TAMMIE HAS A NEW PATIENT AT the end of her work day. A check-up/clean. The woman in the chair isn’t a talker and she doesn’t need to be, yet she doesn’t say good afternoon to Tammie, not even a head-nod by way of greeting. Sits in the chair, waits, and watches her prepare. Tammie does pleasant chatter better than anyone. She can do it for the both of them. Talking about the up-coming referendum, the weather, or about a film she saw the other night, it doesn’t matter, it’s the same as talking to dogs—the tone of voice is key.
It’s important to Tammie that her patients feel at ease and confident that they are in good hands. The best hands around. Not true, of course, but she knows she isn’t the worst either. A great dentist is a natural. It’s a feel for pain, economy, and precision of movement. Still, that sense for another person’s pain is crucial.
Tammie gives herself that escape clause, about how some are “naturals.” She doesn’t believe it. That’s everyone’s favourite cop-out. If she’s honest with herself, then what it comes down to, is how much you care. After all these years, gazing into the straining maw of a stranger continues to be the slightest bit revolting. On bad days she feels as if she’s a vet who despises animals, from their pathetic moans to their awful smells, from the hair in their noses to their fearful flinching.
She moves around her dental surgery efficiently, directs her newbie assistant courteously, to the point, and it will all be under way in a few minutes, over in about thirty. She natters on pleasantly, thinking about other things entirely. Daydreaming about those big hands, those steady yellow eyes, the crude, heavy voice from a deep chest, and that wonderful cock of his—Jovan and the clean smell of his body, even after a day’s work.
When Tammie puts on her white coat she begins her performance. She knows it’s not necessary. She might go about her job efficiently yet she’s eager to cultivate her business. Wants her patients to speak well of her to their friends. She feels the same way when she puts on a dress for Graham and they go out to a fund-raiser, an auction, or dinner party. She knows it’s not her, but what is? Role-playing is what it’s all about. Graham has that ugly horsehair wig with curls down the sides that he puts on top of his head, his black gown that makes him look like a religious nut or Halloween diehard. She’s never gotten used to it. He walks a different way and speaks as though his every word has weight when he enters barrister mode. So Tammie is mostly happy to play her role as well.
“I was watching this interview the other day, with John Howard,” says Tammie, to fill the dead air as her dental assistant suddenly discovers she desperately needs to go to the toilet. Using the word “toilet” in front of the patient. Tammie feels hard-pressed to erase that word for a woman with her mouth half-open and waiting. “And this was on British television. The host asks the Prime Minister of Australia, what he said to people that suggested England would become a republic before Australia did, and that perhaps it was, after all, inevitable. The host says it with a wink. Little Johnny gets this sour expression on his face, and says, ‘The only thing inevitable, is death.’ Glares at the Pom. ‘And taxes,’ he adds. Here we are gearing up for a referendum on whether Australia is ready to be an independent nation, finally ready to cut the Queen’s apron strings, and our Prime Minister can’t conceive of ever doing away with that silly Union Jack in the corner of the flag.”
Her patient is a foreigner so there isn’t much chance of upsetting her. Tammie mentioned the same interview at the dinner at her home the other evening, the one she came late to, yet because she was speaking to right-leaning bigwigs, she’d used it to highlight the dogged resilience so many admired in John Howard. Whether Australia becomes a republic or not is about as interesting to Tammie as the results of her neighbourhood dog show.
Her dental assistant returns and apologises for a stomach bug when Tammie wishes she would keep her stupid mouth closed and not say another word about bowels and toilets. The assistant fumbles around now, searching for a new surgery mask. Has to be reminded to fish out a fresh pair of gloves.
