After the Carnage

by Tara June Winch

  I hang up then, unplug the phone cord from the wall socket, switch off my mobile and return to the living room. Some of the parents will be arriving soon; Kristie is still here though. I have another truth to tell today.

  In my kitchen Kristie is pouring herself a glass of my wine. ‘Let me help you,’ I say and take the glass and bottle from her.

  ‘O-kay.’

  ‘Come outside,’ I say.

  On the balcony we can see the glimpses of the ocean, still an impressive view, even with the houses in front of us renovating higher and higher. I pour our glasses and close the glass sliding door too. I sit down and look at her.

  ‘It’s so lovely here,’ Kristie says. ‘I know we haven’t seen each other in ages, but it’s so nice to catch up and see little James all grown up!’

  ‘I’d like to tell you a secret,’ I say. ‘I don’t know if you know this or not, let’s see – remember one time when we were kids, maybe eleven or twelve, and we played after school and afterward your mother dropped me home, you came for the drive too. Do you remember?’

  ‘Doesn’t ring a bell. Why?’

  ‘Well, your mother insisted on driving me home in your nice gold car you had—’

  ‘Oh, the Camry!’

  ‘Yes, the Camry, and you and your mother were chatting normally in the car, and I was in the backseat and I was trying to work out where I’d tell your mother to drop me off because there was no way I could get dropped off at my actual house. I thought about this beautiful neat house on the corner of my street, it was at a point, like the end of the wishbone in a roast chicken – well, one piece of the bone was private housing, like yours, and the other piece of bone was housing commission, shitholes, like mine. And everyday when I used to walk to and from school I’d pass that tip of the wishbone and pass my favourite house. It was painted a warm dark sandy colour, and the paint matched the planter pots around the terrace, the fence was low and not threatening, it had a big bay window and every Christmas season two little electronic Mr and Mrs Clauses rotated and waved from the windowsill, with little candles in their hands. And the house had an electronic garage door, and that was painted white with the same sandy-coloured trimming. I’d seen some older people living there – neat, decent people, not like on my street. Anyway, in the car I decided that particular house would be my home. And I pointed it out to your mother, and she pulled the Camry into the little driveway there. When you and your mother dropped me “home” I said goodbye and thank you and I walked a few metres up the drive and turned to give the headlights a triumphant wave, but your mother was one of those other mums, a careful mum, a concerned mum. She stayed there in the car to make sure I’d get all the way home safe. I’d pulled the safety latch up on the gate, eased it open, took the stairs slow as I could, and I pushed the doorbell, knowing it didn’t make sense – why wouldn’t I have my own key? Why wouldn’t I have tried to open the door first? The woman came to the door, too old to be my mother, I’d known that already. She said something like “yes, dear?” and I tried to line my body up exactly to where I thought you and your mother’s line of vision would be, to cover the woman’s face. So the woman was standing there and I was smiling in the hopes that she would smile back – as if in recognition, if you and your mother could in fact see her face. “I’m a little scared,” I’d said, something like that – “I’m quite scared of the car out there and I wonder if I can come inside and use the telephone.” “Of course, darling,” she’d said as I hoped she would, she had the yellow sign out front after all – Neighbourhood Watch. My own house, well, we’d never ever be approved to be Neighbourhood Watch – in fact if they’d ever done the house inspection they would have probably sent us kids to foster homes on the spot. Anyway as the stranger woman turned to let me in I triumphantly waved again, not turning, just threw out my arm to you and your mother’s car. I only really took a breath when I saw the headlights from your mother’s car trace across these strangers’ pretty, painted interior walls. She let me use the telephone, of course, and I called my home number. I remember my brother answered. I asked if Mum was home yet, and I’d known the answer – of course she wasn’t home, never was. “Oh, okay, thanks very much,” I said in a happy voice, because the woman you see was watching me, to make sure I was okay. “I’ll be home in five minutes. Love you.” My brother called me a weirdo or something and slammed the phone down before I managed the love you. I convinced the woman I was safe now that you and your mother had left in the car. I don’t know if she really believed me. It didn’t matter.’

  ‘That’s a funny story.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Kids are weird, aren’t they?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I’ve never told anyone that, I didn’t tell anyone that story my whole life. I don’t know if you knew when you were sitting in that car – but I don’t care anymore. That’s why you never came to my house or never saw my mother. I’m going to tell you a secret that I know about someone else now. About you, Kristie.’

  ‘What about me?’ she says, defensively looking out to the ocean and back to her wristwatch.

  ‘My friend, you, Kristie, told the police that I was going to kidnap my son, you thought me and my son should get a nice whooping, to go through the courts, to drain my bank account. I don’t know why you did this. I’ve thought about it for the last ten years. But I’ve also been nice for the last ten years, I had to be nice to everyone you see, but not anymore. I’m going to say exactly what I think. I think you …’

  I pause. I’m not certain how honest I actually need to be.

  ‘I think you should leave and have a very nice life without ever talking to me again.’

