by JT Lawrence
Ah. I’ve seen her naked.
We are serenaded by Eros Ramazotti singing ‘L’Aurora’ on the crackly speakers.
“I’m surprised she’s never mentioned you to me. You two must have been close – I mean – if she trusted you with sorting out her things.”
“It just kind of fell to me to do. We weren’t that close,” she says.
“Oh.” There is a lull. I try to think of something else to say, but she beats me to it.
“We were sisters.”
Sisters? Eve never talked about a sister.
“Let me guess,” Denise says wryly, “She never mentioned a sister.”
“No, she didn’t,” I say, “but to be honest she never talked about any of her family. The lot at the funeral could have been rent-a-crowd for all I know.”
Denise’s lips stutter a smile.
“When she left home, she didn’t look back. She cut off her family completely.”
“But Eve’s not like that,” I say, “Not the Eve I know. Knew.”
“There were things … that happened. I don’t blame her for leaving. It’s a small town. Not a lot happens, but when things do, there’s nowhere to hide.”
“What things?”
“It’s not really for me to say.”
I can tell that she doesn’t want to talk about it and I don’t push her. Not yet.
“So you’re a small-town girl?”
“Yip,” she says, nodding, not offering any more details.
“Do you want to come to my place for a cappuccino?” I ask.
“Why? Are the cappuccinos here bad?”
I lean in to her. “Foul. Blinding. The worst you’ll ever taste.”
When she doesn’t agree straight away I say, “I, on the other hand, make extraordinary cappuccinos. And I live just up the road.”
It’s one of my dating rules: always ask a woman in on the first date. Even if she turns you down she will know you want her.
21
Hand Touches Warm Skin
I wake up in bed knowing that something is different. I don’t have a headache and my mind is clear. I don’t feel like staying in bed all day or jumping in front of a bus, which is unusual. And nice.
I stretch out and my hand touches warm skin. It moans.
I open my eyes and see Denise’s long dark hair splayed over the white pillow.
God.
I remember the night before with a shiver deep inside my body. The sexual equivalent of someone walking over my grave.
I look at her tattoo, close up. Leaves, curlicues and hooks. A climbing rose with no blooms. It reminds me of the thorny branches that strangle the castle in the story of Sleeping Beauty. The prince has to fight his way through the dangerous weed to wake his princess.
I smile at the irony. I’m the one who needs rescuing.
I realise that I may never see this woman again so I decide to ignore one of my most important rules and make her breakfast. For the first time in a long while I feel hungry. On the way to the kitchen I fantasize about creamy scrambled eggs, gravadlax with dill and sour cream on toasted rye.
When I see the state of the kitchen my fantasies instantly grow mould.
Where is Francina? Instead of infecting myself with some rare strain of bacteria poisoning, I decide to nip out for the breakfasts. I call ahead the order in whispers and leave a note for Denise telling her to stay where she is, and she will be rewarded. I can’t believe that one night with a beautiful woman has made such a difference to my state of mind. Here I am doing a breakfast run at seven in the morning when yesterday it took me an hour and the promise of a pre-noon cocktail to get me out of bed.
I could take the easy route and say that it was the fabulous sex but I know it’s not true. Denise has something I need.
A young lip-glossed waitress is standing outside the glass doors of the café with my takeaway in her hands. She looks at me with Bambi eyes and warns me that the coffees are hot. As if her warning is not enough, the text on the paper cup reads CAUTION: CONTENTS MAY BE EXTREMELY HOT. I find this a little unnecessary. Surely if someone has the linguistic capacity to order takeaway coffee they will also understand that coffee is made with boiling water?
The fresh morning air is cool on my cheeks. Everything seems brighter. I reach the house and let myself in. Balancing my swag and a smile I go straight to the bedroom where I find a stark, empty bed. Unmade. After checking the bathroom, guest loo, study, all the bedrooms, the garden, the drained pool, I realise that she has gone.
