The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales Page 3

  Lauren throws her half-finished Nescafé and Marlboro under the caravan, grabs the overnight bag, circles her fingers around Hope’s wrist.

  Walking through the hospital’s main entrance, with Hope’s grip squeezing tight her hand, Lauren sees Saint Felicity cradling the bones of her seven murdered sons, Saint Margaret of Antioch being swallowed by a dragon, Saint Mary of Oignies cutting off chunks of her own flesh. Then a gasp as a contraction hits and the world shrinks to the size of Hope’s body. The inside, even smaller than the outside. This is all there is.

  Twelve hours later, they meet their son. He is as red and scrubbed as a Valentine heart.

  He is a stranger, but his face is familiar to Lauren, like someone she used to know in childhood. They lie on the hospital bed, bodies curled into brackets, and discover that he fits perfectly into the space between them.

  Look at what we made, says Lauren. Look at what we made from what others didn’t need.

  While the rest of her family are asleep, Lauren drives away from the hospital, away from the sun.

  In the field, she hooks the caravan onto the tow-bar attached to the bumper. Even with the accelerator almost flat, the car shrieks but does not move. She gets out of the car and puts her shoulder to the caravan’s back end, shoving in rhythm to the throb of the cars over the bridge. With a disapproving sound, the caravan’s wheels tip forwards out of the dirt. She gets back in the car, presses her foot down, and prays.

  Three turns later, Lauren stops in front of the house and pulls a ring of keys from the glove compartment. Inside, the house smells of paint and dust. Unfamiliar.

  She scoops up the piles of Hope’s belongings from under the letterbox and puts them around the house in their proper places. Goes back outside. Unhooks the caravan in the street in front of their house. Gets back in the car. Turns the key. Drives into the sun.

  The Last 3,600 Seconds

  When the dog starts barking, we know it’s beginning. Or rather, ending.

  We grab handfuls of bottles and climb up onto the roof of the house. She stumbles and her foot slips into the gutter sopped with dead leaves. I grab her wrists and pull her clear – sure, she’s not the person I’d choose to do this with, but she’s my only option so I might as well be nice. Plus I don’t want her to drop the vodka.

  I can hear the world beginning to shift. Sirens frenzy, streets protest, every animal in the city is whining or screeching or crying. We settle on the roof, backs to the chimney, and secure the bottles between our knees. She’s already started on the rum before I manage to arrange my feet on the loosening tiles. I shift closer, our legs pressed, and she drops the rum and stares at me with a look that says already? I shake my head – not yet – and move away so there’s an inch of air between us.

  I can feel everything getting closer, the past catching up. All the cunts and cocks and clits I’ve ever touched. That guy I sucked off behind the all-night garage; the girl I slowfucked in my sunny kitchen; those sisters I seesawed between for a fortnight, never sure which one I wanted to call my girlfriend, then ended up with neither. I left them all on the other side of the world, and now they’re creeping back to me.

  Above us, the sky is a hundred colours at once: sunset, sunrise, aurora borealis, clouds and clear blue. It is every sky that has ever existed. The colours are snagged with stars and planets and planes. I figured the planes would have stopped running, but I guess if it’s going to end then it might as well end in a metal tube in the sky.

  Because it is going to end, and everything I have is not enough. I need another soul, another set of guts to feel this. Maybe her body merging with mine will be the grace I need.

  In school they taught us about the Big Bang: the universe expanding out from a dense primordial heat. They didn’t tell us that eventually it was all going to contract back again. For a month I’d been planning to tell her that I needed more space, some time to myself. Then they announced that the world was crashing in on our heads, and now all I want is to get inside her.

  She’s always taken up too much space: big tits, big mouth, always so loud and hot and restless. Wherever I wanted to be, she’d already be there. Brushing our teeth at night, she’d always have her head over the sink when I wanted to spit. She always used the last tea bag and ate the last biscuit and drained the hot-water tank, and it always made me –

  It’s coming, it’s soon, I know it, there’s no time left. The dog is chewing his feet and the planes are so close I can see the logos on their tails. Tiny fires have broken out all along the horizon, brighter than the approaching stars. Her leg is touching mine, our knee joints pressing hard, and I throw down the whisky and start sucking on the vodka –

  That tendency of hers made the fucking so good, she was everywhere, all over me at once, and I loved that feeling of her breasts pressed up against my face and her wetness on the sheets and her hands holding me down. I wanted all of her then, and soon I’ll be –

  Now the world is so loud that I can’t hear anything, everything is colours and sound and sky and planes and the burn of alcohol and her body – her body on mine, in mine, skin and bone and sinew merging, and this is it, it’s now. We are.

