Devil's Trumpet

by Tracey Slaughter

  There was a rumour that if you turned left on Highway 6 and followed the black-bodied pines and the black-bodied pines and the black-bodied pines until sudden phantoms of white stock started appearing in the moonlit fields and the fenceposts whirred along the glitter of the gouged-out industrial lake you’d reach another small town. And maybe you could live there, once you drove past the freezing works and headstones and quarries and smelter and boarded-up Four Squares and piers. Or in other small towns beyond that. Beyond even that. But that was just a rumour.

  The one about the girl whose lunchbox got done over on the school bus so a tampon string trailed from her sandwich and she got photographed at interval taking a big unthinking fluffy bite. The one about the boys who wank into the vats at Kentucky Fried, crispy coated spermatozoa in the foam, so the poultry gets a genital crunch. The one about the retarded kid who the boys train to lizard the aisles of the school bus peering in oblivious blinks up the squeaking girls’ skirts. The one about the Mr Whippy man, who gets girls to blow him to the Greensleeves jingle in exchange for unlimited snowfreeze (taste buds demolished with icy sediment). The one about the girl who hung herself from chains in the corner of her stepfather’s workshop. The one about the baby who was found looped inside her. The one about the girl who got cells inside her cheek scraped out for a slide in biology class and when the teacher projected the microscope up onto the pull-down screen everyone could make out the flicker of semen, tadpoles travelling in neon squiggles. The rumour it was yours.

  There is a rumour that the stray lasted seven arrows, circling circling circling. The seagulls think they are prize fighters, but there is a rumour that the dump got sundered, a buzzing requiem of feathers. When you are told these rumours, it’s the boys who tell you. It’s boys who hold the title. And you are expected to laugh. Go on, cough it up.

  None of my friends tell me any rumours. I try to stay close to their bony congregation. I try to monitor their giggly amnesia. I try to smell the truth in the mellow arrangements of their hair. The symbolism of their earrings and ankle-socks. There is a rumour that the guy with the glass eye who runs the pub likes to pop it out and slide it up inside his women. I would like to do that too. Guide that gaze up through the dark slip of their misdeeds, find out where you’ve been. But there’s just the daily cellophane sound of them talking. Unwrapping nothing. They don’t have a word to say about you.

  There is a rumour about the girl whose body got snagged in the swollen creek. She was snared for a week in the rickety debris, still trying to signal with the limbs’ black click. Face in residence under the surface. Fingernails miscarried in the crooked trap of wood. There is a rumour of her branched and everlasting beckoning. If anyone is listening.

  The one about the party I go to, once I believe the rumours. The one where I’m on my back on the stone-cold beach. The one where I skull, inhale, spin. Thorn-apple, witches’ weeds, moonflowers, hell’s-bells. It hardly matters. The party after that. And the party after that one. The one where my dress is crippled (past the black pines). The one where the cassette deck crows (on the cusp of manmade lake). The one where I’m lying denuded on a ute bed while catcalls root for the strokes I’ve lost count of (fenceposts knocked into blankness, one after another). The one where your name is the wound that runs the centre of my voice. The one where the future without you is gooseflesh. The one where I stumble back up from the gravel to the barn, missing a clutch of hair, the sight from my right eye, a small town and a shoe, and mutter to somebody, ‘I think I’ve just been raped.’ But everyone laughs. Because they’ve all heard the rumours about me.

  god taught me to give up on people

  She walks in wearing this dirty, heaven-sent dress, and stops to sway a few seconds by the jukebox, although it isn’t playing any surprises. Turning all see-through on her thighs, the skirt is a calico of scrubbed-out flowers. One of God’s leftovers, seventh day. Trust a smalltown Man of God to have a line of pale, fuckable daughters – she was the last in the aisle, where their blond group trailed to the Lord, itty-bitty to tallest. Muttering, head down, I always used to long to reach out, twitch her white bow open so I could see something worth all that throat-clearing praise. Back then they would have brushed out her hair, but you could see the buckled blonde where pigtails had dented it. She bobbed around with the velvet sock for the offering smelling like popcorn and patent maryjanes. I never sucked in her father’s words like that whiff. Straight hymn of hopscotch and purity.

