And it shouldn’t be so easy to slide into memory. But that’s where you’ve slid, looking over at this kid like he could be your brother, like he’s just pulled the stunt your brother used to, skidding off the road-edge just to wake you when you’d dropped quiet in the passenger seat, when it was just the two of you covering those last long miles to see your mother, who was on her way out, not going easy, so you’d get in the car and have nothing to say, hunch into your seat and just try to black out through Ks, knees up against the door rattle, head on the rough sling of seatbelt that reeked of BO and turps. But he wasn’t having that, he’d sled off to the side to bring you back round. He couldn’t take the head space of a trip to visit Mum with you napping, couldn’t take the boredom or the looming of it, so he’d let you get under, just, he’d leave you till your doze was half on, then he’d choke it, he’d jolt you back to front and centre freaking, piss himself laughing while the rear tyres cast round in rubble. Catch a few zzzzz’s there sis?
Yeah whatever, you’ll fucking catch it, you slap sideways, good backhand to his ribs.
Fuck that, he says. Back to me sis, eyes front. Then he drags a sound over his throat, like he’s snoring. Time enough to sleep when you’re dead.
Brings you round cold. But you still don’t talk about your mum, don’t talk about the low-lit end of her ward, or the colour her skin’s turning, or the dripping sound effects of her machines. You talk about stuff that makes that go away, just bits of random shit, just noise and scrap and stupid jokes-not-even, that cancel out the ticking feed of her drip. Then still, you need to stop on any drive you take to visit her, need to kick clear of the state that builds up in the cab, need to stand road-edge and breathe again, you and him, nothing for it but to pit stop, take a slash, or just let the munter car cool off, let the honeycomb radiator sizzle halfway into sky, because the shitbox car is giving up the ghost, too. Nothing for it but the two of you shrugging and passing each other those rest-area grins, that empty-handed yeah-it-fucking-sucks-so-what’s-your-point smile you both got a way with. Or maybe, on the best day, he pulls over by the good hole he knows down the bridge, strips off and bolts down the clay, and goes bombing, straight in, whack, so the whole valley echoes with the flop of him, his trunk shocking water all sides into the glade of dark quiet. And you don’t skulk too long, hover a bit in the shade, then make a grab for his gear and tear off with it, that dash, the roll of stones rivering under your jandals and wet ferns grating your slithering shins, with him bawling out of the pool at you, Oh yeah, good one, starkers, yelping and floundering, good one, but still laughing with you, laughing, laughing.
‘I didn’t take his clothes in, the last time,’ you say into the car now. ‘I never took them in. The last time they got nicked. I got a new set ready, good to go. But I left them. They’re sitting there in plastic, at home, and I’ve left them there for days.’
Which gets nothing back, from the wrecker or the kid. You don’t expect it. Not a nod or a phrase. Just a null. Then the sound of the wrecker smudging some dark into place on the paper, thumbing the tube into shape with a slow exhale. Sealing it off with a fine pact of spit.
‘So, where the fuck are we then? Going or staying. Or what.’
Then ‘You wanna take her?’ this kid looks at you and says. ‘You. Go on. You should take her. Last turn. Your turn. You take her.’
So that’s how it happens. Takes a bit for the kid to crank the car out its lean, but then you’re standing by the driver’s door looking down at him saying ‘Go on then, shove over, eh.’ And once you’ve got the course back he’s coaching you, the road coasting past in horizontals of dust, bursts of laidback haze he’s teaching you to skim up from the margins, with short outs of brake, scuds of wheel. Just semi, just a trial of it, because you’ve got to get out to the quarry, got to get off-road to the east, the arena of the old works gouged miles deep into dirt, the hillside trucked out in wide hacks. But you pick up the rev and the rein-in as you go, give it a burst, the wrecker and the kid yelling help, howling cheers at you. And it’s not so far to the place where you can lose it, not far to the scoured-out wake that the quarry left curbed in clay, an undertow of earth mowed into bands of drag and, when you take a few passes with the kid calling the cues, you carve it and the two men hoot, but you feel it coming, the wider track, the big one, the swerve that takes out time itself.
