Tracey Slaughter

point of view

(for L.B)

I’m giving my character a drinking habit. Or drugs. I haven’t decided yet. Part of me thinks her apartment won’t be real unless there’s the sound of bottles – the cold at her back door, its late-night mesh-screen squeal (I don’t know, I could maybe cut this?) might need the bottles’ secretive clink, her spine feeling the teeth of her zip as she works to huddle those bottles down in the bin, under the layers of other tenants’ rubbish, plastics, a nest pulled from hairbrush quills (ash blonde), frills of rare steak and citrus. Paper showing amounts owed and personal stains. That scene’s not real without the bottles.

But maybe she (Gabriella?) brews tea. Maybe she looks up on the internet, how to boil leaf, only leaf, so it’s not so illegal, or doesn’t feel it anyway, feels culinary, herbal, strictly medicinal, kind of wise-woman to be standing in her galley, in her dressing gown of scarlet fleece, with its fat waist sash, the pale sag of her belly bisected by its decent felty knot, stewing up a broth, a brown-green decoction (check colour details) that looks wholesomely slimy and seemly. She’s an older woman, fifty or so, slipper-wearing, with grey-roots, leeched of oestrogen – it’s not an addiction (she tells herself, prodding the seepage with a silver spoon, one of a fancy set inherited from her mother – might the mother be useful later?), she just needs a nightcap to sleep. No one knows the madness that sets in if you don’t sleep. And don’t sleep. And don’t sleep. And don’t sleep. And Gabriella has been laid straight on the sheets for weeks, her eyes jammed tight on the frontal lobe of her brain that buzzes with hot black lonely weight.

But it’s hard to give up the sound of the bottles. I’m thinking it might prove too hard. Because: Gabriella could remember a day where she once took a trip on a miniature train, and it ground through toitoi and sunlight and tunnels and often when it jerked out the dark there would be a bright bank built of bottles, blue and green, or clear and amber, a spangling slope of domed glass light, and the light on it, trapped and flickering and swollen, made the DTs look beautiful. It felt like being in a cathedral. Except it was a cathedral glued into clay with glass leftover from her own emptiness.

Don’t worry. I’m giving her a reason for her drinking. Or her weed. It’s not what you’re thinking. She’s the strong one.

I wanted to write about being the strong one because I’m not. That’s where Gabriella came in.

As you were leaving, you paused at the slider and said, ‘Don’t you have anything else to say for yourself?’ Behind you the trees were stickering the window with crunched gold leaves. I didn’t. You left. And that’s when I felt Gabriella, on the back of my neck, answering.

Answering.

I’m thinking the ashblonde hair in the bin could be tugged from the brush of a beautiful sunbathing neighbour, one who spreads out the tropical tones of a towel meant for oceans, or no, a padded li-lo which is seethrough metallic with vertical seams and blown up through a squeezy clear nipple. Gabriella could remember how, towards the end, she used to wheel her husband out onto the balcony to let him ogle because it no longer mattered. The roof where the neighbour stretches out should be black (that fibro topping, what’s that called, that gritty seal?), and spiked with aerials like post-modern Christmas trees, and the neighbour should slowly tweak parts of her bikini, just straps off at first, then nudge down pants, and glisten. Once they would have fought if she’d found him, staring. She would have stomped and batted closed the blinds, so the fight would have had the sound of blinds clattering out light, the corny tap of them swinging and plinking. The neighbour could have been seen facedown (slow pan into an ashblonde closeup) with a laugh puffed knowingly onto the back of her hands that smelt of coconut oil and engagement ring – but that would depend on point of view.

