Heat and Light (17 page)

She goes into another room and brings me the jacket, a bright purple-blue blazer.

‘Nice colour,’ I say.

‘Five dollars.’ She smiles triumphantly. ‘I’ll get it dry-cleaned tomorrow and bring it over.’

‘No, it’s okay. ’

‘No, you’re always coming over here, I’ll get it to you easy.’

My throat tightens. I want to tell her the dry-clean isn’t as much as it’s worth, but what is it worth in a dead hoarder’s house? And what will she think of my flat – the pinpoints that show little more to my existence than my brother, offhand study, and her.

My tongue still tingling from the pretend taste of her, I leave fingerprint poetry on the door frame and stair railing as I leave. My heart is a black cat under a car. There is plenty left of the afternoon to wonder what I might have said. But there is tomorrow to ponder. The intensity of my feelings to be retained. The unknown fibres of my inner workings to be kept in a secure lab without sunlight.

My brother hits more when he drinks. My mother appeared those times with a bruised, yellow face. The scent of alcohol lingered on her, too. I can’t look at my brother’s eyes. I shut my eyes when he swings. I cry out. There is a song I hear in my mind when there is darkness. An old song that I have known since the beginning of my memory.

The windy morning before Sarah comes I take a vitamin C tablet, convinced it might stop me craving the orange of her skin. I wash it down with half a glass of water.

‘You look well,’ she says to me when she comes in. An easy thing to say, but still I smile.

‘So do you,’ I say.

‘And you’ll look even better in this jacket.’ She holds it up, still in its plastic cover, then puts it down on the bench. She unzips the bag and I try the coat on for size. Drop it on my shoulders, do the only button up.

‘It’s not too tight around the bust?’ she asks, in a low voice.

I shake my head, frightened to look up. Then I catch her eye when I do, and her hands come up as if she’s going to touch me, but she lets them fall to her side. I wrestle the jacket off and put it back down on the bench.

‘The fit’s fine,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’

And then, the startling clarity of her hand on my waist, drawing me close, the intimacy of the half-embrace. We pull out and she looks back at me with a heavy expectancy. I have left the screen door open and the leaves blow up to the door. A thrilling spring sound. In not too long, she is where I have imagined her, my lips pointed at her. Five flickers of light before she kisses me, before I kiss her back. My body responds with a white pain, the type of pain you don’t remember. We clutch, we claw each other. I trace my fingernails up the inside of her arm, and to the curve of her top lip. We take off our clothes until we’re down to our underwear. I trip over the ankles of my jeans, curl them over my heels and leave them on the floor.

For those easy moments I haven’t thought of David, but there it is, David and Sarah, David throwing bread, cutting holes in his flannelette shirt. Dave screaming at Sarah and her on the floor, hurt.

Her chest is in front of me. She breathes low. Her shaped stomach. Her firm arms. Her tight shoulders. The grainy exposure of her neck. My brother’s lover. She moves my hand to her breasts, my brother’s breasts. I trace the shape of them through her bra.

Unclothed we’re on my bed, her knees at my armpits, her palms flat and open next to me. Her breasts are like lemons. Her skin bruises against mine. She curls her fingers closer to the need of me, her soft thigh presses against mine. I gasp as she moves, she circles me and her mouth moves to my breast. She sucks it with the same rhythm and at the feel of her teeth I feel myself close and groan out. She moves downward with her mouth, and with her tongue she makes me come, wonderfully, feverishly, and I’m feeble after that, but not enough to stop me wanting her, wanting to make her sigh, and I gravitate to her, moving on top and pressing into her. She is deliciously wet, and I put my hand in between us. It is only a short moment until she joins me, shouting, sighing. I kiss her deeply and see how relaxed she looks, eyes curled up. I think of the baby inside her, resting. I want to place my hand on her stomach but instead I take in her form, not trusting myself with words.

When we get up my flat is not the same. Every inch of the floorplan projects a freeze frame of our physicality. When she leaves I feel her kiss dry off my lips, her saliva evaporate from my thighs. Only the furniture is visibly shifted, the lounge on an angle, the bed half a metre off the wall.

The door closes and she is gone for twenty hours.

