THE SIXTH GUEST: Chapter Seven - Part Three

Selina had seen Travis in all sorts of different frames of mind.

She’d seen him in full on rage, breaking all the teeth in a football supporters’ mouth with the toe of his booth for calling him a “pansy-ass hippy.” She’d seen him laughing hysterically as a friend of theirs lost his grip while larking about hanging off the outside of a bridge over the spur road. She’d seen the blank and innocent way his face fell when he was asleep – like a little boy’s. She’d never ever seen him even close to how he looked now.

The blood colour was entirely absent from his cheeks and forehead, concentrated instead into zigzags on his eyeballs, the bulging veins on his arms. All he was doing was staring off, at nothing she could see, his mind obviously reeling back what had happened to them since they got to the church yard. The lightning. The explosion. The bodies. Eddie. And now this man here tonight and the fucked up things he had said.

She slipped onto the bed beside where he sat and touched his thigh. “Travis...”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But I need—”

“You heard me Selina,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t want. To talk. About any of it. Understand?”

She hesitated, then as she started to speak again, he looked her in the eye and said, “If you say a single word I will fucking break you.”

She went rock-still, petrified, only for a tiny instant feeling a flutter of panic-induced sexual tension. She didn’t even nod; she just looked back at him then quickly averted her gaze.

“Fuck this shit.” He’d thrown his jacket on the floor. He reached for it now and went through first one pocket then the other, flipping out the tin he’d had with him in the churchyard earlier. The daffodil tin.

Selina watched him crack it open and jiggle it to sort the contents: the Swan Vestas, the syringes, the spoon and the tightly wound polythene pouch filled with white powder. She watched him get to work making it ready, and as she did she got her own replay of the evening’s events. She tried to screen them off but the pictures kept flopping back into view.

She stood up. She went to the blinds at the window, twisting the rod that shut them off. She watched Travis fiddling with the contents of his little pouch, measuring it out carefully. She scratched the backs of her arms and brushed back at her hair irritably over and over again.

“Travis, can we talk?” she asked, before she could stop herself. “I need to just talk. About what happened.”

As soon as the second syllable was out she knew it was a mistake but she just went on anyway; and Travis did spin round, springing to his feet. He didn’t come at her and pin her to the wall by her neck. He didn’t punch her in the face with his fist.

His shoulders only sagged until he looked, as much as his larger frame could allow, like the old man sitting in the next room. Selina gripped her left wrist in her right hand, twisting it back and forth, the rims of her eyes suddenly itching with the release of moisture from her tear ducts that made her vision start to blur but didn’t trickle over the edges of her lower lids to run down her cheeks.

Travis set the daffodil box down on the wrinkled purple bedspread beside him. He took out his syringe and laid it to the left of the tin, right next to his leg. Then he took out the second syringe, laid it to the right of the box and slid it a little away, toward her, with two of his fingertips. He looked her in the eye and gave her a sad little smile that was maybe the most heartfelt and earnest expression of love he’d ever given her.

Selina found herself nodding and moving haltingly closer, sitting down on the mattress and this time touching his thigh without resistance as he tipped out just enough of the powder into the bowl of the spoon. He lit one of the matches, and they both silently watched the liquid form in the spoon. The smoke of the match curled round his arms as he touched the first syringe, drawing back the plunger to fill it. He repeated the process, preparing the second syringe then laid all the props delicately back in the daffodil tin before he snapped it shut and popped it back into his jacket pocket.

Without any words got two short lengths of rubber tubing from his other jacket pocket and set one of the syringes and one of the tubes into Selina’s open palm. She looked at his face but he didn’t meet her gaze. He was tying the tube he had tightly round his upper arm, using his teeth to grip it long enough to do so. He tapped on the vein in the crook of his elbow, encouraging it to expand.

Selina suddenly felt a scratch of panic that he would be gone into it without her; that she’d be left outside of it by herself. The needle was already at his vein, already pushing in, a pearl of blood forming round its end. She started to scrabble with her own plastic tube, curling it round her own bare arm but she wasn’t quick enough. The plunger went down, injecting the translucent fluid into Travis’s vein and almost immediately he gave a deep groan, stretching back his shoulders so that they audibly crackled.

He groaned again and slumped back onto the bed, the innocent boyish expression on his face, already away from all this; from everything that had happened to them. He was happy and safe inside of it, away from the smouldering bodies and the screaming friends and the man who told them that something terrible was coming.

For almost ten seconds Selina hesitated, that first desperate impulse to follow him faltering, asking herself again if three times made her a user while at the same time trying with all her willpower not to care about that right now.

Then she tightened the plastic strap with a sharp jerk and picked up the syringe from where it had fallen onto the bedclothes. Not allowing herself any doubt now, she placed it against the vein and closed her eyes.