by Anna Taylor
The motel seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. Its white sign had blinked at them even when they were miles away from it, even before they could make out what it was. It had seemed like a haze of bland light hovering somewhere above the land, just at the edge of the horizon. As they got closer they could make out the palm trees, the unnatural-looking pool of water beneath them, the flower, its jagged edge. There were rows of separate units, all with lights on, dotted along the mini porches. The main building was lit up like a Christmas tree. Yellow light bled out of every window, out into the night. It was impossible to tell where they were, if they were close or far away from the lake. But it was dark now, and Tim didn’t really care any more.
Bella swerved into the entrance and turned off the engine, and then the headlights, with a small flick of her wrist. They sat in the dark, side by side, with the feeling of the hawk behind them, though no sound was coming from the back seat now at all.
‘They might know of an afterhours vet,’ Tim said. ‘I’m sure they’ll know what the best thing is to do.’
‘Yeah, sure,’ Bella said. ‘An afterhours vet, right in the middle of the wops. That’s right, city boy.’ She laughed bitterly, and then patted his hand. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But, you know.’
She leaned towards him then, straining against the belt, and kissed the edge of his face. Her lips felt too warm, and moist, like her hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘I just can’t stand this. This whole thing.’
He could feel the small puffs of air coming out her nose, yet she stayed there with her face pressed against his, almost as if she had fallen asleep. He touched her bare knee with his fingertips, lowered his whole hand cautiously onto the skin. She shifted herself, slightly, towards him.
‘Fighting already,’ she whispered. ‘It’s a bad sign.’
Tim pecked the edge of her nose, and her cheek, and up a bit, right at the corner of her eye.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But it’ll be okay. Promise.’
He got out of the car.
*
Tim had met his wife, Jennifer, when they were both eighteen. They had married six months later, and had stayed like that—married, that is—for eighteen years. Eighteen + eighteen, Tim often thought, equals disaster. Not that it was—not a disaster exactly, more of a puttering out, as if they started with too much of a bang, too steady a belief in the power of their supposed love, and then just ran out of gas one day in the middle of nowhere.
Jen had gone in all the wrong directions, she said. Career, no kids. She wanted to start anew. She moved to Australia, and remarried within a year, a car salesman, BMWs or something. She had a baby now, had sent Tim a photo at Christmas, with a card that was friendly but distant. The kid looked nothing like her: it was fair, with a smudge of white hair on the top of its head, and small, fat hands. Tim had looked at the photo for hours, not because he liked babies especially, but because the baby was sitting on her lap. He recognised her hands, the tan of her skin, the veins pressing up underneath it, curling up under her sleeve. He could see her hair too, just the ends of it, slightly brittle, thick. Love Jen, she had scrawled on the back. Love Jen—like a plea, instead of a signing off.
That’s how it seemed to him at the time, anyway: as if there was a message there, in those two words, the meaning seemingly changed just because there was no comma between them. Love Jen—scrawled, smudged, an afterthought perhaps, an attempt at softening the blow of sending a card and picture advertising her new life. It was nothing more than that, of course, and he didn’t even want it to be. That was just the feeling he got when he read the words. Love Jen. Please.
That was at Christmas, and now it was April. He’d been seeing Mandy Smart then, just casually, but that hadn’t even lasted into the New Year.
And now he was seeing Bella. An actress. He could put that in a card to Jen. Here’s a photo of my new partner, it could say, who is an actress in an extremely popular TV series. This is her in costume, it could say. Love Tim.
*
The door of the reception had an old-fashioned bell on it, and it tinkled nervously as he stepped inside.
The walls were panelled in a pale wood, had framed pictures hanging on them, fishing memorabilia, as far as Tim could tell. Even though, from the outside, the lights had seemed glaringly bright, inside everything was dim. It was as if the air was filled with smoke, a dusty soft smoke, almost a fog. The air smelt faintly—Tim couldn’t tell what of, perfume, soap, an attempt at masking tobacco probably. He stood by the counter and waited. The bell at the door hadn’t brought any staff running from the barracks. He pressed the button on the counter-top, not holding it down too long, not wanting to seem impatient. He heard footsteps on the floor above him then, though they were more like the sound of a dead body being heaved around up there.
