I.

Two weeks after

Markus is shoeless. He burnt his pairs on a bonfire held beside the house about two weeks ago. Shoes make no difference. He looks through the lace draped across the inside of his bedroom window. It’s lunchtime. He’s naked and yet to shower. He yawns and scratches his balls, akin to stretching out your muscles after a slept-like-a-log night. The sun fails to break open the thin film of clouds. Since that storm, the rain withholds itself and everything is preserved, overcast. Inanimate things breathe, and some mornings he’s been stunned by this apparent breathing. Everything around him is living, and he’s stagnant because of the knot in his belly.

One of the flat northern plains is covered by knee-high grey-green grass. Murky violet sways between its tufts. There’re no persons or animals, and there are no fences or houses or trees. This Plain takes a day’s travel from one side to the other, and if you make the journey to its edge, you’ll find the Hills, which bear on their backs eucalypts (various) and grevillea (family Proteaceae). From the middle of the Plain this hilly edge is unseeable, because at its centre is the Plain’s only imperfection.

The grass grows to the imperfection’s edge and no further. At this edge, the ground falls down sharp cliffs to form the Depression: a gaping, deep gash in the otherwise perfect surface. The Depression, bound by these unscaleable cliffs, is a smaller area set one hundred and fifty metres below the level of the Plain. Here there are farms and fences, properties and people, sheep runs and dairies, furrows for wheat and rye and barley and canola and maize and corn, orchards and vegetables. Wind dances in the grassy paddocks and screeching sulphur-crested cockatoos (Cacatua galerita) frequent the area. In the centre of the Depression is the township of Narioka (aka Noaks).

A hundred people live in Narioka, with a further hundred producers living on the farms and properties spreading outward to the cliffs. This is enough to make do. Other than this binding rock-face, there’s an ephemeral lake on the outskirts of town with a tributary creek, also empty, cutting through town. The Lake has a natural ironbark (Eucalyptus sideroxylon) bushland around its edges. They say you’re lucky to see either lake or creek fill in your lifetime.

Thirteen days after the destructive thunderstorm, the Narioka Leader is folded over a dining table chair. Markus Bello looks at its front page, which has a story on the progress of the railway to the city. It says they have surveyed the valuable space — ‘valuable’ because there’s only so much land they can acquire from the Depression without affecting the producers. The final paragraph mentions that the recent storm, and the record-breaking rain it dumped, may cause delays. This same rain, even though it’s winter, will not have broken the drought.

The master bedroom door opens behind him. A warm hand touches his shoulder. Elba: his to-be stepmother. She keeps walking, her fingers sliding across his shoulder blades until there’s no more of him for her to touch. They coexist. She re-boils the kettle. She prepares a tea and when she sits across from him, he smells chamomile. She’s sitting side-on, and this pose allows her to rest her left elbow on top of the chair, hand under chin. She gazes out the glass sliding door behind the table and runs her fingers through her long hair. Outside, her to-be husband, and Markus’s father, tends to pumpkins in one of his veggie patches. Elba asks Markus when the overcast will clear. He watches her pick up her tea with both hands and blow across the peachy surface. He scans the Leader for the weather report. She puts the teacup down. He stops at a random page of the paper and points to a random illustration. He needs hope as much as she does.

He says, as Cat jumps up onto the table, There’s a story about the weather. Cat sits for a bit, sanctioning Elba’s strokes under its chin and behind its ears. It stands and stretches and walks to Markus, where it rolls down over the paper. Elba resumes her initial pose. Each of the previous thirteen days has felt like a late-arvo soapie; a little bold, a little beautiful.

Markus walks into the bathroom and turns the heat lamp on high. Soon its strength pricks into the back of his neck. He assesses his shoulder in the mirror. A large bruise the colour of bile wraps itself over his pectoral muscle and collarbone, down his right arm, and stops above the wrist.

His phone rings beside him. No Caller ID.

For thirteen days — those bloody thirteen days — he’s been flicking through his past to find a point of reference. He hadn’t yet caught on anything, until now, until this: Georges’s phone call. He sees Georges and Grayson in the same place. They appear to him as markers of faith amongst a crowd of hundreds of others from around Narioka. These others surround them, but to Markus, they fall far short.

On the other end of the phone, Georges clears his throat. He could be at a café, for there’s the tink of metal on china and the hush of traffic. Georges has put a bookmark in between the pages containing Narioka and the pages of his success as an emerging artist. Which is, in part, why Markus agrees to meet Georges at the pub in Noaks later that afternoon; the conversation is over before he can take any of it back. He spends most of the arvo lag looking into the pantry. He doesn’t want to eat, necessarily, but a hunger of a different kind is growing in his stomach and can’t be satiated with chips or bikkies: Markus wants to redeem a part of his past, and it’s Georges who’s to be consumed to satisfy this unsteady need. Or so he hopes.

With half a pot warming in his rough hands, Markus waits for Georges. The bar bench is sticky on his forearms. Sweat forms in the space where his bare feet touch the barstool. The fire in here’s too hot. There’s no one else except the bartender. Markus avoids eye contact.

The bartender says something about being a brute. Yer can’t trust what the paper says.

Markus looks up at him. Molten lava bulges in his throat; his face may begin to melt. He says nothing, which doesn’t matter because Georges comes in. Markus turns to greet him.

Georges is straight from the turn of the century: distressed jeans, tight, knees torn out, thighs threadbare, the cuffs hanging down the backs of his dusty Volleys, which are scuffed. Markus stops himself from checking to see if there’s a hole in the denim showing off the undies Georges may be wearing. Faux-silk boxers, Marvel-patterned, perhaps? No. Though there’s pattern here: a patchwork of red, grey, and black intersecting in the flannelette long-sleeve, buttons undone, hanging over Georges’s slim frame. Underneath, a white singlet.

Nice, says Markus. He’d forgotten that Georges’s gaze is almost ceremonious: eyes like the blue light coming through stained glass and shining into a phial of holy water.

Georges is looking at Markus’s feet. Least I’m fully dressed, he says. Where are your shoes at?

Markus fills his mouth with beer.

If you tried to get round like that in the city, says Georges, you’d get a syringe in the bottom of your foot. A laugh. A smile. The gap since the last time they spoke closes, a tiny bit.

They sit beside each other, exchanging little.

How’s the city? says Markus.

Busy. Georges puffs out his chest.

Still living with your mum down there?

Georges nods.

Must be different to ol’ Noaks here.

Sure is, says Georges. He sucks in a draught of his own.

Most of the boys at high school used to call Georges dirty sanchez. Markus had had to Google what it means: after anal, you pull out and wipe your bare dick across your partner’s lip, forming a faecal moustache. At the time, the unknown meaning of dirty sanchez, the implication of ‘dirty’, had been enough for Georges to be undesired, to be tainted.

Markus wants to say sorry. Doesn’t.

It’s been too long, he says.

Georges’s fingers swirl in the condensation on the side of his pot. Things get in the way.

But with phones and stuff — two people shouldn’t stop talking. Markus coughs, brings his chin to his chest, and then sips his beer to clear his throat. Georges pats him once, hard, on the shoulder, his healing, bruised shoulder. It doesn’t hurt as much as bring Markus comfort, for some bizarre reason.

C’mon, Georges says as he gets off his stool. Enough of that. He’s at the jukebox, and in minutes a Kanye and Jay-Z song plays. ‘Otis’. Markus spills his beer as he turns on his stool to face Georges.

They’re not going to talk about what’s brought Georges back to Narioka, which is why if he were drunker, Markus’d smash the glass pot on his own face to cover what he begins to notice. It’s an urge towards Georges, as if to pick him up. To take them both away from here. Narioka. Or even to crawl up Georges’s body and pitch a tent inside his heart. He watches Georges dancing as if he knows how to dance. Dirty sanchez.

At the end of the song, Georges skols and says, Time for me to go. Early start back to the city.

Markus says, You got a place to stay?

Kinda.

What’s that mean?

Well, I—

Nah, Markus swats the answer away with his hands. He says, Come to mine. Ren won’t mind. And before Georges can answer, Markus is up and out the door.

Outside the pub, Markus shivers. The night is silent and silky-black. The streetlight orange and hazy in the fog. When Markus breathes out, a white plume coils from his lips. The scene spins, repeats, back and forth. Fark it’s nippy, he says.

Georges laughs as if trying to puff away dust that’s rested on the tip of his nose. Markus bites his tongue because Grayson used to do that. Georges’s voice, whatever he’s saying — maybe something about the cold — stops Markus from speaking, from acting.

The young men walk back to Markus’s father’s farm with the silence from the paddocks wedging between them as they go into the darkness. Markus blames the drink for not making small talk — he’ll probably slur his words — though it’s more that his redemption never came. Redemption he wanted for all the lost years, for all the things unsaid and those he witnessed being said but never stopped those boys from saying. And now, still walking, the crushed stone soft-crunching, Markus fills with confusion about what it is he wants.

Once inside the old farmhouse, Georges says, I’ll sleep on the couch.

Nah, man. Markus makes up an excuse that Cat will piss him off. It’s better in my room, he says, we can top-and-tail if you want. Georges scoffs at this, so the young men sleep side by side: Georges on top of the covers and Markus underneath. In the morning, Markus wakes with his head on Georges’s chest. Georges isn’t awake and Markus needs to shit. He slips from bed, from the room, and to the toilet. No one else is up. When he returns and finds Georges sat up on the side of the bed, putting on his shoes, Markus says, You off?

Georges nods.

Will you be back?

Georges shrugs. He stands up and puts his hands in his jeans’ pockets. Dunno, Mark. He smiles tight. Dunno if I wanna come back to this shithole. He laughs.

And so does Markus, but when he crosses his arms over his chest the laugh cuts short. He says, You need a ride back into town?

Nah, the walk’ll clear my head.

Afterward, Markus returns to his bedroom’s window, hiding behind the lace like an introverted pervert. Georges disappears down the drive. Outside, a bead of dew falling from the eave lands on the petal of an orange geranium flower with such force that the flower’s stem bends, as if bowing, to release itself of the drop. Once released it flicks back to stillness.

Sometimes Markus likes the night, and sometimes he wishes he could sleep right through, undisturbed, from the moment of last light to the moment of first. Other times he wishes light didn’t exist.

His clock radio flashes an angry, red 3.59am. His father, Rene, will be up soon, and Elba: for work, for passing time. Markus goes by the weak moonlight filtering through the skylight in the hallway, walks past the kitchen/dining room and into the lounge room.

Snake is Rene’s pet carpet python (Morelia spilota). Coiled in the sand at the corner of its glass tank, which his father displays in the lounge, it looks like a tiger snake (Notechis scutatus) in the dim light. It’s passive now, facing its abysmal eyes outward, unmoving. Markus hasn’t had to feed it in a while. When he did have to, Snake, coiled as it is now, would eye the shaking rodents and, without warning, Snake’s slim body would pounce, mouth agape, spiny teeth bared. Snake would make a dull thud when it struck, and the mouse would declare a dying squeak as it was squeezed dead.

Markus moves across to, and bends beside, the fireplace and opens its door. Inside, he builds a loose tepee of kindling and puts scrunched-up balls of newspaper underneath. He lights the paper and watches as it burns against the wood. Mute orange flames behind the dirty glass wobble like liquid. Markus wishes he’d fall into those flames and drift away on the log burning beneath. He pulls the blanket from the couch, lies down in front of the fire. The glow sways over the floor in front of him.

Later that week he walks barefoot into town, allowing himself to unwind with the sandy track through the fields and across the bridge over the empty creek.

A little away from the road and outside the township, bulldozers and rollers and other brutish things stand sleepy at the site chosen for the future Narioka Station. The metallic beasts guard the site manager’s office.

Markus finds himself not at the shoe store but at the brim of town and, a little further, the library. Ananke, the librarian, has crisscrossed the carpet with cold steel shelves. The aisles are quiet. He pulls three books: a Thomas, a Byron, and Maurice. He puts the Forster on the bottom and grabs a fourth paperback, a collection by Dorothy Porter. At the service desk, Ananke scans two, and then, at the third, halts. Maurice. The words rush by Ananke’s soft-skinned fingers, flipping the pages. Ananke smiles lightly and places the books in a calico bag, saying to keep them an extra week.

Markus walks down the main street. Georges is right: shoes are a necessity. Though Georges hadn’t said, it’d been in the way he’d looked at Markus. Markus follows the ancient scratching in the main drag’s pavement, and the flat black circles of discarded gum.

Melville Street glimmers in daylight. Both the street itself and the people who walk it are unperturbed. As they approach him on the street, he knows they are preparing their piss-weak smiles, preparing to meet his gaze and offer pleasantries. For your loss, they might say. He walks with his head down and denies them their self-satisfaction. He walks by the chemist and then to the shoe shop. He doesn’t know the assistant inside, and she seems not to know him either because she waits behind the counter. She flicks some paperwork and picks a scabby pimple on her jawline. Close up, she has brown eyes. And where she stands she fills some kind of space, as if a guardian. She points him to a burnt-orange pair of Vans, which he tries on, tying the orange laces tight. Beaming smile. Purchase. He leaves, wearing the Vans and carrying the calico bag of books.

He walks almost three-quarters of the way along Melville Street before turning down Quinn then left on Madigan. The streetscape opens up: on his right the Lake, or rather, what is left of it. Under a eucalypt, he sits by what was once the Lake’s edge, maybe three years ago. About that. It had filled, frozen, broken up, and flooded, making Narioka fearful of any water that fell from sky or tap; fearful that things would overflow again. Fuckers. Now, the Lake is an expansive dip in the ground, covered in drying weeds and surrounded by a binding face of ironbarks, which look tired, black, and smug. In the middle of the Lake is a faux island whose tapered end, which you can’t see from here, joins onto the time-share Country Club. Along the side of the Lake, two rabbits (feral) scratch the hard dirt and bound about each other, in and out of the sun and shade.

He makes his way back to his father’s farm. He finds an empty shoebox under his bed. Small clumps of dust blow away to the windowsill. It’s getting on in the late afternoon. He places the library books inside the box and slides it under his bed, hearing it hit the wall at the bedhead.

