Black Teeth (22 page)

I empty myself out of the car, stumble across the bitumen and feel again at the wound, how bad it is. The glove comes back bloodied and suddenly I'm a lunatic on the run and I survey the immediate area for dangers but there are none.

Up the steps to the door and I knock.

Hear nothing from inside. Maybe she can see me through the peephole, this ragged and desperate gentleman caller with a hand to his head to hide that he's bleeding. The door opens wide and I feel the gust of warmth go through me and she smiles at first but this hardens when she sees the blood.

She says, ‘Timothy?'

35

‘Rudy…' I say. That's all it requires.

Because Beth is how I met Rudy, I figure the least she can do is not turn me away.

‘Oh. God…'

‘I had nowhere else to go.'

‘Come in.'

I do come in.

‘It's not too bad. I'm sorry about this. I hope you don't mind…'

‘What happened?'

It probably should have occurred to me that she would ask this question. I stumble in a pointless circle, stalling as I think of what to say, a diver in the depths of my own bullshit, attempting to neutralise my buoyancy. To her it scans as helplessness.

‘Here…'

And she ushers me through a warmly lit space where the TV plays mute and colourful items on shelves can't be focused on, through a door and into her bathroom the size of a closet, with a smaller closet built into the wall where this girl presumably showers. She follows and turns on the light and there's hot breath on my neck, but it pulls away as I take off the gloves and drop them to the floor.

‘I went to his house,' I say, analysing the mirror. A black gash leers above my eye and my right cheek is swollen like a trackball. I don't remember getting hit there. Blood has dripped down my face, a precisely barbered sideburn.

‘I went to see Rudy. Said I knew his father in jail. In Severington. I said we'd been really good friends.'

It's not all that happened but it
is
what happened. And it takes saying it out loud for me to realise how numpty it is that I tried it.

She pulls at my jacket, helps get it off. ‘Gosh. Why?'

‘Rudy thinks this guy, my client, got his father sent to prison. That's why Rudy's got it in for him. He says his father was innocent. So I went and told him that Piers was guilty, had confessed to me. I thought, like, if I convinced him, like…fucking problem solved.'

A wet flannel appears in her hand. She dabs at my skull, clears the sideburns.

‘I think it's stopped bleeding. I'm going to put on some Dettol.' She opens a cabinet, having assumed the role of ER nurse without even a cautious pause.

The Dettol stings; I push through it.

‘We have to go to the hospital,' she says. ‘You need stitches or else it'll scar.'

I think about that. A scar to show Glen Tyan.

‘I just need to sleep.'

Beth smiles, strange, like I might be joking. Might be delirious with fever or infection or concussion or impending death.

‘Why don't you let me take you and you can decide when we get there?'

‘No, but if you think I should leave, that's fine. Really. You don't need some arsehole showing up out of the—'

‘I'm not kicking you out. You can sleep here if you want.'

That hot breath. I feel it on my lips.

She's like, ‘Your face is a shocker. I'm getting ice.'

And Beth slips out the bathroom door and I'm feeling sleepy. As in, I am about to get down on the tiles and sleep. One hand steadies me against the basin and I lean into my reflection that's more than real now because of the thunder in my blood. Can't feel any tenderness or ache, but they're probably in the post.

‘Take this.'

She's back with an icepack you use for chilling champagne. I take it but she has to tell me, ‘Put it on your face, toots.'

Her hand guides mine to my cheek and holds it there.

I'm like, ‘You told me Rudy couldn't hurt anybody. Those were
your
words.'

It's meant to sound playful but it comes out accusing.

‘Yeah,' she says. ‘He's touchy. About his parents.'

I don't know what this icepack is supposed to do. Why do people put ice on their face? I'm about to ask her when she says, ‘So what does this mean?'

‘What?'

‘I mean, what happens now? Is there anything I can do?' Holding the ice in place keeps her close. Her chest grazes my shoulder.

‘You've done a lot just now.'

‘This is nothing.'

‘It's more than nothing.'

‘Well…' She giggles with a nervous twinge. ‘It feels like nothing.'

What this feels like, I want to say, is the time I kissed Alicia Day, on the scaffolding outside the Computer Lab in O-Week. To be fair, it was the first time I'd kissed someone. To be really fair, she kissed me. And to be painfully fair, she was smashed on Jägermeister and hooked up with James Nibbit about five minutes later. But at that moment, when she held away her cigarette and snogged me in the open air, I had this exact same warmth in my stomach.

‘Umm,' I say.

‘Is it too cold?'

She presses harder against me, almost imperceptibly. Her breath gets hotter.

I say, ‘No.'

Not many women have stood this close to me and then opted to continue doing that. It might be a trick. Or I'm delusional. Or maybe she was drinking Jägermeister before I got here.

‘Why don't you come and lie down?'

She pushes five or six pillows off her bed and I flop on my back, eyes shut. By keeping them shut I might not have to
flirt
or
make a move
. But then there's the tickle of a single hair on my nose and I have to open my eyes and her face is there and it lowers onto mine.

Fuck, the smell of a mouth. The taste of a nose. A tongue, the tool
she uses to scoop out thoughts from my brain. My hands find the flesh of her back, that dolphin skin, while hers hook into my collar and lever her weight onto me and I
want
to feel like she's crushing me.

All through what happens on her bed, I'm shaking like it's the Quickening. She must think I'm woefully inexperienced. That, or crazy nervous. Of which I'm both. I almost tell her I love her, but I read somewhere online that you're not supposed to do that, so I just tell her she's beautiful, over and over…

‘What's this?'

