Deleted Scenes for Lovers

by Tracey Slaughter

  I consented to smile again. My face kept moving in the way it had been trained when a twenty kept tapping on the metal counter. My boss had already torn strips off me for not smiling enough at the customers. ‘It costs you nothing to smile,’ he would say, ‘a smile is free.’ And anyway, a guy like that, so tall, a grown-up, with a rack of pens in his pocket and a huge coil of keys-to-the-world dangling from his other fist, wouldn’t bother with a girl like me, high-school ugly, still in my uniform checks with the logo on a pocket-coated boob, a spit-through blouse that showed up the dimply singlets my mum wouldn’t scrap in favour of training bras yet. That was who I was, a singlet kind of girl, a stringy hair criss-crossed with cheap clips, pulled-up socks and bored blue eyes and pinpricks of pus on the chin kind of girl, with a black food-speckled band around my teeth winching them tighter and flatter. So I could smile more.

  He held out his hand for the ice cream, his keys now hooked over one big thumb, and I consented to pass it to him instead of propping it up in the white plastic cut-out tray like I always did. I consented to leave my hand trapped under his grip, the hot heads of keys grinding into it, for three seconds, four, while I stared down into the fat cage his fingers made, wondering how to yank my hand out without the cone splitting, the ice cream toppling, the canteen of straws splashing out onto the floor, the boss huffing out from the back and finally axing me. And he laughed and let his fingers ease off a bit, not enough to let go, but enough for me to feel that he didn’t even really have to try to keep my dumb hand buzzing with fear in there, the first slick of ice cream dripping, pathetic and sweet, down into my soft, consenting little fist.

  He said, I want you to take the first lick. And he flickered the folded twenty at me. And he gave a little nudge with the fingers that didn’t even have to strain to keep me shackled. He steered the cone like an oozing microphone up to my face and waited, grinning, for me to say nothing.

  But even so I want to know what made me lean in and do what he said. I want to know every bit as much as you. I want to know, every step along the way, what it was that made me do the things he wanted: fill my mouth with sticky, chipped cold so the braces froze and stung on my smile, drop my head in his lap and blink at his stench and let his thumb pump the socket at the base of my ponytail until tears belched out of my face. But that came later. That first day he said, Keep the change. And I took the scoops out back to the Zip, and I stared as the water fizzed out the way it always did, but I didn’t avoid it, just let it splutter out and blister the hand that had lain there inside his. Because in some part of me I’d felt the change, and I didn’t want to keep it.

  I do know what made me consent to get in his car when he pulled over on my walk home the next week. It’s so dumb I almost can’t tell you. It’s this. There was this guy in my class and I loved him. Don’t you laugh when I say love, because this was all the love I could remember for any guy and it still is. I loved his head stacked with surfy curls and the mud that always seemed to be slung up his legs. I loved the way he wrote with black felt on his satchel and painted his fingernails with Twink, and I loved the way he held his asthma pump as if it was a bird or an insect cupped in his hand and the way he made an o-mouth to suck down the vapour once he punched it. I loved the way his thighs went purple in his school shorts in the winter and the way orange Cheezel dust always seemed to be brushed somewhere on his face. I loved the way he would pick up his little sister from primary and they would walk behind me singing or scrapping or, a couple of times, blowing bubbles of dishwash from a plastic pod, and the globes swarmed over me and trembled and popped in my hair. And I loved the way I felt when I lay on my bed after school and wriggled my hand down into my knickers and fluttered the skin until it hummed with a dream of him. I loved the way I could chew on his name in time to the squeeze that hit between my hips.

  I consented for the stupidest reason to get in the car when it pulled over then. I wanted to make the guy that I loved, but I’d never have the guts to tell that I loved, notice and be jealous.

