"The only truth I know is logically defined a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor." (Ursula LeGuin)
Stormwater waste drifts out to sea, churning with the waves, pummelling whitewash. The mess is sucked out and pulled, called by the iceberg that groans under the sea. The swell chews, and crunches on the cellulose. The river bank bleeds silt and decays, but as Sidney edges away, far in sight, it appears calm on the surface.
Sidney sipped instant coffee. The brown liquid slid down and broke its surface as he slurped it up over the edge of a paper cup. The bottom was left with a sludge brown residue, still runny. For a moment the liquid was still in motion. It reminded him of an ochre paint he had used the night before. With this likening, it became strangely unpalatable but he gulped the rest down. The hospital walls stretched out in white corridors. He’d been attending this bed for weeks now, his mother’s chest inflating with the soft elevations of a coma. He’d hold her hand, but it was always cold. He wanted to paint her like this, immortalise it as a kind of conscientious objection to existence, but he just held her hand as it would start to warm. He detested the stink of the place; his jacket had started to smell like the cardboard scent of an aeroplane.
The light was always blue at this time in the morning and the residing rains outside made the gloom deeper; the blue greyer. He ran his hand over a vein on her hand; blood trickling slowly down; lights shining from fluorescence above. His gaze was held on her face, following the lines of her wrinkles. He liked how they gathered into the density of a dimple on one cheek. It reminded him of how she’d smile the most she ever did on their trips in her Kombi down to her favourite spot on the South Coast. They both would sit and watch the sun setting over a Western grouping of mountains. The water was always the warmest of spots in summer, shimmering like the smoky-orange of the campfire. They danced around it and he felt his soul leaping in and around the flames.
He couldn’t bring himself to paint her, or anything about her. She was his blind spot. The silence of the room hummed out in its paradox of sounds. He craved to understand her, not so much to know her. He closed his eyes and watched as an invisible progression of souls, hidden and black, held her body up from below, pushing it up towards the light. The darkness swam around her, the voices groaning from the underneath. He felt as if generations should have been sitting there in mourning. No one had been in to see her. His aunt Judie was probably coasting down the highways, phoneless and free. She’d taken a political theory class at university, and joined an anarchist commune. All that was left of his family were libertines of the most clichéd proportions, engendering all the purest of intentions, but suffering all the mistakes of putting freedom above everything else. For this he enjoyed the silence.
He itched, and this made his diaphragm and throat shake a little from under him. “What freedom?” he thought. Most of his childhood was estranged from her, as if he were a barrier to all she thirsted after, the escapism she craved. There would be no testifying to pretence. He was sorry for the first time since his sixteenth birthday; the day he left home and found her passed out and dolled up, hair like a scarecrow. Peaceful. She had that same goddamned twilight of peace across her face. He wanted her eyelids to open, to see blue eyes. He dug his face into the grey-blonde grease of her hair, and inhaled. He choked, and loved choking, needed it, and his muscles relaxed. The nurse came in and regarded his sobbing with indifference, replacing the drip. With the interruption, and the coming dawn he decided to leave for home, weary from a broken night’s sleep.
The sun opened the sky and made the autumn air crisp. As it swept through Sidney’s hair it bobbed sleekly, forming a precarious quiff. A scent of exhaust fumes and the faint line of ocean salt on the air hit his nose. His hands felt heavy, and he wanted to get them dirty with charcoal, get furious on a canvas. The bus pulled up, and his curiosity was spiked as an old lady, a regular on this route, alighted. She was his favourite passenger, always sporting a new broach on her coat each day. She appeared to have a collection, and he marvelled at how the broaches were so uniquely different from each other, so oddly incongruous with her clothing, or the city surrounds. This time it was an iceberg, standing tall, a white cap on it like a mountain, contrast by a dark grey base, floating on the running lines of a pictorial ocean. He didn’t assign any meaning to it this time; instead he stared out over the humming of the day, undone by the sun-yellow warmth contained in his hands.
