Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 6, Issue 6 Read online

  I will wake up with his voice still sparkling in my mind. The night still on my skin. The man in the apartment will wake. I wonder if he will think of me, look for me, if my perfume will linger in his bed and haunt him for the rest of the day.

  TRACK #2 HUNGRY HEART

  Like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing

  I took a wrong turn and I just kept going

  He left while her body was still warm from marriage. An old sepia-toned wedding photograph, the grain made them look incandescent, holy. A guitar gathering dust; an old chord progression once discovered, much-loved. His fingers wrapped around the neck, body leaning on his knee, the shapes would come back to him soon enough. The test of desire lay in the getting around to things; it was all in the want. How hungry he was.

  Her body had become a new landscape. Foreign to them both, she was unbewildered by it. She’d look at photographs, videos of her in youth and in her mind, like a film montage of juxtaposed images, note the strange slowing down of movement. Smiles grew quicker then, now a rare, slow burn. Then there was the new texture of flesh. The desire to please, his gaze shifting to encompass who she became in the eyes of her children. An old hunger suppressed, she was now the harvest.

  He had trickled away with every heartbeat, blood flowing into an escape plan. All heroes must leave home, so with a copy of Tennyson’s poems in his pack, he started his bike and followed the river through the night, exposed, all senses finely tuned. Heart racing, that old friend adrenalin, pulling up outside a roadside bar, a song like a Christmas carol drifting out into the night, short sharp stabs of piano like jingle bells. A circle song, a revolving melody, resolving itself by beginning again. No conclusion. No dramatic coda. This pattern was humming all around the red-haired woman, the flame, submerged in the song, eyes closed, swaying gently; a familiar anthem to her too. It tasted like love at first sight but maybe it was just the music, maybe it was just the night, maybe it was his heart, but he wasn’t sentimental by nature.

  Home a moveable feast and nothing to feed on.

  Blinded by the Light

  I was with you when you had the world tattooed on your back. Face-down, your rough, unkempt head stayed still the whole time as the red ink buzzed into your flesh. The map of the world behind you, the boy atlas. The tattoo artist wished he’d thought of the idea for himself. So many lost boys, I thought.

  Staying in your little ramshackle cottage, a three-week bliss, peace flags strewn across the front, old brown Commodore parked on the grass, never locked. You were a quiet boy, heavy eyed. You cooked for me, fed me. You combed my hair, said you loved it, that it was ‘wild’. I read your books, piles and piles of them, balancing precariously on top of one another, spurting from every corner of the house. Your sole dogma: always give to buskers. The rest of your worldly possessions took the shapes of an upright piano; a guitar; a drum kit. I knew this would be an education.

  You could slide into each instrument with ease, creating a strangely pleasing cacophony of sound, your body freed from its languor by the music but still elegant, controlled, like a dancer. I’d watch you from over the spine of a book and wonder who you were. You made it look so simple. I sat at the drum kit for the first time, straining to concentrate on my movements, dumbstruck by the coordination it required. I floundered. We stuck to simple tunes on the piano, one hand each, marching up and down the keys. The strange intimacy of sitting next to someone at the keys, our two bodies fitting, just, into the seat, making a song come together. Softly humming a melody, a trembling man-woman harmony. One evening, the last chord still ringing through the instrument, through the air, we pressed our palms together, noted silently our long piano fingers. ‘Wow,’ you said, ‘you have the girl version of my hands.’

  On the last night we lay on your bed listening to records you told me your favourite song was Blinded by the Light, and on it came, in a different voice, yet familiar. A Springsteen song, all this time. You smiled, a wide, pure, sparkling smile. You were pleased you could give me this. I closed my eyes to savour the sound, the smile, to ink them into my memory.

  I woke to a blanket being carefully draped over me. ‘I hate to wake up uncovered’, you said.

  >>>>interlude

  A Saturday night.

  A party. Blue jeans & a Springsteen t-shirt. (Bruce backside, American flag)

  A curiosity in the midst of short, tight, shiny party dresses. Why do you like Springsteen so much?

