Down the Drain

"Hot water fixes most things. Sore muscles, cold bones, dirty gear. It's the stuff it can't reach that stays."

The bathroom was cold. Rebecca hadn't run the wall heater — no reason to, she'd been in and out in minutes, the quick efficient routine of a woman who treated the bathroom as transit rather than destination. The tiles were dry under my socks. The mirror was clear. The towel she'd used hung on the rail, folded once, the dampness contained to the section that had made contact with her body.

I turned the shower on. Let it run while the hot water climbed through the pipes from the cylinder in the laundry — the house's plumbing was original, the pipes narrow, and it took ninety seconds for anything above lukewarm to arrive at the showerhead. The sound of water hitting the empty tub filled the small room with a white noise that closed the walls in, sealed the space, made the bathroom feel like something separate from the rest of the house.

I pulled the fleece over my head. Dropped it on the floor. The running shirt underneath was damp at the lower back where the camera bag's strap had held sweat against my skin. I pulled that off too, and the cold air hit my chest and stomach with a sharpness that made the muscles contract — the body's involuntary response to sudden exposure, the same tightening I'd seen on Mikael's skin when he'd pulled his compression top off in the ruin.

I pushed the thought aside without examining why it needed pushing.

The running tights. I hooked my thumbs under the waistband and pushed them down — over my hips, past my thighs, the fabric peeling away from skin that was cold and slightly tacky from the day's accumulated sweat and bush and everything else the tights had been in contact with. I stepped out of them, one leg then the other, and held them bunched in my hand.

The stain was on the inner front. A darker patch against the black fabric — not immediately obvious, not the kind of thing you'd notice at a glance or from across a room. But visible when you held the tights at arm's length and knew where to look. A discolouration that the black material had absorbed without advertising, the way black absorbed everything. The shape was irregular, roughly the size of a spread hand, the edges feathered where the fluid had wicked outward through the weave before drying.

I stood in the cold bathroom holding my running tights and looking at the stain and wondering, for the first time since the car park, whether Rebecca had seen it.

She'd been at the kitchen table. I'd been standing, then sitting opposite her. The table between us. The kitchen light overhead — bright enough to read by, bright enough to scroll a phone by, bright enough to see a stain on black running tights if you were looking at the tights. But she hadn't been looking at the tights. She'd been looking at her phone. And when she'd looked up, she'd looked at my face — the windburn, the tiredness, whatever else she'd read in the two seconds before returning to her screen.

She hadn't said anything. Hadn't done anything differently. Hadn't paused on her way past my chair or let her hand linger on my shoulder longer than usual or given any of the signals that a woman trained to read crisis would give if she'd noticed something that required reading.

Which meant she hadn't seen it. Or she had, and she'd chosen not to address it. Or she'd seen something that registered as sweat, or water, or any of the dozen fluids a body produced during a day of physical activity in winter bush, and filed it under unremarkable.

The cop surfaced. Not gradually — abruptly, the way professional instinct bypassed conscious thought and took control of the hands before the brain had finished deliberating. I stepped into the shower with the tights.

The water was hot now. It hit my shoulders and ran down my chest and back in streams that the cold body received as something close to pain — the temperature differential too large for comfort, the nerve endings firing protests that the brain overrode because the brain wanted the heat more than the skin wanted relief from it. I stood under the stream and let it do what hot water did — open the pores, loosen the muscles, dissolve the day's accumulated residue from a body that had carried it since morning without complaint.

I worked the tights under the water. Methodical. The same way you'd handle any garment that needed cleaning before it went into a shared laundry basket — soap from the dispenser, working the fabric between my hands, the lather building over the stained area and turning the evidence into foam that the water carried down the drain in a grey spiral that thinned and cleared and disappeared. Not scrubbing. Not frantic. Just washing. The routine maintenance of clothing after a day of physical activity. The unremarkable act of a man cleaning his running gear in the shower because the shower was running and the tights were dirty and the laundry basket was in the bedroom where Rebecca was trying to sleep.

I draped the tights over the shower screen. The water would drip into the tub. They'd be damp in the morning, dry by evening. Unremarkable. Explained, if explanation were ever required, by the creek crossing, the bush, the sweat of a three-hour round trip through winter scrub. All of which was true. All of which was not the reason I was washing them in the shower at nine-thirty on a Sunday night instead of dropping them in the basket.

