But blink. And Christ, now there’s an output of wet. At least you manage to turn your back, partly, to get, if nothing else, a shoulderblade between him and you. Pathetic. Just make out it’s the sun in your eyes, or maybe a dose of fumes, and palm off the slip down the left side of your face. Try make the blank side mutter back, Yeah, fucking heat, it’s like, how many fucking degrees can it get. But that’s not what comes out.
There’s nothing but the sound you make. The groan of it. Unglued. Like words got stuck in muscle, and pulled out of shape there.
Then there’s like, a ricochet, like your noise knocked loose some bit of metal. Listen to it. Some thin piece of rig or trim drops down in the distance, tingles, through its high pile.
And if he’s fazed by you he doesn’t make much show. He sticks with the heat line.
‘Takes it out of you, eh. Cranked up the aircon, but it hardly makes a diff. Mate, I know you from somewhere, eh? Nah? Nah, I reckon I’ve spotted you. Somewhere round. Anyway. You wanna rollie?’
Yes. You do. You just need to get a grip, on a single word.
He is onto it, but. Goes for his pouch, down the right-hand of his overalls, loose-fingered, low-key. Like it’s no biggie. Like he gets people bawling in here every day maybe.
You get into some trance, tracking his fingertips. It’s the routine of rolling that always left you calm, just to watch it, the small motor hush of the moves. Feeding out the dry weed. Flick of dirty thumbs up the paper. And tongue-tip, barely off the lower lip, lazing and flat, a wide, easy run. Just watching it, you go quiet to your fingerprints.
He holds it out to you.
‘Answer for everything, eh?’
You can nod. Just enough, not to tip more useless wet off the edge of your eyes. And then before you get closer, take the smoke, you can tilt your head back as if it’s all about sorting out your hairclip, keeping your manky fringe scrunched clear of the lighter.
Then you let your mouth open, lean in, line up your face with the wrecker’s dirty hand.
Take a jaw full of who you once were.
Drop way back in that smell.
Watch the rafters, up there, dark beams buckled with metal, your head arced in thin sheets of smoke.
You quit years ago, but it’s not like you remember what for—it’s not like you want to breathe these days in any deeper. Yeah, how’s that for a trip?—you gave it up to keep your lungs clean, and now you spend most days trying not to breathe your own life in. Don’t want to inhale the facts. Any of it. As though if you keep your ribs good and still they might not pick up too much trace of the life you’re stuck living, it might not get right under your skin, might not stick. It’s not a well thought-out programme. Just a way to cope. Adrift, sideways. Without looking at the state of things, head on. Like the way you watched the land back away from you on the drive over here, or like driving over to the hospital, most days, only half-awake. Black hills in the rearview, pulling easy out from your gaze. Flatland outside, wired into lines, floods of smooth field moving in reverse, miles you can let leak past you. You could just keep your head half-afloat there, with the coast cruising off to black in a backward haze. No counter to the wheel, no pull, just your hands laid open on the circle, ten and two, like the shape of some emptied-out prayer, loose-palmed. Coasting out to a vacant horizon. And why would you bother, why would you shift your look back to the road? Eyes front, there is fuck-all oncoming. Life is not exactly going anywhere. Not likely to change now. Not for you.
Either way, not for your bro.
