Deleted Scenes for Lovers

by Tracey Slaughter

  Did he volunteer to go out (Hey, not a problem), or did he get sent (You couldn’t be a sweetie, could you)? Derek doesn’t know, but he knows his way round, knows his way out back to the big chest freezer in the workshop; he’s the kind of guy that does this helpful stuff: picks up, pitches in, drops off, lights up, barbecues, gets thanked with sexless cheeky pinches (women) or with clobbers on his broad back (men). Even in the mirror he finds himself offering his copy a chubby, charitable smile, clucking at his image in a No worries mate way, amenable and keen, full of blokeish utility. He’s the designated stand-up guy, the shirt-off-your-back type. Even now, crunching along the drive, he gets a boost just thinking through the grins and Onya mate pats which will greet him when he lugs the ice in. He plans how he can carry it to best effect, heaving it over his shoulder like something he gunned down in the night, a hero.

  But the garage door is ajar when he gets there. He freezes, peers in. There’s a fusion inside of knees and tongues and T-shirts, a belt half-unhinged from shucked denims and flapping at the freezer with a sequence of small, metal pings. They’re young, a couple of teens no one’s noticed for hours now, rubbing at each other, hands crowding under sweaty seams, getting each other to the urgent stage. Or maybe, just he is: she seems fevered but also a little shy, perched on the freezer lid, her rump flinching and scant in the boy’s hand, him beginning to pester a bit, cramming forward with a stubborn rhythm, his talk as he kneads her, teasing but hazardous.

  At the door, Derek thinks for a minute he should clear his throat, break it up, step in. But the thought doesn’t reach the gap in his gut that has already made him creep closer, stare harder.

  Then she does say no, with a kick at the freezer. The boy kicks out after her.

  ‘Anyway, you’ve got a girlfriend,’ she says, plucking her T-shirt down.

  ‘I’ll dump her.’

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘No shit. I’m telling you.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You’re halfway fucking there.’

  ‘Yeah, but like, I don’t want a baby.’

  The word baby warps in the cool of the garage, and you can tell the boy doesn’t take to the echo of it. Even Derek feels dislike: the scrawny woman he’s seen walking round with a baby, earlier, looks like she’s set to pass out under its weight. He’s got no time for women that fold up so pitifully, that trail around with kids like they’re dazed, fatigued. His mother had been one like that, always wandering, dreary, staring at her house-load of undone tasks as if she were disabled.

  ‘Just a blow, then,’ the boy says. He smirks at the compromise.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You give me a blow, and I’ll dump her. Straight up.’

  Maybe he would’ve, or not. But the girl isn’t gambling. She pokes a hand round in a cast-off jacket, produces a phone.

  ‘What’s her number then?’

  He tells it, scraping his sneaker at the grille which is rusting at the base of the freezer. She taps, rapid, tilts it to her head, connects, stays silent, passes him the cell, and he speaks into it, sure of himself, brutal. He moves with the phone, scuffing, a language of cool, his eyebrows flicking as he grunts. He’s so offhand he even cracks a funny.

  From the door Derek doesn’t watch the girl’s face for long. But it’s not blank for the second that he does and he thinks he can feel the hot hole in her belly that has drained all the blood from her face, that makes her close her eyes, stoop. Still, she gets on with it, bucks herself up, fakes the sluttish. She’s crouched before the call is even finished. The boy’s last splutter of breaking up into the phone is hoarse, hysterical, on the verge of come.

  Derek would imagine that it’s not the best blow in the world. But he’s not sure he ever really got one so good himself. And there’s so much triumph in the boy’s face, so much cocky ecstasy, he looks so smug as he spasms, that Derek can’t cope.

  There’s a stack of timber by the garage door. There always is at these lifestyle blocks, old tongue-in-groove, joists, fluted verandah rails. Take him round any of these work dos and Derek’ll know where they are: he’s the guy they always rope in, the hub of any DIY off-day, handy, eager to muck in, whip up smoko, lend tools, forget to grumble when they get buggered or mislaid. Whatya reckon, Derek, mate, kauri, matai? He stares down at the demo planks, the kids still hurting through the corner of his eye, through the chink of the door.