  The Broken West

  Daniel first kisses his brother in a town where no one knows them, a no-account place that’s barely even a town, just some buildings clustered around the highway: a smoky bar, an empty motel, a convenience store that only sells candy and condoms and beer. The nearest gas station is twenty miles away. The nearest bus station is fifty.

  The trail had gone cold somewhere around Louisville, but now their father’s journal is back on track. They know for sure he was in this town, and only a year before he died. They can’t be sure whether he’s wanted here, but it’s possible. Thirty miles up the road there’s a bank and a school, and Dad could rarely pass those institutions without some inklings of a crime. If their father was here then, maybe their brother is here now.

  Daniel can taste the place on the back of his tongue: beer and peanuts and stale sweat. Shreds of cheatgrass rustle in his boot-treads with every step. He’s spent a year checking the face of everyone he passes – does that guy have his eyes, Jack’s chin, Dad’s ears? The only thing he’s discovered is how similar everyone looks. He can’t even tell anymore which noses look like his, which foreheads, which hairlines. They’re all like his, and yet none are.

  Jack climbs onto a barstool, orders a beer and a shot of bourbon. The barman looks at Daniel – the same? – and before Daniel nods he compares the barman’s face to Jack’s.

  Five drinks later, Jack goes to the bathroom. As soon as the bathroom door shuts, Daniel orders three bourbons and necks them, one after the other, swallowing hard so he can’t cough them back up. Saliva fills his mouth, and he grips the bar until red train tracks appear on his palms.

  The bourbon stays down, and Daniel is still pretending not to notice the guy who followed Jack into the bathroom – scrawny, red-eyed, his leather jacket hanging off his shoulders like he’s only bones. Tonight is Jack’s turn at the Investigation, though he takes more turns than Daniel because he enjoys it more. Daniel always worries that it’ll get too far before he finds out, that the other man will already be inside him before he recognises the shape of his eyes or the angle of his nose. That doesn’t seem to bother Jack, and yet he still won’t kiss Daniel.

  Daniel had tried in Topeka to make Jack feel better after he’d puked up a bottle of whisky. He’d tried in Oklahoma City to distract Jack after he’d been slapped by every waitress in the diner. He’d tried in Little Rock to console Jack after their truck’s tyre blew again. Daniel had been shoved away, yelled at, puked on. For Jack, the lost brother is more valuable than the found. Daniel knows it, but it still feels like a sucker-punch.

  Daniel’s halfway through his next beer when Jack slides back into his barstool, his eyes glazed and his cheeks scraped raw. Daniel can’t tell if he’s been fight
ing or fucking, and it doesn’t really matter. Faces look different close up, and the only way to get that close to a stranger is to kiss them or choke them. It’s just someone else to cross off the list. Someone else they didn’t recognise.

  At midnight the bar closes, and Daniel steers Jack across the highway to the motel. The road is acned with yellow starthistle and the parking lot is empty except for their pickup, road-dusted and dipped in rust. The motel’s flickering floodlights pick out movement: shapes flashing white then grey. Daniel’s still squinting his smoke-reddened eyes, trying to combine the shapes into something he knows, when Jack shouts out a curse and launches himself away from Daniel and into the side of the pickup, except that between Jack and the pickup there’s that moving shape, and Daniel sees now that it’s a person.

  Jack’s shouting, pressing the person against the pickup, and he’s sliding down the door and trying to crawl under the truck, and Jack grabs his ankles and pulls him back out, skin on gravel. And Daniel sees his face and it’s just a kid, it’s a boy, scrambling and choking, trying to do anything, to be anywhere except here. The kid’s saying sorry sorry no please no.

