Deleted Scenes for Lovers

by Tracey Slaughter

  She doesn’t tell her lover, when he rings, that she dreamed last night. She was packing her children’s lunchboxes. Tipping in layer after layer of slick dead birds. Pushing down the beaks, compressing the slimy fan of feathers, snap after tiny snap.

  You don’t like where they’re taking the lovers. They are handheld now. It’s unsettling. It makes them hard to follow. There is nowhere to rest in the close-ups. The skin spills sideways. Your sense of the room gets lost to each blink. The shake of the film tips you up, internalises everything; you watch them and feel cornered in your own pulse. There are sequences of doorways and fingertips and streetlights and everything jerks on the diagonal, rapid and silver on the screen, like mercury splashed from a thermometer so you can no longer get a reading of the heat. Nothing is accurate. There is a shot of a cobweb, a child’s blue sketch in crayon, strands on the dial of a machine. It could be an amplifier, but there is no soundtrack. Only footsteps, calling the unseen distance into place with their retreat. There’s a line of dialogue: he says his hands are just hardwired to touch her. But in the next frame his wife is mounted on him, and he is saying her name, and it’s the right name but he has to concentrate to say it, and you can see in the wife’s spine that she can hear that, the pressure it takes for him to focus his mouth on the syllables of her name. And so her orgasm looks lonely, looks solo. The ridges of the sadness she’s learnt in that moment run through the muscles of her back like breaking wings. The camera stares at her. And then the camera is on the floor, and figures pace in and out of its ankle-deep horizon. Until someone runs at it, and the soundtrack clatters, the film still spirals, the room the story is coming apart in swings, kicked across the surface of more than two lives.

  Everything is overexposed. Fruit is shrinking on a chrome plate. Someone packs a yellow suitcase with clothes. The child’s blue sketch has pain in the strokes of the crayon and is shown pinned. Something cowardly and handwritten flutters from a fridge.

  He takes her out. It is like a date. He arranges someone to look after the children. So the he in this sentence is her husband: it’s also a hard change for her to make. It is not her husband whose face she sees, whose skin she tastes, when her body thinks the word him.

  But he does the driving. They drive to the ocean. The roads here bend and are narrow. They turn dark and loose with stones. The towns are all closed-up sheds with signs that read Library and Homekill Butcher. The houses are alone and leaning in the fields, flaking two-room shells with too many summers in the walls. She turns the dial to find something she can sing to, but her voice won’t fit, so they listen to AM, men agreeing with other men who call in middle-aged tones to tolerate nothing. He drives, and she knows something is off when he agrees to pull over at a roadside gallery. Her husband always likes to drive straight, unbroken, from beginning to end. He waits in the car while she walks round the weathered barn and stares at a recycled cathedral window. It has a tall, sharp arch she has to drop her head back to see. It is luminous and dizzying. She feels it split her face into unholy stains.

  The end of the coast road has a sign. It outlines rules for leaving the shore, so they don’t read it. They use it to hold their towels and tuck their shoes in its shade. They walk and feel the chill collapse of the beach, the slippage of unseen sticks and stones. It’s a short walk, but it punctures their feet. They don’t need to go any further.

  He says nothing until they are sitting in a small, rough café. He has not bought them much, because they don’t like what’s waiting under muslin in the plastic cabinet. Everything looks dried at the seams. Even the meat and the cream are dark along the rim and curled. So they don’t eat. But he pauses over coffee and says the words: I am your husband. And she knows everything that’s wrong just by how he says it, part ultimatum, part plea. But she tries to fend the knowing off. A seagull stalks on the railing near them, looking mean and seed-eyed and wounded. She picks up the cup that she bought at the gallery, where they would never have stopped if she were faithful. It is porous and coarse and she dips her face into it and breathes and tells him, This smells exactly, it smells like the road on a summer day before the rain gives … She is going to say, way, gives way. But her husband has let go of his own cup and put his hands down flat on the table. He is crying before she ever gets to the way at the end of the sentence.

  On the drive back she is closer to the sea so the road feels even thinner. Every summer at least two cars slip down onto the rocks beneath. There is always one rescue, an image in the paper of somebody who was saved, a headline about the heroism of a stranger who climbed down and pried out victims. And there is always one whose drift off the edge seems jagged and deliberate.

