Perfections

by Kirstyn McDermott

  ‘Can I just . . .’ She leans forward and presses her ear over the place where his heart should be, her breath held tight in her lungs. Listening, listening, and when she hears it, the faint but steady rhythm, it sounds like magic. Feels like magic, the shiver that spreads across her skin, that thrums through her bones. Because can there be any other word for it? One day he wasn’t here – wasn’t anywhere – and now he’s standing before her, hand cradling her head as this unseen muscle beats and beats and beats, the fact of him so real, so big, it leaves no space for questioning.

  ‘Incredible,’ Antoinette whispers.

  He takes her chin in his hand, tilts her gaze to meet his own. ‘Yours,’ he says, and lowers his head towards hers.

  Jacqueline inches away from the boy newly slumped on the couch at her side. His sweaty arm rubs against hers and she wrinkles her nose at the odour that wafts from his body. He grins at her, head bobbing in time with the music. At least in Merde’s upstairs lounge the sound of the band is somewhat muted, their drums and synths blending to a harmless, syncopated beat. The vocal drone is just another instrument. Woodwind perhaps, or pipe organ.

  ‘You want a drink?’ the boy yells in her ear.

  ‘No thanks.’ Jacqueline smiles, carefully bland. She looks towards the staircase where Ryan disappeared too long ago. The band that’s playing isn’t the one his friends are in. He’s gone to find out when they’ll be on.

  ‘You look thirsty,’ the boy yells at her again. ‘Thirsty and hot.’

  ‘I’m not drinking tonight,’ she says. Not tonight, not ever if she can avoid it. She hates the way alcohol makes her feel. Light-headed and loose. Disconnected from everything, including herself. ‘Thanks anyway.’

  But he’s already on his feet. ‘S’kay, I’ll get you a Coke then.’

  Jacqueline starts to protest, but he’s already making his way towards the bar. Long and lanky, his limbs move as though they’re attached to strings. The girl on the adjacent couch begins to laugh, a harsh and barking sound. ‘Don’t sweat it; Scott totally crushes on newbs.’ She’s lying on her back, legs hooked over the arm of the couch and swinging gently. Her skirt puddles in her lap. Her calves are smooth and well-defined, criss-crossed by the strappy Egyptian-style sandals she’s wearing.

  Jacqueline leans closer. ‘Jane, isn’t it?’

  The girl shakes her head. She wears dreadlocks, like Ryan, only hers are shorter and multicoloured. ‘Zane. With a Z.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Jacqueline says. ‘I must have misheard.’

  The girl shrugs, as though it doesn’t really matter, but there’s a keen, catlike gleam in her eyes. ‘So you’re this big shot gallery chick, right?’

  ‘My boss is the big shot. I just do his dirty work.’

  ‘You reckon he might be interested in someone other’n Ryan?’

  ‘I don’t know, I can’t really speak for–’

  ‘Hang on, look.’ Zane swings her legs around and sits up. She undoes the drawstring on the patchwork pouch she wears slung across her chest and pulls out a handful of photographs. Passes them to Jacqueline. Her fingernails are short and grimy. Her cuticles are ragged. ‘My website’s on the back, yeah?’

  The light’s dim up here and tinted scarlet, making it hard for Jacqueline to discern much detail from prints which appear second-rate to begin with. Shots of boxes, and open suitcases, filled with a variety of different objects. Dolls, or parts of dolls, and scissors clutter one of them. Another seems filled with brightly coloured shapes and shiny pieces of metal. ‘You’re a photographer?’

  Zane shakes her head. ‘No, see, I make what’s in the photos. But you really need to look at them for real, you know? You need to be in the same space. I thought maybe while you were up here, you might like to check them out.’

  Jacqueline shuffles through the photos, flips one of them over. The website address appears to have been stamped on by hand, letter by individual letter. ‘I can certainly pass these on to my boss. He’s always looking for new work.’

  ‘Look, I know the photos are crap. But if you just came by . . .’

  ‘I’m not sure I’ll have time. I’m just here for Ryan.’

  ‘What if I bring a couple of them to you?’ Zane leans forward. Hunger pinches her face. ‘Where you staying?’

