‘Okay,’ I say. My brain is neon pink and bulging.
‘See the cleft that runs down the middle? That separates your brain into two halves?’
‘I do.’ I zoom in on the line in my head.
‘Think of it,’ says Karen; ‘that line is the corridor of your brain.’
My imagined brain doesn’t know what to do, so it just pulsates.
‘Either side of the corridor,’ she goes on, and she starts to stroke my hair with the hand that’s scooped around my back, ‘are the rooms with the memories in.’ Her voice has dropped a bit, and coupled with her breathing, in and out like the feeling of lying in the bottom of a boat in a gentle swell, it’s easier to see the brain corridor. It’s lit with halogen bulbs, and the floor is shiny, like a hospital corridor. There’s no one in it, and it stretches on until it disappears out of sight. Karen starts to stroke my hair behind my ear, again and again. ‘Go in through one of those doors,’ she says. I reach out and when I look down, I’m dressed in an old-fashioned nursing outfit. My shoes are rubber-soled. I turn the door handle and step inside, where I see the bathroom back home and the little knot of wood that I can push out to watch Iris, but it is plugged with loo roll. Outside it is daytime, but also black. I can smell the world around me melting, I can smell the oil in the deep-fat fryer from downstairs, I hear a tinkle of glass breaking.
‘And now step out of that room, via the door you went in through,’ says Karen, and I turn around, and the hospital door is still there, hasn’t closed up while I wasn’t looking, and I step my rubber-soled foot through it and into the dim-lit corridor. ‘And now close the door behind you and lock it.’ I take a large ring of keys from my crisp white pocket, and it jangles as I lock the door.
‘And now walk down the corridor,’ says Karen and her fingers have started to slide deeper into my hair, stroking slowly in time with her breath, and she has slid down a little lower so that I feel her breath in my hair and it feels like hot bread, ‘and choose a new door. Open it. And go in, go into a good place. And if it turns into a bad room, leave, and find a new door.’
I stand at the door with my keys in my hand. I can see my reflection in the safety glass. There’s one of those little paper hats with the red cross on my head. Through the window I can see the room is under water, and something noses at the glass, but the water is dark and I can’t quite make out what it is. I stand in the corridor, with my neat white shoes close together.
‘Are you in that room? Is it a good room?’ asks Karen quietly.
‘Yes,’ I lie, matching her voice. I stay standing in the corridor a moment longer, and then I carry on walking down it — it stretches as far as I can see, and I may never have to go inside another room.
21
I fried flounder in butter and we had it with bread. The sheep was still missing; how long would it be before she showed up as clumps of blooded wool dotted over the hillside? Lloyd was drunk, and I tried to get there too. When we’d walked up the driveway together, Lloyd sprinkling ashes from his envelope as he went so that his fingertips were black, something shrieked and it echoed across the valley. The hair at the back of my neck stood on end. Lloyd noticed nothing, sang his song.
While I cooked, he beetled around making a fire. I pretended not to notice when he unbalanced and had to sit cross-legged in the hearth to build it. He folded up the envelope and pushed it into the centre of his unlit fire, and then set a match to it. It was damp and so it took a few tries, and I felt sad for him that it hadn’t all happened in a more satisfying way. He sat on the sofa once the fire had lit, singing again. ‘“Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older, then we wouldn’t have to wait so long,”’ but his song was slow like a hymn.
Lloyd’s beard had ashes in it, and he only shrugged when I told him, and left them there. The fish was good and the bread mopped up the whisky inside me. We didn’t speak, just the scrape of forks on plates, the gullet swallow of our drinks, and of our glasses being refilled. Outside the rustle of the wind in the trees and now and again a howl that could have been the wind whistling through the valley, from off the sea through the blackthorn, down into the field of sheep feeding in the dark, and opening its mouth wide to swallow the house. We drank more and kept drinking.
‘God, I wish you’d get a haircut,’ he said.
I stood up and swiped at his face, but I only clipped his ear, and he grabbed me round the wrist.
‘Fucking hell!’ he shouted. ‘Just a trim!’
I went to bed.
I woke in the morning with a dry mouth. Downstairs, the fire was just a glow and I fed it with the logs Lloyd had leant against the hearth. Dog was coiled on the other side of him in a deep sleep. I felt a long pulse of nausea from my stomach to my throat and my head, and drank three glasses of water and lit a cigarette. I smoked staring out the window at where the light was starting, pale grey. A late bat whipped around in front of the house and then disappeared under the eaves. No mist today, but a crispness, frost on the ground.
At first I thought it was a cat, because it moved in that way, loped like a cat, but it was larger and even this far away from the woods I could see the hair on its back was thick and wiry, its shoulders dense and muscled.
‘Lloyd,’ I said, but not loud enough. It entered the dark bank of the woods and was gone. I blinked and wondered if I had seen anything at all.
At the shed I filled up the water and feed troughs. The daylight had started to go already and Dog lay down and moaned because he hadn’t eaten yet. It was warm in the shed, and rain on the tin roof mingled with the bustle of the ewes finding their comfort in the straw. It smelled good. Lloyd touched the nose of a ewe I thought would have triplets. She snorted his hand away, but he didn’t flinch. These ones at least were safe for now. I shifted the feed barrel to get to a new box of gloves behind it, and on the floor was a dainty hoof. I stared at it a moment before I understood what it was.
‘Lloyd,’ I said and he came and stood next to me. We both looked at the foot, the bone crunched through at the ankle, the cleft toenails curled. ‘I’m going to sleep in here tonight.’
‘Whisky,’ was all he said.
22
In Darwin, a man with deep pockmarks on his chin and a smell about him like he’s been infused with some kind of pickling vinegar offers me forty-five bucks, but not just for a blowie.
‘The real thing,’ he says. Forty-five dollars does not seem like all that much, when that first one had given me thirty just to use my face.
‘Fifty-five dollars?’ I ask and he smiles at me like he is my indulgent father.
‘We’ll see how you go. You’d better be pretty good for fifty-five.’
I don’t know what to do. With the blowies it is fairly straightforward — I kneel, they unzip. But we stand opposite each other a little while, me shifting from foot to foot.
‘Where’ll we do it?’ I ask, finding that I am blushing.
‘Got a tarp stretched over the back of the ute,’ he says and turns towards the road. His ute is a rusted thing with Queensland plates and a crack in the windscreen that has been reinforced with packing tape. A bright blue tarp is tented in the back tray like a kid’s clubhouse. I stand on the step and go to get in.
‘Not here, girl!’ he snaps. ‘If I’m paying through the nose I want to make noise.’ And he climbs into the cab. I pull myself up on the other side and get in too. As we drive out of town, I feel nervous.
‘What’s your name?’ I ask.