by Karen Runge
This novel remains the copyright © of the author.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Grey Matter Press except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This novel is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SEEING DOUBLE
ISBN 978-1-940658-85-8
First Grey Matter Press Electronic Edition
July 2017
Copyright © 2017 Karen Runge
Design Copyright © 2017 Grey Matter Press
Cover Artwork Copyright © 2017 Dean Samed
All rights reserved.
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DEDICATION
For Jürgen.
My brother, my best friend.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
Part I: SPRING
Part II: SUMMER
Part III: AUTUMN
Part IV: WINTER
Acknowledgements
About the Author
More from Grey Matter Press
PROLOGUE
I want your hands on me. Hard fists, crushing fingers. I want your touch to leave bruises I can look at later, marks I’ll see and know that this happened. Really happened. Evidence that you touched me, exactly in these places; circles on my skin that will fade unless I push them, prod them, squeeze them back from yellow to black.
A torture to take pride in.
I want you to grab my hair in fistfuls and cover my mouth with yours, so I can smell you, taste you. The fury in you, the bite. Your stubble scraping my skin, your scent in my nose. I want your kiss to devour me. I want you to clip my tongue with your teeth, my flesh that you’ll swallow. Blood in saliva, mixed between us.
This chemistry of heaven that we make in hell.
I want you to hurt me like you love me like you hate me. I want you to make me bleed. I want you to fuck me in the ass with a knife up my cunt—double-edged, cold—adding slits to my slits and putting holes in my holes. Sweetness and blood for you to feel, to taste. And even if you spit it out, the taste of me will remain.
I’m not trying to titillate you, you bastard. Looking at me, smug-serious, your ego screaming in your ears. So loud I almost hear it. Congratulating yourself on how weak you think this makes me. That I want this. That I’ve asked for this. To love and hate and fuck and ruin.
I want you to destroy me because this is how I destroy you. How I will make sure I remember you. How you will never be able to forget me.
I want you to do this, you sick fuck. This man I love.
I want you. I want you to. I do.
– ONE –
They were married in Wales, in a grey stone church with a view out onto a lake. It was an early spring, too warm for the time of year. The smell of the water was somehow salty, somehow spoiled, vile and thick. Like fish guts and rotting waterweeds. But it came light and crisp too, cooling the air, and Ada turned her face into it when the wind blew her way.
She left her hair loose down her shoulders, curling it as an afterthought, spirals that softened quickly in the heat and lay in soft knots and tangles. She did not wear a veil. Her lipstick was a scarlet so rich it was almost blue—a deep red, a whore red, shrieking against the pale pink and baby blue flowers Daniel’s mother had picked out for her bouquet.
Women wear pink lipstick to make men think of their labia, she thought as she coloured her mouth, that final touch before they left for the church. Women who wear red want them to think of blood. She capped the tube. She smiled at her reflection.
Ada would have worn a red dress too if Daniel’s mother hadn’t interfered, blanching at her daughter-in-law’s tastes.
“Why should I wear white?” Ada asked. “It’s not my colour.”
“It isn’t a colour. It’s symbolic of purity,” Daniel’s mother said.
“But I’m not pure. I’m not a virgin. I’m not even a Christian. Why should I care?”
Like a rebellious teenager she prodded like this, provoked like this. Grinning maleficence into her future mother-in-law’s shocked face.
It was a small ceremony. Intimate. The word people use to describe weddings that are poorly attended. Immediate family, a handful of friends, a minister. A bare clutch of the unwelcome, welcomed for reasons of social politics. This last included Daniel’s aunt, two of his old university friends, and Ada’s stepmother, Gabriella.
“It’s such a shame for a young bride to be so alone on her wedding day.” Gabriella said loudly as they gathered outside the church.
“I wouldn’t have wanted all those people staring at me anyway,” Ada said, her gaze fixed over the woman’s shoulder. And some thought this was sour grapes, but the groom knew better. He stood with his back to them, pretending to talk to his mother. Only Ada knew from his rigid stance, the way his head was cocked slightly to the side, that he was listening to her instead.
“It was just too short notice,” Ada’s father said, his hand heavy on hers. His eyes were still bloodshot from jetlag. His suit was creased. “You understand.”
I do, but you don’t, she thought with such venom she might have said it out loud if Daniel hadn’t looked over at her just then, turning, his mother struck dumb mid-sentence. He smirked at Ada with blood in his glare. He winked.
This is a charade, that glare said. This is a game, that wink said. We do this and then it’s over. We do this and then we’re gone.
This was the deal that had been made.
Ada was married in a town she’d never before visited, in a country not her own. She was married before strangers. She saved most of her smiles for the groom, and she smiled only once at her father in that final moment as he released her at the altar. A gentle squeeze of her elbow, him for her. A flash of her teeth, her to him. She turned her shoulder. She looked Daniel in the eye. And a secret passed between them.
The air in the church smelled like crushed flowers, clammy skin, expensive perfume. The pews held the scents of wood and dust and history. And up at the altar, there was something else. Something like cold water steaming on warm stones, dusty and earthy, electrified. Holy water sizzling on cursed effigies. Or maybe it was just the smell of the lake drifting in through cracks in the windows and doors. This last she breathed in, deep.
