Just Another Week in Suburbia

by Les Zig

  ‘You can. But he’ll be sleeping off the anaesthetic.’

  ‘Did my wife see him?’

  ‘Yes. She and her friend saw him.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I hang up.

  I grab a beer, sit on the couch.

  Friend. Jane brought a friend to see Wallace. Did she bring Kai? Is he that close that he’s lending emotional support? I’m an idiot. I should’ve asked who the friend was. It mightn’t have been Kai. Maybe it was Sarah.

  I take my beer and jump in the car.

  I finish my beer on the way to the vet. By now, the afternoon’s so hot that I feel it burn in the air. I’m sweating again. I’ll need another shower. And I’m busting to piss.

  I enter the vet and revel in the air-conditioning, standing briefly under the door where a stream of cool air hits. In the waiting room there’s a couple of people with dogs, somebody with a Ragdoll cat, and somebody with a parakeet. The eyes of the animals have that soulful inquisitiveness that only animals and children have, like they’re trying to work out how they’re hurt and how it’s going to be fixed.

  Rebecca sits at reception. She smiles when she sees me. ‘So you came to see Wallace after all?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘He’s asleep.’

  ‘Can I see him?’

  ‘Come this way.’

  Rebecca leads me out the back. Wallace is sleeping on a cot. A drip leads from his heavily bandaged right leg. I hate the sight of the drip. I know it’s probably providing pain relief and fluids, but it makes me think of where needles go when dogs are put down.

  I scratch Wallace behind the ear and watch his chest heave regularly. Poor little thing is going to struggle over the coming weeks. I’ll have to take his basket out of the laundry. God knows how I’m going to arrange for him to be watched while I work. Jane’s parents don’t work. They could babysit. But who knows their availability, all things considered. Luckily school holidays are coming up soon. That’ll help. Somewhat.

  ‘Poor boy,’ Rebecca says. ‘Did you find out how it happened?’

  ‘No.’

  I kneel by Wallace. His eyes are closed slits and the tip of his tongue pokes out from his mouth. I blink. Now there’s a couple of tears. I wipe them away.

  Rebecca pats me on the shoulder. ‘It’s okay, Mr Gray. He’ll be okay. In six weeks, he’ll be as good as new. You’re going to have to take extra special care of him when you get him home.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Dr Dudek explained everything to your wife.’

  ‘Could you … you know, for my sake?’

  Rebecca stares at me, failing to make sense of that.

  ‘I’d like to be prepared.’

  ‘You’ll have to restrict his movement. Keep him locked in the laundry—or, better yet, get one of those kid playpens and keep him in that.’

  ‘It’s not like he’s going to be running on it, is he?’

  ‘No. But he’ll probably start experimenting on it within the next day—you know, putting his foot down, seeing how much it hurts, so you have to restrict his opportunities. The playpen is best. Only take him out to do his business.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘You’ll have to bring him in every couple of days so Dr Dudek can check for inflammation and infection, and so we can change the dressing. He’s in for a tough time, but he should make a full recovery. Dogs are resilient like that. They’re not like us. They don’t have the same hang-ups. They adapt, they move on.’

  I get up. ‘Who was my wife in here with?’

  Rebecca blinks, unprepared for my change of tack. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘My wife. Who did she come in with?’

  ‘Some woman. She was very pretty.’

  Probably Sarah. My whole body loosens. So she didn’t run straight to Kai, although she could’ve gone to Kai’s, then to Sarah’s, or even spent the night with Kai, then gone to Sarah’s in the morning, but I prefer to think she went straight to Sarah’s.

  ‘Is everything all right, Mr Gray?’

  I wipe my eyes with a wrist. ‘Yeah. I …’

  I’m going to make up an excuse: I don’t like seeing Wallace like this. And part of that’s the truth. But Rebecca doesn’t have to know.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  I leave the recovery room.

  37

  When I get home, I jump in the shower in Jane’s bathroom, urinate in there, wash my hair and myself, then stand under the water until it grows tepid. I get out, change into yet another set of fresh clothes and leave the old ones sitting on the floor.

