Rotten Peaches
PRAISE FOR ROTTEN PEACHES
In Rotten Peaches, Lisa de Nikolits has masterfully written two protagonists that are both thoroughly unsympathetic and utterly compelling. It’s impossible to look away as these two women do very bad things in the pursuit of love, happiness, and meaning. And I do mean “very bad”—which makes this book a wild, weird ride, but one that’s very worth taking.
—STACY LEE KONG, contributing editor, Flare Magazine
Welcome to the world of sales cons, messed-up self-help authors, hotel room hookups and murder most vile. Rotten Peaches delivers hilarious thrills and villainous chills right to its final twist. A wild, sexy romp of a book!
—CAROL BRUNEAU, author of A Bird on Every Tree
Wow. Just wow. Lisa de Nikolits’ Rotten Peaches blew me away. A dark, compulsive, and addictive story in which the characters’ secrets and needs conflict with each other and fold back in on themselves in an ever-tightening noose, Rotten Peaches will keep readers gripped until the very last page. Highly recommended!
—KAREN DIONNE, author of The Marsh King’s Daughter
A noir page-turner that digs into the darkest corners of the human heart, Rotten Peaches dissects the lives of Leonie and Bernice, women who live continents apart but are linked by the attentions of a charismatic con man, JayRay. Leonie, a kleptomaniac chemist for an up and coming cosmetics company in Toronto, juggles her trade show junkets with a taste for petty theft and an abusive affair with JayRay. Meanwhile, in South Africa, JayRay’s half-sister Bernice, author of a best-selling series of self-help baking books based on recipes she’s appropriated from her Black housekeeper, is in love with a man committed to returning South Africa to white control. Slowly the two stories begin to merge: as one woman struggles for redemption and self-knowledge, the other slips into a whirlpool of deception and violence. Lisa de Nikolits succeeds in creating a disturbing, mesmerizing tale in which the boundaries of good and evil, justice and punishment, are blurred by family secrets, racism, and sexual obsession.
—TERRI FAVRO, author of Sputnik’s Children and Once Upon a Time in West Toronto
In Rotten Peaches, Lisa de Nikolits has written a novel that combines the irreverent energy of pulp with the cool amorality of film noir. With multiple plot lines that weave a tight chokehold of suspense—and characters who are at least as twisted as their stories—this tale of obsessive love, rage, and revenge is sure to make you shiver.
—KAREN SMYTHE, author of This Side of Sad
In Rotten Peaches, two women grapple with Sisyphean circumstances, paralleled in the seeming inescapable strength of the demons they harbour. Lisa de Nikolits is a skilled craftswoman, gripping the reader from the first page, and suspends her there, brow furrowed, as each new disaster unfolds, highlighted always by our two heroes’ inability to turn away from the men they love and the dangerous plots they’ve been seduced into. With cons, political unrest, poison, sex, and murder plots, Rotten Peaches is an unflinchingly cinematic read.
—ROBIN RICHARDSON, author of Knife Throwing through Self-Hypnosis
An avant garde page-turner, written with honesty and insight that both caresses and shocks. Set around the corner and across the world, Rotten Peaches is an intimate study of human nature in all its imperfect glory. Lisa de Nikolits expertly weaves the lives of four unique characters into a story that rolls out as curiously as life itself. This novel romps with humour and stark private moments in a rhythm that builds with suspense to the climax, a sequence of chilling scenes at a South African farm. Here, de Nikolits uses her art to its highest good to show the reader a vivid and unforgettable snapshot of the country post-apartheid. In supermarkets, fruit is displayed with the shiny side outward, bruises and flaws hidden behind. While there’s no pretending in Rotten Peaches, all flaws are front and centre, there is braveness and truth at its pit.
—JENNIFER SOOSAR, author of Parent Teacher Association
An intense tale of looking for love in all the “wronged” places … a telling of mighty meltdowns at a reckless helter-skelter pace. Bernice and Leonie relate with keen insightfulness and gripping candour their individual see-sawing and perilously-brewed stories, born of cumulative despair-festering inner wounds. Rotten Peaches is an exploration of damage and shame and prejudice, examining the needs and greeds and horrors thereof. The explosive sensuality, the fleeting, shifting pleasures of Rotten Peaches are braided together with anguish and doubt and anger. Rotten Peaches is a vivid and gut-wrenching story so forceful that it feels as if it always existed!
—SHIRLEY MCDANIEL, artist
Lisa de Nikolits dramatically explores our time as we try to understand incomprehensible human nature. A gripping, couldn’t-put-down tale of impulsive, irrational, and extreme interactions that are raw, shocking, historical, political, and horrific while still being relatable. Rotten Peaches is a thrilling escape and a thought-provoking novel.
—MARILYN RIESZ, Registered Psychotherapist and co-author of Bake Your Way to Happiness
Copyright © 2018 Lisa de Nikolits
Except for the use of short passages for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced, in part or in whole, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Collective Agency (Access Copyright).
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.
