Atomic City

by Sally Breen

  I crumple the note in my left hand. Let it fall beside the bed. I crawl in with her.

  STATE OF PLAY

  In the dark, in two different cities, two pairs of people commit crimes, against themselves, against each other. Camille and the Dealer, PJ and Jade, two pairs splitting open. Nothing is ever hidden for long.

  In the apartment he keeps for this kind of thing PJ has Jade where he wants her, underneath him, and Jade is mistaking that power for lust. When the sex is over, when he is finished, he asks her to leave. Jade takes no notice. She tells him she’s got an idea and she would like him to hear her out. He is impatient.

  Okay, let’s hear it.

  Jade fills him in on the telemarketing scam even though she shouldn’t. His power and his arrogance are making her want to. She wants one up on him; she omits the Dealer. PJ just laughs at her, undercuts her cheerfully on the chin. His finger moves into her mouth, the top knuckle hooking behind her teeth, pressing her bottom lip open so he can see inside, into the hole he makes of her mouth. And it hurts but she lets him do it. She hates his laughter. Her pain excites PJ but he underestimates the danger of allowing her to feel, for not playing into her charade. PJ misses what the Dealer got straight away, that Jade’s tales are never just about the game or the cash or the business. Jade’s forgotten she’s in a play.

  Sorry sweetheart, he says. Not interested.

  In Camille’s room the Dealer kisses her hard, pushing her and shoving her with all the left-over ferocity he feels for her, for the absence and the longing of their past, the dreams which he knows he can never fulfil. And she will mistake this force for passion. She will take his despair and she will give it back not knowing any different, not knowing how considerable the gap between them is. Different positions, different meanings, different images. What they remember will always be different.

  For her it will be him slipping inside her for the second time that afternoon and how his face was kind of lost and beautiful – the moment when she decided she was going to ask him to stay.

  For the Dealer it will be watching her naked body caught in the mirror – the sheet, thankfully, a tangled bunch of lace at her feet. He will remember how good it felt to watch her, to fuck her, while all he could think about was going away.

  And none of them will remember what they saw with their eyes when they actually departed. Easier that way. Not everything looks good when you look back on it.

  THE DEALER

  Camille and I spend three days caught in each other’s orbit. It only takes me twenty minutes to undo it.

  We are in the public bar when she asks me to stay. I can smell the stale floor. We sit rigid with a sudden shyness in the heavy chairs by the window. Her face is luminous, and when I say no, she wants to know why.

  Things are happening for me down the coast. I feel like finally things are getting back on track, you know? I can’t stay on track and concentrate on us, not yet. You need to give me some time.

  All I ever give you is time.

  Look, I know you’ve done the best you can, I know. I’m sorry. I really fucked things up for us but all that drama just doesn’t disappear, Camille. It just doesn’t go away.

  She looks at me sadly.

  I think I know that better than anyone.

  Her face is harder now. She knows how much I’ve cost her. Her big job. Her lifestyle. Now she handles barflies like she used to handle jurors. She still wants to drag it on and on. I look away. I’ve never known what to say to her.

  There are always reasons why you won’t, she says. Usually not the ones you say.

  And she’s right. I can’t tell her why. How can I? After the bust and the scandal and the rap she took for me. There’s all that fucked-up history and then there’s the obvious. Camille and I are just built differently. She’s the type of person who admires grace. She likes people who lose with dignity. She values that. She serves people their drinks and their tokens but she doesn’t admonish them because deep down she’s playing the same game. She knows what I’ve done to people, why I nearly went inside and when the extent of what I’d done came out it crushed her like I was two people, she’d said. But still she tried to cover my tracks. The money I’d taken from her firm, from her, because it wasn’t what I’d done necessarily, she said, it was the lies, all the things I hid from her, the things I never told her. Such bullshit. I couldn’t look at her the same. Her martyr act, her self-inflicted penance, it’s all meant to deflect blame, to disguise the fact of her losing, to redefine loss as something dignified, to proclaim loss as a stand. Lawyers are good at that. But I work in a casino. I know about winners. Winners are made.

