Deleted Scenes for Lovers

by Tracey Slaughter

  Decide.

  Get it wrong.

  the wait

  We pulled a blanket over her and sat on the porch. The dark was the whole kind, with only the thin end of moon to cut into it and show up the edges of things: the table where she kept that rough shell she knocked full of ash, those feathers on their nail by the door, the bung board step to the gravel track and, low down by the centre post, the slump of a dug-out candle. The shape of what she’d last been drinking from. If there was any light to come we’d see it in that first, so we just sat and watched for it—glass half-something, the two of us staring down at her dregs for a good long while. Some time morning would have to start shifting in the slick of what she’d never gotten done.

  But it took its time.

  And it was too hard to start, for that first block of waiting, so we didn’t speak, we just sat quiet. Any other night if I was up here this hour, which wasn’t unheard of, it would have been me and her, rugged up and chanting talk into cold air, her with her stocky limbs packed in a bundle and drink propped on her knees and chin. A heavy vessel. But she could drain them: for long straits of talk she’d just crouch in her cane chair, tip it steadily back. And I thought it had peace in it, some dull comfort, the huddle of her, close on the crook boards of the porch, the sound of her lapping her drink between the words, considering. I’d been known to go months at a stretch without getting bugger all sleep; I’d drop half in, but it was never decent. I knew if I had enough of trying, I could walk up here from my shed and she’d be camped out, too, dry-eyed, tucked into a pile. Bottle of some cure lodged in the cradle of her collarbone.

  We both jumped when a bird hooned out from the trees. The leftover sound skidded down the leaves long after, or it could have just felt like that. Maybe that was a low point. In the end we had to start talking, him and me—though we’d never talked about her since she’d shown up out the blue months back, had us both gaping as she shrugged off her swag, two old blokes panting at her sweat-streaked youth, the wet stubs of bush clung to her sawn-off boots. When she shacked up with him, I bowed out, nothing said. But now we had to try something to bridge the place she’d left us—which was an afterthought of porch tacked on to raw boards loosely based on a house. Half of what his crib was made of we’d milled out the bush ourselves, a lifetime back. Felled and chained and split and railed by hand, that place had felt like a mark made, something solid. Now we could feel it behind our shoulders, paint barked, off plumb, only hanging on at the homemade joints.

  And what do you say when it comes down to that.

  I started nowhere. I said, There’s things. You know. Will need doing.

  True, he said. I could hear the blunt of his heel hacking at a board. It was the first time he’d moved in a while. An hour or so back, I’d seen him lean out of his chair into a kneel. It was rough, broadside, not like prayer. He was close enough the dark gave way to let me watch his elbows crane. The rugged sound of his hands worked up through his beard, went stilted on his skull and stayed there. You could hear cracks of his thumbprint in it, scalp crossed with fingers, squared off, smoked stale.

  Yeah, I said. When we get our heads straight, eh. There’s things’ll need doing.

  Still, I couldn’t have told him what.

  I said, Someone. You reckon? Someone I should call?

  Then I could feel him look up at the track: I knew in his head he walked into every out-shed, doors off-kilter on their vacancy, splinted roofs, warped cots spread with dust. There was no help to call up from the outcrop of huts. You could howl up the route and get nothing. The community had all cleared out, years back. From time to time you’d spot things mangled into the bank, someone’s fork or sleeve, a panel of uke or flag, but you’d just look at overgrowth sprouting through the mud of the weave or the frets and know the place was done. The era was done. The dream of it. Bodies muffled on bedrolls in the evening, lounging heavy with the good we thought we were making real, limbs mussed in a nest under this patch of stars. Like we’d never been up there. Now we’d come to this, there was no one to yell for, and only the voice of the blacked-out valley coming back.

  What about, I don’t know, cops. Need calling, you reckon? I’d gotten us both a beer when we first came out but it tasted like rope.

  He said, Fucked if I know.

  Reckon they’d even find us? Up here.

  They always used to know where to come. When it suited them.

  Track’s a mongrel coming off the main road now, but. I could go out and wait for them.

  But he made a sound like he’d had to let out a backlog of breath. And that was all for a bit. A cry like that is a closed circle.