  Jack is not listening. He is kicking, punching, screaming. Daniel is grabbing at limbs: Jack’s, the kid’s, trying to get Jack to stop, but Jack isn’t stopping, even when Daniel’s sure he knows it’s just a kid. Daniel gets in between Jack and the kid, Jack’s kicks tangling in his legs but he stays standing, and he holds Jack’s jaw with both hands and he kisses him.

  And the kid is crying behind them, gravel crunching as he tries to move away, but all Daniel knows is Jack, and it’s taking everything in him to hold Jack still and kiss him hard and not cry. Because this is it, it’s working, Jack’s kissing him back, even as his muscles are tight and his hands are twitching and Daniel can taste the anger in their mouths. This time, in this no-account barely-town, it’s happening just right. As right as it can be, at least.

  And Jack pushes him away, but the kid has already run across the empty highway, still crying but both legs working, pumping to get him away.

  And Daniel can see, even in the flicker of the floodlights, that the kid doesn’t look like either of them.

  The second time that Daniel kisses his brother is after Jack gets the shit kicked out of him for the third time in a week. Jack lies on his hard motel bed, boots dusting gravel on the blanket, and cries until he chokes. After an hour, he lets Daniel wipe off the blood and the dirt and the dried tears. After two hours, he lets Daniel hold him. After three, he sleeps.

  Daniel lies rigid on the single bed, not daring to move in case Jack wakes and pushes him away. His arm is numb under Jack’s shoulder and he desperately has to piss, but he does not move. He breathes slowly, filling his lungs with his brother’s smell: sweat and whisky and something metallic. He focuses on the paintings of faded green trees hanging crooked on the wall and the dripping sound coming from the bathroom. He can feel the heat of Jack’s skin on his cheek.

  Tonight’s fight had not been part of the Investigation. Someone had tried to steal their truck, and this time it wasn’t some punk kid. The guy had left the truck, but not before ramming his extremities into Jack’s belly.

  A beating was worth saving the truck. Without the truck, they’d never find their brother, and the Investigation would be a failure. All that fucking, all that blood, would be for nothing. Daniel knows it was worth it, but he’d still give anything to make Jack stop hurting.

  Daniel slides down on the bed, holding his breath until he’s dizzy, hardly daring to move in case he wakes Jack. Finally his face is level with Jack’s, though his feet are now hanging off the edge of the bed. Lying here, he’s reminded of how small Jack’s bones are.

  Daniel inches his body sideways, trying to press as much of it as possible against Jack. They meet at the shins, arms, lips, forehead, and suddenly it’s a kiss, sweet and soft. Daniel stays that way for a long time, his body tight against Jack’s.

  Three weeks later, two states over, another piece-of-shit town. The brothers have moved up in the world: this town has a gas station and a diner. Daniel, of course, wants to go to the diner; Jack, of course, stomps wordlessly to the bar. Daniel does not drive the pickup, Daniel does not get the bed by the window, and Daniel does not choose where they go. Daniel knows that this town must have a daytime, but they’ve been here for fourteen hours and the sky still looks dark. The stench of flowering goldenrod is caught at the back of Daniel’s throat.

  Their father’s journal is hard to follow; it seemed like he’d written a lot of it drunk, or in a moving car. Daniel and Jack don’t even know if he’s been through this town, but that doesn’t stop Daniel peering at each face as they walk through the bar.

  The air smells of farms: dirt and the flesh of animals. Jack points at the cheapest bottle and the barman empties it into two glasses. The faces in here are the same as the faces in every dirty bar in every shit town in the whole of this stinking country. The same and not the same.

  Daniel hasn’t even touched his drink, but he can feel the fumes burning up his nose. Jack’s glass is half empty, and he keeps his fist clenched around it between gulps, as if afraid someone will snatch it away before he is done. Daniel tries to watch Jack out of the corner of his eye, wishing he had hair to hide behind. Jack shaves both their heads monthly – he says it helps to see their bone structure and features, helps to memorise them. It makes their faces easier to compare.

  Jack seems intent on his drink, so Daniel slides an inch closer on his barstool. Jack drains his glass and slams it on the bar, the crack gunshot-loud over the droning jukebox. Daniel gets the message, slides two inches away on his stool.

  There has been no more kissing. Every morning, Jack undresses, showers, and redresses behind a locked bathroom door. If they could afford it, Daniel is sure that Jack would book separate rooms.

