Devil's Trumpet

by Tracey Slaughter

  Still, it’s something to let Dad coach us through his plan, to pick it out with our feet. We navigate round his escape routes, halt when told, Dad bullying us with a whistle. He wears it permanently now, on a cord round his neck. Hell’s teeth, mutters Jack. I should have bloody throttled you with that thing when you first came home with it. But we stick to Dad’s diagram, inside and out. Remember the base-boards buckling, plaster streaming from the stud. Remember when the fenceline was all claws. Jack and I play it up, do little one-twos on the exit-routes Dad’s charted.

  We’ve done it before, down this path, Jack and I: a slow dance with collapse.

  I think about the route through my house as I left it, the steps that I can’t ever take back. I think about the blood I trailed outside, in Jack’s grasp. The track of evidence. He’s never said a thing. And I don’t have to worry about the neighbour who saw me load my case into the boot that day: she’s dead now.

  if instructed to vacate the building, follow

  the evacuation procedures

  Today the old girl from three doors down is trailing at the end of the driveway. Her cardi is mangy and her floral nightie dangles into her gumboots. She looks at the tarmac, still forked in a wide black crack, takes two steps in her loose wellies, then shuffles back again. She is holding a birdcage, dithering.

  I go out to her.

  Mrs D?

  Her head has a teeny rattle on her neck. The skein of her pegged hair is silver and scant. Her pearly eyes tremor in their deep tan creases.

  Oh, I didn’t want to bother you.

  She looks up the road then, and hitches one side of her nightie, like she intends to wobble off. The bars bump her tiny shins, poking from their rubber boots. I can see a crisscross of impact in her old skin. But then she steadies herself on the letterbox, holds out the cage.

  It’s featherweight, the base a sun-baked lime, the spokes bowed and thin. It’s trimmed with entertainments, a spangled mirror, a ribbon looping on a pecked seed bell. The newsprint lining is fresh, only punctuated lightly with shit. But the bird is dead. It’s lying on its back, the tiny lemon skull on a tilt. There are delicate ridges in the skin of its sealed eyelids. Its claws curl, unbearably frail. The downy trim on its chest shifts in the faint touch of easterly. But it is gone.

  You see I’m not sure, she says. I thought, he might be . . . but then, I didn’t feel quite right saying. You don’t want to be in the wrong, do you? Just imagine that. So I thought, if I kept him for a few more days.

  I look at her.

  Do you think that would be all right, she says. To keep him just a few more days. I didn’t want to be bothering you. But I thought you might know.

  I can hear her dentures give a soft click as her mouth trembles. She works to stop it with a lurch of her pale tongue. She taps at the cage, her own twig fingers curled, gives a near soundless tweet.

  Pretty boy.

  Mrs D. I think . . . I think the kindest thing to do is . . . tuck him up. Somewhere nice.

  I’ve got a little camphor box. On my dresser. I could keep him in there. You’re right. It’s very soft. He’d like it. It’s got a blue Chinese lining, you know, with all those willow sort of trees.

  No, I mean. I mean, yes, we could pop him in there if you liked. But then we’d have to put him . . . down in the ground somewhere. Pick a patch of sun. Or under one of your fruit trees. We’d have to . . . dig a little space. Make a bed for him. Then, you know, cover him up. Wrap him up safe, then just tuck him in. We’ll make it nice. I promise.

  She nods then. That’s what I thought you’d say.

  The sag of her cardi pockets has a gravy trim. Flannelette roses poke out the knit olive rib. There’s toothpaste smudged on her collar, a daub of sky blue, and the milky top-button wobbles in the skin of her neck, loose. So I know she is crying. Just one small iota of tear though, an offwhite trickle.