  It is hard to take sides.

  They are sitting in a car in a neighbourhood where nothing good happens. They are parked up, dead-end. They are talking. But you can hear there’s no real hope in their voices that talk will lead them out of here. It is early, the morning is only half-formed, they have borrowed these streets from other people’s lives. Something about the way they have parked looks seedy, unplanned, like they’ve woken up liquored, awry with the curb, memory off-cue. They could be two strangers coming around in a car with no recall, half-cut and wan. The street is calm, low-decile and couldn’t give a shit either way. Through the passenger window there is a woman mowing her front lawn. She is old and thin and wearing a polyester nightgown and gumboots. The straps are frilly apricot and match the wrinkles of her throat and breasts. Through the driver window there’s a family who have hauled their belongings from the state house onto the grass. All the doors and windows on the state house are open. There are three or four generations squatting in the sun with objects dragged between them: a red towel, a blue-green lampshade, a curtain of plastic flowers, a wire heater. They are not talking. They are blinking and waiting, and letting a brown baby crawl. And topple. And suck. Only the lovers are talking. There should be dialogue here. But I don’t know what to tell you. They’re not talking with any belief. They are not bothering to shake their heads. He is looking through the echo of his own eyes in the rearview mirror, refusing to run. She is trailing her hand on the dry rim of window, she is blotching the light. >>X2. He is turning the circle on his open ring-hand. He is draining the battery with a useless foot on the brake. >>X2 X2. She is staring at a pair of sneakers, bound and dangling from a powerline, flagging, half-mast. >>X2. He is tapping out a cigarette like it will be therapeutic, he is slamming it back in the glovebox. There is dialogue again: Fill it in. With her index finger she is pushing hard at her breastbone. They are both finding it hard to breathe. The knowledge of everyone they’re about to hurt is not an easy element to breathe in. They’re the lovers. You can blame them now, if you want to. That’s your choice: this is the director’s cut.

  go home, stay home

  You get to the age when you start to leave parties separately: that’s when the trouble starts, the drift.

  The drift: she stands at the door looking back for her husband, and feels it, with the rhythm of the baby’s breath gluey at her neck, the crinkle of mucus she can hear in the tiny lungs … But no, the kid’s out to it, angelically slumped, cheeks rough with heat, drool curled through the collared wool.

  She should stay. Stay. There’s nothing wrong with the baby.

  There’s nothing wrong. There’s everything.

  She stands at the door, searches for her husband, makes him out at angles through the smog and thump of dance, bodies groggy with the soundtrack, the slither of dress. It’s a work do. All the other women here work, and even now, at the party, they’re still working, working themselves away from their kids, working the free booze into their glasses, working their hips through the calculated gloss of their get-ups, working their way round the room … towards her husband.

  She stands at the door, looking back at the party she’s about to leave. First.

  She knows she’s not really the one leaving. She’s the one left.

  Once at a party he burnt down a garde
n shed. Doesn’t know how it started but remembers the puncture of his fist, slow-motion and crisp, through the wall, then popping his hand back out from a socket of fibres. He’d been wearing a ring when his fist went in, a silver band his first long-term girlfriend had given him, so he’d started to thumb off chunks of the hole, grope his hand round in the gash of plaster. He remembers feeling the whole shed creaking on his forearm, as if all its slats were going to bust and engulf him, old planks wither and suck him in. So he stepped back, gave it another bash, a crunch with his boot, and before he knew it a line of blokes joined in, bottling and battering the slanted old structure, taking to it with roars. They were all thoroughly lagered and what have you; all sorts of chemical party snacks had done the rounds by then. But it didn’t seem so much a pharmaceutical tantrum as a cosmic one. Something animal. They thrashed the shed to the ground in a kind of trance. Some hot old energy splattered through their blood as they hacked, derailing panels in spurts of curse and dust. None of the sheilas had joined in. They’d stood back: he remembers a silhouette of thin girls grouped under a washline, crooked wires cut across a dry-ice moon. They’d all been standing, arms poked at right angles, aimlessly holding the booze their men left behind.

