1. Feel his knock on the door like it’s thrumming through your ribs.
2. Pretend to wonder if it’s him. Tell yourself it could be your brother or a neighbour, even though you know who it is. Of course you know.
3. Check your hair in the curve of the kitchen window, making sure you look confident, casual and competent – believe your hair can do this.
4. Stride down the hall in your socks, feeling the hardwood press against your soles as you think about putting some shoes on to answer the door. It’s hard to be serious in socks. Decide against it; you want casual, remember, not serious.
5. Roll the door handle in your palm and pull inwards. Blink into the light that surrounds him, for there he is.
6. Drench his body with your eyes, because you can’t look away, and because he needs a wash. So wash him with your vision. Take it all in: the wounds in his jeans and overcoat; the dusky stains on his melted, triple-scabbed feet; the concrete colour of the cloth at his armpits; the grease-thatch of heavily salted black hair; his porous blue eyes; the grit and grime scrubbed into the folds of his face, so deeply ingrained you can tell, just from looking at him, that a brush coarse enough to properly clean him doesn’t exist. And then let the smell of him curl into your nostrils, dense and sharp at the same time, triggering a full-body wince beneath your skin.
7. Wait for him to say something. He doesn’t speak. He just stares at and into you. Not at the sheen of your floorboards or the matte gloss of your walls – at you and you alone.
8. Feel your eyelids flicker and see your vision wobble. Suck down the bulge in your throat and say, of all things, Can I help you?
9. Watch his reaction, which is non-existent, because you have answered your own question just by being everything that you are to this man.
10. Remember: this is a man.
11. And of course you can help him. But you won’t. Not in ways that matter. You could lend him a towel and show him your shower. You could hand him the twenty-five dollars in your wallet. You could feed him the leftover Pad Thai in your fridge, maybe make him a mug of fair-trade tea. You could let him sleep on your foldout couch. You could help him apply for jobs and government assistance. But of course you won’t. You don’t even know how to answer why you won’t, because thinking about what it would be like to do all these things for this filthy voiceless scarecrow is already too much for you. You’ve already started thinking: Leave, just leave. But you know he won’t. And at your core, down where you thump and rattle and at the bars of your ribcage, you know he shouldn’t. Because of what you’ve done to him.
12. Suck dust and air and sink into the memory of it. First, the day you found him in your carport next to your Nissan Pulsar. How you awkwardly hovered over his inert body, wondering what to do. How you walked away from your car and caught the train, instead of explaining that he couldn’t sleep there. Then, remember how you called your landlord, and how frustrated you were when he didn’t do anything about it – he said he’d come and scare the guy off, but you knew he wouldn’t. And he didn’t. So two days later – by then the hobo had dragged a mattress and three bags of junk into the carport – you called the cops. They came over and looked at his stuff when he wasn’t there, and said they’d be back to remove him. But while he returned, the cops didn’t. So you thought: I’m going to do something about this. Some part of you decided: He can’t do this to me. I’ll sort this out. And you felt good about it, about taking care of things. And so you waited until he was gone, grabbed his mattress and bags of junk and took them down the street to the skip behind the auto-shop, and tossed all his belongings into it. Everything this guy owned. And it wasn’t until later, when he came back and found his stuff missing, that the reality of the situation revealed itself. And you saw him through the window, staring at the patch of cement where his stuff had been. And from the slump of his shaking shoulders and the keenness of his sobs you knew, without a quota of doubt, that he would seek reparations.
13. And now here he is at your door. What you’ve done to him is streaming through your mind as he soundlessly opens his mouth. His red maw is mottled with white ulcers that pop and sheen across the wet flesh of his throat. His tongue lies limp and swollen, the pink muscle coated with a yellow-green film. You say Alright, hang on and he does nothing. His jaw hangs there, full of grey teeth and rotten gums where teeth are missing.
14. Without thinking, take a step back and again say Alright, your hands now splayed before you in an unconscious shield.
15. He comes towards you in a slow shuffle, his mouth even wider, still silent. You want to say something else but something in you is stuck; you can only say Alright, alright, alright, as you retreat into your home, the home he has now entered. And as you hear your voice speeding up, spitting Alright alright alright alright alright like a staccato machine gun he finally makes a sound: a ragged breath heaves out of him accompanied by a half-moan, half-wail, loud enough to fill your hallway and echo off the ceiling. And as his cry sinks into the heavy air he keeps moving forward, his wren-blue eyes now as wide as his jaw, closing the distance between the two of you faster than you thought him capable of. And then his skin is on your skin, his clothes are on your clothes, and the two of you are falling to the hardwood, and you cannot undo any of it, not a thought or blink or breath, and you cannot fight or apologise, and he bears down on you in a wave of grey endings.
Robbie Arnott has previously been published in Kill Your Darlings, Island, Seizure, Visible Ink and The Review of Australian Fiction. He won the 2014 Scribe Nonfiction prize for Young Writers, and was a runner up in the 2014 Erica Bell Foundation Literature Award. He is Tasmanian.