Deleted Scenes for Lovers by Tracey Slaughter

Author:Tracey Slaughter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Victoria University Press

leaving the body

I have small, clear sightings of her.

I have one as I’m waiting at the airport: curved, in the cup of water I’m holding, the surface of it stretching from the tremor I can’t stop in my left hand. It shows me the sliding mechanics of a door which glides on its vast glass withdrawal past my shoulder. The sound is steel cable scraped through ice.

And there she is, her body, caught in that sound.

The steward has left me at arrivals, but it wouldn’t matter where he shifted me—my daughter glitters everywhere in this design. All the walls are glass here, the entry halls, the lounges, the long departure tubes: they’re all moving panels of tough metal-jointed transparency that float and interlock as if the southern light itself has been engineered, made to rest in stiff decks, flex between these glinting struts. It’s due to the mountain, of course; its primacy, its tough, tourist pose, the sharp black disaster of it bursting out the flatland. No one wants to lose a second of that view. So they sketched the whole building around it, made a blueprint for these wide banks of ice, safe cinematic ports where you can line up the ranges, postcard style. I have to sit and watch. I have to watch the branches of dark rock crackle down the peaks. Even in my cup I have to watch them tower and trickle, like the hanging black tree the human eye really sees before the brain tips it, so we can believe ourselves standing here the right way up.

She is not the right way up when I see her, a dislocated silver twitch in the dial of my cup. She is dug down, my girl, packed into angles, lonely and awkward, her limbs shovelled into the snow. They are still high-tech colours, all her bright death-proof clothes. So I can follow their flashes of fluorescent cutting-edge mesh, scientifically tested to outlast her, resistant to the layers of snow that have reset her bones. They will withstand her. They will stay here, mark her like a series of flags, tiny pinpricks of a conquered map. So I can make out the patches that were her shins, scrape them out of the searing tread of snow. I can grub to the crest of an elbow, find the shortcut to her fingertips, still in their padded bubbles. But all the colours end at the top of her trunk. Because up there the outpost of her dark head is pushed under, sunk into the heavy airless crystal of pure distance. Even so, I move in closer. I’m her mother, it is my job to go. Her head is too deep to read a face, but I look down anyway, stare down at its crushed out-of-focus globe, a dark shape beneath a rink. Or a blurred figure watching you from the vanishing shine at the back of a mirror you would never in your life have chosen to walk towards.

He used to tell her to ‘harden up’.

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