Middle of Nowhere

Unchristian music is of course one of the most dangerous channels of influence for the one we don’t talk about, but it was for reasons known only to himself that Grace’s father lumped in the brothers Hanson with the likes of satanic heavy-hitters such as Ozzy Osborne and Marilyn Manson. Maybe in his mind there was some connection between “Hanson” and “Manson”, a threat that the mmmbopping boys harboured unspeakably dark perversions. Maybe it was just because they looked too much like girls. Whatever the reason, there was no leniency when he laid down the law. Along with The Simpsons, the concept of fairies and books about teenagers changing into animals, Hanson was banned at Grace’s house. At first this wasn’t anything to Grace, who was never one for faddishness. She was mostly interested making her Barbies sin, then lining them up and baptising them in a salad bowl. Jacob was four years older and only really cared about soccer.

It was Spring. For months already, girls at school like Sarah and Elyse had been writing the brothers’ names on their books. Where’s the Love was charting and the band was phenomenally popular to the delight of a new generation of teenyboppers worldwide. Sarah had to wear a bra already and talked about the boys like she knew them. “Ike’s a scorpio which is why we’re so compatible. And we both actually love 60s music.” Grace felt like there was something adjacent to sin happening here. And yet, despite her father’s ire, despite the annoying prattle of her classmates, despite the feeling of doing something wrong, there was a slow burn. The girlishness was perhaps the thin end of the wedge. It was like solving a magic eye when she saw a picture of Hanson and they didn’t look like girls anymore. The golden hair and porcelain skin shifted from something doll-like to something else. Isaac, the eldest at 16, was too much of a man and Zac too much of a child. The middle brother Taylor was like a boy, but also like an angel. An infatuation was born from stolen glances at TV Hits magazine and chance encounters with radio playing the barely pubescent rasp of Taylor’s voice. Grace combed lemon juice through her hair and lay with it fanned out in the sun, waiting to become a blonde like the brothers. Her hair remained an unremarkable brown and only ever became slightly stiff.

Her love was not like the immature fanaticism of the other girls. She nurtured a private and pathetic grief that she and Taylor would never meet, but there was comfort in it too. Her suffering was exquisite and idolatrous. She never spoke of it, but Taylor was the first and last thing she thought of every day. The certainty of him was something she could retreat into whenever she chose, stilling the world around her, meditating on the playground with the tail of a sour plait in her mouth. His impossible perfection and her insignificance. Sometimes she was so full of Taylor that there was barely any Grace left. She never deigned to pray that they would get married, but she asked God to watch over him and his family. She couldn't really imagine what they would even do if they were together, but she would stroke her own wrists at night as she stared at the ragged sticker she had salvaged from the girls’ toilets and stuck to her bedframe. It’s a secret no one knows.

She lost even that when Jacob told on her. She didn’t cry from the pain of her brother’s betrayal or from her Dad hitting her, but she wept that night when she had to go to bed without Taylor, silent and staring straight up with her stomach wrenching from the repressed sobs. She wished she was dead, then she got scared and asked God not to kill her yet.

—

To this day she wondered if Taylor Hanson had ruined her for other men. She’d kept up with him on and off over the years, more out of curiosity and habit than fervour. By her early 20s she had seen Leo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet and Josh Hartnett in The Virgin Suicides and understood that there was more than one angel on this earth. There’s nothing like the first time though. Taylor was now a father of seven, three ahead of Jacob. On the face of it her brother was fulfilling his duty as a god-fearing patriarch, but had a strained relationship with their father that Grace could never get him to talk about. Grace was childless and didn’t go to church anymore, but was a competent mid-career professional. Her standing in the family reflected this.

At 38 Grace had finally become a blonde, but not by design. Her latest round of divorce highlights had pushed her to a shade that she wasn’t quite comfortable with yet. “Divorce highlights” was coined by a friend and it stuck, even though she and Mark had never actually married. Freya was a good friend: invested in Grace’s flourishing, always ready to denigrate her ex, and mildly annoyed that Grace wasn’t very interested in either of those things. Even back when things fell apart she felt like little more than a spectator. When the smoking gun was discovered, a faceless Tinder account on Mark’s phone, Grace couldn’t even be bothered to feel humiliated. Freya suspected that she might have someone else too, but Grace had never told her about Louis.

It was Autumn. Grace was alone in the townhouse she and Mark had formerly co-habited in, drinking a canned cocktail and writing performance reviews. The idea of dinner had fully retreated after half a pack of smoked salmon and an ice block saw her through to complete satiety. A podcast about relationships that Freya had sent her was little more than ambient chatter, but she was half-watching the muted episode of Gossip Girl that was streaming. Perfectly timed to coincide with a moment of stress when Grace wasn’t sure if she was assessing the correct Madeleine, Mark started haranguing her over WhatsApp. It was about the box of electronics again. He always texted like he was driving, the messages brusque and semi-literate. Ned 2 get ths sortd Grace. Respct = 2 ways street. And so on. Grace was supposed to extract her own belongings from the box, but she was stalling. She also wanted to extract herself from any hard drives or SD cards before returning them to Mark, but hadn’t yet confronted the task of sifting through the devices for photos, saved passwords or other traces of her own browsing habits.

