Deleted Scenes for Lovers

by Tracey Slaughter

  His grip hits the bar with a bang, last minute. The bench quakes. He laughs.

  ‘Boss is always on at me to pack that in, too. Says I’ll have the whole fucking thing down one day.’

  He pushes off from the bench, stalks round, knocks some parts with a lonely shrug. A bolt takes off and rolls across the concrete with a dull jangle.

  ‘Think they were primo myself, the posters. So were his wife’s tits. Ha. But there you go. I suppose I can see his point. I dunno.’ He looks at Jeremy. ‘You see his point, kid?’

  Jeremy looks down at his leg. Red is drooling all over the rag already, although the mechanic yanked it round tight. If he moves too suddenly he feels like he’s travelling behind himself, dragged off-side, catching back up with his own whereabouts with a shudder. There’s a cold spot of pure black waiting just out from his neck: he won’t turn that way in case he drops into it.

  ‘You think we should be getting you somewhere? Emergency or something?’

  ‘Nup.’

  The mechanic crouches again.

  ‘The boss says his wife isn’t coping with hospital. Just lies there and cries, he says. I was going to go in for a visit. She was pretty tidy. Before she got crook, you know, she wasn’t so hard on the eyes. For an old chick. She’s always been a bit of a sweetheart to me, actually. If she was a few years younger I’d have hooked right in. But the boss said, Don’t bother going in to the hospital, said I wouldn’t be able to take it. Probably right.’

  He goes on, ‘S’pose so, eh. If there’s one place you want to keep out of it’s a fucking depressing dump like that. While you got the choice, eh. While you’re in one piece and got the choice.’

  He licks the hard cracked pad of his thumb and stamps it on the concrete to dab up a thin metal shaving.

  ‘Apart from this, mate,’ he nods at Jeremy’s leg, ‘you stand a shot at staying in one piece.’

  Jeremy doesn’t speak until he’s sure he can stay out the dead patch of cold by his throat. It’s long as his own shadow now, an outline of frozen air hanging there like a body bag, and if he slips aside and fills it he doesn’t think he’ll get back out.

  When he thinks it’s safe and the workshop is still around him, he says, ‘It’s not the same way it was. It’s not like … a choice now. It used to feel like choosing, like keeping … some kind of control on things. It did use to work. But it doesn’t now. Not like it did.’

  ‘Must be time to pack it up.’

  ‘I tried. One time.’

  He even tried to read up about it, like the A student they all thought he was. He got online and googled for cutting. Tools commonly used, it said: Diamond blades, drill bits, fingernails, front teeth, broken glass. He thought it sounded like poetry. Then he scrolled up and saw he’d hit the wrong page anyway. Cutting is the separation of an object into two portions, through the application of force or stress, it said. It only occurs when the total stress generated exceeds the strength of the object cut.

  He’d wondered for a moment if that’s what he was doing: it was like he couldn’t see his parents, in two, apart, in his head, couldn’t keep the idea, or the sight of them separate there, couldn’t stand the thought of them in two places and bits. As far as he, his brain and his body, was concerned, he still looked at them as one thing that couldn’t be split. Trying to see them in two was like trying to look at himself in halves, slit open.

  Perhaps he was just trying to get that straight. He needed to face it, to get the fact of their separation, once and for all, into him. The force it took had to be acutely directed, the article said. That was the simplest applicable equation.

  They dangle Barbie, just by her ice skates, upside down in between the bars of the bridge. There are not enough rocks: they must have gotten cleaned up after the bad kids biffed down the big chunk. After they swish off any little bitty stones they can find, Maddy takes the clips out of her hair and flings them up too. Going over, they swing and sparkle, zig-zag like butterflies. When they hit, in a series of pretty spatters, the wheels flick and suck them. The girls press their heads as far as they’ll fit through the struts, stare down and watch them jump, shiny bugs, until they’re crushed. Lastly Madeline slips her rings off, wiggling them up her chubby fingers. She counts some over into Ruth’s blooded hand. Then they keep counting when they drop them. They both know they’re wishing something they don’t tell. They chant the numbers like a bad spell, baby voodoo. Some rings drip, some rush. It’s not enough, just not. Damon, the pig, has always told Maddy she throws like a pussy little girl. But Madeline thinks that maybe her arm doesn’t belong to a girl anymore. Really and truly, a girl’s arm wouldn’t ache so bad to have a rock in it.

