amphibi.us

Bill and Michelle arrive just as we stop arguing. There were still bits of the plate on the floor. One chunk was sticking up like a monster’s toe nail or something. I counted the others lying on the floor. There were seven shards in all. I look back over to her, hustling up the drinks tray.  I walk up behind her and tell her about the remnants of our battle. I call it the Seven Shard Screaming Fight. I put my arms around her. Even though I can’t see her face I know her mouth’s moving all the way up into that smile that’s all lips and hints of teeth that drives me crazy. Sometimes I wish I didn’t love her so much and most of the time I tell myself I’m crazy for thinking like that. The door goes again and I pull myself away, her little finger hooking on my cufflink, keeping me for a second but not quite stopping me. I go to the door.

Bill is wearing this really loud floral print shirt, all blooms and orange stems. He is holding aqua coloured bottles to his chest that seem to be growing from the material on his body. He is wearing shorts and the type of scuffed flip flops old people die in. His hair is short and scruffy and his eyes are already blurred from the contents of his top pocket.

Michelle is another case altogether. Knee length baby blue summer dress, neat white sandals, hair brushed back with a neat band. Sometimes I wish she would dress a little like Michelle, sometimes I say this to her and she tells me that’s just because I’m a little in love with Michelle. She rises up and touches my nose when she tells me this and makes me swear it’s a lie, though to be honest it’s probably a little like the truth. Michelle is like this dream in the back of my head that I know would be good for me to write down but can never get round to the details.

By the time the three of us have hugged and laughed and teased and the rest of it, we make our way into the now shard-less living room. Bill says ‘Hey Joss’ but doesn’t go any closer. I know for a fact that Bill’s in love with her from two things. One, was when the two of us were sitting on top of a burned out car a while back, passing a bottle of whiskey round, and he told me he was in love with her. The other time was when he made a pass at her on New Year’s Eve which she told me about later after they had left. Pretty concrete evidence I’d say. Sometimes I think that me and Joss, without saying it to each other, invite Bill round to torture him a little. So I can slip my hand around her waist a few inches from his eyes. So she can lean across him, or away from him, knowing his hands are close and will do nothing. I guess that makes us both a little messed up but when you’ve got nothing else going for you, it makes a strange sort of sense.

The four of us stand around in the little kitchenette for a little while catching up, comparing notes. Bill puts the bottles down in the centre of the table; Joss puts the snacks by the bottles and I pop the cork and pour the wine. The girls are talking about their patients, while me and Bill swap old war stories. Secretly I want to listen to the patient stories, and I think Bill does too, but we both try and focus on each other and bring out the old familiar names.

Me and Bill worked together for about a year in this hotel. We were paired together but didn’t really say a whole lot to each other for the longest time. Then I came in one day with my head all beat up on account of falling over stone drunk outside a club one night and Bill just opened up right there and then. Wanted to know the ins and outs, how many stitches (eight), how much blood was lost (one pint and a quarter), did I walk or was I driven (police car). I was sent home about an hour later, but once I was patched up, it was like we were old friends after that. He told me about how he had split his lip open, cracked his head, I told him some other stuff I had done. Before the end of the month we were stealing liquor from the bar, playing poker in the empty rooms and getting on like a house on fire. Eventually he walked out and I stayed, but we stayed in touch. To this day I’m not even sure Bill is really a friend, same as he thinks of me, or whether we were just an excuse to not drink alone at work, to play cards rather than stack chairs.

Anyway we drink the first bottle of wine and the bell goes and the food is close to being ready and the three of us shuffle off into the living room while Joss finishes off the whole deal. I scoop the bottles up, point to the chairs and pop the next bottle. Then I move back out into the kitchen to gather the plates, shake the potatoes off the tray.

“I remember when you messed up you face. Your cheek was swollen about half the size again, wasn’t it?” She talks to me while she checks the meat for blood, so it looks like she’s having a conversation with our main course. I hum in agreement and lay the plates out one, two, three, four. She turns and puts her arm round my neck.

