The day I met him, I’d walked straight to the mall on my lunch hour and bought myself a trim black suitcase with a telescope handle. I knew what was happening – the gold zips were thick and the trunk could fold my life into it whole. On my next lunch hour I took it back – I wanted to go after him empty-handed. I did a bad tailgate tracing him home and backed under a jacaranda. I could see him cleaning the plate his wife placed in front of him, back to me, too square not to feel me looking, through French doors. The Datsun ticked in a fall of neon feathers. I could see him rinse dishes with his teen, a sulky helper in the TV strobe. Pollen warped the screen. He never once looked out, like I was zilch. By the time he walked over and got in it was dark and I was blistered by hours at the steering wheel. Finger by finger he picked away my left hand. He looked at the words on my singlet, which were so tall and white they could still be read: Oh Lord I Have Sinned. I haven’t, he said, head-down with repentance. But I just peeled the shirt off and made sure he did.
So he came to the motel, but had to keep on going back. I should understand. It was complicated. There were logistics to leaving. And I did get it – I’d just fuck him extra hard before he left. The fringed quilt at the Cicada felt like fiberglass, and static would net all the nicks in his hard hands. I scrubbed his grip round my breast, working-class electricity, and muttered please don’t go again. Two kids had moved into 16 and they hated each other, were outside playing tag in pink until someone wept. He said there was still so much to sort. I unlassoed him from my legs and tried to think of his wife’s wellbeing. But if I said I remember one iota of compassion for her I’d be lying. At three while he was faking sleep I’d watched the silver twitch along his eyelids. I’d kissed him until our late-night whispering turned bloodshot. He felt like my birthright. When he wouldn’t talk to me I went outside and played hopscotch with the bitchy girls from 16, leaping the pink chalk squares with nine-year-old kicks. In my tight shorts and topknot I looked like a princess – at least to them I did. Before he left again I bribed a View-Master off one of those kids, and fed in the notched discs as he backed out the drive, worked the spring-loaded technicolour trigger. My eyes crossed with sick fans of Disney happy-ends.
I didn’t lie waiting in a slutty getup all day, some bra held together by lace and evil thoughts – but the woman at reception eyeballed me like I did, like she knew the type. And I qualified. Reception was hung with anti-fly ribbons like a melting vinyl rainbow – when you walked through it took minutes for your collarbone to shake off their sticky ricochet. The door jamb shaved my jandal, made me do a little skip up to the desk, rubbery pirouette. I needed more long-term things: an iron, a hairdryer, more of her ultra-life milk in dinky domes. And I wanted to swap games. I wanted Operation, to tweeze out the Adam’s apple, pluck the funny bone. I wanted to win cash scratching out his melted heart, to not hear the buzzer going off in his face. The woman handed his flat box over with a warning that it was intact, she’d counted the bones, and pointed down the main road to the Four Square if I planned to be a longer stayer. She was staple-gunning frills of tinsel to the counter with a line of clunks. I’d forgotten a day as bad as Xmas was coming. But when I got down to the Four Square I couldn’t miss it – the checkout girl was wearing a halo, a fairy-lit number-eight hoop spliced to her head band, with more wire strapped to her smock for shonky wings. She shed white feathers in the yellow bag as she packed it with the tap of single-serve things, blinking greasily at me. The kettle in 17 must have had six hundred horsepower. But none of the sachets worked. The taste of other people’s yesterdays stayed at the back of my tongue. The air felt like asbestos. I tugged on the drawers just to listen to the cutlery make its aim-fire sound. When I opened doors in the dark room all the hinges sang the motel’s name.
He came and went. I knew there were going to be days when we weren’t quite in this together. The days I had him, I’d slow down the order that I peeled off my clothes. I tried my best to give him amnesia. It was all about timing. I’d use a pulpy tube of Revlon to paint myself an oversize grin. I’d line up pills like islands of my own tropical making, deadly getaways I just might take. What they should stash in the drawer, I said, is a quick guide to not wanting to end yourself in small rented rooms. I’d pretend to ring old boyfriends, undoing the spirals in the telephone cord with my fuckyou finger. He stared at me and smiled an unventilated smile. I promised him I’d stick a knife in the toaster. He let me bite him hard then thumb around the toothmarks, the dent-in freckles I’d left, a buckling ring-o’-rosie. Then I dabbled sorry with my tongue. When we walked the beach later, we brought home shells in casual fistfuls and left them on the sill like things we should give names.