  ‘Alison, please, I just thought, I still think, boys need their fathers, it’s very important psychologically …’

  ‘Psychologically? You know what I thought to myself that day you and your mother dropped me at that house, as I walked back to my little hell, my real house? I thought, I promised myself, that when I had a child they would live in a loving home, a nice house like that lady’s. A nice house like your mum made for you. A nice home like this’ – I point into my own home through the sliding door.

  ‘And you did that! You’re amazing – you gave James a great life!’

  ‘Oh Kristie, you are a little dumb, aren’t you? I did half the job, bitch – he was gone half the time in his own little hell, which he’ll have to remember, the broken bones, the head fucking, the bruises – because of you and your stupid ideas on fathers.’

  ‘I don’t need this.’ She gets up, bangs the wineglass on the table and leaves. Something, a mosquito, had bitten me earlier on my arm, and now it begins to itch. I push the door open and close it behind me and take down the calamine lotion from the kitchen cabinet. I dab the bite; after a few moments, it doesn’t bother me at all.

  Longitude

  When they fucked at the beginning of the relationship he would look at her face, and make an O with his lips and break a smile, lean in and kiss her. Now he fucked with clenched eyes, an indifferent mouth. She was still looking back at him, waiting for his eyes. Afterward, the man leapt from the bed and strode toward the bathroom, his penis in hand, and the woman lay among the fitted sheet that had pulled away from his mattress and felt like gift paper that someone might keep for another time, but never use. They dressed, left the apartment and entered the subway together. On the train he put a limp hand at the nape of her neck, and then took it away, his body language seguing into that of a commuting friend.

  ‘What time are we supposed to be there?’ she asked.

  ‘Whenever, nine-thirty.’

  ‘Can I tell you about my dream?’

  ‘Sure – although the thing about telling dreams is that you’ll inevitably fill in the blanks of how the dream should have been.’

  ‘Okay, well, I’ll try not to fill it in. So, we were at a friend’s house and your mom just sho
wed up out of nowhere and started pulling up the carpets and complaining about the terrible quality of the flooring, which was literally, like, four layers of cheap carpet, plastic and cardboard sheets, it really was disgusting. I agreed with her in the dream and she approved of me because of it.’

  ‘Because you agreed that the carpet was bad, my mom liked you?’ he asked, genuinely uncomfortable at the talk of parents.

  ‘Yeah, and then the next scene was just the two of us, we were walking along a pavilion that was a mashup of, like, all these European cities, and someone in the dream, who didn’t have a face I could make out, said it was the place where they shot Antique Roadshows.’

  ‘I’m not a fan of those antique shows, but I can go with it – then what?’

  ‘I’m not a fan either, I could say I’ve never watched one of them before in my life but that’s not entirely true, I’ve not not been depressed when I’ve watched them though. So there’s that. Oh, and a couple of times I went to the public toilets in the dream and I was scared I was going to be murdered, but I had a knife in my sock and kept putting my foot up on the washbasin area to show other people in the toilets that I was armed and they shouldn’t murder me. But that’s kind of normal, ’cause I’m definitely paranoid about bathrooms.’

  ‘Totes. It’s this cold, potentially sinister place, the place where you’ll fall over naked and just die.’

  The man and the woman ran out of pointless things to say to each other. The Q shook them side to side into a lulling stop and the doors parted onto Ditmas Park. The couple walked down the long platform as the train jerked away. On the opposite platform an embankment rose up the back gardens of large, battered townhouses. A gentrified one was painted turquoise and from the glow of its porchlight a tall woman could be seen handling a chicken.

  They had begun dating in May, as spring had erupted under the contrail-littered sky. Where epic chasms of new buds and fresh foliage filled in the bare branches and concrete cracks. Tattooed limbs, toe-jutting sandals and calf-skimming hems appeared.

  Their relationship was only months old, no longer light, yet not yet dark.

  Something felt strange to her, something she couldn’t understand; she thought it might be that he was American. That he tried so hard to be somebody, she thought, instead of just nobody, the way she and everyone she knew at home in Britain were. The men here were different, not just coffee-versus-tea different – they were careless, feigned as carefree. The women scared her; they were full of stealth, double agents. She hoped there’d be no double agents at the party.

  They turned left on Cortelyou Road past competing bodegas and restaurants with names like The Farm and The Plate. The couple walked past laundromats and residential apartments and large common terraces until they arrived at the house of the cocktail party. It was clad in white, though it had looked grey in the spring dusk. A string of coloured paper lanterns hung along the top-floor windows.

  At the landing of the third floor, the apartment split into two distinct bustles of people dressed in vintage clothes: right of the hall, in a large living area where instruments were set up; and left down the hall, to the kitchen area and the balcony.

  ‘I’m going to check in with the guys, grab a beer – you want?’

  ‘No, no, I’m going to put this in the kitchen.’ She held out the plate of Turkish delight they’d brought, as if showing it to him for the first time. She knew she was not herself. Not being the correct version of her for the environment.

  ‘Sweet, I’ll come find you in a bit.’

  As soon as he walked away into the living room the woman regretted not staying with him, having missed the opportunity to greet the hosts as a couple.

