Deleted Scenes for Lovers

by Tracey Slaughter

  Except that I write the words ‘strong case’ and I think of the sled he hauled across the ice, stashed with the instruments and rations they’d need to stay the course, to reach their finish line. A lightweight sleigh: she’d sent me pictures of it, loaded precisely with cargo, a coded pool of plastic-coated stores. She’d sent me photos of herself too, lashed into its harness on practice runs, her face gritted with a wind-burnt smile, her tiny, bold body braced to tow. I think of how it might have been spun around, items capsized, recalculated, set aside in snow. I think of the hollow that might have been made, repacked with my child. But he did not turn back. He had a strong case: he did not use it to bring her home.

  He did not even clear it out to retrace his steps, to recover her body.

  I think of how she was still alive to listen to it, dragged away through the frozen slush. The man she loved at its prow. Her camera equipment put into his safekeeping.

  On my flight here there was a child seated with her family across the aisle from me, who fretted on the takeoff, sobbed in tiny thrashes, gripped at her parents. Her mother tried to distract her with the view out the window, the floating splashes of cloud, the land in dark cut-outs. Then she took the girl’s hand and spooled a chain into it, told her it was charmed, a lucky cross, protection, lowering it into her fist with a hush. But it wasn’t enough. So her father teased her: if she didn’t quieten down the crew would have no choice but to come and shut her away in the overhead compartment. She listened to the warning, curbed her panic into snuffles. When we dropped down through the sloping wake of sky—the fuselage scraped over cloud ledges, buffeted—she stared on, silent, at the line of rattling lockers. I could see it, too: a little girl’s body curled obediently into the chilled white bank.

  The world does not need people like me. I acknowledge that much. I can see it in the steward’s face when he comes back, my walking frame retrieved from the hold of the plane. He is professionally kind but I can see it tires him, this custody. It takes a toll on anyone, to have me in their ward for long.

  There are set-backs, just getting out of the chair. The steward tries to winch me up and we do a rickety dance. He makes muddled grunts, tries to lever me back to the wheelchair, but it squeaks askew, off its brakes. He’s all flustered niceness, stuck with me in this ugly waltz. I can feel how it embarrasses him, the crooked spectacle we make, so public in the light of the terminal, our spasmodic pageant in the wide arena of seats. And then I am pinned upright at my frame, ready to start the trek out to my taxi. He lingers for a moment, checking, unsure of my vertical. I manage a shanty nod. He smiles queasily, gazing at me: I know it’s an appalling project, my walk. But I go on, inching and lunging from my rack. The steward looks away, on behalf of everyone.

  My daughter never brought her leader home to meet me.

  When I get to the venue, the conference room is just being filled. The audience is bustling, prosperously groomed. My jack-knife in from the taxi, the clanking momentum of my walker are barely noticed: they’re networking, practising their salespitched smiles in the over-conditioned air.

  This is the end that justified the means: this tour, this circuit of corporate bodies. This is what he’s done since the launch of his book: PowerPoints for the business sector, motivating speeches on targets, incentives, the driven, uncompromising optimism of top achievers. Of course, he covers her accident, briefly, her determination not to turn the group from its course, not to deviate from the goals of the expedition: the adversities that strike are opportunities, they distinguish the attitudes of overcomers. It was a code she supported. She followed the principles to the end, never once abandoned the team’s objective. She had the heart-muscle of a hero, would not consider jeopardising the higher mission. She weighed the odds, the factors, stayed rational, dispassionate; she did not expect her gender to tip the scales, to plead for special treatment. She had set out into an environment beyond known values, she’d crossed a great distance to put herself beyond limits, beyond the workings of sentiment, the narrow bonds of the norm. There is no ‘I’ in team. He gives her airtime. He gives her the oxygen she could no longer grasp when he left her at that altitude, fused into her frozen shelf. She was fractured, alone, but she did not go to pieces. Her knife-edge decision had been made, he says, she knew it was touch and go.

  But I wonder how she surveyed his face as he did go, I wonder if he paused to touch her, whether she panned his look for pity, that pinprick vision at the centre of his eyes, their blue-white straits. Or whether she just lay there and listened to the hiss and crack of a continent, its endless disinterest.

