Devil's Trumpet

by Tracey Slaughter

  9.

  Sick days off school, watching soap opera. Wiping snot on the velvet couch. Screen full of episodic blondes; stand-offs with fake-tanned Italian rivals. Dozing to Days of Our Lives violins, while my mother filed her nails. Homework, punctuated with pills.

  10.

  One decent nurse to hold your ribs while you puke. One decent nurse who talks like an overdose is something that’s visited, legitimate as cancer. One decent nurse who uses her breaktime to plait your hair. Her pinkies in your cold sweat. A tight French weave that pulls at your scalp like cleanliness. The kind of nurse who’s next to mercy.

  11.

  Anywhere, needle dig. Alley, stall, backroom. Brother’s house, his three kids with Disney laughter out in the lounge. Let it go. Anywhere. The beauty of the tied-off vein.

  12.

  Swings of the girl next door. Oat cookies her mother gave us, tutting, still hot. Sky high, levering up with our piston-shins, trying to be the first one to wind full circle. Legs of the metal frame lifting with our screams. Letting the chains drop, with slackening ankles. Damp grass brush of gathering dusk. Pulse on the plastic seat where your lips long to piss.

  13.

  Relief of it coming, that thin beloved flood. Rise of longed-for spinal oblivion. A tourniquet round your consciousness.

  14.

  Tingle of medicine, hitched from your mother’s dresser, tipped from its vial. Peach screw-tops. Pearly bracelet whose plastic band seals with a clip. The hospital type of her maiden name. Dosage of secrets. Arranged on your lifeline. Countable. Loveline. Each blue seed, with its fineprint stamped in an ideogram. Keep out of delicate reach.

  15.

  That moment when they’re turning. Turning into tunnels, turning into lies, turning into animals.

  16.

  Deathwish pashing, way past curfew. Parked up with any boy, just for the grip and sweat. The feel of your fresh cunt under school uniform. So wet and hungry in its pleats. The not-yet dates, the brinks you bring each other to. Risky edges of shoreline and zip. Headlit wavebreak and leverage on vinyl. Taste of your first saltwater hard-on. Or just kissing clothed till your tongue felt bloodshot. Necking under streetlight till your vertebrae ached. Murmurs of chapstick, and lovebites glowing for days.

  17.

  Boy that first hooked you. Room above the servo. Forecourt of citizens in dirty light. Mint-flannelette-and-camo sleeping-bag on his single. He pumps you to a petrol soundtrack. Pizza boxes under the wire-wove, kisses composted with capsicum. Bedside louvres winched open to blow out B&H. Late-night mutters of secrets and grease. Nutty crewcut smell of his pillows, feathers browned and bruised by his scalp. Minutes the gear has dumped his head there. Helpless Elysium in his blink. Beg.

  Because he’s got something money can buy.

  18.

  Pink cash register I had as a kid. Tinkerbell ping of its plastic tray. Play money fished from the Lucky Dip: head down into the mysteries of sawdust. High-rolling ragdolls shopping with courtesy. Hairclips and knucklebones for small change.

  19.

  Other ways you can earn what you need. Reliable. Skin to pimp, not yet too pitted. Easy, quick jobs up your secondhand skirt. Hallways with fingers, face-down in hatchbacks. Small-change convenience fucks in neon. Bargain on all fours, sweet moans optional. Oh yeah baby, give it to me. Budget pussy. Wipe-clean mind.

  20.

  The way, if you sleep on his pillow, your hair will slipknot the smell of him for the next day. You stand at the bus stop, stroking your face with a tail of fermented loneliness. Oatmeal, Zippo, rancid fragrance.

  21.

  Teaching elastics to your brother’s kids. Trading giggles, lashed at the ankles. Cola in tumblers and unicorn t-shirts. Little titties about to start. Patterns of diamond leap and snap. Jingle, jangle, cradle, bangle.

  Until he finds your stash, and draws the line.

  Pigtails’ ricochet. Laughter cancelled. Backlash to the street, half-dressed, with your bag of no-good.

  Let it go.

  22.

  Bubble in the level of my grandad’s garage. Peephole in the metal with a neon bead. Testing every surface he nailed into sequence. Staring at the window for the slippery balance.

