Atomic City

by Sally Breen

  She would always be on the phone to these people. She would have half-hour phone calls with Tim Horan. And she can’t have been speaking to anyone but she’d say things like, Tim, you played great last night. I watched the match. When you went past that guy it was wonderful – what a try!

  She will stick to any lie you can’t actually disprove. You know, when I tell anyone the story, yeah? It’s like I must have been so, I mean, you think what sort of gullible idiot is this guy to believe what she said. But I’ve been in all sorts of sales situations for an enormously long time. I’m incredibly street-wise; I deal with people all the time, yeah? And I was taken in absolutely hook, line and sinker.

  I mean, I’m a goner. I am. I mean, how am I going to trust anyone ever again? You know, I deliberately went for a girl who was safe, lovely, caring, kind, old-fashioned, good values, etcetera, etcetera. And I was completely burnt. So I must admit I’m seeing someone now and I have to be really careful not to become suspicious and read through their mail. Just to find out, just to know.

  I’ve got this speech now, Do anything you like, be as horrible as you like to me, but please just tell me the truth about it. You know, that would be fine.

  But I said to Jade after we broke up and after it all came out: Next time I’ll read about you in the newspaper.

  And she goes: I don’t think so. Maybe in the obituaries.

  So I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen to her.

  STATE OF PLAY

  Jade is back in the shooting gallery. She goes there nearly every day, every chance she can to get away from the Dealer and his new fun-but-fettered ways. The contact she’s made at the ASA, a young punk by the name of Marto, tells her, when he sees she’s back, that it’s just like therapy, this is.

  He sets her up with a .22-gauge automatic handgun. He shows her how to load it. He collects the shells that drop out of the case as she fires ’cause that’s his job. It’s not his job to lean into her, to rub himself on her when he’s showing her how to fire, steadying her aim. But Jade lets him because he’s going to get her her very own gun.

  Marto thinks Jade’s a bit of a horny secretary, a bit of a Gold Coast slut. The kind of girl he wouldn’t mind giving one to somewhere dark on a Saturday night wasted on E. But he doesn’t push it. He knows he’ll have to be smarter than that. Marto thinks about fucking her while he’s getting stoned in the back room. Sometimes he jerks off imaging Jade’s face on top of the ripe bodies on the posters his boss had ripped out of some hard-core porn for their mutual amusement. Marto makes a few calls to get her what she wants and then he waits. They haven’t talked about how she’s going to pay.

  The order takes two weeks and it costs him eight hundred and fifty bucks. He throws in some ammo for free. Marto can’t really afford the bonus but if it means having her in his grip, he’s willing to risk the fallout. He waits impatiently for her to turn up. She won’t give him her number. All day his leg twitches under the counter and he smokes an extra joint to try and stop it.

  As soon as she walks in Jade knows she’s got him. She’s been coming in later and later and now it’s near closing time. Marto goes through the motions of selling her a session pass and they retreat down the fluorescent hallway to the simulated ranges. The fire in the air, in the galleries around them, winding down. He tells her it’s all sorted. The gun he produces – hers. The ammunition – hers. He watches her load the gun, thinking about his payment, his cock nearly busting out of his pants.

  Jade shoots like he taught her. Her hand steady. A steely eye. The alleys empty and Jade keeps firing. Marto hovers behind her, waiting for everyone to clear out. His boss calls to him from the registration desk. Tells Marto he’s leaving. Tells Marto to lock up. The boss grins at Marto, like he’s doing the kid a favour. He gives him the thumbs-up sign, makes a few lewd thrusts with his hips and walks out.

  Jade waits for the echo of the heavy doors. She lowers the empty gun.

  Marto has been patient. He gets in close behind her, wraps his hand around her, goes straight and without ceremony to her boobs. Jade can smell his young sweat and the faint scent of stale cannabis. She tries to ignore the stench, pushing her arse back against him to keep him in. He makes a move towards her pants and Jade says: No, not here.

  She knows where she’s taking him.

