Devil's Trumpet

by Tracey Slaughter

  When I pass them, their antics go quiet. The hassle, and clatter, and joshing stop. They half-drop tools, stare at their gawky hands. They don’t exactly grin, but their mouths do something sweet and bungled. There’s a muttering that sounds respectful. But it could just be fear.

  I’m an institution too. But no one knows what to say to me.

  I watch for a while out the kitchen window, their klutzy progress, their loose aim, their uncouth trunks. They swing boards round, only half hoping to miss, a mongrel ballet, slapstick, amateur. They don’t skip a chance to roughhouse each other, tousles of sudden punch and passing scrags, topped off with hefty laughs. I think of my boy, their captain – of course he was their captain – who should be out there calling the shots, pulling a blokey pose, overseeing the work, mock-bawling-out their foul-ups, clocking the back of their scalps if they clash too much. Then I think of him, three, in the clobber of his dad’s tool belt, taking goofy outsize stomps to keep up its leather anchor. I think of him, six, lying head to head with me on the cooled trampoline to stare up at the milky chinks of star: I think of the smell of his wonder, the black mat buzzing as he waves up the disbelieving wriggle of his hand. I think of his fontanel, the soft pulsing gap of it fronded by his cottony hair, a thrum of feathery bone I could touch my mouth to, cradling, as he fed. I take out supplies to the boys. I take out a tray of tomato sandwiches, Mountain Dew and Coppertone. I take out a handful of my son’s old caps, the scent of his skull still moulded in their stiff domes. There’s half a handprint of red paint daubed onto one, a mucky blotted lifeline. There’s the coast of his temples, sweated in a fine grey tremor that leaks along the white of the peak. Today in the hospital he hadn’t wanted anyone near him, so I’d had to wait till he slept, to edge closer on his pillow, to creep to his crewcut hair, where the stubble sticks out like his last crop of nerve endings. But here in the backyard I hold out the stains of him, all the rip-shit dents and scuffs – he was always going for broke at whatever activity he was attacking, full tilt, brute force, a mighty irrepressible blur. He was a feat of nature, my boy. A reckoning in teen male skin.

  The boys don’t talk to me. Bar one. Daniel’s the one who’s turned up most to the hospital, although my son still refuses any visits. I see him down by the letterbox, faking a standoff with a hi-top, like it’s packed with stones he can’t bash out. I know it’s an update he wants. So I wander over, chuck him a tube of sunblock, pretend a half-hearted telling off. But he’s too tender, this boy, for the sheer hulk of him, the stout block of muscle that is his jaw. The stocky throat wobbles, his eyes glaze too quick above his heavyset smile. I think of the nurse I liked best at the hospital, an elegant singsongy male who trilled at us coyly as he swished through his work, and blabbed bits of high-pitch nightshift gossip, but touched us, firm, a genuine no-bullshit touch, and sometimes even a hug, his grip a sincere grab right to his ribcage, matter-of-fact with suffering, and crooning some comfort. When Ryan wouldn’t see the kid, this was the nurse who’d steered him away by the shoulderblades, propped him on a park bench outside and nodded as he snivelled, lit him a relay of smokes. But my husband has clout in this small town – they don’t forget you here once you’re captain – and behind the scenes he made sure no more male nurses were rostered on to Ryan’s case. He told me of his victory – it was the least they could do for him, things were going to be hard enough, without the extra humiliation of . . . he couldn’t bring himself to describe the scene, the handling of our boy’s body, its long-term needs. He didn’t see my rage. And I make sure now I don’t show it to the boy by the letterbox with the too-soft eyes.

  Instead I tell him of the day I first brought Ryan back from hospital, a tiny warm survivor, squashed into a car seat, sleeping off the unexplained battle of the last few days. The scrape of the instruments, the evil figures in teal, the march of the ducks. I’d parked and lifted him out of his seat, a wobble of wool and limbs and shuteye, and my husband had come to the car door to help and I’d handed him over, a see-sawed transfer of weight. But when his body left me it was sudden. I found myself on the gravel, crumpled. Wracked with deliverance, giving great gasps of spluttered prayer.

  I won’t know that feeling again.

