Addition (10 page)
I have destroyed everything; held it in my hand and crushed it and there is no recovering from this, none, none none none none none.
Arm is really heavy on me now not moving lying pressing. Not moving not breathing. He could be dead I don’t know him don’t really heart disease asthma some kind of stroke. Aneurism popping in his brain small vital clot. He could be still and turning cold blue I could be pinned who do I call his dead skin touching mine rubbing spreading dead. No movement. Chest still. Can’t turn to see. Are his eyes open staring dead. Lying next to me. Decomposing.
‘Ssshh…It’s all right, it’s all right…’
I jump through the air at least 5, maybe 5.3 centimetres.
‘It’s all right, Grace. You’re having a nightmare.’ His voice is creased with waking and concern. He pats my hair twice, touches my face.
Breathe. Perhaps I am. Perhaps I am having a nightmare.
‘Wake up, Grace. God, you’re shivering. And panting like you’ve run a marathon. You’re all right.’ His voice is lower now, and his words are like cooing. He stops patting me, and now he holds me. Too tight to be a normal hug. Tight like he wants me to know that he’s here. Like he wants to hold all of my body in his arms. He keeps telling me I’m all right. He sounds very confident.
‘God, that must have been a shocker. You feel like ice. Come on. Let me hold you.’
He’s already holding me. His flesh is burning my cold skin. Hold me.
‘Tell me about it. Trust me, it fades quicker if you tell me about it. I know about nightmares. When I was a kid I used to dream there were snakes living under my bed, and they’d come out in the middle of the night and crawl all over me. I’d wake my parents, screaming the house down. Come on, Grace. What was it?’
Maybe he’s right. Everyone has nightmares; even Seamus. Maybe this was just a regular nightmare, the kind that happens to normal, regular people, and I just dreamed I was awake. How many snakes were living under his bed. Only 2? Or 2000?
I want it to stop. I want it all to stop.
Suddenly I’m sick of it. Sick of counting all the time. Of all the little games and rules and orders and lists and chewing my food 30 times and drinking a cup of tea before bed every night. I want to have a job and go to the movies and have a family and people over for a dinner which is not chicken and vegetables. I want to be like everybody else. I want to run as fast as I can in bare feet and on grass like I’m a child and my hair is streaming behind me. I want to run and I want to feel my leg muscles stretch and pull and my chest heave in the service of my freedom.
I don’t want to count any more.
‘My mother. And Jill. Dead,’ I manage.
‘Who’s Jill?’
His eyes narrow and are surrounded by little crinkles of concentration, caused by too much UV exposure. He’s the kind of man who goes outside without sunscreen on. He can drive a car. He can leave his house without knowing where he’s going, and he can take a trip with no itinerary. He could probably go to a restaurant and order food he feels like eating; he wouldn’t need to order the first meal in alphabetical order or the first item on the first page of the menu or any one of a dozen other systems I’ve tried. He knows what it feels like to run fast.
‘My little sister.’ It’s fading fast, this nightmare, and the closer he holds me the faster it fades.
‘What happened? Grace?’
Tell him. He’s holding me and he wants to know. ‘She died and Mother died. They both died horrible deaths and I should have looked after them and it’s all my fault.’
I meet his lovely, crinkly eyes and, although I’m feeling much better, mine fill with tears. He pulls me closer until we are pressed together in my single bed and his limbs enfold mine because they are delightfully longer. His legs are maybe 8 or 9 centimetres longer than mine, his arms maybe 4 or 5. It’s difficult to be accurate from this angle. I have a soft tape measure on my bedside table next to the photo of Nikola that I use to check the placement of the furniture every week, but it’s a little hard to reach for it now. His lips brush my forehead and my hair, and my face becomes pressed against his neck. It’s beautiful in here, warm. It smells kind.
He murmurs in a soft voice like he’s comforting a child. ‘Listen to me Grace. Grace, sweetheart. It’s a bad dream, that’s all. No one’s dead, and no one’s going to die.’
The room is growing pale as the day arrives; it filters through my lace curtains and flicks across the floor. That first half-light lifts my skin and his face and the room seems a different place. The night seems a long way away. Another country. I can hear the birds beginning to sing outside, but it’s still too early for traffic. Seamus is all confidence, lying in my bed in my flat, holding me like I belong to him. He’s a man whose nightmares come only at night. A man who can ask about my toothbrushes and grin and shrug and say, ‘Fair enough,’ when I keep my secret.
