Devil's Trumpet

by Tracey Slaughter

  I wish I could strip you back, here, where this green light is planetary, bare you in the sway of its globe, and get you to kiss me, my whole face, smearing off its legacy of lies and eyeshadow.

  Then I wish you take me fast, wish your grip on my hips, a soundless monopoly so hard it blackens me.

  But I guess: if you can’t be with the one you love . . . then get on all-fours on the room-serviced bed.

  #

  Sun so sharp the mountains are cubist, black geometries cut from light.

  We stop at a café boasting a kissing gate. Turns out that’s nothing to do with valentines. It’s just a basic contraption in rough board, hinged so it doesn’t let in the animals.

  The café’s a crinkled villa set in a garden unruly with frilled and salty herbs. I take a Ladies’ break in an old shearer’s hut, gussied up with green gingham drapes. Antique washhouse utensils on the wall, copper cistern, oak toilet seat. Wood ironing board for a baby change-table, and calendar of carthorses hitched to a post. So all in all it’s like taking a yesteryear piss.

  The hut is big enough for us to bang around in. That’s what I’d be doing with you. Wrangling you into the calico, while bumblebees doze into the weatherboards bombed with rosemary.

  Every small town we drive through has a Coronation Hall. And at least one place where I would fuck you.

  #

  Mountains thinking prehistoric thoughts. Sunlight all over their soft switchbacks. How does their altitude look so gentle? We, more than anyone, know they’re not asleep.

  The rub of sun on grass tips, windows open to pale gusts of heat.

  My husband says, ‘Just think of how far away we are from our lives.’

  And then he says, ‘I love you.’

  #

  I’m going to the restaurant smelling like my own come, as the light in this hotel room is my five-star witness.

  So it’s fitting that the waitress in the backstreet joint I pick wears a t-shirt that reads Hot Secret Shame.

  I chose it because it was the only place in town I could find that was promising (kind of) live music. The entertainment turns out to be a balding hippy, man of blues riffs and long cedar beads. All the songs are jangling synonyms for each other, one giddy-up verse, one lonelier chorus (because somewhere on his journey, peace and love got a little hurt by one ole California gal). After the bridge, he gives his braced harmonica a spurt, a growled choo-choo of irony. I clap because I love him. I clap more, and knock back Chardonnay. My husband has started counting.

  And it’s fine until the cover he plays that is just a muddy stomp and a chord progression aimed at your roots and the lyrics ‘Come back baby, come back, come back to me’. I’m fine until he down-tunes for dirtier frets, and the howling starts in a minor key that makes you know that your soul is sitting in your gut just below where you shovelled your dinner, just above where your lover has been, a place he can’t reach. And doesn’t want to. Though the words won’t ever change, ‘Come back baby, come back to me.’

  #

  Tonight at dinner, I must look encouraging because a man comes over to our table and bends down to me. He’s pasty, kitted out in smart-casual, cosy tones I can see his wife packing for him. ‘Tell me,’ he says, ‘where do the dancers go?’ A gesture at the town, with a travelling salesman’s hand. He wants the music of moving bodies: he blinks at me with a balding kind of hope. But I just shrug: ‘Oh I’m a stranger.’ And my husband heads back with my top-up, gives him a glare. This guy’s not up to fighting territory.

  It’s a good question, though, don’t you think. Tell me, where do the dancers go?

  Back to their wives, in your case.

  #

  Do you get road rage? Today, at the servo, my husband was steaming over two young dykes playing on the forecourt with the windscreen brush, as if they had all the time in the world. One flicked the other with foam while she was pumping the gas, and then had to fend the brush from a tackle. The reprise was cute, and not at all butch: they squealed and fondled in the counter attack, splashing suds up their camos. Their windscreen bubbled. They had matching black beads round their wrists and their biceps were glazed and beloved. I couldn’t help smiling at the struggle (would that have been the same if one of them had a cock?). But my husband went straight to boiling point. Was about to thump the horn, when they panted to a final fizzy kiss, and slapped the brush back into the bucket.

