Slights

by Kaaron Warren

  The housemates who moved out at Christmas, Mo and Ho, they hurt me, I was the one, they are here to cut and spit, slice me up and bleed me, suck my guts out and stop me from breathing.

  Those faces around me. I am the great I am.

  Robert came home, he came home thinking I was asleep, came home to get his things, just a bag full. Get his things and leave me. But he found me, and he stopped me from staying in the dark room. I hated him for that. I imagined it was some other woman he went to, someone not scarred, on wrists and about my head. Sometimes I lie about what caused the scars. More often I'll say casually, "Oh, that was when I cut my wrists," and leave it at that. An air of mystery about me. I thought Robert really loved me. Ignored my damaged body. He left me, though. He had been with me for two months. I think he was scared of my desperation. Thought I might take him with me one time. He found me after midnight and they took me, still warm, to hospital. I was told these events. Robert came to the hospital once, to see his handiwork.

  He said nothing, just sat there discomfited. I didn't feel like helping him; he had brought me back from the place where everybody loved me.

  "You're looking pale," he said.

  "That's nice."

  "Cos I didn't know, at first, when I found you. The stink was awful, but you were pink-cheeked, healthier than you ever looked before. I thought you must have taken a massive dose of vitamins or something."

  "That would've been typical behaviour, wouldn't it?"

  "And suicide is?" he said. He was a self-centred, unobservant idiot.

  I remembered one face, Mrs Beattie, from that visit to the dark room clearly, could hear her breathing, her presence was so strong. The next time I saw her, I looked for signs of illness, thinking that for her to be so strong in the room, she must be close to death. I walked into her corner shop without a care.

  "How are you feeling, Mrs Beattie? I'd be careful if I were you. You never know what's around the corner."

  "Are you threatening us?" her husband said. He rarely spoke a word; she must be sick.

  "Why would I do that?" I said, but suddenly it hit me; they were the ones who called the police on me, precipitating the raid. It was only lucky I'd had a sell-out and there was nothing in the place; not a pill or a puff.

  Now Mrs Beattie thought I was after revenge for her dobbing me in.

  "I'm just saying," I said. "She doesn't look well. You should get away to the sunshine."

  They did, too; left the shop in the care of their daughter and went up north. The only person that move helped was me; I couldn't be blamed for a death so far away.

  Mrs Beattie was massive in the room when I went back.

  I think I'm shrinking. Every time I get smaller, as they take pieces away from me. My legs ache because they cut pieces away. My arms are the same.

  I was forced to go back to counselling. An habitual attempted suicide. Habitual. Like it was something beyond me, out of my control. Like the room ruled me. I was capable of making my own decisions. My resolution then was never to slight anyone, be careful about it, just beware. And be good to the relatives. Blood and marriage ones. Be polite and interested.

  Too fucking hard. Relatives are such a bore. Friends are a bore. Lovers are a bore when they're not actually doing their job. It takes too much effort to be nice. No one trusted me, anyway.

  "What are you after?" Maria said when I rang up just to chat.

  "I haven't got time," Peter said when I offered to help him with his courses, though he had time to drop me off at the new counsellor. Another unfulfilled resolution.

  It was a small room, stuffy, and the counsellor wouldn't open the window.

  "It lets fumes and noise in," he said.

  "So you like to pretend you're living in the country?" I said. He smiled, and I thought, "Here we go." It took about three sessions before he got stuck into me. Every visit I made myself uglier; massaged peanut oil into my hair and skin for greasiness, wore bad clothes, sprayed on the vilest perfume I could find. I didn't want him becoming attracted to me, touching me. But he said, "Steve, I get the impression you're putting up a barrier. Are you protecting yourself from something?"

  "You're a fucken sleazebag," I said. He smiled. He said, "Perhaps you're trying to cover up some of the scars on your body. You don't want to discuss how they got there."

  I realised I had dog shit on my shoe – I thought it was his bad aftershave – and I wiped it on some papers I peeled from his desk. His smile took a downward turn.

  "Steve," he said, "have you ever considered the notion that suicide is one of the most selfish acts? That some people will attempt suicide just before an event in their family's lives, thus damaging that event irreparably?"

  I shrugged. He said, "And that sometimes an act which appears heroic is in fact careless, and this carelessness could be considered suicidal?" His smile was back. He was trying to hurt me. He wanted me to think Dad killed himself. I would never believe that.

  I called Peter to say I wasn't going to go to the counsellor anymore. I wanted him to fix it for me. Make it so I didn't have to go. I had to leave a message on the machine. I put on a real deep, sleazy voice. "Maria, darling, I know you said never to call you there, but I just got to thinking about your big tits. Come over, darling. Oh, it's Johnny, in case you've got more than one of us."

  Peter called me back. He still pretended my attempt was an accident. That I didn't need counselling anyway. "Accident-inclined," he said to me, and it could have been Dad talking. He didn't want the responsibility of my life. If he'd asked I would have told him the truth, that I was doing it for research.

