Devil's Trumpet Read online

  Stage Three

  I gave her cancer in the end. It seemed like the best thing. I picked out a funeral, a finger down the column in the local: it was all too easy. One of those prefab chapels in the next town had overlapping services in three suites: I could just park under the lineup of trees and take my time choosing which one. I liked the shoes on a girl I followed to the green room, the front all glass on a bulldozed rise where they were going to pour a pond: they had stage-three posters in the foyer, with pink flowers planned in the water and buddied-up ducks. The coffin was nice and closed. Some third cousin staked out the arch you had to file through with dead-girl flyers. In her photo she was sipping a cocktail and didn’t know she was going to be compost. There was luck in the happy-hour lipstick and the umbrella was a yellow one, stretched on its toothpick half-life. You could just feel someone saying ‘Cheese’. But I shot so those programmes stayed off-camera: I picked up the chrome and the long necks on the flowers and the hiccups in the crowd. Front and centre there was a hunch of family in the green velvet seats. There was a nana with pantyhose the colour of peanut butter and cut-price flowers on a self-belted dress that still had a drizzle of breakfast down the bust. Her voice shook all over the hymns, which was a good clip. All the best friends blinked off their makeup while her voice wheeled up to God on an epileptic high: I got my close-up. It got a lot of hits. The jack on the shoes of the girl who’d led me in kept her teeth gritted, steep at the ankle to the point she had to stagger to sing. But a quarter-hour in she caught grief like a nosebleed: her head dropped forward and rocked and her lopsided bun got loose like honey. You wouldn’t have thought she’d be the one.

  Something about the green made it look like a cancer funeral. I took time transplanting it. Bits of the service were like jigsaw that I’d jammed in, but no one checked. People online believe in cancer. I’d posted as her aunty, after the opening blurb that she’d lost her fight, asking her friends to vote for which pic I should use on her funeral handout. But I already knew which one would get the thumbs-up. She had a face made for selfies, the kind you can’t shoot in a bad light – nothing but sun and goodness sticks. So there was a gallery of teeth ringed with ColorStay, swatches of hair tossed back from the crown and frosted tight, cheekbones curving like plasticine. She was brand Cancer. No one wanted aftershots. No one asked for close-ups of her scalped and cornered in Ward Six, the ties of her beige gown tagging the bolts of shadow in her downhill spine. But I had a back-catalogue of shots. I could zoom in on details: I did the chuck jug rinsed on the locker waiting for her next gutsy solo, I did the slouchy sack of gels pegged up to slither to the white X of tape that marked her line. I did the endless screw-tops with their apricot glow and their rattle of toxins. No one checked the meds. Grief did for the fineprint. At least, it did for a while. And I wrote her off fast. I got her in the body bag before anyone could ask for flight times. I got to the Silver Shores funeral home and tracked the sad crowd filling the green fibro suite before anyone could try clearing miles in a rental car to pay in-person tribute. I had it sussed. I remember standing in the foyer after the service and smirking with faux pain at the girl I’d followed in her smudged up-do and high-rise shoes. She was one of those women whose face isn’t there until it’s painted into place: her lids were half-cocked now in a run of mascara, and she was angling her cellphone screen to swab the mess. But it was beyond fixing. She sloped around a lipstick but I watched her mouth keep trembling under it. Mid-river the kohl blinked straight back off. I took a lot of her. I was impressed. Her eyes were under a solid inch of tears.

  The night I first posted as her, I remember a preacher being on television. Past his toupee there was a widescreen of blue planet doing 360s in space, and there were pillars that boxed it, budget-temple style like the green room I’d later let her die in. The subtitle said he was a doctor, but he was tinted orange and wore a polka-dot tie. Things like that cancel holy out. He was on about turning points and one of the pillars had gospel flashed up so you could store the numbers for later, blips of digital scripture you could take in the dark like painkillers. I flicked over and there was a show about hoarders, tiny old ladies moving in slow-mo shivers through trenches of plastic bags. There was one headcase in a floral frock, upwards of eighty with a dwarf for a kid and the dwarf got stranded on the reef of cans, microwaves and curtain frills until I couldn’t stand to watch her trying to scale the landfill with her subhuman limbs. They picked an old pan out the bank and tipped it on camera and a tongue of slime came out that felt like the image of the puke that was gluing my diaphragm. Everything inside me felt past its use-by. The garbage was neck-high. I put up her photo and that she moved around a lot and how she was a part-time temp. I joined her up where girls with other profiles like hers were tilting them at all angles, arms outstretched so the flirty cut of their jaws caught the light. I left cute captions, I hashtagged her into place. She liked peeling her boyfriend’s sunburn. She liked distressing retro tees. She liked friends that mixed her playlists not even for like a birthday or anything. I nailed her dumb candy chatter, I hijacked her cover-girl pics. OMG it was so easy. By the end of the first night I was already thinking about where her tumour should be.

