Devil's Trumpet Read online

  Victoria University of Wellington Press

  PO Box 600 Wellington

  New Zealand

  vup.wgtn.ac.nz

  Copyright © Tracey Slaughter 2021

  First published 2021

  This book is copyright. Apart from

  any fair dealing for the purpose of private study,

  research, criticism or review, as permitted under the

  Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any

  process without the permission of the publishers.

  The moral rights of the author

  have been asserted.

  ISBN 9781776564170 (print)

  ISBN 9781776563968 (EPUB)

  ISBN 9781776563975 (Kindle)

  A catalogue record is available at the National Library of New Zealand

  Published with the assistance of a grant from

  Ebook conversion 2021 by meBooks

  For those who give me shelter:

  my sons, my friends, my lover.

  Contents

  stations of the end

  Stage Three

  the receiver

  Fisheye

  Never Tell Your Lover That His Wife Could Be Having an Affair

  I still hoped the photos would come out well

  Cicada Motel

  25–13

  three rides with my sister

  why she married your father

  jilt back

  holding the torch

  eleven love stories you paint blue

  if there is no shelter

  some facts about her home town

  warpaint

  I feel there’s a young girl out there suffering

  extraction

  ladybirds

  devil’s trumpet

  god taught me to give up on people

  dorm

  What You Don’t Know

  compact

  the deal

  if found please return to

  point of view

  list of addictions in no special order

  ministry

  the best reasons

  postcards are a thing of the past

  Acknowledgements

  stations of the end

  1.All that first day she felt happy and hellbent. Lost her sorry walk, just thinking of his smell. Slipped along landings at work, thighs coupling under her skirt. Stooping to sign documents, laugh see-through as a secret.

  2.He had two daughters, but she didn’t think about them. They were mainstays in a photograph he sent her, sweet vague blanks. One blond, one dark, standing on a wharf, either side of the body she wanted. She could taste the logo on his shirt where his chest broadened to circle them, feel the well-known stamp heat and stretch.

  3.She comes down the staircase and the last five steps give her vertigo, a spinal tipping point that makes her gasp. Her wrists tingle, quarter-inched with blood. She gets misadventures of heartbeat. Her mind feels thick and wild. She can see him, out through the shallows of the carpark, the first meet, sharpening his voice into a cell.

  4.Her house feels like a penitentiary. Guilt packs extra ribs into her breath. Dinner plates skid from her hands and she kneels in the grease, making slits in the ends of her finger­tips. Takeout instead, boys. Porcelain and vinegar. Satellites of fat. The sound of a plastic bag feasting on her blood.

  5.I want to drink you. And mess you up. Capsize and keep you there, shuddering under me. Kiss hard, talk haunting. Own every inch of your skin. Know the torque of your collarbone, friction of your thumb. Taste jaw & scalp & ankle. Stroke the tough rise of your cock under denim. Knock out your cufflinks with my tongue. Lie in the uncut grass while you graffiti my freckles. Have your grip twist a sunlight of roots through my hair. Do not send do not send oh do not oh shit Christ get me out of this.

  6.Hotels.com sent her emails, offering her Secret Prices. They said she could Now Pay Lower Prices than Everyone Else! For a Limited Time.

  7.Sometimes, she did think of the daughters. She knew one liked music, so she thought of her fingers on the keys, small cold utensils of sound, fingerpadding loneliness. The other one was blond, so she saw her in a gang, a loud group of smiles, all depicting the latest Maybelline. Baby-oiled summertime thighs, and pixie in-jokes, and somehow-innocent fluoro shoelaces.

  8.Congratulations, you’ve qualified for even more discounts! Now your Premium Room costs 20% less!

  9.All of her days felt en route to him. It didn’t matter what she was doing. She would watch herself doing it, hearing her voice, when she finally reached him, telling him. Today I . . . whatever. And whatever. And whatever. It was just a sound to make, across the humming surface of his skin.

  10.Pressed down on the whetstone of his fingers.

  11.He marked her neck, a terrible stroke of bruise that soaked into layers of sinew. She panicked in the mirror, staring at its flooded purple silks. It thudded like a beacon. It bookmarked her throat, like a page he would go back to read bloodier later. She spent days fluttering, stalling her husband, turning her head. Laundered blouses she hadn’t worn in aeons. Chose words carefully above flimsy collars, unchic, pussybowed. Nothing was ever said.