The Lord had come and I was playing Guess Who when I saw the car waiting – so I just flicked down every face that looked like the wife, picked the blondes off in reverse order. Their clickety plastic capsize was satisfying. I thought it was him at first, here for Jesus after all – but when I realised I winched back the screen and shrugged, might as well come in.
His kid had nothing going for him, none of his dad’s girth and heat. He scrubbed the heel of one sneaker over the laces of the other, fluoro and tryhard. In his hand he had a cracker, a tube of crimped green crêpe.
Sweet. You brought me a present.
He stared at the thing.
Mum cooked this big family dinner, he said.
Oh yeah.
Yeah, this whole awesome spread.
If it was so good why are you here, then?
I wanted to see if my Xmas wish had come true. And you’d just fucked right off.
You know, you could play nicer. Xmas spirit and that.
He’s there. Dad’s still there. I reckon he’s staying.
Crosslegged on the mango bed I could make him look away. My shorts ended high and tight. Bull’s-eye.
How even old are you? he said.
How old are you? You meant to be behind that wheel?
I’m learning. Dad’s teaching me a lot of things.
Yeah? Coincidence. Me too.
I don’t reckon. I don’t reckon you know half of things.
Okay little boy. Go. What?
Then he started to cry, a big ruck of sobs. I watched for a while, then I tipped all the mugshots back up on the Guess Who board.
Wanna play?
He stared at me, using a fist to scrub his flushed face.
Okay, he said. You don’t know my mother.
Or maybe you don’t know your father.
Maybe. But I could always ask him. He is still at home.
Not for long, kid.
Yeah. Says you.
God knows why the Cicada Motel was a stop for any Xmas gig, but we heard a siren warp then, and a fire engine rigged with tinsel pulled into the carpark. Some half-cut local Santa climbed out with a swag of made-in-China presents, ho-ho-ho’ed round the units looking for kids. The checkout girl was his assistant, waving a hairy silver wand, still with the vortex of glitter cabled to her head, her white wings a wobbly scaffolding. I opened the door and watched the pink twins from 16 tweak open the sellotape on their lame gifts. The old girl from reception was blushing by the truck in her best ugly smock. Santa used his rented beard to lean in, snuggle her. She gave him a gurgle of her annual gin, and dished him a slap. I thought about sauntering over to the guy on the driver’s side – in his flame-retardant hero gear he leaned out of the cab to scope the lettering on my tank: My happy place is your happy place burning to the ground. His grin was déjà vu. But I didn’t move. Then the garish parade was pulling out.
And I’d like to tell you that I lived up to the look the old girl gave me before she trudged back to her lobby. A look that said, suppose you’re all right, considering. I’d like to say I didn’t turn back to the unit where the kid was still cluttering the tropical bed, trying to cope with the weight of his wet face. I’d like to say I was done with my nymph skin, that I let it split, and stepped out. The kid was still clutching his Xmas cracker. I latched on to the
end and yanked. The bang made him flinch. I fucking loved the hint of gunpowder. I shook out the festive crap and tossed him the gag.
What’s the joke.
You should know.
I slid on the pink paper crown.
25–13
It is raining out on the field today when I get back from the hospital, and I find myself smiling, as if I called it up. I stand at the ranchslider that squares my lounge off with the turf and watch the downpour chasing off the onlookers. There are mothers out there who’ve thought to bring shelters, staked out a shanty claim of plastic on the sideline, parka’d up the younger kids. They’ve squatted in spiny pop-up deckchairs pre-game to guarantee a prime view. Those mothers fight the longest. They’re still in place when a rush of umbrellas heads off, the deluge whirling from their red and white panels. Everything club-coloured – chilly bins and snap-backs, PVC ponchos and first-aid kits – bumping in retreat along the flooded green sod. In the end it’s just me and those mothers, huddled in resistance beneath their branded tarps. Watching the team still stumbling the muck, as the sky proves no one can hope to stop it.
