Seeing Double

by Karen Runge

  I let go.

  I grappled for the handle and popped the door open, scrambling free, stumbling away from the car. Still laughing, delirious from the cocaine, dizzy from the blow, sick on the taste.

  I ran for two blocks, oblivious to the pain, my skull throbbing in a blood-burst ricochet. I was giggling between breaths. Like a lunatic unleashed. Like a schoolgirl vindicated.

  When I got back to my apartment I brushed my teeth twice, three times, four. Spat pink froth and swallowed mint and blood. My blood, his blood. I didn’t know.

  I stared at myself in the mirror, still leering, still laughing. The wise voice behind my mind asking, What the fuck are you doing, Ada? What the hell is this?

  Shatter. Bleed.

  Maybe then I felt a thrill. You and Daniel have your own ideas. But I think maybe that was the first. My real first. I think.

  – NINETEEN –

  It took hours to find her. The girl with the bright blue halter-neck top and the over-painted eyes. Narrow-hipped, skinny, her jeans riding a half-inch too low as she leaned over the bar. Oblivious, perhaps, to the lace trim edge of her thong. It lay exposed against her bare skin like a strap, like a ragged cut. Red line through white. She was skinny, her hard contours clamped in rough denim. She wore a studded belt. Adding bravado to her bones.

  They were at Blue Stream. To call the place a club was perhaps an overstatement. It was a rundown bar with Occidental dreams: cramped space, dirty corners, broken couches, stripped walls. There were loops of Christmas tinsel nailed to the bar’s runner and out-dated strobe lights flashed over the small dance floor. Red, green and white stuttering against the black, slicing the darkness. Brilliance interspersed with instants of shadow, those shadows filled with moving bodies. The Christmas tinsel aside, it could have been any shitty bar in any shitty part of any city. It stank of low-grade rum and cigarette smoke. Sweat and spilled beer. Hormones, pheromones. The ether of sex.

  Neven, Daniel and Ada stood at the far end of the narrow bar, cringing at the music, drinking weak gin and tonics. Pop synth and modified vocals screeched behind a relentless bass beat that no amount of cocaine could save them from. Not Daniel, not Ada. Neven leaned on the bar, one elbow propped on its sticky surface. He drank nonchalantly and he drank too fast—fitting in better with his worn jeans and faded T-shirt. Pretending to have a good time while Ada ground her teeth, crunching on ice. Daniel stood with one arm around his wife’s shoulders, feeling the tension in them, feeling her twitch. There was half a gram of cocaine left in his jacket pocket. He kept his jacket on, his hand in that pocket. The tiny envelope caged in his fist like a treasure that might break if he held it too tight. He sniffed at the burn in his nostrils—the flesh there was thick and raw, threatening blood—and he tried not to think about cops. The half-worry a paranoid fault line quietly shuddering through his buzz.

  But he kept it in check. And he watched.

  Around them, they saw pale faces garish with overblown makeup, dirty hair gelled in place, warm bodies moving, delicate under their clothes. The music changed in shifting tempos, stuttering through varied speeds. Beneath that they heard it as a constant rush, a roar, muting their thoughts, silencing words.

  But it was Neven, not Daniel, who spotted her first. The girl. Dark-haired, rail thin. She wore a blue top that left half her back bare. It reached up around the front of her shoulders in long tapers that tied behind her neck. The fabric was loose around her ribs, shifting over her insubstantial breasts.

  Neven tapped Daniel’s shoulder with the back of his hand.

  There.

  The girl had just pushed her way clear of the dance floor and was heading to the bar, hardening the angles of her shoulders to shove through the crowd, an empty glass in her hand. There was something a little like Ada about her, the way she might have been when she was just nineteen. Unmoored and underfed. Maybe this was the girl she’d almost been before. The girl she almost was.

  “That one needs to eat something,” Daniel said in Neven’s ear. He grinned and clamped a hand on Ada’s more ample ass. Ada rolled her eyes and stepped away. Her bare shoulder brushed Neven’s chest. On contact she stiffened. He stepped closer.

  And a secret passed between them.

  The girl was at the bar now, bending further forward than she needed to. Jiggling her knee, snapping her fingers for service.