  Ruth is the same. Speckling her neck skin and up behind her black eyes, you can see the mean is switched back on again.

  ‘You liked vat game,’ she says. ‘Ve one we played.’

  Maddy’s legs are thin enough to slip through the edge of the bridge. She skids her bottom in, threads through her legs and lets them sway, pretending they’re ribbon or rope, playing dead or dolly. She looks at her knees, with their scrubbed white circles of skin, and doesn’t answer.

  Ruth, bigger, shuffles in, curling side-on. She scratches her face with a sleeve, a track of snotty-blood brushed up her cheek. Her grin glints with sorrow and pulp. She has no-good plans, but Maddy can tell she got them out of sadness. That’s what sad can do, Maddy knows it now: mix with mean so you can’t feel which is which. Ruth is like that black doll she sometimes brings on visits, those stitched-on fish in the shiny eyeballs which are meant to be tears but end up looking evil. Maddy’s legs, poked through the bars, have gone so cold she can hardly feel them hanging, and Ruth snuggles close-in with her red face puffing. The thought of that flip-flop double-headed doll makes Maddy feel yuck.

  ‘We could break her ub before we drob her. But maybe she drob bedder ad once,’ Ruth says. She humps as much of her shoulder as she can get out over the drop.

  Madeline reaches through to grip the other skate. Legs split wide, Barbie capsizes, faceless under her skirt. The bulk of her plastic hair hisses.

  They miss, and she only bounces a bit, jiggles on the road. When a car hits her it doesn’t even make a nice crack. Just a sort of crinkle.

  It’s disappointing, so disappointing. It makes Maddy feel a bit like crying, the sort of cry she gets shut in her room for at home, a non-stop stamping cry, coughing and squelchy. Until she sees Ruth put her fingers up, in through the dappled slime of her lips. The piece of tooth waves up and down for a little, then lifts away with the tiniest wet click. It’s just a triangle but it glitters the brightest, and the car whose screen it taps on does give a small skidding twitch.

  But no one notices them. That’s what it’s like for the grown-ups, Maddy decides. Little accidents, little hurts happen all the time, but no one notices them.

  ‘We should go back. To the baby,’ Madeline says, after they watch for a while. Her voice is so ladylike in the cooling air she can hardly believe her luck.

  Damon scrapes out through the gate first, then grabs it to haul it open for Jody.

  But Jody has dropped back, unmoving. Steps away, she’s his stepsister again.

  His grasp lets go. The pipe flaps away from his hand with a metallic twinge. He stares at her. All the angles of the way she stands—neck, hip, ankle—chill him, so he calls out nothing, just listens to the long fence hum. The aftertaste of wire replaces her along his skin.

  ‘You think it’s worth it?’ she says. ‘You think, what we’ve done is … worth? Them. Everything they’ve done. Cancels it. Would you … do anything for it? Actually forgive them? Like it could cancel out all this. Just.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Just.’

  ‘Well, maybe.’

  She’s even more distant now, talking down at stones.

  But she’s also at the fence, hooks her fingers through it. Her voice is flat. He doesn’t understand how her face can get so pale, pull away beneath it
s spatter of freckles like there’s nothing going on under their dust.

  He only says, ‘Jody.’

  ‘Mum’s always begging down the phone to him. You know that? She still begs. I bet he laughs when he gets off the phone to her. That right? I bet he tells you all a joke about how pitiful she is. I wish I was there with you, listening to him crack his joke. That’s how terrible being on her side, listening to her, is: I’d rather be there, with him, taking the piss. She thinks we don’t hear her, whining on in her room. She snivels on forever. She breaks me up. I bet you all laugh, over there, in her house. I bet he hangs up on her, and tells you the story. Round the fucking dinner table, all of you, I bet he makes you laugh and laugh about how she still loves him. Sometimes when I hear her weeping that into the phone, I love you, oh, but I still love you, I just want to beat her with it. I want to take the phone and bash her face in.’