  Jacqueline tries not to recoil. ‘Ah, I’m not sure that–’

  ‘Give it up, Zaney.’ The boy, Scott, sidles between them with drinks in hand. ‘No one cares about your stupid puzzle boxes.’ He places one of the glasses on the table in front of Jacqueline. ‘One Coke for the lady, straight up.’

  ‘They’re not puzzle boxes!’ Scowling, the girl aims a kick at him. Misses and hits the table instead. The glass wobbles and Jacqueline reaches to steady it, the photographs dropping to the floor as she does.

  ‘Scott, you dick,’ Zane snaps. She crouches beside Jacqueline’s legs to pick up the scattered prints. ‘They’re not puzzle boxes,’ she says again. ‘They’re more like dioramas, but complicated, you know. Layered. You should see them.’ She offers the photos to Jacqueline, thrusts them towards her.

  ‘Zane, put those away.’ The voice is sudden and commanding, and Jacqueline turns to see Ryan standing with arms crossed beside the couch. ‘No one’s doing business here tonight.’

  ‘I was only showing her.’ The girl pouts, then actually flutters her eyelashes at him. ‘Hey, Ryan, you think I could, like, bring a couple cases round to your place? Creeping Beauty, maybe, or Malice in Wonderland, that be okay? So she can get to see them while she’s here?’

  Ryan grins. ‘A time to every purpose, little thing.’ He bends and kisses the top of her head, right where her dreads morph from pink to peacock blue, rendered purplish in this light. The expression on his face is amused, indulgent. An expression Jacqueline imagines a father might reserve for his favourite child. Except there’s nothing daughterly about the way Zane looks at him. Watching them, Jacqueline wonders about conduits, and whether it would prove help or hindrance to get the girl onside.

  Ryan straightens. ‘Come on,’ he says to Jacqueline. ‘My mates’ll be on soon. Let’s head down, grab us a good possie, eh?’

  Downstairs is the last place she wants to be. Amid the heat and the noise and the crush of the clammy, pulsating bodies that throng before the stage. But Jacqueline smiles and gets to her feet. Tonight, her primary concern is to keep Ryan happy. As she sidles her way out of the circle of couches, Jacqueline catches Zane’s eye. The girl’s mouth is now a hard, thin line, and her gaze has daggers in it.

  Antoinette steps from the shower and grabs one of the ivory-coloured towels from its rail. She still feels bad about ducking away from him like that, slipping mercurial through his arms just as his lips were so obviously about to touch hers, but it was too sudden, and too strange. Kissing him would have been a kind of weirdness she doesn’t want to consider just now.

  Her heel looks much better at least, now that she’s cleaned away the dried and crusted blood. It still hurts to put weight on, but the pain is old, dullish, the edges of the wound crinkled white from the shower. There are butterfly stitches in the medicine cabinet and Antoinette uses three of them, smears on some Savlon and wraps a fresh length of gauze around her foot, hoping the cut won’t open up again. Doctors and stitches and shots, oh my! Antoinette shudders.

  She rubs at her hair, squeezing as much water from it as she can. It’s too long, the curls too thick, and will take ages to dry, but she’s forgotten her anti-frizz stuff back at home – back at Paul’s – and blow-drying would be a disaster without it. Antoinette swipes a hand across the mirror, cuts a swathe through the steam. Maybe she should hack it all away, short as she can stand it. She bundles her hair together, piles it up on top of her head: Raggedy Ann gone gothic, sure, but certainly easier to care for, easier to dye as well. Already time for a touch up, she notes, a fresh coat of bla
ck to conceal the creep of mousy brown.

  Antoinette laughs. All that’s happened in the past couple of days, and she’s worried about the colour of her hair? She pokes out her tongue at her reflection, then wraps herself in the towel and opens the bathroom door.

  There’s music coming from the living room. The new Emilie Autumn album which she bought only a week ago and has barely found time to play, all violins and high-strung harpsichord, higher-strung vocals soaring over the top. Antoinette closes her eyes, opens her senses. She can feel him somehow, can almost visualise him standing by the glass balcony doors, looking out into the night, a glass of red wine in his hand. Like there’s a thread joining the two of them, some unseen umbilicus anchoring him to her. It’s an odd feeling, and not an entirely comfortable one.

