by Paul Haines
“Let me guess,” I snapped. “You try to avoid those as well.”
Her eyes widened. Her hand fell to her side.
“Ah, Fee.” I looked at her portrait again, so full of light and grace and joy I could barely believe it had been born from my brush. And I thought of the dark, decaying cityscape I’d been working on back home, and the cycle of taut, claustrophobic abstracts before it, and before those the grisly series of canvases I’d started within days of meeting Mallory. The ones she’d dubbed abattoir nouveau without even the slightest trace of irony.
“I don’t love her.” I was half-surprised to have spoken the words aloud. “I did once, I think. But not now, not for a long time.”
“But you need her,” Fiona said. “Or you want her. Same difference.”
I shook my head. “I want you.”
Fiona sighed. “It’s a beautiful painting, Josh. But what if that’s all there is?”
“I don’t believe that.” My hand found hers and squeezed, gently. “There’s something here, right? It’s not just in my mind?”
She moved closer, rested her head on my shoulder.
“Yes,” she said. “There is something.”
* * *
Mallory made a face and dumped the half-eaten jar of baby food onto the kitchen table, pushed it towards the centre. Apple and Banana Custard, the label read, though it all looked like the same puréed muck to me.
“I thought that was your favourite,” I mumbled around a mouthful of peanut butter sandwich.
“It tastes off,” she said. “I’m not hungry, anyway.” She sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. The veins on her hands bulged blue against her chalk-dry skin as she clenched and unclenched her fists. Her flesh so wasted away now, I half-expected to hear the grate of bone against bone.
“You should eat,” I told her.
She glared at me. “It would be easier if I just left, wouldn’t it?”
“Mal—”
“It’s not me you want here any more.” Her bottom lip was chapped and tattered and as she spoke the skin split a little and beaded red. “It’s her.”
“This is your home, too, Mal. I’m not just going to throw you out.”
“You can stop being so fucking noble, it doesn’t suit you.”
Her voice broke on the last words and I couldn’t look at her. Instead I stared at the table top, tracing a fingernail over the motley collection of scratches and cuts that crosshatched its surface, some made by me, others by who knows how many previous owners in kitchens past. In the corner was a little heart pierced by two arrows, complete with fletching and tiny droplets of blood suspended from the tips. Mallory had etched that with a compass point one pissed-up night, back when we still got drunk together.
“Mal, this isn’t working. We can’t keep pretending that it is.”
A scrape of chair against lino and then she was sitting at my feet, her fingers picking along the seam of my jeans. “This is what you wanted, Josh.”
“No.” I swallowed, rested my hand on her head. “Not like this.”
“Then it’s up to you to change it,” she said. “Because I can’t do it for you, it’s not my choice to make. It’s never been my choice.”
“I’m so sorry, Mal. I never meant . . . any of this.”
Fingers digging into my thigh, she pulled herself shakily to her feet. “Stupid boy,” she whispered, moving around behind me. Her arms draped over my shoulders and she pressed her lips against my neck. “You think she’s gonna give you what you need? You think she’s all fire and light and fucking glory be?” Her breath smelled of copper and of sour, discarded things. “You need to take into account the common fucking denominator here, my love.”
I turned my head away. “Mal, don’t. Please.”
Mallory straightened, dragging her hands up over my cheeks and across my scalp. She was breathing heavily through her nose, like she always did when trying not to cry. “Go to her then, Josh,” she said. “Just fucking go.”
* * *
Fiona answered the door in her robe and for a single, green-tinged moment I wondered if there was someone else in the flat with her. Another painter she was sitting for, or just some guy waiting impatiently in her bed with his dick in his hands, and I couldn’t for the life of me have said which possibility cut the deepest.
“What happened to you?” she asked. “There’s blood on your neck.”
“It’s nothing.” I rubbed at the place where Mallory’s mouth had been less than an hour before. “It’s not mine.”
“Come inside.” She took my hand and I followed her into the lounge room where my painting—our painting—still leaned upon its easel, bold and golden and luminous. And I knew I’d made the right decision.
