Free Smoke in the Room by Emily Maguire Page A

die so live as though the future matters/you could drop dead any minute so live for the now.
    Adam knew he used to think that way himself, but now death had stopped being abstract. It had become personal and in the past tense; not a future event to hold off as long as possible, but a recent trauma his wife had endured. To worry about the inevitability of death was ridiculous. Death had already happened.
    But he could imagine that it hadn’t, that he could charge up into the cruel light and push through the crowds, peering into shady doorways and through shop windows, grabbing shoulders and spinning blonde-haired strangers until he found her, red-faced and wide-eyed and sweating and she wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and pressed her forehead to his and smiled while she kissed his smile and said
I got so lost
.Then,
then
, he would carry her down here to the tiled, fluorescent-lit cave and place her on this orange plastic seat so she could feel the carved vows of love on the back of her thighs and he would buy her a Coke and they would tell each other all the things that had happened and all the silly fears they had had while they were apart.

7.
    Katie’s heart sped up when Adam walked through the front door. She’d been waiting on the couch, her hair brushed and lips painted pink, a cask of red wine and two glasses on the table in front of her.
    â€˜I don’t want to talk,’ he said and walked past without even glancing in her direction.
    She listened to his feet pound along the hallway and flinched when she heard the lock of his door slide closed. She sat in the living room, trying not to breathe too loudly, trying to interpret the sounds from his room. Itching, she shuffled down the hall, leant against his door, imagined him leaning against the other side, wanting her to call out to him, wanting her to hold him and kiss his face and tell him it would all be fine.
    Then she heard what sounded like a burbling snore and stepped back. ‘Fuck you, then.’

    Dom was sitting exactly as he had been the last time Katie had been here: slumped in his corner booth, hair hanging over his face.
    â€˜Anyway, I was thinking,’ he said, as if she’d just returned from the dunny. ‘Sitting here and getting pissed all the time.’ He tapped the bottle in front of him. ‘What’s the point?’
    She took a swig of her beer. ‘So do something else if you don’t like it.’
    â€˜Like what? Put on a suit, sit behind a desk, pound away at a keyboard all day?’ His hands reared up in front of her face, fingers twitching.
    â€˜Or play the piano,’ said Katie, but he was too busy typing on his invisible, absurdly long keyboard to notice. ‘I’m thinking of getting a job, actually. In a clothes shop. I’d be good at it, I reckon. Helping people choose outfits, telling them how marvellous they look. Wrapping up their purchases in tissue paper with a big ribbon.’
    Dom snorted. ‘Bowing and scraping to materialistic bastards all day. Selling doctors’ wives five-hundred-buck T-shirts made by starving kids in the Third World.’
    â€˜Yep, exactly that, Dom. Exactly. Jesus.’
    â€˜Just telling it like it is, girl.’
    â€˜You being an expert on how it is.’
    He slid forward, resting his tilted-back head on the top of the bench seat. ‘You’re young. You’ll learn.’
    â€˜What will I learn?’
    Dom’s eyes were closed and his mouth open. Katie leant in and put her ear close to his mouth; his breath came soft and slow. The angle of his neck was all wrong; she wished he would shift his body and let his head fall on her shoulder. She finished her beer and his wine, the side of her body pressed hopefully against his.
    When she got home, Adam was in her bed. ‘Sorry,’ he said, rolling over to face the wall. ‘The sun comes in my window in the afternoon. I couldn’t