Tammie waits, and feels the slightest remaining irritation from another tattoo she got two days ago, on her shoulder blade. A Norse compass this time. Björk, one of her favourite musicians, has one on her arm. Tammie often turns around in a mirror at home or her change room here at the hospital admiring the new ink. Graham hasn’t seen it. Who knows when he will? He hasn’t seen the last one either, the skull with a halo of roses. She’s interested in how long it might take for him to notice. A few days, and it would tell her that maybe things aren’t all that bad between them after all. It might take weeks, and then what will it tell her? What if it’s months? What if he sees the two tattoos on her back a year from now and doesn’t think they’re worth mentioning? Maybe he’d be as outraged as Jovan. Her husband would understand she hadn’t bought into her role, mind, body, and soul.
The message in the skull doesn’t mean much to Tammie. It was a joke, wasn’t it? Fleas on the Trojan Horse. Who knows what he actually meant? Clearly fucking crazy. And who cares? Dr. Graffito had become such an interesting presence in the hospital. Where previously a person could die of boredom listening to people bitch and moan about every mundane detail in their trivial lives, now there were these biting messages to make everyone jump, scratching at their Trojan Fleas.
More than anything she loves the way her first tattoo seems to have hit Jovan. It surprised her. All along, since the Christmas piss-up, and this little thing started, he’s had a nonchalant attitude, as though he can walk away from Tammie, as easy as that. Like she was worthless. She’d finally gotten through to him the other night in his van. Not a bit of graffiti he can clean away. And when they said goodbye he seemed afraid. He’d been altered at least. So yes, an impact.
Concentrate, Tammie, she tells herself. Two cancellations today. Also space on the schedule for an extended lunch break, and who wants a three-course meal for lunch every day? There were times in the past when Tammie could not fit in a bite to eat the whole day long, her schedule was so filled with waiting patients. An assistant who understood basic dental surgery etiquette would help, yet Tammie knows that when she talks about “growing her business” really the desperation she feels comes from wondering how she can stop it from dying.
Since she’s thinking of Jovan, and also because this patient has a surname that might be Serbian as well, one of those names ending in ich, she remembers a movie she recently saw.
“I saw this great film the other day, which might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but anyway, it was called Being John Malkovich. And I don’t know, maybe you could tell me. Is he Serbian? John Malkovich?” Tammie is about ready to begin now, and it doesn’t matter what the woman’s answer is.
The patient has murmured something around the white pellets that have been replaced in her mouth by the assistant.
Tammie is obliged to lean in and ask what she said. Her patient hasn’t spoken since she walked into the surgery.
The woman says, “He is American.”
Tammie blinks at the woman on her chair and feels the hair on the back of her neck rise. She looked familiar earlier. There’s no way Tammie could have expected this woman to come and lay herself out in her dental surgery, for a clean and a check-up.
The woman’s mouth opens again, gazing up at Tammie with unblinking eyes. There’s no doubt in her mind that this is Jovan’s wife.
“Of course,” murmurs Tammie, hardly able to remember what they’ve just said, “with a name like Malkovich, he must be from your region.” Those hard black eyes don’t blink. “I mean, originally.”
“My region is now Australia. You and I are in the same region.” Suzana closes her eyes and leans back into the chair. “You can continue to talk as you work,” she tells Tammie.
Tammie has nothing else to say. All her small talk has dried up. She asks Jovan’s wife to open her mouth, and Suzana does that. She also opens those cutting eyes again. Suzana does not flinch as Tammie brings down her sickle probe and applies it to her back molars. Barely blinks as Tammie slips into the soft gum of her mouth, to bring out a bead of blood.
Tammie’s own silence feels suffocating. She keeps thinking, I’ve got to find something to say to this woman. Finds her mind blank. There’s a trembling in her hands and her arms are beginning to feel weak. She should continue talking about the referendum, the cold weather of late autumn in Melbourne, or anything at all. Nothing will come to her because this woman refuses to blink. Mouth wide open to snap off all her fumbling fingers.
