THE BEARINGS ARE MAGNETIC

Andrea Macleod

THAT IS WHEN SHE FINDS THE FIRST BALL OF PAPER IN HER MOUTH. After she loses her job. The morning after she’s been told it is over. Just like that. Twenty years. She suspects someone, perhaps Lucy in accounting who is not losing her job but staying on, says ‘be free Clare’. It is possible she also heard someone say ‘about time’. Then she sees an image of a heavy brown suitcase on a sidewalk bulging with dresses and there might have been an orange hat and a tag that says ‘free’, imagines the owner has died. She hasn’t worn dresses since she was fifteen.

At first she thinks someone is kissing her passionately. Then that it is her own tongue choking her. Then the thing wakes her properly, catches on the roof of her mouth like it might be tacked to her, all balled up and pressing at the roof of her mouth. The idea of a kiss slips away into the dawn and she can’t remember whom she thought she was kissing, oddly gets a flash of Warhol’s Monroe; has a feeling Warhol once said the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away and the better and emptier you feel. Wonders exactly when it was she had wanted to visit the Tate Modern and why she hasn’t done it yet. Finds she can’t say good morning to her cat, like she usually does, because there really is something in her mouth. Thinks it was nearly two years ago that she saw a boy who came into the ER with a set of vampire fangs glued to the roof of his mouth while she sat with a severed finger from trying to use tin snips on a wall hanging of the Centre Pompidou. She gags. The doctor asked why was she cutting it in half. She can’t, for the life of her, remember the answer. Has a feeling somebody told her to. Thinks something slips down the back of her throat. Wonders how it got there. Is sure she fell asleep alone. Has no memory of doing anything other than going to bed, fully dressed, not even climbing under the duvet. Has no one to climb under the duvet with. Vaguely suspects there were tears. Is certain makeup remains on her face, streaked and caked. Gags again as the thing occludes her tongue and makes the air in her lungs spin like a carousel. Suspects initially there is a camera in the room filming her then realises she has no reason to think anyone would do that. She’s not all that funny. Doesn’t know anyone who would do that, not anymore. Nearly chokes. Must pull whatever it is out. Remembers a jelly baby blue as a baby blue sky stuck in her, thinks someone fisted her to get it out. Gags once more and coughs. Thinks someone says eat more of them, jelly beans, just stuff them down. Coughs again. Doesn’t think eating more of anything will help this time. There isn’t room. Can’t swallow. She has a momentary feeling of terror, white-knuckle fear that someone has tried to kill her while she is sleeping. Decides to rake it out. Claw it out. Then uses her finger and pulls. Thinks of it like a bottle cap. Hopes she won’t spring a leak. Pictures a woman leaking out via a plug pulled from the roof of her mouth. Wonders if Dali ever had the same thought. Is relieved when the thing dislodges finally and she can see it is paper, old paper balled up. It isn’t wet so she assumes it hasn’t been in her mouth for long perhaps just the seconds before she woke. She lays it on the bed, lies down beside it, with her cat that hasn’t moved, opens one eye and sees the same. Thinks she can just wrap the duvet over them and disappear. Will it still be like they were there?

She pokes the paper with her severed finger. Has a vision of having the same problem with a moth once and a wing stuck to the roof of her mouth. Never told anyone. Was glad it wasn’t a spider. Felt bad for the moth. Watched for days to see if the rest passed. Wasn’t sure what to think when it didn’t pass obviously as a head, a body, another wing, anything remotely resembling a moth. Didn’t know what she was thinking. Just wanted to know, perhaps, that it wasn’t inside her. Has a vague feeling the boy swallowed the fangs. She flicks the paper off the duvet and it falls to the floor. The cat can’t keep its eye open. Suspects only if the paper had wings would the cat be interested. The sound of a small engine running fills the air. She seems unable to connect it to the cat. Outside as the sun is eaten by a cloud, everything fades. The ball of paper the colour of milky tea unravels on the floor. She sees the map it might be.

