Deleted Scenes for Lovers

by Tracey Slaughter

  ‘And how would you describe your marriage?’ The clouded table was well off-kilter—it tipped then. The jerk was quick but enough to make the tea slurp. We both stared at the diagonal splash. I was fussy about my folder, because it was from my wife, real leather and a gift. She’d got my name embedded in the front and on the spine there were metal initials. So she could see it flustered me. The rag she snatched from the back of the taps was not what I would have used. But she was trying. She swabbed the wet from my pen. I said, ‘Perhaps we had better get on.’

  ‘In one word?’ she said.

  ‘Oh? No, I see. However you like. Describe it in as many words as you need.’ I pointed down at the form. ‘There’s quite a large outline. That’s fine. As many fit in the box.’

  There was skittering from the other room. But I didn’t see the kids then. I only heard the low noise from the TV they must have been scuffling in front of. You could hear cogs turn in the cartoon, some pranking animals caught in a bust-up, the silly chimes when one takes a fall, the sound of limbs scratching air in a panic. She folded one arm across her abdomen, and said, ‘Fair.’

  I left my pen waiting at the end of the word, and looked down at the form, not at her, to see if there was more.

  She went on. ‘Ordinary. Solid. You know. We’ve … got each other. And that’s … lasted.’

  Looking back you always know what you’re looking for. That’s what people forget. But you don’t know when you’re at the table, and there’s a kids’ cartoon playing in the next room, near mute, but with all the explosions and howls which those funny figures pull, murder set to music, the kids’ hijinks in front of it, muffled and slap-dash. And the tea in the cup she’s passed you is turning in whatever afternoon sun can strain through the blinds, 3 pm through the film of winter which has soaked up the fat of the kitchen light. And at that moment, something dislodges on the fire, and thuds down to ember the tiles, and she rushes to bridge it back up with the tongs, and opens the handle beside the hearth and it turns out it’s not a chute but a double-sided cubby, which serves the living room as well, so a kid’s face pokes through the gap above the wood pile, looking like a stray severed head which got wedged in the stack. Or it does when I think of it now, knowing what I know about the end in that cubby, the terrible occupancy of it, the little things backed up in there with no way out.

  My dreams are heavy-handed. I answer my own form, nights I lie awake, I take my words down and watch them in each box, wondering how I could have missed what hers meant or hid.

  But at the time, I just laughed. The little head had its tongue waggled out, its eyeballs crossed and quivered. Skinny, she looked like a kid herself—I thought she bobbed forward to tousle the crown, give the shocked face a kiss.

  We were chuckling when his ute pulled in. I like to keep a proper tone, so I was more wary of cutting my own smile back than watching when hers quit. I hadn’t finished her section, and it had to be done without him in the room, so I made the handshake firm. He didn’t seem bothered. He went out to offload gear from the bed, so the rest of her questions we took through the scrabble and thump of lumber off the ute and to the outshed.

  Her yes and no responses were standard. We got through them steady and swift. I try to see how she looked when she said them, now, if she let something slip in her hands or her head. A flinch in her throat at No, he never suffered anxiety, a crick in her wrist to No, no history of aggression. But I’m almost sure there was nothing. You’ve probably seen the form—they printed it by her picture, a tidy simple list. She was very still, her fingertips balanced on her neckline again, but light, not fixed. Sometimes the thumb stretched stiff, but her voice was neutral. The sound of him outside didn’t shake it. Iron scraped the drive, the shed door was belted with a chain but I didn’t spot a tremor. We signed him off, tick by tick.

  ‘Do you consider him safe around firearms?’ I could hear him lighting up on the back steps then, using the concrete to torque off the heels of his boots, the laces levered wide. By rights, he shouldn’t have been in hearing range. But I let it stand. We were so close to done.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And why do you hold this view?’

  It’s never an easy question. The ends of her hair were drying now, lifting ratty around her neck, the broke strands in a halo while the wet hung close. No one ever answers quick. There was a noise like a bottle rolled off the last step, and he yelled out, ‘All good.’ Then the boy raced into the kitchen, pulled a long panicking sock-skid hairpin, and paddled his hands down the hall to make the door.

