Smoke in the Room (10 page)

‘I think you need to update your guidebook,' Katie said. ‘You seem to think it's 1989.'

Adam counted back; she was right. Everything he thought he knew about this place had come from Eugenie, but she hadn't lived here for over a decade. She was as American as Adam, really, except for the accent. There was something else, too: a belief in the power of Australia to heal its own; a deadly romanticism.

They'd arrived at the concrete lot behind the Broadway shopping mall. Half-a-dozen blue-steel industrial dumpsters swarmed with fruit flies as well as the fat, buzzing common variety. ‘I'll go in; you check the goods,' Katie said. ‘Boost me.'

Adam knelt down so she could climb onto his shoulders. ‘We could be anywhere in the world,' he said.

‘Sure, anywhere people chuck out enough food to feed the Chinese army every night.'

‘Yeah, no, I mean . . . Not doing this, just . . . Eugenie wanted so much to come back here, like it was magical. But it's the same as everywhere else. I don't think she knew that.' And the thought was treacherous, as if he'd said
I don't think she knew much at all
.

‘Tell me about her. Was she beautiful?' Katie asked, her head just visible over the top of the dumpster. It was impossible to know if her dusky halo was a lighting effect courtesy of the setting sun, or a cloud of food dust and grime rising up from beneath her.

‘No,' Adam said. He pushed away the image of Eugenie kneeling in front of the toilet, spitting blood, and focused instead on the way she was that first day in the park: her jerky walk, talcum smell, gooseflesh skin. ‘Not beautiful. Lovely.'

‘Lovely,' Katie echoed, handing him a dusty flour sack. ‘Give these a try.'

Adam sniffed the contents, then took a couple of items out and squeezed. ‘Donuts, some bagels. Fresh enough.'

‘I thought she must have been beautiful, you know, to be with you. I imagined her as super glamorous, some sexy Amazon with glossy hair, big tits, big lips.' She threw a leg over the rim of the dumpster.

‘You think that's my type?' Adam helped her out. Over her shoulder, he saw a trio of women with shaved heads and facial jewellery walking towards them.

‘Next dumpster?'

‘Wait a minute,' he said. ‘People coming.'

Katie turned to see. ‘Nah, they won't care.' She waved at the women. ‘Hey! Do you want some donuts? Plenty to go around.' The women – girls, he saw, now they were
closer – looked at each other and giggled. ‘Skank!' one of them yelled, and they all started walking faster.

‘God, you don't have to run away. Just being friendly. I wasn't going to force you or anything.' Katie turned to Adam. ‘More for us, hey. Boost me again?'

He helped her into the next dumpster and watched the girls disappear into the shopping mall. All three wore denim cut-offs and combat boots; the tallest wore a chocolate brown string-bikini top, showing off an impressive array of body art for someone who couldn't have been more than eighteen.

‘Oi!' Katie hit him on the head with something hard in a plastic bag. ‘So that's your type, eh? Try-hard punk girls. Shaved head, tatts, nipple rings, bad attitude.'

‘Actually, yeah. I guess it is. Or was, anyway. Before . . . Christ, it stinks.' He looked into the bag Katie had thrown down: several blackening bananas and a loaf of white sandwich bread. ‘We done you think?'

‘Yeah. We'll hit the bakery on Glebe Point Road tomorrow. You've got to get there right on six if you want the good stuff. I got a vegetable curry pie there once. Best meal I had in my life.'

‘One time back home, I got a whole roast chicken, stuffing and everything. I went back every night but never saw so much as a wing in there again.'

‘God, I'd kill for some chicken. Wouldn't risk dumpster meat on a day like this, but. Asking for a hospital trip.'

‘We've got some decent stuff here. We'll have mashed banana bagels with donuts for dessert.'

‘
Bernaana
. So cute.'

‘It's not nice to make fun of minorities, Katie.'

‘Ha! Middle-class, white American male. Some minority.'

‘
Here
it is. This place is lousy with Brits and Kiwis but none of my people,' Adam said. ‘I should call my mom. She loves minorities.'

‘Ooh, he mentioned a mother!' She sprang in front of him, flinging her arms around, walking backwards. ‘I want to know about the mother. Who is this woman? What did she do to you? Tell me, Adam; tell me about your
mom
.'

