Taming the Beast (35 page)

‘What happened?’ Mike leant across the mess to pick up his cigarettes.

She pressed her knees together until it hurt. ‘It wasn’t good. He misunderstood me, he…’ Sarah took the smoke from Mike’s hand and drew back on it. ‘He seemed very confused.’

Mike reclaimed his cigarette. ‘You do that to people, Sarah. You cross all these lines, and break all these boundaries and people don’t know what to do. And Jamie… God, the poor bugger has never been the same since you left. His brain probably short circuited when you appeared out of nowhere.’ Mike handed the smoke to Sarah. ‘Did he hurt you?’

Sarah nodded.

‘Does he know he hurt you?’ he asked, and Sarah nodded again, wondering if she would ever be able to think of Jamie again without thinking of the pain when he ripped the yellow ribbon from her hair.

The phone rang. Mike glanced at it, then shrugged and turned
back to Sarah. He stroked her cheek with his fingertips. ‘Poor Sarah,’ he said over the insistent trilling. ‘Poor kid.’

The phone stopped and Sarah realised her shoulders had been all tensed up. She relaxed them, closed her eyes, let her head rest against Mike’s arm, breathed in the scent of his aftershave. She had a crazy thought that the unanswered call had been Daniel, that he had somehow found out where she was and he was calling to tell her–

The phone started up again.

‘God, alright!’ Mike carefully lifted Sarah’s head off his arm, patting her lightly as he stood up and reached for the phone. Sarah watched him and thought that surely it was Daniel, because only he would be so persistent calling and calling until he was answered. Only he could fill a room with tension and a sense of urgency without even being there.

There was a crash, louder and denser sounding than when Mike had dropped his cup. Loud and dense like the sound of a ninety-kilogram adult male falling to his knees on timber floor-boards. Then a small
clack
as the phone receiver landed beside him. Then Mike was screaming the exact same words that had been screaming through Sarah’s brain since last night.

‘Jamie,’ Mike howled. ‘No, Jamie. No, no, no, no, no.’

She barely survived the funeral. Several times she fell and was sorry that Mike was there to catch her. There were animals scratching and clawing inside her; she wanted to smash herself open and let them out. When she saw the damn box he was in, she felt sure that she was supposed to break it open with her skull, but she was stopped by people who did not understand that Jamie would want her to do it. ‘Can’t you control her,’ someone said, and Mike held her tighter and kissed her forehead which made the scratching worse. Someone told Mike to take her home, which felt unfair because there was a kid howling much louder than she was, but she was too tired to struggle.

Mike drove her back to his place, seated her at the kitchen table and went out for a couple of bottles of bourbon and some more cigarettes. When he returned, he told her he didn’t know what to do except get drunk and say what was true, and Sarah wondered why she had never noticed how wise Mike was.

‘A few years ago,’ she said, shortly after the second bottle was opened, ‘this bloke got carried away – it was New Year’s – we were both out of our minds, and he somehow managed to put my head through a shower screen. My face was all swollen, red, black, purple, for a week. Five days, I went to work like that. One eye closed over completely. Five fucking days and not one person asked if I was okay. Then another week with yellow bruising, weeping eyes. Nothing.’ She drank deeply from the bottle. ‘Jamie comes back from his family holiday. My face is almost totally better. He takes–’ She drank again. ‘He took one look at me. At this tiny little cut under my eye, this faint yellow bruise on my cheek… He fucking cried.’

‘I’ve never seen a bloke so soft on a girl as he was on you.’

‘Too soft.’
The stupid bastard
.

They drank to the point of illness and passed out together in Mike’s double bed. When they woke they lay side by side, holding hands and looking at the ceiling.

‘When are you going to go back to your old man?’ Mike asked.

‘Do you want me gone?’ Sarah asked.

‘You can stay as long as you like, but I don’t think you should. Life goes on. You can’t just hide from it forever, no matter how sad you are.’

She rolled on to her side and looked at him. His eyes were bloodshot from all the booze and crying. ‘I’ll go home soon,’ she said. ‘When I feel a bit stronger.’