He’s touching the bandage he’s kept around his hand, which used to cover the bite Cat had made. He takes it off now because when he pushes against the dirty fabric there’s no pain. Underneath, his skin is pale, and the bite’s no more than a shiny scar. He decides to wash. The shower’s steam makes the white tiles underfoot dissolve into each other. He almost can’t see his feet. The smell of the Pears soap calms his belly, his mind. He wipes the amber bar over his body and around his junk. He replaces the soap on its holder, and foams up its residue on his skin. At his cock, he rubs the foam into his pubes, which, along with heat and tranquillity, makes him hard. He soaps his shaft while his other hand touches his scrotum. He closes his eyes …

Georges grabs him, draws him close, like chest to chest. And there, in between their faces, he hears air whistle through Georges’s nostrils. Georges. Markus doesn’t want to be let go. He wants the chest, the heartbeat beating against his own. He listens to Georges. Warm. He listens to the air whistling in each of Georges’s nostrils again and watches his eyeballs slide from side to side to side to side. Alive. There is a silent moment no longer than a second in which he wants their lips to press hard against each other. Present—

Markus cums. Their lips do not touch.

He knocks his kneecap into the glass shower screen, and that sound — the very disjunction and the little bit of pain in his patella — shatters the imagery.

Rene keeps four hanging baskets along the front veranda. In each he grows a single succulent, which, he could’ve once told Markus, is called a donkey tail (Sedum morganianum). Long lime-green tendrils of clustered claws escape the red dirt their roots are confined to. In a light breeze, even if you just breathe out nearby, these tendrils sway like horizontal ripples on a body of water. Too much. If you pull back on imagination, as Rene does, these hangers are embellishments that take the eye away from flaking weatherboards and a rusting bullnose. The recent storm knocked each of the four hangers down. They’ve lain smashed and spreadeagled on the brickwork pavement since. Rene’s cleaning them this evening. The straw broom brushing outside distracts Markus because its sound mimics that of rain. He rolls over. Breathes in and out of his nose to calm his irritation — well, at least that’s what he wants to believe it is. His stomach has begun strangling itself. He slides his window open as Rene scrapes the broom, sweeping the last of the first pot’s dirt away. A phone call interrupts Markus: Cecily. Again. He ignores and deletes the message she’s left.

It isn’t pleasurable for him to wake early. Today, he starts the apprenticeship he was meant to a few weeks back. Dark outside.

His father comes in and turns the light on. Markus covers his face. Rene pulls the doona off. In the kitchen, Rene’s made him toast and packed him a lunch box for the day. He hands him a mug of coffee. Markus chews a mess of toast he doesn’t want and chases it with the last of the coffee. Rene takes him into town because Markus is bringing his faulty motorbike. At Brute Burrows’ Mechanics, his father helps him heave the metal carcass out of the ute’s tray and then heads off. Markus wheels his bike into the garage, stands straight and kicks the bike’s stand down.

The garage smells of oil and is cold; it would feel almost clinical if it weren’t for the pot-belly fire crackling. Smoky scent fills the room.

Brute holds out his hand.

Markus clears his throat and puts his shoulders back. He shakes with Brute. Not long ago, he’d slung this elephantine body up against the pub’s brick wall, because it’d threatened him. That’s irrelevant now. Forget it. Markus doesn’t need a tour. Brute says, Yer’ve been here enough with me son that this place should be like a second home.

A few galahs (Eolophus roseicapillus) burst out from a stand of thick melaleuca across the road. They chirrup and screak and swoop up and over the garage’s entrance.

Brute gets to work on the motorbike. Bent down beside the bike, he sucks his bottom lip. He asks, Who did the shoddy cover-up job?

Buff.

Brute asks for the spanner.

Markus reaches around to the bench behind them, steps a little. His shoe, one of the orange Vans, stubs and his fingertips knock the spanner. It scrapes over the bench’s edge, drops. A dull light reflects off it before its head hits the concrete floor. The noise slows, echoing in his mind even after the spanner rests. Markus hands Brute the spanner. Brute discards it and grabs lock-grip pliers instead.

At lunch, Brute says he has to pop down the street. Yer want anythin’?

Markus shows him the lunch Rene made.

Brute sniffs and turns away.

The day continues in a quick rhythm.

Brute says, Yer motorbike won’t ever go properly. He’s interrupted by an older man dropping his car by, telling them to fix it up quick.

Brute remains silent as a ghoul. A sullen face indicating leave it with me, and again to a woman, and again to the youngest Drumanure boy, whose pushbike’s spokes are done for. Brute tells Markus to leave at about three o’clock. I’ll have a chat this evenin’ with Ren, mate.

The land between town and Markus’s father’s house stretches wide, flat, and forever. And it makes him feel like he’s flying upside-down.

The way Brute had held his body when he’d undone and rolled down the top half of his jumpsuit was forceful. It had revealed a grey singlet and, dangling in the low-cut neckline, a gold neck chain with a crucifix attached, which had swung side to side as he moved. Brute’s son, Buff, wears one similar. As does Elmyra, Markus’s oldest friend, who says she got her crucifix from the two-dollar shop, off a rack that has plastic skull-rings and peace-symbol earrings; says that because she paid no more than half the price of a cup of tea, she may as well’ve stolen it.

Why’s the focus on that gold cross? Some things are better left unsaid, even if they say you can say anything in the confessional. The stained glass, the statues looking down at him when he’d gone to church in primary school: these were enough to make him internalise everything. I farted on my father’s pillow was always good to tell the priest each Friday. Father’d once said, You’d best get off to the doctor, sort that out. Father’s dead now, one of them at least. Markus had gone through the Catholic primary school, and the fates of the other Fathers were and still are irrelevant. Sometimes in the afternoon, when the sky’s looking deep, he wishes he could throw a stone right up at it and smash it. Watch the shards of blue fall into the Depression. He’d smashed with rail stones, back whenever it was, the church’s stained-glass depiction of Jesus and John. And since then it has pissed him off that from the outside, where he had thrown the stone, he couldn’t see how the coloured glass must’ve fallen on the crimson carpet inside. He keeps walking, hands in his pocket. A throw to smash the heavens now from him would fall away, harmless.

The house is empty. He wakes sometime later to the sound of clanging pots: Elba cooking. His bedroom seems smaller. He could use a rail stone, maybe piff it at the window and let the twilight in. Rising and no release. Wanting to break. Abstaining.

He can’t.

This method he hardly knows.

He takes the needle he’s snuck from Elba’s sewing kit and places its sharp, thin point against the skin of his leg. On the inside of his thigh, closer to his groin, he begins to move it back and forth. His skin reddens and tears and bleeds. He pushes harder. When the blood beads and wriggles away from the imperfect gash, threatening to drip to the floor, he stops. He pokes the needle into the side of his mattress. He wipes the blood on his finger and licks it off.

In the shower, he lets the hot water stream onto the wound and the stinging makes his leg shake. He clenches into the fading bruise on his bicep. Numbness.

At dinner, with a hand under the table, he touches the covered abrasion on his leg. Pain.

Rene’s concerned. That face ya makin’.

Markus nods and says, The potatoes are too hot.

Elba’s on the couch, watching The Great Outdoors. She says, It’s the potatoes’ way of telling you not to eat them because they’re bad for you. She sighs, as if the world’s an irritating speck of dust she’s directing away. She becomes Elmyra, whom Markus has suddenly remembered, and whom he silently promises to text.

His promise is intercepted by Rene’s wink. His father’s calloused hand slides the latest Leader; his thick forefinger points at a headline. There’s a charity football match, he says.

The picture his father’s pointing at is of Buff in his footy kit, leaning against a goalpost. Markus stuffs a forkful of potato in his mouth, blowing through his open mouth as the heat sears the roof of his mouth.

His father wakes him by torchlight on the weekend. He touches Markus’s foot. I need a hand, one a the heifers is calvin’, he says.

Markus follows without complaint because his father’s eyes are wide.

Out and down a track, he lags behind. When Rene looks back, Markus nods. He’s pretending the bucket’s thin metal handle in his hand isn’t there. It may as well be slicing him open. A clean slice. The cold, the early dawn, the stars out — all that’s meant to be romantic. The chain and jack Rene holds clink together in a steady rhythm. The crispness biting the tip of Markus’s nose and the lobes of his ears spreads itself out like freezing pools of water. His breath is dark matter drifting through deep space. Rene turns the torch on him and even though Markus squints, he catches the dark matter turn to silver and the silver go white before it disappears again when Rene flicks the beam away. His father pulls out a handkerchief and hands it to him. The material’s warm. Markus wipes his nose. He hears a rustling nearby. Rabbits skitter in the reedy wild oats (Avena fatua).

When Markus was a boy, the man had taken him hunting, perhaps for distant relatives of these same rabbits. It was at dusk, when the strong, slender animals bounded across wheat-stubbled paddocks. Rene had caught them in the spotlight while Markus stood in the ute’s tray.

Have a shot, bud, his father had said, trying to hand him the shotgun.

Markus’d shaken his head at the smooth wood and matte metal shining in front of him.

Rene hadn’t wasted any time — he’d aimed at one of the rabbits, which had stopped and perked up to look right at him, and pulled the trigger. A spray of pellets must’ve caught the rabbit in the head, because its body had flicked backward, spun round, and landed, back legs kicking, on the soil.

This morning, though, his father’s occupied with just the opposite: a louder sound follows, hugging the ground. Rene points the torch to where the sound has come from. Markus puts his free hand in the water in the old white horse-feed bucket he’s carrying. Some of its contents splash over the edge with the motion. His flesh is too numb to register the temperature. He licks the residue from the tip of his finger. Rene turns left and wades through the wild oats growing beside the track. At the fence line, he turns the torch back on Markus. Rene takes the bucket from him, lifts it over the fence, and sets it down over the other side. He opens a horizontal gap between wires, and once both men are through, Rene locates the cow.

Markus holds the torch.

His father stands behind the prostrate cow, pumping the jack. The chain moves along the rig’s pole and away from the cow as it brings out the calf. The mother groans. It’s too slow, and the calf’s feet are unmoving. Rene huffs and Markus stands near, not knowing what to do. After a few minutes, Rene pulls the black calf away from the mother and begins to wipe the mucous out of its mouth. Markus rests the torch on the ground; its beam partially illuminates the scene. He pulls at his father’s shoulder. Rene moves away, and Markus tips the bucket of water over the calf’s head. The mother moos and steam comes from her mouth. The calf remains still. Rene grabs the calf’s forelegs; Markus grabs the hind. His father looks at the calf’s head, at his hands grasping, at Markus’s hands around the hind, and then at his son. They lift it into the air and its head is limp over the soil. They begin to swing it back and forth. Mucous dangles from its mouth. They put it down. Red dirt sticks to its body, to its eyelids. Rene wipes mucous from its face, and he strokes his hand along its throat, back and forth, slow and gentle. The calf coughs, shifting the phlegm from its throat. Its eyes open and roll in its head and it makes a guttural sound.

Persisting with, starting anew, starting same, forgetting about the wound on his leg, a run perhaps, walk … Persisting isn’t quite the right word; a word, though, suited enough to the way the Depression is drifting around Markus. Persisting isn’t about forgetting the scabby-red wound on his thigh or the bruise that’s now faded from his shoulder. Telling people that he’s persisting masks what drifts inside him. Smoke haze makes the eucalypts grey and half put together. He recalls those damned rabbits by the Lake as he fiddles with the pen in his pocket. Persisting’s pooling his thoughts, making them shallow, making them reflect the things above with wavy iridescence. Some ‘thing’ stronger is breaking through the surface. Yes. There it is, coming in like a hefty breaker: he’d missed the funeral.

Had said to Rene that he could not go. Rene’d tried to push the bedroom door open. Markus had dug his feet into the carpet and pushed back. Because of that sickness growing in his stomach, which he gets most days (today, it is quiet). Gnarled, solid nausea. It had started after the accident — amidst the dark and beneath the cold falling rain — and grown larger and larger until, in the half hour before Grayson was going to be buried, it had incapacitated Markus. Miss it, Rene had said as he’d thumped his fist on the other side of the door, the force of which had made Markus jolt. Markus spied, from the gap in his bedroom curtains, Rene drive away to town, to the funeral. He’d sat down on his bed, again leaving the drapes unopened, the door closed. There, in the dimness, the outside light had been threatening. Thirteen days it took him to open those damned drapes, as violent as tearing paper.

Being in that bedroom or being out here — there’s no difference. It isn’t the light that’s threatening. Absence produces a vacuum so powerful that any words spoken in it are torn apart.

On the afternoons when Markus is alone and not working (though he doubts Brute will want him back), when Rene and Elba are out shopping or dining or at whatever appointment they keep to themselves, he stays to the lounge. He opens up the curtains and lets the sinking sun come in and lay across the floor. He opens the windows even if it’s cold, and he gets himself a beer and sits on the carpet with his back against the low windowsill. On such afternoons he reads. Hates that he reads because it seems useless. It calms his mind, though. He reads volumes from the smallish piles of poetry stacked at the foot of his bed. He’s read Thomas, Rimbaud, Cummings, Whitman, and Gunn.

But today, on this specific afternoon, with its specific anticipatory silence, he waits for Elmyra. Where is she anyway? Walking about, most likely, in the shops down the street. He knows whatever it is he knows, i.e., she must have ignored his text.

By five-thirty, he’s had two beers. He gets another book of poetry from his room, doesn’t even check who wrote the stanzas inside. Beer in hand and book in the other, he sits at the window and sips the ale. Putting that aside, he opens the book. Don Juan. Longing and distance and death and breathing. Elmyra’s reading it, too. He saw a copy of Byron in her bag. Perhaps that’s where she is, unweaving rainbows and clipping an angel’s wings. No, that’s Keats. Too late for Keats: Elmyra is Hermes, threatening to find a nymph and disappear to the woods forever. Or Demeter.