Which is not good. It’s the smoke. The smoke has brought him back with it, up from way-back, from far out of his state in the hospital, from somewhere you’ve got a memory of him living, your brother, the two of you teens, hanging out on the rear bench that summer day when your dad got married again, little mongrel know-it-alls that you and him were, in the good gear they made you wear, scowling at everyone except each other, ignoring the pastor and keeping up this mean-as swap of sneers throughout the service. And then your bro actually lights up. He actually goes and lights up while they’re maybe two-thirds through the love and obey and whatever. And passes it, grinning, like a total bastard to you. And fuck it tastes so good, it tastes like you’ve got someone on your side forever, no matter that your mum’s a goner, and your dad’s up there getting hitched to a cheap cow you can’t stand, who he hooked up with before your mum was even cold. And her kids are like everywhere, quarter of your age, expecting to have their sticky fucking hands held, expecting to be part of the team, like they’ve got rights to you and your dad just because everyone’s got shiny wedding clothes the same gross colour, like this new family will just get matched up, all one unit of tight shoes and photoshopped smiles. But not your bro and you. You are way out. You are buzzing on the pisstake you keep going through the whole wedding deal. And now you’ve got your faces down here in the chapel, down where there’s like fold-down prayer steps you’re meant to kneel down on and blah blah suckful praise, and instead you’ve got the smoke moving, in and out the radius of your two faces, yours and his, him and you. Where it’s easy to see who belongs to whose family, because your face is a trade-off for his one, scrub this Maybelline rubbish off it, dig that nasty halo of flowers out your hair, and you’re as good as twins, with smiles of one a switch for the smoked-out laughter hissing up the mouth of the other. With your eyes popping and your ribs humping, your lips jammed in a line, trying not to cough. And the thing that caps it off is: he’s got to go up and sign the licence. There’s a photographer up there waiting and everything, all rigged up to take the shot. And you hold your hand out to snatch the smoke off him before he goes, but he sends you this Nah, mate, have a jack at this look. And he swags up the aisle with it in his fingers. And he puts it down—no shit—he props it in the flowers on the table where they’re waiting to sign. He actually balances it, super careful, right on one green meaty megabucks leaf. And it smokes away, this fizzle rising up in the total tense-as quiet of the church. Then he sits down to scribble, and gets up straight-faced, and picks his fag back out the flowers, says Sweet, and takes a slow stroll to his seat with a nice load of ash getting dropped on the church fucking carpet as he takes his laidback time.
Let it drift through your teeth, the smoke. Haul it in, heat up the ridges at the back of your throat. Look square at him.
‘All good?’ the wrecker says.
‘Course.’ Because that’s where you are. Way out from that day. Waiting, to get the deal done, in a yard.
‘Can never remember what I was stressing about. Once I got my head wrapped round one of these.’
‘True.’
‘Too true. All that shit on the box to put you off. All that Ka mate koe i te kai hikareti. Big whoop. Take more than that. The way I see it. It’s worth every poisonous minute.’
Those are the words that make you grin back at him. Then glance off. At towbars, struts. Outboard winched up in the centre, chained. You don’t have to look far to see yourself in mirrors, wings and rears. At all angles. The whole place reeks, but it’s somehow good to swallow, in with the smoke, the heavy solvent stink of metal, a tank water taste to it, some brew like sour fuel and old leaves. A faint ache of diesel where the roof of your mouth backs down into throat.
‘Pays to keep a few spares, eh. Ha.’
And maybe it’s the word pay, but you get on with it, dig out the wedge of cash in your jeans.
‘Should be the total. Least that’s what my husband said.’
‘Beauty.’
‘He was planning to pick up, but got caught at work. You might want to check. I took off in a bit of a rush and just grabbed it. Think it’s all there, but.’
‘No worries. You didn’t bring someone to help put their back into it?’
‘Just me.’
‘Right. That might be the catch, eh.’
‘Sorry, mate. I didn’t know. Tell you the truth, I can’t say I actually know what I’m here to pick up. He could’ve bid on anything. For all I
know.’
‘Ha. That right?’
‘Sad to say. Yeah. Don’t know what half the crap he drags home is. Just know my house is packed with it. Can’t get in the spare room. It’s coming down the bloody hallway now.’
‘Sell you something off any old shit-pile then, eh? Ha.’
‘You could try.’
‘Nah. Wouldn’t do it to you, love.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘Nah. Not you. Special terms of trade. For sheilas. Of a certain type.’
‘Fucking come off it.’
‘Ha. Nah, come on. Thing is, right, it’ll be a pure bastard to shift. Just between us, I don’t reckon you’d be up to the thing. No offence. But not too sure your bloke was really thinking it through.’
‘That’d be right.’
‘That so.’
Try not to nod too hard.
