They go to the kitchen, out of habit, as if there was something there for them. The room is like the rest of the bald house, plasticised, in eggshell shades. It smells astringent, and when he flips through the cupboards they chill his hands. They have the texture of the cast he once had coating his broken arm: he thinks the whole house is like that, fibrous and chemical, a cast of a house, of a model family.
Jody’s buttocks rock up, slide across the kitchen bench. She watches him flick open, drop the cheap cupboards. Slap.
‘Hungry?’ she says.
‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Teenage boy. Always hungry.’ The grin he gives her is quirky, shot with nerves.
She says, ‘Yeah, some guys from my school went over to yours for some sports gig. They told me all about you.’ The last words are stretched, a tease, a trail. She purrs. But there’s something stagey in her voice too, a kind of bluff, a quaver.
She goes on: ‘They had a whole lot to tell me, actually. About the exploits of my stepbrother. They said you’ve got the weirdest rep ever. For swallowing things. For money. They said you’ll chew up and knock back almost anything for cash. They saw you doing it. You’re like a freak in a ring somewhere. Taking bets.’
‘Yeah. So?’ She’s toying, she’s playing, he should tell her to rack off, but her sweet, sleazy voice gets him a hard one.
‘So,’ she blows out, ‘don’t you think a girl’s got a right to know what’s been in that mouth? Considering?’
He grunts, kicks at the drawer between her dangling sandals. Turn your back on the smart bitch, he thinks, shove her like you used to when you were kids. When things got solved by a Chinese burn or a horsebite. Sting her with a good game of slaps.
‘I’m waiting.’ She sing-songs it, light and nasty.
‘I’d love to smack you one,’ he says.
‘You’d love to eat me, you mean. And I wouldn’t even have to pay you.’
And there goes his tough stance, flattened. If there is a chance of her skin coming close enough to sniff, he’s folding. He’s in the bag.
‘What do you want to know, then?’
‘A goldfish? A butterfly? What the fuck else?’
‘A pack of smokes. A can of cat food. Not much else.’
‘Christ. Why the hell would you do that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, neither do I. Jesus. That is putrid. That is just the sickest, sickest thing.’
He feels it then, standing in the kitchen, the memory of butterfly wings, a kind of spiny, flexing light in his mouth, a membrane rapid and delicate. Terrible watery twitches of tube and ribbon before his jaw can end it, before he can show round his gross metal grin to the crowd, lick it with victory. Everyone else looks queasier than he does: he jabs out his hand for the strips of cash.
‘They do it on TV,’ he manages.
‘For like, fifty thousand. Rancid.’
‘Get bent. I don’t know why I smashed in here.’
‘It’s not like you need the money, even. You’re the one with all of it now. She hasn’t seen any of it yet, my mum. He owes Mum money. Big time. Oh yeah, didn’t you know he’s paid up piss all on the house you’re living in. And she’s been selling stuff, you know. Selling shit, even rings and old books Nana gave her. Stuff she cries over. Stuff she would’ve given to me. He’s a bastard. He eats people up. That’s what he eats. Chews them up, spits them out. Doesn’t even taste us going down, doesn’t even feel us hit the sides, his kids. Is that what you’re learning? Is that what you’re trying to prove?’
‘Who the fuck knows?’ is all he can croak out. He can’t eyeball her, shuffles backward. ‘You fucken tell me who knows. You fucken tell me who.’
He feels like he’s going to cry, feels whole sobs backing up in his chest, great clouds of bawl. His Adam’s apple sucks up and down in his neck, tries to push the howl back like a piston. He can taste salt. His eyes prickle but the skin on his tears holds tight.
And then he sees her nudge down from the bench. She doesn’t move in that slutty way, sly, but gives the jump of a kid. It’s cute. And when she gets close her drizzle of freckles is even cuter. She looks like she’s only just noticed the blood, dips the pad of her finger into it.
Her bitching is over. Now she mutters, leaning into him, whispers things she’ll let him do. But she makes them sound okay: she makes it sound like she thinks them, wants them too, his clumsy dreams, no longer dirty or bullying, but okay because she’s greedy too. Her arms ply, her mouth fits, her pelvis grazes him. And oh, that apex of warm, hollowed out bone. Tell her it’s love. Tell her it’s no-joke big-deal love, too late and forever.