There’s a gentle knock at the door.

Elmyra. The wind blows her hair. She’s not dressed-up today. She’s been dressing as Marilyn Monroe for ages. She stopped when Grayson died. Here, now, there’s an occult partition between her current plainness and the times before, when he’d watch her pat her skirt, run her fingers through her Monroe fringe, glide pink wax over her lips, and pencil black near her eyes.

He says, You aren’t Marilyn.

She doesn’t answer.

I love Marilyn, he says.

That’s why, she says. She’s like a speck caught in a shaft of sunlight, suspended in the atmosphere, shifting side to side, floating into view, out of view. She’s never in the centre long enough to see her from every angle.

She asks for beer.

He nods.

She removes her shoes and places them inside the door. She walks toward the hall and turns in the direction of his room.

He skids on his socks at her and takes hold of her arm, turns her to the open-plan area.

She looks that way, then back to him. Says, Okay, and walks to get a beer. At the bench, she twists the cap of a Dry. In her black woollen trench coat, with her dark hair, she is beautiful. Where Marilyn gives him confidence and makes him safe, Elmyra as she is challenges him to confront what is between them. Marilyn’s like playing games; Elmyra’s like playing at life. He doesn’t confront it, though. She swigs and turns to him, saying, They’re fucked without you.

He raises an eyebrow.

The footy team for the charity match.

Burrows will have it.

Buff? She laughs. Buff Burrows has the least idea of anyone — remember when he first joined and thought wings were still needed?

I trust him.

You say that about everyone.

People are good.

She shakes her head. Only my mother would say that.

That mythical mother, Mrs Robinson: in bed with the blinds drawn and the window open. He’d followed Elmyra in once to see her so-called crazy mother. A summer breeze had made the plastic blinds clack against the window’s frame. Mrs Robinson was unmoving, except for her chest rising and falling under the golden sheet, her eyes on him while he’d looked at her forehead and her damp hair hanging over the side of the bed.

Markus hates that of all the rules he tries to live by, this one, believing in the inherent goodness in people, is the one he cannot break.

Buff wouldn’t know the word ‘charity’ if you showed it to him in the dictionary, Elmyra says.

Something must be wrong with him.

Elmyra leans against the kitchen bench. She looks defeated.

Markus walks into the lounge to his beer, which is where he left it, sitting on the carpet in the sunlight.

Elmyra, who has followed him, sinks into the couch.

He sits back where he began, spine turned against the window. He watches her.

She looks at the roof and drinks.

Why did you give up Marilyn?

She scoffs. I didn’t give her up.

You’re not dressing as her.

She sighs. Says, It seems like too much effort, all things considered. By all things she could mean anything: her mother, Grayson, Burrows, himself.

What’s Buff reckon?

He didn’t say anything. She wiggles in the couch. He just helped me pack away Marilyn’s things.

I could’ve helped with that.

I know, she says, but you’ve got your own shit happening. And anyway, she takes a mouthful of beer, Buff’s so … immovable. He takes everything I throw at him. No questions.

Elmyra believes she’s right when she says Buff’s immovable. No questions. But she can’t feel what moves boys when they’re undressing beside each other in a stuffy change room.

It had happened in PE class. Individual Activities: Grayson, Markus, Buff, and about five or six other boys, all at different stages of puberty, each one of them self-conscious, anxious, and shouting as they walked down Melville Street, sweating under the bitch of burning sun. Subconsciously aware of all that skin around them, beside them. That week they were doing water aerobics at the local outdoor swimming pool. Teacher said to shower in the change rooms before getting in the pool.

The change rooms at the pool had hot, moist concrete underfoot, no roof overhead, and a weathered wooden bench running down the middle. Only two showers at the back. The first two boys ran to get out of the sun and under the shower, to feel a cool rush of water before being allowed out into the big pool. The other boys, including Markus, Buff, and Gray, dropped their bags along the wooden bench and began to get changed.

Most of them wore their togs under their uniform — or, on that particular day, as uniform — but one of the boys got completely starkers. Another boy slapped him on the arse with the back of his hand, saying something like, Geez, yer’d blind us with yer skin if it was any whiter.

Fuck off cunt, said the naked one, least it’d stop yer from checking out me arse.

Not me yer needa worry about, the slapper said, and he seemed to wink and nod, briefly, in Markus’s direction. Equally, he could’ve been flicking a lock of his long, greasy hair from his eyes.

What’s that mean? Gray said. He hitched down his school shorts to reveal bright-yellow board shorts.

The slapper flicked his head round again. None yer fucken business, mate.

I’m not yer mate, mate, Gray returned. He took off his shirt.

Too fucken right, said the slapper. He stood up and took off his shirt, too.

Out of nowhere, Buff laughed, loud and short, as he pulled up beside the boys and took a seat in between the slapper and Grayson. He said, Sometimes in the footy showers, yer get these queer fucks looking sideways at yer wang.

Yer’d lap that shit up, Burrows, said the naked boy, who was now in his own pair of board shorts. Tattered at the waistline, faded blue to violet down the sides.

Nah fuck off, said Buff, it makes me all weird. He mock-shivered. I don’t know whether to shove me cock down his throat or smash his pimply fucken face in.

Why the fuck would yer want him to suck yer off? the slapper said in all seriousness, the faux-credulity with which he’d initially addressed Buff gone.

Buff shrugged and stood. He grabbed his crotch. Free blowie in the shower block, mate, he said. Just close me eyes — and he did, right there in the middle of the open-roofed change room, with his hands now behind his head and his groin pointed out — and picture Elmyra between me legs.

Markus says now, No questions?

Elmyra shrugs.

And you like that? Markus drinks the amber, warm, and finds it pleasant.

She concedes, finishes her stubby, and gets them both another. She peels the beer bottle’s label. Yes, it would be easier if he played along, but their conversation has little life, or at least none that either wishes to acknowledge, and they finish off these beers. The sun has gone. Elmyra lights a candle because, she says, The label says Honeysuckle & Lemon Myrtle. She’s started listening to Cold War Kids on repeat. The smell, she says, honeysuckle and lemon myrtle, reminds me of them.

How so?

She sits the candle on the coffee table. The flame casts long shadows over Juan and over her — both now far across the room, in the dimness. She says, I’ve been listening to the one song, over and over on repeat.

What’s that?

She hums a melody. Asks, Has Cecily got a hold of you? She’s been trying to call.

He says, as he’s getting up, Not heard a word.

Hmm, strange. She swears she has.

I bet, he says. He gets, from his bedroom wardrobe, the bottle of absinthe Rene gave him for his eighteenth and which he’d wanted to share with Grayson. The green liquid goes opaque when he adds iced water to it, and she says, It looks like mucous. By the second, they’re drinking the firewater (she says, Is this lighter fluid?) straight from shot glasses.

Halfway through her second, Elmyra says, Drinking this makes my throat peel. And as if the layer the liquid has softened her, she says, I miss Grayson — his smile and his laugh.

Markus tilts his head. He intends it to prompt her to explain herself, and to make him believe her.

She doesn’t see. She sips her shot and takes the glass from her lips, where it hovers. She leans its rim back to her mouth and pours more of its contents down her throat. She takes it away before it’s all gone.

Markus thinks that by focussing on a single part, you might lose the overall hang of Grayson, so he says, I miss him.

Her head rolls over the pillow and looks across to Markus.

Markus runs his finger around the rim of the shot glass; his finger slips in. He licks the absinthe from it. Georges said we shouldn’t speak of him in the past tense.

But Grayson is gone, Markie. Elmyra downs the small pool of liquid left in her shot. Pours herself another.

Markus doesn’t want to drink the remaining absinthe in his glass. Grayson’s a part of our existence, he says.

You’ve had too much, she says.

Do you remember the first time you met him?

She shakes her head. You?

He says, Yes. At that drought fundraiser in the skate park — he got up, remember, and sang. Markus closes his eyes and arches his head back, as if floating on top of unseen water.

They finish their drinks and leave the candle going.

Elmyra says, I need a moment.

Markus goes into his room, strips naked, and then puts a pair of red undies on. He’s struggling to get his legs into a pair of blue chequered PJ pants.

She comes in. Pushes him on the bed and pulls the pants on for him before falling into place beside him.

He rests his head on the pillow, and its cool cotton soothes his burning cheek. He closes his eyes as the mattress beneath him shifts, rocks a little like the ripples made in a puddle. She moves behind him, curls her body into his shape. Her arm around his waist. She touches her nose into the nape of his neck and breathes out down his back. Her leg weaves through his and her toes rest by his. She wriggles them. She pulls the blanket over them, right up to their necks, and pats it flat. She replaces her arm over his waist and hugs him.

What would they say if they could see us now?

She lowers her voice to mock those boys, and says, Give her a squeeze for me.

Markus’s laugh bubbles over.

I never took what they said seriously. We knew what was what.

And what was that?

I have no idea, she whispers slowly. But they don’t need to know that.

When he wakes next, the moon’s lit the room. Elmyra’s staring at the roof.

Hi.

Her head lolls to him, her lips kiss the tip of his nose. She says, What’s the roof made of?

He looks up. He wants to say I love you, yet like most of his words, they don’t surface. Stramit, I think it’s called; lots and lots and lots of tiny little pieces of straw pushed together.

She says, I’d like to think that the little pieces stick together because they want to. Y’know — good things fall apart so better things can fall together.

That’s so Hollywood, he says.

It’s nice to imagine.

You’re drunk.

She holds his hand. We’re both drunk, Markie.

A neighbour’s dog barks, the sound heavy and low through the night.

In the morning, she says, Thanks.

For what?

She shrugs. For being okay. For you.

He squints. Can’t really be anyone else.

She appears to say something, or at least attempt to, but then doesn’t. And he can’t hold her to account for not saying what she wanted to: she’s probably seen him do that to her more times than she wants to remember. She leaves just as Georges had, and Markus watches her fade down the track from view.

He sits down on the couch where Elmyra had lain last night. He has a pen, holds it between his index and middle fingers in front of his face. Makes it tilt up and down. He shivers, not because of the cold … just because. Cat’s back legs press into his thigh, the place he’d first torn his flesh with Elba’s sewing needle. He’s taken the bandage off now. The wound’s finished its scabbiness. He plays Cold War Kids. He’s begun dreaming that Grayson’s real again, and when he wakes, he wants to go back to sleep. A total cliché, y’know, for real. Like: to go back again to peaceful summer evenings, their lethargy, when flies rest and everything holds its breath waiting for nightfall and a temperature drop.

Frost treats pine-wood farm posts with a bluish damp, as it does to the bottoms of trousers. The wattle’s (genus Acacia) gold sparkles Spartan-like and agrestic, as if he’s in another country. Midwinter, the sun is meek, as it’s mostly been since April — what, with the lingering clouds and the smoke haze from burnings off. Narioka breathes out a cold fog, left behind by the cold nights, from treetops and swirls it into the space of the Depression. It must creep over the cliffs and into the spare fields of the Plain above. It binds. Unlike the heat of summer, which is restless, this becomes what everyone wishes would go.

It’s beginning to fall away. Not the memory — Grayson is falling away. April’s gone, May and June. Time becomes impractical, and in each of its moments he understands that another second, minute, hour disappears since the last time he saw mi compañero. Even though Grayson is absent, Markus detects him here, physically. And perhaps that’s why men believe in gods and goddesses, with their marble-white togas and wreaths of olive in their long flowy hair. Why is it we’re told they’re very beautiful but they’re always out of view? Markus has read some Plato — a gift from Grayson — and he’d got the impression that Ancient Greeks didn’t quite believe that Eros existed as a figure; rather, they believed that two people loving one another was Eros embodied, which would go a long way to explaining the exploding in Markus’s chest.

Markus’s mind is an indissoluble veil of foreign language. Maybe one day it’ll make sense. One day. Mi compañero. He’s not heard that tongue for a while. Out the front window, he watches the evening settle, and ignores twilight’s tweak against his skin. The fire’s unlit. He puts the pen down to hold his belly. He tries to appease the choppy swell that’s threatening to turn his insides into fierce waterspouts, to drown him and make his body bloated and blue.

In the middle of night, a stammered scream bursts up from the middle of his chest. He thrusts his limbs out of his bed and runs to escape down the hallway. He pants, though not from running, rather from the fear of what he’s running from. He mistakes his heart for the thump the front door makes when he tosses it open. The sand and stones of the driveway are smooth and cool on the bottoms of his bare feet. He’s in his underwear. Sweaty hair sticks to his skin and catches between his eyelids. He subsides. He’s been running from a rhythm and now it’s caught him up; it’s buried itself deep, skirting the boundary of his mind. He’s been ignoring its gentle throb. It’s pulsing now and he has to let it out. He hears Grayson’s voice ascending the dissonance of the pub before he’d been killed.

Mate. It’s Rene.

A blanket covers Markus’s body. He opens his eyes. They close when the dawn-light enters.

He assumes he sleeps, because the next time he wakes is in the early afternoon. Rene’s gone to and from town; groceries packed into green bags sit in the ute’s tray. He tells Markus to come help.

Lowering two bags to the ground, his father says, A water main burst in town. The roads were blocked.

Markus takes another two bags and begins walking inside. Rene catches him up. Glass condiment bottles tink together in the bags he’s carrying. Markus shrugs and puts the two bags into one hand and opens the laundry door. They’re pretending nothing mid-night occurred. They dump the bags on the bench and head back out. Markus looks around at the paddocks.

Yer wanna give us a hand with the garden down front? Rene says.

Markus shrugs. Yair. He isn’t morally opposed to work that involves his hands, he’s just never thought himself good at it. Ever since he can remember, his father’s taught him about the land they live in. Scientific names cascaded from Rene’s lips as if ancient spells. Microlaena stipoides; Dacelo novaeguineae; Ornithorhynchus anatinus. One time, early on, Rene told him about hemlock (Conium maculatum) — the memory now is sticky-opaque, like the milky poison in the leaves. He only ever absorbed the lines of genus and species and sub-species, but their distinct, overlapping places in the landscape, and how they all fit together — how they all work — never quite clicked. He follows his father, like the hopeless apprentice only in for a dollar, to the shed to collect a sapling, then down the drive to the garden at the front.

