Butterfly Fish (39 page)

Now and again we ventured out. He took me to a screening of Harmony Korrine's
Mr Lonely
in a dinky little pub slash cinema in Bow called
The Hovel
. The bar was upstairs and the cinema downstairs. It was properly kitschy. The confectionary seemed to have been doused in beer, cigarettes and stale confessions. The lighting was subdued. A scrawny, pockmarked ticket attendant with grey eyes and sallow skin handed us our tickets with sweating hands. The toilet seat had collapsed and it didn't always flush. There was one small screening room with red velvet seats that snapped shut when you stood up. The din from the bar seemed contained yet uncomfortably close. As if people would fall through the ceiling and land in the aisles, mid conversation about their dog's broken leg, the stubborn child they had or how the jukebox's selection of songs was pretty limited.

Rangi and I held hands and ate sweet popcorn together. The movie, about professional impersonators who created their own world unlocked something in me. Loneliness was inescapable. Rangi liked the alcoholic priest who convinced nuns to jump out of planes. Spellbound, I watched the nuns riding bicycles in the sky, habits flapping as they spun. If only it were possible to be that free. If only I could be someone else so I wouldn't have to live inside my head. I cried silently. A man began to talk rudely on his mobile. Rangi left our row. He smacked the man on the head, took the mobile phone and smashed it beneath his boot heel.
Technology doesn't have to fry your fucking brain
he said to the startled man. When he returned, a pulse in his jaw ticked. In the shapeless dark I blinked up at him through my tears. The man, several rows behind us, muttered in disbelief but stayed seated.

Circles

Rangi and I began to hit funerals together. He'd pull up in that temperamental black Mazda with the faulty heating fan dressed in black, hands casually at the wheel. In keeping with my dysfunctional tendencies, I thought it was encouraging we had that level of honesty between us. He didn't lecture me about the dangers of what I was doing or make me feel like a bad person. He was unique in that way, most people would have been very judgemental. Instead he said, “Too many people are concerned about how others perceive them. We should all be more in tune with our desires and not care so much.”

“By doing whatever we want whenever we want?” I asked, side-eyeing him curiously.

He shook his head. “When you live on the edge you experience life that much more. Elements of danger and instability make things more intense, more interesting. Too much routine and not enough freedom is what kills everybody slowly. Your unusual habits are… honest in their duplicity because at least you're making choices.”

I had a feeling if I'd said I wanted to rob banks at gunpoint, he'd have let me do it, with no empathy for the distress other people would encounter. But banks were too risky and they didn't have the appeal of funerals. For one, there would be no sadness in the air, only
fear. No carrying the weight of other people's losses, trying them on for size. I knew that despair, sometimes small or all encompassing. Funerals were manageable. Some days I felt inclined to steal and other days I didn't. There were times I stood on the periphery, scanning small crowds for my mother's face while Rangi sat in the car at a discreet distance, drinking under the glare of daylight.

On other occasions, he'd come into the services with me. We'd act like a couple that knew the deceased. I was astonished by his ability to blend in so quickly, his knack for making you feel both uneasy and comfortable. He imitated the physical expressions of other mourners beautifully, portraying a forlorn figure amongst the gatherings of mourners. Wielding a sad expression and slumped shoulders, he'd thread his way through pale gravestones.

People like Rangi and I, operated on a different frequency. When things got tricky, our signal was three rings to my mobile, which would vibrate silently in my handbag. I knew he enjoyed it. I wondered why he was drawn to death and whether it was for the same reasons I was. One day, we passed time in the car, a bottle of Jack Daniels between us, the engine running. He was calm hearing about my failed suicide attempt. Brushing several unruly twists away from my forehead, he said, “If more people saw death as a way of being reborn, they'd be less scared. This part of existence… it's fleeting, miniscule. Don't you feel the call of other planes inside? Don't you feel their distances shrinking?” A Sainsbury's delivery van came by; huge and white, it was purring beside us for a bit. Before I lost my courage in the jangle of its contents, I answered. “I think somebody wants something from me, to do me harm maybe. But I don't know what it is they want,” I said, leaning into his bright-eyed gaze.

One evening, after another funeral raid we sat in a Rubik's cube shaped bar made of glass. We watched small shadows form over our hands and the edges of the night rising in the tumblers we drank from. I saw myself naked in the gleam of his eyes, then naked on Dr Krull's table, my medical notes spilling from my mouth onto the floor. Rangi was on form, wanting me to know all about him.

The son of an Irish mother and Maori father, Rangi had pretty much had every job you could imagine. In New Zealand, he'd worked as a trawlerman for a while, part of a crew on a twenty-one-metre twin rigger hauling tuna, snapper, salmon and all kinds of fish, hands perpetually slick with fish entrails. Sometimes working against a backdrop of forty foot swells, endless rain and gale force winds with the hazardous sea thrashing, curling and threatening to carry the men into cold, volatile currents.

“Those were rough, good times battling the elements with those men. Imagine the tough conditions, bloody fish scales, hauling heavy nets up. We made some great catches. Not everything you catch surrenders immediately.” He ran a finger over the pulse on my wrist, the far away expression on his face made me certain he wasn't talking about fish.

During his early twenties, he'd travelled through South America; Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Columbia, taking odd jobs to get by. In Buenos Aires, he worked as a farmhand for a woman who prophesised about a red sky coming to kill them all and slept with a long rifle in her bed as though it were a lover.

