A tall skinny man opens the door and steps to one side. Two golden labs are barrelling down the hall at you. They’re huge. They’re out of control. They’re a goddamn disgrace! All paws off the floor: they’re launching at your faces. Ouch! The smaller dog slams into your raised knee. The mutt pitches into the wall, slides to the floor and lies there, legs splayed like a four-legged starfish, looking as sheepish as only a dog can look. Oof! The bigger dog bounces off your guy’s knee, slides down the other wall and lands on his butt where he sits, for a moment, like a pot-bellied bear. He doesn’t look sheepish. No, he’s a mad dog, all tense muzzle and whale eye. The man just watches, stroking his salt-and-pepper goatee.

‘Here for the rower,’ he croaks.

It’s a statement, not a question, but you both nod and wait for an invitation to enter. Nothing. You stand and watch the mutts scramble to their paws, their claws skittering a tap-dance on the gleaming white tiles. You offer Mad Dog the back of your hand, making that timeless gesture of friendliness that most mutts accept because, after all, there’s a deal to be made with the humans if you want them to pat and feed you instead of kick and kill you. But this mutt? This mutt’s his own dog. He’s a goddamn outlaw! He clamps your wrist in his jaws. Luckily, the wintry weather means you’re wearing multiple layers so there’s no chance his teeth will puncture your skin. You glare at him. He firms his grip. You give the man a What the fuck? look. He mutters something, leans down, and pinches the dog’s nostrils together. The mutt’s breathing sputters, then he’s sweeping his head left and right, dislodging the man’s fingers and releasing you. He snuffle-sneezes. His mate licks his muzzle. They both grin. You want to kick them down the hallway. You follow them into the living room instead.

There’s white tiles in here too. The furniture is also white and so damn ugly you can’t tell if it’s very cheap or very expensive. The dogs leap onto the leather couch, turn circles and nest in its cushions, surveying the room like a king and queen. You rub your aching wrist and glare at Mad Dog. He gazes back, as cool as a canine cucumber.

Now the man’s talking. He’s explaining the features of the rowing machine that he’s laid out on a black rubber mat. His voice sounds hoarse, as if someone once took a scalpel, slit open his throat, scraped out its insides, then stitched it back up again. In the bright light, you study his clothes: slim navy jeans; a bottle green shirt, unbuttoned halfway down his chest; a big gold buckle on a belt whose brown leather matches his shoes. But no! They’re not shoes—they’re boots!—boots with heels. Why is he dressed like a cowboy out here—out here where it’s all beach and bush and bogans and boomers and bugger all else? You do what you know you shouldn’t, glance at his throat—looking for scars or a fleshy red hole—but all you see is grey fuzz fluffing from his bare chest. Incredibly—inexplicably!—your crotch throbs. Ahhh, you think, that old feeling. Where have you been?

On he talks, but you aren’t listening. You’re wondering at how, just this morning, you and your guy were walking to the supermarket. You were blathering on about how you must build muscle, at your age, or you’ll become fatter and weaker than you already are. ‘And I’m already too fat and weak!’ you’d said, to which the fool replied, ‘Uh huh.’ Ignoring the stab of his honesty, you’d asked if he thought a rowing machine would do the job, for that was the random solution that leapt out at you from your previous night’s googling. He’d shrugged, but when you walked into the supermarket, he’d laughed and pointed: there, on the community notice board, was a handwritten ad selling a rowing machine. ‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘what’s the chances!?’ Later, as you drove down to inspect the contraption, it felt like another coincidence when you realised you were approaching this house, for it was this house that’d fed your shared imaginings when you’d begun to plot your escape out here, your eyes caught by the perennial sight of these dogs lazing on the veranda like two pygmy lions surveying their sea savannah. How you’d envied these mutts their lives of picturesque luxury!

Your guy is prodding at the brown blisters bursting all over the machine’s metal body. The man shrugs. ‘What can you do? Should be right. It’s just on the surface.’

As if rust is ever just on the surface!