  I said, "Did you know that human blood has a richness unmatched in other species?" I had Auntie Jessie to thank for that one. On page 77 of West with the Night, Beryl Markham's autobiography, she wrote a recipe for Steak and Kidney Pudding near a description of the Masai drink, blood and milk.

  She says, "Human blood has a richness unmatched in other species."

  I made it into the newspaper; they reported on me. I was that aggrieved I wrote a letter to the paper, and didn't that piss people off. In it I said, "It's the fault of the other people, not the suicide person."

  Funny how you think less about your childhood the older you get. It becomes distant. Long gone.

  at twenty-nine

  Maria and I had a screamer over the phone, just before my twenty-ninth birthday.

  I had two housemates at the time; really fun guys who smoked heaps and made me laugh. They hated cleaning up, too, and loved it that I didn't hassle them. We had a great time. The only thing was, I always made them pay for the dope. No free rides here. When they moved in I asked them if they could make golden syrup dumplings and they said, "We can learn." But they didn't.

  We watched TV, ate, hung out. I put on weight while they were there. I couldn't absorb the crap the way they did.

  I rang to ask Peter to come to my place for a birthday barbie in the backyard, just us and the guys.

  He said, "I don't think that's a very good idea. Why don't we have it here?"

  "Why don't you fuck off?" I said. "Get over this thing about our house."

  Then Maria came on the phone.

  "Look, Steph, the story is that we have a lovely home here, very nice, very large. Why don't we have just the family, a nice, comfortable day?"

  "What's it got to do with you? I wasn't even going to ask you, you dull bitch. Or your fucken kids." I loved this stuff. I just said whatever came into my head.

  "All that aside, the story is that we don't like the kids at your place. Your housemates aren't very pleasant and you can't seem to do even the basic cleaning. What's wrong with you? Last time we were there the kids got food poisoning and had nightmares for days."

  I laughed. "Tell you what, Martyr. You tell Peter I hate you so much I'd rather spend my birthday on my own. Tell him I'll mix myself up a nice cocktail." I hung up.

  I'd never threatened suicide before, or used it as leverage. But she was so manipulative.
I had to get her somehow. I didn't hear a word from them. My birthday passed unnoticed, apart from the Granny card. It said:

  "HELLO STEVIE HELLO DEAR

  COME UP HERE AND

  HAVE A BEER"

  I'm seriously thinking about it. I mentioned my birthday to my housemates but they forgot and then they moved out. The timing was bad, because I was going to ask them to help me pay for the fence the Krowskas are insisting on. Who needs a new fence, anyway? The old one is fine.

  I spent hours shuffling through the books Auntie Jessie'd given me over the years, and the ones she'd left me, hundreds of them, dusty, dirty, yellowing, musty. They were already smelling mouldy; when they became mine, after Auntie Jessie's death, most had a fine green dust which sank into my pores and my lungs when I sorted the books. She left me her pearls, too. Three strings, and a padded box with loose ones. She never got around to having them re-strung.

  Much later, I began to flick through those books, read them, sometimes, or read again favourites like Of Mice and Men. Some were different than I remembered. Some had messages; some had pages of pale pencil words. It was hard to read; too old. It tired me.

  I read some of these books as a child, then again as an adult, and it's amazing how much more sense things make when you're an adult. You know what things mean, how to change them. You understand words and jokes, and hardly ever need things explained to you. This is a comfort to me. And I hate it when that sense of bewilderment periodically returns. Age has nothing to do with it, nor the comfort of confidence.

  Auntie Jessie's books are a both a comfort and a distress to me. They gave me knowledge I didn't want to have. My Dad was a good man. The only chance I have is that my Dad was a good man. But when I read through the books, the comfort comes because I feel like she's there, alive, and she loves me. In the book Magnetism by EC Stoner, published

  1946 but unborrowed in her entire time as a librarian, on page 39 – "In the ethane group each carbon atom may be regarded as forming the centre of an electronic distribution of the 'closed configuration' type, while in ethylene and acetylene the two carbon atoms approximate to a single centre for the outer part of the electronic charge" – she wrote: "He has killed again."

  I made a song up, "He Has Killed Again", and I felt lonely. Auntie Jessie wasn't there to talk to, Dad was gone, Mum. I went to a night club to pick up someone. Not a habit. It was too hard to see people's eyes; I couldn't tell what they were thinking. I danced with a man in a singlet top; his nipples were pink, like they say a virgin's are. He kept apologising to people he bumped and smiled too kindly at me.

  I left him without explanation, knowing he was too cowardly to follow. I stood beside a group in their business clothes; women flawless with ironed shirts, men more wrinkled, expensive suits now beer-stained, jackets discarded. They groped and leaned on each other, ordered drinks rapidly, watched the dance floor without joining it. One man was central to the group; so central as to be almost separate. He watched, returned kisses, accepted drinks. His eyes were empty, staring, blue. I saw a gap and slipped in.

  "You're a very magnetic man," I said. He smiled at me.

  "And you're interrupting my night," he said.