“I’m sorry, baby, I know you don’t like me talking to you and looking away.” She affects a stilted upper class accent, “I’m terribly rude.” She kisses me on the bottom of my ear lobe, which she knows gets me crazy and then returns to the food. It’s not like I’m a freak or anything, but when you live with someone for a long time, certain things stick, you know? I know for a fact that drumming my pen when I’m reading the paper can send her ballistic, same with rolling beer bottles between my palms when I’m watching a game. It’s okay to have faults when you live with someone. Personally, I like them. It’s like you know you’re on safe ground when you can trip over in front of a girl and laugh about it instead of feeling like an ass.

“Yeah. I sure did. It was the strangest thing. For about a day and a half I kept looking in the mirror, not recognising myself, and I just started to imagine I was someone completely different. Different name, voice, everything. I started to drink my coffee different, ate different food.” This was when we were dating early on. Heavy kissing on the doorstep and blue balls walks home. I look up. She’s staring up from the dish like the beef just told her a secret about me.

“Did you want to be someone different?” She holds my eyes with hers so I feel like I’m trapped and badly in love at the same time.

“Back then, maybe…I was waiting for you to dump my ass and things weren’t going so great right then. I just… thought about it for a while. About stealing with this mask on. I thought about going door to door as a salesman just to see people’s expressions.” I stop. When I talk crazy like this she either walks away or starts laughing. I can see those teeth again, so I guess I’m on safe ground for a while. Joss is the only person I’ve ever known who I tell the truth to. She comes up to me, hooks her hand around my belt.

“I’m glad you tell me all this and don’t scare our guests. Come over her and tell me what a good job I’ve done with the feast.” She drags me by the belt, the sounds of Bill and Michelle’s heckling loud now and somehow far away and for a second I close my eyes and blank every single thing out apart from the touch of her fingers on my skin.

I carve the food, Joss pours the wine and Bill makes a toast. Michelle is crouched over by the CD player pulling cases from the racks, putting them back after reading the back covers. Outside a plane hurtles overhead, an ambulance races on the street outside.

“I wonder what poor son of a bitch is in the back of that one.” Bill always says something like this when he hears the sirens go by. When they argue and talk at the same time the way couples do, Michelle says Bill would like to have been an ambulance driver, to see all the disaster way up close, but not have to actually deal with the reality of it. Turns out Bill was also the wrong side of a drink drive conviction a little while back and cancelled himself out of that gig.

“You’d get bored of it, soon enough,” Michelle says, sipping her wine. She half swallows, half misses so a thin spike runs down her lip. She dabs her mouth, continues. “It’s just like anything else, once you get to see enough of something, it just doesn’t unsettle you anymore. Our mortician could go through a dozen dead bodies in an afternoon and not blink. He worked through a bus crash one day and still made it in the bar by seven.”

“That’s cold.” Bill says, sipping his own wine, quicker and without spilling a drop.

“It’s not cold, it’s just what he’s grown used to, sweetheart.” Michelle says ‘sweetheart,’ the way other people would say ‘eviction.’ I see what she means, but when I was delivering around the hospital, whenever I was given a mortician’s certificate package, my hands would go stone cold. Just to know there was someone’s life, their death, the times, weight, the colour of their eyes, would just drain the blood from my hand like I was holding ice or something.

“You’re right.” Bill says, even though there is still a jagged pull to what he says. I let my fingers fall underneath the table and Joss collects them up in hers. Sometimes when Bill and Michelle get like this I feel like we’ve been taken hostage. When they’re like this I say to Joss that we should have an ambulance alarm handy in the garden to send Bill off into the night and away from our door. Bill takes the baggie from his chest pocket and raises his eyebrow to us all. We send them into the other room with the bottles to argue in whispers while we collect the plates.