  He was the apple of my eye, she says. And he got through the whole thing. All the business. The shaking. And the shocks. I thought he’d be a goner, nearly every time one hit, to begin with. He used to have such a tizz. You wouldn’t believe it, the palaver inside his cage. The jolly caterwauling. One night half his plumes flying out. I said, now look you little so-and-so, you’ve got to pipe down or you’ll be starkers, the rate you’re moulting. And what blinking use is a bald bird. I told him, look I’m just an old bird too, and if I can stick it out then you can. And he listened, you know. He really did. He still got all flustered – he’d do it before they were coming, have a wee tiff, so you see, I’d know, like an alarm – but then he’d simmer down. I don’t know what I’ll do now. How’ll I know when it’s happening without him to warn me.

  There is a tiny opening of beak, a dot of tongue, rose-white and rigid. I stare at the jointed pale feet, their helpless crimp. The feathers are traced with thin black rills at his hood. I don’t think I can do it.

  But it’s the old woman who gives up and clucks, a good round of boohoos, while I pat her back. Against my t-shirt I feel her repeat to herself there there. There there.

  But where?

  Ounces of soft wing and hollow bone.

  place the other hand on top of the first

  and interlace your fingers

  It happens when only Jack’s left with you.

  You’re not sure if it’s the earth contracting, so you watch the pattern of the carpet slipping. Then the aftershock wanes, and the tightening’s left in your womb.

  He stands you up, amidst slow yanks of muscle.

  The carpet is stilled now, under a thick haul of blood.

  Hell’s teeth, he keeps muttering. I’m no expert, but this is more than monthly, right?

  But you won’t say it. You’re bent around the secret. You’re trying not to spill. But Jack’s face knows.

  Is your dad in on this?

  You can only twist no, before the next pang.

  He shakes his head, stares at the carpet. The blood is real. The words aren’t needed.

  Right. We’re heading straight to A&E then. Hear me?

  But you won’t. You’ve been camped out at the hospital for weeks, watching the injured still red-lining. That’s a place for emergency, for people like your husband. Not for you. So Jack’s got no choice but to let you stagger into boots, help you steer a bloody path out. Thread the dark with a torch where you aim your joint stumbles. The tarmac’s made of crack and quag. Your trunk is trying to split you open. He bundles you on, and thumps on the side of the portaloo when it’s occupied.

  Greater need, he bellows. Greater need. A young bloke flails out, pissed, into the torchlight, clutches his belt, starts up, whatever cunt. But when he sees the state of you, he heads for shadow.

  Jack lights the cubicle, pushes you in. You try to close the door, but he stands guard, spotting you. Good girl, there you go. You try to talk back, but your trunk curbs and burns. Your voice is coming loose, your head pushed between your knees. You’re all right, there you go. You’re all good. There you are love. Then his voice and the pain and the light overturn. Until your baby is empty.

  Then cold is echoing off the plastic, and it is such a comical scuffle, Jack trying to pull you back to rights, rigging your clothes, tapping your cheek, stay with me, good girl, while the whole booth rocks. He holds you jammed and pumps water one-handed at you, and your head does nothing but bounce against his palms. Everything has sobbed between your legs. So you say nothing when he braces you and works the flush. A reflex. You can’t stop it. You can only stand together and listen to the blue howl, its chemical scouring. Your ribs will be hollowed, everafter, by that automated scourge.

  Oh God, Jack mutters. I didn’t mean. Oh, Holy Mother.

  But you shake the head that lolls against him and can only whisper, Thank you.

  He doesn’t say another word.

  leave in a calm orderly manner

  I scrape a notch into the backyard soil. I can only make it shallow – that’ll do, Mrs D squawks if I dig too thick. She makes me fuss wit
h the dark bed, tamping the trowel to get it comfy. I’d like to make it cosy for him. She directs me to tuck him into the right patch of dirt, left a bit, no over, to whisk out any muck she doesn’t like, twigs, a beetle that might pester him. I’ve wound him in a petticoat she fished from a drawer, buttery, with moth-coloured stains. The sunlight catches in its synthetic. We have to unroll him three times, give her one more little tickle, before she lets me put him away, a soft bump in his chiselled box. Then Mrs D fondles its eastern trees, waiting over the hole, where I hold her.

  If your dad were here, he’d have a prayer, she says. He’s got a lovely way with the Lord words, your dad. I don’t suppose any of them have stuck, from listening?