  Antoinette slips into the study and quickly dresses – her favourite black jeans and an old Cure shirt she bought on eBay, a black sweater she’s had so long it’s almost grey – then notices that the computer is still humming, its monitor in sleep mode. Curious, she taps at the space bar and a website flashes onto the screen. Paul’s blog, the latest entry dated Saturday – yesterday? Yes, the clock confirms, today is still Sunday, at least for another sixteen minutes.

  angry, sad and bitter about the waste of too much time, i sit here and stare at the screen in the hope it will give me the answers i need or, failing that, solace. nothing can ever be the same. nothing should ever be the same. sharklike, i swim forward, always forward. otherwise, i remind myself, i will drown.

  Quasi-cryptic, lower-case melodrama, typical Paul, and Antoinette stops reading after the first paragraph. Closes the browser and flicks the monitor off at the switch, mildly surprised at the hurt she doesn’t feel. Sharkboy. She snorts.

  In the living room, she finds him waiting on the couch, still wrapped in her pink dressing gown. Antoinette smiles. ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey yourself,’ he says. There are two wine glasses on the coffee table, one of them empty, along with an open bottle of red. ‘Want some?’

  ‘Okay.’ She sits beside him with her legs crossed beneath her, watching the tendons shift in his hands as he pours the wine and passes over the glass. Their fingers brush as she takes it from him and she’s amazed all over again by how undeniably real he is. ‘Why were you looking at Paul’s blog?’

  He raises an eyebrow. ‘Paul’s blog?’

  ‘Well.’ Antoinette sips her wine. ‘You know.’

  ‘It was trippy,’ he says. ‘I remember what’s in it, but I don’t remember writing it – or living it, not for real. Everything felt sort of second hand, third hand even. Like someone telling me about what someone else has done, except that someone is also me. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Not really,’ she says. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay, I can’t explain it properly anyway.’ He stares into his wine, black hair falling over his face like a curtain, the cast of his mouth so despondent, she wants to reach out and hug him. She shifts her position, and his head snaps up again, blue eyes sharp as splinters. ‘What am I, Antoinette? Who am I?’

  She shakes her head, apologising yet again as she thinks back to the night before, all that manic scribbling, the pressure building in her skull, her chest, her gut, as she wrote, filling page after frantic page, the sensation nothing she can put into words for him now. It feels too intimate, too distant, all at the same time. ‘I never gave you a name,’ she says. ‘I just . . . you were just . . . you just were.’

  He tilts his head, a half-smile quirking his mouth. ‘I still am.’

  A runnel of sweat slides down Jacqueline’s spine. Her hair hangs wet and limp, sticking to her face and the nape of her neck. Ryan is pressed close against her back, his body moving in time with the music. His fist punches the air with every drum beat. There are people in front of her. Behind her. Pushing and pulsing. She feels small and swallowed whole. The water someone pressed into her hand earlier is long gone. She clutches the empty bottle as though it’s a talisman.

  She tries to match herself to the rhythm. Tries to move the way the crowd is moving. Loose and fluid. But her foot is trapped beneath someone else’s and she stumbles. Almost falls. Ryan catches her, his hands strong around her arms.

  ‘You okay, girl?’ he yells into her ear.

  She nods, far from okay. ‘I might take a break.’

  He grins and tosses his head, unhearing.

  Around her, the crowd continues to pulse and sway. There are no gaps to weave herself between. No avenues of escape that won’t involve shoving and squeezing and the sharpness of elbows. On stage, the singer leans into his microphone, his vocals distorted to an electronic screech. Ryan’s hands slide down her arms, coming to rest on her hips. Jacqueline closes her eyes. Tries not to notice the way her head seems to float away from her body.

  Loose and fluid. She licks the sweat from her lips. Fluid and loose.

  ‘Loki?’ Antoinette echoes. ‘That’s really what you want to call yourself?’

  ‘I like it,’ he says. ‘It’s mythic, and strong.’

  ‘I already know two guys who go by the name of Loki.’

  ‘Now you know three.’

  Antoinette is doubtful. ‘It’s a bit . . . pretentious, maybe?’

