Broken Monsters. Lauren Beukes
pad. And that’s a woman’s body, right there. The fullness and softness and the smile lines. She sees the panic on his face and laughs harder, leaning on him, her hand on his stomach. He automatically sucks it in. She’s already seen you naked, genius.
‘You thought …’
‘Zombies I can deal with.’
‘I’m twenty-nine, you idiot.’
‘Well thank God for that.’ And that’s not true, he thinks. The profile he read last night said she was thirty-three.
‘I’m living at home. For now.’
‘And your dad thinks you don’t have sex?’
‘Not under his roof. Well, on his property.’
‘Ah.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I should probably get going then.’
‘You probably should.’ She is grinning madly. She nods her head at the door. ‘Same way you came in.’
‘But you’re still buying me breakfast.’
‘Not today. I’ve got family stuff.’
‘Tomorrow, then.’
She relents. ‘There’s a coffee place in Corktown. I’ll see you there at ten.’
‘That’s not very specific.’
‘You’ll find it.’
‘I’ll get a cab home, then. And see you tomorrow.’ He is trying not to sound desperate.
‘Okay.’ She’s beaming.
‘All right.’ He stands there a moment longer.
‘You should go.’
‘It seems like a very bad idea to leave you.’
‘But you should anyway.’
‘Okay. You know it’s cute that you don’t swear.’
‘Go! For Pete’s sake!’
He leans down and pulls her into a deep kiss. ‘Okay.’ He stalks down the corridor with great stealth and purpose, not looking back, reeking of eau de pussy. It’s no use.
‘Um,’ he says, poking his head round her bedroom door. She is lying with one arm cast above her head, her eyes closed, head tilted back, and her hand between her legs. ‘I’m really sorry to interrupt—?’
She sits up, not the slightest bit embarrassed. ‘Would you get out of here?’
‘I would. I just …’ he shrugs helplessly. ‘I don’t know where we are. It was dark when we came in. If you could give me a suburb at least?’
TK wakes up under a table in a strange house. His feet are sticking out the end in his worn black boots. He pulled a pillow off the couch for his head, used one of the drapes for a blanket. Man has to improvise. When he was eleven, he could drink most grown men under the table, but this is not the case today. Twenty-three years living clean, and he’s got the AA medals to prove it, even if they’re in a cardboard box with the rest of his stuff up in Flint with his sister.
The dawn light is a drowsy gray through the table cloth. Like a shroud. No wonder he was dreaming about being buried alive. Staring up at the dark grain of the wood makes it feel like he’s lying in a coffin – the luxury model you gotta fork out extra for, with the creamy exterior and the gold-plate handles and the silk-lined space inside. Not the kind he buried his momma in. But that’s morbid thinking, and the day is bright and all laid out ahead of him and he’s got a whole house to go through.
A different man would have slept in one of the beds upstairs, but the family took the big mattress with them and it wouldn’t feel right to sleep in one of the little kids’ rooms. Besides, it’s one of his special talents. He’s got a knack for sleeping anywhere, anytime. Worked it up in the assembly line making screws, where if you were smart and motivated and very sneaky, you could take on the work of two men for an hour or two, while the other guy caught some shut-eye, and then switch it up. Bosses didn’t like it, but long as the work got done, what did they care? He finds he sleeps better if it’s really noisy. Conditioning, they call it. Drills and bolts and the whine of heavy machinery? That’s pure lullaby to him. The birds twittering outside to greet the sunrise don’t make the cut.
Something crashes in the kitchen. He bolts upright, smashing his head on the underside of the table. Damn. Shouldn’t have got complacent, even with the door locked behind him and a kind-of permission.
He tried to do it real polite. He stood on the corner across the way, while the family packed the car, loading everything into a station wagon and a U-Haul trailer. They strapped the mattress to the roof and a table to the mattress, upside down with its legs in the air like a dead bug. The kids went into the house and came out again, carrying boxes in relay, while the afternoon shadows stretched out. The wife kept glaring at him, like the foreclosed notice in a plastic folder taped to the door was somehow his fault. The kids, too. Shifty glances at him and then back at their folks, except for the toddler of course, who wanted to play in the boxes. Real cute little boy, getting underfoot like one of those wind-up toys that keeps going.
TK tried to be nonchalant about it. Taking his time to roll a cigarette and smoke it. He didn’t mean to make them freak out. But he couldn’t walk away and leave it to chance, either. Someone else might happen along. And sure, that seems unlikely in this neighborhood where theirs is the last house standing among overgrown lots and burned-out wrecks, and he only chanced on them because it’s what he does; wander the city looking for luck. TK is no stranger to terrible coincidence. Ask his momma, and her twin sister who got her killed.
‘Leave it alone,’ the husband muttered, pulling on the ropes to make sure everything was tight as. But it was boiling up inside her, the whole time he waited, trying to make it seem like he wasn’t.
‘No,’ she said, handing the toddler off to her man and striding toward TK across the yellow grass, her little fists balled up like she was a pro-footballer instead of five-foot nothing. The husband started after her, then realized she’d immobilized him by handing him the baby.
TK dropped the cigarette and ground it out. No manners in breathing your poison in someone else’s face. Nor in littering, nor wasting tobacco, even the cheap stuff. He picked up the stump and pocketed it. When he stood up again, she was in his face, hands on her hips, spitting outrage. Not really at him, but sometimes people need a stand-in. He’d seen it often enough, at the shelter, at meetings. He could be that for her.
‘Can’t you even wait till we’re out of here, you … vulture!’ Her voice cracked as she said it, but the insult bounced right off him. He doesn’t know much about vultures outside of what he’s seen on TV, hop-hopping to get at some dead carcass. If he’d had a choice, he’d have told her he’s more like one of the city’s stray dogs. Because they’re shameless opportunists and you can cuss them out much as you like, they’ve learned not to take it personally. The lone animals anyway. It’s when they pack together that you got a problem. Only takes one mean dog to wind up all the others into biting teeth and snarls. But he’s a solo mutt and he knows how to wag his tail a little.
‘I’m sorry to see you go, ma’am,’ TK said, calm, looking her in the eye. ‘Used to be that it was only the nice white families moving out of Detroit.’
He’d knocked the indignation right out of her sails. Good manners will do that; turn a situation around. You got to treat people like people. Something his momma taught him, along with how to use a gun, and what the minimum going rate for a whore was.
‘Yes, well,’ she said, angrily brushing at her eyes, ‘tell that to the bank.’
‘You