Then it’s come. And what happens is you spiral into memories, you brake and wing out on the missed arc of his life, you pivot through his lost flash-forward of scenes like an oil spill of images your mind keeps spinning through, and light sprays out and out but there’s nothing you can grip. There’s just the burn of a kaleidoscope of scenes he never got to, fragments of a life he couldn’t live, like you’ve swung the car against the tide of the world, against the body of time and where it’s moving, the direction of your bloodstream pumped back against the panels, the skid of sound up through your throat, the echo of his, your scream the outbreak of the shout he never got to lift. His darkness levered open on your spine. And your brain ignites with him, he sparks off and shots of him splash traction sideways, a future cut away in random skids where he doesn’t get to live on in his radiance, he smashes with it into the hard face of unending heat, and it is not God he feels, it is metal, it is zero, it’s the wild machine of living slammed into freefall, and he’s not driving in the seconds that split around him, no one’s driving it, it flies into pain, it flies into questions, it flies into atoms. That go out like light whiplashed silent on the halo of every place you touch his body and turn cold with a need to end its hurt.
And when you stop the last of him is in you. There’s an updraft, like smoke. It settles. And then you know what to do.
local sluts in your area
She has three car accidents in two weeks. After each of them, she climbs from the wreck and walks off down the road. It’s simple. The white lines lead her, hydraulic. The clouds feel close to the side of her head. She walks in their corridor. People who have pulled up to the scene try to follow her, use her elbow to steer her back. They prop her shoulders with jackets, step in her way, speak heavily into her face. It’s the shock, they say. To listen to them she has to blink. Their words are loud in the red beneath her lids, but when she opens her eyes their voices dissolve again. Up in the silence of her hairline she finds she can dig out seeds of fresh glass, guide them into the open and watch them tip off the pad of her finger onto the curb. A truck bores past and she can watch it flatten the grass in silver spasms. She’s surprised to learn later that the three different men who were driving are all still alive.
Her mother’s latest boyfriend turns up to stay. He stands in the doorway of her room like a cliché. He has half a finger missing on his left hand, and he plays the joke of tucking the stump in his pocket and pulling the lack of it out, pop, like a non-rabbit out a hat. It’s a small, neat room—easy to back her into. There are posters on the wall of men who don’t make her gag. Cross-legged, she is sitting on her bed and knitting a halter, a stringy work of summer on oversized needles that sweat. He pulls it again, his trick. She should giggle at this: the air beyond his knuckle strange with emptiness, the bulb battered flat. She should ask what happened, she should blush as she squirms. But she doesn’t. The jump makes the needles skid, the tips swerve out the next knot. Her mother’s boyfriend laughs as she watches holes rush in sequence through the guts of her top. When he goes out to smoke later he leans on the power box outside her window and she hears his jandal squeaking on the side that reads voltage.
Her mother gets called in sometimes to play. Short notice, with a sound guy who shrugs at the set-up and says, Close enough. The leads are left sloppy on the stage. Her mother still fits into her dresses but not her skin. When she sings she is wet eyes and cartilage. Under her feet there is electrical tape peeling in pseudo-crosses all over the carpet, multicoloured as weeds. She sounds like a woman with bills overdue.
Out in the green room she listens to her mother’s voice,
off from the first bar by a minor third. The sound guy rubs his hand a matter of degrees from her cunt. Her legs are her mother’s, he says. The spitting image. Someone has biroed into the 70s wallpaper, asking bands to stop pissing in the corner.
Her mother loads the melody wrong. The back of the sound guy’s neck looks like snakeskin. Diagonals of nylon lantern dip on their wire out the high grid window. Give me a reason, her mother is singing, with her body in the clutch of a red dress it won’t recover from. Everyone buying their drinks looks at the back wall. Her mother is not what was advertised. It’s the word love that’s bad news. The word love makes her cave in around the neck and she does a move stage-left which looks like sidestroke.
On a reef of posters she waits for the punchline of the sound guy’s thumb. These last-minute nights of off-pitch sadness are all that her mother has got.
