Placeholders, page 1
Advance Praise for Placeholders
‘An intimate, unflinching, and, above all, heartfelt novel, the best debut I’ve read this year. Buy your Roseman stock early. I loved this’ RONAN RYAN, author of The Fractured Life of Jimmy Dice
‘A subtle, beautifully written story of two young people trying to make a life – together and as individuals – under the pressures of late capitalism… written with an unflinching tenderness’ LARISSA PHAM, author of Pop Song
For Sarah
This novel contains a depiction of sexual assault.
1
Aaron passes into and out of circles of light cast from the street lamps above. There’s a stabbing pain in his right side that he’s been ignoring for at least three blocks, a steak knife tucked neatly between his ninth and tenth rib. The rubber soles of his high-tops slap the concrete as he runs. He’s at the point now where he can actually feel himself perspiring, the sweat pooling under his arms and across his back. None of it matters; he’s nearly there. That’s all that counts. She’ll understand. He can make up a story that is believable enough to make her forgive him. That is the power of words. They erase the things they purport to describe.
But there is truth, it is a thing that exists, and the truth in this case is devastatingly simple. Mornings come without warning when Aaron finds it impossible to do anything but stare at his alarm clock and watch time pass, guilt and dread churning like oil in his stomach. Sometimes he cries uncontrollably, violent sobs that leave an ache in the hollow of his chest for days. Sometimes he doesn’t cry at all. It started after Moe died, of course. Everything like that started with Moe. He tries not to think about it. Last night, he had a dream that he and his brother were bicycling along their hometown boardwalk. Seagulls and whirring bike gears. Tyres sticking and unsticking themselves to the pavement. The sounds and smells of summer ocean waves crashing against the sea wall beneath them, shooting up and spraying them with mist. Moe’s smiling face. The sun beating down on them. It all felt so real.
Aaron woke in the cobweb remnants of the dream surprised to find himself not in his childhood home but in the basement bedroom of his apartment, his home of the past five years. He spent the morning horizontal beneath the duvet, watching the minute hand go round in circles, praying for an aneurysm or a carbon monoxide leak. It is a miracle he managed to escape his house at all, albeit an hour late, evidence in some capacity of how much he wants to be there with her. This is, of course, going to be much too difficult for Aaron to explain. The truth so often is.
The steak knife twists and Aaron stops in a circle of light, panting, hands on his knees, a throbbing in his side. The restaurant is only a few blocks more. It is possible that she’s left already. Maybe she never came. Aaron takes a deep breath and tries not to think about it. He focuses instead on something else, something like a week ago, the last time he saw her face.
When the bartender finally did come over, Aaron ordered two tequila sodas. He didn’t ask what the girl beside him wanted, he just ordered. He hoped this would make him look decisive.
‘Why the soda?’ she asked.
‘No soda!’ he yelled to the bartender.
‘Two shots, then?’ the bartender asked.
‘Four shots.’
A wave of dancers crashed against the bar, pushing her into him, then ebbed back towards the dance floor. She stayed close.
‘I don’t even know your name,’ he said.
The bartender dropped off the shots. They took them one after the other.
‘It’s Camilla. Like the princess.’
‘Wasn’t that Diana?’
‘We don’t talk about Diana,’ she said. There was a nasal lilt to her voice, an accent Aaron was only then able to disentangle from the enormous noise around them.
‘Where are you from?’
‘Ireland,’ she said, then frowned. ‘Is it obvious?’
Aaron didn’t often come to places like this. It was hot and loud and dark. Circles of coloured light sling-shotted from one wall to another. Jake had said it would be fun to get out and that Aaron should lighten the fuck up sometimes. Aaron couldn’t really talk Jake out of things like that. They came together, Jake got separated, and Aaron got drunk. These events happened in rapid succession. He soon found himself on the dance floor with someone much too beautiful to be real. His head felt like it was full of water sloshing from one side to the other. Every time she took a step, he stepped where her foot had just been. He thought about how he would tell this story to Jake later even as it was playing out in real time in front of him. She smiled, her face illuminated by a passing green light, and that voice in his head went quiet. Now they were at the bar so he must have done something right. People did this all the time. They bought women drinks in hot, loud places and charmed them without wondering which version of themselves to affect.
‘Let me guess,’ Camilla said. ‘You’re Irish too. You’ve a great-great-grand-uncle who was born in Cork, or actually – come to think of it – maybe it was Donegal.’
‘I’m not Irish,’ Aaron said.
‘You might be the only one here who isn’t.’ Her laugh was genuine, as was the smile that followed it.
‘What brought you here? Have you got family in Boston or something?’
‘I’ve always been a bit obsessed with America,’ she said. ‘I burned out our VHS tape of Forrest Gump I watched it so much as a kid.’
She put a hand on his arm as she talked. The gesture was casual and warm. She must glide through her entire life with this ease, he thought. He imagined sitting with her on a train somewhere, sunshine through the window, her head resting on his shoulder.