I sink down on the Chesterfield in the lounge and flick on the flat screen. Greased-up wrestlers throw each other around and break chairs on one another’s heads.
I hope she doesn’t regret it. I hope she didn’t wake up with that one-night-stand-pure-dread feeling.
I unpack a croissant and pull it apart. Shove my fingers into its soft, warm centre, and rip it out. Swallow it down.
I didn’t get her number.
I leave the coffee for a while. Couldn’t bear the shame of scalding my mouth after all those warnings.
A peroxided box cut bounces a curly mop off the side of the ring. I shove the last of the croissant into my mouth and chew without tasting it.
She must feel guilty about Eve. Hell, I feel guilty about Eve. She’s not dead a week and I’m boning her backwater sister. And I’d love to say that she would understand, but I doubt she would.
My curiosity about her past, their past, makes me feel itchy inside.
I empty her coffee down the drain, like an addict, and wonder if I’ll ever see her again.
I decide to spend the day cleaning the kitchen. I don’t know the last time I actually did the dishes. Francina is my domestic fairy godmother. I can imagine that when I’m not looking, she swishes her sjambok and the dirt is magicked away. Where the hell is she? If I didn’t need her so damn much I would fire her. Okay, that’s not true. She knows I would never, could never. I have a tender feeling towards the old girl. Maybe this is why she has left: to teach me a lesson. To appreciate what I have. To show that there won’t always be someone around to pick up the pieces. But somehow I doubt it. Francina has never been one for pontificating. She isn’t answering her phone and the cops have turned up nothing. I miss her. I miss her chubby ankles resting on my kitchen table. I eat a rusk in her honour, off a side plate like she’s taught me. I put on bright yellow plastic gloves that smell like vanilla and fill the sink with hot water and detergent before I remember that I have a dishwasher. I wash everything in the sink anyway, thinking that it will be cathartic. The warmth and the bubbles soothe me. I look out of the window and see that the garden is lush and filled with summer. Inca lilies, arums, cats’ tails all jostle for the sun. The branches of a huge vintage pink rosebush are heavy with blooms. I feel like I went to sleep in winter and woke up now amidst all this life and pollination and colour.
I end up washing everything in sight, picking up empty bottles, sweeping up all the ash and broken glass, scrubbing the porcelain floor, shining all the brushed aluminium I can lay my hands on. After I’m finished it looks more like a scrub room in a hospital than a kitchen.
When there is nothing else to sanitise I decide to go for another jog. Get the old heart pumping again. The last run seemed to do me good. I put on the gear from two days before and head out; Sylvia’s voice chimes in: “You’ve run one kilometre.”
I try to stick to quiet roads where there aren’t a lot of cars to run you over. I like the peace of a run, the way it allows me to get to that mental limbo where thoughts and ideas just flood in one after the other. Nothing practical: that all just disappears as I go into autopilot. It’s one of my favourite feelings. I’m not getting there today though, I am too unfit. I do actually have to think about the distracting trivial things. Like holes in the road, and breathing. My lungs are tightly stitched leather.
In the shower afterwards (Tropical Storm™) I feel great. I feel as though Denise has opened something inside me. Like the first rupture in a
hatching egg.
When I was a kid my dad took Emily and I to a farm somewhere in the North West. Those were the days when you could stop off for fresh milk and eggs. I remember tasting that milk straight from the obliging cow’s udder, how warm and sweet it was. And then later, when the glass bottle had been in the fridge, how the cream formed a thick skin on the top of the milk, thicker than any cream you can buy, like soft white butter. But most of all I remember going in to the hatchery where the farmer picked up an egg that was rolling around and held it out to me in his huge calloused palm. Soon a beak was pecking its way through. I could see that the chick was struggling and I wanted the farmer to help the little bird out. I wanted to take the thing from him and break open the shell like a chocolate Easter egg. But he was patient and eventually the chick was free; a perfect little ball of lemon which, oblivious to his previous labours, hopped away to his brothers and sisters.
