Seeing Double

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Seeing Double Page 3

by Karen Runge


  Fringe too severe, lipstick too pink, tank top too tight.

  The girl grinned at her.

  And a sweet little idiot.

  “You know,” Ada said, “Daniel and I used to come here every Saturday afternoon and drink tequila. It’s good here. They serve it in tiny metal shooters, frozen. You know the kind? We should order some.”

  “Oh, no!” The girl laughed, waving the idea off. She clawed at her forehead, ducking her head. Like a turtle drawing itself in. A shell creature hoping to protect its soft inner parts—the vulnerable hidden parts. Nerves and plush pink organs and tender, blood-rich flesh. “I don’t drink tequila, usually.”

  “Usually?” Ada’s smile was still clamped to her mouth. “Why only usually?”

  “Oh, you know…same as most people I guess. Sometimes I don’t know when to stop. Then I just get really drunk and out of control.”

  Daniel folded his arms on the table. He leaned in at her, smiling. “You remember any of those stories? Let me guess. One night stands. Or do you get sad and start crying?” He considered her, smirking. “No. I don’t think that’s you. You’re more the kind to start dancing on tables.”

  “Or stripping on tables,” Ada added, and laughed. Her eyes flicked from the girl’s cleavage and back to her mouth. Yes, that seemed more like it. For a twenty-something girl with a punk haircut, racy clothes, too much eyeliner. For a young adventurer far from home, still too green to check her actions.

  Consequences, Ada thought. You don’t know what those are just yet. But you will.

  Cassandra stared at them, round eyes ogling, mouth agape. She was at risk of sobering up. “I…I can’t tell you stories like that,” she said. “I might have to work with you again. And I…I’ve just met you, Ada.”

  “Come on,” Daniel winked. “It happens to us all.”

  The girl’s mouth shifted shape, became a smirk. “To us all? So you strip on tables, do you, Daniel?”

  He laughed. “Not quite. But my wife and I love a good, humiliating tequila story. We have a few of our own. Think of it as a bonding thing.”

  Strong, Ada thought in warning. Far too strong.

  “Don’t push her, Daniel,” Ada said, leaning away. “You shouldn’t force people to expose themselves like that.” Then to the girl, “Sorry. Sometimes it’s like Daniel only feels secure around people when he knows some of their secrets.”

  “No, no…that’s okay. To be honest, a beer or two more and I’d probably share without even thinking. You two are fun, I think. For a married couple.”

  This wasn’t meant to sting, but it did. Ada took another swallow. Campari was a short drink and an expensive one. She’d have to switch to beer soon, especially if they were going to be drinking tequila later. Which, she had no doubt, they would be.

  We’d better be.

  “Thank you,” Daniel said. He smiled, but Ada knew that smile—hard-eyed, blood-lit.

  “I wasn’t much of a drinker before I came here,” Cassandra said. “But there really isn’t much else to do.”

  “If you want drugs, Daniel could probably get them for you,” Ada said.

  The girl gaped again, her mouth a perfect circle hole. “Drugs? In this country? But don’t they…don’t they execute people for that here?”

  “Oh, come on,” Daniel snorted. “Only for selling. For using they just kick you out. And even then that only happens if you don’t know the right people to get you out of it.”

  “Connections.” Cassandra nodded.

  “Yes,” Daniel said. “And I’m a high-end translator, interpreter. I couldn’t be more connected. Whatever you want, I can get it.” His smile loosened. “Just say the word.”

  The girl glanced around the bar; furtive, tense. “I…I wouldn’t want to risk it,” she said.

  Big Brother paranoia, Ada thought. But she posed a frown for Daniel. “Careful,” she said to him, “this is a public place. You never know how much of what you say in English might be understood.”

  Cassandra looked relieved. She slugged down a mouthful of beer, settling back in her chair. She raised an eyebrow at Ada. “So are you really an artist?”

  A twitch ran up Ada’s back, jerking her shoulders. A flinch. She nodded at the question—for an instant, almost awkward. “Not really,” she said. “I used to teach it, though.”

  “C’mon.” Daniel’s hand closed over the nape of her neck. His grip too tight. “You’re a brilliant artist.”

