Devil's Trumpet

by Tracey Slaughter

  I don’t know how long it took for Dad to click on that the ring of chairs was edging closer to the house. When we found ourselves off the ex–vege patch, free of the trip-risk of the tent-pegs, he must have twigged. By the night we were east of the washline, watching its wiry shadows grate round the flat, perhaps he’d given up, faced the fact that the margin between him and the brickwork had now shrunk. The solid world was bound to catch up. Jack had moved in to the carport by then, his jerry-rigged walls going up in bright plastic flags – once I’d found out his own room was redded he had zero say. Dad watched him lash up his collection of sails and said he could take the house. No bloody way, Jack snorted. That’s your daughter there, not mine, mate. Soon after, Dad appeared on the couch one evening, with his newspaper, not catching my eye. He stayed for an hour, while we half-watched some channel of shit reception – inevitable lovers in a haze of bad fate and changed minds – and he had a good old grumble at the ads. Then he bent, gave my cheek a heavy peck, before heading back out to his tent. I didn’t try to stop him.

  Out in his shelter, he still doesn’t zip up his sleeping bag. So he’s ready to run.

  for emergency help dial 0 from your room

  A few nights ago my father was between pickups, parked outside an office complex. He was out in a less-hit suburb, and watched from the cab as lights flickered on four storeys up. A couple had entered the space, a glass-fronted box of chrome and air-conditioning, and it was soon clear what they were doing there so late. Their clinch was a staggering tack for the desktop, the parts of their bodies they needed to meet yanked free of clothes, just clear enough. The tube of her skirt rucked up, his belt suspending the pucker of pants at his knees. He worked on her. My father would have tried hard, but there was no way to blot them from his wide screen. Her hands zig-zagging the surface of files so they flooded the carpet with a flap. His face lowered, lapping. The override of his body come down on her. My father told me none of that. He would never have breathed a detail. But just down the road there was a pub where a covers band was loading gear into their van. When they scoped the couple, they jogged to the white line, choking, zoomed in to shoot it all on their cells. It got posted online, a still frame headlined the paper. The lovers probably didn’t keep their jobs. I don’t know. I never followed up. But I did watch their bodies, while the clip was still live, the way they battered into the cubicle as the overhead strobed, the hard intent you could see in their grip as they swerved out of clothes. I’d say they’d fucked each other plenty. They bypassed tenderness, mounted quick, barely traded a kiss. It was a choreography I knew. It was a stage I recognised.

  I can’t help picturing my father, pinned in his cab beneath this scene. He would have looked anywhere but into their cupping and jolting. He was shocked that they made no move to block the spot-lit view. They didn’t seem to care, he reported later, shaking his head. It’s not a story he wants to clip out and keep, although he got so close to it – not a headline he’ll trim down and file in his scrapbook. He’s been collecting stories from the quake, but he goes for the heart-warmers, the hazy testaments to overcoming. His favourite is the wedding dress they let the bride rescue from the red zone, her big day set for after the quake. He’s scissored out a series of their articles, the roped-up salvage team winching down the plastic-covered glory of her gown, the open-air ceremony put together from the shellshocked, who picked flowers, traded shaken speeches, toasted love, kept trying to rise above. He’s right. It is a beautiful spread.

  But not these two, fucking so blind, in the open. They didn’t seem to care who saw. Their flagrancy baffled him. Maybe, I wanted to say, in the context of this city, they just believed there was no point waiting. Maybe it was the act of people who know that tomorrows can cave in, that buildings can fall. Maybe it’s the shaken who learn to be bold, the trapped who seize their days. But instead I let him look at me, stretch out a hand, give me a quick pat of consolation.