  You’ve got the picture about what went on in the car, about what I consented to. I’ve already let it slip. Down at the place where he always drove me there was a tonne of tame, slimy ducks, shuffling round to see if they could stab a feed from your hand. They had pink clumps of skin over their eyes like tumours and holes in their beaks where some kind of liquid frothed. They flocked round on the grass to me, wobbling and gagging, when I went and sat outside afterward. I’d take little packets in my lunchbox for them, and the sparkle of the paper made them mental. Sometimes he’d be a nice guy after he’d zipped up. He’d mop himself and stroke it through my wrangled hair, laughing. He’d give me a smoke. He’d lean in and run a thumb under my eyes where the make-up I could never get right had oozed off. The first time he said I was beautiful. I do remember hearing that. But while he said it his hand sank my skull till my choking made him flatten my spine with his elbow.

  When I choked I would think of those ducks and their eyes almost buried in those scaly red growths and the foam on their beaks and the way he would kick at least one of them every time we pulled up but they never learnt and just came back begging and begging.

  So I guess I have to call it consent. But I’ve been reading about consent lately and it seems to me when they made up the idea they left spaces for way too much pain, too much pressure. There’s part of the word that sounds okay and is all about feeling and thinking the same, about two bodies and minds just sharing themselves because, I don’t know, they match, they touch, and their skins light up in some kind of agreement. But there’s this other side of the word which doesn’t sound right to me at all: to yield, it says, to acquiesce to what is done or proposed by another, to comply. There are ways in which that could still hurt. It sounds to me like there’s stacks of ways you could get yourself thrashed black and blue under cover of that word. And they could say it that way: You get yourself.

  You get yourself dressed up, for instance, when he calls you that last time. You actually fork out some cash for a dress because he says this time he’s going to take you somewhere nice and the idea of not just parking up and scorching your cheek on the steering wheel because he’s got hold of your head and bounces it like there’s nothing left inside, like it’s a ball of bone he could dribble and dribble, the idea of not just getting dealt to like that is like something straight out of a magazine where teenagers hold hands or sit in a convertible with their white teeth flashing out pure public love while they suck from the same vintage Coke and watch the sunset. You spend cash, you spend hours hanging over the sink to get your eyelids tricked out with glitter. You sway the razor up and down over your legs, you jab your lobes with over sixty kinds of studs till you decide on the right ones, lock on the butterflies while staring at the frosted strangeness of your face in the mirror, so fluorescent and tapered and spangled, dusted to adulthood with a can of cheap shimmering atoms. He is right: you are beautiful. And so you stalk, jiggle, stalk, down the front steps towards his car when he finally pulls up and honks.

  His car is always so clean. There are no flowers or love songs or shit like that, but it seems that he cleans it just for you. Just so your pulse-points, tapped with your mum’s best Poison, smoke with such narcotic prettiness you almost cry.

  He smiles. Gear after gear, he smiles. He has a scent also, and it grows with the distance, the miles of light that spurt through the window before the tar seal gives out to stone and then instead of lights there’s the anti-lights of long trees croaking and hissing in the black outside. It’s a real, thick, out-of-town black. Admit it: you are a little spooked. The car is sleazy on the loose-metal corners, your heart is a fraction off in the straining of your blood. But he smiles. So you smile back. Painted as cutely as you are it feels like the muscles on your face consent a little easier.

  You keep on smiling as he pulls up. Oh, it’s just like a magazine, a sweet teen movie: he circles round and clips open your door, extends a hand. There’s so much meat in that hand, but
you forget that, because the car and his keys and his smile are so clean, a whole clean, confident society shines in them. You consent to put your twitching hand into his. So he leads you up a gravel drive to a house you’ll never really find your way out of. You smile as the front door opens and the five men inside all smile back at you.

  Since when did a smile cost you anything?

  It’s free.

  Step inside.

  Now isn’t that consent?

  Can I put you in my shoes just for a minute? The heels are high and when they’re unstrapped and swung at your eye they knock you quite dazzlingly blind. Blood will run down that side of your vision for years with a lightbulb squealing through it. All the faces and the walls are now elastic and come at you in bouts. Can I put you in my head? There’s actually the sound of beer tabs spitting because someone has packed for the event. You hear the flop of a chillybin lid: it’s a picnic. Can I put you in my hair? It’s a leash, tied to so many fists that you feel your scalp split, you see a streak of gelled hair come away in a hand, a gleam of flesh still icing it. Can I put you in my arms? They’re stamped on and taped to a pipe in the emptied room. You’re hung on the hook of your own bones and scream at the pipe until it howls back at you. Six men laugh, they assemble, they’re an organised ring. Would you let me put you in my left eye? Count them: six men, just smashing you calmly, with snarls of confidence, corporate in their bloodied suits. Would you let me put you, just for a minute, right here inside so you go through it with me … ?

