Read Online Smoke in the Room by Emily Maguire - Free Book Online Page B

enough that she wasn’t one anymore, and every few months he’d stop drinking for a week or two and think about going back to college and getting his teaching certificate. Several times he took off to the furthest country he could afford to fly to, but wherever he was he woke the same way, with the same feeling of helpless boredom.
    And then a few days after his thirtieth birthday, he’d shared a laugh with the new mailroom girl and, caught by her accent and swishy blonde ponytail, he asked her tolunch. They ate takeaway Greek salad on a park bench and by the end of the hour agreed that this was very strange.
This
being the unspoken but unquestionable fact that they would be together. It was too obvious to need saying. It would have been like saying
I have skin and a heart that beats
.
    â€˜Aaaadam, I’m starved.’ Katie hovered above him, her hair falling in greasy clumps around her shiny face.
    He covered his nose from her rotten breath, closed his eyes to her cracked lips. She straddled him and squeezed his ribs between her thighs. ‘Come on, I’m going to
die
if I don’t eat. Get up. Get up, get
upgetupgetupgetup
.’
    He kept his hand over his face. She thumped his chest and began to bounce. The movement started a wave of nausea in him. It moved up from his guts and broke in his throat. The inside of his mouth tasted as rancid as her breath smelt.
    â€˜Cut it out. I feel sick.’
    Bounce. Bounce. Thump. Stomach acid and disgust swirled in him.
    â€˜I mean it, Katie. Just stop it.’
    â€˜Or what? You’ll go back to
Eugenie
?’
    He grabbed at her, caught her arms, threw her off. He heard the
oomph
as she hit the floor.
    â€˜Fuck you, arsehole. That hurt!’ She stood and rubbed her arm. ‘What’s your problem? Aren’t I allowed to say her name? Eugenie, Eugenie, Eugenie.’
    â€˜How do you know . . . ?’ Adam pressed both hands to his stomach, covering the crowns, taking breaths.
    â€˜You told me, idiot. Last night, you told me about your
wife
, how you loved her right away.’
    â€˜I don’t remember.’
    â€˜Yeah, probably because I was sucking you off at the time. Distracting, right? So? Are you going to tell me about her? Did she leave you or what? Is she still in America? Are you going back? I mean, this –’, she waved her arm about, pointing to the bed, the bottles, the two of them. ‘Are you getting even or moving on?’
    He rolled upright, stood, pulled on his underpants and jeans, then sat and let his swimming head settle.
    â€˜Adam! Talk! You’re going back to her, aren’t you? Aren’t you?’
    â€˜She’s dead,’ he told her, hearing for the first time the blandness of the word. It conveyed none of the disorienting horror of it all. There were other words for that. Ungainly, tangled words he knew would forever trip off his tongue. Histopathologic. Debulking. Laparotomy. Salpingo-oophorectomy. Recurrent–Epithelial. Metastasis.
    Katie was talking. She was sorry. It was too much to take.
    â€˜I’ve gotta go.’ He slid into his flip-flops and put on a shirt on his way out the door.
    Before they came here, Eugenie told him Sydney was just like San Francisco. The light, she told him, the air, the water, the bridge, the vibe. But it was winter when they arrived and the light, the air, the water, the bridge and most certainly the vibe were grey. Not grey like the cottony fog that hangs over the bay in the morning and lifts to reveal the sparkling colour beneath. Sydney was grey like ashes, like arsenic.
    He buried her in her hometown of Newcastle on a sweltering morning in the first week of December and spentthe rest of the month and most of his savings in a hotel behind Central station. He slept, watched TV and ate potato chips and candy from a machine in the foyer, kept the curtains closed and the air-conditioning on and paid no attention to the digital