  I can’t imagine road rage getting you. Taking the miles with a boner the way you do. The way you once let me watch you. Cruising the plains with your strokes on lazy repeat, highways ideal for in-car handling. You didn’t even ask me to touch it. Just brought yourself to a hazy finish, dabbed with a rag that doubled for the windscreen, and sent me a self-sufficient pleasured grin.

  Oh, my grubby unstoppable love.

  #

  There’s a blue mine, suddenly, steppes of it, gouged in like an amphitheatre where nothing but death’s showing. It’s ruled out the ground in such rigid lines, each grey level scored so straight, descending to a brilliant azure trough. A pattern of orderly wounding. It forces a vast kind of silence upon you.

  Did we cut to the plates, and really think they wouldn’t twitch?

  #

  The bed is a lonely plateau. We are its only guests.

  #

  We book into another room that’s been hoovered, semi-glossed a soporific shade. I’m so tired of what I’m here to mimic staring back at me from the practical furniture. But I still flip through the plastic-coated highlights, a swatch of prosaic reasons to stay and ‘things to do’ while in this stunted metropolis. Shortcuts to companionable fucking.

  #

  There was this island we always used to pass as kids, from the motorway, a fern-tangled hump. By the time we saw it we were deep into grizzling at the journey, the long vinyl miles filled with our whining, the backseat airless and crammed with shins and sweated out with peppermint singing. (The two things my mother always had in the car were a packet of Oddfellows and a list of jolly pass-the-time tunes. She’ll be coming round the fucking mountain.) The island was a black dome in the mangroves, just a chunk of offcut clay topped with bush. But we imagined someone was living there. Made up stories as the island passed, pretended we could see the glint of a hut, a stab of tell-tale lamplight. Some runaway was in residence. Someone had stumbled out there, through the shallows, hid out, staked their claim to unauthorised twilight. Or two people, living rough on each other, wild skins sleeping out.

  So: are we there yet?

  #

  Café today with zoo bars so you sit and feed up against the railings. (The dogs are barking in their cages at a cruising altitude of 10,000 feet.) There is snakeskin everywhere, the roar of plaster creatures, and bar leaners mottled with leopard print. A sticky buildup on the knowingly carnivorous menu, the tropics of plastic foliage. I chew and look at the people in a wall mural, bodies broken into bone and hide, so you can’t tell them from animals as they fork and bend, beasts gliding through the edges of each other. Your eye thinks it’s picked out a figure, but it’s lost the scent.

  Subtext: I want you. And I can’t change my spots.

  #

  The pisser in this place looks like a wedding cake. Cushioned wallpaper of faux white leather, stamped with fat buttons, and stencilled with gold fleur-de-lis. Meringue of white nets gathered at the louvres. And a pull-chain toilet, porcelain handle still damp and swinging from the last in the cubicle.

  Inside the stall, there’s a full-length mirror where you can watch yourself urinating. I think about sending you a spread, white span of my flanks on the china, wet pink interruption. I’ve never even thought of taking photos before – I’m a collection of impulses that never crossed my mind. I shuck my jeans right off, line myself up in the gilt frame, tilting the cold of my pelvis. Swipe until the focus is a white square round my gash. It’s turning purple under the spotlight. The nets above the cistern ruche with radiance, trim me like a dirty bride.

  Then I just
squat and cry.

  #

  Last night we stayed at a B&B, each room named after the iron flowers in the ceiling, roses, tulips, orchids torqued into colonial tin. We got Lily. My husband was unsettled by the high weathered storeys of the place, its latticing of cobwebs, its parched boards and spire. He hated Lily on sight, its cornflower quilt, its periwinkle window seat. The doll on the scotch chest, with her antique deathstare and chilled enamel limbs, made him expect a ghost. So I christened her Lily, teased him. (It was nearly like old times.) Every draught that whistled through the keyhole was her calling. She was lonely. She was jilted. Her ceramic nails were signalling. Supernatural drips oozed the jet lashes anchored to her eyes.

  In the morning, he grunted from a good sleep, saying, ‘Well Lily didn’t come to visit.’

  But I’m not so sure.

  #

  Then a dam settlement, vertical acres of concrete bolting back the water. Everything vacant, the bare range of worker’s stone huts.