  In the café close to the Silver Shores the sky went photonegative, a kind of dark you could not have predicted for the day: until then the funeral was backed by sun. I got the two of us – me and the grief girl – a table by the window with lime vinyl seats, and a dragnet of birds moved left with the weather behind them. In the small room her eyes were a liquid compass. A waitress scuffed over to dump a couple of offhand plates, but she didn’t want what I’d ordered. She played with the strap on her discount clutch and said things about the deadgirl that she couldn’t end: her throat kept glitching. Her talk was dotted lines. The scenery went so dark it stopped making sense. She stared at her shoes like she never chose their height, just woke up and found herself balancing on them. Grief made her look preloaded, but her breath smelt like the sandwich I told her she needed to chew to keep up her strength: after all she was the BFF – that meant duties, like a matron for death. Halfway to her mouth it mostly stopped for memory: losing somebody leaves a slideshow like that. You could see in her face how the images clicked. The deadgirl at New Year’s, the deadgirl wagging school, the deadgirl monkeying around after lights-out on camp – all the fun lucky stuff that should never have stopped. The deadgirl broadsiding in her boyfriend’s car. She felt so ripped off. Outside the place was crawling with clouds. She was talking to me shorthand, like the language of couples. But I knew it wouldn’t last. The café looked like a bunker, and she couldn’t see me through sobs. I wanted to dip my finger in the tear banked up in her right eye, test it for preservatives.

  The deadgirl had been a near-perfect fill-in – if they’d had the lid up I could have shot her headless. They’d probably disinfected her in the right clothes, got the satin lining to ring her in those stagy zig-zags. I could have taken her from the lapels down, hands stiff at peace around a shrinkwrapped rose, long-stem. But still there was traffic on the feed I set up. Like I said, they didn’t want the aftershots. They wanted her capped in her graduation pose between the silk trees, their beds of high-end pink stone. Her squealing in the dorm when the showerblock housed a prehistoric cockroach. Her on all fours playing peek-a-boo with her sister’s brat. But none of it seemed as real as the view from that café. I’d known I couldn’t make her stay. The sulky waitress had done another handover of ham-frilled white, but her eyes started drying. The lemon checks on the plastic tablecloth sprawled. The whole place felt pranked by the cat on the neon fridge that kept waving a motorised paw. I went to the bathroom like I could breathe there. But I could smell lotion going cool in her shadows and the plexi-petals fading out in the mini-tub of flowers. The toilet exit told me Open this Door Carefully. Someone May Be on the Other Side. But I knew when I did she’d be gone. I paid and left to the waitress’s blatant smile.

  Red light green light the expressway back from
Silver Shores was packed. I tailgated a dust-bowl van that someone had tagged the screen of: I once saw a woman whose T-shirt read GUESS so I said “ ”. You could see the pixels of fingertips, but no answer. It seemed like hours I blinked into the gap. When I pulled home I cut the funeral to bite-size frames, and added cute catchwords. I blurbed the aunt’s send-off. I looted every sweet crummy thing that gets chatted on death by people who are safe and clueless, did a remix. But I did think of her eyes marinated, the tangerine polish topping her long nails counting off the forks in the canteen, their failure to glint. And all of the photos that came out her mouth, like details that should have been taped to the coffin. I was happy with the goodbye playact by the time I hit the last key. The trashy grief came in, like after like. #RememberHerLikeSheWas. #ShesInABetterPlace. The thing is: so what. After the service, there’d been a blank book in the foyer, pen strung on with tassel, the word remembrance misspelled with crystal on the spine. You queue up, leave wishes, as if they count for shit. Not like I bothered with a close-up of that. The stage-three ducks went on travelling in pairs, on hazy slalom through promotional heaven. Everyone crossed the consolation sage of the carpet to squeeze each other’s goosebumped arms. Nana got anchored on a vinyl bench and cat-napped, making low-oxygen moans. Her head dropped back so you could see the ruts, blue with useless hymn in the chamber of her mouth. The fluoro lights gave a couple of flicks, which made everything look like it was loading for an instant. By the time I’d shut her page down and gone outside a heavyweight wind had come up. I could lie down to watch it crossfire through all the leaves that could never hope to hold on. I’m no fan of dreams, but I knew if my eyes closed that dwarf would still be in there, rustling her walls of handmade trash with taps of stunted love. Hell isn’t other people.

