Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

He isn't really happy with anyone.

A bag. He needs a paper bag now, doesn't he? There's not much fucking point, he thinks-and then goes back and deletes the "fucking"-there's not much point in picking up a few hundred pieces of broken glass without having something to put them in.

He gets up, hearing his knees pop in a way they didn't used to, and returns to the kitchen. The paper supermarket bags are neatly folded into thirds and pressed flat, then jammed by Rose into the space between the side of the stove and the counter, in such high numbers that they've reached the kind of superdensity that Rafferty associates with collapsed stars. It takes him three or four minutes to tease one out, and when he's worked the corner free and is tugging it, it promptly tears off in his hand. The rest of the bag remains, pristine and unmolested, in the cramp of brown paper between the oven and the counter.

He crouches there, the kitchen floor vaguely tacky under the soles of his shoes, and looks down at the little corner of bag in his hand. Then he gets up, deliberately drops the tiny piece of paper on the floor, and grinds it beneath his shoe. That chore done, he puts both hands against the edge of the stove and shoves it with every ounce of strength he possesses, into the side of the pantry.

The stove has only a couple of inches to travel, but it accelerates surprisingly and creates a rewarding wham when it hits the pantry wall. The smell of old grease wafts invisibly upward. Lazily, as if in slow motion, the bags that had been jammed between the counter and the side of the stove fan out like a hand in gin rummy and then spill onto the kitchen floor in a slippery cascade. Some of them manage to slide all the way to the counter on the room's far side.

Isn't gin rummy an alcoholic-sounding game? Rafferty thinks as he uses the soles of his shoes to stretch, mark, and tear as many of the bags as possible. Gin and rum, all in one game-and a game that kids play, at that. Have to look into the origins of the name sometime. This is precisely the kind of thing the Oxford English Dictionary is for, not that he has an Oxford English Dictionary. What he has, at the moment at least, is an apartment that is easy to visualize as a map, complete with borders, heavily defended borders, dividing the independent nations that fight over the space: Roseland, Miaowistan, and the Kingdom of Poke. Crossing these borders involves negotiation, checkpoints, and body-cavity searches. And even then you might be turned away.

"I didn't sign on for this," he says aloud.

He picks up the single bag that's survived his shoes-obviously the sturdiest bag of all, and it has to be sturdy to hold this much broken glass without shredding, so he can tell Rose, assuming he ever speaks to her again, that he was testing the bags to find the one that would keep them safe from the shards. Safe from the shards, safe from the shards. He totes the shard-safe bag into the living room, where he sees the broom and dustpan right where he put them a year or two ago, and he sets the bag down, sweeps some glass into the dustpan, tries three times to sweep in one larger piece that doesn't want to be swept, bends down to shove it into the dustpan, and…

… slices the pad of his thumb.

In one white-hot movement, he drops the piece of glass, drops the dustpan, grabs his thumb and squeezes it, all the while straightening his knees and his back, coming up until he's standing and whirling in a circle against the pain, swinging the bleeding thumb fast enough to create a zigzag Jackson Pollock lighting strike of blood on the white wall beside the door. He steps sideways and bangs his bandaged elbow against the wall to his left, and the next thing he knows, he's kicking the dustpan as hard as he can and it's sailing across the room straight and true, shedding splinters of glass as it gains altitude, until it bangs up against the door to the bedroom. It flips over and spills all the glass he's swept up, directly onto the carpet in front of the bedroom door.

A moment later the door opens, and Rose stands there. She sees the blood on the wall, sees him folded over in pain, and steps into the room at the precise instant he realizes that she's barefoot.

"No!" he shouts.

Rose says "Uuuuiiiii, uuuuiiiii!" and grabs her right foot. She looks at the bottom of the foot, and she's bleeding.

Rafferty feels something swell inside him, low in his belly, and then there's some kind of pressure forcing its way up, and suddenly he's laughing. The laughter reaches down and brings more laughter with it, and he's standing there, still bent over, injured elbow tight against his side, squeezing his sliced thumb, simultaneously laughing like a fool and blinking away tears as Rose, her foot still in her hand, glares down at the hazardous litter on the carpet in front of her, clenches her teeth, bends the knee of the leg she's standing on, and jumps over the spill of glass. She lands on one leg, windmills her free arm to stay up, and manages to remain standing, and then she's laughing, too, and Rafferty moves crablike, still bent forward, across the room to her, and he puts his unbandaged arm around her, pointing the bleeding thumb away to keep the blood off her clothes, and the two of them lean against each other and laugh until Rose starts to cry.

Very slowly, very carefully, Rafferty maneuvers her to the couch, Rose taking small, backward, one-legged hops, and gets her seated. He kneels in front of her and cups her face in his hands, painting a bright brushstroke of blood across her cheek, as she closes her eyes and weeps, bringing her own hands up to hold his wrists. He leans toward her until their foreheads are touching, his hands still cradling her face. She makes an enormous snuffling sound, and he laughs again, although his own cheeks are cool and wet. Rose's sobbing turns into a laugh and then a hiccup, and Rafferty says, "Look at us."

Rose pulls back enough to pass her arm over her cheeks and sees the blood she's smeared on her arm. "We're both bleeding."

Rafferty says, "Are we ever."

He feels a presence and turns to his left to see Miaow and Pim standing there, staring at them, eyes wide and faces wide open.

Rose snuffles again and then wipes her nose on the back of her hand. "Okay," she says. "It's time."

Pim backs away from the crying, laughing people on the couch. She puts a hand behind her for the doorknob and says, "Thank you for a nice afternoon."

"You might as well stay," Rose says. "You need to hear this as much as they do."

"But I have to-"

Rose sails over her with a single breath. "No you don't. You need to know about this. You must be hungry, right? Well, Poke's going to bandage his thumb and bring me a bandage for my foot, and then he's going down to get us all some takeout from the street vendors. You and Miaow can go down with him to help him carry it all. Get a lot, because this is going to take a long time."

Miaow looks suspicious. "What're you going to do?"

Rose reaches over and brushes Rafferty's hair off his forehead, then raises her hand as though she's going to swat him. "Be Poke's wife," she says. "Wipe blood off walls. Sweep glass."

Afternoon sunlight sparkles off the stones on her fingers and at her wrists.

Kwan watches as the young woman leads a small parade of children, the bolder ones pushing forward for a closer look as though she's fallen to the dust from outer space, as though some of them hadn't known her when she was as brown and filthy as they are. The children wear patched shorts and dirt-brown T-shirts, liberally ventilated with holes. Their feet are bare or slap along on rubber flip-flops. Scabs define their knees, and their legs are lumped and mottled from insect bites. One of them, not one of the bolder ones, is Kwan's next-youngest sister, Mai. At thirteen, Mai is one of the tallest children in the queue, but that's because she's older than most of them. She hasn't yet had the growth spurt her mother dreads, the spurt that says that Mai may yet become as freakishly tall as Kwan.