Smoke in the Room (22 page)

‘No, he's giving it away. All that dough? He donated it to a charity.' Adam compared the statements again. ‘Left himself with barely a thousand bucks.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Yeah. This first one is his personal account. The second one is a notice of transfer. It's not his account and it's not his money anymore. He gave it all away.' Adam waited for Katie to make some crack about how the old man could have given
her
some since he was throwing it around, but she remained still and silent.

‘What?'

‘He's going to die.'

‘What?' Adam looked down at the papers then back at her face. ‘Because of this? No, come on.'

She lay face down on the bed, kicking papers off to make room for her legs. Adam gathered the documents up and placed them on the bedside table.

‘Have you noticed him being sick? Because if it's something terminal there'd be symptoms.'

‘I don't think he's sick.'

‘You don't? So . . . ?'

‘God, it's so obvious. He's in love with death.' Her voice was muffled by the pillow. ‘He wants to talk about it all the time. I thought – ha! Stupid – I thought we were talking about me.'

‘Is he . . .' Adam didn't even know what the question should be. ‘Why?' he asked finally.

Katie snorted. ‘Does it matter?'

‘No, I guess not. I just . . . I don't understand why he would want to . . . if he even does. I don't get why you're so sure and I'm . . . I'm lost. It doesn't make sense.'

She sat up and crossed her arms over her bare chest, looking around the room and blinking as though she had just woken. ‘Not to you. You have no idea what the world looks like to someone like him, like
me
.'

‘Then tell me. What does it look like?'

‘Bleak. Intensely, endlessly bleak and then you realise there is, well, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. And the trick is that the light switch is right there.' She stroked the air in front of her. ‘And once you know it's there, that you can flick the switch at any time, well, it's all you can think about.'

‘No.' Adam grabbed a pillow, squeezed it hard. ‘No. I watched my wife . . . I understand bleak, Katie, but I still don't have a clue what you're talking about.'

‘I know, but listen . . .' She put her hand on his arm, and leant forward so their foreheads were almost touching. ‘Think of it from Graeme's point of view. He's been to all these horrible places, right? Fed some starving babies in this place, helped build a hospital for people with AIDS in another. And now every day he deals with people who've done everything to get here. They've eaten grass and dirt and rotting animals, brought up their kids in tent-cities and refugee camps, spent months at sea worried the whole time that the boat'll sink. They've been raped, tortured, watched everyone they love get murdered and they keep smiling and giving birth and kissing each other goodnight and begging to be allowed to stay here and clean our offices, drive our taxis.'

Katie's grip tightened, her eyes were wet and unfocused. ‘And then one day Graeme wakes up, right, and realises that even if he fixed it so no person would ever go hungry, that there'll never be another war, that no baby
will ever get AIDS – even if he could cure that damned disease and all the other ones – even then it wouldn't matter because all of those saved would die in the end, same as him.'

‘Katie, calm down for a minute.' Adam spoke loudly, trying to break through the miasma. ‘Has he said anything like this to you? Maybe you're projecting.' He was looking into her eyes, but there was no connection.

‘Awhile back I found this book, diary, whatever, and this thing about a little girl who was raped and drowned and he was – god, he was trying to make it right, of course. Make it mean something . . . And all those red crosses and notes about what was useful and what . . .' Her focus returned and she blinked into his eyes. ‘All this time, he's been preparing, see? I'm so dense. So self-absorbed. Everything he's ever said and done and –' She leapt off the bed. ‘Did you take my shirt?'

‘What? No, it's right –'

But she was already pulling it over her head. ‘I have to go out.' She pulled on a pair of tracksuit bottoms and ran her fingers through her spikes. ‘I'll see you later, okay?'

Adam rubbed the half-moons her nails had imprinted on his forearm. Deep grooves for someone with short, bitten nails. Like marks on the wall of a cell. The front door slammed and a second later his body reacted. ‘Katie!' He bolted down the hall, through the living room and wrenched open the door. The outside hallway was empty. He pressed the call button on the lift wondering if it would be quicker to take the fire stairs than wait for the lift to come back up – but the doors slid open immediately.

He stood stunned for a moment, then charged down the hall and yanked open the heavy red fire door.

‘Katie!'

Her neck was bent, the top of her head flush against the slanted roof. Her two bare feet gripped the steel rail, like a bird on a wire, over the open pyramid of the stairwell. The door slammed behind Adam and she flinched.

He lunged, wrapped his arms around her knees, pulled against the force of her stumble. For a vertiginous second he felt himself moving forward with her, but the low roof worked as a brake. Katie cried out as her neck was wrenched backward then forward again and the top of her head scraped along the rough concrete.

Several steps back from the rail, Adam released her legs. She crumpled at his feet. She rubbed her scalp and patches of bright blood appeared beneath the bristles. ‘Ouch,' she said. ‘You could have broken my neck.'

Adam leant against the cool cement wall, waiting for his vision to clear and for the dizziness to pass. If she made a run for it now, he'd have no hope of stopping her. He watched her and breathed and thought about the wall behind him, the solidity of it.

When he felt steadier he took a careful step forward and reassured himself that he would not faint or stumble. ‘Tomorrow morning, first thing. I'm taking you to a doctor.'

She blinked up at him. ‘I'm sorry I scared you, but I'm fine. Snapped right out of it. It happens like that sometimes.'

‘No. No more of this embracing madness bullshit. No more bullshit about survivors and light switches. I've had it. It stops, okay?'

She grabbed the bars with both hands and pulled herself up. In the second between releasing the bars and
grabbing the rail, Adam saw that her hands were shaking. ‘Not up to you, mate.'