She sailed when she was seven. It was in her blood her mother said. Forefathers had mapped coasts across the Pacific. Her father was a painter, painted the shore, the waves, the Banksia and Pandanus trees. She remembers seven fathoms deep. He dives off the boat. He sinks to the bottom of the sea and never comes back. She remembers a house on a creek that slid out to the sea and the incoming tide turned the black water blue. And that a body pulled from clams is bursting with the colour purple.

She dials emergency. Listens to the woman’s voice. Police. Fire. Ambulance. What is your emergency? Can’t work out whom to ask for. She waits a second and hangs up. Outside the clouds dissolve and the sun swells in the room until it touches her. The paper, struck by the light, hardens. She presses her palm against it and sees a tiny coastline, the jagged edges of space and time. Puts her glasses on and a word is illuminated: Beecroft Point. She closes her eyes and all the flavours of childhood fill her mouth, the taste of wind on beach hikes and mountain drives, the salt on her lips navigating sandbars in her father’s boat and then drinking hot chocolate as they went over his maps, their maps, meticulously drawn together. For the first time in years she feels like painting breadfruit.

She has an appointment with a doctor. Her head has been hurting; is a pain in her neck. She puts the paper on the kitchen table. Puts a cover over it. Reminds the cat to leave it alone. Later as she is leaving the doctors with a pill for the pain and note to write down what makes the pain worse, she wonders if she has dreamed the paper the way she has often dreamed small mice are growing inside her or that red flowers will burst from her mouth. Perhaps it was just a distant kiss after all. When she opens the door to the cat on the mat she expects nothing to be under the cover and suspects illusions of grandeur. Instead it is where she has left it. She feels an unfathomable darkness fall over her.

Her sleep is rocky. When she wakes the cat’s face is beside hers, its breath is woven into her. She tastes sardines on her lips. Then she notices the paper caught on the cat’s claw, pulls cat hair from her mouth and knows the cat has been fishing inside her. She has a feeling the cat is aware of the mice. On the notebook beside her bed she writes the cat makes me nervous. She writes also #2 paper and the date. The new paper is larger. It contains no words, just numbers and her head fills with all the directions she has been in her life. She considers also the cat may have saved her life. She pats the cat and runs a line through what she has written in the notebook. Underneath she writes the words paper, inside me, past and then a question: is a map ever accurate considering the tides. She puts the new paper under the cover and reminds the cat once more. For three days more paper is in her mouth when she wakes. Most pieces are the same size but each has edges that still don’t quite connect with the others though she suspects with tape they would look almost right, just a little off.  Most have numbers, some coastlines. She doesn’t know what she thinks it should be sequential. She finds another word Byron Bay. On the fifth day she stops staring at the pieces, pulls herself away from trying to fill in the lines, the names on the map and she leaves the house. She takes a walk and with the wind blowing the trees she strolls through the park and to a small coffee shop tucked against a withering hedge. While ordering coffee she asks the barista, a tall woman with red hair and freckles on her nose if she would be worried if she started coughing up balls of paper. The woman puts the lid on the coffee and says like a cat coughs up hair. She shakes her head. Then I don’t understand the question, the barista replies. She tries to explain but the woman hands her the coffee and tells her to call someone, tell someone, aren’t you worried someone is entering your place. She thinks the woman wants to say aren’t you worried someone is entering you. The woman takes back the cup and scribbles a smiley face on it. Tell someone she says. Please.

She calls a company to install a camera. The man who comes to fit out her room is sleight with curly brown hair and reminds her of her last boyfriend Simon, a maritime law professor obsessed with 17th Century French naval ships. It was Simon who had refused to go to the Centre Pompidou with her when they were in Paris; went under protest and caused a scene by pointing out that just because Renzo Piano said the building was an exercise in freedom didn’t mean that it was. Things change, he protested. He wanted to visit the Musee National del Marine but they had run out of time for both. She had a way of winning out. Later he gave her the wall hanging to apologise. She quoted Piano again when she kissed him and said ‘when you are young, you are innocent and do what you feel’.  She fucked him then, pretended that was what she had meant by feel. She had needed to see the Centre Pompidou back then, had wanted to trace its lines. When the man installs the camera she asks him things about the reasons people install cameras. She says please tell me the strangest things people think are happening to them. He says ‘lady it’s all strange people watching themselves, watching others, watching people watching them’. He pauses, looks up for a second, look for a moment as if he is going to ask her why then returns to the cable ties and securing the camera. She asks again, surely there are degrees. She wants to ask him have you ever heard of a woman coughing up a map. As he finishes putting away his tools she imagines how a man cheating on his wife might meticulously cough up a copy of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold or a ballet dancer could choke to death on the laces from her first ever pair of ballet shoes. How the man might say people have all sorts of things inside them.  Instead he looks right at her and says you understand you might not like what you find.

