Like it Matters

by David Cornwell

  The painting the next day was better because it didn’t hurt as much as the scraping, but it was more irritating in other ways.

  Duade joined in.

  And Charlotte was a Nazi about how smooth the undercoat had to be, which wouldn’t have actually been so much of a problem except the paint Duade got us was cheap, thin and grainy at the same time, and it’d clot along every groove and bubble in every crack and crevice, and when you tried to take some off you always took much more than you wanted to and then you’d have to do it all over again. For a while there, it almost felt like it was going to be eternal, like one of those Greek punishments

  And it did take ages and ages—

  But Christ, it was magnificent when it was done.

  We stood there looking at it, the three of us, and it was another perfect afternoon, and in that gold light, the thing looked like it belonged in a cathedral. We stood there forever, just looking at it

  Nobody saying anything

  Then Charlotte said, “Maybe we should leave it like this? Just do another coat, like a rich cream or something.”

  Duade said, “Kiff.”

  “Ja, I thought about that,” I said. “But the problem with that’s all it takes is a couple of seagulls to shit on it, a couple of dirty winds to blow in from the Flats and a grey day overhead, and the thing’s going to look fucking vertraag all over again. It won’t look like marble forever, no matter what we do. I think we’ve just got to enjoy this for now. Safe in their alabaster chambers.”

  Duade said, “What?”

  I told him, “It’s a poem.”

  We stared at it a bit longer but then as soon as the light started fading the thing did start looking cheap and the show was over, just like that, and we threw a cover over it and then knocked in some pegs to hold the cover down. Then we said cheers to Duade and started heading home.

  I wasn’t as tired as the day before, but still, I was pretty tired and we didn’t really talk on the walk back, just held hands.

  But when we turned the last corner on the way to the house—

  From four blocks away—

  We could see that fucking van parked right outside the gate.

  And a cop car parked just behind it.

  Charlotte stopped walking. I looked back at her. She looked so angry I had no idea what she was going to do next. She put her face in her hands and scratched and pulled at her hair, then just moaned, “Fuck’s sake.”

  I went back up the road to her. “Oh, shit, what?” I said. “Did you take something?”

  The way she’d been breathing and hugging herself really did have me worried, but then I heard something else, a laugh, and then she looked up at me with this glee on her face.

  “You mean, like something valuable, on my way out?” She giggled. “Is that what you think of me?”

  “Hey,” I said. “No judgement here. I was this close to kifing those coasters.”

  She smiled and kissed me, just quickly. “I’ll handle this, okay? You just get Freddy to go home.”

  “How’d they find us?”

  “Ag, Freddy knows everybody. It’s fucking irritating.”

  When we got closer to the house, the cop car started up and her dad climbed out the passenger seat. I didn’t see if it was Freddy or not, they drove off before we could tell. I tried to make eye contact with her dad but his eyes were fixed on Charlotte, and I felt a bit worried but she told me again just to go inside—

  So I did, I went in and started making supper.

  I didn’t have a radio or anything, and they were loud out there in the street, even above the sound of the stuff frying in the pan, and unless the train was going past, I had to sing to myself to block them out.

  I didn’t want to hear them, but I couldn’t help watching from the window. It was horrible but I couldn’t look away—they started on their feet, squared off, and they leaned their chins forward while they shouted at each other and I told myself if he raised a hand at her I was going to run outside and deck him.

  But then suddenly, he just went and sat on the pavement, feet in the gutter, and she rounded on him—she stood over him and she was pointing at him and shouting—and he was shouting back but his voice was thick, you could hear he was losing, at some point he started crying and then he was making horrible sounds, almost like a dog.

  They got quieter after a while and I could hear her voice had gone stern, not vicious anymore—then he got in the van and drove off soon after the streetlights came on.

  There was something like a smile on her face when she came inside.

  “Sorry about that,” she said.

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing. Nothing that’s our problem, anyway.”

  “Come on,” I said. “Tell me.”

  “Well, you know when my ma left, it wasn’t like she just, you know, hitch-hiked to Mozambique or something. There was this rich, young IT surfer dude she’d been fucking forever. Everybody knew.”

  “Even your dad?”

  “He says no but I’m convinced. Anyway, how’s this, this is actually quite nice, they’ve been sending my dad money for years. I think to help him take care of me.”

  “That is nice,” I said.

  “Ja, right? But now my dad goes and calls my ma out of the blue—I don’t even know how he got the number, probably through Freddy—but he calls her and tells her about me moving out. And then apparently things got a bit raw on the phone between them, big surprise, and now the upshot is my ma’s told him he can forget about getting cash anymore.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  But really, it was more the way she was telling me, that curl in her lip—

  I’d never been capable of that, not even at my meanest—

  “So what did you tell him?”

  “Well, let’s be frank. He was a fucking idiot to get hold of her in the first place. Especially if he knew he was sommer just going to rock up here and break down anyway. He’s a fucking mess, man. That’s basically what I told him.”

