Atomic City

by Sally Breen

  What’ll we call her? Jade asks.

  I don’t know. What do you think?

  I keep glancing at the fluorescent minutes ticking over on the clock radio behind her.

  Let’s call her Rouge, she says, like a bet on red.

  I wince, hoping her joke is for real. Maybe I’m just freaking out. Maybe this offence is just speculation, merely a spin of the wheel, nothing else and nothing more, but I find it harder to hold up in the face of such innocence. All these families here. Jade’s not used to it, I’m not used to it. Babies remind me of responsibility, of tangibility, of our crimes.

  We have to steal everything in order to feel it.

  I am close to tears, of rage, of frustration, of being affected by Jade’s losses, painful and untapped, I don’t know which. I’m looking at this strange creature that belongs to someone else, and I’m watching Jade, and I’m realising that despite how similar we are I don’t really know her at all, that there’s something huge, something unhinged in her past. I also know this is probably the closest we will ever come to real intimacy and probably the moment of us being blown apart. It’s like Jade has wired herself to a baby that is also a bomb.

  Jade takes Rouge’s arm in her fingers. The whole wrist fits in the concave space of her palm, just like a token. And now it’s time to play my hand.

  I’ll come with you, I say to Jade. Let’s take her back.

  Walking back with her is so damned risky, but I know my coming along is the only reason she agrees. I tie my shoelaces hurriedly, praying that Rouge will not cry before we can get there. I couldn’t handle that. There’s no change in the scrunched little face; she seems quite happy. Outside I can hear the noise of one of the buggies on the circuit and people coming and going, opening and shutting doors. Jade asks me to carry it. The bundle. The baby. The bomb. I hesitate but I can see that’s what she wants me to do. Jade opens the door and we step out into the afternoon sunlight. The adrenaline really kicks. I’m all wired clarity.

  Sticking to the leafier side of the road I attempt to look casual but Jade is walking so strangely, either from the drink or her state of mind, I can’t tell. She falls back a few steps. Behind us I can hear the sound of a buggy approaching. I shift Rouge into my right arm and stop, waiting for Jade to catch up. I put out my free arm as she reaches me and wrap it around her. I try to pull her up straighter. The buggy slows.

  Hiya, you guys need a lift?

  No thanks, mate. Just having a walk.

  No worries.

  I wave to the family in the buggy as they roll past. A middle-aged woman looks at Jade caught in the crook of my arm, and catches my eye. I can see her head turn, still watching us as the buggy rounds the next bend. Finally, they’re gone. I let out my breath but I don’t let go of Jade.

  Rouge is becoming heavy in my arm. I look down, startled to see her watching me. My movements must have woken her. I pray for her to stay calm, and try to make my steps light. Her eyes are green like Camille’s eyes, green like Jade’s name. All these women in my life infected with the stain of envy. Jade’s shoulders square up under my hand. Let me go.

  I let her pull away from me. I don’t want a scene. We keep walking, my eyes and ears attuned to any approaching thing. Veering off the main strip on to the long drive to the Mosman, I lose my footing on some gravel and I hold my breath because the baby’s eyes squint, showing concern. Righting myself, I shift her inexpertly and notice with dismay that ahead of us a scattered procession of families is headed our way. Jade sees them too, and mercifully decides to join me again. She keeps her head down. I gaze at the baby as I imagine fathers do and then I pretend to be looking at the scenery. The children get to us first, running ahead of their clans that I register only as a collection of sunburnt faces and white T-shirts bobbing in the near distance. The kids don’t look at us but the parents do, the mothers smiling and acknowledging the way I’m holding the baby, like they know it’s our first. I nod in a friendly way to the fathers. One of them says: Glorious day. Jade’s head twitches but she doesn’t reply. I say: Yes, perfect isn’t it? Putting my arm back around her, for a moment I consider how much Jade and I have gained and lost in the space of this weekend and for once it isn’t about the numbers, it’s about something bigger than that. Something about the past and the present. When I look back I realise it isn’t our history that is irreconcilable, it is our future.

