TURBINE | KAPOHAU

PART I                                                         

 

A date bluetooths his speaker from his watch so we can have what he calls rhythm.  

Rhythm.  

My boxing coach syncing his hand pads with my blows, numeric sequences he calls out, repeated, left-right-left-uppercut, biff, biff, biff, Smack. ‘Good, Lark.’  

After rhythm, when you blur into a flurry of swipes, and you know you have lost. 

The full body torque of ‘to hit’.                                                                       

 

Date grabs a fist of my hair and yanks my head into his crotch. 

 

When I’m stood facing him, this tank of a softie, I tell him it was weird, the young boxer saying, ‘think of training as self-defence’ to a class of women. 

Date doesn’t follow. 

I hold my hands like a saucer. ‘Women lift weights like this.’ I hug a barrel. ‘Men lift this. Self-defence is a mental thing. It’s weird my trainer thinks his class does
anything.’                                                        

                                                                 

PART II 

 

‘If you’re bitching up—’ A new date, a boxer, demonstrates [unhelpful] tension.          

 

‘Bring it in, Lark.’ Offers hug by way of introduction. 

 

Lark and Boxer drank: Summit Ultra, two jugs of. In a sports bar. 

His fingernails kempt. He mimes inserting a tool down a shaft, 24m down. That’s deep. 

‘That’s deep,’ Lark says.      

 

‘You want me to kiss you.’ Fish kisses air. 

‘Don’t do that.’ Rolls her
eyes.                                                                                                               

                                                                

The next day, Lark replies to her brother-confidante, ‘Yeah, but also some of what’s not for you will not go by you.’ Mentions [not] keeping a straight face while [not] passing as a chick a boxer/drill operator would pick up in a sports bar, and yet. 

‘Bwahahahha well there’s that.’                                                                                                                        

 

Surprise surprise. 1. The boxer/drill operator is actually good looking in the bar 2. shows off (they always get it wrong) with numerology 3. holds his own 4. has no lazy eye but grunts when he fucks, ‘Rookie!’ Lark calls, ‘That was fast,’ unimpressed, no longer needing to earn him.   

Under lamplight. Boxer looked disgusted at her, like an apostle.            

                              

Lark, you sound cynical.                                                                               

 

I feel festive about hungering for the good and bad surprises in dates! 

Out of self-defence? 

In levity — their personalities being entirely beyond me.                                                                                                  

 

She’d poured him the start of a beer badly, foam rose. ‘Argh, I’m giving you so much head.’ She kept pouring. 

He didn’t crack up but he smiled.                                                                                                                                                                         

 

Ethical whatever is not taking advantage of the wholesome guys to whom it’d mean something. 

                                                                                                                                                        

Boxer didn’t show his hand. Except, ‘Nah, you’re okay,’ he said periodically, palms on his thighs, apropos of nothing. Like, fuckable. Appraising her. In a bored way. To her face.                                                

 

 

PART III                                                                      

 

Morning. Sun shines. Scrubs blood off the carpet with soap. 

 

Fuck me I got good mileage out of that honesty, calling Boxer out on lazy sex. This time he brought it.                                                                                                                                                          

–                                        

                                                                                                                                   

In the heat of [  ] my calves are stretched. I can’t think of the word for the type of reps that tightened them. I senselessly urge him on. Blurt, ‘Deadlift!’ He laughs midthrust. 

 

When he’s dressed and zipped up his hoodie, he asks me if I box loose, meaning my clench. 

‘You said about this last time too.’ I mimic his ‘bitching up’ pose. 

He loosens his wrists. ‘Tuck your elbows into your gut,’ he says, fists inward. ‘Wedge them in there.’                                                                           

‘Like, brace them.’  

‘Yeah. That’s how you want to be all the time. Saves you energy.’ He slow-motions throwing a punch. ‘You just tighten at the last moment, the shot.’ 

 

Boxer’s a drill operator (this is relevant) for finding water tables before foundations are laid for new builds. Big projects. A private hospital this time. His work has put him and his two crew up in an AirBnB in Māori Hill.

‘Heh, the rich part of town,’ I say. 

‘Yeh. I thought so!’                                                                                                     

‘Purebred dogs?’                                                                         

‘Fancy dogs. Older women who are happy.’ 

‘That’s a thing?’ I laugh. ‘I mean, older women being happy signals prosperity?’ 

‘And the cars. Fiats, Audis. There’s a Church of God.’ 

Boxer, however, wants to know the slums of this city. 

