We’ll Stand In That Place

Kit Scriven

T he pants of Andy’s best suit tighten at Baby’s knees and crotch. Baby settles onto his haunches, stretching Andy over him.

Rubbish floats on the fringe of the tide that smudges the beach. Baby studies a cigarette filter that has unravelled into a tangle-winged butterfly. A thin film covers the surface of the water in which it floats. Oil, Baby decides, perhaps from one of the tankers he can see on the bay, an accident, or maybe a deliberate release from one of the ships stacked with containers, the captain impatient for his berth and the brothel and needing to punish something, even this water, which licks his stain into the beach.

Baby dips his hand into the smudge and scoops up the remnants of the cigarette. The water is tinged with a thickness that blurs its translucence and shines pink, green and yellow and every colour Baby knows. If Andy was here, Baby would demonstrate how the unravelled filter of a cigarette is a butterfly with wings of impossible colour.

Baby’s contemplation is disturbed by a dog splashing in the shallows, a tall hound with legs soaked to the shoulder. An Afghan, Baby decides. The dog poses in front of him, a catwalk model of a dog, strong-jawed and high cheek-boned, alert to her beauty.

‘Out. Out,’ a voice to his right says.

Baby jumps. The dog points her head at the voice, decides not to listen, and walk-wades south, towards the marina.

Got a boat of her own, Baby thinks. Dog like that.

‘Damn dog.’

The speaker is too close. She is bare-legged, and her feet are unclothed, toes scrunching the sand. Adjacent to her knees is a lead, fancy leather with studs of silver. Baby envisions a shopping expedition, the smile stretched on the lips of the assistant as she calculates the time it will take to rehang the leads of fine leather discarded across the high backs of chairs. But there is a lot to consider, how best to complement the elegance of the Afghan, the shade of tan on the hands and forearms of the holder of the lead, whether the colour of the leather will clash with the seats of the BMW, whether they’ll look too much of a pair when the owner wears that leather thing around her neck.

Baby doesn’t lift his head. He doesn’t want to talk. He keeps his head down and his eyes on the woman’s feet, which are narrow and long-toed and seem a good fit with her ankles, calves and knees. Since Baby returned to St Kilda he has persevered with his study of feet. He could provide a detailed description of the woman to the police if required: height, weight, a good stab at hairstyle and colour, whether she is loud or like him, and even if he hadn’t seen the Afghan, the breed of dog with which the beach walker might accessorise her life.

A moment later all that’s left are the footprints of the woman and the stink of wet dog, which Baby knows he has imagined. Because smell is a handy way to endow a daydream. Baby conjures the deck of a boat at the marina, then the hound, and a warm towel with which he rubs away the wet carpet stink of her. Then they parade along Acland Street, the Afghan haughty in her stride, Baby trying to look humble, but failing, because everyone remarks her. They stop for a coffee and one of those cakes made of glazed fruit and custard, the Afghan standing alongside as Baby glistens at a table outside the cake shop. The Afghan’s stance is regal, her face is level with his. In Baby’s daydream, the front right paw of the dog presses down on his left shoe so that later, when he finds somewhere to sit and think, he can rest his right foot on his left and be reminded of love.

Andy’s dress shoes aren’t suited to sand. Baby labours his way to the steps and mounts the wooden walkway the council has constructed, a path along the beach which is part sculpture and part footpath and all St Kilda. Baby maintains his back to the bay. He crosses the grass and the lanes of bitumen.

Ahead, and well before Shakespeare Grove intersects with Acland Street, a man dressed as a cowboy is dangling a lariat. He is busking in the shadow of Luna Park, adjacent to the blunt southern wall, the blank foil to the big-toothed, open-mouthed entrance on the northern side. The cowboy’s hat is on his head. And there isn’t another hat for the money. Sometimes buskers use a scarf coiled in the shape of a small dam, somewhere to pool the coins and the occasional note.

Baby’s lips bend as he remembers that little dog, one of those sweet-faced customised things, bred for the people who on Sunday mornings stalk the stalls along the esplanade. And the dog—Baby grins up the memory—the dog thought the scarf of the busker was a basket, and curled itself in the sun-warmed fabric and coins. And they’d laughed, stall owners, the parents of the sweet-faced dog, the walkers of other dogs, everyone, including the busker who fingered a guitar he couldn’t play very well.

Everyone laughed, even Andy.

Andy was off the stuff again and had driven down from Maryborough in his clapped-out Kingswood. He wore the suit and the shoes that worked for Baby, but Andy hadn’t yet worked up the guts to ask Baby if he was coming back. As they’d strolled away from the little dog and the laughter, Baby could have pushed two fingers into the side pocket of Andy’s suit, because that was the moment, but he didn’t, and they’d walked back to the Kingswood and Andy had driven away.

Afterwards, Baby had watched the water for a long time, the sea yielding waves to the beach, the beach surrendering sand to the water, the mutuality of infiltrator and infiltrated. Where the sea met the land was a place of love, and never a threshold that was forever one thing on one side and a different thing on the other. Love was the water gifting and the sand accepting. As he watched the waves and the sand, Baby concluded that love was as relentless as the tide testing the shore; love was for keeps.

The cowboy is for keeps and is not a busker. He is a threshold Baby has to negotiate, because the lariat he’d sighted from the end of Shakespeare Grove is not a lariat, it’s a belt, noosed and dangling from the left fist of the cowboy.

‘Whoa,’ Baby says, and then wishes he hadn’t spoken. Whoa is a cowboy word and might not be a suitable opening for a conversation with a real cowboy, let alone someone in Shakespeare Grove wearing a plastic cowboy hat and designer jeans. But the boots look like real cowboy boots. And the spurs attached to the boots jut the required cruelty.

