A few weeks into this ritual, when he was three or four whiskies down, the phone rang. Lex knew it could only be his mother. No one else had his number.
‘Mum,’ he said, hooking the receiver on his shoulder and pouring another drink, taking care not to clink the bottle against the glass.
‘Darling. How are you? Just thought I’d ring and see how your holiday was going.’
‘It’s not a holiday, Mum.’
She didn’t like to think of him moving away, he knew that.
‘Let’s be realistic, darling,’ she said in her fruity voice.
‘You just need a little break. After what you’ve been through, that’s only natural. Then you can come back refreshed and sort everything out.’
‘Yes, Mum,’ he said.
But after all that had passed, there was nothing to go back to.
‘I do understand that you’ve had a bad time,’ his mother was saying. ‘Jilly’s been terrible and the funeral was awful . . .’
Lex walked to the window, gripping his glass tight. He didn’t want to think about the funeral, or Jilly.
‘Mum, I’m fine. I’m just settling in.’
‘Lex, you’re in the country. There’s nothing you can do there that would be remotely interesting for you. Why don’t you do what I suggested? Have a few more weeks’ rest then I’ll come down and visit. We’ll have a chat.’
Lex tossed back the rest of his whisky and emptied the remnants of the bottle into his glass. His last bottle.
‘You’ve been drinking, haven’t you?’
He said nothing.
‘I knew it. Darling, you need some help. It’s not shameful to need help. We all do at times. Why don’t you rent the house out and come back here where you belong.’
Lex didn’t feel like he belonged anywhere.
‘Jilly’s very upset,’ his mother said.
‘She threw me out.’
‘I’m sure she regrets that. We all do silly things sometimes.’
Lex said nothing.
‘You didn’t give it very long, did you?’
Four months of hell.
‘These things take time to work out,’ his mother continued. ‘Both of you had such a traumatic time. Perhaps you should come back and give it another go. Persevere longer. Jilly’s very distraught. Just tell me when you’re coming. We can find you a flat, or you can stay here until you and Jilly patch things up.’
Nausea swept through him and he realised he was sweating.
‘. . . I know about what happened just after Isabel died,’ his mother was saying. ‘I know what Jilly did . . . Her mother told me.’
‘Mum, I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I understand that it was terrible for you. I miss you, darling. I’ll come and visit in a week or two. Things are very busy here, as you know.’
‘Fine. Just call me before you come.’
Lex put the phone down. For a moment he leaned against the kitchen bench, exhausted. Then panic took him and his chest curdled in its grip. With tight hands he clutched the bench, holding himself up, struggling to breathe. In one ragged gulp he drained his whisky, then crashed open the kitchen drawer and snatched out the bottle opener. With the whisky all gone, he’d have to drink wine. He pulled a bottle from the pantry, but his hands were shaking so much he couldn’t pierce the cork, so he threw the opener against the wall and held the bench tight until the panic passed.
At last, the black swamp of it left him and he wobbled to the couch and slumped there. He had forgotten how these attacks left him ripped open and empty. He lay down in a foetal curl and tears seeped out.
Later, cold, stiff and horribly sober, he went to bed.
He dreamed he was in the kitchen of his Sydney home, making breakfast. He could see the bowls of cereal laid out before him on the bench. On the wall, the clock was ticking, measuring time. Jilly and Isabel were both sleeping in.
At the bench he sliced strawberries, one at a time, until Jilly came out, all fluffy with sleep. They both looked at his hands, still cutting strawberries, and then Jilly looked at the clock and jolted when she saw the time.
‘It’s eight o’clock,’ she said.
Lex heard his own voice, distant and hollow, as if he were far away. ‘What time did you feed her?’
‘I don’t know. Two o’clock, maybe.’
Jilly disappeared down the hallway to wake Isabel and Lex put down the knife. He could hear floorboards creaking.
He looked at the clock, stared at it, watching the numbers rippling as if the clock was underwater. The second hand didn’t seem to be moving and Jilly’s footsteps were slow in the hall. He wanted her to get to Isabel’s room, but it seemed she’d never get there, and the second hand on the clock was still not moving.
There was silence, then Jilly’s voice, strangled, panicked.
‘Lex. She’s not breathing.’
