Chapter 7 Adam
He has been at Nowhere for twenty-six days. His bedroom is large and light, with a floor-to-ceiling window that shows the mountains. It smells of cedar. Adam has never slept in a room as nice as this and he loves it – except for one thing. The men’s clothes in the closet.
The first day he asked Leaf, ‘Can I move this stuff?’
Leaf was standing by the window, lit by mountain sun, talking about the view. He turned his bright hazel gaze on Adam. ‘The clothes? No.’
Adam said, hesitant, ‘I could put them in another closet, another bedroom, there must be plenty of room—’
‘No.’
‘But …’
‘Please, let’s not fight.’ Leaf looked plaintive and young suddenly, and Adam felt like a bully.
So the shirts and pants and sweaters are still hanging in the closet.
They’re not clean and they’re not his size.
In fact, they are many different sizes. There are a couple of flannel shirts, which would fit someone taller and more rugged than Adam.
They bear brown sweat stains under the arms and still hold the sharp odour of the man who wore them.
There is a grey suit which smells faintly of cologne.
There are running shorts and a singlet, marked with green grass skid-marks where whoever it was slipped.
There’s a Grateful Dead concert t-shirt, worn soft with use. That one smells faintly of pot.
These untenanted clothes are the only thing Adam doesn’t like about life at Nowhere.
At night sometimes he dreams that the past inhabitants of his room return.
They materialise in the dark closet. A body fills the sweat-stained flannel shirt slowly, like a tyre being pumped up.
A head grows slowly from the collar of the grey suit like a balloon.
Legs descend down into the empty pants legs.
Adam thinks of them as the mirrormen. They step out of the closet, grinning.
They look at Adam with their mirror eyes.
Now he showers and dresses quickly, taking his clothes from the pile he keeps neatly folded on the chair beside his bed. He doesn’t use the wardrobe.
Adam wipes his brow, leaving a streak of sawdust. He’s pleased with the wood he chose – aged cedar to match the house. The scent of it fills the air.
‘How’s it going?’ He hadn’t heard Leaf approaching over the sound of the drill. ‘Can you take a break?’
‘Sure.’ As Adam takes off his safety glasses he sees Leaf pass a hand across his own brow, wiping away imaginary sawdust.
‘Stop it,’ Adam says.
‘What?’
‘Stop – storing me. I’m not a character. I’m a person. You should learn the difference.’ Adam strides out of the house into the sunshine. There’s a light breeze and the woods rustle with life. Somewhere there’s a woodpecker.
‘It’s my job,’ Leaf says. He stands on the steps, arms folded. ‘You want paying? You let me do my job.’
Adam blinks. He feels calmer than he has ever been. ‘If you speak to me like that again I quit.’
‘Fine,’ Leaf says, mouth creased with anger. ‘I’m sorry, ok, please – look, let’s take a walk.’
They go up the sloping paddock. Seven or eight horses follow hopefully, ears pricked. Sometimes the horses touch Leaf or Adam with their velvet muzzles, hoping that they’ve brought food.
‘I used to think,’ Leaf says, pushing a grey horse gently away from his side, ‘I’ll wait a little, until I’m more famous. Until people will miss me just a little more.’
‘Wait, until what?’
‘Until I kill myself.’
‘That’s messed up.’ Adam stumbles as a friendly bay noses him in the small of his back. He rights himself and turns to Leaf. ‘What kind of person would say that?’
Leaf kicks a tussock of grass across the field. ‘Do you want me to lie?’
‘No.’
‘Sometimes I feel I’ve given everything I am to the characters,’ Leaf says. ‘Maybe there’s not much left.’ He puts a conciliatory arm on Adam’s shoulder. ‘Let’s go see Tinkerbell. If you understand Tinkerbell maybe you’ll understand everything.’
The horses follow them all the way to the fence, nosing at their pockets.
Leaf and Adam go past the staff block, where some children are running through the long grass, chasing each other. It’s nice, Adam thinks, through his anger, how everyone lives together up here. The kids get to grow up in this beautiful place.
They go through the dappled light of the orchard, until water gleams ahead.
‘It’s over this way,’ Leaf says. ‘He needs a temperature-controlled environment so I built a tank by the lake, using the water.’ Leaf speaks briefly into his walkie talkie.
Leaf leads Adam to a stairway down into the earth.
The entrance is nearly concealed by sedge grass.
Adam follows, heart beating fast. They come out into a small chamber below the water.
A bench sits between two glass walls on either side.
Carefully placed lights show waving waterweed, gravel and sand, floating particles.
‘I told them to feed him,’ Leaf says, settling on the bench. ‘I want you to see.’ Adam sits too. He knows the lake water can’t get in, but he feels like it might.
A silvery corpse drops from the surface above. Blood leaks in threads through the fish’s gills into the water.
A great dark shape stirs in the depths, in the distance, sinuous, great body swimming.
The crocodile comes into view. Adam can see its eyes, each dark warty scale, every tooth that protrudes from its ancient jaws.
‘No,’ he says. ‘No …’
Leaf holds him in place, gentle but firm. ‘It’s ok. Tinkerbell can’t hurt you. The glass is four feet thick.’
The crocodile parts its jaws and takes the fish. It turns slowly, its scales scraping on the glass, and goes back into the darkness of its tank.
Adam gasps a great breath. The water on either side presses in on him.
‘I know,’ Leaf says. ‘I know, I know, I know.’
Adam is interested to find that he is actually trembling. His hand, when he holds it level, cannot maintain a stillness. ‘What do you know?’ he asks, almost absent.
‘I keep him to remind me,’ says Leaf. ‘My family sold me to show business. Then my mother let them eat me. Then I took control, and I decided how much they ate.’
‘And me?’ Adam asks. ‘How much of you do you think I—’
‘I’m sorry,’ Leaf calls as Adam runs up the steps, into the fresh air. Leaf runs after, into the light.
Adam is leaning against a tree as Leaf stumbles out. He strokes the bark because it’s real under his fingers.
‘I’m sorry,’ Leaf says. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you with Tinkerbell. I—’
‘It isn’t the crocodile that scares me,’ Adam says. ‘It’s you. Stop it. Stop hiding behind all this – stuff.’
‘I don’t know what—’
‘You say things but you don’t really talk. You tell stories. I’m not interested in stories.’ Adam comes close to Leaf. ‘You’re going away tomorrow. What do you feel about that?’
Leaf gasps like he’s just come up from deep water. ‘I can’t wait,’ he says. ‘When I’m away I can be whoever I want. But also—’ Leaf takes another hard breath. ‘It also means being away from you.’
Adam says, quiet, ‘You don’t get to eat me alive.’
‘It’s other people who eat me,’ Leaf says, ‘they all take, take …’
‘None of that is happening now,’ Adam says. ‘You and I are both here.’ Adam puts his thumb to Leaf’s cheek, touches his warm skin, fingers making roads in Leaf’s hair. ‘Can’t you see that?’
‘These are easy things to say,’ Leaf hisses. ‘So easy.’
Adam pushes down panic and reaches for a still place inside himself. ‘Either you want me,’ he says, ‘or you don’t.’
‘It’s not that easy,’ Leaf says.
‘No.’ Adam pushes down thoughts of Christie and the baby. ‘But I can’t go on like this.’
Leaf looks at him, cold. ‘Learn to go on,’ he says. ‘Like everyone else.’
In the distance Adam thinks he hears the crocodile, moving dark beneath the water.