Devil's Trumpet

by Tracey Slaughter

  My father knows this syndrome. He’s seen it enough. When he first got back on the job, he couldn’t find his way around the city either, though he’d driven it a lifetime of lone-man nights, endless bored circuits on near auto-pilot, the same streets always beneath him in a long-term drone. Before the quake, all routes were known. My dad was a master of shortcuts, byways. I watched him come home post-quake for a handful of days, defeated, then I called shotgun. But my navigation proved as bleak. At least we could sit together, pulled over at an oblong of no-man’s under hurricane wire, and trade the names of the roads we thought we could head out on, point out the turns that might still take us somewhere we needed. I wish they’d put up the white chairs earlier. Sometimes it seems like we could pilot the streets by their lineup, plotting our course by that corner with its shining lounge of ghosts.

  alert those around you

  The chairs in the hotel were black. I waited for my lover, blinking on a cheap dark throne, sometimes shifting to the next if his car took too long, but always standing by the time I heard the engine reach our park, its memorised tinny diesel grrr. They were eighties metal arches, tubular ebony with hi-gloss legs, and padded velour that felt clammy and fingerprinted, splotched Miami chic in mauve and teal. One afternoon we fucked on one, adding to the build-up of low-lit human stains. He was due to be inside me when the quake hit. That’s the way it should have been. We should have ridden out the damage on bad velvet, moaning of true love in our four-legged rut. I should have had my hands spread on black bars, watching the wet crook of everything we wanted, pumped into coupling, stooped through the spine to the grin he upturned for a dovetail kiss. We shouldn’t have noticed that the world was leaking plaster, dusting our pangs with a fibrous mist, that cracks were snaking in the budget walls, stucco bouts the shorted sprinklers turned to gum, the grey carpet roaring. Our bodies should have moved as the room coughed a canopy of grit, as the hotel turned to confetti.

  The hotel chairs were black, and I belonged on them.

  I remember once, when he was late, I spent the wait scouring my body for flaws. I huddled in a black chair, and hunted my stripped-back skin for places I hadn’t prepared enough. I wanted to be marble, I wanted to be silk, so I’d stretched myself for hours, to clean, to shave. But contorting on my chair before he came I found nicks and tiny broken veins. I found the dry buff of blued elbow skin. I found a microscopic rash in raised pinpricks. I found a single toe where a curled blond hair had evaded the razor. It obsessed me, that toe. I’d been using my fingernails in vain to tweeze when he walked in the door. And I’d forgotten it.

  The room always turned over when he walked in.

  If they’d found anything in the rubble, I could have identified it. I stood long enough outside his building – or the capsized hulk where the building had been. They should have come to me. I could have told any part of his body, from a follicle, a half-moon, the merest fleck. But they kept us on the margins, staked out perimeter tape to hold back grief. We’re pushy, the leftovers, the ones who know the wreckage holds no hope but who still have to watch. I stood, lit to neon by floodlights and sirens. I stood in an aluminium blanket. I stood, and mumbled answers to somebody holding a clipboard who had stars on her collar. I thought of games we had versed in the cheesy motel, I thought of sheets we’d kicked off for Jenga towers, a squatting naked playoff on the woozy mattress surface, blocks thumbed out of plumb with a squeal of fluke, before we scrambled them with coming again, a shonky wooden splatter under our spines. I thought of how little I knew of him – tax bracket, allergies, IQ, blood type, place of birth – except every inch of his body, his birthmark in a smear at the nape, the zig-zag punctures of long-ago stitching on his knee, hair nesting down to his crotch in a sweet-and-sour whorl. But the woman with lapels didn’t want those answers. Her pen stopped scoring on its hard-backed cleat, and she tweaked the foil blanket tighter around my chin with a tut. Then she moved on: there was no shortage of people lined up in the smoke, to stare and yell and shake. When she came back she suggested we start again. I made more sense on the fresh page. I’d realised by then I shouldn’t be giving the details of my lover, but of his workmate, my husband.

  don’t use lifts – keep left on stairs

  My husband had known, since the first quake, that the building wasn’t right. But no one he talked to seemed to listen. After I’d met him in town one day for lunch, he took me in and he stood me in the stairwell, made me hush, so I could pick up the wind amplified on the rails, the outer wall’s strange buzz. I didn’t like it. Something odd and faint was thrumming, like a tuning fork. But I shook it off.