See, now that you’re no longer a tourist blinded by daydreams and longing, you’ve learned that these coveted houses are full of rust and asbestos and wood-rot and debt and divorce and illness, just as you’ve learned that the sea is full of flotsam-webs of fishing line and plastic, and the summers are full of noise and drownings and car crashes and piss heads, and the winters are full of Antarctic-born rain and wind that makes the low season so damn low that the hotels close up and the locals go loony. That is to say, now that you live here you’ve learned the difference between fantasy and reality—just as you’ve learned what fantasies are for in a life. You got what you wanted, right? So, what’s your excuse for failing at all that you promised God you’d do and be if your prayers came true? What’s your excuse for still being, after all, the very same person you were before? And what have you to dream about, aim for, struggle towards now—now that your wishes have been granted? 

Just the other day, when your guy was getting anxious about the endless empty future, you’d given him a tongue lashing. What did you say? ‘The then what has you by the balls, buddy!’ And it did. His balls were caught in the pincer grip of those two words that reply to every action and inaction, every success and failure, every breath in and out. Then what. Then what. Then what!?

The man squats by the rower to point out this and that. Your guy squats on the other side, nodding. Irritation jags through you. He always does this, ingratiates himself with everyone in his eternal need to be ‘one of the gang,’ no matter who the gang is. And he doesn’t deny it, either. ‘You like to rock boats, babe. I like to sail them!’ He loves this come-back because he knows it’s true. But so what if it’s true?! No one likes butt-kissers. That’s true too! And where does he think his butt-kissing is going to sail him away to anyhow? He’s still right here with you, isn’t he?

You wander to the windows. Mad Dog growls as you pass. Outside, the garden is sandy, speared with native grasses. You turn back to the room and your guy’s hairy arse-crack stares straight back you. Rage rushes through you. How often have you told him to pull up his goddamn pants? It’s a form of aggression, you think for the millionth time, to impose your body on others like this.

A sharp tap-tapping approaches the room. The dogs perk up. With stunning synchronisation they leap over the rower like the world’s fattest gazelles. They rush towards the door then paw-brake into a sit-skid and slide to a stop at the feet of a very tall and handsome woman. Fascinating! you think, realising you’d assumed that the cowboy was a bachelor. But no, he lives with a Glamazon!

The woman is—of course—dressed in white. She is all cheekbones and eyes and nose and teeth. Her mahogany hair pours down her back. Her frilly white blouse is half unbuttoned, just like her man’s, revealing mysteriously tanned, mysteriously buoyant breasts that are separated by a ladder of hard-knuckled bones. Her long narrow feet sport pearly white heels. Not just any old heels—stilettos! That explains the tiles, you think. The woman ignores the dogs that are drooling up at her, and you realise your mistake. This is the top dog. Mad Dog is but a lieutenant, a pawn, an underling. The woman stares daggers at you from under her exquisitely groomed eyebrows.

You stare back, playing chicken, which she wins immediately when you glance down at the hoarse-voiced man. He is twisted awkwardly, looking up and over his shoulder, staring at the woman like he’s never seen her before in his life.

Why, you wonder, are they so dressed up? Who do they do it for?

The answer is obvious. They do it for each other. They try to look good, for each other. They put in effort, for each other.

You look at your guy. His hairy arse-crack stares right back at you.

You start rubbing your face. You find the orange whisker that appeared months ago at the corner of your mouth like the distinguished mustachio of a carp. You finger it and wonder why you’ve done nothing about it, even after your guy pointed it out right after you’d had sex recently. ‘You growin’ a moe, babe?!’ he’d said. You didn’t worry if he was amused or disgusted, because the sex and his comment had transported you to another time and place. You’d returned to that afternoon when you’d once sat with your mother in her caravan and she’d reached over her filthy kitchen table, gripped your face in her bony claw, and said: Heads up, honey. (And yes, she’d tilted your chin up as she said this.) There comes a time when you stop fucking and start plucking. You’d laughed because you’d felt her shake and thought she was offering you that sly old-woman-wit that acted as a beacon for you to swim towards in those final years when the ancient seas of her bitterness gushed out of her, released by her widowhood and her bizarre self-exile to that beer-swilling, wife-bashing, bong-smoking, caravan-park in the desert. But no, she wasn’t joking! The vibration you’d felt wasn’t the birth-rumbles of her laughter. It was the tuning forks of her bones, conducting a deadly new tremor in her, making her grip tighten so that your head jiggled in time to the symphony of her degeneration. She’d said, ‘Honey, you listen to me. You stick with this one. Just fuck him, and stick with him, and he’ll be as loyal as a dog.’

