The Spite Game

by Anna Snoekstra

  “Hi,” a voice said. A voice I knew well. Looking to my left, there he was. Evan.

  “Hey!” I said, my excitement seeming out of place compared to his neutral expression. “How are you?”

  “Good,” he said. “I thought it would be nice to show my support to my stepmum-to-be.”

  “Of course! I wasn’t sure if you’d come, but it’s so good you’re here.”

  I knew he was coming, I’d asked Bea more than once. I’d been thinking that I’d see if he wanted to go for a drink after. Enough time had passed now; he couldn’t be angry with me anymore.

  “Not hard anymore. I only live ten minutes from here,” he said.

  “God, don’t rub it in.” I tried to sound nonchalant. “So what are you doing after this?”

  “Don’t know. Did you have something in mind?” At first I thought he was talking to me, and I opened my mouth to answer, but he’d turned to the person standing next to him. A girl, about our age.

  “Maybe grab some dinner?” she said. She smiled at me, then looked at Evan, as though waiting for an introduction, but he didn’t make one. I looked at her hand, clasped around a copy of Bea’s book. Her fingernails were perfectly rounded, with a shiny polish that made them glimmer in the light. My fingers had never looked like that.

  “Better get this to my mum before it starts,” I said, then scurried past them, not caring how many feet I stepped on.

  I sipped at my wine as the speeches began. It was warm, and sickeningly sweet. The author spoke first and I tried to focus. It was obvious she was nervous; her voice was thick, like she had a lump in her throat. I couldn’t bear to look at her, just seeing her so anxious was making my heart race. The people were pressing in all around me. It was so hot in here. Everyone applauded and the author sat down and Bea stood up. There was sweat on her forehead. I could see the shiny gleam of it all the way back from where I was standing. She started talking, but I could barely hear her. I could hear only the rush of my own blood in my ears. I don’t know if it was the wine or the closeness of the people next to me in the hot room, but I was sure I was going to throw up. Bea kept speaking, laughing nervously after each sentence. The people around laughed politely along with her. I stared down at the ankles of the person standing in front of me until, finally, it was over.

  “Back in a sec,” I said to my mum.

  I ran toward the entrance, nearly tripping over a kid sitting on the floor. Putting my wineglass on the front counter I rushed out of the store. The night air was cold against my hot skin. I kept walking, as quickly as I could, away from the store. Away from Evan and that girl. I’d go back; I’d have to. But I couldn’t be there in that crowd. I couldn’t be there for a polite conversation with Evan. A conversation with no humor, no trying to scare each other with dumb stories, no smiles or glittering eyes. I felt like it would kill me.

  I kept walking, away from the shops and restaurants, down toward the main road. Where there were no people, just cars and exhaust fumes and building sites. I tried to breathe, but I couldn’t. I hadn’t been able to breathe properly since that last night outside Saanvi’s window. Even sitting at home, watching television alone, my breath felt too shallow, my neck and back aching with tension. The tension of nothing. Of doing nothing, being nothing.

  I got to one of the building sites and reached a hand out to support myself. Pressing my hand onto the white plastic sign attached to the fence, I clenched my eyes shut and tried to force my breath to slow down. I had to get back. It was Bea’s night. I didn’t want her to even notice my absence. I let the exhaust-fumed air fill my lungs as slowly as I could manage, then released it. I could do this. I had to.

  I took my hand away from the sign and turned back to the road, squinting as a car came past with bright headlights. The lights lit up the sign next to me. I only saw it out of my peripheral vision, but that was enough to make me stop. Turn back. I could have so easily missed it. I could have walked back to the bookstore and not even noticed. But I did. I took a step backward toward the road, balanced my feet on the edge of the curb. There it was, right in front of me. The sign I had been resting on had a large architectural rendering of the building that was going to exist in the brown cavern behind it. When I stared at it, my breath came out in a whoosh. My lungs opened up. I could breathe again.

