Deleted Scenes for Lovers

by Tracey Slaughter

  He has to knock, although he has a key. You have to say no, you’ve changed your mind. Everything feels like lint; the air on your lipstick, the chain to the faux-panelled door. The ashtrays have to be scallop shells. You can’t stand the feel of scallop shells. You can’t stand the sound they make on the glass coffee table every time you stub. It gets in your teeth, that sound, that calcified ripple, like tiny bones clicking out of place. It’s the sound as you rig your last cigarette, exhaled to the base, in that pink fluted dump. Then open the door to him after all.

  Because you’re a joke. You have to be a cheap joke, don’t you? Everything here has been pointing to it.

  24.

  Later, he pulls the New Testament out of its bedside cubby. It lies on his abdomen. There’s a spiral of hair as dark as all the ex-flies nuked and suspended outside the unit door. The testament breathes there. We have to sin, he says to you. He pulls a preacher’s yea-behold hand sign, grinning. Verily, I say unto you. We have to sin. Or Jesus died for nothing.

  26.

  The woman at the shop has had a gutsful of tourists. Dark brown freckles spurt down her forearms as she grapples with the ice cream scoop. The backs of her hands look like they’ve been dragged through sand. She’s gruff with the mint choc chip—the bastard’s iced up.

  You’ve got plenty of time to pick out the change, exact, while she’s hacking at the pastel tub. The cone stand makes a graunch as she shoves yours upright—a triple, of course, it bloody had to be. You hold the little stack of coins over her palm, release with a simper. You hear her sling them in the till, huffy, as you flick out through the anti-fly rainbow flaps.

  The track there is longer than you thought, and rougher. Your jandals keep skidding on the clay, and you give sudden blushing Oohs and off-kilter Whoopsies, checking for anyone snickering your way. But it’s nice and clear. You gum on the balls of mint. The heat drips the green down the cone, so you mop up with your tongue.

  Your ticker is thudding by the time you reach the stairs. It’s steeper than you’d bargained for, a shonky frame of salt-bleached wood. The plastic tread they nailed on the steps has sheared off to poke up in silly black curls from its pins. You suck on the last of your cone to get your hands free. It’s beautifully soggy at the ice-creamy base, baggy with sweetness.

  Once you’ve got down, you let your jandals ping you through the scruff of seaweed to the finer white. The rock cathedral is crooked and smells of secrets the earth is keeping. Cool ripples work the distance of minerals up through the strangeness of the roof. The air feels ancient, moulded to your mouth like a song. You slip off your jandals and let your feet mottle the sand. You always thought you’d marry here. Oh well.

  There’s no sense feeling sorry. It could be worse as you dig your towel out of your kit and flap it open in the sunlight. It could be worse than a gladwrapped package of sandwiches and a flask for one. A little dip in the tide and a paperback romance. You should be careful what you hanker for. There’s nothing like getting your haunches settled on your towel with the warmth of the sand humming through to them. You pat on your sunscreen, set up your jandals in a neat couple at the end of the towel, toe-prints in a smutty fan. What more could you ask.

  29.

  There are no turns to take. Just the grey of a left-handed world driving in through your screen. There are letterboxes. They’re not all white, but they look it. The words inside them seem very black when you blink. You blink. He is never in the words. He is never in a letter sent to any number down a road where you are always moving backwards until you reach a house where you still don’t stop even though you’re at zero.

  31.

  You don’t have a self in a waiting room. You have a name and a vowel sound. They call one and you answer with the other. The two do not seem joined anymore. You are joined to the chair with its blue vinyl grips. You are joined to the steel rings puncturing the curtain. You are joined to the yellow needle stubbed into your wrist with its jack of clouded tubing. When they lie you flat later, you are joined to the keyboard that is wheeled to the ward by a senior troop of do-gooders. The morphine takes no time to climb your bicep and punch across the easy muscle of your heart. The morphine joins you deeper to the song being pumped out of the keyboard, What a Friend We Have in Jesus.