  12.For days she dreamed about the first kiss. Would he catch her by the tailbone, jack her quick skirt, would they lumber to the wall – a cinema feat of kiss, kickstarted by a look and clattering the hot halls of some darkened house. Or would it be withheld. Heads in a soft buzz of axis that neither brushes or nuzzles, but sends volts of absent touch across their scalps. Till their mouths meet, hesitant. And perishable. Would she let it happen at all. Could she not?

  13.It’s the little things that break her. Like her husband calling for a grocery list. So she can hear him, the traffic in his voice, the steering, the mechanised breeze mixed with easy listening, the radio station she always used to tease him for, a lame pick of 50k stick-to-the-speed-limit hits. On his way to be thoughtful, to stop at the supermarket. To ask about things, what they’re out of, to have her check the fridge. So she stands in front of it, open, staring, at its cool blue rack, at its clammy shelves, and can hardly say what they’re low on, what they’ve used up, avocado, maybe kale, can hardly say eggs. Hopes he doesn’t buy her flowers. His voice sounds like it’s considering handing her some tulips, in festive sprays of plastic.

  14.She’s all about his musk. Obsessed with the thick block of bone that is his thumb joint, the pale corner seam (so parched, so male) of his mouth. She’s about the countdown of buttons, the business of cotton getting shed, the hot cost of it all come undone. The cufflinks she wants to taunt him about, their clicky inlaid stone miscellany, because somehow they remind her of what he must have looked like dressing up as a kid. Reruns of locked office doors. Seconds when he straightens, to stare at her in ultra-silence.

  15.She notices things about her boys. The way the birthmark of the oldest has faded, elongated so its ragged edges pull on his shoulder like a blurred red wing. The blunted stink of their rooms, each with its different top-note of sabotaged schoolbag, arsehole, saltwater, bare feet, cigarettes. The twitch of strawberry growth on the chin of her baby, so his grin juts prickly with softness. The sound of old stored paintings they once made her, stiff pelts of paper dyed to a crackling wash, their coasts and boats and birds and buildings losing their outlines to a dry haze that turns everything blue, their tiny cornered signatures sticks. They’re so big now they can grab her in the kitchen, if there’s food to be played up for, to give her steep blank hugs. The indents of their dog-eared t-shirts, the yanked hems and scuffed guts and chewed-out trim. The way the middle one has to sit in the leather sofa, learning to click his fingers, a complicated rig-up of goofy elastic flicks, trying to make his lovely skin sound tougher.

  16.She buys a special penci
l for the periphery of her mouth, fills in its long-lasting lie with fresh hibiscus.

  17.She’ll play for hours, kiss-lazed, with those cufflinks, bobbling them round in her palm while they’re talking, naked, nothing but flat-out love going into their knucklebones of steel construction.

  18.There was a third daughter. She was small, blue, born dead. The room she was delivered to must have been vinyl-lined and silent. There must have been a hover of wheeled machines not breathing. Tubes and dials unhooked, clicked back. Purl-stitched white wool packed into tissue, spiderweb ivory boots. Ribbons expecting family. A capsule, rented, with a sterilised seatbelt, for the ride home.

  19.He sends messages, brief, blunt, knowing. Imperative. His words may as well be fingertips, working the flesh between her pelvic bone, raising thick roses of flesh, leaving her plush.

  20.Then, at work, when the days have lost count of her, she sits under a rotating fan and thinks of the circles they’re turning and turning in, everything stale and literal and jaded, no way out of the circuit that shifts waste air back into her worn-out mouth, which spits the same phrases, we can’t keep doing this, we have to stop, meet me now, I want you, I’m not ready to break this off, I can’t I can’t, on binary sequence, so they’re always at a start, or at an end, and either way, ergo, fucking ergo, it’s hurting, hurting, outright hurt. She tries to stay calm amidst the smokefree working-day light, to index things, action them, audit them. But sits among the hardware, and stares along the palings of her desk, like the answer might be lying somewhere on it, she can tap it out on the keys, test the focus of the screen and it will manifest – something curative, wise, something resolved, a pledge, something ultimate. A way forward: she would sign now in blood. But all she can feel is the fan, the yawn of it, heavy and implacable, no other options.