  Marto would have liked to fuck her in the shooting-range but he’s not about to argue. She walks in front of him, gun still in one hand, bullets in the other. His eyes are transfixed by the swing of her hips. He rubs his cock through his jeans, worried about coming too quickly. When they reach the counter, Jade turns to Marto, puts a lingering hand on his shoulder, smiles and says: Okay, let’s see it.

  Marto grins, just seconds away, he thinks. He fumbles with the buttons on his jeans. Jade watches him, liking the sleek heavy feel of the gun in her hand. He pushes her backwards towards the counter. She puts down the gun and the ammo. He pulls her top up hurriedly, shoves her bra aside and starts licking her tits. Jade sighs, with boredom and exasperation.

  She turns around and sticks out her arse so that Marto can concentrate on her rear end, her hands flat against the counter. He gets one set of fingers between her legs, the other around the front of her thigh. She reaches for the packet of ammunition, unlatches the safety, releases the cartridge and loads. Just like he showed her. He presses himself hard against her and asks how she likes it.

  Yeah, it’s good, Marto.

  And he asks how she likes holding the gun.

  Yeah, I like it, Marto.

  She whacks the cartridge in place, spins around suddenly, points the gun at Marto’s head and tells him to step back. He looks at her about to laugh and then he stops. Jade aims the gun at his face.

  Get in the office, she says.

  Leaning forward, Jade pulls the ring of keys from his undone pants. She doesn’t have to ask him twice. He backs up. His hard-on dying. Eyes for the first time locked on her face. Jade shuts the kid in the office with all his dirty porn, turns the key, adjusts herself and leaves. When Jade arrives at PJ’s house, she leaves the gun under the seat.

  THE DEALER

  We are east, in the canals. Jade is inside PJ’s house and I am outside, waiting for her signal. When my phone vibrates in my jeans I’ll know it’s time to go in. Jade’s explained everything to me but I don’t tell her I’ve been here before.

  The computerised key I use to open the gate rests flat in my hand. From Jade. A new style of key, one I don’t remember, opens a gate twice the size of me but just as quiet. A high-tech slide against undesirables but still, I’m here, standing on the inside this time, uninvited in his manicured garden, outside his peach monument to money because Jade just let everything else in. No Russian security on Thursday mornings and a deactivated alarm system; all the cameras, all the eyes in the sky, shut down by Jade.

  I know what to do. I use the key to kill the sensor system on the front door. From somewhere behind the solid brass handle, the lock kicks and a single red beam flashes. I hold my breath. Crossing the threshold of my past, prepared for all the tangible things that might remind me, trying not to look. As I do, I realise everything in PJ’s house has changed. I recognise nothing. All of it is different: the furniture, the artwork, the appliances, the floor coverings, even the bloody light switches are different. New insides for the same shell. New toys for the same man. New sights and no expectations. The absolute erasure starts to make me nervous but not enough to make me stop. I concentrate on Jade’s voice in my head:

  Cross the white marble entrance hall and go around the internal fountain. Take the hallway veering to the left. Go all the way past the ballroom until you see the Buddha. Take the second staircase to the third floor. When you get to the top go directly into the room on the left. Do not shut the door.

  I continue to move through the house quickly, as if it is still a blueprint, trying not to pay attention to the sensation that my body is shrinking. I ignore the fact the pictures on sideboards and
walls no longer contain images of me and that I was expecting them to; I don’t want to register that he used to consider me as family. I don’t want to look at the new faces, the blondes, the big nights, the heavy friends that seem like incarnations, the evidence of PJ’s recyclable human trends. The personal that isn’t personal, the fresh details of his life lend so much gravity to my displacement. I don’t feel guilty. I feel replaced. Everything in this house highlights his power and my subordination.

