Life-Changers
By Kara Allen
Copyright 2014 Kara Allen
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for Bene, who enables me,
and my mum, who puts up with me
in which sometimes it seems innocuous—‘you are beautiful’—he liked it so—everything ends with a body in a box—2.8 million young, healthy soviet pows—боже как больно—she was his childhood sweetheart—it was one time too many—how do you tell your cousin her boyfriend’s a pig?—well, you did steal a car—doing what you can isn’t always enough—it takes ten years to go home—we, all of us, are connected
ash floats gently down to thinly coat the ground, the train tracks, alice’s thick, dark hair. it disintegrates between her fingers when she touches it. the sky, when she looks up, is heavy with yellow-grey smoke.
a train is due in seven minutes and, in twelve, alice will meet erin.
she is typing, curiously, bushfire perth toda, when she is bumped and her phone leaps from her hand and skitters away across the thin carpet.
‘i'm so sorry,’ erin says. her hair spills over her shoulder in a red waterfall when she crouches to retrieve it; her eyes are very blue.
their fingers brush and then the phone is safely tucked away in alice’s coat pocket.
‘no, no, it’s fine. thank you,’ alice says. she looks out the window at the slowly blueing sky, at the plume of smoke that shrinks away from her, cowers into the distance. erin is watching her when she looks back; she smiles, she leans forward, she takes a chance. ‘hi, i'm alice.’
*
erin has scars: straight, white lines that criss-cross the front of her upper thighs. she watches alice trace over them with her fingertips, and she itches to draw the sheet back over herself.
‘high school was tough,’ she says to her bedroom wall.
she doesn’t say, i looked in the mirror and hated myself
she doesn’t say, i didn’t understand why i didn’t want boys the way my friends did
she doesn’t say, i lost my virginity to tom white at a party and he was too-eager and he smelled like vodka and sweat
she doesn’t say, i wanted to do worse and i was too scared
she does say, ‘i'm better now,’ and she is. but she regrets.
many things.
there's a cool, soft pressure on her thigh and she is startled into looking down. alice kisses it again; her lips press the skin where two lines intersect to make a perfect x.
‘they’re your history,’ alice says. she catches erin’s hand, and then her gaze, and smiles, soft. she doesn’t need to say anything else.
*
the gardens are beautiful. an ancient willow dips its branches in the stream that runs beside them. roses and orchids and gerberas bloom. a frog croaks quietly from a lily pad on the pond.
in front of one hundred and fifty seven people, tom white says, ‘i do.’
he slips a ring on juliet’s finger.
he wipes away the tear that releases from her eyelashes.
he smiles so hard his whole face hurts.
and he kisses her even as ryanne begins to say, ‘i now pronounce you…’ and he doesn’t hear the rest of it over the roar of his heart, over juliet laughing breathlessly and saying, like a mantra, ‘i love you i love you i love you i love you.’
*
ryanne's eyes have been dry for two weeks, since the day she walked into a room and found her mother crying on the phone. she stands on firmly-packed, mown grass and watches a long, black box lowered into a hole in the ground.
her younger brother, niall, lent over during the service to whisper, ‘is granddad in that box?’
ryanne whispered back, ‘shut up!’ and mum had to separate them before they caused a scene, pulling ryanne up and swapping seats with her so niall couldn’t do more than stick his tongue out from around her pregnant belly.
evgeny was sitting on mum’s other side, and he smiled for ryanne with slow tears tracking over the valleys of his face, before he turned back to watch one of ryanne’s uncles give his eulogy.
evgeny and her granddad have been friends longer than ryanne’s been alive. after grandma died and granddad moved in with them a few years ago, evgeny would come round and they would play cards in the tiny back garden. ryanne always loved to sit just out of sight and listen to them chatting in a language she was never taught. she loved evgeny’s laugh: a deep, rich sound that seemed punched out of him, as if he was always surprised by it.
once the coffin is covered by dirt, the crowd begins to drift away. ryanne sits instead, cross-legged, and she doesn’t realise she is not alone until evgeny settles beside her, his lanky, too-long legs looking ungainly when he mimics her.
‘i'm old man. i regret already,’ he tells her in his thick, russian accent, a secret smile playing at his lips.
ryanne smiles back, but she can’t tear her eyes away from the uneven earth for long. she feels dampness in the corners of her eyes, feels tears rising behind her lids when she blinks.
evgeny touches her hand, splayed on the grass beside her, in gentle recognition. he says, quiet, ‘your grandfather good man. he save me.’