  I go downstairs and stand in the dining room, again unsure of what to do. There’s that hateful sense of waiting. I’m tempted to text Jane, ask her to talk, although I don’t know what I’d say. It’s then that I decide I need her to come to me before I can formulate any response of my own.

  I get my sketchpad from the kitchen counter, sit on the couch, and open the sketchpad to a new page.

  A lot of great artists suffered. Maybe this is what I needed—at least as far as my drawing’s concerned. I take a deep breath, wait for inspiration to move me. And, if this were a movie, it would. There’d be a masterpiece. That’s what would come out of all this. I’d enter some fugue and draw something breathtaking. Maybe Jane would see it and the picture would signify my pain and she’d understand.

  The blank page remains blank.

  I grab a beer, sit back down, but nothing. I go through the sketchpad, look at the pictures of inanimate objects and the portraits of Wallace. This is the way it was before all this began and this is the way it is after. Maybe all I have in me are simple pictures. I don’t look at the sketch of Jane, or think about what could’ve been.

  I finish my beer and grab another. My mind relaxes, but not in the right way. I fixate back on the house’s emptiness. Kai’s responsible. I think of Luke’s simple violent solution. Vic would do it. Luke definitely would. Wouldn’t most men?

  I don’t know where my rage is.

  I have no plan in mind. It’s curiosity more than anything. But I use my phone to pull up the White Pages and look up Kai Bardy. In all likelihood, I won’t find a listing, and that’ll be the end of it. But I do. And not far from me—but, of course, Jane did say he lived out this way.

  I lie on the couch, sip at my beer, think about the things I could do to Kai, think about where I could shove the sledgehammer, think about what I could smash, and, most of all, think about where it would get me. No. This isn’t helpful. That’s Luke talking.

  I pick up my sketchpad again, and now my mind’s working, it’s really working. But it has nothing to do with drawing. How can one man take another’s wife? How can he break up their home? How can he be so oblivious?

  I finish my beer, grab another, and sketch an arc across the blank page. It’s wrong. I tear out the page, scrunch it up, toss it on the floor. I start a new sketch, a single line that serves as a cornerstone. Now I have it. Nope. Nothing else comes. Another crushed page joins the first one on the floor.

  Over the next several hours, I begin sketches, although perhaps begin is a misnomer. I draw lines, break the virginity of the page, sure some masterpiece will unravel from my imagination now that I have a cue. But only emptiness follows, emptiness and the page ripped from the sketchpad, the page crumpled up, and tossed to the floor.

  Inevitably, I run out of paper. Some forty scrunched up sheets litter the floor, mocking me, while my empty beers stand stoically in a ring, like pallbearers, around the dying roses in the vase on the coffee table—the roses I bought Jane the other night.

  I flick back through the sketchpad, a handful of sheets of hopeful sketches, ending with the unfinished portrait of Jane—Jane, when I was sure she loved me, loved me exclusively and devotedly, and we shared an evening that I thought crystallised our union into something beyond reproach.

  I close the sketchpad.

  Time to visit Kai.

  38

  I jump in the car. Start the engine. Look at th
e dashboard clock: 4.51pm.

  As usual when I try to draw, time’s slipped by.

  I shut off the engine and sit there.

  I get out of the car, get the sledgehammer from the garage, put him in the back seat, and restart the engine.

  I kill the engine. Get out. Grab a beer from the house, open it, and jump back in the car. I put the beer in the cup holder, start the engine, and pull out of the drive.

  39

  As I drive, I rehearse scenarios in my mind. In some I beat up Kai. In others I rant at him, like he’s a naughty kid who needs a talking to. I know none of it will work out close to the way I imagine. Real life never does. But I want to see him. I want him to look in the eye the husband of the woman he’s fucking.

  Of course, he already did that earlier in the week when he returned Jane’s bag. I’d forgotten about that. They’d probably been fucking then. My right hand tightens around the wheel. It’d probably been a joke to them. I swill a third of the beer. Jane had been showering. She’d come to the balustrade of the landing in her robe.

  I couldn’t believe it when I saw you at the door, Jane might’ve said to him the next day.

  You looked good in your robe, your leg sticking out.

