Tarcutta Wake by Josephine Rowe Read Free Book Online Page B

remind myself. It’s all for show, doesn’t belong to anybody anymore. David asks how Thao would stand if he were waiting for something. Whether he was a loud talker or a soft talker. Whether he ate with his hands. The shape his mouth made when he came. Most things I don’t have an answer for. Most things I have to make up.
    I invite him home to show him Thao’s clothes and his trashy thrillers that had wriggled their way into my bookshelves. I show him the grey earth in the back garden, from which Thao had coaxed basil, parsley, the feathery gills of dill, coriander that he replanted every fortnight in summer, as it went to seed so quickly. On the kitchen table I smooth out brittle newspaper clippings of the World War II naval mine Thao had found almost thirty years ago, massive and urcheonlike amongst the coral. He had known that it was very old – tired, he said, from drifting around the Pacific for so many years, broken free from the chain which had once anchored it to the sea floor. Itinerant, was another word that he used, which always brought to my mind the addition of a battered leather suitcase and a waterlogged bowler hat, though I never joked about this with Thao. He’d swum out to meet it every day for a week before finally telling his father, a fervent alerter of proper authorities. The mine was carefully extracted from the reef, and detonated offshore a week later. Thao, who had never been allowed pets, recalled this incident in the manner that others recall euthanised animals sent to fictitious farms.
    Must you befriend all the salty old ruins? I asked him.
    Georgia is ambivalent when it comes to the subject of the mine.
    I mean, how do you stage that? How do you stage it without ruining it? She shakes her head. I don’t want it to look like a high school production.
    I can see him clearly, skinny arms around his bony knees, conversing silently with the mine beneath the surface of the water.
    It’s already been ruined, George. I ruined it by writing it. Thao ruined it by telling me. It might as well be ruined some more.
    Alex. Georgia looks into my face. You are a sad, sad man. Anyway, I don’t think it’s in the budget. Maybe we’ll just have Thao talk about it.
    You mean David.
    I mean Thao, who is being played by David. Are you getting precious?
    Right. No, I’m not precious.
    There are things I want to ask David. There are moments when I think he will be able to answer. I want to ask him what Thao saw, whether it was bright enough for him to see anything at all, there in the oil-black water. Whether it calmed him, laying his hands against the great hull of the dead ship. Feeling something like a heartbeat as the tide pulsed inside it. I know he might not have made it out that far. I like to think that he did, though I’m not sure why it matters, either way. He washed up on some doctor’s private beach. Or what some doctor thought of as her private beach. I had to read about it.
    Onstage, Alex is demolishing the fourth wall. I’ve decided that I don’t much like Alex. Everything he says sounds pantomimic. It’s all I can do to not shout out, He’s behind you, you fool!
    It was not a compulsion, he tells the audience, which just now consists of Georgia and myself. Not a need that I had for sexual conquest or variety. Just a fundamental interest in other people’s lives, and how they lived them. The stories they told themselves through the photographs and possessions they chose to display. I wanted the kind of insight that came with nights spent awake in strangers’ houses …
    Georgia hollers down at the stage every now and then, I want to see more regret there. Again please, and can we have a longer pause this time?
    I sit beside her with a printout of the script, making a shuddery little mark at every point that I fail to conceal a bodily cringe.
    Our final argument is being staged in a lounge room. For reasons pertaining to