Deleted Scenes for Lovers

by Tracey Slaughter

  There’s a triangle of van window that pushes in. Ruth wriggles her arm in, waves it over Madeline. She can’t get a poke, but the dress hem shifts, a toe showing up beneath it, one dirty bud. She pulls her arm back out, nudges Barbie through and digs at the kid with the doll’s ice skate, the thin blade folding over on her boot.

  Madeline must be pretending. Shitty kid. Stuff her. Who needs her to play. You’re always getting stuck with her. Only knows baby-talk shitty games, anyway. Should push the window back up and choke her. Should hook the van to fill up and snuff her like Mum cried to Dad on the phone that she would try.

  Ruth spreads her lips on the window, fluffs lightly, then blows, hard. The blow balloons her face, and she feels air running the bone above her teeth. The second blow squeals. The third is so hard that her top teeth chip down at the window, and when Ruth puts in her fingertip one front tooth is juicy and creaking.

  Damon and Jody wedge through the fence. It’s a tight fit, but okay if they go easy, creeping through the high gate wrapped with chain. They hear their mothers, the rattle of stones, the argument coming in seizures.

  ‘What the fuck are they on about now?’ Damon is through and he puts back a hand to hold the gate-slit wide as she’s shunting. He can’t look straight at her hips or the warp of her tits as she’s sliding past his fingers. He looks back to the women. They’re figures in a silent movie, their tragedy spiky and sped-up.

  ‘Dunno. Your mum pulling up in that dirty new van is what I reckon did it. Mum was already ropeable about her crap car by then. Jeremy had climbed in the car when we left, and told her off because she didn’t have the rego up to date. You shoulda heard her go off: It’s a sticker, Jeremy, and there’s no bloody money left to dress up the car in fucking little stickers. I can’t go forking out wads of the weekly food budget just for stickers.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says. Her stomach is close to his thumb-joint. He watches her push through a notch, the skin between singlet and jeans contracting. Her belly button is a white loop, rounded and fragile as an eyelid.

  ‘Jeremy gets all his tackle in a tangle when things aren’t legit. He’s such a square. Mum just lost it at him. Then, what do you know, here comes your mum, grinning down over the wheel of a shiny new van.’ She’s working her crutch past the gate pole, tender jolts. ‘God, this thing’s gonna tear me a new box.’

  Christ, he can’t think about that. He’ll explode. He tries to get back to the conversation, back from the sight of her little box rocking under denim. He knows what it’ll be like in there: he’s got there on one other girl, just lately, outside a mate’s party, got fingers into that warm socket. But he was still thinking of Jody. And felt like a true dog, his fingers rough and awkward in some other girl, her staggering on them, half-drunk and knocking the brick wall with clucking noises. And when his fingers clumped, thicker, he heard a licking sound coming up through the wet. Jody, god, Jody.

  ‘I didn’t want to move in there anyway,’ he says. ‘I mean, it didn’t seem like your dad should be able to get back in the house. And get you out. Plus we had our own place.’

  ‘She couldn’t pay. The mortgage and that. But he could. So he told her he’d buy her out. Mum just needed the money.’ She’s through, panting. They watch each other. When she squints, a horseshoe of darker freckles forms under one eye.

  ‘I can’t follow it.’ All he knows is he now sleeps in her old bedroom, and goes mad thinking of her there.

  ‘You think I fucken can?’

  They shrug at each other. She turns and walks towards the first house, a demo-home, the paint sharp, the plants all shining pots of flax and claws. She prowls, focused, rattles the doorknob, runs her fingers up aluminium frames. Nothing opens.

  ‘You know how to break in?’ she asks him.

  ‘Nup. Why would I?’

  ‘With your mother? Thought you’d be a natural at home-breaks.’

  ‘Get fucked, will ya.’ But he thinks: Don’t be angry, don’t be angry, please god, Jody, god, don’t.

  ‘Why we’re here isn’t it?’ she says. ‘To get fucked.’ But with the sneer she stretches out a hand to touch his T-shirt, the cracked plastic Goofy on his gut—why to christ had he worn that? She rubs, rubs the dumb Disney grin between breastbone and bellybutton. Damon feels the logo stick and peel with her finger’s rhythm. When she stops, he looks around the empty lot, picks a stone out a big plant tub, strips off his shirt and wraps the rock, then swings it, clean through a side window.

