Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls (11 page)
Cross and confused, I walked the few blocks to our flat without a coat, the cold of the night bringing a kind of sobriety. When I got there, he was sitting in the dark. The light I switched on was bright and I saw that he had been crying. The rims of his eyes were stretched and reddened. He looked as if he had been poisoned, his irises a malignant green, his lips and cheeks pale and slack. But I was not sensible enough to be afraid.
He shouted and accused.
‘Why didn’t you just fuck him?’
‘Who?’
‘Why didn’t you just get up on the pool table and spread your legs for him?’
‘You’re not making any sense,’ I said, shouting too.
He stood over me, but I did not back down. Nor did I see it coming. It was too far beyond my experience, too far outside my expectations. His fist felt huge against my small face.
On the couch, I couldn’t sleep. In our bed, he could. In the early hours of the morning I was still awake, stunned and pressing a packet of frozen peas to my cheek, when he briefly woke and stumbled into the living room. He was disoriented, and did not seem to see me. I watched in the darkness as he took aim and pissed all over the television set, then took himself back to bed.
When the true morning came I woke from an uncomfortable half-sleep clutching a warm bag of squashed peas. He was squatting by the television, dressed neither as Jesus nor a monk, but looking penitent anyway with a bucket of soapy water and a sponge. He saw that I was awake, but said nothing; just went on cleaning and wiping and dusting, in the living room, the kitchen and the bathroom, while I watched from my couch-island in silence. When the house was clean, he shaved and showered and dressed a little more neatly than was usual. On his way out the door, he kissed my cheek softly and I smelled shampoo in the wet flick of his hair against my nose.
He came home with treats, and to begin with I was like a child who would not be enticed. I shook my head to chocolates in the shape of ladybirds wrapped in shiny red foil and to a tiny iridescent fish in a plastic bag of water. I cried and said no to striped socks with toes in them and to a jar full of tiny rubber dinosaurs that were purple, orange and yellow.
But I caved in when he ran me a bath and filled it with bubbles from a bottle that looked like a magnum of champagne. I let him put a cotton pad soaked in witch-hazel over my bruised and swollen eye, and read to me — doing all the voices and accents, too — from
The Snow Goose
, which made me cry. He put me to bed in clean sheets and got in beside me, and I kept crying while he kissed every part of me, and the tears were a drug whose effect felt strongly like love.
I slept all day and, when I woke up, there was pizza for dinner and
National Velvet
on the video.
‘Come on the Pie,’ he said, in perfect mimicry of little Lizzie Taylor, and I laughed. There had been some kind of aberration, but reality, it seemed, had now been restored. The next day, at a pharmacy in a suburb where I would never normally shop, I bought the kind of make-up that older women wear to give them ‘more coverage’. I wore it for a week, and then life went on as before.
The wolf has fur.
When I first met him it had been clipped close to the scalp, but by the time we had been living together for nine months it was brushing the collar of his shirt. It was very dark, with a patch of bright white in the back where, he said, it had lost its memory. It was soft and glossy and I loved to fiddle with it while we were watching television and sculpt it into devil’s horns when it was full of shampoo in the bath. Over the winter, I took an impressive lead in the all-time Scrabble match tally that we kept in permanent texta down the side of our fridge, and he threatened to cut his hair unless I agreed to a ban on the tricky two-letter words that were the centrepiece of my strategy. Within a month, we were back to level-pegging.
The morning after the night on which he hit me for the second time, he looked at my face and then he put his head in my lap and cried. I stroked and soothed him, pushing my fingers into the dense, dark pelt of his beautiful hair. The grazed skin on the inside of my mouth felt, to my tongue’s touch, like raw steak. I could still taste blood.
I had been late home from work. I could claim no big story, no pressing deadline — only a need to catch up on all the mornings lost to late sleeping and extended lunch hours spent going home to him. I had arrived to find the flat in darkness and full of the sweet smell of crushed juniper berries. I flicked on the light and saw the unhidden evidence of the empty gin bottle.
I let some light into the black bedroom along with myself, but he was not in the bed. He was crouched in the corner, a foetal shape, just the outline of him and his shaggy head picked out by the scattered motes of light.