  She said, ‘Because he follows rules. He’s very aware of rules. He always follows them. And he makes sure others do.’

  You’ve seen her other answers, no doubt. And his. He was calm, got everything right. I liked him. He was relaxed: he peeled off his work socks while we were talking, and he buffed at a toe where the nail had ruptured, gone black. But he was respectful, and looked at the notes I was taking like he cared for the way I was filling out the page, word for word and streamlined. She never looked at what I wrote. And afterwards he led me to inspect the gun cabinet, bolted into the hallway cupboard, braced to the hot water cylinder with heavy straps. There were clothes in a ruck on the shelves, bibs and fleece that had seen whiter days, and a sprawl of grey delicates I could’ve done without. But his end of it was regulation. The job was sturdy, it fitted all the specs. You could see he had an eye for finishing.

  When he walked me out, she was sitting in the sunroom on the side of the house. It was a strange old arrangement, not much more than a glass case, narrow and crookedly tacked. There was nothing in it except for the chair she was on, a bare one with red-tipped metal legs that reminded me of school. The glass was banded by battens at chest height, and over it the line of her look must have been at both kids who’d now shot out. The girl was bouncing on a blue trailer. I did think of safety, but she was too small to make it tip. When I went over to her there was an apple core and two white feathers lodged in a splinter of the bed. It’s odd what you think of. The boy was pedalling a moulded motorbike that was in a bad way, yellow plastic sun-struck just about white. He was hooning with the red handles, rickety. He rammed it through the potholes with bloody-minded gumboots. The trailer rumbled but the girl’s feet couldn’t make it seesaw. I just thought they were lively kids.

  She watched while I shook his hand.

  Over at the letterbox there was a green balloon tied onto the nib of the flap. It was half let-down, from a birthday way back, gone darkened and slack. Its wobble on the loose string in the wind is another thing I see that makes me queasy now. But it didn’t then.

  I did go over to say goodbye to her, thank her for her cooperation. The strip of sunroom had a chill and on the concrete her bare feet were flat. For something to say I admired the tight plait I’d noticed in the little girl’s hair—it was complex, the scalp primed hard through the cross-hairs.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It takes me hours. If I can keep her quiet for long enough.’

  It was an afterthought when I asked her if I could pop back in to use the bathroom—I had miles before my last stop of the day and the call of nature crossed my mind. She nodded, ‘First on the right.’ There was carpet in there, too, an orange from the 70s, a brown corona round the pedestal, gone vile. The toddler’s plastic step in the corner was a green hippopotamus, grinning and unclean with stickered teeth. I was less than impressed, and scrubbed my hands on hot. When I came out she was standing in the hallway. At a loose end. Awkward, it’s true, when I think back. But I was wagging my hands in the air: the towel on the wonky rail did not bear thinking about. And neither of us said a thing.

  Like I told you, I drove past the place the other day. When you look back you know everything is evidence. But the new owners must have had permission, now the case is done, to tear the fittings out the house. There were huddles of the wall-to-wall, rotted, the blinds in a sleazy fan, buckled and fly-blown. Nothing was left of the sunroom of course—but that doesn’
t stop me sitting with her. In the silence I go on marking the page, like she’ll speak up, leaving dark bullet points. Her fingernails move on the thick bone skirting her throat, or she stares at them, counting down. I ask her questions, and her look at me is dead-eyed, waiting for the glass to jackknife. People don’t ask for help. That’s the lesson. They don’t believe it’s there to be asked for. What’s coming is loaded in the dark outside.

  the longest drink in town

  ‘Them bitches yours?’

  The boy stares at the bloke behind the service station counter. There’s a bird-shape of grease wiped up the guy’s boob, a drying crow of thumbprints over the car logo. The bloke gives a hoot you can hear snot and tar in, and twitches his head out the shop window.

  ‘Them over there in the carpark. Them bitches, carrying on.’ The guy stops to belch, then jolts his head again. ‘They got something to do with you?’