The bus doors swung open, and he greeted the clean air of the Bondi cliff faces. He caught sight of an ice-cream that had been spilt on the walkway up towards his apartment building. He caught it in passing, oozing over the wooden board; a white mound retaining some of its shape amongst the seagull-white. The sound of wash pummelled the cliffs, gushing up from below. As he walked up the steps toward the apartment block and opened the foyer door, he failed to pull all he’d seen together. He put thoughts aside, and pressed four on the elevator. He loved the mild coconut smell of the place, and the sand embedded in the carpet, and the wooden finish of the corridors. He was excited to see Michael, maybe kiss his neck and taste the salt on it from the early morning surf. A fresh canvas awaited him too, untouched, and bare.
The apartment was empty and the French doors were left slightly ajar, letting the easterly winds breeze in. A guitar was sitting on the couch amongst a pile of sheet music, and a laptop was placed next to a script marked with corrections. The shower clouds on the horizon were strung together, moving in formation closer to the shore. The glass battered lightly as the wind whimpered. Sidney decided to open up the studio room. He’d let it get musty, and it was full of mess, coffee cups and old paint that had dried hard on palettes. On the table were some of his childhood drawings that he’d gotten out the day he received the call from the hospital. They sat like a calendar, chronicles of his past, brown and tea-stained.
One pile contained pictures of his mother that he drew as a child in the sixties dresses she used to wear. In therapy he was told that he was an extreme introvert as a child, and the education system didn’t cater for his learning style. One of the drawings was missing, which he gave as a gift to his mother for her thirty seventh birthday. As a boy he thought it was his best drawing -- smoke enveloping her, cigarette ashtray full of burnt hashish by her side, sprawled out on a bed. Her reaction was engraved in his mind as he gave it to her; her lips tightened and a tear dropped from an eye. This was hidden quickly by a face, sweaty and flushed from the summer heat. She starred at it for a moment, in awe of what he could do, but this was concealed by a blush, an untamed fury rising, a crack, a bloodshot vein. “Are you testing me?” she said. Her face would bend in anger, beautiful and savage like that.
There was a severe drought and bushfires that year, and the city was flurried by a cloud of black ash and dust. Ribbons and strips of ash would fall like a black rain. As the wind carried them, her breath came like eucalypt vapour, dry and wavering in the heat, sucked up by flame. As she slapped him he would just focus on the one tooth, black behind the white, half-dead and hanging from ruddy gums. His nose would dribble, and dry, caked with the ash. He was grounded for three months, and given a severe strapping. Blue bruises stung if he sat, and they stretched over most of his buttocks. She took his drawing outside with her, setting it alight with her cigarette lighter and proceeded to bring in the washing. He saw the flames through his back window; smoke rising from the kindling of a barbeque. From that day the fire stung him, cooked his flesh. He wanted to let it up; extinguish the embers. His hands moved over the canvas, unsure of what he’d draw, with that same image of her in peace on the bed, floating with the smoke.
He wanted to sleep, to have Michael by his side as the hours passed. His toes dug into the carpet. The charcoal box contained only a few remaining cylinders, his canvas a bending ocean moving yet still with the crushing of waves. From obtuse arches and curves came a shape like an iceberg. It sat amongst the two dimensional mess, sticking up and over, above the chaos; a dark monolith against a grey sky, a black expanse beneath. He’d never charcoaled like this before – it had always been abstracts made with ochres, fluid and languid; surrealist landscapes that made the industrial natural and the natural industrial and merged the bush and the sea with the geometries of city centres, factories, and warehouses. His supervisor at art school always tried to introduce him to oils and paints because he had the nimble fingers, and the eye for visual textures. She said they’d provide him with greater modality, contrast, depth of exposition. A charcoalist had to have large palms, and rough thumbs, always handicapped in the art market by the shortened longevity of their medium.
