White Dwarfs

‘Four beers, please.’ Cate and I were at the drinks stand. Randwick Racecourse was hosting a music festival: there was an outdoor stage and stalls selling band merchandise and food. The crowd was young and fashionable. Most of the girls wore undersized clothes and oversized sunglasses. It was unseasonably warm for May.

‘Here you go, sweetheart.’ The bartender passed them across to Cate.

‘Let’s go find the others,’ Cate said and handed me two of the drinks. We walked back across grass, through a crowd of guys spilling rum and Cokes from plastic cups and girls in denim skirts, see-through tops and fairy wings.

We found Elijah and Zed standing back from the stage where the people were less closely packed and we could hear each other speak.

Zed was still managing the Trinity Bar in Surry Hills. He had come straight from there and was wearing jeans with a belt that had metal studs on it. He’d taken his collared work shirt off and tied it around his waist; he wore only a white T-shirt on top. He looked older than twenty-six in the bright daylight, and older than Elijah. His skin had a fine wrinkle around his eyes, as if the years since school had been longer for him. Zed’s whole right arm was covered in art now, up past the shoulder. There were tribal designs, hanging flowers that looked like wisteria and hieroglyphic symbols. Tattoos embellished his entire limb, but nothing about the design looked aggressive or like any others I’d seen; there was a delicacy to it. I wanted to take his T-shirt off then, to see how the details all fit together, around her face – the original.

Zed had been my first. We’d got together a few years earlier at a three-day music festival in Lorne not dissimilar to this one. That event was set up around a natural amphitheatre. The bands played on a main stage at the bottom from midday to midnight and at the perimeter, closer to the trees, was the campground. The chemistry between us had been crackling in the weeks leading up to it, and on the second night we’d snuck back to his khaki tent. It was strange inside, the smell of down from the sleeping bag underneath us, the intensity of our intimacy. On the other side of the polyester we could hear people laughing, coming and going from the sites. I tried to be quiet under his heaviness. The sex was raw and tender, Zed being entirely familiar to me and simultaneously charged with unexpectedness. He had sunspots on the ledges of his shoulders. I held onto them and dug my fingers in. It had seemed fitting to be with Zed in such a liminal place – not quite private or public. He was always pushing me, and Elijah, right to the edges of ourselves.

Elijah nodded his head to the music. He caught my eye and smiled. ‘Bag Raiders,’ he said. Even though he’d spent most of the time listening to classical when we were younger, he enjoyed all different kinds of sound now. He pulled a plastic bag out of his pocket and stuck a rectangle of cigarette paper to his bottom lip. He proceeded to roll a joint and light it. Elijah put his head down and inhaled, before passing it to Zed. Zed took it in between his thumb and index finger and curled his hand around it before having a toke. Zed passed it to Cate, and when she breathed out Cate passed it to me. The smoke tasted earthy and after a while made everything seem more full. I felt the music inside my chest and in the ground, moving underneath my shoes.

‘Empire of the Sun will be on in twenty,’ Zed said, looking at his watch. He dug into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a small plastic bag. There were two white tablets in there.

Elijah leant in to look at them. ‘What are they, mitsubishis?’

‘Nah,’ Zed said, ‘they’ve got stars on them: they’re called white dwarfs.’

There were only two tablets. Cate and I weren’t offered any.

The sun was dropping and the lights on the stage went out. The cheers and chattering of the crowd filled dusk air that smelt of beer and soil. In the distance, the Empire duo took the stage dressed in futuristic uniforms and headdresses.

‘It’s “Walking on a dream”!’ Elijah yelled as the music amped up. ‘Let’s get closer to the front.’ He put one arm around my shoulders and one around Zed’s; Zed dropped the rest of his beer and put his other arm around Cate’s waist. We ran like that, interlinked, towards the stage and I was filled with euphoria that made me forget everything else in my life. I was just there, with Elijah, Cate and Zed; I was alive in a way that felt complete.

~

Elijah and I had promised to go back to Northbridge the following night, to have dinner with Nonno; by the time it came around after the festival, we were tired and subdued.

‘Pass the butter?’ Dad asked.

