Perfections

by Kirstyn McDermott

  ‘It’s all disappeared, everything you wrote?’

  ‘Every last word.’

  ‘How? Where did they go?’

  ‘I don’t know, Loki! Where did they come from in the first place? Where did you come from? You need to stop looking at me like I should have all the answers, because I don’t even know where to start.’

  Except he’s not looking at her like that, not anymore. The grin that brightens his face is so broad and wild and infectious, so full of delight, that she can’t help smiling in return. ‘What?’ she asks. ‘What did I say?’

  ‘You called me Loki,’ he says. ‘That’s the first time you’ve used my name.’

  — 6 —

  Jacqueline stares at the mug of green tea Ryan has set in front of her. She isn’t sure she wants to drink it. She isn’t sure she wants to drink anything that she hasn’t prepared for herself ever again. Ryan sits down opposite with a plate of toast. Reaches across the scarred wooden table top for her hand.

  She snatches it away. ‘Don’t. Please.’

  He sighs. ‘Drink your tea, you’ll feel better.’

  Jacqueline crosses her arms. Her blue silk cocktail frock was overdressed for the valley at night; in Ryan’s kitchen, with the midday sun blazing through the windows, she feels like a Christmas decoration left up past Easter. She wants to go back to the motel. She wants to take a shower.

  ‘Really,’ she says. ‘I’ll just call a taxi.’

  Ryan shakes his head. ‘Least I can do is give you a lift. Just let me finish my toast.’ He picks up a piece, thickly slathered with peanut butter. Waves it at her. ‘Sure you don’t want some?’

  Jacqueline looks away. The sight of the food is nauseating; the sound of Ryan’s chewing makes her stomach roll. There’s not much of last night that she can remember with any clarity. The light and the heat. The press of bodies. Little else. She can’t even picture the boy who gave her the bottle of water that turned out to be spiked. Something low grade, Ryan assured her this morning, relatively harmless. Just some stupid prank gone wrong. Nothing happened, he promised, nothing at all.

  We just came back here and talked till you passed out.

  What did we talk about? What did I say?

  The usual stuff and nonsense. Girl, you were pretty out of it.

  Steam curls from her mug, the smell of tea grassy and sharp. Jacqueline takes a tentative sip. ‘Ryan?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘You said it was a prank. What did you mean?’

  He takes another bite of his toast, chewing slowly while he studies her face. Swallows, then wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘What you need to get about me is, most days, I’m an arsehole.’

  Jacqueline frowns. ‘Pardon?’

  The drink-spiking, he explains, case in point. He doesn’t like being watched, doesn’t like being handled and, yeah, maybe he is starting to have second thoughts about schlepping his paintings halfway across the country for a bunch of Melbourne hipsters to gawk over. And when, after all the sniping emails and passive aggressive phone messages, she rocked up to his home town, then yeah, maybe he thinks it’s time to take her down a peg or two. Nothing too freaky; he only wanted to embarrass her.

  ‘You drugged me?’ Jacqueline doesn’t want to believe it.

  ‘No, I called it off. Thought I did, anyways.’

  Because once she came to his house and they got to talking, he changed his mind about her pretty quick smart. Only someone didn’t get the message, or someone thought they’d have some fun with the Melbourne girl anyway; whatever, someone has been dealt with. So, yeah, he’s sorry about the whole mess, the way it panned out.

  ‘But, hey,’ he says. ‘Points for honesty?’

  Jacqueline squares her jaw. She wants to leave immediately. No, not quite immediately. First, she wants to stand up, reach across the table and slap him. Watch her handprint bloom across his cheek. Tell him where he can stick his damn paintings. But she can’t afford to burn any bridges here; Dante would never forgive her. Lighten the hell up, Jacks, she can hear him saying. This prima donna shit is part of your job, so just swallow it and deal.

  She takes a deep breath. ‘You’re right, Ryan. You are an arsehole.’

  He smiles. ‘I am.’

  Her chair scrapes on the linoleum as she pushes it back from the table. She stands up, arms folded across her chest. ‘I need to go. Now.’