You’re the strong one. I want Gabriella to have your strength. I want her to lift her husband in and out of the chair (in memory, because in the now of her story, in the bottles glancing light round her apartment, her husband is gone, and the bottles make the echo gone, gone – or maybe that’s too much), and be able to take the stale feel of his skin, the clamminess of his deadweight. The spindly hair between his nipples. The blueness of his elbows. The given-up smudge of his bellybutton. I want her to hate and love his torso as she washes it. A slow awkward swab. With a limegreen flannel she dabs into a tin bowl of tepid water laced with antiseptic, a chemical splotch she tips in, 5 mls, and stares at it, frilling out into the fluid, holding solid in a small pale clot at first, like a foetus, then tremoring out, dissolving into ripples. He’s hard to roll. He’s hard to clean. He’s hard to talk to. It’s a bowl from a set of nesting bowls that she once used to mix him a pancake breakfast, after he’d first stayed the night, and she sees herself humming half-dressed in the after-sex kitchen, barefoot and skittish with getting loved-up, whisking the batter with whimsical flicks, checking the notches on the edge of the small tin dish to dust in the perfect ingredients, all the time thinking of his body, asprawl in her bed, that she would feed, teasing him with the spoon (oh, that smutty syrup all over mother’s silver), snatching kisses through his carefree chomps, then tote the tray off to the kitchen, tiptoe back and straddle. I want her to spend a long time pushing the lime green flannel into the solution. Watching it billow. Wringing it. I want her to spend hours refusing to sob.

You’ll say the wheelchair is too much. But he needs to really be broken, the husband. He can’t just be in pain for nothing. Like me.

There’s no ‘I’ in pain. It looks like there is. But that’s a trick. You can’t use it. There’s no narrator. You can’t say ‘I’m in pain.’ It doesn’t work. It all comes out sounding like teenage self-pity. ‘You’re talking like a teenage girl,’ you said to me last night, when I said I was done with it, the pain had finally won, I wanted out. And all I could think of was to drink my way out, drink myself gone. You were right. You see? First-person pain always sounds like such a teenage girl.

That’s why I need Gabriella. I need her to be the strong one, fifty-something. But also, she can drink.

Or maybe she gets the weed from a student. Maybe she teaches writing, like you, and one of her students slips her the weed, or not even slips it, because it’s not like it’s a big deal to them. They laugh at her, camouflaging it, ramming its baggie down in a used envelope black-block-lettered INTERNAL MAIL, and zipping and flipping compartments in her satchel so it’s stashed with an old bike padlock and half-squashed tampons. I can see this student – she’s an acid waif, ultra thin, with a blasé swathe of hair she trims herself, in chic deconstructionist chops. She’s got more talent in her little finger than Gabrielle could ever muster – she writes loud mean beautiful poems with timebomb images and shitty doubletakes on manifestos, and every stanza ends in a luminous bored-with-her-own-entitlement sneer. She’s a genius. And Gabrielle’s embarrassed to have to pretend to be teaching her – in workshops she doesn’t mutter the astonishment that is the real reaction that detonates her sternum when she reads the latest of this girl’s poems. She feels it would be too harsh on the other students, who work very hard on their pedestrian imagery, who strain to tidy their quotidian stanzas, pushing round flecks of punctuation and nodding at Gabriella earnestly, yep, cut out adverbs, check. She’s so jealous of the lines she can’t breathe – they float on the page in offhand sophistication, their self-reflexive floweriness glinting with bite, and once, on her bus home, while the driver brakes at lights, she sees the student reflected in a bar, and her tiny expostulating pose at the table with a beer bottle ticking in just two fingers is as bulletproof as her poems, as slender and high IQ and impossible to wound. A bitter girl that’s come from a very good home. But she doesn’t smirk at Gabrielle. She calls her Gabe like she respects her, when she could have just coined the easy jibe of Gab. Lobbed across the classroom, yo Gab. She acts fond of her. She slips her a little sleeve of weed to fend off her sleeplessness.