She and Daniel stood very straight with the minister between them, presiding. Priest, president and master of the ceremony, the only one present with the power to bind. They didn’t look at him. Instead they faced each other with their shoulders squared, their heads tilted back. As though they were challenging each other. Opponents waiting for the count before they began their duel. But they each had the hint of a smile softening the hard edges of their mouths. Ada’s fingernails, painted red to match her lips, dug into the fragile stems she held in her hands. A few pink petals drifted to the stone floor. Her cheeks flared, but she said, “I do.” And Daniel said, “I do.”
And it was done.
* * *
“I used to call my mother Fishy when I was a kid,” Daniel told Ada that night. “Because of that glassy look she gets in her eyes when she’s shocked by something. Her mouth opening and closing like that. She looks just like a dumb fucking fish. Flapping around, struggling to breathe. It’s her signature expression when she thinks you’re being ‘out of order.’”
Ada thought of
broken machines.
She traced the pattern of the bedspread with a freshly manicured finger—that violent shade of red not yet chipped. “She’s given you that look a few times too, huh?”
“Oh, you have no idea.”
She laughed. “I think I have some.”
She lay across the bed, the curves of her shoulder and hip ribboning a loose M against the maroon bed sheets. Maroon for a bridal bed. To save the bride the shame of her blood, maybe. A step in the opposite direction to the older tradition of using white, only white—symbolic, pure—for new husbands to revel in the stains.
I fucked her and she bled.
I fucked her, and I was first.
They lay close against each other, talking. His fingers wrapped in the tangles and knots of her hair, her hand flexing around his penis so that its limp weight thickened into a greasy curve. Like a fattening slug, semi-turgid, softening back to frail human flesh. The texture reminded Ada, uneasily, of Gab’s new jowls—those soft weights tacked on either side of her stepmother’s chin. Beauty slumping, sliding barbs under the woman’s tongue. She thought of her father, dazed and well-meaning, his watery eyes liquid like those of a piddling puppy, kicked.
“I’m free of them now,” she said. She felt giddy, overwhelmed. Grinning at her fingernails, she didn’t catch Daniel’s smile.
The inn had left them a bottle of champagne in a bucket of ice and two crystal glasses. Antique, neatly cut, one stem chipped. The couple left the ice to melt and drank on the bed, the fine little glasses twirled in their hands, forgotten on the bedside tables, retrieved. They drank slowly, which was unusual for them. Impotent froth and sour-sweet sips.
For a little while, they slept.
In the early hours of the morning Ada began to bleed, a stain on the sheet beneath her shaped like a crescent moon. She cursed the timing, showered alone and fashioned a tampon out of toilet paper. Then she took two painkillers and lay back down beside her husband. She kissed his forehead with a soft touch of her lips. His beard had already thickened on his chin, a darkening growth above his upper lip and along the edge of his jaw. He was naked, the sheets tangled around his waist. Free of fabric from the waist up, his bare skin shimmered pale and vulnerable in the fragile dawn light. She stared at him. The sparse chest hair that twirled out between dark pores, the slim shoulders, the arms so slender they might have been a woman’s. And his face, slack, his consciousness vanished.
I’ll remember him like this, she thought. Always exactly like this.
Before they checked out, she rinsed the two crystal glasses, wrapped them in a summer dress and hid them in her suitcase.
And then they left Wales.
* * *
They went to Cambodia for their honeymoon. A corner of Asia still exotic to them, with its jungle heat and battered streets. They hiked into the forests and walked through ancient, abandoned temples that stood in silence, roped with vines, their ornate stone walls trapped beneath roots that cascaded down like long fingers, gripping the rock without quite crushing it. Back in town, they followed a friend’s advice and found the restaurant that served pizza laced with marijuana, cunningly disguised on the menu as Happy Herb. The taste of it was like dust and green caught in cheap cheese. It roiled in their stomachs and gave them each a thick, throbbing headache that wrapped them in sick lethargy. Back at the hotel, they sat out on the veranda and drank a cheap Chilean chardonnay. They didn’t speak. In the evening they joined on their hotel bed and merged with the heat. The two of them alone. Spent.
She bit the tip of his penis, but he didn’t let her draw his blood.
When the honeymoon ended they flew back to the charmless block of Asia they had made their home. They painted their landlord’s dingy walls a rich shade of burgundy, cursed the shoddy modern furniture he would not remove, unfurled their new rugs and confessed to their friends what they had done.
“You got married when you were away?”
“Yes,” Daniel nodded, taking Ada’s hand across the table.
“Oh come on,” Ada said at the looks of shocked delight in their friends’ faces. When she rolled her eyes she looked disconcertingly like a preteen girl, garishly painted. Her lipstick was still too dark. “These days marriage is just something you do to shut the old folks up.”
“And to solve visa issues,” Daniel said.
She nodded. “Yes, that too.”