  Ryan chews his toast, slowly, his gaze not wavering from her own. ‘How’s about my painting then?’

  ‘What painting?’

  ‘The one you came all this way to spy on. Could show it to you now, if you like.’

  ‘I thought it wasn’t finished.’

  ‘It isn’t.’ He brushes the crumbs from his hands with three quick slaps. ‘You could see it anyway.’

  Jacqueline regards him evenly. There’s an upper hand in the balance here, and she senses the scales tipping in her favour. ‘Later,’ she tells him, then stalks barefoot into the living room where she left her shoes and bag.

  She’s buckling the strap on the second sandal, hoping the four-inch stilettos won’t prove too much for her compromised equilibrium, when she hears Ryan push his own chair back from the table. Jacqueline retrieves her phone from her bag. Holds it up to him as he walks into the room. ‘Do I need to call a taxi?’

  He pauses, then shakes his head. ‘Give me a sec to find my keys.’

  It’s a fifteen-minute drive to the motel in Ascot and Jacqueline spends most of it with her head turned towards the window, watching suburbs melt past in the sun. Brisbane in February. If she never comes here again in her life, she will die happy. At least Ryan’s car has air conditioning, which he obligingly turns up to maximum. ‘Not much for the heat, are you, girl?’

  ‘Not much.’

  She parries further attempts at conversation with equally terse responses, and he soon stops trying. Switches the radio on instead. Turns the volume up loud, filling the car with the kind of abrasive, masculine rock that scrapes on Jacqueline like asphalt over skin. Strident guitars and sandpaper vocals. Flame trees and weary drivers.

  Jacqueline sighs. Lifts a hand to shield her eyes from the glare.

  ‘Number eleven,’ she says – almost shouts – when they reach the motel.

  Ryan pulls up in the parking space outside her room and kills the engine. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry, okay? It was a shitty thing to do to someone.’

  ‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘It was.’

  The car grows warm in the silence. Jacqueline reaches for the door handle, pulls it towards her just as Ryan grabs her other arm.

  ‘Look,’ he says again. ‘This hasn’t mucked everything up, has it?’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  He rubs at his chin. ‘You gonna tell Dante to cancel my show?’

  Jacqueline curbs a smile. If only she wielded that sort of influence. ‘Isn’t that what you want?’ she asks. ‘This whole song and dance number you’ve been running for the past few months. You’ve been practically daring us to rip up your contract.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Ryan slumps in his seat. ‘Yeah, I guess.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me what’s going on?’

  He shrugs. ‘I dunno. These past couple of months, nothing seems to be coming out right. Like it’s just cut me off, you know?’

  ‘Cut you off?’

  ‘The painting. It doesn’t wanna play anymore. Or I’ve lost sight of what I was doing in the first place, maybe, or I never knew.’

  Jacqueline shifts to face him. Her hem rides up on her thighs and she pulls it back down. It doesn’t pull far. ‘If you want some feedback, I’d be more than happy to–’

  ‘Feedback.’ Ryan grimaces. ‘What I want is an exit strategy.’

  ‘You don’t mean that,’ Jacquelin
e says. ‘I’ve seen your work and it’s good, it really is. How about I come by tomorrow morning? You can show me the painting then, and we can talk things over. Perhaps the show doesn’t even need it. There are already enough canvases in your studio to fill Seventh Circle twice over.’

  ‘It needs it,’ he says. ‘You know it needs it. No centrepiece, no show. Right?’

  Jacqueline bites her lip. ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow. Yeah, sure.’

  He looks deflated, defeated. She touches his knee, lightly. Right where a stripe of sunlight falls across his skin, setting the hairs aglow. His skin is warm. His muscles twitch.

  ‘I’m exhausted, Ryan. My eyes hurt. I need to sleep.’

  He looks down at her hand. ‘Yeah, I reckon you do at that.’ He traces a finger over her skin, describing extended figure eights between her knuckles. ‘Smooth,’ he says. ‘Soft.’

