by Sally Breen
The days drag on. I see or hear no sign of her, more and more convinced she’s gone. Gone like my inspiration for the game. My pit boss tells me I’m becoming unimaginative. Jaded. And he’s right on the mark. I’ve lost sight of her and the reasons I ever exalted risk. Even in the two-up ring, a place I usually enjoy, the punters are coming over abusive. Protecting their antes like babies. On the gaming floors they swim around me like maternal whales with dead calves hooked under winglike flippers, carrying those stashes until they disintegrate.
Sometimes I pretend she might come back. That she’ll walk across the floor like she did that first day and ask me to hit her. Like she always does. Sometimes, when I look up, the world is spinning above me, and in the circles of mirrored roulette wheels I watch the distorted faces and bodies twist. The Casino, the carnival, cut up and flipped on its back. And always on the edges the fruit machines taunt me; the people playing them, zombies to the light, and when their cups are empty, they try and return the goods they bought before they sunk their losses: cigarettes, magazines, clothes; their fingertips black from handling the coins that slide endlessly into steel slots. Their upper bodies, arms and fingers so sore they find it difficult to open their wallets.
Things get more desperate when the night starts to slide to morning. Peripheral tables shut, the outlook becomes dismal. Now it’s the punters and the croupiers trying to pick up, but I go straight to my car. And drive around the streets looking for her. Looking until my eyes, until the black, start closing in.
At two in the morning she calls, her voice like a ghost at the end of the line. She asks me to come and get her, so I pick her up outside a house with black windows. I don’t ask about the house and she tells me to keep driving. I drive until her heart calms down.
We check into a motel over the border. I have to work in a few hours, but like everything else this pales in significance to her return. I would have gone anywhere with her but now there aren’t many places left for us to go. Maybe for us there never have been.
Inside the cheap room Jade breaks down. I hold her in my arms until the tears subside, lay her on the bed, take off the silver high-heeled shoes. I start to rub her feet, but she flinches and says: Don’t.
She looks tired. Thick make-up is smeared across her face, mixed with the residue of her tears. Under the paint her eyes are ringed grey. Her hair and her dress reek of cigarettes, cheap perfume and second-hand sweat. Her body is motionless, flopped on the bed like a rag-doll, her face intent on reading the ceiling. Jade’s silence is one of shock. I don’t have to guess at the things he’s made her do.
I’ll run you a bath.
Thank you.
I try to make the bath hot; thank God, the motel plumbing is up to it. I find a complimentary sachet of bath gel, or whatever, and swirl that into the running water. When the bath is nicely full, I leave it for her to get into. In the room, I don’t turn on the television or make any noise to disturb her. In a little while she calls for me. I take in a cushion and sit on the floor, my back resting against the basin cupboards, slippery with steam. Jade looks better. She’s ready to tell me, but I’m not sure I want to hear.
He was there, she says.
Who?
She looks down into the suds.
James.
I’d expected something about the cops, about the charges, about PJ, about the house I picked her up from, not this damn James guy again. My fingers clench. Surely even now she’s not making shit up? When I don’t say anything she looks back into the gel bubbles I made for her and blows some off her chin.
I know you know about him.
I nod because whether I do or not doesn’t really matter. I’m not even sure if he’s a real thing.
What happened?
We had a big party coming in. All the girls. A group of guys from Sydney. When they hadn’t arrived by ten the boss started getting pissed off. He’d blocked off other stuff for this. Finally, about twelve, they arrived. Drunk. Fucked up. We could hear them from downstairs and they were wrestling on the floor.
I make a face and Jade pauses. It’s hard for me to hear this. Jade’s eyes, her face, her body – too true, too honest, like I’m seeing her as real for the first time and not just some human apparition of my own fucked-up desire. She continues.
PJ threatened them with a no-show and they quietened down, a bit. We had to wear those ugly fucking shoes, and masks – half-ones that left our mouths free. I didn’t want to wear it. We went up. I didn’t see him at first. They all look the same, you know. When I did …
Jade stops. I reach over to her, running my hand on the back of her dripping head. Her body starts to shake and there are more tears. She sits up in the bath to hug me and the water comes with her, soaks through my shirt, drips down my chest and my back, forms puddles on the floor where I’m now kneeling. A cloud of steam rushes off her body into the air above us. She cries into my shoulder, mumbling something about a baby and James’s and it feels like all the water in the world is here. And I think about how this substance, this water, has always been between us, in front of us, surrounding us, making deeper the colour of our eyes, making her slippery like she’s always been, but soft like never before. Tears and water, salt and skin. For me the weight of many months of holding back is giving way; for Jade, it’s been a much longer vigil. Finally, we let the dam break. All the broken water …
He fucked me, she says, and he didn’t even know
Drenched, in the damp room, I think about this guy, someone I hadn’t really factored in; I think about him on top of her, inside her, without knowing. And I wonder how that would feel. Sex with a lover made a stranger. Your body faded from their memory. Your body older, less pubescent, less fresh than even you remember.
