Derrick

Since the accident I can’t stop falling in love. 

It came to me like a dormant superpower, and suddenly I was the Hulk of crushing on strangers in the supermarket. Watching them buying their All-Bran, comparing the prices of economy packs of toilet paper. Every one of them a potential target for this newfound thing of mine. 

Falling for women, that was familiar. But the men – that was new, yet not unwelcome. I found it invigorating, even.

Since the accident, I’ve been happier than ever. It’s just that, ahh—

I still haven't worked out how to tell my wife. 

***

We met at an electronics superstore. I liked the way she scolded me for not knowing the difference between male and female A/V plugs, as well as the way her earrings flirted with her bare shoulders. I liked how, after I was fired for skipping shifts, she wore my starchy work shirt like it was a trophy.

These days she’s taken to drowning her cereal in light milk and watching game show marathons. She used to hate being so idle. She was a winner, a champion, a would-be-Olympian.

On the day of my accident, she chewed on her Rice Bubbles, jaw moving slowly. She looked through me, her spoon clinking against the side of the ceramic bowl. 

We should try and get there early, I had been saying. 

Only then did she realise I was looking at her too. 

***

They told me I had been in a coma. I couldn’t communicate, and I couldn’t wake, no matter how much I wanted to. I didn’t dream. But I could hear everything with a newfound clarity. Strangers debated about which bouquets to order; argued about who would take home the rotting lilacs. A nurse with a baritone voice murmured in my ear, “I like your muscles”, all while massaging my forearms, my wrists, my calves.

When my wife was alone in the room with me, she spoke to me like I was an heirloom carted from rental to rental. She’d try to coax me awake by saying something vague: “Okay, I better make your favourite dinner now”, and when I wouldn’t respond, she’d sigh, and eventually leave again.

***

On my first night home, my wife mentioned that Derrick had stopped by the hospital every evening. I already knew as much: He would begin with an anecdote (“mate, remember when that kid set fire to the chapel and we got held back after school?”) then latch onto a character (“actually, Davey's teaching at the high school now, can you believe?”) and end with some kind of reconsideration or recognition (“I should give him a call, I wonder if he's heard? He'll bring you a fuck-off bunch of flowers. Everyone's so different these days”). He’d vent about colleagues he hated, and then walk it back. “Sorry to unload on you, champion, got no other ear to chew off, hah.” In a stilted narration, he read out the back page of the newspaper. I think it was good for him.

Derrick wore the same outfit daily, like a cartoon character; a boxy, forest green army jacket, though he never enlisted. He was the first kid to bring cigarettes to school, the first to get suspended. Now we’re both forty and he's still chatting shit about girls he thinks he could score a gobby from. 

He calls everyone ‘champion’ except for men he’s intimidated by, who he just calls ‘champ’. He’s a loyal dog of a man. (His dog, a shelter mutt that he says is ‘mostly labrador’, is named Mate; this might be the loftiest title Derrick could bestow upon another living being.)

After I was discharged, Derrick kept up his routine. He told me he wanted to be certain that I was still alive. He would bring over his Xbox and make me watch him do wicked stunts in his video game. I never fully understood what I'd been watching — but it calmed me, not having to make the choices. 

Derrick helped me order a laptop with my insurance payout. I could browse the internet without anyone looking over my shoulder. Not that I'd ever look at anything unsightly, but even if I occasionally brought up an associate’s Facebook profile to scroll through, my wife would always drill me with questions she didn't care to know the answers to. She had to watch over me, like a prison warden, like God himself, like Mark Zuckerberg.

Derrick played his game. His character wore a dazzle-pattern vest and held a military-grade sniper rifle. “You see this fucker here?” he said. “I'm going to shoot this guy in the head, and he'll hate me for it, but he's never gonna see it coming.” In this reality Derrick was not just talk: the man’s head, almost instantaneously, would flicker out of existence. His body would crumple underneath him like a plastic cup on a waiting room floor. “See,” Derrick would say, “nobody noticed me. I'm the fucking ghost!”