‘She's not your typical suburban mom, but that's cool.'

‘Not typical how?'

‘She's real political, an activist. Most of my childhood we lived in this old mansion owned by this crazy old hippy. It was a sort of an open home for radicals and their kids. Everything belonged to everybody and all the moms took responsibility for all the kids.'

‘That sounds awesome. Was it?'

‘It was okay. It seemed normal to me.'

‘And your dad?'

‘Never knew him. The story goes that my mom, having made the decision to become a mother, went to this herbalist-slash-witchdoctor and got a potion guaranteed to produce a girl. But the unsuspecting sperm donor – my dad – was real sweaty and the potion washed away while they were boning.'

‘Bullshit,' said Katie, falling into step, snaking an arm around his back.

‘Probably. My mom and her friends are expert at creating personal mythologies. So, naturally, the story of my creation is all about what an amazing humanitarian she is. The way she tells it, she was bummed when she discovered she had a boy-child, but she decided to keep me, anyway.'

‘You're exaggerating. You're too sweet to have been raised by some rabid man-hater.'

‘She doesn't
hate
men. She distrusts them – us – especially those of us who are able-bodied, straight and white. You know, we have unearnt authority, unearnt opportunity, no awareness of our privilege. She says she almost feels sorry for us because our status means we can never really know what it is to struggle and so can never know how good it feels to overcome adversity. The “almost” is important here: she made sure I never forgot for one moment that the last person she could ever feel sorry for was me.'

‘Honey, you are breaking my heart.'

‘I'm not telling you anything else.'

‘Oh, come on,' Katie said. ‘My dad took off before I was born and my mum left me with my grandparents when I was thirteen because she couldn't handle my
moods
now that she had a new husband and baby to take care of. I can boo-hoo at you, if I want. Continue!'

‘All right. Same as any other kid, I wanted my mom to love me. I was always trying to find ways to please her. I couldn't help being white, but I had lots of black and Latino friends, which was good. Being able-bodied was another flaw . . .'

‘You inherited that self-mythologising thing, huh? For real, man, if you'd wanted to lose an arm you would have found a way. I've never heard such a load of shit.'

Adam knew Katie was right, sort of. It wasn't like he'd seriously gone out to get hurt. But he did consciously try to make his mom worry, subconsciously wishing for permanent harm. That was Eugenie's explanation of his behaviour, too.

‘Anyway, when I was sixteen I hit on the perfect solution: I decided to be gay.'

‘Oh my lord, this is good.' They had reached their
building. Katie took the box from Adam's arms and placed it on the ground. ‘If we go in you won't finish.' She pushed him onto the front step and sat beside him. ‘Go on.'

The stone griffins guarding the entrance to the shopping mall scowled down at him from across the street. Who puts griffins over the entry to a mall? Not even shopping obsessed Sydneysiders would consider a mall worthy of supernatural protection. No, it must have been the other way around: the griffins were supposed to be guarding something else, something precious and important, but they slacked off and the precious, important thing was stolen from beneath their lazy eyes and replaced with racks of jeans and piles of bath towels.

‘What used to be in there? Before it was a mall?'

‘What? I don't know. Who cares? I want to know about when you were a shirt-lifter.'

‘Right. Well, my mom was proud – she took me to
PFLAG
events and even set me up with guys she knew from the neighbourhood. And it was great, really. I liked the guys I dated: they took me to all these cool clubs, gave me awesome drugs. I was comfortable with them, they had all this anger and pride – it was what I'd been raised with. I know it's a tiny, rarefied world, the scene I grew up in, but it seemed like the way to be happy.'

‘But you couldn't drive stick?'

‘No, I could. I did. I was sixteen – I had a boner all the time, anyway; it wasn't hard to pretend it was directed at a guy. And
man
, did those guys know what they were doing. The sex was way better than anything I would've been having with girls my age. But I felt bad. I really liked the guys I dated. I couldn't keep lying to them, pretending
I was jerking off over Judd Nelson rather than Molly Ringwald.'

‘So you came out, again.' Katie laughed.

‘Broke Mom's heart. Made slightly better by the fact that the next girl I dated was a Chinese punk rocker. Disappointed her all over again when I married Eugenie, of course.'

‘She didn't like her?'

‘She didn't know her. She didn't like the idea of her, I think.'