  21.She thinks in lousy lame words like caress. They start to spread their dumb sugar over everything. Gaze in a sappy haze, memory sloppy with half-cooked pictures all involving softest skin. She writes things like long and yearn, stops short, thank God, at burn, tries to ignore fate. Bites her fingernails down at the thought of her meant-to-be stupidity. Her dopey idiom. A new dictionary of dizzy and squish. Makes herself write things like prey.

  22.She would like to be a butterfly pinned to velvet, stretched out and staked down by each tiny cufflink, wrists and insteps engraved by little black bad endings.

  23.The bleached crop circle the oldest one leaves on the lawn where he likes to pee out his bedroom window, a late-night jet he thinks she doesn’t guess, though she can hear him through her insomnia, covert, levering open his hatch, and letting go a two-storey iridescent sizzle.

  24.She can’t make herself feel like a villain. But she is. Doesn’t it give her these little kicks? She gets sultry, surefooted with her own wrongdoing, moving in her clothes all filmy and succulent, the pink hinge sending up bolts of electricity, so her trunk glides around, indifferent, gauzy, blissed. Yes, yes. The uncut version coursing through her. Everything else feels so Old Testament. Watch her. Honeymooning on the thought of him, inside the true colours of her loose dress.

  25.The way all three boys watch cartoons, picking their noses companionably, unperturbed by one another, tipping the skull to work in a deep finger, puffing away at their overhanging fringe, eyes glued to the anime, its primary wide-eyed dazzle, its stylised clash, testing viscosity with little dabs, digging out dry scales. Eating off an unthinking hand.

  26.You’ve Been Given Something Special! You’re Now Eligible for 50% Less!

  27.She feels like she’s walking masked through the house, an impostor. She hears her voice manufacturing sound. She worries she’ll choke on some counterfeit phrase, something she’s always meant, so easy, love you too, see you later, which now feels as hollow as the possible alibis she keeps listing, I’m picking up X, I’m working late, the best clichés she can spin, which sicken her to utter. Though she still updates the list.

  28.Flocked cotton, white ribbons, all expecting breath. A muslin-swaddled shape they must have had to pass each other. Then pass back. He must have sat in the vinyl-lined room and wept with his wife. He must have held her blue hand.

  29.Inconsolable things happen inside her chest. Spaces pull between bone, making sobs of deep vowel she has to anchor herself to weather through. The longing turns her heartbeat to leather, a swollen thing moving with a terrible sloth, stiffening, withered in the distant ribs, then punching a vast ache back into prominence. Goodbye lasts for two days. Neither of them can stick to it.

  30.Lying in sheets, blown out, dedicated to sweat, not a single thing feels regrettable. His voice, hair-raising before, is a lullaby after, a smoky brand of comfort at her temple. Their vocation is to fuck, and the world outside of anywhere they touch is a desert. Like the agony outside a prayer.

  31.How can her husband not be onto her, her scent – it must be coming off her in waves, dense indecent ripples of pheromone, salty odours of loaded hunger. How is the singing in her bloodstream not audible, the flinching of her featherweight heart. Seam wet as a full mouth.

  32.She doesn’t belong on his wife’s sage carpet, doesn’t belong by her well-appointed faux-marble bench. So she doesn’t touch anything. The little manuscripts of kitchen lists, birthday cards, bills, another woman’s blueprint on all of them, bunched and fanned into a bowl on the countertop, envelopes smudged with her quick homely efficiency. Little blots and grittings of sauce, stuck to them in that 6pm domestic clatter, all its din and sift. A half-hearted dish of near-junk marked with warmth and tomorrows and kinship.

  33.It’s not like she didn’t ponder it – the steps she’d have to take to make it right. Some days when he doesn’t get in touch, she doesn’t mope. Sometimes she feels released, cut free, level-headed again, temporarily restored. She can think in terms of a sensible trajectory, a guarded future, a solid outlook. Then she thinks of his hands and feels all the heat of her body, wanting to get them gloved.