***

The feeling of a crush starts like a brain freeze – sudden, overwhelming, a total hijack of the limbic system. The first time it happened, I thought I was going to be sick, but there was nothing in my stomach to bring back up. Daylight was sharp and the halogens were hell. After it thaws, the adrenaline hits, and my face goes blush red. My arms, my palms, like a sunburn. The comedown feels ecstatic.

With Genevieve, with Taliah, with Chris, with Ezra: I pined from afar. It's easier these days, with the internet. I liked how Genevieve looked so consciously pampered in photographs; even in photos with her spoilt poodle crossbreed, she was the more manicured of the two. Taliah always wrote “ha ha” before everything – “ha ha yeah” or “ha ha sorry to hear”. Chris sent me a message that was just a moving image of an M&M hugging a Skittle. And Ezra. He put a little ‘:)’ on my takeaway cappuccino one morning, and didn't question it when I returned twice more that day. I got a little heart on my third cup. 

I’d had a relatively chaste adolescence. The only person I'd kissed was Maggie Farmer. I had done this on a dare from her friend Lily, because I had really wanted to kiss Lily, and I would have done anything she said.

Derrick, on the other hand, was always telling me about his latest mark. “This is the one,” he'd swear to me. “I think it's love.” Then he’d get his dumb heart stepped on again. I don’t think he ever had a relationship that lasted longer than six months. He’d have more success if he put any effort into personal grooming. But he wanted to be Derrick unmodified. He wouldn’t bend for anyone.

It didn’t take long for him to just leave his Xbox in my living room. He’d said it was too much hassle to drive it back and forth. I think he wanted to move in with me, like he’d confessed to wanting to do when we graduated. Roomies. 

Derrick took the day shift, watching over me. He’d gather his things when the noise of my wife's car pulling up hit our ears. “Must be dinner time for Mate,” he’d say.

***

My wife is embarrassed by my accident. She won’t admit it, but when people ask how it happened, she omits the fact that we were skiing. When I tried to raise this, she asked if I needed more painkillers, or a hot chocolate, or “can I make you some chai?” But I kept poking at it. After a few days she snapped. “Well, it’s a bad look, isn’t it?”

On the day we met, she told me she was going to ski for her country. It excited me, imagining being dragged between mountaintops. I would prepare nutritious meals and rub her feet in the evenings. I didn’t have much else going for me; being a good-luck token seemed an acceptable life.

At her peak, my wife was one of the best in Australia. She’d competed at the Commonwealth Youth Games. Now she teaches the children of rich families how to fall safely in the snow. The parents like to be near her, I think. I don’t blame them. 

We married on the eve of her twenty-first birthday, when our families begrudgingly met for the first time. The only no-show was Derrick, who had moved to a small landholding out in the bush a few months earlier. He needed to find himself, he said, though not in those words. He did say that he'd be back in town for the big day. I could only take his word for it – he didn't have a landline.

A postcard appeared in our letterbox a week later, wishing my wife a happy birthday. He wrote about a dog he saw – some dingo half-breed. It ripped apart a hen that he’d been asked to care for. The next day the rest of the birds roasted in the hen shed. He blamed a local kid, some firebug. The postcard didn't mention our wedding. 

When he moved back to the city, his beard had gone wild and wiry, and there was a limp to him, a crooked knee. Still he made the same jokes, drank the same blue-label beer; his old boss even took him back on. I figured he mustn’t have ever been lost in the first place.

***

Derrick asked me to step in for a no-show on his social soccer team. All the men sported knock-off Premier League jerseys and looked unfit; all the women wore athleisure. Our goalkeeper was the only player to break this rule – a high-vis bib over what looked like the work clothes of a primary school teacher. Derrick seemed overly friendly to her; more chipper in her immediate presence. 