  She was giving me this thrill—this slightly scary, entirely irresistible thrill. It was the sexiest she’d been by far. I went over to her and I put my hand on her face and I said, “Jeez. Did he who made the lamb make thee?”

  And she said, “Fuck off”

  And it made me a bit crazy.

  I was kissing her very hard and I was touching her in a way I hadn’t yet—it was plain, and hungry—and I could feel her resisting but I could also feel her trying not to resist, she was biting on my bottom lip and I could feel the muscles working in her leg where it tightened round me, at the same time

  I could feel her hands pushing against my chest. She gasped and the sound almost killed me, and I think I tried to pick her up to take her somewhere we could lie down

  And then whack—

  She got me right on the side of the face.

  Just the once, and not very hard, but it freaked me out completely and I let her go and I was saying, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  Her eyes welled up and she stood there with a really miserable look on her face—

  All that fierceness, all that badness, it was gone—

  She just looked sad and fucked up again and young, very young.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just, Ed, sex … It’s weird for me when I’m sober.”

  “Ha, me too actually,” I said. “Now that you mention it.”

  “No, I mean … I’m so … I don’t even know if it’s possible anymore.”

  “Alright.”

  We hadn’t said anything about drinking or drugs the last few days, not since she’d moved in. I think maybe we were hoping, since now we had each other, that all those thoughts were going to disappear. But they were there still, obviously. That’s just how it works once you’ve gone too far. Sure, in your mind maybe you feel like you’ve turned around—but it’s a long, long way back up the road, and there’s always stuff, whispers and memories, tugging like hands on the back of your shirt.

/>   I was close to crying about it all

  But then she blurted out, “Can we get not sober?”

  “Now?” I said.

  “No.” She smiled. “Maybe not now. Just sometime.”

  I made this weird sound—I sounded like a donkey—I think it was a laugh, but it also made my eyes sting

  And it took me a while to say anything because I didn’t trust my voice. And it was strange, but the last few long months of my life, which had hardened me, I think, in some ways, all of a sudden started to slip and slide

  And I wanted her

  And I didn’t want her to know how little I could trust myself, how little she should trust me with this stuff, even just booze—

  And in the end all I said was, “Ja, sure. Why not?”

  Then in a wave I could feel breaking in my chest, I got sad—that breathless sad—and I held her hand and I asked her, “But like, on the whole, we’re doing well though, hey?”

  “What’s well?” she said.

  “Like, look around … Things are sort of normal, aren’t they?”

  “Fuck. Who knows, Ed. Everyone’s got a different normal.”

  “Ja, well …” I said. “I don’t want you to hate yourself anymore. Okay? That’s actually all I want.”

  She kissed me.

  And then right into my ear, in a warm, wet voice

  She whispered, “Go get wine.”

  THE NEXT DAY, BY THE TIME WE GOT TO WORK it was raining—heavy, steady rain.

  We stood under my jacket beneath a bare jacaranda, the clouds and the rain so thick it didn’t seem like anything existed beyond the tree and the street corner. Eventually Duade showed up and gave us some money for the last two days and told us to come back tomorrow unless it was raining again. We walked home and we each had a shower and put on some dry clothes, and then we sat in the lounge

  And with the lights on and the rain pelting the windows, and the trains going by—

  And neither of us being able to say anything—

  The morning really started to wear on and I can’t even remember whose idea it was, but we went out and got drunk again.

  Slowly—it wasn’t like we were trying to stop the shakes or anything like that. We ate. We talked and laughed, and on the way home we picked up more stuff at a bottle store and then we went to the Cash Converters and found a CD player for eighty bucks, and it worked when we got home and plugged it in. We lay together in bed and listened to music and drank and smoked cigarettes, and at some point we passed out, and then later—outside it was a bright grey evening—we woke up at about the same time feeling gentled and unafraid, and we made love and then we just stayed in bed, drinking and loving each other till we passed out again.

  The day after that, hungover as sin

  Somehow we made it all the way to work but when we got there we found a plastic sleeve hanging on the door to the workshop, with a pen and note from Duade inside:

  Hi Guys

  Sorry hey guys, its my nephew’s in trouble.

  Come back in a few days or write your number here (because then I can call you when)

  ......................................................... (number)

  I got the pen and the note out the plastic sleeve, and I wrote on there:

  We don’t have numbers, we’ll come back in a few days. Good luck to everyone.

  And we walked home past Thirstie’s.

  Two days later, we’d actually gone to a meeting, but we were a bit drunk when we got there and even though we thought we were being under wraps about it, they’d kicked us out

  And then that afternoon in bed, she was taking a dark view of things

  And then we both were

  And then both of us were jawing for something harder than booze and then I can’t remember how we got there but we were crying

  And she was saying, “Okay, so we’re allowed to drink, fine. But not in the daytime anymore.”

  “What about weekends?”

  “Then maybe.”

  I tried to picture that—the two of us observing hours. I’d done that before, a few times, but with me what normally ended up happening was that I’d get so childishly depressed in the sober hours, so angry with my lot, that I was a nightmare to be around, and it was usually better for everyone when I just chucked it in and went back to the steady burn.

