“Those were rough, good times battling the elements with those men. Imagine the tough conditions, bloody fish scales, hauling heavy nets up. We made some great catches. Not everything you catch surrenders immediately.” He ran a finger over the pulse on my wrist, the far away expression on his face made me certain he wasn’t talking about fish.
During his early twenties, he’d travelled through South America; Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Columbia, taking odd jobs to get by. In Buenos Aires, he worked as a farmhand for a woman who prophesised about a red sky coming to kill them all and slept with a long rifle in her bed as though it were a lover.
“She was right about something coming,” Rangi explained, running a hand over his jaw before knocking back a shot of whisky. “Thieves broke in one night, they shot most of the livestock, killed her with her own gun. Coincidentally, I was away from the farm that night. A woman I’d been seeing had wanted to go dancing. It was funny, while we were out, I could taste blood in my mouth but I thought it was one of my nosebleeds coming. I didn’t understand until I got back to the farm the next day and saw the carnage.”
In Mexico, he supplemented bar work as a nude model. One particular painter named Javier had requested him often. Sometimes they drank together afterwards, listening to old Mexican records.
“So there are nude paintings of you floating around.” I smiled at this notion. “Do you think he was in love with you?”
He watched me from hooded eyes. “Why do you ask that?”
“I don’t know, just a feeling. You said he painted you naked sometimes.”
“Maybe he was. He was good to me.” He nodded at the barman, setting his glass on the countertop for another shot. I drew my own conclusions.
In Montreal, he worked nightshifts at a factory producing mannequins. His sleep became so badly affected; he started seeing body parts of other staff coming round the conveyor belt and the mannequins walking around with bits of dawn in their eyes.
“You drift in and out of a lot of people’s lives don’t you?” I asked, trying to shake away the feeling of unease, the coldness in my bones.
“Maybe they drift in and out of mine,” he said.
In London, he worked in a butcher’s shop, coming home smelling of raw meat. Sometimes, he supplemented that income cabbing, shepherding people at all hours of the night. We looked out at the city, the traffic, the flow of people scurrying in different directions. The buildings were hazy, their lines distorted. I could see Rangi climbing into distances before leaping ahead in a change of clothes.
On the drive back home, I swallowed the stone floating in my minds eye. It sank to the bottom of my stomach, doing nothing to temper the nausea I felt. I slid down in my seat. The partially rolled down window had light spots of rain. Windscreen wipers flattened small shapes of water. The purple collar of my dress was stiff, ready to corner stray creatures of night. The streets were peppered with lights. Saviours and sinners spun in close proximity. Hands became other instruments in cold pockets.
We stopped on a bridge by the river for air. A fox was taking orders from something unseen. Rangi lit a cigarette, took a draw and began to pace the small area we’d resigned ourselves to. An empty bottle of Australian Pinot Grigio rolled nearby. My hands trembled, suddenly accosted by a memory; my mother running barefoot across a bridge, crying about inheritance being inescapable, fleeing down metallic stairs. My small frame rooted to a spot at the edge. I’m reminded of hovering above the river with metallic corners, afterwards searching for answers in my mother’s expressions, before the water inherited them forever, of chasing the changes, the timeline of when it all begun.
Tracks
I woke up on the train tracks not remembering the walk up. Everything seemed to be in slow motion; the stream of night commuters, the last train announcement ringing in my ears, a crushing weight on my right arm so painful my eyes watered. Half stars blended into the mocking glints of the tracks. The train wheel against my arm was unbearable. I lay there clenching and unclenching my left fist, grunting, reducing to small parts mice would scurry over. Faces swam. Voices came from a distance. Broken, silver light danced above like shrapnel flying. I’m not sure how much time passed between coming round and finally being lifted but a slow pained breath left me and the shrapnel had begun to reassemble in my body as a siren wept.
“What’s happening?” I asked the faces blending into one, my voice faint, hoarse.
“There’s been an accident but you’re alright now dear,” a kindly, male voice said. His slim hands moved like quick sparrows. I vaguely registered his green uniform.
“I can’t feel my arm anymore!” I said, desperately attempting to grab his elbow with my left hand, clutching the moments before the accident I couldn’t remember. Fragments had attached themselves to the announcement sign, the boot imprint of an ambulance man, a baby tugging its mother’s white collar.
I spotted Anon in the crowd holding the brass head as I was wheeled away. She looked calm. One wheel from the bed squeaked as she moved her mouth. I felt myself slipping into the dark, away from the weight of her judgement. The blurring of those lost moments before the accident became the unlikely half children of the stars.
During the ride to the hospital, the sound of tires on the road was oddly comforting. My eyes adjusted to the fluorescent lighting overhead. For a moment, I thought it was a scene from a movie maybe. That the van would flatten into a stage, the players disappearing into their corners. But the pain in my right shoulder indicated otherwise. Blood on my shirt had smudged. The lower part of my arm hung on tenuously, joined at the elbow. Light-headed, the van shook. Its ceiling became a bright, foreign sky. A drumbeat rattled the doors, faster and faster. Red earth bearing footprints with water covered the floor. Blue petals fell gently. A woman crying interrupted my thoughts, loudly at first, and then quietly, followed by the sound of a shovel in the soil and the soft murmurings of a man. I ran towards that sound, reaching the moments before the accident but I couldn’t remember. I ran in slip roads going nowhere, began to scream so loudly, my throat hurt. The van screeched to a halt.
My numb arm dangled in blind spots.
I came round again in the hospital bed aware I’d lost time. I felt sick and slow, the same feelings you got following an adventure ride, knowing that the angle of flight had reassembled things inside you. Most of my right arm was gone, hacked off by surgeons. I no longer had a right hand. The right hand I stole with, masturbated with, and caught a butterfly fish from a pool with. They’d had to amputate. It must have been pinned beneath that train wheel for longer than I realised.
I knew Anon was partially responsible for the state I’d found myself in but why did I deserve this? Hadn’t I suffered enough? Why had I inherited one punishment after another? I thought of calling Rangi or Mrs Harris but I’d left my mobile on the kitchen counter. I was in a world of strangers, listening through stethoscopes tapping against a God’s chest. Nurses’ smiles wavered as they lied to patients out of kindness. This was a country I came from. I knew the language of the damned. Through the rage, helplessness and despair, I spoke it to the ceiling.
I drifted in and out of consciousness, wrung my hand in the light bedcovering listening to an internal clock ticking. I cried when a silhouette from the ceiling leapt into black train tracks. Doctors and nurses came and went; cut-outs travelling on ripples. They hovered by my bed checking the stump. Pain medications with names I could not pronounce slipped down my throat. The withered old man in the next bay coughed out his insides, arms outstretched as if to retrieve them.