By Jade Campbell
There is a section for each animal. Labels in all-caps announce what they have become: cows recast as beef, etc. Creatures transformed into something different, necessarily less creaturely. The shelves bow under the weight.
“It locks from the outside so you gotta be careful.”
Torn from her thoughts, Eve shivers in the cold.
Danny grins, his mouth slightly open. “Davey, the guy you’re replacing, he forgot one time and I only found him when one of his tables started bitching about service. Poor fuck almost froze his dick off.” He taps the toe of her shoe with his. “But you wouldn’t have that problem, would you hon?”
On the restaurant floor the heat is oppressive. Danny introduces her to Cathy and slips through a doorway behind the bar.
“Hey, how old did you tell him you are?”
“He didn’t ask.” Eve had prepared herself to lie, but the need hadn’t arisen.
Cathy smiles as though they’ve shared a joke. “He wouldn’t.”
Before Eve can think of how to respond, Cathy’s name is called out once, and again, from somewhere deeper in the restaurant. “Cath! Cath-ee!”
“We’d better see what he wants. Don’t mind him, okay? He’s harmless.”
The man is alone in a booth. His face is so flushed that Eve almost doesn’t recognise him. When she does, she lowers her head slightly, angles it away.
“Cathy baby! That beer was so good I need another one. With extra love!” His words slur. “Don’t forget, okay? More than this one even.” He waves his glass. Flecks of foam fly from the rim. Cathy grips the glass but he doesn’t let go. “I dunno what you do back there but make sure you put the love. I gotta taste it!”
“You got it Stevie. Double the love.”
Eve steps back, waiting for Cathy to lead her away, but the man leans forward.
“Who’s your friend Cath? Keeping her all to yourself? Listen, hey, listen. Don’t you know what Barney says? Sharing’s caring!”
Cathy grimaces at Eve, mouths “I’ll be quick” and leaves.
“Where you been hiding sweetie? Girl pretty as you. We gotta see you.” He wraps clammy fingers around her wrist. Eve feels she might faint; that perhaps she should.
“Haven’t seen you here before. I’ve been missing out, huh?” He pulls her forward.
The wing bones of eight chickens are piled on his plate. Sixteen. She knows the number from the menu. He drops her wrist and puts his hand on the outside of her thigh, moves it up and down. “There are real nice pants. Real smooth.”
She should leave before her memory of the old Mr Carter is corrupted completely, but her feet feel very far away; she’s not sure they’d move if she told them to.
The restaurant is almost empty, so no one sees his hand move to her inner thigh. His movements are slow, surprisingly measured. Eve feels light-headed. That leg is not hers, she thinks vaguely, she cannot feel it. She focuses on the plate of bones instead. They make her sad in a way that is at least familiar. The hopelessness of them, piled carelessly, is a calming weight in her chest. Chicken bones. Like finger bones. The hand on her leg will not last either.
“Let me clear these for you.”
Suddenly he looks disoriented, hearing her voice. He peers, trying to bring her into focus. His hand stills.
Just then Cathy returns, placing a beer on the table. “Eve?” She says.
“Eve?” He withdraws his hand like he’s been stung. “Fuck. Eve,” he says to his plate. He picks up a serviette. Folds and unfolds it. “The last time… You were a kid. You can’t be…”
“What’s going on?” Cathy asks.
“We, um, we knew each other. Know each other.”
Mr Carter looks smaller. “Aren’t you too young? To work here? Matty’s only fifteen.” “Sixteen.”
“Shit, I mean sixteen.”
Eve turns to Cathy. “Mr Carter was my swimming coach in primary school. I was friends with his son.”
“Oh. Okay, great! You two catch up. It’s quiet anyway.”
***
In the winters the pool was heated and only half of the insulation mats were removed for the juniors’ training. Under the mats there was little light, especially further in, and the other children fought to avoid the lane closest to the darkness. But after practice, when the pool was empty and Mr Carter was packing away the kickboards, Matthew and Eve swam in and out beneath the covers. Deep in the warm shadows they held their breath and, almost blind, touched each other’s faces. He ran his fingertips across her closed eyelids so she could feel their wrinkled prints, and she pressed her palms against his cheeks until a stream of bubbles spooled from his mouth. Then they burst through the nearest gap in the mats, gasping, laughing so deeply that the feeling of it stayed in their ribs until Mr Carter said it was time to get out.
***
“Do you want to sit down?” He sounds like an anxious child. He shuffles the things on the table, pushes them to the side.
Eve sits across from him. When she was little and her parents fought, she learned to imagine that the air around her was pushing against her body from every direction, holding her in place.
“I can’t believe I didn’t recognise you.” He’s hunched over the table. The stale smell of beer makes her want to throw up. He curls the serviette around his index finger. “It’s been so long.”
Not that long, she thinks, but long enough that Mr Carter’s face has changed. No longer tanned, not bright-eyed and freckled like Matthew’s had been.
