Furious Horses

>Although the sun burned bright white against the distant shimmering of heat, there could yet be distinguished a sense of purpose guiding the single figure walking slowly amongst the scrub.

The girl could remember coming this way once before; there was a memory ever-present, gilded with regret—the hollow feeling of what could have been. Hers was a harsh land, stretched like cracked skin from end to end, pockmarked with some dead botanist’s observations.

But her insides burnt when she thought of him. Of his certain steps flattening the dead grass. He was a riparian incision through brown growth as good as dust.

So she walked longer, under the midday sky, with its clouds like raked-through cream. She knew he was somewhere here, amongst the iron and the ironbark. Waiting to be seen in a half-caught glimpse, like sunlight through the moving leaves. Iñez, she heard him call. Iñez. Pure. Her name was like a drug; she had not heard it for so long.

In the afternoon, inside, she sated her saccharine habits, feasting on good thick chocolate because it clumped away at the dead dust of her throat. Black coffee to follow, burning and sealing like tar. Was she sure she had seen him, or heard his voice? His was a name she knew, spoken in dreams where she danced—wraith-like—to the tunes of his tongue.

He was a black mark on the town. His feet were well cleansed by the locals’ spiteful aim.

*

In the evening she heard someone on the porch; boots on blue gum in the twilight stillness. Three hits of a fist, intonations of intractable force. It had to be him. She opened the door, and swept the gritty ground with a hard heel. He seemed to stare through her, but she saw, in his eyes, a reflection of her own fascination.

He did not move from the doorway. He was a shipwreck on the stifling shore of outside heat.

She moved towards him, and began to stroke his hair, his arms, his tight folds of skin. His places of imperfect air. She closed her eyes; let him kiss her, let his pulse beat through her like a fingerprint. His slow deliberate steps of life.

Later, and later still, she would know his taste, how his abdomen pulled back when she touched it; soft then hard like flexed metal. He would be inside her and tell her long melodic stories that opened like flowers, each corolla a semblance of history.

She would dance in his dream times. His whispers like welcome weather.

When she woke, she felt strangely at home. Mulga. Gidgee. Weonaworri. The trees and the spears of thunder. A partial face. A straining muscle. Land. Sea. Sky. Moon.

He slept, like something nocturnal given up to winter’s call. It was still night, but so luminous in lieu of morning. A belt of stars brightened the sky like scattered sand. She turned her body towards him, rumpling their bed of spinifex, and slipped under his arm with a breathless and welcome warmth.

The cold night lifted from their embrace like dew, and the first light filled the air with promise. The sun raised them from the earth. Lifted them from the dirt, past the house, past the town, past the country, past the world. Their throats tightened as the oxygen thinned. They were on their way.

> “What’s that supposed to be?”

“It’s a bilby,” I say.

“A what?”

I blink a few times and say it again slower. I try not to look at Brendan’s yellow teeth that smell of peanut butter. He picks up my drawing and stares at it for a minute.

“What’s it wearing shoes for, Dumbo?” he asks with a nasty smile on his face.

“It’s for the Olympics, Brendan. We were supposed to draw an Olympic mascot for school.”

Brendan turns around when I say the word school. He starts poking the girl sitting in front of him with his finger.

For the rest of the bus trip I look at my bilby. It is the best drawing I have ever done.

I had the idea while I was having dinner, and I was allowed to stay up and work on it until 8 o’clock. Dad even let me sit at his desk to draw it, his big brown desk, with the seat so high that my feet don’t even touch the ground. I wrote BONZER BILBY on top of the page in thick pencil. Bonzer Bilby is yellow and black and white and wore bright red shoes.

The hot bus seat sticks to my back and the banana in my lunch box will be squishy by morning tea, but I don’t care. Today I will do something the same as everyone else.

*

“Now class,” Mrs Borbley’s bright pink fingernails tap on her cheek, “can we all get our work books out please?”

