By Jennifer Down
Published in Overland 213 Summer 2013
The afternoons when Murray got home first, he liked to take the dog for a walk down the foreshore. In winter the fat palms shivered and used fits dotted the cement sand. Murray spent his days with trees. Naming them, measuring them, collecting the soil they stood up in. He’d lived in St Kilda for thirty-odd years, but sometimes the sour smells of rotting seaweed and dim sims and car fumes still surprised him. He had a habit of sniffing his fingers to see if they still smelled of forest at the end of the day. They never did, but sometimes his nails were still caked with soil, and that was enough.
The dog was a border collie named Quincy. He was a good dog. Murray was engaged in a steady, patient strategy to win him over. He had a feeling the dog liked Lou better anyway but he kept trying. He had a feeling the dog was onto him.
Lou rang while they were out walking. ‘You down the beach?’ she said. ‘It sounds windy.’ ‘Just on our way home. How was your day?’
‘Oh, a bit long. Got this really turgid letter from the Honourable Minister for Education. It’s the death rattle. I reckon we’ll be gone this time next year.’
Quincy stopped and started sniffing at the pavement. Murray let him.
‘You’re sounding a bit nihilistic there, Louise.’ He was hurting in his joints like he might be coming down with the ’flu.
‘Not nihilistic. I’m calling it like it is. The union’s gone to shit. Nobody cares about these kids.’
‘Well, maybe not those wankers on Spring Street, but – oh, Quincy, mate – ’he grimaced. ‘Your dog is hanging a whacking great turd. On the pavement outside the Espy.’
‘My dog.’
Murray was happy he’d got a laugh out of her. He thought he was getting better, after all these years, at listening for the signs and signals. Like a kid in the country feeling the vibrations of the freight trains shuddering down the tracks from miles away. He’d been in love with Lou for a long time, but he was still scared of the sorrow of which she was capable.
At work out in the forests, they first thing they did was choose a centre point, hammer in a star picket, run a tape out in cardinal directions. They could only hope that what they measured in that circle-plot patch was representative of the surrounding bush. Murray liked patterns he could read; liked trying to gauge things.
//
In their backyard, under the curve of the verandah roof, was an old church pew. Murray sat on it to pull off his boots. Inside at the kitchen sink he scraped half a tin of dog food into the metal bowl. It smelled foul; offensively meaty. He tipped in the leftover fried rice, then remembered dogs weren’t supposed to have onion. He plugged his fingers into the rice and tried to find any shreds of the offending vegetable. He went outside with the bowl in his hands. The sky was like something from a renaissance painting.
‘They’re called stratocumulus,’ he said to Quincy. He made the dog sit before he set the bowl on the bricks. He went to the far end of the garden to chop some wood. The axe split it cleanly, and the hunks fell away. He was aching all over.
He thought a bath might help. That’s what Lou would suggest. He went into the bathroom and turned on the taps; listened to the air shuddering through the old pipes. He peeled off his clothes.
He looked at his soft belly, the stencil of his ribcage. His skin was grey in the bathroom light. His dick hung down limply. Only yesterday he’d had a good wank in almost exactly this position, bracing himself with one hand on the veneer of the sink, thinking about Lou’s legs. She’d peeled off her stockings and flung them into the kitchen tidy. There was a hole in the big toe and it had been giving her the irrits all day. Then she’d walked around in her t-shirt and underwear. Her flesh had gone all goosepimply; the pale hairs on her thighs stood up. She’d never shaved above the knee.
Murray stood looking at himself in the mirror. There was fine hair on the backs of his knuckles; bike-riding muscle clung to his legs. He shivered. The light in that room was like a doctor’s surgery. Those stupid energy-efficient bulbs Lou insisted on. They took forever to come on, and then made everything anaemic and dull. The wind came in through the gap in the sash window and made a noise like a toothy whistle. The tiles were cold underfoot. How could he relax in there? He reached over and shut off the tap. He tugged at the rubber plug and everything drained away noisily, rushing toward the plughole in a hysterical whirlpool.
He stood under the shower instead. Through the bubble glass he could still make out the alien outline of his own reflection in the mirror, skin slowly turning pink with the steam. He turned to face the shower head, cupped the water in his hands; splashed it over his head like a baptism.