Rene says, You know that cricketer hit by a ball?

Markus doesn’t know more than a whisper he’s heard from wherever.

He died. Rene bends over to the soil. Young, too.

Yair.

Y’know the charity footy game?

Markus doesn’t speak.

They’re gunna give half the money to the family.

What if the family doesn’t want it?

Someone else will.

Father and son are on the stretch of land running the length of the drive. Markus imagines that Rene told him to help so as to keep him on an invisible leash, what with last night’s antics. Rene also said that Brute said Markus isn’t quite right for a mechanic’s work.

They’re expecting you.

Who?

The coach. The team.

I haven’t played a game in years.

They want you to captain, an’ it’d make Grayson proud.

Markus scoffs.

Just go to the practice match.

Nah.

I’m not asking you. Rene begins clearing a patch of ground.

Markus shifts the bagged sapling standing between them. The bag’s black plastic protects the roots of a red ironbark. They’re planting it because it’ll provide a good home for bats (various) and boobooks (Ninox novaeseelandiae) and, when it’s big, some shade for the Murray Greys … according to his father. Two years full maturity in ideal conditions, his father’d also said. Sky’s blue and the sun’s harsh, even though it’s still winter. Markus has sweat prickle on his back and forehead. Too many clothes. When he woke, it’d been overcast.

Rene says, Fuck, yer’d think it’s summer. Drought’ll never break in this.

Markus has forgotten about the previous summer’s heat. And the drought. The dust, the rabbits, the Burrows’ slaughtered livestock and the brittle grass. With the cooler nights of this winter, the idea that the land could be so devoid as to be dead is impossible. Markus says, How do you know?

It’s what they say, y’know.

Markus says, It can’t be good for the tree, no water and drought.

S’alright, too much’ll kill it. Rene takes his eyes out to an unseen place. The blokes over north’ve gotten rid a trees. Y’know that matchstick tree farm? Work the land too much. He slides his thumb and index finger over a blade of nearby plains grass (Austrostipa aristiglumis). An’ the soil’ll slide right out under ’em. The grass disintegrates as he rolls it between his fingers. Rene stands and shovels a hole, shin-deep to himself and as wide as his own forearm from wrist to elbow. He starts with ease, but each time the blade slices deeper into the soil, Rene grows more tired and more sweaty and more breathless.

A magpie (Cracticus tibicen) warbles.

A good tree needs firm roots, healthy soil, nutrition an’ water. If the balance is right, bud, the tree’ll pay back tenfold. Rene unties the rope binding the black bag around the ironbark’s roots, and pulls the plastic away.

The roots are neat, dark in colour, and they lighten as the soil on them air-dries. Smell earthy. There are a number of other, very mature ironbarks lining the driveway with thick-looking bark, gnarled and black, like rot.

When they’re done, Rene has to go into town. Order out some business.

Markus, inside the house, sits down in the lounge.

Elba’s out selling Herbalife.

There’s a huntsman spider (family Sparassidae) on the lounge-room floor. Markus keeps it near him by tapping the ground in front of it whenever it turns to scamper away. It’s facing him, raising its front legs in the air.

When Markus was younger, he’d sit and watch rainfall pattering against the glass panes and trickling down. As he grew older, the water wriggling over the window made him think of sex education. The droplets became sperm gametes careening to somewhere out of sight — useless and expired ejaculate. If he were out in the rain, he’d stop and stand and get soaked. Sometimes, he and Grayson came home from school in the rain. After Grayson had left for his own house, Markus’d wait at the driveway. He’d see Grayson’s bluish shadow get lighter and lighter the further he went into the grey rain-haze. When Grayson was gone, Markus would watch the water flow down the furrows in the bark of the towering eucalypts in the driveway. Raindrops collected on the leaves of the geraniums below the canopy. The water re-formed at the geranium’s leaf tips and dripped onto the greying straw that was spread on the garden beds. He’d rub his face with his palms and then look up at the sky, leaving his mouth open, and squinting because he wanted to be able to see. He’d run up and down the driveway and jump into puddles. His shoes would fill with cold water and his socks, when he took them off later, would smell like wet dog. He did this on the afternoons of rain when Rene wasn’t home. He did this then because it was Rene who’d made him, when he was younger, sit in the lounge and watch the rain fall against the glass panes, when all along Markus had wanted to wriggle free.

A tremor against his hand: the huntsman’s creeping away. Markus makes a fist and brings it down onto the spider’s back. It’d make Grayson proud. What on earth could his father have meant by that? Grayson is dead and incapable of pride. It’s not even that — it’s that Rene had had no interest in Grayson even when Grayson had been able to be proud. The pleasurable satisfaction from an act, possession, quality, or relationship by which you measure your stature or self-worth: proud. A relationship … could Rene ever be proud of Markus?

In his room, Markus pulls the sewing needle out. It’d make Grayson proud. When the needle pinches and enters his flesh, he doesn’t react. And when he begins to bleed, he does not react. He’s surprised at how the blood rises out of the wound, like a balloon being inflated by a breath within his thigh. Pleasure derives from this balloon growing and stopping, the glistening bead waiting for the pulsation of his vein. It breaks, or bursts, and spreads over the skin of his thigh as a wet pinkish film, matting the hair near it. He can see a tiny, darker scar left from the first cut he’d made, wriggling on his thigh around the edge and out of sight. He tries to make himself receptive. The needle tears and jabs. His scratches form black calluses on his arm and crystallise like bark. He punches his thigh. It bruises. He drifts.

Rene tells him to get ready for the practice charity football match. A week until the real thing, though the way his father says it sounds like reel thin.

Markus prepares himself, i.e. footy gear etc. As he does, a twisting feeling forms in his stomach. He drinks water and vomits it into the toilet. Rene, with Elba in the passenger seat, drives Markus to the oval. While sitting in the backseat of Elba’s insurance-Jeep (the one that they gave her after Markus crashed her old one), Markus is thinking that it doesn’t matter what you do to try and stop something; it will happen, or won’t, depending on heaps-many things not under human control or within human comprehension. Epictetus, which he’d read before Grayson had given him Plato to read. Markus rekindles this Epictetian attitude, words it up to make it sound more profound than the simple Fuck it the boys say.

At the footy oval, he finds himself in the toilet. Each of the four cubicles is occupied, and he does not want to piss into the urinal, where the stream will splash onto his shoes as it hits the tray; he’ll get stage fright. So, he waits. Each of the four cubicle doors remains open. Men with hands around their fronts train their gazes on their piss. Markus hears the piss spray. His bladder is at the point of being painful. He waits by the wall, pretending to text. The four men finish and are replaced by another four. It’s not until this four falls by two that Markus takes up a free cubicle. He locks the cubicle door. Talks himself into trying to piss. His bladder won’t release. It seems like ten minutes of pushing before a weak stream starts. He flushes. The toilets are now empty; the practice game about to start.

Fuck it.

Any other Sunday, he’d’ve gone with Grayson and got a sausage roll in a roll with tomato sauce, which would ooze out the sides and drop on his palms. Thinking of licking the tangy sauce is better than if he actually ate. He moves his tongue around his empty mouth, pushing it against the places where bubbles of cask wine would fizz, between his teeth, against his lips, on his gums — if it were any other Sunday before. It was better before, because he didn’t have to think or reflect. It’s all consuming and overwhelming now. You see, before = with. It meant there was no space to fill, because there was walking, and Grayson bringing the cask, and gasping to cool the volcanic mouthful of half-mushed sausage roll.

Markus leaves the room and, in the kitchen, fills the kettle. Boiling water hisses like the kazillion cicadas on hot nights when Grayson and he had gone camping. They’d set out with a two-man tent and fishing rods. That was year eight or nine. They stayed wide-eyed to the break of dawn.

Markus hears a thunk and then another. He sees through the kitchen window, standing outside Rene’s shed, Buff Burrows.

Buff has a yet untouched slab of round wood, a rope tied over its middle, at his feet. He’s wearing a long-sleeved red-checked flannel shirt, its front buttons undone, even in this cold, to reveal a tight-white singlet underneath. He’s wearing his footy shorts from yesterday’s practice match and has changed his footy boots for Blundstones. Buff raises the maul, its blade glinting.

Markus heads out there. He drags his feet a few times in the sandy yard and sits down on a spare chopping block. Nearby is a small pile of wood Buff’s already cut.

Markus says, Who sent you around?

Thunk: the maul’s blade hits the centre of the wood. A crack appears.

Buff says, What happened there? He nods to where Markus’s motorbike used to stand. Buff’s biceps kind of tense when the maul’s above his head and then ripple when the blade cuts into the timber. Rigid, controlled momentum paired with strength.

Still fucked, Markus says.

Thunk: hits the log at a small angle from the first cut to make a wedge of wood.

Fucken unreliable.

Markus plays with his leg hair. What are you doing here?

I told y’at footy.

Markus doesn’t recall.

Said I’d come t’ help you an’ Ren out.

Thunk: working clockwise around the log, cutting cake wedges. The rope around the middle keeps each wedge placed even as he slices the log itself apart.

Markus moves to the prep table pushed up against the wall inside Rene’s shed. On the table, small plastic pots: rows of geranium and eucalyptus. Of the latter, he’d felled a fully-grown specimen back in the summer, the same wood Buff’s now slicing. Markus picks one of the seedlings up. Its leaves move in similar rhythms to a butterfly’s wings.

Buff asks if he’s heard from Cecily. He’s surely after something — why else would he be here of his own accord? To chop wood? Bullshit.

Bellos, Buff huffs.

Markus replaces the pot. He hoicks onto the shed’s floor.

You’re a shit bloke, Buff says, puffy and husky, his words like dirty coal from a mine.

Markus watches Buff pull the maul’s blade from the wood. Elmyra was here the other day, he says.

She told me.

No Marilyn.

Would it’ve been different if she was? Buff’s a mostly harmless mosquito, silently landing and putting his own saliva, laced with anti-coagulant, into your veins before drawing back your blood. Give and take. Blond hair and marble skin as threateningly incendiary as the sun. Elmyra’s intoxicated with him.

Probably not, says Markus, but quiet enough that only he can hear.

At some point, Markus, too, had almost succumbed to the same heady, deadened masculinity Buff Burrows spreads about him. When Buff first appeared in the area, armoured in dark Ray-Bans and unflattering beige cargo shorts. At football training. Buff had said he’s a wingman. Markus, as then-captain, said, We’ll put you in mid-field. Wings are useless. Fully prepared to go the distance, Markus had made him vice-captain. And, in line with his responsibilities, Buff spoke out at anyone who spoke out at Markus.

But none of that really matters now — not footy, not Buff, not captains and vices, not speaking out or staying silent.

Markus worries that the pressure he feels inside himself — if released — will rip through his entire body like a white-head pustule on his late-pubescent face. He says, Leave you to it then. And as he walks away from Buff, he tells himself he’s prevented someone else from having to clean his blood-pus mess off the mirror.

Patchy sky of grey clouds. Some holes where the blue sky can be seen: a broken mosaic. Or a whole mosaic? Whatever. Sunbeams don’t shine on him or near the ground around him; rather, the beams make landfall beyond his sight, on distant countryside. Other mornings, the sun’s rays hit a paddock a few hundred metres away. And on these mornings, it’s as if he and the room he stands in are a far too shadowed place within his subconscious. Forever out of his way. Like Byron’s estrella de la mañana de la memoria. Spanish sticks, as does the recollection of the accent Grayson would do to keep them going through the double periods before lunch. For a week or so now, Markus has been trying to dissect the language, which at school he never had, but which Grayson spoke so finely. Is it de la recuerdo instead?

¿Puedo ir al baño? Grayson would rub his jumper where his bladder might’ve been. He pointed at the door.

Sólo si realmente eres, Teacher replied.

Grayson laughed and then said, Donde voy no es nada para usted preocuparse.

Teacher smiled, Hazlo rápido, niño descarado.

And Grayson leant to Markus and whispered, Me estoy saliendo, amigo. Tu elección si quieres venir.

How can it be that Markus is heading forward and at the same time going back? Disassociating from the present, i.e., not in the so-called now, as he used to be. He’s associated in the reality of memory and imagination.

A week. A week. His room is lived in, smells lived-in, too. He opens the curtains. On the floor, sunlight falls. He thinks of Moses and the Israelites. Purple linen, censers and scents, glints of tabernacle gold — alpha chi rho omega make the phrase I Rule. What does discovering any of that mean to him?

Rene calls him. Over the phone, he tells Markus to be ready when he gets home because today is the actual charity football match.

Back at the bedroom window, Markus sees it has light streaks across it because of the angle the sun’s coming at it. The pane shakes from the wind. The bright, slim streaks, three or four of them, slant in front of his face. He peers between two of the lines to the yard beyond. He raises his fist, pushes it toward the glass. Stops. He tips his fist and taps on the glass with his knuckles. Pulls away and thrusts his fist back again. Stops. Lowers his fist and rests his forehead on the window.

Rene’s ute comes up the driveway.

Markus switches the bathroom’s radio on and is greeted by Lewis McKirdy’s voice. He waits for the music. Lewis is going on, getting annoying. Fuck. Markus switches the radio off and puts his iPod into the dock. When he’s dried and re-underweared, he watches himself in the mirror as he slides his razor over his neck, past his Adam’s apple. When he’s done he washes the excess shaving foam away, and, with drips off his chin and dribbles on his cheek, Markus pummels his reflection with both his fists. He dresses in trackies, a blue shirt, and a white hoodie with a print of LSP saying, ‘What the lump?’ Footy stuff and other shit together, he heads to the open-plan area.

I’m not magnificent. I’m not magnificent, special, happy, or light. I’m dark. Sunken. An unseen iceberg in the Southern Ocean: grey-white, bobbing and spumeless. I’ll melt away because of rising sea temperatures and become water, rain, and salt to taint freshwater supplies. I’ll be the drought.