  I knew that building. I knew its smooth curves against sharp edges. It was almost an exact replica of the model that Matt Solloway was holding in the Facebook picture. Saanvi had never been looking at him in the picture; she’d been looking at his assignment. On the top of the sign in front of me, in big bold letters was King & Dinisen.

  * * *

  You may have heard about what happened next. I wonder if I’ll have to remind you? It was in the newspaper at the time: Vigilante Vandal was the heading, or something like that. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit to it. Vandalism is illegal after all. But compared to what I’ve done since, it doesn’t seem too serious. I wonder if you’ll remember the photograph that went underneath the heading in the paper. It was taken from across the street, I think. The construction site, the large King & Dinisen sign and, next to it, a black-and-white photograph of poor old Matt Solloway, proudly holding the replica. I’d had it printed to be a meter square, and pasted it right next to the sign with the word STOLEN at the top in the same font as King & Dinisen.

  Poor Saanvi. I could have almost felt sorry for her.

  I’d stayed awake until 4:00 a.m. in order to do it. That road was never entirely empty, but I pulled up my hood and took the risk. A few cars passed me while I pasted up the sign of Matt; one even slowed down. But no one stopped.

  I slept in my car for what was left of darkness. There was no point going home. When the sun was rising and people began emerging in suits and heels I joined them. I went to the city and waited outside her office building, wishing I could see through the steel and concrete to what was going on inside. She went up the elevator at eight thirty. By nine o’clock she came back down. Her arms were crossed over her body and her shoulders were rounded. She walked slowly toward the tram that took her back to her share house. I was expecting tears and anger, but she just looked dazed. Someone was calling her again and again, but she just kept muting the ringer and putting it back in her pocket. Eventually she answered, sitting down on one of the benches of the tram stop. I sat on the bench behind it.

  “So I’m guessing you heard?” she said into her phone. I wondered who was on the other line.

  “Yep, I’m definitely fired. Definitely.”

  She listened to what the other person was saying for a while, then she seemed like she was sick of it.

  “No. It’s done. I’ll never get another job in architecture, no way. They aren’t going to wear this—don’t you get it? They are going to put it all on me. Everyone will know. My future is fucked.”

  She paused for a moment, then cut in again. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore, Mum. There’s nothing to say. Anyway, my tram is here.”

  She hung up and flung the phone back into her bag.

  I didn’t follow her onto the tram. I didn’t need to. We were even.

  25

  “Why are you back here, Ava-babe? I thought you’d be buttering your croissants by now,” Celia said to me as I walked back in from the pharmacy. I forced the annoyance from my face. She’d starting asking me why I wasn’t in France at least three times a day, even after just going to the bathroom.

  “I’ve barely been gone an hour,” I told her. “The pharmacist reckons we are getting through these pills too quickly by the way.”

  “What does she know? I’ve never even met her.”

  I unpacked the painkillers into the cupboard, aware of Celia eyeing me from the couch. The thrill of ruining Saanvi had started to wear off by then. I was beginning to feel stuck again. Stuck in my house, stuck in this job. Now that I didn’t have Saanvi to follow, I had no reason
to go anywhere. I hadn’t left Lakeside for a whole two weeks, and the future was beginning to look terrifyingly long.

  “Hand me that bottle,” Celia said, pointing to a bottle of amber-colored sherry that was on the top shelf of the pantry.

  “I think that Nancy has put it up there so you can’t have it. You aren’t meant to mix it with your meds,” I told her. It was starting to get annoying to always have to be responsible. I’d never wanted Mum’s job, and somehow I’d ended up with it anyway.

  “Fuck it,” I said, and grabbed the sherry down and pulled two clean glasses out of the dishwasher.

  “Much better,” Celia said, and poured us two fingers each.

  I took a sip. It was syrupy and burnt my throat, but somehow made the dull ache that had been pulsing in my temples ease.

  “Ah!” said Celia, smacking her lips together. “That’s much better. Now, I’m not going to ask you why you are in one of your muddy moods again, because you are meant to be looking after me, not the other way around. I don’t have enough time left to be helping you out of a sulk.”