‘I thought you’d left me,’ he said. A whimper.
I crouched down beside him, held out the back of my hand as if to a wounded dog.
‘Hey, I was just at work. I’m sorry, I should have called.’
‘You’ll leave me. One of these days you’ll leave me, I know you will,’ he said, louder now.
‘I won’t. I won’t. I won’t ever leave you.’
‘Don’t LIE,’ he snarled, a fist striking out of his dark hunch.
Later that week, my bruises under the cover of the older women’s make-up, we sat at his parents’ table while the only foster child in the house said grace. The head-banging one had gone to live somewhere else. We all said amen into our laps and then the house resumed a silence that didn’t feel safe. For all of the time it had taken her to make the gravy, his mother had said nothing. Now she pushed some food onto her fork and brought it halfway to her mouth, then put it down again as if it disgusted her. She looked up at her son with her big and green and sad eyes.
‘Did you do that to her?’
‘What?’
‘You did do that to her, didn’t you?’
‘Do what?’
‘I know what it looks like when a man hits a woman. I know exactly what it looks like. And it looks like that.’
‘Mum.’
‘I can’t. I just can’t,’ she said, standing up at the table and taking away his still-full plate and mine. She tipped our meat and vegetables into the pedal bin and let the lid fall. She was standing over it, sob-breathing and gulping, as we left the house. In the dark of the driveway, I felt ashamed.
The wolf has teeth.
It was true that his top incisors sloped inward a little, making his canines appear quite prominent; but it was not these that bit. It was the clean and white-painted right angle of the edge of our bedroom door. I hammered into it fast, a dervish, whirling. My brow-bone fractured on impact. Skin split and out poured unexpectedly dark blood. It streaked down the white paint as I slid to the floor.
I had gone home, to my parents’ house, for a weekend. I had rattled northwards, out of the city, in my little old Mini, but not without fear of what I would find when I returned. This time, it was tequila instead of gin. And this time, my hands were up, quickly, in a flimsy block between my face and his chest. I felt adrenalin gush to my hands and feet as he grabbed me, tightly, and held me by both wrists.
‘Why did you even bother to come back?’
‘I have no idea,’ I screamed, my pulse hammering.
‘You love them more than you’ve ever loved me.’
‘Of course I do, you stupid fuck.’
He pulled me towards him and then pushed. I left his grip in a fast, hard spin, a dance move out of control, and collected the door with my face.
In the second moment of impact it was me that was stationary and the object that was moving. It was a needle, coming right towards my eye. Slowly, slowly, leaving plenty of time for the apprehension of pain.
‘Close your eyes,’ the nurse said from out of white space.
But I couldn’t. I could only think of aqueous and vitreous humour, the liquid and the jelly that made my eyeball a globe, and how, if the needle slipped, they might leak out and my eyeball would be just a slimy white casing like a fish skin tossed in the scuppers.
It didn’t slip. It just numbed my skin so that when the second needle came, towing its lengths of black thread, I could feel only the tugging as the nurse quilted the skin between my eyebrows. When he had finished, he let me sit up so I could look at myself in a mirror.
The wound would heal and, over time, fade into a pale crescent scar. One time, much later on, I would colour the moon-shaped mark blue and call myself a maiden of Avalon. But now it was an ugly gash of puckered skin and knotted twine marking the midpoint of eye sockets stained magenta and purple. My forehead was swollen and misshapen. The fine crack revealed by the X-ray was concealed beneath my swollen forehead, but in the mirror I could see the unmissable sign of ownership. A brand.
I was not allowed to leave the hospital until I had seen the domestic violence counsellor. She was not much older than I was, and her long hair was held back with a polka-dot bandana. She wore her wrong-side-of-the-tracks accent like a badge of pride, saying ‘arks’ for ‘ask’ and ‘was’ for ‘were’. But it was a dialect of blunt truth and I could not evade its meanings, no matter how delicately I danced around them with pretty words.
‘He’ll bash you again,’ she said.