  The terracotta trail that leads to the residences is littered with leaves. The wind has come up. We pause at the start of the circular drive and I’m glad the Mosman is last in line, curled out of sight.

  This is as far as I go, Jade.

  Rouge starts to whimper and finally Jade seems able to admit to the pressure of little time. We exchange the baby, eyes focused on each other. I kiss Jade on the cheek in an attempt to comfort her, and feel only the tautness of our skins. We have never dealt with something like this before, something so fragile, so dangerous. I leave Jade to enter the Mosman alone and hurry back to my suite via the trees.

  An hour later Jade is back on the edge of my bed, this time alone and with every trace of tenderness and confusion in her face gone. She’s leaning on her hands, spread arrogantly behind her. The look she gives me suggests she doesn’t want to talk about the baby or anything that has happened. Her feet twitch like her head, continuously tilting away from me in anger as if she’s blaming me for her being remiss, but I don’t let it get to me; I’ve got other angles to cover. I don’t ask her why she stole the baby. I know she wouldn’t consider this a valid question. I know the reasons why she’s angry; she has let me see the true emotion in her, just a chink, and it’s not about me. It’s about a baby. It’s about Armidale.

  I take a risk by sitting very close to her on the bed. I put my arm around her and am relieved when she relaxes into me, begins to talk.

  I don’t try and stop this, you know, from happening to me. I used to be able to control it. Now I just think something’s gone wrong inside. Something doesn’t work.

  I know, Jade.

  Her softness makes me brave. I decide to use her vulnerability to broach the subject of Harvey.

  Don’t you see why you’ve got to leave him? He’s making it worse.

  Some things are worth holding on to for a bit.

  And I think she might be right but I don’t answer because the look on her face and the comment is full of resignation. For once I don’t want to say anything that might sway the moment.

  Jade stands up suddenly.

  I need some action.

  This is more of a command than a statement, so I say: Yeah. Let’s get out of here. What’ve we got? A few hours?

  I move because I want to go with her, and because, the beauty is, in Jade’s world nothing’s sacred.

  In twenty minutes Jade and I find ourselves gambling in a rundown club in a nearby small town. It’s not our turf and it’s not cool, but we’ve had enough of the Hyatt resort. This is just the kind of trashy venue we need to shake the suffocation. On the overhead televisions the club has seen fit to play re-runs of COPS. I don’t know why. Maybe they think the show adds an edge. LAPD brutality boosting their own Kmart, government-endorsed brand of vice. No one’s really watching except me. I can’t tear my eyes away. I know why Jade doesn’t flinch. While I shudder at the images I can’t hear, at the prime-time persecution she just laughs and shakes her coin cup. They still have those cups here. I guess they figure the place isn’t big enough, nor the clientele hardcore enough, to piss in them.

  Jade’s playing the machines because that’s the only thing on offer. All around us people stare intently at screens, while above them the white faces of redneck LA cops grin large in close-up. Not even breaking a sweat, twenty of them swarm on a suburban street in Los Angeles, to one house where a black woman in an old dress raises her hands in a doorway to protect her life. The camera pulls in sharply on her face as her sons are taken away.

  Jade laughs because COPS is just like gambling, she says. And this is why it�
��s here, in a room full of amateur punters, all of them obsessed with tactical manoeuvres. The images beam in, sending the message that a button on a fruit machine can be replaced easily with a trigger, that the faces that fall are just cards ground into the bitumen, public servants addicted to the rush and just like the casino they’ve been funded to win and this is what pisses me off. But such a well-orchestrated farce doesn’t seem to matter to Jade.

  Jade doesn’t hunch into her machine like other addicts do. She doesn’t cower in front of it, or press it tentatively. She faces the machine square-on, straight-backed, strapping in something bigger than her, but dumber than her, for a ride. And though she can’t beat a relentless and rigged system she can control how it makes her feel. It never beats her. Jade’s above the machine: she doesn’t even play it for kicks, she plays it because it’s there. When she looks up at me her eyes roll and I wish I could say I was playing up the contempt I feel for the low end of the game on the machine and the high end on the screen but I can’t separate myself completely from the surfaces that hide and the surfaces that reveal. Not when she’s beside me, laughing all the way and slipping in between. Not when there’s a guy next to me staring into a fruit machine that isn’t even on.