He stepped forward with his arms outstretched. She let go of the rail and put all her weight on his chest. He held her a moment and then hauled her up, over his shoulder. She began to kick. She kicked all the way down the hallway and when he dropped her on the living room sofa she reared up and punched him in the face. ‘Fuck you.'

Adam swung out and pulled back almost in the same instant. His knuckles connected with her cheekbone but there was no force behind it. Before she could react, he took hold of her shoulders, pushed her onto her back and straddled her.

‘You listen to me.' His own voice sounded hoarse, unfamiliar. ‘I will sit on you all night if I have to. I will tie you up and carry you into the doctor's office. I don't care if you hate me. I will call the police, social services, whoever I have to, to force you to get help.'

Katie went limp. Adam's heart was beating so fast he thought he might pass out. Never had he used force to get his own way; never had he used threats. If he'd known how effective it would be, he would have done it years ago.

The day after he installed the security bars on the flat's windows, Graeme phoned Bushland Burials, a Central Coast business whose ad he'd clipped from a newspaper six months ago. The woman who answered invited him to come up to the site the following Monday. When he asked if he could come tomorrow afternoon instead, she paused.

‘It's just that . . .' He squeezed the chair arm with his free hand. ‘I don't know if I'll be up to the trip by next week.'

‘That bad, eh? Well, sure, come tomorrow. Whatever time you like.' She gave him the directions and, before hanging up, added, ‘I'll keep an eye out for you, love.'

He left work early the next day, his prepared excuse of a dentist appointment unused. After stopping in at the flat to change clothes, he caught the train up the coast and then a taxi to the site, which looked from the road like a thinned-out rainforest with a small timber hut at the entrance.

A stocky woman wearing grey coveralls and gumboots answered the door and introduced herself as Dot. Graeme
put her at around forty-five, until she mentioned that the hut was usually manned by her twenty-year-old granddaughter. He took a decade off his own age when she asked.

Dot locked the hut door and led him through the bluegums. Half a kilometre or so in, he noticed the discreet plaques bearing names and dates. ‘Timber,' she said when he bent down to touch
Marcella Tripodi
. ‘Ronnie, my eldest, does the carving himself. When my dad died ten years ago we buried him under a truckload of concrete in some soulless, heartless mass cemetery in the suburbs. He was a farmer, a rider. The original outdoor Aussie bloke and there was nothing we could do except cover him in concrete or turn him into ash. And cremation is a dreadful thing to do to the world. You know how much crap gets released into the atmosphere from one body? Carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, sulphur oxide, dioxin, mercury: nice parting gift for the grandkids.'

‘I've always thought there should be a better way,' Graeme said. ‘A way to just sort of . . . vaporise. Not leave a trace.' Then, seeing her frown he added, ‘I just don't want to leave the place any worse off than it was when I got here.'

‘Exactly. That's exactly what I thought. So even though Dad was already buried, I kept researching alternatives. I came across this thing they do in Tibet, called a sky burial. They cut the body into pieces and grind the bones to dust, then leave it all on a mountain for the vultures. The idea of becoming part of the food chain appealed to me. I'm real spiritual – not that you'd tell – but I am, I believe in the circle of life, the divinity of nature. Anyway, long story short: we don't have vultures here, there are
laws against leaving bodies lying around and my kids didn't speak to me for days after I said I wanted them to chop me into bird feed.'

Graeme chuckled in the hope that Dot would think he too had loved ones who'd be appalled at such a grisly suggestion.

‘So I realised I should be thinking about them, the people left behind. I should be trying to find something they could feel at peace with. Because that's what it's all about, isn't it, Graeme? Consolation for the living?'

Graeme shivered. The rustle of the trees and the dead beneath his feet like in the forest outside Murambi, but there were no tasteful timber plaques
there
. Fifty thousand slaughtered, no one left to need consolation. He felt himself fading and shoved the heels of his hands into his eyes, breathed deeply and the smell of the eucalypt meant he was nowhere else but here.

‘Sorry, love. Do you need to stop for a minute?'

He shook his head clear, shook his head
no
. ‘Please,' he said, motioning for her to go on.

‘Anyway, eventually I came across a mob of hippies in the UK doing forest burials and then found there was a whole international eco-burial movement using biodegradable cardboard coffins that could be buried in a forest or the bush. Cardboard breaks down, body decomposes, trees get yummy nutrients. Circle of life. I gathered the info, made a nuisance of myself to every regulatory body in the nation and here we are.' She smiled, spreading her arms out wide. ‘It's not a vulture feedlot but it's nice just the same.'

The train would have gotten him home by midnight, but at the last minute he decided not to take it. He'd not slept well for three nights, stirring at every noise, straining to hear footsteps when there were none. Better to stay at the motor inn by the station, sleep undisturbed by hope.

Except that sleep wouldn't come to him here, either. For almost an hour he lay in the double bed, held stiff by the tightly tucked sheets, listening to strangers through the wall fight about the cost of dinner. He got up and went to the glass shelf labelled
MINI BAR
, opened a tiny bottle of Jack Daniels and drank it in two shots. He looked at the receipt sitting on top of the television set, the Bush Burials letterhead with its cartoon trees and bush critters crawling across the top, and his chest heaved.

He found a half-full plastic ice-tray, and slammed it against the mini bar shelf until it gave up its cubes. He filled a water tumbler with ice and poured a second bottle of whisky over it. Only days ago he'd caught himself thinking how wonderful it was that the universe had thrown Katie in his path, that her small, eager hands had gripped his unwilling ones and dragged him into the future. He'd been in the shower when that image came to him and the adolescent soppiness of it made him snort hot water. Laughably sentimental as it was, he didn't doubt that there was truth in it.