  He gets under my skin

  <<<<<<br />
  TRACK #3 COVER ME

  Promise me baby you won’t let them find us

  Hold me in your arms, let’s let our love blind us

  He rides a bus home at the end of the working day, through the dark, he searches for something. Training his mind on beauty, on light, he attempts to conjure a gorgeous sight, a sign. He stands, swaying with the movement of the bus, the strange undulating dance of inertia. No eyes meet his. They stare at the floor, out the window; some eyes remain closed. Passengers ensconced in private sonic worlds, headphones draped over heads, or buds rooted firmly inside their ears. External noise impermissible. Bodies bunker down inside overcoats. Outside the vehicle, the streaking-by world reflects the faces of the people inside; nothing certain is revealed, only passing impressions of light on blank surfaces. The sound of a wild wind blowing, its presence known by the erratic movement of sheets of rain pouring down. Raindrops still holding their dark pattern, spotting navy his blue collared shirt.

  He leans over a man flicking through a magazine, has to bend his head slightly to make out the image over the sheen of the page. A girl, standing in front of a window in an otherwise barren room and the light adores her, creates an aura around her silhouette. An American flag wrapped around her nakedness: her arms, her blonde hair, encased inside the flag cocoon. Two bare shins, two bare feet on unpolished wood, and a face. A coy, almost melancholy expression stares out at him through the grain of the photograph, the effect more artistic than pornographic. The image doesn’t titillate; he feels protective of this girl. He feels a sudden surge of new blood inside him.

  To come home, to find her in his house, just like that. To lock the door, turn off the lights. To unwind the flag from her body, raise it above them both and let it fall softly, to cover them. To be held, to be blinded. To live for that, and nothing more. And to know it’s safer that she lives in the picture; safer to keep these morsels as fleeting flavours, tiny fantasies, quiet yearnings. To be covered, smothered by love would mean being devoured, totally lost in the craving for the only thing able to sustain him.

  Rosalita in a Minor Key

  For a long time I felt love, relationships, had to be tumultuous to be exciting, vital, poetic. An element of Capulet and Montague was essential, an added spice of danger. Growing up, witnessing cinematic, vanilla fairytale romances, milk-fed me on the idea that I was but a half, that my goal was to seek completion through another. The concept appealed, loosely, but I required an edge. He had to be dark, brooding, artistic; a little sinister, a little mean-looking, but not necessarily in nature. Not all the time anyway. Seduced by the image of the archetypal, redemptive maiden figure, I would be there to wash his wounds when he crashed his motorcycle. When the music wasn’t coming together; when all the answers didn’t amount to much; I would be the balm to soothe the creative frustration.

  Build him and he will come. Over time I added tattoos, dark clothing, denim, black t-shirts, leather jacket, quirky hats, perhaps a touch of sadism in his approach to sex. No hard drinking, but enough to grow pensive, ponderous; the sensual, romanticised side of the troubled soul orbiting towards me, the sun. He would still comb my hair, carry me when I was tired, and tell me I was beautiful. Even write me a song or two and serenade me, he would stare into my eyes, no need to glance down at his hands on the guitar, ever.

  I would speak to him, High Fidelity style, as he jammed on his electric guitar in a sound booth in a vague New Jersey somewhere. Me lying on my bed, red-lipped, black
lace dress, conjuring his presence somewhere near the ceiling. And he would respond with his casual, cool American grace. If I can be Rosalita, good girl gone a little bad, ready to come out tonight, to be liberated, confiscated, to be the one, full heart, stone desire, where is the Bruce? I’ve cut loose, I’m a little dynamite, sitting by your fire as you play with matches, watching the flame burn down to the quick and, nearly there, at the precise moment, SLOW hey hey hey HEY!!!

  And he would humour me, sitting next to the speaker, one ear on the sound. But I couldn’t help but think he told me only what I wanted to hear.