  Most of us did.

  The first quake had taught us we were blessed. So many of us woke unscratched, our houses dented, our streets hashtagged with wire, but with nothing irreversible taken. We hovered, relieved, in the clutter that had swilled from high shelves, the silky muck that slid from the tarmac, sunk our cars. We dozed back the slop of belongings, and shuddered at the blizzard of glass that had levelled the shops, and traded near-miss stories, and counted ourselves saved. The worst had hit, and most of us slept through it. Nothing seemed fatal. There were only a few, like my husband, who didn’t feel delivered, who couldn’t believe this state of calm. Who kept pointing out the cracks.

  And he was right: as we stood in the stairwell that day, I remember there were hairline trails, thin splits that climbed the plaster, flutters of fine-tooth crumbling that met in deeper throbs. He held my palm over one of them. The pitch of something wrong shivered the surface, a hint of sound that travelled my wrist. But then his colleague lurched out onto the landing above us, took the slope down in three bold thuds, levering off the handrail to touchdown at our feet. I stared at the salvo, the muscle buttoned into blue business shirt, the slick black shoes detonating on concrete. His good-to-meet-ya grin, so casual, left me feeling concussed. So you’re Chicken Licken’s wife, he smirked. My husband punched him, a cut-it-out jab at the arm he was already aiming over, in cheeky greeting, at me. Mrs Licken. Good to put a face. My pulse ricocheted from his decent handshake.

  And so I joined the ranks of those who no longer listened to my husband.

  I should have leant in to where my husband tried to steer me, I should have pressed my temple to the stairwell wall. I should have felt it coming in scalp and eyelids. The building tried to tell us. In gooseflesh. In a minor key.

  Later, after my husband was proved right, I would be stranded in a stairwell at the hospital, tracking his gurney as a straggle of volunteers tried to lever him somewhere, anywhere, to be seen, the lifts cut and crooked on their cables, and bodies pushing past to some other rushed triage, and aftershocks coming so the concrete strobed and lights dropped and peals of panic kept swelling while they jimmied him aloft.

  But I couldn’t see that disaster falling. The one I felt, standing there on the flight, with my hand in that grip, was the man in front of me. He was all the emergency I could breathe.

  Lovers say: my world will fall apart. I’ll break into tiny pieces. You have torn me down and open. We should be banned from speaking.

  don’t attempt to return to your building

  until the all-clear is given

  I live with my father in his yellow-zone one-bed, along with a driver who works with him. Jack is a crusty old darling, all eyebrows and pot gut, his kneecaps spangled with psoriasis. He lets me sneak out to his den, which is just Dad’s carport tarped and boarded up, and squat on his stretcher, tap a smoke from his stash, and he doesn’t let on to my dad. He runs his scaly old fingers round his grin like a zip, and gives me a mortal wink. I light up, inhale, pass it to him, and we take turns fiddling gaps into the tarp splits, wheezing smoke out of the crackling plastic. Dad knows what we get up to, of course. He makes out that some new dispatch he’s catching on the half-munted TV is much more crucial, that his flustered jig around the lounge with the aerial to make the broadcast stick is life and death for a bit. Only once did he come out and sit with us, shaking his he
ad in the chill and fug. He felt guilty for snapping at a fare he’d picked up, another foreigner who’d moaned about the state of the shops: What do you poor souls do for retail? All this time and it’s still like a bomb’s gone off. Dad couldn’t take it. Give us a chance, he’d said. That was it. Just give us all a chance. But he shook his head in Jack’s lean-to, and told me, What I wanted to use was that word you do. He’d never speak it, my gentleman dad. He’s a churchgoer, too, a faith that has lasted the quake, none too fond of my godless vocab. So I blew out a gust and said it for him. Give us all a fucking chance. Jack near wobbled off his stool, made the whole night echo with his wicked chortle.

  assemble outside and keep well clear of the roadways

  Jack likes to escort me to the portaloo, if he spots me going out at night. We shuffle on gummies, and bang our torches, and work our way round the gaps and swamps, the letterboxes and pickets that have finally tipped. You never know when the stuff that looks to have survived will fold up suddenly: paths ripple, wires shirr off, gulfs open, leaks darken brick. Sheds make a sigh, turn to metal origami. Concrete garden beds prolapse. Toppling aerials scatter birds, and washlines swing down a tailspin of wet clothes. You have to watch the edges of the world now, for the drop-off, the plummeting. That’s just the way it is. We were always in a red zone in this part of the world, Jack says. We just didn’t bloody know it, eh.