  Tonight it is Daniel’s turn at the Investigation. He raises his glass, fumes clouding in his throat, then lowers it. Standing by the pool table, in mud-spattered boots and a wrinkled T-shirt, is a man. He pulls his hair back from his face to take a shot, and Daniel sees Jack’s nose. The ball thumps into the pocket, and the man smiles: Daniel sees Dad’s dimple.

  Daniel finishes his drink in three burning gulps, swallowing hard to keep it from rising back up. He fixes his eyes on the man’s legs and walks towards him. He pulls a cigarette from the crumpled pack in his pocket, sticks it between his lips, and asks for a light.

  Five minutes later they’re in the alley behind the bar, the man’s face lit by the sickly yellow moon. Daniel pushes him against the wall, stumbling on ground littered with broken planks, smashed bottles, shreds of plastic. The man licks Daniel’s neck and Daniel pulls away, holding the man’s hair back off his face with both hands, looking for Jack’s nose. The man shows his teeth and undoes Daniel’s belt. Daniel stares at the man’s face under the dull half-moon, and he knows. He sees himself, his brother, his father.

  Daniel stumbles, gets his balance. The man has Daniel’s pants down on the uneven ground and Daniel doesn’t want it, can’t want it, but his body doesn’t listen; his body knows that the man smells like Jack, that the man has the shapes and angles of Jack, and his body knows that that is good enough. Daniel leans his head back against the wall and stares up at the moon and feels the spread of the man’s saliva across his skin.

  Daniel leaves the man on his knees in the alley and goes back into the bar, back to his brother. Jack looks up and raises his eyebrows – is it? – but Daniel just shakes his head. He takes Jack’s unsteady arm, slides him off the barstool, and leads him back to the motel.

  Bibliophagy

  #1. THE TIME HE HID THE WORDS IN THE FOOTWELL OF THE CAR

  He knows that his wife knows. She can smell the adverbs on his tongue in the mornings. But he cannot get through another evening in that house without consonants. His daughter sits in her wardrobe dappling the edge of a razor along her i
nner arm; the tissues stain the toilet bowl pink. His son blows up airports and builds towns full of women with beachball breasts and men with wings covered in black boils. His wife stutters home from work with arms full of carrier bags and frowns at the tiles he spent all day gluing to the walls of the vestibule: red and blue roses with thorns as big as dragons’ teeth. They are the wrong colour. He knows it. She keeps frowning. He says that he will go to the 24-hour hardware shop to get the right tiles and walks down the garden path swinging his keyring around his finger and whistling the theme tune from a TV programme and he drives his car around the block and parks under a sycamore which gently vomits leaves onto the roof and lies down on the back seat and reaches into the footwell and brings up handfuls of words and closes his eyes and swallows them.

  #2. THE TIME HE HID THE WORDS AT THE BACK OF THE FRIDGE

  In the vegetable drawer. Behind the onions. Far enough past their best that no one will pull them out for spag bol but not old enough to be binned. The words will be safe there, cushioned by the softening onions, silenced by their papery skins. He feigns deep breathing until the moon has settled above the skylight, then slips from under his wife’s arm. Standing pigeon-toed and bruise-kneed in the light from the fridge, his neck finally stops twitching. The words are waiting, cold as milk. When he reaches for the words he feels his heels already beginning to rise, already beginning to lift him higher, beginning to move him up up up. He turns away so that the moon is hidden behind next door’s chimney. He lifts the words. He shudders to think how smooth the vowels will feel along his oesophagus. He swallows.

  #3. THE TIME HE HID THE WORDS IN THE TOES OF HIS DRESS SHOES

  It is getting more difficult. His arms are in slings after he fell off the roof trying to talk to the disappearing moon. His children will not hold his gaze. Sometimes he gets up at dawn to go into the woods and take off all his clothes and wait to freeze, but he never makes it past the end of the road. When he gets home his hands shake too much to hold his morning coffee. He loves his children but they are not verbs. They are only pronouns and he is a fragment. He is surrounded by the dregs of words and no matter how many he swallows he cannot focus on the moon. He plants unsteady kisses on his family’s foreheads. He climbs the stairs and crawls into his wardrobe. He lifts his shoes and stares at the sickly tangle of consonants. This is the last, he says, and he swallows.