—
JOVAN WALKS INTO the silent house late in the evening. All the lights are turned off. He closes the door and hears the echo bounce off the walls. He switches on the lamp on the dresser in the hallway. There are pictures of his children on the walls. No pictures of Suzana or himself. He’s never noticed that before. Drops his wallet and keys on the dresser. He makes his way to the kitchen first. She’s not there. He doesn’t turn on any lights because he can’t tolerate the glare. He walks past the closed door of their bedroom to the bathroom and opens the door. He sits on the edge of the bath. His eyes close and after a few minutes he sways and jerks awake.
Jovan manages to get up and turn on the lights. Squints. Not asleep, not awake. A vibration through his legs and arms. He walks to the medicine cabinet and swallows some pills and then leans against the bathroom wall to take off his pants. When he gets into the shower he uses almost no hot water. A cool shower, not to wake himself up so much as to keep himself conscious. He is slow, using the soap with gentle hands and when he gets out he gingerly dries himself with the towel. Bruises on his arms and shins, torso, head, so many he’s confused by the map of them over his body—a new landscape of pain. There’s a bulging lump on the crown of his head from when he hit the door frame of the squad car.
He throws his towel into the bathtub. Suzana’s long blue skirt is on the towel rail, still a little damp to the touch. There’s the smell of her body within the material. He breathes her in again and turns off the light.
Jovan walks to the bedroom, opens the door, and finds her body laid out on the bed. Motionless and unbreathing. He takes a stumbled step inside. So exhausted that he cannot think. He is naked and knows he needs at least a shirt and pants but can’t find the energy. He lifts the sheet and blanket and takes his place beside his wife on the bed. Dead to the world a few moments later.
—
NURSES RUN THROUGH the hallways and a doctor nearly barrels into Suzana as she is walking through the foyer. The hospital phones ring without answer. Police park their cars outside in Emergency as Suzana gets into a car she borrowed from Jelka. Commotion brought on, no doubt, by another act of petulance from Dr. Graffito. Something for her husband and his friend David Dickens to talk about for hours on the weekend. Suzana heard one nurse say to another, A Bleach Bath. Perhaps that’s the title of his latest piece.
Jelka’s car is an automatic and it should mean it is easier to drive. Suzana has always driven manuals and her foot is restless for a clutch—she feels she’s not quite in control of the car. Suzana puts the Corolla into drive and stops at Bluff Road, ready to head home when the sound of horns draws her attention to a white van pulling a ragged U-turn through traffic. She’d wondered whether she would bump into her husband at the hospital yet hadn’t expected for that to happen on the street.
She watches him pull up to a bus shelter. Jovan gets out, walks around his vehicle so he can usher a young woman over, even opening the door for her. The van roars out into the heavy evening traffic. Suzana contemplates following them, her indicator ticking. A silver BMW behind Suzana beeps—two long blasts. Suzana reaches for the gearstick and realises that the automatic is already in drive. Of course. She rolls out onto Bluff Road. Heads in the opposite direction to Jovan and the blonde.
A minute down the road and the streetlights are on. They were off and then they are on—she never notices the precise instant of change. The sunlight is fading quickly and by the time she reaches the Best Western the sun is nothing but a vaporous haze on the water horizon. She flicks on her blinker and waits to make the turn into her motel, where she will be greeted as Miss Johnson if she bumps into any of the staff on the way to her room. She’s already told Scott on the desk that she’ll be leaving in the morning.
The thought of talking to Scott again, to explain that she’ll be staying on for a little while longer, makes her grip the steering wheel tight—two weeks in that room was enough to find a little space and for that same space to collapse into less than what she had before finding it. She flicks off her blinker yet she doesn’t turn towards Reservoir Road either. She can taste blood in her mouth. Clumsy nicks in her gums from the stainless steel probes.
She keeps driving down the Nepean Highway and when she passes Mornington, detours onto the Esplanade, so she can continue along the darkened bay. Her window is down and Jelka’s Corolla is quiet. Suzana can hear the ocean and see the flashing white seagulls tumbling around beneath the streetlights—spaced out in regular intervals—illuminating the shore sweeping along the peninsula.