Motor-neuron. Motor-neuron. That’s the machinery she listens to at night. (Gabriella, of course. Who’s going to make that mistake?). The neon dashboard of his breathing. Gabriella blinking along to the cardiac twitch. The trail of meds shunting. Catheters on snaky release. That’s when she starts the drinking. She starts one night, sitting out on the balcony, sitting in the sixth month unable to sleep, motor-neuron, motor-neuron, with the sky a polluted powder-blue, and the gritty seal on the rooftops ticking, and a faint fine-boned shrill lifting up off the aerials, crookedly, in the built-up apartment-block breeze, or coming from her, from the spot where her spine meets her mind and the bad join keeps beating and beating. Everything juts to that point. Everything juts there, gets stuck, keeps beating. She drinks to blackout that. But first, she stands on the balcony and takes off her robe, unbuttons her nightie at its thick homely yoke, then does a clumsy hop out her underpants, that are serviceable but still silky, cupping her abdomen like a deep satin bucket. Elasticated, but sloppy. She thinks of the long blonde hair with its coating of tan lotion, oily and desired in the light. Of the pert gloss of caramel thighs untied from their tiny flicker of lycra. Her sorrow such a joke. The lime green cloth she weaves around her husband’s anus. The muslin she trades to smooth along his eyelid (silver bowl inside a bowl). The pinprick sheen where his lashes are fastened to the rim. She used to lie awake to watch them tremoring, the sheets kicked dreamy in the aftermath of sweat, one pillowcase wisped with come. Her sorrow such a bottle-worthy joke.

I’m getting that wrong. I know. The timeline’s off. I’ll go back and fix it later.

There are other bits which might not fit in. Like: I see the student picking up a photo of Gabriella’s husband from the desk in her office, and holding it like she held that beer at the bar, a cynical dangle, and it would matter here, if the husband is gone or not yet, you would think, but maybe it doesn’t, maybe Gabriella can watch the girl with the photo fluttering in her brilliant pinch, and can listen to her say something clipped and jaunty, some cutting send-up of married love, while her sardonic fingertips work the frame in that dangle (you’d tell me, in the margin, if you graded this piece, time to find another word) that looks tantalizing, and does it have to matter if the man in the frame is here or gone, because isn’t the whole thing one long blur of dying and even the strong one can’t get out the end of that corridor of dying unscathed, and no one could blame them, even the strong one, for catching a breath as the brilliant girl – because she experiments with people as easy as she does with words – leans closer so the silvery critique of her earrings snarls in Gabriella’s hair, and the devastating wit of her lipstick comes down, tangy and elegant and fresh and slick, and practised, so practised, and ending with a chichi little nip. It’s like eating a line from one of her poems. Urbane, tart cherry and unapologetic. Who could ever blame Gabriella? So the husband in the (photo in the) girl’s grip is dead and alive, for now. Just another thing to fix.

I’ll get there.

I’ll drink there. There’s nothing like drink to smudge images.

The pearly click of chickenbones, winging in slithers down the bin. Papers measled with gravy, A-neg. Clear ribbed plastics, popping as the bottles drop. (The ampules she snaps out their grid and squeezes into his mask, his drip.) Gone. Gone. The ventricles of liquid ribboning away from that slow motion tin-bowl heart.

She’s still the strong one. The strong need something.

The strong need some nights, out on the balcony, wasted into off-key song, like the full moon was just laid as bait for solo tunes, sloshed show croons of half-cut self-pity. Don’t write a letter when you want to leave. She gets blasted and performs them with alleycat steps, I know the way we should spend that day. Gabriella’s neighbours give her leeway, as she bangs around the planters on her juliet balcony, as she cabarets the scrolled metal chairs and pulls medleys in between slutty nuzzles of vodka. She slugs deep. Her soprano is not strong. And also on the balcony I think she has a canary, a small freckled pet in a scuffle of feathers which doesn’t even peck at its bell, or bother to set its mirror spinning, just sits there in its cage of shit-sequins, but is otherwise no company, zero help, which doesn’t learn to talk when she squashes her face to the bars to interrogate who’s-a-pretty-girl-then-who, just pings blankly around its newsprint base in tiny bickerings of seed. And sometimes she thumbs at the hinge, and fumbles in, and watches her giant fingers cup it, so the swivel of its pastel skull is delicate with panic in her too-hard hands, and the pad of her palm is tapped with a threnody of heartrate that is sickening. Just sickening. She would like to crush things. This could be one. This could be one. Surely they deserve to, the strong? She feels entitled to want to stop something. To feel it end. Because it has to end, doesn’t it, sometime? Even for the strong. The neighbours will let her serenade for long boozed hours, tugging their curtains on her breeze-blown love songs. She licks, mic’d up, in heat, some nights, along the lonely neck of the bottle. So beloved. Three sheets gone.