  Once you used to daydream of accidents you’d have. You thought they would bring him back. He would cross to you and ponder your hair, strewn by emergency. He would not stand to see you suffer. He would make it stop. You would still have mascara on. And if it wasn’t him it would be another man. Someone would find you, spritzed with fever, pale and silkily arranged in your tragedy.

  When the salvation keyboard has finished, one of the aging singers comes to your bed. She leaves you a flannel with crocheted edges and a tie-on card with a psalm on it. She will visit again tomorrow. It will be the season for you to throw up. The plastic puke container is the size of a Chinese takeout serve and she will hold it although it’s not big enough. She will use the flannel to rinse off the pigment of your sick, your pretty lashes dragged away with it.

  You will look forward to seeing her.

  You will read the psalm and cry.

  You will think God looks like a woman with a lukewarm rag who knotted its edges by hand.

  You will live for the night-shift dose of morphine uttering its subcutaneous blasphemies.

  33.

  You’re taking off your make-up. Once you used to hate doing this because there was a young girl waiting underneath. Now you hate doing it because there is an old woman. You can’t wait to put a fresh coat on.

  You try not to look at the still life of your face. If he had chosen you, you would have had a different one. You could have stared at the whole thing, instead of painting in corners. The lines aren’t even fine print anymore. You apply shadows, tack around the lips. You strain the skin sideways. Black visors cloak your eyes. You tweeze your brows into broken feathers. Close range, side-on, you eyeball your pores, use a thumbnail to dredge out silver jelly.

  All you’ve done is paint on another face he’ll never love.

  36.

  You’re having a pyjama day. That’s it, fuck it. It’s for mental health. You’ll bung your hair in a ponytail where it will wobble around unwashed. You’ll boycott bras, or underarm, or breakfast. You’ll leave the curtains yanked shut, hotbox the lounge and plug in every crap movie you can think of. Calorie intake will be continuous, sticky and guilt-free. You will let out farts into your flannelette boxers.

  You will forget your calendar. You’ll forget there’s a Trade Me pickup coming. You will freeze at the first door knocks, think if you don’t budge they’re bound to back off and just go home. But they don’t. They head around, hunting for gaps in the curtains. They can hear the white noise of TV. Just your luck that the violins are gearing up to underline a true romantic bit.

  So you’ve got no choice. He starts hailing from the kitchen side, where he can see clear through. What’s worse, when you roll your arse off the couch you trip over the manky cat, launch across the lounge with a stumble that’s still going by the door handle. He’s speechless when the door bunts open. He gives the waistband of his shorts an awkward lift. His work boots are charged with clay up the tread. The print of the cushion on your lazy face must look like a birthmark: you can feel its pins and needles. But turns out he’s got a grin to give you. Turns out he’s not hard on the eyes. Turns out he doesn’t mind his women no frills.

  39.

  The days are filling with ways he won’t meet you. You’re still drunk when you wake up. The room is sandbagged with stale clothes, not all of them yours, and everything you touch is an omen. You rake down the blinds to try to bypass the sun but the season is full-scale, the heat won’t be blocked. Your tongue is rugged in a bloodless mouth. Small errors blur everything. All the hallways feel like hairpin turns—you get nowhere fast. Outside six birds are picking the kerbside clean. But you can’t eat. His face in the back of your memory doesn’t help you wat
ch the man in the bed, who turns when you go back to the room, and makes a reach like a shortcut for a better gesture. You lie down under that abbreviation of touch.

  41.

  You drink on the swings and the piss spreads a sting through your chest. The chains click. There are seagulls everywhere, seed-eyed, strands of fishing line snagged in their feathers and ragged webbed feet. Such mongrel birds. The sea that’s supposed to be here for you has backed off for miles. The harbour’s full of holes, shallow Os in the flat light, part silver, part shit. They make you blink. Your hips hurt, the bones of them built too wide for the vinyl hanger. You catch a length of hair in the cleats and your scalp pulls up, red hot, at the temple. But it’s worth it. Because he leans in and tells you it’s a long road, but he knows you’re waiting at the end of it for him. Yeah, that’s it, you’re like his fate. The other girls mean nothing. You’re meant to be. So you chug vodka and murmur it into his kiss, as the gulls flog each other for crusts and the mud flicks the sun out.