  He would like to pick out a tidy little length of four by two, he would like to stride, yes, stride in, hearing the metal door screech as he swings, he would like to organise the wood in tosses through a loose fist, chuckling, until he’s scared the two of em white and shitless, until he’s got the grip of a lifetime, he’d like to hoist the thing up two-handed and feel the drag, the resistance, the air blast up at all his arm-muscle as the batten drops.

  But he’s Derek.

  In real terms, Derek’s the sort of bloke who worries about the looks he’s going to earn if he goes back into the party without the bloody ice.

  Jackie didn’t get off the bus. This is what amazes her, what she carries around the party, this thought, uncertainly shiny, like her drink.

  She could’ve got off. She could’ve yelled, could’ve struggled from her seat, could’ve clawed at the bell, torn down the whole string if she’d wanted, could’ve sprinted the aisle with the bell-cord whipping from her hand and made a scene, could’ve strangled the driver if he didn’t pull over, flip the door and say Get out then, you mad bitch. Isn’t that what she could’ve done? Would’ve done once?

  Yes. Once.

  Once, she would have said that to see him like that, walking down a street in the middle of a city past exactly her stop, was Fate. The odds, the chances, the random criss-cross of events that had to splice to bring them both to that same time and turning, you couldn’t possibly calculate. Only Destiny, once, she would have been sure, could drive such an equation; when Jackie was a teenager, x always equalled the meant-to-be of true star-tangled love.

  She didn’t recognise him at first—perhaps that was the problem. He didn’t look like he used to: it looked like the basic outline of him, but he was missing something, an attitude, an angle of cunning, a kind of syncopation, horny and fun like the rhythm of back-seat sex, which always used to be there in his walk, shoulders poked back, grin sleazy, eyebrows in on some big cosmic joke. The personalised shrug of his teenage walk, with its blend of sloppy I-don’t-give-a-toss outlook and promise of a muscly fuck-beat in it: that had gone. It was his prototype, sure, his model, she could see walking up the street as her bus passed her stop, but it was in a suit, and its steps were regular. The rebel come-on, the dirty-cute shove of the ribcage taking on the world, the shock of gritty hair: all that was gone. He didn’t even swing his briefcase—he just seemed to guide it smoothly down the street, keeping it level beside his groomed suit. His face looked concave with monotony. His balding head, shining back the chrome of the shop-fronts, made her somehow think the word high-rise.

  No doubt he was successful. So maybe that was why she didn’t get off. She was hardly a success now, was she? Unkempt kindy-mother, dangling a nappy bag from part-time work to part-time uni, a plastic pod of vege slush already burst on her philosophy book, Nietzsche glugged with pumpkin, last night’s half-hearted make-up a decomposing yellow round her chin and glittering blue in her eye-wrinkles; she looked, in fact, like van Gogh’s self-portrait only without the goatee and with her kid’s ladybird scrunchy tied in desperation up into her smelly trail of hair. She was hardly going to knock him dead, was she, if she jumped out down the bus-steps at him now, such a slouch, no one’s yummy-mummy, no one’s MILF, but a kind of waste product of domestic chaos, a pile of whatever was left over from the morning’s scramble to get-kids-packed-and-out-the-door. But she didn’t have the kids now: she couldn’t use them as an excuse. They weren’t the reason she didn’t stop, didn’t wave out. She’d already dropped them off, at sch
ool, at playcentre. She was alone, she could’ve gotten off. Although, maybe, they were with her in habit, in a general weary principle of shortcuts and whatevers. Slack Jack, her husband called her. She didn’t carry a briefcase, just the woman’s version of it: the middle-aged, motherly, too-hard basket.