  If I looked down to the left I could make out the tank he’d halved for her last year to plant out. I hardly ever saw her any other way than hunched up, messing around with her hands in the soil, grubbing scraps of dry plant in and out, flicking down seeds into thumbed-out gulleys. Mostly we’d mutter through hours that way, her back to me, all-fours, inching round her plots, the hair she dumped upwards and forked through full of unbrushed sun. I’d pace near, or drop to a squat, and we’d just keep that trade up, low-key sentences, easy as a shrug, but somehow it felt like we were sorting through everything just by talking. Nothing major, just clearing up our bit of the world. When she stood up and knocked dirt off her knuckles, a smoke would be in them before she took two steps. She’d make chops at her knees to clean up but there were always dents, muck lodged around the joint. She only had stringy, bleached layers of singlet and rugby shorts, caked with dust around the arse. You’d watch as the smoke drifted down through the armholes, yanked wide enough to see ribs unsettled. Her hair was close to dreads, a mix of suede and straw, and she’d rub at the crown, leave a halo of scruff round her head. She’d reek of earth, stick her face into her armpit and poke out her tongue. High fucking heaven, she’d say.

  She got people? I tried again.

  It didn’t seem right that there could be a sun coming that wasn’t going to land on those creases of her body, her face raked with clay at the grin lines, the bulk of her forearms, the drum skin of gut gone dark below her tank. It didn’t seem sun could get a grip on the valley without her skin to fix its glare in place.

  He said, She tell you she had people?

  I shook my head. I was trying to pinpoint anything we’d talked of, but all I could get to was her voice, the murky honey timbre, faced away from me, murmured down in the rubble of her garden. The way it smudged with tar when she laughed, like a lullaby winding up in the rough. When she crouched for the dig, there was a bared stretch of tendon and above it in her groin, a pale cove.

  Know what she told me? She told me she’d been up here when she was a kid.

  Eh?

  Back in the day. When the place was packed. She said she came up here with her mother.

  No. Who?

  That friend of Parsons. Did pottery.

  Eve?

  That’s her.

  Don’t remember her having a kid. Do I?

  She did.

  Suppose. Could be I didn’t notice.

  There was the splatter of another bird through flax. Nothing left to do but pore over the dark that would hardly let you see a world through it.

  No, he said. We didn’t notice.

  That’s not what I meant.

  But that’s the point, eh. That’s been the whole point.

  Something made me want it to rain. Just seemed the smell of wet earth might give us something to breathe in. But out from where we were sitting, nothing moved, nothing crowed or dripped. You could just hear the pull-back of trees right at the sky-end. It seemed like the porch had become unmoored from everything.

  The place was full then, I said.

  Still.

  Look. It wasn’t us.

  The place was us. That’s what it was about. We were the whole place.

  Not her.

  You never noticed. You just said.

  She wasn’t one of them.

  Righto.<
br />
  She tell you she was?

  No.

  Well then.

  She never went that far. All she ever said was, she was there. Back when.

  Then why was she here now.

  Maybe, he said. Maybe this. Maybe she came back exactly for this.

  He was steady now, I could hear it. His voice was like a brace knocked hard into the lean of the dark. He wasn’t going to need to go aground on the boards of the porch again, like he was steering his body down through its last collapse. He wasn’t going to coast his hand around his head like the ruts left in bone might hold some answer.

  We thought she was something new, he said.

  Did we?

  Don’t bullshit me. I know you did.

  Like what?

  A sign of something coming. She brought it back, that feel, like we could build it all up.

  And that made me hunch. The blanket we’d lowered over her was earth-toned, saddle-weight. You could smell the clay dried in between the weave, turned to seed. The smell of her skin couldn’t muster through it, which I suppose was a good thing. It wasn’t going to keep, her odour of sesame, leather, overripe apples in the heat. I’d loped behind her so long when she was at work, to breathe that in, but I knew it would be lost. When a loose rain did start to sift down I could hear it, rinsing the cloth-end her barefeet were stowed under. I would have stooped to hitch her closer, but I knew at least it wasn’t the hollows of her face that would be taking more weight. It was too much to have to think of her mouth, her gaze, thatched with canvas.