My brother and I were opposite each other at the wooden table in the same seats we always sat in growing up. Nonno was next to Elijah, and my mother and Dad took the ends.

‘I saw Lewis perform this week,’ my mother said, referring to a person who used to play in a quartet with Elijah. ‘He was fantastic,’ she said as she looked upwards.

‘That’s good,’ Elijah said, but I could tell from his voice that he didn’t care.

‘Where is she? My wife?’ Nonno asked.

The year Elijah took off with Zed had turned into two. After that he enrolled at the Conservatorium of Music just like my mother had wanted, but he never finished his degree. The joy he derived from classical music ran out: water seeping into a dried riverbed, never making it to the ocean. Elijah’s abandonment of the cello remained a constant irritation to our mother.

‘She’s not here, Papa, remember – she passed away,’ my mother said before she turned to Elijah. ‘We’re going to the Sydney Symphony next week: you should come.’

‘You’re lying,’ Nonno said.

‘No thanks,’ Elijah said.

‘You should have never taken that time off after school,’ she said. ‘It’s done you no good.’

‘You’re lying,’ Nonno said.

‘Give me a break,’ Elijah said.

My mother took Nonno’s hand. ‘She died in 1994, Papa, remember? She passed quickly; she didn’t suffer.’

‘I loved her,’ Nonno said.

‘It has nothing to do with that,’ Elijah said.

‘Well, what has it got to do with?’ asked our mother.

‘I’m just enjoying my art more now, and I want to spend more time investing in that.’

Dad and I sat and chewed our food in silence. Dad caught me looking at him and rolled his eyes behind his steel-rimmed glasses.

‘The art, well, you’re just not as good at it.’

Elijah glared. ‘Gee, thanks, Ma,’ he said with a raised voice; he became annoyed more quickly these days.

‘I loved her.’

‘Can I make you some tea, Papa?’ my mother asked, and then to Elijah, ‘So you’re just going to walk away from music, from all your talent?’

‘I guess.’

‘Well, that’s madness.’

‘I loved her.’

‘I know, Papa.’

‘Can someone please pass the butter?’ Dad asked again.

After we ate dessert Dad offered to drop Elijah and me at Town Hall on the way back to Nonno’s nursing home.

Elijah helped Dad walk Nonno to the car and I went to use the bathroom. I found my mother already in there applying mascara. She had changed into a burgundy dress and smelt of perfume. Her face looked dewy from freshly applied make-up; the gentle light together with her high cheeks and strong jawline allowed her to pass as a much younger woman.

‘Are you coming with us?’ I asked.

‘I just need to pop out for a while,’ she said.

‘Okay.’ I walked back out to the car. The dull squeeze in my bladder would have to wait.

At Town Hall Elijah and I were heading different ways.

‘You okay?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, it just drives me crazy the way Mum still goes on about Lewis and all that. I’m a bit edgy at the moment too – I haven’t been sleeping well.’

‘Oh really, why’s that?’

‘Just working really hard on my pieces for the exhibition. When I get in that zone, making art, it’s exhilarating, but it can be hard to unwind after.’

My brother had a bag slung on his left shoulder and was balancing the leftover food with his right hand. He managed to wrap that arm around my shoulder. I was surprised I still fit there, under his wing.

‘Yeah, I can imagine. Okay, well, I’ll see you at unseen colour,’ I said, hugging him back hard. ‘Try and get some rest though,’ I said. I felt a small electromagnetic field between us then, made up of narrow wavering light lines that were the colour of tangerine.

‘Good to see you, Grub,’ Elijah said, and I still remember how he looked standing there in front of the glass-covered stairwell that led from the street down to the tracks. He sent me a wink before he left to catch the train. ‘Keep saving lives.’

That Thursday after work, I met Cate at the Darlo Bar.

‘I’m a bit worried about Elijah,’ I said as we drank our beers.

‘What do you mean? About what?’ Cate asked.

‘He’s been acting a bit strange lately,’ I said. I tried to explain how he seemed tired and irritable most of the time now, about the look in his eyes and how his face was changing. The words came in fits and starts, and they weren’t the right ones. I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say.

‘Sounds like he needs to get a job,’ Cate said.