  43.

  Just walk in! Great first home! Everything’s been straightened, and the realtor’s gone with the trick of bread baking, fumed the house with yeasty warmth. But they can’t hide the signs of a split. Unfaded frame shapes left on the wallpaper, not a white dress to be seen in the shots still tacked up. Lawyers’ cards under the butterfly magnets on the fridge. Vendors are motivated! Your husband keeps touching you every room you view—just an index tap on your forearm, out the realtor’s gaze, a code for the deal you could score. Has to be seen to be believed! You can hear your kids, their racket in the Quarter-acre section! You open the bathroom cupboards and one side is wiped clean—though there’s shreds of stubble knocked from a shaver left in the corner. So this could be it. Your husband has gone outside to tone the kids down—they’ve showered the lawn in hoodies and boots and taken to the trampoline. You go to the office, where it’s all him, packed into cartons, find yourself flicking up a layer of wrap. The size of the photo you have in your hand is a jigsaw fit for the fade in the living room wall: and the groom is looking straight at you. You go back to the bathroom, lick your finger and dab it in the scurf. Your heart crams with blood. The kids are a circus outside. The realtor’s creeping the verandah with its Wraparound views! Your husband is walking the narrow hallway and you know from the set of his jawline that he’s running figures on A future in the sun! You put a hand to the neck of your shirt and use it to scour the collarbone that won’t stop leaping, your finger, unforgivable, alive with his roughage.

  46.

  They send you back to clean Room 617. Someone’s complained they lost their wallet—bitch at the office eyeballs you like you’re suspect. What the fuck ever. Exhibit A: you drag back the trolley, flip her the bird. Crank the key and the smog of sealed room hits you. You’re well into the off-season. The only couples that book in now are up to nothing good. They need to get well off the map. You rark through all the likely spots, yank back curtains, the shadows in the sou’east of the wardrobe. Everything stinks of emptiness. Everything’s holding this chill of cheap carpet and sweat, base-rate rooms only used for a fuck. Pastels, no extras, the scent of dripping taps, but the splendour of skin gone to shine in endless wrangling—rooms that get to stage the epic dirty things no marriage does. Or so you reckon. But you can’t find a wallet, no matter how you dredge the corners. Until you’ve got down on your gut, aimed your head in the dark channel under the Super King. You need to get back up, ram the handle of the mop back in the gap to swish the billfold free. Then you squat there, turning the clear plastic flaps, your body stiff in its budget uniform, viewing the faces of him and his kids, a line-up of birthdays and mugshots of travel, his wife with her middle-class strings of fob chain dangled from the shoulder she’s got tensed with the fucking Taj Mahal in the background.

  49.

  In the left-hand corner there’s the edge of his board, the scuffle of wax up its curve gone murky with toeholds. You remember that. Behind him the bed, you know, will be riveted with sand. His T-shirt will be greasy, and you’ll be pitiful, tapping the print on his diaphragm where the logo for a car yard leads nowhere near his heart. The room will smell like mosquitoes, a high-pitched smell so full of summer you scratch and pant. Your feet will be bare, but still reek of jandals, the nub of wet rubber haltering your toes. You’ll pull off your singlet, but still have a bib of sunburn, dribbled with freckles, like scraps of a better girl’s tan. You’ll try to kiss him until your teeth ache. You’ll let him buckle your legs and slide you back on the lino. You’ll want to get that ugly 70s print tattooed in black fins on your back—go on, let him walk on you. There’s a spider plant dangled from his mum’s macramé which hangs there like a brown beaded spine. Your mouth is branded Lion Red. The windows are scaly—the whole town looks like salt. But there isn’t a town out there anyway, only a spit, a flatline horizon, kids dropping like gulls off the one-lane bridge, a distance of pines carved off at the stumps, trucks low-gearing out to the exit you’re too young and thick to take. You’ll take it later. Maybe you will. Freehand now, you’re just all over his skin. He’s sour and the low tick of veins are in your mouth, one real deep thump where your lip meets cock base, a spaz of hair that tastes of togs. There’s ants, single file, where he’s left a sandwich, stubbed in tinfoil, a collection of shot glasses, flags he scored for some shit at school. For being first, for being beautiful. You get up and study the shape of the photo that no one ever takes, the shadows of it fluid on his outstretched trunk, the fused light waiting in the blue pools of his hand. You walk out the memory and pass it to me. I add it to the album of moments I never got to frame before he changed his mind and kicked me out the room like the easy lay I was.

