‘I guess it is a big city.’
‘Ya.’
‘Should we go back in? It’s freezing out here.’
Dennis didn’t respond. He was looking away again, as if he hadn’t heard Dan, as if Dan wasn’t even there. ‘Ya ya. She — she is. Is. Dha-dha-dha-dha-ng.’ His words were a blur of hard consonants and slithering sibilants that made no sense to Dan.
‘Sorry, mate, I didn’t get that.’
Dennis angrily wiped spit from the sides of his mouth. He looked flushed, embarrassed, as though he were furious at Dan. ‘I–I wi-wish sh-sh-she wouwad. Wad. Wad. Wad dj dj djusshtd die.’
Dan was shocked at the cruelty of his words but then he saw that his cousin’s eyes had watered, he was trying hard not to cry. He wondered how long he had been coming to the hospital, watching the old woman slowly disappear. Watching her death. He hadn’t thought of his giagia as anything but a stranger. But for Dennis she would have been a real grandmother, she would have looked after him, changed his nappies, watched him grow, told him her stories: she would have loved him. And he would have loved her.
‘I’m really sorry, mate.’
‘I–I-I hate hate this ho ho hos pi. Tal.’ It was said so vehemently that a spray of spit struck Dan’s cheek. ‘I–I fuck fucken hate. It.’
I’d fucking hate it too, thought Dan. I’d hate to be here every day, having to watch this old woman whose soul has already left, who’s nothing but skin and bone. What was happening to her wasn’t life. All of that had finished.
‘Dennis,’ Dan said, ‘why don’t you and I just go and hang out? Why don’t we just get the fuck out of here?’
His mother and his aunt had not moved from their positions on either side of the dying woman. They were both visibly surprised at Dan’s suggestion that he should drive his cousin home. For a moment Dan hesitated. His mother looked lost and fragile and he knew he was abandoning her, but the heat and the smell and the whisperings in a language he didn’t understand, all of it was overwhelming, and when his aunt Bettina handed him her keys he felt nothing but relief.
‘Come on, Dennis,’ he said brightly, then blushed at his transparency. But his mother winked at him and he knew it would be alright. He kissed her goodbye, and then looked down at the old woman on the bed, at her vacant eyes, and he knew his cousins and uncles and aunts would be expecting him to kiss his grandmother. But he couldn’t bring himself to touch her, he thought it would be like kissing death.
As he and Dennis were leaving, his aunt said, ‘Don’t let Dennis drive.’
So Dennis could drive. Or he must have known how to at some stage.
In the car his cousin was cheerful; not that he said much, just pointed to which streets Dan should turn into, but he had a big grin on his face as he looked out to the clear blue sky above them. They skirted the border of a giant park on the edge of the city. The trees had started to shed their leaves, their mottled blue-grey branches spiking and twisting high into the sky.
Bettina’s house was a small weatherboard cottage, with an overgrown front yard and a sleek grey cat asleep on the porch. The cat opened one eye as the men walked past it, then stretched out on its back purring as Dennis tickled its belly.
The front part of the house was dark, the corridor tiny, but at the other end a renovation had opened up the kitchen to make room for a long dining table; large windows looked out to a small, immaculately neat courtyard. Dennis headed straight for the fridge and took out a bottle of Diet Coke and poured a glass for both of them. There were photographs everywhere of the family, of Dennis and his mother, of Dennis with his grandmother and grandfather, and Dan recognised a young, slim Joanna. As in Jo’s house, there were no photographs of Dan’s mother, nor any of their family. There also seemed to be none of Dennis’s father, whoever he might have been. There was so much Dan didn’t know about his cousin. Dennis was twisting his solid body on the revolving seat of a high stool, still grinning, still looking up, through the tiny skylight in the ceiling up to the sky. He suddenly stopped twirling.
‘Do-do-do ya wanna wanna see. Do do ya wanna see ma ma rumm?’
Dan’s cousin slept on a single bed tucked into the far corner of his room. It looked like a gym: there were barbells and weights scattered around, an expensive-looking steel rowing machine, a lifting bench placed perpendicular to a full-length mirror. Posters of bodybuilders, male and female, adorned the wall. There were only two photographs, in simple black frames, both hanging above the bed. In one a teenage Dennis, dressed in a dark suit, had one arm around his mother and the other around his sister. In the second photograph, Dennis was older, wearing leathers and holding a helmet, standing next to a motorcycle. A young dark-skinned woman held his hand, and in the other she gripped a motorbike helmet. Dan manoeuvred himself carefully over the barbells to look more closely at the photograph of Dennis and the girl next to the motorcycle.
Dennis had sat himself on the rower, idly shifting his weight back and forth. ‘Ma Ma Mama. She ha ha hate hates. Ha hates tha tha pho pho phot. To. Pho. To. Graph.’ Dennis was looking high up above himself, at the world beyond the ceiling, a grin on his face. His syllables still struggled to escape but he no longer seemed encumbered or frustrated by them. ‘Tha tha that. That was me. Be be four. Be. Four that ha. Tha. Ax. Ax. Axi. Dent.’
’Dan turned back to the photograph, to the attractive young couple at the end of their teens.
‘Handsome, wasn’t I?’
Dan realised he was starting to hear between the spaces of his cousin’s words, that he could separate the sounds from the spit that pooled in Dennis’s mouth as he strained to enunciate.
‘You were alright,’ Dan teased, and pointed to the young woman in the photo. ‘But she’s the really pretty one. What’s her name?’
Dennis’s only response was to throw himself furiously into working the rowing machine. Dan sat on the bed and watched the man row. Within minutes Dennis was dripping with sweat; it ran down his brow and the back of his neck and plastered his hair to his skin. Dan waited for him to finish but Dennis kept pulling at the bar, pounding backwards and forwards, the gears of the rower clanking and spinning, the mechanism giving a low whistle with every stroke. Sweat had soaked through the t-shirt which clung to his powerful torso. And all the while Dennis looked up, as if urging his body to take flight, thought Dan, as if wishing it could burst through the plaster and beams and slate and break free into the sky. There was a clanking sound as Dennis’s foot slipped off the pedal.
‘Fucking bullshit!’
The wheel was still spinning manically. Dennis reached across and grabbed it, bringing it to a sudden halt.
‘Her name is Christine. She was my girlfriend.’ There was a spitting and rumbling, a battle in his larynx before Dennis could get the sentence out.
‘Did something happen to her in the accident?’
Dennis shuddered. ‘No, God no. She just left.’ And then he turned and faced his cousin. ‘I guess she got tired of hanging around a retard.’
Dan blinked, at the force of the word, the way Dennis spat it out. ‘Do you miss her?’
Dennis’s eyes were wandering again. ‘Not as much as I miss my fucking motorbike.’
A choking sound came from Dennis’s lips that at first alarmed Dan. He was choking and gurgling; there was a rivulet of dribble coming from one side of his mouth. But Dennis’s eyes were dancing. He was laughing.