‘It’s not that,’ I said, defensively. ‘I mean, he’s going to be an artist.’

Cate rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t know how you deal with him,’ she said. ‘Sounds like a lot of drama.’

~

‘Just this one, thanks.’ At Terrace Books I pushed The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat across the counter towards Hyun. I wasn’t sure if he’d remember me from before. He was knitting today, working on a magenta section that linked to a long existing tail of cinnamon and cream.

‘Ah, Oliver Sacks, he’s the neurology guy,’ Hyun said, putting down his needles.

Jonathan had mentioned the book in conversation over lunch the day before. It was a series of essays based on real cases of people with rare neurological conditions.

I reached out to touch an edge of knitting.

‘My nonna used to knit,’ I said, feeling close to her then. ‘That’s a nice garter stitch.’

‘Why thank you. Hey, how did you like The Immortal Life?’

‘Yeah, it was amazing. I mean, enlightening – and shocking. I’m glad her story is out there.’

Hyun nodded in agreement as I spoke. The item he was knitting had curious dimensions: it was too wide and long to be a scarf.

‘What are you making, anyway?’ I asked.

‘I’m actually part of a yarn-bombing collective,’ Hyun said.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Yeah. You aren’t with the undercover police, are you? I think you have to tell me now if you are.’

I raised both of my hands, showing him my palms, fingertips pointed to the ceiling. ‘I am not. Although I’m not one hundred per cent sure it works that way.’

‘You may have seen some of our work around,’ Hyun said, unpinning a local newspaper clipping that was stuck behind the shop counter.

The picture was of the Queen Victoria statue on George Street. She was draped with garlands of colourful knitting. The top layer was red and had black letters that spelt out COLONISER.

‘So … craft as political protest?’

‘Exactly.’

A woman in a beret approached the counter then, wanting to make a purchase.

‘I’d better go,’ I said.

‘No worries – oh hey, wait!’ Hyun turned around and opened a large horizonal drawer on the far wall. The drawer was labelled with a laminated card: Hyun’s Secret Book Stuff.

‘Here, this is that music that was on the other day, you can borrow it,’ he said, lying the CD face down on the counter. ‘This is the track you liked,’ he said, pointing to the number nine. ‘It’s called “Re: Stacks”.’

‘Oh thank you – but it’s not really book stuff,’’ I said, nodding at the drawer.

The woman in the beret sighed loudly.

Hyun tilted his head to the side. ‘Book slash book adjacent. Catch you later,’ he said and turned to face the next customer.

~

Jonathan, Serey and I spent longer and longer hours in the lab. We all arrived around eight am and opened the biosafety cabinets where we took it in turns to perform experiments involving our different genes. We had an agreement that whoever got in first could choose the radio station for the day. I liked the indie folk tunes on Triple J while Serey preferred RnB on the commercial stations. She and I agreed that Jonathan’s preference for Aussie rock was terrible.

One morning Jonathan and I arrived pretty much at the same time and bolted unceremoniously into the lab. We were lucky not to break anything as we raced to get to the radio. Professor Olsen found us there, laughing. I had my hand on the tuner dial but Jonathan had his on mine and was trying to manipulate it to land on his station. In the end I traded his brash taste in music for first session on the microscope that day, but I dragged out the negotiations so I could prolong my standing in his space, with his hand on mine.

The professor shook his head, bemused at us, and returned to his office.

No matter how early we turned up or how late we left Professor Olsen’s office was always lit, his door often a little ajar. This resulted in his omnipresence, for if he was never seen to leave or be gone, the reverse must be true: that he was always there.

My mobile rang and Cate’s name lit up on the screen.

‘Hey, what are you doing tonight? Do you want to come out?’ Cate asked.

It was lunchtime and I was sitting on the outdoor balcony of the institute, adjacent to the cafeteria. We hadn’t managed a Govindas night in nearly a month, mostly due to me.

‘Ugh, I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Come on! It’s Thursday night!’

Was it? The name of the day seemed to matter less, recently.

‘Where are you going?’

‘We’re meeting at the Bank and then going to see Cat Empire at the Sandringham.’

I slid my ballet flats off and reapplied the Band-Aid to the back of my right heel.