//
Lou was home by the time he’d dressed again. In the kitchen, talking quietly to the dog, scratching his belly. Quincy lay spreadeagled in a slatternly way.
‘Bloody turncoat,’ Murray muttered. Lou turned up her face to him like a naughty kid; did her disarming smile, still crouched. She went on stroking the dog’s fur. Sometimes Murray wanted to write poems or songs for her, but he didn’t know how. She was like a cigarette itch.
They were becoming older in symmetrical ways, both of them thinner and bolshier. He had the elegant sort of skull that was kind to thinning hair. She tried to sit up straight these days, to undo years of a tall woman’s self-conscious hunch, but it was a hard habit to break. Somehow they had always managed to coordinate their spasms of melancholia so that one of them kept it together while the other was doomed. Hers were shorter, more acute, more frequent. Often precipitated by a tiny failure: an embarrassment anyone else would have forgotten.
It was happening again, Murray was sure. Last week they’d gone to a friend’s book launch. She’d clutched her glass of wine with that private, terrible look on her face. Every time someone tried to make conversation, she’d slipped away and left him to do the work. He hated explaining her absence, her awkwardness. She knew it. She was always apologetic, always guilty after the fact; always paralysed at the time.
‘We can just go, Louie,’ Murray had said. ‘Tim won’t care. We’ve said hullo.
We’ve bought his book.’
‘Can’t. He’s our friend,’ she’d said, as though that explained it. Coming home she’d had a headache from clenching her jaw. They fought between the tram stop and their flat.
He was getting better at recognising it, that train hurtling along in its iron misery.
Now she straightened up, kissed him on the cheek. He couldn’t even remember what that other Louise was like.
In the forest, in that theoretical circle plot they’d measured out, they had to work out the diameter of each tree. The universal standard was diameter at breast height. Lou had laughed the first time he’d described it to her; the way you had to throw a measuring tape around the trunk and catch it with the other hand, pull it tight to get a reading. Wouldn’t want Hinch to hear about that, she’d said. You’re literally tree-huggers. Murray was a shy romantic. He liked to get home first in the evenings so he could put on a record, or cook one of the meals he knew how. Most nights he walked in to find her laughing in the kitchen, on the phone to her sister; or sorting through the bills. He could throw his arms around a tree and work out how much carbon was in a forest, but holding Louie, pressing his face to her neck, did not permit him to estimate anything.
//
Murray’s sister came for tea. Lou had taken to inviting her more regularly, after the divorce had come through and her children had moved out. Lou insisted it wasn’t pity: ‘I just can’t imagine going from a four-person household to living by yourself,’ she’d snapped once, when Murray had asked, but he hadn’t really seen the difference between that and charity. Lou had always gotten along well with his sister. She always remembered the kids’ birthdays; what they were studying; where the boy was playing his gigs.
Lou cooked a great pot of soup, and when she was slicing the bread she turned to laugh at something Murray was saying, and the breadknife nicked her fingertip. There seemed to be a lot of blood for such a small cut. It dripped over the bread and the cutting board, and ran into the lines of her palm when she held up her hand in shock.
‘Let me get a look,’ Murray said. She’d cut a jagged flap of skin from the tip of her middle finger.
‘Have you got elastoplasts in your bathroom?’ asked his sister.
‘Yes, but we’ve got no bread,’ Lou said in a panic, and they all laughed.
Murray loved her very hard.
Whenever his sister started on about menopause, Murray kept his mouth shut and listened for Lou’s occasional, empathetic murmur. He felt a mild horror, but he was grimly fascinated by the way they spoke. When he was a child his mother, then his sister, too, had burned their sanitary napkins in the incinerator in the backyard. He remembered watching them from the doorway, poking the soiled stuff with a stick. He didn’t really understand the way any of it worked, but something about that memory of his mother and sister standing there by the incinerator at dusk made him think of bleeding as a ritual, something secret and pyrrhic. He’d tried to explain it to Lou once, and she’d laughed. Nothing too mystical about it, she’d said, it’s a sort of dragging pain at the tops of your legs.
Murray and Lou stood in the kitchen after his sister had left.
‘The way she talks about it – it’s almost like a grieving process, isn’t it,’ Lou said thoughtfully, drawing the tea-towel in between her fingers. ‘I’ve never even thought about it like that. Isn’t it funny. None of us understands one another at all.’