  “I haven’t painted anything in a while,” Ada said, ignoring Daniel’s hand. Blocking out the word “brilliant,” which seared her in a spotlight of bright acid. Burning. “Lately I find it too frustrating.”

  “Frustrating?” the girl asked. “What do you mean?”

  It was hard for Ada to be clear in moments like this. Trying to pick and choose in a split second which parts of herself to express. Which versions of the truth.

  “Well, I mean the art that sells here is much more traditional. I don’t get excited about mountain views and bowls of fruit. I like to paint things with a bit more of a pulse. Something a little more exciting.”

  Cassandra leaned in. “You mean like nudes? You look like someone who might paint nudes.” She put her hand over her mouth, and giggled. “I think.”

  Trite little mind, Ada thought, grinning inside.

  “Well, no, not necessarily…”

  Daniel took his phone out, tapped out a message and rested the phone on his leg. Noticing this, Ada stood and leaned over the table to retrieve her bag. As her proximity to the girl tightened, she made a point of not looking at her. Her hair fell over her shoulder, offering the girl a gift of perfume. “Sorry,” she mumbled, and sat back down.

  “So you paint…what?”

  “Whatever interests me.”

  “I’m sure it must be brilliant,” the girl said, awkwardly enthused. A drop of beer moistened the cusp between her lower lip and the curve of her chin. “I read somewhere that artists who don’t shut up about their work are the wannabes, the fakes. And those who don’t are the real deal. I think that’s true. It must be. I only deal with graphics. Computer graphics, you know? But I think I understand when I hear artists talk. I mean, computer graphics is an art, that’s true, but in so many ways it really isn’t the same. You know?”

  Ada nodded, sedate.

  Keep her fragile. Keep her trying.

  Daniel and Ada’s latest little idiot took another large swallow of her beer. She was nervous, drinking like it could help her. Ada studied her again. The messy dark hair, the smooth pale skin. And her chest—plush arcs trapped under thin fabric. Pressing. Nipples tightening.

  “I used to draw and paint in school,” the girl went on, “but I’m not sure I was any good. I once did a painting of this bowl of cherries, and I used…”

  Ada’s phone sounded. Daniels’s message, delivered. She opened it and read: I want to fuck her tits.

  Ada smiled.

  – SIX –

  When I was sixteen, I spent the summer holiday at my father’s house. He and Gab were still working, leaving me alone during the day in their new home. A new house, the air within thick with the caustic smells of paint and drying plaster. Modern. They used this word when they described it to me over the phone, before I saw the place in the flesh. Their voices crackling down the line, rapid, enthused. Modern. It was. It was white-walled and white-tiled as an asylum might be. As an exhibition space, or a public lavatory. It was open-plan, adding to the vacuous blankness of all that surface area, all that white. Maybe to try and balance this, it had skylights and laminate countertops and blinds that opened and closed on plastic pulls.

  The grass outside was green, trim. Not wild, not yellow. No devil thorns to puncture my feet if I walked across it, to rip at my back if I lay down on it. I was glad for that. And in the middle of that lawn there was a hole. Deep, but not endless. Tiled, not vacuous. A circular swimming pool, a perfect O of clear blue water. A safer place to fall into.

  It was a summer of
water. Before I swam, I bathed. After I swam, I showered. Soap and chlorine and dry skin, my scalp tight, my nose tormented by heat and cold and pool chemicals. Blood sliding from my nostrils in thin trails, dressing my upper lip, feeding its raw salt taste into my mouth. Sweet metal.

  Gab kept the freezer stocked with store-bought pizzas wrapped in cellophane. I heated them in the oven and ate them cross-legged in front of the TV, skipping through channels, staring at the screen. Faces, images, voices, sounds. Sick on cheap salami, sometimes I laughed out loud. My voice cracking against those blank white walls.

  I was lonely. I was alone. I was afraid to be alone because I was afraid of my own thoughts. I filled my head with TV voices and the sounds of rushing water. I tried not to look into reflective surfaces because there was something different in my eyes. A hollow softness. A harder helplessness. I stepped around my shadow, afraid of how far it might reach.