  Upstairs now, I can hear the sounds of PJ and Jade fucking. The loud rhythmic crash of the bedhead thumping, the master bedroom at the end of the hall, the only room in this house I’ve never seen. PJ’s really giving it to her. Grunting like a dog and I know the fucking shouldn’t bother me – she’s been fucking other guys ever since Harvey, probably ever since I’ve known her, and she’s been visiting PJ for weeks, but I’ve never had to bear the actual sound of her fucking someone else and the pictures it makes in my mind. His gut hanging over her. The way her face goes when she’s coming. She sounds like she’s coming.

  She sounds exactly like she does with me.

  I turn right into the generous spread of PJ’s study. A bay window. The memory of him sitting sentinel at his desk kicks in. The back wall full of glass. The vision of me as a young punk. Invincible. Greedy. Stupid. I gaze down at the perfect blue of the pool, listening to the over-exaggeration of Jade’s moans. In the light reflected on the window I catch my eyes full of jealousy and a hard-edged desire for revenge. If I had a gun right now I’d kill him.

  Breathe, I tell myself. Hold something.

  I grip the edge of PJ’s mahogany desk, look at the pool. The water is so still it gleams like blue glass. Everything in his world is just surface waiting to be cracked. Damage that comes like a smash in the night. Loud and visible by morning. Damage that ripples through lives like a body crashing through water. Like my body then, like Jade’s body now, like my head held under water by hands he ordered till I thought I was going to die. The iron bars smashing my shoulder blades. The idea of smashing him back, smashing him apart, has entertained me ever since but has never been enough. And now I’m here, in his new-fangled house, I see I was right to resist that shiny lure. To wait it out. PJ has always been buffered by the protective film of his own surfaces. If you’re going to get him you have to get inside. A punch is just material, would undulate without any definitive impact. Like a rock thrown into a still pool. A hole that wouldn’t leave any trace.

  Jade might want his cash, might want to prove her point, but I want to make PJ remember.

  I need to move. PJ and Jade are still going at it, like dogs, I decide, or rabbits. I take the stocking out of my pocket and pull it over my head, just in case, push back the wood panelling on the bar and reach for the safe. Punch in the new combination. Wait for the dull click of released steel. The door pops open an inch. I rest my hand on the soft inside and listen.

  Fuck me, Jade is screaming, fuck me.

  Like a porn star. And PJ is still grunting, harder now, faster. The sound of their fucking is making me sick. I haven’t got much time. I pull wide the door of his safe. Waist level. Look in.

  And the money is all there just like she said it would be. Tightly packed bundles of twenty grand. I want to take the lot but I stick to the plan. Reach for the top two from each stack, lift them off and stuff them down the front of my pants. As I do a flash of white catches my eye. I bend down slightly to get a better look. Reach in. Where the money was resting the edges of two playing cards stick out. My heart fires up, beats madly. I pull them out. Turn the first one over. A queen. The second. A joker.

  I freeze.

  I feel the hairs on my neck stand up, expecting hard hands. The rush of fear down my spine. Not watching my back.

  I put the cards back hurriedly, trying not to notice the shaking in my hands. A thousand thoughts rushing through my mind. The noise of Jade and PJ dying down. It’s too quiet. I do everything quick but it feels like slow motion, like I’m stuck outside myself watching. Thinking about the end with every sound and I can’t get out of this plush white strip of a hallway fast enough.

  At the gate I’m so panicked about the silence of the house, about the cards, about the sound of the gate opening that I wait for a car to go by. Then I dodge through. My hands twitching. Hardly breathing. The fear in my back.

  I take side streets and mad diversions, hide in front yards and lush bushes, the money moving around uncomfortably in my pants. My eyes scan everything, taking the long way to my parked car, freaking out and not knowing whether I might have just successfully landed our first sting on PJ or cashed in a death wish – underpaid.

  STATE OF PLAY

  Outside PJ’s place Jade gets into a taxi, white with yellow palm-treed doors. He watches her from the upstairs window. Makes a call. The taxi pulls away. A dark blue car rounds the bend, following her. PJ tightens the cord on his robe and walks calmly to the study. When he opens the door he knows. He is attuned to difference, to the smell of invasion. He opens the safe. Just a set of baggies gone and the cards left. He smiles. Curious.