I didn’t know what I’d done last night. When you got up this morning you asked, do you remember what you said? I looked at you, because now you’re the only place left to look. Do you remember I had to carry you to bed? Are you trying to finish yourself off? Yes, I said. I know that. I said yes. And watched you leave for work. The trees behind you were gluing leaves all over the glass in fine-veined gusts. You walked out their wet crackling. You had a job to do.

Pain is not a job.

I don’t know how you teach writing. I could never finish. I remember that about your class – that I’d start each exercise you set with a rush. You’d say freewrite, and my pen would slip away across the page, tripping over its own images. The whole time I’d blink at you through dizzy agitations of ink. All I really wanted was to get to your body. Words that would get me inside your clothes. That’s what I needed, not sentences, but a way to get through seams, into clefts, to get clambering and handling – when you dictated active verbs that’s all I heard. How to write my way to you. Which was all right in poems. Not prose. There was no ending. Until I stood on a balcony with you, on a night when my tied hair was pinned with summer insects, and through our chatter you kept shooing off their dustmotes of glitz, and you moved your hand to smudge one off my temple, but you didn’t know how deep I itched, and I leant up and bit you, and I had to teeter, so I tripped out my sandal with my stoned right foot, and you bent down and caught it by the straps, and let its leathery spangle just hang there, waiting in your fist, while you watched me recover and climb back up the buttons of your shirt, onetwo, and sip, and sip.

There is a hill, where the train drones out the holes they’ve burrowed through the ranges, and it’s built of bottles and the light makes you thirsty for all the love you never got to swallow, all the beauty brushed by blue fern and birdsong and cirrus you almost got to taste. But now there’s only pain and booze and only one of them you can drink to the bottom.

Which means nothing to the girl. As she flaps round the photo in the office, of the husband (who’s dead or alive), and who tells Gabriella she’s banning that stale old exercise, write from a family photo concentrating on concrete detail, she’s outlawing it, it’s had its dull old day, so it doesn’t matter whether the man in the photo is stripped to the waist, and shot on black sand, with the dappled wax on a longboard and the chapped rim of his lips a thin zinc echo of the coastline, or if he’s taken throwing a child high in the air, so the baby is a creamy star of giggles, hanging in the safe void that lives above his hands, shocked into squeals at the launch (which he counts down, five, four, three, two, with the child already wriggling and shrilling), but trusting in the big wide grab of the palms, just waiting for the quick pluck back from sky into cuddles. Which means nothing to the girl – has Gabriella ever had a child? How could she have? She left it too late. (A clot in a silver bowl shimmers, disperses). It was too late, then there were only bottles. And on one too many, one night, she could slip to his room, and try to mount his hospital bed, half-clad, and at least press skin, push warmth through the tug of seams and wires, hold a dog pose which doesn’t wake him out of his deep glaze of meds, which they both forget. A brief facedown prayer into loneliness.

Which means even less.

I had too much to drink last night. Or I had nowhere near enough.

Some of your images are luminous, you used to write, but the narrative line is too unclear. Your transition to prose will mean less poetic texture, more stress on a linked sequence of events, portrayed with clarity and forward movement. Point of view needs thinking through too. I’d retrace the loops of your ballpoint with a fingernail. It only mattered that you’d touched my page. That something of you, eyelash, brainwave, had brushed past my paragraphs, if only to subtract marks.

There were once insects clipped into my hair, a small dazzle of mites that kept simmering our dusk, so we’d do laughing semaphore arms on the terrace, or wave off their bloodthirsty dives with our glass, or sudden claps when we thought they hovered still enough to ambush, and then you shooed one from my temple, a stray flick, as if you were tucking a flower in my hair, so gentle, I’d feel the stem travel my scalp like a silk scratch that caught on a synapse, because everything you did, every move, travelled in from the surface of me, and stuck so deep, and you caught it, its body a black smear on your palms, its thorax detached like a memory, its clear jointed wings just a twitch of light, blood-tinted, unpicked from living with one swift crush, so I had to drive up into a kiss and tipped out of my shoe, which you tied back on, stumbling, lacewing, later. To the pulse of my ankle. Like a promise.