Tears go slack, come loose from his hot eyes.
She wipes them into a meek, nuzzling kiss.
It all speeds up, awkward, beautiful.
At the last minute she marks the way with two fingers split open, a long V, fuck you or peace. He slides—can’t believe it—slides through the middle, and there’s a cold silver ring on one finger that grazes his penis. There are ridges in there like the roof of his own mouth. That tighten as his cry jerks across it.
In the workshop, posters are stuck up with slanted scraps of tape, mostly women leaning on hoods toying with long, gleaming cylinders, nozzles of oil. When Jeremy hears the shout, he turns—there’s a real young guy, a mechanic or something, up on a workbench kicking at tools, his overalls shucked to his waist. The sleeves are tied but not tight enough: his hips have started to slip through the dirty noose.
‘Any of these get you hard, mate? You hear me?’ He bangs his hand on the posters above his platform: there’s a chick shackled in the biggest one, slippery yellow-skinned, wearing silver car-guts round the good bits. The car parts that cuff her are so clean they pick up the glint of want in her teeth, pure hate in her eye.
‘One a these babies. You want one?’ the guy says again. His fingers fan on the yellow abdomen, stroke it. Fresh grease shines on her; the poster gives a spasm.
‘What’ya taking them down for?’
The guy looks down, shoves a couple of things with his boot, shafts and axles. ‘You want the key for the shitter, mate? Come back and I’ll give you the story. About to knock off.’
He jumps off the bench, pulls a key looped over a nail on the other wall.
‘Here you go, bro.’ He has an angled grin, fleshy in his soiled face. ‘Go shake hands with the unemployed,’ he says.
When Jeremy gets back, the guy is peeling the last of the smutty posters down. He rolls them, puts the funnel to his eye, makes the offer one last time. Jeremy, shy and grim in the guy’s dirty scope, gives a scuff at the concrete in place of a headshake.
‘Sure?’
‘Nup.’
‘Suit yourself.’
The mechanic sticks the posters into a crack in the giant metal bin, drives them down with a screech between chunks and coils. He struts to the edge of the shop, pulls the remains of his overalls down off his shorts, working himself up through them with butts and skips. His shorts are hacked-off jeans, already filthy.
‘Sweet,’ he breathes. ‘I plan to get shit-faced. Wanna join me? Only got ten steps to go.’
‘The pub?’
‘Nah, the church, dopey.’
‘You were gonna tell me. You know. Why you taken all the posters down.’
‘Yeah, all right. Over a beer, but. Fucken depressing.’
The mechanic stuffs his gear into a washing machine, the basin chocker with other mulchy shapes. Jeremy stares: it’s strange, homely, the way he shuffles the gear around in the drum for balance, drizzles long streams of white grain from the hand he holds high above the tub.
‘Mate,’ the mechanic says, bumping the lid down, snapping the black buttons. ‘You all right?’
Jeremy gets out a nod. But he can feel the new bleed flex under his clothing, more of it than most days. He moves and the wound lets out a warm, heavy slurp. Back in the brick bog he’s tried to keep the slices tidy, stared at the raised glass stars on the door, tried to
nick himself in easy clusters, scratch the skin in parallels. But some kind of vertigo has hit him, over his own skin. He stares down, dazzled by the radii of cuts. His hand is an engine. He says, ‘Daddy,’ then drops the razor harder to try and cut himself clear of the word.
But it’s the mechanic’s voice now, loud and hollow in the present, in the black garage.
‘Snap back, kid. You look a bloody world away.’
The mechanic lets out a jab-cross, knuckles lax and friendly, into Jeremy’s ribs.
‘Let’s go get trolleyed, eh?’
Jeremy follows him.
Alongside him outside the workshop, Jeremy tries to copy his walk, its slouch and scuff. The lope is not easy, loose but with a threat somewhere in the muscle, a mark of how quick he could snap, strike, lunge into a fight. But he doesn’t: he rocks to a halt outside the pub, grinning, his fists giving little pumps inside his pockets as he sways.
‘Got any pingers, mate?’
Jeremy watches the guy, the sinew flickering in his arms and throat. The guy looks away, a rogue, cunning and lazy, rolls back and forth on his thick boots. He lets out a giggle, relaxed, looks back at Jeremy.
