Slights (30 page)

  She says, "Human blood has a richness unmatched in other species."

I made it into the newspaper; they reported on me. I was that aggrieved I wrote a letter to the paper, and didn't
that
piss people off. In it I said, "It's the fault of the other people, not the suicide person."

  Funny how you think less about your childhood the older you get. It becomes distant. Long gone.

at twenty-nine

Maria and I had a screamer over the phone, just before my twenty-ninth birthday.

  I had two housemates at the time; really fun guys who smoked heaps and made me laugh. They hated cleaning up, too, and loved it that I didn't hassle them. We had a great time. The only thing was, I always made them pay for the dope. No free rides here. When they moved in I asked them if they could make golden syrup dumplings and they said, "We can learn." But they didn't.

  We watched TV, ate, hung out. I put on weight while they were there. I couldn't absorb the crap the way they did.

  I rang to ask Peter to come to my place for a birthday barbie in the backyard, just us and the guys.

  He said, "I don't think that's a very good idea. Why don't we have it here?"

  "Why don't you fuck off?" I said. "Get over this thing about our house."

Then Maria came on the phone.

  "Look, Steph, the story is that we have a lovely home here, very nice, very large. Why don't we have just the family, a nice, comfortable day?"

  "What's it got to do with you? I wasn't even going to ask you, you dull bitch. Or your fucken kids." I loved this stuff. I just said whatever came into my head.

  "All that aside, the story is that we don't like the kids at your place. Your housemates aren't very pleasant and you can't seem to do even the basic cleaning. What's wrong with you? Last time we were there the kids got food poisoning and had nightmares for days."

  I laughed. "Tell you what, Martyr. You tell Peter I hate you so much I'd rather spend my birthday on my own. Tell him I'll mix myself up a nice cocktail." I hung up.

  I'd never threatened suicide before, or used it as leverage. But she was so manipulative. I had to get her somehow. I didn't hear a word from them. My birthday passed unnoticed, apart from the Granny card. It said:

  I'm seriously thinking about it. I mentioned my birthday to my housemates but they forgot and then they moved out. The timing was bad, because I was going to ask them to help me pay for the fence the Krowskas are insisting on. Who needs a new fence, anyway? The old one is fine.

  I spent hours shuffling through the books Auntie Jessie'd given me over the years, and the ones she'd left me, hundreds of them, dusty, dirty, yellowing, musty. They were already smelling mouldy; when they became mine, after Auntie Jessie's death, most had a fine green dust which sank into my pores and my lungs when I sorted the books. She left me her pearls, too. Three strings, and a padded box with loose ones. She never got around to having them re-strung.

  Much later, I began to flick through those books, read them, sometimes, or read again favourites like
Of Mice and Men
. Some were different than I remembered. Some had messages; some had pages of pale pencil words. It was hard to read; too old. It tired me.

  I read some of these books as a child, then again as an adult, and it's amazing how much more sense things make when you're an adult. You know what things mean, how to change them. You understand words and jokes, and hardly ever need things explained to you. This is a comfort to me. And I hate it when that sense of bewilderment periodically returns. Age has nothing to do with it, nor the comfort of confidence.

  Auntie Jessie's books are a both a comfort and a distress to me. They gave me knowledge I didn't want to have. My Dad was a good man. The only chance I have is that my Dad was a good man. But when I read through the books, the comfort comes because I feel like she's there, alive, and she loves me. In the book
Magnetism
by EC Stoner, published

1946 but unborrowed in her entire time as a librarian, on page 39 – "In the ethane group each carbon atom may be regarded as forming the centre of an electronic distribution of the 'closed configuration' type, while in ethylene and acetylene the two carbon atoms approximate to a single centre for the outer part of the electronic charge" – she wrote:
"He
has killed again."

  I made a song up, "He Has Killed Again", and I felt lonely. Auntie Jessie wasn't there to talk to, Dad was gone, Mum. I went to a night club to pick up someone. Not a habit. It was too hard to see people's eyes; I couldn't tell what they were thinking. I danced with a man in a singlet top; his nipples were pink, like they say a virgin's are. He kept apologising to people he bumped and smiled too kindly at me.

  I left him without explanation, knowing he was too cowardly to follow. I stood beside a group in their business clothes; women flawless with ironed shirts, men more wrinkled, expensive suits now beer-stained, jackets discarded. They groped and leaned on each other, ordered drinks rapidly, watched the dance floor without joining it. One man was central to the group; so central as to be almost separate. He watched, returned kisses, accepted drinks. His eyes were empty, staring, blue. I saw a gap and slipped in.

  "You're a very magnetic man," I said. He smiled at me.

  "And you're interrupting my night," he said.

  "From where I'm sitting, you seem to be bored out of your brain."