Jade looks up. I was sixteen.
Things are moving backwards. This is the guy everything goes back to. I see it now. The baby, the past. The memory has her on a string; everything she does, everything leads back to a moment between him and her and their lost kid. A moment when something snapped clean.
He made me.
She pulls back from me, staring deep into my eyes, searching me, I think, for some kind of absolution.
He made me.
She coughs into her hand and I see it’s shaking.
He was out of my league, she says almost under her breath.
I don’t know what to say. All the ugly, small-town business of it. Hugging her, I can’t help thinking what might have been if she’d spoken, really told me her story, about James and what had happened to her. If I hadn’t had to play into this whole thing blind I might have been able to help her.
But it doesn’t matter. In this dingy room we’ve reached the end of the road. Jade has chosen the mask as she has always done. Waiting for a kind of recognition that would never come. Her real face was never enough. For James. For any of us.
Later, when the bath has drained, taking with it all the dirt on the outside, and we are seated on the shabby couch in the threadbare room, I hear about the rest. The stuff that can’t be wiped away.
It’s serious, she says. Forty-eight counts of fraudulent activity.
And part of her believes in her falsehoods, every one of them.
I listen to Jade talk about everything she’s done, and it doesn’t concern me. What does worry me is she has no place to land; she has forgotten her way back. Everything she has set up is winding, coiling back on her like a hot wire. Jade can’t stop it, but she can’t let go.
All of Jade’s stories, all of her words, are coming back to her in the dark and she doesn’t know why they’re mixing up. She can’t see where she’s supposed to stop and gather them. There’s no place for her to collect herself and all her nervous names. Jade is thrown over her words, caught in a void where everything has become so real it has vanished. Jade has run out of space; now there is just this endless pathological slide. She tells me fifty grand is all she needs to put it right. But she can’t start again, can’t strike herself up against a bric
k wall again. Jade’s run out of fire. It takes something red-hot to steal. To make it seem like a happy accident. Nobody will remember how she was before; they will only remember her afterwards, after the end of the slow burn.
A whole town will never forgive her.
In the late morning, Jade decides she wants to plead insanity, so we pack up the small amount of stuff we have and check out, closing the door on our last remaining vacancy. In the car I try not to think about what this is going to mean for her, and I just keep driving south then west. Back to her mother. Along a lonely highway full of travellers en route to somewhere else.
And this is what people do, I think, when they’ve had enough, when they’re fed up; they take a holiday so they can cope with going back. Jade and I share this road with these holiday-makers in their loaded-up cars and caravans, but there’s no joy in it for us; the crucial difference is we’re not taking time off, we’re running out of it.
Jade sleeps, and we speed along the coastal stretch of road that unravels on the eastern side of our country, all those towns I’ve forgotten until I’m passing through them again. It seems everything I have done since I met her is related to running away. From who she was, from where she was born, from what she’d become, from where she might end up. All this running, to change the circumstances of her name and everything it meant. I sigh with resignation, wondering why our lives have to be like this, why after all this time the only option left for us is to take her back. I don’t bother to think about why it is that I always have to run.
Jade wakes up. I don’t tell her what I’m thinking. I wager she won’t want to hear it.
But she knows. She turns her face to look at me and I move my left hand, my dealing hand, towards her. This time, all my fingers are offering is a truce.
In the middle of her mother’s town I stop the car. I make a move to take her in my arms, awkwardly in the bucket seats of the Celica, and kiss her. She doesn’t kiss me back. Her mouth is numb, her lips dry from the dusty wind, and her hands on my shoulder are shaking and she has that spaced-out look in her eyes I should have recognised as more than a warning on that first night. Jade pulls away from me and uses my mobile to call her mother. I try not to look around at the place I’m leaving her, at the tired greyscale streets. She hands the phone back to me and says: She’ll be here in ten minutes. You should go.
I pop the boot. Jade steps out of the car, and when I start to join her she says: No, stay there, I don’t want anyone to see you.
And so I wait. Jade puts her bags on the kerb, and then she comes over to the driver’s window, a wrapped bundle in her hand. She passes it to me. Something heavy, in a soft cotton pillowcase. I open it. A gun.
Can you get rid of it for me?
She asks like the gun is something less consequential.
Why?
I decided not to use it.
I don’t like the connotations of the gun or what she’s said, but delving into Jade’s motivations is just not worth the effort anymore. I can’t ask her to explain. I just nod my head.
Jade looks at me with a pair of smiling eyes, and then she walks away. I U-turn the car cautiously and it will be as if I was never there.
