by Pip Adam
Behind the Carl’s Jnr and across the road from the supermarket was a row of shops. The Mexican place was gone but the bottle store and the fruit and vegetable shop would be there forever. Columbus Coffee had been renovated after the fire, and was busy every time Carla cut through to the bus stop during the day. She figured the new shops, here and at Lunn Avenue, said something – about the growing middle class, about gentrification – but it was hard for her to work up a strong argument when she walked down from the horrible set of flats she lived in. The Indian restaurant was all warm light and warm smells and they ordered curries and rice and bread which all came in see-through plastic containers in a paper bag. Carla paid and then screwed the top of the bag down and down so she could hold it in one hand. In Duey’s car, she put the food on the floor between her feet, leaning down to rip off some bread, which she passed to Duey as she drove.
At the door of the flat, Carla gave the bag to Duey so she could reach into her tote for the keys. She lived in a shitty place. She knew that. Duey’s apartment was so much nicer, and central. They’d both grown up around here, in the eastern suburbs, they’d both gone to Selwyn College, walked the streets, drunk in its parks, but somehow Carla was the only person they knew who’d ended up back here. Everywhere was expensive in Auckland. When she got back.
Once she got her feet back on the ground, she’d started off quite picky. She’d had a couple of nice places in Mt Albert, but the owners sold them and she got pushed further and further out. People thought it was different now, or that it had just started, but it had been rumbling since the 90s. Carla had moved out of home to live with Duey in a flat in Ponsonby. It was on a street that had a hard British name Carla couldn’t recall now, as she dug in her bag in the hallway in front of the door of her shitty flat which housed her terrifying dog who was planning on killing her and was now making low, growling warnings to that effect. Then Duey and Carla had to move out of that place. Their flatmate went crazy and took a knife to their other flatmate. Duey and Carla broke into Carla’s parents’ house and stayed the night before sneaking back to the flat during the day to grab their stuff. Which didn’t amount to much. A couple of suitcases of clothes, and some books. They left the mattress they’d been sleeping on. It all just seemed a bit hard, what with the flatmate and the big, floppy, impossible bedding. They took their sheets and blankets and started looking around for a place to live, immediately. They must have had a day off work.
‘Remember that flat?’ Carla said. Holding her set of keys up to the light, sorting through them.
‘Which one?’
‘The one with the knifey flatmate. Robert?’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘How come we didn’t have to go to work that day, after we left?’
Carla could feel Duey thinking about it, then she said, ‘Did we have a day off?’
‘That’s what I can’t figure out.’
‘Did we take a day off?’ Duey said again.
‘Did we ever take a day off?’ Carla asked.
‘Can’t remember,’ Duey said, looking at her phone.
Carla found the key and opened the door a crack. She pushed the weight of the pit bull back, shouting the whole way. Calm, assertive, she thought, but really the dog was biding its time. Waiting for both of them to come in. Duey was behind Carla and then they were both inside before Doug leapt at Carla, high, at her face, at her neck. Carla punched the dog and it fell against the wall and then whined back to a place beside the bed. Duey didn’t flinch.
This was how low her opinion had plummeted, Carla thought. Of her. Of the situation Carla had got herself into. Duey didn’t have an opinion. She wasn’t disappointed. It was just the next thing that had happened to Carla.
Carla looked around the room. The dog had tried to get out everywhere. Everything had her teeth in it and, if not her teeth, her claws dragged through it. Doug looked at Carla and her eyes flicked for a second to the kitchenette bench. Carla looked as fast as the dog did and realised Doug had been up on it while she’d been away. From up that high the dog could see out the window and onto the road. Doug wouldn’t have given away her vantage point if Carla hadn’t hit her so hard. They were pitched against each other. Only one of them would walk away from this. Carla had the upper hand, literally – opposable thumbs, bipedal locomotion, technology – but Doug had teeth and was only muscle. Carla could never kill Doug with her bare hands, she’d need a gun or a vet or a car. Carla wouldn’t kill her, though, and this was another problem. She wanted to, and wanting to seemed not to be enough. But Doug could kill Carla quickly.