  "Never," he said, but he winked and put his arm around my waist. He leaned over, collected someone's lighter, lit a cigarette, pocketed the lighter. All without words; almost without movement. I kept the lighter, later, when I found it in his pocket.

  "Tell me about your enemies," I said. "Who hates you?"

  He laughed. "That guy whose lighter I just stole, for one," he said. If he was joking, he was in for a shock, when the guy showed up in his dark room.

  I said, "And there's a dick over there who thought he could magnetise me. He's thinking, 'If that arsehole wasn't there I'd be in.'"

  "And that girl with red hair? I just ignore anything she says. She probably hates me."

  He didn't ask me the same question, or any questions. His self-absorption made me think there would be lots more in his dark room. I said, "Do you have to be home by a certain time? Is there some patient, trusting female, cup of tea ready, legs shaved just in case?"

  He gave me his full attention now, looking at my face. "Do you want to take me home?" he said.

  I took his hand and led him to where I wanted him to go. I am very good at measuring the timing of these things; I can push them over or bring them back, depending. This man, his name was Dennis, Den, he fought me, he had been there before and didn't want to go back.

  "Interesting home you have," he said, and I raised my head and it was my Dad standing there, talking, talking, honey voice all full of caring.

  And I was my mum or some stranger woman; my skin tightened into a smile as his words seduced me. His words made me do something I didn't want to do.

  Although he was like my father, I couldn't love him. It was his shoes. Who could love a man who wore black and white shoes? He dumped his keys on the coffee table. They had a little key ring; #1, it said.

  Smooth talkers are the most attractive types, but they always disappoint. After we became intimate he told me about the time he nearly died, but he lied. He must have been quite healthy and just dreaming. A fantasy about some fucken tunnel, fucken light, fucken voices calling him back. It really made me angry, that he lied. Because no one had ever called me back. Not a whisper or a shout. I went into the bathroom to make with the diaphragm but I had him use a condom as well. Can't be too careful. Don't want any babies, babies, running around, crying, cooing, clinging, growing, trouble. Who wants them, anyway? Who needs them?

  He told me it had been an accident, that his father hadn't meant to hurt him so badly, it was a slip of the fist. And of the knee. It was the slip of a son in hospital. It made me so angry I couldn't look at him any longer. We drank whisky; I found glasses without greasy lip stains and poured it in. He seemed bewildered by the mess of the place and my lack of apology.

  "Not much of a housekeeper, are you?" he said. He shoved newspaper out of the way to sit on the floor and uncovered some CDs I thought I'd lost. The covers were cracked.

  "I'm dirty," I said. "I'm so dirty dogs won't lick me. All my clothes are filthy and my body stinks."

  He knew that wasn't true; his nose had been nestled under my arms, in my belly button, behind my knees. He sipped whisky. I drank from the bottle; straddled him, standing. Seduction never sat comfortably with me; I always feel ridiculous.

  "Show me," he said, and I unbuttoned my short silk top, let it drop, I stood up and unzipped my short skirt, let it fall. I had matching underwear; I had bought it that morning.

  "Magnetising," he said. I filled his glass again, gave him ice from the kitchen, gave him a little something to make him sleepy.

  "Let me tell you about magnetism," I said, and I read to him from my special yellow book: "To ensure that values characteristic of free molecules are obtained, it would be necessary to make measurements on gases. The volume susceptibility of gases is proportional to the pressure, the molecular susceptibility being constant. Some experimental results, which were taken to indicate that at low pressures the volume from a linear relation, have not been shown to have been due to secondary experimental effects. It has been shown by Vaidyanathan (1927) that generally, though not invariably, measurements of the susceptibility of a substance in the liquid and vapour state lead to approximately the same value for molecular susceptibility."

I flicked through the yellowing pages of the strange little book, the science nonsense of it comforting me. These things were said a long time ago; history can be changed.

  I led Den to the bath. He sat on the toilet while I filled the bath with hot water and sandalwood scent. He didn't know the lid was down and forgot I was there; he pissed, the whole lot spilling and spurting onto my dirty white floor. It was good when there were no housemates. I was tired of housemates.

  "Filthy," I said. I don't think that's what decided me to let him die; it was more that I couldn't be bothered with the small talk later, making him coffee and toast, going through the "I'll call you" lie.

  He had stripped his clothes off clumsily as we walked up the hallway, imagining he was still capable of sex. He would have fallen asleep immediately and been too embarrassed the next morning, too keen to escape me as soon as possible, to ask what had happened.

  "Into the bath, then," I said. I made sure he was sitting up safely. I wouldn't be able to see his eyes underwater if he drowned, and he wouldn't talk. I needed to see if he reached his own dark room, would hold his eyelids open with my fingers to look into his eyes.