  He said, She came back for this.

  No, I said. Because you had to shoulder it again when he spoke it, the buckle of her nape. The loosened trunk, its weight cut free of her face, the stumble of us sawing her down from her harness. And who knew the vocals that a body could make, when you try to bully the life back in. I could taste tears I hadn’t got the stomach for, spread on the roof of my mouth like they’d stay there, for good, in the grip.

  He said, I know she bloody did. She did. She’d been waiting. She came back for this.

  Then early traces of light just started to wheel in the base of her bloodshot glass. You know when you have ambled to the end, when you’ve reached the numb final thing that was always coming. And I wanted to shake my head, to keep my no going on repeat, but the twitch of the dawn had got up into the trees. The wind was just a graze but it took to her bindings, flicked the ends gentle as an omen. And then you had to think of her fists and the way, when they weren’t sporting tools or fishing in the dirt to tie down tendrils of plant, they were stringing on the porch, hooking oxidised arches of bone-coloured wood and bead into chimes. It was me she’d got to lash those catchers up round the place, climb up and puzzle out all the fault-lines of knot and rod until they dangled free. I’d look down and in my chest her grin would leave an aftertaste. Nothing much moved now, but it wouldn’t take an hour for the weather to turn, and it would be over. We’d have to sit here listening to all those things, tingling on their pulleys.

  7 images you can’t use

  1.

  It would be good to open on an image here.

  Use an image, they say in class: dirt in the bed of a silver ute, tools and thick grit sluiced on the hairpins, a rotted-out bird nest, beer cans ricocheting light, the white crimps in his iris, the murky park where he pulls off-road, breathes into the rearview. Look how much you’ve got to use (it rhymes with lose for a reason). Draw the reader into the details. Be concrete: oh, the concrete stubbing your tailbone, the ramp you can hear kids flogging their bikes down, the plywood hauled circular and hollowed with mould, your landing mangling the clay as he grubs under your jeans, and you grub back, to cup him unequivocally with muscle, close your lonely cunt on fingertips. Get the picture? Use it any way you like.

  2.

  Stay with the image. In the image, he withdraws. There’s no background, there’s no foreground. You lie face up, let your breath resettle your trunk, his come cool down on your hip. The concrete on the back of your wrists: Ah, you sad bitch, there’s the rub. Everything grazing you, except for his kiss. You are the place in the world he won’t look at. He’s interested in getting his gear straight, his smokes out, his boots on their track through the pines, ute-wards. He’s got shit to do, right? Don’t pretend you didn’t know it. When you get up, in this shiver, this clamber, no one’s feeling sorry. This is the way it works. Tipped upright, a trickle still winds up in the jeans you drag on. Warm and rough on the seam, dead-centre: you blunder back after him with that, adrift. He’s a diagonal of dark pines ahead. You watch him kick a nest out left, so it’s loose-knit, up-ended and grey at the base of the trees. Nothing lives in it. That says something. Driver’s side, he’ll rev the ute engine maybe once, then bail. So you hurry. There’s a sea that slumps at the bottom of the gully. Nothing ride-able down there, just low-cut humps of dirty green. The kids have got fuck all air off the half-pipe. It’s spongy with weather and the nails are squeezing back up. It’s good of him to give you a lift. You suppose.

  3.

  Grit on silver, travelling in half-light. Tools vibrating in their metal slide. Stars of egg white glinting on your belly. The view: nothing but tremors at a distance, silt and liquid the woman tells you is limbs. The wand runs down your gut. She nudges it into the give above your pubic bone, reading the bulges of light that come from its bounce: spine, fingertips. There’s a click of numbers on her screen to measure it in weeks. So here’s an image: accidental, the shape of a kid, like a mess you trace in sand, unthinking, with a cracked stick, all those hours you wait on the beach and stare out, watching the glide of him when a swell gets up, unloving you.

  4.

