Homing (14 page)

“So what’s wrong?” he asked, carefully splitting a match lengthways with his Stanley knife.

Anna opened her mouth, but the answer seemed to stick, as if too large to escape her chest.

“What?” He looked up, knife in hand.

Before she could answer, a grey dove flew in through an open window and flapped about from wall to floor and back to the window, beating helplessly against the wrong pane of glass. Glad of the distraction, Anna tracked it with her camera, preserving its panic in three quick shots full of blurred feathers and sunlight through the dusty glass. It made another dash across the room, crashing into a matchstick tower on its way.

“Ah
fuck
!” cried Hein, rising from his seat.

The bird pressed itself to the cornice and watched them with an inky, flustered eye.

“I’ll get it,” she said.

Anna’s father used to keep pigeons, and he’d taught her how to hold and stroke them in such a way as to soothe their tiny brains. So she knew how to take the bird deftly in one hand, wings fast against the body, legs straightened, the whole bird folded up as neatly as a big warm flower-bud. It’s easy to give such small animals heart attacks: one must be gentle. Its head swivelled from side to side, seeing her with first one eye and then the other, the pea-sized heart pulsing wildly from fear of some disaster beyond the comprehension of a bird. Anna could have stilled it with one squeeze. She turned to show the dove to Hein.

“Get it out of here. It’s wrecked my castle.”

Anna explained: “You can break their wings, if you do it wrong. This is how you pick up birds.” She showed him her neat handful. “Like this. You hold the wings and the legs so it can’t flap and hurt itself.”

Hein just scowled, picked out a match from the rubble on the table and lit another cigarette. He was a messy, crude smoker, no elegant gestures or spirals of smoke – it seemed the smoke rose from his whole body, like steam. Everywhere he went he left holes in carpets, tablecloths, furniture.

Anna’s father’s pigeons were always falling down the crooked chimneys of her childhood home. Late at night, she would hear a panicky, irregular flapping coming from the fireplace, and would creep from bed to feel in the gap behind the grate, expecting giant spiders or a hand to grab hers in the blackness. But her fingertips would find warm feathers, a frightened bird. Anna would grasp the bird the way she’d been taught, like a firm handshake, and with one hand scoop it into the light. It would stare at her in dazzled incomprehension, and Anna would feel brave and magnanimous, and wake her parents to show them her good deed. Not often since had she felt so courageous.

Anna opened the kitchen window and released the bird into the air as if she were placing a china teacup on a shelf. The dove shrugged its wings and was gone.

Hein was engrossed again, straightening the tower. Wordlessly, Anna went to the bedroom and took the photograph from her pocket. It was small and blurred – her hands had been shaking – but nicely composed: Hein, in bed with a girl they knew, both naked and asleep. Her arm was coyly draped across his crotch, and his hand cupped her head, fingers caught in her long hair. Sunlight illuminated a cat, curled up in the crook of a smooth-skinned knee. Anna had glimpsed this pretty scene the day before, through a half-open door, while visiting a friend. It was one of those digs where five or six students lived, and where people were always wandering in and out.

Trusting her camera’s eye more than her own, she hadn’t really believed it until she saw the glossy print. It was like holding in her hand a colour still from one of her own dreams: proof of the truth of nightmares.

Anna had met Hein on the beach. She’d been on her knees, taking photographs of stones, when he came up to her.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Just looking,” she said, like someone caught shoplifting. He received this information seriously.

Anna observed him, standing there frowning, with his wet shorts clinging to his thighs. Although he was quite still, except for one hand smoothing back his hair, Anna felt an impatient energy twisting in him like a water snake. With black hair and green eyes, his colours were strong and clear. He had a solid body, undefined, as if protected by a thin, even layer of fat under the skin. But he did not have the paunchy indignity of a fat man: his body was smooth and powerful like a sea creature’s, proportionate, functional.

On nervous impulse, Anna lifted her camera and snapped a picture. When she lowered the lens, she was surprised to see on his face a ravishing smile, the brilliant grin of one who loves to be looked at.

“You’re at art school, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Yes, Photography.” Anna stood up primly, adjusting the towel around her waist.

