The Same Woman (8 page)

“About what?” She turned her back on him and lay facing the wall.

“You won't talk to me. Ever since we got back. Something is wrong and I can't fix it if I don't know what it is.”

She didn't say anything. He was starting to move towards her when she began speaking again.

“Did you think this was going to be easy, this getting back together, that you could just say, oh, I'm sorry, and everything would be okay?”

“No, but I didn't expect to get the silent treatment!”

“I'm not giving you the silent treatment.” Her voice warbled and he realised she was crying. He knelt down next to the couch. He followed the line of her spine with his finger in apology.

“Don't cry, Ruby.”

“I'm just so tired. I don't want to talk about it. It stresses me out.”

“Why? Why are you so tired?”

Like hopelessly knotted shoelace, Ruby's mind was bound to what Nal had said yesterday.
You didn't sugg est that he go and find someone to replace you with
. With agonising clarity, the months of miserable fuzz had been replaced with words for exactly what Tariq had done wrong.

“You replaced me,” she said into the couch cushion.

“What? What did you say?” She felt his breath stroking her neck. His tiniest movements could still undo her. They still reminded her of
how much they had loved each other.

After it ended on New Year's Day, she had tried to forget how much they loved each other. But her heart was addicted to the memory, hopelessly hopeful that it could get that love back. She was dragged back to Tariq by her bleating heart, full of memories and hope, but maybe not sense.

Love doesn't keep one shape, it shifts. Their love didn't end but it warped, from the pressure of things she had suggested and things he had done and things neither of them could say. That old love was something that she and her heart could see, but not have. It was like looking at a photograph of someone who had died.

Blindly she put her arms out for the warm body. She pulled him towards her. But even as she pressed her soggy face into his lap, she was overwhelmed by the chasm between then and now, and the sense that Ruby-and-Tariq was gone forever.

“Ruby, what is wrong?”

“I just want to be with you.”

“Ruby, I don't know what to do with you. One minute you're telling me to go away, the next minute you want to be with me.” She quickly withdrew her arms.

“Please Tariq.” Her crying turned into shaking. “I just think I should go to sleep. When I get up I'll feel better.”

He left her alone.

On the walk to the bar Ruby was grumpy because she had gotten up late, and didn't have enough time to get gussied. She was also grumpy that it mattered to her how she looked. Tariq took her hand and squeezed it, she squeezed back, but this crumb of affection didn't assure him that everything was okay.

The bar was decorated like a hunting den. A mounted moose's head hung over the draft taps, and paintings of deer and rabbits frolicking healthily plastered the walls. Instead of regular white light, the light bulbs were all painted a deep fleshy red colour. Under what Tariq hoped was a replica of a rifle, Ruby squealed happily to see her friends and her face turned round with smiles. Tariq said hello to everyone, and tried not to look aggravated, but she squandered her affection on her friends and then had none left for him. He walked away, heading to the bar to get a drink.

Octavia was unwrapping the little pile of birthday presents that her friends had placed at her table. She unwrapped a black box with a cellophane front that revealed tens of tiny little pasta bits shaped like penises.

“Whoohoo!” Isi cried, “Penis pasta!”

“Isi, you're only supposed to give people penis pasta at bachelor parties,” Octavia protested.

“Yeah, but they're made of organic spelt! This is an anytime gift!”

It was reggae night and the DJ played slowed down beats that copied the rhythm of a heart. “Pour Ruby into the pitcher!” Octavia ordered, drunken and mangling language into strange images. Someone gave Ruby a pint. The dim light and the liquor dulled Ruby's grief and she was glad. She smiled at distant conversations, drifted and imagined herself floating peacefully in a green pond.

Octavia sat beside her in the red plush booth and squeezed her arm.

“I'm so happy that you're back,” Octavia said.

“Me too,” Ruby lied convincingly and squeezed her arm back. She wanted so much for it to be true. Where was Tariq, she wondered. In her dulled state she wanted to find him and give him a kiss.

She got up from the booth, and considered drinking all the time. When she was tipsy the effort of pretending to be sober kept her mind off everything else.