  The counsellor passes you an image, too. It’s a face in a pale sac, a fleck of baby. Bud hands, bloated head, a dob of black eye under film. A pink squirming rope, afloat. In her office, there’s a skylight in four metal squares that stamp the light down. She is not helping you. Not the way you thought. She twitches her chair close, pats you, underhanded. The image has fine veins that fill as she licks her index to turn the next page. Now the image has fingernails. You thought she would give you procedures. Book times, count you down. Instead she gives you prayers. It’s too late to back out past the pot plants, the doll-pink plastic guts with their snap-on kids. The layers of organ cupped around the foetus look made in China, wipe-clean and toxic, like things you used to line up on plates as a child in your playhouse kitchenette. You can see fillets in the image, see-through muscles binding to a tiny backbone. The woman has a file of hole-punched options and you feel it in your teeth when she clicks the steel rings closed.

  5.

  There’s a shaped glass so you can see who’s coming in the pub door when you’re out the back. You’re rinsing the dishes: people slide over the dial of it, magnified. The apron, taped at your waist, is where you wipe your hands. Your belly ends the night in a wet sail. You don’t think about its passenger. Your hands look chlorinated.

  Except when it’s him—his image on the mirror, taking a slow dive from left to right. He goes to the bottle store side of the bar, not where the usual losers are dozing. Your palms are heavy with what you’ve got to hide.

  He’s stocking up large—must be a big night on. You rack it up on the till, but the cost comes out sky high—a trail of zeros he’s not fucking paying for. As if, he leans in and tells you, as if. You ring it on again, damp thumbs in a slow thud. He guillotines his wallet on the counter, a fed-up tap. You try to read a pattern in his stubble, like it could map where he’s been, who he’s hanging with, whether he’s got two fucks to give. But he’s not interested in you. Why would that change? You can’t take his eyes square on. You think of the girl he’s bound to tip this booze down, the nest he’ll punch between her open legs, the seconds she’ll lie down in, see as love. The thing inside you swivels and makes no difference.

  You have to be careful opening the till, so the tray doesn’t whang out and munt you in the gut. But you’re not. Big dea
l. Like he was going to flinch. He wants his change. You scour it out, count it back into his hand. And that’s it. You’ve got a sink to get to. Strips of fish to swab in batter, drop into a gush. Order up. People wade across the surface of the mirror. The thing inside you is a sigh, or just as pitiful. All those dishes won’t scrape themselves.

  6.

  If you need a wider angle: stand by the sea. It won’t help you. All it does is tip the horizon to ankle-level, swish by swish. Gulls black out bits of the sky. Where the sand spits out there’s a park with some mongrel swings, bung chains on slipshod legs. The picnic tables are meant for knives and bird shit. A cast of kids hoot from their hoodies, getting good and pissed. The cloud looks tidal, shapes washed up in it you only half recognise. Behind you the rest of the town backs down. The church, the pub, the dump, in a line. Where else would you be? Even the kid’s got no exit.

  7.

  What does it look like from inside?—your black bush singlet the only thing that fits, the cross-hatched slack of it, and under that a layer of belly, pulled hard in a bloodshot swell. You’re like a giant eyelid. Sometimes he drives past you in the main street and doesn’t blink. You stand and watch—the afterbirth of green tarpaulin flapping on the ute bed.

  8.

  The class is on a truck they drag round coastal towns—there’s no shortage of them, sun-lit and shit-house. They call it a foundation course. The social worker sends you down. The writing teacher has a lesbo hairdo dyed malignant blond. She believes in all you losers. Use an image, she says, use your voice. Give the reader the details, specifics, so they see. All the other women, run to fat in their marl tracksuits, have brought in a long-ago photo in a white gown. Boobs boned up on budget satin, a tinny ignition of cut-price sequins down their frocks. There are men in the shot, but it’s their own face they mostly write about, in the only day of make-up that ever stuck right. Their poems sound like smudge-proof adverts. The teacher’s earrings are branded dyke artillery and they lurch when she nods at you. Your turn. But you don’t have a photo—why would you keep one? Detail: his hair came out tussock-coloured. Detail: he had blue-brown fists. Detail: they dumped him on the wet bed of your trunk while you feathered the blood in his hair, left-handed. There were some seconds where his mouth went, specific, easy-does-it around your nipple, browsing for some love you couldn’t stock. And that was it. No one took a photo. So you don’t have an image to end on.