‘Yeah, maybe. Anyway, how’s your man? Is he going to be there?’

‘Yes, Sebastian! Ermegerd it’s going so well with him. I can’t believe you still haven’t met him. He’s just so … I don’t know … interesting and fun. I love him. I mean, I think I love him, I dunno – even if I did I wouldn’t tell him this soon. Obviously! How are you? How’s life as a researcher? Any cute scientist-types?’

With my free hand I opened up my salad sandwich and rearranged the contents before closing it again. ‘It’s going well. I mean, I still feel a bit out of my depth. It’s challenging but in a good way – and the people I work with are nice.’

‘Awesome. Sounds less traumatic than hospital life. Anyway, I’ll see you tonight. Come. Don’t be boring.’

‘Does Prof Olsen have a family?’ I asked Serey. We’d developed a ritual of after-work drinks at the Green Park after long-experiment days. I would meet Cate in Newtown later.

‘Apparently,’ Serey said as Jonathan returned to our table holding three beers. ‘I think he’s a high-functioning insomniac.’

Jonathan always bought the first and last rounds and never took our money.

‘Argh, I’m so sick of my gene and the mouse house,’ Serey said as she took her first sip. When her mobile vibrated, she picked it up and typed into it quickly with both thumbs. ‘Hey, what’s the deal with the little wooden chicken in your Facebook photos?’ she asked Jonathan.

‘Ah,’ Jonathan said, taking another swig and leaning back into his chair, ‘it’s just a thing me and some of my mates did when we were in Europe.’ Jonathan explained how after high school he took a year off to work as a boarding master in England. Over the summer he and his buddies, who were doing the same, got Eurail tickets and travelled for nearly three months.

‘The chicken, rooster actually, was from one of our first stops, in Porto – Portugal. It’s such a rad city, built into this steep terrain, with the Douro River running through it. A lot of the buildings are falling down, covered in graffiti … Anyway, we bought the rooster there, just at a souvenir shop, but he kind of became our mascot. We decided everywhere we went we would take a photo of him.’

Serey pulled her laptop out of her bag. ‘You’ve gotta see this,’ she said to me. She found the right page and started clicking though the photos, turning the best ones towards me and snorting. ‘That’s classic,’ she said. The small wooden rooster under the Gaudi spires in Barcelona, holding up the Tower of Pisa, Jonathan kissing the rooster’s comb underneath the Eiffel Tower.

We were all laughing hard; I tried to stop the beer from fizzing into my nose. When I could eventually speak I managed to ask, ‘Did the rooster have a name?’

‘Galo,’ Jonathan answered, with a grin. ‘It’s Portuguese for rooster … I think?’

When we left the pub I did the maths and realised I wouldn’t make it to Newtown before the start of the concert.

Sorry, not going to make it tonight, I messaged to Cate.

I saw her three-dot ellipses fade on, then nothing.

Later that night, after I got home, I received an email, the headline stating that Jonathan had requested to be friends on Facebook. I didn’t really use my account much. Cate had helped set it up for me, and my profile picture was of the horizon. Sure enough, when I logged in there was a red circle above the globe icon, and when I accepted and clicked on the link his profile shot with the Portuguese rooster was there. He was smiling in a way that was larger than he did at the institute, and he wore a hat that made it look like he was on holidays. There were more photos of Galo: in front of Stonehenge and having its head dipped in Glühwein, and it should have seemed silly and juvenile but actually just made Jonathan more adorable.

Of course, then I had to stay up half the night rifling through all his old photos. He’d only been married the year before. The wedding was in Bright, the honeymoon in Bali, where it seemed her extended family was from. He was dapper in a suit. His wife looked like a model: she wore her dark hair with a blunt too-short fringe that a person with lesser cheekbones would be unable to pull off. I’d heard she used to be a principal in the Melbourne Ballet, and had now joined the Australian Ballet, in Sydney. I kept clicking right past all the photos of them together. I turned the website into a digital flip book and moved backwards in time. Jonathan had longer hair at the end of high school and more flesh around his face: puppy fat. Eventually I came to the time before they met, and it was here that I started to imagine what could have happened, if only I’d met him before she did.

I’ve finished with the microscope if you need it, Jonathan texted me.