  I didn’t want her to see that in me, not so early in this whole thing. Hard to fall in love with a coward.

  “So how about just a plain, easy rule then?” I said. “Hey? Only drinking. Fuck times and whatever, okay? Only drinking. Charlotte, I’ll be honest, that’s still something for me.”

  “Ja,” she said. “Okay. Only drinking.”

  “That’s The Rule?”

  “That’s The Rule.”

  “And we don’t feel bad about it?” I said. “Well, even if we do. Then we tell each other at least it could be worse, right?”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  She went off to the kitchen, I thought maybe to pour us another drink.

  But she came back with a pair of scissors.

  She sat on the side of the bed and took my hand, then cut the bracelets off our wrists and rolled them up and packed them away in a box she’d brought with her from home.

  JUNE?

  WE WERE SO SURE IT WAS A BABY—

  This parking lot behind the fabric shops by the Checkers—

  We heard the thing bawling and then in the corner of the lot, next to the garbage skips, we saw a bundle of rags lying there and I told her to hold the bottle and I ran over but it was just a bundle of rags, the crying was coming from the first floor in the block of flats on the other side of the wall.

  She caught up with me, and I pointed up to the flats and I said, “How fucking loud’s that baby?”

  “Jeez,” she said, poking through the bundle. “I really thought that’s what it was, hey.”

  “Me too. Did you see me run?”

  “Fuck,” she said. “What would we have done? I was going to pick it up and take it home, I think. I think that’s what I was thinking.”

  I laughed and said, “Wow, Jesus. Well thank god it’s nothing. Imagine us as parents!”

  And she started crying, on the spot

  And there was a sip or two left in the bottle but she threw it at me, then just turned round and started walking home.

  She locked me out of the bedroom but only for an hour, and then we were lying there with a glass in our hands, quiet and sad, dwelling on my crime of making us feel shit about ourselves. She wasn’t angry anymore. She was holding my hand.

  It was probably around lunchtime and the room was bright grey. I think I was flirting with passing out but then she said, “Why’s it so hard, Ed?”

  “What?”

  “Life.”

  I was so tired by that point, and that horse felt so thoroughly fucking flogged, I said, “Come on, it’s not that hard, Charlotte. Look what we get to do all day. And it’s going to rain tonight and our house isn’t going to leak. Remember this morning we saw those pictures of those shacks washing away. That’s hard.”

  “Ja, but that’s it. Exactly, Ed. It’s hard even when it’s not. I mean, even worse, look at our parents. Didn’t whites have like the best lives in the world when they were young? Look what ours did with them.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  “You know actually, I never want a baby. You’re right. Not if the poor thing’s going to grow up with us.”

  “Okay, but haven’t we done this now?” I said. “We’re not that bad. We’re sticking to The Rule, aren’t we?”

  “Ja, but I mean like how we live, Ed. No, I mean like, where.”

  “Muizenberg?”

  “No man, fuck. It’s like … When I was young, I used to have these nightmares where my parents were fighting so I’d go out for a walk. Or they’d send me out to go buy something. And I’d be walking around the neighbourhood and I’d just happen to hear it, music and voices, and I’d go over
to a house on a corner with a big back garden, different corner, different house every time—but in the garden, always, were all the kids I knew from school, their parents, the teachers, some people from town, basically everyone I knew in the world, all just having a party and giving each other presents and stuff. They were always the worst dreams I had, Ed, and I’d be all weird at school for days afterwards, like just in my own little world, feeling so … outside.”

  “Ag,” I said. “I guess that’s why there’s such things as margins. Hey?”

  “How can you just say that?”

  “What? There’s more of us in the margins than in the middle, Charlotte. You know that.”

  “Ja, but what kind of people, Ed? Hey? Fucking doomed nobody people.” She was staring at me in a way that made the skin on my face burn. “Hey, Ed? Tell me I’m wrong.”

  ANOTHER GHOST

  I COULDN’T BELIEVE HOW BROKE I WAS ALREADY. How broke we were.

  “Shit, this is a problem,” I told her.

  “Ja?”

  “Did I pay rent?”

  “When?”

  “Like two, three weeks ago. I did, hey? Where’re my envelopes?”

  A couple of months back, I’d pretty much gutted my bank account and added it to the stack of cash I’d stolen from The Rainbow Lodge and split all the money into envelopes that said things like FOOD and RENT and FUN on them. She’d stuck the money she’d made from her Wayne scam in there as well—but then winter had sort of passed us by, in a blur of booze and blankets and repeating CDS and sex.

  “No, that’s gone,” she said. “Long gone. I remember.”

  “Shit,” I said. “We have like fifteen hundred left, and that’s it.”

  “That’s a few weeks,” she said.

  “Ja, but then what?”

  She smiled and rubbed her hands over her face, like she was waking herself up. She was drunker than me. “I have marketable skills,” she said.