I argued that I knew how to avoid it now. If I could just keep my mouth shut at the right moment. If I didn’t provoke him when he’d been drinking. She looked at me wearily, and I began to hear myself. After I had been silent for a time, she looked at her watch and said that I could go.
‘You’ll have to have someone pick you up, but. Your mum, maybe?’
I shook my head.
‘Well, who was you going to call then?’
I didn’t know. Beyond the yellowed curtain of the Emergency Department cubicle there were people milling about, but none of them belonged to me. I was alone. I had been delivered to the hospital by policemen (called to our house by the pizza cook), and one of them had sat in the back of the car with me and held his handkerchief to my bleeding face.
‘Must be someone.’
There was only one person. I was cold and shivering and all I wanted was him. I wanted to kiss him on his lips, and then to drive my teeth into them, furious with love for him, and draw blood. But instead I took a taxi to the home of a friend who wouldn’t scold.
In the late morning — washed, and dressed in borrowed clothes -– I went back to the apartment behind the pizza shop. He was sleeping. I sat beside him for a while, on the edge of our bed, watching dream-tremors flit through the muscles under the skin of his face. Gelfling, plump as a cushion in the crook of his knees, fixed me with one yellow and disdainful eye, as if she knew my decision already.
The wolf has a heart.
And there were times, during the year of my lesson in wolf anatomy, when I was close enough to see it. Just a glimpse of it, beating red and slick inside the dark fur. I have to think hard, now, to remember how it looked. But I did see it. I’m sure that I did.
S
itting across the table from one another, at about ten past eight on the evening of the second anniversary of the day that they’d met, Paula and Will were like a pair of dangerously inflated balloons. Each of them had something important to say to the other, and the words that would make up these important somethings were already in their lungs, clinging like horseback riders to molecules of oxygen, impatiently awaiting a chance to escape. So preoccupied were Paula and Will by the sensation of mounting pressure within their chests that neither of them actually saw the waitress. The soup, a consommé, appeared simply to land — in wide, white bowls — on the table before them.
Perhaps it was the rising vapours of the soup that alerted the waiting words to the fact that an opportunity was nigh. Or perhaps it was the crusty warm scent of the bread rolls on the side plates. But in any case, by the time Paula and Will took up their spoons, words were jockeying in their mouths, swelling out their cheeks. Paula and Will each parted their lips in order to take a shallow sip of air, and the trapped and pent-up words took their chance, making a headlong, hurdy-gurdy rush for the big outside world.
The crucial question is, of course, whose words would get there first? But in order to answer this question, we must consider the events that took place in the lives of Paula and Will in the week leading up to the anniversary dinner, and also some elementary facts of physics.
1. What Will did in the week leading up to the anniversary
He took Wednesday afternoon off work and drove across town, through the industrial suburbs with their workshops and warehouses, to the home of Paula’s father, who no longer lived with Paula’s mother. She had quite dispassionately up and left him a few days after the youngest of their four daughters finished school, and then, once the paperwork was in order, married a quiet and gentle bachelor with notably short legs. Will thought it was rather as if she had simply decided that at her stage of life one was better off with a dachshund than an alsatian.
Paula’s father was not the sort of man Will could ever imagine himself being able to hug, but he hoped to be able to conclude today’s conversation with a warm handshake, perhaps even one of the sincere, two-handed variety. That’s if Paula’s father was at home. Will had decided not to ring first, because Paula’s father might have asked what he wanted to see him about, and that would have been awkward. It was not a conversation he wanted to have over the phone.
The house was a charmless red brick square, out the front of which was a cemented yard with a few circular sinkholes that were home to straggly and untended rosebushes. Will didn’t bother to ring the doorbell, just followed the sound of an idling engine around the side of the house to the garage in the backyard. Here Paula’s father stood between the nostrils, and beneath the raised sky-blue hood, of his 1955 Holden FJ.
As he crossed the yard, Will felt in his pocket for the box containing the ring that he had on Monday collected from the jeweller. Paula’s father wasn’t exactly the type to appreciate the subtleties of the design, but a diamond that size was expensive in anyone’s language. Will might not even show it, but it was there, as a prop, in case he needed a graphic demonstration of just how serious he was.