Melinda was still gaping at them. “But—I mean—married! It’s funny, you know. I did think of you. Or maybe it was sort of a premonition. About two weeks ago we were coming out of the subway, and I could’ve sworn I saw you two crossing the street ahead of us. Anthony spotted you, too. We were going to try catch up with you, or call you up, but then I said ‘No Anthony, that can’t be Daniel and Ada. Daniel and Ada are in England.’”
“Wales.”
“Wales. Europe anyway.”
“And Cambodia after, for the honeymoon,” Ada said.
“Oh it was Cambodia you went to! Tell!”
And so the first sighting went by barely mentioned, almost unnoticed. A flash in the crowd on a busy street. A glimpse of a couple walking away, vanishing in the crush. Their heads down, their steps in time. Sunlight kissing the backs of their necks.
– TWO –
Listen. You don’t know this about me. The way I battled my own will to get to where I am now. The way I’ve had to split myself, alter myself. Not so much a chameleon changing shades. Not even so much a leopard changing its spots. More a full-force shape-shift: supernatural, fantastical. At times even horrific. But above all, extreme.
I was fourteen years old the first time. He was seventeen. He was taller than you, and skinny. He took the same shortcut home from school. A path through an open lot behind the sports field, yellow grass and hissing crickets, heat and open sky. But mostly heat. There was a path through there, narrow, dusty, patterned with devil thorns. If you crossed it barefoot it’d make you bleed. I wore school shoes, brown, with laces. Or maybe it was buckles. No, laces. I hated the buckled ones. They made me think of Alice in Wonderland, or very little girls who dreamed of rabbit holes and didn’t know how far they could fall. I wore brown school shoes, laces, white ankle socks because it was summer. Remember, I told you. The heat. Sweat on the back of my neck, scabs on my shins from wounds opened by the grass. Every blade sharp enough to cut.
He liked to whistle. I’d hear him coming up behind me. And he walked fast because his legs were so long. In the beginning he’d shove past me and carry on, head down. Shirt sleeves rolled up, waist untucked, school tie flapping over his shoulder like a long black tongue. A black tongue with yellow stripes. Diagonal. He went to the same high school as me. I knew by the tie. He was a few years ahead of me. I knew by the stripes.
I never saw him much between classes. Or maybe I did and just didn’t think about it. The way we think, process, is so different when we’re young like that. The way we compartmentalise. Training for adult denial, maybe. Or maybe we do the same thing now, too. We just won’t know until we’re older, much older, and get to reflect again on such a large piece of our lives. See it as a whole. The whole is endless, though none of us really look at it like that.
Alice in Wonderland. Alice and her holes.
In the beginning he’d push past me like the path was crowded, like I was in his way and he was angry with me. Annoyed, I should say. He never glanced back, just shoved. For a moment, an instant of maybe half a step, we shared the path. One foot wrapped in long yellow grass, the other crushing thorns. And me caught between. I want to say there’s something symbolic there, but that would be trite. I think that would be trite, because this isn’t about symbols. This is something much more solid than that.
He had a long face, sucked-in cheeks. High cheekbones and a wide jaw, so the shape of his face was like a Roman numeral, a capital I. The forehead, the jaw, the line of the nose. His cheeks sucked in, skull-like, creating absences in his face, one on each side when you looked him head-on. This too soun
ds like symbolism. It’s not.
He hadn’t quite grown a beard. Not yet. But the hairs on his upper lip were long and black and fine. Like paintbrush hairs, disassembled, spread. His lips were full, like his mouth was swollen. Red lips, thick. You knew just by looking they were very soft.
He was repulsive. You don’t understand. He was hideous. Skeletal and bony so even his fingers looked sharp. Tapered tips, swollen knuckles. The nails were too long. The colour, yellow. As if they’d been stained with nicotine or had earwax caked beneath.
He gave me a cigarette, once.
Talking to me in a shy voice that seemed to come from the base of his throat, so that his words were half swallowed and sometimes he was difficult to understand. I had to keep saying, “What? Sorry, what?” And I know it made me look shy. Made me look like he made me shy. Nervous. But really I was trying to be nice. Nice because I thought that was the right way to be. Back then.
He talked to me. Walked with me. I couldn’t stand to look at his face. Those hard angles, that mouth like a ripped wound, those delicate black hairs fluffed across his upper lip in nauseatingly delicate wisps. He licked his lips too often, chapping them, cracking them. Thick pink tongue sweeping across, scouring the flesh red. Hair and skin. Black and pink. Soft and wet, splitting. And that was especially repulsive. Vile to watch.
I watched.
When he walked with me I felt dizzy, sick. I kept my hands clenched on the straps of my backpack. I looked at my feet, his feet. I turned my head so that I saw only my feet and imagined I was walking alone.
Once I looked at the growth on his upper lip and thought of licking it flat. My tongue on those hairs, tasting that soft swell. And I was so nauseated I blushed, crossed my arms over my chest, shook my head. I think I even gasped, hissed air back in between my teeth. I do that even now sometimes. Gasp for no reason. Clench myself in. When memories, flashes, images, ricochet through my head. You’ve heard me do it, I think.