  the receiver

  By 9pm at his son’s eighteenth party, he’s lost in thoughts of his first girlfriend’s voice. He’s sitting over a glass of merlot – huh, sad joke in itself while the kids have got coolers of ice crammed with premix poisons, neon twist-tops that match the fizzy soundtrack of techno feeding back off his garage door – and he can actually feel the tremor of memory that comes with his first girlfriend talking, the breastbone thrum he used to get from lying on the floor of his bedroom listening to her down the phone. Checked out to everything but her tone, a station only he could tune to – those long afternoons he was all about her voice.

  That garage of teens getting messed-up in the background now wouldn’t know what he was on about – they’re all permanently on their phones, but never to talk. Why don’t you just call her, he’d said to the boy he spotted out on the driveway minutes before, tapping stress-signals into the face of his phone, trying to get hold of some girl who’d stood him up. The boy had shot him an uh-duh blink and gone on working the screen, his fingers top-speed, sodium-lit. But what would they know? He felt sorry for them, missing the teen bliss he’d once lived for – crashed on the carpet with the cord spiralled out to its max, receiver buzzing in the crook of his collarbone, mouths turning everything to lowdown murmurs of secret, heartrates hanging on each vocal hush. Staring up into the postered distance of his ceiling, he’d come out with daredevil things, bass blue mutters of horny sweetness he’d choke on if they were face to face, and he could read her breath, could feel that every cell in her still body listened, her skin all audience – how could these kids go without that? Those blurred kinky sentences of long-range lust, lying there helpless just at the clearing of a throat, at a phrase whose shaky static left him feeling x-rayed. These kids don’t know what they’re missing.

  But they’d all had hardware, tonight’s team of late-teens, when they walked in, him lined up by the door to get names and numbers, and notes off all the underage ones who needed parental permission to ruck a pop-top out that psychedelic ice. They held up their phones – they had direct lines back to Mum and Dad, and didn’t need him checking in or jacking up lifts. Yeah thanks, they laughed, heading past him, whatever, into the rigged-out garage where the playlist was pounding. He stayed in the kitchen – from time to time now he totes out snacks, the same plastic platters of deep fries and additives that kid parties always pack, just washed down with vodka these days, the guaranteed ratio of puke at the end no different. In the kitchen he tips himself sly thirds of drink, at first in disposable cups, their synthetic stubbing his lip as he takes guilty slugs – but then he gives up and lets the burble of ageing richness colour a proper glass. An old guy’s glass, full-bodied. The glass of a well-off thinking drunk.

  He doesn’t lean close enough to Mary to let her smell it when he takes her tray up. She looks at the bland balanced nutrients he’s pureed and dobbed on her plate, and asks about the party food. He goes through the menu again: the onion dip and cardboard pizza, the skin-tight pods of red meat, the blood-clot sauce squelched into its tubs. She gives as much of a laugh as she can, a rustle on her slope of pillows. Remember, she starts, remember . . . but no, he says no. He knows where her recall is leaning: once, their son’s parties were epic events, and she’d be frazzled in the icing-sugared kitchen, bashing butter mixture to lacquer, sporting an elasticated pirate hat, dizzy with pin-the-tail plans and stuffing goodie bags, crossing her eyes with low-oxygen swoons as her laughter spat off the end of renegade balloons, everything a singsong of jubilant panic, last-minute candles and jelly snakes and cellophane. He says, no, not now, no don’t. So she lifts her good hand, makes a slow manoeuvre for the spoon, as if she’ll obey and lap a mouthful. You’re right, she nods, a tilt that pulls her eyes closed, lids traced with vessels in her thin stubbled head, yes, let’s just get through. Of course. He tells her he’ll send him up later, their boy. Oh, she says. No, don’t bother him. It’s . . . enough.