We go around collecting the plates, roll our eyes at the mounds of food Bill left on the table, smiling to each other like it’s all a secret. Sometimes when we’re doing stuff like this, I feel like we’re both in school or something, that our love is wrapped up in glances and half spoken words and a suit of armour that no one else can access. I know that’s stupid, I know other people are in love, more in love, but when she catches me with one of those half looks, I can’t explain it.

“So what would you do, given the chance, baby?” She looks up from the stack of plates, holds me for a second. “Bill wants to be a horror-watcher, how about you, given the chance?” She puts the plates down, pours the last of the bottle into two glasses, letting me know we’ve got a little space. She walks around to my side of the table, I pull out a chair for her, she pushes me onto it and then is on top of me, falling and laughing, both a little drunk. I think about this, sip my wine.

“That’s a good question, honey. I guess for a long time I liked the idea of working on the trains, the old school ones, you know, with the steam and the coal. I like the idea of going across all the wilderness or something.” I look down to my glass, until she lifts my chin with her finger and tells me it’s alright.

“I like the idea of being a park keeper, too. Keeping all the grounds tidy, maybe ordering the bulbs and seeds for the different seasons. Recognising faces, talking without having to say anything much.” I look over to her.

“I used to play paddle bat with my dad when I was a kid, with these old broken up rackets. I remember I always used to ask for the one with the blue taped handle with the chunk missing on the right hand edge.” Joss’ dad died when she was fourteen. She has his name tattooed on her upper arm. I didn’t ask about it for the longest time and when I finally did we both had tears in our eyes. “I remember the parkie used to let us play for hours when it was quiet. He’d just sit there, smoking, nodding over to us once in a while. I like the idea of park-keepers. I think you’d be good at it too. People talk to you. They trust you.”

She sits back and rests against me. When she talks about her dad she gets exhausted and likes to rest. So I don’t ask her about her jobs or anything like that; instead I just let her weight fall against mine until Michelle’s voice pulls us into the other room.

By the time we get in there, Bill and Michelle are already well over half way gone. They sit close to each other, swaying slowly, nearly bumping shoulders, nearly titling all the way forward and hitting the deck. We sit the other side of them, pour the wine, and take a few quick hits to get close to where they are now. In front of us is a pack of over-sized cards.

“They’re tarot cards.” Michelle says. Her voice is thin and full of echoes. It sounds like she’s trapped somewhere. “They’re my sister’s. We did a reading about a year ago.”

“Did any of it come true?” Joss says this and I am thinking it at the same time. I look over and we smile to each other, looking woozy, varnished in butter.

“It’s an ongoing thing. Some of it did yeah, but the other stuff I’m not so sure. I’ll start it off.”

As Michelle turns the cards over, Bill and Joss start to shout out topics, like sex and careers and kids. I remember me and a few friends doing an Ouija board a while ago. We did it the same day there was a pile up on the motorway close by. The bulletins disclosed some of the deceased. That night two of my friends spelt one of the names out to a girlfriend, explained the situation. She went pale and laughed, but she remembered it whenever I saw her afterward. Even if I saw her on the street she would mention the name like it was someone she knew.

The cards lay down against the wood. The way Michelle deals them, they smack like weak gunshots. Michelle goes first, and the cards read that she will become rich and have a boy. She holds Bill’s hands as we read out the results, but I notice their fingers tumble in and out of each other when we speak. Bill’s say little and as he waits he knocks his glass over, smashes it. I go and fetch a rag as they set in on Joss. I collect the rag; stop to take a glass of water as I listen to them talking. Michelle mentions financial problems, Bill speaks of flights. By the time I walk back into the room, Joss’ arm is outstretched and waiting for my hand. I carefully collect the glass up as Bill begins to talk.

Bill speaks about worries and doubt, Michelle about investments and food. I put the rag to one side and collect Joss up in my arms. Both our readings are negative and full of worries for the future. I look over to Bill and imagine the flowers on his shirt have started to wilt. I sip my wine and Joss fake sobs into my chest and tells us we’re both doomed. I tilt her head back up to mine and tell her we’re not doomed. That we’re going to be fine. I say this quietly and mean it, and her smile shifts from joking to re-assurance. I look back and see Bill and Michelle are both looking at us. Joss is nestled in my chest and is oblivious, but it looks as if they are both waiting to say something to me. Their faces are serious, the dark making them look sombre, the light making them look thin and gaunt. I open my mouth to say something when the doorbell rings and their taxi arrives.

Joss is close to sleeping so I put her onto the couch and slowly rise up. We make our way to the door, all back to hugs and smiles. We are talking quietly, our bodies simultaneously clumsy and loud.  Bill makes a joke about the cards and Michelle shushes him out of the door. As the two of them move outside they look like burnt spiders in the snow. The corridor is lit and burning and I wave goodbye once and then close the door firmly.

I reach down and pull my shoes and socks off, take off my shirt. When I turn round the room looks perfect. It is dark and only lit by the fire and Joss is in the corner of the room, as if she has just climbed out of the flames. I take the last bottle and walk over to her. When I sit down, I notice the soles of my feet are covered in white dust and chalky from the china bowl. I close my eyes for a moment and imagine it is snow and I have just come back from some expedition that has taken me months and left me worn and half defeated. Joss moves into my arms and asks about the others. I tell her and she comes round, looks around to see if they really are gone or not. I pour the last two glasses and hand her one over. I lean over and gather the bag with the china in and throw it into the fire. After a few seconds the flames crackle and sparks begin to climb out towards us. We sit back and watch them for a while, our breathing constant and in synch.

“I had a job for a couple of summers, working in an old people’s home. The summer after my dad died. I had to serve up the food, drinks, simple stuff really. I got to know a few of them and they were really friendly old people. So after a while I had to help one old lady around, Mrs. Childs, who was in a wheelchair. I’d have to take her to the shops, collect things for her. But she was the most fascinating old lady; been a dancer, married a soldier, kids, travelled the word, the whole set. So after a while she asked me to take her to this private garden she remembered from when she was growing up. I took her there and it was beautiful, over hanging displays, every flower you could think of. But the thing was Mrs. Childs’ eyes were going. She had to wear these huge glasses as it was to help her read. I think she wanted to see it one last time, you know?”

She stopped and took a sip of her drink. The crackling had died down, so now the fire was just a low hum. The smoke was starting to settle in my head a little now, so that now my focus was coming back; Each lock of Joss’ hair, her bangles, the stem of the wine glass. I listened for the traffic, the aeroplanes above, but there was nothing moving around us. Nothing at all.

“I went back the next summer. Some of the old people had moved on. I suppose some of them had died, but I didn’t think of it like that. Instead I hoped their children had come and collected them, had found them better places to stay. But Mrs. Childs was still there, though, and we got back to being thick as thieves all over again. She was all but blind by then, so I got to spend a lot more time looking after her. And it got to the end of the summer and I mentioned the garden and the day before we left we headed back down there.

“There was nothing. The whole thing had been torn down. There was just rubble and a really bad sketch of how it was going to look eighteen months from then. And we stopped at the gates and I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t bring myself to say a word. So we just waited there in silence for the longest time, God knows how long. And then Mrs. Childs just started to say how she thought the blossoms scent was stronger this season.  And she waited for a second…and I just went along with it. She knew I was lying and I knew she didn’t believe me but somehow, it just seemed to… fit. I started to push the chair and we began to talk and I described the bushes and the branches and the stems and the petals down to the finest details, and we walked for hours, and talked and talked until I ran out of breath and I could hardly talk anymore, until my throat ached from talking. And by the time we got back it was dark and I got a real ticking off and I said goodnight and that was the last time I saw her. I think if I had a chance to say something, to tell people a thing I did… I think that would be a good thing.”

There is a quiet then. We both sip the last of our drinks, put them onto the floor, in amongst the crushed glass and cheap china. We both look into the fire, watching the flames, thinking about the story. Then Joss whispers my name. I run my hand across her cheek and say her name. Sometimes it’s all we need.

© Chris Castle, 2010

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