  There are things the boy could say to me. He could come out with some banality, the slogans they drill them in over at the club. I hear them nearly every night, shouts that echo from the field, their barks of courage, stale. But he doesn’t. He takes the cap I offer out to him, and he slides it on, so his face darkens, thickened with shade. He farts his palm with sunscreen, fumbles it over his face. That’s what makes his eyes red. He’s a tough boy. And he is learning. I don’t know if he’ll be visiting Ryan again.

  The rest of the boys don’t say his name to me. My husband assures me, though, our son’s a legend to them. Nothing will ever change that. He tells me later there’s plans for the boys to line up along the drive on the day we bring him home, guard of honour. They’ll do the haka for him. Kia kaha. They’ll be spruced up, their thick bodies jammed in their formals, sternums huffing under blazers, throats tweaking yanked ties, awkward with clean-shaved ahems. Then the shout will fire up, and their hands will rout and clap, they’ll outface, their shins will thud. It will be bloodthirsty and beautiful, a boom on the earth as their big limbs thunder out a warrior’s welcome.

  And I’ll wheel my son past them, where we’ve tucked him in his contraption. Where he doesn’t want to live.

  There are traditions I can’t stop. I know that tonight, when I hear the haka pounding the dancefloor over at the club. It’s been a big game, a decider, and there’s a band in: I watched them unloading the van from my ranchslider earlier, a clapped-out troop of musos dragging in amps and light bars, stopping mid-packdown for a fag, a trio on the sunset blockwall in matching black tees. I know it’s a zero-sleep night: if I bother to lie in my bed the bass will only detonate my chest-wall, a deep controlled bruising. And I’ve lived alongside club nights long enough. I can pick out every item in the soundtrack: the shrill as the hatchbacks of girls arrive, their preloaded silvery high-heeled squealing. The hoots as the old blokes, sinking their brews since mid-arvo, start pulling their stumbled boogie, weaving the girls in harmless nostalgic jolts, getting freaky with their senior hips. The lineup for the feed, the clack of plastic, shovel of chips round the steel bins, squeak of the arse-end sauce, the wrangled chops. I even know the tone of funerals, or weddings, or birthdays, the shift in decibels, the dead or alive playlists. And this: the tribute of half-cut boots thundering the wood floor. A spasm of remembrance before the band cranks up its millionth ‘Sweet Home’ or ‘Simple Man’, and they’re all too plastered to stagger any further. The frieze around the walls is of themselves, as gods. There isn’t a stretch where they’re not mighty, ranged in their divisions, lined up in their frames, fists held hard on their wide-planted knees or squared across their chests, no mistaking the set of their jaws. Here to dominate. Season after mud-gold season. The frames rattle as their stance hounds the floor. There are traditions that aren’t up to me. If they have to thump their grief against their sternums, if they have to stomp and bellow it, then so be it. Grief is not a language I understand any better.

  I think what I want to sign mine is a whistle.

  I think I should be allowed one. It’s a whistle I want when the doctors half-explain to me, when the dash starts shrieking on his ray of machines, and they sprint into the room, and the sound of their efficiency, played against the vinyl and sterility and metal, terrifies me, their mouths moving in fast-paced clips of jargon that make every blip feel fatal. There needs to be half-time, they need to let me call it, take a breather. And it’s a whistle I want when the journalist, who’s been told no, hung up on many times now, tries to sneak in and steal a bedside soundbite to headline their hard-hitting exposé. When the same reporter stakes out the dayroom and catches my son’s girlfriend ringed with her besties, who try to tone their giggles down to ICU levels, but who still spill details, of the backle
ss ball dress his girlfriend won’t be wearing, can’t resist all its chic sequinned specs, and the night they won’t be spending at the Sun Kist Inn where he’d booked like the actual honeymoon suite, OMG, supersweet, for their first time, clumsy and gentle, a room with a waterbed in padded crimson velour and a dozen red roses he’d pre-ordered, and how sad, but they’d heard it could still be, you know, um, managed, in the long-term, you know, there were ways it could be sorted, all blushing in simpers, making tragic corny bats with their lashes, little measured blinks of semi-wet tint, because it was all so (dainty sob) like ultra saaaaaad, while the journalist sketched down their soft-core handicapped dreams.