  I keep watching her and the dance of pixels all around. And despite the fact I’m working myself up, this feels like we’re back on track. Jade keeps pressing and I keep watching the totals on her screen veer back and forth. Two steps forward, two steps back. Jade is patient. She waits until the total is big enough and then she wagers the lot. As soon as she cracks the machine we move on.

  Jade likes the machines best that sound like the jungle. She loves the shrieking of monkeys when she hits a round of free spins. She sits back. She laughs and her hand reaches over to squeeze my leg. She wants me to hang off her, to scowl at everything around us and turn back.

  Eventually Jade’s cups start stacking up. I take the walk to the cashier to swap the gold for notes. I give her back the cash and she doesn’t look at or count the money, just slides it cleanly into her back pocket. When the totals start dwindling, Jade will know it’s time. Outside the dark night has settled in. Walking back to the car, green tree frogs burp out their small repetitive songs somewhere in the shadows of the tropical bush. Harvey will be wondering where Jade has gone, but would never guess what has actually kept her.

  Jade drives us back to the resort. The Merc glides on the coast roads, carving through the wind.

  She pulls up outside the resort. Just in case. I make a move to jump out but she reaches for me and says: Wait.

  From her pocket she draws out the cash and counts it. I look away. She holds out what looks like a couple of hundred.

  Not bad, considering.

  I hesitate and look at her, not sure if I should accept the payment.

  Take it, what’s the matter? Not enough for you, hey?

  No, it’s not that. I just didn’t think …

  Shut up. Fifty–fifty was the deal. Still is the deal.

  I thank her and get out. Walking back to my room I realise everyone needs a frisson of fear to remind them they’re real, but this interrelation is no pinch on the skin, my moments with Jade have become more than a series of exchanges I enter into and retreat from. I’m not stopping at her accident to lend a hand. Camille knew that was bullshit and now I know it too. I’m in the accident. I’m riding shotgun.

  In the morning Jade looks tired. Standing in reception, she and Harvey look like the farce they are. There’s no hint, no breath of desire between them. Jade leans on the counter, sunglasses on, unamused. Harvey turns away from the transaction, hands in pockets, uncomfortable about the fact he’s not paying. I watch him. He stares out the giant plate-glass windows of the foyer, blankly, as if even they are saying something about the stretch of emptiness between him and Jade.

  I sit, pleased and comfortable, on the lower mezzanine holding a newspaper that may as well be upside-down. That’s how interested I am in what’s happening in the rest of the world. How interested I am in what anyone else has to say about it. To me, Jade is the world, the microcosm, the tragedy, the triumph, the merger of commerce and invention. She’s going to leave him. Has already left him. It’s fixed.

  Harvey used to pay attention, he used to get off on her; now he’s dragging Jade behind him like a well-bred but disappointing greyhound. Harvey will be attracted to the potential of her money for a while longer yet; he’s still in this game to win, but not so sure anymore that he’s backed a sure thing. I smile over what I could tell him. How much he’s lost on her. But inwardly I’m smiling more at the thought swelling and growing inside me, the thought of the bigger fish to fry, the level Jade and I can move up to.

  I turn towards the mountain rising beautifully beyond the windows, the scene Harvey no longer looks at. He’s not the type of person to see the meaning in a picture, even when it’s right in front of him. If he was a superstitious man he might be disturbed by the scene’s ironic proximity. I know this because I have just learnt the name of the mountain from the legend, written on the wall behind me:

  Long ago in the Dreamtime a young warrior named Coolum loved a beautiful maiden named Maroochy but another warrior, Ninderry, tried to steal her away. The two men fought and Ninderry killed Coolum. The watching gods were so moved by Coolum’s courage that they turned his fallen body into a mighty stone mountain to stand forever by the sea, gazing down on the river formed by the grief-stricken Maroochy’s tears.