I smile proudly at my desk. Desk number 12, if you count from the left. Just behind Mary Gillett, who always wears a big bow in her hair, and just in front of Brendan Pritchman, who doesn’t wear a bow, but calls me names and always looks like he is chewing something. Richie Smith, who sits next to me, told me Brendan eats things out of his nose.

I reach into my bag, and get out my blue book with a sunflower on the front. I practice writing Yous and Doubleyous (I can’t write them that way though) between dotted lines while everyone else copies something that is written on the blackboard.

I always have a different book to everyone else. Wednesdays and Fridays I even go into a different room, all by myself, and practice speaking with a tape. Mr. Willard helps me. He’s nice, but he talks strangely sometimes.

I stop writing when I know Mrs Borbley is standing right behind me. She likes to do that.

“Don’t worry about me David,” she says when I tip my head backwards to look at her. “Just carry on with your writing.”

Her mouth looks funny from upside down, and she has hair under her nose. I don’t tell her this though. I start on a new row of letters.

She says, “Try to keep those Ns inside the lines.”

*

It’s morning tea break now and I’m sitting on a bench under a big shady tree, pulling the gladwrap off a biscuit. I hear some kids over behind the Grade Seven building playing. One of them will be throwing a tennis ball at the others, who stand in a line against the wall, trying to dodge out of the way. The teachers try to get me to play sometimes but I always get hurt.

I see Richie Smith coming towards me. He is wearing a smiley face badge on his blazer.

“Hi David,” he says, throwing up an eraser in his hand and catching it again.

Richie is a good friend. He sat next to me on my first day of school and showed me his stamp album. Richie told me his dad drove aeroplanes all over the world, and every time he came back, he would bring Richie new stamps. He even one from India, with a green tiger on it.

“Can I sit next to you?” says Richie, in a funny voice.

“Okay Richie.” I try to copy the voice, but it doesn’t sound quite the same.

Richie laughs. He has a strange sort of laugh—it sounds like he is coughing but he isn’t. He pulls an orange lolly out of his pocket and puts it in his mouth. Richie is lucky because he gets lollies from the doctor that he’s even allowed to eat at school. His eraser has a funny dog on it.

“That’s a great eraser,” I say.

“You can have it,” says Richie, giving it to me. “I’ve got another one at home.”

I thank him and put it in my pocket. Mrs Borbley always makes me rub out my mistakes.

“Want to see my Olympic picture?” I say.

“Sure.”

I pull it out of my bag carefully, using the fingers without crumbs on them. Richie looks at the picture.

“Wow!” he says. “That’s really good! Much better than mine. You should show Mr Willard. He’d love it.”

“I think I will,” I say, putting the gladwrap back in my lunch box.

*

After morning tea, I go down the hall with my picture to see Mr Willard. I walk past the shelf with the shiny trophies, past the door with the fuzzy glass and a sign that says PRINCIPAL . The door opens and Brendan steps out. His shoelaces are untied and he has a frown on his face.

“What’re you looking at, Dumbo?” he says. Brendan is always in the principal’s office.

“Nothing.”

“Hey, give me a look at that picture,” he says, sort of smiling.

“Okay.”

Brendan snatches my picture and walks down the hallway.

“Hey, that’s my picture Brendan!” I shout. But he keeps walking.

“Thanks Dumbo,” he says. “I don’t have to draw one now.” He folds my picture and puts it in his top blazer pocket. As he walks off, he shouts over his shoulder: “Not a word to the teachers Dumbo, or it’s trouble!”

My mouth is wide open. No picture – no Bonzer Bilby. I was so proud of it and now no one was going to see it. I start to cry. I feel a hand on my shoulder.

“What’s the matter, dude?”

It’s Mr Willard. I don’t want to look at him. I don’t want to be here any more.

*

Mr Willard takes me to the teachers’ room and gets me a drink of red cordial.

“This is pretty cool,” he says. “You’re the only student I know who’s been in here. Probably thought it’d look a bit more like a torture chamber hey?”

I smile a little bit.

“So what’s the problem, buddy?” he asks.

I tell him I lost my picture.

“Can’t you do another drawing?”