Tim craned his neck to try and read the papers strewn across the reception desk, ran his foot back and forth across the carpet. A car door slammed outside. The front door opened, setting the bell off, letting out a shimmer of sound. Tim turned, expecting Bella, but it wasn’t her at all, and the woman who moved into the reception shot right past him, lifting up the counter-top, ducking under, landing in the seat behind the desk like a large bird on the surface of a pond. Her flesh, mostly concealed under a floral kaftan, seemed to shudder for a moment, almost in her wake, though of course it wasn’t, just all around her, soft and voluminous, moist-looking.
‘Stairs broke,’ she said to Tim abruptly, her small eyes blinking hard.
He didn’t know what she meant.
‘Sorry?’
‘Stairs broke,’ she said again, in exactly the same tone, ‘so I have to come down the outside. Every time. I’ve called the builder three times. Could’ve broke my damn neck. Or worse.’ She smiled then, as if it was funny, though she clearly didn’t think it was. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ she said, and smiled again, added, ‘Sir,’ like a child who had just remembered its manners.
Tim tried to smile back. He felt overwhelmed by tiredness.
‘We’re after a double room,’ he said, ‘a double room, and a recommendation for where we could find some dinner, and we have a little problem—’ he paused— ‘that I’m hoping you may be able to help me with.’
The woman still had her lips pinched upwards, though Tim realised it was more of a default setting than a smile. Her face was just set that way.
‘Try me,’ she said.
Tim swallowed.
‘I have a bird in the car,’ he said, ‘a sick—well, a hurt bird, really. I hit it, you see. On the road. It’s a hawk.’ He stopped, scratched at his neck.
The woman narrowed her eyes at him as if she’d just stepped out into a great wind.
‘A hawk,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘That you hit on the road.’
‘Regrettably, yes.’
‘Mr . . . ?’
‘Sheridan.’
‘Mr Sheridan.’ She shuffled her hands round the computer. The skin of her forearms swayed as she did so, slowly, back and forth. ‘Mr Sheridan, we have a no pets policy in our rooms.’
She slapped a laminated sign down triumphantly on the counter. No Pets, it said. Et cetera, et cetera.
‘We have a no pets policy,’ she said again. She smiled.
‘It isn’t a pet,’ Tim said quietly, ‘and we don’t want it sleeping in our bed, I can assure you. It’s half dead. There must be someone we can call for help.’ He waved his arms around, feeling stranded. ‘There must be someone we can call,’ he said, raising his voice ever so slightly, ‘who’ll know what to do.’
The woman opened and shut her mouth several times. Her hair was dyed cherry red, had grey roots that looked more out of place, somehow, than the lurid brassiness beyond them. It was cut short and had the fluffy shapelessness of brushed cotton.
‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ she said. There was laughter lurking somewhere in behind her voice. ‘Help you? With a half-dead hawk?’ Her lips c
urled up—default setting. ‘No, Mr Sheridan,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘No vet you know of who I could call? No?’
She did a little shake of her head, and made a sound in her throat to accompany it.
‘No ideas at all?’
Another shake.
Tim started to back towards the door.
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Forget it. Forget the room. I’ll sort it out. Thanks anyway.’
She leaned back in her chair. ‘What I would’ve said—’ she cocked her chin at him, lifted one dappled arm up towards the counter— ‘what I would’ve said is, don’t pick it up in the first place. That’s what I would’ve told you. Leave it, I would’ve said. That’s my advice.’
‘I wish you’d been there to give it to me then,’ Tim said. ‘It would have been helpful, I’m sure.’