  The car follows Jade to their tower, watches her exit the taxi, parks and waits. A call is put through to PJ. He answers on the third ring. The driver tells him where she is. PJ nods, puts down the phone, tightens the grip on his robe for the second time and laughs.

  Upstairs the Dealer is frantic. Out of his mind. He yells at Jade. She asks him for the money. He throws the cash on the glass table. He’s sure PJ is on to them.

  He knows, he knows, he says. He knows it’s me, us.

  But Jade doesn’t listen. Jade is looking at the money and smiling. Post-fucked-him serene. She picks up the money and walks into the bedroom. Tells the Dealer they better get ready for clients tonight. He better get it together. The Dealer follows in tight behind her. Jade splays herself out on the bed, exhausted, triumphant, a baggy of cash in each hand. The Dealer sits on the edge, his face full of regret and a secret remorse for what he has done, for what he hasn’t told her; his eyes close, tense with the memory of his own unsaid past.

  Jade’s face is turned away from him and her eyes are wide open. She is relishing her triumph over PJ in secret. She is pretending to be in this moment with the Dealer. She is pretending to listen, to be vaguely sympathetic. To acknowledge his pain and his panic. But she isn’t. Jade doesn’t register anything the Dealer is feeling.

  Jade is concentrating on his finger, on the slow path it is making on the skin of her leg, at the things such a movement is telling her. Jade can tell the Dealer has lost the edge. The evidence is in his hands. Not what she wants but she lies there and lets him touch her, lies there like a pacified animal watching the light change and thinking to herself, acutely aware of everything, the late afternoon sun falling below eye level in their soundless vertical village, the bed washed in a gold haze, the darker corners of the room moving towards a liquorice blue night.

  Finally the Dealer tells her about the cards, his hand clenching her shin.

  Jade’s eyes flicker.

  The Queen and the Joker.

  She tells him she put the cards there. Just a little joke.

  No need, she says, for you to get so upset. I thought you’d get it, thought you’d think it was funny.

  Jade sits up, puts her arms around his back. Hides the surprise in her own eyes.

  Silly man, she says. It was just a joke. You used to like my signals. I wanted you to know I was thinking of you. That I was there with you and not – she lowers her head for effect – in the other room.

  She lies.

  The Queen and the Joker.

  The Dealer lets out a long breath. Relieved but not quite ready to believe her.

  Nevertheless …

  And she knows he wants to leave.

  She knows his fingers are soft because he is afraid.

  The Dealer tries to persuade her to close up shop tonight. Jade says no. She would rather stay. She wants them to come.

  And outside a d
ark car is parked, the passengers unhurried, waiting patiently for the catch to fall out of the tree.

  THE DEALER

  By eight o’clock I’m still feeling low, not up for the night ahead of us, so Jade gives me a pill to pep me up. I don’t ask her what’s in it or how much I should take, I just pop the pill whole, wanting a new headspace, needing different thoughts in my mind to shake off the niggling doubts of the day. I take a drink by the empty bar, waiting for it to come on. Jade sidles up to me occasionally, between getting things ready and chatting quietly with the slowly arriving crew. She rubs my back and whispers in my ear, and I like the attention but I don’t react. I want her to comfort me, I expect her to, but I’m not ready to forgive her, for making me do this tonight, for everything she makes me do. I want her to feel my distance, my quiet and removed capability, and I want the crew to feel it too, to shut up and slink around in deference, eyes averted. And they do, sharp enough to know something’s up. I want them all, Jade included, respectful and on their knees. I want her to think, to consider just for a moment, how this place would be without me.

  I look at them moving in the mirror behind the bar, wondering where they’ve all come from, how I happened to be in charge of all of this so quickly, avoiding the hunched form of my own reflection. Jade can’t hide how good she feels. My eyes flick over her; she looks so beautiful tonight, radiant, serene. Like she’s gliding over the floor. Like she’s been dusted off and buffed up. I won’t tell her how she looks because I don’t like her fresh aroma of secrecy.