‘Needs his head read, eh. You don’t mind me saying. Expecting a little thing like you to take the weight. Fuck me. The damn thing’d flatten you. If you can hang on, but, I’ll see if I can jack a mate up. To give us a hand. Got a mate lives right up back, next property. Young guy. Bit of a munter, but do anything for you. Should be sweet as. No reason you got to shoot off?’
‘S’pose not.’
‘Said you were in a rush, but.’
‘I thought I was.’
‘Things change.’
‘I probably … just wanted a reason to let him have it. My husband.’
‘Fair enough. Gets like that, eh.’
‘Some days. You want to just. I don’t know. Have it out.’
‘Sounds like wedded bliss, eh. Know it well.’
And there’s smoke moving in and out of all of it, you and him talking. And something on the end of his sentences, this seedy twitch like he knows what’s coming. Or could be. If he plays his cards right. He’s banking on his eyes, on you reading how the glint is dialling up in them, bits of sky building in his iris.
‘So. Nothing to lose then, eh.’
Which suits him. Far as you can see.
And you say, ‘I’m meant to get to hospital. For a visit. Someone there I got to go see.’
‘That so. Well, look. We can sort this later then. If you’ve got a mate not doing too good.’
‘No it’s … It’s not like they’re good. But it’s not changing.’
‘Sounds rough.’
‘So it doesn’t matter what time I go. It’s the same deal. Whatever day I make it. They don’t know. They don’t change.’
‘That’s a bugger.’
‘It is what it is.’
‘True. You go there a lot, maybe that’s where I seen you. I go in sometimes. On jobs and shit.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘When they get issues up the boiler room. I fix the burners and stuff. You wouldn’t believe the system they got up there. Fucking ages old. Got to make shit up to keep it running, out of this lot. I’ve had to go up and put in all kinds of parts, scavenged from this heap. You wouldn’t credit. And I don’t want to even think what they burn off in there.’
Which moves you away. Which is too real, the dark outline of what he’s telling you. And he must pick it up. He rucks in his pocket, flicks you his stash and says, ‘Anyway. Roll yourself one while you wait. I’ll get on the blower, get my mate fixed up. He’ll give us a lift. Shouldn’t be too much of a hold-up.’
You’re not fit to talk. So you take up what slack you can by scuffing round the shop. Making out you’ve got an eye for what’s down in the far bins. The shadows there are colossal. Jacks, off-cuts. The walls held up by whole dunes of machine. The guy’s got a foxhole of semi-office space, cleared just barely out the iron banks, a flimsy retaining wall of file cabs, a greasy roller desk, a bulb on a pull-chain. And you can hear him: turns out his mate is up back, should be down before you know it. You just drift on, take shortcuts through the high slopes of junk. You hardly know what any of it is, what it’s worth keeping for. All of it steep, tough, without meaning, so far without meaning, that you feel your mind black out around the edges of it. Or could just be your eyes, still playing up. The leakage is getting a habit. But what’s the diff. And anyway, it’s not like you’d know the meaning if you looked under the hood into an engine that was running, where the charge was good. It’s all the same to you, the bands of dark plug, the pistons punching life into the geared-up coils. You wouldn’t know the difference between a working slab of engine and a heap of unhooked junk. And you think you could tell him this, maybe, the wrecker. This is the problem: how do you tell? Tell anyone, might take some weight off it. But it’s not the kind of thought you can let last.