  No, of course not.

  Who would consent to that?

  Silence, they say, is a kind of consent.

  The least you can do then is stay here with me, just sit with me in the silence that comes next.

  There are seconds, just a few lovely, numb seconds when I first wake, where I think I am a child, that I must have dozed off and my parents scooped me up and shifted me in the night. Somehow I think, if I lie still and listen, the house will not be totally strange because I’ll tune into the trickle of my parents’ voices, the murmuring sameness of Mum and Dad, clicks and drones and scuffing as they chat and clear up. They have picked me up, rocked me down some dark hallway, taken off clips that might prick in the night or buttons that dig or beads that might wrap me. They’ve tucked me in, chuckling lightly, tripping on the room’s unfamiliar shapes. We have been somewhere new, on a holiday, we’ve had a picnic: I remember the flop of the chillybin lid. It’s morning and if I listen, even in this strange motel, I will still hear my mother: the toaster will still ching, there’ll be the scratch of her buttering, the sound of the seal unwrinkling from the fridge. There is a knot at the top of my head where my child hand can drowse and fiddle: if I just reach up that tuft will be there, that warm hoop of habit, that murky smooth curl and I can weave in my thumb and turn and turn …

  But in that place, as you know, I am balded and blooded. Pain is a crown and if I move the nerves will spill from it in a gush. Pain is a crown and it will be hard to stand in it, hard to balance, hard to walk under its throb. It will be hard to move down the hall, so hard to carry that red crown, sliding and scraping, trying to find slivers of clothing, find an exit, find home.

  Finding instead a mirror, where everything I am has ruptured.

  And then, later, in court, as you know, they will crown me again. I will stumble, I’ll swerve through those rooms, too, because somehow they’ll think this shredded dress is a sash, they’ll think that I painted my smile like a gutter to take in the splash of seed and fists, that my pain is a prize, my shame a reward I asked for. I’ll stagger again as they crown me. Miss Consent.

  So just let the silence go on a bit longer.

  Just let me lie here and remember when consent was a word that still had something in it. Something that sounded like sympathy, that seemed like a sharing, even a kind of compassion. Something that sounded like my parents’ voices, their morning exchange of dopey gentleness, lazily pacing and mumbling in the ordinary distance of love.

  leaving the body

  I have small, clear sightings of her.

  I have one as I’m waiting at the airport: curved, in the cup of water I’m holding, the surface of it stretching from the tremor I can’t stop in my left hand. It shows me the sliding mechanics of a door which glides on its vast glass withdrawal past my shoulder. The sound is steel cable scraped through ice.

  And there she is, her body, caught in that sound.

  The steward has left me at arrivals, but it wouldn’t matter where he shifted me—my daughter glitters everywhere in this design. All the walls are glass here, the entry halls, the lounges, the long departure tubes: they’re all moving panels of tough metal-jointed transparency that float and interlock as if the southern light itself has been engineered, made to rest in stiff decks, flex between these glinting struts. It’s due to the mountain, of course; its primacy, its tough, tourist pose, the sharp black disaster of it bursting out the flatland. No one wants to lose a second of that view. So they sketched the whole building around it, made a blueprint for these wide banks of ice, safe cinematic ports where you can line up the ranges, postcard style. I have to sit and watch. I have to watch the branches of dark rock crackle down the peaks. Even in my cup I have to watch them tower and trickle, like the hanging black tree the human eye really sees before the brain tips it, so we can believe ourselves standing here the right way up.