His buyers loved them, but he wasn’t sure he did. As he continued sketching, he felt the hint of flamboyancy in his hands that he hadn’t for a long time. It was a release of colours – yellows and light blues, and reds. Vibrancy came all in a rush, like a smudged rainbow falling with the rain. The wind swept up, whistling outside with the onset of a shower. He closed a window, sitting and adjusting the drawing. He hadn’t heard the figure creeping behind him with the pummelling of the rain. He flinched slightly as Michael kissed him on the neck, running his hands over his shoulders in a massage. A wave of exhaustion overcame him as Michael plied and caressed his shoulders. Michael’s eyes smiled, speculating the shape in front of him.
The surf was really choppy today, full of twigs and rubbish… unusually cold too – they say there’re icebergs floating up from the arctic.
Sidney rubbed his black hands together.
I had a productive day.
Y’know, this is really different, Sid.
I’m happy with it.
Thought we could go for a walk after the rain stops.
Bit tired. Can we make it an early night? Got to see Mum again early tomorrow.
The sun was revealed by the passing of the shower clouds. It slid under the horizon, a yellow orb encased with orange ochres. Sidney tasted the light and it was dry like the tip of Michael’s lips. He kissed them and ran his hands over his back, smearing Michael’s singlet, dunness like shale, sweaty from a jog. The black of the sea devoured the day, and they swam in its orange sleekness, under the shimmering as the eucalypt smoke burnt off. Heat rose to a sating breath; a gasp up on the surface. The cliff faces called with the final tweets and shrills of birds amongst the green of the bottlebrush. The waves crashed on the iceberg, gurgling with the water retaining itself around the vessel; the moving entity being drawn out into utterance. It sank deeper, thawing out with time.
Sidney woke to the dark, Michael lying sprawled on the bed, mouth hanging open as he twitched in dream. That same blue light confronted him, and filled the whole room; his mother’s chest emptying: the long, slow exhale of the ocean noise outside. He opened the fridge and poured a glass of milk unable to sleep. The digital clock on the microwave flashed 5:13am. He drank the milk up and over the room’s stillness. He put on his jacket and went down in the elevator. He was dazed, staring at his reflection in the silver of its steal plating; a groggy blur. He liked the new flowers in the foyer. They were wax-red lilies, and blooming full, their stamens furry with yellow pollen. His new landlord had a better maintenance keeper than the last. He closed the foyer door. The sky was dark, except for house lights on the head land and street lights in the distance. He noticed the ice-cream from yesterday had run off with the rain and water was still running off under the wooden boards and mossy undergrowth. The sandstone cliffs stood high, reaching over the sea like the heads of ancient creatures and the waves were crashing hard from the swell of the low pressure system funnelling out to sea. His favourite rock pool for swimming was overflowing with the high tide.
He climbed up and over the bush track along the side of the cliffs. He expected to see runners weaving their way along the track, the corporates enjoying the same early morning freedom. Perhaps it was too early. Instead the track was empty, and he walked over the wooden floor boards to look out a little higher up. As he listened to the snores of early morning; a rat scurrying past him, and the occasional rustle in the bushes, he sat on a railing at the southern most point, and stared out over the declension of the cliff faces. He had often gained inspiration from the rock faces; carved out by the rain and salt. He greeted the first of the buttery light of dawn on the horizon and the sand white beach in the curve of the bay. His eye moved curiously to a figure far across from him who stuck out from the landscape. They were lower on one the sandstone ledges to the most seaward extremity across the escarpment, wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. He couldn’t make them out exactly but he watched as their hair blew in the wind. It wailed a little in his ears.
The figure stood there motionless, staring out to sea, like a living memorial to the drowning sound − some grand figure from myth, emerging out from the blue of the sky. The figure seemed unfettered by time and consummate to the force pushing them back from the cliff face. Sidney’s heart started to beat faster as he felt the unease of their closeness to the edge, and heard the silence of their fall. The white wash rushed around it as the figure hit the surface, breaking it open; sinking under the sea.