‘…Da would get me on the table and he’d start a line and I’d finish it, that’s how well I knew it.’
Aaron nodded, unsure of what to say to keep her talking. Then came a tap on her shoulder from a blonde in a sequined dress, leaning forward to whisper something into her ear.
‘Right so,’ Camilla said and patted Aaron’s chest. ‘Thanks for the drinks.’
‘Any time,’ he said, but she’d already left.
Aaron found Jake singing in a bathroom stall with some suit who was holding out his phone. Jake snorted something off its screen. Music pounded through the door. The man in the suit was named Percy. The stall smelled strongly of patchouli and piss.
‘This is Aaron, this is the guy I was telling you about,’ Jake said.
‘That’s fucking – that’s crazy, man, isn’t it? You were just talking about him and now he’s here. What is that, serendipity? Coincidence? What do you call that?’
‘Here,’ Jake said, holding out Percy’s phone. ‘Have some of this.’
‘What is it?’ Aaron asked.
‘Do you care?’
‘Not really, no.’
There was a rip of fire up his nostril and then clumps of baking soda bitterness at the back of his throat. He sniffled a few times. There was a sensation like water dripping out of his nose. He waited for something to happen.
‘They want us spinning like hamsters in our wheels, churning out profits,’ Percy said. He took a bag of off-white powder from the inside pocket of his blazer and balanced the phone in one hand and tapped out a line with the other, all while bopping his head along to the music. ‘And we’re approaching the endgame. What’s unemployment at? What’s the average Fortune 500 CEO make?’
‘It’s fucked,’ Jake agreed.
‘It’s absolutely fucked,’ Percy said. He straightened out the line with a metal credit card. ‘And the worst part is that it’s intentional. Have you heard of the Rothschilds? George Soros?’
‘What is this, coke?’ Aaron asked.
‘Ket,’ Percy said, evening out the lines. ‘Did you know that I work at a bank?’
‘What did he say?’ Aaron asked Jake. ‘I can’t hear a fucking thing.’
‘A bank,’ Percy shouted. ‘I said, I work at a bank! Get some of this into you, it’ll fix your hearing.’
This time felt more like snorting tiny shards of glass. Aaron wiped at his nose with the back of his hand and it came away with a paintbrush of watery red across it. The blood beaded on the skin. Aaron hadn’t always done drugs in bathrooms with strangers. He’d been one of those kids who took notes during the drug awareness seminars in high school, convinced that so much as a joint could render his future comprehensively fucked. But that was before. Before he lived with Jake. Before Moe died. Before he stopped speaking to his parents. Coke – or something like it – was now an expected staple of their nights out. Aaron stared at the blood streaked across the back of his hand. Oblivion was, at its heart, another form of absolution.
‘Oh fuck.’ Percy had two baggies in his hands and he was looking between them. ‘Fuck me, man, this one’s the ketamine.’
They returned to the dance floor and treaded water in the ocean of bodies. The bass was overwhelming. Aaron closed his eyes and let his arms hang loose at his sides and felt his heartbeat slow down and speed up to match the underlying rhythm of the beat. He was covered in sweat and his mouth was dry. Percy returned with three drinks in hand.
‘I’ve got an expense account,’ he shouted. ‘Fuck ’em, right? I’ll say I was out with prospective clients; they won’t give a shit. Fuck ’em!’
This was how people behaved. Aaron knew Percy, or at least people like Percy, but only in the abstract. Individuals who participated in just t
‘Those fucks drive around in their fancy cars and live in their fancy apartments,’ Percy said. ‘My boss made three mil last year overseeing derivatives, can you believe that? He wasn’t even the one selling them. If I were a ditch digger at least there’d be some holes in the ground.’
‘You’ve never dug a hole in your fucking life,’ Jake shouted.
Percy nodded and bopped his head to the music. ‘They all go out in Seaport, but this is more my scene. These are my people. Real, salt-of-the-earth, normal people.’ His jaw swivelled back and forth as he ground his teeth. ‘Have you guys ever been to Gstaad?’
Jake nudged Aaron’s shoulder and pointed to someone at the bar through a split in the crowd. ‘She keeps making eyes at you.’
There was a brunette deep in conversation with her friend. The crowd merged together and Aaron lost sight of her.
‘In Thailand they have these brothels where you select the women through a one-way mirror,’ Percy shouted at no one in particular. ‘It’s disgusting, but in a way it’s more direct, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t the transaction basically the same?’
Aaron wanted to point out how the social intricacies of dating and international sex trafficking had a subtle but significant difference that Percy may have overlooked but then the crowd opened up and the brunette from the bar walked over to them. Aaron finished his drink in four burning gulps and shoved his empty plastic cup into Percy’s hands. The woman led Aaron away by the hand as his head began to swim.
‘Dance with me,’ she said, so he put all his effort into sticking one foot in front of the other.