I'd been drifting off, my skinny arm draped over her belly. The sheets are damp from sweat and I don't know how long it's been since we stopped what we were doing and lay back, breathless, sated, congealed in our betrayal of Rudy.

She taps at the webbing of my right hand.

I'm like, ‘That's…the same tattoo Rudy's got.'

‘It's smudged.'

My sweat has smudged my whole body.

‘I drew it on. To try and connect with him.'

‘I did the one he's got,' Beth said. ‘Did you know that?'

I look at her now. The first time I've looked at her without her glasses.

‘You did the black teeth on Rudy?'

‘It's not like I wanted to. It was the day after he found out about his dad. That he'd passed away. He begged me and I guess, like, I have a hard time saying no. We had to YouTube how to do it.'

Exhaustion seeps up from my feet and breaks across my brain.

‘Did Rudy tell you why he wanted it?'

‘Not really. Just that his father had it.'

Her body lists and the lamp beside the bed clicks off. Headlights play across the ceiling, a lame kaleidoscope, meshing then rolling apart. She strokes the spot on my hand.

‘You're lucky, Tim. You get to wipe yours off.'

If I were honest with her, I'd tell her how jealous I am of Rudy's tattoo. Of how he feels about it. But there's so much truth to be told, I'm not going to start there.

‘My name is Jason.'

It's too dark to see her reaction.

‘Jason what?'

‘Jason Ginaff.'

‘Why didn't you…I mean, why did you lie?'

‘I don't know. I'm more comfortable when I pretend to be someone else.'

‘Are you really an investigator?'

‘Yes,' I say. And, I mean, basically, I am.

Her response is silence; I assume it's a stunned one.

What should I tell her next? That the man Rudy plans to hurt is my dad? That the insurance policy is a fraud?

Instead of either of those, I sleep.

36

The coldest place on Earth. The flatness of it lets the wind whip you like a slave and I'm half-tempted to steal one of the football scarves that's tied to every third or fourth headstone and wrap it around my head like a hijab. Light drizzle across the tundra, the least rain you can have and still have rain. Tyan might call this off if it gets too heavy. He stomps as he walks, wearing more layers than he's previously been capable of, matching my raincoat and boots but his gloves aren't smeared with dried blood like mine. Also, he's not wearing gloves. One hand is dug deep into a pocket, the other blanches in the open air, throttles a bouquet of carnations. I'm surprised he brought them; in fact, I'm surprised to see fresh flowers laid across the park like glitter. Even in a Melbourne winter, people make the journey to the graves of loved ones. Surely not all of them have been emotionally blackmailed into it by their estranged son.

When we met at the cemetery gate Tyan seemed actually moved by the sight of my face, the black cut over one eyebrow and the blue cheek. His voice was shaky.

‘Are you okay?'

At first I was touched. Then I wondered if he was mentally comparing this beating to the one he'd administered.

‘Let's do this first,' I said, too cold to linger. ‘I'll tell you about it later.'

We walk apart, Tyan trailing because he doesn't know where to go. We wouldn't be likely to have a conversation in this gale if he was keeping up. From a distance we must present as wholly
separate mourning parties, briefly contiguous.

Things were painfully awkward at Beth's this morning. Neither of us was used to sharing a bed, we each lay awake forever before we made our wakefulness apparent to each other. I shied away from my face in the mirror, pulled on my clothes and told her I had a ‘family thing'. She suggested we meet later and maybe she was just preserving a fiction but I accepted gratefully.

Into the wind we make it past the cement tombs and the freshly dug plots and all the birdless perennials growing here because a stretch of dead trees would be just
too
appropriate, come upon her plaque:
Helen Ginaff 1958—2011
.
Loving Mother. Always.
I'm not sure what the
Always
is supposed to mean, except that I'll probably
Always
wish I'd written a better epitaph.

The earth is slightly sunken and the grass brighter than on other graves because it's been sown and watered more recently, but still how it scans is that fresh corpses make great fertiliser. My unconscious policy of never stepping on the grass is crashed through by Tyan when he plonks down a foot in the middle of the plot and lays his bouquet at the plaque.

Then, like it's nothing at all, he puts an arm around my shoulder.

‘Fifty-three,' he says. ‘Too young.'

‘She was fifty-two when she died.'

‘I remember her playing guitar. Did she keep that up?'

‘No.'

‘Finger-picking kind of guitar. It's got a name. She was great. Didn't know many songs.'

‘Did you play an instrument?'

‘Nah mate.'

‘What songs did she play?'

‘I can't remember.' There's a finality in how he says that.

‘I think she'd be glad we've met.'

This isn't really true. She never seemed keen for me to meet Glen Tyan, though she knew I wanted to. After she got sick it never

really came up. And then circumstances overtook us.

My comment has the predictable effect: a sigh, the arm comes off my shoulder, but Tyan's graveside manner isn't so crude as to deny paternity right here at this moment.

He's like, ‘She was a stunning bird, I suppose you know.'

‘Then why did you leave?'

I keep watching the plaque like it's the one that has the answer.

‘It was hard back then. Being a cop and having a girlfriend.'

I listen. Wait for him to get it all out. How the trauma of the job was too much to bring home to a family. How time consuming it was to stay ahead of the criminals and their wicked schemes. How a cop's pay was too measly for him to even throw her a few dollars when he walked out.

But he doesn't keep going. He's
finished
. That was his explanation and his apology and his restoration. A few clipped words in the rain.