I am not dangerous

I needed someone to share the house with Allen and me. I put an ad in the bookshop and Brendan came around. It was sunny and we stood in the garden. Yeah, move in as soon as you like, tomorrow’s fine, I said.

Later, he told me that he was really stoned at the time. Later still, he told me that his ex-wife had a restraining order against him. And that women were manipulative bitches who used the legal system to persecute men. By that stage he had moved in.

‘I am not dangerous.’

My home had that house-by-the-sea feeling: the glassed-in sunroom at the back, the flapping fly-wire door. The paint colour must have been a bargain buy during the Depression, a peeling sea blue-green. The floors inside evoked the motions of the waves-troughs and crests everywhere.

In the house that we shared, there was good food, a fireplace, lots of books and a guitar. There wasn’t much money. Allen was hardly ever around so Brendan and I spent our days together. We drank pots of exotic herbal tea, laced with garlic and ginger. He sat at his typewriter and pummelled it with short sentences. He sang simple songs, with a voice of deep resonance. My skin tingled. His three year old daughter would visit each week.

He wrote stories that made me cry. Brought them to me like offerings in the evenings. I would close my door, get warm in my bed and read. Across the dark, musty hallway, he’d be in his room, waiting. A silent buzz between our spaces, a feeling. Waiting for me to cross the line I had drawn and climb into the warmth of his bed. Instead, I cried slow, hot tears as I read, while he sat at his typewriter.

‘I am not dangerous.’

The two guys seemed to have achieved a civil eqilibrium. Sometimes the three of us had meals together and once we got smashed together at the pub. They both cooked for me, with an edge of pride and competitiveness.

Then one night the issue of ‘class’ emerged. Brendan got under Allen’s skin by inferring that he was middle class bourgeois. “Don’t you presume anything about my family!” demanded Allen. “You don’t know me. Besides, my father is a working class bloke who’s slaved all his life.”

The conversation persisted, degenerating into interruptions, abuse and then anger. Brendan yelled, ”You’re obviously not prepared to listen, so I won’t continue.” Allen looked down at him coolly from his height and said “Calm down, Brendan.” Heart, intellect and ego battled above the brown carpet.

I left the house under its tense truce. By the time I had returned, Brendan had beaten Allen up. He had followed him into his bedroom, punching Allen as he retreated. “Rich Boy! Get out of my home!” Brendan screamed. Allen decided to do just that. But not before asking, “Is this because you’re shorter than me, Brendan?” 

I sat and talked with Brendan for hours that night trying to understand his actions. He became so enraged that he screamed at me at close range as he stood over me, berating me. I burst into tears. This was no short story. I had been through this sort of thing before.

‘I am not dangerous.’

Allen moved out the next day and I found myself alone in the house with Brendan. Afraid. I thought about locking my bedroom door at night. I stayed out late to avoid seeing him. When Brendan’s Austudy payment day came, he bought another bottle of port instead of paying me the rent. Then a litre bottle of wine. Then a cask of claret. He spent days and nights in front of the television.

I tried to talk to him in the kitchen one day. He was chopping vegetables for his daughter’s meal. He was making a point as he chopped, his voice getting louder and more aggressive. “Now listen, Anna,” he menaced as he held his knife towards me. In my dazed head, I saw the knife moving in flight across the room as he hurled it at me. I imagined how it would feel to be pinned by a long blade to the door.

I took the phone to my room and called my parents overseas. “He has to move out,” I was saying. “I can’t feel safe here anymore.” Suddenly the line went dead. I felt paralyzed. I had read this scene in one of the Raymond Carver stories he had lent me. He was coming to sink the knife into my chest. I dashed to my door and turned the key.

I dreamed that I was trapped in my room, claustrophobia strangling me. I couldn’t speak or yell. A huge malformed hand holding a knife smashed through the panel of my door. I couldn’t breathe.

‘I am not dangerous.’

After a few days, the skin across my right shoulder had erupted in five bumps. At first I thought they were spider bites. Small spiders that had got in under my shirt and traversed my shoulder blade, leaving puncture marks as they moved across me. But it was something boiling within my nerves. Shingles. Blistering, red raw skin.

I walked through the living room where he was watching television, wearing only my sarong. I exposed my weeping pain to him. I knew his eyes would be on me as he drank from the neck of the cheap bottle of port. Five red eruptions, huge boils across my right shoulder. Like the fingermarks of an angry pursuer, grabbing me as I tried to evade him.

He left me a pleading note, asking me not to make him move out. He would lose access to his child, it said. He wrote: “The only important thing is this: I am not dangerous. I am not a person you have to worry about. I fucked up with Allen. That doesn’t mean I’m a total fuck up. Does it?” 

 ‘I am not dangerous.'

I got legal advice and spoke to him after that. Told him he had to go. He sat in front of the TV and drank from his port bottle. When I started talking, he turned the television up really loud. It was like a childhood sibling argument. I turned it down. He turned it up again.

I had given him notice in writing, as the lawyer said to, and tried to hand it to him. He refused to receive it. I dropped it at his feet and went interstate for ten days. When I returned to the house, his things were gone. All that he left was one of his daughter’s ribbons and some of her typewritten poetry stuck on the side of the fridge.

I sat alone in the backyard. It was frightening in its fertility. The hibiscus tree groaned, with its weight of a thousand flowers pressed down on the feeble tin roof of the shaky bungalow. The figs, all seeds and sweetness, were swollen. I could hear them as they fell-plop-heavy, dripping and rotten. Roses were wild, as were the weeds, and the nasturtiums progressed madly and brightly towards total possession of the garden.

I squatted on the concrete and watched an amazing thing: the struggling birth of a bright shiny creature, as it emerged from a cigar-shaped cocoon of twigs and bark. The blood red slug emerged visceral and naked as it oozed and sucked at the concrete, its cocoon dragging along behind it.

‘The only important thing is this...’

© Anna Sublet

April 1997

Draft Short Story-1000 words approx.

draftkent