Well, that advice worked for her, didn’t it? She and your father were married for over fifty years. Loyalty is superglue. But what about love? Love! That word wasn’t even in their lexicon, and all you can remember from your childhood is its atmosphere: tension, tension, tension. Endless-breathless-fucking-tension born from their lapsed-Catholic conviction that self-created, ever-perpetuated misery was proof of their integrity, or authenticity, or seriousness—or something. You were raised in a pressure cooker, and now that pressure cooker is in you—is you! All loyalty, no love. All tension, no tenderness. All seriousness, no silliness. All fear, no fun. All words, no music. That’s it! That’s the world you grew up in. That’s the world that made you. A world full of words—but no music!

Your thoughts are like this these days. 

You stroke your mustachio and look from your guy’s arse-crack to the mean lemon-suck look that has formed on the woman’s face. She is arching her brows into a question that asks something like: ‘What’s a frump like you doing on my gleaming white tiles?’ You realise your own scrubby brows are arching too, as if in parody. She crosses her arms and pulls back her shoulders so her spectacular tits pin you from across the room. What’s up your arse? you think, except that you hear a voice—your voice—saying those very same words. The men’s heads flick to stare at you. Oopsy daisy!

The woman’s brows arch higher. The men look from you, to her, and back again. The dogs keep drooling up at her—besotted, oblivious. She squooshes her lips to one side, as if considering your question, then pivots on a heel and stalks down the hallway, clicking two fingers behind her. The dogs obey and follow her, their leonine heads as close and conspirational as ever.

The hoarse-voiced man says to nobody, ‘My babies. My darlings. Spoiled,’ he says. ‘Bunch of spoiled dogs,’ he says, then he laughs up a lung full of razor blades.

Your guy suddenly stands. He raises his arms, points his fingers to the ceiling and begins bouncing on the balls of his feet. He’s pumped. He’s an athlete ready to compete. You cringe, but the man just stares into his garden.   

Your guy lowers himself onto the machine and straps his feet into the stirrups. His arse-crack—thank God—has retreated back under his clothes, which means you’re the only one who saw it, so what does it matter? (But that’s why it matters! As you’ve lamented to him a million times before, ‘This is how we move through life. From the intimacy of the bathroom, as babes in nappies, to the intimacy of the bedroom, as adult lovers, and then… then what? Then it’s back to the intimacy of the goddamn toilet again, and thanks to you we’re already there, babe!’)

The hoarse-voiced man bends to scratch his ankle. When he stands, he catches you staring at his chest. Though you glance away, you’ve seen the laval tidemark of his burns—for they must be burns—that end in a curiously neat line across the bottom of his neck. From there, a fine silver scar slithers up the length of his ruddy throat.

Again, that throb in your groin, like a phantom pain, like a long-forgotten memory.

The man smiles at you for the first time, smiles like he knows exactly what you’re feeling.

As your guy rows up a storm—fluffs of golden fur gusting up around the rower’s fan—you wander the room. You stop in front of a tall glass cabinet full of photos. From inside, the woman stares out at you, young and gorgeous and all wrapped up in the arms of her man.

He says, ‘She was a model once. Top shit in America. Spent years there together.’

You don’t respond.