Markus’s breath forms a grey patch on the ute’s window as the vehicle turns into the footy ground.

Rene drops him out back of the change rooms.

The shower room is a large sandstone cube that acts as a small divider, built in the middle of the change room’s tin outer. The shower block has two entries: one for the home team and one for the away team (home: those living in Narioka; away: those from the farmlands). These entries oppose each other, and through each is the respective change room. Markus used to tell everyone the sandstone was asbestos, and he’d throw little chunks that had fallen from the edges at his teammates, at their feet as they showered, in their hair as they dressed, into their bags. Today, he prefers the soft crunching of the fallen-away chunks as he steps on them.

His duffel bag slaps on the polished concrete floor.

Buff stands beside him, naked from a pre-game shower. His pink junk. His firm muscles. He’s mostly firm. And yet, where there are fine blond hairs coating his thighs and arse, these limbs, especially his arse, quiver each time he steps around. He’s starting to dress: pulling up jocks, the black and red footy shorts over the top, a Guernsey. The quiver in his looser areas is slight, and makes the built-up areas seem to be hiding his self beneath, as if his self begs on hands and knees to be noticed at all.

Markus shrugs. He pulls on the red-and-black Guernsey, like Essendon, he’d once thought. It puffs against his skin. Whiffs of athletic rub come in draughts: hot-cutting and comforting before play. The grassy oval will be dew and frost. The wind driving down centre field will be shards of ice. Coldness makes cracking his fingers painful. He disbelieves that cracking knuckles causes arthritis. Keeping the joints uncracked hurts more. He takes each finger, bent over, and presses it down into itself. It may crack. It may not. Sitting on the low wood bench along the dim change room’s wall, he does this to his fingers. One doesn’t get the pain and the release. He stretches out the uncracked finger, an index finger, to see if it needs warming up, then presses it down again. It doesn’t crack. He pushes harder. The knuckle turns white and the creases go deep red, like they’re going to split his skin open.

Ya gunna break it off, Coach yells.

Markus rests his hands between his legs.

Buff says, Fucken spastic.

The coach gives a pre-game speech: grit, determination, teamwork. An’ piss orf if yer not up fer it! The team, two by two, leaves the shed and heads out onto the foggy field. The silence has a sound: hushed static, as if tuning in for signs of life. The fog means most can’t see the scratches running tracks up Markus’s arms or the callouses from the sewing needle criss-crossing his thighs. No doubt, someone caught sight of them back in the change room. None said a word. The skimpy footy outfit tells the story; walking in the fog is like walking through cottonwool. Filling up his ribcage: the siren. Young men’s reckless bodies thud to the earth and the ump’s whistle is shrill. Markus can’t see where the bodies collide or where words from restless mouths shout at him to run left. Left he goes. Through a stretching hole in the fog a red Sherrin pirouettes and drops into his hands. Thoof. He spins, boots it out of sight. Cheers. Car horns. Noise rises up into his ears. Snap of the goalkeeper’s flags. A whistle. He focuses on his thumping heart. It’s aural, internal. Echoing. He punches himself in the gut, and its contents spill out, yellow frothy bile, onto the field.

You right? It’s the Youarang kid come running over. His hand’s on Markus’s back.

Markus nods, stands up and says, Yair. He wipes the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand.

Youarang sniffs a laugh and says, Nah, mate. He whacks Markus gently on the shoulder. Why don’t you head back to the rooms — foggy as all get out here, Coach won’t even notice one less. Youarang whacks him once more. Go.

Markus crumples onto the yellowish tiles inside the shower block. His shins are bruised and his silky shorts stained by grass and mud. His hair drips murky water. There’s no one else here. Hot water from the showerhead above hisses and slaps against Markus and the tiles he’s sitting on. The noises outside are deadened by the chamber of sandstone. He disregards those things he cannot see. Almost, for there’s always one thing he can’t escape. This thing has been split up as many things. Now, the splits forge, and the gap between the things he can’t see and can’t touch closes and joins into the singular thing they’ve always been. Just now, in this shower block, they come into involuntary, premature realisation. Knees drawn to his chest, arms hugging his legs, head hung in the hissing water — he can feel himself as if he’s beating with clenched fists on Grayson’s grave.

You in here, Bellos? The tacks on the bottoms of Buff’s boots crunch over the concrete, making it sound like a thick layer of gravel. The athletic rub scent wavers in the air. Buff leans against the door’s jamb and says, You’rang said y’chucked on field.

Markus looks at the tiles near his toes and says, It was behind play.

Buff starts to untie his boots. Why?

Because.

’Cause why?

Because.

You sick? Buff takes his first boot off.

Markus doesn’t reply.

Buff begins wrestling the second sodden boot. His arm’s skin is white, exposed and even; with his bulging biceps and square-set shoulders, he is buried inside the Guernsey. Or perhaps it’s burying itself into him, an entire sporting code seeping from the dyed cotton through his white skin and into his healthy veins. Buff Burrows. He is … what? Small. He’s taking the other boot off, throwing it behind him into the change room. He’s playing with the fluff on the tips of his footy socks. His shorts are too short, and from the way he’s sitting, Markus can see his yellow underwear and the outline of his junk.

Another update on the railway appears in the Leader: a tradie injures himself while attending the construction site. He, along with his colleagues, had resumed work when he slipped on loose earth and broke his arm. Inquiries, investigations, paperwork will hold up construction.

Markus is standing beside the kitchen table. Through the glass door, he sees his father in one of the veggie patches out back. Rene has a tiny paintbrush in one hand, which he’s using to transfer pollen from one flower to the stamen of a flower of the same species. The bees who used to pollinate the crops all over Narioka stopped arriving a year or so back. Markus closes the newspaper. Takes his coffee in his hands. He closes his eyes.

Try again.

There’s a smudgeable layer of oil or grease on the table top. He rubs hard. It relocates itself on the pad of his finger. He makes another cuppa. Tea this time, and the bag’s left in, and the water goes this crazy peachy colour that reminds him of the sunrise. Cold War Kids plays from the dock sitting underneath the telly. He can’t name the tune. There’s afternoon coming in, shining across the iPod’s screen and blocking the song’s title. Saying it aloud, a whisper will do. Y’know. The tongue’s rebellious, and the words it flicks are futile and never come out to mean what is intended. What could I say? He bangs his fist into his thigh, alternating hard and soft. He can never speak aloud what’s inside. A paralysis.

Markus winces.

He loves Grayson.

Tea spills down the side of the cup.

Markus hates that he loves Grayson, because he tells himself he hates men. He finds people repulsive. People and their relationships. Especially men. Repulsive. Rene: drove his first wife away with a glass of gin and a well-aimed fist. Buff: billowing with maleness he hasn’t a hold on. Georges: dirty sanchez.

Men are repulsive. With their sex. With their hair. Their physicality. With their laughs and deep voices and motives and desires and kisses and hands, searching-seeking hands searching and seeking minds and fingers and tongues and lips and beards and stubble. Men. Cocks and balls and fucks and butts and ribs and thighs and ears. Their eyes, deep blue or the-always-loveliest brown eyes, and wrinkled faces when the sun’s shining in their brown eyes. Like earth. Like death. Regeneration. Life. Growth. Nutrition. Men with their thoughts. Men with their minds again and again. Their hearts and wanting to fill their hearts with love. Selfish love. Fuck their love. He shouldn’t have a life he never asked for and be expected to love men. With their problems never spoken outward. And childhood trauma and family issues. Men wanting to be held or hold. Markus laughs or sniffs or huffs. Perhaps growls.

To let someone love him: they say you shouldn’t use the word ‘love’ — you should show it. Yet when the person he loves lies six feet beneath the surface, there’s little except the abstract nature of words to describe, or not, what he feels inside.

Outside him, out there in the small microcosm his father’s creating, the veggies Rene hand-pollinated fatten in the warming months, engorging themselves with sunlight and becoming rosy in the cheeks. Around them the cicadas sing, above them cockatoos screak, and between the full pumpkins and bundles of cherry tomatoes the cabbage butterflies flick and whisk. Inside, away from all this, Markus’s nineteenth birthday passes. Onward and upward. The charity footy match is never spoken of again, the money raised never quoted. Buff reports that his dad said it was a huge success. A thank-you note in the mail and all. And Elmyra’s doing whatever she’s doing, her Marilyn unseen since before Grayson died. Markus begins work for his father, because Brute said he wasn’t fit for the apprenticeship. So, Markus works on the farm’s books, the paperwork, the finances, that drib-drab correspondence with the bank manager. Rene’s in a bit of money trouble. Markus doesn’t say; instead, he tries to find the money where he can and sweet-talk the bank some more.

Elba says, You’re talking more quietly than usual.

He says, I’m not — you’re not listening at your usual.

She laughs.

He turns the muscles in his face into the shape of an orange quarter.

She asks him, How’re you doing?

And he says, Fine.

And she says, How are you, really?

And he says, Really, I’m fine.

And she goes to speak again, stops. With tight lips she smiles once more. She mostly leaves him be, continuing to sell Herbalife in town five days a week. Leaving Markus each day to begin the farm’s books, leaving him to wait for the mail. He peeks through the lace at every car that passes. The tyres hush over the crumbling bitumen at the end of the driveway. He makes sure his mind doesn’t forget about the stars, the night, the long-gone rain and wind and the cold, the shivering on the ground and the headlights flickering on, off, on, off, and the nothing, the calling out, the out calling, the crying out and the crying and the rain. The unfound. One morning, he gives up waiting earlier than usual. He turns from the window and drinks his coffee. None left. Makes a fourth and sits at the table, his back to the lounge and its window and to the mailbox, turned away from the road and remembrances. He drinks the coffee and in between sips, he bites his top lip. Peels its skin away. With each coffee sip and each intermittent bite, his lip becomes more sensitive. The steaming liquid burns his exposed lip and makes it bleed. When he pulls back the cup, he sees a tiny swirl of blood in the liquid. Tie-dye. Behind him, he hears a car slow down. The mailperson.

The Leader says they’ve restarted rail work, begun installing the actual railway. Markus looks at the images in the wrap-around special. Flat, long, and endless, a foundation of ballasts and sleepers ready to have rails laid. A few sleepers have been stolen and others turned over or misplaced.

Buff says that he wants to come around and tinker with Rene’s muscle car. Markus didn’t know that Rene had a muscle car. While he waits for Buff, Markus stands near the shed. He eats a banana and watches mud-dauber wasps (Sceliphron sp.) skirt across the dirt. Supposes they mustn’t do pollination, then.

Buff’s car speeds up the drive, trailing dust. He brakes and slams the door shut as he exits.

Cicadas fill the pause.

Ya didn’t show up at footy pre-season.

Markus says, I had work.

Coach asked for ya.

Yair.

Right. Look, I shoulda bin around after ya.

Markus says, It’s alright, and the convo dies.

The muscle car is kept under a black sheet; beneath, its duco is east sky at twilight. The chassis hugs the shed’s floor, looking clever.

Straight from the showroom, Buff says. He hovers his fingers over the bonnet. Imagine how fast it’d go.

Tracey Chapman comes to mind. Markus looks around for his father. Guess the shed’s too dark, I didn’t see it, he says.

Or Ren didn’t want you to know about it. Buff’s done a full circle around the vehicle, checked every window and even smelled it. Dad an’ I are goin’ pig huntin’, he finally says.

Markus nods.

You should come.

Markus shakes his head.

Dad didn’t give a choice, Buff says, replacing the sheet over the car. Said y’need t’ get off this property.

I work here.

He said y’shouldn’t work where ya live.

What else am I supposed to do here? Markus gestures with his hand to the purlieus, the paddocks that he cannot see through the shed’s walls of tin.

Buff shrugs.

I always do shit for people, Markus says.

Dad’s just lookin’ out for ya. Buff’s weighing the sheet down on the ground with bricks, readjusting it not-too-tight, so as not to damage the car.

The next day, before the Burrows are to pick up Markus for the pig-hunting trip, a letter with legal insignia arrives addressed to a Mr M. W. Bello. A court summons for a hearing in some months’ time.

Rene says, She’ll be right — yer haven’t driven for a year, got no priors, yer young. And remorseful, yair?

Markus sits in the back seat of Brute’s car. Buff’s driving. They head to the bush around the Lake. Buff rests two shotguns against a sapling. By mid-arvo, they’re hunting.

It’s not the killing of the pig that creeps Markus out the most; he supports removal of pests from where they don’t belong. Rene taught him that. Someone, maybe Cecily, once said that humans should be removed then, too: we don’t belong here. The feral pig is smaller and leaner and more muscular than a domestic pig. It’s got sinewy shoulders and neck, which remind him of an animal far grander — i.e. a wildebeest, though this pig, this mangy thing, is more thin and coarse. It has a long snout and tusks. Its tail is straight, with a bushy tip. Markus had been expecting a curly tail. It’s disturbing, never mind the coughing gurgle it’s making as the leftover air escapes its lungs. The blood: fine, bright, syrupy blood creeping through the boar’s hair. It makes him shiver.

Brute calls Markus a pussy.

Buff bends down beside his father, who’s wrestling the pig’s head into a position. Blood oozes out the pig’s left nostril. The Burrows look up from under their wide-brimmed hats. The sun brightens the scene, makes them squint, and Buff tilts his head toward his father.

Markus lines them up in the phone’s screen, because they’ve asked him to take a photo. It’s unbalanced. Too much weight. Too much emphasis on the people and not the pig — not enough emphasis on the pig’s wounds, which their friends in Narioka will admire when they look at this picture on Facebook. Markus moves toward the pig, grabs its ear. Warm. Perhaps not quite dead. Warm, and disgusting for being warm. It’s meant to be dead. Should be cold and vacant. Yet the glint of its eye hasn’t vacated. Markus pushes the limp pig’s head toward Brute and Buff, and the shotgun wound settles between them to show off torn ligament and shattered flesh. Brute was close when he was demonstrating to Buff how to shoot proper-point-blank in the neck. After readjusting the carcass, Markus steps back and realigns the men and the pig in the frame of Buff’s smartphone.