The hot water found the muscles. I stood under it with my eyes closed and let the heat work — shoulders first, where the camera strap had created a groove of tension that ran from my neck to the point of my shoulder blade. Then the lower back, the chronic ache of asymmetric loading easing as the heat penetrated the tissue and convinced the fibres to release what they'd been gripping. My calves. My hamstrings. The network of fatigue that the day's walking had woven through my legs softening under the water's patient, indiscriminate attention.

Soap. The bar from the dish — Rebecca's, something from the markets in Devonport that smelled of eucalyptus and something else, tea tree maybe, the scent arriving through the steam with a sharpness that cut through the heat's fog and placed me back in the room, in the body, in the specific sensory reality of standing naked under hot water in a house where someone was sleeping twenty feet away.

My hands moved over my own skin the way hands moved when they were washing — mechanical, purposeful, the touch of function rather than exploration. Chest. Arms. Stomach. The soap creating a slickness that the water would remove, the body being cleaned the way a tool was cleaned after use, the maintenance that kept the machinery operational.

But the heat was doing something else. The hot water and the steam and the enclosed space and the absence of anything to look at — eyes closed, no viewfinder, no frame, just the dark behind my eyelids and the water's sound and the soap's smell and the sensory deprivation that left nothing to process except what the body was feeling. And the body was feeling. The accumulated tension of the day releasing, the muscles softening, the system downshifting from the operational state it had maintained since dawn into something lower, slower, more aware of its own surfaces.

My hand slowed on my stomach. Not stopping. Not deciding. Just — decelerating, the way a car decelerated when the driver's attention shifted from the road ahead to something happening inside the vehicle. The soap's slickness on my skin. The heat. The privacy of the closed bathroom, the sealed space, the white noise of water that covered everything and asked nothing.

A flicker. Behind my eyelids. Mikael in the viewfinder — not his face but lower, the frame dropped to his chest and the scar that ran parallel to his lowest rib, the white thread of healed tissue against skin that the cold had flushed and the blood had warmed. The image sharp. The focus locked. The 50mm rendering him at a distance that was too close for architecture and exactly right for whatever he was.

Behind me, warmth that wasn't the shower. The ghost of Lena's body against my back — not memory but echo, the nerve endings replaying contact the consciousness hadn't archived. Her torso against my lower spine. The fabric of her thermal top against my bare skin where the shirt had ridden up. The press of her, steady and certain, the weight of someone leaning into you because your body was the fixed point in the room and hers was the thing that moved around it.

My hand moved lower. Found myself. The touch was soft — fingertips first, then the curl of the palm, the grip closing with a gentleness that the body asked for and the hand provided. Lena's grip. The same calibration. The same unhurried specificity. The body remembering through contact what the mind hadn't stored as narrative — not what happened but how it felt, the texture of being held by someone whose hands understood pressure the way a musician's understood strings.

The viewfinder dropped. Mikael's abdomen. The ridge of muscle that ran from his ribs to his hip. The line the light had followed all afternoon — the body's central meridian, the geography that the camera had mapped with the same dispassionate attention it brought to sandstone. His hand moving along that line. The image in the frame shifting from still to motion as the camera recorded what the camera had been pointed at and the photographer had chosen not to look away from.

My hips moved. Forward. Into my own grip, into the slickness of soap and water, the motion arriving from somewhere deeper than intention — the pelvis driving with a force that the hand hadn't requested, the body asserting a rhythm that was less caress than collision. The thrust pushed me forward, my free hand bracing against the shower wall, fingers spread on the wet tiles the way Lena's fingers had spread on the sandstone, the posture of someone anchoring themselves against a surface because the surface was the only solid thing in a room where everything else was moving.

Cut.

Kitchen floor. Linoleum. Yellow, with a brown diamond pattern. Blood on the yellow — thick, not pooled but smeared. Dragged through. Crawled through. The pattern of someone who'd been down and tried to move.

Lena's breath on my neck. Close, warm, the rhythm of someone watching something build without needing to intervene. Her hand on my hip — or was that the shower wall, the cold tile against my pelvis where the hot water didn't reach, the body confusing contact points, layering the present over the past until the two occupied the same nerve endings simultaneously.

My hand tightened. The grip shifting from Lena's gentleness to something harder, more urgent, the fingers closing with a pressure that was closer to holding on than holding. My hips drove forward again — sharper this time, the thrust carrying a force that had nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with the body's need to move, to push, to drive itself through whatever was building toward whatever was waiting on the other side.

Cut.

A hand. Small. A child's hand gripping the chrome leg of a kitchen chair with fingers white at the knuckles. The fingernails painted purple. Chipped at the edges. Two coats where one was enough.