Your guy continues to huff and puff, making a fool of himself. Is he testing the integrity of the machine? Is he trying to impress the man? Impress you? Or is he doing what he’s been doing a lot this past year, trying to increase his ‘incidental exercise,’ his cure-all for a spectacular on-rush of middle age that—stupidly—neither of you saw coming. For months, he’s been doing step ups and push ups and tricep dips in public places, no matter what he’s wearing or what you’re doing or who’s around. Bloody idiot. Suddenly, he stops rowing, unstraps himself and leaps up. ‘Get in,’ he says. ‘You wanted it, you try it.’

You shake your head.

He smiles at you—or is he baring his teeth? ‘Get in,’ he says. ‘You wanted it. You try it.’

As elegantly as an elephant, you plop onto the rower’s seat. Your guy squats, straps your feet in, stands, then smiles down at you, though warmly this time. Psycho, you think, glaring up at him, but really, what’s your problem? You’re used to these oscillations between intense hatred and affection—his and yours—that seem to characterise your life together these days, these years, these decades, for Christ’s sakes.

Just as you attempt your first row, you hear claws and heels tap-dancing down the hallway. The dogs bowl into the room. They’re grinning. Mad Dog comes straight at you. His jaws clamp around your bicep and he tugs you over: slowly, firmly, purposefully. Within seconds the rower is lying on its side with you still strapped into it. With one cheek on the floor, you stare up—indecently!—from between Mad Dog’s back legs, and watch the woman tip a glass of green liquid down her throat. She slurps loudly, filling the room with herself. Then she shakes her head at you, as if you’ve done something wrong.

‘Gonna help me?’ you mumble. The hoarse-voiced man comes over and kicks Mad Dog away. From beneath, and close, you see how gentle the kick is—can see how all this flicking and kicking and clicking is just a way of talking. You watch the mutt trot back to his mate, his head low, his ears flat, his tail sweeping back and forth in a slow wag of false contrition. The woman pats him briskly—pat, pat, pat—and his mate licks his muzzle—kiss, kiss, kiss—then they all tap out the room.  

Your guy comes over. With his hands on your shoulders, he tips you and the rower back to an upright position. ‘You’re an idiot,’ he says, but you’re not listening because you’re rowing. Rowing! Back and forth you go. You close your eyes, so that the breathing of the men becomes the wind roughing up the sun-seared gums that scrape the sky all around you. You close your eyes, so that the eyes and minds of the men become the eyes and minds of the animals and bugs that look on as you pull yourself along the dark swirling glitter of life’s ever-rushing river. Back and forth, back and forth—warming up, warming up—warming up and away from the storm and freeze of this relentless fucking winter.

Eyes closed, you hear the man speak. ‘Throat got butchered ‘cos of cancer. Nearly died. Jules looked after me for three years. Gave up everything. Stopped modelling. Had a kid too. She wanted one. In case I died. In case I lived. I dunno, but I outlived the kid. Ha!’

You stop rowing. Open your eyes. Look up at him. ‘$200, right?’ (That’s what the ad said.)

Your guy appears—which makes you realise he’d disappeared—with a glass of green gunk. He skulls it loudly.

The man makes a mean lemon-suck of his mouth. Shakes his head. ‘Nah. $250. Seeing youse on it reminds me what a good piece of gear it is.’

Your guy makes a mean lemon-suck of his mouth: mirroring, mirroring, mirroring. ‘$150,’ he says.

The man laughs up another lung full of razor blades. ‘Ok mate. $180, if you take it right now.’

They shake hands and you realise—just as you did each time Mad Dog clamped his jaws around you—that everyone, everyone is playing games that you will never ever understand.  

As you unstrap yourself from the rower, the guy says, ‘Yeah. Nah. She never looked after me. She’s never given a shit about anyone other than herself!’

You stand up and dust yourself off. ‘Beautiful people get away with murder.’

He nods. ‘Damn straight they do, darlin’. She was beautiful once,’ he says. ‘That’s what I got from her! Ha!’

Your guy turns on you. ‘You’re such a jealous angry bitch!’ Another joust of his hatred.

You shrug, he’s right—it’s true!—but what you said is true too.  

They pick up the rower. There’s that arse-crack again.

You stride down the hall to the kitchen.