Back at the campsite, Brute drags the boar from the ute’s tray and then some distance away from their camp. Buff takes off his hat. He fills a plastic tub with water and rubs his hands in the liquid. Dirt and blood from the boar wash away. When he’s done, he walks to a nearby ironbark and pours the pink-tinted water at its base. Markus sits in a camp chair beside the fire, somewhat aware of Buff’s father hacking into the dirty flesh of a gigantic pig. He draws a random pattern in the dirt with the end of a stick he’s holding.

Buff sits beside him. Says, What d’you think?

About?

The hunt, he chuckles.

Markus shrugs.

Yer reckon it felt much?

What?

The pig.

Maybe at the start.

Yair. Buff’s picking stuff out from under his fingernails.

Markus says, It’s for the best. He’s thinking of the time this very situation had been reversed, when Buff had dropped a live mouse into Snake’s tank to be killed. He’s thinking how one event can flip over on its head.

Buff nods. Course, didn’t say otherwise, did I.

Nah, says Markus. He tosses the stick into the fire.

When the Burrows first moved into the region — father, mother, son — they bought the most expensive farm out the other side of Narioka. Prime real estate.

The Burrows family enjoyed aloneness in this arrangement, away from the goings-on of Narioka, eating dinner each night illuminated by the TV screen. Brute brought with him a mythology of rebellion — a bikie from a city club or some shit — though Markus never bought into it. At the first footy training Brute attended, Markus watched him drop a punt and then grab his hamstring as the ball fell wide of the goalposts. Despite this inaccuracy, the Burrows, from what Markus has seen over the years, are outward, upfront, and would rather chip-in to the community before they chipped in for each other. Buff’s mother is the chair of the PTA and president at the local netball club — always in the pub with a raffle board for one or the other. Brute, as the local mechanic, kept the town in motion and, in turn, the town kept him as both ruck rover and captain of the first eighteen. Their son, Buff, left to his own devices, pinged back and forth across the Depression. He vaunted his muscles, such as at the school swimming carnivals and even athletics day, though he insisted he went shirtless because of tags. In those sunglasses, shielding his eyes from the world, he spat out his hatred of any tag that scratched his neck: size tags, brand tags, name tags. He’d kick a shirt he tossed on the ground and complain, Companies fucken stitch tags into material so I can’t cut ’em away.

After the hunting trip, Rene’s asked him to put out a load of washing. Markus, the kitchen’s cool slate tile underfoot, instead fills a glass with boiling water and bi-carb soda and into it drops his top and bottom retainers. The bubbles fizz about the blue plastic moulds. With the glass in hand, he goes to the lounge and switches the AC on. He goes to his room, sits the glass on his bedside table. He falls onto his bed and covers himself with the doona. Throws it back because it’s far too hot for that. The heat irritates and makes him want to flick the taut skin covering his stomach.

Elba will be home soon. Maybe she’ll be hungry. He should cook. Pfft. He’s not her mother nor is she his mother. And she’s damn well not Elba. She’s Samantha, and everyone in town knows that Samantha became Elba. ¡Hola! Me llamo. Me nombré es Elba. May YAH-moh. Soy Elba. She’d taken a retreat trip to Spain three or four years back, which she maintains was paid for and run by Herbalife. Gone a week, two, maybe three. Upon her impending return, she’d phoned ahead. Gather in the lounge, she informed Rene over the phone. I’ve some news. Perhaps she’d said it in Spanish. On the day when Samantha was to arrive, Markus’d grabbed Cat and sat beside Rene on the couch. They hadn’t yet got an AC, so they were sticky-hot. Markus’d been in his undies prior to Samantha’s arrival, at least until his father thundered, Y’ain’t a Hilfiger model, now get in ya fucken clothes. Rene flicked over the pages of the Leader until he heard a car horn toot twice and jolted to his feet. Cat crouched low at this, eyes wide, ears back, claws dug deeper into Markus’s bare skin: needles piercing his thigh. Samantha came in, wearing a flowy orange flamenco-type skirt and a white sleeveless calico shirt, along with clunky jewellery. The top two buttons of her shirt were undone. Her hair was loose, wavy, darker, and it somehow made her green eyes illuminate.

From that day to this, and into the coming days, she is called Elba. Sometimes he wants to tear the clothes, tear the Spanish, from Elba. She’s more than that. She’s like Elmyra — both trying to forge identities in the confines of this small town. That’s what makes the men in the pub point them out. But he can’t tear their clothes away, because perhaps they’d tear his away in return … He hears the sound of a car in the distance. He shifts to the end of the mattress and reaches to close his bedroom door. It slams. He presses play on his music dock and the sound comes loud enough to signal don’t disturb. He tosses around a bit. The mattress holds the warmth from his body and intensifies it. He flops onto the floor. Even the floor, raised as it is off the ground by stilts, cannot escape the heat coming inside and making itself comfortable. The carpet bites into his back. A gap in the curtains releases a shaft of sunlight diagonally over his chest. Sweat pricking on his forehead.

The last two editions of the Leader have said that there might not be enough water to fill the public swimming pool this summer. The picture accompanying the articles both times was the Mayor and the lifeguard, that Youarang kid. The picture showed the Mayor standing on the pavement outside the pool’s cyclone-wire fence and Youarang inside the fence. Golden grass abounded. Youarang insisted that they make the pool full for summer to keep wayward youth off the street. The Mayor says, We’re here to do what’s best for the community, and if that means withholding water from the public pool for water on the farms, so be it.

Markus heads into the lounge, where Elba’s laying on the couch in the cool and dark; one forearm rests against her forehead, the other hand on her belly.

He announces that he’s going for a swim.

She lifts her head to say, Don’t drown.

He pokes his tongue out at her and exits through the front. He makes his way into town, doesn’t pay attention to which way he’s going. This place is familiar and his feet know their way. Besides, the pool is his focus, not how he gets there. The sudden need for water, for cool-blue, is possessing.

When he arrives, the pool is waterless. Was he expecting a fairy-tale ending? What, because he’s had a hard time? Yair. Right. Through the cyclone fence, Markus sees a dark crusty line against the side of the pool from where the water used to rest. On the front gate is a paper sign. There’ll be no swimming this summer. He pulls the pen out from his pocket and writes beneath you can if you like, mind your head on the bottom. When he turns away, his vision is obstructed: the bright sunlight reflecting off the white-paper note burnt into his pupils. A few moments, his eyes have readjusted. Clear. Turning away from the locked gates, he is paying attention to the scratchings in the pavement and the trodden-down chewing gum when he bumps into another person out here on the quiet street.

It’s Cecily. Her skin paler than the last time he saw her — which was in her togs, sitting beside Grayson at the pool. Her lips thinner than when they had maneuvered cherry-flavoured ice cream into her mouth; today, they’re ajar as if she’s breathless. She puts her hand on her stomach.

Without any witnesses, he speaks to her directly: What are you doing here?

I live here. She hitches her duffle bag up on her shoulder. And I could ask you the same. She’s not looking at him; she’s wearing sunglasses, though, so could be casting side glances.

I came to see if the newspaper article about the pool was true, he says.

She nods. Same.

He wants her to hold him responsible, to smash his face into the contorted cyclone wire. He peers at her, pleading her to place it all on him. To make it known he’s solely responsible.

Yet she says, I tried to call you heaps of times.

I know.

To no answer.

I know.

All I wanted was to … I dunno, she says and shrugs at the same time.

He finally looks away, across to the empty creek. He’s certain this is the end. He says, We could get a coffee? The words as bitter in his mouth as the burnt coffee he’s just suggested they should get.

She scoffs, spilling a scolding of embarrassment over his skin. It’s too late for that, she says. She hitches up her duffel bag once more and goes to step around him.

He touches her elbow and says, I love him.

She might have blinked, long and slow, before she answers. So do I. She removes herself from his touch and heads down the empty street, searching for a different pool to swim in.

Feeling defeated, and without any water to hold him afloat, his days are disposed of by doing very little. Blue seeps into his mind, perhaps because of the heat, the absence of water. Blue light in stained-glass. He catches sight of it out the corner of his eye. Reflective blue, sky-high soaring blue, deep blue. Blue eyes. He can never focus on it, but he can’t escape it either. Recently, it’s been getting closer to ceremonious blue, the colour of regret.

Or the violet-blue shade of the official flower of Derby Day at far-off Flemington — cornflower (Centaurea cyanus): that flower, on purpose, conflicts with the upcoming yellow-gold rose of Tuesday’s grander Cup. Rene’s betting two bucks each way on each race; he sips mineral waters on ice, with a slice of lemon. Elba’s done a platter of tonally different cheeses, cured meats and fruit, and one or two dips of questionable colour. Markus drops a grand on the nose of the clear favourite, but he loses it all when some 100–1 shot cuts through the pack to claim the win.

Despite the work he’s doing for the farm’s books, right through to Christmas Rene is at him. Ya need a proper job. Markus is surprised his father doesn’t count the bookwork and money-finding as proper work. The north winds get drier, hotter, stronger. Good washing days, Markus says to Elba. She looks at him, smiles and says, Well, we best get to it.

On Boxing Day, Rene makes him play backyard cricket. The kerbside bin’s the stumps. Rene bowls from near the house. Six and out, no LBs, auto wikie. The radio’s crackling. The Test at the ’G is almost understandable. Elba sits under the shade of a few stray oleanders, which Rene’s yet to remove and poison.

At the end of the week, Rene and Elba go into town on New Year’s Eve. No fireworks: total fire ban. Markus says he’ll stay home. No point without fireworks. He watches Round The Twist and drinks beer.

And in time, Markus’s twentieth birthday passes in the form of a chocolate mud-cake from the IGA and home-brand fizzy drink. Rene’s working hard, and comes in from the land at nine or ten pm to say, Thistles’ve blown in from the next property over — ’bout a k ’way. Took longer than expected to chip them out.

By mid-February, Rene’s at it again. Ya need a proper job.

Where in this desolation? Markus, instead, keeps to his father’s farm’s books. The money trouble doesn’t worsen or improve.

And then autumn’s mid-way through its moods. Outside, none of the leaves drop: the trees keep hold of them as if pulling a woolly jumper tighter around their branches. The grass begins to green. A fake green that’ll turn yellow with the faintest lick of heat.

Winter’s darkness rises at six in the evening. Days shorten. When not filled with cloud or fog, the sky’s heavy. He wants it to fall to the earth and fill the Depression to the brim.

Markus looks at the weave in the carpet. The fibres bind themselves up with one another. He attempts to unpick them: Platonic union will always end in undoing. An hour later, he’s showered and dressed. It’s not much. It’s enough. Black and grey, as if for a funeral. The suit’s tight over his chest and pinches a little under his arms.

Rene says, Shirt looks better tucked in.

It’s otherworldly. A court appearance is otherworldly. A world of murder in dank alleys and drug busts in ghettos. Somehow, Markus has fallen to the other side of the tracks. You don’t have to deal with that side unless you do something otherworldly. He gets a waft of new-leather from his shoes. Their stiff heels bite into his ankle’s soft flesh. The mirror shows him his own blank eyes, which say he’s not ready.

Narioka’s courthouse is a solid red-brick structure. It holds a single courtroom surrounded on three sides by offices. The façade is elaborate, flanked by timber and a cast-iron bullnose veranda. The ridged slate roof is decorated with railings and finials. The gable reaches an interesting culmination, though none can actually see the culmination because it reaches too high for prying eyes — passers-by just assume it’s interesting. When judges are not using the rooms — which they do just once a month — local growers use them to sell produce from. The judge, in gown and cap, sits behind a wooden desk, which is too elaborate for this rurality. The judge is small, and appears lost in the elongated grain and tight knots and growth rings and burls and slubs. Most of the room’s interior is composed of wood: it is as if Markus has been transported inside the trunk of a giant eucalypt, like a bardi grub under instruction from the barrister he has met today. He, or rather the pro bono barrister, pleads guilty to one count of dangerous driving. Evidence is presented, questions asked, points contested, flipped, proven, shushed-up. Markus watches, through the windows, the blue sky outside and some cockatoos flapping past.

No rain falls. They say the drought’s broken in the city — a pipeline is their saviour. Yet, it’s hard to keep the city’s reservoirs full when they’re thirty-two per cent, slowly falling, and there’s no water left here in the Depression for them to pipe away.

In bed, Markus rolls over to his stomach. The new position draws out stiffness in his lower back. Waking in the same room that he fell asleep in isn’t enough. As he clamps shut his eyes, he wishes he’d remained asleep.

A day after his sentencing, Markus is the same.

He’d gotten home the previous night and cried in the bottom of the shower. No release, just salty water running in with the clean and washing away down the drain. He’d used Elba’s sewing needle to cut open his skin. No release, just stinging in the shower and even that, the pain, no longer calmed him. What he assumes the judicial system intends as a release — the sentence — is rather anticlimactic. As far as the judge is concerned, the case is finished, and in a fortnight, Markus will begin community service as a council worker, weeding at the side of the road, marking lines in the middle of it, mowing the lawn beside the public swimming pool. Wearing a high-visibility vest won’t make the deceased visible.

It was the farmer first on scene who’d stuck more than anything else.

The farmer had asked, You okay?

Markus nodded. Just a little tired, he said.

Stay awake and count for me.

One two three four …

You the only one in the car? the farmer asked.

No, Markus said.

Was there two of ya, son? More?

Markus nodded. Two. But I don’t know where he is now.

Help’ll be here soon, the farmer said.

Can you help me find him?

I don’t think we will.

How can you know that?

The farmer patted Markus’s shoulder. Are ya right? the farmer asked.

Markus nodded. It could be worse.

You’re alive, aren’t ya.

Yair.

Son, the farmer said, ya need to sit down for a minute.

But what about my friend?

Sit on the grass, the farmer said. The ambos are here.

Can you get my friend?

The ambos want to look ya over.

Where’s Grayson?

C’mon, son, the farmer said.

You know where Grayson is, don’t you?

The farmer nodded.

