Citrus & State Lines

Six and a half hours into the trip, I pull the four wheel drive into a highway-side truckstop and we eat mandarin segments leaning against the sun-warmed bonnet. The fruit is shitty; dry, pithy pieces which taste only a memory of flavour. The bleached-red metal burns dully against my exposed thighs, denim shorts riding uncomfortably up my crotch.

Mary spits a grey seed into the dirt and lets out a huff, kicking up dirt with the rubber tips of her canvas shoes. I know she would’ve rather pulled out her top row of teeth, one-by-one, than willingly come were it not for some shred of decency snagged somewhere between her heart and ribcage. I know we’re too far in it now for her to back out, so it would be enough to spare the angst-swollen dramatics.

“Listen,” I say, picking a string of fuzzy pith from under my fingernail, “It shouldn’t be far now, yeah? We’ll give it another six hours, call this the halfway point.”

“Yip-dee-fucking-do,”

Mary’s face contorts to a thing hideous in displeasure––the deep blue shadows of gumtree branches leaving a dark patina over her pale skin. The lazy wind stirs the loose red hair knotted at the base of her neck, pulling with it her vague scent of cheap jasmine perfume and sweat.

“We’ll get a hotel on the way back,” I say in a desperate bid to smooth the lines creasing her forehead, to melt the tension taut between us, “Just…detox. Room service and chlorine”

The idea comes to me as an impossible mirage, all worries discarded in place of polyester bikinis and turquoise pool tiles. Candy-red lobsters under solid silver cloches, fucking on Egyptian cotton, the smell of Le Labo candles burning by the claw-footed tub.

“Yeah, Ive? You got hotel money now? Breaking news to me.”

I push myself off of the bonnet, wrap my arms around my middle

“Maybe I'd have a little more wiggle room with my finances if I weren’t repeatedly funding your spontaneous cross country road trips.”

“Oh cry me a god dammed river,” She says, placing another citrine piece of mandarin between her puffy lips, “This fruit is awful, by the way. Do your finances permit us to stop for loose-change-menu hamburgers, or have I drained you too greatly?”

“This isn’t what I signed up for, you get that, right?”

Her green eyes narrow.

“Oh you poor sweet thing how very hard this must be on you,”

“You know no one else would put up with this, right? No one sane. I am implicating myself again and again, for what?!”

The dread that’s been consistently pooling in my stomach for the past twelve hours reaches its crescendo, tingling my arms into rigidity. Oh god, oh god. It’s barely any easier the third time around.

“Maybe time for some self reflection, then,” She pauses to spit another seed into the soil––a large, pendulous glob of saliva falling from her pursed lips––before finally saying, “You’re not trapped, Ivy, you can leave whenever you want!”

Mary scatters the citrus skins and wrenches open the car door, folding herself into the passenger seat with knees brought to her chest. Through the windscreen, the wooden rosary knotted to the rearview mirror tremors with the movement. It now seems horrifically out of place, even through the lens of my watery, barely-hanging-on faith. Her and holiness should only repel––oil beaded in water, one magnet chasing the other.

My arms feel frozen, a tingling curling up from the fingerpads to the balls of my elbows. I can hear the erratic beat of my heart amplified in my ears, the sickening churn of upset blood. Nausea needles through my stomach. I am suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to sleep, to fold myself into oblivion, to tuck myself where no one could ever find me. Exhausted by my very being.

Could I really? Leave? Or would I wind up hogtied in the trunk of my own car, some new lover driving my deserted corpse interstate; some man with a movie star jaw or 21st century, timidly spoken Marilyn Monroe? I can see myself swallowed in felted darkness, limbs bent to angles impossible in life. Blood, threading my hairline from a fatal blow, or pooling in the caverns of my collarbones from a mid-cooking ‘accident’. It makes me faint. I’ve always had a thing about blood, but that seems ironic now.

Would I leave, even if I knew I could do it and survive?

The last thing I want is my death at your hands. The only thing I want is my death at your hands. I am paradoxical in my morbidity. We’re a match made outside heaven’s gates.

The wind sifts through my hair as I look down at the mandarin peels discarded in the red soil like beached goldfish, scales crisped by the biological wrongness of their environment. Literally out of their depth. There would be no lobster, no expensive, fragranced wax. There never is.

–––

I drive, so wound up in my own mind––knitting possibilities from anxiety, cannibalising consciousness––that time seems to glitch out, escape me. One moment we’re pulling out of the truck stop and the next we’re 100km away, and Mary’s silent, and I’m unsure how I’ve managed to unconsciously drive without totalling the car.

In the passenger seat Mary sits with her feet up on the dashboard, turquoise-lacquered toenails glassy in the waning sunlight, Tarantino-esque. She reads a newspaper spread open over her thighs, so hideously relaxed in herself. We haven’t spoken since the truck stop, since slammed doors and scattered skins.

It’s claustrophobic, the thick blanket of silence, the space between Mary, me, and the one we can’t see. Out of sight out of mind is a bullshit phrase.

Mary clicks her tongue, folding up the newspaper and sliding it between the seat and door.

“I’m sorry,” the words seem to cut her, to pull with them bile.

I don’t reply. It’s better for me not to show how pathetically grateful I am for the two words.

Silence bellies between us, threatening to pop, punctuated by the squeak of Mary rolling down the window.

“Damn, it’s ripe in here.”

I nod and do everything I can to keep myself from screwing my eyes shut, throwing the entire nasty day into darkness. Everything I can to not assign meaning to the comment.