“I’ve just started there. Hein. I’m Sculpture.”

And that made her smile, too.

Two years later, she still had that first photograph: Hein, a glossy water creature with skin glistening and hair slicked back. The famous smile is just starting on his face. That image would be followed by many more: Hein working; Hein dressed up, laughing; Hein, always, near water – he loved the ocean, the pointless, noisy violence of it. While Anna feared the undertow, for Hein it was temptation, and he would tease her by swimming out as far as his strong arms could take him, too far out for her to ever rescue him. Anna sulked on the beach, digging her toes into the sand, imagining disaster; but of course he would always bounce back out, blinking drips from his eyes, triumphant, scornful.

Later, Anna would remember those beach outings as strange and sad, filled with portents of coming storms. Once, they found a dead seal on the beach, its eyes rotted out and ribs showing through the sodden pelt. There were strange marks gouged in the sand, tracks of unknown creatures, indecipherable traces. The sky in her memories was always overcast, and there were no other characters – just Hein, always too far away down the beach. Of course they must’ve gone on crowded, sunny afternoons, but Hein and Anna seemed to move in a charmed, rainy circle, the other beachgoers like ghosts in ghostly sunshine. Only the two of them were vivid, every drop of brine on their skins a clear lens, every word as sharp as a gull’s cry.

“Take the picture!” called Hein, laughing, far away beneath a sky full of heavy rain.

Hein was an engine, constantly in motion, streaked with industrial grime. His hands and clothes were stained with oil, petrol, paint – not ordinary dirt, no food stains or even sweat, nothing organic. He was always fixing things, breaking them, reducing them to rubble and building them up again, at once clumsy and delicate: motors, brick walls, old appliances. He moved in a storm of metallic noises and light effects, producing sparks and pyrotechnic swear words, shouting for her to come and look, come see what he had done.

When they first met, he was into big metal sculptures. Anna believed he liked them for their sheer mass, their capacity for noise and danger and their tendency to fall over. One group of pieces seemed to be suits of armour for seven-foot aliens. They lurked in his workshop, glinting dully. Anna photographed them once, a frightening series of warlike visages in semi-darkness. The flash lit sharp edges of raw metal. She didn’t like to go near them.

Anna had her projects too, and her machines – her two beloved cameras. But they were delicate instruments of frosted metal and glass, not comparable to crude welding iron and electric drill. Silent except for the sexy
schink
of the shutter, their mechanisms were as precise as insect mouthparts. Anna had trapped and examined Hein a thousand times in their shiny innards.

She wondered how he maintained his gloss, living as he did in a world of such hard edges. He had no scars: the surface of his skin was smooth, as if he walked unscathed in the centre of a personal tornado.

Anna herself had picked up countless scars, marks that life had notched on her body to record this little pain, that small mistake. Some of them were from Hein; they followed from living in close proximity to his careless energy, his blunders, his sharp objects. The wounds were accidental, but sometimes Anna could not understand – as the hammer dropped onto her foot not his, as the glass he had broken drew blood from her hand, as he twisted her arm back too roughly in play – how such damage could come if not from some secret core of malice.

Hein was very strong, with muscles that could quickly and alarmingly harden out of recognition. It unnerved her, in the middle of pillow fight or mock boxing match: the rigidity of his body, the violence of his desire to win.
Ah
, she realised, as his forearm slapped hers to the table in an arm wrestle, as she poked her fingers into a torso grown suddenly, strangely hard,
ah, so this is really where we stand
. Or Anna would catch sight of him idly cracking open a bottle of beer, briefly revealing a bicep as solid and distinct as a cricket ball. It made her think of a man casually pointing to a concealed gun. A little reminder
.

Anna sat in the darkened bedroom.

“What’s going on?” he called from the kitchen.

Her eyes were wide in the dimness, her camera held like a bird to her chest. She could not bring herself to answer.

“Hey, come on, it’s nearly finished. Photo time!” A rap on the door. “Come on, I want you to see this. It’s got a little secret corridor and everything.”

She fetched a single syllable from her throat: “No.”

“No? Ah, come on … what’s wrong?” He tried the doorknob. “Anna?”

“No.” It was the only word she could muster.