  Tonight it’s her photographs that reach the screen first, a drift of her images, outtakes from the store she passed into his preserving hands. They are vast stills, a montage from a cold world, white plains becalmed and killing, cliffs and coasts of blank, inhuman light. It’s luminous, this sphere of minus. Its blast comes through the screen at me. I stand in its deserted totality, a white unbreathable vault. The images float on, wrecks and spars of ice. I close my eyes, but they stay, break up beneath the lids.

  He mounts the stage against this background. He’s dressed for a voyage, his outfit insulated, bodycon, tacked with bright stitching like an outline of robotic muscle. ‘Pain,’ he begins from his spotlight, ‘is just weakness leaving the body.’ There is a gust of applause.

  My progress is slow, and the aisle is darkened. The audience is riveted, tense with worship. But at some point the grinding treble of my frame starts to cut through his talk. I have taken a name tag from the table in the foyer, although I have written nothing on it except Mother, a small word, barely visible on its white face. I feel it, pinned to the spasms of my chest as I jar my frame forward, as I keep on, at my crawl.

  My finish line lies nowhere I will ever cross.

  They are a condition of my life I don’t expect to lift: my sightings of her. There is an ‘I’ in pain. She’s like something tinned. She’s so hard you could tap on the crust of her clothing, on her colourless skin. There’s a traction like pumice, you could count the knocks of your thumbprint. I unglove her hands, her fingertips glint back at me like stars. There is ice on everything, ice studding her, arcing out from her in fins, ice spiny in the solid wheel of her hair, ice in her ear’s white, foetal curl of cartilage.

  I think of her pain, in the times when my own returns. I hope she did not last overnight. I hope she slid, numbed and quick, into delirium. I hope she did not linger to feel herself put out, cell by cell, the last of the moisture in her skin fanning out, clustering to itself, crystal at her nerve ends. There is an ‘I’ in pain. And I hope she did not know it. I only hope the snow took her, whole.

  50 ways to meet your lover

  3.

  Turn left, west, where the voice is telling you. There’s nothing here. A zone where they put up the kind of buildings no one needs to walk through the doors of, bleached industrial squares selling things no one wants. But the voice is certain. You’re here. You park. This can’t be right. You think about backhanding the screen so the useless voice can’t repeat itself. But you don’t: you can just hear the way your husband would go off. You wait for a while. Decide you may as well scrape up the litter from the floor of the car while you’re here. May as well: the whole afternoon feels like a shrug. There’s a king bin you can dump it in. So you’ve got handfuls of slippery till trail, coupons for next to nothing off, plastic wrap from a world of bad choices stuffed in your grip when you catch sight—it’s him. It’s not. It can’t be. Only it is.

  It’s him. Only.

  The voice announces out the open car door that you’ve arrived at your destination. You should have bashed its budget teeth in when you had the chance.

  6.

  Your mother calls. She never calls. But she’s fizzing. You can’t even hear her flicking the pages of her magazines while she’s talking. You can’t even hear her lighting up. She’s not even pausing to poison herself. So this must be choice. You wait for the gossip—someone’s da
ughter, no doubt, has dropped a Down’s syndrome kid, or embezzled the kindergarten fundraising, or can’t fit into anything but polar fleece and crocs because she’s packed on the pounds. But no: it’s your turn. You’ve got her attention. You’re better than roll-your-own. You’re better than the Emmy spread of best and worst gowns.

  She’s seen him. She bumped into him at a local do, a reunion, well, it was a funeral really, but everyone had such a beaut time catching up. And she knew he was watching her. She knew it. But he didn’t come over for a while. Not until he was properly plastered. There were tears in his eyes. Tears, for real. She’s not shitting you. And you’ll never believe what he looks like now: he looks mean. She’ll repeat that, Mean, you would not believe. And he told her he’d never stopped loving her daughter. He fell in love with you back then and it had never worn off.

  My daughter, she says. He’d loved my daughter all these years. And he looked mean, but I tell you, in his eyes there were tears.