*
the camp, when they arrive in it, is little more than a patch of dirt fenced off with barbed wire. the only buildings are watchtowers spotted around the borders.
they have been forced to march for hundreds of kilometres to get to this place, and evgeny is so weak from hunger and from the beatings he takes along the way that he thinks, fondly and often, of simply collapsing to the road and letting the germans do what they do best.
he would not have made it but for vlad, who bears his weight when he feels he cannot walk any longer, who murmurs, ‘do not give up, my friend. think of your sofia,’ and does not let him break down.
many of the pows have dug themselves holes to shelter from the bitterly cold winds that have begun; many more have died already. together, vlad and evgeny carry a man, whose face is dried up, whose ribs are rows of trenches down his muddy chest, to the vast pit and dump him there. they take his hole, dig around the edges until it fits two half-starved humans, and huddle together for warmth.
they watch hundreds of men die from their shelter in the dirt, watch them starved and shot and beaten by germans who return to conversations about their wives and children as if they had not just murdered in cold blood.
vlad takes to telling evgeny, wrapped around each other, so cold that breathing is another agony to add to their list, ‘we are russian. we are stronger than this,’ but, later, after the war ends and, somehow, vlad is proven right, evgeny holds no illusions that he would have survived alone.
*
sofia lies in a stark, new york city labour room on the other side of the world and gives birth to the child of a man she could not wait for. there is a pretty blonde woman called mary in the bed beside her, but it does not make the room feel any warmer or less lonely.
she tells the nurse in haltering english that her name is zocha, that she is polish. she is terrified that they will not help her if they know she is soviet.
she cries and swears in russian until the child is born and gives herself away, but the americans do not know better than to believe her. the doctor never once looks into her face, and the nurse is as distracted and coolly disinterested when she places sofia’s little boy in her arms as she was before.
sofia almost calls him evgeny, but she knows she needs to be realistic, not sentimental. she cannot risk that all americans will be so ignora
nt, and she should not give them undue cause to be suspicious. she sets evgeny aside as wishful thinking, sets it aside with the fantasy that one day she will open her front door to a tall, lanky man with large hands and a silly grin.
she calls him, instead, edward.
*
captain america and bucky are watching chuck blayne’s speech on the television when eddie is interrupted by a soft knock on his bedroom door and his mother’s voice through it saying, ‘zhenya, betty is here. she wants to see you.’
‘ok!’ eddie drops his copy of the last captain america issue onto the pile of comics on his bedside table; he’s read it so many times since it came out a few years ago that the pages are dog-eared and wrinkled, and he doesn’t need to finish the hour of doom to know how it ends.
eddie kicks his legs over the side of his bed and sits up. he's still in his neatly pressed slacks and dress shirt from church this morning, with his neck tie loosened and his quiff a mess from lying with his head on the pillow. he looks like a total square and an ankle-biter besides, but betty’s never expected him to be cool. it's not like she’s expecting paul newman.
and betty, when his mom lets her in, is too distracted to notice anyway. she murmurs thanks to mom as she comes into the room.
mom says, ‘i'm leaving this door open,’ but she walks away.
‘oh, eddie,’ betty says, almost in tears. ‘i had to come tell you right away! daddy got a new job; we’re movin’ to california!’
*
‘honey, where are you?’ sam asks. his voice is sugary-sweet and it makes betty want to be sick. ‘where are the kids?’
‘we’re at a hotel,’ she says, wrapping the phone cord around her finger so tightly the tip goes white. she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. ‘we’ll be back tomorrow and i want you to be out by then.’
‘what’s going on?’
betty looks up at the ceiling. the children are asleep already, curled around each other in the farther bed from where she’s sitting, but she still hesitates to say this aloud in front of them. ‘i know about that girl marikit,’ she says. ‘you said it wouldn’t happen again.’
‘betty,’ sam says. ‘oh, damn, betty, c’mon don’t do this.’
‘you can’t talk your way out of it, not this time. i'm filing for a divorce.’