  Our Father . . . you took away the walls of the world.

  But I do want my father. I want somebody who knows the words that end in God, that end in comfort and answers, amen. If he was here, I wouldn’t stand in the background muttering, wouldn’t watch him go through his little ceremonies and scoff. I’d shut up. I’d let be. I’d say a prayer, because what the hell else?

  Our Lord, whose loving hand hath given us all that we sit in the wreckage of, bless and keep him and don’t let the earth spit him up.

  keep pumping the chest until help takes over

  I can’t get my dreams to knock the city down. When I sleep there is so much still standing. The stones climb each other’s dark blocks neatly, and hold history up in a strong Gothic grid. In the CBD the walls stretch glass to the sky, their joints float, the clouds kept tight in bright high-rise panels. It all looks real. It all looks lasting and solid. Like the concrete will be under my next step. Like I’ll walk through a door and there will be shelter.

  Waking crushes it. You can walk out, looking for the rebuild, looking for evidence of the new. But the view along any compass point is still gilded with smash, sunk with wounds. All our street blocks chipped by God. A foliage of wire and plastered clutter, like something the Lord is ready to winch into a skip. Faces blinking out from pasteboard hovels, the air still dusted with fine-grade terror. Our houses are fibrolite and honeycombed glass, blotches of duct tape holding on hinges of tarp that keep our senses crackling, their fine spackles of movement crunching in our sleep. The earth, sounding the wrong note deep in itself, could jerk at any moment, tug our strings. Everything webbed with flight-paths of grit that keep lifting and knitting the loneliness. Hunks that still crumble. Buried things shimmying to light. It’s too late, the buildings have showed their bones.

  I walk past the hotel because somehow that’s what you find yourself doing, adrift past what’s gone. Staying. Staring. The front of it has cracked off clean. It’s like the dollhouse my father built me once, the front face unhinged. They haven’t bothered salvaging much. In some units it’s all still installed. The bedspread the colour of flax. The IV line of the lamp cord. In the bathrooms, tiny headstones of soap.

  I think of his body, on the days of our meetings, how he could barely get out of a doorframe before I’d backed him down, hijacked zips, primed the noose of his tie, pulled his laughter down on top of me.

  The thing about a rented room is that you remember what happens in it – almost as if you’ve paid to stop time, to seal memory. You set the blinds to a different shutter-speed. The hours can’t get through. You only filter now in, sun crossed with the white sheets, the weft of his skin as you slide his belt buckle clear of it. The scurfy ashtray is a chalice. Everything else dims – traffic, cicadas, promises. You take your dress off too seriously, so he scoffs, and you whack him one, fucking behave. The ceiling fan doesn’t let anything down but heat. There’s the tenor of next door’s TV, the curtains – because you need curtains plus blinds, there’s so much to block out, the hotelier knows it – toughened with maximum sun. You love the wistful end-of-stock wall-print, some monochrome horizon where a nice couple kiss; you love the tree of cutlery, love the misfit plastic flowers. There’s a bible in the end-table, like a novel for the half-blind. You love the snagged quilt, fingernailed by so many inmates – if you lean into its fibres there’s a whiff of their salt. There’s the hum of the tenants on your right, pulling something equally sleazy in their chenille hideaway. There’s the billow of him, kicking off all the covers, before the fabric melts to your skin. There’s your follow-through lick along tendons as he cranes his head back over the ledge of the bed. You think this is bliss, and that you can have it forever.

  On the misshapen pavement outside, it’s gone in a blink. The smallprint of all the walls is torn out, trailing. The plaster is fleecy, shot with wires. You can stare into the hallways, where the carpet is marrow. Hatches of roof feed in the sky. There’s no crescent on the sign, no neon flash of vacancy. It doesn’t matter what the hotel was called – it’s not named anything now except DO NOT ENTER, a notice handwritten on cardboard, twined to hurricane wire. We used to laugh and call it the Luminol Motel – if you sprayed it God knows what would have showed up, the walls an irradiated frieze of human splashes. It was a sick joke, our own special crime scene. We giggled like idiots, picturing spurts of DNA, unit 17 a carousel of chromosomes. I wormed up under the kingsize shroud, my hair pricking out in a nimbus of static. He just pried me wetter, not caring where we left evidence.