  It’s been a long time since you were my daughter. It must have made you seem worthwhile. Tears in his mean eyes made you worth calling. She might even spread it, might even hiss it, later, round the ladies’ night. You might be the talk of the garden bar.

  Whatever, you say. And hang up.

  7.

  You’ve got to go because the lever of your wrist is going to give way and splash the phone, the sink you’re standing over is going to find your head in it, your mouth stretched in a howl of soapy Os, your knees unhinged and letting you skid to the lino, taking down a clatter off the bench so you’re huddled in a spray of last night’s foodscraps, your arse in a puddle and, up in the slack of your lemonfresh disinfected hair, a tiara of crumbs. You’re a joke. You’re fucking soaking in it.

  9.

  You are standing in a dusk itchy with flies and stars. There is everything between you. A school picnic. Kids with sauce on their cheeks and tinsel in their hair. Tufts of gladwrap round the paddock. Someone painting faces with oozy stripes that look allergenic and carnival. Someone lashing the ankles of mothers together to gun them three-legged to the crinkle of tape. Pets shitting on the end of their leashes, having clawed off their also-ran ribbons. Kids behind cardboard stalls flogging rubbish they’ve glued. The smiles on the mothers that bake. The smiles on the mothers whose Tupperware is name-tagged. The smiles.

  You want to walk through them all and tug him by the edge of his T-shirt. Over the pitch. Out through the courts, through the posts, to where the field turns to tussock and storm bank and shoelessness and gulf. You are standing in a dusk and that’s what you want. You’re woozy with the goal of it. You’re crooked to the thighs.

  But you’re rostered on. How could you forget? One of the smiles has to trot over and tell you it’s your turn on the hotdogs. There’s tubs of marge to get to the edges of the bagged bread. There’s onions, to give you something to cry about.

  11.

  People die. People you both know. You hover at the cusp of the ingoing crowd. Everyone has turned slow motion in their good shoes. They bottleneck the aisles. Glass cuts the heat into colours that feel unholy. Everyone is dressed to the point of suffocation. You can’t count the degrees of sun reflected on your spine. Your black zipper itches. Your hair wilts out of the fix you sprayed round it, a gauzy radius of triple super-hold. You sweat on the commemorative programme. You try not to smudge the corpse’s face.

  It’s the kind of church where you have to wedge a stool down under your line-up of bad knees and mutter thanks. The litany comes out so half-arsed. It’s the kind of church where no one can sing, except the vicar, whose contralto is a shrill joke. He pipes it hard and pious and pitchy so you drop your head as if you’re praying. The hymns keep coming so it looks like you and God are tight.

  You’re not going to look in the coffin. Blow that. Where did it even come from, the idea of parading past the box—from the old days where they needed to double-check you’d carked? You hang back when the queue starts. You pat a tissue at the damp flex of mascara so people will think you’re overcome. Not squeamish. At the back of the church someone is juggling a baby. The heat is dialing up. The flowers bulge with scent, looming off the altar. How long does it take to kiss a corpse goodbye anyway. The baby handler is doing a lousy job of shutting it up. The air feels whiney with lilies. You hate that pollen. People file back from rubbernecking death and press against your flanks.

  You don’t see him until you’re saying hallelujah for your club sandwich, giving thanks for the trinity of ham and cucumber and mashed egg with no crusts. Everyone’s black clothes are clichéd with sweat, clouded at the impractical armpits. He’s flushed too: he’s rucking with the collar of his suit, but knocks it off when he spots you. Juts his lats back, his jaw up, the way he used to, tries to look swag as he weaves through the pack of old ladies fussing round the cake. You don’t want to smile: you know your gums will be arched with suckers of soft white bread.

  But then, you’re not dead.

  13.

  You’ve learnt to back down from your mother. The guy behind the counter can tell your training is just about to kick in. It’s in his face as he goes through the warranty clauses: he’s banking on you giving up. And that’s what makes you smack both wrists on the bench, your fingernails a tenfold piss off. No way, mate. You are not going to stand for it. You want to see the manager.

