He looks at his kid. It’s a noncommittal groping, the lads’ talk around them still going on, his son looking bored and hard at the same time. At some point he breaks off the blonde’s hold and nods at his father, smug and half-cut. No worries old man, he bawls out. And he waves his dad over, lurching his big warm arm, slapping his shoulder when he gets there, their gruff brand of love. All good fulla? he says to his dad, and of course it is, what more could any man tell him – he’s eighteen, ignorant, strong as a king, the way he should be. You don’t want to mess with this scene. He’s a solid kid, a kid with mates and swagger and sweetly pissed girls lining up, and he’s straight-up and good value, and he should be let off tonight. He won’t end up untouched. His mum is wrecking a youth that was otherwise pretty fucking model, that was shaping up big-time. Let him fondle the odd random girl and knock back a few too many brews. What’s the damage? You can count on that later. The damage will catch up.
Which is maybe when the thought of that sad kid, stranded outside on his cellphone, comes back in. He has got a duty. He’s got more than one. He should doublecheck Mary, then hunt down that cut-off kid, see where he’s skulking now. He’s past trying to cover up the merlot – he loads up and weaves the hall with it, reckless, clubfooted. But the trouble with Mary’s room is, it used to be his, be theirs. He’s never wanted to leave it. He’s never volunteered. He wanted to sleep beside her, even through this. But she wouldn’t have it. She asked him, begged, please love, clear out. She’s too far gone – there’s a place in pain where there is no company, where the body’s just alone in it. That’s all. He knows. Sometimes when he creeps in like this she opens her eyes like she’s awake but when he looks in she is gone from her own gaze, already evaporated under her bald lids. The blips of fluorescence that monitor her bed remind him of the gameshows they used to binge on, flicking on the TV while they scrounged up dinner, countdowns of strobe in the background while the dim contestants bombed – yeah they’d mock-cheerlead from their 5pm kitchen, let’s watch some people lose. I’m sorry baby but for you the chase is over. He steps closer. In her sleep she’s a sketch of bone, superficial on the sheets – it’s belief that’s gone from her body, it’s any faith that she’ll outlast. Her breath is a baritone struggle through her chest, the air trying to navigate, failing, reaching the crease of her lips with a starved-out shrill, a low-dose end-game song. She doesn’t want him beside her for this, she wants to exile him, save him from it. But what he has to back away from now is not her breathing’s ugly encore – it’s the pinch of freckles still on her nose-bridge, his first girlfriend superimposed, that cinnamon smidgen of memory more than he can take.
It does him in, it’s the end of him. Except then he’s stumbling down the hall, and even though it’s remodelled by merlot, acid and elastic, and its walls lurch and swell, he hears a ruckus coming from the bathroom, a raking foil-backed sound he knows is no good. And that halts him. He’s too cut to tap on the door, wait politely – he barges full-force into the room, and almost upturns the boy who’s squatting on the tiles, prescription debris spread around him, a jillion ways to check out, vacuum-packed. His reaction is blindside, a jolt of pure rage.
You see your name on any of those boxes?
Nothing. The kid’s all heave and blink.
Do you?
A head shake, dropping a silver sheet of pills. They’re splashed out of their packets like mechanical leaves, and he’s sick of their rattle, their lightweight tabs of promise, their slow-release hopelessness. He kicks a swatch across the shiny floor.
Thought you’d scull the whole shebang did you? Eh? Plenty to choose from here. Got a bit distracted by the sheer choice, did you boy? Oh yeah we stock everything.
But the kid he’s picking on is only a shiver, thin-skinned in his black tee. Fuck, just look at him. He could almost laugh at the underage pain of it, all elbows and desperation.
Thought that would solve your fucking snivels. What’s the count, then? Eh? How many?
I haven’t even . . . started yet. The kid thumps his ears, like he’d bash out the sound of his own puny voice if he could. That’s how – that’s how gutless I am.
These – the man grabs down and flails a box in the kid’s eyeline – are not for you.
The boy folds. There’s a gulp in his torso, and his eyelids flurry. I know that. I’m sorry.