  Round the back of the service station, Jeremy kicks the bog door. The glass rattles, already part-broken, cut into rows of stars like the ones on the coke can he crushes and biffs. He puts his head to the panel, watches his leg swell in the reflection, almost man-size. But the real leg is puny, too much little-boy bone down the foot end, although muscle grows in a hunk up the top, a wedge of it, secret.

  He kicks again. Course, they’d keep the fucken thing locked, wouldn’t they? Look at the poncy sign: Customers Only (Please Inquire for Key). General Restroom Located over Road in Rest Area. Well, there’s no fucken resting there anymore, he thinks, not with his mother and stepmother shrieking like hos. Serve the damn place right if you just unzipped and took a slash anyway. Looks like people have been, too: there’s a galaxy of mildew in the green brick wall. Jeremy drops his forehead on that now, kicks again. This time his school shoe makes for the wall base. A chunk of sound, rubbery. A throb up through his toe-nerves. It heats and widens, buzzing along the bone.

  He wants that. He wants to get in, somewhere quiet, and hurt himself. It’s the way it’s so ordinary that makes it worse. The way everyone shrugs, and says, Yeah, you get that. It’s ordinary, your mum and dad splitting: you can’t say you’ve got all this pain just from that, big deal. Yeah, tell someone who gives a shit. BFD. Hey, Jeremy, what colour are your eyes, sooka-bubba red?

  You got to do something not ordinary, something not normal, just to match it.

  Jeremy found it, the thing that matches the pain. He found it by accident, dragging his dad’s stuff out the bathroom cupboard when his mum was too freaked out to start the packing. There’d been a box of porno shoved in the back. The cardboard was soft with fungus, the pages sucking on each other with slime. A troop of pink limbs split open as Jeremy thumbed at the corners and pulled them back. The mounds were all hairier than his mother’s, shots taken right in at flushed, rambling lips. The women all looked like they’d taken a tackle, but they looked rowdy and animal as well, skidding on shiny floors and tabletops, chucked down but daring whoever was looming above them to dig the boot in again. The pictures were taken like it was your bulk above them, you that they snarled at and begged. Their nipples and slits were all lassoed with red and black lace. The lace reminded Jeremy of veins.

  He’d kept on cleaning the closet. It smelt like the brown coast of make-up that always went streaky round his mother’s face, her neck a sorrowful white below it, the blue traces in there, a deep bloody crop. Such a weakling. It had seemed, when he pulled out his dad’s stash of razors, like something meant to be.

  When Jeremy fitted one into his leg, he didn’t know who or what he was cutting. Everyone, on every side, just got cut, in his head, as he lowered it in. He rocked it one way, then lifted, turned, watched right angles of plasma rising. And the main point was: he was doing the cutting, not his father, or his mother. And the other main point was: afterwards there was a wound to match the pain.

  A little crusty crucifix. All showy and useless. When he walked off to school in the morning, he could feel it glittering under his shorts.

  The visits make it worse. He needs a whole rail of crosses then. He normally starts on the morning he has to go, sets up a boundary line, straight and gristly round his thigh, where no can see it but he can hoard it, a secret, squatting on the low C block seats, the dark meat pulling along his leg, nervy and crystal. But today got all messed up because it was swimming sports, and he had to strip off for freestyle and butterfly. No chance of laying down fresh work:
even the band of white scars was barely covered, kept flickering, suspicious, as he took his mark. But the dive is his best bit, his moment: he’s a competitor, he leaves the pool-edge like a bullet of bone, and Jeremy knows that no one sees anything but a hero, a star, head boy. Well-adjusted, a confident, focused all-rounder, says his school report; no one is checking for blade tracks around his thigh. His home life is ordinary.

  He needs it now. He’s got to get it in, somehow, to help him get through the visit. It’s a line he needs: he can’t cross to their side without something there, between him and them. In the beginning, he’d said that he wouldn’t go, that his dad could just stick it, could keep his new kids. He wasn’t going to fucken visit, just so his dad could show round his school report, slap on his shoulder and talk about pride and achievement and rising to challenges. But his dad went all legal, and courts got roped in, and Mum had no money to fight with him. Jeremy needs to feel the razor seesaw into the meat. It’s a fence, but it’s also a tally. He needs to see the blood, keeping score.