  You wait in the manager’s office. The chair they’ve put you on is munted, so you pulse a little on the plastic seat, a diagonal tock that’s out of sync with the minute hand. The lino gives your sandals an unwashed scud. You’re not touching the water they’ve given you. The children framed on the desktop are diving into sunlight only money can buy. You feel ripped off.

  You ready your turned back when the door opens. You pick off the fold-back clip on your home-file of docs and get ready to drop them in a splay, an I mean business spread, aggressive, on his desk.

  When he touches your hair. So you twist to see who it is. His hand goes looking for memory. The air in the room is out of order. Small claims scatter to your ankle-strap. The half-hearted water glass floods. Your scalp goes neon with love.

  Lifetime guarantee.

  15.

  The world is a jigsaw of places you could meet him in. This town is a big dark chunk, a solid edge, its streets interlocking one border of the lonely rented life he’s bound to find you in, pretending to trade under your married name, telling your lies. You feel yourself getting backed against it. At night, you look out the window and the street lights click the aimlessness into sequence. In other lives you’ve slipped past leading, the headlights of his car will pull towards you or away, deciding the direction you’ll walk in when you wake, the outline you will chalk into dreams to help your fall. You know what you’ve got coming.

  17.

  You’re on a jetty. The sea could not be slimier, moving in sucks of green oil through gaps in the boards. Nail heads stick out. Nothing round here is safe. The soles of your feet are good as fish in their grieving. You could paddle on the splinters all day. And why don’t you? Take your shoes off or leave them on? Plastic bags wobble past in the foam. The aching of ropes leads down to the water. Everything down there discolours and bloats. The ridges of your mouth don’t feel like words will ever split them open again.

  He’s gone. It should be what’s written on all of the hulls that are turning in the harbour. It should be what’s written on the concave silk you find when you pick up the bleached scab of a shell. He’s gone.

  Pace the boards. Your shoes weigh nothing. Testing, testing. Everything down there knows it.

  20.

  So: reality TV. He’s in a gang of contestants, scrounging for clues on an island somewhere. The sun is too good for him. You’d like to kick sand in his face. But you watch his backbone, coming out of scrub. He’ll find the idol, he always does. The scramble of his thighs wins every battle, his throat bound in buffs, his torso a tough republic. You map the drip of his sweat, think of swallowing its nutrients.
The night vision camera makes you want to slip your thumbs into the phosphorescence of his eyes. The bend of his retinas, his teeth, should be cupped like pearls.

  Vote him out first.

  23.

  It has to be this cheap. There has to be twin lemon polyester bedspreads that smell like burnt hair. There has to be a blue plastic New Testament, chill to the touch in the lino-topped drawer. The blinds have to leave your thumbprints hanging in the dust. By the unit door there has to be a frosted globe of light the glass has busted on, trimmed with the crisp dark joints of roasted insect. You have to stare at it. Wing and thorax, a comical crystal ball of fuzz.

  You wait a long time. There has to be time to wait. Or how would you see the detail: the looped pile in the orange carpet, how the ball of your foot can ooze through its swirls. There has to be time to locate the band of hair clustered in the shower grille. It’s turning into a crown, bonded with slime. There has to be time to find that. The brown lines parched into the leathery apricot soap. Wire legs on the bouclé chairs. The flex to the fringed lamps thick as tendons. The melted roses on the toaster’s plastic tray. How would you feel if you missed any of that?

  How would you feel if you couldn’t smell your breath in the Arcoroc coffee cup, the fumes of stale remorse damp on your make-up. How would you feel if the vintage TV didn’t hiccup through three silver channels, flashes of re-run glitching the water you don’t let tip out your pencilled eyes. It’s a good theme song for weeping but there’s not enough volume. You hover above the bowl to piss. You have to laugh at yourself, squatting upright, your OCD flanks. The blinds have to break up the mirror, seven years of bad luck you only blink at. Your hairdo has to turn orange with the carpark glow. You have to lay down. You decide it’s wigs, or maybe the dolls you boxed up back in childhood—yes, the bedspreads smell like wigs.