They’re to help someone live. To live, you get me.
Not me die.
You got it in one. You stupid little shit.
He’s crying now, he’s lost it, the kid, his eyes unloading, big dumb blobs of tear.
The man drops his standover pose, sits down on the bath.
She called it off, eh?
She never . . . called it on. But I . . . can’t give up.
No.
She’s the first one . . .
I know. I know all about that. I know the whole story.
The kid is even more spooked by softness. But he halts a sob and looks.
My wife, the man starts. She was, you know.
He stops. The kid swallows.
I still know her number. True. I could still tell you that. You believe me? I could still tell you the phone number of my first girl.
What was it?
87 653.
Real. And it’s . . . you know. For her now. Is it . . . ?
It’s a countdown. That’s it.
I’m sorry.
Yep. It’s a fucking countdown.
Then there’s nothing more there. Nothing more left. Maybe the kid feels it. All they can do is sit. Song-drone and voices come in from the garage, yelps of pissed all-purpose party noise. The kid starts to scrape up the fanned pewter packets, slot them back in their sleeves.
I’m real – I’m sorry, he says. You don’t – have to stress. I’m good. I can get my shit together.
And he kneels by the jacked-open cupboard, starts shoving back the boxes.
There’s a bloody party going on. Hear that. We should get your sad arse back.
Eh?
If you weren’t such a sad prat you would have clocked on to the fact that my garage is packed with girls. Rack off out there now will you.
You sure?
Don’t push me, kid.
So he walks the boy back to the scene of the throb, the quasi-music still jetting off the steel door, gives him a shove on the backbone for good luck. The kids are all dropped in a deeper state of party, a large-scale saturated dance going on, eyes closed, the girls re-glittered with sweat, the boys banging tone-deaf limbs, their hi-tops ungoverned, a blundering offbeat groove. He hangs back to watch – he hopes they’re all off their faces with nowness, blank in the knell of that cheap music. He’d like to stay too, like to let himself go numb in that pounding zone of sound, lose his head here where nothing’s terminal. But when the track cycles, the bassline bridges and slows, a blond girl raises her phone, and the room is suddenly a field of swaying hands, cells flagging a hi-fi trail of radiance. One more thing he can’t cope with.
He goes back to the bathroom, the clean-up, he starts up a Jenga of overbalanced white boxes. Any way he tries to tower them, the meds slip back down, her name a pharmaceutical slump. There’s too much. And in the back of the cupboard he spots a carton he could maybe turf, make room. But when he yanks it out, it’s the baby monitor they used to rig up by their son’s crib, stumpy pastel antennae and heart-shape dials, a robot so cute he wants to puke. He sits with it for a moment, then he thumbs the thick handsets from their polystyrene sockets. The batteries are dud – he pads out to the living room, scavenges the double As from the TV remote. All the channels he needs are in his hands. He doesn’t think as he heads back to Mary, as he props one up on the medical slalom of her locker. He carries his back to the kitchen. He doesn’t think for outright seconds, everything he knows disbanded. He’s an idiot, holding this sappy walkie-talkie, this lovesick transistor like he could dial something back between them. He snaps it on, the receiver, lo to hi, and the pain is analogue,
moves him to a hunch. Thank God there’s not a screen – but he’s watching her anyway. He is watching her, his first-ever girlfriend, bending down to blow candles out for her eighteenth. He is waiting to hear her voice through the wire, all presence, all ache in its teen gasps and whispers, he is waiting to hear the flicker of tongue, the husky mechanics of each cute breath and lip-roll of moistened indecision, will you . . . you know, go with me? But the circuit could be broken.
Fisheye
The big one’s head they have to hack off to fit it in the tub. But even then the bugger won’t tuck, a fin stuck out the chilly bin, scales as chunky and sunlit as the packed-out ice. They’re grinning like bastards when they hump it up to the weigh-in. ‘Bloody good crack at First this year boys.’ They dig for it in the knock of ice, flop it down, silvery, with a crisp thud. The added head leaves good frills of blood on the tray. ‘What y’reckon, eh?’ ‘Could be. Could take her out.’ Its eye is a disc of tightened slime, yellow trim with a stud of black jelly. Specks of sky could go queasy and stretched in its lens – if you look too long. But they don’t check out shit like eyes. They get into brews while the bloke makes a note of the kilos. The prizes, dumped on the pool table, will take more than a few cold ones to get to.
