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.
how long before she is "eddie"?
ReplyDeleteits interesting to watch. she knows exactly where this "path" goes. she just had a visceral reminder with Eddie (pre-barbeque) but its easier than finding an alternative.
ReplyDeleteIts jumping off the roof because its easier than looking for the stairs, besides I won't hit today and maybe a helicopter will come by before...
that kind of time based rationalization is fascinating.
Yeah. It's the allure of self destruction.
Delete