  Everything was rented in those days. They were all young and no one owned anything. They couldn’t have given a shit when the old hut dropped right down on the grass. It came as a bit of an anti-climax in fact, after their scrum, how madly they’d stuck into it. The final flop, the last timbers whinging and shuffling, the slush of tin, were sort of feeble. The boys kicked around for a bit, puffing, feeling gutted. But then somebody, maybe it was him, had suggested they might stand a chance of getting it past the landlord if it looked like it had somehow caught alight. It was the kind of city where things burnt down, a row of streets just waiting for an accident. And the shed was chocker with weird old cans of poison and paint. So they’d fished out a few and set about torching it. The boys got a second wind waving the tins, coils of kero and toxic whatnot, pissing wild into the sky, bottles tagged with flame and bombed at the carcass with howling run-ups through the garden. They sang in raucous gulps, any crap they could think of, just to hear the words explode, an anthem of destruction. The fire made them operatic. He’d never heard his voice pump out the way it did that night, not before or after. The trash crawled and dissolved in the flame and sang its own chorus.

  When the girls came close he managed to get his arm around a good one. She was a ripe one-nighter with a large arse packed under silvery jeans and a healthy portion of boob that was already turning lax and motherly. He couldn’t recall her name but he remembered that: the texture of the tit he’d got his hand around, glossy and young when she lay back and let him gum its lustre in the open moonlight, but when she rolled to pull him towards her, tugging unhappily with signs of how the skin was going to give. Couples teamed up like this as the fire dropped and glowed, some matched by desire, some by default. The ones who just paired up with a shrug got stuck into each other faster, got busy humping under the old coats or sleeping bags that’d been dragged out, didn’t bother wasting time criss-crossing whispers and limbs, tracing eyelids in awe through the firelight. Not that he was the kind to go boo-hooing because no girl unknotted his long hair or stared at the ridge of his jawbone through that foreground of flame. He’d proven that he wasn’t that type, after all, he’d never had a girlfriend do that to him, or one he’d done it to, and not so much later he’d married, to be honest, by far the solidest shag he’d had, a girl with a monumental lower-half and a rigorous, strapping attitude to life both in and out of the sack. And he could not complain: she was the go-ahead type, productive, full of get-go. A model of old-fashioned drive, his dad had clucked and nodded his head. Without much input from him, really, a household, packed with enduring blocks of furniture and placid kids in bunks, had just seemed to assemble itself around her and thrive. It wouldn’t be fair of him to make a complaint. Biologically, practically, she was a sound partner, good value. The one thing he could say, though, was that sometimes, through no fault of his own, he’d be standing in the clean kitchen opposite her, that dull, strict look of habit in her gaze, and it was all he could do not to walk right out.

  Lately there had even been once or twice that he was not fussed when she’d clambered on top of him, the stronghold of her lower-half grappling him from all sides. Even then she’d been convinced old-fashioned drive could sort things out, rubbing him, tersely, the right way with serviceable kisses.

  Not that any of this had bothered him too much, outright. It hadn’t been a big issue. Not until tonight. But tonight, there was a new woman here, at the party, and just looking at her had jarred him, caused him alarm. He’d gone out and crouched on a kid’s plastic seat by the barbecue, made a hard effort not to look for her again. But she seemed to be drifting the party, trembling with the load of a tiny, over-wrapped kid, not catching anybody’s notice or managing to fit herself into any conversation. She hovered alongside groups, giving wan little grins as if she was joining in, shifting the burden of the baby with shivers that gave away how she was feeling, a kind of loneliness transmitted through her thin grip that he’d never seen when his capable wife grabbed their children, tidied and tucked them in. And then, as he watched, a guy from the last group actually sidelined her, stepped across her to crack a joke, and without even knowing it, pushed her out with the brawny wall of his back. And she stood there for a moment, dazed, with a quivering smile still on her face, staring at the man’s thick shoulder as he shoved his drink in a punchline across the group, then she stared down into the blankets she carried, down, as if something life or death would happen in there.

  She’d looked around for a way out through the bodies as if the house were on fire.