Suzana keeps the car humming, on through Rosebud, and thinks how before she’d seen Rosebud, she’d imagined the tulip fields of Holland in some diminished form, and was surprised by how drab, dismal, and utterly charmless the rudiments of a town were here. The place takes its name from the shipwreck of a cargo vessel called Rosebud and not from flower growing. Further along the road is Rye, another speck of a seaside town. Rye is the Serbian word for heaven. The town has as little to do with paradise as it does grain.
She drives on to Sorrento, where she turns into a car park near the waterline. When they first started looking for places to rent, this had been where Suzana wanted to live. Frankston is affordable and practical, Sorrento is neither. The white limestone buildings of the town, the way they pick up the evening lights, still appeal to her.
The real-estate agent told them, imparting a history lesson to foreigners, that the first attempt to create Melbourne had failed here. Those original colonists buried their dead and moved down to Tasmania. It was a generation later before Melbourne was given another shot at life. Had things gone differently Suzana wouldn’t be sitting in an empty gravel car park by the beach. She’d be stopped at a busy intersection roaring with the power of generations—glass towers rising to radiate into the night skies from a white city teeming with spectral ambition. A failed nucleus, she thinks, and turns the car off.
Suzana gets out of the car. There’s enough moonlight so that she need not watch her step too carefully as she makes her way down and over a hillock. She sits and removes her shoes, stands again and walks across the wet sand. Seawater rushes over her feet in white foam and then leaves a flawless stretch of sand as it draws back. Walking by the shoreline, tasting blood again. Pain in her gums. The shaking hands of that empty woman Jovan fell into. Suzana had thought she could pull her husband out, as if he had been drowning. They’d had an agreement about Tammie. Suzana was obviously mistaken, if not about the dentist, then about Jovan.
She can feel her sleeve sticking to her inside elbow. The swab and medical tape have come loose. She rolls up her sleeve and peels the bandage off. A blood test at the doctor’s before she went in to see the dentist—killing two birds with one stone. That phrase had run through her mind. It doesn’t signify the difficulty of resolving two issues at the same time. It means simply crossing both items off in one deft stroke. She is still so much more literal when she uses English than a native speaker would be, imagining tiny bird heads, a stone, and the impossibility of that one throw.
Suzana rubs the soft part of her elbow. Her blood filled the small glass cylinder and she will be told tomorrow what she already knows. She rolls down her sleeve. The nurse blinked when she saw the scars on Suzana’s wrist. A quiet one; efficient. A friendly hello as she brought out the needle, tied a rubber tube around Suzana’s bicep, and found the vein with a firm, sure touch. Suzana is carrying her shoes, sandy up to her ankles, specks of mud on her calves. She’ll have to wash her skirt when she gets home. Shakes her head. When she gets to the motel. Shaking her head again.
The nurse told her it was easy to miss a vein. Little of the useless chit-chat that she had to endure with Tammie, as bad as the slips of her dental hooks. Are you hoping for a little boy or a little girl? The young nurse with a lovely smile, asking as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Suzana hadn’t seen the blond nurse’s face as she walked from the bus shelter to her husband’s vehicle. Pretty, no doubt. Did men ever pick up ugly women?
The breeze off the water is getting colder with the evening. Suzana turns, trying to work out the direction of the wind, wet feet beginning to feel icy. She takes a few steps back into drier sand. The wind gives her no choice, it’s a face full of whipping hair whichever way she turns. She sits down and puts her shoes beside her and uses both hands to gather her hair, pulling it across one shoulder and tucking it beneath her cheek.
There’s enough moonlight to see out across the bay a good distance, to watch it heave out into small rolling waves and settle back into its chaotic, restless skin. Suzana hadn’t been able to answer the question easily; as naturally as she should. It had been neither a boy nor a girl before the pleasant nurse asked, the possibility had been enough. It was enough even after the home test gave her a positive in the motel yesterday. And Suzana’s answer, after staring at the smiling nurse for a stunned second, was the easier cliché—boy or girl, it doesn’t matter, ten fingers, ten toes, and healthy. The truth is she wants both a boy and a girl, both Dejan and Ana.
