Hitler was a Vegan

It takes time to stop trying to beautify him—she was raised that way. She keeps cutting her gaze over, trying to catch a look before the accustomed ways of sight lower the blinds, screwing up her eyes while he raises the ‘I eat steak sandwiches’ flag and lets it flap. ‘Hitler was a Vegan,’ he says.

He snaps the air between second finger and thumb, ‘testing the brightness of sound’ he offers. This is her living room. It’s bright as a bell. She lives above an eight-lane road in an apartment with easter-coloured concrete floors. Her mother says the traffic sounds like waves. At a pinch, she could be living by the sea. Another day she says it is like Paris. She hasn’t visited since.

But she sees him most days. He comes to sit in her armchair and mark pages of dialogue, while she translates these marks onto a screen. He has a bedroom, an office with busy phones, nowhere quiet to work. The truth is it’s even harder to keep his mind on work here—the rising tide below the windows, this woman moving between rooms—but he comes anyway.

Every time he is due to arrive she leaves a note on the street door asking the tenants of the building to keep the lock unsnibbed, otherwise he won’t be able to get in. She lives on a street fronted by prestige car showrooms and whores, and the men from the suburbs who come to look and sweat and, less often, buy. If there was a buzzer night would turn into day.

Her own front door is deadlocked, so that when he wants to leave he has to stand and wait like a boy in long shorts who has heard the bell and thinks only of flight. He waits while she searches for the keys. Extra white teeth, he thinks, biting back the urge to reach out and tap them. Hard as piano keys.

She releases the lock. Sometimes he feels he could disappear from his life into hers. A potential Bermuda Triangle from which he can’t keep away. Doorways are where he feels it most. He stomps through them leading with his head, keeping his small, flesh-padded hands to himself. His body may look vast with appetite, but he has it well trained.

There is something about the way he is covered with flesh, as if he feasted all alone. It fascinates her.

page 49

He’s out walking with his Dad. They pass a big breasted woman and his Dad nudges him and says ‘all meat and no potatoes’. He eats all the potatoes on his plate no trouble, followed by the meat. The greens, he takes a half hearted swipe at, and skirts.

There is no meat on her plate. A lot of vegetables though. The beetroot—small gratings that stain her skin, and the celery moons— horribly strong, she weeds out, stores in her pocket and later throws under the bed. She turns a comer in her sleep and there they are, cursing and swearing: the vegetable Mafia come to get her.

He picks offal from his hot and sour soup and looks like Buddha with a spoon instead of a large man stirring dishwater stock.

She uses too many big words. She reminds him, just a bit, of the poddy calves that used to run him along the fence when he was a child, so that he was caught between warm, honey-colour flank, and barbed wire on the other side.

Just the two of them working away, deadlocked in, something he once read about—hostage syndrome—springs to mind: hostages slowly but surely falling in love with their captors. Didn’t it happen to Patty Hearst?

The bunch of keys jangle in her hand. She wonders who is who here? She steps onto a wheel of thought: imagines his XL-sized embrace, imagines the black hair that curls on the back of his neck working itself all the way down. It makes her stomach swirl.

But when his hands continue their beautifully self-appointed journeys across pages and pages of type oblivious to her, she is disappointed.

He looks looser in his own house; she can read his gate-swinging past, see the narrow pink feet kicking through fertiliser green.

She’s wearing the shiniest tights—red—he’s ever seen.

There’s a vein strobing the dome of his head—that chuckle he gets, like her younger brother’s only enlarged. Like cupid, she thinks, but bigger.

There’s a collection of vases on the top of the cupboard above the sink top where he’s sitting. She chooses one at random, green, fan-shaped, and tries to pull her mind into shape. The only word that comes is ‘crush’. She wants to hear it leaving her body and take to the air. She wants to hear it hit him, front on, no escape. Her hands are weaving against the front of her dress. She says it.

There’s a woman in his kitchen walking her heart like a dog that pulls page 50 on the leash. Appetite stirs—and fails him.

Before she began talking this way though, she’d put her arms behind her head, exposing the armpit hair, and he noticed the way sweat had darkened the fabric below. Like a poem he thought, imagining moving his face against the alcove, against the smell. Is she trying to seduce me? He blinks and smiles a big inane smile to disguise a feeling with serious intent passing through.

‘It’s not one way,’ he manages at last, teeth clenched. His eyes, big and green, swim out—just a bit—to meet her. He stays parked on the bench though, feet clearing the floor.

He already has someone. That’s the point. He waves this at her like an unloved coat he’d rather leave hanging in the hall, but is forced to wear on extra cold days. A bit of human warmth.

He shows her out, scrunches a few loose pebbles underfoot, breathes easier outdoors. There are three sickle-thin eucalypt leaves on the footpath. They have a soft blush to them, bits of grey-green showing through. She crouches and gathers them, one by one. ‘What do you want with those?’ he grins.

It’s as if she were picking her life up where it lay outside his door, and taking it—away. She looks at him standing there behind the iron palings, under the big Australian sky. ‘Goodbye,’ she says. ‘Goodbye,’ he returns in a particularly nice way, ‘Goodbye.’ He breaks her name into two syllables and rides it like a horse that bucks midway through.

He picks up the phone and dials. ‘Hello,’ she says, ‘I was just writing a poem about you.’ It rolls to meet him bright as carpet and he rolls with it. There’s a poem in his head too. ‘Just two or three lines, I haven’t written it down— a visual poem,’ he says. And he tells her the one about the armpit.