Spectral at Best by Isabella Venutti
Spectral at Best
“This is the spot here.”
When she spoke and clicked the indicator, pulling up to a stretch of barbed wire fencing, I was startled, lurched forward a bit in my seat, her flat affect carving into the immense and sturdy silence we’d sat still in for the entire ride.
I peered out of the window. “This is what you wanted to show me?”
It was a huge stretch of land. Tall grass, scratchy, parched. Littered with circular hay bales, flanked by native trees. All blanketed by the butter gold of just-setting sun.
“Yeah” she said not looking up, rooting around in her tote bag for the bits to roll a cigarette. “Hop out and sus the full view.”
I popped the door open and stepped out, sky now in sight. Two giant columns of opaque, white smoke swirled and rose through the air. From where I stood, all I could make out of their origin was the tops of what seemed to be grey concrete cylinders.
The landscape was imposing, I felt dwarfed, a tiny faceless figure in a Jeffrey Smart or Edward Hopper painting.
Anna got out to join me, leaning on the bonnet as she lit up her ciggie. She offered me a drag. I took it and asked where we were.
“Used to come here all the time and just chill.” She stared blankly ahead, gesturing to the plumes. “That’s the power station. Dad used to work there.” I leaned against the car, shifting my weight to face her. “You’re from around here? I always just assumed you were inner north born and bred.”
“Nah. Moved there soon as I turned eighteen though, so it might seem like it, I guess.”
I took a drag from the cigarette and immediately coughed.
“Oh my god is this weed?”
Anna shook her head and laughed in this breathy, condescending way she often did.
“I thought for sure you knew?”
When I first met Anna, I was young enough to think anyone in a band with a gig booked at a venue was famous; when my primary response to Melbourne’s monsoon-esque early summer rains was to cock my head back and drink up.
We were out the front of the Evelyn in the smoking section, she was performing- gangly armed, highly gestural storytelling. A group of six or seven acquaintances crowded around her, involuntarily spitting out laughs that threatened their veneers of cuffed-trouser cool. I’d hovered at the edge of the group, sipping a warm beer and smiling shyly. My gaze flitted between the rim of my pint glass and the group, avoiding prolonged eye contact as I was then wont to do. Her hair was long. Dirty blonde and ribbon glossy. Her cheeks were concave and Norwegian. Her nose, smattered with sun damage, looked almost twice broken. She was wearing a blood-red crushed velvet top and slinky pinstripe suit pants, both with that faint crumple and odour characteristic of unwashed op-shop purchases. She wore a slick, dark lipstick and no other makeup, those little gold tubes I would come to know so well, ground into oddly shaped stubs, tumbling loose in the bottoms of handbags and drawers. She was recounting a string of disturbing dreams she’d had recently. One where she’d travelled back in time to the 90s and was going to be offered the role of Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction over Uma Thurman on one condition- she would have to breast feed Tarantino and his entire cast and crew.
She was funny in a way that I knew I was too but couldn’t articulate out loud in front of people. I had just moved to the city, and she blazed with this sort of delicious transgressiveness. Back then I needed desperately to be different. Blunted flat by suburbia, I pulsed around anything that promised to sharpen me up. The clothes, the music, the books, the art, the drugs. I wanted to chip deeper and deeper into myself till a transcendent bas relief had emerged. I pursued her later on in the night in the crowd of the band room, once I’d loosened myself sufficiently with alcohol in order to extract the iota of charm I was capable of. We danced to the loose, shitty post-punk together, thrashing our hair about. We had shouty conversations over the wall of sound wherein neither of us understood what the other was saying very well, but both of us grinned and laughed a lot. Before we knew it, we had our arms flung over each other, spilling most of our pints of Furphy down one another’s long leather jackets.
Anna brought out this meekness in me. Especially when it came to her want of a good time. That’s why, at twenty-six, years after I’d been tangled up in her bullshit, I had taken a day off of work, driven with her to a field, charming though it was, in the middle of fucking nowhere, and agreed to share with her, the entire joint that she’d non-consensually sprung on me. Leaning on the Camry I watched her pacing out into the grass, and it occurred to me, as if for the first time, that though it had been years since we had been that young and dumb, that though we technically had a lot of memories together, that sort of I didn’t know Anna at all. This strange hollow dread crept up on me as I watched her unbrushed hair flailing in the breeze, like watching a movie you didn’t realise was a horror until halfway through.
I called her my best friend, but we only really liked each other when we were drunk. When we ended up living in the same share house together two years into our friendship, we would circle each other like jealous, territorial cats during the day. We both levied jabs at one another’s insecurities and took pleasure in doing so. She always stressed how many different groups of friends she drifted between, made a point of lamenting all of the Facebook invites she was burdened with every weekend. She knew well she was my only access to a wild social life. I’d reiterate my plans for further study beyond my bachelor’s degree, because the one thing I had on her was a semi-clear life path planned out. Then at night after a few glasses of acrid, cheap wine our neuroses would dim. She’d relent to my clinginess, and I’d submit to her need for a partner in unravelling. We’d be right as rain, terrorising everyone who crossed our path.
