Suspended In Dusk (24 page)

I turn to Starla, stare into those great big eyes, and scream, “Where the fuck is it? Give it to me, quick!”

She doesn’t hesitate. She reaches in between her breasts, and gravity does that weird, reverse concussion. She draws out the maguffin. Reality realigns. I snatch it from her and the universe wraps around me. I cock back my arm and time bends. I throw.

The maguffin sails towards the warping monster of messy death charging towards us, carrying the weight of reality with it. As it flies, the adrenal augment, borne by the tiny Higgs-Bosson drive, erupts from the beast’s chest in a spray of viscera.

I grab Starla. Together we leap for the safety of the bar.

They meet.

The world goes thick. Reality slows. Across the room, items rise from their surfaces. An ashtray hovers. A chair lifts from the ground. Behind the bar, the bottled liquids become floating bubbles of myriad hues.

They touch. Gravity meets
gravitas
.

The universe goes pop.

8

We scramble through the hole in the Kennedy Club’s wall and into the night. My left lung is on fire and I’m breathing hard in the smoke and dust. Miraculously, Kennedy’s sedan has remained intact, minus a couple windows. Starla helps me over the last of the rubble and up to the driver’s side door. But as we’re climbing in either side, she puts her hand on my leg and motions for silence.

A field mouse creeps from the ruins of Four Finger Kennedy’s club. Her head shoots left and right as she scans the smoke and shadows. The glasses are gone. Her eyes are wild but sharp. She clutches something tight to her breast with both hands as she climbs through the cavity in the blasted, brick wall and flees down the alley. Words tumble after her into the night.

“Do we follow her?” asks Starla beside me, “Do we go after it?”

I knock some loose nuggets of glass from the side window, clear a porthole through the soot on the windscreen, then pump the break a few times to check for irony. Satisfied, I light a cigarette.

“Let her keep it,” I say. I reach beneath the dashboard and set the engine humming as the story races away from us. “We don’t need it anymo

Hope Is Here

Karen Runge

THE SUNSHINE GROUP:

WE ARE HERE TO MAKE THE WORLD A CLEAN AND HAPPY PLACE!

The proclamation screams in bright blue, the background cream-yellow. The bottom of the sign is printed with a child’s drawing, or maybe a drawing done by an adult pretending to be a child, depicting round green hills and nose-less, orb-faced boys and girls, all standing in a line and holding hands.

Beneath the edict, above the drawing, it reads:

HOT FOOD

HOT SHOWERS

HOPE IS HERE!

The script is fresh, natural. It’s hard to tell if it was stencilled on or drawn by hand. I stare at the words, and then look again at the drawing of the children. In their stiff, finger-linked line, they look as though they are marching forward. Maybe this was the idea. When children sing or play games, they’re always standing or sitting in a circle. I remember that from the days when I used to go to the playground in the park, and watch them in their brightly-coloured groups, pushing each other down slides, sometimes screaming and laughing; sometimes crying, or being made to cry. I’d spend whole afternoons there, often mornings, too. Seated on that bench by the gate, comfortable beneath the shade of the tree, my sturdy old backpack leaned against my legs.

This was before one of those parents noticed me, and looked at me as though I were a shark in a swimming pool. I remember her. The dyed hair and the too-tight jeans, her face full of makeup papered over the creases that spread across her face. I remember the loose folds of her neck flushing red, the lipstick caught on her teeth, that forefinger raised with its painted fingernail, stabbing at the air, at me, until I mumbled my apologies and left, never to return. She looked at me as though I were a wolf. That witch. I was just a man with an empty day and nothing else to make me smile.

I wanted to scrape the makeup off her face with the rough edges of my bitten fingernails. Take some of the skin off, too.

But that would make the kids scream and cry.

There are no adults in this picture, either. This picture on the sign, with its children wearing scribble-smiles, caught in the colours of eternal sunshine. There are no adults, though the place this sign was made for is an adult place. A place for adults like me, who have lost children, forgotten children. Who are not allowed near children anymore.

Are they trying to tell us children are our salvation? That children are the ones reaching out to us, and not people with bank accounts and fundraising plans, and lists of volunteers?

If I were to go in, would it be little boys and girls laced up with aprons, standing in a row behind the service table, dishing out watery potatoes and plates of over-cooked pasta?

‘Budget food’, I think, is the term. Staples bought from wholesalers in bulk.

If I were to say this out loud to anyone who listened, they might look at me as though I shouldn’t know the difference. As though it’s ungrateful of me to even bring it up. This is how, even when people think they’re being kind, they’re being cruel. They forget that those like me have had our time among people with grocery lists and well-stocked kitchens all of their own. I used to be one of them, didn’t I? The only difference is that I’ve had to accustom my tastes to the contents of trashcans and discarded sandwich crusts. The only difference is that I know what
real
hunger is now, and how joyful the idea of having my own plate is. My own plate, filled, the contents of which would slide into my belly and ease the slow burn that nests there like a hungry demon, scrabbling at my insides with needle claws and teeth.

Staring at that sign from across the street, with its cheerful promise and its shiny glass doors, I avoid my reflection and try to move my feet. Beyond those doors stands a row of clean-cut faces, smiles spread to wide, white-toothed grins. Voices come in smooth, welcoming tones of condescension. Their eyes melt with pity, a thin film layered over the look of disgust they’re so desperate to hide. They sniff a lot, as though they have colds. They’ll try anything to cover their noses, for whatever brief moment, and make it look innocent.

This is the razorblade hidden in the apple. This is the paradox of help and harm.

* * *

It’s going to rain later. I smell it in the air, a faint electric damp. I see it too, the way the sky is slightly darkened at the edge of the horizon. A storm blue, bleeding into pale pastel shades. On the high street, women in sleeveless summer dresses click down the pavement in strappy high heels, swinging their arms as they step. Businessmen carry their jackets slung over their arms, their long sleeves rolled up, top buttons undone.

They are absolutely oblivious to the changes in the sky, the threat rolling in on them.

I sit on the bench outside the coffee shop, waiting for Mandy. When it’s busy in there she sometimes takes a little longer, but for now the weather is still warm and people don’t want to drink hot coffee. They want to go down to the beach and eat ice-cream; maybe candy apples, sweet and red. They want to knock off work early and head to one of the bars on the quay. Later, when it starts to rain, they’ll come crowding back along here.

Mandy comes out after she spots me through the window, her dark hair tied up off her neck, her apron smeared with chocolate sauce.

“Having a messy day, today!” she smiles, and hands me the small latte and jam pastry she probably pays for herself. I don’t know, I never asked. “This is the second apron I’m gonna have to change.”

“You’re still beautiful,” I tell her, cramming the pastry into my mouth and softening it with a swig of hot coffee. I do this to keep my eyes watering. I do this to keep from staring at her breasts, those soft mounds sheathed in fabric, her waist laced in tight.

She giggles, moves to hit my shoulder, then stops her hand mid-motion. She blushes, smirks, folds her arms. “I can’t stay,” she says.

“You’ll be busy later,” I tell her. “When the storm comes in.”

“Storm?” She squints her eyes and cranes her neck, looking up into the sky. “You sure?”

I nod, slurping coffee, already turning away. “See you around,” I say.

I do not thank her. I have never thanked her. I don’t go there for the coffee, you see.

* * *

Down under the bridge, Manxy is up on one of the rocks, mid-speech, mid crazy-eyed roll. “You gotta check it out, man!” he says. “They got piles of pasta—you know,
spaghetti
. Not dry noodles with a spoon of boiled tomatoes, I mean
spaghetti
. With pork and mushrooms. I asked them, ‘Where’s the garlic bread?’ and the guy there laughed, and he told me, he said, ‘Next time, friend!’ He said
next time
. He said ‘Tell your friends!’”

The dog that’s always at his feet sits gazing up at him in adoration. It’s a small thing, small enough to send flying if you were to give it a kick. It’s got patchy fur and a busted ear, but its eyes are always wet and soft, especially when it’s watching Manxy talk. It sees me coming, turns its head a little, and starts yapping.

I glare at it and saunter over to the water’s edge.

“Gee,” he calls me. Forgetting that my name used to be Gary. Forgetting that I hate any other name. “Hey, Gee! They got pretty girls there, too!”

What has Manxy been smoking? I wish he wouldn’t talk to me.

“Gee, you like the pretty girls! The girls there are all in short skirts and tit
-
busting shirts. And they lean over when they dish the food out. You wouldn’t believe it! You’d go wild!”

When I was new out here, I once made the mistake of telling Manxy how I got to be this way. There’s nothing wrong with swapping stories, we all need to do it sometimes, but I was dumb and didn’t know how to choose which people are the right ones to tell. Manxy isn’t the right person to tell anything to. He’s like the town crier of the underbelly. Every time I see him, he’ll say something like this, something to remind me. Something to make me want to gut him and his dog both.

“Fuck off, Manxy.”

“No serious, Gee. You gotta go. It’s called Hope is Here, and it’s run by this new group, a charity or something. They call themselves The Sunshine Group. Their place is all brand new, up on Wyle Street. Big shiny windows. The showers are all new, too. Fresh built. The place smells like paint and plaster. And they’re not like those big communal ones either. Each one has its own stall. A
stall
!”

“I’ll shower in the rain,” I tell him. Then, remembering my manners, I add, “Thank you.”

“That’s why you smell so goddamn bad,” he says. “Like shit smeared on rotten eggs. You wanna be like this the rest of your life? You’ve gotta take what’s offered. Everyone else does!”

Shit smeared on rotten eggs. Fantastic. I remember Mandy and her hand getting stuck mid-air. The chocolate sauce drying over her left breast. The way she smiles at me and then steps back. No razorblades in that apple.

Still, it hurts. The rain’s coming.

“What’s the catch, Manxy?” I ask him. “Do they stick you with needles, give you lectures about drugs?”

“No,” Manxy shakes his head. “Just get you to answer a few questions. They’re doing data collecting, something like that. Standard practice, man. Standard. They’re devoted to getting us all off the streets.”

I wouldn’t know what’s standard or not. The closest I’ve ever been to a soup kitchen or shelter was the Christmas drive, when the Church van came to us, came right down here to the bridge with boxes of food and piles of clothes. Teenage girls with pimpled chins and elf hats tried not to sneer when they handed the stuff over. They just wanted to go home and watch their parents get trashed, then sneak out to smoke joints in the back garden. Their mothers were right behind them, though. Fat ladies flashing gold jewellery, dishing stuff out with plastic smiles, sniffing like they all had colds.

The sneers are more honest. I gave those girls the widest grins.

Everybody said “Merry Christmas!” at least a hundred times, until it was ringing in my head like a goddamn chant. Then they packed themselves up and hurtled back to their homes to carve turkeys and drink wine.

It wasn’t so bad. After all, it’s my door they were knocking on, and not the other way around.

* * *

I head back along the high street, and stand across the road from Mandy’s coffee shop. It’s hard to see her through the distance, through the crowd. The rain picks up and chills the warmth out of the air, and the people passing by start ducking into the coffee shop. Through the mess of moving heads, I sometimes glimpse her face. She’s moving fast behind the counter, working the till, grabbing pastries. Her eyebrows tight with concentration, her lips curled into a smile. Mandy, she’s always smiling. It doesn’t matter what it is she’s looking at.