Cover portraiture art: Jennifer Shelswell
Cover design: Lisa de Nikolits
eBook: tikaebooks.com
Rotten Peaches is a work of fiction. All the characters and situations portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
De Nikolits, Lisa, 1966-, author
Rotten peaches / Lisa de Nikolits.
(Inanna poetry & fiction series)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77133-529-4 (softcover).-- ISBN 978-1-77133-530-0 (epub).--
ISBN 978-1-77133-531-7 (Kindle).-- ISBN 978-1-77133-532-4 (pdf)
I. Title. II. Series: Inanna poetry and fiction series
PS8607.E63R68 2018 C813’.6 C2018-904345-8
C2018-904346-6
Printed and bound in Canada
Inanna Publications and Education Inc.
210 Founders College, York University
4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3
Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax: (416) 736-5765
Email: inanna.publications@inanna.ca Website: www.inanna.ca
A NOVEL BY
LISA DE NIKOLITS
INANNA PUBLICATIONS AND EDUCATION INC.
TORONTO, CANADA
ALSO BY LISA DE NIKOLITS:
No Fury Like That
The Nearly Girl
Between The Cracks She Fell
The Witchdoctor’s Bones
A Glittering Chaos
West of Wawa
The Hungry Mirror
To my lovely Bradford Dunlop.
And with much gratitude and love to the unsung Bettys
of this world. There were, and are, many.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
—Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”
THE WORLD IS ENDING
LEONIE
I AM NOT A KILLER. I just fell in love with
the wrong man.
I went too far this time, and there’s no going back. There’s no going anywhere, period.
I nearly stayed afloat, but my luck ran out. Luck, that mystical mythical glue that holds the shards of despair together and makes life navigable. But fragmented despair, that’s what sinks you.
It’s the middle of the day and the ghost of a cat walks across my bed. I am hidden in the downy softness of bleach-laundered sheets, sheets ironed with starch and cleansed of their filthy sins by scalding Catholic water.
The bed is high and wide and the pillows are like clouds ripped from a summer’s sky. I bury my head in cotton balls, puffy meringues and whipped cream, and try to ignore the ghost of the cat that is walking the length of my back.
The cat settles at my feet but it gets up again and pads along my legs. When it first started its prowl, I sat up and reached for it but, like all ghosts, it immediately vanished and waited for me to turn away before settling in a warm, heavy lump against my side. Its weight is comforting in a way, like being massaged by the hand of God, but it isn’t God. It can’t be, because God, like luck, has left the building of my life.
I am here on a business trip. Right now I should be standing next to my table at the tradeshow luring in the poor and the desperate. Sell SuperBeauty and make Super Money!
But I can’t get out of bed. But I’ve lost that right, along with the rest of my life.
“My luck has gone,” I tell the cat. “The glue has desiccated and all that’s left is despair, and despair is gunk in the engine; the engine is dying a gunk-filled death.”
So, what? You’re going to lie here until you die?
Be hard to do, wouldn’t it? Realistically, I mean. Who ever died by lying in the world’s most comfortable bed? Suicide by soft, cushy whiteness?
You’d have to take some pills, the cat says. He’s trying to be helpful.
“I don’t have any pills left,” I reply. “And besides, I don’t want to kill myself, I just want this hell to end. I want to trade in my current life for a new model, this lemon’s run out of gas.”
The cat settles like a soft sigh on the back of my thighs and I bury my face deeper into the pillow, wishing I had closed the blinds and blocked out that glittering day, but it’s too late and I am not getting up now.
I am pulled down into the undertow of the bed and the day turns to night and even the cat leaves me. It joins God and luck and all the missing socks of my life. It joins the childhood assumption that life gets easier when you get older, not harder, and that courage is rewarded and that fortune cookie guru zen crapfests still make a modicum of sense.
There’s a knock at the door and I want to answer it but I can’t move, my body won’t move. I hear the door being opened and I am relieved. He has come to get me.
“Leo, baby,” a voice says and I blink.
I want to move but I can’t. I can’t even tell him that I can’t move.
He explains something to a man who must be the hotel manager. He says, “I’ve got this, you can go now,” and the manager makes a few cursory protesting noises, but he sounds happy to be leaving this mess for someone else to clean up.
“Baby, we’ve got to be somewhere,” he says and his voice makes my groin hot and tight, and I hate myself for my reaction, hate myself like I always do when I am around him.
He helps me sit up and he props a pillow behind my back.
He puts the coffee machine to work and he feeds me some water, a little at a time and the fog starts to clear.
“What the fuck, JayRay?” I manage. “What the fuck?”
He looks at me.
“It’s time to get our shit together. It’s time, Leo, it’s time.”
LEONIE AND BERNICE BEGIN TO FALL APART
1. LEONIE
SHAME. IT HAPPENS EVERY TIME. The same sickening thud of realization that I am failing again. Failing to keep my stupid crazy impulses under control. My greed will get the better of me yet again. And the most shameful thing of all is that the object of my lust is spectacularly ordinary, thoroughly stupid, and wholly unremarkable. It is a handmade pottery mug, pot-bellied and orange brown, with blue and white daisies etched into the uneven glaze. I want it, not only for the reassuringness of its unassuming shape but because of the insignia inscribed in uneven white cursive icing cake script: Live your dreams.