‘In case they’re better than the Ōtau- than the Christchurch ones?’ I ask. ‘South Dunedin is a poorer quarter. Gets sun.’                                                                                

‘You find rats in bandanas and shit?’ He grins. 

‘Your
people?’                                                                                                                                                             

 

Our experiences of being on acid are incomparable. We compare them.  

For him, butterflies on TV went fractal then fired machine guns. It was too much. He went to pour a glass of water but got stuck in a loop— 

‘Your fine motor skills—’ 

He tried to sleep but, crawls his hands over his body— 

‘Another wave—’ 

hit and he… Boxer’s memory tails off. 

‘We get so normalised to our bodies and our psyches. It’s cool when drugs disrupt that and we glimpse… I dunno. It’s real though.’ I’m in equilibrium, sitting on the back top of a reversed chair, my feet on the coffee table. Boxer lounges naked too, taking up the whole couch in a crude, manly, open spread. I clap my face. ‘I can’t believe you did acid watching TV!’ I contrast being in the bush, ‘The lifeforce in things! My God. Like, auras. It’s weird afterwards, to know all that lifeforce is around and in an ordinary state we just—’ the hedgerow tosses in the streetlight outside — ‘can’t see it.’                                                                                                             

                                             

Boxer tells me about MDMA. ‘You’re really social for like 15 minutes then it’s like there’s this drip in the back of your throat, with this drug taste.’ 

‘Ew. How long does that last?’ Wry smile. ‘More than 15 minutes?’ 

‘You make friends with it.’                                                                          

And your face dismorphs, he demonstrates. It’s not a great look. 

‘But you feel great, you don’t know your face looks like that.’ 

‘So you either do it with really good friends, or total strangers,’ I say. 

He raises the neck of his hoodie. ‘You mask up. Sunglasses.’ 

 

He likes the way I [  ] after I [  ]. 

Really? Other female bodies don’t reflex like that?                                                                                        

‘You kiss!’ I say. ‘You’re a kisser.’ This is perhaps overstating it. He is a wet, forceful kisser. No call-and-response in there. 

He takes the compliment though. ‘You’re good with kissing, you do those [little things] with [the tip of] your tongue.’         

I take the compliment. I share my restless fact. ‘I didn’t have my first kiss till I was 22.’ 

‘Hey that’s cool.’ Boxer’s quiet. ‘I guess I got sexualized pretty young.’ 

We have a predictable conversation about kids running around in the streets, the pressure to brag to mates, that not being sex sex, and then Boxer goes off into something about memorable sex, or memorable partners, or crazy partners and since they don’t know they’re crazy you don’t know whether you’re crazy
yourself.                                                                                                    

‘Wait? Do you mean the sex is crazy or the person?’ 

‘Yeah.’                                                                                                                             

‘Do you mean you warn each other?’ 

‘You go apart. But, like, you needed to, it changed you.’                                                                                                                                                         

‘She changed you?’ 

‘Yeah.’ Boxer looks up at the ceiling.                           

 

My threaten-you voice, is how I express pleasure [desire] [urgency] during sex. Like trying to clamp something in your teeth. It’s a grinding way of vocalising, expressing support exhorting threatening into as a beneficiary of, a dependant, a collaborator.  

 

Boxing my gym partner’s mitts the next morning, a bead of wet weighs its way down my face from my nostril slowly, like blood, and the partner smiles at my mitts (I can’t wipe my nose). I go harder, smack, ‘Good.’ He curses it, his own hair slick with sweat.                                                                                                            

 

PART IIII 

 

Lark’s into rap and Lark’s into Boxer a man of that world, a world she couldn’t assimilate into. She can’t say she fucks Boxer, that’s not the dynamic, but she ensures she’s fucked by him whenever he’s in town on some contract. She props herself up on his shoulders in the hallway and kicks with delight about the rat’s tail behind his short, coarse hair. Slow, he tells himself aloud as she backs him against the wall. He says it already breathing heavily. When he’s away she stalls in the garage not turning off the student radio (rap) or she stands on an outdoor table and smokes a cigarette. Boxer disqualifies Lark from being quite so middle class.  

Her mug half-full of coffee clunks against the pot plant as she lifts it out and carries it up to those redundant steps behind her house, the old stoop that gives her a view of the world’s coldest ocean through a furred spray of pink mallow.  

How can I climb onto my roof, she
wonders.                                                                                           

 

She may have inherited an interest-free mortgage in her thirties and she might need to get that off her chest.