  The stones on the window are tender, a sprinkle. Madeline sees them through a pleat of light: she’s not going to really open her eyes until Ruth has gone away. Go away, bugger off, she thinks. But Ruth keeps tapping and groping at her, the rod of dolly’s leg dug hard in her cheek. Madeline knows the only reason Ruth’s kept hanging around so long, squeaking and poking, is she can see her sleep is fake, her little sloppy breaths and twitches a put-on, shamming. But she keeps playing, dead and baby. She doesn’t want to play with Ruth. Ruth is born bad and plays mean anyway. A mean streak, Madeline’s mother says, always shakes her head, both those little madams. Madeline thinks Jody’s mostly nice, but she can imagine the streak in Ruth, a long black cable up Ruth’s body, that splits in two inside her head and sparks in her dark eyes when she goes nasty, her neck and cheeks all red-patched and crackling with badness.

  Last time she visited, she’d been the meanest of all. She’d done mean things with the dollies. Madeline’s dollies and Ruth’s dollies, all mixed up and pushed into Barbie’s pink bed, and Action Man, who she’d pinched off her big brother Jeremy, ordering them to do sick, sick deeds. Giving them telling-offs, tying them up with elastics, Action Man’s hand going scooping under their fairy costumes, plastic and whipping, and making Maddy feel gross. And then she’d taken the baby dolly and made Barbie carry it up to her balcony: up on the top yellow floor of the highrise, Barbie had laughed and thrown off the kid. Ruth had even made squelching sounds, to show how the baby would splat open.

  When Madeline cried that she’d tell her mother, Ruth had just said, She’ll know that you liked it. She’ll shut you right up in your room because she’ll know that you liked it. All the way through.

  So Madeline tries to freeze, tries not to jump at the shots of gravel. Until something louder clips the van window, something crunchy in a wet mass of sound.

  There is a red smear on the window. Madeline climbs up and sees Ruth behind it, a few steps back. Ruth’s face floats through the red sponge left on the glass. Her front teeth fork and she has a hand up like a crib below them, cupping the blood. But the blood will not be cupped and drips down, wriggling, over her school pinafore.

  Ruth is alone in the carpark, her hand full of worms.

  Their mothers have moved away, haven’t seen. Madeline looks around for them, spots them over by the toilets. They’re grabbing at each other’s hands, scrabbling apart, then making a cradle, their joined bodies thudding into the block wall, until someone wrestles out, and the other one comes for them again.

  ‘Try nga rip ovva rings.’ Ruth has come to the van door, lets her mouth run as she opens it.

  Madeline shakes her head, big-eyed: she doesn’t get it.

  Ruth makes a gulp, her thumb on the bent tooth as if she’s afraid it’ll go down her throat.

  ‘Vey’re trying ta rip ovv each uvver’s rings.’ Blood gets stuck: the words sound gurgly, stringy. Madeline is busting to get a good look at the tooth. She likes the dental nurse’s because she likes the pictures: one cartoon tooth looks yellow and twisted, the other is plump and shiny, marching along with its brush on its shoulder like a gun. That’s the way she imagines herself, compared to Ruth. Ruth is the yucky tooth, Madeline’s the good one, a little Colgate soldier. She smiles.

  ‘Mum only got one lev’, she sol’ da uvvers,’ says Ruth.

  ‘They fighting over rings? She sold her rings?’

  ‘Yub. Bud she keep her wedding ring. Your mum yelling ad her to ged it ovv.’

  ‘What you do to your face? Did they hit you? With a stone?’

  ‘Nub.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we tell?’

  ‘Vey don’ care.’

  ‘But … ’

  ‘Look ad em. Vey don’ care.’