Maybe this painful twisting inside of me is part of some kind of genesis, and I am going to emerge as a better version of myself. It’s an optimistic thought. It helps to believe in something.
Just as I am falling asleep the night after having Denise, a hovering weight settles on my chest. If she finds out about my bizarre plan to pseudo-murder Eve, she’ll think I’m a psychopath and have me locked up before I could explain to her that I only did it to save my own life, and that I never meant to take anyone else’s. Telling Frank was a mistake. Who knows what he has told the cops about me. God, I was an idiot to tell him. The police haven’t been back to visit since Saturday but I think that they are watching me. At least I hope it’s them. Every time I look out of the window or leave the house lately, I have the feeling that someone is out there, waiting, watching.
22
Dirty Death Metal
I begin the annoying habit of thinking of Denise a lot of the time. It is as if I have absorbed some part of her essence. As if we are joined in some way. I try to avoid it, and the nagging non-writing feeling I have, by trying to do the things that Francina would usually do. Today I’m doing the washing as I have run out of jocks. And old Metallica and Iron Maiden shirts. It takes a while to figure out how a washing machine works but in the end it isn’t so difficult. Fill the tray with a mixture of washing powder and softener (at least I think it was softener), pat it down a bit to avoid spillage, stuff the drum full of dirty Death Metal T-shirts and jack up the heat. If I am going to do the washing then I am going to do it properly! While I’m reading the paper at the kitchen table the machine jumps around a bit. I interpret that as enthusiasm and give it the thumbs-up.
An hour later when the machine stops spinning I try to wrench open the door for three full minutes before it decides to humour me. There’s obviously a trick to how you do the wrenching. Not sure how to hang clothes up on a line, I throw the lot into the tumble dryer. When I retrieve them they are hot and full of static. My silk boxers end up two sizes smaller and muddy-grey but all in all, I’m pleased with my work. I hug the warm clothes to my chest. Oh! The fulfilment of an honest day’s work! To be a common labourer!
The phone rings, snapping me out of my Yeats-like dream of romantic toil. Before thinking I pick it up.
“Hello?” I say. Damn it! I forgot that nowadays I’m not answering the phone.
It is quiet on the other end. Someone is there but they are not speaking.
“Hello?” I say again. Something flutters and the phone line goes dead.
Bad connection.
It rings again and now I know I shouldn’t pick it up. I grab the handset.
“Hello?” I say.
Shuffling of papers. An ear-swap.
“Hello,” says the person on the other side, “I’m looking for a Mister Slade Harris.”
“That’s me,” I say, wishing I hadn’t.
The voice is composed. Too composed.
“Mister Harris, good day. I’m phoning in connection with the overdue payments on your bond at 83 16th Avenue.”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“Are you aware that your payments are two months behind?” he asks, quite politely. Of course he is calm and polite. He has a job. And most likely a house. And he knows where his next pay cheque is coming from.
“No,” I say, although I did have an idea. I have stopped opening the mail since Eve died, since I started feeling vulnerable. And I stopped paying bills quite a time before that. All the post goes straight from the letterbox into the rubbish bin, with minimal handling. I now know what anthrax can do to you. And letter bombs.
“Mister Harris, please be informed that we require your urgent settlement of this debt or we will be forced to begin legal proceedings.”
“Yes,” I say, “I understand.”
“Thank you for your time,” he says, and hangs up.
Yes, hang up, I think. Hang up and go home to your wife and children and domestic worker and paid-up house. So I’m a bit behind on my bond repayments. Is it really necessary to threaten legal action? I’ll make the payments, I always have. I shake my fist at the composed caller: take that! Bugger.
The doorbell rings and for a second I think it is the bank with papers that say the house is no longer mine. I tiptoe to the peephole and see that it’s Frank. I reasoned after what happened at the funeral I would never see him again. Maybe he has come to finish me off.
I open the front door, salute him, but hesitate to buzz the pedestrian gate.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
“Can I come in?”
“That depends,” I say.
He looks at me.