  I was with her three days ago, but she’s got no recall. Up at the counter she smacks down a glass and says, the Lord is my let down. He maketh me walk to the bar. There’s something grisly at the base of her voice, and her eyes look repainted without stripping yesterday’s off. She tines her nails back on her scalp – there’s no holy water to rinse those dark roots. In the hotel room she’d crosslegged on the green quilt, repeated what I wanted, a bad act testing a microphone, check, breathe, check. Her bra, with its grey mechanics of lace, smelt like turpentine. She still has teenage knees, but a store-bought blink she aims at me limpid with liquor. I listen to another black hit click into the jukebox, a hoop she starts crooning to – litany of smoke and real old news.

  dorm

  He’d turn up at my dorm room, having woken in the next strange bed. He’d still be too drunk to be subtle about it – he’d blunder our corridor, slurring for me, before his palm belted the door, and I kicked from bed, flicked the latch, and let his body tip in. He’d land on the carpet, muttering, prop himself back so the story could spill, his skull a dozy topple against my desk, knocking my essays slithering. He wouldn’t know the man. He’d just have come around, in a clinch, piled with limbs, off his face in some gully of bed. He wouldn’t stay. It still shocked him, to wake up nowhere, fucked and stripped. He’d bolt to me instead, break in the way I’d shown him, make a racket on the stairs with his wasted cartoon stealth. He’d talk me through the lead-in, pieces of street sign, dialogue, skin shots that all the drink had blitzed. He was so dazed with happy shame, dumbstruck with being touched, using my pages to clean out the blood that was gluey at his nostrils, or stuck once, going blacker, along the hem of his shirt. Sometimes the clothes that he’d grappled off the floor, half-lit, weren’t even his, yanked on, smelling backwards. And I tried not to want to load him on a bus out, as if there were a fare we could pay to go home to the high school where we’d held hands three years solid in smalltown boy–girl love. The bruise of smile on his split lip shone and shone. When he could stagger straight, he’d take me out to breakfast, we’d shovel something homely out a bakery warmer, and then passers-by would watch us on a park bench, trading alternate nuzzles of pastry out the soft mess in each other’s hands.

  What You Don’t Know

  We went to a hotel. You’d earned a deal through work – wife included, not the usual corporate bonus plan. You showed me the brochure, a gatefold of wide-angle rooms with models relaxed in them, couples on hourly hire reclined in a mock-up of love by the endless pool. We packed simply, didn’t say what we hoped to save by this glossy visit. Why would we need a retreat? The grounds were so clean the horizon left a chemical aftertaste. Nothing in the lobby was allowed to wilt and the staff were apparelled in seamless neutrals. I felt followed by their 360-degree smiles. The kind of sex expected by the suite didn’t come to us, but we tried, made do. Part-way through it didn’t seem workable, our two bodies jointed in the cream rental room, but we kept it up, handled each other to a low-key habit of come. I couldn’t close my eyes. They were still open when you scuffed my cheek with an afterthought of kiss that felt air-conditioned, got up half-mast to pat yourself down. Then you sat on the edge of the too-beige bed to read me the in-house menu. This is how you save a marriage. The booths for dinner were deodorised as coffins, and globes lit our meal with retro orange.

  I was so long gone. We’d left the boys alone in the house, so I thought of him there: drool trickling into the rough brocade of our guest pillows, leaning sideways into our spare ba
throom mirror to thumbnail a dark pore, jaw dissolved in strokes of heavy breath. Mapping our hallway with his palms as he shuffled, blinking, for a predawn piss, the cup of his marl jocks warmed and stiffened. (I could smell the cotton, front soured, I could feel the nudge of that half-dozing cock.) I’d left the rooms so straight all the angles ached. The whole place was rigged to catch his steps. When I got back I imagined it would be forensic, how I’d trace him, through the spaces I’d primed to catch his prints. All night the nerves between my thighs were shrill under the pastel quilt. If you had woken and rolled to me, the way the man in the brochure did, you would have been surprised I was so wet.