Bettie had a generosity to her. When the ball walloped me in my solar plexus and I had to sit out the rest of the game, she joined me on the bench. The world reformed beneath my feet. We judged the performance of her reluctant replacement, Derrick. Whenever the ball rolled off his fingertips and into the netting, he’d say, “It's important to remember this is just a bit of fun!” and, “What a workout!” and, “Nice goal, champ!” I mentioned the ski accident and her face scrunched up with concern. When she placed a hand on my shoulder, my body shot through with adrenaline. It felt good. It felt right.

She told me she was a primary school teacher and the vindication made me want to kiss the sky. It felt like we were already on the inside of an in-joke, a shared secret just for us – it’s just that I’d forgotten to tell her both the set-up and the punchline.

***

Now, night has pushed the sun out of its rightful place. My wife closes the bedroom curtains and settles into bed beside me. She’s reading a romance novel when I make a realisation about my new laptop. I am googling whether anyone has the same psychic symptoms as me – whether what I’m feeling is a precursor to a rare disease, or a degeneration of the heart – when I learn that my new laptop’s touch screen can be detached from the keyboard and used separately. As the laptop comes apart, I make an inelegant and futile attempt to save the two halves from splitting. I must look desperate.

My wife turns to me and, God, I want to die. Instead she says, “We could watch pornography together, you know?” and with too many beats passing, I said: I hear people do that. I must have been blushing. We make love, as she calls it, for the first time since the accident. We make it like kids making pottery out of Play-Doh. 

I wake up in a film of sweat. A shift has occurred inside my body. I feel nauseous. 

I look around for something to ground me, the sterilised machines or the IV support pole – but there she is, my wife, unperturbed and snoring. In our own bed. It takes me a second to realise why I had been feeling so upturned: I have a crush on my own wife. 

I buy her a bouquet that costs more than fifty dollars. We eat dinner, out. I let her choose our Friday night movie – I don't say a word even though it's subtitled. She lays her head in the crook of my neck; I had forgotten the faint herbal aroma of her prescription skin cream, and for once in my life, I find joy in the way it makes my nostrils twitch. We draw the lace white curtains. I want to make a show of our affection. I want the whole world to know just how I love my wife, that I am loving correctly, linearly, solely and only. That it is right.

My crush lasts five days, then I wake up. I feel ordinary again. 

I must radiate cold because my wife scowls as she climbs out of bed. She says she has to prepare for a call. I nod. It’s to New Zealand, she adds, as if it means something.

This will not be the end of the world. If my crush returns – I am certain it will, the only question is when – well, that's not half bad, for our age, is it? A blue moon romance. It sounds practical, when put like that. We can still live our lives in-between. It might be better than before. That’s something to hold on to. 

***

I ask Derrick if he's free and he takes the day off work. He brings over a stack of DVDs all labelled 4WD Action – I think he can sense my indignation because they never get further than the coffee table. Instead, I watch him play FIFA. I put together a plate of various dips; during my crush, I told my wife that I'd eat healthier. I figured it was too soon to break that particular promise. Derrick wins six goals nil against a team of children. His digital men holler and jump on top of one another. They smash champagne on each other's hulls. 

I wait until he and his men have finished celebrating. He puts his controller down. “So, mate,” he says. “What's up?”

I tell him: I'm in love with everyone. I lather a stick of carrot with hummus. Day in, day out, a new love. I feel explosive. I feel implosive. I feel like a teenager. 

“After what you've been through? I'm sure everything looks rosier nowadays, hey? Could you go a drink?”

I shake my head. It's not even midday. Derrick goes to my kitchen. On the screen, a man juggles a soccer ball from knee to knee. Derrick returns with two cans of Draught, and hands me one.

“I'm glad you're still here, mate.”

Thanks, I say. I mean, yes, all that, but no. I tell him about my new brain, or my new heart – whatever organ is liable for sending me into emotional hives over someone new each morning. I reel off a list of names. Unknowing marks who held my entire world in their hands. Genevie, Taliah, Chris. Ezra. I don’t mention my wife.

