No Neat Endings by Dominic Carew

Author:Dominic Carew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MidnightSun Publishing

I didn’t know why, but I felt worse that afternoon than I had when she’d left the apartment. Worse, too, than the times before. Something in the way she’d let the keys fall, limply, with finality, as if her hand would never again close around them, or me. It hit me hard, and I sat at home all afternoon on the crate (I couldn’t bring myself to sit on the new lounge) and thought about my life. I was thirty-three. I had maybe two years before my hairline went from receding, to non-existent. I wasn’t fat, but I wasn’t in great shape either and if I got much more of this Aussie sun, I’d be a forty-year-old prune, croc-faced, lizard-backed. The only saving grace was my income, which was good, and getting better by the quarter. But I could hardly keep my heart warm by logging into net bank every night and nuzzling up to my laptop. Sarah had left me this time and she wasn’t coming back. Quite simply, Clint Fisher didn’t have what it took. She wanted a saint, or someone, at least, with a moral compass wide enough to see the world like she saw it. God, what bullshit.

I stood up from the milk crate. I had a beer in my hand, which I finished off. I added the bottle to the empties along the window sill. Jesus. I’d finished the six pack. Keys turned in the door.

‘Clinty McClint Face!’

Lyle stood in the doorway wearing his boardies. His feet were caked in dried sand. He was arming his surfboard and holding a case.

‘I see you’re on the cannies,’ he said, nodding at my bottles. ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got the same idea.’

He walked across the living room, put his board against the wall and the case on the crate.

‘Man,’ he said. ‘I just had a filthy surf. Shit everywhere at Tama.’

‘Shit?’

‘Storm water maybe.’

He did smell a bit.

‘Did some thinking, though,’ he said, ripping open the box of tins and handing me one. It was warm, but I took it. ‘I think that Kowalski bloke was right. I keep having these flashbacks. Think I got pretty flipped that night.’

I just looked at him, necking my beer.

‘It’s funny how you forget things, eh?’

I burped.

Over the next three hours, as the afternoon ebbed and a golden syrup light began its trickle through the windows, Lyle and I got shitfaced on cheap tins of Mythos he’d nicked from the back of a bottle-O.

‘You shouldna done that,’ I said, but I didn’t press it.

By eight, we were on the vodkas. He kept going into the kitchen to make us new ones as soon as we’d finished, squeezing in limes that Sarah had abandoned. The mixture tasted funny, tart, with a furry catch in the back of the throat. I assumed the limes had turned and thought nothing of it. Lyle kept gazing at me, though, from his seat on the new couch, a wide, goofy grin on his face, and I couldn’t help but feel he was up to something.

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