Like it Matters (9 page)

“So what do we do now?” I asked her.

“We chip all the old paint off, then we paint the whole thing white. Like an undercoat.”

“That doesn’t sound fun.”

“Ja, it won’t be,” she said. “You have to work for the fun parts.”

Just chipping the paint took the rest of the day—and it was kak work, maybe some of the worst I’ve ever done. It was so easy to hurt your hands with the scraper, and they’d bleed and then flakes of paint would get into the cuts and make them sting. And then you’d have to use the sandpaper, and the cuts would close up with dirt and your hands would throb and go red and start to look a bit unrecognisable. After an hour of it I told her to put her scraper down, her hands were too important, I’d do the rest.

At about two o’clock I’d finished chipping all the horses and all the poles and some of the skirting at the bottom of the thing and I was lying flat on my back, with my hands dipped in ice-cream tubs full of water with some dish soap in it, my head in her lap, my eyelids red and warm in the sun—she’d been telling me about what was going on in the street but then she’d gone quiet and she’d put her fingers in my hair. I was nearly asleep

When I heard her say, “Ah, Jesus”—

And I felt her fingernails go into my scalp.

I saw him as soon as I sat up. But it wasn’t like her dad was coming for us or anything like that, he looked busy with something out on the street. He had a black plastic bag with him. He was carrying it around like a sack.

“What’s he doing?” I said.

“Probably a poster run.”

“Huh?”

“Ja, check, he hasn’t seen us. Hide me,” she said, and she pulled me on top of her.

We kissed for a while and then when we sat up again he was gone.

“Please tell me,” I said.

She giggled. “You know those abortion posters? Those back-alley things that say
CLEAN
and
SAFE
and
PAINFREE
all over them? He rips them down.”

I said, “What about the ones for penis cream? Or the ones that can bring your wife back or get you a new job?”

“They all come down,” she said. “It’s all witchcraft to him.”

I finished the scraping that day, that night I passed out on my bed on the couch with my fucking plate of supper right there on my chest.

I know that’s what happened, because when I knocked it all over in the middle of the night I woke Charlotte up. Even though she’d been asleep, when she came through to the lounge she was laughing. “I knew that was going to happen,” she said. We kissed and I put my sore hands on her ribcage, on the skin—

Just that, because I didn’t want to try touch too much and ruin it again—

But just that and I was embarrassingly hard, and I think we were both still half fucked up on sleep and I thought maybe at last something was going to happen

But then she just broke it off and went back to the room, told me she’d help clean up the plate in the morning. I cleaned it up right then to save my hands from having to jack off, and then when I went back to the couch, till I fell asleep, I imagined her ribcage like this enormous river valley, soft folds, long curved hills, I was lying there in grass like breathing velvet in a breeze that smelled like her hair …

The painting the next day was better because it didn’t hurt as much as the scraping, but it was more irritating in other ways.

Duade joined in.

And Charlotte was a Nazi about how smooth the undercoat had to be, which wouldn’t have actually been so much of a problem except the paint Duade got us was cheap, thin and grainy at the same time, and it’d clot along every groove and bubble in every crack and crevice, and when you tried to take some off you always took much more than you wanted to and then you’d have to do it all over again. For a while there, it almost felt like it was going to be eternal, like one of those Greek punishments

And it did take ages and ages—

But Christ, it was magnificent when it was done.

We stood there looking at it, the three of us, and it was another perfect afternoon, and in that gold light, the thing looked like it belonged in a cathedral. We stood there forever, just looking at it

Nobody saying anything

Then Charlotte said, “Maybe we should leave it like this? Just do another coat, like a rich cream or something.”

Duade said, “Kiff.”

“Ja, I thought about that,” I said. “But the problem with that’s all it takes is a couple of seagulls to shit on it, a couple of dirty winds to blow in from the Flats and a grey day overhead, and the thing’s going to look fucking vertraag all over again. It won’t look like marble forever, no matter what we do. I think we’ve just got to enjoy this for now. Safe in their alabaster chambers.”

