What We’ve Come To
written by: Peter Farrar
I hadn’t noticed your sunspots. Sprinkled over hands the way soil speckled skin. I didn’t see them during cold mornings, rubbing hands between mine, returning warmth and blood into your fingers. They spotted you like tiny barnacles. Now you slept, head against the passenger window. I drove, horizons far enough away to be other countries.
Home seemed weeks ago. There was no home now. It used to squat in our straight street. We gave up on the repayments. Gave up on heating all those rooms. I remember your fingers lifting the flap of the envelope when the letter came from the bank. The way some people open presents without wanting to tear the paper. You read it out to me haltingly, as if seeing more full stops than there were. After we moved out a neighbour called to tell us the house was demolished. Two townhouses would be built. Winds sawed through where our home used to be.
Six months before a bulging envelope was handed to me at work. Papers slipped around inside.
“I’m sorry,” Human Resources said. “You’re not the only one. We included a severance certificate.”
You woke and asked to pull over at a rest stop. Outside the car, heat weighed on us. I noticed your slight limp and knew you’d say something about a hip replacement. We often finished each other’s sentences. An old gum tree dappled you in moving shadows. I drank thermos coffee.
We drove through small towns. Shapes jumbled in my corner vision; church spire, hotel, service station then out the other side into flat plains of powdery dirt. Soil sometimes wisped in eddies of breeze. Later I couldn’t recall the towns, the way I forgot dreams. The car thudded over a bridge and I said the creek was dry.
That night we slept in the car. I opened cans of minced salmon and peeled tomatoes. The radio played music scratchy with static from far away storms. I swigged the last of the salmon oil from the tin. Asked you to dance, leaving the car door open so violins and saxophone lifted into air. You twirled hesitantly over stones and ruts, my steadying arms holding you. The music finished and we fell tangled into the back seat. I closed doors and left narrow gaps at the tops of windows. Your foot settled into my lap. I touched you there and you gasped as you used to in passion. I said that foot walked beside me in Paris and San Francisco. So long ago.
“Kids’ generation must be disappointed in us,” I said. “Parents like to leave their children money. Property maybe. But what’s our generation really leaving? Nuclear weapons? Dying oceans?”
You said you’d tried your best. But whatever we’d done, you did alone. I’d returned from long days at the office, arriving home drained and exhausted. You worried I’d fall asleep and drown our kids while bathing them. That made you sneak to the door, checking I was still awake as I sloshed soap trails off their backs. I nodded off reading to them until you hauled each child out of my lap, laying them in their beds. I slept through brushing teeth, whispered goodnights, and tip-toeing back hours later to see their peaceful faces. Who knows, you said. Maybe that explains why you were never close to them.
We drove in silence. I eased down a window, wind gusting in a single flat note. The holiday park was off the road, behind a trail of dust left by an earlier car. I braked, turning towards it. You pitched slightly forward, bobbing as we thudded over the corrugated road.
We lugged in the bags. You closed curtains and stood by the window, peeling clothes off as I turned on a ceiling fan. It shuddered and scraped above us. You unhooked your bra and I noticed the lines left in your skin. You told me it was too hot and stood under the downdraught. Your eyes closed and hair shifted. You were motionless, skin drooping.
“You stopped seeing me. Years ago,” you said.
“What do you mean?”
“You never heard me anymore. You were under our roof. But in another place.”
“I was working. Remember? Same desk every day. Same voices telling me what to do. All that changed was some days the detergent left in mugs tasted stronger than the coffee.”
“You left me. You didn’t pack and walk out the door. You were still at the table, in the bed. But you left.”
“What did you want me to do?” I glared at her.
“We aren’t just old. We’re already dead. We’ve been dead for years.”
Later I walked into the searing heat. Crinkled eyes against glare. My steps fell awkwardly on the blunt rocks. A sign pointed to Wentworth and I imagined its outskirts one boiled radiator and two flat tyres from here. I heard you crying from outside, where I stood rigidly still, your sobs as soft as breath, yet jarring into me. I knew I wouldn’t know what to say. That even in your most vulnerable moment, sad and unclothed, I couldn’t comfort you. Not besides patting your arm and saying over and over ‘it’ll be okay.’ What I could express was figures on tax returns, kilometres per litre and skinless chicken at the supermarket reduced to $18.99. I’d otherwise stand mute and blank faced in front of you, waiting for your tears to stop so I could change the subject.
I could look back over our years together. Like gazing over landscapes we’d passed through. Noticing the dark of still lakes, low slung hills and clumps of bush. See the arching of your body in childbirth, the threading of a ring onto your finger, the volts in your voice during the times you shouted at me and how your face looked between kisses.
Later you said it was possible to see dusk coming from a long way off. Your voice had softened, as if this was how you mended things between us. You marvelled at the sky gently darkening like a room down the hall painted another colour. You smiled thinly and I allowed myself to pretend everything was fine. We stood as the first stars appeared. Trucks lit orange swished along the highway. We returned inside and I cooked. We talked as if what happened earlier never took place.
In the morning I looked out into the building heat. Others milled around, a few holding coffees. I remarked it seemed like a place where our generation came to die. In the future someone would dig up the bones of seventy somethings who finished lives here. I felt you next to me, peering over my shoulder as if the intensity of your gaze singed my skin.
“Look at us. This is what we’ve come to,” I said quietly.
You looked at me. Uncertain, as if bracing yourself for what I’d say next. But I spoke on anyway. I said we once marched. Resisted. People thought they insulted us by calling us hippies. Decades later our activism faded into clicking petitions and posting Facebook comments. Our kids couldn’t believe their father opposed anything except an umpiring decision during football. Later you went outside the unit, meandering around the park. I glimpsed you stopping and talking to people. Wide brimmed hats cast circles of shade over faces. Your giggling shrilled from far off, the way I used to hear baby birds tucked into nests under eaves. You returned animated. A woman had offered to apply makeup for free. Someone was passing through on their way to Broken Hill. A retired chef, geologist and a boxer who lost his last five fights stayed in the park. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw you so full of life.
I’d always woken first. Swinging away from you and the clefts in your bare shoulders. Edging out the front door into cool air, jogging through empty streets. Gasping for breath at the end, returning to a milky latte before drawing on the suit. Now I crept up, stepping into spaces where I recalled the floor didn’t creak. Our unpacked bags piled in a corner. Clothes hung out the side of one like wet cement oozed between bricks.
Sometimes I thought about our old property. I couldn’t picture it bulldozed and the piled up levels of townhouses that’d replaced it. There was a strip of land across the front where the security fence would now be erected I recalled clearly. The section of garden I used to kneel next to, watering plants in careful circles around their roots when I wanted to be alone. I imagined their heaped foliage, clumped and trampled by builders but surviving in the squares of shade the townhouse frameworks cast, growing in defiance of whatever happened next.
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