Her hand tightened on my wrist. I sat in the hole, one glazed eye watching the bottle and the drunken gulls orbiting above.
Rangi and I spent the next few weeks in our own bubble, having debauched sex and numbing our bodies to the things we couldn’t talk about. We slipped into a routine of sorts. Some evenings, I’d turn up at his door with weed or skunk from a dealer I knew who sold drugs out of his ice cream van, sucking red ice-lollies during transactions. I knew the weed probably made me more paranoid but I couldn’t do without it for long spells. Once, I thought I was trapped in Rangi’s chest while we fucked on the staircase.
Another time, we did it on the small veranda off the bedroom. I was so high; I was convinced we’d fallen over the bars, tumbled down onto the kerb naked. Only I didn’t feel the drop or landing, just my hands in the turnings of silver alloy wheels, exhaust pipe smoke spilled from my mouth as I came, head lolling between road markings. Rangi liked to drink but if he was an alcoholic he was a functional one. There were bottles stashed everywhere in his flat, as if he didn’t want to have to go all the way to the kitchen if he started craving. Seductive bottles of gin, vodka, rum and wine were kept in the bottom tray of the bookshelf in the hallway, a bedroom drawer, the floor of his wardrobe. I’d sit in his minimal, faux black marble kitchen, blowing smoke into the air while he cooked. I was convinced he might have been slipping something into the meals he prepared but didn’t care enough to ask him.
His fast hands fascinated me, chopping meat or delicately deboning fish as though it were an art, fish eyes gleaming between us on the countertops. A shrunken spliff in the corner of my mouth, I felt comfortable watching him butcher things, the blade thumping loudly on the chopping board. Sometimes, he bought whole chickens, gutting their insides himself, their heads spinning in the blade. He’d dump their intestines inside jars of water, a secret smile on his face before depositing them in the fridge. He told me that once as a boy he’d gutted a pig; its last cries had haunted him through the following winter. Once or twice, he’d heard his parents repeating those cries at the dinner table and saw the pig trying to rear its head in their faces.
Now and again we ventured out. He took me to a screening of Harmony Korrine’s Mr Lonely in a dinky little pub slash cinema in Bow called The Hovel. The bar was upstairs and the cinema downstairs. It was properly kitschy. The confectionary seemed to have been doused in beer, cigarettes and stale confessions. The lighting was subdued. A scrawny, pockmarked ticket attendant with grey eyes and sallow skin handed us our tickets with sweating hands. The toilet seat had collapsed and it didn’t always flush. There was one small screening room with red velvet seats that snapped shut when you stood up. The din from the bar seemed contained yet uncomfortably close. As if people would fall through the ceiling and land in the aisles, mid conversation about their dog’s broken leg, the stubborn child they had or how the jukebox’s selection of songs was pretty limited.
Rangi and I held hands and ate sweet popcorn together. The movie, about professional impersonators who created their own world unlocked something in me. Loneliness was inescapable. Rangi liked the alcoholic priest who convinced nuns to jump out of planes. Spellbound, I watched the nuns riding bicycles in the sky, habits flapping as they spun. If only it were possible to be that free. If only I could be someone else so I wouldn’t have to live inside my head. I cried silently. A man began to talk rudely on his mobile. Rangi left our row. He smacked the man on the head, took the mobile phone and smashed it beneath his boot heel. Technology doesn’t have to fry your fucking brain he said to the startled man. When he returned, a pulse in his jaw ticked. In the shapeless dark I blinked up at him through my tears. The man, several rows behind us, muttered in disbelief but stayed seated.
Circles
Rangi and I began to hit funerals together. He’d pull up in that temperamental black Mazda with the faulty heating fan dressed in black, hands casually at the wheel. In keeping with my dysfunctional tendencies, I thought it was encouraging we had that level of honesty between us. He didn’t lecture me about the dangers of what I was doing or make me feel like a bad person. He was unique in that way, most people would have been very judgemental. Instead he said, “Too many people are concerned about how others perceive them. We should all be more in tune with our desires and not care so much.”
“By doing whatever we want whenever we want?” I asked, side-eyeing him curiously.
He shook his head. “When you live on the edge you experience life that much more. Elements of danger and instability make things more intense, more interesting. Too much routine and not enough freedom is what kills everybody slowly. Your unusual habits are… honest in their duplicity because at least you’re making choices.”
I had a feeling if I’d said I wanted to rob banks at gunpoint, he’d have let me do it, with no empathy for the distress other people would encounter. But banks were too risky and they didn’t have the appeal of funerals. For one, there would be no sadness in the air, only fear. No carrying the weight of other people’s losses, trying them on for size. I knew that despair, sometimes small or all encompassing. Funerals were manageable. Some days I felt inclined to steal and other days I didn’t. There were times I stood on the periphery, scanning small crowds for my mother’s face while Rangi sat in the car at a discreet distance, drinking under the glare of daylight.
On other occasions, he’d come into the services with me. We’d act like a couple that knew the deceased. I was astonished by his ability to blend in so quickly, his knack for making you feel both uneasy and comfortable. He imitated the physical expressions of other mourners beautifully, portraying a forlorn figure amongst the gatherings of mourners. Wielding a sad expression and slumped shoulders, he’d thread his way through pale gravestones.
People like Rangi and I, operated on a different frequency. When things got tricky, our signal was three rings to my mobile, which would vibrate silently in my handbag. I knew he enjoyed it. I wondered why he was drawn to death and whether it was for the same reasons I was. One day, we passed time in the car, a bottle of Jack Daniels between us, the engine running. He was calm hearing about my failed suicide attempt. Brushing several unruly twists away from my forehead, he said, “If more people saw death as a way of being reborn, they’d be less scared. This part of existence… it’s fleeting, miniscule. Don’t you feel the call of other planes inside? Don’t you feel their distances shrinking?” A Sainsbury’s delivery van came by; huge and white, it was purring beside us for a bit. Before I lost my courage in the jangle of its contents, I answered. “I think somebody wants something from me, to do me harm maybe. But I don’t know what it is they want,” I said, leaning into his bright-eyed gaze.
One evening, after another funeral raid we sat in a Rubik’s cube shaped bar made of glass. We watched small shadows form over our hands and the edges of the night rising in the tumblers we drank from. I saw myself naked in the gleam of his eyes, then naked on Dr Krull’s table, my medical notes spilling from my mouth onto the floor. Rangi was on form, wanting me to know all about him.
The son of an Irish mother and Maori father, Rangi had pretty much had every job you could imagine. In New Zealand, he’d worked as a trawlerman for a while, part of a crew on a twenty-one-metre twin rigger hauling tuna, snapper, salmon and all kinds of fish, hands perpetually slick with fish entrails. Sometimes working against a backdrop of forty foot swells, endless rain and gale force winds with the hazardous sea thrashing, curling and threatening to carry the men into cold, volatile currents.