Seamus smiles at me. ‘No one’s number’s up while I’m here.’
The next time I wake, the lightness inside my lids tells me the sun is up and the air is still instead of moving. My eyes are closed, and my mind and my body are still. I am in my childhood bedroom.
I feel the angle of the bed from the way the sun falls. I can smell the ironed clothes hanging in the cupboard. The sheets are flannelette, not crisp cotton. If I opened my eyes I’d see my china figurines. Yet there is one thing that brings me back to the present, a smooth brown arm curled around my waist. After my nightmare, I must have fallen asleep again in those arms.
I open my eyes. On my bedside table, Nikola is looking down at me. The night before the killing of Kemmler, Nikola probably woke at 4.00 a.m., perhaps in panic as I did and perhaps like me he saw only death around him. The next morning, August 6 1890, at 6.00 a.m., Kemmler would die, smoothly and cleanly as Edison had promised. All Nikola had thought of and dreamed of would finish. No one would ever want AC power in their homes.
But it didn’t finish. Because Kemmler didn’t die cleanly.
As soon as the electricity coursed through his skin and nerves and vessels, Kemmler began to pull at the ties that bound him, stretching them in anguish until they came close to breaking. He screamed too, a sound that stabbed the ears of those who hailed electricity as a new era in humane killing. After 17 seconds the current was switched off.
I wish I could have been with Nikola that dark night. I wish I could have told him, ‘Pay no attention to your fears. The scent of death may be upon you, and it may be upon your dreams, but it will not kill your vision.’ Perhaps I would even have held him and said, ‘Your number’s not up, Nikola. Not while I’m here.’
Kemmler was still alive, horribly injured and writhing, his bladder and bowels and balls emptying in front of the appalled witnesses.
The executioner decided to switch the generator on for another burst, but they had to wait until it recharged. They were forced to wait as Kemmler convulsed and gasped. This time the current ran through his body again for almost a minute and by the end the air in the small room was thick with the smell of burning flesh and smoke was rising from Kemmler’s scalp.
‘They would,’ Westinghouse said later, ‘have done better using an axe.’
Perhaps not the next morning, but soon after the execution, Edison’s power over the future of electricity began to wane. Despite the terror in the night, despite the horrible dreams of death, perhaps it didn’t take long for Nikola’s faith in his vision to return, and a sense of certainty about his future to fill him again. Nikola would have slept more soundly; resting like he was again a child. Like the man beside me.
‘Seamus,’ I mouth his name. I know he is awake, but his breathing is long and even and his eyes are closed.
He is on his left side, against the wall, so close to me in my single bed that with my head turned towards him he takes up my entire field of vision. I am on my back, one of his arms under my neck and the other across my body below my breasts. His blondish hair looks darker now, pressed down against his scalp. His forehead is high and smooth. His eyebrows are unruly, and underneath his eyes are puffy bags. His nose is a fraction too big for his face, and between his nose and his lips the indentation is deep to match the dimple in his chin. His morning shadow is darker than his hair.
I want to kiss every cell.
Instead I take a deep breath in, and let it out in a sigh. ‘I need to tell you something.’
‘Hmmm?’ His eyes are still closed.
‘My name is Grace Lisa Vandenburg,’ I say, still staring at the ceiling. ‘I am 35 years old. My mother is Marjorie Anne, and my sister Jill Stella is 33. Jill is married to Harry Venables; he’s 40 on the second of May. They have three children: Harry junior is 11, Hilary is 10 and Bethany is 6. My father’s name was James Clay Vandenburg, and he died 17 years, 9 months and 13 days ago. I have a science degree and a Dip Ed. I lost my virginity in my first boyfriend’s car outside my mother’s house. I don’t like coriander. I don’t like realist paintings. Why don’t people take a photo if they want realism? I love abstract paintings. Once I went to the National Gallery in Canberra on a school trip and stared at
Blue Poles
for an hour.’
I think for a moment, and then I say, ‘Lycra makes me look fat.’
His eyelids jerk open. ‘Fat? Nonsense. Where?’
I squeeze the triceps of my right arm, the saggy bit that looks like a raw pork sausage, with my left hand. ‘Here.’