But later that night, she came out of her room and allowed him to present the completed castle to her. It was huge, a sprawling wooden contraption with inner courtyards, trapdoors, spiral staircases. Anna felt outrage at the time he’d spent on it, the hours of tenderness and care.

“I worked really hard on this one. I’m not even going to burn it. It’s for you. You always wanted to keep one. Well here: it’s yours. You can varnish it or whatever. Now take the goddamn picture.”

Anna took a deep breath, tried again. But nothing seemed more eloquent: “No.”

“What is
wrong
with you?”

Anna allowed herself a smile.

“What? What’s funny?”

She laughed, remembering sunlight on soft, foreign skin. “Hein. I’m not taking photos any more. I’m so sick of it.” She leant forward to take his cigarette lighter and held it up. “Do you have any idea how sick I am of watching you?” She waved the Zippo in front of his eyes, flicked open the cap and produced a flame with a roll of her small thumb.

His eyes widened: “Don’t you dare!”

But she’d already lit the castle in three different places: tower, drawbridge, bastion. It crackled into flame.

“You’re crazy!” he yelled, lunging forward.

Anna feinted again with the flaming Zippo. When he tried to snatch it, she pulled back, laughing. He grabbed her wrist, twisted it behind her back so that she dropped the lighter, and in one impossibly hard and unexpected motion brought his fist up and slammed it into her face.

For a long moment they stood quite still, leaning awkwardly into each other. His eyes were wide and shining their brightest green. Anna felt the blood welling in her nose, the pain astonishing. Beside them, the castle burnt wildly, flames almost reaching the ceiling. It’s really dangerous, Anna thought, making fires like this inside the house.

He let her go suddenly, backing off with his hands raised and a scared look. “I’m sorry.”

Anna could feel the bruises coming already on her wrist. She couldn’t speak from disbelief.

“Oh god, you’re bleeding. Oh god, oh god.”

“Hein,” she said. Her voice sounded thick and she could taste blood in her mouth. “Hein, the fire.”

With clumsy movements, he filled a bowl at the sink and threw water on the hissing flames, three times. Then fetched a wet towel, hugged her, wiped her face.

“I’m sorry. Anna, love, I’m sorry,” he kept repeating. Behind him, the ruins smoked.

Anna looked at him, noting the way the light reflected off his eyeballs, the slight shadow under his cheekbone.

“Say something.” He tried to dab the blood that was still pouring from her nose.

Anna pushed his hand away and went to the bedroom. The cool glass of the mirror soothed her: she was intrigued by the blood, the swelling. Her camera watched her from the dresser with a shining, sympathetic eye. Eventually the pain subsided.

Anna found Hein sitting where she’d left him, looking sick. There was a stinking black mess on the table before him. She sat down opposite him and put her camera on the table.

“Here, I want you to take some pictures of me.”

He looked at the camera, then at her. “You’re not serious.”

“I am. We’ll do my face now. My wrist tomorrow, when the bruises show.”

They stared at each other. He raised his hands, palms up, and took the camera. His fingers looked too big for it.

“Be careful, it’s very delicate. Very expensive.”

“You’re crazy,” he said without spirit. He looked quite nauseous.

Anna presented her bloodied nose to the camera.

“Look carefully.”

Anna allowed Hein to help her frame the pictures. They used his Stanley knife to cut the white cardboard. He seemed sad.

“Always thought I’d be the one exhibiting,” he said.

Anna was pleased with the way her pictures looked, framed: the clean white borders containing the muddied violence of the images. She felt clean and precise herself. She placed her smaller hands carefully on the backs of his, mindful of the prominent veins. Never before had she felt capable of hurting Hein: always she had felt like a watchful ghost, his solidity threatening to pass right through her.

The pictures that Hein had taken were some of the best at her exhibition: her blue wrist and hand transformed into a dream landscape, her face blurred in extreme close-up, colour bleached from it except for the shocking red of the blood, so clearly genuine.

Looking at all her photographs together, arranged chronologically on the white walls of the gallery, Anna was struck by their narrative of violence: blood and bruises. Burning buildings. A trapped bird. Metal demons. How could she have ignored such clear warnings?