“What are you talking about? You've got it set. Wife. A home. I'm paying rent to a kid half my age, for Christ’s sake.” He finishes his beer; with effort, he compacts the can between his two palms. “You can't afford to be – what is it? – crushing on every other girl who walks past you. Take a look, sure, but keep that ring on your finger, mate. That's all I'm saying.”

He doesn't understand. He thinks I’m talking about Bettie; he’s playing defence. My skin feels itchy. It's only a matter of time before the wrong people become a target of this thing, too. People too close to avoid. But I don’t tell him that. Anyway, that's not the right word for it – thing. I try to place a finger on it.

Hey Derrick, I ask, What's the middle ground between a blessing and a curse?

“This some kind of riddle? I dunno, mate. You know I hate crosswords.”

He starts another soccer match. His fingers drum against the glass tabletop while the game loads. My unopened beer can reverberates.

“Maybe it’s just like, a worn armchair you find in hard rubbish,” he says. “And it’s good for a while, until the springs give out, and even though it's done you well you still regret ever taking it in because now the council has gone and stopped hard rubbish, hasn’t it, and its your problem now.” It makes me realise how long it’s been since I’ve been inside Derrick’s apartment – what does his lounge room look like again? What adorns his walls? Before I can interrupt, he decides he has a better answer. “Or that Alanis Morissette song, you know the one. Maybe that's the middle ground.”

I nod. Maybe. On the television, his men swarm the field. The crowd holler, chant. His team kick-off.

Derrick watches the screen intently. His hands are dexterous in a way I’ve never noticed before; muscle memory is a hell of a thing, I suppose. When he makes a particularly taxing manoeuvre, his tongue touches the beard hairs at the corner of his mouth. 

I try not to let him see me studying him.

His phone rings. He answers and goes “uh-huh, uh-huh”. He turns to me.

“Shit, mate, sorry. Something’s come up. Might be big. Mind if I head out for a bit?”

He’s being awfully coy.

Of course, I say, of course.

***

My wife tells me I'm too obliging; Bettie asks if I'd like tea at hers and I'm there, in her living room, as if no time has passed. I know this power she has over me will wear off eventually, but still: this is risky. I told myself I'd never step over that line. I want this thing to be clear cut — nothing more than a game of kiss chasey, and then for the bell to sing out, ding ding, back to class! Derrick’s words ring in my ears. Maybe he’s right. I can’t afford this.

Bettie's put the kettle on. Her kitchenette is kitted out like on cooking shows, utensils hanging from above, but the room is so tiny that it looks more like a theatre set. The impression of a well-put-together person.

A Myna bird pecks at her windowsill. Bettie stands on the ends of her feet to watch another Myna have a go at her garden. “Look at that little sparrow,” she says.

I want to kiss Bettie, but I don’t want to have kissed her. 

I think about Derrick. The way he announces himself whenever he arrives. A loyal stray. His straw hair. I hear you can create digital people these days, and have them bunk up with other digital people, and they can look like you or your friends or whatever celebrity you fancied in high school. Derrick mentioned it once. A game. You can contort these people into ever more beguiling situations, just to see what they'd do, hypothetically. 

I'm thinking about asking Derrick if he can order the game for me, but I feel embarrassed. Maybe I can find it on my own. I catch the end of Bettie’s bird monologue. I smile, nod, and tell her I agree.

I ask how she knows Derrick, and she shakes her head, and stifles a laugh. “Well,” she begins, and pauses for effect. (“Any story worth telling begins like this,” Derrick often says.) “Well, do you remember that flash flooding we had a couple years back? When the whole city looked like a water slide. My cat got out, and she wound up a suburb over. Derrick found Petal on some kind of mattress-turned-raft. Poor kitty. He said she looked like the end of Titanic. The door scene. You know?”

The kettle whistles. Bettie places one Earl Grey and one Lady Grey teabag into a fine gold-rimmed mug, and one Earl Grey into a mug that looks like it came from Kmart.

She ushers me to the lounge area. Her venetians are at such an angle that all the dust looks like fireflies and not just dead skin. The room is fringed with dead things. An owl hangs on a fishing line from the ceiling. A rabbit leers at me, frozen.