A woman I met once had been on a program to quit smoking. They told her how she would feel when she regained her normal sense of smell and taste, peeling an orange. A week later she’d kicked the urge, and the navel orange underneath her fingernails was the most powerful sensation she’d had in her life. When I asked her if it was the anticipation, she thought about it and nodded.

Sarah has talked to me about names for the baby, if it’s a girl. She says she still has a baby names book she got from Lifeline when she was ten. Her grandmother used to take her to the vintage stores on the north side, and Sarah would go sit by the books. Her grandmother didn’t want her to buy it, no doubt thinking about a teenage pregnancy, but Sarah convinced her and the book remains on the bookshelf. She has had many favourite names, but there are a few that have endured. She likes names that are hardy, shapely, circular. Old-fashioned but other-worldly. She likes Grete, Lachina and Margo. I tell her I like Grete the best, that it reminds me of a warrior’s name. This child, I say, if she is a girl, will be a strong girl, like her mother. I ask Sarah if Dave has names he likes; have they talked about it? She says he wants a name that doesn’t look like anything else.

‘Is he back?’ is the first thing I ask Sarah when she’s at my door the next morning.

‘Yes,’ she says softly. She has let her hair out and pulls a piece in front of her mouth, hiding it, keeping it from me.

I hastily move to grab a chair with a thick cushion on the back for her and we sit down, facing each other. ‘Where was he?’

‘He didn’t tell me.’

‘You said he knew about …’ I am anxious. ‘About this. Us.’

‘Some of it. I told him we’d talked about a connection. He himself thought it was strange, and had noticed it. Maybe feels left out. But, Jodie, he can never find out about this.’

‘What are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘The nausea has been bad lately. I can’t cook.’

I touch her shoulder. ‘Sarah, you know he has a mental illness.’

She moves my hand away and I feel the loss. ‘He’s just having a rough time. With your mum, and everything that happened. Your dad dying. He’s a twenty-year-old; he doesn’t have things figured yet. He has a bit of a temper. But he’s not crazy.’

‘Sarah, did he tell you he spent a few weeks in the mental health ward of the hospital? Did he tell you what happened when he left? Why he didn’t finish school?’

‘I’m looking after him,’ she says.

‘You got to look after yourself, too.’

She starts to get up, holding her stomach.

‘Has he hurt you?’

She won’t answer. Then, ‘Jodie, why are you doing this?’

‘I just want to protect you,’ I say. ‘He’s living with you, and I worry. What he might do to you. All I’ve ever wanted is to protect you.’

‘I don’t need that,’ Sarah says. ‘Maybe you should have been thinking about your brother.’

‘I do think about him! Every day. Sarah, I’ve tried and tried and tried. But he’s a danger to others.’

After she leaves I know I’ve said too much, that I have loved wrongly.

When Dave was in the hospital I remember going to the ward for a visit. There was a courtyard with palm trees and Dave sat there with me. The other patients would come past and acknowledge him, but he wouldn’t say anything. He had marks up his arms and looked so thin. We both sat there in silence. I waited for him to say sorry. I waited to say sorry. The doctor came by, well dressed in her jacket and pencil skirt, and said he would not be allowed to leave, they would prevent him from leaving until they thought he was ready. When we met alone, she asked me why my mother didn’t know yet. I said that I would tell my mother. The doctor told me the name of the medication he was on. The side-effects, and how they were monitoring it. ‘Is he normally like this?’ she asked. I answered as best I could and she went away. I sat next to my brother again. I had brought him a packed bag of clothes and toiletries. We looked at the sky, faded red from an afternoon storm. A breeze spun through the gap between the buildings. My brother looked at me and smiled, he said they had turtles here and for that second, that moment, I thought he was getting better. Hope for him. Hope for me.

I keep my distance from the house, from Sarah and David. I tell myself it’s best for all of us, that Sarah doesn’t want to see me anymore. I must only remember how upset she is with me. I can’t think of her skin against mine. It has been two weeks. I have met my supervisor and there is a lot of work to be done between now and November, but I spend a fair bit of time staring out of my balcony or lying in bed. At night I listen to the radio – no music – the news channel, so there is always talking. I sob after I touch myself, a tangle of sheets around my ankles. A grieving that is not dignified, nor quiet.

