Tim Winton - Eyrie

I’m just writing down my number, he murmured.

We know where you are.

Right, he said, steadying himself to remember the digits. But you’re off to work, he’s here on his own. I mean, in case you’re worried.

I’m not worried.

I know it’s none of my business.

But.

I don’t mind looking in on him.

He’s fine, she said. He’s used to it now.

For a fleeting moment Keely thought he could detect a hint of regret, as if she wanted to take him up but daren’t. He wondered if it was last night, the lingering implication of a transaction. Or just pity, having seen how hopeless and awkward he was.

Well, the offer’s there.

Sad. That you didn’t have em.

Kids?

They fuck you up, anyway.

Every good thing does, doesn’t it?

She shrugged and he felt himself gently dismissed.

At the door she patted his arm. He hesitated. Then pecked her on the cheek. And pulling away, saw that it irritated her — the hesitation, or perhaps the kiss itself. She closed the door on him before he’d even turned to go.

With the laundry all done and no dinner dishes to deal with, Keely found himself at a loose end. A stroll perhaps. But he was still tenderfooted from this morning’s fugue-walk around the marina. And he hardly had the funds to entertain himself in town. Not at a pub and certainly not the bottleshop. He couldn’t afford them, not in any sense. So there was no other choice but to stay in. Which left what? Google? While he still had access. Either that or the rich tapestry of network TV. He’d given up on the Norwegian novel — couldn’t concentrate.

He should clean the flat. That’d burn an hour or so. And God knows it needed doing. But just thinking about it made him wilt.

He was tired. His brain felt scorched. Too much sun. Too much happening and too quickly. And he didn’t want to think anymore, not tonight. Being with Gemma. Her strange kid. The Esperance fiasco bringing him back to the boil. He needed to break off, cut the frigging circuit before he shorted out. Needed to calm the fuck down. His bloody heart was pelting. So shower again. Clean towel. Brush your teeth. Jesus, that face. Eyes like crushed strawberries.

Just paracetamol. Two. And nothing else.

And lie down. Fucking head. Like there’s sand in it. Just lie there. And go to sleep like a normal person. Sparking.

He tried a few of the relaxation exercises Harriet had gone in for. Lying back on the righteously clean pillowslip, endeavouring to ignore the slightly shrunken feel of his sunburnt face. He was tired enough — wasn’t he always tired? But getting over the edge was the objective. Once you tilted out you were alright. And there was no feeling so sweet as falling. So over half an hour he huffed and cooed himself into a swoon. And for five, maybe ten minutes he was close, giddily close, projecting, wafting out towards the purple New Age precipice, beyond which only sleep awaited. No thinking, no puzzling or raging. Just sleep. Goneness. Paddocks of sleep, forests of sleep, valleys and rivers and churning gorges of sleep.

And he was almost there, right at the cusp, when he heard it. The whimpering wall. Those cries of fear. The noise that made his arse pucker in horror. His neighbour. So clear, so close. She sounded as if someone were in the flat with her, standing over her, slavering, ready to do something unspeakable. But there was nothing he could do. She was alone in there, duking it out with herself, tormented by something that descended on her like the weather. You could feel her cringing, hiding, balling up, quietening a moment until she gathered herself, became defiant, cried out, cursing whatever it was at her shoulder, commanding it to get behind, and then retreating, finding a rhythm, falling into the grunts and chants that saved or ensnared her, poor beggar. It was horrible to hear: and there she went again, off and riffing, on a roll now, louder, more insistent, uglier, more desperate and distressing every second. Oh, Christ!

Keely sat up.

How could someone so troubled be allowed to live ten storeys in the air? How was it she hadn’t hurled herself from her balcony already? And how was it, for that matter, that he hadn’t done so himself in order to be free of her? The poor creature — why couldn’t they help her, why couldn’t they just cart her the hell away and let him sleep?

Get out! she growled. Out! Out-out-out-out-out-out-out-out!

He belted on the wall with a shoe. She fell silent a moment, as if startled by the intrusion, then she muttered darkly, cried out once, plain and shrill, and resumed the chant.

Keely got up, flailed about for the dinky iPod, and shoved the buds in his ears. He tried a bit of Delius to calm himself, but quickly discovered that the first cuckoo in spring was no match for the nutjob next door. Yelping and barking through the wall, she was more cuckoo than anything the London Philharmonic could come up with. What he needed was a fortress of noise, his own sonic Monte Cristo, but Black Sabbath seemed in poor taste in the circumstances. So he chose a bit of Captain Beefheart, despite how perversely it brought Harriet to mind. He shouldn’t be thinking about her like this. She hated Beefheart, the opaque melodies, absurd lyrics, the man’s savage, grating voice. Keely cranked it up, hoping to match madness with madness, and he blasted the poor woman out of range, cast her into a lake of fiery tumult which gave him wild relief, before the guilt set in and his head began to fizz and his thoughts returned unhelpfully to Harriet.

She needn’t have gone. They might have gotten past it eventually, outlived the catastrophe she’d brought down upon them. He could have lived with it, with what had happened; he was convinced of that. Hadn’t he forgiven her? She thought he had to be cracking up, just by saying it, but could simple forgiveness be such a threat? Apparently so. She said it frightened her when he was like this. So weird and jerkadelic, like his stupid Beefheart albums. So florid and manic. As if he thought he were a character in a Russian novel. It was creepy. It wasn’t normal.

It was no good.

He ripped the buds from his ears, lurched up off the bed with a sickening suddenness and weaved out into the livingroom, tormented afresh by thoughts of Harriet and her baby. The other bloke’s baby. He had to get off this jag, stop thinking about it.

So many half-clear weeks on that front and he was back to flaying himself with something he could never fix. It was unsound, unhelpful; it unhinged him and rendered him pathetic, laughable, immobile. Et cetera.

He stood at the open sliding door to watch the orange lights of container cranes strobing across the north quay. Beyond them, like a fence against the darkness, the channel markers flashed red and green without ceasing.

Gemma was right. They fuck you up. Even the ones you don’t have. Especially them.

But enough of that. He needed to be asleep, to be gone from this.

As he wrenched the knife drawer open all the matt-plastic bottles rolled away as one. He snatched up the first serious-looking container within reach and got it open and pitched a bunch into his palm. The tap water tasted metallic. And he wondered if that was how a horse tasted the bit, whether it tasted anything at all.

The phone.

Phone.

Phone.

That really was the phone ringing. So far away. So close to his head.

Waking was like clawing his way free of something dark and heavy. But he was, in the end, awake. He lay panting. The phone brayed away on the side table. He craned to see the luminous digits of the clock — 2:15. Not good. If he really was awake, then this wasn’t good. Unless it was Faith in London, forgetting the time difference; that was just an accident, that’d be harmless.