She wondered if the renewed efforts on the text front indicated that his very young girlfriend was through with him. She’d met Talia in passing, who couldn’t have been more than 25 and was so pretty that Grace wondered if there was some kind of financial arrangement at play. She couldn’t imagine the girl being attracted to her ex, but then again Mark had just been Mark for a long time. Maybe there was something she just couldn’t see anymore. She cracked another can of passionfruit vodka and texted Mark that it was on her to-do list. When they first met it had felt like a bold move to be with this forward and gregarious man. He said fuck to mean sex and was good at unfathomable things like spear fishing. He fit into the world easily and even managed a rapport with Grace’s dad. For a time it felt like her big life had finally started. But after a while there was always just more Mark. More fillets of tarakihi, more Sky Sport on Sundays, more Christmases in Hamilton. Grace thought about the hard line between the red of Mark’s neck and the skin that his wetsuit covered. Then she thought of Louis and the tan on his neck that went all the way down. He’d been on her mind the whole time really, but she had a deal with herself that she’d finish the work first. And she should stop being a pathetic woman anyway. But Grace didn’t want to stop.

Louis Olssen’s even tan was a product of his dedication to year-round ocean swimming. Louis Olssen was from Napier and barely thirty. Grace closed her laptop, turned off the podcast and gave herself up to reverie. She had spoken to him maybe fifteen times total, always guarded and professional. He was an incongruous figure around the office. A lighthouse of a man, always looking like he should be cutting through the open water or on a mountain somewhere. It did not go unnoticed, but he mitigated any sexual tension by allowing himself to be made into a bit of a pet by his colleagues, which worked for everyone. Except for Grace, who had a mental map of every mole on the parts of his body she’d seen and all the creases on his face when he smiled. Louis of the cowlick. Louis of the crowded lower incisors. She loved every scrap of him.

Even more killing than his looks were the things Grace noticed him doing. Some days he looked sad and watched the clouds reflected in the mirrored windows of the building across the street. Some days he looked tired and let his head hang over the backrest of his chair with his eyes closed. Once he bought a really expensive candle and made all his deskmates smell it and guess how much it had cost. Grace was incredibly moved by all of this. It made her feel like there was an aching and cold hole in her chest. She knew instinctively that there was more to him than anyone could see, such depths that if you could throw a stone into him you wouldn’t hear it land. He went all the way down. Reclining on her couch, she thought of him emerging from the harbour with seawater beading on his skin. She thought of licking the salt off him like a cat. She could go on like this for hours until some external force made her return to herself, the self where she felt sick and desperate. She would’ve drunk his sweat. She fought sleep until very late so that she could keep dreaming.

The next day Grace was groggy, unironed and peevish. By 8am Freya had already forwarded her an empowering post about choosing oneself. She didn’t respond. It was fine for Freya because she was already like that. Freya moved to Chile by herself when she was nineteen. Freya was German. It was a bad day to be out of sorts. The restructure was almost certainly going ahead and it was very likely some of her team would have their roles disestablished. She felt like telling the CE to take her out instead. Sucking down a 3pm coffee, she returned to her desk to find an oversized envelope on her keyboard.

Oh, who’s leaving? she asked anyone within earshot.

Louis. Moving to Brisbane with his partner.

Ah, right.

She signed the card with a small and neat Best wishes for the future and discreetly put $87 in the envelope, which was all the cash she had on her, then passed it on. It was alright. Loss was part of it from the beginning. Grace was born to lose. Louis would pass into the realm of memory and would become more and more blurry without renewal. One day Grace would try to summon him in her mind and nothing would happen anymore and then she’d be truly alone. It was alright. She left early to beat the traffic and while she was driving Mark and Freya both called her.

You shouldn’t be alone too much right now Grace. You can’t just disappear without anyone noticing. You have real friends in this world, please just reply to me sometimes so I know you’re ok. She promised to call Freya later. Mark's call went to voicemail. He urgently wanted possession of the OpenSwim headphones that Grace had bought him last Christmas, presumably so that he could listen to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers while he was fucking serial murdering fish. Grace stripped off her work clothes and dumped the box of electronics onto the bed. She extracted the headphones from a rat’s nest of cables and connected them to her laptop. She showered, dressed again and packed a few things into a bag, then got back in the car and drove towards the harbour.

Out onto the peninsula, past the scout hall, the boat sheds, the yacht club. Further and further until a little dirt strip opened up next to the road where she could park. The beach here was all pebbles. The sky was grey and the water looked cold and choppy. Grace stripped down to her togs and put on the headphones. When the water hit her shins she nearly lost her nerve. She thought hard of Louis, urgently flicking through the mental archive, and felt her body less. There’s a picture that’s hanging in the back of my head, I see it over and over. It was the second album, from after Taylor’s voice had broken. The waves at hip level took her breath away again and she pushed forward to reach numbness faster. You’ve got to hold it in, this time, tonight. Her swimsuit sagged around her body as she took the final steps, in past her breasts and shoulders. If only I had the guts to feel this way. Then she was off her feet, gasping, dog-paddling frantically against the cold. If only you’d look at me and want to stay. Grace was not a strong swimmer but she fought hard, the water rushing against her ears as the song vibrated through her cheekbones. She kept going, beyond tiredness, beyond feeling, barely noticing the water she’d swallowed. When she could go no further she stretched out her arms and legs and floated on her back like Jacob had taught her when they were small. Back on the shore a man with a dog was watching her. She ignored him and stared up at the sky, pushed and pulled by the waves, filled with Taylor who was also Louis, who was also Grace, who was nowhere.