“It’s over,” I said. “She hasn’t left yet, but she will. It’s over, Fee, it really is.”
My vision blurred and something I hadn’t even realised was there uncoiled itself from around my chest and slunk away, defeated. And then Fiona was kissing me, her robe falling to the floor and us falling close behind it, and for a while there was nothing in my head but light.
* * *
The sun was well into its daily arc by the time I got back home the next morning, but the flat was dim, all the blinds still drawn, and silent.
“Mal?” I called. “Mal, it’s me.”
The bedroom door was shut. I eased it open a crack and peered through to find her curled up beneath the blankets, tight little Mallory-ball so small it almost hurt to see. Almost. Still no response when I called her name again, little more than a whisper this time, so I closed the door quietly behind me.
I lifted my dead city painting from the easel and leaned it against the wall, face down. Driving home, I’d pictured myself taking to it with a Stanley knife, shredding the paint-stiff canvas to harmless strips, but now something stayed my hand. There was a certain fatalistic grandeur to its darkness that demanded further consideration. So I left it to itself for now and cleaned up all the half-curled tubes of paint and near-empty jars from the floor. I scrubbed my hands with turpentine, digging out the last stubborn dregs of black and indigo and cobalt blue which had taken up near permanent residence beneath my nails.
Then I made toast and ate it thickly buttered over the sink and thought about the look that loosened Fiona’s face when she came.
Afterwards, I went to the bedroom again and knocked on the door. “Mal, you awake yet?” No answer, not even the slightest sound of movement in the room beyond, and suddenly everything felt wrong. Leave, just leave now and don’t ever come back. But instead, I turned the handle and pushed open the door.
Mallory was still in bed, still tightly cocooned in the blankets, and I placed a hand on the bump I guessed to be her shoulder. “Mal, baby, you okay?” She felt odd, sort of spongy, and then, as I shook her, she just . . . wasn’t there.
“Fuck!” I stumbled backwards, tripping on some stray bit of crap on the floor, and coming down hard on one knee. Bolts of pain shot up my leg, and I swore again through gritted teeth, but never once took my eyes from the bed, from the newly flat and barren place where Mallory had been. Ignoring the persistent voice in my head that was telling me again to leave, leave now, and whatever you do, don’t look don’t look don’t look, I reached out and grasped a corner of the blanket. Lifted, then swallowed hard, and pulled it all the way back.
Thick and viscous, like treacle or honey left too long in the fridge, the sludge that quivered and spread across the bottom sheet in a shape that too painfully resembled the form of a girl lying on her side. Mallory, the way I’d seen her all too often: curled with knees pressed against her chest, skinny arms hugging her shoulders and her head tucked chin to breastbone like a Bronze Age sacrifice awaiting the slow mummification of peat. I didn’t even realise I’d touched the stuff until my fingers were at my mouth, glistening dark and smelling of salt and iron and loss.
She tasted like nothing I could begin to describe.
I crawled to the toilet and vomited until m
y guts were sore and only hot strings of bile were coming up.
Back in the bedroom, I spotted the little jar I’d stumbled over before and bent to pick it up. And saw under the bed, a battalion of them, tiny glass soldiers guarding a tomb. My breath caught in my throat. Mallory had been eating nothing but that shit for weeks, maybe for months, but still I couldn’t believe the sheer number of empties she’d managed to accumulate. I stared at the mess on the bed, then at the jar in my hand, and slowly unscrewed the lid.
It look less than half of them to contain her.
The rest of the jars I collected into two plastic shopping bags and took straight down to the bins on the street. I stripped the bed and threw the sheets away as well. Contemplated burning them, consigning the last of the stains they harboured to fire and ash, but it was hardly a practical solution and I didn’t want them in the flat a second longer.
I didn’t know what to do with the jars I’d filled.