Duade said, “What?”

I told him, “It’s a poem.”

We stared at it a bit longer but then as soon as the light started fading the thing did start looking cheap and the show was over, just like that, and we threw a cover over it and then knocked in some pegs to hold the cover down. Then we said cheers to Duade and started heading home.

I wasn’t as tired as the day before, but still, I was pretty tired and we didn’t really talk on the walk back, just held hands.

But when we turned the last corner on the way to the house—

From four blocks away—

We could see that fucking van parked right outside the gate.

And a cop car parked just behind it.

Charlotte stopped walking. I looked back at her. She looked so angry I had no idea what she was going to do next. She put her face in her hands and scratched and pulled at her hair, then just moaned, “
Fuck’s
sake.”

I went back up the road to her. “Oh, shit, what?” I said. “Did you take something?”

The way she’d been breathing and hugging herself really did have me worried, but then I heard something else, a laugh, and then she looked up at me with this glee on her face.

“You mean, like something
valuable
, on my way out?” She giggled. “Is that what you think of me?”

“Hey,” I said. “No judgement here. I was this close to kifing those coasters.”

She smiled and kissed me, just quickly. “I’ll handle this, okay? You just get Freddy to go home.”

“How’d they find us?”

“Ag, Freddy knows everybody. It’s fucking irritating.”

When we got closer to the house, the cop car started up and her dad climbed out the passenger seat. I didn’t see if it was Freddy or not, they drove off before we could tell. I tried to make eye contact with her dad but his eyes were fixed on Charlotte, and I felt a bit worried but she told me again just to go inside—

So I did, I went in and started making supper.

I didn’t have a radio or anything, and they were loud out there in the street, even above the sound of the stuff frying in the pan, and unless the train was going past, I had to sing to myself to block them out.

I didn’t want to hear them, but I couldn’t help watching from the window. It was horrible but I couldn’t look away—they started on their feet, squared off, and they leaned their chins forward while they shouted at each other and I told myself if he raised a hand at her I was going to run outside and deck him.

But then suddenly, he just went and sat on the pavement, feet in the gutter, and she rounded on him—she stood over him and she was pointing at him and shouting—and he was shouting back but his voice was thick, you could hear he was losing, at some point he started crying and then he was making horrible sounds, almost like a dog.

They got quieter after a while and I could hear her voice had gone stern, not vicious anymore—then he got in the van and drove off soon after the streetlights came on.

There was something like a smile on her face when she came inside.

“Sorry about that,” she said.

“What’s up?”

“Nothing. Nothing that’s our problem, anyway.”

“Come on,” I said. “Tell me.”

“Well, you know when my ma left, it wasn’t like she just, you know, hitch-hiked to Mozambique or something. There was this rich, young
IT
surfer dude she’d been fucking forever. Everybody knew.”

“Even your dad?”

“He says no but I’m convinced. Anyway, how’s this, this is actually quite nice, they’ve been sending my dad money for years. I think to help him take care of me.”

“That is nice,” I said.

“Ja, right? But now my dad goes and calls my ma out of the blue—I don’t even know how he got the number, probably through Freddy—but he calls her and tells her about me moving out. And then apparently things got a bit raw on the phone between them, big surprise, and now the upshot is my ma’s told him he can forget about getting cash anymore.”

“Wow,” I said.

But really, it was more the
way
she was telling me, that curl in her lip—

I’d never been capable of that, not even at my meanest—

“So what did you tell him?”

“Well, let’s be frank. He was a fucking idiot to get hold of her in the first place. Especially if he knew he was sommer just going to rock up here and break down anyway. He’s a fucking mess, man. That’s basically what I told him.”

She was giving me this thrill—this slightly scary, entirely irresistible thrill. It was the sexiest she’d been by far. I went over to her and I put my hand on her face and I said, “Jeez. Did he who made the lamb make thee?”