‘Whatever, mate,’ he says. ‘Thought you could shout me in here, while I tell you the story. I’m skint, that’s all. No biggy.’
Jeremy pats around in his pockets for cash. There’s a few shrivelled notes, a couple of coins. He rakes it out with his fingers, awkward. The pack of razors flips out too.
Perhaps there is too much in the kid’s face. Or a flinch, a wincing. He’s too young to curb it. The mechanic is fast. He punches the kid away, playing, then weaves down and scrapes the pack up from the gravel. The razors lie, box open and wet, in his hand and he stares back at the boy.
‘Mate,’ he says.
For a few seconds Jeremy prides himself on saying nothing. Then he feels his body glide downward anyway, his head arriving at the end with a thud. Back in the toilets he couldn’t cut deep enough: it was getting more and more like that these days, getting to the stage he’d need an artery, he’d need an amputation. But now, as the impact ploughs up the side of his head, the fix he couldn’t cut to comes on. Finally. He must look gutless, lying down here like a little bitch, but he doesn’t much care. He lies there, feeling the pressure released from his brain, as if a black balloon has popped.
Ruth does not look like her streak is switched on today. Her mean black eyes are not fizzing, her skin not blotched. She’s not scrappy, not stirring things up, she doesn’t look sneaky. She’s sitting in the gravel, smudging her legs around. All loosey-goosey, like she’s run out of trouble.
It makes Madeline feel a bit in charge. She tries to think good grown-up thoughts just like a mum. She wishes she had her nurse’s equipment: the tubes you can switch on to hear a pretend heart bumping, the plastic needle that sucks up and down on pink syrup.
‘Well, we need to get you cleaned up then. Don’t we.’
She uses a there-there voice. It comes out ladylike, fake and sing-y: she’s pleased with it. It makes her bold enough to pick up Ruth’s hand, fiddle finger in through finger. She gets their little fists knitted up, bobs them up and down for comfort.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Creek’s down there. I can wash up your face. I’ll be very gentle. Very extra.’
There is extra traffic now. The way they walk, the cars get thicker, louder. Some faces screw up in the car windows, wonder, even go a bit slow. But the two girls get to the creek, squat and then bum-heel down the bank. It’s only a trickle, a drain, not really and truly a creek. Empty packets blob and crinkle there, dirty fish shifting with slimy whispers.
Madeline has seen a movie where a woman rips a hunk off her skirt to tie down the blood that’s squirting off a cowboy. She tries. It doesn’t work. Her mother sewed up the edges too good. So she gets Ruth to lie down right by the water, bunches her sundress and kneels beside her. She dips the skirt, first in the furry water, then dabs it on the face. She keeps it light, a drizzle, watching the pulp thin, become wings under it.
‘Out of one to ten, how would you say your pain?’ she questions in the sweet voice.
Ruth drops her head back and forth, grunts up at her.
‘I heard a real nurse say that once. Once when the baby might not have got borned. Or got borned too quick and little, or somethink. You know, how the lambs in the next-door paddock come whooshing out too soon, when they’re not supposed. Your dad had to take us in. Fast. It was night. I remember what the nurse sayed. But I don’t remember my mum’s number.’
Madeline lets the skirt paddle. It flowers, squirms: beads of green hair come loose from the stones as the skirt grows over them. Madeline’s knees slip a little in the water-fuzz as she hunches, closer to the mouth.
‘You got a number?’
‘Ngub.’
‘Nup.’ Madeline looks back into the water, thinks a bit more about that night. The colour of her mother’s neck, grinding and puffing above her fat body with the baby in. The balloon they blew up on her arm, like a floatie to help you pop up when you couldn’t swim. But they only blew up one black ring, and Madeline pestered the nurse about it. You need two to keep her up really, she bugged her, but the nurse had shushed and steered her away. Madeline sat in the waiting room then, pushing the tangled toys round the basket. There was nothing whole to play with, just parts of things, sucked-on heads, and cracked-off wheels, a dog with its eyes chewed out and a caterpillar snapped down the middle of its plastic bubbles. Loads of stuff that was supposed to move by itself but didn’t anymore, like the people in the beds. Then a priest had come in, and crouched by a woman, and told her that her husband was dead. He’d hunched down, guarding the words, made them low and private, like he could shut out the listening kid, but Madeline had stared back at him, watching his hands pat-pat the ugly old woman. Madeline liked to think of death, that the baby she didn’t want might simply fall out—but she would have liked her mum to have two rings, so she could be certain her mum would bob up and stay splashing above the dead baby. With two blown-up rings she could just lie back, angel-shaped, while her belly emptied the baby and its pool.