Some crazy part of me is convinced that if I take the mug, I will take the magic too, and all my dreams will come true. If I stop and ask myself what my dreams are, the answer will be that I want to be happy, normal and free. I can’t tell you what the specifics of that picture looks like.
Maybe it is as simple as a moment on a sunlit sandy beach, or baking cookies with my kids, or going apple picking. But no, none of these fit the Instagram post of me being happy, normal, and free. Instead, I’d like to ask freedom to unlock the chains of my self-destructive, humiliating urges; yes, that would be a dream come true — to not want to steal other people’s shit all the time.
Right now, I am not free. I can only see one thing in the room, the mug, that mug. I can’t hear what anyone is saying because the trillions of synapses in my brain are sounding the siren of need, the unquenchable, uncontrollable need to own that mug.
Live your dreams. I need the mug much more than my colleague does. She’s got a great life, her dreams have already come true, but mine haven’t, not by a long shot.
But how can I get my hands on it? It’s surrounded by a protective barrier of post-it notes and papers and file folders and pictures of grandkids.
I realize, yet again, that I should get some pics of Maddie and Kenzie framed for my desk, but somehow I always remember this at the wrong time, like now, when all I want to do is inhale that pot-bellied mug and fill the gaping, yearning hole in my own belly.
I can’t concentrate. I’m in the open office plan desk area we call the pigpen, riffing off cops having a bullpen. The pigpen is full, each desk occupied by a happy little piglet, each conscientiously attending to their workerly duties. Except for me. I am obsessed with someone else’s magic. I try to distract myself with my usual complaint that I rate a personal office, a glassed-in cubicle at the very least, but my boss says I’m not there often enough to warrant the cost and besides, he says it’s good for me to “bond with my fellow colleagues at a grassroots level.”
My phone rings. It’s my husband, Dave. I reach for it and look up to see my boss signaling. I wave at him and point to the phone.
“We figured we’d make you mac and cheese,” Dave says. “Since you’re home and all, tonight.”
“Great.” I feel helpless with hatred. “Sure, Dave, sounds great. I’ll be a bit late, an hour or so.”
“No worries,” Dave says and it always annoys me when he says that. Who is he, some faux Aussie cheerleader: no worries, mate?
Two little koalas, that’s Dave and me.
The mug-owning colleague starts wrapping up for the day. I watch her tidy her desk in the time it takes an ice age to melt. She finally gets things into some semblance of order and then she takes her mug to the kitchen. When she returns to collect her purse, her hands are empty.
She must have left the mug in the kitchen. My skin is burning and I scratch at my arms while I wait for her to get the fuck out of Dodge. I manage to sit still for five minutes after she leaves and then I stroll into the kitchen. The mug is drying upside down on a stack of paper towels. I am about to reach for it when my boss comes in and I snatch my hand back and flick the kettle on instead.
“I did the math on the last show,” Ralph says and he gives me a high-five. I try to smile. “You did good. Listen, are you sure you’re still okay with all this travel? You can start training Sandra any time. She can do the shows and you can focus on advertising and product development.”
“I’m developing the product all the time and Sandra’s a fucking moron,” I say and
Ralph laughs.
“Why don’t you tell me what you really think? But you are right. She does lack your edge. We’ll hold off for a while. But I don’t want you to burn out, okay? You’ll tell me if you start feeling stressed? You sleeping at night?”
“Yeah,” I tell him, thinking of the bottles of Nyquil that give me a couple of hours of shut-eye. Lately, I’ve been adding pain meds for arthritis, which helped for a while but the effects only last for so long and I need an increasingly heavy dose. I scored a pack of muscle relaxants on the last roadshow; got them from Fred, a regular with a booth piled high with handmade silverware from Maine, two stalls down from me, and I added those to my mix. Despite my ministrations, sleep and rest remain elusive, but I don’t tell Ralph that.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Ralph says and he brushes the kitchen counter with the palm of his hand and wipes it clean on his trouser leg. “Remember kid, you ever need me, my door is always open. Feel free to reach out any time.”
I nod. Is he referring to anything specific? But he walks out before I can say anything else.
The kettle has long since boiled but I don’t care. I pick up the mug, tuck it under my armpit, and walk back to my desk, my arms folded. I sit down quickly. My heart is a shuddering jet plane in my ears and I am deafened by the fear that I will be caught. I lean down and shove the mug into my purse and it falls with a dispirited clank, hitting something metal. Probably some forks I picked up at the Best Western. I wonder if the mug is broken but I don’t dare look. My armpits are slick and the heat rises through my blouse like a steamy forest fog, something raw and unbathed. The other pigs in the pen don’t notice anything; they’re chatting about some new TV show they love or some crap like that.
Sirens are going off in my head: put it back, put it back, put it back, and its usual place on my colleague’s desk is already spotlit with loss and accusatory stares. I stare at the glaring absence but I cannot return the mug. I need the magic. The mug is mine now.