  The front of the shop is glass, dirt-frosted. Through the grit Jeremy sees the shapes of his mother and stepmother. Fumes rise from the metal stems that customers slot into their car tanks. The women are distant and heat-bent, but everyone can see the scrap. Movements that are jokes of rage, squawking elbows, high heels stabbing the tarmac. Christ, a chick fight. Pitchy, hissed little bits of their voices drift across the forecourt. The boy sees people shrug, cough out chuckles or scorn, hunch back over their filling wagons.

  ‘Things you see when you don’t have a gun, eh boy?’

  Jeremy watches the man add another wing-mark of stain across the guy-tit, which is clear and plump under the cheap uniform. He feels the snicker, general and mean, waiting in the torsos of those queuing behind him. They’re mostly cockies and truckers, all bashed-up boots and rock-shapes of muscle they rub while waiting, but there’s the odd nana, tracksuit smelling like the kitchen junk drawer, rancid butter and gladwrap and biscuit and fag.

  They’re all as bad as each other and want a bit of goss.

  ‘What’s their deal then, eh? Why they going at it?’

  Jeremy stares at the guy. He wants to tell the nosey prick to rack off, but instead he mutters, ‘It wasn’t supposed to be her, my stepmother, coming to pick us up. It says on the rules. For visitation. It’s meant to be Dad. But … she turned up instead. And she’s in a new van. And Mum’s old heap of a munted Holden hasn’t even got a rego or warrant.’

  The razors are on the counter, cardboard wrapped. Jeremy shoves them over the glass top, watching them knock his Coke can. The red can tips a bit, shudders in circles, croaks. It bothers the boy when things move slow motion like this. Like … this: the spiral of asterisks on his Coke can, empty wet prickles which swell up and burst in your eye, but then don’t tell you anything. Not anything.

  The man bleeps the razorblades over the barcode gap. Jeremy knows the kind of crack that’s coming: his little-boy lips are like meaty petals, spit-tender and far too fucken pink. There’s only fronds of hair around them, and a big rut up to his nose as waxy as a kid’s arse. Fucken tear-drop shaped.

  He’s gonna start spluttering. Fuck, fuck. He’s gonna get going, big bubba, big sook. No, he’s not. Not for this wank, no way.

  ‘You wanna watch you don’t put someone’s eye out with that stubble, mate.’ The man apes a serious bloke-to-bloke nudge of the head, his fat eyebrows lifting.

  ‘You wanna shave that growth back regular, before it gets dangerous.’ He cracks up at himself, his tit-crow flapping up and down at his comic timing.

  The boy drops coins, picks up the razors and punches out through the customers. He hears them behind him, hacking up smokers’ applause in the hot, packed shop.

  Madeline lies in the van, half-awake by the baby. The baby is in its plastic cocoon in the back, the blankets tucked into a little ditch for its head, knots of yellow fluff. Madeline pokes at the big woolly halo, supposed to hold its wobbly neck, its no-bones neck which makes Madeline think of the worms they catch in Tip Top containers, although even the worms seem to know how to make some sense out of their sleazing bodies when the baby just lolls, its worm-pink wrinkles going nowhere. You could put the baby, Madeline thinks, in an ice cream container of dirt, too; you could snap on the lid and listen to the air squeak out and forget to punch holes in. The baby would just lie there, jelly and hopeless, not even trying to nose down into the soil.

  The baby is less than a worm. The baby is even less than a maggot. Madeline has seen maggots, too, their curly little pipes all noisy on a hot dead sheep she’d found after dogs got into the next-door paddock.

  Madeline is half-asleep. The baby is half her sister, half not. The car is as hot as a dead sheep or an ice cream box someone forgot to stab the knife in. Things come up when she’s half-asleep that just don’t seem to make sense to Madeline.

  But Madeline is not as stupid as the baby. Madeline can wrestle on the sticky seat. She humps around and lets out her arms and legs like tentacles from her body. The van seems empty, but Madeline doesn’t wake to find out why, where her mother, her brother, have gone, why the baby is left there. She dreams of wriggling down into dark pulp, finding coolness with tiny threads of herself.

  ‘Screwing. You ever thought about that?’

