"Hey what happened to that ring I gave you? Remember?" She lifted her head up and flicked dark hair back across her shoulders.
"What ring? Sorry, I was drifting; somewhere else." As if there was more than one - and somewhere else?
"You know, the one in the shape of a scarab, with the bits of lapis in the back.." They had found it together at the market; he remembered it as their first day out in public together. Such a small city, you couldn't go anywhere without meeting at least three people you knew. Of course in many ways that was what he liked about living there. It was easy like a village, even though it was the capital.
"Oh right." She peeled away from him and reached for a drink of water. "I gave it to Absinth."
"You what?" He felt like she'd thrown the glass of water over him. Absinth was her seventeen year old daughter. She was tall and lean like her father, friends everywhere, irresponsible, unkempt, eyes like spiders in the shadows of his mind. "But I gave you that. Remember?" She shrugged and stroked his chest. He could hear Absinth's laughter in his head and see the ring on her slim fingers.
"Well, you know what she's like, she just loved it, then started wearing it anyway. So I gave it to her." She stopped, thinking, her warm palm moving slowly over his left nipple. "Really I felt like it was a kind of birthday present, cause I couldn't afford to buy her the mountain bike when it was her birthday."
He got out of bed and dressed, looking through the curtains at the perfect day outside. She lay on one elbow looking at him , still only half-awake.
"Are you pissed off with me?" Her voice soft like a wave.
"Not really. Well, I dunno, disconcerted more than anything. I felt kind of like it was symbolic of us getting together."
"You're the one who's always saying that material things aren't important."
"OK. Yeah I do believe that, but you're missing the point." He felt the house shudder as his children slammed the front door. They called out up the stairs. Then silence, they had probably dashed into the kitchen to refuel, all that energy from the popcorn and ice-creams worn off the instant they stepped in the door.
He watched her as he tied his laces, and wished they had time to make love again. Thinking about Absinth always sent shivers, no waves, of lust through him. It was hardly the kind of thing he could talk about. Imagine - "Hey I really fancy your daughter, would you be hung up if I went out with her?" Ha ha.
Two days later he met Absinth outside the Video shop, she was hauling a squat white dog along on a string lead.
"Hi. Didn't know you had a dog."
"Nah. Belongs to a friend who's gone up to New Plymouth for a few days. His name's Snowy, you know, like in Tin Tin. He's real sweet too."
"Can't say he looks it. Reminds me more of one of the Beagle boys." He thought he could see the scarab ring on her index finger, in between the curly snake one she wore on her thumb and the amethyst on the middle one. She kept moving restlessly, tugging on the leash as the truculent little animal faced up to a passing Labrador, then growled at a thin guy in overalls coming out of Patels unwrapping a pie. Silver bracelets on her arms winked and flickered in the sunlight, and her small sharp nipples mocked him under a tattered black singlet.
He wanted to ask her about the ring, but couldn't find the right words, and before he could manage to she was gone, tugging the dog, so that it had to scurry on it's small legs to keep up with her. They disappeared around the corner by the butcher's shop. He stood on the edge of the traffic, his brain jumbled with images, her smile, and her legs wrapped around his, still wearing fishnet stockings filled with holes.
He sighed, and went in to try and focus on choosing a video. The titles blurred before his eyes. He couldn't remember what they'd seen. Together, or separately. Well, he could mostly remember what he'd seen, but there was no way he could remember all the ones she'd talked about. Sometimes she just talked and talked, so that he lost touch with the meaning of her words, they became a kind of background sound to the inner rhythm of his own thoughts. He wondered then if everyone lived like that. Finally he just grabbed a French film that sounded slightly funny, yet sexy, but intellectual enough to appear respectable.
"I saw it at the film festival." She muttered at him, after glancing at the title. "Remember, I told you all about it that night we went out to dinner in Kelburn.?"
"Oh of course. I got confused with all those poncy French titles." He opened one of the special reds out of his cellar to make up for it.
It didn't of course. It never did. After, they made love silently, as if all their children were in the next room listening. And somehow, he felt, that he was never quite good enough. Not sexually, but on those unsaid levels that make up relationships. The other realities. In the aftermath of sex his mind raced, speeding along unfamiliar tracks, like a biker on the wall of death, taking the dangerous options. He breathed deeply, eager for the familiar patterns of numb sleep to fall across his body.