First, you look for the dogs: thankfully, they’re out on the veranda, surveying their sea savannah. You look at the woman. She stands with her backside propped against the sink. Her waistband is pulled out so she can gaze into the deep dark depths of her crotch.

You ask her for a drink of the smoothie. There’s a blender jug next to her, half-full of it.

She releases her waistband and looks at you. ‘There’s nothing left,’ she says.

‘Yes there is.’ You point to the jug.

She ignores you and, looking at the wall, begins to talk. ‘I used to be a model in America. I was earning ten thousand dollars a day. Met Dazza on a job. Stuck together. Travelled the world. Finally moved out here to detox. I was so thin, my bones were breaking. My teeth were falling out. My periods had stopped, but somehow I got pregnant real quick. Didn’t want to keep it. Didn’t want to get rid of it. We moved up into the hills to do the whole hippy dippy family thing. Then, Ash Wednesday. Daz chucked me in the car, said he’d save the house. Idiot. He sheltered between the concrete water tanks. Held the hose upright so the water sprayed over him like an umbrella. When the roaring stopped, he stuck his head out. Hit a wall of heat. Must have shielded himself somehow, because everything melted except his face and neck. Even his insides melted when he breathed it all in. He went back behind the tanks. The world roared again. The hose started melting. The pump stopped. And then? Then the fire was gone, racing up the rest of the hill. Not that I knew that. I was on the beach with everyone else, watching houses blow up—Bang! Bang! Bang!—just watching and knowing that people were dying.’

She slides her tongue slowly along her top lip, then the bottom.

‘He should have died too, like all the other poor bastards. Tough as a roach, that’s my Dazza. They put him in a coma. By the time he woke up, Max was already born, dead and buried.’

With a dry sniff, she wipes a white sleeve under her nose. ‘Daz thinks he’s the one who was traumatised—the one who suffered—but he was asleep for most of it. Didn’t even see his burns till they were halfway to healing. I saw everything. Felt everything. Knew everything. And those bitch nurses made sure I did too. They treated me like shit. Because I was famous. Because I was beautiful. They made sure I knew that I was nothing but a junkie in the junkie ward, with all the other junkie mums and their half-dead junkie babies.’

She crosses her arms. Juts her chin. ‘I was a true blue, bona fide, heroin chick supermodel. I was so skinny, I’d started growing fur. I was a human peach. The doc said I was dying but I just kept on waxing and living off air. That’s how committed I was to my job. But guess what happens when you fall? You get punished for being what people want you to be, tell you to be, buy and sell you for being. You get damned for being exactly what they loved you for being in the first place! Ha!’

You take a dirty glass from the sink, rinse it, pick up the blender and fill the glass right to the top. Sip. Ugh! It’s grassy, gritty—disgusting! You tip the muck down the drain.

The woman follows your hands’ movements, then looks at your face.

You eyeball each other. The earth stops spinning.

Time starts again when she says, ‘Yeah. Nah. Dazzles was sliced and diced long before I met him. Been smoking since he was a kid. I was just looking for a guy who wasn’t going to scream at me all the time—and there he was!’

She grins and—goddamn it!—she’s fucking gorgeous. Like Julia Roberts. That’s who she looks like! Not actually pretty at all, with those ginormous features jangling about her face, but so… expressive. You can suddenly see what her man sees in her. Can suddenly see what the whole world saw in her, once upon a time. All the face of her. All of her, in her face. She’s so irresistible that you almost grin too. You make for the door instead.

As you step into the hallway, a hiss behind you. ‘Loser.’ You stop in your tracks. Did she really just say that? Or did you just think it? You force yourself to keep on walking, despite your chest squeezing with that old, old pain—the pain that began when you were just a little girl and you realised, for the first time, that no one wanted to play with you. You could never work out why, and the pain pulsed on and on throughout your life, intensifying over decades as you hoped and tried—tried so hard—to become someone other than who you are.