He didn’t understand. That was my best picture ever.

“Just give it a go, dude,” he says. “I’ve got some really radical textas in my desk.”

He gives me some paper and a blue pencil and goes out the door. I start writing BONZER BILBY as hard as I can on the paper, imagining the letters going in and out of the dotted lines. I screw up my eyes hard and open them again. The letters mix around. Inside and outside the lines.

All of a sudden I see it. I don’t want my picture back any more. This is even better.

*

Brendan Pritchman takes off his blazer, throws it down next to the monkey bars and runs off with a wet tennis ball in his hand. I munch my sandwich and watch him disappear behind the grade seven building. I put my hand in my pocket. The funny dog eraser and Mr Willard’s pencil are still there. I walk over to the monkey bars.

*

“Now class, it’s time for show and tell,” says Mrs Borbley. “I asked you all to do a drawing of a mascot for the Olympics. Did everyone draw one?”

Everyone says yes in a quiet voice.

“Who would like to be first to come up and show the class their drawing?”

Brendan sticks up his hand.

“I shouldn’t have to tell you again Brendan,” says Mrs Borbley. “You have to go to the toilet before class starts.”

“No Miss,” says Brendan. “I want to show you my picture.”

Mrs Borbley stops in the middle of a yawn and looks at him strangely.

“Um … all right Brendan,” she says. “You may come up here and show everybody your picture.”

Brendan stands up in front of the class and speaks in a posh voice. “Hello teachers, girls and boys, here I have my show and tell.”

He is looking right at me. He unfolds the piece of paper and holds it out in front of him so we can all see it. Someone starts giggling. Then someone else. Then we’re all laughing. Brendan looks at us and his smile turns to a frown. He turns the page around so he can see it. He stares at the picture. He looks as if his underpants have been turned inside out with him still wearing them.

Our teacher sees the picture too.

It doesn’t say BONZER BILBY any more. It says MRS BORBLEY.

“I suppose you think this is funny do you Brendan?” says in a very angry voice.

Brendan makes a little squeak.

“I’ve had just about enough of you Brendan Pritchman!” she shouts. “I’m ringing your parents right now!”

“But … but it was David’s picture!” he whines.

“Don’t be stupid,” says Mrs Borbley. “You know David couldn’t have done that.”

“I can’t draw that well Brendan,” I say, smiling.

Mrs Borbley pulls Brendan out the door by his arm. Everyone is still laughing. I open my blue book and start practicing my letters with the blue pencil.

I give Richie back his eraser. I don’t need it anymore.

BONZER BILBY

>My boyfriend spent more time in the elevator than he ever spent with me. This was my observation, and this was the theory I explained to him over breakfast. I told him that he worked on the 67th floor of a large building, and that the elvator ride from the lobby to his floor took, on average, one minute and 43 seconds. So to get up and down every day, it took him two minutes and 26 seconds. Now, I explained to him, I knew he smoked, which required at least three trips down from his office to the lobby everyday, which was another six trips in the lift, or ten minutes and 18 seconds, giving a daily total of twelve minutes and 45 seconds spent travelling in the elevator. As he finished his muffin, looking at his watch nervously (he too, it seemed was finally beginning to realise my point that time just adds up, I finished my analysis.

He would take one more elevator trip for lunch, plus one more, which I generously attributed to miscellaneous office tasks, bringing to a grand total the time my boyfriend spent in the elevator over a single day to fourteen minutes and ten seconds. So that meant–I explained to him as he downed the last of his coffee and made for the door–that he spent 70 minutes and fifty seconds every week travelling either up or down in an elevator!

I was about to tell him how many hours that came to in a whole year, but by that time we had reached his floor, the doors had opened, and he stepped out, pacing down the hallway like he was running late, like he had no time to spare.

>And deep on the island, his prison, his hell,
he was no longer Gary, but Mr Gazelle,
and his hoof-boots were hard, and his horn-hat was tall,
and his pelt-coat was thick, and his tail quite small.
And with firm resolution he knew what to do,
which of course was Escape! From Crazy Zoo.