The back of the fist that holds the belt wears the tendrils of a tattoo that disappears under the cowboy’s shirt and reappears on his neck. Ink has infiltrated his jaw and the left side of his face. Something white and pink flowers in the hollow of the cowboy’s cheek.

The cowboy’s hand bobs once or twice. The noose sways and turns.

‘Whoa,’ Baby says again. He lifts his hand in a gesture he hopes the cowboy will interpret as a start to negotiations.

That crazy ride that circumnavigates Luna Park starts up. Baby hears the grinding of the car on the rails, a few preparatory squeals from the passengers and then a chaos of sound is above them, one shriek indistinguishable from another, then a hiatus as the car tunnels and surfaces at a crest, then a girl’s voice screaming clear and perfect, ‘Do him, Cowboy. Do him.’

The cowboy lifts his lariat. The noose sways.

Baby’s hand is still grasping air. He can’t lower it because he needs something between him and the cowboy, whose hand, the one holding the belt, is level with Baby’s hand and swaying forward and back, an ebb and push that is all St Kilda.

The tattoo on the back of the cowboy’s hand is crisp and inked in black and shades of grey with distinctions of pink and mesmerising white. Baby apprehends the startling beauty of the magnolias that adorn the skin of the cowboy, whose shirt interrupts the display, cheap flannel in a green-and-white check that will never contain the reckless flowering that obliges the cowboy to stand in Shakespeare Grove and cull the maverick from the herd.

Andy had loved magnolias. ‘They flaunt it, magnolias. All stick and flower, like me.’

Baby wonders if he’s dreaming again. Perhaps he’s hallucinated the cowboy. Sometimes he’s not sure where he is, and he’s almost certain that he’s never seen a tattoo with slivers of white ink, and a tattoo of a magnolia without white was impossible, because Andy was forever pointing out magnolias, and all the magnolias that Andy ever pointed out to Baby were white and pink.

You stuck it into Andy and he flowered. The needle, anything.

After the funeral Bonnie crammed the Kingswood with Andy’s stuff: runners, grass-stained and worn down at the right heel, courtesy of that knee and Andy’s compromised stride; then the suit, in which Andy would have been buried if Baby had got his way; then shoes, two pairs, one pair dressy and which Baby would have worn to the funeral, if they’d let him. CDs next; then Andy’s novels, some of the pages dog-eared, because Andy didn’t like bookmarks; then a Macquarie Dictionary, which must have been new because the pages hadn’t been Andied. Bonnie threw it all into the back seat of Andy’s car.

Bonnie waved a fifty in Baby’s face. ‘Petrol.’

She jingled the car keys and pressed them into Baby’s hands. She stood alongside him and folded an arm around his shoulders. They stared at the house where Andy had died. Someone screamed. Then another voice, and laughter.

‘Run, Baby.’

Bonnie pushed him towards the driver’s door of the Kingswood. His shin struck the bumper. Baby knew Bonnie believed she had to get him in the car. Quick. She’d always watched out for him and knew it took him a while to figure the thrust of things. He let her push him into the driver’s seat and acquiesced while she fastened his seatbelt.

Bonnie had been good to Andy. Maybe she’d feel better if she believed she’d saved Baby a belting. But he was never going to fight those bastards. Andy had explained lines in the sand, the power of the herd, consequences.

‘Live in the blur,’ he’d said. ‘On the edge, in the smudge where one thing can transform into another. You’ll be safe there, Baby.’

Andy had vomited on the bedsheets and the pillow, so they’d covered his head with a towel and gone back to the party. Baby arrived to once-and-for-all have it out and the girl who rented the house, Bonnie’s sister, had told him that Andy was in the bedroom. Waiting, darling. Waiting.

Baby wandered down the passage and pushed open the door to Andy’s room and all he thought was: They should have put the towel over his feet, because anyone can see those feet are dead.

Baby wonders if he should tell the cowboy that he loves magnolias. And once they get talking and if the cowboy lowers his lariat, Baby might be able to explain why he stands out from the herd. Instead, he babbles.

‘I don’t belong,’ Baby says.

‘I wasn’t finished properly. Andy reckoned it was the same for everyone.

‘“But they look right, Andy.” That’s what I told him.

‘I should have told him the rest of it. How there are too many thresholds. Too many ways of seeing things. And what that does to you.

‘There’s waking up one morning and believing that you can read your feet and not liking that story. There’s dogs, and seeing them, really seeing them. There’s lines in the sand. There’s Andy. There’s thresholds you can’t see until you step into them. There’s love—that lariat that tightens with the struggle. There’s cowboys. There’s stepping through the threshold.

‘His feet should have been under the towel. He was just a boy. He wasn’t finished.’

The cowboy stares at Baby. He lowers the hand that holds the belt. The noose nestles at his feet, a tangle of leather that from a distance might be mistaken for a small dog curled at the feet of someone it loved.

‘How’s this?’ Baby says. ‘We’ll walk to the beach and onto the sand. I’ll roll up the cuffs of Andy’s pants and your jeans. I’ll take off our shoes and our socks.

‘I could read our feet. But then I’d have to tell you why you thought your belt was a noose. I’d have to tell you why I should have been culled instead of Andy.

‘Instead, let’s stand in that place where the waves meet the sand. We’ll find that translucence—that way of seeing that transforms the unravelled butt of a cigarette into a butterfly with wings coloured and shaped like you’ve never seen. I’ll dream the weight of the paw of a dog resting on my left foot. I’ll conjure love by resting my right foot on my left.

‘In that place your belt and the noose at the end is a leather lead and a puppy. And the warmth and the lick of the water is the puppy’s tongue on your feet.

‘We’ll stand where everything smudges, and there are no lines in the sand.’