Before she left the city, she had been a regular at this bar. She had learned how to play pool here. She had kissed her first adult boyfriend in the stairwell by the bathrooms, and had never been able to walk down there since without remembering the breathlessness and the feeling of his forehead resting against her own for the first time. Two people were sitting on the stairs, which seemed like a bad idea in such a narrow staircase.

Ruby kept walking. Two doormen were blocking the entrance, checking identification, even though almost everyone in the bar was over 25.

“Is that Ruby?” One of them said. “Hey Ruby!” It was Yousuke. He had been a bouncer at the first bar Ruby worked at. He was tall and lean and beautiful.

“It's so good to see you honey,” he leaned down from what seemed
like mountainous heights to kiss her on the cheek. “I didn't even know you were back!”

“You know me, like a bad penny,” Ruby said, and immediately regretted it.

“I saw Tariq a few minutes ago. You guys are still together?”

“Way to cut to the chase buddy,” the other bouncer snorted.

“Oh well, you know, we weathered the storm,” Ruby cringed at her own words and asked herself why she couldn't stop talking like a fool.

“I guess it's my loss then,” Yousuke said and winked at his co-worker.

“It was nice to see you,” Ruby said, relieved that she had finally said something normal.

“You betcha,” he winked at her this time and she blushed, slightly embarrassed to be attracted to such a “man”.”

“I.D.s please.” Yousuke and his partner turned to check a group of three people who were coming in. Ruby glanced at them, and her bar-induced fuzziness stopped short. It was the boy who had danced across the café patio, Ronald, and Frankie.

Tariq was sitting at a stool in the middle of the bar. The bodies around him formed something like a rugby scrum, except their object of attention was beer instead of a ball.

He was watching an animated program playing on the TV set on the wall, trying to follow the dialogue by reading cartoon lips. Ruby pushed through the crush easily. She was extremely assertive when angry. Her chest and her cheeks felt like they were going to explode. Rage gushed inside her.

“I'm going to throw up,” she said to him. He put his arm around her and pulled her body to him, “Did you have too much to drink?”

“No,” she said and her voice was so laden with enraged tears that she could hardly say, “Frankie's here.” There was nothing to say beyond that. All the expletives in the world were useless tonight, too puny to convey her anger. When she did speak her voice seethed through her teeth, so soft that Tariq could not really hear her.

“She's here for Octavia's birthday. How fucking ridiculous is that? She's not friends with her. She knew I would be here. She knew you would be here. I don't know what she wants, I don't even care, I just
want her out of my face.” And then she said, every word choking out of her as if each was a sentence on its own, “I. Have. Had. Enough.”

Tariq looked over Ruby's shoulder, scanning the room for his ex-lover. He found her with her face turned away from him, talking to a coiffed skinny boy wearing a tiny tie. He had not seen her in two months. He didn't recognise any of the clothes that she was wearing. If she had seen him she showed no sign of it. It was like they had never known each other.

He turned his head, pressed his face into Ruby's hair and tried to keep the memories of the things he wished he hadn't done from spurting up, like bile.

“What are you doing?” Ruby jerked her head away from his face. She stared at him for a moment in disgust. “Maybe you want to go over and say hello?”

“No, Ruby, please.”

“Please what? What do you want to do?”

“Whatever you want to do, if you want to leave we can leave, if you want to stay, we'll stay.”

“I'm not leaving,” Ruby said, “It's my best friend's birthday. That girl just keeps on pushing me and pushing me, and some time soon I'm going to push back.”

“What are you talking about?” Tariq panicked in the face of such undiluted fury. He tried to talk her out of it. It was probably the worst thing he could've done.

“Maybe she just happened to come here tonight.”

“What?!” Ruby's voice went from a whisper to a scream, but as the night got later the music got louder and no one could hear her — except the bar staff who often hoped for drama like this to liven up a monotonous shift.

“Why does everyone keep on saying it's a coincidence? Did she just happen to stumble into the café where she knew Octavia worked? Did she just happen to stumble into your bed?” This high drama was too much for Tariq.

