Devil's Trumpet

by Tracey Slaughter

  And then I find the entrance to the last hotel.

  There are only a handful of tall buildings left in this city. Hardly anywhere left with a high-enough ledge.

  I start climbing it for no reason.

  The columns are a trick, their faux marble tilted, waiting for their colossal moment to capsize. The floor is a rink of leakage, glass and potholes. There’s a statue whose Greek face is buried, the bloom of rainwater discolouring her skull. There are doorways that arch and bell, in rows, the sounds of near-night bloated through them. Visitations of spotlight and headwind. It takes a long time for a building to die.

  Futile notices are pinned to the wall, banning inhabitation. Someone has fired a stream of missiles at them. Keep Out tape is balled up, barring nothing at the base of a stairwell. Graffiti recoils around the oxidised walls, tags slung high on a brazen axis or tinier scribbles of quiet claim or goodbye – not the tenants the place was built for. They like the fact that the quake has let them in, leave initials, hearts and fuckyous.

  In one hotel room all the chairs lie on their backs, a queue for a cinema staring skyward. In another some prowlers have played a game of throwing them at the wall: there are three whose black legs have pierced through the plaster and hang suspended there, with the names of the champions. In the next room there’s an unaccountable pile of kettles and irons ringed in a corner, a white nest where rodents have journeyed along their cords. Turned to the wall there’s a stack of shattered headboards.

  In the dining room instalments of cutlery are waxed with filth, still wait around flinted plates. A couple of napkins are shaped like a demi-swan. Headshots of stone are randomised around the tables, dust and pigeon shit icing the feast. The frilled wedge of a pie, the black curl of a sandwich, laced with blight. A milk bottle stands by the coffee machine, swollen to a thick balloon. Something stands caramelised in a glass, the stippling of mould, seal-skinned, a floating umber. The toxic stillness of it, final and aquatic. Cake forks crisscrossed on a fetid serviette. The standalone algae of the fridge.

  There’s a corridor of tremble, a corridor of seepage. Everywhere the detritus has turned gossamer, gotten a kind of flaking shimmer to it. Nothing’s lacklustre, the waste displayed in petals, loose farewells of web. You can’t fault the groves of rot, the damp that has honeyed everything. Buds unhook from the couches. Tables ooze, posing for the droves of flies. Bathtubs snake with slime. Everything is veiled and blossoming. And I stand there and remember my delusions: that we’d rise from the wreck that we’d caused all around us to somehow drift up here to a happy ending. The honeymoon suite. The bridal wallpaper has turned forensic, and the luxe wool carpet is branched with light. Big magnolias of mould, thick as jewellery, are the new stars on the vaulted ceiling. The quilt is rewrapped with spored trim, congealed spills. The pillows are dewy, ulcerated. Feathers of rot etch everything.

  I walk to a brink. There’s a split that’s in ascendance through the wall near the king bed, jagged with moonlight and chill. It’s wide enough to feed through one of Jack’s postcards: I could take the one he’s trusted me to post out my pocket, let its delusion spin and drop. Close your eyes, write my name, my lover once pencilled on the monographed paper when he left me sleeping at the hotel. I think about waking up, filling the page with the sound of him, the ache of his name in my sternum.

  Perhaps I climbed up here for a reason. Perhaps I came up here to meet him.

  Once, I lay in the hotel waiting, with the white sheet pulled up over my face.

  Storeys of cold call up from the cracks. Close your eyes, write my name.

  I think of a wedding dress, passed through the gap, wired through the sunlight in pearly plastic, rescued, an angel craned down into rescuing hands.

  When my smoke is lit, I lean into the plaster, breathe it out through the hairlined wall.

  There’s light through the roots of the floor, a series of debased doors. The marshes of the carpet melt and mislead. But I hew past broken and cabled things. Girders laundered by blackening rain. Disappear into the sacked hotel.

  stay calm and position yourself in a safe place

  How do you pick up a city, a house, a small room? Jack does it piece by handled piece, watching for what’s left. Because it’s not all rubble to him. It’s not all crushed. Sometimes there’s an object, still whole, or a shred that’s enough to build a memory on. A cold token. And if you can turn it in your palm for long enough, it grows warm.