Carla remembered Duey. She’d never forgotten about Duey, but remembered her again and that she could see the fucking flat. The disaster of the flat. The wreckage, and for a second Carla could see what her landlord would see, when it was all over and he’d come round to change the locks or dryclean the big bloody spot in the carpet where either Carla or Doug or both had died. Carla tried to imagine the conversation she would finally have with her landlord, or that Duey would have to have, and realised she couldn’t imagine it, not really, it would be different from anything she expected. That was the way things always were. Part of her felt so fucked off, not knowing what it would be like. She had very little money. She’d had to start again when she came back – from scratch. She earned money but it cost a lot, living, and the rent was crazy. She was paying so much.
She looked around as she grabbed Doug by the collar and dragged her towards the bathroom. It was an awful flat. She’d hated it from the minute she saw it, 18 months ago. She hadn’t thought it could get worse, but here she was pulling a dog across the carpet, keeping out of the way of its teeth, the same dog that was taking the place apart in a very non-methodical way – hauling it apart, digging and eating its way out of the flat, like it was the inside of a whale that had swallowed the dog whole. Knowing almost everywhere Carla walked had been shat on or pissed on, or vomited all over, it was hard to live in it. That’s what she found. The stuff she had to deal with was fine in the moment she was dealing with it, but the residue it left just did her head in.
She shut the bathroom door on the dog.
‘Okay,’ she said, trying to adjust back to human beings, back to Duey, who was holding the bag with the food in it. Carla watched Duey bring the bag into the kitchenette, watched her like she watched Doug. Why couldn’t Carla be a good friend? She hated herself every time she couldn’t answer the question with better action. It was a reminder of her worst self. The self she didn’t want to show anyone. The part of her which was just horrible. She hated herself largely because of how much she had learnt about herself. If only she hadn’t learnt anything. If only she’d just trudged through life, looking at her phone, watching telly, buying stuff. If she had money, she would. She liked work. Work kept her busy and made things feel okay. But this, the way she kept hating Duey – no, not hating her, but just being empty to her. It was almost unlivable. She had no idea how she would get through it.
‘Don’t you play music anymore?’ Duey was unpacking the food on the bench.
Carla hadn’t tried to make the flat look like home. Some of her clothes were still in boxes. It felt so close, all of it. Fuck, Carla hated the flat.
‘Hm.’ Carla always did this. Spoke like she wasn’t paying attention, like she was focused on something else so tightly. Everything was in such tight, fine focus and then she’d say ‘Huh?’ It was probably self-hate. Someone had said that before. Her mother. Her aunt. All of them, before they went away, died, or left New Zealand. She was seeing the world through a filter of her distaste at herself, they told Carla.
‘Music,’ Duey said. ‘Don’t you play music anymore?’
Carla nodded. She listened to music a lot. Had it been that long since they had been in a room together when they weren’t working? She got out her phone and went over to the small speakers beside her bed and plugged it in. She put on Public Enemy. It was a personal joke. They’d loved them. Completely.
‘Do you
still listen to this?’ Duey said, licking the spoon she’d used to spread the dal all over her rice. The plastic containers were open on the bench. Carla watched her. She felt something inside her firing up. Why did they need fucking plastic spoons? Why did the world need such sophisticated delivery devices for food? She nodded.
‘Me too.’ Duey was balancing everything now, bread on top of the open container, a papadum, a can of coke under her arm. Duey had a huge appetite but stayed thin and flat-chested, slim-hipped.
The container would be in the rubbish tomorrow, later tonight, in like 20 minutes. There was no further use for it, except this one meal. It had been made solely so that Duey could eat out of it just once. Instead of the firing-up amounting to anything Carla walked over to the counter and got her meal. Duey was sitting on the edge of Carla’s bed, eating with a passion. Carla was fatter than she’d ever been. But there was something about being a man. For the shortest moment Carla hated Duey for being so completed, and then she didn’t. They didn’t drink as much now but they ate more and neither of them smoked anymore.
‘Do you miss it?’ Duey said.
‘Huh?’ Again with the vagueness, as if the vagueness was holding all the fury at bay, like anesthetic.
‘Smoking?’
‘How did you know I was thinking about smoking?’
‘’Cause I was.’ Duey dipped her bread into the dal. ‘I was thinking, I love food, and then I thought how both of us are fatter than we were and then I was thinking, why’s that? And then I thought about how much we used to smoke. Fuck, we smoked a lot.’
‘Fucking so fucking much.’
They would sit for hours. Sometimes in the salon they would smoke three cigarettes in a row. Back when you could still smoke in bars, they wouldn’t put them out.
‘We didn’t even put them out sometimes,’ Carla said, filling her mouth with papadum. It was dry and crisp and cumin. ‘Like we’d light one off the last one. Fuck.’
‘Fuck,’ Duey said. ‘Do you miss it? I fucking miss it.’
They both laughed.
Carla realised she hadn’t been here when Duey had given up. Had no idea whether she’d found it hard, or easy, or if she used nicotine gum or patches, or when it happened. When she came back Duey didn’t smoke. And Carla didn’t smoke, obviously, and that was as awkward as everything else. She looked at her feet. They’d never quite recovered. She couldn’t flatten the back of them fully to the floor. She was always on tiptoes. Her whole body swung back slightly if she wasn’t wearing shoes. She had dreadful balance. Had it ever been good? She was better in a heel – usually she wore wedged sneakers. In bare feet she would tiptoe around, which looked more hilarious the bigger she got. Carla had never been lightfooted. ‘I kind of miss it,’ she said now, to Duey.
Carla got Doug’s food out of the fridge. It was like Duey wasn’t there. She hadn’t forgotten Duey was there, but she felt like there was no point. She was exhausted. Tired of it all. What Duey thought was what Duey thought – there was no future for them. This was where their friendship would end.
Carla pulled out the bone. There was still some meat on it. The meat would have been pumped full of hormones. It looked like rage. The cow would have been male. Every time Carla fed Doug, she knew she was giving her more male. The dog huffed down the testosterone, the adrenaline that was locked into the animal’s body as it died, all tight inside Doug, and it ran the race of her as she sat all day waiting, plotting, trying to dig her way out of the flat. Once out, Doug would hunt her down, Carla was sure. Find her, jump to her throat and leave her to bleed.
Carla opened the bathroom door a tiny crack and threw the bone as far into the tiny room as she could and closed the door. Duey judged her. Carla could feel her doing it. She wouldn’t tell anyone because that wasn’t her style, but somewhere inside she was thinking about how this was how far Carla had sunk. Carla had no business getting a dog but no one else would take it and if she looked inside herself she had taken it to try and do the right thing. To try and show Duey. Showing Duey was over, now, though. There was no point. Duey had seen Carla. About a month ago she’d realised what was happening. Duey was making a study of her and, the study almost done, she could see all of Carla and there was no point in hiding any of it anymore.
‘Is that your phone?’ Duey said through a mouthful of dal. Carla turned to face her quickly. Doug sat heavily against the other side of the door – bone in paws, most likely. The room spun for a moment. She picked up her phone. It was Elodie.
Carla held it in her hand. ‘It’s Elodie,’ she said, hoping Duey would tell her what to do.
‘Oh,’ Duey said. ‘Will you answer it?’
‘I don’t think I want to,’ Carla said. ‘I’m not sure it will help. I mean, I only have bad news. I think I won’t.’ The phone rang on and on in her hand. ‘Do you think that’s the right thing to do?’
Duey shrugged. She was eating, she wasn’t thinking about work. This was her time off. Carla answered the call.
Elodie was engaged. Tommy looked at his watch. It seemed late for her to be talking to someone but maybe she was. Maybe she was calling him and it was just one of those strange things that happen. Two people calling each other at once, one half a second before the other. He was calling from his parents’ landline. He’d excused himself, picked up the cordless phone and gone out to the deck the kitchen opened onto. There was an outdoor lounge set beside the spa pool. It looked out over the large flat section, at the trampoline his parents wouldn’t get rid of, the fruit trees – huge now. The house was 200 years old. He’d grown up in it – in Cheltenham. Jerry and Rachel had a house in the Coromandel. Everyone expected them to sell the Cheltenham house, even now, after they’d had the other one for years. Tommy’s father still worked and his mother liked to be in Cheltenham, near the sea, near the village in Devonport which she could have in Pauanui but Cheltenham was also close to the city – the galleries, the shops. They divided their time between the two places – but they weren’t ready to move to Pauanui just yet. Tommy got out his phone and found Cal’s number. He liked using the landline sometimes. The weight of the cordless phone, the way he could cradle it between his jaw and shoulder. It didn’t heat up. He wasn’t worried about cancer. It was just nice occasionally to use a phone like this. He called Kurt while he was waiting for Elodie’s phone to be free, and then he thought he better call Cal.
Cal answered straight away and before Tommy could say anything said, ‘Are the clothes there yet?’
‘Well,’ said Tommy. He wasn’t sure how Cal recognised his parents’ number. ‘That’s kind of what I was calling you about. I thought we should all meet. At the workroom. Have a chat about the makeup. I’m rethinking the makeup.’
Cal didn’t say anything for a moment. Tommy could hear noise in the background. He was at a bar, maybe he was at the fundraiser.
‘Are you at the thing?’ Tommy said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Maybe you could bring Dominic.’ Tommy cradled the phone, looked around the property, the expanse of it. ‘Carla’s been calling.’
‘I know,’ Cal said.
‘Did she call you?’
‘Yeah. I said I didn’t know where he was.’
‘Why did you say that?’ Tommy asked.
‘Because he didn’t want to leave.’
‘Okay. Okay. Well, yeah, it’s just I’ve rethought the makeup and I think it would be good if we all meet at the workroom. We can see where Sharona’s at. Meet and have a think.’
‘About rescheduling?’
‘Not about rescheduling.’ Tommy hated the way Cal did this. He’d rung him straight after Kurt because he knew it would take this time. Kurt just said yes, but Cal wanted to know everything, how everything was going to fit. He had no faith. ‘About the shoot.’
‘It’s after nine. It’s night.’
‘Yeah.’ Tommy wanted a cigarette. He hadn’t had one all afternoon. He’d been with his father and now both of his parents. ‘Yeah, so I
’ll see you and Dominic there at 10.15. And Elodie.’
‘Elodie’s not here.’ Cal said. ‘Why would Elodie be here?’
Tommy was sick of the landline. He texted Carla and Sharona then dialled Elodie’s number again.
‘Hi Tommy.’ She was almost laughing, but she always sounded like that, like she was happy and fine.
‘Hi, it’s Tommy.’ He’d decided on the greeting and wasn’t changing it for her. ‘Sorry for’ – he was going to say ‘calling so late’ but she interrupted. ‘I’ll see you at 10.15.’
Tommy looked at his phone. He’d thought it was Cal. He tried to reorientate everything to fit the new information. Tried to move through the fact he hadn’t known. That he had it wrong. ‘Is Kurt there?’ he asked, just so he had it right now, just so he wouldn’t get it wrong again. He rubbed one of his eyes with the hand that wasn’t holding the phone.
‘Sorry,’ Elodie said, which was enough to make Tommy stop.
‘Okay, so I’ll see you at the workroom in an hour.’ He hung up. None of his emotions had caught up. He’d acted on what he thought he knew and that was wrong, so what was the meeting for? He couldn’t cancel the meeting. He knew that. He just needed to readjust. Cal. Kurt. It didn’t make much of a difference. It made a huge difference. He felt like he needed to sit down but he needed to get to the meeting. The meeting was a good idea. They needed to have a meeting.
His mother and father were sitting in the lounge with large glasses of white wine, talking to each other. Everything in the house was slightly old-fashioned. His mother was always buying new things, but it was their taste – old money. Tommy wasn’t sure what they were talking about. When his father saw him, he said, ‘I was just telling your mother how well you’re doing.’
Tommy nodded, laughed a bit. He was doing well. Things looked good whichever way you looked at them. Except with Elodie but even that was working its way out. Maybe Kurt had texted her. Maybe they were in the same restaurant. It could have sounded like a bar. Maybe she’d gone to a quiet part of the bar. Perhaps that was what she’d done.
