Salt and Mangoes
Lana had blue eyes. Light blue, the type that looked like water in the sun. This is what James liked about her, he remembered now.
He had opened the flyscreen to her standing there, like a cardboard cut out, looking him over.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Miss me much?’
She drew breath through her teeth and smiled.
She had changed. Her face was taut and angular, the features oversized; lashes thick, eyes wide set, lips greasy, hair too blonde and straight. And she wore a dress─ she never wore a dress─ black stretch cotton, straight past the knees and clenched in at the waist. Bought from one of those cheap imitation shops, James thought.
It became apparent that she was standing on the concrete slab that fronted his caravan, and that half dry towels were flapping at her shoulders.
‘No need to stand there with your mouth open.’ She cocked her chin to the side.
Blue eyes, he saw, blue eyes and thick lips.
James stepped aside, ‘Wasn’t expecting you back so soon, actually.’
Lana laughed and James watched her walk through the door.
He wanted to touch her; he wanted to pull her apart.

It was quite possible that when Lana was there, James saw his habitat in new light.
Twenty-one Kingfisher Avenue, Open Point Caravan Park, said the laminated piece of cardboard tied to his key ring. There sat a 1992 fixed Jayco, opposite the shower block and the holiday chalets, with a 1996 Magna rusting at its side. The park was built in the 60s, in the late 70s the highway decided to bypass its neon palm tree signs, it changed owners in the 80s and hasn’t been touched since.
Holiday chalets, James laughed, have a nice holiday in your chalet.

When Lana slept that night, the silence was unbearable. She was stretched out on her stomach, face turned to him, fingers curled around her chin. The outside light filtered through the flyscreen and distorted her features. It welled in curves on her face, blackened her eyes, added silver to her cheekbones and lengthened her fingers.
But they are still small, James knew, her fingers are small.
He had an impulse to pull them from her mouth and scoop them into his pocket, hoard them for later, suck on them when he craved sugar.
It was the silent expelling of breath he couldn’t stand. It seeped out of her body; this soft gas that warmed the pillow and thickened his breath. The walls of the caravan swelled. He could have choked.
At 2am he thought, at 2am I’ll wake her up and turn her over.

She would stay for months sometimes, a few weeks here and there, depending on work and study.
‘Tourism, Bachelor of Leisure and Tourism’, she would say when people asked.
It annoyed him how she pronounced Bachelor.
James paid the rent by working shifts unloading furniture and delivering ice to local petrol stations. His body had grown with the work; calf muscles thickened, back broadened, the skin on has face tanned and grew squint lines. At work, he didn’t mind using muscle in a mechanically predetermined way, at times he wondered if he was too complex for it, but at others enjoyed using his brain to obtain fixed results. These worn features created a sense of strength in his appearance that people respected.

On Sundays, if Lana wasn’t there, James would unfold his deckchair onto the concrete slab and gut his catch. Brim, whiting, black-jack, flat-head, collections of fish that had grown thick skinned and bloated from sitting on sun-heated rocks─ a knife down the spine would do it, then push your fingers in and pull out the entrails. Sometimes he would hose off the slab and push the muck out into the weeds, sometimes not. On those days the blood would seep in the pores of the concrete to be baked orange by the morning sun.

At thirteen, he can remember, his dad told him to kill a stingray.
It was perched on the sand, right side up, with its tail being pushed up and down by the shore line.
‘Here’s the knife, go put it out of its misery.’
It was alive, the wings were moving, it kept flashing the white of its belly. But the eyes, James remembers, the eyes were already glazed over.
‘Straight between eyes, that’s the way.’ The sand was wet under his feet.
His mother was horrified when they brought the lump of flesh home. It sat on the kitchen table for a few hours and stared at the stove.

After gutting fish on Lana-less Sundays he would examine the small changes that were happening to his caravan over time─ the cracks in the concrete or the tufts of bindis and clovers that wedged in between them, or, from the inside, the peeling lino on the mini-fridge, the pilling of his carpet covered bench seat, the circles or rust that surrounded the sink’s pump handle. He liked their unpredictability, their rawness, their inherent beauty. It reassured him that he, himself, was not in control of his life ─ he had always had a certain amount of admiration for drift wood.

Last Monday morning, early, his mother stood in the same place as Lana.
‘A mess’, she said, ‘your father would think it a pigsty, and you know how he liked to keep it. You know’, she said, and waved her arms around.

***

When Lana wasn’t there he craved her. Not always her, he didn’t really know how to crave that, but it was a version of her, or a part of her ─ freckles on white flesh, hair on a pillow, salt on lips, mangoes, mangoes and salty lips─ they were images caught in time, transfixed and fragmentary, she never moved.