“You guys got on so well. What happened? I know with him moving school… but it’s not that far from here. You still could’ve seen each other.” He pauses. The thought of his son has lifted his shame. “But he’s loving it there. He’s on the A team. And he can really tackle. Took a couple of big boys down last weekend. Here, look at this.” He fumbles for his phone.
She remembers Matthew as dappled with bruises. Here, on the calf, they had rolled down the slope to the cricket field. On the elbow, they’d fallen off a skateboard on the promenade. The ankle, a doorframe. The knee, a slippery stone in the river beneath their school. Bruised and battered, the both of them.
In the photos, Matthew looks taller, his hair darker. The first shows a row of boys, shoulder to shoulder in maroon rugby kit. Matthew is in the centre and although the boys are unsmiling, the corners of his mouth give him away. The second is a photograph of a photograph, a headshot taken by the school. The glossy paper reflects the light, obscuring his chin. In another, Matthew is grinning, mid-step, pointing a squash racket at someone out of frame.
Mr Carter talks incessantly through a few more photos until, without warning, his voice quavers. “I didn’t know, I swear. That it was you. If you talk to Matty… please don’t… You look different, that’s why. Your hair is different, so I didn’t know. Don’t tell him, okay? He has enough shit to hold against me.” He is still distractedly scrolling through the pictures, and his son is getting younger in each one. She wonders if she’ll see the Matthew she remembers.
***
The last time she saw Matthew was in the Christmas holidays after sixth grade. Mr Carter threw coins into the pool for them to dive for and Mrs Carter roasted a chicken for lunch. When they ran past her, wrapped in towels and dripping, she held up a handful of stuffing in a way that told them to slow down.
In his room, they pulled their clothes over their swimming costumes. Pushing her wet hair out of her eyes, Eve moved towards the door but Matthew said to wait.
“Sit on the bed and close your eyes.” He said, and she did, holding out her small hands thinking of some trinket gift. Instead, he kissed her and she smelled chlorine. His lips were cold and foreign. She pulled away and puffed out her cheeks to make a silly face. They laughed.
“But seriously.” He said, putting his hands on her cheeks to prevent their inflation. She laughed again, uncertain, and he leaned in, pushing his tongue into her mouth. His teeth caught against her lower lip. This time, when she moved her head backwards, he followed, as though hungry. In her lap, her fingers curled and straightened in small, irregular movements. She could feel the damp of her costume spreading through her shorts and into the duvet beneath her.
“You’re supposed to kiss me back.”
“Let’s do something else.” She wriggled away slightly.
“Okay, how about this.” He put his hand under her shirt, flat against her stomach.
She sat up straight, breathing in, and gripped his wrist with both hands to pull it away from her. She tried to remember to smile. “Something else.”
“Fine.” He stood abruptly. “It’s that or the mouse game. You have to choose.”
“The mouse game. How does it go?”
On the far side of his bedroom were two terrariums. In the bigger one were a plastic bush, a piece of driftwood, a blue water bowl, and a snake. In the smaller one, next to the snake like a view through a window, were five baby mice.
“You pick first.” He said, flexing his hands in excitement. When he smiled, she could see his one skew tooth, angled forward. It had never before looked like something capable of doing harm.
“How does the game work?”
“Just pick. They’re going to race.”
She pointed to the smallest one, so new to the world that it hadn’t opened its eyes yet. She didn’t care about winning. He placed the mouse in her hand. Its pink belly settled warmly in the curve of her palm. Its legs moved blindly, flailing.
“How can it race? It’s too little.”
“Just wait.” He said, holding his own mouse in one hand and shifting the lid of the second terrarium with the other. “We have to put them in at the same time. So no one has an advantage. Whoever’s lasts longer wins.”
Her fingers closed in a cage around the small creature, now asleep.
“You want to change your choice?”
The question felt like it had been posed to her underwater. The sound of it was dulled and it seemed to wash against her face as though it had displaced the air between them. She wasn’t sure which choice he meant.
She thought of his tongue, alien in her mouth, and his hands, suddenly greedy, no longer a child’s. In his look, she had seen the seed of something previously unglimpsed take root. She had not thought it would feel like that.
In her palm the mouse slept on. She looked at it and she thought, you are doomed. The snake will have you. If not today, then tomorrow, or the day after. What future is there for you? If I save you now it will not last. Forgive me.
Her mouse lost the race. The snake ate it head-first, mouth opening in a wide grin to accommodate the shoulders. There was a struggle, of course. The mouse wriggled until it was gone, the shape of it still whole in the snake’s throat. Its tail flicked from the snake’s mouth like an extra tongue. Eve thought she could taste the blood.
At lunch, poking the chicken around her plate, Mrs Carter asked if she was alright.
“Yes, I’m fine.” She said, smiling.
***
“You won’t tell him, will you?” Mr Carter asks again, eyes pleading.
“Can I clear these for you?” Eve stands, reaching for the empty glass and plate. The bones, bare even of cartilage, are left to carry some hidden structure, remote as the silent sky. He nods and she walks away.