My housemate Kiera
was the daughter of a prominent politician in Melbourne. A federal member and a
Liberal, Kiera’s dad was tall and very broad, an Irishman who still spoke with
an accent and who was a devout catholic. When he wasn’t in Canberra or in his
office on Orrong Road, Kiera’s dad was doing ambassadorial stuff for the
biggest anti-abortion organisation in Australia. He wore suits with thin ties
on the weekends – at least on the weekends I saw him – and his aftershave was
too young for him, probably something with ‘ocean’ or ‘mist’ in its name.
I didn’t like
Kiera’s dad very much at first. For starters, there was a lupine aspect to his
face – the big toothy mouth and pale, beautiful eyes – that, in combination
with the sheer mass of the man, made me uneasy. His hair was so thick and anchored
to his forehead in such an immoveable, angular line that it almost looked
woven, or like the pelt of a huge Irish Wolfhound. It was all black too, but
not in a coloured kind of way. Is it
possible for a fifty year-old man to be without a single grey hair? Even on the
sides? It was weird and it scared me.
Secondly, Kiera’s
dad’s eyes were the same as hers. I mean exactly
the same. That unbelievable likeness niggled at me every time I looked at
her sexiest feature and I resented her dad for it, despite the fact that they
were his eyes first. Not that it mattered much either: I had never been – and would
never be – able to stare into Kiera’s the way I wanted.
But when you got
right down to it, Kiera’s dad was difficult to like because he couldn’t stand
me. When she had first moved into the apartment we share and was hauling her
bed through the corridor, he, holding onto the other side, muttered something I
heard distinctly and which is still kind of on reverb in my mind whenever I see
him, even now that he and I have had a beer together.
-He’s a painter,
dad, I heard Kiera say. A really good one.
-So he paints
houses then?
-Dad, he’s an artist
-I’m just taking
the mickey, Kiera, I knew he was an artist just by looking at him. If a young,
middle class Melbournian man looks like he’s a Pirate of Penzance, then he’s
probably an artist. And a vegetarian. Is he a vegetarian?
I couldn’t hear
what Kiera said next – maybe she nodded. Because her dad said hmm and then something about which way
the bed was going to face.
Even though it was
amusing to hear an Irishman actually say taking
the mickey, I became self-conscious and thought later that two people who
were different ages and whose political and religious views sharply diverged,
and who hated what the other wore and who thought what the other said was funny
when it wasn’t supposed to be, that two people like that could never get along.
So how did this beer eventuate then? And why would I bother writing about it? Well,
the answer to the second question is that it now seems as if the beer was
representative of the breakdown I had and am kind of still having. The
breakdown that started last month when I set a spider on fire. The answer to
the first is this story.
A Huntsman. It was
bigger than average, the size you can make into a monster with an outstretched
hand and not feel like a liar. It scuttled across my bed. I was reading A Discovery of Strangers and a John
Serrie album, one of his collaborations with Gary Stroutos, was murmuring in
the background. I liked to listen to Serrie while I read; his arrangements were
sparse, seemed incommensurate with the speed at which I absorbed each page, and
had the effect of both slowing down and supercharging time, as if I were
surfing a wave as well as watching it from the beach, building miles and miles
offshore. My white blinds were drawn, but backlit brightly enough to know it
was still the afternoon. Now and then I could hear Kiera and her boyfriend
Daniel making food, which usually made me hungry and lonely because Daniel was
a chef and I was in love with Kiera but the window of opportunity had been
steamed over by our living arrangements and the fact that she didn’t love me
back. Something interesting is that our house was a double-storey but the kitchen
was the only room upstairs.
The sight of the spider almost gave me a
heart attack. In that moment I was suddenly reminded of the time when I was a
kid that I had gone for a swim and taken a bunched up towel off our table
tennis table to dry myself and then felt something in my hair, felt the tickle
of it coming down my front, saw it on my chest in the reflection of the
backdoor, woke in the night at the slightest odd sensation for weeks
afterwards. It was a memory I had forgotten and at the shock of it I sprang up.
I eventually managed to track the spider to behind the bed-head, which I had covered
in cutout pages of Hesse’s Siddhartha.
The spider was sitting as motionless as if it had never moved in its life. Its
legs were curled up, like a dead crab’s. Its body – or sac, or whatever you
call it – looked like a bulb of nutmeg and the thought of putting it in a nutcracker
made me grit my teeth. As calmly as possible I pulled the rest of the bed away
from the bed-head, revealing a sliver of dusty floorboards, a pen and a couple
of odd socks. Now the spider had nowhere to go.
One of the dusty
socks was thick, an Explorer I think they call them, and I put it over my hand
like a puppet of death. The dust made me want to cough but I held it down. My
dad had always used a jam jar and a paper towel to trap spiders, or cockroaches
for that matter, putting them out in the yard or, to make my sister and I laugh,
over our neighbour’s fence, but I was panicked didn’t have any empty jars or
paper towels. All I had – or thought I had – was a sock. For a split second
though I took my eyes off the spider and looked around, maybe to see if anyone
was watching. It was then that I noticed the cigarette lighter on my
windowsill, sitting in the bonsai pot. I used it to light candles for my incense burner. There was
also a can of shoe waterproofer I had happened to be using that morning in
preparation for the trip I was making to Mount Bogong.
*
When I doused it
for the first time, the shocked spider darted halfway up the wall in a flash
before staggering back to the floor, poisoned, already half-dead.
Never before had I
done anything like what I’d just done, but by now, except for the nervous start
I gave when it reacted to the water-proofer, a kind of trance had come over me.
I was looking at the spider the way I looked at the last page of a book just
prior to sleep. If the book was no longer a book but a lullaby, something which
coaxed me into another mental imperative, then so was the spider hardly a
spider. My weird urge to burn had smoked ethics and the naming of things and
there was only one way to ease it.
Certain that it
had no more escape attempts left in it, I sprayed the spider a second time.
While it was glistening wet I swooped the lighter in close and sparked. There
was a crackle, and a very high-pitched, beetle-like squeal, and the smell of
burning rubbish, all of which I took in with the focus of a scientist
conducting an experiment. I was deathly quiet and could feel that my eyes were
open wider than normal. I sprayed the spider some more and the flames turned
greenish and almost sucked back up into the can, terrifying me. So I raised the
can higher and pressed the trigger as softly as I could; the occasional droplet
of combustant would fall and stoke the flaming spider on its pyre of smoking
dust.
There was a lot of
fire and smoke. There was a lot of waterproofer on my fingers. And even after the
spider had devolved to a shapeless piece of charcoal I continued to dapple it
with waterproofer, relight the flames if they went out, unthinking and so
unmoved, transfixed and so not really watching. Then when there was nothing at
all left to fuel the fire I swept the remnants into a dustpan and threw them
out my window. I pushed my mattress back into place. I realised I was still
wearing the sock on my hand and took it off, dazedly put it in the bin.
I opened my
bedroom door and the smell of whatever it was that Kiera and Daniel were
cooking rushed at me, attacked me. It smelt good.
No comments:
Post a Comment