  I want to stay in one of them. Teach you how we can’t control this. Over me the dark eaves of your ribs.

  #

  We pull over at a junk store today. It’s not even a town we stop in, just a fork in the road, clustered with a few shops – or hunches of building that used to trade, signs now snuffed and windows boarded up. Everything’s mangy. In the store we step into – through the flak of insect blinds – the woman looks taken aback. She pats the beige tines of her spiral perm and blinks at us, as if she wasn’t ready to receive. The tattoo that slithers down into her cleavage reads Davey.

  Everything inside crawled here to die. Trinkets, doilies, taxidermy. Ice skates, swastikas.

  I scratch at the odd vinyl, poster, souvenir, try not to release dust.

  Then the woman springs to life, wags her hand over at me.

  ‘I don’t s’pose youse could let me use a cellphone. Mine’s munted. And I need to call my man urgent.’

  I know, of course, that my husband won’t be budging. I can feel him stiffening instantly. But there’s something about the woman’s fried hair. I hand mine over. Her crimped tan grins at me. She’s missing canines and her eyes are rolled with yesterday’s kohl.

  The conversation she has isn’t long. But it isn’t with a husband. My own has gone out to wait in the car, clipping the driver’s door to mark his huff. I glide round the dim stands, feign speculation on brooches and tools. The woman’s voice is greasy. She mutters at her cash box, hushed suppliant things. A whine of bargaining that tries to be sexy, plea and purr. Her fingers worry at the bra line of her stretch-lace top. He cuts the call off for her. The wattle of her throat keeps swallowing. She’s too unglued to say thank you as she passes me my phone.

  I buy a burnout top that reeks of BO, a civet acidity leeched into its velvet. And a black deathrock t-shirt, tattooed with cannibals, headed Everything Up Louder.

  When I get back in the car, my husband’s silent. He passes me the sanitizer, suggests I wipe ‘that crackwhore’ off the screen.

  #

  ‘That movie sounds terrible,’ said the old bird at an adjacent café table today. ‘It’s about a concentration camp.’ She tutted, like dirty historical laundry was the last thing she’d part with good money to see. They’d been on a peony talk, sat nibbling at their lamingtons and chattering about deadheading and fair climate. Now their shrilling had switched to the flicks they’d like to see. ‘No,’ the other one sucked on her dentures. ‘Apparently there’s quite a nice love story with it.’

  This is how sick I am. If you loved me, I would take the apocalypse.

  #

  Someone else’s waterline lingers round the bath, grey silt where another body sank. The spare blankets harbour the smell of flaking skin. The unconditioned air feels inhabited. Fingerprinted dust runs the tongues of the blinds. The lamps have given out, gooseneck.

  My husband is calling reception, dressing them down about the lapse in hygiene. I don’t know what he expects. This whole town has a chickenwire, plywood feel, a place of harsh luck, smelling of kerosene and one crammed schoolroom. We’re privileged the door has a latch. But he’s not wearing it: the stains of others. He booked a room for two only, he tells them, not three.

  I stroke the tideline, feeling for the soot.

  It’s like you’ve been here before me.

  #

  Since it’s silence you want between us, let me tell you what the silence is like here. You can taste the ice age in it. I’m standing in a piercing wind and letting myself be gusted by it. The cold is trying to howl me to my knees. There’s a roadside of frozen light and a fleet of stripped trees, a long black arcadia. I don’t know if I’m breathing. I don’t want to love you. It’s bleeding me out. But I can’t find the tourniquet.

  Clouds like spilt milk. Nothing to cry over.

  #

  A woman on television is telling us about her kilos of weight-loss. A woman on television is telling us about a miracle bleaching agent. A woman on television is describing the outfit her loved one was last seen in. A woman on television is having her face reset along deep butchered lines.

  When we finally pick a channel it’s a doco on long-distance romances that are getting to meet. It doesn’t matter that their ages are way out of synch, that the brides are dialled from third-world cultures. Or that’s what the stagey theme music wants us to think, stringing us along with flares of saccharine. Planes land, and there’s a gate to bring flowers to, to bring the desperate bouncy logos on silver balloons, to bring handmade signs from ghetto cardboard that read Welcome Home. They clasp each other, and you feel that word clasp. ‘I’m just happy he’s not a ghost,’ beams one woman.