“My dad was a taxidermist,” she says. “Hobby, not trade. It’s a hard world to break into, you know? We always believed in him, our whole family. And you can see he was amazing, right? Real attention to detail. He had a huge heart, he did. It’s amazing, watching someone so talented.”

I want to tell Bettie about my wife’s past life: how we had made it, more-or-less, how she stood on top of the world. I feel proud of her again. I don't say a thing – but my face must give something away, because Bettie says: “She’s okay with you being here? Your wife? You two have an arrangement?”

Oh. All of a sudden, another world is laid before me. I think: an arrangement could work. I want to say it too, but I’m feeling flushed. Part of me feels like I’ve already betrayed her, not saying her name. 

Could an arrangement work? 

We’re adults, I finally say. I don’t know what I mean by this, so I smile at Bettie and hope that’s enough. I’m sweating.

There’s a bookshelf devoid of books. On the middle shelf a ginger tabby proudly stands on all fours. Its eyes look glassy. Bettie shakes her head – but there's a trick of the light, and I only see part of the motion. Like a film reel missing frames.

“Poor, poor Petal,” I think she says.

Her fingers brush my skin as she hands me my cup of tea. The mug’s edge feels sharp to the touch. Actually, I say, could I ask you for a glass of water? My words sound distant. She says something in response but it doesn’t make sense. She’s not making sense. 

My hand feels clammy. I forget what I’m holding on to.

The mug smashes. 

My head is on the floor.

***

The doctor says I have a tiny ball of blood pushing against my skull. She calls me “sir”, but it doesn't sound right. She's talking like she's reading from a film script. Contusion. Swelling. Alarming. Months? Years? I think I hear some of these words. If I'm being honest, my brain isn't retaining anything. Maybe that’s what she’s trying to tell me.

She must have mistaken me for another heartbroken sham. There's a mistake. 

Bettie has gone home. I think she pities me. We’re adults. How naff.

I can’t decide if the story she told me about Derrick was true. I try to picture him corralling a wet cat around his tiny apartment, patting it down with a bikini-model-print beach towel. I can already hear the joke he’d make. 

A nurse is looking at me askance. “Are you okay?” His voice is deep and familiar. He looks at my chart and frowns, and then at my body.

“Just get comfortable.” He turns to leave but doesn’t. He looks at me again. “You should work out more. You’ve let yourself go.”

I feel nothing for this man.

A doctor enters the room and organises a time for me to see another specialist. “Someone who can deal with you properly” – that’s the language she uses. I don't understand what she’s talking about. Her hair is long and bouncy, a shampoo commercial. She’s the most fashionable person I’ve ever seen inside a hospital. I feel nothing for her, too.

I ask her about this other thing going on with me, the psychic injury, this lovesickness, but she looks at me strangely.

“I’m engaged,” she says, affronted.

I leave the hospital without signing anything, a stack of pamphlets under my arm. A baby cries at me.

I look at my reflection in the glass of a bus shelter. The bandage wrapped around my head makes me look like a ghoul. 

***

The bus drops me a few streets from our house, on a small retail strip that turns over every few years. At the newly-unfranchised bottle-o, I put a bottle of Moët onto our credit card, but it declines. I exchange it for a cheaper brand and pay with cash.

I've never been great at breaking news. I've found that champagne is an adequate shortcut. A consolation prize.

Ezra is pulling closed the café’s shutters as I walk by. He smiles, nods at the wine in my hands and says, “you should come in more often.” 

Last month, I found myself unexpectedly erect at overhearing his voice in the line at the newsagency. Now, I consider him no more than I would a statue in a park. 

As I approach the house, I try to play out the conversation in my head, but I am struggling to think linearly. Maybe I’ll confess to the crushes, to seeing Bettie; I’ll mention that hypothetical arrangement, and she’ll be so livid it’ll take the sting out of my medical news. Or I’ll hand her the pamphlets and weep. Or, maybe, I’ll just tell her I’m feeling extraordinarily drowsy, and her pity will sustain me until morning. A night’s reprieve.  

