Atomic City

by Sally Breen

  Yeah, I mean, she spent – I don’t know if she did pay for it, they haven’t been phoning me so she might have done – two and a half thousand dollars on a dress for the ball. Had it made on Chevron Island and if she ever was short of cash, there’d always be some excuse about her cheque book being stolen, her father’s cheque book or whatever. You know, I had to get money transferred and it was a real pain.

  Oh, and she told me a story about a friend stealing fifty thousand dollars from her account two years earlier. She told me, all of us, a story that where you get your cars registered, someone had taken her credit card and taken a thousand dollars an hour all weekend. Forty-eight thousand dollars. The police were wanting to talk to her about it, and she was crying about this money that had been taken. On another occasion there’s something else and on another occasion something else. We’d decided that she was the unluckiest girl in the world.

  So I got to the stage where, as I said, I just didn’t even really like the girl, you know, she’d changed. She never lived with me but she’d stay over quite a lot. And in the end I just didn’t really want to go out with her anymore, but still occasionally she’d turn up at my place, four o’clock in the morning drunk and we’d sleep together, because what can you do, you know?

  THE DEALER

  Back home, the call I get from Jade comes quicker than expected.

  I’ve done it. I’m out. I need a new name.

  I try to calm her.

  Slow down! What are you saying?

  I’ve gotta get to the cemetery. Now.

  Confused, I say: What the fuck do you wanna go to the cemetery for?

  You’ll see. Come and get me.

  I pick her up and we drive west through the suburbs. I want her to talk about the bust-up with Harvey, but she won’t. She waves her hand at me. For her he’s history, behind her already, reduced to a dot, inconsequential. Clearly she’s wrong, but I go with her renewed urgency. All Jade wants to do is explain the new deal to me. I tell her: Fine. What’s happening?

  I found this out, she says. The government departments that register births aren’t linked to the departments that register deaths. Only in Queensland, it seems. So you can get a birth certificate from the birth registrar of somebody who’s already dead and no one’ll ever make the connection. Easy. The most difficult thing, though, is finding the dead people who’d be your own age if they were still kicking around. So, we need a cemetery.

  Her premise sounds logical; however, the fact she’s wearing black is a tad over the top. But I don’t comment; her energy excites me.

  We pull up on a side street alongside the cemetery. There are no other cars here but I’m pretty sure we’re not at the main entrance. Jade pulls out a notepad from her bag and a pen.

  Jesus, you look like a reporter. What do you need those that for?

  There might be a few options, she explains.

  When I don’t make a move she adds: You coming?

  And the look of mild amusement on her face is enough to motivate me to get out of the car.

  I hang back from her because even though I can’t see anyone else, she’s moving embarrassingly too fast to be in mourning. Putting my cigarette out on the bark of a tree, overly conscious there are thousands of dead people rotting in the earth under me, I figure they deserve some dignity. Jade doesn’t seem to have the same concerns. I watch her, amazed and enchanted, as she walks directly across tombs and patches of grass in front of headstones, intent on closure.

  I think this is the old bit, she says. And signals with her arm for me to follow her up the hill.

  I feel like I should at least read the headstones as I pass, not overlook anyone, certainly not trample on anybody. But at the same time what I really want to do is dig to the depths of Jade. What’s going on with her? Where are we headed?

  Most of the tombs disgust me, so much lingering pretension. But one, for a baby, is particularly sad. Jack Burnsforth born 1985, died 1987. His resting place is a little mound, as if his belly’s still sticking up in it. The ground isn’t even covered by cement. His parents have made a cross out of wood, resting precariously within a bunch of sticks. Around the makeshift grave are small toys and trivial things he must have loved, coloured pieces tied with string to the remnants of fallen wood. A hand-made arrangement of love and grief so powerful that the surrounding tombs, giant, black marble, soft-lens photographs, gold-leaf appellations, pastel images of Christ, mean nothing.

  I find Jade foraging through a mass of tall grass sprouting metres high out of a raised grave. She’s trying to cut through the dry stalks to read the headstone.

