Guilt

2009

Tommy

On the outskirts of Tully the air is foul if it's been raining. The ground on the floodplain sips at the water, as though savouring, cautious not to drink too fast in case a month of dry wind follows. It spits back dirty mouthfuls in bubbles, and when a gust sweeps across the water's skin, they pop: the floodplain's breath expelled, stinking of sour earth and cowshit.

Tommy Mathis leaves his car window down on mornings like this as he travels from his caravan. He doesn't mind the stench; it reminds him of his old school playground, the patches of grass on the low side of the science building, where rainwater puddled for the entire winter of 1988. Everything swollen with mud and smelling just like the floodplain.

Tommy thinks of those days while he drives. Of Paul Stanton, Chris Morris and himself sitting on an old asphalt basketball court eating their lunch. Of how they talked about parties, girls, the HSC and what they'd all do with the marks they got. About the school formal. The eighteenth-birthday parties. The last day of school. Sex. Whether or not he'd lose his virginity.

He parks adjacent to the supermarket, in a space where he can see the bakery. There's a lady who works there he likes the look of. Her name is Meg Dunmore; she speaks slowly, and she smiles whenever she serves him. She's got short dark hair and light blue eyes, and her teeth are yellowish, but they're straight and have no spaces between them. He thinks she might have had braces as a teenager to have teeth so perfect.

As he gets out of his car he can see the shape of her behind the counter, serving a customer. It gives him something to look forward to: the end of the day when he'll talk to her.

He looks over at the supermarket; he imagines its smell, which he loathes. The cold, tinny air that fills every aisle, and the remnants of many perfumes, none of which he's ever liked.

Once inside, he fixes his name badge to his pocket, and checks the shelves as he heads toward the register, making sure each jar or packet is brought forward and aligned neatly.

His supervisor, Jolene, who's half his age, walks past him, talking on her phone. She looks at him but offers nothing more. She stands at the end of the aisle, laughing as she speaks. She's clearly in a good mood, and Tommy wonders whether today might be a good day to ask for the time off he wants. He looks at her, at the yellowness of her bleached hair, and thinks about what would happen if someone told her it looks cheap, that everything about her – that hair and the make-up and the leggings she pulls too tightly against her crotch – makes her look like a slut. What would happen, he thinks, if he were the one to tell her? He wants to – not to be cruel, but because he thinks she could look so much more attractive, beautiful even.

At lunchtime he gets an hour. He drives out of town and turns through a gate onto a track that leads to a narrow creek hemmed in by gum trees. He relaxes against the softness of the ground under his wheels, and as he listens to the grit sputter over the car's mud-flaps, he allows his body to go limp, to sway and sink and bob across the potholes.

When he reaches the creek he looks behind him; he can't see the road or the fencing either side of him, and when he opens his window the only thing he can hear is the slapping of tiny waves pushed by the wind and dying quickly over the mud. He eats the sandwiches he made last night, drinks a can of Coke, and before he leaves takes a piss in the scrub.

When he gets back he knows Jolene's mood has changed. She rips into him for being five minutes late, and when he leaves his register later to go to the toilet she swears at him.

'You're useless, Tommy! You have to ask me first! Fuckin' degenerates around here steal shit and then I'm in trouble.'

'Sorry.'

'Whatever – just stay behind your register.'

She goes outside for twenty-five minutes to smoke cigarettes and argue with her mother over the phone. Tommy doesn't want to listen, but the fight blows in on the wind when the automatic doors open for customers. It's to do with babysitting Jolene's infant daughter next month when there's a concert on. He can hear they both want to go, Jolene and her mother, and neither sounds willing to give in.

When Jolene returns she's angry. Her face is red, and tiny white balls of saliva stick to her lips and stretch like gum across her mouth as she talks.

'What are you lookin' at? You're always staring . . . it's weird.' Tommy looks away. 'I hate this place. Why would you want to come and live here, huh? Really?' Jolene snarls at him. 'You're fucking retarded.' She walks off, picking quickly at the fleshy divide between her leggings as she turns up an aisle and disappears.

Tommy bites down on his bottom lip, and makes the face he always does when angry. He wants to take her by the shoulders and shake her, tell her how lucky she is, that her life is good. That she should spend more time appreciating what she has and less time dreaming of winning the fucking lottery, which would make her no happier. He wants to tell her to stop wanting more.

After work he goes to the bakery; Meg Dunmore has his pie waiting for him in a brown paper bag that's darkened and blotchy with grease from the pastry. His mood has turned melancholic and so he doesn't say more than he needs to, though he tries to appear interested. He once told Meg Dunmore that she looked pretty, and when she didn't respond at all he wondered whether he hadn't said it loudly enough, or whether she'd ignored him. He's berated himself many times since and vowed to try again.

He drives home at dusk and the sun flickers and flares through the bottom edges of the eucalypt canopies. Every second car he passes is hauling a boat – families scrambling to get to the river before feeding time, kids imagining the mud between their toes and the clanging from inside the boat as it's pushed away from the bank. And the smell of beer as their father burps and twists the throttle and they rumble out to their spot.

But Tommy doesn't see any of that; instead he looks at the twisted and gnarled trunk of the gum tree that stands alone on the shoulder of the road, away from the edge of the scrub. He keeps looking at it through his rear-vision mirror after he's driven past it.

His caravan is at the end of a row, in a camping ground that is deserted now it's the middle of winter. There are a couple of back-packers in tents on the lawn but they won't stay for more than a few nights; the cold moves them on, further north and toward the coast. In summer, though, the caravans are all full and there's barely a patch of lawn spare. The air is smoky then, from the wood-fire barbecues that cook all day.

Tommy's caravan is white, with bands in different shades of blue halfway up the sides. The windows are covered with flyscreens that disintegrate when touched, and he wants to have them replaced but doesn't know of anybody in town who would do it.

Inside, his bed is neatly made, covered by a mustard-coloured bedspread made from corduroy so worn it barely ripples under Tommy's hand when he flattens it out. From the ceiling fan he's hung a little yellow tree that smells like vanilla, and on the small table he eats at, a single placemat and cutlery are arranged. His fridge is stacked tidily and his stove, though old, is clean. His cupboards are full of food he's grown to like – canned stuff mostly, tins of seasoned salmon and tuna that blend easily and stick to pasta or rice.

Tommy didn't care so much about neatness while he was growing up. But now it gives him some kind of comfort, self-respect.

It was a habit he developed in prison, a means of attaching some kind of worth to the life he lived in there.