  I was thinking of you.

  Yeah? What were you thinking of?

  Fucking you.

  I take another drink and weave through traffic. Honk people going slow. Cars are too close. If I’m pulled over, that’ll be it. I’ll be over the limit. I will also have to explain the sledgehammer in the back seat. I try to come up with a reason for it, but with no luck.

  My phone buzzes. I dig it out of my pocket. It’s Beth:

  Hey you. You okay?

  I look up just in time to see the traffic’s stopped. I slam on the brakes. The tyres shriek, the car jolts. I’m thrown into the steering wheel. The breath’s squashed from my lungs. I sit up. Inhale. There’s a pain in my chest, but it’ll pass.

  I grab the seatbelt and put it on, then take a drink to steady myself.

  There’re a lot of little winding streets and I get lost several times. I’m about to pull over and check the GPS on my phone when I reach the top of a hill and see the turn-off to Kai’s street.

  I take the corner and brace myself.

  Kai lives in a block of flats. His car is out the front. I park by the curb, finish what’s left of my beer—which has gone warm and makes me gag—and get out.

  I walk across the block’s parking lot. There’s a dull roar in my ears. I don’t know what it is. My breath’s catching. I feel my heart hard and fast in my chest. But it feels good. It’s the driving tempo of whatever I’m feeling. Anger, indignation, outrage—I don’t know if any of them are accurate.

  But at least it’s something.

  There’s a security door on the front door of Kai’s flat. It’s scratched and the flyscreen’s ripped. When I pull the door, it squeals and comes too quickly. The piston that should control its pace is busted. The top hinge of the door is also loose so the door hangs askew in the jamb.

  I knock on the door. I want to thump. I want to kick it down. But I don’t want to give Kai cause to not answer, or to hide.

  The door opens. Kai stands there in a shirt that might’ve once been white, cut-off jeans hanging halfway down his hips, and bare feet. The door jerks in his hand, like he wants to slam it shut. He stops himself, holds my gaze, although I can see in his eyes he’s forcing himself to. There’s a shake in the arm that holds the door.

  I don’t know what I plan to do. I go to hoist the sledgehammer over my shoulder—just a threatening little gesture, but it’s now I realise I’ve left the sledgehammer in the back seat of the car. I wonder how it would look if I excuse myself to get him. Of course, I can’t do that. New plan of attack. I could punch Kai—an uppercut into his guts. Or I could kick him in the kneecap. Or in the balls. That would be more fitting. But facing him, I don’t know why I’m here.

  I shove him in the chest. He bounces back into the flat. I enter his unit. It’s so hot it’s unbearable.

  A little hallway shoots through an archway into the dining room. The curtains are drawn. What looks to be a seventy-inch LCD TV stands on a cabinet. There’s some music clip on I don’t recognise. In one corner, a small fan blows uselessly across the room.

  The dining room itself is a mess: there’s a little coffee table with magazines and newspapers all over it, their pages fluttering under the fan’s duress; clothes (some of which look unwashed) lie on a tattered couch; and I count three glasses—one on an end table by the couch, one by the foot of the recliner, and one on the TV cabinet—which seem to have been forgotten. Several laptops and a desktop computer tangled in a web of cables crowd onto a small table in one corner.

  ‘She’s not …’ Kai starts.

  I spin. He stands in the archway. Bows his head.

  I go into the adjoining kitchenette and rifle through the cupboards. There isn’t much food; all I see are cans—canned tuna, canned beans, canned corn. I open the fridge. It’s small, pitiful, and doesn’t have much in it either, although there are three beers on the bottom shelf. The brand’s Asahi, a Japanese beer.

  I pull one out, leave the fridge door open, and pull open a kitchen drawer I think might have a bottle opener in it. It doesn’t. It has junk—a torch, some keys, tape, just miscellaneous stuff like that. I jerk the drawer all the way out of its slides and let it fall to the floor.

  ‘Hey,’ Kai says.

  I open another drawer. This one has tea towels in it, so I yank it to the floor.

  ‘Hey!’ Kai says. He steps forward.