  “She’ll taste like fish, soft and salty,” Neven said, his breath warm against Ada’s neck.

  Ada laughed. Fish. She saw rainbow-coloured scales glimmering at her feet. She shook her head, her hair tickling his throat. “No, no, she’ll taste like river water. Murky. Wild.”

  The Blue girl took her change, her bottle of beer and disappeared back to her corner of the bar.

  They watched for other options. Girls who ordered drinks for just themselves or a handful of female friends, girls who didn’t have boyfriends or would-be lovers draped over them. There weren’t too many of those. Time dragged on, the music shifting with it.

  Bored, Ada pawed at Daniel’s pockets until he surrendered the coke.

  “Just a little, okay?” he said.

  “I promise.” She kissed his cheek, turned to kiss Neven’s. Her lips pricked with stubble, she slipped back between them to find the bathroom.

  “That one,” Daniel said, catching Neven’s attention. “She’s back.”

  Blue girl. Her eyes roving the room, restless, leaving the section of battered and beer-stained couches by the dingy dance floor and crossing back to the bar. Back toward them. Abandoning her friends—who was she here with?—to get herself a shot, to look for somebody. Or just to move, to see something, or to be seen. Fiddling with her hair at the bar while she waited. Hoping she was being watched. This hope was clear in the way she fidgeted, glanced around. Leaned.

  She turned her head and caught Neven’s eye. He held her gaze for a second, then he looked away. His smile was small, unperturbed.

  “Did you block her off?” Daniel asked in Neven’s ear. An anxious hiss.

  Neven shook his head. “No. I let her know I looked.”

  Daniel clapped him on the shoulder.

  And this is how it starts.

  The crowd had thinned a little and they saw where she went—to a couch that faced the dance floor, with two other girls waiting for her. These other girls—surely not friends—sat with their shoulders hunched, sipping their drinks. They were exquisitely out of place with their neat hairstyles and tight-set smiles. They didn’t seem to be saying much.

  Classmates. They had to be. Foreign language students still homesick for daddy, skimming the surface of everything around them, storing up the details of the city’s eccentricities for gushy emails home. Overusing exclamation points.

  Hi everyone!!

  Last night I went to a club with these two girls I know from class! You wouldn’t believe what clubs are like here!! The place was FILTHY and the music was all at least five years old. The bartender didn’t even know what a martini was! Or maybe I wasn’t saying it right. This language is HARD! Then later this one girl I was with made friends with these people, and they raped her outside the bar! They held her against the wall and fucked her with a bottle!! Don’t worry, I got home safe.

  Kisses!

  P.S. I can’t wait to start my calligraphy class next week! I’ll send you pictures soon!!

  Daniel tapped this out on his phone and sent the message to Neven, who read it and burst into raucous laughter.

  They watched again. Blue girl, out of place beside those two girls. Those girls, brown bread to Blue’s ravenous dazzle. Pure virgin, worlds away from bare hips and brash belts.

  Ada returned, loose on her feet, settling herself between her men.

  The next time Blue came to the bar, she returned to her long, leaning pose, her thong riding up, her jeans riding down. A passing student—probably Russian, by the haircut—saw her and took the invitation on impulse, grabbing her from behind, clapping heavily ringed fingers on her hips.

&
nbsp; “Hey!” She turned, outraged—not drunk enough yet to elude offence. Wrenching her hips out of his grasp, sneering back at him. A hideous twist of her mouth, bestial in the flashing lights. An expression that stripped something lovely from her face.

  Neven stepped in without prompting, forgetting Ada, pushing past. “Get your hands off my girl.” Posturing, combative. Even over the music, violence struck the air like static when he spoke. Lightning storms rolling in.

  The Russian was just a skinny kid with a pierced lip and a torn vest. Pigeon-chested, frail, everything about him set in stark contrast to the metal in his eyes. Smouldering, staring back.

  “Yeah, fuck off,” Neven said, feigning fury so well that even the bartender, setting up a line of shooters, glanced up with practiced vigilance.

  “She was—”

  “No she wasn’t.”

  Daniel unwound himself from his wife’s shoulders, stepping to Neven’s side. Daniel, himself skinny and seeming ineffectual. Still, the Russian kid tallied it up: two against one and the girl unwilling. He sneered and gave Neven the finger, then slunk off back into the crush.

  “Your girl, am I?” Blue asked with an Irish lilt, turning to Neven with her hand on her hip. Already smiling at him, this presumptuous hero of hers who stood a little too close though he wasn’t half as drunk as her. Though his gaze didn’t waver, and hers did.

  “You could be, if you wanted. How about it?” Boyish smile, only half teasing.

  Her laugh was as lyrical as her voice.

  Got her.

  * * *

  This girl. The Blue girl. Later wrapping her arms around Neven’s waist, the muscles in his back tensing against her touch. Still, he didn’t push her away.

  Daniel made the offer and she looked at Neven, saying “Sure, okay. Yeah, why not?”

  She looked at him with the promise of sex in the narrowing of her eyes. A flutter black with thick mascara. Dreaming of things with him. Dreaming of things. Of him.

  Ada watched, crushing ice between her teeth.

  They left just as the atmosphere in the bar roiled down to lunacy. Bleary eyes and paranoia, and boisterous, desperate aggression. Animal senses slipping past outer veneers.

  “It’s cunt o’ clock!” Ada announced to the madness. Stepping toward the doors, crossing the bare cement floor with its cigarette butts and spills, ash and dirt, and lost liquor tracked toward the exit in the shape of her shoeprints. The last remaining patrons stumbled backwards and forwards in clumps, in knots, their arms around each other’s shoulders, zigzagging like they couldn’t find the door. Like they didn’t want to see it, even with dawn lighting the sky a thick, electric blue. Day waking.

  “You come back with us,” Neven said to Blue.

  An order, not a request.

  Sure, okay.

  Yeah, why not?

  Fucking idiot.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you,” Ada said, smoke winding past her teeth as she smiled.

  This promise she always made.

  – TWENTY –

  When Daniel was a little boy, his parents used to leave him with their neighbour when they went out. Thick woman, meat woman, low-class to his family’s mid-tier dreams. She worked at the abattoir. She had a son his age. Roland. A boy with red hair, freckles, warts on his knuckles and an accent scrubbed down to such a slow, nasal drawl that it was hard to believe they were neighbours, Daniel and him. Different worlds separated by a low brick wall. The UK, a kingdom defined by accents. More so than by borders, cities, districts, maybe. But I can’t say. I’ve only been there.

  “You comin’ over?”

  That simple phrase made of butchered words—chopped consonants and stretched vowels—to Daniel, he was like another kind of human. When his own mother was emphatic about him not dropping his Ts, not smudging his dental fricatives. Roland didn’t know the difference.

  Roland threw stones at stray cats. Roland skipped school every chance he got. He stole sweets from the newsstands and stuffed them into his friends’ pockets. He drew pigs in his school exercise books—plump hog behinds resplendent with starfish anuses, oval-slit vaginas, improbable penises, all drawn in emphatic blue Bic lines. Roland’s laugh was a cackle so high and so raucous that Daniel, by far the more sedate, sometimes suppressed the urge to cover his ears at the sound.

  Daniel was polite back then. He hadn’t yet learned how to tell people when he wanted them to shut the fuck up.

  But this is the story he has to tell about that. The story of his own shattering, his particular version of a shape-shift.

  Friday. Roland was anxious. Skinny legs bobbing at the knees. “You comin’ over?” Urgent eyes. “Friday night? My ma’am, she drinks. She drinks on Friday nights.”

  Friday night. That Friday night. The first Friday night he spent at the house next door. Escorted to the front door with a crush of cash in his pocket to thank Roland’s mother for the trouble. Kissed and waved to and left behind.

  “It’s Friday. My ma’am—she drinks.”

  Daniel’s parents drank on Fridays, too. They went to parties and sometimes they hosted parties, his mother’s neck roped with opalescent beads, her hair fixed with hairspray, his father in neat suits and shiny cufflinks. Shaved cheeks and minted breath.

  His parents drank too, on Friday nights. But not like this.