There were rules to this. People talked about alcohol tolerance like it was strength, some physiological attribute that could be trained intentionally over time, as if at a certain point four beers didn’t make a dent. To Aaron it was more like driving a fifty-year-old shitbox in a Nor’easter. You could practise downshifting in the snow and turning against the drift and get better at it with time. There was a knack to it. It wasn’t that you didn’t get drunk, you just got better at being drunk, the core mechanical operation of driving a body that was out of commission.
He stepped where her foot had just been. She put her arms around his neck and it felt nice, but then he thought about Camilla at the bar and her hand on his arm and he squirrelled out of her embrace in what he hoped looked like an elaborate dance move. Her face reflected her confusion, and then the image clicked.
‘Camilla,’ he said.
‘You forgot my name, didn’t you?’
‘No, I just–’
‘You absolutely forgot my name,’ she said. ‘You’re lucky you’re drunk.’
Aaron explained the shitbox and the Nor’easter, the downshifting in the snow. She waved away the words and pulled him down by the neck, kissing him. Aaron wondered if his heart was going to explode, it was beating so fast.
‘My name isn’t Camilla, it’s Róisín.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I don’t like giving my name out to strangers.’
Aaron smiled.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘We’re not strangers, then,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said, returning the smile. ‘I suppose not.’
They spent the rest of the night alternating between dancing and drinking. Aaron felt something like the lifting of a weight and imagined a knot in his stomach loosening just enough to sneak a finger between the gaps in the rope. This was something very near real life, a simulacrum of emotional connection, of loneliness corrected. Róisín danced, illuminated by the passing colours. She looked truly beautiful. Aaron could have watched her for the rest of his life.
At one thirty, the lights came on and the music stopped and the exit doors opened. They stood for a moment in the stark reality, blinking and waiting for it all to come into focus. Róisín tapped a spot below her nostril.
‘You’re bleeding,’ she said.
Aaron found a paper napkin in his pocket and pressed it against his face. ‘I get nosebleeds,’ he said, nodding.
Conversation bubbled up from the crowd surrounding them. There was a lurch and then they were caught in a flow of sweaty people emptying out onto the sidewalk beside the club. The air was sudden and cold. They stood beneath a street light and the crowd dissolved around them. Róisín saw Sofia, her blonde friend in the red sequined dress, and called her over. There was a punch on Aaron’s arm and he was reunited with Jake, who was soaked in sweat and bleeding a little from his nose, and with Percy, who looked much younger in the yellow light.
‘Let’s get a taxi back to my place,’ he said, so they did.
Róisín held Aaron’s hand as they got into the car. That’s how easily it started.
2
The waiter leads Róisín to a table, pulls out a chair, waits for her to sit and then pushes in the chair. Light jazz plays from hidden speakers. The walls are crammed with framed sepia photographs and memorabilia. Róisín removes her phone from her handbag and types out a message then presses send. She returns the phone to her bag. The waiter sets down a basket of bread.
‘How are we doing tonight?’ he asks. ‘Have you dined with us before?’
‘No,’ Róisín says.
‘First time, that’s awesome. Welcome. Would you like me to run you through how the menu works, or will I wait for the rest of your party to arrive?’
‘He must be running late,’ she says.
The waiter offers a wide smile and nods before leaving. She takes a roll from the basket and pulls it apart. She puts a piece of warm dough onto her tongue and sucks on it until it turns tasteless in her mouth. Across the restaurant, a man takes a sip from his wine glass and nods to a waiter to pour more.
‘Excellent choice,’ the waiter says, smiling widely. ‘A truly excellent choice.’
The man at the table sets down his wine glass and shrugs at his wife as if to say, ‘But what do I know?’ Róisín feels an acute longing in the space behind her heart. All she’s ever wanted is someone to shrug at her from across the table, someone who also feels they’re playing pretend, the two of them children in grown-up clothing both in on the big joke of it all.
There’s a candle in the centre of the table, a tealight in a red glass holder. She peers above the lip to check if it’s real. It is. Her phone buzzes in her bag. It’s Sofia.
so???
Róisín types out a message.
not here yet. 10 demerits.
Her phone vibrates in her hand as another message appears.
poor form. bad start.
She is unsure what to expect of this reunion. The last time she spoke to Aaron they were in his bed, naked, and he was apologising.
Percy had taken them from the club to a luxury complex in Seaport overlooking the harbour. His gaff was a two-bed with in-unit laundry and a six-burner double-oven Viking cooking range with a built-in heating shelf. Rent cost $6,890 per month. He told them all of this on the lift ride up to the twenty-third floor.
‘Are you two fucking?’ Percy asked Róisín. ‘Is he, like, your boyfriend or something?’
‘Not yet,’ Róisín said, yawning.
She felt Aaron tense beneath his coat. There was a simple beauty in his transparency. When she’d kissed him that first time on the dance floor, he’d kissed her back like he’d been wanting to do it all night, holding nothing back. And the way he’d spun out of her grip out of loyalty before realising she was the woman from the bar. His open want for her was pleasantly blatant.
‘Hm,’ Percy said. He bit his thumbnail and nodded towards Jake and Sofia. ‘And what about you two?’