  Must be fertile, this one.

  That’s not funny, Jade.

  My serious tone surprises her and she looks up at me quizzically. When I don’t elaborate she shrugs her shoulders and says: Whatever.

  I look away because I can’t watch her. It’s not that I don’t recognise I’ve done worse things to people alive, it’s just that in the finality of death your name is all that’s left. Jade starts to write down the details.

  I hear the baby first. The loud cries echoing in waves off all the cement. Coming closer to us. I grab Jade’s arm roughly and pull her off the grave.

  Fuck you, she says righting herself on the slanted ground. I drop my hand but she’s wary enough not to turn back.

  You got what you wanted, let’s go.

  I don’t want anyone to see us, to be a witness to her scavenging, so I start moving off. Jade storms past me, not content to follow. The sound of the baby crying hunts us downhill. I can tell the sound unnerves Jade because her shoulders are pulled tight in defence against it. I realise the crying is the only pitch that can pierce through her disaffection. At the bottom of the hill we come across a couple – the crying infant in a stroller. The mother is tidying up a grave, placing flowers on the headstone. The father is push-pulling the stroller, trying to get the kid to shut up.

  Safe in the car I feel better. But Jade is still pissed with me.

  What was that all about? Jesus, if I’d known you were going to freak out I wouldn’t have asked you.

  Yeah, I say sighing. Sorry.

  Jade looks at me, confused by the tone of my voice.

  I don’t know Jade. I’m worried; all this baby stuff is freaking me out …

  She looks at me, alarmed.

  Don’t, she says. Don’t talk about it.

  But we can, Jade. We can.

  She looks down.

  We sit, both of us staring straight ahead. The long dirt road running along the edge of the cemetery doesn’t seem to end. Either she’s lost a kid or she wants one. Something. She certainly isn’t going to tell me. I flick the wipers on and off harder than I should.

  Jade stirs first.

  Well, I only got one name, but that’s fine. Cassandra Higgins.

  She looks at her notepad, then at me for my approval, I decide.

  A forgotten accident, she says and I can tell that’s all she’s going to give me.

  I start the car.

  Cassy, hey?

  Later that night when Jade walks towards me across the floor of the Casino I almost don’t recognise her. She is launching Cassandra. A blonde. A woman in a cheap blue dress. A dress cut so badly she looks fuller, rounder. Her eyes hover brightly above the dress mirroring the fabric’s sheen, the obvious iridescence. A lot of work has already gone into Cassandra. She’s wearing very, very high heels, towering over the crowd. The kind of effect that commands eyes: colour, shine and a dress thigh-high. An attitude of potential danger that also commands the attention of security.

  She stops two tables down at a group with a higher minimum and a broader range of men. My eyes keep shifting towards her. She shoots me looks, taunting me over her bare shoulder. There’s nothing subtle about Cassandra Higgins, our new woman.

  An older man offers her a chair, but Jade says she prefers to stand. I can hear her from here. The shrill voice of impropriety. She’s acting drunk, she’s acting fun and the circ
le starts to close in around her. She throws notes on the table like they’re inconsequential. She wins just enough times to keep the crowd interested. Someone buys her a drink, a cocktail the same colour as her dress. I keep dealing to my table, the one hard-core player sensing a loss of interest.

  I’ve created a monster.

  Seeing this apparition of her is like watching the metamorphosis of a butterfly in reverse. Just the sight of her is making me feel queasy. Even the way she’s holding her mouth is like an open invitation but I can’t look away. When Jade shifts she certainly doesn’t shift lightly. I pray she doesn’t extend her hospitality to my table. I indicate to my pit boss that I need a break. He signals no.

  I shouldn’t complain. I asked for this.