But in his dreams a line of lapis blue scarab beetles made their patient way across landscapes of moving flesh.....
In the bright summer morning she was happy, smiling at him, passing toast and putting sugar in his tea. (His mother had once said, "You don't put sugar in someone else's tea, let them do it for themselves.")
"Why?" He stirred the tea, fast, some slopped into the saucer as he watched the swirls disappear.
"Why what darling?" She was gazing out the window. The leaves shimmered on the sycamore tree in the early morning sun.
"Why has your daughter still got that ring?" At least she didn't ask what ring. Sometimes he had a vision, of how people were. Some in control, some being controlled. Nah, that was too simple. Some sure of themselves. Some not. Some happy, some not. He felt he often had visions. Not necessarily big ones, sometimes just little insights, that flashed like sparks across his eyes from distant comets.
She leaned across and turned up the radio. He couldn't believe the song - 'What's wrong with Huntly?' Jesus. What was right with the whole goddamn country? He sipped his tea, feeling the universe spinning around him like a Tibetan merry-go round, filled with obese gods, their hands exploding with snakes and dragons.
"Christ you know, you're out of it sometimes." At least she got something right, even if all the background music was in the wrong key, even if..... What?
"I gave it to her, and if you give someone something, you don't ask for it back, well not in my book anyway." She stared at him, with the piercing imperious look that he'd got to know so well so quickly. He lowered his eyes and didn't speak. The radio blurred into a high guitar feedback. He didn't slam the door as he went out to work.
Absinth was down in Christchurch, at a funeral for yet another friend who'd overdosed quietly in a small dark room.
He got a frantic call at work.
"She's been arrested. I couldn't make it out, she was on a card phone. Surely you can do something, you've got friends down there?" His mind shrank back like a bamboo bending from the wind. Something like this was always happening. Well not always, but often enough......
"Darling, what do you expect from me? What can I do that you can't?" Even as he said it, he knew that it wasn't the right question.
"Jesus God that's just the sort of self-righteous babble I'd have expected from you. I don't want a bloody lecture, I just want my daughter out of jail!"
"All right calm down, I'll see what I can do." He put the phone down, sighed, and reached for his address book. He had been tempted to say that she probably deserved to be there, but he'd learnt across the years that truth was not always what people wanted to hear. It took most of the morning before he'd sorted the situation. He was left feeling irritable, jangled without really knowing why. Maybe it was all that time of Absinth in his thoughts, dreams of her long legs and sharp fingernails.
Absinth came round to his place a few days later, to mutter her thanks. She left a long-haired youth driving a white Rover outside. He smoked and stared into space, tapping his pale fingers against the door and the steering wheel.
"Hey I got a new tat down there, there's this really cool guy with a place just near the station." She hauled at her top and shrugged around towards him to display the snarling dragon that curled over her shoulder. "Got another one too, but you can't see that one." She grinned, standing close to him, her eyes bright. Then left after borrowing twenty dollars. The Rover's engine noise vibrated foreign in the narrow street. Her only jewellery had been a silver ring through her bottom lip. That was new too. When he came back into the room an hour later, he could still smell her, that combination of patchouli, sweat and tobacco that licked at his senses like a lizard.
He arrived for dinner on a Tuesday night, and stood opening a bottle of wine at the sideboard. A ripple of light caught his eye. There in a small blue and white porcelain dish sat the scarab ring. He turned towards her, stirring sauce at the stove, and held it up.
"What's this then?"
"Oh Absinth gave it back to me." She held the pot up to the light, and peered at the sauce. "Got tired of it she said, you know what she's like."
He gently eased the cork out, poured a taste of chardonnay, and sipped it with slow pleasure. He wished that all of his desires could be this easily satisfied.
"Not sure that I know what anyone's like. Really." She glanced at him briefly, as if to speak, then tipped the sauce into a casserole of vegetables. They ate the meal slowly, in a silence companionable yet empty.
He dreamed of multicoloured tattoos.
Upthrust nipples pierced with silver rings, stared at him from a silence slit with echoes and strange laughter.