I’m standing in our front yard. My wife is in our living room, gesticulating by the window, but she has her back to me. It looks like she’s talking to someone. The curtain is pulled halfway closed, obscuring the listener. My wife appears to be yelling; she shakes her head. She is oblivious to the world outside. I am squatting by her row of petunias, holding the wine. The figure she’s yelling at has been filtered out of existence by white lace. 

Did Bettie have a change of heart? I should have never stepped through her door. When I think of her, I see nothing but a pair of glass eyes staring back.

I cover half my vision to focus on the figure behind the curtain. Their shadow moves slowly, distorted by the folds in the lace; there are moments when I think the figure might not be human at all. But when the headlights of a passing car illuminate the window, it becomes obvious that it’s not Bettie, but a man’s body. For a second the silhouette seems familiar. A jacket, heavy shoulders. 

He looks to be crying, this man. I remove the palm from my eye, and the world is too bright.

I need to call Derrick. I need him to tell me I’m seeing ghosts. He must be at work. At home. In a pub somewhere, playing pinball. My hands are shaky. The panes of frosted glass on our front door turn murky – there’s someone behind it. The door handle will be next. 

I panic. I hide in the carport with the wine bottle still in hand. Derrick’s voice winds out of the porch. He’s speaking in a tone I'm unfamiliar with. I think I hear a reference to my name. He says: “his head will be okay, right?”

My wife’s Suzuki is parked before me. The back seats are taken up by our three-piece luggage set, skis on the roof racks. 

Her voice filters down to me. She says something that I can't comprehend. It sounds like there's blood in my ears. I sit down on the concrete.

The car door opens. We make eye contact, and she sees me. She sees me.

She pulls the door shut. It’s like she’s in a fishtank. The headlights go on. She exhales, closes her eyelids; she reverses out of the carport blind.

I close my eyes too. I’m not exactly sure why – maybe out of respect, or submission. I listen to her car’s engine fade down our hill.

“Mate?” It's Derrick's voice. “You shouldn't be here,” he says. I am crushed by a deep wave of shame. I don’t want to be seen.

He places a hand on my shoulder.

“Come on, mate. Let’s get you inside.”

***

At sunrise, Derrick comes back to get me in his Landcruiser. My head is throbbing. Mate lies flat on the backseat, uncharacteristically indifferent to the passing world. Derrick closes the back windows.

 Derrick makes small talk but in a way that’s uncommitted, scattered. He turns up the radio just a little and Mate falls asleep.

We trade the suburbs for a highway, for an untarmacked road. An hour passes. Derrick pulls up before a small property, where a colonial weatherboard cottage lies on a flat plain. I feel a vague sense of familiarity.

“So, what do you think?”

Derrick had always made the old landholding sound like another world – a compound of thick bush overrun by rainbow lorikeets in the day and potoroos by night. But it looks so ordinary. I spy the burnt remains of what might have once been a chicken shed.

I turn to Derrick. He looks so proud. We step out of the car and let Mate out, who goes out to do his business. We lean against the rotting timber fence.

“Old owner’s heading interstate,” he tells me. He falters. We’re thinking the same thing: my wife has accepted a job in another country, and I'm still here.

“Yeah, so, the place will be available. It can be mine, if I pull the trigger.”

I think about a man’s head crumpling into his body.

I say: You got space for me, right? I intend it as a joke, but my voice is too affectless. He knows whose name my home is under, and it certainly isn’t mine.

“There was always a spare room for you, mate.”

He rubs his bad knee. Everything seems older out here. The gums are tall and thick. The stubble on Derrick’s chin is going silver. The temperature drops and goosebumps form on my forearms.

“You good there, mate?” By the time I realise Derrick is addressing me he’s already popped open the back of the SUV. I notice the bottle of sparkling wine I bought last night sitting amongst his vehicular detritus. Derrick returns with a windbreaker and hands it to me.