She flung the cloth over one shoulder like a waitress; turned back to the sink, took up the scourer. The light in their kitchen was gentle. Murray watched the shadows on the back of her neck as she scrubbed.
‘You’re beautiful, Louie,’ he said.
She looked up in surprise; she was already grinning. ‘When I’m cleaning the sink.’
‘Yep.’
Out in the forest, once they’d measured the trees, they moved on to the other components of the ecosystem. There was a way of breaking down the bush into the trees, the shrubs, the herbs and grasses, the litter – the leaves and sticks – the fallen boughs. Last was the foot of soil underneath it all. Out there they measured everything. They left with armfuls of brown paper bags filled with leaf litter and cores of soil.
Murray wanted to say, don’t be sad, Louie, but it didn’t seem to fit. She looked indefatigable, pushing her hair back from her forehead with the back of her hand; she looked placid. Had he dreamt it? He suddenly felt very unwell.
‘I might jump in the shower before bed,’ he stammered.
‘Okay,’ she said. She glanced at him over her shoulder again. ‘You all right? You look a bit grey.’
‘Yeah, yeah.’
He reached into the bathtub and set the tap running. He stripped off his clothes quickly, and tried not to look at himself in the mirror, but that made it worse. He shut off the tap, and sat on the edge of the bath. The cold enamel dug into his bum. He put his head in his hands, elbows on his knees.
‘You all right?’ Lou’s voice floated in under the door. ‘Murray? Don’t bloody pass out in there.’
‘I’m okay,’ he said. ‘Can’t a man take a shower by himself?’
The water was pooled at his ankles. He sniffed his hands. They smelled like nothing at all.
//
Midweek he had to drive out to Marysville. Bushfire country. In the morning he and Lou fucked sleepily. She reached for him like a lucid dream; froggy hands, stale breath. He was barely awake when he came. Afterwards she sat on the toilet and complained about the tiles being cold under her feet, and gave him a torpid leadlight smile, exactly like that Ray Carver poem. He almost told her that, but something stopped him. The first time he’d come as a kid, he’d thought there was something wrong. It had frightened him that he was capable of it. He’d called for his mother, panicked, hand still clutching his cock. His mother wasn’t home. He’d thanked God regularly for years afterward. Remembering it even now made him ache with embarrassment. He’d told Lou that before. She’d laughed like a child.
After all these years Murray was still struck by that immediate disorientation that came with a new site, walking in circles, lining out tapes. It all looked the same, all greys and greens and blacks. There was no north, no south. All the trees were mountain ash when he first saw them. He liked mapping out the people, too. The ecological researchers were young and efficient; they did things by the books. They spoke less, worked cheerfully. The old boys were quiet at first, but they got to talking as the day wore on. Then the fieldwork moved slower. They’d stop to lean against the trunks, watch the researchers measuring leaf litter or diameters, and theorise on relationships. By the end of the day, Murray was always so familiar with the site that he’d wonder how he was ever disoriented. He liked working with the CSIRO blokes, who insisted on taking a six-pack of Melbourne Bitter – though they were all from Canberra – in the ute fridge. At the end of each day they had a sort of debrief before they went back to the motel. Murray liked the ceremony of that.
At night he mostly ate dinner by himself, then phoned Lou lying on top of the bed.
‘How’s the motel?’ she asked.
‘Pretty flash. WIN news programmes, floral quilt. Little plastic bag of bickies and all.’
She laughed. It was an old joke of theirs, making his work travels more exotic than they were. ‘You know what they do have, though,’ he went on, ‘is a really good globe in the bathroom.’
‘Are you being funny?’
‘Not in the slightest. It’s sort of warm light. Make you look fantastic. I think I might get one for our bathroom.’
‘All right,’ Lou said. The way she just let it go made him furious. Murray wanted her to understand it: that energy-efficient globe was horrible; it was driving him mad. She started talking about the letter she’d been asked to draft on behalf of the staff, something about a funding profile, she might see if she could write a piece for The Drum or somewhere like that.
‘The problem is, none of them have got much fight left, they’re all so burnt- out.’ She paused. ‘Fiona said today, I wish the kids knew how hard we were pushing. But they can’t – they’re kids, that’s it.’
‘It’s really enough that they go to school,’ said Murray absently. He held one hand to his nose, but his fingers just smelled like cheap soap. ‘How’s Quince, anyway?’