  He looks at her. There’s some pulse gunning in his head. Words jar his mouth, so he bites down, tries cutting through the struggle of them. Like clamping your jaw on the shiver of a butterfly: he’s tempted to pull back his lips, show her what a mess he’s making. What a mess he is. He wants to say something, no reason why, about last summer, last summer when she played at his place, when they were kids enough to still say played (Hey, wanna play over at my place? which was always okay because their mums were such good mates so the kids always thumped in and out each other’s homes, groped under gladwrap in whichever fridge had the leftovers, slumped with their tangle of gaming wires on either couch), and he crawled underneath the trampoline (last summer, was it?) and lay spreadeagled, face-up, daring her, betting she couldn’t make a jump so wild she’d actually hit him. And then he’d nearly shat himself watching the black mat strain and ricochet, hearing the springs churn, smelling the plasticised air puff at him as she drove it down with the bony missiles of her bare feet. Then she went for a spinal slam, hair thrashing and legs kicked up to reload with sky. Or she rolled and bellied it, and he lay freaked beneath the bang of her flat guts, the hard pegs of her elbows, knees, the dig of her small tits he couldn’t close his eyes against. In between each launch towards him, she pedalled and boogied, scampering in light, chucking hair into the sky. When she slowed it was on her hips, her backside dabbing up and down towards him. Then she’d curled on her side, her hair in a flag so he couldn’t see the face above him. ‘You didn’t move,’ she whispered. So he’d reached up and tickled the shape in the hammock, half-play, half-gamble. She’d turned on her front, staring down through the black mesh and he’d moved on, breathing deeper, to make deeper stabs, then less deep. His dirty blunt fingers had crackled.

  He wants to get his fist through the fence now, get to the freckles, wake her up under them. She’s gotten buried in there. He needs to get his hands through, rock her face in them, shake the colour and sound of her back out.

  It’s not the face that had hovered above him that day (Why can’t he say, just start, lost summer, last summer?), let him brush it through the dark elastic, dip his fingers into the black pool that stretched across the mouth, not the face that nuzzled the friction of his thumbnails. That day, that day, she’d hung there forever and sometimes she’d slid her face aside into the hood of her hair, hidden her breath in its scratchy static. But then his mum had wandered out back humping a basket of gear for the line, looked over and called out, Stop that. Jody had murmured down, Don’t, don’t stop, Damon, but his mum had snapped again, Cut that out, cut that out right now, you two. So he’d stopped and wormed himself out from under the tramp and gone over to help his mother. Because the shape of the baby was there in his mum, already, a delicate watery bump he’d seen her tying under her old wraparound. And he didn’t know yet whose it was, just loved it, for some dumb reason, loved to think of its tiny little see-through limbs reaching out from its chrysalis body, to think of it somersaulting, slow motion, star-like there in the dim warm of his pretty mum.

  ‘The only reason Dad really left us is because of that stupid baby,’ Jody says. ‘If it wasn’t for your mum and her baby he wouldn’t have gone. Not for good, anyway.’

  It’s all in the way she cuts off what she’s said and sticks her fingers to the side of her head, as if she’d like to strike clean through there, make a stab in for the words, put a stop to the thoughts.

  He says, ‘You … ’

  ‘You don’t know … ’

  ‘You think if you have a baby … ’

  ‘Don’t … ’

  ‘He might come back home again.’

  ‘I’m not her.’

  ‘You think that might bring him back.’

  ‘I’m not weak enough to want him back. I’m not her.’

  The fence echoes, wiring the screech along its length.

  ‘If I have a baby,’ she finally says, ‘and it’s yours, then you’ll be its uncle as well as its dad. That’s choice, eh? That’s priceless. And what about the other baby? That’ll be … I can’t get my head around it. Some kind of double aunt?’

  He finds himself staring at stones and thinking how it felt when his mother let him cup her stomach, the morning he found her in the bathroom when she was wrapping her old skirt around the baby’s rise. She’d told him he could rest his hand there, wanting him to feel the quickening, the secret shiver. When he shook his head, she’d smiled at him and said, ‘Oh, I wish you could. It feels just like a butterfly.’