  He was taking comfort that his daughter would never be so brazen.

  avoid injury from flying debris

  The hotel ceiling was always falling. Our bodies kept knocking its glitter down, tufts of its scratchy fibre dusting our workout on the kingsize bed. I’d find its pigment when I propped my head on his chest, twitching to his heartbeat, blown free with a laugh. Once, I remember, I bayoneted a chunk on his nipple: he took the bait, and flipped me onto my back. It would sometimes be in my seams when I trekked home, a dirty sediment I’d crouch in a shadow of my bedroom to brush when my husband wasn’t watching, a gritty fleck of secret like his trickle of come still cooling beneath my jeans. It was always falling. We’d slink home with its smut in the roots of our hair, as if we were a reno couple, smashing out the Artex, sanding a sharp new living-room from its seventies crust. But we weren’t restoring anything. Every time we met we were dismantling something, bigger pieces of world coming down than the chintzy powder we lay in and laughed at, that we flicked as it stuck to the replayed sheets round our hips, itched through our next kiss. But you don’t stop, even when you know what you’re demolishing, even when you know you’re kicking base-blocks out the tower. Secret by secret in the no-star room, we were pulling down each other’s futures, and the gaudy glisten that chipped off the roof of our room just made us bring it down faster. In some way, I think, by the time I was waiting on the final day, I knew the world would drop.

  And we’d deserve it.

  And maybe I’d pay for it again, even now, to be back there, crashed into the lull after a fuck, our recklessness disjointing the clock hands, our pashing turned waxy with the build-up of whispers, semen, minibar piss. Anything to have ridden his shuddering into a drowsy layout of limbs, still panting, to have skidded from the last glaze of head, faceplanting on his chest where a pinprick of plaster waits to hurt my eye like a close-up on a galaxy. The world come too close, finally exploded.

  To be lying there, fingertips browsing his torso, nuzzling his skull through scurf, the air in the cheap room meshed with the shimmery mess we were making of everything.

  know the location of all exits

  The last letter I ever wrote is still waiting in the red zone. The third time I went back to get it, I was mistaken for a whore.

  You could draw a line down the street where we once lived. One side is flattened – and I know why they rail us off, keep us out of that downrush of brick. From the hurricane fence I can see the plunge of stone, the open floors heaved into mounds. Unhinged doors swing open over sheer drops. A tide of masonry, speared with metal. Strange rags of plaster still held upright, streaks of wall projected in ripples. Rooms prone, crushed. Others dangling. A clutch of glass still sticking in a frame, jigsawed with light. I can see that we need to be stopped from going back, combing for belongings: stone waits there in a deadly tilt. But the other side just stands there untouched. I could undo the door, retrieve the letter. It wouldn’t take too many footprints. I’d promise not to dislodge anything else. I’m not looking for trinkets, for mementos, stores, clothes. There’s no photos I need, no basics. I just want that letter I wrote to my husband, the day of the quake, saying I didn’t love him.

  That end of town was always whore central, but it’s dotted with even more now. Where the blockades end, the women begin, a trail of underfed working girls, tees sketchy over ribs, hair mottled with dust. There’s plenty of work to go round. It’s a hi-vis city, the inner quadrant, staffed with men in hardhats, men with steel tools, tough attitudes. The girls know where the work is, gather where the utes brake, press their skin along the barricades.

  Of course I could have been one of them. Nothing to tell us apart.

  He baled me up when I was close. I’d made it past curfew, edged through a slit in the fence, raked my stomach in a tunnel of wire. I was nearly at the door when he yelled, a thick bark of warning. I tried bolting the last steps. I could see our red oak oblong, the eyelid of the lock. But then he was on me, grappling. He backed us out, me flapping off his grip, my elbows winging as he bumped
me through the boundary fence. Once he’d dumped me clear, he bent down, took a closer look. Offered me a flat fee, his dick, which he rumbled from under his belt, like just another tool. It didn’t seem too bad a deal, to earn a way back. I countered. Just minutes through the wire. My house didn’t have a scratch on it. Please, I’d do anything. But he wasn’t having it. Enough bodies in there as it was, he wasn’t adding more. When he knew I wasn’t taking his cash, he shrugged, tucked his cock back down, the bills rolled back at its side. He was a good bloke, spat into the rubble, let me walk home.