And she said, “Fuck off”

And it made me a bit crazy.

I was kissing her very hard and I was touching her in a way I hadn’t yet—it was plain, and hungry—and I could feel her resisting but I could also feel her trying not to resist, she was biting on my bottom lip and I could feel the muscles working in her leg where it tightened round me, at the same time

I could feel her hands pushing against my chest. She gasped and the sound almost killed me, and I think I tried to pick her up to take her somewhere we could lie down

And then
whack—

She got me right on the side of the face.

Just the once, and not very hard, but it freaked me out completely and I let her go and I was saying, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

Her eyes welled up and she stood there with a really miserable look on her face—

All that fierceness, all that badness, it was gone—

She just looked sad and fucked up again and young, very young.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just, Ed, sex … It’s weird for me when I’m sober.”

“Ha, me too actually,” I said. “Now that you mention it.”

“No, I mean … I’m so … I don’t even know if it’s possible anymore.”

“Alright.”

We hadn’t said anything about drinking or drugs the last few days, not since she’d moved in. I think maybe we were hoping, since now we had each other, that all those thoughts were going to disappear. But they were there still, obviously. That’s just how it works once you’ve gone too far. Sure, in your mind maybe you feel like you’ve turned around—but it’s a long, long way back up the road, and there’s always stuff, whispers and memories, tugging like hands on the back of your shirt.

I was close to crying about it all

But then she blurted out, “Can we get not sober?”

“
Now?
” I said.

“No.” She smiled. “Maybe not now. Just sometime.”

I made this weird sound—I sounded like a donkey—I think it was a laugh, but it also made my eyes sting

And it took me a while to say anything because I didn’t trust my voice. And it was strange, but the last few long months of my life, which had hardened me, I think, in some ways, all of a sudden started to slip and slide

And I wanted her

And I didn’t want her to know how little I could trust myself, how little
she
should trust me with this stuff, even just booze—

And in the end all I said was, “Ja, sure. Why not?”

Then in a wave I could feel breaking in my chest, I got sad—that breathless sad—and I held her hand and I asked her, “But like, on the whole, we’re doing well though, hey?”

“What’s well?” she said.

“Like, look around … Things are sort of normal, aren’t they?”

“Fuck. Who knows, Ed. Everyone’s got a different normal.”

“Ja, well …” I said. “I don’t want you to hate yourself anymore. Okay? That’s actually all I want.”

She kissed me.

And then right into my ear, in a warm, wet voice

She whispered, “Go get wine.”

T
HE NEXT DAY, BY THE TIME WE GOT TO WORK
it was raining—heavy, steady rain.

We stood under my jacket beneath a bare jacaranda, the clouds and the rain so thick it didn’t seem like anything existed beyond the tree and the street corner. Eventually Duade showed up and gave us some money for the last two days and told us to come back tomorrow unless it was raining again. We walked home and we each had a shower and put on some dry clothes, and then we sat in the lounge

And with the lights on and the rain pelting the windows, and the trains going by—

And neither of us being able to say anything—

The morning really started to wear on and I can’t even remember whose idea it was, but we went out and got drunk again.

Slowly—it wasn’t like we were trying to stop the shakes or anything like that. We ate. We talked and laughed, and on the way home we picked up more stuff at a bottle store and then we went to the Cash Converters and found a
CD
player for eighty bucks, and it
worked
when we got home and plugged it in. We lay together in bed and listened to music and drank and smoked cigarettes, and at some point we passed out, and then later—outside it was a bright grey evening—we woke up at about the same time feeling gentled and unafraid, and we made love and then we just stayed in bed, drinking and loving each other till we passed out again.

The day after that, hungover as sin

Somehow we made it all the way to work but when we got there we found a plastic sleeve hanging on the door to the workshop, with a pen and note from Duade inside: