Deleted Scenes for Lovers

by Tracey Slaughter

  He could half remember a friendliness for the hand she put under the sheets, a recognition, her mouth on his a sob of sour comfort. And he could half-remember the heat of his stomach rolling a cry hard up into itself. Nights curled round the bad dream of her, like the pumping acid pod of an appendix.

  He’s way, way stoned.

  Nah, it was too long. He was too small for that kiss.

  He’s lonely, lonely, stoned. He wonders if he’s making her up, that girl, lumbering over from the next-door property, her old cords garnished with the loose slime of grass and her hair in stumpy plaits. But if it isn’t real, his insides shouldn’t feel … feel gristly as the carcass his father would slip the good butcher knife down, in one gliding hack. If she’s real, he misses her, hates her, misses her, however that works. He never, and always, understood. Suppose at least he had her, if she was real: other little kids at milking got tied in their beds, his mum and dad had said. For safety. That’s how they did it round their parts.

  It’s the farmhouse feel. The nothing-else-ever vacancy of the place. Some party, some fucking do, yahoo. Back-paddock freezer-door dark. Stars and animals swinging. And the whole fuselage of the sky about to drop down on you.

  She’s a hard woman. Ian can’t take his eyes from the rod of her collarbone, steely under silk-strings, and even her cigarette shines hard as bone in the outdoor light. She breathes long lashes of smoke, sneers, angles. Brackets of bone rub the dress’s surface: he hears static. Everything she does implies, leads: her sharp tongue-tip, the vapour of ribs along the sheath, the teeth letting out their smooth nicotine shiver.

  It seems to have been decided that they’ll disappear and fuck some time. It’s a done deal. It’s some contract they made in the spill of drink-dance, in bumping with a laugh through the ranchslider, the blur of lighting up. His wife has gone; her husband’s had a skinful and is trampling solo to old disco tracks, couch waiting to catch him, comatose for keeps. So Ian’s just a few cigarettes away. From shoving that fabric upward, thumbing at that sleek bone, hoping she’s tight enough to sprain him.

  But he thinks he should say something. Should talk to her, before.

  A teen silhouette shrugs over the lawn in front of them, moves with a thrum out through the fence.

  ‘I reckon … I thought the 30s would be different,’ he finds himself muttering. ‘I thought I’d be, I don’t know, looking back and feeling … somehow wise. Like here tonight, seeing these teenagers. I thought I’d be all like, If only I’d known then what I know now.’

  She’s a hard woman, exhales a hover of smoke. Her mouth looks leathery. There’s something bitter, sweating through the skintight of her metallic dress. Her eyes are an empty glass.

  ‘If only I felt now what I felt then,’ she says. ‘That’s more fucking like it.’

  Somehow Sonia finds herself rubber-gloved, scraping the plates into a rubbish bag. Gown bunched just-a-bit into her undies so the hem doesn’t dangle into the mulch. A plastic peg in her hair to stop it sweating into weeds around her face.

  Her face in its Maybelline leftovers. Crikey, what a hoot. She catches sight of it, doughy and dun in the oven door. Lippy slithered into wrinkles and blue syrup stuck in ducts. What a real hoot she is.

  Ah well, no sense moping. She belongs in the kitchen, in the guts of a party, on the run-up or the clean-up. That’s who she is. She’s a vending machine of a woman, or one of them big squeaky trolleys, kitted out with clean towels and bleaches.

  In herself, though, she doesn’t scrub up well.

  Turns out she’s not the only one, either. Another woman wanders in, semi-grins, sets about gladwrapping, jamming the washer tray full. Her frock’s an eyesore, too, a lolly-coloured flop like something the shop spat out half-chewed. Big wombly bosom, asymmetrical, a tea-towel smell wafting out from its sides. Still, it’s something, not to be the only one. Something to have a sort of mate. Once they’ve had a wipe round they share a dish of tidbits that won’t fit in the fridge, smirk at each other with grease, the companionable sludge of pastry along their teeth.

  A thick dusk, ripe and silent as tree roots, trickles towards them over the paddocks. They stop on the lino, in the last block of honey the light leaves, and sway with it, nearing touch. Side by side, the bowls of their breasts almost slope to each other, knock, damp with love.

  He’s going to take her home, because how could he not, when she comes out to sit on the deck and smiles at him, such a feeble smile, her upper lip rising so palely, it cuts him to bits. He’s a dismal flirt so doesn’t try it. Just hunches where he is, on a plastic kid’s chair, and watches her, nudging about the baby. Watches, looks off, swallows, stares again. It’s red-hot and hellish—all the blood in his torso, slowly detonating.

  ‘I think there’s something wrong,’ she finally says, not so much to him as the dark along the decking. Her voice isn’t sweet, but even so he gets a rush from it. There’s the sound of a brink in it, a shiver, breaking-point.

  ‘Bubs?’ he says. ‘Nah. Look’s KO’d to me. You want to leave them while they’re kipping. Take a break from worrying.’

  ‘No. I feel it. You see?’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘I know he’s asleep. But … I think there’s something wrong with him. I should get him home.’

  ‘Give it a bit, eh? You don’t want to bail too soon. The hard bit’s getting them off to sleep. And that’s done.’

  He’s never had to give comfort like this, to reassure anyone: his durable wife never needs it. There’s so much contentment in it, he feels like extra stars have cropped up above them, stars as cheap and breakable and surplus as the clips achieving nothing in the shambles of her hair. The plastic cup starts to crack in the compassion of his grip. He reaches out and pats a little friendly drum riff on the barbecue. Through the grate the smell of char tingles. Love relaxes in the thump of his hand and he longs to stretch it out.

  But she doesn’t pick up on the solace of it. Fumbling, sober, she knocks the kid awake. Fist-sized, the face wails out from its woollen stranglehold. She starts to scrabble at the neck of her dress, as if she might haul a breast up from it, then blinks across at him, eyes wet.

  ‘I put this dress on,’ she shakes her head, ‘without thinking of how … It was my first time out since … Oh god, I’m an idiot. It does up at the back.’

  So this is how he gets up and goes over to her, how he scrapes aside hair from the apex of her back, how he feels the tender hunk of bone there, buried in the thinness, the size of a grenade, how he thumbs around the gauzy neck for the zip, almost pierces the dress as he tries to steer it downward. And this is how one side of her body almost slips right into his hands, outside the oblivious house with its packed thudding of half-cut dance, its lonely buzz of prattle and boozy clink. This is how he finds himself bending towards the shoulderblade that rises, that flinches, wing-like in the chill, a structure his hand could crush, that almost meets his lips. Almost: he feels heat run along his teeth, the sting of almost. In half-light he makes out a birthmark on her shoulder: as he pulls away the shape of it blots his lids.

  A rough guide to the rest of the night might go like this, although he hardly remembers: she asks for the dress to be done up again, thanks him, backs into the party to mutter to her husband that she needs to leave, can’t feed the baby, has to go home. But the baby has dropped to sleep again; her husband tries to woo, distract, bully, then snaps, slaps the keys at her. She walks to the door, turns, watches her husband for a minute. He shakes his head, sulks, flanked by a trio of women who soothe as he grizzles, gulping his next drink.

  Stepping in from the deck he clears it with the husband: No worries mate, I’ll take her, nah, some women lose it after kids, eh, not a prob, no biggy. It’s easy to stride to her, retrieve the keys from her tiny fist, pull off the one she taps as house, flip the rest back across the lounge to one of the women. The husband shrugs, the women gleam.

  Either no one gets the drift, or everyone does.

 
But the rough guide to how he gets her outside is irrelevant. What he remembers is what it looks like out there: all the kids that everyone’s been ignoring have torches or cellphones out in the fields, and the lights swing and blister unsteady stains in his eyes as he walks her down the drive.

  ‘Go Home, Stay Home,’ she says, when he stops her by the car.

  He stares back. The children scuttle through the iridescence, shrieking. The fence wire they slither in and out of drones in low-pitch ripples through the night. Then one girl veers up the driveway past them, pulls to a halt, turns in the stones and, staring at them, thrusts a torch under, then into her mouth, her teeth clunking plastic. Her face blazes, the meat of it translucent, its shape inside-out, tongue twining with wet light. The concave phosphorescence of her face drives her eyes back under bone hoods. Then she gags softly, the evil of the joke gone in a flash. She dangles the torch away from her, drops it, listens to the blank bump and runs off up the drive.

  ‘What the fuck,’ he says as he bends down for the torch.

  ‘Do you remember the rules?’ the woman asks him.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘For Go Home, Stay Home. Do you remember the rules? How you’re meant to play it?’

  He hits her with the beam so her eyelids flick, wrinkle away from him.

  ‘I think,’ she says, ‘I remember my first game. I was little, you know, always the littlest kid. I thought it was magic to start with, how you could have a home in it, how you just say where, choose a place where you’re just … safe. But then I learnt how you had to go out from it. They made you go away, that was the whole game. And there was always someone to stop you coming back there. And the longer you left it, the more you got scared and hid and crept, the more people there were to stop you. Getting home. The longer you left it the more the tagging spread.’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘I think … my husband got tagged tonight. Do you?’

  The question shivers, slips. But she seems to have the kid in a sturdier hold now, and with her free fingers she’s running the trim of the car door. He listens to the squeal of her fingertips, not saying anything else except ‘I’ll let you in’.

  In the car she looks straight through the screen and talks.

  ‘When I was little, our street was on a party line. You remember them? Whenever you were on the phone you could feel the others listening in. I could feel their voices, feel what they’d think of me, how they’d be saying it. My mother was like that too. She’d hardly use the thing, because of everyone in there. You could feel their voices there, I mean that, humming through the line right into your head, even though they weren’t saying anything. It’s like that all the time now. What I do with the baby, how I don’t do things right, with the house. Like everything I do is … on the party line somehow. You ever feel like that?’

  He says, ‘I’m not the type that … stuff gets through to. Most days. I’d be stoked to feel … much at all.’

  ‘You don’t seem like that.’

  ‘Tonight … I’m not, tonight. I’ll … let you in.’

  He says it again, pulling up at the house she’s directed him to, walks ahead of her to the front doorway and jams in the key she’s selected for him. It’s a brand new, clean, metallic and up-and-coming house, executive and symmetrical, but he feels something collapsing as he steps into it.

  That’s what he wants: a demolition.

  He stands in the dark lounge as she skims past him, puts the baby in its crib.

  Muscle overheats in his torso, smacks in his chest, waiting. When he feels her come back to the edge of the room he can’t believe the battery of hot blood that speeds through him, hair-trigger, toxic. Can’t believe it doesn’t ignite, splash the place with fire. But she doesn’t come closer. And he doesn’t know the layout. So he strokes around for a switch and reaches out to punch on the light his hands have found. She’s bright for a heartbeat, but at the last minute, his hand knocks the dimmer. And he has to watch the room sink, down through levels of dull, opulent, orderly loneliness. Back to dilute black.

  He hasn’t thought to bring the torch. He has to rely on her, in the vague room, to have the motive to drift towards him.

  the next stop

  It was the kid who saw him first. There was a line-up of orange vinyl chairs on the side by the Coke fridge and you could guess that’s what the kid would head for, flat out. He was rarked up, jumpy, my kid. Like half the South Island, I suppose. Only he was extra jumpy, being thirteen, or just about. So he got into the shop ahead of me and took a jack straight for the Coke. Dropped the chain fly-screen back at me and Bubs with a slap.

  There were maybe five vinyl chairs, or seven, to wait on between the counter and the corner. Orange, with black metal legs, and if you sat down on them you’d feel fish and chip grease suck up to your thighs. Half the seats were gone black and slashed, so there’d be this bubble of fatty air squeak open under you. You wouldn’t want to even pick up those thin, oily mags, but you’d probably get desperate not to stare into space at some point. The air tasted soggy and chocker with salt from the vats. Plus, there was this 70s rope thing rigged in the dirty wedge of window by the very last chair. You wouldn’t want a bar of that. It was this sticky net sack with a gross glass tub stuffed in it. Tucked into that there was one of those plastic spider-ferns that the sun had made an even worse joke of.