—
AFTERNOON LIGHT PUSHES through the edges of the curtain. The smell of pan-fried sausages from the kitchen, coming up under the bedroom door, has woken him. He gets up slowly and goes to the bathroom. He takes two pills and hobbles to the kitchen, his body so sore he can barely walk. He sits at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, waiting for his eyes to be ready for the blaze coming through the kitchen windows.
“I thought that might get you out of bed,” says Suzana.
“Well, yeah…I can’t remember when I ate last. What time is it?”
She looks at the clock for him as he rubs at his face. “Almost two o’clock.”
Suzana lets him eat before she asks any questions. He is wearing the new bathrobe she bought him for the colder weather. It fits him well and that’s a relief. Buying for Jovan isn’t easy.
“Are you OK?” she asks him, when he’s finished his meal, and has begun to sip the fresh cup of tea she’s put before him. “I’ve talked to David Dickens. Or at least, he talked at me. After half an hour of his monkey chatter I wasn’t sure of anything. A woman was murdered at the hospital. That can’t be true, can it?”
“I swear to God…” Jovan shakes his head and wipes his hands across his face as though it might be possible to pull unwanted images from his eyes. “That hospital has done my head in.”
“There are other jobs,” she says.
Jovan looks at her. “You’re right. One thing’s for sure, I’m done with this job.” He sips his tea, and notices the way her hand is resting on her belly. He doesn’t say anything. Her hand moves away from it as if it never strayed for that particular touch.
“I spent most of the night on a wooden bench at the police station because this drug-fucked nurse got it in her fucking head that I was Dr. Graffito. Me. Like I could be insane enough, not only to write all that graffiti, but insane enough to clean up my own graffiti after making it—for months on end. That’s extra insane, isn’t it? As hysterical as that was, I could have been in some real trouble because of that poor woman they found in a bathtub. The police were just as hysterical, grabbing me up as though I had my hands around a second woman’s throat.”
“Drowned in bleach?”
“Seriously.” Jovan holds up a hand. “I’m too tired. I feel broken. It’s so fucking terrible I don’t know what to say. She’s a woman I’ve seen around in the hospital. A nurse called Melissa Martin. I never knew her name before getting hauled in by the police. They held me for questioning, and then forgot me in the holding cell as they got a confession from Bill Dimitriadis. I don’t know if I mentioned that Greek kid—a janitor like me.”
“You mentioned almost beating his head in.”
Jovan nods. “Bill’s old man, who was also a janitor in the same hospital for twenty years, turned Bill over as soon as he found out about it. Fucking drove him to the police station. I can imagine the old man taking him by the ear through the front door.” Jovan leans back in his chair and breathes out, carefully rubbing at the swelling on the crown of his head. “Bill and the girl were together a few times and she’d blown him off for some hotshot surgeon.”
“What? So Bill killed her.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“And he did all that graffiti?”
“That idiot didn’t even come up with the words he wrote on the poor girl’s body. He’s been getting letters from Graffito. Dropped off in the bottom of his locker in the change room. Saying different things, yet in each letter there’s the constant refrain ‘Waste of Life.’ Or it’s ‘Life of Waste.’ One moment Bill’s the confidant of the famous Dr. Graffito, and he feels special, and the next, Bill is getting his life deconstructed. About twenty letters in all, each one urging the guy a little further along a path that, step by step, gets him to kill some poor nurse who did nothing worse than kiss him once or twice.”
“Graffito did something similar to that optometrist, didn’t he?”
“Miss Richards was already very isolated and unhappy. If a person’s on the edge it doesn’t take much of a push. It’s not as if the guy is a criminal mastermind.”
“No, but it sounds as though he’s fully invested—in people, rather than the place. The hospital is his world and everyone within it belongs to him. Twenty letters isn’t a casual interest. That’s real commitment.”
