Crooked Words Read online

or swoon, maybe, as Chris ran the tip of hir tongue along the back of Ben’s hand, just light enough to tease. It wasn’t what he expected or wanted, but it was pretty damn fine, not when Chris shot him another smirking smile as ze lowered Ben’s hand onto the surface of the table and covered it with hir palm.

  It seemed absurd, in any case, to expect Chris to do something that was in any way expected.

  Lisa coughed, loudly. “Get a room, both of you.” She reached for her glass and shot Ben a faux-angry glare. “I can’t check out the hot chicks at the bar while you two are blocking my view and being all romantic.”

  “Could do,” Ben said, and translated this into best-friend ‘I don’t care if you abandon me while we’re out together’ speak. He wiggled his fingers just enough to make Chris grin and nudge Ben in the shin with one boot-clad foot. “Are we cramping your style?”

  “You’re disgusting,” Lisa said; she rolled her eyes at them both. “Go for that walk. There’s probably a café on the beach selling hot chocolate. Go be all smoochy with your metaphors.” She stood up and brushed down her skirt, and then grabbed her satchel. “Right. There’s a gorgeous woman at the end of the bar who’s been sitting on her own for the last ten minutes. I’m going in.”

  “Good luck,” Ben said, and he slapped her on the shoulder as she went past. He knew that whatever happened, they’d meet up for coffee sometime on the weekend, and Lisa would ask him everything about Chris, and he’d ask her about whomever she did or didn’t meet. They’d always be there for each other, whatever else happened. “And thanks.”

  Lisa snorted and headed to the bar, leaving Ben to sit there and hold Chris’s hand.

  “This is going to be awkward,” he said, “and I don’t know how to ask, but…”

  Chris raised hir eyebrows and said nothing.

  No: he should have expected that Chris would be okay enough with the awkwardness to not want to step in and help a guy out. Ben sighed. “What do I call you?”

  “That’s all you have to ask.” Chris shrugged, the words just mild enough to be reproachful—but then ze broke into another broad, melting grin. “They. They. Any other questions?”

  The challenge in Chris’s voice—the explicit dare to ask any further questions about their body—made Ben wonder just how many people had failed at this final test. “Beach. How about it?” Peace and privacy, hot chocolate, the ocean, a gorgeous companion—and the assurance that Chris would make the evening anything but traditional or cliché? Whatever happened even half an hour from now, it would sure as hell be interesting—and maybe this time, with this person, Ben wouldn’t be taking the morning walk of shame. “Besides, you owe me a proper kiss, arsehole.”

  Chris sat still for a moment, as if considering, and then stood, grabbing their coat from the back of the other chair. “Well. I do know this fish and chip shop famous for deep-fried Mars Bars.”

  Ben grinned, stood, and straightened the lace-trimmed hem of his red silk blouse before he slipped one arm through Chris’s and headed towards the door.

  Elysium

  Even with the door closed, Eve can’t escape the smell—some nauseating combination of industrial-strength disinfectant, vegetables cooked down to a soft mush and the nose-prickling medicinal reek of sealed bandages and antiseptic lotion. Is it bottled up, she wonders as she runs her fingernails back and forth across the hard plastic surface of her uncomfortable green chair. Does someone in a factory somewhere slap an ‘Eau du Hospitale’ label on a bottle and ship it out to every hospital around the country so that patients know what to expect on admission—just like a McDonald’s?

  She can’t sit still; her heart pounds in her chest, frantic, desperate.

  Eve laughs, folds her hands on her lap, unfolds them again. The chemical odour does more than give her a headache: it seems to strip colour and light from everything it touches. This room, with its sad greyish-pink walls, grey-brown carpet, flesh-coloured frames around faded prints—had it been colourful, once? Maybe the prints on the walls featured sunflowers and poppies instead of—she leans forward, frowning, unable to decide what those pink-purple blurs had once been.

  Impressionism, she thinks, hides a lot of sins.