  My father and Gab came home in the evenings. They took me to restaurants, bars. We ate Indian, Vietnamese, Greek. These restaurants all had signature tablecloths—ornate, white, check. They all had special dishes and special ways to eat the food—fingers, forks, chopsticks. This sauce, that sauce. In this order, for that mouthful. That bite. The tables were all square, evenly spaced, lit by flames. Candles, lamps. Things that glow, that slowly burn.

  “Are you getting lots of rest?” Gab asked. “Are you having a good time?”

  Because she was still trying to win me over, back then.

  “I’m sorry we can’t be with you more, sweetheart,” my father said.

  Sorry? I was never sure. Sometimes in these restaurants a look would pass between him and Gab. Commiseration, I think.

  It’s okay. It will be over soon. It’s okay. We’ll be alone again soon.

  These unspoken words I sometimes heard.

  At some of the bars, Gab ordered soda water for me and dumped half her wine into my glass when no one was looking. At other bars, places where the lights were a little dimmer and the tables a lot stickier, she ordered me rum and Coke or vodka and orange juice. Sweet things with teeth. And the bartenders would shake their heads and mix the drinks, grinning and sometimes winking at me as they slid them across the bar.

  I see you.

  Whenever I got up the room would spin. On my way to the restroom, I’d push through the crush of people and every touch felt like a blow. Too much, too many—hands and shoulders and hips. Ramming me. I’d slam the stall door shut behind me and breathe like I couldn’t breathe. Clawing at the lock, my eyes burning. Biting my fingers. Blood on my tongue.

  If we stayed late enough, after a while my father and Gab would forget I was there. Pretend to forget. They’d turn toward each other, turn away from me. From across the room it looked like I was sitting alone. Drinking alone. I got up. I wandered. Not wanting to speak, but wanting to be near the pulse of these strangers. Middle-aged men with broad shoulders, beer bellies. Divorced women in too-tight clothes and teased up hair. Raucous, laughing. Far from me.

  But they noticed me. Too young, too nervous, sipping my drinks down, chewing the straws. My hair twisted over my shoulder. Gab’s lipstick, desperately offered, searing my lips.

  “Hey, girl.”

  “Can I get you another?”

  “Hey girl, you here alone?”

  I slid on and off the chairs these men offered, stumbled to and away from the bar where they put their arms around me, leaned close to me. Their bleary eyes locked onto me, alcohol loosening their smiles into smirks.

  “You’re really fucking sexy.”

  I remember the man who said that to me. Threw it out there like it was a hard admission. Then laughed, like it was funny.

  And I asked, “Am I?”

  “Yes, you are,” he said. “I like you.” Then, “Do you like me?”

  “Yes,” I said. Did I? Didn’t I? I didn’t know how to tell. Remembering school shoes and devil thorns. Tasting blood in my mouth, blood on my tongue. A phantom wound, burning.

  “How old are you?” he asked. “No, don’t tell me. However old you are, you’re trouble.”

  Trouble. I smiled at him for that.

  I drank the drinks he bought me. He wrapped his arms around my hips and pulled me back against him. A circle around me. Another kind of hole. He pulled me closer. Pressed. And there was a roaring in my ears—a rush that made me close my eyes and lean back into him, resting. Bliss. My head rolling back on his shoulder as his hand slipped under my shirt. Tentative, cautious fingertips trembling against my skin.

  When it was time to go, my father called me away. Himself bleary-eyed, his own smile a smirk. Only aimed at Gab, and not at me. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders, pulling me away.

  “Who was that man?” he asked.

  We were walking out the bar. We were walking through the doors. I was not looking back.

  “No one,” I said. Because, of course, he was nobody to me.

  “You must be careful around men,” Gab said, her tone mother-wise, her voice too loud, her words slurred.

  “No,” I said. “Not me. I’m the trouble, not them.”

  Trouble.

  And my father laughed. And Gab laughed. But neither of them understood.

  – SEVEN –

  Sunday morning. The morning after. Ada woke in disarray, sunlight striking the windows, smudging shadows through the dark curtains. She was on the couch, a sheet wrapped around her. It was caught around her body in knots and snarls that had tightened as she turned in the night, constricting her ribcage so that she woke from a dream in which someone was crushing her—arms clamped around her, thick and soft. God-like in their totality. She woke gasping, a thick pounding in her head and heat searing between her legs. She looked to her left and saw the girl slumped beside her. Dark hair tousled, wild, black-circle eyeliner smudged across her cheeks. Like she’d been crying. But she hadn’t been—had she? Ada stared, waiting for her to twitch, to snore, something. Anything. The girl was deep in sleep. Drugged sleep. Lost sleep. That sleep so much like death.

  Dead things move, Ada thought. Live things lie still. We gave her too much.

  Ada studied the girl. There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead, a thin line of blood, rust-brown, dried at the edge of her mouth. But otherwise she seemed all right. A quilt had been thrown over her, and when Ada drew it back she saw the girl was naked too, legs apart, a bottle resting between her thighs. The residue left on its neck had dried to a fine powder white. No blood. The girl’s chest rose and fell in shallow breaths. No blood and not dead.

  She felt strangely happy.

  Ada bunched the sheet around herself and limped to the bathroom. She urinated in sharp, acidic bursts that made her hiss through her teeth. She hunched over the sink and brushed her teeth until the froth turned pink. She made her way into the bedroom. Throbbing, stinging.

  Daniel lay naked on top of the sheets, his body thin and pale and shadowed.

  He’s beautiful when he sleeps, she remembered. His teeth are to the wall. Who had taught her that expression? The Russian girl, of course. Her and Daniel’s second escapade, failed. They’d been lucky to find her, they’d thought, until they got her home and she asked for money. And instead of being angry, the girl was terrified. Or was it that, instead of being terrified, she’d been angry? Ada couldn’t really remember anymore.

  Every day a clean slate. Close the mind and time draws a veil.

  She slid onto the bed, over Daniel’s body. Her breasts pressed against his back, her hipbones digging into the soft mounds of his buttocks. He groaned, half waking. She helped him find her hand.

  “We’re alone?” he mumbled into the pillow.

  “No,” she said, kissing the soft, scarred skin between his shoulder blades. “She’s still out.”

  “How out?”

  “Very out.”

  “S’time?”

  “Still early.”

  “Good,” he groaned, squeezing her fingers. “Good, good.”

  “But the sun
’s up.”

  He yawned into his pillow. “Take care of it, babe,” he drawled. And closed his eyes again.

  Ada lifted herself up onto her elbows, staring down at the nape of his neck. She blinked her vision clear. She tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry.

  “Daniel,” she said, bending closer to his ear.

  “Hmmm?”

  “You’re leaving me with her?”

  “What?”

  “Please wake up.”

  He shifted under her, rousing himself. “She’s not so heavy,” he said. “You’ll be all right.”

  It wasn’t the first time Ada wished she wasn’t alone.

  – EIGHT –

  My first, maybe my real first, I was eighteen. He was nineteen. He was exactly two hundred days older than me. We worked that out. We turned it into a game. Like when he thought I didn’t understand something the same way he did, he’d say, “Add two hundred.” Like when I thought he was treating me like I was dumb, I’d say, “Add two hundred.” And we laughed. This game we played with our impressions of what it meant to be mature.

  He said he loved me. I didn’t know what to say. I was too aware of the contradictions in me, the ruptures in my personality. Shape-shift separations, divides. Already, I knew they were there. For example, there was that question I always asked in answer: which parts of me do you love?

  For example, there was that question I never dared ask: which parts of me can’t you love?

  And I never said it back: I love you.

  I tried to see myself through his eyes. Knowing that the image we each had of me didn’t quite match. Like looking at a painting on a wall, then seeing its reflection in a mirror. The same thing, different. The same thing, backwards. And when you look again at the original, you realise you’re choosing what to see.

  I was like that. He didn’t see me like that. I was like that, to me.

  I wanted him close to me—I wanted him far from me. He knew my history, he knew my thoughts. He knew things about me he shouldn’t have known. I’d told him things. I’d told too much.

 

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