  In the kitchen there were people she didn’t know, watching a television on mute that ran green and black video of some houses being surveyed and periodically turned to little green clouds. The woman overheard a man holding a tumbler of whiskey and orange shavings declare that:

  ‘From this distance nothing looks especially violent.’

  The woman pressed down on the outside of her arms and squeezed her elbows as if she was sore from lifting heavy things or had something on her mind or was cold, but it was for no reason at all. She eye-smiled at some of the other guests and approached the cluster of wine on the kitchen island. Another woman approached the wine bottles; the other woman had thick brown hair, long eyelashes, the clavicle of a ballet dancer, and a carnation behind her ear.

  ‘What’ve we got?’

  ‘Sancerre and’ – she tipped the bottle – ‘Bourgogne.’

  ‘Nice.’

  The other woman poured the Sancerre confidently into her own glass and held it out for the woman’s glass, and poured that too.

  ‘What everyone in Williamsburg and Flatbush doesn’t realise is we’re all out here now, am I right?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Are you out here too?’

  ‘Greenpoint.’

  ‘Oh, with the youth.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘My friend, my childhood friend, keeps calling.’

  She held out her phone, lit with a ponytailed face and a telephone handle.

  ‘I’ll be back.’

  The other woman curled her way out to the balcony and stood next to a pig turning mid-air, its mouth filled with red garden roses. Below it was a plastic bucket, faded blue-white from relentless sunlight.

  The man with the tumbler was speaking passionately and loudly enough to draw most of the attention in the kitchen area, where beautiful thin women and men with facial hair joined in.

  ‘The absence of photography makes it easier to accept.’

  ‘We’re still seeing photography from the war.’

  ‘Yes, but the whole thing is controlled now, like with PR firms.’

  ‘Right, like they leak Photoshopped images so that the world then has a kind of disbelief of everything going on. The developed world.’

  ‘But even if they believe it, do people really have the sensitivity to consider what the photos mean in the context of war anymore?’

  ‘I mean, what good are the photos anyway, these people are already dead.’

  ‘That’s either very perceptive or a very fucked-up view.’

  ‘Well, the saviour of people isn’t determined by public donations anymore, money doesn’t fix shit, it gets churned within charities for five years before doing any good.’

  ‘I don’t know, it moves public opinion, it definitely has a purpose. You can’t say, um, photos are useless.’

  ‘But you see, they are useless, because we either don’t care or don’t believe the stories anymore.’

  ‘You may feel empathetic, but it’s more socially acceptable these days to just be apathetic; people want distraction from the overload of imagery. That’s it.’

  ‘I disagree, I feel there isn’t enough information being relayed …’

  ‘Are you kidding me – the problem is too much from too far away.’

  ‘No, it’s incomplete, it’s deceptive in the fact that we don’t get enough imagery.’

  ‘I disagree, I mean, I respect you, but I disagree.’

  ‘Like, the reaction to the coverage of, say, the West African famine, the Sudanese civil war, was momentous. It was the first one they’d covered where film crews, where international media actually recorded the unfolding of millions and millions of people’s deaths. Unlike Rwanda, they weren’t too late, they were right on time and the world watched it closely, in colour, on TV. Week by week, the African starvation was the west’s new soap series. In the ’90s Sudan was in civil war, and that guy took the photo of the child with a vulture – have you seen it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah, maybe.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, it’s a photo, a portrait of a child close up, brink of death, the child had crawled just a f
ew metres from a food tent, but it appeared the child was alone in a field, and that photographer happened to get the child from the best angle, doubled over with a vulture looming in the background, the light shining off the child’s ribs and all. The guy – the guy who shot the photo won the Pulitzer that year, and after the fanfare, he shot himself in the mouth.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘I don’t know, it’s just I think that wouldn’t happen anymore. I don’t think people are really shell-shocked anymore.’

  ‘Well, I have seen shell shock, it’s fucking real, my cousin was in the marines, let me say, what a fucking mess he is.’

  ‘What a fucking mess we all are, though.’

  ‘Ha.’

  The woman walked away from the kitchen conversation then, walked down the hall to the others. She hey-ed and cheek-kissed some of the musicians she knew, crossed the room with both hands on her wineglass and leant into the shoulder of the man. He put his arm around her shoulders and kissed the top of her head.

  ‘You want to play?’

  ‘No, you play.’

  ‘Okay, I think we’re going to do a sort of extended version of the opera with pedals.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Yeah. You okay, babe? With the wine?’

  ‘Mm-hmm. What have you got?’

  ‘Milk & Honey specialty.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Let me play a bit now and I’ll come find you in a while.’

  The man limply pulled her close and kissed her again on the forehead, then released her with his free arm.

  She remembered his arm then, like that, pulling her in at the Poconos, that clear moment before a cold nightfall over the lake. How they had both been wearing jeans and grey sweaters, vaguely coordinating. She remembered as the air had hinted at becoming crisp, they had held each other as if it were already freezing. The warmness of their breath, the fabric, bodies squished together, not limp. How their faces met and their eyes were gazing and grateful and they still noticed the imperfect loveliness of their faces that close.