  Over the course of the next thirty minutes I watch Jade lose six grand and she knows I’m watching when she walks off with some guy who wants what’s left in her handbag just as much as what’s in her pants. I care about her body but I care even more about the cash. I’ve got the feeling ‘Cassandra’ won’t come clean with me, fifty–fifty could slide into a much less advantageous equation. I think about the money dwindling in my account, how the deposits keep on lessening. Before she left with that dick she was hovering over red more than black. I decide I need to reel her back in again, get her to calm down. Get some control because this new Jade is going to make a lot of money. It’s going to be less subtle, it’s going to be fast and dangerous, but it’s going to be a lot.

  STATE OF PLAY

  The new version of Jade signals the shift. The renaissance. Everything on the Gold Coast has more than one chance. The Dealer decides to meet fire with fire. He decides he’s been too soft. Jade as humble little rich girl he thought he could handle but Jade as Cassandra, as white-hot light, he’s struggling with.

  At home he looks at himself in the mirror. Grips the edge of the basin, his face splashed clean and awake with water. He looks and he says to himself: Just say what you really want. Just say it.

  He looks deep into his own eyes, so hard and grey and he knows what this is. He knows what he wants. He wants everything he shouldn’t have, everything he’s never been given, and everything he never had the guts to take.

  Just admit it, he says.

  The Dealer’s been getting around like a prize-fighter itching for combat. Been hiding how he really feels. What he really wants. Trying to be somebody better. Letting people like Camille round out what he thinks it means to be real. The Dealer knows he doesn’t want certainty now. He never really did. He wants to crash through his indecision, he wants to stop hanging on the edges. He wants to get on the inside. He wants Jade.

  And the city is saying: Yes.

  And the city is saying: Go to her. You know there’s nothing behind anything, everything’s just a lie. Go to her and tell her that you know. You know where to go and you know where she’s headed.

  And the city is saying: Forget about your history. Forget about your lineage and your birth. Look at everything you don’t have, look at everyone else who’s got it. Look at all those things that are all about wealth and power and automatic access for a few and fight back. Don’t think about what your addiction has taken from you, all that talk of a shot at decency, the chance of a so-called normal life. That has never been how you wanted to play it. Stop dealing and start taking. Start listening to who you really are.

  And the city is saying: Go to Jade. Go to her. You know how much you want to. You know you’ve always wanted to. Just go to her. Just go to her and start running.

  THE DEALER

  It takes nearly all my effort to hold myself together. I feel like my skin is no longer keeping me in, I feel like I’m everywhere. Driving away from my apartment, from the dead-ends and the false starts, I’m crying and laughing and excited and the emotion coursing through me is all so mixed, driving, loud music in the car, inside my head, listening to the rounded-up sound of myself, thinking of her. I speed through lights and the city is letting me in. The heat and sugar and signs all coaxing me to believe and I feel swallowed and hungry and spat back out. I love this city, this city that looks like her, this place that promises so much but can never be still, a place where I will never know where I stand, a town that will never recognise me, a place where I will fade always into the switch and simmer.

  I revel in the claptrap highway, all the signs and tokens that distract, the motels, the hotels that promise and remind me of sex, the burger huts, the sushi trains, the revolving restaurants I will never eat in, the tourist buses that turn into boats, the canals that have no tides, the Casino that keeps reeling me in.

  Driving fast over long bridges I notice peripherally the subtle turn of the Gold Coast’s inlets and coves, the sight of a single boat travelling out to sea. With the windows down I can hear the rush of the car and the rabble of sea birds filling up the trees. I can see everything. This city’s relentless and indifferent beauty. I will not put it in a box, fall down to the obvious, the plethora of shonky deals, stings and cash. I have always known the things I think I understand, this city, Jade, are always more complicated than that.

  We’re in a sports car. We’re driving around the Indy track. Top down, the tops of our heads blown off. I’m so fucking high the windshield’s like a space shuttle.

  I quit my job today. I goddamn quit my job today.

  And Jade looks at me, her eyes wild like a crazy woman’s, and she shrieks and stands up in the car full of adrenaline, pumping her arms at the city in excitement. She loves me. This girl fucking loves me. I speed down the straight and she falls back flat against the leather; her body whacks down and she laughs and rolls over towards me, squealing with pleasure.