‘I think you should at least call him. Let him know where you are, that you’re okay.’

‘If I tell him where I am, he’ll come here and he’ll kill you.’

‘This is who you want to spend your life with?’

‘Want to? No. I don’t want to spend my life with him anymore than Jamie wanted to… sometimes you’re fucked either way, it’s just a matter of how and how fast.’

‘God!’ Mike turned to her. His distress was clear; it bled out of the corners of his eyes and into the lines of his face. ‘You say these big, huge, heartbreaking things, and you’re so calm. Not a tear, not a quiver in your voice. Like everything that happens is as dull as everything else. You’re like a robot.’

‘Would you feel better if I cried? Would it make you happy?’

A sigh. ‘What has my happiness ever had to do with you, Sarah?’

Sarah almost did cry then. Instead, she pulled him to her and kissed him.

Sex had always been her cure all, and even though Daniel chided her for it, and Jamie had catastrophically used it against her,
she still felt there was value in it. Loneliness and fear and loss were not intellectual states that could be healed through talk or analysis. They were physical conditions and could only be soothed by physical means.

The loss of Jamie manifested itself as a sensation of bareness. Even weighed down under blankets Sarah felt too exposed. There was too much air on her skin. Air that rushed in through the Jamie shaped hole in the world. Mike’s body shut off the air for a little while and made her feel something that wasn’t pain. It was good that it was Mike, because he knew why she could hardly move, why her legs and arms stayed locked around him, why she whimpered when he stopped cradling her neck. He knew without her having to explain, because he knew Jamie, and he knew what the cold, relentless wind of missing him was like.

They clung together and whispered things to each other, both nonsensical and important. Sarah remembered something of Mallarmé’s and said the words into Mike’s ear and he moaned as though he understood her. Afterwards, he asked her what she had said.

‘
La chair est triste, helas, et j’ai lu tous les livres
,’ Sarah repeated, holding him as tightly as she could. ‘The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books.’

‘Amen,’ Mike said.

Sarah woke early and dressed in the clothes Mike had washed and dried for her. She shook him awake.

‘You leaving?’ He squinted up with half-closed, crusty eyes.

She nodded and he sat up, rubbing his face. ‘Will I see you again?’

Sarah sat beside him and took his hand. ‘I don’t know.’

He turned her hand over and pressed the inside of her knuckles. ‘Take care of yourself.’

‘You too.’ She pecked his cheek, gave his hands a final squeeze and walked calmly out of his bedroom. Door closed behind her, she started to run.

She found Daniel on the sofa, naked, except for a pair of black socks. Stubble covered his cheeks, coarse and almost white. There was a packet of salted peanuts wedged under his left thigh. His eyes were closed. One arm was twisted at the elbow, pointing over his head to the back wall. The other arm hung over the edge of the sofa, his fingertips skimming the floor.

‘Daniel?’

He didn’t stir.

On the floor, a photo of Sarah was lying in a pool of vomit. The stomach acid had eaten away at Sarah’s face, leaving her a torso with just the swirly shadow of a head. Next to that, an ashtray with a cigarette butt balanced perfectly on the rim. A bottle of vodka, empty, and a bottle of scotch, two-thirds gone.

Sarah stepped over them, and picked up his hand. ‘Daniel?’ She understood for the first time what it was to have your heart in your mouth. Hers was blocking her windpipe and pressing up into her palate. It was pushing up against her teeth.

His hand was limp and cold. Breathing, concentrating on breathing, Sarah remembered to use her index finger, not her thumb, to touch his wrist. Her heart had left her mouth and filled her ears with its desperate pounding. Her hand was shaking too much to be of use. He is just trying to give me a scare, she thought. And then:
maybe that was all Jamie had wanted to do
. Sarah pressed hard on Daniel’s wrist, then harder, then gave it up and pulled on his whole arm.

The cold white arm jerked, then pulled away and tucked itself into the body.