Briefly, I considered taking them out to the bay and throwing them into the water, or burying them somewhere up in the Dandenong ranges, deep in the earth where they’d never be found. But something inside me balked at the idea of taking them anywhere, of taking her anywhere, so instead I simply stowed them under the bed again. Lined them up against the wall beneath where my head would lie, making sure all the lids were screwed on tight.
I had no idea whether or not she would spoil.
* * *
It wasn’t the light. My flat was dim, sure, the new compact fluorescents overly harsh, but the painting could have been standing beneath the brightest of summer suns and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference.
It wasn’t the light; it was what the light exposed.
I rubbed hard at my forehead, wondering how the fuck I could’ve ever believed Fiona’s portrait to hold any real worth at all. Simplistic and garish, it had nothing to say beyond the most clichéd commentary on beauty and the female form, nothing that hadn’t already been said by the likes of Klimt and Modigliani—decades earlier and with infinitely greater eloquence. I could imagine prints being sold by the truckload out of suburban shopping malls, disconnected housewives only too delighted to find something pretty and cheerful and just a little bit risqué. Something that didn’t clash with their new designer lounge suite.
At best, the painting was vacuous; at worst, utterly mute.
I felt sick.
“Josh?” Fiona called from the bedroom. “You’re sure she doesn’t want any of this stuff? She’s not coming back for it?”
“Just bag it all,” I told her. “She’s not coming back.”
My ruined city reproached me from its place against the wall, and rightfully so. For all its flaws, it at least possessed a tongue.
“How weird would it be if I hung onto this?” Fiona asked from behind me. “Most of her things are kind of dire, but this suits me, don’t you reckon?”
I turned, and my throat tightened. I remembered that dress. The bright red fabric dotted with tiny white flowers, the deeply scooped neckline and that row of buttons which ran all the way up the front and which were damn near impossible to undo in a hurry. How long had it been since I’d seen that dress, seen Mallory in it?
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“In the wardrobe, shoved behind everything else.” Fiona twirled and the skirt flounced around her bare thighs. It fitted her curves perfectly and I seemed to remember it sitting the exact same way on Mallory once. I tried to picture how she looked when we’d first got together, before she lost all the weight, back when there was something beneath her skin beyond the bitter jut of bone.
I couldn’t.
“So, too weird?” Fiona asked.
“It’s a bit weird,” I told her. “But keep it, if you want.”
She crossed the room, put her arms around my waist and pressed her cheek against my shoulder. “I don’t have to move right in,” she said. “You know, if it’s too soon. I can find another place.” The lease was up on her apartment and her arsehole landlord had decided to double the rent. It’d been my suggestion that she come live with me; anything else just seemed like delaying the inevitable.
“I want you to be here, Fee.” I ruffled her hair. Dark roots were starting to push up through the pale blonde, and I tried to imagine how Fiona would look if she ever quit the peroxide habit.
The skin on the back of my neck prickled. I could see how the painting could be saved; moreover, I could feel it deep in my guts, the rightness of it. The undercurrent of darkness that needed to sit just beneath the surface, the hint of sordid truth behind the beautiful lie that we all want so desperately to believe. But I had to be subtle with it, sound a barely discernable note of unease, just enough to knock the portrait off kilter. Shadows and hollows and the sly insinuation of decay.
Of defilement.
“Ow, Josh, that hurts!” Fiona was struggling in my hands, my fingers digging deep into the soft flesh of her upper arms. I released my grip, watched its ghosts bloom angry and scarlet on her skin.
“Shit, Fee, I’m sorry. I didn’t even realise.”
“It’s okay.” She rubbed at the places I’d been holding her. “Where’d you go just now?”
“Nowhere, just thinking.” I kissed the top of her head, still thinking. About how to fix the painting, and about the jars that waited beneath my bed. I could see how that dark opalescence would mix with the airy golden tones of Fiona’s portrait, how it would give them texture and weight. How it would make them real.
My fingers flexed, ached for a paintbrush.
“I’m going to make chai,” Fiona said. “You want some?”