“I don't know what to say,” he said.

“Yeah, I know.” Ruby began to push her way out of the bar crowd and Tariq hopelessly let her go.

She was headed for Octavia and Isi, but when she got halfway
across the room, Ronald, Frankie, and the boy with the tiny tie who was actually called Aurelio, were at Octavia's table. Ruby was trapped on the dance floor between Tariq at the bar and Frankie at the table.

All the things Ruby had tried not to think about cascaded over her. Had Frankie ever come here with Tariq? Had he held her in one of the red plush booths and touched her back under her shirt with the same fingers and bones and skin that touched Ruby? How long had it taken Tariq's hands to forget Ruby?

Bodies swung around her. Though she was still, Ruby wasn't hesitant. She knew exactly what to do. A plan was ready in her mind as if it had always been there. Ruby headed straight for the front door.

Yousuke was talking to one of the few women in the bar who could've been under 25.

“Yousuke,” Ruby said, and smiled benevolently at the younger girl, who half-smiled and then stepped back, deftly hiding her annoyance.

“What's going on?” He put his hand on her back and she was aware that he could've held her entire torso in one hand. She leaned into him so that he could feel the warmth of her and the soft curves of her body against him. Ruby knew how to gain power over a man like Yousuke but she had rarely been willing to do it.

“There's a girl here who's been harassing me.”

“No way. Where is she?”

“She's at the table, talking to my friend, you remember Octavia?”

“Yeah, of course. Which girl is it?”

“She has long hair, she's standing up, in the black.”

“I see her.”

“I just,” Ruby paused dramatically. She slid her arm around Yousuke's waist, and stood on her toes so that she was speaking right into his ear, her lips brushing the skin on his neck. On some remote level of clarity she was sickened by Yousuke's cologne and how easy this was. “I feel scared. She came after me in the bathroom, and she said,” Ruby stopped. What did she say?

“It's okay honey,” Yousuke said. “Don't worry about it, I'll take care of it.”

“I guess she knows Tariq from some class, and she has an intense thing for him. I'm sorry to bug you, I just didn't know what else to do. But please,” Ruby turned her head and glanced at Frankie. She was
standing with her hands in her pockets, talking and smiling with another regular who had turned up at the bar. She looked so normal and sweet-natured that for a moment Ruby didn't think Yousuke would believe her. She said quickly, before she lost her nerve, “don't tell her that I asked you to do it, ok?”

“Of course. You never have to worry when I'm around.” He squeezed her tightly to him for a moment and Ruby felt intoxicated by this intimacy with a strange man who embodied all the things that women are expected to be attracted to. He released her and turned to the other bouncer, “I gotta go take care of something,” He was using a different voice from his usual conversational one. This one was deepened by authority. “You watch the door.”

Ruby walked back to the bar, slowly winding through the crowd. For a moment, out of the corner of her eye she watched the scene beginning to unfold at Octavia's table, arms moving, heads shaking “no”.

Then she turned her back and ordered a drink. When it came she wrapped her hands around it to try and stop them from shaking. She felt dizzy and weak. The door was only about ten feet from where she stood facing away from it. The crowd parted as Yousuke pulled Frankie out the door by the soft meaty part of her upper arm, and the retracting bodies pushed Ruby up against the counter, and hid her and her wobbling knees from Frankie, Ronald and Aurelio. She heard Ronald's voice protesting, “I'm positive that you got the wrong person,” and Yousuke in his powerful manly voice, “nope, I know what I'm doing brother. Let's go.”

Ruby stayed where she was for a while, taking deep breaths and trying to calm herself by tracing the grain of the wood bar top with her finger. She had done the wrong thing. But now she had gone too far into Revenge and she could not turn back. She stood with her elbow resting on the top of the bar, caught her tongue in her teeth and shifted her jaw to one side of her mouth. She channelled the fearsomeness of those high school girls who wait on the front steps of shopping malls, and make hard, threatening faces that dare you to fight them, their naïve belief in their own invincibility making them sublimely dangerous