  Tonight he’s pulled the chairs close to the house, propped a munted little table out and spread its surface. At first I think it’s another jigsaw he’s salvaged from the berm – he’s taken to carting them into the hospital lately, shaken pieces that are never complete. He lays them out on my husband’s wheeled tray-table, chats away to him like its teamwork. And from time to time, I imagine my husband does blink down, watch the fingers sort the sky from the stones, snap together the shattered trim of a fenceline. Jack will even lend him credit for a find, for a join. Jesus, he’ll say, and give his latest fit a palm-heel whack to cement its linkage, you’re an architect, mate. A bloody architect.

  But what he’s scored today is not a jigsaw. It’s slides, a whole clear sack clicking with transparencies. So he’s on a stepladder to hitch up an old sheet on the back wall of our unit as a makeshift screen. He’s loading the cartridge – he’s had the projector for weeks now, a plastic wheel he fished out of untold trash in a skip, couldn’t believe his luck when it switched on. But he only found the stash of slides this morning. How’s that for meant to be, he grins at me. He’s ringing the carousel with them. He hits the squares he holds up with his torch, so the tiny figures flare, like signatures scratched on the night. He takes a squint, reloads the chamber, fiddling at the order.

  So the three of us sit in the backyard. There’s a bit of a let-down when the light spits out, goes dud to start, and Jack does a dance round the grass with his set-up of plugs. Dad offers him a weary caution about wet ground and electricals not mixing, but Jack won’t hear of it, keeps jigging at his daisy-chain, restless – then acts up a fizzzzzzzz! like he’s taken a decent jolt. My father is not impressed. He makes to exit – he’s jumpy enough with his chair settled here, in proximity to brick. But I shake my head, put a hand out to keep him, grizzling a little, on his stately mahogany. With his sleep roll packed round him, so close to the house, I don’t have to tell him what I wish. There’ve been nights when he’s almost drifted off, so close, stretched careful on the couch. Then a twitch takes his spine. And he makes for his shelter, the taped glass ticking as he leaves. Now he huffs, but stays in place on his chair, stagily disgruntled.

  And then the sheet turns golden.

  Jack looks on, like they’re breathing things he’s picked from the rubble.

  There’s a woman, standing with her palms cupped round her globed trunk, cradling a bell of blue cloth. Her face a blush of plenty.

  There’s a man in overalls, holding aloft the hood of a car in a stream of blown-out smoke.

  There’s a set of old hands, fanning something they’ve spaded from soil.

  There’s a toddler, spot-lit in naps and black sunglasses, giving a milk-teeth shriek behind a steering wheel.

  There’s a girl, suspended in the backyard blaze of a sky, heels joy-kicked and hair a nimbus. Her squeal is launched from the mat of a tramp – you can feel the chords the springs are playing. Her ribs are bundled, exultant with shout. Beyond her laughter, an unwavering city.

  And not a single memory is ours.

  But the images rattle. Nothing falls, nothing leans. Nothing gets translated into dust. Nothing is lost, and we sit and watch it. I hear Dad sigh, and we blink in this radiance, where nothing dissolves and nothing drops. More than once Jack has to pat the machine until the next memory jumps. But it doesn’t matter if there’s a wait. It doesn’t matter that nothing belongs to us.

  Some nights we look up, surprised the stars are not broken.

  some facts about her home town

  1
.The shoe-store owner finished at five, slid shut the thick copper screen and bolted it, then walked to the station, where he waited for the evening express. He didn’t so much leap in front of it as take a last understated step. She watched him from the platform, dropping, in his clean shoes.

  2.There wasn’t a speck of blood left on her blue uniform, but she dreamed there was – tangelo, collateral.

  3.There were three swings at the only park. She could still thread her legs through the scooped black rubber one, meant to balance toddlers. She liked its afterschool heat, and where the buckle jutted.

  4.Bananas crated in thick green plastic, and avocados with lizard skin, went softly black as she walked home from maths, calculating their four o’clock drizzle of fruit flies.

  5.An older girl at high school with orange hair told her she could use two tampons, demonstrating on fingers cocked like a gun. She had baby-oiled thighs and an eyetooth missing. Her knuckles didn’t love or hate anyone.

  6.For eight days after they installed her braces, her upper lip would get snagged when she smiled. She had to manually un-grin, picking her cupid’s bow off the sharp black equipment.