“To what?” Jovan asks.
“To putting his pain into someone else,” Suzana says, as though it should be obvious.
“How’s that a relief for Graffito?”
“Seeing your madness in someone else might make it feel more bearable. Even if it’s only a moment. And then you go back to the unbearable and wait for it to break you again.”
Jovan thinks about Vladimir Mitrovich drinking that bottle of Belgrade rakia. “We all want to see ourselves reflected in the world. Is that it? He’s thinking—”
“It doesn’t matter what he’s thinking,” Suzana cuts him off. “My point is that he’s not invested in only Miss Richards and Bill Dimitriadis. You get what I’m saying, right?”
Jovan nods. “Ethical cleansing.”
“Finish your tea,” Suzana says. Jovan finishes the rest of the cup in two swallows. She walks over to him, lifts his face, and looks at him for a few seconds, puts her lips to his forehead, and then pushes his head away playfully.
“So you’re done with that place?” she asks.
“Done as the dog’s dinner,” he says in English, sounding Aussie for the first time ever, and makes Suzana laugh. She gets up and gets ice cream from the freezer and fills two bowls.
She says, “Carlo has been barking all morning. You should take him for a walk.”
“I will.” They move the spoons to their mouths slowly. Jovan says, “I just noticed that we don’t have any pictures of us on the wall. You and me.”
Suzana shrugs and turns her spoon in the cream at the edge of the bowl, where it’s already beginning to melt. She says, “We should put some up.”
“It’s been a while since we took any photos. Let’s not put up anything old.”
“We should buy a camera. I don’t know if we should be spending a few hundred dollars on a camera if you’re quitting your hospital job. We can wait for some photos.”
“David Dickens is an amateur photographer. That’s part of the reason he’s putting together that book about graffiti.”
“Alright, but give me some warning. In fact, give me a warning any time that guy’s coming over, with or without his camera.” She gets up and goes to the dining room table to continue her novel. “I might get Jelka to come over and give me a touch up. She’ll bring a whole wardrobe.” Suzana sits down at the table and opens her notebooks.
“Maybe we should get you a computer,” Jovan suggests.
“I sometimes get nostalgic for my typewriter.” She’s distracted.
“Slavko has been asking me to go paint houses with him for a while now. There’s good money in it.” He leans back in his chair and he raises an eyebrow. “And if people ask me what I do, I’ll make sure I’m wearing a beret and tell them, I’m a painter.”
Suzana glances out the window to where Charlemagne lopes along to an old fellow about to slot some advertising into their letter box, and then thinking better of it when he sees the monster dog moving towards him.
She nods. Says, “Maybe you should rest today. Carlo can wait until tomorrow.” She’s bent over her pages. She makes a selection from her mug full of pens. She smoothes the paper and waits for the words to emerge.
He sits awhile and watches Suzana write. He’s been reading her novel and he is looking forward to finding out what happens next, now the Janissary is nearing the concourse of the Sava and Danube rivers, about to enter old Belgrade. It’s strange to think that the rest of the book doesn’t exist, yet here it is with the movements of her fingers. He sees her left hand unconsciously move to her belly again.
Jovan sits in the kitchen and yawns. He stretches his arms out wide. Walks his plate and cup to the sink and washes them, gazing out the kitchen window into the backyard. No rosellas today. They’re frightened of the giant dog prowling around but soon should get used to the harmless monster. He pushes open the back security door and sits on the steps. It doesn’t take Charlemagne long to come trotting over to Jovan. He nuzzles at Jovan’s shoulder and then detects movement and off he goes again—across the lawn.
A sparrow picking at the roots of grass, head half in these emerald blades, head half in a cutting paradise, this world of crumbs from God’s broken soul, head half out, amongst the emerald blades, small sharpened eyes looking for the seeds of paradise.