>There go the dead. Stalking your floor. White-eyed beneath their hair: all nails and earlobes and slashed-up grins. You stand at the fridge, arming your face with the warmth of a twenty-watt bulb, your one point of confidence. Your back, bare to any attack.

>At the end of winter, when those who’ve held out all winter get flus, Danny went to a party. Danny hadn’t been single long. Not really ever been. A few months later, Christmas time, his friends presented Best Ofs for the year, or duked them out over eggnog. Danny won Best Awkward Hitting On Everyone We Know and could only look around at his friends. This party was a Halloween one but he was not dressed up. Or was dressed as a hick, in a cap of mangled leather, but this had been the way for many of the colourful parties that season. One of his friends was dressed as a sailor ghost. But he often wore a sailor’s shirt, and ended up drawing a dancing tatt on his arm that looked like his girlfriend.

This party in October was in deep suburbs. So there was a marvellous yard without the errors of homes closer to the city, which all sloped or were populous with stumps. Everyone sat in circles – small ones with their friends. And as circles broke, as people went upstairs to pee, the groups loosened and rejoined. But in circles, always circles, as though the cosmos held a slow light compass.

Danny sat on a chocolate couch beneath the house talking to Aaron, who he hadn’t known lived there with Luise. Through his time on the couch, he caught the motions of the yard through the load-bearing posts. Those who stood, or were hoisted by their lovers, came close to the house and spoke privately, not knowing a splinter cell relaxed beneath. When Danny climbed the stairs to pee and looked upon the panorama, the configuration had reached its apex in one circle twenty-strong.

He couldn’t get drunk tonight. They probably have to do with the speed you start at: those nights where no matter what you do, you keep that three-drinks feeling. He descended the stairs and the sailor ghost had out one nut, another fun thing that was not so special.

Danny had never really ‘regarded’ Aaron. Aaron came to some parties when he moved to the city. He tried people on and found those who fit in Danny’s periphery, and became someone Danny saw a couple times a year. On the chocolate couch, their conversation had felt free-floating. It contained a degree of good electricity and a degree of harm, but Danny was unable to determine what these degrees were. They established that it was not Aaron’s party, but Luise’s. Aaron was uncomfortable tonight for probably no reason. And Aaron was studying comparative religion and listening to Dismemberment Plan. Danny was no longer living alone – someone had moved into his spare room, a girl he cooked with. And it wasn’t so far away for Aaron in this suburb, just you had to catch a train, a system for which Danny held fear. Everything Danny and Aaron spoke of was boring, but the conversation was like tasting someone else’s meal. Hardly consciously, once he’d peed, Danny corrected a stagger in the circle, placing himself in a sort of mirroring position to the person creating the stagger. A mirroring position is probably the wrong term. He created a shape optically pleasing when you considered the limbs and focuses of the other people in the circle.

Although Danny had the three-drinks feeling, everyone around him was walking and falling and failing to hoist, and the air had snapped, releasing coldness. The sailor ghost was flexing the dancing girl on his arm. Danny got a funny feeling from the tattoo; she resembled the sailor’s girlfriend so uncannily, the breasts must also have been hers. For feeling so funny he called a cab, and sat on the curb with the girlfriend and the sailor ghost. After half an hour a cab came and he let them take it; the cab was black and white, but no one could remember who had called the black and white company and who yellow. He felt he was sitting in mist. He called both the black and white company and the yellow, though it felt like lying. Neither company had a booking for this address. He realised the mist was not still, but was a slow drift of rain. The air snapped again and the rain fell more quickly and Danny ascended the stairs and Aaron stood by a wall. He said Danny could sleep in his bed. Danny said, Top to tail? Aaron said, Why not? But Danny recalled what he’d promised the girl he cooked with: that he was through spooning boys. He had been spooning too many, and though the promise was unsolicited, he thought that it was good. Anyway he said to Aaron, Sure. Then another black and white came, even though Danny knew the yellow company had a fleet almost double in size. He was quiet to the driver, who spoke with a clip.