  Scent of his lathed wood, spilling to the concrete in spirals.

  Smoko: my grandmother calling. Squatting on their backsteps by the sweetpeas. Too-hot tea with a blue taste of her false teeth. Cupcakes levered from the tin that you can suck the crinkles off.

  23.

  See-through vinyl of the next IV. Any decent nurse to rig you to its trickling. Watching it rock like the only moon you want in the night ward. Monologue of metered silver drips.

  24.

  Room in the care home where your mother’s forgotten. Forgotten you proved such a dead-loss girl. Days you can slouch on her corduroy cushions, breathing in her polaroids. Cold scent of Earl Grey and woollen rainbows. Every sixth blink a new hello sweetheart. Fresh, like her iris only just found you. Days she will grin and let you dose her, one for me, one for . . . Days you can rake her purse.

  25.

  Sanctuary of board-lined dives. Anonymous voices, good as graffiti. Blackbox hovels to lie in and spike.

  Breaks in the rain. Weight of soaked clothes in the hush. Tar seal slid to black velvet. Plastic speckled in your pocket, and traffic in your iris – full of your next fix.

  26.

  Names I thought, as a kid, were beautiful. But proved deadly: Pearl Harbour. Watergate. Enola Gay. Orange Crush.

  Joy flakes. Heaven dust.

  27.

  Chapel we once drove to, on some beach. So stoned, I don’t remember. Disused shed of God in tussock. Shell path to doors a good wind would unbolt. Standing, swaying, in the weathered aisle – where a bride would, if she wasn’t a junkie. Love of my life shooting up in a pew. Gulls and veins on hallelujah. Chorus of scavengers outside chanting him hymn him.

  28.

  Circus tents. Their big blue and yellow, in crescents, like some kid crayoned them into place. Sawdust dimpled with scat and candyfloss. Lining up to force-feed clowns. Oil-drum mirrors that play with the bubble of your brain. Girls that dangle from the roof like death-defying birds. Their swoop and pivot into rhinestone cross-hairs. Silence for the next stunt, spot-lit, net-less. Bridled creatures pacing the glitter of their cages.

  29.

  Laundrette nights with no one to fucking judge. Lean back on the bald slat bench. Bleached world spilling through the ordered portals. Perpetual cycle of rinse, repeat. Powdery tokens that can’t kill you. Automated whir of comfort. Scorch of super-dried sheets that crackle your eyelashes.

  30.

  Image you can’t scrape away from your back-brain. The tankers on the forecourt are filling up the huge black vats that live beneath the concrete. He’s in his jockeys, round back, inverted on the stairs, whose tread speaks the vowel sounds: alone. T-shirt half off, collaring one shoulder. His beautiful jailbird ribs are bared. Face upended in a chute of light. The last time you see him, he’s gilt with diesel. Tankers are churning out their black load of sound. A breeze scans your hair but it’s not his soul leaving: that bailed, hours back. The needle’s intact; he’s chambered it so good you can watch it give a quizzical bounce. You don’t even flinch. There’s foam in his final kiss.

  ministry

  The night feels amphetamine.

  Top-speed laugh, razorcut hair. Her quicksilver way with a shot glass. Not an inkling of where she’ll lead you next.

  Past the long blue bandage of posters on a club wall, bassline strobe, alleyed blur. The ministry of vodka. Dancefloor wakening under the hounding of heels. Ions of her perfume, her irises. The beat doth magnify her pearly hair. Equivocal pixels of her face, under a glass marquee of sound.

  In the stall, her touch comes like predestination. Her juice along your shirttails. Ceaseless, vagrant fingers. You want to bark with joy, nailing her. The happening of skin, so fast you feel your load-bearing heart.

  Morning, you c
atch sight of her scars.

  Her apartment is a slice of dirty city, a petrochemical smell. She’s an unexpected child in sleep, tinted streetlight blue. Her hair lies flat, doesn’t look CGI anymore. Flies on the sill, shift of her breath in faint decibels.

  Wrists a pale slipway. Yesterdays thickening.

  You can see through the vanished sutures to real throats of pain.

  What else can you do. But dress.