  She is not the right way up when I see her, a dislocated silver twitch in the dial of my cup. She is dug down, my girl, packed into angles, lonely and awkward, her limbs shovelled into the snow. They are still high-tech colours, all her bright death-proof clothes. So I can follow their flashes of fluorescent cutting-edge mesh, scientifically tested to outlast her, resistant to the layers of snow that have reset her bones. They will withstand her. They will stay here, mark her like a series of flags, tiny pinpricks of a conquered map. So I can make out the patches that were her shins, scrape them out of the searing tread of snow. I can grub to the crest of an elbow, find the shortcut to her fingertips, still in their padded bubbles. But all the colours end at the top of her trunk. Because up there the outpost of her dark head is pushed under, sunk into the heavy airless crystal of pure distance. Even so, I move in closer. I’m her mother, it is my job to go. Her head is too deep to read a face, but I look down anyway, stare down at its crushed out-of-focus globe, a dark shape beneath a rink. Or a blurred figure watching you from the vanishing shine at the back of a mirror you would never in your life have chosen to walk towards.

  He used to tell her to ‘harden up’. She would send me footage online, all that winter of her training, and I would hear him saying it, Harden up, a fond but targeted command as he marched through her film. They were scanty updates from basecamp, off-cuts of clip, brief flickers of her downtime she scratched from the official documentary she was making, but I lived on them, set them looping in long feeds of replay, click-dragged her round my dim screen from half a world away. Harden up. He was a captain in his sponsored gear, you could see it in the rigidity of his smile, the planting of his clamped boots notched with metal spines. It was a striving body, overstocked with might: she couldn’t help but hone the lens in on it, close in on the magnitude of shoulderblade, the attitude packed into torso, compassed in his iris. She spent long, still minutes with the camera on him: sledging his bodyweight into a headwind, staking out a channel in the gale-polished ice, his team behind him stumbling into his footsteps, lesser men, a shaken, straggling troop. You could see he was born to test ground, knock through horizons. You could see the kind of kid he’d once been; gutsy, brutal, all hard games and muddy follow-through, the national brand. ‘Become an overcomer’, that was a slogan he used and that she repeated, thrived on. That and ‘Harden up’. She would laugh back when he told her off, a mate’s laugh, taking the ribbing the way she’d been coached, his recruit. But I could feel something else in the way she zeroed in: once, when her long shot tunnelled towards him, the whole plateau spread out on his mask, and wh
en he shoved off his visor, she pulled into the single-minded glitter of his eyes. They looked crafted out of ice. ‘This is where he lives,’ I heard her whisper at the edge of the film. ‘He lives in the zone.’ And it was in her voice, the risk she was taking, the zone she was living in.

  There is no ‘I’ in team. Or in love.

  My daughter came in and out of focus in the film she sent me, mucking about in the mess hall, nicknaming her crewmates who waved at me sheepishly, shaking their heads at her long-distance gossip to Mum. She tracked herself, babbled bits of narrative as she scanned around her hut, talked me through apparatus, provisions, huddled in her thermals before lights out, sent me exhausted sleep-tight wishes, a diary cam of yawns. Outside, she’d make jokes on the hazardous climate, frolic up and over small stacks of rock, the handheld quavering, bounce jerkily in the spongy cladding of her suit, a big goodbye grin fogging up her goggles, flagging out at me with arm-swings of goofy love. Lined up with her squad, she was a being I did not know, a slogging shape, toughened, featureless, ploughing ahead into hardship, degrees below. It is possible to be both proud and terrified. Sometimes in those months I dug through the remains of her girlhood, crumpled trinkets, seashells gluey with dust, waxy tap shoes she used to clatter endlessly around in, frilled diaries cramped with secrets. I pulled out summer dresses I’d stowed, a lightweight shambles frothing over cartons. They were ghosted with her smell.

  She had been an uncertain child; skittish, flimsy, likely to hide. And then the bunkers that she made herself from the furniture—the draped hatches, the cushioned nests, the soft retreats and pegged-out tunnels—became caves, became clambers underground, adventures in black water. She strode out from them, charged with stamina; she’d discovered a need for challenges, a gift for lasting miles. But it was him that she credited. She’d been empowered, transformed, she told me, and I had him to thank. His leadership had made her sturdy, self-reliant, intrepid. ‘The world needs people like him,’ she said to me. Which is arguably true, which a strong case can be made for.