She’s silent for a while, chin turned out the open window.

“You know I don’t mean to be like this, I don't want to be. I just…get upset,” she pulls her head back inside, looks at me.

I keep my eyes on the road.

“We all have things we don’t want to be, even though we are. Most don’t come with a body count.” Maybe I mean it to be profound, but it just comes out as chiding, begging. A tired school teacher.

And then, despite myself, I say,

“I know.”

“And you know I love you?”

“Yeah.”

I finally turn to look at her. Her berry-toned lips turn up into a small smile. The sunset takes her in its mouth, spits her out in shades of pink, of golden light pulling white. The porcelain sheen of her skin, the deep red of her hair as it wisps over her face, hyphenating freckles. I wish I hadn’t looked. I wish I never had.

–––

The first night, you called me with tears slugging your voice; wet, heaving sobs.

“I did something bad.”

Something bad. I had driven to you in looping paranoia of what that could imply. You, in bed with someone else. You, shooting up in a dingy back alley. You, provoking the wild girls who frequented our town’s bars and ending up with your ski-slope nose smushed into your face.

I didn’t expect the man, the front of his balding skull red and cavernous, his eyes like pickled specimens, the soaked rock in your palm.

You had dragged him, you explained through heavy hiccups, from the pub’s back fire exit as far into the bushland as you could muster (which was a laughable distance). You had left him sprawled between bindis and bottle glass as you retraced your steps, scrubbing at the streaks of blood over wooden floors with the hem of your skirt. Forgive me for saying it, but you were hardly a mastermind––it was a miracle no drunk patron, searching for a patch of dead grass to hurl into, had stumbled upon him.

Balling your hands into your skirt, you told me that he’d touched you, so in that moment I lost any moral judgement I'd levied at you. I didn’t care, Mary, didn’t care about the blood, the gore. It was retribution, it was almost God's work, nothing more than an early entry to eternal suffering.

We moved him to the trunk of my car, breathless from it; neither of us was what one could call ‘strong’. We wrenched him through the back door to your house, the fabric of his trousers catching on torn mosquito screen. We took kitchen knives to his corpse in your bathtub, arduous, hours of gruesome work done with solem acceptance, punctuated by my four bouts of vomiting in the toilet to your angry dismay. It was less than I anticipated, you had to give me that. I, who couldn’t have blood drawn or slit my fingerpad on a paper’s edge without losing conscious. I, who always ordered my steak well done because the slightest dribble of red, the slightest indication that the pan-charred slab was once a breathing creature, was enough to turn me off my food. That same girl with mint green rubber gloves up to her elbows, making a bloody mess of your porcelain.

But the second, a fried-haired woman from the mini mart who always rolled her eyes or popped her strawberry gum at you as you checked out, hadn’t laid hands on you. And the third, the boy––barely nineteen with hair like a cherub and cheeks the colour of roses, I couldn’t even extract from you an explanation for. You brickwalled the questions as I drove over state lines in robotic obedience, his corpse folded into the boot of my car like a paper swan. Silent until shared fruit and a glimpse of my upset.

Did your initial self defence open up a bigger world for you than you could have predicted? Did you see the first blood shed, feel the first sickening crack of stone meeting skull, and know you were forever changed?

When you say you love someone you say you’d kill for them, but this wasn't born of love. When you love someone you say you’d help them hide a dead body, but could I call this anymore than the start of a daisy chain of my idiocracy?

Oh, Mary. My Mary. You were named for divinity, purity, and then refuted all of that. How have I loved you? Was it for the holiness I projected upon your milky skin, your soft jaw, your blushed knuckles? You, like a Jacobean interpretation of Mary Magdalene. All the holiness I could level against my perversion, all the holiness you shed yourself of until I was begging for your sin.

What have we done, Mary?

–––

“Yeah?

She looks at me, turns her whole body to face me so the licorice-coloured seatbelt is cutting into her. Her eyes are pleading, wide as twin moons. I fasten my gaze back to the road.

“Can’t you say it back? Can’t you give me that.”

What are words? Do I have to speak to prove my loyalty? She knows. There’s no way she couldn’t. Only love would drive someone this far into Hell, only love can damn you like this.

The words pour from her, one long, uncut ribbon twirling from her lips.

“I am grateful. I am so grateful, Ivy. I know this is awful. I know. Don’t you know I’m sorry? Please tell me you know I’m sorry. Please.”

I’ve never noticed how insecure she is before, how needing in validation. Funny.

I push down on the gas, fast enough to escape the both of us. To escape this morbid wreck she’s made me.

“I’m fucking sorry okay? I mean, how many times do I need to say it until we’re fine. Fucking look at me. I’m still the same, nothing has changed. I was just upset. In a mood, hungry, tired!”

Is this mania the final thing they saw? Mary with her hair falling loose, her tobacco-tinged teeth bared, spittle escaping her lips, nails dug into her knees.

“Please, you have to forgive me. I can’t go on if you won’t even look at me! I’m not a monster, do you think I’m a monster?”

Oh Mary, do the ears of the dead still listen? Is the poor, broken boy stuffed in the trunk, all unnatural angles and sallow skin, pitying us?

“Ivy, please, slow down. I’m right here, please.”

I look down at the glass plate of the speedometer, the needle moving higher and higher, the watery ghost of my face swimming in undulating lights of blue and red. And I don’t recognise myself.