine, tart apples, cheese, flowers and mangoes – a whole box of mangoes, waxy and blushing. Last year they ate them in the bath, licking the sticky juice from each other’s chins and throats, laughing, careless. The skins and seeds thrown onto the tiles. Her lover’s breasts had been heavy and warm: buoyed up by the water, they seemed to rise to meet her hands, the nipples dark and familiar. Death slept within them.
She ties Bagel up outside the bottle shop. Inside the bottles gleam. No more wine, she swears, but she aches for the bitter slick of a martini, dry and heavy, with an olive glowering in its base. Gin, then, and vermouth. At the counter the man smiles as he takes her money. “Haven’t seen you in a while,” he says. Smiling, smiling. “How’s Lily?”
“She isn’t coming.”
“Oh,” he says, putting the bottles in a plastic bag and looking out the door towards Bagel. Bagel is slumped on the stoop in the hot air as two children offer him their ice cream. “Next time then, eh? Say hello to her for me.”
“Sure,” she says.
The children have given up and are walking away, ice cream dribbling down the cones onto their hands. Bagel does not raise his head to watch them go.
A car rushes by in the street.
To avoid the thought of never kissing her lover again she tries to remember the goodbye she didn’t, at the time, recognise as a final farewell: a rapid, see-you-later glancing of their lips. Her lover’s mouth was dry, a little fevered, but she looked as she had looked the day before; there was nothing to mark the change that had transpired. Her friends were waiting in the car outside, the motor idling. The ocean waited in their salt-bleached hair. Just a day away from the smell of antiseptic and morphine, from the sight of her lover’s veins swollen and bruised as a junkie’s, her once-long, thick hair grown slight and frail, clumping in the bathroom sink. One day in the curative abrasions of suck and sand, swell and salt. A quick kiss, then, and as the horn beeped she smiled, chucked her lover under the chin, and turned away. She tries to remember another farewell – insists on another last kiss, more loving or true. She imagines herself touching her lover’s mouth with her thumb, rubbing back and forth against soft, familiar, dented flesh before she leans in and kisses her – softly, tenderly, forever. She holds on tight, feeling the weather of death blow over them, through them, as they think the same thoughts, wish the same wish, learn to let go.
She does not think of driving home, of her lover’s body heavy against the bathroom door, of the blood – already darkening – that came across the tiles and stained the wood. She does not think of the thief her lover had become, of the regret and guilt and fury she felt. She will not think of her lover meeting death on her own terms, in her own time. She will not think of her lover’s hands, those hands that had held and hurt her, pushing the blade into her wrists and waiting, alone, for time to pass.
Back at the house she pours a martini into a cheap glass. She takes her lover’s hair out of its paper bag and winds the slim rope around her wrist. It barely reaches to her elbow, the thin ends tickling the crook of her arm. The blue bruise beneath her hair bracelet has darkened, deepened. The hairs embedded in her arm have burrowed deeper into her skin, thickened, feathered. She unwraps the plait, places it on the table. She resists the urge to bring the rope to her face and gulp the smell. Her lover used to smell of warm almonds.
There’s a loud, rattling thump against the kitchen window. When she looks up, startled, she sees a bird – brightly-coloured, unfamiliar – wheel a few metres away and hurl itself at the glass. Bagel comes into the room and barks at the bird as it hurls itself against the glass again and again. She reaches up and unlatches the window, watches the bird wheel again as she pushes it open. Does it hesitate? It seems to hover in the middle of its turn, peering into the room behind her. As it dives she steps aside, then watches it fly onto the table and pick up the rope of her lover’s hair in its claws. It pecks at the ropy gold. It turns, cocks its queer, bright head, the threads crimped in its beak. When she reaches out a hand to grasp at the hair the bird rises, swerves around her, and flies out the window: across the garden and into the forest.
She dreams of a tower within which time has stopped. It is wrapped in storms and creeper vines, the stones damp with humidity, warm and heavy and grey. The tower recedes over her head amid gravid, ancient fig trees with buttressed roots. The earth is dark: crumbling and pliant beneath her bare feet. The soft rot of time clutches her ankles. She circles the tower, again and again, knowing there is no entrance. She pushes at the stones until her hands are red and bloody, nails torn from her fingertips, her cheeks damp with tears and blood and soil. The bird whips past her. The long rope of hair dangles from its claws, trails over her shoulder in the old, familiar way. Blue feathers push through her wrists, pinion out into the half-light.
When she wakes the house is so quiet she can hear the ambient electric hum: the refrigerator cycling, the stove’s clock marking time. She wanders barefoot, bare-breasted, into the garden and wrenches the fuses from the fusebox, one by one, feels the satisfying ceramic scratch as they fall on the concrete path at her feet.
Back in her bed the darkness thickens like soup. She quiets her breathing, burrows beneath the sheets, and presses her hands to her ears. Outside the forest breathes carbon, oxygen, and rot. She falls back into the dream: the tower, the gravid figs, the bird, the hair. The feathers at her wrists throb like a wound as she presses weightlessly against the stones.