In summer, one year, he thought she had drowned. They were swimming at Open Point, the north end, where a few edgy rocks left over from the cliff face cropped into the ocean. Lana had pulled him outside by the wrists.
‘It’s not healthy to mope inside all day,’ she said, ‘your skin, it needs sun.’
It wasn’t a sunny day; clouds were low and the air thick. A north-easterly held the waves up when they came through in spats of dramatic couplets and pushed them onto rock or sand. From the water you could see the beach’s bush-lined arch that started and ended in jutting rocks. When it started, she was climbing a rock, he was treading water.
‘Ay, you, hear me over there?’
Her hands were searching for lumps to pull her weight on; one knee was pressed into her chest. She’d raise her head every now and then, to make sure he was watching.
‘I think I should have been a diver, don’t you. But the ones that have a pair. Come be my pair James!’
It made James anxious to see her move like that. She stood on the top of the rock now, upright, in her white and red stripped bikini. Her body was compacted by the scenery, everything was tiny─ shoulders, breasts, waist, hips, thighs─ and they all merged into one. In the background, James noticed, the water crashed into rocks or soaked into sand. The difference between the two was frightening.

He turned from her to dive under a wave, the water silencing her voice, and when he emerged she was gone. His breath stopped half way. He started swimming, towards her, towards the rock, flapping his arms about, fighting the swell, pushing muscle into the water.
‘Lana!-la…Jesus-ana- Christ-Lana!’
Salt water slapped his teeth.

He found her, on the other side of the rock, hands gripped to a cleft and legs floating.
She was laughing. She pulled herself closer to the rock to keep her head up.
‘I thought,’ he said. ‘It’s not funny.’
She cocked her head sideways, asking him to laugh too. When he didn’t she dove under the water. James saw the backs of her knees turn white.

***

‘Let me take you to the city for a week or two,’ Lana said one morning.
It was 10am; she was standing with her back to him, watching toast brown and pop.
‘It’d be fun you know. We could hang out at bars on the campus, I’d show you around, go see a few bands play.’
She stopped fiddling with the toaster dial. He was sitting on the carpet bench, flicking through TV stations, enjoying the quick succession of bright images.
Weather report, flick, fuzz, flick, people discussing North Korea, flick, people yelling over coffee, people walking down a street at night, flick.
‘You know, like how we use to go into the The Manter with Tony and that. ’
People driving in the Great Barrier Reef. Flick.
‘But better. That Manter was a bit poor on the cocktails. I mean, screw drivers can only have so much sophistication. And that duke box could have done with an update.’
He let the TV sit on fuzz and looked at her back. Her shoulders tightened.
You’re nervous, James thought, you are making toast and you are nervous.
He spoke to her back before she could turn.
‘You’re twenty-seven Lana. Twenty- seven.’ He sounded out the twenty.

In the morning, he stretched his arm out in search of her back, but found mattress instead. She had gone, he knew. He pulled the sheets off and saw his own legs. They were brown in patches, thick with hair. The different shapes disgruntled him; the knobs of the knees, the thickness of the calves, the bones in his ankles, they made him feel fragile.

The TV was making low burring noises. James’s eyes surveyed the room─ the sink was empty, bottles were stacked in a plastic bag, towels were folded and put on the carpet bench.

His eyes fell on the TV. There was an image of a man, lean, maybe seventy, with a thick beard and worn brown coat, crouched in front of a sandstone building. The camera stayed on him. There was a homemade sign sitting at his feet; the man ran his fingers through his beard and stared at the concrete. Someone was talking over the top of the image, a man, deep voice, the volume was too low for James to make out the words. The camera cut to people walking down the street. They were striding, all of them, pushing against each other, women and men, clenching oversized brief cases, hands strong, elbows straight, all of them moving.
The camera cut again. James could see the old man sitting there, but through the people’s moving feet. The thick black soles all hit the ground, and the man, the man ran his fingers through his beard and watched them walk.

James’s breath stiffened half-way down his chest. He pictured Lana, in the crowd, pushing along; shoes black and thick. He couldn’t stand it; he couldn’t stand the thought of it. His ears were buzzing. The room felt sterile and white. He wanted to pull at her, pull her out of the screen, pull her back, to pull her back and put her away.

The Magna warmed into gear. He didn’t realise he was driving until he was on the highway. The windows were shut tight, heat pressed against his scull. It was bright, so bright; the sun looked like it could burn through glass. Tar run under the car, James watched it, and the white lines flickered. He felt drunk, light-headed, bloated, high, in deep concentration, acutely in touch with the images captured by his eyes.

His tongue was pressed against his teeth, Lana’s name might have been there, but he couldn’t remember how to pronounce it. The steering wheel enamel flexed under his fingers.

He had an unnerving urge to pull the wheel and steer the Magna into something hard. He wanted to feel it─ muscle, burning steel, the jolt into unconsciousness. But the images, they were fixating. In his eye’s corners the moving images compounded into streams of white light, they overtook him. He had to keep his foot on the accelerator, to keep watching the white lines.

This is how he drove for hours, not knowing where he was going, in a state of transition, hypnotised by his own senses. He did return to the caravan, later, when he could remember the way back. But when he stood on the concrete he realised it no longer felt like his own.

Word Count : 2078

Brooke Forbes