*

When the new winter began, Danny ran into Luise and followed her home. The sky shifts to cold, to such clarified black, and someone like Danny gets ideas in his head. Like exercising too much, or following acquaintances home. The beginning of winter is a dangerous time for the healthy. They sweat and it’s a time for sweat to freeze. Danny was aquiline like a shark, but he’d been doing push-ups and felt strong as a bull. A bull shark.

Luise’s room was at the top of the stairs. Her door had been closed at her party, and looked so like a wall that Danny’d missed it. He began to smoke. You can’t smoke there, she said. My clothes. These were all dresses, and looked fine. So they sat at the bottom and Luise bummed his smokes and put them out in one piece of junk mail. She loved the band Roxette. You’re not into Aaron, are you? she said. Danny had not really ‘regarded’ Aaron since Halloween. I think that Aaron is straight, he said. Come on, said Luise, let me show you his room.

Aaron had a raised bed, half a bunk, and a little desk beneath. The blue of the bunk bed pulled away the desk’s rigour and made it childish. This was the Seuss box set Luise had given him for Christmas, these were the books in miniature, and this was his CD drawer, including Dismemberment Plan. The CD triggered Danny’s feeling of Aaron – the good electric and the harm. So the room’s childishness was ready to lift when Luise said, That bed creaks. Her statement reminded Danny that Aaron had gone out with Luise when he first moved. Why did you show me this? said Danny. Luise said, You asked, which wasn’t true at all. Feeling energised, Danny decided to walk part of the way home and hail a cab. This walk felt like when you walk somewhere new but have directions. The walk is not long, but indeterminate, like it could be. It felt as though every sound could be a human sound. Danny made up a game called Tree or Person – where you try to work out whether a dark shape is a tree or a person – and played it in his head. He texted Aaron.

*

Aaron could not find the party later that week, and when he arrived, he was uncomfortable. For Danny, parties were compressed people, so he could not find fault in them. This was the small birthday of a friend, and everyone was inside. Inside-parties are choppy and no matter how good the couches are, people hover in the kitchen on silver wires. The sailor ghost played poker. Danny and Aaron sat outside among the plants. The birthday girl grew garlic. Danny still cooked. Aaron said he was attending job interviews, to work out what to do. This caused Danny to consider what to do in general with his life, which brought their electricity to ground. Hungry? he said, and offered risotto.

*

Aaron said Danny’s apartment looked like a human-box, though he didn’t sound too critical. Danny had lived alone although not single, and the girl moved in when he was done. The human-box suited them, and the rule was they could wake each other with coffee. Aaron hovered in the kitchen while Danny cooked. Mostly they were silent, because he cooked with the music up. The risotto came out like pudding, and Aaron thought it might work with cheese. He said, I’m sorry if I was weird at that party. You weren’t, said Danny, not sure which party he meant. Aaron said, It’s just I’ve never had someone come so full-on onto me. On the chocolate couch. He was looking at Danny very openly.

Danny experienced one of those memories where you vividly render not only what happened around you but also yourself. He was spooning Gavin or Zach, post-drunk and tired out, saying something stupid about how the blinds lined the moonlight, or how the lights widened their limbs. Then specific things he said: Have you ever done this before? And eating risotto in the human-box, he felt as tired out as in the memory. He felt the need to sleep diagonally in his giant bed. Later on he heard the girl he lived with come home, and in the morning he made Aaron coffee, another later for the girl.

>

His sister called in the afternoon to say their mother might be dead. She didn’t say those words exactly, never actually mentioned the word ‘dead’, but they both understood the subtext.

“She’s not picking up her either phone,” she said, “and I’ve been calling for hours.”

Maybe she was at the shops, he said. Doing some gardening. Taking a very, very long nap.

“Usually, I’d think that too,” she said. “Except I called her last night, and she didn’t pick up then either. Then I called this morning, and I’ve called over ten times since then. Nothing.”