She wakes again, with angry tears: soil stains the sheets, the bruise on her wrist is buried beneath feathers, blue and bright. When she lifts her wing, the fingers beneath the dense colour seem boneless, filled with light.
The bird is perched in her bedroom window. Outside it is barely light. The trees are hazy, blue-black ghosts of their daylight selves. The bird peers at her. She pushes back her hair, a headache already pounding in her temples, nausea nestled firmly in her belly. The glass on her bedside table is still half-full. Her skin and sheets reek of stale sweat, alcohol and red, friable soil. The bird hops across the sill and flutters onto the table, its claws clicking against the dusty timber.
“Shoo,” she says, flapping her wing as it hops closer.
The bird lifts into the air and circles the room. It dives towards the end of the bed, to the quilt and sheets she has kicked to the floor. She hears the scritch and scatter of its claws and reaches under her pillow, searching. The bird rises over the end of the bed, gold threads gleaming in its beak. She sits up suddenly, light-headed and furious. “Bitch,” she says, “give it back. It’s mine. Fucking bird.”
The bird swerves around her head; a caress as it brushes her temple – the animal frailty and warmth of its body a soft, penetrative shock – before it lunges past her, out the window.
“Bagel!” she calls, though when he enters the room she cannot imagine why she has called him. “That bird,” she says. “That fucking bird took her hair.”
Bagel eyes her, waiting for something he can respond to, something he understands. She reaches out her wing and he comes closer, rubs his body against her calves. She bends over to retrieve the remains of her lover’s rope and finds almost nothing – a handful of threads scattered across the mess of sheets. She lowers herself onto the floor, Bagel panting beside her, and lifts the blankets, peers under the bed. “Fuck,” she mutters, brushing her feathers through the dust, raising swirls of dirt among the old boots and newspapers. “Where is it? It can’t have got it all.”
She hears a rustle at the open window and Bagel’s curious snort. The bird is on the sill again, peering at her. Waiting.
“What have you done with it?” she says.
The bird hops up and down, peering in at the thin scatter of gold clutched in her claw. She tightens her fist. Hot tears seep from her eyes. “Why?” she says.
The bird hops closer, onto the floor beside her. It presses its tiny head against her feathers. She feels the pinch of its beak as it pulls at the hair bracelet, still tied about her wing. It worries at the knots until it is undone. The bird sits with the plait in its beak, watching her with black-eyed certainty, before fluttering down out the window into the soft, blue air.
She follows the bird down the old track, barely visible between the press of dangling roots, banyan trees and silky oaks. It is dark, heavy with quiet and damp. Walker canes whip against her shins as she presses past them, their prickly fingers puncturing her skin. Dead leaves shush her as she passes. She has left her shoes, beside her lover’s, on the back step, leaning quietly together. The back door is open, the light at the top of the stairs turned on. Ahead of her the bird flies, lands on branches thick with greenery, to wait for her. She feels her heart lift towards it. In the falling light it seems only half real: a thing of air and light.
When the track turns she lifts into the air to follow the bird. She feels her moist, hollow bones tremble with effort as she folds her claws beneath her body and pushes wilfully into the sky. The light falls through her as she rises. Ahead is the tree, the storm, the tower. At the tower’s peak a bright nest: a tangle of golden hair. She peers into the down-lined bowl at her lover’s beating heart.
Bagel pads about the house, his claws scratching on the wooden floors, his fur coating the furniture. There is no one left to care or scold him. He cannot count the days – she threw away the calendars before she went. It was forbidden, it seemed, to utter the names of days and months, to speak of now and then, today and yesterday. Words had to drop like stones from her mouth without forming sentences, without beginning or end, lest time creep in and learn, again, to pass. She ceased speaking to him; she could not speak, nor think, for the deathly arrangement of noun and verb, premise and conclusion, marked a progression that invited yet another end. The seasons she left behind her at the shore, at the ocean. Up here there was only heat and damp, the suck and sap of lucent chlorophyll. The measured substance that pushes the world this way and that, the invented sequence that hovers between the simple raising and lowering of a glass, could no longer be tolerated.
She nailed the windows shut: blocked the temporal movement of the sun and stars from her view. The rhythmic pulsation of light suggested, it seems, the unstoppable equation that attaches to mass and energy. She lived blindfolded. Her ears, too, covered for fear of hearing rain fall, or leaves snap from their moorings and tumble, the owl hooting its signature on the night sky. She burned her hands on the stove, forced each tip and palm into the flame until all trace of whorl was gone.
She had overlooked her heart: her poor beating heart. Like a mindless machine it continued to beat inside her, to add and subtract the path of days. A whimsical toy, it beeped and sighed, singing and songing along the jointed channels of her blood. Counting, counting. Now diminishing. Now expanding. Now sinking. Now swelling. Insisting on its literal dance. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Filling her up with deadly arithmetic. For all her quietude, her sinking into silence, it only beat faster. Faster. Faster. Pushing blood and grief and forgetfulness through her veins.
We wasted time, she said to Bagel as she walked away, following the thread of her lover’s hair, following the bird who came to her window, who plucked at her skin like a death-eater.
Nike is a QLD writer. You can find out more about her and her work at: http://www.nabourke.com/