  place the heel of one hand on the sternum

  at the centre of the chest

  It happens because you’re trying to do good. This is you on outreach, mucking in for the relief effort. There is still so much to clean up – but everyone has lived, there’s something thankful in the line-up of people driving their spades into the scum. And the sky is clear, if toned a bit watery, and volunteers shake each other’s cruddy hands and get to know each other, side by side in the mire, roughed up, but celebratory. And children are picking up brittle things and flicking them into plastic bags, which they wheel and swing, their gumboots all fizzly in the silt – this is just playtime, sand they can pivot their sticks in and skid down, it’s a good game, all this slush. They jab their plastic spades in, load up toy dozers, and they don’t care what wells up, though their frazzled mums do their best to keep them out the worst gunk. They ferry off any bits of junk they can use as playthings, laughing in the sleet. But it’s lain around for long enough, all this waste. And the aftershocks keep spitting it back up. The adults put their backbone into it. And no one’s in charge, so there’s no instructions, it’s just a group of people trying to do their bit, to lend a hand. So no one minds that it’s kind of feeble, the meagre scratches you can make with your spade, no technique and less muscle, dopey and off-balance with the big blade. You’re giving it a go, aren’t you, getting stuck in? That’s what counts. But you’re still sort of self-conscious. And you don’t want to stop, you want to keep slogging with the rest, but you have to take a break for a sec, and you wander up the line, drag your shovel behind you, a lazy metal itch, bouncing off the odd stone. And you could call it kind of beautiful, this row of strangers, all panting but positive, and buoyed up with each other’s grimy nods and raw good will. It should be a moment when you see the best in everyone – a day where you store up some image of human good, and the details you should keep in the frame are the woman rugged-up in the wheelchair over by the car boot handing out mugs of steaming tea, the old girl with Osti frock hitched into knickers battling a barrow under the treeline, the man with a newborn strapped in a doze to his chest helping shoulder a sunk stationwagon out the sleaze. But you don’t. Because that’s him. That’s him. That is the guy you met in the stairwell. Your husband’s colleague. And then you don’t see anything. Just the grit that’s drizzled on the end of his curls. Just the gleam dislodged from muscle. When the spade wedges in, you can stand and watch the mud glint on his trunk. When he straightens up you can follow the eddies of fine hair that weave down into his jeans, a waistband your fingernails long to slide, sudden, low-riding. Then he catches your eye. And it’s too late. Desire is an airlock. His smile rocks the whole world backwards.

  close all doors behind you when you leave

  Sometimes, in the early days, we used to get coupons for food left on the doorstep. Now it’s all flyers for church. My dad consults them all, if I don’t get to them first and trash them. One or two he’s even fished out the bin, planed their wrinkles with a thick, patient hand, not glancing at me. I liked the free food better, I say, banging around the kitchen, while he levels their font on the Formica, stroking their promises flush. Holy Consolations. Divine Comfort. At least it means he’s inside with me, for a bit. He’s got a little sheaf, tucked up by the side of the telly, with a clip on it, messiah blue. Some nights, he slips them out, reads them over again, Hope in a Dark Hour, nudging up the bridge of his glasses like it will help redemption come into clearer view.

  But he can’t go into a church.

  He just can’t set foot.

  Churches are heavy and tall with pain. He can’t sit tight in the lines of dark pew, stare up into that glass citadel. He can’t watch the ornate rafters stretch to their pinnacles while the singing shakes. He used to love the way the chapels cast back all the chants he’s known since childhood, the long sculpted murmurs, but now their echoes fill his head with unholy weight. He can picture them bloodstained. The hymns are full of threat. The tapers flicker too much, God buzzes in his strongbox. My father knows we’d all dissolve like wafers.

  I know he muttered prayers to the fare he was carrying in the backseat on the day of the quake. He was pinned to the steering wheel, and she was a voice from the downpour of masonry behind him. They’d been parked up, on the first ticks of the tab, then the thick stone frontage of the shops let go. His cab was crushed. But the driver’s side ruched around my dad, left him a cavity, jutted him at trunk and shin, but breathing. The voice of his fare had called, and stopped. She was young, a twenty-something in a print frock she’d grabbed at the hem of to stop the breeze whipping it. He remembered her sliding into the cab with a blush, a babble of happy instructions. He’d been late, he’d apologised, tardiness was never like him. He could offer her a discount off the meter. But she squiggled her mouth, a peachy no-matter. Happens to everyone, she brushed it off.

  And then it hit.