  So Jack and me, torch-lit, scuff along slow. Lately he’s been helping me at the hospital, too, calling round on the days I’m on training, the trial nights when I’m left with my husband for a stint of sole charge. Dodging off shift for a bit, he’ll wink. Suits me to muck in. You’re a bloody good excuse. He runs me through the steps, caregiving eh, like he’s interested, gets me to recount the instructions that the nurses drill in. Somebody else may as well learn the ropes, he says. You’ll need a hand when they let him back home again. He even helps with my husband’s pan. We two-step the corridor, and when I retch he takes the weight; he never says a word about it, the sloppy indignity of sound against metal, the animal stink of our limits. If he has to, he’ll help me turn it over, upend it into the beaming sink. If he has to now, in the road outside our unit, he’ll even stand and wait with his torch, while I crouch in the stall for long sobs he doesn’t mention. When I falter out, he’ll steer me back home. If I stumble, if it lasts, he will even get down on creaky knees, offer me his brand of blokeish comfort, patting my back and saying, good girl. Come on now. You’re all right. You’re a good girl.

  report any damage

  I know my husband’s body now, the way I once knew the lover I lost. I know the flare of red on his skin from the endless pressure of the sheeting, I know the places that ulcerate, sacrum, coccyx, heel, where the serum leaks. I know to anchor the back of his head, to pack his nape with a halo of feathers. I know to move the spoon in slow motion, dabs of soft mash, and I know when I wave it, even if his eyes are blank, I have to give it time, to wait for his lip’s reflex, to watch for his tongue tip reaching out for the pulp. I know the side of his mouth that leaves a tremor of grease, and I know when I wipe it he might half-talk, or at least, his chest-wall might move with a load of vowel sounds his mouth can’t shape any further. Not in a language I know, or one I deserve – because why should he ever talk to me? I know the clefts where the flannel must be thorough, the crevices I must sponge with gentle drips; I know the intricacy of shit on hair. I know the gouge that buildings leave when they are not to code, know the rare ways we crumble. I know the pigment of bedpans, and their tone in the night, the acoustic slosh of loneliness. I know how to breathe in the narrow room, its microclimate of piss and sweat. With his hospital bed and my cot, there’s not even room for a chair. And that’s how it should be.

  unless the building has collapsed, await

  instructions to evacuate

  I want to tell Jack I am not a good girl. I want to tell him when he’s at our kitchen table, writing a postcard to his wife in his slipshod hand, all flashy off-kilter letters, and a sloppy X to end. She fled the city when the first quake hit, and there’s no chance she’ll come back – she’s always been the one with sense, Jack nods. He’s stocked up on shots of the city that was, from a tourist stand they once flogged in their cabs, bolted to the seatbacks, and he sifts them out of a shoebox, one a week, like coupons for memory. Spots we grew up in, he tells me. Spots we took the nippers, even spots we . . . got up to mischief. He shoots me a devilish wink. The muddle of berry jam and Vegemite he’s paddling onto chunks of bread leaves the latest message tacky, but he’s happy with it. You’ve got to have a project, the way he sees it.

  His project, most days he’s not driving shifts, is to comb the suburbs hunting for junk to trawl home. There’s no shortage. There’s street after street lined with offcuts of furniture, cast off bric-a-brac, the abdicated slump of old mattresses homely with ground-down springs, the silver-brown watermarks of sex or birth or heat. The arms and legs of oak props and panels, the white metal faces that no longer tick, the fringed lamps shimmying like a frilly joke. Come into my parlour, where everything’s dust. Tablecloths scalloped and murky with fingerprints, the tatty knots of curtain half-hooked to splintered rods. The crooked trash we used to need to live. He keeps on tugging it home. Free to a good’un, he’ll report when he comes back towing a haul – he needs us to know he’s a cut above the looters. His takings are all above board. Just another family trucked out, left it all behind. The whole shebang. You’d hardly credit it. Sign up saying help yourself. No smiley face though. He doesn’t get smiles from us, either. We hardly have the space for it all. But we’ve let him wedge his lean-to with it, curio cabinets with no walls to tack them on, the copper dents of a firescreen though we don’t have a hearth. A set of chipped enamel tiles sitting in a stainless tub, curlicues of crunched deco sheen. I don’t know what it means, this hoarding. Perhaps he imagines he’s storing up the makings of a fitted-out base so his wife will come back. She’s always been the one with sense, he says, but I’m the one with hope.