  And that move—flinging her head around, with her hair coursing down from the fretwork of hopeless clips, and the neck of her dress yanked aslant with the baby so he could see the echoes of blue veins making their descent—that move had started it. Not long ago, he’d thought, at a party, I knocked something down. I burnt a place right down to zero.

  When Rigg was a kid, his mother called a party a hooley. The street he’d grown up on was known for hoolies, and his house, smack in the centre of the cul-de-sac, was hooley headquarters: once in a while the gang would troop round to another place and try to stage a bash there, but it always fizzled, and everyone would drift back to their pad, sometimes on the same night, adults with their plastic goblets and their hair in splurges and their sexy gibberish and their tendency to snuggle together vomiting or pashing or squabbling on the kerbside, skipping back down or up to his house, thudding into each other with gropes and sways as they tripped around looking for the key. Usually it would take a kid—from the line of kids that had tramped back up the road behind them, rambling along, still dozy in PJs or jousting in their sleeping bags, racing them in wriggles up the grass verge, sometimes whooping, sometimes listening just to the silver soundpattern of their haul, their hiss—to fish the key out from its hiding spot or slither up to some high window and let the tribe in. Then the hooley would restart, a junction of drunk bodies, trashed and succulent through all the rooms, leftovers plucked from the fridge, smoke oozing and poised between mouths, guitars slashed and brushed, kids clumping in corners, on beanbags, and blinking in time to the song and puke and politics and lunacy as they burst and faded, rose and broke back out. He loved drifting in and out of half-sleep to that, as a kid, sprawling in the hazy liquidity of hooley nights, the rumbling of joy through the walls of the overrun house. He’d give anything to sleep to that soundtrack again: here, at this party, he stares at the couch, in fact, and finds himself longing to curl up and nap with the buzz of the adult world cupping his head, humming him to sleep with a rugged, sleazy, irresponsible symphony he has no part in.

  None.

  Nothing the adult world has to offer can take him back to that state, let him freefall, to bliss, against a background of wildness like that. Here he is, in hard
fact, the Boss Man at a party, the Big Rigg, and everything he does, what he wears, what he says, what he drinks, is a part of that. He took the precaution of getting himself high before he came but that does nothing to excuse him from his role. And just now, seconds ago, he took the liberty of letting himself into the loo while the hostess was still wiping, he took the chance of pinning her back on the seat and rummaging under her skirt, while she squirmed and nestled and pulsed out a little more urine onto his cuff. But even before he withdrew his fingers he knew it wasn’t enough. Because he still has to walk out to the party, to his part, stand around, making chat, trading industry pointers, talking profiles, portfolios, means, percentiles, projected returns, expedients, fuel injections and miles to the fucking tank.

  His mother, if she walked into this room, this party, if she stood here barefoot and bombed in her rustling dress, with her unhooked pouches of hippy breast and her clinking beaded hair, would not know who he fucking was.

  And here he is, having judged her, somehow, having left her in every step he took, to study, to exceed, to invest, to achieve, to outclass, to possess, here he is, and he’d give anything to walk back out now on his rank, his code, his successful model and find a world of dropouts, a loungeful of stoned, fondling, amoral lovers and lie down on some handmade rug, let their laziness bury him.

  Derek goes out to the garage for the ice. Just a plastic bag of ice is all he wants. He’s not thinking of much else, except maybe dumb things like how the metal on the drive reminds him of how he used to have to put the milk bottles out as a kid, six bottles in a crate that had a rust-milk-rubber smell, a bloody long hike up the back drive, maybe a whole K freezing in the sheep-shitty dusk, and he used to have to take a big hunk of batten along with him to fend off the fucking mad ram his father had trained to bowl everyone. How he loved to whack its wild head for a six, back up and wait for it to bolt, then swoop the batten down and listen for the crack, which never finished it off but made its lizard-eyes flicker, its hooves waggle, cartoonish in the half-dark. What a mean little shit he must have been, but then his father hadn’t been much better, egging the beast on to tackle everyone, as if there weren’t enough backhands going round … How does he start thinking that, just walking down a stone drive, slipping out from a party to fetch ice?