‘Sherry’s being killed off upstairs,’ she said. She glanced at the clock on the wall, and Tim was suddenly aware of its ticking, slightly irregular. ‘I’ve almost missed it,’ she said. ‘Sherry’s last show.’
Tim was by the door, and he reached for the handle.
‘I interrupted you. Sorry.’
‘My advice,’ she called after him, ‘would be to put it back on the road, let someone finish off what you started. Sad, Mr Sheridan, but true!’
He let the door clang back into place behind him.
Bella was sitting on the bonnet of the car. She had her legs folded up against her body, her arms holding her knees. He couldn’t see the expression on her face; it looked smooth, featureless.
‘How’d it go?’ she said.
Behind him, Tim heard the door of the reception open and then shut again. The woman started down the ramp, wobbling a little. She was wearing her slippers—he hadn’t noticed that before. They flapped against her feet, making a soft squelching sound. She kept her head down, as if she didn’t know they were there.
‘Not so good,’ he said. He almost laughed.
*
In the last year of their marriage, Jen’s cat had died. It was old, and its death was well overdue, but it still felt like an omen, a metaphor for their already failed relationship. It was twenty-one, a silver-haired Persian, and its fur had taken on the qualities of a soiled rug in a skip. It had lost clumps of flesh to cancer, maybe even an organ or two. Nearing the end, it could hardly even meow. Tim referred to it as The Doorstop.
Still, Jen was devastated. And Tim, despite himself, was somewhat stricken too. They brought it home from the vet, wrapped in a pink baby blanket, its body strangely heavy, feeling more full, more solid, than when they’d carried it in alive.
Tim dug a hole in the back yard, and they put it in and covered it over with dirt. Afterwards Jen lay down, placed the side of her face against the earthy mound like a doctor listening to a child’s chest. He should have lain down there with her—wanted to, even—but he didn’t, just went inside to put tea on. He could see the dark shape of her body from the kitchen window, the stillness of it. After half an hour, maybe more, she raised herself up slowly, just like something coming back from the dead. He could hear the softness of her feet padding down the hallway, the sound of the shower being turned on.
She came into the kitchen wearing only her underpants and one sock.
‘Help me, please,’ she said, and for a moment he thought she was asking him to take it away, the pain; to hold her or something. But she only meant with her necklace, the clasp. He fumbled with it against her neck.
There were two spindly twigs, caught there, in her hair.
*
They started driving again, the hum of the Oasis Motel getting smaller and smaller behind them until it was swallowed suddenly by the black. It seemed as if they were driving backwards, as if leaving the light behind was wrong somehow, as if they should be crawling towards it instead. They had not eaten for hours, but neither of them mentioned it, and perhaps neither of them needed to. Tim didn’t feel hungry certainly.
The hawk still shifted from time to time in the back seat—a soft feathery scraping. Bella no longer cried out when she heard it, but lifted her hand to her face as if to muffle the sound that wasn’t coming out anyway. She seemed so small to Tim, sitting there in the seat beside him. He could hardly relate her to the woman who had flicked her tongue against his skin in the restaurant the night they met; the brashness of her hand sliding under his shirt in a room full of people; her unbuckling his belt in the car. She seemed so cool to him then, putting the show on the road, running it. And now, perched in the passenger seat, with the bleeding bird and a bad afternoon behind her, she seemed like the opposite, yes, the opposite, of everything he’d thought she was.
‘How old are your parents?’ she said to him, quite out of the blue, as if it was something she had wanted to know all along and had only just found the words.
‘Seventies. Yours?’
‘Their fifties.’
She was almost smiling, her face turned slightly towards him and the road also. Something in her expression made him tap down lightly on the accelerator, as if a little more speed was the answer, though he didn’t know what the question was.
It had begun to rain, just a drizzle really, a wet mist frosting the windscreen. The wipers squeaked against the glass.
‘You’ll have to kill it, Tim,’ she said. ‘You know that, don’t you.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do.’