The weed made me feel like I was walking downstairs into the basement of my own murky thoughts, and so I decided I’d take a turn about the area. I started walking, first towards Anna, but then realised that she was on the phone to someone, making plans, doing her cool girl spiel, which triggered my jealousy, essential to our dynamic.
My legs swished through the thicket, bits of hay-like grass sticking to my jeans. Why the fuck has she brought me here.
It was so typical of her. To get me outside of myself, force me to let rip and then watch me keep spinning at arm’s length. I walked for some time, then turned back around and stalked over to her with purpose. I pointed at her phone and shook my head inquisitively like, what the fuck, who the fuck. She looked a little stunned. She said she’d call them back and quickly hung up.
My eyes stung. “Why are we here Anna?”
She was acting performatively dumbfounded.
“Uh... well you said you could hang?”
“Yeah, but it’s been a fucking minute. When you called, I thought something was seriously up.”
Her lips turned down at the corners, exaggerated, Pierrot clown. One of her few tells of vulnerability that always slipped through.
“I told you not to take the day off if it was going to impede upon your schedule in any way. You seemed keen, I-” her voice was starting to crack. Her eyes slicked over with some deep, unspoken ache. I looked into them square, it was like seeing a fight through a stories high window from outside on the street, but you just keep walking, because the world is too big and you can’t hold its hurt.
“There’s always some shit going on but, I thought that I’d see you, and that we’d do this, and, we’d just... have a fucking laugh, you know.”
She sighed and frustratedly swatted her hands about her face. “Whatever.”
I exhaled, sharp. “Right, whatever.”
She crossed her arms, lip jutted.
“It seems like you need to walk this out, you always needed to walk it out, you get stoned so easily, it’s like-”
Before she could finish, I’d turned back in the opposite direction and started tramping away from her.
I kept going, cursing under my breath. Hating myself for only ever being lit up by people who forced me to work for it. Who proved something to me when I proved myself to them. I stopped when I spotted a rock on the ground.
With my hands I parted the long, dry bramble, unleashing a flurry of dandelion spores. It revealed itself to me like some kind of talismanic object, large, oblong shaped with the slight green tinge of European antiquity. I held it to my chest and shut my eyes, meditatively tracing its crags and contours with my thumbs. My chest blushed with this need to show Anna, to see if she’d feel its aura, its magic. My anger had scattered away within minutes, just like it always did. I spun round, scanning my surrounds. She was gone, she was nowhere.
I started pacing, heart rate elevating, eyes pricked with tears. I dropped to the ground in a squat, finally buckling under the weight of wanting so much from a person whose presence in my life had always been spectral, at best. Panicked, I tried to conjure the memories we’d text each other about on birthdays, shut my eyes, scoured each image for meaning like a precocious gallery patron.
When we’d laid beneath darkening overcast on the grass at a music festival, bellied, grey clouds, chanting mantras to ward off the weather-
clouds have brought the cold to stay, please bring the sun to warm the day
-and the first fat drops of rain had fallen down square on our heads.
When we’d pretended to be Swedish to get out of a tram fine at 7am on a Sunday, not yet having slept.
The constant making and breaking and sharing of plans, of night missions, of scheming. Annoying and cackling to the bitter end. We’d had something that I didn’t get from my colleagues, my partner, my core group of adult friends and our dinner parties which required bottles of wine with increasing price tags and rarity as each year went on.
I wanted to follow her, feral again. For her to kneel at my bedside like a mother, our breathing in synch as I melted to sleep. To hide myself in the fine web of her hair and inhale her smell deeply, be the subject of stories she’d tell at the pub. Get invited everywhere like a package deal, like sisters, like lovers, like past life compatriots doing it over again. Share clothes and adopt each other’s vernacular to the point that people would confuse us for one another in public.
The golden heat of the afternoon touched my bare neck, caring in the way only the sun on your skin can, onwards, onwards.
I looked up at the fat plumes of smoke overhead, drifting listlessly- cotton socks on a clothesline suspended in breeze.
I picked up the rock and frustratedly threw it away from myself. It’s thud on the ground was a strange aural pleasure, I laughed to myself, scurrying towards it like a child to grab it and throw it again. I kept doing this repeatedly, smiling with teeth, tears in my eyes. Though I was throwing and running in the direction of the smoke the landscape didn’t seem to be changing, nothing seemed to be drawing any closer. It just kept going on, boundless and panting, and I was inside of it.
Like someone had put me there.
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