  "From where I'm sitting, you seem to be bored out of your brain."

  "Never," he said, but he winked and put his arm around my waist. He leaned over, collected someone's lighter, lit a cigarette, pocketed the lighter. All without words; almost without movement. I kept the lighter, later, when I found it in his pocket.

  "Tell me about your enemies," I said. "Who hates you?"

  He laughed. "That guy whose lighter I just stole, for one," he said. If he was joking, he was in for a shock, when the guy showed up in his dark room.

  I said, "And there's a dick over there who thought he could magnetise me. He's thinking, 'If that arsehole wasn't there I'd be in.'"

  "And that girl with red hair? I just ignore anything she says. She probably hates me."

  He didn't ask me the same question, or any questions. His self-absorption made me think there would be lots more in his dark room. I said, "Do you have to be home by a certain time? Is there some patient, trusting female, cup of tea ready, legs shaved just in case?"

  He gave me his full attention now, looking at my face. "Do you want to take me home?" he said.

  I took his hand and led him to where I wanted him to go. I am very good at measuring the timing of these things; I can push them over or bring them back, depending. This man, his name was Dennis, Den, he fought me, he had been there before and didn't want to go back.

  "Interesting home you have," he said, and I raised my head and it was my Dad standing there, talking, talking, honey voice all full of caring.

  And I was my mum or some stranger woman; my skin tightened into a smile as his words seduced me. His words made me do something I didn't want to do.

  Although he was like my father, I couldn't love him. It was his shoes. Who could love a man who wore black and white shoes? He dumped his keys on the coffee table. They had a little key ring; #1, it said.

  Smooth talkers are the most attractive types, but they always disappoint. After we became intimate he told me about the time he nearly died, but he lied. He must have been quite healthy and just dreaming. A fantasy about some fucken tunnel, fucken light, fucken voices calling him back. It really made me angry, that he lied. Because no one had ever called me back. Not a whisper or a shout. I went into the bathroom to make with the diaphragm but I had him use a condom as well. Can't be too careful. Don't want any babies, babies, running around, crying, cooing, clinging, growing, trouble. Who wants them, anyway? Who needs them?

  He told me it had been an accident, that his father hadn't meant to hurt him so badly, it was a slip of the fist. And of the knee. It was the slip of a son in hospital. It made me so angry I couldn't look at him any longer. We drank whisky; I found glasses without greasy lip stains and poured it in. He seemed bewildered by the mess of the place and my lack of apology.

  "Not much of a housekeeper, are you?" he said. He shoved newspaper out of the way to sit on the floor and uncovered some CDs I thought I'd lost. The covers were cracked.

  "I'm dirty," I said. "I'm so dirty dogs won't lick me. All my clothes are filthy and my body stinks."

  He knew that wasn't true; his nose had been nestled under my arms, in my belly button, behind my knees. He sipped whisky. I drank from the bottle; straddled him, standing. Seduction never sat comfortably with me; I always feel ridiculous.

  "Show me," he said, and I unbuttoned my short silk top, let it drop, I stood up and unzipped my short skirt, let it fall. I had matching underwear; I had bought it that morning.

  "Magnetising," he said. I filled his glass again, gave him ice from the kitchen, gave him a little something to make him sleepy.

  "Let me tell you about magnetism," I said, and I read to him from my special yellow book: "To ensure that values characteristic of free molecules are obtained, it would be necessary to make measurements on gases. The volume susceptibility of gases is proportional to the pressure, the molecular susceptibility being constant. Some experimental results, which were taken to indicate that at low pressures the volume from a linear relation, have not been shown to have been due to secondary experimental effects. It has been shown by Vaidyanathan (1927) that generally, though not invariably, measurements of the susceptibility of a substance in the liquid and vapour state lead to approximately the same value for molecular susceptibility."

  I flicked through the yellowing pages of the strange little book, the science nonsense of it comforting me. These things were said a long time ago; history can be changed.

  I led Den to the bath. He sat on the toilet while I filled the bath with hot water and sandalwood scent. He didn't know the lid was down and forgot I was there; he pissed, the whole lot spilling and spurting onto my dirty white floor. It was good when there were no housemates. I was tired of housemates.

  "Filthy," I said. I don't think that's what decided me to let
him die; it was more that I couldn't be bothered with the small talk later, making him coffee and toast, going through the "I'll call you" lie.

  He had stripped his clothes off clumsily as we walked up the hallway, imagining he was still capable of sex. He would have fallen asleep immediately and been too embarrassed the next morning, too keen to escape me as soon as possible, to ask what had happened.

  "Into the bath, then," I said. I made sure he was sitting up safely. I wouldn't be able to see his eyes underwater if he drowned, and he wouldn't talk. I needed to see if he reached his own dark room, would hold his eyelids open with my fingers to look into his eyes.

  I took one wrist, then the other, and sliced them long ways. It made me think of a joke I saw in Punch magazine. A man with cuts on his face says, "These scars? I cut myself attempting suicide."