And then the silence descended on them again, like a faint smell.
___
It seemed, in a way, that the lake found them.
The road, the hills and trees all around, the white markers, the headlights rolling on in front—it had all felt endless. And then suddenly there was the water, smooth and dark, the land opening out to accommodate it. A sound came out Bella’s mouth, but it wasn’t anguish, it was a sing-song sort of sigh; it was relief.
Tim swerved onto the gravel and turned off the engine.
It was half-past nine.
They opened the windows, and the drizzle angled in, tapping against their faces.
‘You have to kill it,’ Bella said again. She stared straight ahead.
Tim sat dead still, his hands pressed against his knees. From somewhere under the bonnet of the car came a ticking sound, loud and irregular. His breath seemed to match it—or that’s how it seemed to him—but Bella’s beside him was steady and slow, hardly audible. He waited for her to say something else but she didn’t. She wound the window down a little, and then up a little, and continued looking out through the windscreen.
‘How about if I said you had to kill it,’ he said. ‘Then what would you do?’
It was a question he didn’t want an answer to particularly, and a question he knew it wasn’t really fair to ask. He could, if he wanted, fool himself into believing he was truly interested in the answer. But it wasn’t that. It was her response that interested him.
Bella paused, and drew her tongue across her top lip.
‘I’d probably get out and walk home,’ she said, and then she turned her face square towards him and smiled an odd little smile, its edges slightly jagged. ‘Why, Tim?’ she said, smiling all the time. ‘Are you going to ask me that?’ The whites of her eyes were lit up by the lights on the dashboard and the headlights outside.
She shook her head. ‘Are you?’ she said again.
There seemed to be a hardening in the skin round her jaw. Something in the way she held her teeth—tight together, the bottoms bared—made the skin all round her mouth and under her cheeks look like it had set.
Tim tried to laugh, though the sound that came out of his mouth was more like a warble.
‘No of course not,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. Ignore me. I was just trying to make a joke.’
He smiled at her in the hope she would smile back, but she had already turned her face towards the windscreen again, and she was looking out it, peering even, as though she was waiting for something—anything—to appear in front of her on the road.
‘Well, ha-ha,’ she said.
Tim got out of the car, opened the back door, leaned in across the passenger seat. The hawk was hard to grasp, covered in the sweatshirt, its broken wing falling right to the floor. He felt its resistance, though it didn’t struggle, and for a moment he hoped that it was just the resistance of bone, and that it may already be dead. It was wishful thinking, for sure. As he tried to angle the wing out the door, it wavered slightly, and then rose sharply towards his face. It just about hit him in the eye. It seemed to take all his strength to get it contained again, pressed tight against his chest. He tried not to pay attention to the fact that the fabric—Bella’s Hawaii sweatshirt—felt wet under his hands: wet and sticky, but cold.
Tim moved down the bank and across the pebbles and onto the sand. The sound of the lake, slapping in and out, was loud, so close-sounding, it could have been right upon him. He turned back towards the car. Bella had turned the internal light on, and the doors were open, and she sat in the whiteness, staring straight ahead, quite still. Her head looked small and dark, like the top of a pin, and he suddenly felt that his whole life was in that car, though of course it wasn’t. That was the only life he had right at that moment, though: her, and the hawk, and the water, and the heavy throb of the sky above them, releasing gusts of wet into the air.
Go to her, something said to him, inside.
He laid the hawk down on the sand and moved his body down beside it. He was muttering to himself, trying to stay calm. When he peeled the sweatshirt back the hawk lifted slightly, out towards the air. In the dark he could hardly see, and he was glad of that, glad to be spared the mess he had made. The hawk seemed more alive than it should, he thought, considering everything it had lost. It clawed at the air with its one leg, its beak opening and shutting, creaking softly. As Tim lifted its body out of the sweatshirt, he felt where the fabric stuck a little to a wound, the soft tear as he pulled the two apart.