  Madeline looks down at her own rings, her treasures, sweating on her stubby hand. She has six plastic gems and one ring of paper she coloured in today with hearts and taped on. She’s learnt to draw hearts just this week and she’s drawn a parade of them everywhere, shivery, slow, tongue-out curves. Her mother says she presses too hard, but she likes the way the paper goes furry. She secretly liked the way today’s hearts got heavy and hairy and blotched through the page, leaving stamps all over the lawyer-papers her mother had ready, about the visiting rights. The hazy pink slops had made her mum angry; she’d snatched them up, flapping the pages at Madeline’s face. Madeline sulked, didn’t care: her mother should have told her hearts were this easy, just two wormy things curled together, heads and tails. Anyone could make one, a dumb shape like that: her mother was too busy with the baby.

  ‘What about the others?’

  ‘Vey all gone.’

  Madeline looks around for her brother. She did draw hearts on Damon’s homework, and he slapped her with the plastic-wrapped book, leaving a sting all over her titty. But she didn’t think he’d be angry enough to leave her. Just to leave her here.

  Or the baby.

  She looks at Ruth’s face.

  It’s funny how different teeth can make you look: when Damon got braces they’d made his whole face look white and slimy and kind of caged. The things clipped onto his teeth looked like tiny sticks of dynamite: it worried Madeline, seeing her brother with those shiny dark things strapped under his face. But Madeline had heard her new daddy yelling through the telephone because his old wife said that Jeremy needed braces too, but she couldn’t pay for them. There’s a limit, her new daddy barked through the phone, There is just a limit to it, and even when he’d smacked the phone back on the wall, three times, he stood there saying it. Madeline thinks the limit could be the name for the wire round Damon’s teeth, but she also thinks it could be the name for the mean streak that Ruth shares with her old daddy.

  ‘Is that your baby tooth?’ she asks Ruth. ‘Or the big one.’

  Ruth says, ‘Yub. Big one.’ She makes a guzzle and Maddy thinks of the slurp you’re not supposed to do when you suck to the end of the milkshake you’re only allowed to get when the other kids come, from the corner dairy in the super-tall giraffe cup. That’s the only good thing about visitation, that you get to hold onto your very own money all the way down to the dairy till the queen’s head is burning hot, to pick your own flavour and guts yourself with that sticky froth. That’s spoiled now, though, looking at Ruth. Now the whole thought of the fluffy milk feels yucky, even the giraffe she loves. Madeline doesn’t like to think of Ruth’s blood at the same time as that giraffe grinning at you, the knock knock sound of the empty cup, waxy and crushed. The Longest Drink in Town.

  It’s not easy, the mix of slither and balance you need to get up through that frame. You know you’re going to get cut: let’s face it, you’re climbing a square of knives, it’ll slice you somewhere. But you push off, try to strain up with just your fingers, try not to let your palm skid down, hope the dumb soles on your school shoes are really as tough as the advert says, with that big hulking teen hero slamming down his lightning-charged lace-ups like they’re supernaturall
y cool.

  You think so hard about your feet and hands that it’s your dopey head you scrape. You feel it, a rake of needles through your scalp. You jump so hard at the shock you knock your head up and feel the glass get thicker, go deeper.

  You give up, want to get it over with now, throw yourself through the final gap. Another nick on the spine, but nothing much. You land in splinters but manage not to drive your hands down into them.

  Straighten up. Done. Damon, you’re a legend, he thinks. Damon, you are the man.

  He puts his hand through the spikes of hair gel to the stinging. No chips, just some thin fresh streaks of blood. He feels his eyebrow taking the first long trickle, steering it down his face. He’s hit with a vision—sharp, electric—of opening the door to Jody, pulling her through it, brutal and no-questions-asked, into a grappling kiss. One of those kisses, slow mo and animal, you see on the movies, a snap-kiss like an attack. He wants to grab her like that: necks rotating, mouths chaotic. He wants the kiss that his blood runs into, raw against her mouth.

  But that’s about as true as the cosmic cool of school shoes. He can’t sell the image to himself very long. He hasn’t got the voltage, hasn’t got the ball sack. He blinks the picture off, finds his way down the hall to let her in.

  What he does, when he sees Jody’s face, is shake. He feels his gut start trembling. Oh, you’re a legend all right, Damon. She angles past him, wanders the hall with one finger tracing the wallpaper. He walks behind her, drinking in the sound of her finger, feeling the hiss slip through his trunk.