‘Nup, nup,’ she chants again. She picks at her paper pinky ring then. She doesn’t know why but she wants it off, rubs hard, turns its tape-shine into a dirt-red string. She shakes it into the creek, watches it turn, swing in the murk, drop softly.
‘You want to go for a walk, now you’re cleaned up?’ she asks.
Ruth has pulled, curled herself up. She looks garden gnome-like, gross and perky. She’s stopped trying to talk, but makes snot-coughs and burbles from the back of her throat.
The two girls skid up the bank, hook, slip, and roll themselves up to the darkening roadside.
They stand for a minute, unsure, thin. Loud stripes of white traffic pass them.
Then Madeline points. ‘Down this way is where Damon told me those kids threw the rock down.’
She lets her foot stroke, stroke at the gravel. She shivers a little, feels the sound of the black grit flexing and mixing in her skin.
‘You know? The ones that hit that lady and got put in jail. You want to go and see that?’
Ruth’s throat snuffles, she swings at Barbie.
‘Anyway, I don’t reckon there is one,’ Madeline says as they walk. ‘You know. A pain number.’
‘That hurt still?’
‘Nup.’
‘What about … when you’re at it? Sticking yourself. That hurt?’
‘Nup.’
‘So you’re one of them cutters?’
‘It works.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Dunno. Just does.’
‘So does suicide, mate.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Fuck nothing, you mongrel. I mopped you up. I’ll dump you back there if you give me any shit, right?’
Jeremy stares at the young guy, harder. In patches it’s a bit of a girl’s face, close-up like this, but the rest is lean enough to make it to manhood. When he
smiles there’s a ditch right down the tough muscle of his cheek, a trench that grease has gotten into and deepened. But the cheekbone above is maybe too pretty for a bloke.
‘So what’s your story?’ the mechanic says.
‘There isn’t one.’
‘Fucking must be.’
‘Nup.’
‘Well I’d need a fucken good story to go carving myself up like the Sunday bloody roast.’
‘Yeah, well. Your parent’s splitting isn’t a story anymore, is it? Not a big enough deal. To count.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Families are history.’
‘You reckon.’
‘You know any fucken long-term husbands and wives?’
‘I actually do, mate.’
The mechanic squats down by Jeremy. The kid’s leg was a sight; it knocked him, maybe not so much the gashing but the blood that got everywhere. But he feels better now he’s got the kid back here to the workshop. To him it’s a clanging black heaven of junk. It’s paradise, it’s shelter: he loves the shadows of lurking parts, loves just to hang out here handling the muzzles and casings. He drinks in the fume and glug of oils, loves his slithering hands as he works his fingers into barrel and chamber. He lives to hear it, the little click when he’s jointed something, rod to breech. It kind of helped to look at the kid’s leg like that, sheared wires, a leaky connection.
He says, ‘You want to know why I was up there taking those posters down. I’ll tell you, mate. The boss, out back here, couldn’t cope with them up anymore. His wife just got out of surgery, you see. Had both of her breasts off. No shit, I mean they took both of the babies right off, as well as all the gland things that hang on and that. But doctors told him that’s probably not going to be enough. They reckon it’s shot all over the place, little pin-pricks of it, the cancer. So the last thing he can face seeing when he comes in here is these posters, he reckons. Says they’re not just tits to him anymore. Ha.’
The mechanic gets up from his squat, stretches. Jeremy watches from the spot he’s hunched in, a booth amongst the junk. There’s a rail around the workshop bench and the guy spreads his hands wide and hangs back from it, knees bent, like he’s limbering up before a swim race. He levers his weight and scoots his hands in, claps hard, no grip for a second. Then he lunges, as if the floor’s liquid and he’s about to slash in backwards for butterfly stroke.
Deleted Scenes for Lovers Page 20