  Here we go Jade, here we go.

  And I lock the brakes to fly into what would be a chicane but is now just a corner I’m not supposed to cut through. The tyres screech as we slide sideways into the oncoming street.

  Oh my God, Jade says and flips her head up to see where we’re headed.

  We fly down past Narrowneck in the shorter straight, the water lit up, the waves glowing by the moon and the lights on this flat stretch of street with no buildings. No marker but the shallow kerb between the car and the sand, the car and the ocean and we’re flying on a knife-edge. Ahead of us the buildings rise, warped towers full of light, the street gets narrower and I pull a hard left into Breaker Street, chunk down the gears, fly one-handed through the twists and turns in Main Beach. And Jade is screaming now, sometimes her arms above her head, sometimes gripping her legs as they fling upwards with speed. We come round the bend, back to the Gold Coast Highway. At the intersection a string of cars are taking off. I speed up towards the on-road that winds us on to the highway.

  Go! Go! Jade screams and I straighten up and flatten the pedal. We lurch forward and the car grunts with the pressure but then rights itself and we fly three lanes across the highway cutting them all off.

  Fuck yeah! I yell back at the cars stalled in shock behind us.

  Jade throws her head back on the seat and laughs, her hair flying wildly over her face. We cruise into a fast-forward motion and she reaches for the volume on the stereo, cranking it, the deep bass of the music throbbing through the seats and bouncing out into the lit-up world around us.

  Yes, I tell her but my voice is lost in the rush of beats and air. I nod my head at her frenetically. She moves the counter up – 13, 14, 18, 25.

  Ahead the lights of the city swirl, the tops of buildings sway, the night and the music give way to the movement of the car and speed of our passing. Neon swirls over our skin. This is the city, this is its music; a track of light and velocity and heat; an electric relentless beat; the smell of the tyres as they burn and screech; everything so quick and beautiful and fast. Jade is my race partner, my dance partner, my loose-cannon girl.

  Coming out again at the curve of Main Beach the lights are green and this time I swing the car right, over the bridge away from the city. I want to find a dark pocket to take her in. I swing left at Queen St
reet, let the car slide left into the curve that winds down around the seaway parallel to the bridge. Above us the Rivage Royale looms, resplendently curved and pastel pink. Lit up and primped and primed. Just behind the building, a dark park. And on the other side of that the decrepit crash zone of a demolished shopping centre. This is the place. I hit the brakes, swing the car around, park on the left where the lights have been taken out by bulldozers and look over at the lush grounds of the park, so green and rich and running to the edge like a black velvet sheet. Beyond, the high-rises and multi-storey mansions in Paradise Waters glitter and send shivers of coloured light across the water. I turn off the ignition. We exhale.

  Come on, I say to Jade and she knows what I have in mind.

  No, she says. Put the top up; let’s fuck in the car.

  I press the button. The roof unwinds, we wind up the windows, wind down the seats. I push play. Jade takes her underwear off. Pulls her skirt up, the dark downy hair caught in a flash of light. I pull my jeans away to my thighs and in one move she straddles me, so wet. Her left knee hits the door and her other leg is splayed out wide. She pumps me almost faster than the beat. She groans and in this moment, in this street, witnessed by the city, this is all her and me. This is what we want.

  STATE OF PLAY

  The Dealer is doing well. The Dealer has quit his job. The Dealer has found his way inside.

  He takes an apartment with Jade on the edge of the city at the top of a tower, and starts dealing it out. Jade is meeting people in the nightclub where she serves drinks. Her eyes outlined in black, her hair wet and slicked, her mouth a gash of burnished red. There is something about Jade that tells them she knows something, that she’s got something to offer. And the Dealer watches. Watches her move in the tight T-shirt knotted high above the waist, the smooth curve of her flat stomach twisting and turning as she leans and pours and purrs to the punters in front of her. He likes watching her. He gets hard.