*
marikit visits australia once, after james is born. she’s been pen pals with her cousin leah since they were girls, and nothing would stop her from meeting her cousin’s baby, even if she had to save up for months to afford the short trip.
she stays with leah and her boyfriend liam in their ugly, rundown home in mount druitt, on the outskirts of sydney, and it takes less than a day for her to hate liam. he's a deadbeat, even if leah is determined not to see it, and he makes marikit’s skin crawl.
she's sitting on their worn couch on day three of her stay, with james burbling in her lap, when liam sits down beside her. the couch isn’t so small that their bodies should touch so much, from shoulder to knee, and marikit cuts a glance over her shoulder. liam isn’t looking at her, apparently oblivious.
‘hey, jimbo,’ he says, and james coos, catching marikit’s attention back.
she tries to tell herself it’s nothing, tries to school her breath steady and her heartbeat slow, but she can’t help being hyperaware of every place she can feel liam against her.
‘you’ve such a doting aunt, eh, jimbo?’ liam says; his breath is hot on her ear, across her cheek, and she laughs, awkwardly and doesn’t reply, hoping he’ll realise what he’s doing and pull back. instead, he draws so close his lips touch her throat when he adds, ‘i can put one in you some time. i love an exotic girl.’
marikit stands, abruptly, and deposits james in liam’s lap. ‘i need to. i have a.’ but she can’t think of an excuse. she points vaguely toward the spare bedroom where she’s been sleeping and flees.
after dinner, liam goes out drinking and marikit tries to tell leah what happened, tries to explain it, but she can’t find the words.
*
red has been red so long he hesitates over offering his name, has to bite back the automatic reply. he says, wary, ‘james robeck,’ and the man who introduced himself as police constable andrew ng says, ‘you need to come with us.’
‘fuck you,’ red says, and, ‘hey!’ and, ‘get your hands off me, you cunts!’ when police constable simon honeyman shoves him against the wall and police constable andrew ng cuffs his wrists.
‘you’re under arrest,’ police constable andrew ng says. ‘you have the right to remain silent.’
‘go fuck yourself,’ red spits.
*
andrew’s first corpse, the first real dead body he sees on the job, is a five-year-old indigenous boy called albert. he throws up afterwards in a bin by the side of the road, and simon claps him on the shoulder and says, ‘you never get used to it. c'mon, we’ve got to break it to the family.’
andrew doesn’t know what to expect, but albert's mother doesn’t say anything when they break the news. she clenches her fists and her shoulders are wracked with sobs, the ugly, full-body kind that make it hard to breathe. albert's siblings, kevin and sarah, are sitting beside her, fourteen at best and looking suddenly much smaller, much more fragile. kevin tries to touch his mother’s shoulder and she flinches away from him.
‘we’re doing everything we can to find who did this,’ andrew says, when simon doesn’t offer up anything himself, but it’s an empty promise and they all know it.
*
kev has trouble staying in one place. pro-surfing makes it easy for him to pick up and move when he can’t stand to look at the same walls, walk down the same streets, catch the same waves any longer. when he’s itching to get out.
he lives in bondi for a while, then costa rica, then fuerteventura.
he dates alice, a pretty bi girl, for six months back in australia, living in perth and making day trips down to margaret river or spending mornings out at trigg beach, before he has to leave again. he moves to jeffreys bay and they send emails back and forth; he moves to sipora and they fall out of touch.
he's in santa catarina, living out of a surf hostel in florianópolis. he wipes his sandy feet off in the front yard, surrounded by palm trees, swaying back and forth in the breeze, and wanders inside.
he keeps his phone in a locker while he’s surfing, and when he checks it, he sees four missed calls. there's one text message, from sarah. all it says is, we need you, please come home.
he hasn’t had an email from sarah in months, hasn’t spoken to her on the phone in longer, and it’s been ten years since he’s seen anyone from home at all, but he doesn’t question it. he can’t. she’s his twin sister and if she says she needs him, it’s important.
he sends back, i'm coming, and books the first flight home.
*
ash floats gently down to thinly coat the ground, the train tracks, alice’s thick, dark hair. she will spend the rest of her life loving the woman she meets today.
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About the Author
Kara Allen is an emerging writer born and raised in Fremantle, Western Australia. She is studying creative writing at Edith Cowan University, and has recently returned from a semester abroad in USA. She writes for Not Your Average Damsels, a blog interested in the lives and experiences of all women, and her fiction and poetry have appeared in Hubbub Creative Arts Exhibition Catalogue and Primo Lux.
Works by Kara Allen
Always
Life-Changers
Connect with Me
Find me at my blog: https://karaallen.blogspot.com.au
I also write at: https://www.notyouraveragedamsels.blogspot.com.au
Twitter: @karaallenau