  I took one wrist, then the other, and sliced them long ways. It made me think of a joke I saw in
Punch
magazine. A man with cuts on his face says, "These scars? I cut myself attempting suicide."

  "What do you see? Talk to me!" I held his eyes open; my knees pressed into the bathroom tiles and they were damp. I couldn't tell if was from his piss or overflow from the bath. His arms flapped; I gently placed them back in the water. I stared into his eyes, hoping for a movie there.

  The thing is I can defend this. I don't do it because I want to kill them. I do it because I want to talk to them afterwards. But it's so hard to time. I get caught up – I don't want to bring them back too soon. I want them to spend time in the room so they can tell me.

  Den began to pant, and the blood flow seemed weaker. His lips moved. I considered bandaging his arms, stopping the flow, but he hadn't been there yet. He hadn't seen it. Just a few more moments, he needed to be closer.

  I could see the dark room approaching in his eyes. I stared harder, stared until my eyes stung. I allowed myself to be slighted by him, to see what happens when the person dies. There was a momentary shiver, was all, as that snippet ends up in the cold room with the dead person. So those shivers we all get, and we say someone's walking over my grave, but the truth is someone we were slighted by has died. It felt an itch, like a lost limb. A small piece shaved away. I shivered, goosestep on grave.

  He shook his head from my grasp, widened his eyes and said, clearly, "Dark." I was elated. He had seen the room, then, the dark, the razor teeth, smelt the shit. I smelt it too, but it was him, the bath a mess of blood, oil, shit.

  Then he sank away from me. His pupils were wide and black. I could see my own staring monkey face. Slowly, a thin cloud filmed over his eyes, and his eyeballs seemed to flatten. His face was grey, flat, toneless. He seemed to shrink; he was half the man he had been when we set out.

  "Talk to me," I said. "Is it golden? Is there someone there?
What do you see?"

  When I was cleaning the bathroom later I saw, at the end of the bath, staring with glass eyes, my rubber ducky. Duck. Not dark. Duck.

  I buried him in the backyard.

  The phone rang as I was finishing in the garden. Peter said, "God, took you long enough."

  "I was digging in the garden."

  "Hmph. I thought you'd finished with all that. Look, I just wanted to tell you about Kelly's birthday. She's ten, you know. We're just having a party at home."

  I said, "I thought you hated those. We always went somewhere for your birthdays."

  Silence.

  Peter said, "Yes, but we had to."

  I said, "What do you mean? Mum and Dad loved kids."

  Peter said, "Come on, Steve. You know what I'm talking about."

  I said, "You tell me, Peter."

  Peter said, "I don't want to discuss it."

  I said, "Peter, if you say the words it'll be okay. My counsellor said so."

  Peter said, "It was Dad, Steve. I was ashamed of him. I thought he might lose it."

  I said, "You're kidding. What are you on about? Just because he liked me better than you doesn't mean you should lie about him. I wouldn't be seen dead at your ugly child's fucken party." I hung up.

  It was amazing they kept asking me back to these things. Just weeks later it was Maria's birthday; her parents threw her a party like she was a child. I didn't want to go; she never comes to any of mine. I told Auntie Ruth and she harumphed as I knew she would. "Who does that family think they are? Do they think they're
your
family? You've got family of your own, Steve. You just come right over here if you want company. I've made some special soup and we'll watch TV together. I've made a lovely banana cake…always use bananas which are almost black, Stevie, and you won't go wrong."

  That night was medical drama night; three of them in a row, and Auntie Ruth imagining she belonged in a hospital. I could never be sure if she preferred the idea of being a patient or a doctor. She told anyone who'd listen the commercial stations were best because you had time to go to the toilet during the ads.

  I could taste the soup just hearing about it. Auntie Ruth was a frugal person. If things were going off in her fridge she turned them into soup, anything. Yoghurt, mashed potato, tomatoes, meat, chicken, sausages, pumpkin, Brussels sprouts, anything went in, all vitamised to a texture and served with a sprig of wilting parsley. She called them her "vitamin soups". I called them vitamin goo.

  So I went to Maria's birthday. Half of them weren't there; sick politics in that family. We were served oysters and everyone nudged Peter, rude bastards, as if they knew something.

  I said, "I wouldn't eat it, Peter. Maria prefers them limp and in the other bed, doesn't she?" Peter was the only one who laughed. I looked into the faces of each of them, smiling.

  "What are you doing, Steve?" her sister Elise asked me.

  "Just being careful," I said. These people were my family, and Peter's, and I didn't want to slight them. It's so hard to be aware. You have to listen and respond to everything, watch where you walk, and when you get to the room they're waiting, anyway.