  *

  Sometimes it seems he’s in every picture of our son. I can’t turn pages without him recurring, a stowaway, a twin. They are drag-racing sleeping bags in silvery bashes up the hall, they are winching themselves from a roped-up pine to somersault the creek. They are small haloes of faces padded in parkas grinning at the spazz of sparklers, their fists zig-zagged with burn-time. They are crossdressed as chicks for a mufti-day stunt, their tough calves shredding my second-best pantyhose, my leftover eyeliner glued round their lids. I remember the twitch of his gun-shy lashes as I leaned in. My Revlon reversed around the liquid of his mouth – there was still Weetbix at the roots of his teeth. I know he was once a bed-wetter. I know his blood type. I once stood at a school camp holding a clipboard that listed him as a strong swimmer. I once beached him, recovery position, nursed his lips free of a black-sand belch. I know the password his family uses in case someone else needs to pick him up from school. Only two years ago I spoke it: he was shaky on the sick-bay bench, grey to the eardrums with shame and chuck. He’d capsized in science, hadn’t been able to scalpel the mouse, tweeze out its listed innards, its tiny paws spreadeagled on the ice tray with pins. He was the same the next year with the sheep’s heart, the aorta’s dark bubble – a sick classmate had put his finger in, wobbled it, gory, puppet-like. That was the end. I shouldered him across the carpark, steered him at my wagon, and gave him the code. He said, ‘I’m too old for that now, Irene.’ My first name, used by his mouth, the first time. ‘I’m way too old for that.’

  By the time we reached the hotel I knew that if I didn’t stop, my son would have to slice his childhood album through its ringbound spine. But I didn’t know the safety word.

  *

  The couple from the brochure were on the television, too. At the hotel, they had their own channel, beaming through a programme of local activities. The words had been removed from their mouths but everything mimed satisfaction, the kind of sleazy bliss that couples project when they’ve fogged their room successfully with eau de fuck and are heading out into the promo-ed landscape they’ve earned. They tampered with each other’s fingers while they ticked off the itinerary sheet. The long-shots tracked them through the complex wearing compatible outfits in a post-coital dusk. The voiceover, listing the highlights of the area, was a tenor croon I recalled from an eighties blind-date show. As a teen I’d had a crush on him, his come-on-downs issued through sponsored teeth, his crow’s feet neon in his faux lifesaving tan.

  We’d done the expected. We’d been down through the anodyne foyer to order a taxi for our first sightseeing outing. Perhaps it’s optical, the effect the lodge plans on a marriage – grounds to reception, everything looked so maintained and parallel. The staff stood sentry with their eco smiles. The lobby played a soundtrack of ringtones. We sipped something sedative, waiting in an alcove for our top-end lift. But the driver in his cockpit wasn’t tipped enough to narrate landmarks where we were headed. His indifference was constant in the rear-view, the tariff ticked past subsidised vistas. I could feel you tightening your lips, making a mental note of his substandard service.

  There is a hotel for everything. Back in our room your thumbs on my buttons tried out the positions of rehab. You tasted like your appetizer, a marinated kiss, overpriced, that couldn’t hope to fill me up.

  When we were out I’d sent the boys a dual postcard, although you’d tutted and told me off (and you were proved right: we did in fact make it home before the mail had a hope). The spiral racks were loaded with mandatory mountains and sheep in lush paddocks: I thought about their dark handfuls of heart under photo-bleached fleece. I chose the adrenaline shots, 3 for $2 – lean tourists in bodycon brights taking leaps into canyons, hog-tied to elastic. There was no room to write anything quotable. I said something mumsy and practical (check the elements, don’t forget to lock up) and watched the pen weaken where it signed off love. I couldn’t let myself X a kiss: my hand shook and looked too bareknuckled.

  We sat outside at a table for a while. We can afford to sit, not talking, in diverse settings of manufactured green. It’s something the advertised couple took frequently, drafts of al fresco quality time. An atrium of groomed leaves latticed the breeze and your cufflinks tapped the marble tabletop. You’d gathered brochures from the tiers in the foyer, and sampled a boutique ale, speculating on a golf course. I thought about overturning another card, inking it with unforgiveable things. I thought about the column of feathers at his navel, the crosshairs broken with inlets of skin, how I’d seen it unzipped, just before we departed, and I’d been grounded, stranded in the hall at the chance glimpse, shaking at the cove of a button, the indent of stud, how the roof of my mouth turned liquid, answering it. He’d gotten a fright when he spotted me hovering, then tried to man back up, grin it off. ‘Woah. Jump scare,’ he’d joshed, flustered. And I’d pretended I was sorting out dirties for the wash – such a good carer, always on the lookout. He granted me his top-mum nod. Oh, you know, just part of my job. He stood in his daks and packed my palms with shucked gear that was still warm-blooded.