  He wants to be sick, and starts to do it. But as he bends he catches Jody’s look. He turns, drinks the acid back down.

  Across the carpark there is no one. No vehicles. No van, no car. Just marks where they were.

  The baby cannot even count to ten.

  Maddy, in the waiting room, kicks her legs from the big chair and practises counting from ten, down, backwards. Sometimes the backwardness gets so hard she has to blink her eyes up into red hearts and use her teeth to stop her tongue wriggling off without her. But she loves the inside out, falling-slowly sound of it. That’s what it sounds like to her, as she listens. The words fall humming wrong-way-round out her head, through her speaking, and keep falling slow, slow. It is very bright in the waiting room, the whole square whited-out with buzzing tubes of brightness. But Maddy can almost see the numbers, splotches dropping all around the white air as she chants.

  The baby cannot even count. Before they took Maddy out of its room, she saw that. That’s what the machine said. Even with a big machine helping it, the baby is so dumb it can’t count.

  The nurse that brought Maddy in here can’t count too. She said it would only be a little while, chatted cutely to Maddy for a bit, then parked her here beside the tubs of gluggy flowers and the toy basket. But the toys here are broken too, just like the box in the other hospital. ‘They’re all bust,’ she told the nurse. But the nurse only chirped, ‘Well, see what you can make from them then.’ When she left, Maddy tipped up the whole bin and walked on them, feeling little snaps beneath her bare feet. Then she jumped on the big chair and see-sawed, swinging her feet so the sting of meanness trickled up and down.

  Maggot toys, noisy and bust, like the sheep. Sucky dog-got toys. Can’t move, like the people. All the people, too dumb to count backwards out their tip-top rooms. Their buzzy white rooms, waiting, waiting, for someone to stab air in.

  They’ve all gone off to other rooms: her mum with the baby, Ruth’s mum with Ruth, and Damon with the mechanic who helped to drive them here. Everyone has gone off, to get the broke bits fixed up. But Maddy doesn’t care. And ha ha, to Ruth’s dad, anyway, ha ha to him, so there, running in like he did, with a face like when she showed him round the next door’s paddock, with the sheep-the-dog-got-to lying everywhere, so he didn’t know which noisy one to go to first. He doesn’t know which one to go to here, either. He doesn’t know which room comes first. Ha ha to him. She doesn’t care. The nurse said, ‘What’s your name then, little girl?’ and she said, ‘Maddy’ but it came out inside-backwards, mean plus sad, meany, saddy equals Maddy. She doesn’t care. She can count. She
hopes the priest is coming.

  She is going to tell the priest that she found the pain number. The way she did it was to screw up her eyes till red spun. The way she did it was to turn her mind inside out and push the numbers through her red tears like black fish, little black fish swimming backwards, backwards, into the zero of real pain which is also, always, a pool of cracked toys, hearts, worms, where tied-up flowers drink the dirty waiting room light.

  And it’s only there she’ll ever remember her hand on the window. Backwards. Forwards. Tipping in, or out, the longest drink of air.

  The mechanic hangs out. He’s into the machines in Jeremy’s room. Scuffs round, checking them, while Jeremy’s getting seen to. Wouldn’t mind having them to bits, when the nurse’s back is turned, taking a crack at their workings. One of them, clipped onto the kid’s finger, goes on the blink.

  ‘Oh, near enough,’ tuts the nurse. She charts the reading anyway, gives the mechanic a grin, sideways. Strokes of fresh lippy nicked and shiny on a cream front tooth. Come to think of it, he wouldn’t mind a quick crack at her. Not too shabby.

  ‘Not going to tell me off, are you?’ she smirks.

  ‘Not even if he carks it.’ The mechanic’s got a rude-as look on his mug, big front teeth in his pretty bottom lip, eyebrows flashing, hunched. Jeremy starts to cry.

  ‘Oh, mate. Mate. Get a grip. Not like I’d mean it.’

  The nurse scrunches a laugh through her nose, trades a grin with the kid too, unwinds a bit of tubing, gives his collarbone a coy pat-pat. ‘Come on. You’re not critical, sweetie.’

  ‘Wouldn’t a been funny if you weren’t well out the worst, now, would it?’