  7.The pub was by the church was by the dump was by the graveyard was by the TAB was by the servo on the route to the station.

  8.The sun zig-zagged everything.

  9.A younger girl at high school was carrying somebody’s baby. Phys Ed broke her water and she stood in the gymnasium, blinking, still in line to scale the climbing net.

  10.The station sold the kind of apple pies that turned to a kelpy gel green and got priced down in the afternoon, two for one. She liked to pad her tongue around their syrupy lumps when no one on the platform was watching. It felt especially good if an easterly was blowing up the tracks from the south, just hard enough to wrinkle the sugary paper bag cupped round her chin.

  11.The frilled ring of cream was dotted on with such finesse. She liked to comb it with her fine-wire braces. A light artistic nuzzling.

  12.From the top of the climbing net she could see the monument, through wide, hinged windows that needed a special appliance to wind them out. She loved the silver pirouette of sound cycling her collarbone when she was window monitor.

  13.The monument itemised a white tower of dead men, and if she was lucky a boy-in-a-car would drive her up there later to fingerfuck.

  14.The statue on top was a brave rubble youth wearing a bayonet and graffiti.

  15.When she was little, she’d bought new shoes from the man in the suicidal shoe store. They were red patent and the clasp was a ladybird whose edges beetled her left arch till it bled. She hopscotched around on the good one, scabbed, but still sort of happy with its brand-new clack.

  16.There is not enough sound for what is happening to him.

  17.In the TAB the radio was always tuned to brown loneliness. Pens hung on slack abdications of string. The old blokes smoked their wins and losses.

  18.The maths test asks her to tally up stories about two trains coming from the west and east, and if she blinks at the right miles-per-hour will they pass before she can stop her pencil braking nowhere in a long graphite drag?

  19.The older girl borrows her blue pen, but for the whole test-hour only works it into the asterisks she inks in her knuckles, an architecture of black ants and roadkill hearts.

  20.Her piano lessons take place twice weekly through the lace drapes of an old lady’s villa. The keys are cold and stick with musty semitones. Wisps of the old lady’s thinning hair silver the flip-top stool’s damp tapestry.

  21.In the graveyard there was a woodcutter clipped to a tombstone. It didn’t take much breeze to make his milled axe go whirring.

  22.He quits the edge with a metronome click. Her splashed eye pinpoints a grey suit’s collision.

  23.The vodka the boy at the monument will give her will tip her half unconscious fast. There will be a warm accompaniment, elastic and thumbs. The honey-coloured vinyl, close-up, will be noisy and pucker with topstitched anointing.

  24.In the pub toilet stall, the older girl will teach her, two-fingered again, to jukebox her meal up. They’ve just shared the best battered plate of her life. The bowl will be ringed with Fisherman’s Basket.

  25.She will rock her head back on the baby swing and think chainlink things about sunlight and blowflies and time.

  26.The boy will climb the plinth with a rattle of spray-can to glaze the young soldier with a curse. She will have no choice but to wipe her thighs on the seatbelts. There is nothing else.

  27.The tapestry is sturdy but sanded by musical arses. It has maidens in long faded robes, holding apples and leashes with doves on them and harps. She thinks of the pie slush unplucked from her teeth, the sly tune stuck in their sugary guitar-strings.

  28.In the eight days she couldn’t smile she went to the shoe store to ask for a job. She handed the owner a pink sleeve of wipe-clean reasons why she would be ideally suited to kneeling on the buff carpet fitting shoes over straggles of chopped-off mocha pantyhose. She smiled as she modelled how good she’d be at fondling reptilian heels.

  29.It wasn’t her fish-hooked lip that stopped him hiring her. It was the look of the older girl outside waiting, with her rep, the bird she flipped passers-by, the maryjane biroed in stipples across her army surplus satchel.

  30.There is not enough sound. And then there is a skyful. Engines of screaming, miles of siren. When she hyperventilates someone makes her breathe into the bag, so her panic tastes like apples.

  31.The old lady plays piano at his funeral. The town lines up for it out of nosiness. It’s not in the church, though, but in the gymnasium, where even a symphony plonks like chopsticks.

  32.On the other side of the monument someone has carved the names of girls who got knocked up there.

  33.There’s a photograph of him, at the service, looking teenage in a jungle of khaki sadness. Behind him, like some prop from M*A*S*H, is the shady complication of a camo net.