  Jacqueline pulls away. Opens the door and pushes herself from the car with less grace than she’d like. Leans back in to retrieve her bag from the footwell. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning, then?’

  ‘Want me to come pick you up?’

  ‘All right,’ she says. ‘Around nine?’

  He laughs. ‘Christ, up with the birds, eh? How about ten?’

  ‘All right,’ she says again. ‘See you then.’

  Antoinette sits outside in the car for several minutes, watching the darkened flat that used to be her home. Paul will be out at his Monday night critiquing-slash-drinking session with his writer buddies, she knows that, but still she waits, watching for the sudden switch of a light, the movement of a silhouette beyond the glass. She yawns, tired despite having slept most of yet another day away. Tired down to her bones, her body clock all screwed up, and it will take some time to set it right.

  At least she doesn’t have to work tonight, though the favours she owes Michelle are multiplying like amoeba. You need to let him go, was the lecture when Antoinette called that afternoon, you don’t heal a broken heart by picking at the wound. And I know, Antoinette told her, and it isn’t that, honest. Explaining about her foot, about how she really should let it rest just one more night, and promising to make it up to Michelle any way she liked – which means she now has to pull a double-shift on Wednesday, but she’ll hobble across that bridge when she gets to it.

  ‘Come on, girlie-girl,’ she tells herself. ‘Get this over with.’

  She wrestles the two suitcases from the back seat. They’re both large – Jacqueline took the smallest with her to Brisbane – and Antoinette dreads the weight of them once full, but the fewer trips she makes back here the better. Without bothering to knock, she unlocks the front door and pushes inside.

  The flat is dark and empty and feels like . . . nothing.

  Surprised, Antoinette flicks on the hall light. Just a couple of days ago, the place was full of jagged edges and pointed corners, heavy with grief and the salt-sharp taste of regret. There are still memories aplenty – the empty peg on the wall where she used to hang her coat; the geisha-girl painting they bought at a garage sale for five dollars, haggled down from ten; the deadly, hip-bruising cupboard – but now they seem like old memories, smooth and threadbare and worn, leached of any emotion stronger than a vague nostalgia.

  Antoinette supposes she should feel grateful – and mostly she is – but there’s a small part of her that also feels robbed, like something precious has been lost, or stolen, or was maybe never there in the first place.

  In the bedroom, she throws the suitcases onto the unmade bed, side by side with bellies eager for filling. This, too, is easier than she thought it would be: all her clothes pulled from the wardrobe, from the chest of drawers that she scavenged out of hard rubbish but which Paul could keep, from underneath the bed itself. Neatly folding everything into the first suitcase, deciding to leave the coat hangers with their awkward elbows behind, impressed with how much the thing can swallow.

  When it comes to Paul’s clothes, she chooses carefully.

  A black woollen jumper she bought him a couple of years ago, an old pair of jeans he hasn’t worn for ages, a couple of T-shirts from the bottom drawer. A handful of socks and jocks that won’t be missed, and a pair of black Converse sneakers that have been living under the bed for so long she has to blow an entire tribe of dust bunnies from their laces before stuffing them down the side of the suitcase. A few more odds and sods, nothing he wears very often, nothing he should miss. Her hand pauses over the leather jacket hanging on the back of the door, but only for a moment.

  That really would feel like stealing.

  Antoinette sits on the end of the bed, head in her hands, thinking of what else she needs to take with her. There’s too much to consider: personal things like books and DVDs and CDs and all the little knick-knacks and bits of junk she’s carried along throughout her life; and then the household stuff, not so much the furniture which was mostly here when she moved in, but all the mundane minutiae, cups and saucepans and towels and blankets and crappy paintings of Japanese girls in cheap wooden frames.

  She’d like to abandon it all. Just take what she’s already packed and leave the rest for Paul to do with what he will. A clean break, a fresh start, the notion exquisite but impossible; she won’t be able to afford to replace everything she’ll need in whatever place she eventually finds for herself – and for Loki, she supposes with a jolt. She has no idea what to do about Loki, her new and needy shadow with his strong, blue-veined hands and eyes that trace her every step.