“On whether you’re here to have a beer or break my nose again.”
He looks sheepish. He shouldn’t. Punching me was The Right Thing To Do.
“To have a beer?” he smiles. It looks like he means it but my paranoia is hovering.
“Actually, don’t come in. I don’t have any … er … beers in the fridge. Let me grab my jacket and we’ll walk to the pub.”
“I like what you’ve done with the place,” he jokes, gesturing to the broken window and faint graffiti.
There is a kind of neighbourhood pub just down the road. The Pint & Sausage. It’s the type of place you can go to alone if your friends aren’t handy. You’re bound to bump into somebody you know or meet someone interesting. They serve all manner of different beers and a mean pub lunch.
The walk over is awkward, we don’t say much; settled in a booth with a lager we seem to ease up.
“I’ve been worried about you,” Frank says.
“About my nose? It’s fine,” I say, willing to be gracious because it’s nice to sit here in this warm place with a few drops of booze in you. Besides, the swelling has gone down and the bridge isn’t too skew. I touch it for good measure.
“Not about your nose,” he says. There is clearly not going to be an apology.
“I’ve been worried because you didn’t come to soccer. And then I tried to call you a few times, to see if you were okay, and you never answered.”
He takes a long sip of his beer and I join him.
“I haven’t been going out much. And I haven’t been answering the phone.”
Frank nods his slow nod.
“The thing is, I’ve been wrecked over Eve’s death. It has completely freaked me out.”
“Yeah,” says Frank.
“And I’ve also been feeling a little … paranoid. I have this feeling that I am being monitored.”
“Cops?” he asks.
“Maybe. Or someone meaning to do me harm.”
Frank chortles at this.
“Like who?”
“I don’t know,” I say. Then he stops laughing.
“PsychoSally?” he asks. Frank is just as spooked by Sally as I am. He doesn’t like to talk about her. If I mention her he changes the subject.
“Maybe,” I say, “maybe she is upping her game. Or someone who blames me for Eve’s death. Someone like you,”
Frank licks his lips.
“Look bu
ddy, I was mad. When I heard that Eve had been murdered I thought it must have been you.”
“It wasn’t,” I say, maybe too firmly. “For fuck’s sake Frank, do you honestly think I’m capable of killing someone? Someone I …”
“Yes?” he says.
“Well, I was fond of her,” I say.
“You’ve killed before,” he says. I can feel my face darken. I look around to make sure no one can hear our conversation. A memory taps at my skull, asking to be let in. I ignore it.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I feel like throwing him against the wall. We stare at each other.
“Angola.”
I blink, relieved.
“That’s different, Frank, you know it is.”
He softens.
“Yeah, I know it is.”
“Being an ex-soldier doesn’t mean I’m a psychopath. That I go around knocking people off. For Christ’s Sake.”
“Yeah,” says Frank. “I’m sorry I said that. I just, well, I just thought the worst when I heard.”
“Yes, well,” I say, “You’re not the only one.”
Another draught later we’re almost back to normal, but Eve’s death has changed something between us. Frank seems different. On edge. I wonder if it’s because he thinks I’m a murderer. Or if it’s because it has been him watching me. Jesus on a skateboard, I’m paranoid. Usually we’d order dinner and drink way too much and laugh about it the next time we saw each other but, while I’d like the company tonight, Frank doesn’t want to eat so we stop at a sensible number of drinks and walk back to my house, his car, without saying a word.
Then he’s off, leaving me to a long night in an empty house.
23
Dark Ribbon of Red
I have been having bizarre dreams so when the doorbell rings it in the middle of a particularly vivid one it jolts me like a defibrillator in a medical drama series. I dread the phone ringing and the doorbell jangling, it sets my heart racing. I don’t want to see anyone. I want time to just sit around on my own and think. And sleep. And eat four meals of two-minute noodles in a row without washing any dishes. It rings again and I want to pull the blanket over my head and pretend I’m not home but in the end my curiosity gets the better of me.