He raises himself and at the same time pulls me closer. He brings his face very close to my right arm. His nose almost touches my skin, like a scientist peering at an unusual bacterium with a microscope. He examines it, smoothing the skin with his fingers. Then he nips it with his front teeth.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘And here.’ I lift my shirt and squeeze my tummy between my fingers.
He lowers his head, and this time his nip is slower.
‘Nope.’
He trails his teeth down and my heart beats faster. He slips two fingers under the elastic of my pants and wriggles them lower. The bed is narrow so he rolls over on top of my leg. His lips are brushing the top of my pubic hair.
I realise I am rubbing my hands together, threading my fingers through each other. I force my hands to my sides. ‘There’s more. There’s so much more I need to tell you.’ Nikola. Electricity. I hardly know where to begin.
He stops and looks up at me. ‘I’m sure there is more. And it’s all good to know, Grace, especially about the coriander. You never know when I might decide to send you a bunch of long-stemmed Asian herbs. But don’t tell me right now. Later.’
I grip the sheets with my hands. Now. It’s got to be now. God knows he can’t know everything—can’t even know the most important things. But I need for him to see at least part of me. And he can’t see me if he’s inside me.
Besides, Nikola is staring right at us.
But now his breath is hot on my inner thigh, and his hands reach around and slip under my pants to grab my bottom. If I don’t stop now… ‘Seamus?’
‘Hmmm?’
‘I’m worried I might have caught a communicable disease.’
He rolls off my leg and sits on the bed beside me. ‘From me?’
‘No. From watching the late movie on SBS without a condom.’
He laughs. ‘Isn’t it a bit late to be thinking of that?’
‘Late, shmate. Should I be worried?’
‘No. Should I worry about a little half-Irish half-supermodel surprise in nine months’ time?’
‘I’m on the pill.’
He stretches like a cat, then turns on his side and unhooks my fingers from around the sheet. He holds my hand flat and kisses the pulse point of my wrist, tracing with his lips and teeth a line down to my inner elbow. ‘I do feel a bit guilty,’ he says.
He feels guilty? Nikola is staring at me in bed with an usherette I’ve known for 15 days and
he
feels guilty? My God. He’s got a wife. Ten kids. My hands make fists, nails burrowing into my palms. ‘Why?’
He sits on the edge of the bed. I scoot my body away. ‘I promised you Italian. No Italian. Then I promised you gourmet supermarket quail, and still nothing. No dinner at all. You must be starving.’ In an instant he vaults over me, landing lightly on his feet on the floor. ‘I have a great idea. How about breakfast? Something unrelentingly bad for you like bacon or eggs Benedict or pancakes or preferably all three. Then you can tell me more things. Childhood illnesses, favourite music, your football team—whatever you like.’
I look up at the ceiling. I’ve got so many things to do. I need to wash my hair and dry it and brush each section 100 times, then dress. And Saturday mornings are for shopping. I have to brush my teeth and wash my face and I’ve missed the alarm already but that doesn’t mean the day is ruined. I can start again at the beginning of the next hour.
‘That is…I mean…if you’re free…’
‘It’s not that.’
He takes my hands, and holds them together by the wrists. He brings them close to his body so I have no choice but to look into his eyes. ‘Grace, I have something very important to ask you. Please don’t think I’m asking this lightly. Please think about it, carefully, before you answer.’
I tense my shoulders, my hands.
‘Grace, can I have one of your toothbrushes? I’d really like to brush my teeth but I’d hate to leave you short. For…whatever.’
I laugh. I’ll pretend the supermarket had one less. ‘You may.’
‘Thanks. Now, I’m going to the toilet. Then I’m going to brush my teeth with a specimen from your collection. I’m going to put on my clothes from last night, as unappealing as that sounds. Then I’m taking you out for breakfast, because we need food and we need coffee. Okay?’
The air is even more still now than it was before. It’s early. The day is brand new. This morning, I have woken up with someone else in my bed. Last night, I did not do my night-time routine. The day is new, and it is filled with possibilities and I am filled with possibilities. He barely knows me. I can be anyone I want.
‘Well?’ he asks again.
Get up. Go to the loo. Brush my teeth with a new toothbrush. Put on clothes from last night. Go for breakfast.
The way he said it like that, it sounds like a list.