The backs of their necks feel near-third-degree and the grass seems like it needs anchoring. Still, they’ll last, as long as Kev doesn’t start up again about his wife. Out on the water he’d tried it a couple of times but the chop was too stubborn and the catch too thick and fast to give him a proper shot. The poor bloke had zero clue – you wouldn’t credit it. They cast out and yanked back trails of prime, while Kev tried to whine about intimacy. The fish shut him down all gasp and wing. The boys grinned into buckets at their tinfoil fits, their jaws adrift in throes of wet freckle. First is a trip for two to the Islands. Let’s face it: any one of them could take Kev’s wife.
Never Tell Your Lover That His Wife Could Be Having an Affair
Because she’s not the type, understand? Her calendars are annotated. Her daughters are booked in for play dates and dental visits and clean underwear. She tucks affirmative Post-it notes in their lunchboxes to raise their self-esteem. Her heart wears sturdy shoes. When she serves her family glossy meals she pats the base of your lover’s scalp, and asks him to untie her apron before she takes her seat: carbohydrates and retro foreplay. She marks red X’s in children’s workbooks, or rewards the chosen with a solid track of ticks. She brings the glass box with the scaly class-pet home on weekends, and sits it on the sun-baked sideboard, so your lover can listen to the beast scrape its belly on micro-gravel while she feeds it small tendrils of meat. The pink Post-it notes say Take Pride In You! and there’s fruit slotted in, skins rinsed of pesticides. She vacuums the footwells in her five-door hatchback. She has three categories for recycling, and on the weekends your lover can wake to the high-pressure hollows of her bumping the hose round the buckets out on their concrete drive.
So don’t suggest that she backed down that driveway tonight to head to her own dirty secret. Don’t hint that she smudged a see-ya-later kiss on his cheek in a shade of ulterior peach. Don’t speculate that the tin-foiled cordon bleu she left him was assembled with hot-texting fingers. Whatever you do, don’t slide off the body of your lover, panting, lace dampened and askew, and insinuate anything, anything suspect about the unexpected bonus-hour he got free to fuck you. She’s off-limits, understand? Her beige life is reliable and holy. Back off – that kind of talk is deal-breaking.
Put your clothes on. Affairs are for sluts like you.
I still hoped the photos would come out well
You were wasted by the time we left for our honeymoon. I had to get behind the wheel, but first I had to pick off the bouquets of toilet roll, do what I could with the stringy quartet of tin cans. Groggy laughter jilted out of you. It was pointless handing you the map. My satin had built up sticky underarms, but I was trying to keep it civilised. Only one day a girl gets elected to be beautiful, and it takes stars stapled hard into your hair. All night I’d been sipping something lilac and acid, but my pumps kept busy dancing with everyone.
We were halfway to the hotel and everything was silver. I kerbed it, and got you as far as someone’s camellias, bridling your hair. The puke-work made prisms of your eyes. We kneeled in the smell of hurl and metal letterbox. I tried to tell you hush, but the sick was barking you like a dog. You yawned out the feast we’d spent eighteen months saving for. Tipped face-first into the luxury chill of my skirt.
I thought of the silky crescendo – as a hire-team, miles behind us, floated down the marquee.
Wiry hymn of a screen door opening. The old girl who came out was planning to be coldblooded, but then she spotted the dress. Scuffed back inside in maudlin slippers and moved in her thick kitchen nets like a moth. There’d been a perfect plastic duo spiked into the top of the icing carousel. You were finishing off in my lap with a last chunky gasp. Nothing felt like champagne anymore. When she came back, she helped me spade you into your seat and passed me a damp chequered cloth.
The tin cans kept banging along like stuff not getting said.