She hands him her credit card and when it is paid for he explains how to operate the camera. Not looking up from his case, he says so you remember where the erase button is. She mumbles yes and shows the man the door. She listens to his footsteps until he reaches the hall entry and hears the foyer door open and slam shut. Then she stares at the on button, listens to the neighbours in the hall and the church bell across the street as it rings on the hour until she finally falls asleep.When she reviews the security footage the following day she discovers that all night she just lies in her bed, mostly on her back, sometimes snoring but does not get up and nobody enters her apartment. Only the cat moves, sometimes staring at her face and sniffing her every so often as if she is fish. Then when she opens her mouth the paper is there, round and tightly scrunched.

She starts ironing them flat and has pieced together several sections. One day she rings a help line to ask what she should do about the pieces but the man she is speaking with struggles to understand, tells her to throw out the rubbish, mentions holding on to things that don’t serve any purpose. She starts to tell him some of these places I have never even heard of, stammers and begins again trying to say it seems I have no control over it; can’t get that sentence out either. Hangs up on the man. She goes out for a walk. She runs into a man eating a hotdog and the sauce splatters on them both. She is certain she asks for oranges at the grocer but is given a bag of potatoes. She isn’t sure why she can’t see clearly, feels like there is a fog. Thinks about putting down anchor, not moving but suspects that is exactly what the map wants her to do. She almost throws it all in the tip. Lights a fire in the sink and threatens to burn it. Decides to catch a train to the sea just in case there is a clue by the ocean. She watches the tide roll in. Follows a crab along the sand. Buries herself in the dunes and watches an eagle roll on the wind. On the train home, as darkness falls, she sees the lights coming on in houses flickering hazily in the perspex, looks around to the other passengers and listening to the noiselessness of the train she yearns for open water, for waves and for a moment, closing her eyes, allows the rock of the train to transport her as the weight and pull of all the words The Bearings are Magnetic settle into her consciousness and she feels the wrenching of it.

The next day the paper is smaller and the day after smaller still until she starts to need tweezers to pull the tiny balls from the crevices in her teeth and a magnifying glass to take note of the words. She coughs up Perpendicular Point. Crocodile Head, Plantation Point. These are places she knows. She pins them to the other pieces. Sometimes she stands up on a chair to look down on it all.

That morning, the one after the paper with no markings, she watches the sun rise and the clouds turn pink as rain falls. She realizes she hasn’t looked at the video footage in weeks. Hasn’t left the house in days. Climbing down from the chair, the cat cleaning a leg, she boils water for an egg and thinks about pressing delete on the footage. Then she presses play and realizes the tape is already empty. She brushes her teeth and realizes again there is no paper that day. She goes to look at the map, which is broken and incomplete. She stands in the bathroom and opens her mouth wide to check there really is nothing in there nothing stuck to a tooth but there is not a shred, not a grain. She makes a cup of tea and sits by the pieces. She looks at all the names she knows, the ones she doesn’t and all the sea in between. She stars at one tiny dot marked Grasshopper Island and wonders if someone had gone ashore and found the place infested with grasshoppers.

She makes a meal and stands by the window, watches people making their way through the rain with their umbrellas violently blowing in the wind. Later in the day a man without an umbrella puts his briefcase over his head and then gives into the rain, just looks up at and lets it fall on him. She sees him disappear in the direction of the lake. She rests her head on the table and looks closely at all the pieces and realizes the coast and the sea wander like patterns the beetles make under the bark on river gums and the idea that a beetle and a man can make the same marks seems to lull her to sleep.