Through the viewfinder. Mikael's eyes. Direct. Unguarded. Looking into the lens at the moment his own hand found its rhythm, the composure breaking across his features in waves that the camera captured frame by frame — jaw tight, lips parted, the breath visible in cold air, shortening.

The thrust was violent now. I could feel the violence in it — the force that the body channelled through the pelvis when it couldn't channel it anywhere else, the kinetic expression of something that wasn't sexual and wasn't anger and wasn't grief but occupied the same corridors as all three, using the same muscles, the same nerve pathways, the same machinery of release.

The viewfinder dropped. Below the scar. Below the tattoo. Below the line where the camera had been hovering all afternoon in the safe territory of torso and composition and form. The frame fell to where the body stopped pretending it was architecture. Mikael's cock, hard, the blood's declaration visible and unambiguous against the cold-flushed skin of his thigh. The image in the viewfinder as sharp and composed as every other image the camera had captured that afternoon — the same resolution, the same fidelity, the same mechanical indifference to what it was recording. Lichen. Sandstone. Doorway. This. The camera didn't distinguish. The camera never distinguished.

Cut.

The wall above the stove. A handprint. Adult. Male. Fingers spread wide in something dark and wet. Below the handprint, a tea towel on the oven handle. A rooster. The rooster was smiling.

Through the viewfinder. Mikael's hand on his own cock. The fingers wrapped around the shaft the way mine were wrapped around my own — the mirror image, the synchronised act, two men holding themselves in the same room at the same moment except one room was golden stone and the other was white tile and both were filling with something that the walls would hold long after the bodies had finished.

Lena's hand finding me. The moment of first contact replaying — not the rhythm but the arrival, the instant her fingers closed and the world contracted to the diameter of her grip. The warmth. The certainty. The knowledge in her touch that bypassed introduction and went directly to fluency.

My hips slammed forward. The tile wall taking the impact through my braced hand, the shock travelling up my arm and into my shoulder and down my spine where it met the upward surge from my pelvis and the two forces collided somewhere behind my navel in a knot that was tightening with every thrust, every stroke, every frame that flashed behind my eyelids whether I wanted it there or not.

Cut.

Hair on the lino. Long. Dark. Fanned out in a shape the blood had fixed in place. At the edge of the hair, a face. Turned away. The angle wrong.

Cut.

Mikael's cock in his hand. The rhythm building. His hips pushing forward into his own grip the way mine pushed forward into mine — the same force, the same violence, the body driving itself through itself.

Cut.

The child's hand. Purple nails. White knuckles.

Cut.

Lena's palm flat on my sternum. My heartbeat against her hand.

Cut.

A shoe. A man's work boot. Standing. The sole dark. The laces undone. And beyond the boot, on the floor, in the space between the chair legs where the child's hand gripped the chrome with purple fingernails —

My body broke. The release arrived not as pleasure but as rupture — the knot behind my navel tearing open, the accumulated charge of the entire day discharging through a body that had stopped distinguishing between what it was coming from and what it was coming for. The thrust drove me forward against the wall. My hand gripped and held. The sound I made was swallowed by the shower's noise, buried in the water's white roar, audible to nobody including myself — a sound the body produced from its own animal vocabulary that had nothing to do with language and nothing to do with anything I could have named if naming had been possible, which it wasn't, because for three seconds or five seconds or whatever interval the climax occupied I was not a person with a name, I was a system discharging, a mechanism completing its cycle, a body ridding itself of everything it had carried since six-fourteen on a Wednesday morning three weeks ago and since standing in a sandstone room four hours ago and since some point earlier than either that I couldn't locate and didn't want to.

The water ran. The steam held. My forehead rested against the tiles, the ceramic cool against the skin that the hot water hadn't reached, my breathing coming in shallow pulls that the lungs managed without my involvement. My hand released. My hips stilled. The body returned to itself the way a shaken instrument returned to silence — by degrees, the vibration diminishing through frequencies too low to hear until what remained was just the faint hum of a system idling.

The shower's water carried everything down the drain. The soap. The sweat. Whatever my body had just expelled into the steam and the noise and the privacy of a room where no camera had been running and no lens had been pointed and no image existed of what had just happened except the images behind my eyes that I couldn't delete because they weren't files, they were me, they were the part of me that the camera couldn't reach and the shower couldn't wash and the sleep that was coming wouldn't touch.

Wednesday. Ulverstone. 6:14 AM. The front door had been open. The smell had —

I turned the water off.