by Dan Noble
KISS KILL
BOOK 1 - THE GIRL IN THE BOOK SERIES
Dan Noble
Illustrated by
The Cover Collection
DB Co.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Coming Soon…
Mailing List
About the Author
Thank You For Reading
You don’t know how you got here
You just know you want out.
—U2, “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me”
1
ERIN
You want to hear what happened to my girl. I understand. It’s impossible to believe a thing like that could happen, so you want to hear about it over and over and over, but the truth is that no matter how many times you focus on the minute details, put it all together in a big picture, step back, and then sharpen your take, you’re never going to know anything that makes sense of the thing. It happened, and we should all move on, or else off ourselves. But I couldn’t possibly say that. People don’t like coincidences and plain bad luck. They want reasons, to make sense of things. I can certainly understand that.
It is not new to me, this feeling of being a plus-one. My husband is an important so-and-so. He is brave and good and cares about the rights and safety of people. He is the kind of person who makes you look in the mirror and say, Why the hell am I so worried about failing as a person/whether there will ever be another opportunity to feel good about another day beginning/if my speech is often accelerated and slightly hysterical, sounding as if I’ve drunk one too many coffees? Because there are people out there who exist on rice—when they can get it, that is—and who have lost their legs and family members to land mines and now have to swindle and connive to get enough to pay for a piece of plywood to put over their head for a shelter. They don’t have time to think about whether they like themselves. Losing merely one child is considered lucky.
The fact remains, now I am a plus-one in Olivia’s story, and this is as it should be. Still, I am here, and as unpalatable as the following will sound to you, it sounds even more so to me: I would like to move on, and so I am taking myself to a small restaurant overlooking the ocean, with the express goal of sleeping with a man I have thrice seen go to this restaurant, sit at the bar, and not speak with anyone but the bartender. I have told my husband I am meeting a friend for dinner.
I kept it simple, which is what you’re meant to do with lies. He didn’t ask which friend. This is not surprising. Gav does not listen to me. He avoids looking at me because our daughter looked like me—with the olive eyes (who ate the pimento? he used to say) and the fuzzy, fine hair (though mine is not arranged in piggy tails or twisty snails—yes, these erstwhile adorable twists of phrase stay in your head when they have turned perverse and painful to hear; the brain is not our friend), and the heavy forward-leaning walk (we’ve got places to go! she and I used to say)—and I pretend not to notice, and in this way we are able to go to sleep at night and wake in the morning and smile at the air when he leaves for work each day.
But it’s been nine years now, and I am not going to admit publicly to this terrible reality, which sounds obscene even to myself, but here it is: I want.
And I believe what I want is to live again. The activities I most often think about longingly are snorting in laughter and smiling naturally—and not just in private, or on the sly, when someone steps in shit or loses their cool at a supermarket cashier and drops the F-bomb.
I went last week and bought one of those full skirts with the pockets that look so elegant to me, and a fitted blouse that comes just to the waist of the skirt. The shop girl got so excited because she’d been trying to sell this look, and no one was ready for it, she said. I liked the sound of that for this occasion and enjoyed remembering the feeling of being fashion forward—a thing of simple sensory delight, so I bought everything she suggested—even the shoes and the earrings. She showed me, in a three-way mirror with light bulbs up the sides, how to twist my hair up in the new way—high, tight, but slightly imperfect. The Erin in that mirror was the Could Have Been Erin. It was so obvious that it got me thinking I must be on the right track.
I wore it all home, smiled slightly madly at the mailman, and then quickly ran upstairs to undress and wash my face and unpin and fluff out my hair. After that, I went into Olivia’s room and tried to remember what it was like to be annoyed at her for not picking up her alphabet blocks the way I had told her to three times, to tell her she must sit on the top step for two and a half minutes and think about what she had done (“I’m thinking,” she’d sing-song down the stairs while I tried not to laugh), to tell her she would not be able to watch Ben and Holly’s Little Kingdom if she didn’t eat her cheese sandwich (not the crusts, obviously).
I could remember, but I couldn’t recreate the lip-curling irritation those moments used to rouse. What was so trying about a child not eating her cheese sandwich? It was Jarlsberg, for crying out loud; I never would have looked at Jarlsberg when I was that age. The guilt is unsettling, usually, but this time, it settled—like a dog hair in my water glass that I couldn’t fish out—tangible, locatable, out of place. I took this as proof; I was doing the right thing. Sure, I might continue to gag on it, but a gag, I could handle.
I didn’t go that Friday. Instead I waited until the next one, in case I wanted to change my mind, a thought which never once did I entertain. There was a parking space right in front, and payment was not required for the meter, as it was after six. This was a typical North Queensland pub, but cleaned up and renovated, so that it had become slightly bland, but in turn had clean toilets and nice-enough brick oven pizzas.