The pile of strawberries started rolling into the sink, one after another, and then a flood of them, filling the sink and overflowing onto the floor.
‘Lex.’
He pulled up feet like lead and tried to run down the hallway. The ticking of the clock became the beating of his heart, and he ran and ran. But the hallway stretched forever and it seemed he’d never reach the end, never arrive in Isabel’s room.
Then he was there, trying to drag back the curtains.
‘Hurry,’ Jilly said.
His heartbeat was in his mouth, thundering. Then he was at the cot, looking down.
Isabel’s face was slack. Her mouth was open, her lips blue, like plastic. He lifted her out, rolled her out of the wrap—everything happening fast now. He placed her on the bed. She was still and cold. All loose and floppy.
‘Call the ambulance.’ His breathing was loud, and his voice was strange, like it was someone else speaking. Someone far away, using a megaphone.
He closed his mouth over Isabel’s face and exhaled into her. Two small puffs. Two tiny airy breaths. Careful not to rupture her lungs. He watched her chest rise and fall and his heart thumped in his ears. Two of his fingers reached to Isabel’s sternum. He beat out a string of chest compressions. Was he supposed to do ten or fifteen? He counted, pressed, breathed, counted, pressed, breathed. She could have been a doll in First Aid class.
Her eyes flew open, black and deep as wells, and she watched him as he worked on her. She was cold, so cold. And her lips were blue and flaccid. Panic surged in him. Why was she watching him? Why didn’t she breathe? He didn’t check her pulse.
Then he heard the siren. The ambulance was coming at last. Was it too soon or too late? In a minute he would know what he already knew.
They came in and ushered him aside. Their hands were kind and firm, slipping over Isabel, his baby, feeling her, touching her. Hands slipping, rolling, sliding, examining. Their hands seemed to be everywhere. He wanted to stop them. What were they doing?
‘Keep up the CPR,’ he said, panicky. ‘Don’t stop.’
They looked at him and the truth was in their eyes. He felt it in Isabel’s cold lips. He knew it in his heart.
But why was everyone staring at him—the paramedics, Jilly, Isabel? Were they all thinking it was his fault? He could see it in their accusing eyes.
I didn’t do it, he wanted to cry. It isn’t my fault. But his voice wouldn’t come. It was stuck in his throat, like a great lump of clay, and the words were buried.
Then there were Jilly’s screams: hollow, echoing, like in a tunnel. His mind was telling him to reach for her, but everything was frozen. She was like an animal, contorted, red, wet. She was sobbing, sobbing, but he couldn’t reach out to her. And there was another sound, an eerie moaning that wasn’t of this earth, a grinding utterance of despair. It was coming from him. He was an animal too.
And then he and Jilly were falling into each other, clinging and grasping, like two strangers on a life raft. Holding each other up. It was physical support, nothing else. Everything was over.
Jilly took the baby. She sat on the couch in the lounge room, Isabel’s dead body loose in her lap. Lex saw the arms swinging, the head fallen back. He sat in the corner and watched them, maybe for hours. He saw the baby’s eyes watching him. And he wanted to reach for her. He wanted to tell Jilly the paramedics were wrong. That Isabel was still alive. But he couldn’t move from the corner. He was weighted there, and it was as if Jilly had forgotten him as she wailed over Isabel’s body.
Eventually, he crawled near, reaching for the baby. But Jilly was like a feral cat, snarling and hissing. He wanted to touch the baby. His baby too. But she clawed at him and he retreated to his corner again and again.
Then her mother came. Her long and haggard face looked at him, huddled in his corner. She went to Jilly and stroked her like a kitten, humming and cooing as she ran her hand over Jilly’s head, rocked her. Finally she lifted the baby, all rag-doll loose, and brought her to him, helped him unfold so he could wrap himself around that little body and hold it close. She patted him, his head bent to Isabel’s cheek. And then tears came, and wailing, chest deep. He was shaking with it, and it went on and on and there was no end to it.
When he woke, sweating, the night was large and dense around him. The dull roar of the sea reminded him where he was, and he lay in bed listening before he flicked on a light.
In the corner, his suitcase leaned lid-open against the wall. Everything he’d brought with him was still packed in there. The wardrobe remained empty. In truth, he was afraid of unpacking. Unfolding his clothes and hanging them up might signify ownership of this place. It might mean permanence of some sort. It might mean he had become someone else. Another person with another life.