‘That's sad. I love the idea of her. I wish I met her.'

‘Me too,' Adam said. It was just a reflex.

While Adam slept, Katie decided to shave her head. First, she hacked at it with kitchen scissors, then trimmed it close with nail scissors. She lathered her head with soap and began to scrape a razor over it, but the blade kept getting stuck. At one point she pressed too hard and blood dribbled into her ear. She balanced a hand mirror on the toilet cistern and twisted so the back of her head was reflected in the medicine cabinet, but when she swivelled she lost sight of the mirror. She tried to do without the reflection but nicked herself again, and swore loudly, kicking the wall until she remembered this was supposed to be a surprise and so she should take care not to wake Adam until she was done. ‘Fuckity, fuck, fuck fuck,' she whispered, pressing wadded toilet paper to the back of her head. ‘Fuck, diddly, fuck sticks.'

‘Are you all right in there?' It was Graeme. ‘I heard banging. Are you hurt?'

She opened the door, pulled him in, and shut it again. ‘Sshh! Adam's sleeping.'

He looked down at his blue-striped pyjamas. ‘So was I.'

‘Sorry! I just –' She bent to show him the back of her head. ‘I cut myself.'

‘Yes.' He took the wadded paper away. ‘Do you mind if I . . . ?' He pointed between the sink and the back of her head.

‘Okay.' Katie realised as she said it that she didn't really know what it was he was asking and she was consenting to. She remembered feeling afraid of him that night in front of the TV, but couldn't remember why.

Graeme took a silver tin from the shelf over the sink and pulled out a cluster of multi-coloured cotton balls. He wet several under the cold tap and dabbed at the cuts. Katie winced, more for effect than out of real pain.

‘Okay.' Graeme tossed the cotton balls in the bin. ‘Bleeding's stopped. I think you'll survive.'

Katie looked in the mirror. ‘I look like that little swan. You know, in that story. I look like the swan before he knew he was a swan, when he thought he was a duck and all the other cuter ducklings were mean to him. That's me.'

‘If I remember correctly, the ugly duckling had “feathers all ruffled and brown”. You have no feathers at all. Just a few little tufts. More like a plucked chicken than a baby swan, I think.'

Katie punched him on the arm. ‘That was mean. But I'll let you make it up to me.'

‘How kind of you. What can I do?'

She pointed at her head, then at the razor on the sink. ‘Fix it.'

Graeme hesitated. Katie hadn't considered until now how gross it would be to pick up something covered in someone else's blood. Plus dangerous. Even she couldn't
be sure she wasn't infected with
something
. She was about to reach around him and push the nasty thing into the bin when he picked it up and held it to the light, turning it around. ‘Skin stuck in this one,' he said. He tossed it in the bin and then washed his hands. If Katie were him she would be scrubbing the skin with a nail brush and soaking her hands in Dettol. But he just soaped and rinsed for a few seconds, then grabbed the hand towel and, still drying, opened the door. ‘Wait here.'

She sat on the toilet, facing the mirror. She had never noticed how small her ears were. They were like dried apricots. Her nose was small, too. All her features were. She looked like a baby pig. She opened her eyes as wide as they would go but that only made her look murderous.

Graeme came back carrying an electric shaver. ‘Okay. Sit still now.'

‘Yes, sir.' Katie made herself stiff. She was sick of her own face and so she watched him in the mirror as he worked. He had almost as little hair as she did, just a few light brown patches over his ears. Gran said he was a lawyer but he looked more like a gardener. The skin on the back of his hands and face had that mottled look that pale men get after years spent outdoors, and although he was skinny, the muscles in his forearms rippled as he manoeuvred the shaver. His fingertips, when he pressed against her skull and pulled the skin taut, were soft and cool.

‘Right. You're ready for . . . well, you're done, anyway.'

‘Think Adam will like it?'

Graeme met her eyes in the mirror, then looked away. ‘This is for him?'

‘Yeah.' There was an almost empty bottle of baby oil beside the sink. She poured some on her hands and rubbed
them together to warm it. ‘He told me the girls he used to go out with – before he got married – those girls had shaved heads. Some of them, anyway. So I thought . . . He'll probably laugh, but that's okay. It's nice for him to have something to laugh at, I think. And if he reckons it's, you know, sexy or whatever, then that's good, too.'