My heart palpitates. I’m rushed by nausea – I steady myself on the fencepost. My tempo doubles. It’s too much for my body, my ribcage. I think: this is it. I should have settled my affairs. I should have apologised when I had the time. I should have never woken up. I should have lived as Bruce Banner. I should have been more ashamed.

But, as quickly as it came over me, it dissipates. I catch my breath.

The air feels purified. 

I am clearheaded.

For the first time since the accident, the inside of my skull feels like undisputed territory. I turn to Derrick.

You heard about Davey? I say. From school. He's teaching at St. Michaels now. Can you believe it? 

Derrick closes his eyes, and nods. “Yeah, I think I heard that. I think I heard something like that.”

***

This was the story, more or less, as I told it to Doctor Yu. A clinical psychologist, she had  contacted me after visiting the emergency room. My mouth dried. I wanted to leave the story  there, let it hang like a raincoat drying in intermittent spots of sun. But our session had not  reached its conclusion. She lowered her pad and gave me an expectant look. 

“And so the medical procedures followed, which we’ve discussed, but I’m interested  in him.” She refilled my glass with filtered water. “In Derrick.” I talked loosely, in wide berths. Our lives became intertwined, I said, out of necessity.  Our living arrangement an ongoing Platonic gesture. Derrick, Mate and me. We carpooled  often, when work or medical appointments pulled us towards the city, soundtracked by  ebullient FM talkback. Such logistical quandaries – groceries, my health, Derrick’s job, our  end–of-week pub dinners with Bettie – were the overriding determinants of our day-to-day  existence. Things went safely unsaid. The shift was gradual. Dinner, televised sports, taking  Mate down the trails, to the beaches. Derrick taught me how to operate a ride-on mower. As I outlined how I spent my days, Doctor Yu said the phrase symbiotic splinters and  nodded to herself, noting down a thought. As if Derrick and I were thumbs playing at war,  thumbs constantly getting under one another, a fingernail beneath skin. At our first meeting, Doctor Yu was visibly disappointed to learn that, by the time she  found me, my effusive romanticism had waned. She explained that my symptoms – my “sudden and overwhelming interior shapeshifting” – were not unheard of. 

“It’s more common than you’d think.” She had met several patients with similar  afflictions; Doctor Yu let insinuated that she had once had to withhold professional contact  with one woman who had become enamoured with her. 

She said the exact things I had wanted to hear after my accident, but it now felt trivial,  academic. The turbulent giddiness was gone, but my head constantly ached. In her eyes I took  the shape, I suppose, of a case study. She took little interest in the whereabouts of my wife,  only vaguely nodded when I mentioned my tentative reconnection with Bettie. (I didn’t  mention Derrick’s resurgent interest in Bettie – that seemed a topic of conversation for a  different kind of therapist, one I was not currently seeing.) Instead, Doctor Yu wanted to  know more about Derrick. I had not brought the two together; I sidestepped her requests to  invite him to a session. 

On the nightstand – a formation of recovered timber that Derrick had sanded, treated,  and nailed together – sat a lengthy psychological questionnaire. Collated and stapled along its  long edge, it had the weight of a magazine, and had become embedded, I guess, with  a certain definitive significance. I hesitated to put biro to checkbox. Mate lumbered into the  bedroom and distracted me, dozing languidly at the end of the bed. It warmed me to see him  rest. Walking him earlier in the day, he had seemed uninterested in the aromatic world of fish  heads and gull droppings. 

In the morning, Mate did not want to get up, refused to drink, to eat. I sat in the  backseat with him, head on lap, as we drove to the veterinary hospital. 

*** 

Mate is tired, older than his age. He rests by the fireplace. I place my palm on his back and  pay attention to how his long, unhurried breaths inflect his body. The radiant warmth on his  fur.  

I return to the dining table, a small, circular salvage perfect for two, and take my place  on a fold-out chair that ordinally lives out on the veranda. We made an awkward triangle – on  my left, Derrick, and on my right, Bettie, the taxidermist’s daughter. 