Pain has no events. I’ve told you. There’s nothing left to write about. No narrative to move forward with. Last night you had to carry me to bed. When I’d drunk through the bottle that would black my body quiet. Which was not enough.

It’s enough for this story that Gabriella is the strong one. I think her husband is called Martin. Now Gabriella has to watch Martin die. But I’m not going to watch. He can’t even watch himself. I can give him a name, but not a real story. And never a point of view. You think there is an ‘I’ in Martin, you think there’s an ‘I’ in pain, in sick, in terminal. There’s not. There’s nowhere here to narrate from. I know the last scene now, but Martin and I, we can’t look on.

So I need Gabriella. I need her to get the call while she’s at work, while she’s in the office, with a light coat of gloss from the girl’s kiss still smudged along her smile, acerbic and distantly saccharine, the call that he’s bad, that he’s turned, the signs are not vital, so she’s shaken, and she dithers with her keys, she flounders and gulps in the door of the office and doesn’t know if she can balance on her heels, or not like a fifty-something sensible brown-shoed woman whose husband might be dying, who’s the strong one, who knows not to hope it will be quick, who knows that dying lasts for nights, who has already watched those nights stretch away from the balcony into a city of shadows and wires, a vast horizon which no one else is awake for except the person dying, who is doing all the hard work, the hard hard work of dying amongst tubes and silence and vials, so the girl does a swoop across the office to the rescue, self-conscious, and commandeers Gabriella’s keys (I’m not silly, Gabe, I know you’re still loaded from last night) and insists on driving her, though the route to the hospital (yes, it’s the hospital this time, that final place) is clogged with one-way roads, and the girl is comically shonky in a manual, racking the gearbox so they get there in a goofy chain of hops and stalls and waving out the rear screen at backed up traffic fuming and honking, which doesn’t faze the girl, who is still so chic she can giggle it off in one-liners and elegant scoffs, but who doesn’t do hospitals, she says when they get there, when she bunny-jumps the hatchback into a park, who frankly doesn’t do anything more ickily medical ever than a bandaid, so Gabriella has to go in alone, the strong one, through the sliding doors, where the leaves are plastered in a shimmering golden overlap. No, I have nothing else to say for myself, just watch Gabriella take the lift, although a place in her abdomen doesn’t, it trails behind for floors and dark floors, but she gets there, follows her sturdy tan shoes along the lino, checks along the numbered doors, with the relay of faces turning too slow from their steel beds to watch her passing, their blinks too weighted, their wrists too tired on the leash of their needles to lift hello, their lashes too colourblind, and the bottles on their lockers always topped with nothing strong enough, nothing to the clear plastic brim, and it happens, what happens, the thing that has been her-life-his-death, the doing of it, the daily events which link her to his infinite going, so it doesn’t matter which stage it is at, this narrative, when she wanders from the bed, for an instant, just an instant, and there is the girl. Seen down through a fourth storey window. Across the carpark where there’s workmen repainting a church. And they’re stripping off the old paint, so it’s awash on the autumn like a series of ghosts. And the girl is laughing as they graze the old sacrosanct boards and the lead-based haze lifts off in filmy riffs, she’s laughing and ruffling her hair in its transparent grit, scurrying the pileup of leaves which punctuate its veil, and Gabriella can watch, as one of the workman halts in his sanding, and slides a grin sideways out his white mask, and walks over to the girl and scuffs around his overalls, a foursquare pat (two pockets down, two up top) for a lighter, and he and the girl withdraw a short distance, and there in the carpark, while headlights edge in and out of the allotted slots, she sees them sharing a joint, their heads together on the intake like it’s the easiest thing in the world, okay, a little shady, but still blasé in their instant smoky intimacy, like four storeys up there’s no need to worry where to tell a story from, you’ve said everything you need to say, you just lever the latch and hangover the edge and gaze at the afterlives of white paint drifting off the girl’s mouth and god’s walls.