  That was all true. But it was also more than that. And somehow, the more-than-that had made her get dressed up tonight, slide her body, still lithe, into the slinkiest sheath she could find wedged in plastic at the back of the cupboard, weave herself through the party with a bare arm waving a few too many topped-up gins, sexily colliding with the guests, tilting her frosted face in the chatting groups with a flushed, potent look, as if she might suddenly shout, spin, strip, let her body show off the lovely freed-up thumping of its blood, the giddy knowledge of no longer being in love …

  No longer in love with the boy she thought of as her one-and-only, her true-and-for-all-time, madly-deeply-despite-her-marriage-and-three-kids, miserable, slavish love.

  He was now so dull she could see him walking down a street and feel him bore her from a distance. Bore her so badly she sat, blank and yawning, in her seat and did not even bother to think about getting off the bus.

  It is possible to say it.

  The doctor had said it, several times, and nothing happened to the muscles of his face as she heard it, that word, clipped onto the others, simply lined up with other words, stapled into logical, colourless monotone, pronounced, repeated by the doctor’s accomplished mouth. He has no lips, Monica’s doctor (she’d once joked to her husband—ex-husband—that this seemed respectable for a gynaecologist), just a pair of dry stripes where the words exit, each one assembled like the next. Yes, once she’d quipped to her husband (ex), fresh from a probing check-up, that her doctor’s lack of any pert, flushed pout brought a balance to their intercourse. But sitting in his office this afternoon … oh, the joke was on her today, in her, wasn’t it, and even more so because now she had no husband to tell. She studied the doctor’s watertight, linear mouth, working blandly through the contents of his notepad. Without underlining or pausing. Not even for effect.

  So, it is possible to say it. That word.

  She tries, in the kitchen, at the party, to say it to someone, to say it to one of the women as they twist the trays of ice and clunk them in the buckets. She tries, as more women arrive and sing out offers of a hand, as together they ring little gourmet dobs of finger food around the trays, squelch out dips and spray bowls with clattering chips to get rid of the kids. She comes close, the gulps of gin bringing her closer, but the word only skims off her eyelids, past her tight mouth. She shakes her bracelets down, pats hard at the cup of her bra and waves away questions. The women laugh back, relieved to see her giggling off whatever-it-is, flicking at mascara that’s dripped along her eyes, left a hologram of lashes: none of the women are here for dramas, or at least, only dramas of their own making, slinky scrums forming as they weave through the talkers on the dancefloor, tongues flirting around a glass, just enough to leave a horny buzz but avoid a husband cutting in. She knows this. So she yells out the window to the men round the barbecue, tosses them loaves of buttered bread, makes a frisbee of the plastic plates, dumbbells from the Watties cans. When someone totes in a gift basket, full of luxury pre-wrapped thank yous for hosting the do, she undoes the silver raffia bow, stakes it in her hair. She bellows that the music needs cranking up, she finishes dressing the plates with a groove around the kitchen.

  It is not possible to shake your thing, to circulate, gossip, knock back gins, while saying that word.

  But she says it later, says it and says it, squatting on the loo, wiping herself, still sleek with the doctor’s gel. She drops her head down and sees it, the doctor’s clear emulsion drizzling from her in a string. She puts her palm against the warmth of herself. Skin laps at her wedding ring. The word, the word is. Muscle moulds to her hand as she sobs.

  Then he comes in, blunders, with his zip already open, overbalances to see her on the seat, drops to his knees, without really looking, and his hands replace hers. He’s the boss man, the top man, doesn’t notice, or care, whose hands he’s knocking aside, just knows where his own are driving. Soon he’ll be signing off on her application for sick leave, he’ll be giving her company clearance to crawl off officially and die, he’ll be authorising, okaying that, he will manage it, as if transferring her to suffering is just another relocation, death just a different department. But for now she stares up at his stoned grin, kneads down on his knuckles, braces her stilettos on the lino, grafts onto his hand. He extracts it, shakes, strokes one of her earrings for a moment, then leaves.

  She leans her head on the wall and says it. She feels it move in her mouth the way it’s moved in her body, swallowing, spreading. Eating every other word inside her head.

  He had the kind of wife no one remembered.

  Not her face, not her name.

