Three Hearts Beating Once
CLAIRE BUICK
In the salt-bitten suburbia where Nicolas grew up, the first magical thing he ever saw was an octopus. A Martian, a mythical mollusc, beginning a life-long obsession. First came the facts, learning everything scientific back to front, then the occult, clutching various self-made amulets after school in the pool, visualising tentacles sprouting from shoulder sockets and suckers forming from his toes. It took months of trying before he gave up.
When Nic was eleven, he read a poem by Dr Earl Reum for a class assignment that made all the other students uncomfortable and made his teacher pull him aside afterward. Kids he used to sit with on the playground were unable to look him in the eyes, and he began eating lunch in bathroom stalls. He thought the poem was beautiful.
High school commenced and the octopus obsession didn’t cease, and he began solo bus trips to the beach on weekends, goggle-clad to scour the rockpools. Solace from other students was found in the 590s of the library floor, the rough carpet turning to sand and boys’ hoots from outside to sailors drinking the salt air.
Nic blossomed into a talented pianist, and when he wasn’t tracing tentacle tattoos into his arms with ballpoint pens, his horns were locked with the head of the music department, the two arguing over whether or not he would be able to play a classically-reimagined 'Crazy Train' for his final exams. He won out, naturally. Adults often found it difficult to say no to him, intelligent beyond his years but so obviously socially alienated.
That same year Nic met Nancy. He bought pot off a guy in a band called Contamination Station. The pot was rough but he kept buying it anyway, and he spent many summer afternoons smoking in the caves by the beach when all the octopodes had floated back out to sea.
Contamination Station were playing at Dulwich Hill; the front door plastered in band stickers, dingy bar stools surrounding the stage, a jungle of leads with amps for landmarks.
Nancy appears in red flashes of LEDs, a dirty fuchsia skirt here, a bedazzled belt there, glittery in eye makeup. They get bashed around, dragged into the mosh like a rip at sea, and Nic crashes himself closer and closer to her like a tide, a moon-abiding pulsing beast of limbs. The song ends. He smiles at her, a grin full of crooked teeth, his hair stuck to his forehead, and he smells of teenage boy and beer.
The band is packing up. Nancy is standing nearby, getting tangled in leads as she tries to help wrap them. Nic clutches what courage he has to ask her name, which she mumbles, even when he asks again and leans down so she can speak directly into the conch of his ear, Nic being much taller than her, and lanky, a most attractive misanthrope. After a name mumbled and misheard again, she takes a sharp breath and begins to say something else, but her lips shut like a clam and she pulls away to stare at Nic, for too long, false lashes almost touching over-shaved eyebrows. He doesn’t ask her what she was about to say.
Eventually, their hands find each other, a sweaty conglomeration, and Nic pulls her into the hallway, where she offers a cigarette. He lights hers before his own. A gaggle of glittery girls squirm past and he pulls her closer to him, nonchalant, the unspoken excuse of making more room for the crowd. But he doesn’t move away, not even after their giggles have dissipated. He tilts her chin up to kiss him, and it’s slimy.
That winter, they rent an apartment, a mish-mosh of bohemian rugs that do their best to smooth out the death-trap floorboards, liminal lighting into a black and white film, a perpetually unmade bed and Nic’s old keyboard. They roll joints and make love, her skirt shucked up her torso and fingers roaming his back, finding handholds in his scapulas like a rock climber. When he asks her if it hurts, she says no. He places kisses all over her body, his lips becoming a sucker’s infundibulum, creating a film.
On weekends they visit the beach, shuffling in the cold sand, hair whipping and hand in hand. He tells her that the blue ringed octopus has enough venom to kill twenty-six adult humans. Nancy gawps, and asks him if he knows that lobsters, if they aren’t killed by predators, die from exhaustion, as their cells continue to regenerate until they become too big to be able to moult out of their shells. Nic wonders where the hell she heard that, and smiles, shaking his head.
Once, on a stormy day when summer was only just clinging on by a thread, they went swimming together and got caught in a rip. Nic is a strong swimmer and could hold his ground, but Nancy’s feet are swept off the ocean floor and her hand ripped from his. She tries to dogpaddle back towards him, too late. A wave sends her crashing into a rocky outcrop that bursts from nowhere, again and again. Her feet slip on the slick seaweed, and her dark hair pours into her mouth and chokes her as she tumbles in this humungous washing machine, until Nic finally catches her and carries her bleeding body back to shore. He apologised, over and over, even after Nancy had stopped spewing seawater enough to tell him she was fine. But since then, she’s only ever swum up to her knees.
Nicolas strives for the peace of the ocean. He and Nancy lie in bed, white comforter blossoming around them like foam, the window left open to let in the view of the street far below, street lamps sputtering, muttering, a reprise of the poetry studied in a school far too many years ago.
“Did I ever tell you about the first time I tried cocaine?"
Nancy reasserts herself on the bed, shifting her head that’s resting in the crook of his arm to peek up at him, drawing her knees closer to his body.
“No, I don’t think so.” Her eyes are wide.