This worried the brother. Immediately, his mind went back to the day before, and the last phone call he’d had with his mother. During the course of the conversation, she had stated the following things:

1. They did not call her enough;
2. She resented the fact they did not call her enough;
3. No one returned her calls any more and she may as well be dead; and
4. If she were to die, how would anyone know?

It wasn’t exactly a pleasant conversation and, so, ironically, didn’t provide much incentive for him to stay on the line. Considering the chat centered on how no one apparently called her, the phone call struck him as a precise, borderline-genius exercise in self-sabotage and passive aggression. Well played, he’d thought at the time. Well played. Then midway through the conversation, he became frustrated and exasperated—and a little bit bored—and told her he needed to go. When she insisted on talking more, he said cheerful goodbye and promptly hung up on her.

Recalling the conversation now, he started to sweat. Usually when he sweated, he didn’t smell any differently than normal, but if he became nervous or frightened, his armpits begin to secrete an odour that was not unlike garbage. In his mind, it was like a defence mechanism, similar to a skunk’s. If someone was to attack him in a dark alley way, he would smell this way. He smelled like that now, the thought crossing his mind that he’d inadvertently killed his mother, or at least driven her to suicide. If the purpose of the weird armpit smell was a defence mechanism, right now, it was defending him against accusations of murder.

Both he and his sister lived over an hour’s drive away from their mother. They could not possibly know whether she was dead or not. Neither of them said this out loud.

They called their other sister. The mother and the other sister were arch enemies. But for inexplicable reasons, she was the only sibling who lived within a 20 kilometre radius. They asked whether she could drive by, to ensure their mother wasn’t dead. Again, they avoided the word ‘dead’, and instead told her to check whether their mother was ‘okay’—which, by extension, implied ‘alive’.

“Okay, I’ll do it,” the other sister said. “But I don’t have the keys.”

The first sister explained that their mother kept emergency keys, and gave her precise directions as to where to find them.

After the other sister started to drive off, the brother started calling the mother again—on the landline, on the mobile—leaving messages on the answering machine, even though he knew she wasn’t there. As always, the greeting made the mother sound like she was caught in a blizzard, a thousand miles away, at the ends of the earth, somewhere where satellite reception was fading fast. He left messages—Where are you? Are you dead? Why do you even have a phone?—and kept calling and calling and calling, the same way someone continues with CPR long after they know their loved one is dead, long gone, kaput.

When the other sister arrived at their mother’s house, she called back.

“I’ve rung the doorbell, no response,” she said. “I’m about to go inside now with the emergency keys. I’ll call you back again.”

She hung up on him before he could say anything, and he quickly realised they should have stayed on the line together. What was the point of hanging up? Was she going to call back only after she’d found their mother’s corpse, dangling from the rafters like an effigy? Was she going to call back when she’d found her vomit-stained body on the linoleum floor, still convulsing from having forcefully ingested bleach? Was she going to call back when she found their mother’s electrified cadaver in the bath, a faulty appliance still plugged into the wall and—

The phone rang.

“She’s not here,” his other sister said on the phone. “No one’s home.”

She’d checked the garage too. The doors were locked. The blinds were closed. The phone and purse had been taken. These were all the things their mother did before she left the house. Nevertheless, the brother started calling hospitals. Each of the hospitals said the same thing, before transferring him to another line: “You’ll want the emergency ward, then.” All the hospitals said no one had been admitted under their mother’s name, but things like this happened all the time, and for them not to worry.

Together, the siblings waited in silence, their phones in their hands.

When the mother eventually returned from the shops, where she’d been for the past five hours, she was irate that the other sister had entered the house without her permission.

“But we thought you were dead,” the other sister said.

“Well, I’m not dead,” the mother said. “Not that anybody’s interested.”

She hadn’t recharged her phone battery, and on her way out, it had died. Out of everyone, she was not afraid to use the word. My phone battery was dead. But I’m not dead. And even if I was dead, would you even care? Care that I was dead?