  I laughed and lay back. “You’re not planning on dying soon, are you?”

  “Not in the next month, if that helps. Long-term, I’m afraid I can’t make any promises.”

  “I think I’m going to have a major career crisis when it happens, so try to hold out as long as you can, alright?”

  Celia scoffed, sipped at her sherry, then spoke low. “When I was young you were only given three choices—nurse, teacher or secretary. There was a fourth choice too, of course. Still is.”

  “What was it?”

  “Deviant.”

  She let out one of her signature cackling laughs, and chugged the rest of her sherry.

  “What in hell are you still doing here anyway, Ava-babe?”

  “God, don’t ask me about Paris again. Please, I want to go. I do.”

  “I know you want me to tell you that life is short, but I won’t. It’s tediously long-winded. Only thing I bothered to stay around for are presents. Did you like my last one?”

  She reached for the sherry bottle again but I snatched it away from her in time.

  * * *

  When I got home the first thing I did was dig into the back of my closet. Underneath my winter coat and odd socks was Celia’s present; I’d never bothered to unwrap it. I ripped open the scrunched wrapping paper. Inside, it was filled with money. Twenty-dollar, fifty-dollar and hundred-dollar notes crammed tight.

  Part 5

  SEXUAL PROMISCUITY

  2014

  26

  It was just like in the movies. The streets were cobblestoned. The buildings were from another time. People’s breath rose above them in white clouds as they strode briskly past the huge brass statues of men on horseback and grand soldiers without even looking up. Cars honked, and pedestrians yelled, “Merde!” and “Qu’est-ce que tu fous?” as they walked straight into the oncoming traffic.

  The bluestone building had been quiet for the last hour. Now people poured from its doors. Some of the passersby did double takes. All of the people leaving the building were women. All of them were approximately five feet seven inches and sixty kilos. They had straight brown hair and were wearing blue jeans and plain white T-shirts under their assorted jackets.

  Among the different-shaped eyes, the different-sized noses, the varying skin colors, the moles, the blue eyes and the brown, was her. The one. Mel. Real and wholly from a dream all at once.

  She turned left and made for the Metro station. Her flat-soled boots clapping against each stair as she descended. The first step light and the second heavy, a lopsided rhythm, clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop. She slipped a thin white card into the machine and the gates opened for her.

  Her phone rang as the train arrived. She withdrew it from her bag and her face lit up. She stepped onto the train as she answered.

  “Hello?” Her voice reverberated around the half-full carriage. People spoke in low French, a couple kissed and giggled in the back.

  “Yeah, fine,” she said, her voice rising. “I was just at an audition...Good, I think. What about you?”

  An older man turned to her, but she didn’t notice. She remained standing, despite the surplus of empty seats, holding one of the handles from the upper rails, her body undulating with the train’s movement.

  “Tonight?...I’d love to! Coltrane?...Yeah, I think I know it. It’s on Rue Notre-Dame, right?...Alright, see you at eight.”

  She took her phone from her ear and grinned, looking around to see who had been listening.

  * * *

  Mel got off at Republique station. The crowd ebbed and flowed around her, turning her head into a bobbing buoy, disappearing and resurfacing. Across the public square where kids in puffy jackets chased pigeons. Past the boucherie on the corner, its window full of headless, gutted pigs, its smell of flesh. Down a narrow pathway, up a hill. And then, we were there. In the photograph I’d seen before. The one I’d spent so long staring at that I’d memorized every detail. The white facade, the windows like two gaping eye sockets. She took her keys from her bag and the air caught their jingle. She entered the house and was gone.

  I’d been so close on my walks with Celia. Even closer this past week, when I’d wandered the streets myself. Scarf around my head, ears stinging pink from the cold. Winter was different here. Back home it was drizzle and flapping wind; here it was ice and heavy white mist. My feet felt rigid from cold through the thin soles of my shoes; my nose was often numb. But I didn’t care. I was here. I was going to destroy Mel. She was the one who really mattered. If I could repay her, finally get even, I knew that I could move on. Then I would finally be free.