  I wanna know if love is real

  Springsteen Artefacts: An Anthropological Dig

  A dream of rifling deep down inside his dresser drawer, of peeking under his pillow. Helping myself to sandwiches and beer from his rider, a slow awesome exploration of his dressing room. Notebooks, suitcases, a stone pony figurine. Like the intimacy of artefacts strewn across a stranger’s bedroom floor, each commonplace object is imbued with significance, magic even, in the dreamer’s mind (devils and dust). I open your closet and inhale your babe-like scent:

  - 3 pairs of blue jeans

  - 1 black leather jacket

  - 2 red bandanas

  - 5 plaid flannelette shirts

  - 7 singlets (navy, white, red)

  - 55 t-shirts (black, white, grey)

  - 1 black suit

  - 5 dress shirts

  - 1 purple paisley shirt (!)

  - 3 vests (denim, black, grey)

  - Belts, various hats, black motorcycle boots, sneakers...

  And then...

  Amidst the miscellanea, amps, effects pedals, harmonicas, tambourines, microphones, picks, cables: the plethora of Fenders and Gibsons sparkling like jewels, tuned and strung and ready to rock and roll.

  Darkness on The Edge of Town: Swings & Roundabouts

  I can get in my car and within a quarter of an hour be outside the front gates of my high school. One place where you begin and end. From the car I can see the long driveway, the oval, the auditorium, some classrooms, girt by well-manicured lawns and flowerbeds. Unassuming, functional, orderly square structures of brown brick with white roofs and awnings. I see the flower-adorned facades; know the importance of appearing to have it all together. All around felt so heavy on me then. And always the sense of waiting out the slow creep of hours. The weighty crawl of passivity, dying for some action. All the while I’d kill time by honing the craft of teenage rebellion, the feminine version: a slow simmer under the inscrutable surface, an outwardly polite, disguised contempt. Darkness just on the edge.

  Everything concealed, nothing on display, the itch of the school uniform on my skin, like a costume for a traditional dance. Formless tunic to knee, long-sleeved blouse to wrist, blazer, tie, hat, gloves, stockings, socks, shoes. Trussed up, I appeared five days a week as a lick of face balancing atop a mass of cloth, teetering on two sheerly covered shins.

  Mostly I remember the library. I can just make it out, the high red roof a beacon of solace. Lunch hours dwindled away to the soundtrack of my strange old music, lost in books. Gaining fulsome new experiences without going anywhere.

  Another short drive, on the road and through my mind, and I’m traversing the landscape of my teens, mapping the grid. Sites of parties: paddocks, parks, palaces; friends so drunk by the time you arrived they didn’t recognise you. Sites too of sex and its exploration, bodies making use of each other in the dark: any slightly secluded place granted a few moments of fumbling towards a quasi-ecstasy. All heat and no light.

  One memorable party, the energy of the night imbued with the glamour of the American exchange student. An exotic curio, straight from the cinema screen into our hearts. After a few drinks his silhouette glowed silver. When he talked, everyone paid attention, and everyone saw when he pulled the gun out of his pocket and pointed it at me. Just like something out of the movies. ‘Is it loaded? Or is it not?’ he asked, eyes locked on mine, sensing my distrust from the start. I acted cool, indifferent, stared him down. I played my part, held it together for the scene and later when I left, home, in my room, I couldn’t stop shaking.

  You learn there’s what you do with your body every day, the part people bear witness to and what you do with your mind. They are seldom in the same world.

  It takes me a little longer but soon enough I can drive to the site of the car accident. The pillar by the side of the road, emblematic, still slightly askance. So many pass by, unaware of what caused the damage, the backstory, the moment of impact. Shards of glass raining softly on a story seen from above. Perspective switched. All the threads of the narrative imbedded in the town, woven through my body, explaining how I came to be who I am. Yet I always wonder on these nightly excursions who that girl was.

