Tim Winton - Eyrie

In the bathroom he sluiced himself with cool water, stood dripping a while in the half-dark before reaching for the gamy towel. The dim outline in the mirror moved in sympathy. Not really in sync. An approximation.

But when he turned for bed and stepped through the doorway there was a different form in the bedroom window, a shape too small to be his reflection, too distinct to be any kind of reflection at all.

The size of a child. Naked in the strobing, distant light. Pressed against the screen as if held there by wind-shear alone. Bare arms aloft in benediction or flight. He was calm, those moments he lingered; the boy was calm and solemn and terrible.

Then gone, like an unsustainable thought.

Keely knelt on the bed before the suddenly vacant window. Nothing there but breathless night. When his pulse finally subsided he lay down and tried to sleep. But he could feel it returning. Not the image, but the dream. In wisps and fits and flashes. Settling upon him like a dread familiar.

It was the boy. Gemma Buck’s kid. In the dream he was out on the balcony — Gemma’s, not his. And in the dream Keely was alone, wrapped in a towel in cool, cool air, impossibly cold air, not seeing the boy out there across the way until he moved. The child was three balconies distant. He was bare-chested, squatting on a milk crate, breasting the rail and dipping his head to it. His pale hair shone in the dark as he perched and bobbed, lapping dew off the iron like a thirsty dove.

And that was it. All the dream that would come safely to mind. Even this much frightened him. He sensed that there’d been more than just squatting, but he didn’t want to go there; he was practised enough at shelving what could not be borne. But the logic of something worse beat on in him for minutes until he began to feel he’d assimilated it for what it was, a harmless bit of mental indigestion. He was fine. It was all good and there was juice left in the pills, current enough to tug at him so he felt himself leaching away towards delicious sleep. And yet he could feel the pale glow of the boy there, waiting. In the swamp of his ungoverned country. Perched, pigeon-chested. Too high. Unguarded. Only a straightened leg away from toppling.

Keely clawed back, roused himself. Got up. Dragged on some shorts. Blundered through to the dim livingroom, jacked open the slider and stepped outside.

All along the building the balconies were deserted. A few railings were still illuminated by blue flickers of television, but nobody was out there.

The invisible sea revealed itself in throbbing boundaries — red lights, green lights, the distant pulses of the island lighthouses. The port thrummed, the town itself reduced to echoes and murmurs as the streetsweeper trundled out towards the marina.

He went back in. But was too afraid to sleep. Which should have been funny given how much he craved it, what he’d swallowed to get there, how muzzy and ready he felt. He’d just lie here a while, ignore the leg tremors, wait it out.

Dawn. Morning. Day.

Didn’t take the bike out. Didn’t swim. Eyes like hot pea gravel. The flat was roasting but he holed up there all day. The building trembled with the comings and goings of others. All that purposeful Friday traffic. He tooled about on the laptop, googling aimlessly, squinting, holding his scone like it was an IED.

His inbox was stacked with unread emails, most from bewildered or exasperated friends and comrades, though the most recent were many weeks old. By the boldface subject titles he could see solicitude taper away to hurt silence and worse. Two of the last, from people he’d promised vital briefings on the wetlands strategy, were simply headed, WTF?Piled in their aging strata, these unanswered messages were a miserable sort of archaeology, a register of failure. It was absurd and lowering to keep them like this. Sick to pull them up and survey them, scrolling down the list, pausing over one now and then as if daring yourself to open it. It was time to end it.

He got up, strode to the sliding door, looked out at the sea a moment, then returned to the table and closed down the email address, fried everything while he had the will.

Afterwards he felt a glimmer of achievement. But in terms of satisfaction it was hardly more substantial or sustaining than the afterglow of a good shit.

The phone rang twice that day — in the morning, in the afternoon — but he didn’t answer. He scrounged leftovers, ate fruit no longer in the first flush of its youth. Market day, but he wasn’t going down there. Tourists. Earnest local faces. All that friendly stallholder shouting. The heat. The confined cattle smell of his countrymen. Fuck that.

Still ruined from his dream-stalked night, he napped fitfully in the chair. In the afternoon the woman next door cranked up, fighting off powers and principalities with chants and admonitions. He had to admire it, the way she held herself together with language. The longer she went, the stronger she sounded. He envied her. Which was stupid. And frightening.

Late in the day, bored rather than needy, he dug the last cleanskin from the carton under the bed — a flabby grenache he usually resorted to only as a stopgap sedative — and the first glass he poured was hot and calming. He worked through it unhurriedly, savouring the late arrival of the sea breeze, and at sunset he used the dregs to wash down a few Mersyndols and a hayfever tab for good measure, closing out the day with a certain resolve.

Maybe one last moment on the balcony before bed. To make sure of it, confirm it’d all been in his weary mind. He’d get up in a moment, go out. If only he could swim up against the weight of all that tepid water pressing him into the chair.

But hang on. Wasn’t that him? Not even bothering to wait for Keely to doze off. There already. There before him. Just past the pulsing insect mesh of the slider. The kid. Perched atop the rail, braced against a battering sea wind. The boy was motionless. Held there like a kite in the updraught. While the building swayed and rustled like a tuart tree. The sky purple, violent, the child without expression, staring off in profile, hair shining. Keely called out, tried to wave him back to safety, but the kid seemed startled by the sudden movement. Flexed. Pitched forward. And was gone in an instant.

*

He woke and it was dark. Woke. Actually, fully awake. But trusting nothing. He stood outside in his briefs. Gemma’s balcony was empty but he was too rattled to let things go at that. He went back in, unlatched the front door and weaved his way up the walkway to where the dome light burned above the grille at 1010. The door behind the screen was the same dirty beige as his, the warped security mesh furred with corrosion from the salt wind. At the kitchen window the curtain was drawn, but there was a light on inside. He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to make sure all was well, but at 11.08 p.m. in his cock-jocks there seemed no easy means of doing so. He lingered, dithering, pressed against the hot bricks.

Down the walkway, a door slammed. A woman in a sari — a deep green sari it was — gathered her keys and handbag. Lustrous dark hair. A bindi red as a camera light on her brow. On that dark brow, that raised face. Which was looking directly his way. Seeing him, recording his semi-nude presence. She stiffened, let out a sudden chirp of alarm, and sent him tilting homeward.

He was late getting up, and bleary along with it, but for the remainder of the morning he kept an eye out for Gemma, even broke his own rule and left the door ajar, but she didn’t come by. With the nightshifts he was loath to knock on her door. He paced. He made his grimy bed. Paced a little more.