  Camille keeps pushing me, making the reason I’m leaving harder to ignore.

  I need time, I say.

  She looks away, knowing I don’t mean it. Her body, set so stiffly in the chair; her beautiful body which only hours before had moved so freely with me, around me, above me, now locked into this pointless resistance, into this starched silence and I realise I’ve made a big mistake. I’ve been careless with her, with myself, because part of me probably even loves her but to me love doesn’t mean forever, it doesn’t even mean tomorrow. For Camille love is something else, something bigger. I can’t look at her; I stir the ice in my drink.

  I would come back with you, you know, if you wanted me to.

  I sigh. How willing she is to go all in, to throw it all down. Camille was never a good gambler. She doesn’t know how to wait. All I can think about is Jade, the kind of girl who would never leave herself so exposed. No matter how much the odds were stacked against her she’d feel you out, hunt you down slow, never concede. And that’s what I want, I tell myself. Fight, strategy, not some watered-down version of survival, because nothing I’ve seen has ever convinced me there is anything gracious about loss. I want to get back to Jade, to follow through the thread I’ve started with her. Already I feel I’ve left her for too long. Camille takes my silence as a no.

  Just promise me you won’t get mixed up in anything.

  I drain the watery dregs of my drink. When I grab her hand she flinches from the cold residue on my fingers.

  I can’t promise anything, Camille.

  She looks down, wraps her hand over mine and holds on to me. I don’t feel anything but her grip. I put up with the pressure of her light hand because I think it helps her. Then, without warning, she lets me go.

  I get in the car. Sitting behind the wheel, I can already feel the split. Love is so fragile in the morning, so fragile in the face of the world, kicking our neuroses back at us. And nothing can justify me, nothing can mask the resignation in Camille’s face, the defeat in her eyes, outside the pub as I pull away.

  Do people choose places or do places choose them? I wonder this as I pull off the highway to the Gold Coast. Is this how you know you are in the right place? When coming back feels like a combination of pleasure and relief.

  There are always reasons why I leave but the reasons why I stay are synonymous with who I am. The Gold Coast is an outcast city: a refuge for exiles, misfits and players. When I glide my car along that skinny stretch of bitumen, so close to the edge, my windscreen seems to disappear, becomes the blue ocean, and my parched thirst for extremity, for difference, for insubordination, is satiated by this city’s remorseless nuclear flash.

  The Gold Coast is even better from the air. No other city has quite the same aerodynamic entry. A city built for the sky always looks best from it. The combination of blue and green and gold in the Queensland light. The view from up high, a picture taken a thousand times, flattened and two dimensional. Live, it is something else.

  I would have enjoyed seeing Jade arrive. Like watching someone view the ocean for the first time. Does she see the Gold Coast as I see it? A city of surfaces, an ocean of seamless blue fanned by frivolous edges and what’s underneath, does she see that? All the endless covert possibility.

  I’m thawing out. Closer to the shore my tension melts. At dusk I slip along my imitation S
unset Strip, mould myself into California in miniature; this is the shooting hour – at five in the morning and five in the afternoon the light is best for pictures. I drive by signs and skyscrapers glowing yellow in the small space of the day that takes your breath away. In the shooting hour it all works. The hard edges of the city soften and you can believe the imaginers.

  I think about the Casino in Broadbeach further down the strip, curled in on itself in the afternoon, shielding its players from illumination and waiting patiently for the onset of night. I don’t expect Jade is there and I’m not ready to think about her yet. Right now I need the anonymity of my apartment, away from the sky needles and the endless provocations. It is too soon, too light and too close. I need to check myself.