I had been too tentative with Bettie, perhaps. My connection to her – the truncated  date, the shattered mug, how she reached out after – had become, without agenda, Derrick’s  connection, too. I was still nursing the supposed psychic wound that comes with such a  severance of the heart-brain chemical bridge. After the rock hopping romanticism of the past months, I was a slow, weary creature. But the truth is: I did not want  to crush Derrick’s hopes, his chances. Cutting his grass, I decided, would be constrained to  the landholding’s lawn. 

Bettie and Derrick had seen each other a handful of times, outside of the company of  their social soccer team and our shared parma nights. Had been seeing each other. On the  topic Derrick had been avoidant, but it sounded, from the outside, like a slow walk from  friendship to courtship. The way he prepared himself before seeing her, ironing jeans and  trimming his beard; how he was less rambunctious when he returned home. He exhibited an  unusual grace, a patience. But despite his best efforts, the whole thing stalled. All because of  a minor miscommunication that got away from Derrick like an uncontrolled backburn; he  hadn’t even noticed his hands idly flicking the cap of the lighter, tik, tik, open, closed. So to  speak. Derrick and Bettie hadn’t talked since the soccer season had ended.  

Under the auspice of Mate’s future, we make a wordless agreement to set a faint  shadow over our shared histories. Bettie smiles politely, her cardigan patterned in finches.  Derrick is withdrawn, as he has been for the past few days – I have been playing his usual  role; cracking his jokes, cracking his beers . (He still drank them.) 

Derrick keeps looking sidelong at his boy. Through the reverberation of the table I  can sense his leg jittering. Bettie looks at Derrick like he’s a sparrow to be kept in a box,  mended to health. With pity, care. 

I think about the frogmouth on Bettie’s bookshelf, about the antiquated hare with its  missing patches of fur. On the balcony earlier, before I welcomed her into Derrick's presence,  she had shown me photographs of her own attempts at the family business. “I know  professionals,” she’d said, “don’t worry.” I noticed for the first time the childish gaps in her  teeth. She took my hand and squeezed. There was something there more than a reassuring  warmth – a reminder of the birdsong from her kitchen, her openness. 

Seated at the table, Derrick’s gaze is only for Mate. Bettie looks between him, the  dog, and me. She is shier, I realise, when not on home turf. 

Okay, I say, and their attention turns to me. We all love Mate, and we will always  love Mate. Life is unfair and unpredictable and, you know. We all know that. Now, we have  some expertise with us today. We are just going to talk, to explore options without  judgement, about what is best for Mate, for now, for the next week, and for what comes after.  

I feel like the host of a midday talk show where nobody acknowledges the glowing  sign telling them how to react. I feel absurd, having expected this setting of the scene to shake off the cloudy malaise. Then I feel a hand on my right knee. The fingers softly grasping  my body is a comfort, a recognition.  

Pity, care. 

I mirror her gesture, send it leftwards. I can feel the heat of Derrick’s body beneath  his bent knee. At first his leg first wants to pull away from my palm – but he trusts me, loyal  Derrick. He trusts me. He lets my hand rest on restless leg. The anxious motion slows, stops.  

He has not broken eye contact with the sleeping dog, but I can see in Bettie’s eyes,  and in the way his opposing shoulder shifts, that Derrick’s palm is mirroring the action, too. An unbroken circuit of warmth and solitude. A self-sustaining loop.  Sudden, overwhelming, cyclical.  

I feel something I haven’t felt for months. I have something I want to keep here,  within this circle, not disclose to any doctor, not dissect. I don’t want to understand it.  My hand feels warm. Derrick closes his eyes. Life comes to his face; a veil pierced by  a ray of setting sunlight. He opens his eyes again. 

In unison, we watch Mate slowly roll over in front of the wood heater. The dog begins  to snore. He appears peaceful. 

Derrick looks at Bettie, and then at me, and then at Bettie, and then at me.  Derrick watches me studying him.  

I feel the palm on my leg shift.