Please tell me?

Afterward, the local sergeant said, We’ll be in contact soon.

Rene drove Markus home from the scene, and neither of them said a word. It was a long while ago if counting the days chronologically and rather inadequate if measuring by your own peculiar sense of time. They’d pulled up out back of Rene’s as the sun began to raise its golden head: a sleepy teenager yawning through fairy-floss pink clouds and breaking the robin-egg blue. Last night’s violent storm was nothing more than the four smashed hanging pots lying on the veranda’s brickwork. Markus looked at the mud on his hands, under his nails, the redder stuff up his arms; he looked at his torn jeans and punctured shirt. Inside the house, he’d stripped to his undies and slipped beneath the cold doona. Tears came. Kept coming and he gasped. When he could no longer hear the sounds of Rene or Elba, he took his swimming bag and left the house. The distinct claustrophobia of safety was too much. He walked out into a high sun. He walked the back roads. He walked to the public pool (which had still had water in it). It was empty of people.

Didn’t reckon we’d be seeing you this morning, said Youarang, who stood in the dim entry room with the ice-creams and packet chips and Python snakes, wearing his glary yellow YMCA lifesaver t-shirt.

Markus went there to feel exhausted, to feel his body burn and burst, just like most other mornings; however, this morning, he contemplated letting the water extinguish him.

Standing in the mid-section of the public pool, the water was ice-blue cool on Markus’s skin. A car hushed past on Melville Street. Gone before he saw it. He looked at the replica steam-train in the rose gardens beside the empty creek before he sank beneath the water. He let his back touch the bottom. He couldn’t decide where the surface ended and the sky began. He screamed into the water. What he screamed was an attempt to push the crushing weight suffocating his chest out of him. The air bubbles from his lungs rattled the water, rushing to the surface as if his scream had boiled it. When there was no air left in him, he considered breathing in. Instead, he put his feet on the semi-slimy bottom and followed his bubbles upward, onward. He swashed the mud and dried blood from his body until he was clean. Picking out the same stuff stuck under his fingernails took the longest. He swam next. Lap after lap of breaststroke, kicking against the water, splitting it and dragging it behind him with his palms. Lap after lap, until he was dry-retching above the overflow drain that runs around the rim of the pool.

At home, he’d made his way to the bathroom. Put the radio on. He’d looked at himself in the mirror for a long time and had clenched at the pain in his shoulder — he could remember that side of his body hitting the driver’s door when the car flipped. He hoped it’d bruise. He let go of the shoulder. Clenched again.

He found the traces that Grayson had left behind after he had stayed over two nights ago, after Markus’s eighteenth birthday. There was an un-hung towel and the Vegemite jar out on the bench, with further evidence of its use — a dirty knife and plate — in the sink. These traces annoyed Markus as he followed them around the house, because he was the one who had to clean them up and it was like Grayson was dying again. But touching them, picking them up — running his fingers over the dried-out towel — he realised that these things were some of the last things Grayson had touched. And this made Markus appreciate them. These traces of Grayson were a strange currency that Markus felt comfortable using in the days following Grayson’s death. An economy he used to buy the next day, and the next. Even after the towel had been hung out on the line, smelling of rosy fabric softener. Even after the plate and knife were put away, sparkling.

Elba was on the couch, her auburn hair black in the dim room, her dress lying against her skin as if it were a blanket. Her damp hair hung off her forehead. The plastic blinds drawn over the lounge room’s windows clacked against the sill. Markus imagined blowing Elba’s dress away, as he would a tissue from the bench into the bin. She snored. The telly was playing a repeat of Seinfeld. He decided it wasn’t funny, turned it over to The Amazing World Of Gumball. It wasn’t any funnier, but it made him forget the world for the show’s duration.

He woke when it was dark.

Rene’d replaced Elba on the couch, and the telly had Seinfeld back. Rene told him, We’re gunna have a bonfire out back.

Markus said, I’ll be right.

Rene said, It’s for you.

And Markus had agreed. Too tired to argue or, rather, too light — there it was again: light. He said, I can’t stay up too late, my apprenticeship starts tomorrow.

Nah, bud. It’s sorted. I spoke with Brute. Says start when y’ready.

While Markus waited for the fire, he deleted all the apps from his phone. Facebook, Snapchat, Insta, Words with Friends. He took the battery and SIM out. Tried to stop anyone from getting in his head. He placed his mobile in the same snap-lock plastic bag Elba had presented a rock from Uluru to him in only a few days ago. He put the bag under his bed. He got his laptop and disconnected from the internet, returned the laptop to its satchel and put it on the floor inside his wardrobe. He turned off the power points in his room, except for his bedside lamp. He gathered his shoes and put them in a garbage bag, ready to burn on the bonfire. Outside, he felt frost forming on the grass between his toes and he felt the dampness soaking into the hems of his jeans. He looked into the fire.

’Nother log’ll do ’er, Rene said.

Markus said he’d get it.

Y’got no shoes on.

S’alright.

Elba said, Let him be, Ren. The sangria stuck to her cheeks when she said, Shoes make no difference now. Markus felt more strongly than ever the desire to lose himself in an alternative identity, just as she had. Rene, his face shadowy from the flickering flame, smiled tight and walked away to get another log for the fire. Markus began burning all his shoes, starting with his Blundstones.

The next morning, the bonfire was smouldering and its streaky-white smoke sailed upward into the ironbark canopies above the driveway. There were galahs squabbling over roosting room in the branches, or perhaps the birds were complaining at the smoke. Beneath them, Rene and Markus re-laid straw and replaced geraniums — the first of his father’s attempts to return to normal, though these actions would slowly become an invisible leash to keep Markus close. Rene showed Markus how the geraniums flowered: the unassuming flower heads broke open to reveal a delicate flesh-pink flower, which would deepen to a tangerine.

The depth of winter shallows into summer. Markus goes for a walk, passing by his old high school. The tall gum trees around frame it. And standing before that place, he feels he’s grown, not up, but away. And not away from that place mentally, but rather away from place physically. This place: Narioka.

In year eight or nine his then PE class, called Individual Activities, spent four weeks of first term doing water sports. That means we piss on each other, one of the boys said, and the whole group had laughed. Where’s Georges, said another of the boys, he’d be a slut for it. They laughed again, one of them mimicking holding his cock and pretending to piss into the water. Grayson said, Water aerobics is old people’s swimming. He’d been standing erect, hands on his hips and a dip in his back: a dip that urged Markus to sink his head in its cradle (like when Grayson would lie down beside the footy oval and rest his head on his arms and his body looked as if it were the perfect place to sleep). Markus watched Grayson watch the water, and saw the crystal-blue reflection dancing in Grayson’s brown eyes. Markus stops himself there, aware of the potential disaster of fairy-tale happiness. Cut. Cut. Cut back to the core.

When he gets home from this walk, the ABC is playing reruns of the first season of Dance Academy. He has watched it each week previous and now he watches each episode again. Rene and Elba have left him quite alone since his sentencing — they’re waiting for the legal papers to come back to see where they’ve set up his community service. While they wait, one’s working and the other is lunching with the girls. At dinner the other night, there was some talk of his twenty-first birthday: his plans, their plans etc. Markus had said nothing. A birthday’s not what it once was. For now, he settles in on the couch, blanket over him. Tells himself he has a dancer’s body and that this body can leap and soar.

The Leader’s on the coffee table. He’d stopped reading the articles about the railway construction saga when the editor had started placing them beyond the crossword. The latest edition reports that due to financial difficulties elicited by drought, the rail project is on hold, of course. Drought this and drought that. It isn’t only the absence of water; it sucks life not only out of the land but also from opportunity.

Cat’s sitting on the windowsill scratching at the glass, which distracts Markus. Cat meows and starts scratching its claw harder. Markus groans, rolls off the couch, and sways over on all fours. He catches sight of a blur outside, rubs an eye, and when it refocuses he sees a slim, brown-fur cat slink away into the plains-grass paddock. Cat turns its head up, meows. Markus pats it. Cat purrs and slumps off.

After he’s folded the blanket over the back of the couch, Markus finds Cat in his bedroom, sleeping on top of the poetry piled at the foot of the bed. Markus taps on his lamp. The light’s beautiful and enough. He strips his bed sheets and moves the things that’ll get in the way, like his pedestal fan. He vacuums his mattress and his bedside table and the floor and the curtains and the roof. When he’s done, he gets a bucket of steaming water. Washes the walls and the door and the window. Goes out the front door and splashes the dirty water into a wild-looking geranium. The liquid drips off the leaves. He remakes his bed. He puts his four pillows in pairs, diagonally beside each other, at the top of the bed. He replaces the pedestal fan. He takes down from the walls the faded Aquaman posters. Opens the curtains, and a cool breeze puffs the lace behind the curtains into his body. It’s a little before six — the sky is cyan, pink clouds, and a tinge yellow-green.

Elmyra opens the door to her house. She’d called him up while he was contemplating the clouds. She’d asked him over. Her shoulders curl inward when she sees him.

He didn’t bring anything — no gift, no card, no flowers — because, as he was rushing out the door to come over here, a vague thought had crossed his mind: sentimental gestures won’t close this gap.

They’d found Mrs Robinson, dead, sitting in the front seat of her old Falcon. Apparently, she’d driven through the Country Club to the back of the faux island, along its jutting mass, down the bank, and out into the middle of the empty Lake. She’d parked there. Exposed. And hot, very hot inside a closed-up car. The engine was running, and by now there was a hose taped to the exhaust.

Elmyra told him on the phone, in a stream of rapid word-vomit, that she’s blu-tacked to her mother’s door a flimsy-plastic danger do not enter sign. She said she got it from the cheap shop in town, the same place she got her plastic crucifix.

And now, alone in the house, she doesn’t invite Markus in with words; rather, it’s her eyes that draw him in. The activity inside, suspended momentarily to answer a knock at the door, distracts him from the weight of the situation. A kettle lost in a wild, boiling roar, quietening. Piles of clothes systematically laid out on the kitchen table — dirty, clean, and folded. Dotted between, and spilling out onto the kitchen bench nearby, are vases with flowers and cards embossed in looped script that fails to express the deepest sympathy it purports.

I didn’t bring anything, he says. He stops to let her pass.

She’s close behind him, not looking at him. She runs one of her hands, fingers splayed, through her soft, long hair as she passes by him. Her scent is numb, sleepy. She takes down two mugs from a kitchen overhead cupboard and then looks at him.

It’s not ice or glass or any other clichéd glaze in her eyes; it’s exhaustion.

I’ll get it, he says.

She shrugs, returning to the table to fold the clean and dried clothes.

Markus drops a spoonful of instant into each mug. He notices that the clothes she’s washed, all of the clothes, are her mother’s clothes. He knows this because the fabric’s cut and the patterned intensity of these clothes are not as exact or as fine as what he knows Elmyra prefers. He lightens the coffee with milk, and offers a mug to her. She appraises it and continues folding.

She stops when she comes to a white shirt. Tightens the fabric between her hands.

You okay?

There’s a stain.

He lifts his chin, trying to peer to where her gaze is fixed. He says, You can wash it again, yair? Elba makes me use this—

Fuck, she spits. She drops the shirt. She runs a hand through her hair, combing it back.

What’s wrong? he says, though as the words leave him, they sound wrong.

I’m fucken hopeless is what’s wrong.

That’s not—

Enough, she cuts him off. She moves past him, opens a drawer and takes out a permanent marker. Across the room, where she opens the door to her mother’s room. The plastic danger sign falls down.

Fuck, he breathes. He sets down his coffee and follows after her.

Elmyra’s cleaned Mrs Robinson’s room, and packed away the knickknacks into a few small cardboard boxes. Only a bed, stripped of its sheets, and two bedside tables remain. Elmyra crawls on her hands and knees to the middle of her mother’s mattress. She uncaps the permanent marker, biting the cap off with her teeth. Still. Then, she begins scrawling. The nib scratches across the thin threads of her mother’s bare bed. Catching and breaking away, catching again. Her hand moves steadily across the mattress, swipes back towards the middle to continue writing.

She jerks upright; her knees depress the mattress as if to engulf her body. She throws the permanent marker at the wall and falls in on herself. She stays side-on, lying across the words she’s written.

Markus squats beside the bed and rests his chin on top of the mattress. She’s looking at him, and he at her.

She whispers, I’m sorry.

He smiles. He stands. Helps her to her feet. He takes her to the bathroom and tells her, I’ll stay here while you shower. He waits to hear the rush of water before going back to her mother’s bedroom. He picks up the ‘danger’ sign from the floor, chucks it on the mattress, and closes the door behind him. He walks back down the hallway and sits beside the bathroom door.

When she comes out sometime later, her body’s sweaty, red, and she smells of honeysuckle and lemon myrtle. He takes her to her own bedroom. When she’s sunk beneath her bed’s flower canopy, safe under the heavy doona, he sits at her dresser and waits until she’s asleep. She’s breathing heavily. He turns to the three mirror panes on the dresser: three of him look back from three different angles. He plays with the glass perfume bottles. When he lifts them, they leave clean circles in the dust that’s settled. He moves them around, their vibrant tones clinking into each other. This is where she used to become Marilyn.

A few days later, he decides to revisit Elmyra. He’s not heard from her. Buff had messaged him and said she’d set a manky mattress on fire in her front yard. Markus wrote his response straight away and then waited an hour to send it. He’d said: the mattress isn’t the point.

Buff responded within a minute: exactly u soft cock.

Markus imagines Elmyra sinking into a bathtub of slow-moving steaming water. Not drowning, just resting beneath the surface while a candle burns fire into the room. He sends back to Buff: have you seen her.

everyday u?

For a moment Markus wants to respond with no she has you but he doesn’t.

On the day he has chosen, a high sun waits for him. He tugs up his polo’s collar. No wind. The canopied drive gives shelter. Toward the end of the driveway, he heads over to the orange geraniums, from which he picks full-flowering blooms and three other fine stems with unbloomed buds. He jumps in the empty potholes in the road to town and smiles and laughs and wishes Grayson were here. And that there was rain. Blue. Water to turn the potholes into tiny lakes. A car with its lights on full-beam gains distance. He’s looking at the twinkle they make in the heat wave, liquid rising off the road’s surface.