  ‘I like it,’ he says again. She opens her mouth, wanting to say something about the types of boys who dub themselves Loki or Thorne or Vlad – pick a cliché, any cliché, paint it black and watch it insist it isn’t a goth – but he reaches out and touches a finger to her lips. ‘You had the chance to name me. Now it’s my turn.’ His finger slides across her cheekbone, dips down to run along her jaw. ‘I choose Loki.’ Smiling, he cups her chin with his hand, moves a little closer. Beneath them, the couch shifts and creaks.

  ‘All right,’ Antoinette says, all right, as she pulls away from him, wedging herself into the corner with her knees pulled up between them. ‘Whatever, look, just stop doing that, okay? Give me some space.’

  He leans back. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Neither do I.’ She pulls a cushion onto her lap, hugs it close.

  ‘Why am I here? Why did you bring me here?’

  Antoinette looks away, unable to meet his eyes for the confusion that shines there, teary bright and oh so wounded, so she takes his hand instead. Traces the grooves on his palm, the sweeping curve of his lifeline, bifurcated near the base just like Paul’s was – just like Paul’s is, she reminds herself with no small amount of wonder, the seep of past tense startling and unexpected.

  ‘Antoinette?’ he asks, Loki asks. ‘Talk to me.’

  She squeezes his hand, their fingers interlacing. His skin is so pale compared to her own, so utterly unblemished – a stone-smooth pallor which sunlight cannot penetrate, she recalls writing, though the specifics of much else now elude her. The harder she tries to remember, the quicker the phrases seem to twist away, slippery as shoals of fish, and Antoinette gives up, frustrated and fearful.

  ‘Have you seen my notebook?’ she asks, scanning the room, trying to think where she might have left it. Because knowing exactly what she wrote, being able to see the precise words that conjured him, this creature who now sits beside her – her creature, her Loki – suddenly seems of vital importance.

  Jacqueline fades in and out. The lights, the music, the texture of the patchy velour couch beneath her cheek, all pull at her from different directions. The girl with hair like shivery, coloured serpents crouches down in front of her, mouth moving – how you going down there? – and Jacqueline smiles at her. ‘Ryan?’

  The girl shakes her head. Snakes whip about her face. He’s gone to find you some water. You don’t look so good.

  Jacqueline keeps smiling. ‘I’m fine.’

  Yeah, right. The girl presses a cold hand to Jacqueline’s face, a hand that feels like glass. And I’m the Virgin Mary.

  She mi
ght be, the way the lights shine around her head. A crimson halo, a corona made from dust and darkspun dreams. Zaney, she remembers, the girl is called Zaney. And something else. ‘You make puzzle boxes,’ Jacqueline says.

  The girl rolls her eyes but it doesn’t matter because now Jacqueline can see Ryan Jellicoe over on the other side of the room. He’s holding some boy by the shirt with one hand, pushing him hard up against the wall. His mouth moves and he’s pointing, pointing towards Jacqueline, and the boy is shaking his head, his mouth moving as well. Then Ryan Jellicoe does something, something with his shoulder and his knee, too fast for her to catch and then the boy is on the floor, and now Ryan Jellicoe is stalking in her direction with a face full of thunder and demons.

  And. Jacqueline. Fades.

  Antoinette flips through the notebook again, cover to lilac cover. It’s definitely the same one she was using last night, inky flowers filling the first page, along with her own name and the lopsided heart and the four little blocks that no longer spell P-A-U-L, but the rest of the pages are blank. Not new, though, not pristine. Rumpled and worn, like they’ve been written on, then thoroughly, impossibly, erased, and if she tilts the book to the light just so, Antoinette can even make out the imprint of curves and strokes, faded little ghosts of words that must once have been.

  ‘It was already like this?’ she asks. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I guess,’ he says. ‘I found it under the table while I was cleaning up but I didn’t even open it. Just put it in here with the rest of your things.’

  Antoinette throws him a glance. ‘I still can’t believe you cleaned up. Without the threat of corporal punishment even.’

  He blinks. ‘I’m not him, you know.’

  ‘I know. Sorry, it’s just . . .’

  ‘I’ll never be him.’

  Antoinette sighs. ‘I don’t want you to be him, believe me. That’s the very last thing I want.’ She closes the notebook, tosses it onto the desk. ‘Bloody useless.’