  The resort sees the mountain as an accessory; Harvey doesn’t even notice. Just like he can’t see the focus of Jade’s attention now, why her head’s turned around suddenly because she’s exchanging glances with me. They’re walking out the doors, his hand on the small of her back. A gesture that disclaims. This is the right thing to do, Harvey. Say thank you and usher. Look for the source that has attracted her but see nothing. Don’t see me and turn away with a quickly hidden frown and the agitated need for a plan. Gotcha.

  CARTE BLANCHE

  HARVEY

  Jade just went off the boil, you know, she just spent more time chatting. The big boss questioned some of the things she said, but in the end she wasn’t getting the results that she had done and they decided to sack her. Part of that was she was so ridiculously rich anyway, they didn’t think she would mind that much but when she got sacked she went a bit mad; she was hysterical. I didn’t have to do it. She wasn’t working for me directly; she was working for someone else. Um, she started to change at that point. She dyed her hair, she cut her hair and she started to wear skimpier and skimpier clothing. Um, to a certain degree she started to become like this bimbo, this Gold Coast sort of bimbo. She dyed her hair blonde and I don’t know, when we were arguing, and we were arguing a lot in those last two months, we were on and off, we split up like, um, four or five times, I’d say.

  Look, if I wanted to go out with a Gold Coast bimbo I would have picked a really pretty one. Those aren’t the qualities that attracted me to her in the first place.

  When she got sacked from here she made up all these things about all these other jobs she was going for, all these interviews that again weren’t true. Um, and she ended up working at a nightclub, right? Again all this was covered by the idea she’d put in our heads that her father was furious, her father wanted her to live a normal life for three years, she was meant to take over the company as soon as she was twenty-five, he wanted her to get experience, he wasn’t going to let her sponge. She had to do all this, live in a normal house, drive a normal car. Though she always spent tons of money. She bought me four-hundred-dollar wallets. Anything and everything. Cash most of the time. She took me away for the weekend to the Hyatt Coolum. She paid for the whole weekend, took me in a fancy car. And said, you know, that her dad had actually coughed up the money in the end and that was her father’s car. Turns out it wasn’t. It was rented for the weekend.

  She stole.

  We now know that she stole cheques and no one ever suspected her. We had a big
deal with the police here and everything. Because firstly she was stinking rich, secondly she was such a nice girl. This isn’t just me, this is every manager here; this is, you know, everyone. I mean, she’d send flowers to people she hardly knew in hospital. She’d buy presents for one of the manager’s little daughters, you know, she’d just run around doing everything. All that kind of thing she did automatically. I had a burglary at my house. She lost a necklace and a watch that she told the police, on a police report, was worth a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. Original Cartier. And I lost fifteen hundred dollars cash. So she’d actually staged the whole robbery. The necklace and the watch weren’t worth anything like that sort of money, but were used just to steal my fifteen hundred dollars cash. Other times I’d go out and get drunk and think I’d lost money, ’cause I’m pretty careless with money and it was, Oh there’s four hundred bucks missing, oh you must’ve dropped it.

  And again, I never suspected her for one moment because she was so good. We’d go out to eat five nights a week at top restaurants and I wouldn’t pay all the time. I’d say, Listen, I can’t afford to go out again and she’d say, Oh no, don’t worry. I’ll pay, I’ll pay.

  So never once was she short of money. And then she took us to the Indy; she took us and the other manager. Eight hundred dollars a ticket. We saw it on the invoice; they faxed it through, right? She took everyone, ten of us, to a corporate lunch at the Sheraton; said her father had already booked it, we might as well go. At the lunch, at the auction they were holding, she bought a heart-shaped bed from the Variety Club, a thousand dollars. She said her father told her to buy whatever came up at auction for charity. The bed is still at my apartment, the Variety Club are going to come and get it, she never paid for it. She then took ten people to the Indy Ball at the Marriott. A hundred-odd bucks a ticket. Um, again said her father did it so they might as well go. Ran a six-hundred-dollar bar tab as well and hasn’t paid for any of that.