You wander down the hallway. There are tumbleweeds of golden hair gathered in every corner. Everything is so pale and spare in this house. Tidy, but unclean. You think of your own little shack way down the back of town. Dark, dirty, derelict and cluttered with crap that you just don’t know how to get rid of. Not true. It’s full of his crap, crap that’s not yours to throw out. Hoarders, you’ve heard, are people who’ve lost things and cannot bear to lose anything else. He’s lost things. You know that. But so what? You’ve lost things too. Everyone loses everything, eventually.

Outside, the two men heave the rower into the back of the ute, chatting away like old mates. They’re talking about surfing, your guy pretending he can surf when you’ve seen toddlers—literally seen toddlers—who can surf better than he does.

Finally, they shake hands. Your guy gets into the driver’s seat. The man turns, his body between you and the ute. Suddenly, he grabs his unbuttoned shirt and jerks it wide open. ‘Have a look!’ he says, grinning like a crazy fuck.

And so, you do.

Through the grey curls, gelato-coloured swirls of pink and lemon and white. The molten skin looks ropey, tough. You remove your glove. Reach through the icy air. First, his warm hair tickling your fingertips. Then, your palm sinking in, searching and finding skin that is, in fact, so much softer than your own. You move your hand down his chest to rest on his taut stomach.

Again, your crotch throbs, throbs so hard it hurts.

You hear a terrible sound. A groan. Or a sob.

You stare into the man’s eyes. They’re green, flecked with gold. That must be the salt air, you think, rusting him from the outside in, from the inside out. You can see, now, that the whites of his eyes are curdled like those of someone who is ancient or dying. You were beautiful once too, you think. Or do you say it?

He frowns. Gently, he takes your hand and removes it from under his shirt. He holds your wrist and you both gaze down at the bruises blooming from Mad Dog’s first bite.

All of this happens in a stutter of seconds. You assume that your guy cannot see what’s going on until blaaaaarrrrrrp, he’s blasting the horn at you. The dogs start hollering at the front of the house. The man steps to one side and turns so you can both squint through the windscreen’s glare at your guy’s moronic smile.

‘Sorry about Barry,’ the man says. ‘He’s a fuckin’ mongrel.’ He slams back into the house.  

As you reverse past the veranda, the dogs holler harder. You open your window and bark right back. For a second they shut up, their heads cocked. Then Barry howls up to the sky, as if there’s a fully moon up there instead of a hot white winter’s sun.  

‘That’s one crazy pair of mutts,’ your guy says, as he swings onto the ocean road. ‘And that’s one freakin’ weird couple!’

You nod. For once, you are both in perfect agreement.

You look out at the craggy wild coast you’ve grown to love and hate these past few years. It does not look back. You turn to face the road ahead but can hardly see a thing for the windscreen has fogged up from your twinned breaths steaming up the cold.

He says, ‘De-mist it, babe.’

You turn on the de-mister, the heater and aircon and the fog clears in seconds.

He gives you a thumbs up, then flicks on the radio and soon—despite the song that’s already blaring into the car—he starts to sing. ‘Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily life is but a dream.’ On he goes, knowing fine and well that you cannot stand this—the endless noise of him. ‘Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a scene. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is butter-cream.’ He leans sideways, towards you—eyes still on the road—and booms, à la Pavarotti, ‘Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a screammmm.’

Despite your irritation at this performance—at his coercion—you smile, exactly as he wants you to, exactly as he knew you would.

Reality, fantasy. Loyalty, love. Tension, tenderness. Fear, fun. Serious silliness. This man. This fool. This stone in your shoe. This shoe for your stone. Your oldest—your only—friend. Where have you been?

You unbuckle your seatbelt, recline all the way back and prop your boots on the dash so that, if you crash, you will shoot straight out the windscreen like a torpedo. You close your eyes and listen to the words and music filling the car and you wonder about the hours you will spend now, rowing through space, leaving nowhere and arriving nowhere, but forever moving. This could be good, you think. This just might be something.

H.C. Gildfind

H.C. Gildfind is the author of the prize-winning novella Born Sleeping (Miami University Press, 2021) and the short fiction collection The Worry Front (Margaret River Press, 2018).

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