Taylor had been his noise, his nonstop reality show narrator. She’d filled his brain with sound: her talk, her music, her bad-tempered presence in the house, but Georgia had been his everything else. His sanity and satiety, his rest and consolation. She was the hands that soothed, the lips that whispered his name, calling him back from the blackest thoughts, the emptiest prospects. And now she was somehow broken and he could not fix her with his body alone, any more than he could stay silent.
“Georgia, tell me.” His first words, soft and unformed in his throat like porridge, like sludge in the air, too heavy, too fractured for volume.
Her hand fast to his throat. Her, “Oh no,” slipped inside a sob. Then she kissed him, lips firm, pressing ungently, stopping him from saying more while he held her too tight and tried to swallow over the soreness in his throat and the ache behind his eyes.
She twitched, shifted. He was holding her too hard. Her hand over his mouth now. “Don’t talk, don’t, please don’t. I’m sorry. I’m all right. It was a shock.” He relaxed his grip, but tried to scent her distress in the salty heat of her tears. “No one is hurt, everything is all right. I’m so sorry I panicked you.” She traced a finger over his lips, up his cheek, around his eye. “I got a letter from Hamish.” A shuddered breath Damon felt in his ribcage. “I’ve been carrying it around for a week. Too scared to open it. He wrote to apologise for…” She wiped at her face, her elbow brushing his chest. “To apologise for what went wrong between us. It was a shock. I’ll be all right, I’m fine. I’m so sorry I scared you.”
He caught her chin in his hand, brought his nose to her face. He knew his cheek would be rough on hers; he could barely remember when he’d last shaved, but he needed to feel her, to learn her distress and her hopes though his skin.
Her hands went to his neck, to his hair. “I promise you I’m okay. Our end was so bitter, I never thought I’d hear from Hamish again. I’ve been carrying the letter around since your operation. I almost threw it away. He half expected me to.” She sighed, and he could all but taste her unhappiness. “I made you speak.”
He would’ve transformed into a flying, fire-breathing dragon for fear of what was happening to her, for the visceral need that lived inside him to have her safe and happy, and that knowledge was rawer, tougher to bear than the sound of his torn voice.
“It’s too soon to know. It’s too soon.” She’d been shocked by the contents of the letter and shocked again when he spoke after days of communication that was all touch and breath, type and sound, so tender and tenuous it made him want to curl up in it and take comfort, but so emasculating, he also recoiled from it.
It wasn’t too soon. It was already over. And the time for indecision, for stalling was run to nothing.
Four more days would barely make any difference. He felt like he’d eaten a bucket of sand. The swelling should be down by now, swallowing less constrained. And Georgia, who’d been his consolation when he’d wanted nothing but to wallow in the sweaty stink of his fear, now needed her own comfort
“Don’t try to talk again. I’ll get your tablet.”
He stopped her moving. He’d had enough of the tablet, the reading software, the pad and pen, the inability to express himself directly without breaking something. He was so eaten up by foul humour had he voice he’d have rivalled Taylor for attitude. He’d have silenced the birds and shaken leaves from trees with his anger, laid cracks in the house’s foundations and had the neighbours calling the police.
And she who needed comforting was still comforting him.
She pulled from his clench. “Then let me see your foot. I forgot about it.”
His foot could rot. Turn into a stump and wither, cripple him in a new way. Why not? He was stumbling around, locked in silence and darkness, what did it matter if he stumbled some more?
She crouched beside him, her hand on his instep. “I’ll read you the letter, but not yet, not today. I need time to read it again, to let it settle. I never thought to hear the things Hamish said. Never thought we might find a place we could be civil with each other.”
It wasn’t too soon and things would not settle, not for him. He flinched when she pulled a shard of porcelain from his heel. Wanted to push her away, stop her fussing. He tapped her shoulder and shook his head. Was she even looking at him?
“I’ll get something to put on this.”
She le
ft him there, to his anger, to the septic decay in his heart. He’d struggled to know what to do, a prisoner in his own head, but he knew now. He wasn’t mythical creature enough to give her what she needed, and though he didn’t know the extent of the impact of the letter on her, he could hear it in her voice, a kind of wonder spotted with hope. It was the sound of his decision.
He let her plaster his foot. He took a call from Jamie, his lame joke of the day. He cooked, for the first time in a long time. Smoked salmon pasta, capers in cream sauce. He drifted through the next few days. He heard that hurt and pleasure in Georgia’s voice when she read him Hamish’s letter and he took her kisses, like a thief.
At night when the house slept, in the odd moments of the day when he was alone, he broke the silence. He spoke to the night air and the dew damp grass; he addressed the dining room table and the sweet smelling flowers in vases in a voice that was lace and tissue, made from ash and scoured metal, erratic like a mad kitten, composed of too many stops and starts, sudden quiets and uneven pounces.
He had a voice, but it was not Damon Donovan’s. It was not the one he wanted or needed, had trained to command attention. Damon Donovan’s voice could command a space fleet, start an interplanetary war.
This imposter would have trouble ordering a pizza.
And it was only going to get worse.
28: Death Wish
Taylor’s punch made Damon fold forward. His hand went to the wall to steady himself and he grunted in shock. Georgia wished Taylor had hit him harder.
She ducked to look at his face. “What were you doing?”
Jamie had phoned the house an hour ago in a panic. He’d lost Damon and was out of his head worried, unsure what to do. He’d called again, relieved and angry fifteen minutes ago and now he had nothing to say beyond a grimace and a head shake. He walked passed them into the kitchen. Taylor went in the opposite direction, out to the front of the house where she sat on the front steps to fume and nurse her hand.
Damon straightened up. “It’s called swimming.” The harsh low grate of his voice almost matched his appearance. His hair was matted, damp and stiff with salt, his t-shirt wet against his chest, the board shorts that once fit so well hung off his hips. He was unshaven again and he needed a haircut. He’d traded sleeping most of the day away to hardly sleeping at all. She’d wake to find the bed empty. He’d be somewhere in the house with his headphones on, music leaching through them, locking himself away again even when he no longer needed to, but this—swimming in the surf on his own—this was a different kind of lashing out.