Sarah told me about the first time she saw me come in to the fish shop. She said she knew immediately I was David’s sister, how could I not be? We have the same face. She said she was filled with a warmth at discovering this, that I was a person that could easily enter into her life. She had found out she was pregnant that day, at the doctor’s in Chermside.

I think about going to the animal park in Dakabin and watching the turtles, watching them swim and also lie on the rocks. I hope they have real rocks there.

One night, late, I wake up to a message from Sarah on my phone. She can’t stop thinking about me. About the day we were together. She wants to be in my arms. She wants my hands on her breasts. I go to the kitchen and have a glass of wine before I reply.

There is a movie on television, a space one. David used to love the
Star Wars
movies, and he got books of the series out of the library. He would insist on reading out loud from them. He would do it on long car trips when Dad was trying to find us somewhere to live, running from the loan sharks.

Sarah tells me she and Dave have had a blue and he’s left again. I fill another wine glass. Outside, a bat flaps over the park. My legs are shaking. My phone beeps a few times an hour. In this blue room of technological seduction we tell each other things that should be physical. We are in love with each other. It is just no good not to be together. I tell her to come over, I want her here. And she doesn’t respond; my phone sits in self-imposed darkness.

Let me not forget that our mother used to hit us, too. That my little brother would cry at the first violation of child’s flesh, a mother’s touch turned untoward. These tears would suspend from his puffed round eyes and go nowhere. His body was so close to mine as we took shelter in the bathroom of our house, standing in the bathtub with the pale yellow curtain closed. Together, refugees, but we were not one. We could not look at each other. The saltiness of her wild, primal screams still on our mouths. I did not tell my little brother I would take him away from it. That I would protect him, that I would stand up to her. It was not in my capacity.

I said I’d keep my distance but a couple of times I go to Sandgate and just walk around, spying from the fringes. On a cloudy day, I walk on the path beside the beach, starting at the playground, past the pool and the cafe across from it. I don’t see her.

As I look out into the ocean I remember my brother’s grip on the back of my head, pulling my hair as the sea water plunged into my throat, a scream underwater. Back then, I was bigger, but only just. A couple of kicks and he’d let me go.

I go over to the Sandgate home by bus – my tyres are low. The sticky flowers from the yellow trees are peeled over the footpath. Dave is shirtless in the front yard moving stuff in a wheelbarrow. His chest and shoulders are pale against the rest of his body. I have pulled the blue-purple jacket over a black T-shirt dress with tights, and when I see his outfit, I realise the foolishness of mine; it will be a thirty-five degree day and I have sweated just walking from the bus stop. I clip open the gate and Dave looks up.

‘She’s not here,’ he says.

‘Where is she?’ I say, moving closer.

‘At the shops, I think.’

‘How are you going?’

‘Fine. Hey, sis, did you ever see a shovel round here, by any chance?’

I shake my head.

He sifts through another large plastic tub.

‘I want you to stay away from her,’ he says. His eyes cold.

‘What do you mean? Sarah?’

‘I’ve seen the messages. I know all of it.’ He is smiling, unnervingly.

I don’t know what to make of it, his stance is not threatening.

‘Now,’ he says. ‘Will you help me find a shovel?’

I follow him, under the house. I now see the extent of Sarah’s grandmother’s collecting. She has left boxes and furniture in every corner of the dirt boxroom. I pull things aside productively, because I haven’t seen David this agitated for a while. Since he’s been here, maybe. It is as if I had forgotten this side of him, but of course I hadn’t, this is what I had worried about the whole time. It is almost a relief that there is no pretence about it. There is me and him and his shoulders square as he grunts in frustration.

‘I’m going to get something upstairs,’ he says. ‘Wait here.’

I step towards the door to watch him go up the back steps. He takes the steps two at a time, holding a screwdriver in his hand. I see the dog’s bed, an old hessian bag, she has scratched the corners of it. Next to the bed, Scary’s stainless steel drinking bowl is dry, a layer of green mould at the bottom. I wonder how long Sarah has been out.

The backyard is also painted with the gold flowers. Seedpods from a neighbouring tree collect under the clothesline. When I walk back out into the yard there is something to the left of my vision that I didn’t see when I was indoors.