The Family Men by Catherine Harris

blood startling against the pale limestone, the ocean fast washing it away.
    He stands in the shower and turns on the faucet hard in defiance of the water restrictions, letting the torrent gush as he replays the scene over and over, trapping water in reservoirs at his feet, wedging his toes together, an impenetrable shelf, until the level breaches his ankles and overflows.
    Rosie is fond of whispering messages when she thinks he is asleep. Better than if he is awake, thinks Harry, not having to acknowledge her ridiculous feelings, enunciated so quietly they might not exist at all. Definitely the way he prefers it. Already enough under the rug without having to accommodate her muffled contribution. This time it is that she loves him. “I love you,” she utters, barely a notch above her breath. “Do you love me too?”
    He doubts it, doesn’t think so.
    They’d first hooked up at the pub about eight months before and have been fucking on and off ever since. Not that anybody knows, not officially, it isn’t exactly the Christian thing to do, getting together secretly after dark, at the beach, by the surf club, at her flat if Katia, her flatmate, is out, Rosie’s thick body a lumpy buttress against the fray, her homeliness his private antidote to the onslaught. He grips her upper arm, watches the way the flesh bulges between his roughened fingers, his hand wrapped around her stippled skin like a vice.
    Father Murphy says that romantic love is a blessing, the spirit of the creator packaged for human scale, as sacred and honourable as any other bestowed by God, but if that is the case then why does he loathe her so much? He asks his mother. “Is it possible to love something you hate?”
    She scoffs. “Have you been talking to your dad?”
    Even after the shower he can still smell Rosie on him, that cloying sweetness in his hair as he stands over the bathroom sink, the cool water running across his hands and wrists, wondering how it is that he can detect her perfume after lathering himself so thoroughly. I love you . Did they have sex or not? He doesn’t think so. He is pretty sure he just passed out, though he can’t be certain. Fuck, he hopes they didn’t.
    His mum is sorting invoices when he returns to the kitchen, little piles of paper distributed across the table. He struggles with the new aspirin bottle, first fiddling with the security seal then roughly pulling at the residual sheath blocking the opening, releasing a cascade of pills that pour over his palm and scatter in a kind of dot design across the speckled Laminex.
    The phone rings again. An image of Jack and Eddy, older and younger brother, conjoined, a grotesque minotaur.
    â€œJesus. This is bullshit.”
    His mum doesn’t want to hear it. “Just answer it,” she says. “Don’t be such a drama queen.”
    It is probably only Margo following up about their lunch date, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t want to sit down with her for a blow by blow of how he ties his shoelaces. He doesn’t want to get that close. “I don’t want to talk to anybody right now. Can’t you just answer it, say I’m out? You’re my mother; buy me some space.”
    â€œRight, that’s it,” says Diana. “I’ve had enough.”
    He heads straight to his dad’s latest dwelling, a battered two-bedroom weatherboard around the corner (such are the gifts of the true believers), his parents being modern divorcees, publicly loathing each other but always living within easy walking distance for the sake of the children; it being their game when the boys were growing up – sending them back and forth between their two houses whenever they had a point to prove, as though regular eviction was somehow beneficial to the children’s welfare. “Run, don’t walk,” his mother’s catchcry. How was he supposed to learn to pace himself?
    Dean helps him