  TRACK #4 SECRET GARDEN

  You’ve gone a million miles

  How far’d you get

  To that place where you can’t remember

  And you can’t forget

  Sometimes when the light is right he comes around. A touch before night becomes day and she lets him inside. He woos just with his way. Sweating over the craft of the kiss. She lets him inside her mouth. He doesn’t regard her as a riddle, a blind spot on a well-travelled road. She is new, he is learning her, willingly wading right in over his head, submerged in the flotsam, the detritus, the distant flicker way above of gasoline rainbows streaked across the surface.

  He takes her hand, delicate scent in the inner wrist, like the afterglow of a corsage. They go on night drives together. Cruising around the slumbering suburbs, noting whose lights are on, whose silhouettes are dreaming awake in front of televisions, smoking on front porches, talking to lovers on the telephone late into the night. It’s illicit, sublime, this wondering. A cheap thrill flowing on from a glass of cheap wine. A red stain on her skirt because she’s getting clumsy around him, gauche in her shy blossoming. She always drives. He doesn’t push it, her body just being there is a gift. He doesn’t tamper with her tape player, nor twist the controls on her radio.

  She lets her guard down as she drives, distracted murmuring over the purr of the engine, vignettes of moments that built her, coloured her, turned her on. Petals of light floating across her cheeks. He comes apart a little at these ones, dismantled, fraying ever so slightly. Yet he knows these are still surface impressions. Coming closer, he knows she’ll make his lungs and limbs burn for it, kicking blindly through the murk, gasping for breath.

  His hand on her thigh, she looks at him and smiles. She’s really there. They’ve been driving a long time. Awkward orchids pungent in the steam of the greenhouse, there’s the smell of her captured in the car, he’s following her scent like the pull of the moon. Afterwards he wakes from nightmares, of lush gardens, walled in, his hands calloused and bleeding from clawing for a door he’s certain is buried undercover of thick, twisting, oppressive life.

  There are always the befores that necessitate the hidden place.

  The Angel

  ‘You look like an angel.’

  That’s all it took. His awkward grace in forming the sentence, its utterance, more than the fact he was a music maker. He played the guitar, wrote songs and sang them. A magazine described him as a young Springsteen. I feigned nonchalance when we were introduced, a group of bodies, hot and high from the sounds still reverberating in our ears and through our limbs, propelled out of the fire exit at the back of the bar. The warm electricity of us all huddled together and him amongst the throng. I felt like I was looking at him from very far away, sizing him up, outside in the early dawn. A light rain was falling, our skins shining crimson, illuminated from the bar’s signage above.

  ‘Goldilocks; a fairy princess.’

  So tall, so suspiciously handsome. Like the boy on the back of Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. We left together and strolled through the city, his guitar on his back, my hand encased in his. We flowed along, a natural progression, him humming a tune, feeling each other there. Taking it in my stride.
A taut string inside.

  We walked through a park, below the sentinels of night-shrouded trees. This was a test, I decided, a test of finesse. When we came to a large clearing, we were no longer alone. Possums, all around, lost in their scurrying trajectories, oblivious to our presence, our slow bloom.

  ‘Possums are a good omen, Goldilocks. A little bit of magic, existing just for us. I hear they like a song, too.’

  He reached for his guitar, and played for me. A moonlight serenade recalling the night’s events. I closed my eyes and tuned in. Right into the marrow, of being young, free, alive. And yet at the same time, I quietly cursed anyone awake in the city at this moment who might be urging this moment forward, as they waited to get home, to sleep, to dream. I yearned to cling on. To record this moment, play it on a loop, until I was ready to let go.

  I kept time with the beat, knowing in the morning it would all evaporate. But it was enough.

  TRACK #5 DANCING IN THE DARK

  I’m dying for some action

  I’m sick of sitting ’round here trying to write this book

  I need a love reaction

  Come on now baby gimme just one look

  Sleeping through the day, she feels she can defy linear life. Waking to a new world at night, its liquid, operating at a different frequency. She dwells in syncopated time. There she works. Thinks. Writes the book. The things she does best. No conversation required, she becomes mute in the night hours; talk belongs in the subterranean realm of the day, and she does sing, to herself, as she moves around her apartment. The instrument she can carry everywhere. Her buried treasure.