Okay thanks. Hey how did your cloning experiment go? I typed back.

Jonathan sent back a photograph of an empty gel inside an electrophoresis tank. Normally it would have blue protein laddered on it in bands. Terrible. I forgot about it and ran the gel for too long. All the proteins were dragged off the end and into the buffer.

Oh that sucks. Set an alarm on your phone next time? I wrote.

All things are difficult before they become easy, Jonathan wrote.

Who said that, Einstein?

I subscribed to a motivational science bot.

LOL.

I had worked all week to expand a neuronal cell line in flasks, growing it like milk thistle over glass slides. Then I transferred extra copies of my gene that was mutated to be defunct into the cells – to see what happened. The neurons were stained with fluorescent dyes so I could identify the membrane, the nucleus and other intracellular structures. Five days later I took the slides out of the flasks and fixed them, overlaid them with coverslips and carried them into the darkroom.

Behind a closed door I loaded the slides onto the microscope stage. I didn’t know what to expect. I looked down the eyepieces but there was a mistake. The neurons were all dead: there was no illumination.

When I came out of the darkroom Jonathan was waiting. His tall handsome frame leant against the wall; the smell of his aftershave thumped on the inside of my chest.

‘Well, Dr Donohue?’ he asked as he looked at my slides. Jonathan had called me that ever since he found out I’d been through medical school. Usually he said it in a kind of mocking way when I asked him for help with how to use the PCR machine or shut down the flow cytometer. He thought it was amusing that I’d beaten him to that title, even though he knew more about laboratory science.

‘I have to repeat it,’ I said.

Back at my desk I opened my internet browser, which had The Sydney Morning Herald as the homesite. One of the banner head stories was about a long-nosed fur seal that had taken to basking on the northern Opera House steps. He lay sunning himself on the distinctive pebblecrete ledges that continued into the harbour depths. In some shots he had his head arched back, and in others he held a front flipper out, drying it. I smiled as I read about the seal migrating from further south, near Narooma, and how overseas tourists delighted at his presence, stopping to take his picture. Almost instinctively I pressed Control+C and pasted the link into an email to Elijah. Meet Sydney’s newest icon, Benny, I typed as the heading.

I went on checking and replying to other emails. Elijah must’ve been at his computer too; around ten minutes later a reply pinged in my inbox.

Classic! What a handsome fellow. That’s funny as those steps are normally reserved for VIPs arriving by private boat. E x

Elijah and I had fallen into a pattern of sending each other interesting local aquatic sightings. I liked the way they interrupted the more studious moments of my day, the same way he used to burst into my bedroom to show me things when we were kids.

We were reminding each other that we didn’t live in a bustling metropolis, but rather a city whose edges sat below tidelines.

Downstairs in the foyer Jonathan’s wife waited for him. She sat on a blue chair near the slow-turning stained glass of the double helix. She was tall and thin and her hair was pulled into a tight ponytail, that blunt fringe editorial-perfect. You could see she was a dancer in the form of her, in the deep crevices and grooves between her muscles.

I tried to make eye contact with her as I walked past and I wondered if she even knew who I was. She sat with her ankles and knees together, perfectly postured as she flicked through a thick magazine. I crossed the rest of the lobby over the tiled floor to the revolving door. I think I’m falling for your husband. I said it to myself, but I suppose in a way I was trying to let her know. She didn’t look up. She was backlit by the window and I saw a feathery layer of fine hair on the nape of her neck and the tops of her shoulders.

Outside it was evening, and I found I had walked onto a canvas. In the afternoon a street artist had painstakingly outlined all the shadows on the sidewalk in chalk. The silhouettes of street lamps, garbage bins, trees and buildings were preserved in white dust. The cracks in the footpath, the joins between the pavers, had also been sewn together in hatch-marked stitches. As the sun continued to drop, shadows that had been encased by chalk moved beyond the edges of their outlines. The effect was disorienting, especially after being inside the lab all day. At the corner I saw the illegible signature of the artist below the words:

Shadows and Stitches

I headed down Victoria Street towards Oxford Street, timing my steps to avoid treading on the cracks: a three-dimensional character walking through cartoon cells.