—
SUZANA LOWERS HERSELF into the water. The blue water ripples across the surface until those long, languorous moments when that luminescent skin is perfectly calm. The whole twenty-five-metre pool—perfectly placid. Pacific. Suzana takes that word down into the water with her, breaking that lovely blue surface, and paddles into the middle of the near empty public pool. Drifts out into a pacific blue.
The name a conquistador gave to the ocean after he’d crossed through Central America. The first Spaniard to do so. He called it the Pacific. Such a lovely word in English. When Suzana first heard this story she thought the ocean must have been very calm that day. She reaches the opposite wall of the Frankston pool and knows it had far more to do with the turbulence of that man’s life easing away as he reached the final limits of his world.
A few remaining children by the side of the pool are plucked out of the water by their parents. A fat man trundles along to the change rooms with his sandals slapping his yellow callused heels, his arm picking out the material of his bathers from his blubberous crotch. The lifeguard has announced that they’re closing in fifteen minutes and he now goes to attend to a problem at the front counter. He’s already rolled up the long blue non-slip mats around the pool and hosed down some of the concrete.
It leaves the entire area the way Suzana likes it. No infant screams, no loud bellows from males exchanging lewd insights, no women and their cackled commentary. Even when they were silent, people created ripples or waves simply breathing. There was nothing like being alone in a large body of water. Suzana let herself drift—half submerged on her back, her ears subdued by the gentle lapping of the water, not worrying about getting in someone’s way, a man’s penetrating eyes, or women comparing themselves and evaluating.
The lifeguard hasn’t returned and it occurs to Suzana that it’s a bit early to do away with all the safety measures. Rolling up the long blue mats and watering the concrete before all the children had even been led away. The lifeguard gone, despite a woman well along in her pregnancy, drifting around. Suzana is happy to be alone yet she’s aware of her own perversity as she feels annoyed by the way this solitude has come about. She drifts across the water, her growing belly above the waterline, a corkscrew smile works its way across her lips—how difficult it is for her to really allow herself pleasure and freedom.
Her eyes are closed. She doesn’t notice a thin man slipping into the pool without a splash. Suzana tries to relax before she’s called out of the water by the lifeguard. The pressure on her bladder had come much sooner than in her previous pregnancies. What’s the difference this time around? Perhaps it’s because she’s older. Her aging bladder had forced her to the toilet every ten minutes today. She should let herself urinate in the pool as she suspects most of the children do. How many times had she waddled over the rough concrete? How many times struggling out of the wet bathing suit? She wants a long rest now in the water. Feeling the float of her new body. She feels the water moving around her as the thin man comes close.
Suzana tilts her head a little farther back so that her ears go underwater and she can hear her own breathing, and lets all of her tumbled-over thinking stop spinning for a moment, folding into the calm space of air moving cool down through her lips and out again. Listens to that hypnotic rhythm of breathing, her belly, nose, and mouth breaking the surface. Letting go of all her thoughts.
Suzana is pushed underwater. She is annoyed, not much more than that. This is some kind of accident. Her eyes are open below the water and she sees a torso black with tattoos. The arms and legs are strangely free of the ink—pale white limbs. She’s that clear in her mind. She notices this disparity. Across his chest, amongst the many, many words are three fractured skulls, and within them: The Trojan Flea.
Suzana had been struck by that expression the first time Jovan told her months ago about Dr. Graffito. His other hand is now over the top of her head as he pushes her deeper under the water, the rough heels of his feet are brutal as they push down her thighs. She begins to struggle frantically, the nails of his toes claw down her chest, just as frantic to keep her below. Perhaps only a minute. The air has escaped her so it doesn’t take long before she’s taking in the chlorinated water, filling her stomach and lungs. And then there is nothing but rest at the bottom of the pool. Silence and stillness, and then not even the darkness.
—
JOVAN CRASHES HIS panel van. It’s not a major accident. Ironic, because he finally got around to changing his brake pads a few weeks ago. Overcompensating and locking up the wheels on a damp road, making the van swerve off the side into a telephone pole. A kid on a bike darted out from a driveway. Jovan is not hurt. The van will need some panel beating, new shocks, and who knows what else? Not enough light to see what kind of damage in the undercarriage.