  And leave.

  the best reasons

  They make the very best decision, standing under the trees. They come to it together, trading the words in sad, rational sentences. It is a hot day, and while he is speaking she watches the neck of his blue shirt convert the words to sweat. He undoes two buttons to clear the right things from his throat. They list the givens, the necessities, so later they can’t pick out whose final decision it is. Her heartbeat feels uphill. Her guilt agrees, mutual. He stares at the sandals that quarter her feet. She can’t make her hands do anything definitive, but he can’t reach out to take one – it’s a touch he won’t be able to stop. He tests a quick joke – they can catchup next at one of their funerals – but it’s bitter, and their eyes can’t meet, their skin on the brink. And when she writes about it later, she will think about putting in a scene where they can watch X or Y – the detail of a child howling at the topple of their ice cream to the concrete, the leftover cone poised stupidly near their scream like a fragile tooth-marked megaphone. A lone gull limping round a black mesh rubbish bin, dragging the gouge of a fishing-lined wing. An old couple spreading a moss-coloured blanket over the spongy park-bench slats, the doddery ritual of their stainless-steel thermos, so tepid and requited. But she won’t be able to. She won’t be able to take her eyes from the two of them, withheld, under all those trees. The leaves underfoot are a dark trance. She will listen to the names of his children. Recite the good points of her husband. Then they will turn and walk apart. They are reaching the best decision. The birds vote from the branches.

  postcards are a thing of the past

  #

  This morning I squatted in the showerbox and shaved my snatch for my husband, the way I would have done for you.

  So you can’t say I’m not trying.

  It would have seemed like redemption, except that my lips swelled. Like they were moaning at the contours of you. Remember, you once did the job for me, demanded to, pinned me back, and left me sleek and nicked. Then bent to kiss a tiny slip-up, hauling at my slathery hips, to get your laugh into the blood. I remember. I was tempted to reload my fist with complimentary soap and crouch in the memory for hours. Watch my ugly needs in stainless steel. Such a hot-blooded cowering. But when I travel with my husband, we’ve always got a timetable.

  #

  On the flight here, I didn’t sit with my husband. Some booking glitch got us an in-flight divorce. The first thing I did was pick up my phone: but then I remembered, you didn’t want to hear from me. I sat beside a little girl selected by the hostess to hand around the sweets, the ones you suckle for descent so the altitude doesn’t get stuck in your eardrums. She wore a pink tiger t-shirt, with blond curls ponytailed, but a jackal face. She had a touchscreen baby PC, with games that ran on pink tracks, and her fingers triggered flowers and stars. Across the aisle, the rest of her family were strapped: dumber little sis, mother half-bothered to love the loud swaddled demands of a babe in arms, and father, sexily greying with long-haul exhaustion. The hostess made a special trip to brief them in the fitting of infant life-jackets, the recommended brace positions. Neither parent could muster more than a blink. The man who got the window seat by me was wild: he’d been stuck near the kid on his incoming flight too, and felt unable to make violent movie picks. The sound of the little girl winning over and over was glittery. I refused her stock of rainbow sweets when she skipped round. I thought about your reason, your daughter. I wished I could programme a bloody zoo to screen on the headrest in front of my seat, a reel of R18s. The attendant didn’t like me, made a point of checking that I’d fastened my silver-buckled crotch for landing. We could hear the quarantined dogs barking from the hold, stress soiling their cages.

  #

  No one told me of the drone of marital fucking, the habitual understated rut of it.

  The bedside lights here are like black trombones. They pull out from the headboard on steel concertinas, pitched low, as if ready to conduct a gynaecological exam. I could imagine what you’d get up to with them. Angle my hips back on the plush basin of the quilt, search me for sulky details.

  But my husband, post a kind of dull coitus, is watching men hunt on the backblocks of TV. ‘Well we went out and we found something,’ one guy says, scratching back his plaid cap. ‘Now we just got to shoot it.’

  I lie here, breathing the vanished scent of your shirt.

  No one told me the brace position for this.

  #

  We had a fried pile of fish today, bite-size, dumped on shells, a platter of withered scallops. It tasted like the estuary I used to swim as a kid, like seaweed, vinegar, chilled togs and snot. I had my first kiss there, under a bridge, and it tasted like that, with bubblegum mixed in, with a faint itch of the coconut that used to spritz the white cream of the school-issue Sally Lunns. I remember my pigtails catching on the sharp frills of shell that clung to the concrete, and a pincher coming at my demi-nipple until it hurt through my rubbery suit. I didn’t like the boy. I just needed to be kissed. It was time. There was a troop of kids watching from the rails of the bridge, yelling us on. I rotated my head the way I’d seen on telly, and tried not to gag on the complicated seafood of his tongue.