If I stay here, it’s almost as if none of what has happened ever happened at all. If I stay still. As if all is normal and continual and eternal, like the arching emptiness of the dogged sunlight whipping across the surface at the public pool. Only the pool’s waterless. Looking past the car’s headlights flashing—

Move, dickhead!

Markus stumbles onto the gravel at the side of the road and the deep-twilight-blue car speeds on behind him. He looks at the geraniums he’s picked for Elmyra, and throws them into the tall wild oats growing between the side of the road and the fenced-off paddock at his left. He can’t give her flowers; he needs a gesture bigger than petals and stamens and unopened buds.

That’s when he gets a call from Georges, which distracts him completely from Elmyra. Because the rippling water returns, unrevealing and dazzling: Georges’s eyes. The blue that’s been seeping into his vision has been there since last time. Last time, the pearly-white circling Georges’s blue was tarnished by thin red capillaries that’d blown, and which wriggled like the vibrant roots of seaweed. Back then, in the pub as ‘Otis’ played, Georges had said that he was rooted because he’d driven from the city late at night to get to Narioka in time for Grayson’s funeral. This time, years later, Georges says he’s won a wanky award in the city and that Narioka Council’s asked him to bring some artwork for the country folk. For inspiration (and to scoff at).

He says to Markus that it’d be nice if they could catch up.

Yair.

Georges says, I get the feeling much has changed and no one’s sat drunken in a bar and reviewed the progress.

Wind’s cold and comes through Markus’s thinning jumper, which he’s had since he was in year six and that nineteen-year-old cricketer from Manchester (UK) came to play for a season. Markus had heard Manchester fucking a girl from the pub into uncontrolled moans — both hers and his. Markus knows stories of girlfriends wearing items of their boyfriends’ clothes, like the girl from the pub the next morning was wearing one of Manchester’s shirts with the word ‘OBEY’ across her breasts. In the days before Manchester was to fly back to the UK, Markus had snuck into his room and stolen a clean-smelling brown jumper out of the tallboy. It seemed like the only thing he could do to maintain his infatuation with Manchester, because, even though Manchester had never laid a finger (or any other body part) on him, Markus wanted to, just like the girl from the pub, feel close to him. Markus is wearing that jumper today. It is old and thinning, but it still fits him, and something this old and from another time is hard to throw away.

There’s a seat across from Markus where Georges will sit.

The emptiness of the chair and its potential makes him recall how, in year ten, Buff said he’d gone to a Nine Inch Nails concert in the city and that it wasn’t lame to line up after the gig for Ternt/Kent/Trent to sign his CD. CDs, Grayson had said as if they were as ancient as paper and pen. Who on earth buys CDs? And Buff had said nothing. Something he’d been unaware of had been brought to his attention.

Markus shakes his head and looks down the street. Silly stuff. The wind disarms him. His thoughts are promising.

Seeing someone you’ve not seen for years is like regaining a part of yourself you hadn’t realised you’d lost, or like finding money in the washing. Markus realises this as soon as Georges hugs him. They come together, and Georges makes a quiet joke about being the only ‘two’ in Narioka. As they hug, Georges’s biceps press firm against Markus.

They break apart.

Markus says, You got fit. He laughs.

There’s like an expectation that I have a fit body now, Georges says. And I like to prove them wrong.

How so?

There’s this club in St Kilda, says Georges, maybe it’s the crystal, maybe the beat, but all the guys get down to their jockstraps. Mostly it’s hairy-fucker bears with beer guts and sweaty chests. He pauses. It’s actually quite repulsive.

Is that why you do it?

To be repulsive? No, Markus. Spartan strength doesn’t armour you. Nor does a beer gut and hairy chest. Georges winks. The sweat is what gives you away. He pauses and takes a sip of water. He says, I’ve been at the movies with Elmyra and Cecily. Gatsby. Fucken thing ran longer than expected. The man wouldn’t die. D’you know it makes me really sad that he didn’t want to leave Daisy. He hums to the music playing over the café’s PA above them. He says, I loved Gatsby since the first time we read it at school. I know I wasn’t the only one.

Markus pours himself a glass of water, to which Georges raises his own in a cheers. I reread it recently, Markus says. Found it a bit Baroque.

Isn’t that the way of love?

Markus shrugs. Runs his finger around the rim of his glass. Says, What have you been doing the last few years? I didn’t hear from you in between.

And I didn’t hear from you, Georges says. Mostly? Mum and I go to gallery openings, and eat way too much food. I’m sure people thinks it’s lame we spend so much time together, but she did push me out into this world. And, honestly, it’s so much more meaningful spending time with her than with some uptight little fairy that only wants a fuck.

Markus tries to play it cool. That can’t be all that bad.

Don’t get me wrong — I don’t mind the sex, but it’s so tedious sometimes, and I’d much prefer to do things I enjoy with people I enjoy being around.

You’ve been busy then?

Sure, Georges says curtly. And you?

Markus looks into his glass, then up and around as he says, Just been here, I guess.

You guess?

Markus shrugs. You’ve lived here. You know what it’s like.

Sure.

Anyway, says Markus. I wanted to say that I liked your exhibition.

Before they met up here, Markus had popped into the Town Hall where the exhibition was. An old lady handed him a booklet, printed on A4 paper and folded in half. It had the titles of each of the paintings and a short description; Markus had thrown it away. They were big canvases, ceiling-height in the old school hall and coloured black, white, and grey. None of them were framed. It was as if they each bled over their individual edges and grew into each other. They were sketch-like oil paintings, mostly of men: some naked, some clothed, some together, some alone. There was nothing provocative or progressive, and Markus had only been able to tell that they were men because he’d been looking hard enough through the restless paint-strokes, which Georges’s deliberate hand had seemingly placed in an attempt to censor the truth. They made Markus smile. He wanted to get in between the layers of colour, where the tones shifted and changed and intermingled. They each seemed so full that he felt like if he stood closer, he’d breathe in what he hasn’t accepted in himself.

Georges asks, What did you think?

Markus says, They’re better than the ones you did in high school.

That’s because I’ve given up trying to explain myself, Georges says. Cold War Kids, y’know, dancing like a martyr.

It softens Markus to hear him mention Cold War Kids.

Georges says, It’s a shame I have to go early in the morning. I have to pack the exhibition away. He says, You should come to the big smoke sometime.

Markus replies, One day.

You know when we were in high school and all those boys used to make fun of me? Hearing this said aloud shocks Markus, who fumbles for an explanation, a defence of himself. Georges holds up a hand. You had your own shit to deal with, he says. This is about me. For a moment, Georges is very serious, but then he smiles and his smiling mouth drifts into his words. At the time, my father got sick and I watched him get sicker and sicker, as I started to hate myself more and more because of what those boys were saying, doing, to me. I was cutting myself, taking drugs, crying. And one day when my dad was still at home, he heard me crying.

Markus can’t look at him directly.

Dad comes in, coughing, these massive fucken black bags under his eyes. Sits beside me and says, what are yer doin’, mate? I think he knew that I knew what he meant, even though I said I didn’t, because the next thing he says is, everyone’s a cunt, some worse than others, trick is don’t let the real bad ones tell yer any different. I nodded, pretending that I still didn’t know he knew his son was a little queer.

But I’m—

Shouldn’t matter what I am, Markus, or what I’m not.

What does it matter then?

It matters because ‘one day’ will get away from you. And here, in Narioka, especially.

The wind blows up from the paddocks outside town and makes Markus’s jumper flap against his body and his fringe blow into his eyes. Each time he wipes his hair away, he catches a different aspect of the view before him: the skate park; eucalypts; a finished plate of dinner. None fit together. Except Georges. There’s that urge toward him, which has now reshaped itself into Markus wanting Georges to pick him up.

Georges studies Markus, and then asks, You had a twenty-first? I figured my invite just got lost in the mail. An innocent smile indicates a joke.

Markus says, My twenty-first kinda got lost in everything else.

It would’ve been nice to celebrate. Not everyone gets to.

Maybe. Y’know, things get in the way, and then Elmyra’s mother …

Georges doesn’t know.

Mrs Robinson topped herself.

No.

El didn’t say anything at the movies?

Georges shakes his head. Or Cec. He looks at the pattern in the pavement. The entire movie and neither of them …

Markus shrugs and says, I think she’s enjoying the space.

That’s vulgar, Markus, really.

And Markus reminds Georges that Elmyra had cared for her mother since year eight, cared for her like trying to cure a disease.

Whether or not Elmyra is enjoying the new space created by her absent mother, the next morning, as Markus is hanging washing out on the line, he can’t quite believe he’d said it. Perhaps seeing Georges had made him say more than he’d anticipated; perhaps what he said was, purely, an explanation for how he feels about Elmyra and her mother. He’s hanging undies by their corners with one peg. The Hills Hoist’s wire is beginning to fray. This whole time he’s avoided reconnecting with his oldest friend because he hasn’t felt he’s had the right way to go about it. Fuck it. Inside, he tosses the washing basket into the laundry trough. Into his room, where he dons a hoodie and his orange Vans.

He ducks out the back door, walking through the paths between the veggie beds, toward the shed. He opens the gun cabinet and takes out his father’s gun. He collects two shots, and two shots only, before heading around the front of the house, to Rene’s ute. He places the gun behind the driver’s seat. Takes a moment before he gets in. Elmyra swirls like a wide skirt through his hesitation.

Markus drives to Elmyra’s house. Kills the engine when he arrives. Vibrations still tingling in him as he walks up the front path and knocks on door. She doesn’t answer, of course, so he jumps the side fence and goes around the back. The sliding door is open. Sitting beside the fruit bowl on her dining-room table is a postcard he found in St Vinnies years and years ago. Light reflects off the Pink Lady apples in the bowl, giving the card in a rosy glow. He’d given it to her one birthday. It has on its front a picture of Marilyn Monroe, without make-up and looking directly at the viewer.

El, he calls into the space. You in here? He goes to her bedroom.

She’s sleeping inside. Her head almost covered entirely by the doona, in a cocoon of her own making. Beside her sleeps Buff Burrows. Immovable. Of course he is. His back’s not covered by the doona. Exposed.

El, he whispers so as not to wake Buff. He places his hand on her shoulder. Wake up, El.

She stirs.

El.

She recoils, takes a moment to assess. The fuck, Markie? she mumbles.

He places a finger over his mouth, glares at Buff beside her.

We’re sleeping.

Were, he corrects.

What?

C’mon, he whispers, heading over to her wardrobe. He carefully opens the doors and looks at the rainbow of colour inside.

Where are we going? He sees in her tri-fold mirror that she’s stretching under the covers. He sees as she rolls over to Buff and presses her lips to his temple.

Business to do, he says.

Huh.

He selects a dress. Turns and shows it to her.

Remind me to never let you pick my outfit. She gets out of bed and pushes him from the room.

He sits in the lounge, watching the ABC, as she gets ready. She comes out dolled-up as Marilyn. He smiles.

What? she says.

Marilyn.

She’s picking her fingernails. She says, Fuck off, Markus.

He flicks the TV off and takes her by the hand. At the ute, he helps her up into the cabin because she’s wearing heels. He gets in behind the wheel.

You right? she says, fixing her make-up in the visor’s mirror.

Yair, he says taking hold of the wheel, yair I am. He starts the engine and drives them out to the Lake, pulling up near to the edge.

Fuck off, Markie, she says.

Wait.

You can’t be serious, she says, looking out the passenger window. Why bring me here?

He reaches behind the driver’s seat and pulls out the shotgun.

She laughs, You’ve fucken lost it.

No, it’s right here in my hand. He gets out. She follows, complaining that her heels are sinking in the sand. At the edge, they stand, perhaps near to where they’d once stood in their bathers, back when the Lake was full. He can’t remember. Nor can she. She’s staring out, probably at the place where her mother’s car was found.

She says, I haven’t been out here since it happened.

He’s holding the gun’s barrel pointed to the empty Lake. He’s not sure how they got to Mrs Robinson through the tangle of overgrown weeds lining the Lake’s bed. Further across, on the faux island projecting into this mess, the rabbits at the edge of the Lake skitter and dart up the bank into the longer grass. Two of them. Fat. Free. Feral.

What are we doing here? Elmyra whines a little. She stretches out her arms high above her head. I just want to go home.

He points the gun toward the pair of rabbits. Markus had never let his father teach him how to shoot. So he says to her, You take the first shot. You were always good at clay target. He holds out the gun for her; she is hesitant, her head dipping to the weapon then back up to him.

Then, with a firm, distinct grip, she takes it.

He says, Keep an eye out and wait.

You never learnt how to shoot, she says, so don’t tell me what to do. She places the gun’s butt against her shoulder, assumes her stance as if professional. Your turn next.

But before he can protest, one of the rabbits hops down onto the bank on the faux island, slowly and very cautiously. The second follows, hopping over to its mate. Elmyra releases the safety, cocks the barrel, and shoots. Part of the head, the brain, of the first rabbit spatters onto the second.

Fuck, Markus says.

She snaps open the barrel and says, Rabbits are a lot easier than clays. She puts out her hand for the second round, which he pulls out of his pocket and hands to her. She loads the gun with ease, snapping the barrel back into place. Your turn, she says.

He shakes his head.

For fuck’s sake. She grabs his arm. Like this. She presses the gun’s butt into his shoulder and takes him by the hand, telling him where to hold it.

There’s no rabbit to shoot, he says.

The second one’ll come back down to check on its mate, she says. Rabbits are dumb, they always do. Don’t put your finger on the trigger until you’re ready to shoot. I’ll get everything; you just shoot when I say.

Just as she said would happen, the second rabbit steps out of the grass and comes down to the side of the first. It sniffs the tattered remains.

Aim.

Markus says, Fuck, under his breath, really quietly.

Put your finger on the trigger, she says.

And he does.

Now.