  How many kilos are there in a heart?

  #

  There’s part of the lake where you can walk out on a tiny peninsula to a picnic table. The kind of lake where nothing’s moving. The water and the sky one reflection of staleness.

  We met at a river once, but you were so afraid of being seen you would barely talk to me. I remember there were flowers floating on the current, no doubt the victims of some dreamy kid. Frilly pink decapitations, spinning in the flow. I think we could hear the faint giggle of the girl who was drowning them, rippled by the trees.

  They weren’t marigolds, so not set adrift for a grief.

  There should be marigolds here. You should die now. Set me free.

  Just die, why don’t you?

  #

  I’ve been sightseeing with my eyes closed. Until we get to the stone church. Then in the window of the Good Shepherd I’m an atrocity. There’s an angel on a plinth wearing carved arcs of feather or petal or claw or armour. There’s a rope across the altar, thick knots like a mooring, or a noose. Then just a window.

  These mountains are enough for any Messiah.

  On my left there’s an old white woman trembling. On my right there’s an Asian family. The man takes off his navy bandana and drives it, with thumb joints, round the salt of his eyes. His wife lays one hand on his crewcut, one finger tapping on his fontanel, like a bird’s beak. When he doesn’t stop, she fumbles at a baby, packed in her lap in a fat Antarctic pouch. She wobbles it onto his knees, and yanks off its bonnet, so his sobs thrum its fine black pigtails.

  I think of your little girl.

  And then I cry too. I don’t know how – just my chest gets full of the glare and the landscape, and the stale gentleness of the hymn they’re playing on a tape deck that says things like ‘oh redeemer’ and sings of wanting to be worthy, and the woman who puts down the mauve mohair purl of her knitting to pass me a psalm card as I’m leaving fans them like we’re facing off over a hand of poker, and I see her faith and raise her the sound of the south wind shrieking, I see her sympathy and raise her my deranged heart, which won’t give up your blasphemy in my life, and outside there’s a thorn bush, black and spiked, like the barbarous alleys my blood goes down, cunt, scalp, thorax, every time I think of you.

  My husband is touched by my sentimentality. Takes a photo of m
e on the stone steps. Still holding my little ticket to heaven.

  #

  White lime town with black steel ornaments. We go to a phantasmagorical foundry, walk through working beasts of industrial dream. Spined dresses and shattered machines, the sound effects of nightmare piped. Metal arcana welded into creatures, shadows that clank with uncivilised promises. Steampunk headquarters aren’t to my husband’s taste. He stalks through the weird black garden ahead of me.

  So he misses the door that invites you in, like Alice. Open Me. And I do. And it’s not me that stretches or comes apart inside. It is the entire cosmos. I’m standing on a thin silver walkway. And it hangs on an abyss that is mirrored blackness. Below, it plunges down, streaming to infinity; above, it races up into a nothingness that shrinks you to a quivering speck. And all is lit with the hover of stars that echo in endless panes of forever, radiant strands of grenade that set obliteration sparkling. It takes a while for the trick to sink in. Of course, it’s just a mirror-lined room, narrow, a slightly outsized coffin, glinting surfaces warping the watching mind. The awe turns my gut over, almost makes me cling to the rail for the moments I believe my gangplank reels over sheer drop. Then my heartrate starts to get a kind of focus. I begin to see the cords on the stars, their calculated dangling.

  I’m not on a brink. But then I see the bird. It’s a fantail. And I know what it means to have one enter a room. I know that it brings death flicking, its tiny claws pinching at the ropes of the stars. It cannot be still. Its flitting is relentless. It tries to beat itself against the edges of the light. It can feel the black box, but its universe keeps vanishing beyond the borders where the mirrors meet and part. And I open the door, so a piece of the world can come back in to the frame, a thin window of the real enter the circuit. But of course, it’s twinned, picked up in the infinity, and even if the bird can see it, there is only an endless corridor of false doors opened in its night.

  So I seal the door closed on our panic again. And watch the bird circle in its beautiful insanity. Trapped forever inside the bars of its fall.