  So much hope that he scurries the crumbs off his polo and wobbles into his boots, determined to get to the postbox, feed his note into the slot. And I go with him, keen to block him spotting the latest leftovers piled on the berm, hitching home with more shards. He likes my company, though he half suspects I’m tagging along to thwart his fossicking. Sometimes he pulls a dopey dawdle like a toddler wowing over some new speck – you can just see him as a kid poking fingers at a flickering insect or oil spill on the pavement. I swear when he starts to dally round a junk pile, grubbing at the crisscross and fishing something free, he shoots me a cheeky-boy glance just waiting for his telling-off. He puffs happily at my stroppiness, and turfs back whatever it was he’d forked out. His grizzle never lasts. And we go on, cagey, to the box where he plants a big kiss on his latest postcard, a cheesy smack on the script before he slides it in. We can hear it flap down into dark. He gives two knocks on the side for luck.

  I want to tell him that I’m not a good girl. I want to, all the slow route home. I want to as we pick through upturned chunks of footpath, as we veer and backtrack to skirt the fresh wire, to bypass the mix of taped-off buildings, some gutted, vacant, some half spliced back up. I want to when he pulls his trademark move, leapfrogs an orange cone, to prove he’s still a spry bugger. And when he says, do you good to write too, you know. You ought to be trying it. Doesn’t bloody matter what. There shouldn’t be a lock on that head of yours. Pick anyone to talk to. Even hubby, love. He’ll hear you, I know it. You just scratch it down. He claps his rough hands, one-two, a just-like-that diagonal. And send it off.

  It’s me that points out, then, a spiral of floor-rug that’s been lugged over somebody’s letterbox. His eyes light up, and he’s over at the huddle, pulling out a flap to suss its condition. It’s thick, baroque, its blue pile not even flooded. When they’ve squared your new digs – when hubby’s home with you, Jack tells me, this beauty’ll be just the trick. Consider it a housewarming gift. I don’
t say a thing, but Jack is too keyed-up to notice. So I let him roll it tight, and we do a clumsy dance lumping it home. Like the freight of a body. He’s so stoked that he forgets to ask the question.

  I’m not a good girl. The last thing I wrote was a letter to my husband, on the day of the quake. Telling him I was leaving him.

  position yourself away from windows

  It is Jack who’s been working at the task of bringing my dad in from the garden. He started it sly, with a game of chairs. I’d first come across him queuing for water when the tanker was parked up three streets over, and told him about Dad in his tent, the green slump pitched out back on the unit’s scrap of lawn. I thought I’d never get him in. I’d wave to him from the taped kitchen window, bait him with cups of tea, grin over the tiny gas-ring – but he wouldn’t budge. It had been weeks. To make him eat I’d have to tote the meal out to a drop cloth, dig cups into the lawn. He’d try to chew and chat, for what it was worth, but would always duck back under his awning. From the house I would watch him blinking from the span of guy-ropes at bricks still pretending to stand. Some nights I crept out and crouched by his shelter, tried to hear his breath over the crunch of the northerly bivouacking the plastic.

  Then Jack called in, the taxi stashed with chairs, three eyesores he shouldered round back, one by one, grinning flaming tada! The deckchair he shook out its scrawny concertina and motioned me over, concierge-style, to its yellow fibro slats, for madame. The school chair, old splintered balsa bolted onto brown legs, he jabbed down, flicking off a few rough chips. The last was too good for us, or at least it had been once, a frame of thick mahogany whorls, its soft plush polished by upper-class bums until it purred. Do the honours, he nodded at Dad. When the old man looked cagey he scoffed, don’t be an ungrateful bugger. And so we perched, in a rickety trio, for our first half-silent night out back. All you can damn well do when things are dark as this, said Jack, is wait for stars. Which came out a bit bogus, as if he was taking the piss out of himself. And there, Jack pointed out, there the blighters are. And they were stuck there the next night too, when he popped in, sat another chatty vigil. If you plan to come back tomorrow, said Dad, I reckon a whiskey would help them come out quicker. Too right, laughed Jack. That’s the proper cure.