Days later, they would discover she had done it all on purpose. But even before he’d known the details, the brother had a lot of things to say to her, some of which made sense, others not so much. You need to keep your phone charged. You are irresponsible. My armpits smell like a bin. You need to grow up. I have spent the last three hours on the phone. I’m hungry. We have no food in the pantry. Maybe I should buy some eggs. Do you realise how worried we were?

“Hold the line,” he told his other sister. “I want to speak to her.”

At that moment, the mother was coming out the bathroom and was about to receive his call. He would say all of these things to her, he realised.

And just at that moment, his phone battery went dead too.

>When it gets in your eyes, your skin, your soul. A window disappears,
a straight view to a street below. Instead, a tree, full of fists,
shaking hours out and down, making time matter, all over again.

>One of her arms hung over the chair. Salami in a butcher's window.
Pink and speckled, elbow folding up. Fingers red-tipped triangles.
Yesterday's eye-shadow: charcoal crumbs. Asleep, her head tipped
back. Clock on the table beside. Cheap and green. She dreamt of
birds. Blue, delicate things. Not fit for any world.

>We were watching television when we heard the sound. It was strange, and yet familiar at the same time, a sudden hiss of air or water, some element let loose in a hurry. It was loud too. Graeme turned the television up and then, after the second whoosh of sound he muted the set and we both sat up, listening.

We were sitting on opposite ends of the couch, his feet pointing towards my head, my feet adjacent to the stretch of his body. It was a large corner couch and there was a lot of soft space between us. Velure. I was in my bra and pants because I liked the feel of it on my skin while I watched television and I had to reach for my dress and slip it on before following Graeme outside.

He was looking up. I squinted into the dark outline of leaves and the stars beyond them and there was the sound again and I knew what it was, suddenly, that whoosh of flames and hot wind and the little click of the torch being turned off as if it were a tap.

We had been up in a hot air balloon on our first anniversary. My treat. A surprise. I remembered darkness and dew and the sleepy warmth of a cab as we headed towards the sports grounds where the balloons rose into the air like magic mushrooms, tethered by their earthbound baskets and the ropes and their tamers, wrangling them like elephants in a circus. I remembered Graeme’s face drained of its sleepy glow, paling to the colour of the moon as he saw them lit up by the park lights.

“I’m afraid of heights.” He said, unsteadily but he submitted himself to the trauma of the surprise ride, fingers white on the basket as we dipped down over the silver curl of the river, relaxing, finally as the sun rose and the buildings became nothing but a patchwork quilt beneath us.
The sound of the hot air balloon was very loud. It should have been right above us there, hovering just on the other side of the tree. We looked up past other people’s balconies. We saw the blue flickering lights of televisions in other apartments. I could hear the theme song from the news programme that we had been watching. There was no billow of silk, or flare of a torch, just the sound of the thing firing up. Perhaps it was on the other side of the building, out of sight but still, it seemed strange.

Graeme’s fingers twitched and for a moment I thought that he might reach for my hand but he didn’t. I wondered if he was remembering that morning when we drifted up above his vertigo, when he allowed me to take him somewhere unsafe and admitted eventually that he had liked it. I smiled, but it was dark and he didn’t notice the change in my expression.

“We should go back inside. We are missing the programme,” he said.

We sat on the couch and Graeme watched TV and I shifted on the couch making the velure rub back and forth against my skin and I remembered the times we had made love on that couch and the positions and how perhaps I would get tired of the feel of the fabric one day.
The sound of the hot air balloon continued, firing up at irregular intervals. I felt as if it were perhaps hovering right above the apartment building, looking down into our courtyard, taking photographs. I stood and walked outside and I could hear Graeme yelling at me to put some clothes on, but I just stood in the dark and listened, and it seemed like the sound was coming from one of the apartments, two floors up and a little to the right. The window was in darkness. I listened till the sound came again and the man in the unit directly above us stepped out on the balcony and leaned out and looked up. Then I stepped back inside, pulled the dress over my head and lay on the couch again.

“Anything?” Graeme didn’t look up from the programme on the television.

I shook my head but he wouldn’t have seen this and he didn’t ask again.