  And it’s a whistle I want, tonight, as I’m walking to the clubrooms now for my out-back toke with Maggie but she heads me off, jumpy under the spotlight, clearly aiming to stop my gaze falling on the girl who’s groaning up against the wall, and it’s not like it’s a shock to see a girl corralled there, staggering the brickwork with a boy in control, so her head is bobbing on the end of his thrusts, and she’s maybe even tipping out a little pre-mix puke mid-groping, then tripping off after, her torso a-trickle, oblivious to what’s been pumped into it, except she’s been anointed by one of the boys, so she can afford to zig-zag back to the hall and gabble her baptism to pals on the dancefloor, and drunkenly point to the boy who’s left his mark, imprimatur on her greasy thighs, and dream maybe he’ll hit her up for more, maybe even let her wear the hallowed branding of his first-fifteen jersey to school on Monday, way romantic, it’s hardly a shock she’s there, but I want a whistle when I know that it’s her, it’s my son’s girl, straddling a hard-at-it boy, not a gentle replacement, but a rough-as-guts fuck, though the boy’s grunting dopey endearments while he’s blocking, and she’s rambling something too, some drivel about broke hearts, cold facts, lost love, but she’s already forgetting what she’s lost, except all the remains that will drain from her later and the brickwork remembered on her spine in lagered bruises.

  And if the boy turns I know he’ll have too-soft eyes.

  ‘It is what it is,’ says Maggie beside me. And somehow that works as well as a whistle.

  And what is there to do then but let Maggie lead me round to the rear mess door, and prop me against the barred screen while she fetches us a couple of quiet ones. And then let her lead me, white tubs in hand, to the mini crane-lift that they service the floodlights with. She’s an institution in this place, and she’s got the keys – too right, she eyebrows me, as if there was any fucking doubt. She bangs the yellow crate, up ya get, and fiddles with some mechanism over on the frog-green cab. Then she hoists her arse over the rails, and upends a tub with a hollow pop. ‘There you go. Throne, ya uptight princess.’ Her ragged teeth are grinning at me, pushy and gapped.

  I do as she says and climb on. Maggie’s tough thumb-joints jog at controls and we’re aloft, a slow grinding rise above the field. It smells like rust and ascension and turf. The mist is coming out, a float of it over the green, and we drift over its illumination. The floodlights are like some sleek artillery from heaven.

  ‘I used to do this with my boy sometimes. He was into it. There’ve been some choice moments.’ She nods at me. ‘Not much, eh. But something.’ She answers herself, ‘Well I reckon anyway.’

  The altitude is radiant, a good place to get pissed. So we do, careful to do it mostly silent. Although I tell Maggie once, or maybe more, that the lift-tray makes me think of when Ryan was little, how he used to love to huddle in the plastic laundry basket, and beg me to launch him overhead. And how somewhere, over my baby, locked in his terrible isolation, there’s a line of animals extending their lonely wet eyes to out-of-reach trees. And once, in the clubrooms, I remember him nicking off with someone’s nana’s wheelchair, and hooning it, on long giggling burnouts round the hall. And Maggie blows listening grooves of smoke and says nothing. I look out over the lines of the field and think of the old man who comes to mark them, who’s done it for years now, a patient ploughing of the paint roller, jittery and silver on the grass, along the string lines he’s measured, meticulous, pegged out, recalibrated, offside. He’s religious about it, kneels on the turf, doublechecks, genuflects, before he stamps it white. When Ryan was little he’d sneak out our fenceline and follow him, poor man – stuck with a toddler, rowdy and fidgeting and nonstop nattering beside him as he yanked round his trail of paint. And everything would grow through it, burst, bloom, smudge, break, the bodies just scrape away its borders, so he’d have to come back and do it all again before the next game.

  three rides with my sister

  My sister’s car was a powder-blue deathbox. It smelt like heavy-petting and eyeshadow, spermicidal silver sachets and leaded petrol. Her painted toenails accelerated hard, a patent heel tossed out the footwell to me – if I was lucky enough to call shotgun. She hated how the seatbelt crushed her work-of-art bust, so she’d flick off its cleat as soon as we cleared our cul-de-sac. But she ordered all the windows wound down: her mahogany hair graffitied the breeze with bad perm. Kilometres came at us wild. There were gusts of her perfume and kinky gossip. Her passengers giggled, not-quite-bad-enough girls. My sister pulled breathtaking tricks in the traffic, thriving on their squeals. She hair-pinned, gunned it, spun on the handbrake. Mostly hunted boys. Stalked man-wagons, tailed suits, revved surfers, overtook. Raced stray moonlight up the beach, the shrapnel of seashells clattering the chassis. But sometimes she just drove, aimed out our small town, nailing the centre line. Tinted mascara lit up her deathwish eyes.