  I cruise into Southport. I’ve heard people say in the trendier avenues that they would never live further than the Southport Bridge, a long line separating the suburban body of the Gold Coast from its infamous face. There are downtimes when I prefer the body with all its dimpled curves and back-street surprises, times when I feel like I’m holed up in the city’s heart, sucking on the pulse, the mainline to the head. I need the respite the real offers from slippery surfaces. Here I see the evidence of this city’s manipulation, not its product. The forgotten things I have to take stock of. The old surfaces tarnished with use. The body releasing all the waste, the fingerprints, the grime, the backlash, the record of games, the same manoeuvres played over and over again. These are the suburbs where people lose, where the buildings and the people are stained.

  Over the bridge I’m local and as close to being centred as you can be in this city. I follow the water, which is lapping quietly. On the calm side the tourists still come. Working-class clans looking for cheaper alternatives to the strip, booking into the Tuscany-inspired complex next door and laughing well into the night. The bay water in front shiny but not too clean. Climbing the stairs to my flat I listen to the tourists, see them multiplying in pools, the kids calling for Marco Polo, or shrieking for their fathers to catch them. Sometimes I watch them through the windows, sitting in clumps in front of cable TV; sometimes they watch me and I think I see in their eyes a sad kind of recognition. My kitchen, my life, my presence is not in the brochure. I wonder when they get the free buses to the theme parks in the bright blue mornings whether they stare up at the towers and want to be in them. So high up you don’t have to look sideways at all the people living low to the ground.

  I think about how the city seduces the tourists then makes them feel guilty. I see them walking in the Casino, in Surfers Paradise and along the esplanades clutching their wallets, their children clinging to their legs, grabbing at them, overloaded by the spectacle and the relentless pressure, the idea everything here has to be paid for. I watch these package-holiday families dividing up the budget. And I watch the cream moving in between – the gold-plated travellers from overseas. Japan, the Middle East, India. Whatever the accent, they own this city. The Cartier, Louis Vuitton and Billabong bags bulging. These are the people who hover in the towers, who buy one hundred and forty-eight T-shirts for the wedding party back home in one sitting. The people the head likes, and the body works for. The people who will never watch me outside my front door fumbling for my keys.

  STATE OF PLAY

  The Dealer’s shore. Populated by sea eagles and the pedestrian poor. Unloved kids with shaved heads on bikes. Young men with no shirts on, running barefoot, screaming out at the empty night: See you in hell, motherfucker.

  Even rage is celluloid American.

  On one side, black bitumen runs past him, into the strip. On the other, dirty water runs between him and the islands. To his right, on the highway, the cars never stop passing by quickly, fluid, uninterrupted. To his left, a paddle-steamer moves through the slipway out and back at the same time every night outlined by fairy lights, fluid and uninterrupted.

  The Dealer watches the sun set, he tries to stay still in his buffer zone, to calm down the adrenaline in his body, to still his ragged mind, full of confusions, the connections, the dangers of Jade, the flashbacks of Camille, her soft body. He wants to get back on the game. He wants to sort through every detail before he lets Jade see him, to control every variable, have an answer for every question. He tells himself he must anticipate but nothing’s coming through, nothing’s computing right. For once he isn’t even sure he wants to know or influence or control what is going to happen next. His hands are edgy. He wants Jade to decide.

  The city rests at arm’s length. Hovering on a more easterly point, he looks at the phosphorescent strip, an architectural trick of light. He feels an ache of recognition. He lets the city lure him, limp to the wash of its relentless wave, the will to go on and on and on. He takes a deep breath. He feels like light. He feels like going, he feels like arriving. He feels like wanting everything all at once.

  The Dealer’s wavering lasts less than three hours. Everything can be predicted. Jade is waiting.

  He flies over the bridge in his low-line car attracted to the light, to the diamond city. Light on the water clear, the moon clear, the reflection back, clear. Glass, water, mirrors, skylight. A sugar, candy, crystal diet. He parks outside his first hunch and he’s right. Inside Aces, Jade is not alone. She is with the other dealers gambling in free time, gambling illegal and serious. The Dealer knows his place here, on the other side of the table. He smiles at Jade and everything is forgiven. They do not tell each other what has happened and neither of them asks. Their separate ways mesh back together, as easily as doing up a loose zipper. The Dealer sits next to her and they play up till the morning.