  But it’s not enough. He goes and stands awhile on the landing, listens to the beat jar the shell of the garage. The songs – well, not songs, but tracks in the worst sense – seem to him mechanised as treadmills, sirens marking the wind-up of some chanted slogan meant to be a chorus. They grind into his brainstem. He hates their processed riffs, their synthy adrenaline. He doubles back to check with Mary that she can manage the din. She gives a no, it’s fine, leave them, really, blinks discoloured eyes. He heads back to the kitchen, a little more determined to get himself good and pissed.

  Which is working out well. But it turns out that boy’s up the drive again, this time out by the letterbox, holding his phone at the end of a skinny high arm, like he’s guiding it through a current. Trying to flag a signal, climbing on the rockwall, raking the phone on a wilder incline, getting aggro with the air. He looks out-of-it in that way that teen boys do, sullen and breakable. He can’t just leave the kid out there, lank and jumpy in the last of the light. So he scuffs up, tells him the service here’s shit on old makes. Still texting the same girl? No answer, but the boy looks bummed out. You could just call her? You know, the landline? Used to work for me. The kid’s scowl looks like it could turn to tears, and his fingers go hyper on the screen trying to counter it. She your girlfriend? Bail on you or something? Wouldn’t worry, mate. You know what they’re like. But he stops. It’s in the kid’s eyelashes, that giveaway tizz: he’s blinking like mad, so he doesn’t come unglued.

  For fuck’s sake – he’s not up to dealing with that. He’s hardly fit to keep someone else from the edge. So he shuffles there a couple of secs, watching the kid’s antsy taps on the cell, the screen all pins and needles. Then he turns back. Okay, look, the offer’s there, you know, if you can’t get through. And he leaves the kid, wanders back. He can see a thin remnant of Mary through the upstairs window. A dilute quiver of light on her eggshell skull.

  And there she is again – his first girlfriend. She’d lived in a cul-de-sac he’d cruise to, low-gear afternoons, lazy on his silver three-speed, so he’d have the sight of her, slipping to the letterbox, her flimsy dress shot to pieces with sun, and he’d pull up his ride, coasting through the last stretch on a solo pedal so he could swing a cool dismount, kick out its oily stand,
and then lean in to kiss. And kiss. And kiss. All this was in slow-mo afterschool dusk, before the adults materialised, before they took the streets back over, and sat you down at tables with lists of disappointment and chores. So the kiss could go on, could be wholesale with soft wet longing and dizzy with wishful heat, and he could part-lift her in his go-getter hands and even start some hijinks with her bra and she could push at the slogan on his t-shirt and huff pleas in his neck until they were both a write-off. And the memory reminds him now of spoke-sound, his old bike in the spin of cool-down, their makeout full of the ticking music of time crisscrossed in his steel-string wheels. And even after that, he’d still want to lie down half the night, after getting past homework and mum-jobs, and corkscrew his fingers in her voice, lounge in the lull of saying near-nothing down the phone, just so the pressure of her breath was in his ear, the purrs that were her wriggling her p-j’d ribcage, the semi-puffs that were her clearing the feathers of her fringe out of her drowsing eyes.

  But merlot should be good for memory. He doesn’t mind if he helps himself – why thank you sir. Suppose he should check in on the eighteenth crew again before he gets too sauced. He’s meant to be preventing any kids from getting dieselled – right now he gives zero shits. He interlopes, looking in from the garage door. He can’t be bothered topping up their plastic banquet. The girls all wear their hair the same, in topknots that are ratty bubbles – their tanks, shifting in their half-dance of mingling chat, flick him cut-outs of inappropriate skin. That poor kid outside should have gone for one of these – it’s a smorgasbord of open, easy-sussed girls, feet docked in sinister shoes, tinted to look tough, sure, but underneath it tender, needy even. Any one of these girls would take him. His son, for instance, is tied up with one blonde, a casual nuzzling going on. It makes him think of student parties back in the fall-down of derro villa flats, his own half-lit blunders with strange girls, into outbuildings where they’d stage long clinches, blurry and delinquent, hearing the floors beneath them splinter, their heavy breathing laced with southern cold and lead paint. Those brokedown houses seemed to license their boozed hookups, outbreaks of ramshackle kissing no one cared about, the welcoming suck of free-trade tongues. That’s what he’d really studied at uni, while his first girlfriend waited at home – he would have fucked it for good, their future, if she ever knew. But he was a wily little bastard by then, knew how to deflect and soothe her, knew what comfort to send deep-barrelled down the phone. He knew his voice worked her, settled her, so she’d mimic it back, forever babe, true.