  Roland’s mother came home carrying plastic bags that clinked as she swayed on her heavy, half-circle steps. Her gait was set that way to accommodate her thighs, their turgid velocity, skin rubbing skin. She smelled of sweat and something sweet and thick—this latter, the smell of death. It’s a creeping scent, one that cloisters. It coats the skin and sinks into fabric, hair. Daniel remembered it years later when he smelled it again as an adult, and that was when he finally placed it. Remembering Roland’s mother. Remembering Friday night.

  That night.

  “Come sit with me tonight, boys?” she offered when she came in and saw them. Setting the bags down on the kitchen table, she huffed out her words, sweat on her upper lip.

  “Hello, darlin’ Daniel.”

  That upper lip of hers flattened out when she smiled at him. It turned thin and straight as it stretched and folded against her teeth. Her teeth were squat and very white, like milk teeth that had hardened in place instead of falling out and being replaced. She unpacked the bags. The wine she’d bought was Crackling. Cheap and sweet and kicking with chemical fizz. She served it to them in plastic cups, half-filled. A show of moderation. But only show.

  “Come along, cheekies. Let’s watch some TV. Come sit with me.”

  They sat at her feet watching old taped episodes of her favourite shows. Watching Black Adder. Watching Only Fools and Horses. Watching Last of the Summer Wine.

  Last.

  Summer.

  Wine.

  “Drink up, boys.” She splashed more into their cups. Their cups kept half-full.

  Daniel says the wine was too sweet, sick-sweet, but he liked it. He says the bubbles burned the back of his mouth and threatened to shoot through his nose, but he liked that, too. He says between bouts of this new delirium he felt nausea thicken in his guts. He says he fought it off, making jokes with Roland about Jean Fergusson’s perplexing hairstyle, poking fun at Kathy Staff.

  “You like wrinkly horse faces! That’s your girlfriend!”

  “That’s your wife!”

  “Bet you love smooching her—”

  “Bet you like—”

  Making kissing sounds off the backs of their hands, kicking their feet, giggling. Roland’s mother laughing above them, behind them. Nudging their buttocks with her stockinged feet. That hard toe of hers, catching the waistband of Daniel’s shorts, wedging itself in the cleft of his buttocks.

  “You don’t want yucky old women, you two,” she said. Nudging. “Not yucky old women like me. Do you?”

  Daniel felt sick surprise at this thought. What a thought.

  He moved away from her, from that foot. That nylon-sheathed
toe. The stockings she wore were short, sock-length, the fat of her calves bulging over the reinforced hem. The bare skin there thick and puffy and pale, tinged blue. He stretched out on the carpet, flat on his belly. Out of her reach, he propped himself up on his elbows. He drained his cup.

  “Come here, Danny. Let’s get you some more. Roland, you rub ma’am’s feet for her, okay? She’s had a long day. The sort not even Peter Sallis can help with.”

  This, she laughed at. A joke she told to herself.

  Daniel offered his cup. She filled it. Half full. Roland sat cross-legged with his mother’s foot in his lap. He worked her toes, his head bowed. Not watching the television anymore. Not laughing anymore. Not smiling.

  “Hey Roland, your girlfriend’s back!”

  “Shhh, Daniel,” Roland’s mother said. “The show can wait. Spending time together is better than just watching silly old TV. Don’t you know?”

  The way she said this, she was ecstatic, enthused. Making him complicit just with that. Her voice, her tone.

  Roland’s mother slipped off a stocking. Daniel only saw this because he’d reached back round for his cup, recently refilled, resting now on the carpet beside his knee.

  She raised her foot and wriggled her toes against her son’s mouth.

  Roland bent. He pressed her big toe into his mouth. A thick bulb of flesh, the nail painted pastel pink. Roland’s hair hung in his eyes, its bright red muted to a dull copper against the glare of the television.

  Daniel couldn’t see his eyes.

  That was game one. There were many more to follow. But don’t think of this as abuse. Daniel doesn’t remember this as abuse. He remembers this as awkward, blissful. Scary the way it’s always scary the first time you take your clothes off in front of someone new. Scary the way any moment of no return is. Exhilarating for the same reasons, and in exactly the same way. He says it was. He sees it as.