When Ryan was a child we had to rush him to hospital. I remember the walls were lemon then, too, and the frieze was a march of ducklings, grins of goofy fuzz with gumboots on webbed feet and sky-blue plastic hats. It was raining on them, but that only made them cuter. I hated the things, galoshing around in the splash, their peach beaks smirky and dimpling. I think Ryan hated them too. He hated the whole room, and everyone in teal that entered into it, carrying wires to the bed, and liquids, and trays, and needles, and, lastly, straps. They’d plug and stick him, maintaining near-smiles, and gag his howl with clear-gloved fingers. We never had to guess his hatred. He screamed at them all, loud belts of terror, pitched from the struggle of his trunk, his blond-white hair spiked with fever, his milk teeth in fits. And it was my job to hold him down, to pin the tiny hammer of his heartbeat to the trolley, to lock down his clattering flannelette pj’s with their pattern of choo-choos all jumping the track. To use my whole body if I had to, like a vice, bear down on my baby, his flailing heels and wrists. Mutter everything I could find of comfort, while his head swung side to side and bludgeoned up at me. Keep on with a babble of falsetto sweetness, crossing my heart with fake promises. Hating the ducks the whole time, their chubby parade around the walls where the squeaky-clean blobs of entertaining rain would never drop down hard enough to drown them.
Let the rain come. Last weekend, when there was another minor incident, I stood at the window and watched while the ambulance coasted, low-profile, through coloured margin flags. While the stretcher was manoeuvred off, swift, unobtrusive. While the game played on. And those mothers never moved. Except one. But she wasn’t from the home team.
I’ve taken to wandering over to the back of the clubrooms on some nights that I can’t sleep. Maggie sees me coming, where the spotlights smudge the mist above the field, and taps out a couple of smokes. We sit on a pair of overturned white buckets she’s scrubbed out by the bar door. With the heel of my runners I fiddle with the handle, so it keeps hitting the concrete with a thin silver click. I don’t know why, but I find myself falling a lot into rote motions like this, waking up with my unthinking body caught in little drones and tics. I tap and rock. It might be my own therapy – my body trying to jerk out a new mode for itself – but if it is, it’s a poor joke on the exercises I watch them putting Ryan through each morning, his big frame stranded on the bed. He blinks at them when they call it training, when they cast the tiny twitches of muscle as heroic, when they chant in big explosive hoots for the vacant limb they haul through its range of movement. It’s my job to make the same noise. And I do. I’m relentless, an over-age bogus cheerleader, flapping my nonstop applause. There are pinboard panels on the ceiling of the therapy room and he blinks up into them. I want to give up and stare with him, count the black array of dots, an unmoving hole-punched universe. But I don’t. I’m still full of promises, I brim with them. I swear, I vow, I pledge. I set targets, forge pacts. I’ll get him up on his feet again. If it’s the last thing . . .
I don’t have to press my body over his to block his protest. He never makes a sound. We’re still in the children’s wing, which would have once humiliated him. But now he doesn’t care. The frieze this time is of giraffes, the long freckled glide of their spines around lanky trees, the doped, friendly glaze of their eyelashes. A patch of them skipping, dorky and cloven, meant to be adorable. I just stare through their hides to their happy bones towering, the way I watch the vertebrae of figures who gleam at home from our late-night TV, picking up nothing of the plot, tuning out the buzz of dialogue, so my husband will sigh beside me, hard, on the couch, scoffs of reproach he doesn’t aim straight at me but over at the brown scrawl of curtains or down into his can of DB. But I go on staring at the bodies on the screen, the seamless way their hidden bones arrange their easy movements, their sliding thoughtless links beneath the well-lit skin. Waiting for the crack.
Maggie has known me since secondary school. She was a bitch to me back then – but I had it coming, a stuffy little priss, part Barbie doll, part religion. I’d put on lipstick, quote scripture, and girls like Maggie, with spiky fringes and homemade tats of maryjane and khaki army-surplus satchels, would have to hold themselves back from lobbing a fist at my sanctimonious pink mouth. She makes me laugh about it now, as we sit on our tubs and inhale and huff, and sometimes munch on the odd leftover courtesy meat-pie. She still has the bad ring-o’-rosie of metal stuck along her left ear’s cartilage, a silver pick-and-mix – I remember when she lanced the first one, in a bathroom off C Block, where I hid in a stall and tried not to sick up as I watched her school-shirt spat with safety-pinned blood. I love the toughness of those studs now, the saggy ammunition of them trailing their curve, the grey roots tracking out her way-too-red dyed hair, the lined mocha slur of her smile. She sneers at everything. She’s worked the club since she was in her twenties. A couple of weeks back when her cellphone got pinched out her ute, the boys hunted the culprit and pounded him, a lesson delivered big-time. She’s an institution now. Revered. So fucking watch it, right?