She gets a second job cleaning the school. There’s the drone of the teachers backing out the carpark. Everything feels like glue. Clods of bog paper have been fired, wet, at the lino ceiling of the boys’ loo, and she has to use a ladder to pick off the baked white nests.
In the old classroom that used to be hers, the children have made fake self-portraits. Butterflied metal pegs their too-big heads and their too-pink skins to a washline. They stiffen over the sink and watch her, teeth in a neat box, eyelashes winging out like splinters. When she roughs the mop past they make a grey paint-buckled sound, like a photocopy of thunder.
When she has finished with the polisher she sits on the carpet corner where she used to have mat-time, the teacher squatting on a cut-down chair, the pages of a story sucking over in glossy airless flops. There used to be a melt of corduroy cushions, brown and pummelled in a heap the kids could lie on—she can still smell them if she lets herself, nuzzle the musty sound of the word snooze. She nearly does. Before it drops out the sun goes the colour of her long-ago paintings, wide-angle, done by hand. The truth is she should get on with her job but she stalls and watches the sunlight weather her shins, in shapes like pages there’s no time left to turn. She isn’t hired to daydream. She’s old enough to know now not to put her head down, let tears roll off it into a dull corduroy knoll.
Hanging over the stink of the warped bins, she shoos away a veil of drowsing flies.
Sometimes she reads about disasters to a woman in a unit. The aging care used to be by the sea, until waterfront prices. Then they moved it to a road out by the sewage plant. The unit is yellow and the woman was once her neighbour for a couple of years. She was little when, up between their houses, there was a flush of geraniums, a sketch of fence gone crooked under them, wire in a slack silver hint through their juicy sprawl. She never loved those flowers: the climb between sections was grazed with their fibres and their compost sweetness. The rattly shelves inside were what she visited. The old woman let her tiptoe the china figurines through their icing of dust. The stories had all turned the colour of apple-core.
The old woman cannot talk anymore. The unit is alarmed and there is a doping effect to its four tight walls. Time and muscles around the eyes go into the woman’s painstaking stare, until the room seems to blink with her, drawn into the force of the skin contracting round her iris. As a tiny girl she once survived an earthquake, used to cluck out tales, bathtubs coasting along main-street, the glittery widescreen death of parched fish flipping in mile after mile of cancelled sea. She likes to have the illustrated horrors turned over for her. She can’t narrate them anymore, but catalogues them with swoops of swollen blue knuckle. The book on the earthquake is heavy and the plastic gatefold digs into the knee the girl is using to lever the story’s dead weight—she gives the old woman a kiss before she leaves, and tastes Deep Heat and urine and lavender. She tries to find a channel so the woman has a reason to keep her eyes open but on TV there are only other rooms with nurses.
The three live men all look the same, although she met them different places in the two weeks she crashed. She works out back at the pub in her other job and after closing she turns up at parties, the cars she’s stepped into to get there a blur to her, a revving emptiness, a sequence of flashes of head-lit letterboxes, hotel fronts, near-miss trees if she closes her eyes. Which she is learning not to. She stands in rooms and is handed glasses and does the dance of laying her head back, technical, the sway of liquid lapped headlong off the rim, while her hips, rocked opposite, sip at the outskirts of the beat. She likes this, for long seconds, laughs at the coma she feels coming on, drops shots back into the laugh, goes barefoot, rotors with the song, cyclones her hair. The rain is purple, if she lurches long enough. She’s lead guitar, she’s make-believe. She laughs at how easy a dance knocks pain off-camera, a drink tips the past out of shot. She is growing up. Then she trips and the glass of a side table turns to crimson tokens in her hand. Everything’s cut. Until she wakes up with her vision cornered in a whining, vinyl wedge. A man she does not remember pumps her lower body. She watches his blank shape, jockeying. She smells the blood before she lifts it, groping the handles of a car door she can’t smudge free. It runs down the hand that she squirms at the window, her wrist filling with ladders of it.