  Never mind the way he looks at her, eyes fox-sharp and fox-hungry, the colour of winter skies and low horizons, holding her gaze throughout the night as questions spilled relentless from his mouth. How did you and why did you and what am I, and even though most of her answers were merely variations on the theme of I don’t know, still he kept on asking.

  Tell me more. Tell me everything. Tell me again.

  And so she did. Curled on the couch until the thin light of dawn broke over the bay: her life, her memories, all the messy, painful stuff with Paul, hashed through again for him or, rather, with him. For as she spoke he would nod and sigh, and I remember, he would say, pressing her hand to his cheek. Or I know. I remember knowing. His skin so warm beneath her fingers, vellum-soft, as he asked her again to tell him of his creation, her eager young Sunday schooler begging for serpents and fruit.

  Tell me more. Tell me everything.

  Enough. Antoinette gets up, tosses the two lacquered jewellery boxes from the top of the dresser into a suitcase, not caring how they rattle, nothing in them more valuable than amethyst and sterling silver anyway. There’s an old Poppy Z Brite paperback on her bedside table, a novel she’s read almost to death, its broken spine so creased the title is all but rubbed away. Lost Souls, comfort reading for the shy and cynical, and surely there’s a couple more rounds left in it, so she throws the book into the case as well, then tugs the zipper closed.

  And that’s the bedroom done at least.

  Dispirited, she shuffles into the kitchen and checks there’s enough milk in the fridge before switching on the kettle. She should take the toaster with her – Jacqueline gave them that – and there are her favourite mugs as well, not to forget the three googly-eyed bat magnets she found at a two-dollar shop, or the Halloween-themed potholders with their black cats and pumpkins. So much stuff. She’s going to need more than a couple of suitcases to remove herself completely from this place; she’s going to need boxes and bubblewrap and possibly someone with a station wagon.

  And she’s going to need to sit down with Paul and talk.

  It makes her tired just to think about it. It makes her feel old.

  Antoinette stirs three heaped sugars into her coffee. Ever-expanding hips be damned, tonight she needs it sweet. There’s a picture frame lying face-down on the kitchen table. Bright red with bleeding black hearts she pa
inted on using nail-polish their first Valentine’s together, it used to hang in the living room near the stereo. She picks it up and turns it over, wanting to see again the photo of the two of them Paul took at arm’s length the time they drove down to Phillip Island to see the fairy penguins, their hearts as big and open and clear as the blue summer sky spread above them.

  Except the photo isn’t in the frame.

  There’s only a piece of plain white paper pressed behind the glass. Antoinette frowns and unclips the backplate. Not plain paper after all, not with the faint grey Kodak logo stamped all over the underside, but the kind she used to print the photo onto in the first place, and that’s just too weird. Taking the frame down, she can understand. Removing the photo, even putting another snapshot in its place, fine. But replacing it with nothing, just a blank white space? That she cannot begin to fathom.

  ‘None of your business,’ she tells herself. ‘Not anymore.’

  It seems odd, not the words themselves, but the absence of an echoing pang. Only three days since Paul kicked her out, only three days since it felt like the tears would never stop, like the ragged hole behind her ribs would never heal, and surely it can’t be this easy? This odd oasis of calm in which she finds herself can only be a temporary reprieve, some species of shock limping in a little late for the bell, or maybe just a reaction to the much, much stranger things that have come to come pass since Friday night. In a world where fantasy turns flesh-and-blood, after all, who’s to say what is and isn’t normal?

  Antoinette shakes her head. She needs to get moving, needs to get these clothes back to him – back to Loki – so he can get out of her dressing gown once and for all. He was still wearing it when she dragged herself out of bed late that afternoon, still or again, because his hair was wet and smelling of shampoo, dripping down his narrow back when she poked her head through the study door to see if he wanted coffee. His smile less effusive than the day before, cast fresh with caution, with uncertainty, and it pained her to see that, to know she was the cause.