  I go for another drawer. This one has kitchen utensils in it. There’s a big knife, as well as a steak knife, which I take out and place on the counter as I search the drawer. I could thrust either into Kai and disembowel him. He stops his approach, like he knows that’s a possibility. I grab the bottle opener, open my beer, leave the bottle opener on the kitchen counter, take a drink, then wrench that drawer to the floor. The sound of all the utensils crashing to the floor is like a cacophony of cymbals.

  I go back through the dining room, noticing a smell I hadn’t picked up on before because of the fan. It’s familiarity—the familiarity of staleness: the staleness of clothes that haven’t been washed, carpets that haven’t been vacuumed, and a room that hasn’t been aired out. This is what our house grew to smell like after Mum died, and reeked of just before I moved out. Well, that, and Scotch—Dad’s drink of choice. The added ingredient here is musk—a cologne, perhaps. It’s a good cologne. I can tell that much just by the scent of it.

  Drinking my beer, I head into the hallway and check the other rooms. The bathroom is tiny—you’d have to sit in the tub—and a crack runs through the glass partition of the shower cubicle. The toilet is small, and the toilet itself low. Then there’s a small empty room, which must be a laundry, although it contains no washing machine.

  Finally, the bedroom. I expect maybe this’ll be the pinnacle of Kai’s majesty, but it’s like the rest of the unit. It’s small, the curtains drawn, and has a set of double doors that probably lead into a closet. The bed’s nothing special—just a regular double bed with a beige quilt. But it might be a bed on which my wife has fucked.

  I see Jane straddling Kai on the bed … although it wouldn’t be the measured pace we enjoy. Not after what I saw. I take a drink. A big drink. The Asahi’s bitter after the smoothness of the Corona, but it’s a nice beer. Half of it goes down in one gulp.

  How many ways has Jane fucked him? How many things has she done with him that she’s never done with me?

  I take another drink. Kai’s come about halfway down the hall. The open door silhouettes him. Now he steps back, presses his back against the wall like he wants to clear the way for me to take the door.

  ‘She told me it’s over,’ he says.

  I finish the beer, spin it in my hand, hold it by the neck, like a hammer.

  I approach him. He flattens against the wall.

 
‘It’s really … you know, I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘It shouldn’t have happened.’

  I walk past him, back into the dining room, back into the kitchenette. I grab another beer. Open it. Take a drink. Then I stand there, scanning the unit and imagine all the places Kai might’ve fucked Jane: on the couch, over the coffee table, against the TV cabinet, over the kitchen counter, pushed up against the jamb of the archway in which Kai now squirms.

  I shake my head.

  Walk back across the dining room. Hurl the empty bottle at the LCD TV. The plan is to shatter it, but my inebriated aim is bad. The bottle smashes against the wall above the TV. Shards of glass spray everywhere.

  ‘Hey!’ Kai says.

  He advances on me. I spin. He stops. He holds his hands up. That’s the extent of his defiance. He doesn’t know I accidently missed the TV. Better that he thinks it was a warning. Of course, I could still smash the TV, but it seems redundant now.

  I take another drink of my beer. ‘I could come back,’ I say. ‘I don’t know. If I do, I don’t know what I’ll do to you.’

  I start for the door. Turn just as I reach it. Kai gapes at me. He’s worked it out: I have no idea what I’m doing, but that doesn’t mean I won’t snap—all I need is the trigger. He doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, as if that inactivity will grant him invisibility.

  I leave his unit.

  I drive back up the hill. The setting sun’s waiting at the top. It blazes into my eyes.

  I head home.

  40

  My stomach’s grumbling by the time I pull into the drive. There’s an acidic taste in the back of my throat. I’ve drunk too much. I should eat something, but don’t think I’ll be able to keep anything down. I grab the beer from the cup holder. There’s half left. I should tip it out. But I finish it and grimace.

  I grab the empty bottle and the sledgehammer from the back and get out of my car. I hoist the sledgehammer over my shoulder, the way a soldier would carry a rifle. He’s been a good friend over the last couple of days, even if I didn’t need him today. There’s nothing I can’t do with him. I’m like Thor, the God of Thunder. That’s who I’ve become.