  The door creaks open, brings with it a gust of antiseptic sharp enough to burn her nostrils. Wheels rattle outside and she can hear a trolley or a wheelchair banging over the linoleum floor, human voices low and loud. Deep inside the glass and concrete prison, surrounded by layers of plaster and steel, she can only hear the trees whisper inside her dreams—a whisper that grows fainter with every passing day. The creak of bough and the clean eucalyptus scent follows her into wakefulness, however, the summons playing over and over again in her mind: Eve, Eve, Eve…

  “Eve. I’m so sorry for making you wait.” The door clicks shut behind her and Linda crosses over to the desk, drops a set of keys and a pile of folders on the bare surface of her desk. She smiles her white-woman white-bread smile as if she’s glad to see Eve, her face light and relaxed—she’s the best pretender Eve’s ever known. Even Dr Johannes’s smile slips at the corners, but Linda never looks anything but happy to sit down and talk. “I won’t bore you with the tale of what happened with the neighbour’s cat…”

  Eve shrugs, stares down at her hands to hide from Linda’s warm brown eyes. The cuff of her shirt sleeve has crept up her arm, revealing the start of the pale red cuts, jagged and uneven; she grabs the cuff and yanks it down, and then wonders why she bothers. She can invent a lie—everyone knows she’s clumsy, she always breaks things because she’s too lazy to be careful—but it won’t matter.

  “Eve?”

  She looks up and meets Linda’s eyes. Linda perches on the edge of her desk, a pen and notepad in her hands. Her black skirt suit, her bobbed hair, her make-up are all as boring as her office, which makes everything easier. Dressed in green jeans and a purple shirt and sporting wiry blue hair that’s just starting to grow out, Eve feels like a bruise, an assault on pale skin, something that doesn’t belong. It’s easier to ignore Linda when she knows she’s never going to fit into Linda’s ordered, professional world—easier to say good-bye.

  “I understand,” Linda says in her soft, quiet voice, leaning forwards as if she’s willing to listen, “that you want to go home.”

  Home. She supposes it’s as good a word as any—is it Eve’s fault that everyone else thinks of ordinary human things, of houses and roofs and families, when they say that word? How is she lying if she chooses not to correct them? “Yes,” she says, and she folds her arms across her chest. “I’m on my meds. I’m going to take them—I said I would. I’ll go to the psych. The outpatient program. I won’t do anything…” She pauses, hunts for the right word to frame the act of glass piercing skin—the kind of word that makes her sound ordinary and sane. “Stupid.”

  She expects Linda to nod and agree with her, but she frowns, lips pursed, writing something on the notepad. Eve tenses, but Linda just looks sad, and she holds her silence a little too long for the expression to herald anger. Eve lets out a long breath, tucks her shaking hands further under her armpits—and then frowns. Why isn’t Linda angry? Why isn’t she beginning the usual stream of loud concern and louder criticism Mum and Dad wield in all similar situations? Eve said the wrong thing, so why isn’t Linda telling her that?

  She supposes it has something to with the cutting, with meds and diagnostic words like mental illness and clinical depression. People are supposed to treat the crazy with leather gloves.

  “Depression isn’t stupid.” Linda shakes her head. “You were depressed and miserable and trying to express that, none of which is stupid.” She sighs and stares at Eve until Eve nods. Okay. Don’t use the word ‘stupid’ around Linda—not that it matters. But she can do that; she can avoid saying the word until this last torturous session is over. It’s not so very much to ask. “Do you mean to go back to your parents?”

  She nods and stares at her hands and not Linda’s eyes, afraid the lie is too visible in her face.r />
  “I’m concerned about that. I don’t think you should go back.”

  Eve jerks her head up in surprise. “What—run away?” The words sound too defiant and she shakes again, afraid that she’s betrayed herself in one moment of shock. People like Linda, after all, spend their days putting together the puzzle of someone’s soul, patching together the bleeding and broken. Eve meant to tell Linda, during their first session, of her fucked-up desire to turn her body into art—how she couldn’t resist the lure of her own brown skin, how beautiful the spill of blood looked once she’d parted her skin with the glass shard. The words came out strange and twisted, though, because she told the tale of the glass slipping from her fingers and the sound it made when it shattered across the carpet. She talked about Dad’s booming shout and the way she cried, always the cry-baby, while he pinned her against the wall and bellowed: stop being so fucking careless, do you think I’m made of money, I’m tired of fixing all your fucking mistakes, what are you crying for, do you want me to really give you something to cry about? She spoke of the way Mum frowned once Dad stormed out of the room and told her that he wouldn’t have yelled if she just stopped crying, and how that made her cry harder. She found herself sitting there and saying, in a strange,