Because thoughts like that are an easy track to memory, just the place you don’t need to go. You don’t know the fucking diff, same as your bro always said, looking up at you from the car he’s working on, nights when it’s like the two of you in a club, your hangout the half-lit shed down back and what’s in the front house all wrong since your dad got hitched. So the two of you hunch on your crates and only lever off an elbow to light up and stare at the bad joke of your dad’s silhouette in the lounge playing dumbarse baby games with all those new kids he’s taken on, so what else would you do, the two of yous, but gang up and sulk in the garage, your bro banging shit out the panels of rando cars that he picks up from all places. The neighbourhood, the town even, knows to tip their mongrel wagons out back of his shed and yell Good fucking luck to you mate, so you spend your nights shaking your head at the next sorry dumper he’s dug in under the chassis of, telling him Fuck, bro, what goes through your skull, but his voice underground in the grille is full of love, he tells you what a dream ride he’ll make of the heap, he’ll tell you Nah, you wait, she’ll come up a beauty, she’s just got a bit of brain damage, that’s all, and reach his hand out to you, wait for you to drop the answer into it, in the shape of the next tool, the right bolt or hinge. And you don’t have a clue, do you, wouldn’t know what the fuck to pass him. So all’s you get’s a follow-up shot of laughter, the next round of pisstake. But you don’t mind. Not so much. Because it warms the shed, it warms your sternum, and the way your life’s in outbuildings now means this is all you’ve got to warm it, you and your bro is all, this greasy kingdom, where it’s okay that the wheels are off everything, okay that you crouch out here basically muttering nothing to each other round a series of wrecks, it’s like the whole place says No loss, whatever, it says So what if you’ve got to hang round in here, numb while your dad clowns round with a houseful of new kids, big deal, there’s the music of your bro unbelting a panel that’s been puckered like cloth, there’s the orchestral tingle of tools biffed on the concrete, there’s the feel that some shit does mend, at least enough to flog a few more miles out of it. There’s the sense of something bonded and thick, watching his hands climb round the dark compound, the mess under the hood. And if your dad comes out to tell you again, You two need to buck your ideas up, to give you a piece of his mind on the subject of two stubborn youths refusing to live under the perfectly good roof he’s provided for them, then you two can just stare back at him with your what-the-fuck-would-you-know gaze like it’s trained on him through cross-hairs. You’re so like twins in the grimy light that hangs from the one bad garage bulb, you know it freaks him out, your one face recurring in the shallows. You smirk at each other when he gets to his last flustered blink. He’ll say, Ah fuck yas then, and stamp back to the house. And you will laugh, although it’s not a laugh that reaches deep. It doesn’t fill you. It’s not like the fill you get from the nights when you spend so long out back you just crawl into the trailer your bro crashes in, you’re so tired and lagered you can’t be fucked taking the few dark steps that would get you to the house, you just slump in the metal box that he’s made his, a covered junk trailer propped one end, with a hole in the roof that’s been knocked through ragged with stars and a bucket to lash on to try pick off the rain, which flickers in anyway, when it wants to, and sets off the flaky smell of rust which—you’re so sick�
�you love to suck into your nostrils and feel prickle there. It’s all like comfort, you two uprooted kids slung in the trailer with the babble of rain scumming the bucket and the sting of rusted metal sour and chafing up the back of each calm breath. And sure, there’s guys by now, there’s guys that turn up and cramp round the wreck with only half an eye on anything to do with the mechanics of it, that spend their night shooting the shit with your bro and walking wide outlines round your presence, keeping their eyes in check when they pass you brews, not puzzling on your wrists or where your tits hint out from beneath your T-shirt, busting out these drum lines on the leg of their jeans to signal how laidback they are when you slink past. But you know, so you twist, and let a shank of hair scrape them, let this solo finger leave a trace on the cold one you hold out, make them jump, drop a stray touch, but it’s not enough; you play them, vague as, you leave them no proof, and your brother knows too, he’s onto you, and he raises his eyebrows at you, and there’s that smirk again. And he says, one night, when you’re banked up against him kipping in the trailer and the slurp of rain is silvering your sleeping bags anyway, screw whatever the dumbfuck bucket is supposed to achieve, he just says, You may as well put one out their misery. And you love the way he slurs may as well. You tease him, Marzel, nice prodrunkenunciation dude. But you may as well. And you wait. Then the one he suggests is your husband. It’s that simple. Tag, and he’s it. Your husband is one minute this kid shrugging in the wraparound haze of your late-night sessions, then next he’s the one whose lap you arrive in, loose-limbed and woozy like it took you getting dieseled to do it. To weave across the concrete and trip against blank parts and topple, making like you’re aimless, like your nuzzle is an accident, just a mishap, like something relaxes, there’s a half-cut slip and you loop yourself around him just by chance, just by freak. It happens. You shelter in his grab, and that’s where it stops.
Deleted Scenes for Lovers Page 14