“Hmm? Yeah, sure.” My eyes followed the sway of her hips as she strolled towards the kitchen. Just as she reached the doorway, I called her name and she half-turned, her face bright and open and expectant.
“You look good in that dress,” I told her.
Fiona smiled. “Thanks,” she said.
I listened to the safe, domestic sounds of tea-making and wondered how long the jars would last, how many more canvases Mallory could permeate before she was, finally, gone. Already, my brain was beginning to clutter and swarm with new visions, new ideas, and I got down on my knees to retrieve my sketchbook from where it had slid beneath the couch, a stub of charcoal marking a new page. But my hand was too cautious, too careful, its first little sketch so timid and needy. Frustrated, I flipped the page.
You’ll find it, Josh. You always do, in the end.
I nodded. Closed my eyes and tried to recall the sharp, pinched lines of Mallory’s body, the lost and broken expression on her face. I’d never drawn her, not once, which seemed a strange thing. And now she was too scattered, too faded, and I couldn’t get the pieces to stay together.
Josh?
“I’m sorry, baby,” I whispered.
Josh.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Josh!”
My eyes snapped open. “Fee?” I lurched to my feet and half-ran, half-stumbled into the kitchen where Fiona was standing over the sink, both hands pressed to her face. “Fee, what’s wrong?”
“My nose.” She sniffed, loud and wet and awful, as blood started to seep through her fingers. “I need a tissue.”
There was more chance of finding a silk handkerchief in this place, so I snatched up a tea towel instead. She waved it away, protesting about stains, but I shook my head—”It doesn’t matter, Fee”—and held it gently to her nose. Blood soaked through the cloth.
“Fuck. Here, sit down.” I guided her to a chair. “Keep your head back.”
It took almost five minutes for the bleeding to stop completely. Half a roll of toilet paper littered the table and floor, all of it bright with crimson blotches. Kitchen as surgical ward, triage tent, autopsy room, with Fiona hunched pale and shaky in the centre, one hand clutched sweaty in mine.
“It must be the dry weather,” she said at last.
I nodded, unable to look away from the patterns made by the blood.
“I think I need to lie down,” she said.
“Good idea.”
I helped her into bed, and she asked me to sit with her for a while, and so I did. Stroking her hair and contemplating the mess in the kitchen, all that blood-soaked paper, and how wrong it seemed to simply throw it away.
Just when I thought she had fallen asleep, Fiona slid a hand from beneath the sheet and squeezed my thigh. “You still want me here, don’t you, Josh?”
“Of course.” A dry crust of blood stained her upper lip and I licked my thumb, rubbed most of it away. “I need you, Fee.” And she smiled, or nearly did. Weary little shadow of a smile that barely creased the corners of her mouth, and I didn’t think I’d ever seen anyone look so fragile. Not even Mallory.
“That’s good,” she said. “That’s perfect.”
Where We Go To Be Made Lighter
Christopher Green
I drove faster, and the car bounced and slid around in the gravel. Amy and I had three trips to make, and I didn’t want to be doing any of this in the dark.
She’d been getting phone calls, over the last few weeks. They called her, haunted her, and she’d convinced herself that they’d only stop if the house was emptied of their memory. She wanted all the girls I’d met before to be bagged and gone.
We were nearer the dump, now, and Amy wasn’t saying anything. I ignored her silence and concentrated on not bottoming us out in one of the little gullies that fell across the road like logs.
She’d asked, then begged, then demanded, and so here we were. If that wasn’t enough, then Amy wanted more than I had to give.
The dump wasn’t an official one, not in the same way a chain-link fence or a man at the gate would have made it, but it didn’t matter. Everyone threw whatever they no longer wanted into the old stone quarry, and that made it official enough for our purpose.
The gravel road swung around a bend and we followed it around, right to the slant into the quarry. Two-litre bottles and copper tubing had begun to pop and crumple beneath the tires. Then the sun slid behind a cloud, and I fought an urge to turn on the headlights. Gulls were everywhere, and everything was rhymed in their shit, like frost.