Cicada Motel
At the Cicada Motel, the woman booked me into the runt of the rooms. The caramel carpet had flecks in it the colour of cabbage tree. The bedspread was mango. She gave me a suss look, like I’d prove fly-by-night, and handed over the 17 key, fixing her glare on the palm I held out as if I had dirt all through my heartline. My husband will be here, I said, soon, but she just huffed like she’d won the standoff, if you say so, then banged her smock out through the hole-punched mosquito screen. Husband. The outdoor bulb sizzled with speed-of-light insects.
I’d left first. I knew it was going to take him much longer. The Cicada Motel was just somewhere to be while I waited for him to cut strings.
In the morning the sea was not the kind I was used to, just lay there and looked stale. Miles of flat grey sand pin-pricked with animal sink-holes, where dregs of silver water clicked – that close-up came later when I walked out ankle-deep. For now I just blinked out the window, a glittery reverse game of join-the-dots. He hadn’t called. I tuned in to chitchat from other rooms, the sound of footfalls scuffing bored squares, the on-holiday lingo of couples being nicer to each other because they’d paid. Above the yellow sink, the mirror wore a hairline crack and smelt of ointment. I dyed my hair a bad shade to match the room and pigment wriggled into my ears. On a far-out channel folks in a black-and-white movie were tap-dancing and beseeching. It was shit reception, a choice of either violins or prophecy, a fake-tanned pastor strutting in a rhinestone vest, pumping his arm over sins of the flesh with all the holy poison he could muster. While I was waiting I starfished on the mango bed and touched myself. My scalp bled cheap bronze into the sheets. Later I made myself a bridal veil of toilet paper, and lay down quiet in the confetti of someone else’s skin. I felt at home in that fruit cocktail quilt.
He did get there three days later. By that time I’d set up Monopoly from reception, and the queen spread was a landfill of tokens, houses on my cheated streets bite-size as pills. Do not pass go, I looked up and told him. Do not collect. Not a thing. Not one thing. But 17 only had one doorway, and he filled it up with his sad bulk, his hands encumbered with junk she’d fought to keep but eventually let him have, more tubs jammed in his car boot. Something alto had happened to his voice. His wife had happened. I pitied him, invited him in. How did you befall me? he said, with a soap-opera shake of his head. I was dead level with the skin he was pushing out his clothes – I grinned at the trophy and doused my grip with spit. Later I picked hotels out his spine and told him, winner takes all. We lay awake and listened to everything leaking.
We hadn’t exactly paid top-dollar. In the Formica-fronted drawers we turned up the usual tackle of can-openers and steelos, and handy wipe-clean bedside bibles, commandments shrunk into a font my conscience couldn’t decode, ultimatums from a cut-price god. On all the cups were enamelled roses like something my grand
mother once said, and brown stains left runny circular ghosts round the rims. We sat up, sucking wine out of them. I liked to say unanswerable things. Like, are hotel flies different to house flies? Or, why do they play the f word in songs on the radio without the k? Like just taking out that one letter makes it okay? He demonstrated, with cartoon suck-suck hands. Cos that’s the bit that sounds like it, he said. Then blushed like he’d never played so dirty. I slapped his fingers, then worked them inside me, laying right back in onomatopoeia.
Then he went again. All I had behind me was a life I’d had no problem leaving, so sitting on the bed at the Cicada Motel I didn’t waste time looking over the past. I turned the flip-covers of the things-to-do-in-town file, clingwrapped highlights of the shithouse district, mostly takeaway joints – the pages were endorsed by grease, sweet-and-sour meals consumed by people alone on the polyester quilt. The fridge with its bony low-lit shelves cut through my sleep with a bluebottle hum. Open, it smelt like potato peel. I blinked into its budget light but could never get hungry enough to go out. If I did I’d just have to walk back staring into other people’s units, dioramas in a long sad row. I’d do little rituals of housekeeping, though somehow I couldn’t leave my handprints on anything. There were the guttural sounds of couples in other rooms taking an ordinary fuck. I’d squat on the grey plastic O to piss and early on I could smile – in my pants there was still a cooling stripe of his brine. To me that eddy was holy. I was at his beck and call.
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