“She was right about something coming,” Rangi explained, running a hand over his jaw before knocking back a shot of whisky. “Thieves broke in one night, they shot most of the livestock, killed her with her own gun. Coincidentally, I was away from the farm that night. A woman I'd been seeing had wanted to go dancing. It was funny, while we were out, I could taste blood in my mouth but I thought it was one of my nosebleeds coming. I didn't understand until I got back to the farm the next day and saw the carnage.”

In Mexico, he supplemented bar work as a nude model. One particular painter named Javier had requested him often. Sometimes they drank together afterwards, listening to old Mexican records.

“So there are nude paintings of you floating around.” I smiled at this notion. “Do you think he was in love with you?”

He watched me from hooded eyes. “Why do you ask that?”

“I don't know, just a feeling. You said he painted you naked sometimes.”

“Maybe he was. He was good to me.” He nodded at the barman, setting his glass on the countertop for another shot. I drew my own conclusions.

In Montreal, he worked nightshifts at a factory producing mannequins. His sleep became so badly affected; he started seeing body parts of other staff coming round the conveyor belt and the mannequins walking around with bits of dawn in their eyes.

“You drift in and out of a lot of people's lives don't you?” I asked, trying to shake away the feeling of unease, the coldness in my bones.

“Maybe they drift in and out of mine,” he said.

In London, he worked in a butcher's shop, coming home smelling of raw meat. Sometimes, he supplemented that income cabbing, shepherding people at all hours of the night. We looked out at the city, the traffic, the flow of people scurrying in different directions. The buildings were hazy, their lines distorted. I could see Rangi climbing into distances before leaping ahead in a change of clothes.

On the drive back home, I swallowed the stone floating in my minds eye. It sank to the bottom of my stomach, doing nothing to temper the nausea I felt. I slid down in my seat. The partially rolled down window had light spots of rain. Windscreen wipers flattened small shapes of water. The purple collar of my dress was stiff, ready to corner stray creatures of night. The streets were peppered with lights. Saviours and sinners spun in close proximity. Hands became other instruments in cold pockets.

We stopped on a bridge by the river for air. A fox was taking orders from something unseen. Rangi lit a cigarette, took a draw and began to pace the small area we'd resigned ourselves to. An empty bottle of Australian Pinot Grigio rolled nearby. My hands trembled, suddenly accosted by a memory; my mother running barefoot across a bridge, crying about inheritance being inescapable, fleeing down metallic stairs. My small frame rooted to a spot at the edge. I'm
reminded of hovering above the river with metallic corners, afterwards searching for answers in my mother's expressions, before the water inherited them forever, of chasing the changes, the timeline of when it all begun.

Tracks

I woke up on the train tracks not remembering the walk up. Everything seemed to be in slow motion; the stream of night commuters, the last train announcement ringing in my ears, a crushing weight on my right arm so painful my eyes watered. Half stars blended into the mocking glints of the tracks. The train wheel against my arm was unbearable. I lay there clenching and unclenching my left fist, grunting, reducing to small parts mice would scurry over. Faces swam. Voices came from a distance. Broken, silver light danced above like shrapnel flying. I'm not sure how much time passed between coming round and finally being lifted but a slow pained breath left me and the shrapnel had begun to reassemble in my body as a siren wept.

“What's happening?” I asked the faces blending into one, my voice faint, hoarse.

“There's been an accident but you're alright now dear,” a kindly, male voice said. His slim hands moved like quick sparrows. I vaguely registered his green uniform.

“I can't feel my arm anymore!” I said, desperately attempting to grab his elbow with my left hand, clutching the moments before the accident I couldn't remember. Fragments had attached themselves to the announcement sign, the boot imprint of an ambulance man, a baby tugging its mother's white collar.

I spotted Anon in the crowd holding the brass head as I was wheeled away. She looked calm. One wheel from the bed squeaked as she moved her mouth. I felt myself slipping into the dark, away from the weight of her judgement. The blurring of those lost moments before the accident became the unlikely half children of the stars.

During the ride to the hospital, the sound of tires on the road was oddly comforting. My eyes adjusted to the fluorescent lighting overhead. For a moment, I thought it was a scene from a movie maybe. That the van would flatten into a stage, the players disappearing into their corners. But the pain in my right shoulder indicated otherwise. Blood on my shirt had smudged. The lower part of my arm hung on tenuously, joined at the elbow. Light-headed, the van shook. Its ceiling became a bright, foreign sky. A drumbeat rattled the doors, faster and faster. Red earth bearing footprints with water covered the floor. Blue petals fell gently. A woman crying interrupted my thoughts, loudly at first, and then quietly, followed by the sound of a shovel in the soil and the soft murmurings of a man. I ran towards that sound, reaching the moments before the accident but I couldn't remember. I ran in slip roads going nowhere, began to scream so loudly, my throat hurt. The van screeched to a halt.

My numb arm dangled in blind spots.

I came round again in the hospital bed aware I'd lost time. I felt sick and slow, the same feelings you got following an adventure ride, knowing that the angle of flight had reassembled things inside you. Most of my right arm was gone, hacked off by surgeons. I no longer had a right hand. The right hand I stole with, masturbated with, and caught a butterfly fish from a pool with. They'd had to amputate. It must have been pinned beneath that train wheel for longer than I realised.