But wasn’t that why he had come here? Wasn’t that why he had left?
He stared at the suitcase, feeling the sudden weight of everything. In the city, it had seemed important to keep something of himself, something from his past. But now these things were anchors. One month into a new life and nothing had changed. He was the same bruised person carrying the same scars. Still weak, broken and pitiful. He had thought things would improve by now. He’d thought the wounds might have begun to heal in this new place with its new sky and its cleansing wind.
The sound of the sea reinvaded him, and he remembered the incinerator in the backyard. It was near the crumbling chimney, all that was left of a previous house knocked down years before. He dragged on clothes and boots, grabbed an old newspaper from the box beside the wood heater and hauled the suitcase out the back.
In the dull shimmer of the outside light, and with shaking hands, he stuffed balls of crushed newspaper in the base of the incinerator, then struck a match and guided it to the paper. At first, the flames licked lazily, singeing the paper along its edges. He felt the warm glow against his face and the flicker of shadows at his back. Gradually the flames gained energy. He shoved in more paper, screwing it into balls, feeding the fire. Then he turned to the suitcase and pulled out a polyester shirt, dropped it in, his chest thrilling as it disappeared in clawing flames. He grabbed another shirt, neatly folded. Then three more. They were gone in seconds.
Later, it amazed him that there had been a strange sort of logic within his craziness. A definite structure to the burning. He managed to choose clothes in order of flammability. The shirts first. Then socks, jocks, fleece jackets, cotton T-shirts. The flames were tall and angry, leaping and roaring through the top of the incinerator like a great beast trying to escape. Flashing vivid streaks in the darkness.
He threw his jeans in last, then stood back, mesmerised, and watched the ripples of heat and flame rising into the dark dome of the sky. It was only then that he registered the hammering of his heart.
He was just turning back to the yellow glow of the house when a scrap of burning denim wafted down out of the night and settled at his feet. He watched it smoulder in the shadows. Then he thought he saw a wisp of smoke, and the grass crackled into thin flames. All around him, bits of glowing denim were floating and landing. Within seconds there were dozens of fires across the lawn. He ran from one to the next, jabbing his foot on the flames to choke them. But there were more chunks of material descending through the darkness, more quivering flames licking at the grass. Panting, he ran to the incinerator and closed the heavy lid. Then he dashed around the shadowy lawn, putting out fires.
Afterwards, he remembered this fragment of time in slow motion: a strange foot-stomping dance in the darkness, with orange flames glowing around him like torches illuminating his steps.
When it was finished, he hauled back the lid of the incinerator and peered inside. The last remnants of clothing were smouldering embers, slowly fading. He turned and went back into the house.
At the kitchen bench he stopped to look at the only possession he’d kept. A photograph in a frame. Isabel smiling out at him. All gums.
How did you come to terms with something as definite and infinite as death?
For a while, he stood staring at her, trying to hold on to the memory of her face. But he knew he was already losing her, knew that she was becoming as fleeting and ethereal as those leaping flames clawing their way out of the incinerator.
With his heart heaving, he pulled the magnet-torch off the fridge and went out the front door. Barefoot, he walked across the tarmac, over the moist pads of couch grass, among the sighing shadows of the wind-torn heath, down the uneven sandy steps, and out onto the open expanse of the beach. The stars cascaded across the clear sky like tiny flung jewels, right out to the black horizon where they seemed to fall into the murk of the sea.
At first the ocean seemed hollow and distant, but then the sound crept closer as he sat in a dent in the damp sand and the night swelled around him. He had never felt so small and vulnerable, so awash with loss, grief and desolation.
Dense with despair, he shrugged off his clothes and strode blindly into the breakers. He could see the wild white puffs of shredded manes as the waves dashed at him out of the dark. There was a sense of strength in pressing through the churn of the water, a sense of taking charge as the tingling cold smashed around his groin and splashed up his chest and back. There could be an end to all this. Everything could dissolve into blackness. But when he stumbled in a gutter and the waters surged over him, he realised that if he let himself go out there, sliding half-willingly into the surging night, Isabel’s death would mean nothing. He foundered, panicky, trying to find his feet and drag himself away from the urgent pull of the rip. The dark suddenly seemed infinite.