  THE JOKER

  THE DEALER

  In her room Jade tells me to be quiet. Seven am and we are cashed up and drunk. Jade and I make a good team. The other dealers are starting to get suspicious of her, not just because they’re on to her but because she’s with me. I’m too old school in their eyes to be pulling up stunts like Jade. Together we clean up. Jade hasn’t mentioned my absence and I’ve managed to pull away from it spectacularly. Only now I’m in her room do I think of Camille, briefly, and I do feel some kind of guilt. I can picture her working, pulling beers, holding court, her tiny expressions no match for the loaded idiosyncrasies of Jade. Will Camille even suspect, let alone fathom, how far I’ve come in less than twenty-four hours? I want to grab Jade and jump around, to scream in enthusiasm for her pace, but I don’t because she’s counting our money on her bed. She counts out loud. She’s not excited, just efficient.

  I scan her room.

  We’re in here because there’s a new girl sharing her apartment, someone Jade calls safe, another new arrival equating to a waitress, but nothing can help the holiday-unit resemblance, lots of new white surfaces and cut corners. Between the two girls there are few personal effects, no decoration other than what the landlord provides, no displayed memories, just another couple of exiles caught in a small community, runaways imitating residents imitating tourists. I know this is a good place for Jade, a place where she is not encouraged to leave an imprint and a place where I am not confronted with any indications of who she really is.

  I look at her on the bed. She seems to occupy a lot of space. It is the length of her stretched out in the dramatic black of her dress against the pastel floral explosions of her cheap bedspread; her image hits me from the other side of the room. Her hair looks black also, slicked into the nape of her neck so the angles of her face are more intense. She’s not wearing enough make-up so I can tell. When she glances at me her bright blue eyes seem to slip back into the typical seascape print behind her head.

  Four thousand, she says holding out the cash.

  I take it and ask her what’s next. She rolls her eyes like I should already know.

  From under the bed Jade produces a large wooden box, rests it on her lap, unlocks the lid and opens it towards me so I cannot see inside. Drawing out a yellow business envelope marked Harvey, I see her handwriting is precise. I had expected it to be messy. Jade closes the box, locks
it, and places it back under the bed. She invites me to sit next to her. I cross the room eager to engage in her next move. She empties the contents of the envelope on the florals.

  So far there isn’t much to Harvey. A few sheets of paper and one photograph. Jade hands me the picture, stolen, she says, from his desk. I nod and study Harvey. He seems familiar mostly because he looks like a bastard. His smile’s smug. He’s carrying a bit of weight, making the best of his looks that have probably endured a rough twenties. Harvey’s got that puffed-up look of someone who consumes well and often. His eyes appear shifty but even in the still image he comes over as slow. The slack jaw. The weakness for temptation. Perfect.

  I smile at Jade and she hands me another piece of paper. She doesn’t like to explain things, to talk too much. I read a clipping she has taken from the classifieds. An advertisement for telemarketers in Surfers Paradise. Company: Paradise Holdings International. Contact: Harvey Carter, Manager.

  I started yesterday, she says.

  The other sheets of paper she hands me are notes about Harvey. Already she’s profiling him. I’m more interested in what we’re going to get out of it. Reading me well, Jade hands me a photocopy of company records. I see there isn’t much cash, not the kind that would keep us interested for long enough. Jade senses my disappointment.

  Don’t worry, the company’s just a front, she says. There’s plenty more where that came from.

  And Harvey?

  Yeah, he’s fair. He’s got enough of his own cash we can play with as well.

  Good.

  I give her back the papers and there it is, a deal done. It’s not like she said: Do you want in on this? She just assumed. I know her deal is never a real deal. I know I’ll probably never see my share. But money isn’t really why I’m in. I like the process better than the fruits. At least I tell myself I do.