  Back in the room your touch proceeded. I said it had been a long day, I didn’t mind, we could take a break. But you had an agenda. You’d made an investment in this suite. It was not sex but a takeover. This is a place where money changes perspective – and you’d paid a premium to love me again.

  We switched on the TV so we didn’t hear the sound of our less-than-half-bothered hands on skin. The eighties host guided his models through a softly lit grove for a multi-choice meal. There was the sequel of an intimate sunset they were directed to nuzzle in. So when we were finished there was somewhere else to look.

  *

  It was last summer that started it – the sun-flooded lounge flanked with boys. Lowriding boardies, bare brown trunks. The scuffle of limbs on the leather, sweat on the controllers, as they bucked in time to their games. They were fucking up, gunning down everything, laughter so loud it jarred the windows as they watched each other lose. Their hardout thumbs worked the X in a spasm, with dog sounds, and teeth sunk into their lips. They yanked the blinds, pissed off at the set-up of light. Our cat flopped in their shade, rolled sluttishly against their shins.

  It was the evenness of all the surfaces I was learning to hate. I wiped everything down and re-wiped it. The sink shone its hole at me. The oven offered a clean place to lay my head, racks of silver hygiene. The boys were blowing whole torsos into pixels, loud coronas of meat. When they left, their sweat would be on my couches, spinal, evaporating. I wasn’t even background noise.

  But I still made them sandwiches. That’s what mothers do. He wandered to the island wanting more, handed me the warm dark oval of his plate. He said sorry for its brackets of leftover crust. He was sheepish and cheesy, like he was starting to guess his charm. Horizontal, as he leant, there were tiny clefts in his abdomen, the shade of dirty honey, and as he chatted he itched them, slow, with his trigger finger. I laid out a board of white bread. The harness above his velcro had frayed into black fuzz. I fell in love right through my sternum. I could feel it coming like a muscle cramp.

  I wrote that, later, on the back of a postcard. On the front a woman had paid to plunge headfirst through miles of terminal sky.

  *

  The real couple was down in the aqua plaza that afternoon. The pool slid nowhere in its infinite c
hemicals and they didn’t look like they’d had a matinee. I’d seen her earlier in the morning spa, where we lay on our designer gurneys being groomed. She’d asked if I’d recognised the muzak chiming: it was the theme from The Young and the Restless. For a while, as attendants paddled us with cream, we’d chatted through our memory of soap names, Brooke and Storm caught in blond storylines of high-class pain. Now she dithered by the shallow end and the nether line of her suit looked stubbed. She wore her bikini like apologetic underwear. I knew I’d look no different.

  You took up a posture that indicated you didn’t want to talk. And I knew better than to fuss on the topic of what the boys might get up to in our absence. You’d never had patience with my neurotic forecasting, my automatic parental fear of the worst case. But I thought of them, prowling our rooms, colliding with heirlooms, bass line cranked to full, hosting a gang of their mates with your hijacked whisky. I hoped they were raising hell. If they’d been here by the vacant lot of the pool they would have been ambushing each other, they’d never be able to resist the leg-sweep, they’d scrag each other into the water with acrobatic thumps. The place would be booming with their mongrel shouts. I hoped back home they were playing up. I imagined bathtubs boozy with ice and oak-cracking battles on our bespoke furniture. Maybe girls. They were due to start fucking the same rough-house way. Back when we’d let them hold an early party, I’d sprung him in torchlight stuck into his first kiss, ramming a girl, whose suck was just as rugged, against our garage door. His hands were frank on her skittish arse and I could hear the tack of their mouths, crude with hunger. I’d thought it was a cheap laugh then, the teenage ruck of it, all traction and moisture. Now I’d do anything to get pulled into such a roughneck kiss.