  34.At the servo, she gets a job filling up wagons, popping hoods, threading in the spiny dipstick. Hoping the cute boys case out her arse as she funnels down the quarts of oil. Swishing the frothy brush out the bucket, to nudge little insects off the metal frontier.

  35.She’s not in the wrong swing when the younger girl brings her baby down. She’s up on the tall one, watching her feet trail in and out the concave bowl of bark. The baby in the rubber seat is lemon and sulky and wobbly, and his mother can hardly be bothered to push.

  36.If there’s sunlight coming from east and west, her feet dangle for how many miles? The chain sings a long diesel equation.

  37.She thinks of her red shoes, one foot stretched out, burning in air. In the new shoebox he’d packed up her battered ones, so she could carry them home from the shop, like a too-old secret, held just between the two of them.

  warpaint

  It’s your basic pub accommodation – walls pockmarked a candy-mint. Chunk bashed out the blue Formica bedside table, forked on four metal legs. A sagging old sash window that won’t lever up, a clapped-out single under it. Bunk beds door-side, low slung aluminium hammocks. I test out both, but they whine like a bitch. Teen bedspreads read Angel Bait! Don’t Cross: Queen of Hearts! Two towels, green-grey, gone stiff with sun, a stub of plastic-wrapped fern-print soap propped on them. The blonded goddess on the bedspread pattern has thick green satisfied eyelashes and a smirk that looks cuntstruck at herself. Universal Girl Power! Kiss Command! Her wink triggers a pink graffiti trail of mini hearts.

  I won’t even get to bags the single, and rib Bruz all night about his stocky arse squealing the bunks. He asked the owners for separate rooms tonight. He’s bringing his new girlfriend.

  He tells me I’ll like her. I’m prepared to try.

  Apricot blanket on a locker, punctuated by moths. Rectangle of nothing-to-see-here mirror glued to pastel wall. Creak of doors up and down the hall, but somehow no footsteps. A navy-blue-and-white-striped bin, plastic-lined for sicking in. Bruz could fill it and then some, after a
good binge. Pirouette of hair crimped into floorboard dust. Bolt-on sink with a brown mouth stamped Royal Doulton. Out the sash, an acre of corrugated roof, and off its stretch the town – wharf, red cones, jacaranda, Liquorland, big fucking deal. The fire escape’s a joyride over split-level tin, strap-on steel-punched tread and wonky rails like bits of fairground knocked off some old attraction and clipped on at random to the vintage pub. Downstairs in the bar, above our stage, there’s a game on the wall called Chase the Ace!, the whole fifty-two pack framed with loser cards purple-dotted, mostly bad picks of diamonds. And a cartoon strip of three wise men bringing gifts of hard grog to a Mary who’s no damn virgin.

  His guitar gets your blood up. All these years and that’s still true.

  Fuck gently weeping. Bruz gets going on a solo and it can make you moan from where you’re frozen, right down into old pain.

  And who wouldn’t want that?

  But I doubt his new girlfriend has any. Bruz backs the van up on the kerb, ready to unload gear, and she climbs out the cab. Little sugarcane bleat of laugh. Patent heels that should come with a warning. And what’s worse, she tries to help unload, stabbing about in the lethal things, humping stands and amps. Up on the shonky stage she teeters way too close, unstacks bins, tries fishing out cables and mics. I’m in my rights to give her a stormy look. One false step, her stilettos could skewer me.

  At least Bruz picks up on it. ‘Babe, we’ve got kind of a system. How ’bout you just go get us some drinks, eh.’

  To her credit, she totters off. Her hair is a palette of over-dyes, jet to blue to astronomical blonde, and her bralet is a fierce piece of scaffolding. Flag of black silk sketched into a see-through shrug. Bullet hole of lipstick, dark clouds of blush. If Bruz and I had ever had a daughter, she’d be this age. Warning: Pout Power!

  Her epic fingernails make shouting us a drink difficult – she can hardly grip one glass, let alone weave back with three of them. But she pulls the trick off. ‘There you go,’ Bruz grins at me from where he’s crouched onstage, daisy-chaining the monitors. ‘Get some of that into you. Bit of the old waipiro.’ I can’t resist the old shithead’s wink.