Sarah felt everything rising up inside her. All those things that Mike had said, the things he thought she should cry over, the things he thought she couldn’t cry over and didn’t care about, all came rushing out. She had thought she was numb but that wasn’t right, she had just been anaesthetised, and now it had worn off and the wounds were screaming.

Some hours later, she stopped crying enough to raise her head. Her eyes met his and he moaned in relief and sorrow. Sarah answered in kind. Their bodies merged and more time passed.

‘You love me,’ Daniel said, and Sarah didn’t answer because it wasn’t a question. It had never been a question and answering yes or no wouldn’t make it one.

Time then, to accept certain realities. This pathetic old man smelling of piss and vomit, being the first one. The reality of him was both uglier and sweeter than she had previously admitted. More vile, and more human. But no less hers than he had ever been.

‘Someone died,’ she told him.

‘Not you though. Not me.’

‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘Not fair is it?’

‘Never has been.’

The other reality was harder to face and more important. For the twenty seconds that Sarah thought Daniel dead, she had felt fear and repulsion and regret, but also, she had known in some deep, unexamined corner of herself that she could live without him. She knew that this dark, messy, inexplicably beautiful entanglement was a choice. It was not fated, and she could leave anytime she liked. If she were to stay, she would have to do so knowing that a life with him was but one option out of a million.

But then, life is a constant withering of possibilities. Some are stolen with the lives of people you love. Others are let go, with regret and reluctance and deep, deep sorrow. But there is compensation
for lives unlived in the intoxicating joy of knowing that the life you have – right here, right now – is the one you have chosen. There is power in that, and hope.

Other Serpent’s Tail books of interest

One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed

Melissa P
.
Translated by Lawrence Venuti

‘A very elegantly written memoir… Her reflections on the power of sensual memory are particularly poignant, to the point of Proustian… This is a beautiful book, serious in its intent
Sunday Independent

‘The sex diary of Melissa P shows she is experienced – and wise – beyond her years… [a] combination of candour and intelligence, and Melissa’s compelling mix of aggression and passivity’
GQ

‘A frank and vivid account of sexual rites of passage’
Telegraph

‘A blistering bestselling Italian debut’
The List

‘Melissa’s candour regarding her extreme experience offers an apprehension, however fleeting, of modern adolescence’
The Times

‘A warm and erotic book, packed with intense and shocking sexual experiences’
Diva

An immediate bestseller,
One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed
is the candid diary of a beautiful Sicilian teenager who embarks upon a quest for love but instead enters a world of eroticism and sadomasochism.

Melissa writes: ‘I want love, Diary. I want to feel my heart melt, want to see my icy stalactites shatter and plunge into a river of passion and beauty.’ She searches for love through lonely-hearts columns, internet chat rooms and even with her math tutor but the men she meets only want sex. With the pain of unrequited love comes the excitement caused by her discovery of the sexual power she has over men (and other women). Her sex life comes to define her clandestine identity, revealed only in her diary entries. When first published, it was assumed that a teenager could not write such a novel and Melissa was forced to reveal her identity to her shocked family and to the world.

Also by Emily Maguire and published by Serpent’s Tail

The Gospel According to Luke

Aggie Grey is a jaded sexual health counsellor who finds herself having to defend her abortion clinic against the attacks of a radical new fundamentalist sect. Pastor Luke Butler is young, idealistic and out to capture the hearts and minds of Sydney's disaffected youth; his first campaign is to shut down Aggie Grey’s clinic.

Caught in the crossfire is 16-year-old Honey - pregnant, battered and ready to cling to whatever hope is offered. As Aggie and Luke fight over the fate of Honey’s unborn child, they discover a deep and surprising connection. But as the war between the secular and religious intensifies, Aggie, Luke and Honey find themselves in moral and physical danger. Against a backdrop of religious terrorism and social decay,
The Gospel According to Luke
is a contemporary love story about belief, family, grief and hope.

‘Maguire is an energetic, often powerful writer who has once again shown us her hunger for more than most of us can chew comfortably’
The Australian Literary Review

‘Maguire has nailed it… [she] can dramatise ideological difference with realism and sympathy for all of the characters concerned’
Sydney Morning Herald