  He didn’t know what else to do but pray, my father, out loud, on dull repeat. Her noises had been high at first, a thick treble of blood. Then the vowel sounds gelled. And whistles that weren’t voluntary rose from her, bricked-in moans. She forgot most words. In the beginning, he remembers, she kept telling him where she lived, as if they could still drive there, as if he could just light the buckled dash, and pull them both away from the ruin of the kerb. Then she panicked that she needed to pee. I’m busting, she kept saying, please, I’m busting. She fretted that by the time she was pulled free she’d have wet herself. How long, I can’t hold it, she kept saying. And my father kept praying, oh Lord, let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm. I’m busting. Oh Christ above me. I can’t hold it. It’s all right. You can’t help it. I’m busting. Christ where I fall. Christ where I arise.

  do not pull the emergency cord

  I finished the letter to my husband on the day of the quake. But I’d been trying to write it for weeks. When I couldn’t find the words I would walk through the house to convince my body it was capable of leaving him. I’d watch the proof of my footprints, tacking on the rimu, tracing a slowed getaway. There were only seventeen steps from the edge of our double bed to our front door. I even trekked with a suitcase, as far as the car boot, to show my left hand the grip it would need. The push off the hip to hump it into the trunk, wedge it down on the thin black carpet among blown-out gym shoes, the pouch of tools from my father (as if I could tinker with the engine myself, pop the hood, lean over, she’s right, and torque at pistons). I stared at the case, a brittle red relic from my mother’s teens, silver-rimmed, patched with stickers, a faux-skin lining, zebra-striped, that felt like the surface of a snooker table. All my slutty little articles, balled up neatly, nested in its black-and-white pelt. I slammed the boot, and pretended I could breathe. That day my neighbour watched me, over the street, from a prim twitch of curtain. I longed to give her the finger. But instead, I stood and stared at my licence plate, as if that number would crack some crime. I went back inside, and in place of words, I inked its raised metal code on the page, a whole sheet of digits, six black figures like tracking coordinates into the distance. Then the numbers became letters, became a new sheet, excuses, facts, reasons. What I’d done. What I was carrying. What I was making myself go through with. For the longest time I couldn’t write his name: it didn’t seem possible to leave it there, heading the whole longhand mess, like the last bloody clue. When I wrote that last line, I sealed the envelope, and I found myself moving throug
h the drilled route as if it would detonate. Of course, it’s still standing, every step, but they won’t let me back in.

  I think of it tonight, as Dad calls Jack and me for a meeting, the chairs triangulated, formal, out in the yard. He’s taken to holding these sessions, itemising provisions he’s made sure we’re stocked with, underlining preparedness, bullet-pointing stats and risks. He takes it deadly serious, scoring through charts with a marker, leaving thick black checks. I poke at Jack when he starts to drowse; he plumes his brows over spare me eyeballs and is partial to a punctuating fart in his school chair. But there’ll be moments even he’s struck sober. The last meeting Dad presented us both with a first-aid kit, a sturdy box with a cleated lid – he lined the contents up on the lawn, an audit of casualties, a breakdown of how to salve and stitch. In mine there were sanitary napkins nested in the gauze: he’d thought of everything.

  Tonight Dad passes out maps of our unit, our yard, with every path blocked out, a walk-through of arrows barbed, emphatic in felt. He’s copied them out by hand – so I can see the tremors where his wrist hit what ifs, where the outline’s jarred by knowledge. It’s cost him, to think his way through these plans. I never enter a building now without scoping the exit points. The supermarket is the worst, all the till bleeps ticking up to a void packed with metal, great vents that hum with gravity. Staves of light, and joists that press on your mind. These are contingencies he knows about. I can see it in Dad’s map: what if point A plummeted, what if you fled to B and it coursed down. And we know too, as we watch him smooth his diagrams out, tap on sites of shaky safety with an index. We know about the seesaw, the splinter of angles where you brace yourself, the myth of shelter under doorframes. We know about the pitch of surfaces, handholds. Nothing is a shield. We know about glass – we know it careens at you in jerks, until your freckles are lit up, red studded. We know about the world capsizing and everyone floundering, no help, no help at all. Dad rolls out his map like it’s a kind of guarantee. But we know what we’ve seen. We know the whole world is paper.