  +

  It’s hard to lift her into the car today. I relay her feet in, still icy in their ward slippers. I wind out the belt, click her safe, watching stitches. Count her chemical breaths on my jawbone. When I ask where we should head, she just blinks. The sky moves over her powder-blue scalp.

  +

  On the journey home from the hospital, road-workers have messed up the marker paint, so it speeds in a trail, spilling the kerb in a random white splash like a tidebreak.

  Or a monitor-reading, spiked.

  why she married your father

  She had a job in a green smock with a zip front, stocking Four Square shelves. She’d left school with mild Arithmetic, acne under a spiral perm, and Home Economics. The shop was the only one in town so it carried everything, a blockade of brown-cloaked boxes out back where trucks beeped in. She loved the sound of gashed paper, long stripes of it ripping from her coral-coated nails. She gelled her fringe to grow out behind a barricade of clips (tortoise-shell, 25% staff discount).

  She was on shelves until she earned trust. She was aiming for the till, but the boss was wary of fresh girls now: he’d just caught one embezzling. (He’d sprung her on the ladder as she pasted up This Week’s Mega Deals and a hairband of twenties had peeked out her smock.) So it was trial-run – if she was lucky the boss’d let her work up to a bit of aisle display.

  A decorative pyramid of canned baby peas.

  A stapled fan of neon coupons bursting from a baked-bean stadium.

  Mostly she kneeled and stacked, bummed boxes round the gritty linoleum, lined rows up, label out. She loved the sticky tempo of the pricing gun, the spiky Specials tags.

  And then there was the cigarette racks. The weekly rep, passing her the packs to load the wire carousel, sending her the odd wink that made her stomach skid. Until this Thursday he craned down, gorgeous, let an outbreath of smoke cruise the neck of her uniform.

  Has anyone ever told you you’re beautiful?

  Marlborough and hope looped her ponytail. She pivoted, No, on crumpling knees. Something was slipping out her zip-front heart.

  He leaned lower, grinned.

  No – and they’re never likely to neither.

  jilt back

  When he didn’t marry her, she realised how much dress she had left to drag behind her. A thirteen-kilo streamer of satin snagging against everything she slalomed: altar, guests, trestles, lychgate, marquee, kerb. Every few minutes it would lynch her at the hips, so she’d
be pinned in frilly limbo, until she could work her fingers down the white slide to unhitch. She got tired of unbraiding herself. The world is full of nail heads, and she started to pluck herself free with a cut-throat tug. She felt less like confectionery then. She pulled the spiked ring of flotsam off her scalp. The sequins of her bodice felt like microscopic headlights. She pushed into the open, crazy-glued with extra light. She thought of places she could go: into the magic show at the casino to get her ivory bulk sawn in half, down to the overpass to let her sleek banner be gas-canned with wild have-not graffiti. Down to the river, to scrabble through the miles of white-shine for her own be-muddied thighs, to finally fuck the boy she’d loved since fifteen. She felt like she was on the true path. Under all that boning she’d had no aspirations. The white lines polished her with dark resolve now as she passed. Her dress sounded like a long hot tirade.

  holding the torch

  I want to know: can you still smell our memories? We slept in our togs, their rockpool scent – our bodies sucked all summer on their itchy stretch. Because I remember: we are tucked into bed top and tail, but we squiggle up, breath to breath, to mutter what feels like the whole night in our rubbery pelts. We must close our eyes eventually – but when our lids drop we are still half-talking, the story dozing off in the soft joint fumble of our tongues. We try to nudge each other, poke ourselves awake, hitch up our lashes. But the bed is too much for us – that old wire-wove, battered and deep and warm and wonky. We want to keep whispering, giggling, but our beached-out limbs get too lulled by its flocked flannelette. Do you remember giving in? Whose hair was whose as we snored and nuzzled? We both stank of dune days, sheep shit and seaweed and salt, and big hunks of sunburnt white bread. With the last of our silly chuckles, as our trunks fell slack in the bed, trickles of sand crept out of secret pockets.