  But I didn’t pick up on him, sitting right there. It was the kid that did first.

  I’d got through the fly-chains at the door and grizzled at the kid for just swinging that flap at me and Bubs. She was being a major handful, Bubs, and was due to pack a real shit if I didn’t let her down out my grip, and I don’t know, odds are it was already too late. But we might of stood a chance if the kid hadn’t made it so obvious. There was some station half-tuned on a beat-up radio propped out back over the vats and they had the Eagles jangling a four-part whine about sunrise. Plus there was the buzzing of the fryers and stuff, and hooked above it all there was a fan pumping around, a big flywheel of grease that was off by a fair few degrees and squealing, making everything feel tilted. Plus, you know how they sink those metal tubs down in the troughs. They shunt them in the vat and everything froths. They tip them on the paper and whack them back to drip off the racks. So my point is, there was no shortage of noise. If the kid had kept it quiet, we could of maybe pulled a uey. Just backed out through the chain strips where we’d come in. (They use them to sift out the flies, but it’s not like it made a diff. There was still a tag team of black flies twitching round the shop.) But he’s no good at covering, the kid. Straight up, he made this dumb gulp: there was some word in it, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. Then it was too late. Plus Bubs was wriggling big time in my arms. She was full on by then and I just felt like dumping her. I’d done my best to keep her topped up on the road, but she’d had a total gutsful. Fair enough, I suppose: me fucking too. The whole day had just lasted too long on that bus. I don’t know. It was like we’d gone past the point of any way out by hours and hours. Drove off the edge of any plan to get things straight. I’d done my best to get us sorted—last stop, I’d gotten hold of the timetable and taken a crack at making our trip stop somewhere decent in the island. But it didn’t matter what we tried to catch. There was no good road that was coming to meet us.

  Then I knew he’d seen me before I saw him. I knew because when I looked at him, his whole head already had a fix, that stage before a low smile he gets where his eyes are jammed on target and the only thing moving is this tiny shiver in the thread-veins just above his beard. He had a cap on that smelt like something mowed and read CREW, and when he came close the red of it picked up those veins. They’d been in his face as long as I knew him, weird strings hanging like an inch above where he’d shave. Looked like red pen someone had been testing out in scribbles on an old beer box. Before she learnt better Mum used to take the piss. But I didn’t. Plus he was wearing a shirt the green of the pine needles you could see clumped in the clay
of his boot tread. There was this blowfly that landed on him later, when I was having to talk to him. It dozed around his collar, interested in some stink built up there. I watched it. The edge of the shirt was dieseled, gone the colour of that fly’s back-end.

  But by rights it was the high-vis vest you saw first. Zipped up the front, with chunks of pocket plugged full of work tools. He gave little Bubs one to play with later, pliers or some shit. I wasn’t too fussed on it—I’m no prize mum but even I could see that was a hazard. But he just laughed and said, You gotta shut them up somehow, eh.

  That was later, but. First up he just walked close, easing CREW back on the sweat of his head. Took his time looking me over and said, Hard case.

  Suppose I just froze for a few secs. While he went on clocking me. Hard case, he said, hard case seeing you here.

  Which is where it went to bits. So let me back up. Righto: the kid had gone hunting for his Coke and, instead, got the chiller halfway open and made this yell. It rebounded off the rows of cans. And too late, he looked our way and scoped me and Bubs, straight off. But it took him a couple of seconds to click with the kid. The kid has grown: thirteen is that point where your body gets away on you. He’s all shins and collarbone and doesn’t matter what you put on him, his corners poke out all his gear. Maybe the hair reminded him. Now the kid’s stopped being such a runt he’s got hair like I used to, that same colour, flicking out wide round his head. The funny thing is, it even smells the same to me. When he lets me lean in to get a good whiff, which isn’t much, there’s something I can breathe in off his neck bones and it’s stale and wet and feathery like something left over from my own self. Like the smell I used to wake up with coming off my pillow where my own head was sunk years back.