Driving away on the long road out of town I can still see her standing on the kerb, sunglasses on, a bag in her hand, looking harmless and innocent and young. And the vision is always the same; looking at her you could never know just what she’s capable of. I think about all the lies, the delusions, and the gun – sitting under the passenger seat, full of bullets probably, and unexplained intentions. I wonder if the gun was set for me. Or PJ. What’s worse is the idea she could have had it set for herself.
I drive north, wanting the main road.
I wonder what changed. I wonder most of all about the stuff I never knew or will never know. Looking straight ahead, I realise people don’t end up resembling their stories; what happens to us is never a climax; our stories are never finished, ended or rounded – they fade in, they fade out.
I drive, numb, no radio, in silence. At the juncture on the highway separating the line to the Gold Coast and the line to Brisbane I hesitate. Two green signs point towards my choices. My heart thumps watching the fork in the road come nearer and nearer and I know why, I know what’s going on. My pain is willing me left, to head north to Camille, to that old town full of her warmth and all her languid, placid comfort.
It’s a simple choice but eventually I choose right.
CODA: THE ELEMENT OF RUIN
THE DEALER
The longer I am without Jade, the more surreal she becomes. I remember her like the spin of two dice, variable and too close to call. I turn her into my music, my movies, my escape. I think about her in celluloid. Read her spread out like a tabloid. Have conversations with myself about where we’ve been and where she’s at and how much those two things might have once gone together. I try not to picture her as someone committed, as someone on the inside. I picture her as someone given over to her own kind of bureaucracy, a star system – her own studio and movie lot, where the only executives in charge of her ability to work are the ghosts of men who still send her flowers.
I think about all of Jade’s scenarios, all her lonely monologues, honed and delivered in the Casino, in the emptiest theatre in the world, because I understand that the finest illusions are actually real. She is the best live act I have ever seen. My head’s like her scrapbook. Now Jade is just an autograph in my hand.
Every time I roll a dice, every time I turn a card, every time I flush chips down a hole, I think of her, especially. I move automated now. Take away Jade and you take away the risk. Take away risk and you take away the impetus: to gamble and to live. All our lives roll back to before her. No more bets.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Atomic City is a reworked incarnation of a book developed during my PhD studies at Griffith University and many people contributed to its development. Most especially I’d like to thank Professor Nigel Krauth for his faith in me, his brilliance in seeing the nuances of every story and for telling me (again) to ‘keep up the juice’. To Michael Wilding, who always said the real book was inside the old one, and my publisher and editor, Jo Butler, for helping me realise it. My gratitude to Peter and Patricia Wise who shared my love of glass and mirrors and light and gave me some pretty good guidance on how to shine them. Thanks to Will Hodgson for the first spark on Jade and for all the Gold Coasters who got me into places, bought me lunch and told me things they really shouldn’t have.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alex Helfich Maureen Trainor Starshots Surfers Paradise
Sally Breen is a writer, editor and academic. Her memoir The Casuals was released by HarperCollins in 2011. She lives in Mermaid Beach, Queensland.
Praise for The Casuals
‘a movingly sad memoir about the life of a girl (and then as a young woman) about whom songs are written, caught in the spotlight of her beauty and her personality, the strength of which she does not quite understand, a spotlight which, in part, is shined intensely and confusedly by her father – it is a memoir of unquiet things told quietly but with courageous brio against a finely etched suburban background of the 1980s and 1990s and the styles, fashions and often excruciating customs by which one “grew up” … her work speaks to all generations’
– Frank Moorhouse, award-winning author of
Grand Days, Dark Palace and Cold Light
‘The Casuals opens as a lyrical memoir of a suburban childhood but then transforms into something completely unique – an honest, heart wrenching, unflinching portrait of a woman’s journey through what we have already dismissed as the bland final decades of the 20th century in Australia. Breen writes beautifully of agony and wanting, of confusion and longing. It is her story but it is everyone’s story, and by the end, it sings, in all its flawed glory, the song of life’
‘The great, unforgettable undertow through The Casuals is the relationship between father and daughter, parent and child, and it is this
that gives the memoir an at times unbearable poignancy. The book is a stunning example of how the honest, meticulous and beautifully rendered details of a supposed ordinary life, in a set time and place, can transcend into universality. It should be applauded for its courage, its truth, and its reach. Breen, too, has managed to encapsulate and make her own a generation. It was only yesterday, but The Casuals has already fixed Breen and her contemporaries as timeless’
– Matt Condon, writer for The Courier-Mail and
author of The Pillow Fight, Lime Bar and The Trout Opera
Other Books by Sally Breen
The Casuals
COPYRIGHT
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Australia in 2013
This edition published in 2013
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Sally Breen 2013
The right of Sally Breen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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