  I’ve been doing this a long time, it seems.

  Subtext: I’ve only ever loved you.

  #

  Tonight the wet skin between my thighs only knows profanity. I’ve used all the sachets in the bathroom, leached out all the single-use tubes. I’m a slippery cocktail. My skin sounds gluttonous. Ylang ylang stroked into cavities, wheatgrass massaged over wide-open bone. Bergamot and neroli get me blossoming.

  All this toxicology makes me miss you.

  When I lie down the sheets will be foxed with me. There was an anti-theft notice slid into the pocket of the lush white bathrobe (a pair in bleached towelling with their arms tucked into each other like a cute origami hug): I love it here. Please buy my twin in reception. So I know everyone wants to steal a skin.

  Come back. I’ve forgotten the terms of the standoff.

  It would only take a short-lived kiss to flip me over and fuck me to the marrow.

  #

  I’ve never seen hills with such secret velvety creases, all this high-country pasture combed and moist. Clouds easing over them, into their mellow smoothness, glazing their curves with sky. In declivities, the unmoving slick of a lake: a single black swan, stillness. The slope and roll of everything golden green, like earth brushed into slow waves.

  Or maybe that’s just me.

  #

  I look like a slice of motel hell this morning. You wouldn’t even recognise me. My vision is equal parts gin and mascara. There’s hotel soap in my wedding ring. There’s a married taste worn into the back of my mouth. The window of our last room had no vantage point. But this one is high-rise, a vast pan of glass over town. Late night, an epic stretch of lights changed the alleys, dressed all their grime in an optical shivering. I downed a whole bottle in front of it. My husband sat around for a while, in indecisive underwear, then opted to snooze. I wandered over once, held my face close to his snores: he smelled like yesterday. Then I just sat and stared at the glass in my grip, like there was a lot there to swallow. And out at the view, hoping something was zoned for demolition.

  #

  He’s been enjoying the driving. Though we can only tune our rental car into shitty stations, retro radio that spits up lyrics where love ‘cuts like a knife / but feels so right’. ‘I hear the secrets that you keep / when you’re talking in your sleep.’ That was today’s pop offering. And somehow its corni
ness put him in a playful mood. He crooned along, with toots of cheesy sendup, underlining it in full disco delivery. ‘Don’t you know you’re sleeping in the spotlight,’ all jazz hands and loony tongue. But I didn’t sing the harmony.

  It’s not like him to let his sombre outlook go on holiday. He even got an on-road semi. ‘Touch it. Oh go on, just touch it.’ But that particular traveller didn’t last long. We got stuck behind a truck that read Waste Management, crawling the range with a streak of black leaking from its tail plate. Our windshield went gauzy with its hissing trail of filth. Pinned in its wake, he dropped gears, raked the wipers, yanked the steering wheel in a spasm of rage. ‘They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. Who the hell knows what the slime is belching out of that thing.’

  But I was face-down, unzipping memory. Forgetting white lines, in your oncoming thrusts. Laughing at the brake jerks, filling my squeals with come.

  There was a number on the waste truck to report it. I imagined it was mine. Or yours.

  #

  Let me tell you exactly how I wish you were here. Since you tell me that you’re not jealous.

  I wish you were here on the refit seventies carpet that is chic again, an asphalt pile with accents of tangelo and teal.

  I wish you were here on the balcony that floats over tussock.

  I wish you were here to tell the neighbours’ kids to shut the fuck up with their jandals and Coke and happiness. I wish you were here to snarl harder when they gave you sass.

  I wish you were here, exactly, on the long back zip that bisects my dress, your knuckles slipping and unco on the top hook and eye, always tricky since it washed kinky. I wish for the scent of your whispered cursewords at the base of my cervical spine. I wish when you finally mastered its teeth you breathed in, prolonging its metal reversal. I wish that shudder that comes from the graze of your thumb could never stop travelling me, scalp to tailbone.