  You could see it in the bored haze of everyone’s hellos. The tensionless smiles and handshakes. They seemed to get duller as Stirling led her round the room. And you recall my wife? Oh yes of course: blank nods, blah-blah monotones. Flimsy grips, glances past her hairdo at the wallpaper. Weary displays of teeth, interest-free.

  He remembered girls he’d had at school, how he’d lent his first XV jersey to them, the chosen ones, how they’d strutted up hallways, anointed by him, or arranged themselves at lunchtime along the wooden seats, uniform skirts slashed way past regulations, bald thighs shining in big, fresh chunks and the crest of his jersey a tangled gold star on one tit, like a stamp to show he’d wrapped his sports-hero hand round it: Stirling (head boy, first XV, just missed dux, with Toyota hatchback) Was Here.

  But apart from the show of it, Stirling hadn’t ever really liked that kind of girl. Permed, flashy, unshrinking in their slutted-up uniforms, webby black bras like splashes of Coke under their shirts.

  His wife, overall, had seemed a much better option. She wore rolled socks in nice lace-ups all year, not twinked-over romans, and she smelled of talcum, sammies of luncheon meat, fabric softener, chapel.

  But no one remembers her.

  Half the time, more, if he’s honest, that includes him.

  And tonight, on the way here, they’d stopped at a one-way bridge and there’d been a roadside sign. Home-painted, half-arsed on warped Gib, hanging by a nail: Greenhill High School Centenary, it read. Beside him, his wife had given a small woof of laughter, one or two follow-up talcumy puffs.

  For a minute, she said, I thought it read High School Cemetery.

  No one, he realised, would remember her next time either.

  Stoned, Blake lies back in the paddock, gapes at the veering of stars. What the fuck is it with him tonight? It’s the farmhouse feel of the place—might be a lifestyle block, but it still gave off that cabbage-tree, offal-pit, flannelette feel, still had the sound of windblown fence wire you could taste, that chilled tin tone that hummed along your childhood teeth. And the dark was the real dark, the dark of the farm he grew up on, homekill freezer-lid dark, that strung-up meaty blackness he’d always held his kid-breath to get through, praying that he never felt the veiny punch-bag knock, the fatty kiss as he shivered past the creaking sides of meat. Now it didn’t get to him so much, of course, as a grown-up. Just that tonight he’d rolled one too many, had too many workmates turn down a joint, look shocked at the offer, look like they might want to make a fucking memo of it, inform the boss (apart from the fact that he looks totalled as well). Blake’d grinned, shrugged, woven off: uptight blokes turned to speak to the women beside them like they wanted to dictate a formal fucking warning. He’d polished the stash off himself. First he’d lost feel of his limbs in the boozy, rocked room, so his torso had bobbed around like something in a trough. Then his spine had zinged into his head, rolled up into his skull with a final stinging flick like his dad’s old don’t-fucking-touch-it metal tape measure. He was blessed he’d even made it out the swinging room. Coming round, helicopter style, in a
paddock, even conked out like this, on black sheep jellybeans of shit, could be counted as lucky, could be counted like the big bolts of star that stopped the frozen sky-lid from locking on his head with a whack.

  Yep, it was the farmhouse feel that did it. The drench-gravel-dahlia-twostroke-creek smell: they couldn’t lifestyle block that out, couldn’t subdivide and run the ride-on mower over it. It made him think of her. It made him take too many hits, and think her back in, think her back through the green bedroom door at the edge of his skull where she smiled a half-girl, half-ghoul smile and slid the yellow light out with a cracked liquid click.

  The babysitter. Tucking him in. Tucking him too long in.

  He could only half remember. And that half was mixed. So she sat on the bed, just the nice girl minding him at milking time, as if she would tell him a story—and she sat on the bed, as if she were the monster from that story herself. He remembered the thickness of her big, blunt half-adult teeth pulled into a smile of pure loneliness. The loneliness of all those farms, packed into clammy bulk around her singlet, bicep, chin. There was no one else but the two of them and miles of outside hissing fenceline. He could feel the warm, heavy nowhereness of her, dwelling, dwelling on the end of his bed. He could feel the warm wet burden of her eyes, like a cow down and doomed in the drizzle of barn light.