Suzana will be waiting so he sets off on foot. The Ford practically looks parked by the side of the road and Slavko can help him tow it home tomorrow morning. The Frankston Aquatic Centre isn’t too far away from his crash. He will still be late. They can catch a taxi home. Suzana will tell him that there’s no way he should get the van fixed and he’ll have to buy a new car. It’s amazing how much she hates the Ford. It’s senseless. Well, maybe not. How had he become such a total blue-collar “bloke,” as Australians said, that he doesn’t have a regular car? He’d left no room for himself to be anything else other than the guy in that rust-bucket of a vehicle, his white Ford panel van. That was her point, even if she’s never come out and said it. He’s not wearing a watch so he’s not sure how late he’ll be. He begins to walk quickly. He waits for her outside in the van normally and it’s often a quick ride home so she can use the toilet. He doesn’t remember her bladder being this weak with the previous pregnancies.
The lifeguard is a teenager and he’s on the phone having the kind of argument it’s only possible to have with another teenager that he’s in love with. Accusations and profanities and it doesn’t matter who’s around to hear. Jovan walks through the internal doors that lead to the pool area. No point waiting outside when he doesn’t have the van. He decides that the first thing he’ll tell Suzana is not that he had an accident, rather, that he’s decided he’s going to buy a new car since he’s now got the new job and tonight they’ll go out to Frankston Pier with some fish and chips. The last time he went out there he was feeling lonesome and the idea of taking Suzana to the pier feels good. She’s got her own ideas and he wonders whether he’ll be able to persuade her as he walks into the empty pool area.
No one’s around other than a thin man in the water near the edge. Jovan blinks and realises he recognises him from the hospital. One of the surgeons he never had a reason to talk with. As soon as the doctor lifts his head there’s a different kind of recognition. The man has tattoos across his torso, and every word is familiar to Jovan—he has obliterated most of them from the hospital’s walls. INSPIRATION down the centre of his chest. Words pushing in, crossing over each other. Obliteration. Oblivion. Self-made tattoos, letters cut into the flesh as deep as they would go. A God of Small Knives. A Devil of Deep Cuts. And in red letters, set within three skulls lined up across the man’s heart, The Trojan Flea.
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SUZANA WAKES TRYING to breathe out water. She’s coughing up chlorine for a long time. Coughing so much she doesn’t think she’ll ever stop. Taking in air is all she can think about for minutes. And then she’s aware that she’s lying on her side and the first thing she does is reach down for the bump. Pulled out of the water by the wrist as if she weighed nothing. She remembers the ferocious grip on her wrist, the severance beforehand, the void she’d fallen into so total she only felt it when she was rejoined, ready to go on clinging to the immense arm that had pulled her from the water.
She closes her eyes, still coughing, listening, and waiting for a movement. Nothing else can happen now. Wait for a kick or a punch. Wait. Wait. Wait. There it is. That faint tingle as an elbow nudges her spine.
When she opens her eyes there’s a man bleeding from his face, his nose, his ears, and a mouth missing most of its teeth. Teeth being washed down the grates by the side of the pool. The blood dripping down his face and cleaned away by the filters. The water would still be deep blue. She can’t see it. All she can see is the blood. Pacific. What a lovely word that is. Dead. The man can’t be alive.
Her colossus is bringing down one rock-crushing fist after another into the man’s body and then into his face again. Another tooth comes loose. Kicking within her. Alive and as deep as the Pacific. Safe and sound in those words. Her husband. How good. The only thing she can think is how powerful and great, how strong and noble. Jovan’s Pacific eyes. His mouth set—a storm swallowed. As expressionless as a god’s face as he does his work. Obliterating every other word. And how good she thinks, how good. Her Jovan. Her husband. Her good man. How very good. As expressionless as a god remaking the world.