  34.She decides, from the image of his wife, she doesn’t look right – she looks added on, collateral. The wristwatch she’s wearing looks too big. Her sandals are serviceable, hefty. She’s waving some morsel of barbecue in her hand, there’s a frilled paper plate on her lap in a skid and there’s a dog lounged against her, the blear of its jaw adored and slathering. A wide loose comfortable smile. It somehow reminds her of her husband’s voice when he’s on a business call, saying things like ‘additional security’.

  35.What happens when she nears him. Everything yields. The fix of his retinas, the point-blank range of love.

  36.Stationed around the walls in frames of varied beige, his life, the one he’s let her into. She shouldn’t be here – it’s a raid, an invasion – but stares at the minutiae in the pictures, their predictable sandy backdrops, their lineup of loved ones in shorts or first-ball frocks. Cricket pitches, school halls that glitter. Such an ordinary lovely cast to hurt. What stops her the most though: the small dome of plaster, a curved white plaque on a pink satin band. Five toe-buds in a curl above the sole shells. Dust in the creases of two ghost hands.

  37.The blonde must have been the one who liked piano. A long pale hair on the mahogany stool they knock. Pages of black staves and quavers she can’t read. Splashed aside with their cumbersome symphony. The thud of her arse as he jerks into her across the keys.

  38.You Deserve a Special Getaway! Make Dreams Come True! Terms and Conditions, Additional Restrictions and Blackout Dates May Apply.

  39.I want to know the smallest things: what your pillowcase smells like. Which way you curl when you sleep. How you breathe when you’re angry (I want to make you angry). Claw & climb you. Kneel & never let you out my mouth. Never let you out, your hands locked under my dress, your head in my fists as you lick me to heaven. Dig through your shadows to the places you don’t want to live. Sleep beside you, along you, too hard-fucked to dream, too tender to believe it could end. Keep talking. Roll you in dumb jokes & lullaby. Pash up like kids. Shield you. Map out your vertebrae. Find my
way home in your voice. Send send send.

  40.At night, with her husband, she watches intrigues where people in threatening suits say give me the flash drive and no one ever surrenders, so the chase goes on, across ancient bridges that detonate, and glass towers that groan and collapse, to the highrise chic of industrial apartments where light glints gently off guns and exotic models’ lipstick. People in silver couture who are gaunt and vigilant hold dinner parties trading piquant quips and the cordon bleu is laced with poison and nothing is ever terminal. Accidental heroes get enlisted, and things crash apart, hearts, aisles, sidewalks, cars, in eurekas of flame. There are venomous close-ups and slow-mos of CGI injury. And the truth comes out, it always does, the case is hacked, the espionage is foiled. And she thinks of a range of sad outcomes, where probably nothing will be set alight, no gunpowder laid or bounty offered, no car bombs or kamikazes or killshots, no microdoses of toxin stirred into unsuspecting polystyrene cups. But everything will just . . . be over, all the same. She sits by her husband and thinks of it: her world, pulled quietly sky-high, just floating apart.

  41.She’s surprised on the day though, when he makes a quarry of her wardrobe. She hears the noise of footfalls, and yes, it sounds focused, but not stressed. Then light through a window starts tapering. Her husband is outside, in kerosene vigil, the can dumped on the grass, gutted. She gets as close as she dares, but there’s a radius around him, and she knows what’s in it: knowledge. It’s a low-intensity flame at first, a modest kind of melting. The colours twitch nervously, embossed. Then faceted bits of fabric rise, tongues, flagging necks. An effigy of her. He’s got something from the shed he’s using as an oar, netting more clothes, feeding the fire their thrash. The heat must be blistering, but he’s staying in it, dipping, patient, funerary. The house behind her is slowly made of boys’ heads, looking out, at the scent.

  42.In the photo with his daughters on the wharf, the catch is strung behind them, a glisten chained up to a frame. Another man poses by it, triumphant. There’s a smear that might signal a fin, still twitching. She cannot see its head, but she feels its unhooked mouth, its rubbery hang in the sunlight. She cannot see the eye, but she feels it behind his daughter’s head, neat and vacant and wet as an exit wound. She thinks of how they won’t be able to breathe when he tells them. She thinks of how her father once took her down the back steps of her house and told her. Then threw her back.