I walked up to the barman, without scanning to look for The Man, and asked for a Tom Collins. Now, I had no idea what was in a Tom Collins, but I didn’t want to do anything that came naturally to me. I stirred the cherry-orange skewered toothpick regretfully, but on my tongue the drink was sweeter than I’d imagined; refreshing. Refreshing refreshing refreshing. God, I hate that word; it’s an ad for a word, it’s not an actual word is something I used to say at dinner parties when there was nothing else to go for.
Gav doesn’t expect me to go to dinner parties anymore, and it was a relief now—because I wouldn’t be instantly recognized here the way I once would have been when I was more social. If I was noticed at all, someone might think, I know her from somewhere. And though I was grateful for the increased degree of anonymity, I missed society, the careful costuming, the mysteriously confident self-deprecation. I was good at it. I had been lucky. Post career stall-out, mine had become a life of enjoyment, that rare thing I’d worked long and hard to attain.
But now I was a person who said refreshing and meant it. And this person just spied the man she was going to sleep with. He was wearing a Billabong T-shirt with an incomprehensible image on it that probably meant something to people who surf, but was lost on me. For all I kne
w, it was lost on him, and he was merely pretending to be amongst the knowing. For all I knew, he’d washed it a million times in a few weeks to make it look that old because it was cooler that way. Or he was wearing an old shirt because he didn’t give a shit about what people thought, and the image had once been comprehensible, but had worn away in the important spots. Or it had been bought for him that way, and he’d never given it a thought.
It was surprisingly easy to make eye contact. An old song I remembered from the early wear-makeup-to-bed days with my husband, then boyfriend, was playing. I looked up, and bang. There were that surfing T-shirt wearer’s eyes. They were kind and the skin around them sun slackened; but there was a vacuous quality to them that frightened me a little—and was exactly the reason I’d chosen him.
The punk song’s purposely blasé base line worked its magic: I remembered this slightly condescending thrill of getting it and smiled—a real one produced by a happy thought. After wanting it all this time, I couldn’t believe how shameful it felt. But it was too late. He had already taken the grin as an invitation and walked over.
“Can I buy you a beer?”
“But I’m drinking a Sav Blanc.”
“Can I buy you a beer?”
“Are you saying that’s all that’s on offer?”
“Yes.”
“Interesting.”
“Is it?” There was the smell of a fresh shower on him.
“Very.” I was halfway between running and completely throwing myself into this; there wasn’t feeling and thought as much as the sense of having been thrown into the middle of the ocean and trying to survive.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
“If you insist.”
“No one said anything about insisting.” This self-assurance would come off as a good thing in any other situation, but it’s the worst look for a mourning mother—confident is not what people want to see. They want to see how terrible your pallor is, how timid the world has made you so they can ply you with pity-kindness, all the while trying not to look terrified that they might catch your bad luck before they bolt home, hug their kids, and thank God it hadn’t happened to them.
“Two Four X Gold.” An indiscreet nod from the young bartender said a lot. There was judgment there: old-man tastes that never change. My man must have been here plenty.
“Mmmm,” I said, incredulous.
His look said he caught on but didn’t care.
“Seen you here before.”
“You have,” I said. I didn’t worry over the silence; it seemed nuanced, measured. We drank and watched two girls, indecently dressed, enter the bar. Always the same thought: if my daughter ever dressed like that . . .
“Live over this way?”
“Up in the big house, at the point.”
“Ah.” He took a long sip. Why had I said that? The plan was ruined, and I ought to have run; I’d sabotaged it purposely, hadn’t I? Do I want to be that man? I imagined him thinking. The one who had an affair with that woman. But maybe it was more a general wondering about the kind of woman who comes on to a man when she lives in that kind of house and is married to an important so-and-so and should be lying in the dark, crying over Olivia. What had it ever been like to be anonymous? Clearly, I didn’t want to recall.
“And you?”
“In the littlest house, as far from the point as you can get.”
“Ah.”
Silence.
“So what do you do with yourself . . .?”
“Erin.”
“Erin; I’m Mick.”
“Nice to meet you, Micko. I . . . work as a waitress.” I was as surprised as he was to hear it come out of my mouth.
He didn’t ask where, only half-heartedly followed along with my obvious lie. “And how do you find that?”
I let out a horsey sigh. “Honestly? It’s a fairly subtle art.”
He laughed.
“No, really. It sounds silly; I know. But hear me out. Look—look at that girl with the short skirt standing at the far table, taking down that young family’s order. Everyone’s got this expectation at that table—I’m going to get that great barra with the herby crust; I’m really looking forward to their chips with the tarragon. So, she’s got them already on a hook. Then it’s the simplicity that gets me: take the order, pass it to the kitchen, retrieve the order; transaction complete. There’s a beautiful symmetry to restaurant dining if you know how to see it. It’s a time out; you can be anyone, but here—you all do the same thing. You eat your fish and chips and have a drink and pay your bill and look at the taped-up sign that says, ‘tips,’ ignore it, and then go home. The great equalizer.” Did I really believe that? Was it actually simplistic, easy, or was it precisely the kind of simplicity that says everything if you just meditate on it long enough? What about all the people who couldn’t afford to eat out, who didn’t get any protein in their diets? Where was the equality for them? Again, the thought: losing one kid was considered lucky in those kinds of places—it was the ones who’d lost five, seven, who had it rough.
“Okay.” His look said it all.
“Aren’t you moved by my depth of vision?”
“Completely.”
“You aren’t very keen to impress.”
“No.”
He wasn’t vacuous. He’d tricked me, too.
I wish I could say I was aroused; that there was a flicker of eroticism in our exchange. But I hadn’t felt anything along those lines in a long time; I wasn’t wearing sexy underwear—just the same style nude bra and panties I wore daily. If there was a strip of lace, it certainly wasn’t designed to entice as much as soften. What passed between us wasn’t inconsiderable, though.
The lights and music dulled twice—as if the power were about to go out. A chorus of uh-oh ensued, but everything returned to normal.
“And you? What do you do?”
“Does it matter?” Our looks challenged. What were we saying? My experiment had gone off the rails, and I should probably jump ship now. This was about more than a one-night stand; there was no turning back from a move like this.
Oh, stuff it. “It does. Turns out I’m not as slick as I’d thought.”
“I could have told you that.”
“Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Shift over to this version of things without missing a beat.”
“Apologies, but I am as slick as I thought.”
I smiled. The sensation wasn’t as painful this time. Besides, I’d done it in private, in the cloak of a dark closet nearly daily. I just had to, in the same way that tonight I just had to do this. “So what do we do now?”
“Eat something?” He gestured toward the dining room. “I hear the herb-crusted barra is great.”
Our table was in a terrible spot—too close to the bar, and near a band setting up, already too loud during the sound check. The table was immaculate, though, as if it was loved, this ordinary thing. Exchanging smiles, we ordered the barra—his with baked potato, mine with salad. We were past the age when chips were tempting; they were a precursor to a bad belly and a couple extra kilos.
The second round of drinks arrived on their beer mats. Everything did seem to make sense. We sipped.
“Good band, this one.”
“I can only imagine.”
“No, you’ll see.”
The first song was a classic designed to make the crowd warm to the band. It worked. Everyone loves a sing-along. I found myself resistant to liking them; I didn’t want him to be right. But in the familiar strums and riffs, we found our former selves (it wasn’t just me) and scanned to see whether we’d been transported to those could-have-beens. There’s a belligerent hope in musical memory, and it was in this toughness I mustered the strength to stay.
The band went right into a new song I recognized from the radio, but their rendition was arranged differently, slowly, thoughtfully. When it was through, I realized I’d disappeared into it. If I wanted to sleep with this man, w
hy wasn’t I doing it? I wasn’t even flirting; where was all the smiling I’d planned on doing?
“So tell me something.”
I took him where my brain had been lately. “Okay. Do you read?”
“That’s more of a question.” He’d somehow eaten all his fish and now lifted his fork to make some headway on the potatoes. “Yes, I read. History mostly.”
“History; never can get at the whole truth, so take the best you can get at.”
“Of course you gotta question everything, or you’ll get fed all kinds of rubbish. So, you were saying?”
You sound like my husband, I nearly said. “I’m working up to it. Did you know novels—proper modern ones that we read today—only began to take shape when writers left the morality play setup and started to feature specific people, writing the stories autobiographically, as if the action was happening to them?”
“You really know how to turn a guy on.”
“Really, I’m trying to answer your first question—honestly now. Hang on.”
“You’re not really a waitress? And I went ahead and took your tip on the barra.”
“You know I’m not.”
“Okay; thrill me.”
“Archetypes, moral tales were what everyone wrote, not someone frying onions and stepping over a crack and hammering nails to make it feel real. But see? That change of perspective, and bam! An amazing way to open up unique experience to the world. And the magic of it is,” I held up a finger in pause, “It’s the specificity of the representation that truly began to tell stories that connected universally, because the more authentic the details, the more realistic the experience, and the reader could feel they were walking in the characters’ shoes. I could think all day about the infinite narrative techniques novels use to recreate reality without copying it. It’s so real that sometimes—sometimes—” The finger again; I used to use this finger all the time. People would say, watch out, she’s pulled out the finger!