  27

  For twenty-seven hours I had waited in the dark. I had watched bad American comedies on the screen that was inches from my nose. I had contorted myself into every position I could think of on my seat, trying to find one that didn’t deepen the ache in my lower back. Eventually, I turned the screen off and sat in still silence, staring numbly out the window to the tiny dots of lights as we got closer and closer to our destination. Paris. I had imagined it so many times it had become like a dream place. In the black limbo of the plane, hovering above the world, it didn’t feel like we’d ever arrive anywhere. Like we were in a timeless, spaceless purgatory. Like this could just go on indefinitely.

  But at last, the lights flickered on. A ding sounded, and the seat belt sign turned orange. We began our descent. Within minutes, we were shuffling out into the arrivals terminal, all of us tousled and stinking. I stood in line at immigration, the straps of my backpack digging into my shoulders. Despite people speaking French all around me, it still didn’t seem real.

  When I grabbed my suitcase from the luggage conveyor, I noticed a group of policemen standing near one of the doors. Their guns were huge, almost as long as my forearm. I tried not to look at them as I passed. I walked through to the huge cavern of the airport. It looked like some kind of spacecraft, the roof a net of fluorescent lighting that made my eyes sting even more. It was all too bright.

  At the bottom of the escalator at the Metro, the woman in the small glass service booth glared at me.

  “Je peux vous aider?”

  “Oh, um.” I cleared my throat, I hadn’t used my voice since I’d left Melbourne and it sounded thick and rasping. “Sorry. English?”

  “Yes.” She raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Great. Thanks. Um, one to Republique station? Can I get one train there or do I need to swap?”

  “Gare du Nord, ten euro thirty,” she snapped.

  I dug through my backpack for my wallet and pulled out some notes for her. For some reason, her abruptness made me want to cry. I tried to tell myself it was just fatigue, just the weight of the bag on my back and the awkwardness of carrying the suitcase.

  As I sat on the train
into Paris, I stared out into the dark streets. It looked terrifying out there, dangerous. My stomach was cringing from the bad airplane food, my mouth was clammy and my skin was gummy with dried sweat. I wished violently I was still at home, in the safety of Lakeside. Wrapped up in the January warmth. I was sure that I’d made a terrible mistake coming here, that it was all going to be a disaster, that something awful might happen.

  After finally figuring out the trains and getting lost dragging my suitcase in the cold, I found my hostel. Outside, everything had been closed down and dark. Only a few bars were still open, drunks yelling words I didn’t understand. I’d kept my head down, the sound of my suitcase’s wheels against the pavement marking me as a tourist, a target.

  I entered the dim lights of the hostel, ears bitten from the chill, eyes watering, feeling conspicuous and stupid. The tattooed woman behind the reception desk had shaken her head at me when I’d begun talking in English. When I fumbled through my bag to find the computer printout of the reservation she’d looked at it for only a moment before handing me a silver key attached to a heavy piece of wood with the number seventeen on it. I had climbed the steep stairs, wincing as my suitcase banged loudly against each, and made it to the room. It was quiet and warm. There were three sets of bunks, only one bed empty. I didn’t care that this room was alien, that I didn’t even know the faces of the people I was sharing it with—I just wanted sleep. I tugged off my sticky jeans, pulled on the pyjama pants from my backpack and took my bra off from under my top. I burrowed into the clean sheets of the bed and could have groaned with bliss. Sleep pulled me under almost instantly.

  * * *

  I’d woken early the next day, the room still almost dark. A square of pale gray framed the blackout blinds. Pulling myself from the bed, I’d padded down the stairs. Passing the front desk, I’d smiled at the new girl who sat behind it; she smiled back. Then I pushed open the front doors, just to have a look.

  I can’t describe the feeling of that moment. Of standing out there, the cold going straight through my cotton pants, the air smelling different to anything else. The menacing foreignness of last night was like a bad dream. It wasn’t anything like that anymore.