  49.

  Write a story. Place him at the right-hand edge of the sentence, crouched. Use a shadow, running the length of his shoulder, to signal his intent to turn. Lay a comma on the brink of his hipline, a suspended pause of dark. Space your fingers on the keys: they are the roots of his hair. Pray he never gets closer than the page.

  the turn

  You know you’ll get the hit of a million cigarettes. A mile off, still, you can smell it on him. It’s bad light out the back of his place, but it’s a smoker’s shout he aims at you, a rough greeting to guide you round the stockpiles of junk in the dim shop, until you get to him. Howzit mate? He knocks his forehead back, expecting a bloke, then maybe you come into tighter focus, out of the shed-front of square-on sun and edging round the dump of bung machines with some tilt to your hips or something, so then you get his toked-up grin. All tobacco molars up back—but that can’t block the eyes, which are bad-news blue and playing up whatever sun they’ve got. To the max. And smoke. Smoke round him, like you haven’t wanted for years. To huff it hard down into you. Drag on it fully and hold it, chocker, in your gut.

  ‘You the pick up, eh?’

  And he knows. Knows full well his eyes give him leeway. His stare gets more than an innings down on your hips. Then climbs up, in no hurry. And Jesus, you’ve hardly put a thought into how you look, heading over here, last minute, giving your husband all kinds of lip on the phone for thinking he could just send you round to do his shit jobs, It’s not as if it’s work, even, you’d spit into the sink as the teeth got maybe a once-over, still freaking at him down the phone, it’s a half-arsed hobby, it’s for losers, what kind of loser packs the house out with random munted stuff that he flogs off for fuck-all and thinks he’s like some shrewd top fucking dealer. Trade Me is for wankers. So you’ve hardly yanked a comb through your hair, you just balled it up the back of your skull as you were stamping down the drive, and punched some clip up through it that you grubbed out the glovebox, still ranting. Still going off into the air in the empty car, because when you told your husband you’d got the hospital to visit, remember, he’d tried to use it, he’d tried to get into it, gentle and whiny, No you don’t have to babe, you know you don’t have to, but you just launch, you just cut him off, I told you we are not fucking talking about that. And
now you are standing in a wrecker’s to pick up some junk he’s bid on, with way too much sunlight up your back and sweat fanning out your T-shirt pits. And there is a stare coming at you from this guy that makes you think back to a line you used at high school, Take a picture why don’t you, it’ll last longer, and you can feel the load of your hair slipping out its shonky grip. Some afterthought of scrapping it out with your husband, like sadness, getting loose on your scalp.

  You dizzy bitch.

  It’s the motion, though, this guy’s look going through you, and how it gets lodged somewhere, spinal. And you can’t even be sure when you last got scoped like this, so you go hunting for a memory of some point when you used to move sleek and cool through a pub or a backyard at parties because you knew there were eyes on you, there were looks aimed low. But all you come up with is sadness again. And your husband had said when you were clashing, It’s years, babe, I don’t think you look in the mirror anymore, you do know it’s been years, eh? And now it’s like all the ribs in your chest don’t fit, won’t flex to let you shrug it off. They’re gridlocked. So you stare off instead at the hunks of machine the guy’s got stashed round the shed, and it’s true, they all look in better shape than you. All this shit is at least good for something. You are the write-off. Nothing in you worth storing up, reusing. There’s no yard for you.

  ‘Heat fucking with you, eh? Need a cold one?’

  Place is a maze of parts. There are propellers, paddles, in the heap out left. There are windshields, tie-downs, drums. You stare around the shed, the lean-tos tacked onto its tin sides, tubs of bolt, racks of tools. Tanks, straps. You try target your stare, like you’re fully running inventory, like you’ve got an eye for a good deal, weighing up. Like your head’s not stocked with tears.