  She’s leaning against the high wire fence, the skin of her back pushed hard into its diamonds. He’s hanging just down from her, leaning too, watching: her freckles are cold sand or raw sugar, one or two darker, dirtier tips. Damon focuses through the grid: how many freckles are caught in each section? She thrusts with one sandal, raises her pelvis, her bare shoulders cut even deeper into the fence; when she lets her body thud back on the wire he can hear all its hooks singing. Not gonna take any notice of their mothers, over the carpark, red-faced and wild. Just gonna hang here listening to this, her body moving on a rack of sound.

  His stepsister’s body. They went and made her his sister. Just when he could taste her. Jody, Jody: he writes it at home on his desk and her name almost looks like body, like body pulled long and warm, blurred, untied. Or body with his own long warmth pushed into it.

  ‘Because screwing is all it’s about, you know. All this.’ She flicks her hand across the carpark, at their jerking mothers. There is the sound of a hand, beating flat on the bonnet of her mother’s tin-can car, then a handful of gravel sprayed across the van. Men have strayed out of the service station and pub across the road to watch the women scrap. Spurts of laughter come out as they wallop their T-shirts and frisk each other. Jody and Damon watch them, a coarse hairy mime, with mocked-up girly grunts.

  ‘Shove—the FUCK—OFF!’ Jody suddenly screeches across the carpark.

  The men look ready to split her in two for a minute, then one of them jostles his mate. They turn and slouch back to the bar and the shop, although the angriest turns with a final finger, fixed and vicious, his teeth bit into his sneer. Like he means it.

  ‘Well, fuck them,’ Jody whispers.

  ‘I can’t believe you did that,’ he says.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’ll get your fucken head ripped off. That’s why. Dumb as.’

  ‘You think they’d notice?’ They take a look at their mothers. Pathetic.

  ‘Nup.’

  ‘You think they’d notice anything we went and did? Anything?’

  Damon looks at her, his head, like hers, rolling on the fence. And her face is close and, suddenly, full of everything he wants there. Everything he wants, staring right back into him, hitting his throat and his gut.

  ‘You ever wonder why they think it’s worth all this? Screwing, I mean. Why it’s such a big deal?’

  He swallows. It’s the only answer he can give. He thinks about it every day, about how her father must think about his mother the way he thinks and thinks about her, Damon and Jody and his mum and her dad getting mixed into a wild knot of tongues and cocks. Which he can’t climb out of. And he wakes up sick with. And goes back to sleep bucking and wanting more.

  ‘You wanna find out?’

  Everything under his jaw is suddenly water, voice, g
uts, bones. She lets her face run closer, closer, her hair sliding in the ridges of the fence. The wire smells like diesel, and her face in its freckles looks like it’s wearing a mask of wet dust.

  Ruth hits the van window with Barbie’s head. Madeline isn’t waking up. Ruth tries again, a stab with Barbie’s ice skates. Madeline stays asleep, fat-rag-bodied on the back seat, but her legs twitch up into her dress. Ruth presses her face to the window, lets her nose bulge, her mouth fart, a puffy wet ring.

  She stares at Madeline. Madeline reminds Ruth of the long-skirt dolly at home, the double dolly, the one you tip up and instead of a set of white legs a grinning black head pops out. Ruth has never liked the black doll side: her side of the skirt looks cheap, like a tea towel, and scratches. The white doll side was always her favourite, classy pink with glitter lace on it and a little plastic tiara glued to her big flop of yellow hair. But lately Ruth lets the black doll stay out. Even with her bald head in a red snot rag. Even with her evil eyes with white fish shapes supposed to be tears sewn into them.

  Ruth leaves her mouth on the glass, doodling and slimy. Behind her she hears her mother, hooting. It’s not like her mother to be scrapping like this, but lately her mother’s voice is not like it was: words crack open in it now that she never used to say, never. There’s no kiss goodnight left in it, no once-upon-a-time sound; it’s not a voice you want to lean back against, fall asleep on, its warm throat hushing and muttering. It’s a voice that shits and fucks and makes doors slam and dishes break and dinners burn and cars turn hard and pull fast into nowhere, into stones. It chases Jeremy down the hall, it runs to its room and stabs and sings there. You hear it on the phone to your dad, like the cord is pulled round it, tighter and tighter. And it shoves her stepmother, now, shoves and trips her. And Ruth doesn’t know if she really cares. About either of them.