Nic tells her about how he could feel his heart rattling around his ribcage, his head buzzing with a kind of static electricity. Nancy wraps a slim hand tightly around his middle.
“Have you ever tried it since?”
He says no, and sighs. “Do you love me less because of it?”
She pauses, contemplative. “How could I? It’s a way to cope, a mask of a deeper problem. We use the tools that are given to us.”
Moments pass. Nancy asks timidly, “Do you think we should open a window? I think something’s gone off.”
Nic doesn’t reply, and Nancy drifts into sleep. He isn’t sure if he believes her.
Nancy begins seeing Contamination Station by herself. Nic begins rummaging through rubbish bins. Nancy asks him what he's looking for. Nic doesn't say anything.
Nic’s parents are asking when they might finally meet Nancy. Nic tells them later, soon, he’s busy. They don't push.
Nic swims in the ocean by himself, day after day. He develops hypothermia. Lying in the hospital bed by himself, a nurse asks him if there's anyone they can call to let them know what's happened. Nic tells them, Nancy.
'What’s Nancy's number sweetheart?'
'No number.'
'Maybe an address?'
He falls back asleep. No Nancy appears to pick him up from the hospital and Nic checks himself out, catching the bus back home.
Days pass. Nic’s parents arrive at the apartment to check on him. Nic shoves needles under rugs so thick with dust they're almost glued to the floor. Nancy must have gone out. Where to? Nic doesn't know. His mother dismisses this, and instead rushes to throw open the musty curtains, disdainful, holding her nose. Nic squints, but doesn't have the energy to protest. He gets them out as quick as he can, before they can see the mold growing on the cutlery, the shattered lightbulb in the bathtub, the mice that have made their homes in the gaps of the skirting boards.
Nic sells the bed to pay for drugs. They sleep on the floor. Nic talks to Nancy about isopods and vampire squid. She doesn't say anything back. Nic can’t force her to reply. He shoots up methamphetamine in the morning, when he wakes to find Nancy gone.
Nic sits in the caves by the ocean and writes poetry to her.
He goes back to Dulwich Hill, looking for a girl in a pink skirt, asking the bartender who looks at him contemptuously before telling him to get lost. Nic chain-smokes on the long walk back home, peering around every corner.
He drudges through weeks before going to the police. Without a surname or a phone number, they can't do much to find a missing Nancy. Nic shouts at them before he is escorted roughly from the premises.
Nancy appears in Nic’s dreams. In them, they drink coffee and go to poetry readings, and he recites that poem by Dr Earl Reum, and Nancy cries and tells him that it’s beautiful.
Nic burns the poetry he wrote for Nancy, then scatters the ashes in the ocean, all the while chanting spells from his witchcraft days, in the hopes that this literal casting out will dispel her from his mind.
He lies on the floor in the sinking sunlight, floorboards digging into his back, that become a girl’s fingernails, that go back to being boards. He remembers how easy it was to visualize her.
Spellcasting proving fruitless, Nic tears the apartment limb from limb, looking for anything that might belong to her; a ribbon, a notebook, a crumpled pair of cotton underwear, a single sock. Nothing. He trips over spilled drawers, mouse shit, into curtains that wrap around him oppressively before crashing down.
Nancy materialises by the brine while Nic lets himself be throttled by the freezing waves, floating around him like a wraith, a siren. Nic holds his breath until it burns, because to fight for the surface would be to live again without her. Nic thinks a million thoughts. He’s finally dumped on the shore, vomiting water so black it looks like ink.
Nic remembers the first time she appeared to him in a spectacular vision. He remembers the girls in the hallway who ran through his cigarette smoke, looking at him superciliously before pushing past. He remembers the first time he ever saw an octopus. That was real magic. He remembers when he told Nancy about doing coke for the first time, and her thoughtful admission. He remembers later, being high as hell, and her not saying anything because he couldn't think up anything for her to say. Nic remembers that a blue-ringed octopus has enough venom to kill 26 people. He doesn't say that fact aloud to himself this time. He remembers how lobsters die, he learnt that in high school. He remembers being in the hospital after being smashed against the rocks, blood mixing with salt water, thinking only of a girl, and he gave her elbows and hair and thought how easy it was to think up a character on morphine. Nic thinks in conversation with himself. What else is there to do when you are alone? Life only means anything when it is embedded with the lives of others. What else is a day if not measured against a friend’s? He thinks of his crustacean companions on the school library floor. They could talk, even though he knew it was scientifically impossible. Thought is the only real truth of life.
The moon shatters itself in waves that lap against Nic’s body, almost in apology. He doesn’t resist when Nancy wraps her fingers, calloused and thick, the hands of a pianist, then multiplying, ten becoming eighty, bruised and blue, around his throat, squeezing. Pressure builds, then releases, and for the first time, Nic feels the magic of peace.
Claire Buick throttles her keyboard in the backrooms of the hairdressers, when she's not running around with scissors in one hand and bleach in the other. She's had six career changes since graduating, but finds peace in exploring the chaos of daily life in her miserably gruesome short stories.