Her son, too, has something wrong with him – though it wasn’t the game, he was just born with it. Sometimes she has to bring him in, and she sets him up at a station in the kitchen. He likes to butter the big yellow sleeves of bread, flicking marge out the tall white boxes and striping it with a wide grin onto the slices his mum has chequer-boarded around the stainless bench. He has to study hard to close up each sticky pair, a drool of twenty-something concentration. I don’t know if she just dumps the bread. No one’s ever had the guts to ask. And she doesn’t ask about my son, either, doesn’t offer me any cheap proverbs, or trite old tags. When people do, I’m tempted to follow her example and aim for the fat goal of their smiles, take some platitudinous teeth out. We just sit and lick pixels of pie crust out our gumlines, and blow the air with tired fuckyous of smoke. And Maggie takes the piss about how uppity I used to be: ‘Tight-arse little princess, but me too, eh, I could be a bit of a dick. Hāngī-pants too. Check us out now. Haha. Ah well. Is what it is.’ And we’ll watch the last of the tanked-up kids lacing through the carpark, the topple of trios of high-heeled girls, their tube-frocks moist with oblivious sick, and we’ll wish the dumb young fuckers well in their stagger home to normality and think of our sons.
Inside the club, there’s still a picture of me marrying my husband. There’s a whole wall of club weddings spanned across the decades, but girls that win the captains, like I did, still rate at the top. And she’s right – I am a tight-arse princess, iced into white satin, strapped into a shiny cylinder of it, so I wince each show-offy breath through the dress’s boned column. I’m so goddamn delighted with myself. I’ve struck a trophy pose, and my husband has the shield on his blazer and stamped on his diagonal tie. He’s a thick-set honey, his tousle of hair greased back, with a beautifully munted smile. He’s a team player, and I’m marrying the whole t
eam – and I don’t mind, I feel like a matchfit goddess. We’ve even bought a section that fronts onto the club grounds, and he’s going to knock us up a house right there, like we’re in permanent reserve, with his own rugged number-eight hands. And I’m going to get myself knocked up, and feel my babies ruck inside me, and let my captain stroke the globe of my stomach and crack lame jokes about them kicking, coach them through my waters with his gruff game-play commands. Be dominant – that’s his favourite one, the one he’d roar from the sidelines while our son blitzed by, a hulk of strain and froth, thudding through the cross-grain of bodies, braced around the ball, gouging forward – Ryyyyyyy-an, the syllable stretched like a curse on his opponents, be dominant.
Be dominant.
Plummeting the turf to a soundless stop. While the crowd kept bawling my baby’s glory.
And later, while he lay in the rattle of the hospital, his body in the throb of the tubes and the tests and the strobes, more than one person posted the outcome to his Facebook page: mate, we wasted ’em. Even a mother, oblivious. Letting you know the score! We took it out 25–13!
They’re decent, the boys. It could be the same bunch that worked over Maggie’s thief, head-down over a stack of lumber in the backyard when I get home from the hospital today. They’ve volunteered to help with the ramp. There’s a row of them, good-value kids, and a couple of dads, and the skeleton’s going up quick, piles thumped in, a good frame righted in struts. The lads are trying to out-hammer each other, and one or two are going at warp speed, jerking in guffaws off the end of a nail gun, until they get yelled at, don’t arse about or I’ll knock your bloody heads together. For the most part, they’ve stripped off their t-shirts and wear them stuffed above their bums, so when they swag around the lawn their sweaty flags flail around. One has his tee collared back over his scalp so it girlifies him with a long blue veil. There’s not a drop of sunscreen on any of them, and the ozone glints on their torsos already, a promise of third-degree.
Devil's Trumpet Page 4