Their latest house used to be a butcher shop and when they move in there are still display trimmings, edging the glass front and the doors that open right on the pavement. The risk is, anyone could walk off the street, but they have to watch TV with the swing doors propped to ease air in, so every sunset there’s the thrum of plastic grass with model animals clipped into its fringe, stock before they’re sirloin. When it gets dark, the passing cars stretch a silhouette of high blades up the wallpaper, the plastic beasts looming in a blurred parade of limbs. Close-up to the shop front she can still make out the choice cuts promoted in the shaved red paint.
Out back there is the old chiller. It can be clamped shut from the inside. She stocks it with boxes of stuff that wouldn’t jam into her room with its flimsy narrow walls. She goes to visit them, liking the noise of the door as it seals, bolted and emphatic. She even unpacks some things she hasn’t seen in a while. Her dolls all end up smelling like homekill.
Her mother is a memory of good looks gone to tan and sinew. But she likes her camera, a Kodak that feeds out instant shots. She keeps it in the kitchen, on the shelf with the pills, so it’s at hand whenever a new man arrives. The fridge is a collage of headshots.
The girl hates the gallery but likes the moist, mechanical buzz the camera makes, the oblong blank ejected with a squeak from its lip. She likes to stare down at the black shine of panel and sense the photo coming round, like an image in a coma, hints of movement flicking in its skin.
She is wasted when one of the three men offers her a ride. She only remembers one face and one voice, but the rides are all taking her in the same direction. He comes into the toilet when she’s cleaning up after the guy she’s just let fuck her out back. The party is winding down, someone hurling, someone tossing empties into a blue plastic sack. He’s heard from the last guy. They have a system, a way to pass round girls. He kneels by the bog, burrows into her legs, and his fingers pick out the stepping-stone freckles of her jaw, walk over the bridge of her nose. Freckles, he murmurs, are such a fucking shame. She doesn’t need a mirror to know she’s mapped. There’s one gone slushy, a dark stretch of sunkiss, under her right eye, just waiting for his thumb.
A.M., her mother takes an angle on the table, the kitchen window diagonal to her jaw. Her ankles spread wider than the chair legs, like she’s bearing down. Her cami dangles from strings that are no longer lace, and talk juts her collarbones. But she wants to talk. She wants to talk to her girl when she’s lost. Counter clockwise: that’s how she stubs her cigarette. Baby, baby come. Talk to your mother.
There is a watch, too wide on her wrist, a bangle that her baby has never known how to read. There’s no numbers on its face, just gold slits spaced round the cut-price oval like they’re supposed to mean something. There’s no waterfront through her windows. The forecast is a view of walls. North of her mother�
�s face there will be smoke in a layer that semaphores for days.
If it’s a good morning, she will leave her door open so you can hear a man’s breath coming from her sheets. So you can hear that the house has weight, fresh obligation, a ribcage you can’t shift. She will let you soak that in for a second, the good news of that phlegm melodic. Then she’ll pucker a grin round her cigarette, twitch the place she pencils on her eyebrows to nod at you. She’s won.
After the first crash she goes to visit the boy who used to be her best friend. He’s lying on an orange beanbag watching re-runs he’s taped off TV. High school has taught him that she’s worth nothing but he lets her touch the back of his hand while he mouths the lines. Through the window there’s the primary-coloured mini-golf course his parents own, the slant spaceships and chipped windmills. All their moving toy-town parts keen in the light that goes fibrous on the green plastic putts. She watches children squeal at a distance and pelt the balls too hard, the failed shots tocking off concrete hairpins. They used to play for hours there, back when he would be seen with her. She tries to nudge her fingertips in through the curb of his fist. He’s shirtless, so she stares at his breastbone, the span of hard trunk that looks like shelter. They are crashing cars on the show he’s taped and he can’t be bothered with her.
When he won’t talk she wanders to the inside garden, a paved rectangle at the centre of the house. In the inside garden there is bamboo and a plastic kiddy-pool, not blown up. It’s a squashed carousel of smiling animals baked flat in the shaft of sun, and when she tries to peel it off the tiles, she feels the sound of its slow bleached suck, like a plaster hauled too soon off a cut.
Deleted Scenes for Lovers Page 16