//
Driving back into the city he stopped at a big lighting store. He stood in front of all the globes and chewed his thumbnail. He ignored all the energy-efficient bulbs. The LED ones were expensive. He thought the bathroom had a bayonet fitting, but he couldn’t be sure. Maybe he should call Lou. He felt helpless.
A kid with a name badge and a haircut he recognised as trendy approached him, asked if he wanted a hand.
‘Lot of choice, isn’t there,’ Murray mumbled.
‘The LED ones are good. They only use about 10{ffd998e434de82fa2ca6425c71bdd72c1920e852190139d56bb64e18e4951bfd} the energy of your traditional bulbs.’
‘Just give me a second, will you, mate. I’ll let you know if I need anything.’ It came out meaner that he’d meant it to, and Murray instantly wanted to apologise, but the kid’s smile didn’t waver.
‘No worries. Take it easy,’ he said. Murray went back to the little boxes. Even the incandescent bulbs had names and codes he couldn’t understand. He flipped his car keys over in his hand.
Lou phoned when he’d just arrived home, but the line was breaking up and he couldn’t understand her.
‘ – branch meeting last night – ’ she was saying.
‘What?’ Murray said desperately. ‘Louie, I can’t hear you. Will you be home soon?’
‘ – quart’ to six,’ she said, and disappeared with a crackle. Murray looked at the dog.
‘It’s too cold to go down the beach now, Quince,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we just have some tea and call it a day.’ He fed the dog; he made him sit before he set the bowl on the bricks. It was almost dark. Lou had marked the shortest day of the year on their calendar in the kitchen, and he’d been watching it draw nearer.
He went to the shed and fetched the stepladder. He unscrewed the old bulb and fitted the new one. The light was better. He took the old, energy-efficient one outside and hurled it into the bin. It made a satisfying splintering noise. Was that dangerous? He couldn’t remember. The bath was ready. Murray dipped a foot into the water. It was hot. His skin hurt; he was aching all over. He lowered himself into the tub and closed his eyes.
Keys in the door, Lou’s boots in the hallway. She was talking to the dog.
‘You home?’ she called.
‘Yep.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Bathroom.’
‘Nina can’t use her MSO tickets tonight. It’s Tristan and Isolde. Do you feel like going?’
He wrung out the facecloth. He didn’t answer.
She appeared in the doorway. ‘I’ve just had the most beautiful walk home,’ she said. Her cheeks were red. ‘All the stars were out. Just this bitter wind. I had my scarf up over my mouth.’
‘Doesn’t sound too flash.’
‘The way the clouds were moving,’ she said, ‘made it look like the moon was falling.’ She was breathless. He knew it then: one day soon we’ll be friends. He wanted to say it out loud. He wanted to tell her, like the morbid facts they read to each other from the newspapers. Inexorably rising sea levels; endangered animals.
‘You hardly ever have baths,’ she said. She took off her woollen hat and let her hair fall down. She turned to the mirrored cabinet above the sink. She shook her head; she scrunched her fingers at her scalp. He could see her reflection in the mirror. Clear grey eyes. She was ready for him to say something funny. She turned back to him expectantly.
He felt his mouth go slack as a child’s. ‘I think I’m crook, mate,’ he said. ‘I think I’m getting crook.’
He brought his hands to his eyes. Tepid water splashed up his forearms.
‘Okay. It’s all right,’ he heard Lou say.
‘I’m scared,’ he said. He pressed his palms hard against his eyelids. Pinpricks of light swarmed across his vision. No Louise, only those terrible stars.
She was stroking his ears with flat palms, the way she might comfort a dog.
He could feel her hot breath on his cheek. She was very close.
‘You’re okay,’ she said. ‘You’re okay.’
‘I know. Sorry. Stupid.’
‘Not stupid, Murray, fuckssake.’
He made the air go in and out his teeth. He opened his eyes. Lou looked relieved. Murray realised she’d thought that was it. He tried to think of ten botanical names quickly, then twenty. Eucalyptus badjensis, gully ash. Eucalyptus cypellocarpa, spotted mountain grey gum. The skin of his gut was papery.
Lou sat on the bathmat beside him, put a hand to her neck.
‘Did the bulb go in here?’ she asked. ‘Light’s different.’