  Now it’s the building that looks like it’s ready to crack its own sick joke, level more of us. The lobby end it’s humpbacked, but still four storeys, with huge chunks of sky punched out of its height, so it looks on stilts, just waiting for the final wobble. If I get as close as I can to the façade I can stare through to the front reception, the light still dangling from a tactless chandelier. Room please – I could still ding the silver bell for attention. I could wait for service, watching the circuits of tropical fish in their tank beside the counter, their spiny fluttering fins. I could still pick up the key.

  listen for official warnings

  My mother used to build me huts out on the lawn. An expedition in sunlight and linen. She’d help me lug a trail of sheets out to a clearing, she’d range out deckchairs and drape around a home. I’d lie in the hollow, rayed by cushions, watching billows. I’d scold and cuddle the doll in my grip. A sky above me coated with softness. A candy-striped ceiling that couldn’t hurt anyone.

  Tonight I crawl in under Dad’s green tarp. It’s been too long now, the chill is getting permanent again, too many nights are tipped with frost. I can’t see how he can last another season. From the unit I stare at the stake of his shelter, its bent scale, its slack lines, and fear it will be lethal. He’s weathered too much. He’s packed the thing with every precaution he can think of, wraps himself up in insulating layers. You look like you’re trekking to the effing Pole, I tease him, use his silence to try to pressure him to decamp. But he won’t hear of leaving, he swears he’ll stick it out.

  So I just lie with him in his lightweight vault.

  He holds my hand while we listen to the wind test its ripples, the night stretch its ropes. Traffic grinds the turf beneath us. Cargo trucks shiver the ground-sheeted grass. The land’s spine is down there, and ours can only listen. It still pays to listen.

  I think it’s time I tell you, Dad says. But then he cuts himself off.

  The quiet goes on so long I bump his coat-sleeve, almost a punch at his arm’s thick swaddling.

  I’m too freezing to wait for a prologue, I tell him. I rub my icy shins together. Get to the point.

  His voice coughs cold. It’s a bark of chilled breath that stays above us.

  You need to know something. Jack’s notes.

  Yeah.

  Well, his wife.

  What. Dad. Spit it out.

  She. Well. It’s just.

  What.

  They’re to no one. Well, no – they’re to his wife. But she isn’t.

  Isn’t coming home? Or what?

  She’s gone.

  Dad’s voice can’t offer more.

  I lie there with that fact in me. All Jack’s postcards go to no one. I think of him crouching over their images, his grin as h
e fills me in on backstory. That day, he tells me, oh my, that date she was wearing a dress that could make your eyes hurt. The careful capitals of his lettering. Bridges, blossoms, tramlines, glimpses of her moving past a clocktower, vanished in the sheen of a street. We went for a walk and I swear the river nearly turned its track just to keep alongside her.

  Dad and I listen to a gale brush the tent wall.

  I think it’s better just to leave him.

  Yes. We can leave him, Dad answers. I don’t have the heart.

  The complicated padding of his weather gear polishes the night as he shakes his head against the groundsheet. There’s a dog a few doors down that must feel an aftershock toying with the end of his chain.

  There are things, Dad finishes, that don’t need to be brought to light.

  If the wind unsettled the huts my mother built me, the sheets would only graze your face. You’d still have time to scatter out, squealing. You’d have time to bunny-hop back and save your babies. If the chairs started tilting, they’d warn you with a lightweight clatter. But their collapse would only sound like summertime.

  if you are able, make your own way directly

  There are days at the hospital when we always seem to be shifting him, like we’ve never made it out of that stairwell. We seem to have been winding his body through halls, and tests, and lights, and wires since the start. Then there are times when the stillness sets in, nights high, storeys deep.