Submarine

by Joe Dunthorne

  ‘Shut up,’ he says. ‘Take your T-shirt off.’

  Women find confidence sexy. Too often, Dad lets Mum drive.

  There is the crumpling of a single sleeping bag.

  ‘Comfortable?’ he asks, playing sensitive.

  ‘Yah,’ she says. Yah is my word.

  ‘Right,’ he says.

  There’s a quiet slapping sound.

  ‘Relax,’ he says.

  ‘Mmm.’

  I get that feeling again. Insulation foam expands in my skull, my lungs, my gut.

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  Then there’s the sound of an exhalation, a release. There’s none of the usual clumsy, carpentry noises like when Mum and Dad do it.

  I knew this would be tantric. The whole thing is virtually noiseless.

  ‘I can feel that you’re tight,’ he says.

  He just said those words. He actually said them.

  I think of pulling out the pegs and rolling them into a ditch or jumping off the Volvo’s bonnet and body-slamming the tent.

  ‘Here?’ he says.

  ‘Ow,’ she says.

  Her breathing goes jerky.

  I never wanted to hate her this much.

  ‘Right?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Too hard?’

  ‘No, s’good, thanks,’ she says.

  I could kill her.

  ‘Nada,’ he says.

  I quietly step backwards.

  ‘Aah,’ she says. And again: ‘Aah.’ Like Bisto.

  My heart is a cold, hard stone.

  ‘Ngh,’ she says.

  My body is a shell.

  I stand up and turn to walk away but I am having trouble communicating with my legs. I am seriously disabled. I need round-the-clock care.

  Somehow I start walking. My legs are doing it by themselves.

  I walk down past the embers of the campfire to the bottom of the field. I step over the stile into the car park. I check the time – one-seventeen – and I mentally chart their trajectory towards tantrigasm: multiple is too restrained a word for the oodles of cumming that starts at her toes, throbs up through her gut, inflating her, transforming her into gas. Orange moths will gather on the flysheet. Worms will rise to the surface and cavort in the dirt.

  My father wouldn’t understand. He is the sort of man who has spectacle marks on either side of his nose bridge. He has memorized the phone number for Swansea Council’s Pothole Hotline.

  I look at my watch – one-eighteen. Dad lasted ten minutes.

  I can hear techno. It sounds like someone rhythmically clearing their throat.

  The two cars are still parked tightly side by side. The smaller of the two cars has its courtesy light turned on. (The best gift that Dad brought back from his trip to Boston was a selection of cheesy – corny – words for everyday things. I already knew the obvious ones – sidewalk, trunk, restroom – but we both fell in love with courtesy light.) There are two boys – older than me – sitting in the front seats; one rests his head on the steering wheel.

  As I walk across the gravel, I watch the tip of a spliff, occasionally flaring in the dark, being passed from one car to the other. It bobs up and down like the red dot from a laser-targeting sniper rifle.

  As I get within a few metres, I am suddenly blind or dead or back in the womb or comatose or undergoing shock therapy or they’ve just turned their headlights on. There is the sound of semi-sympathetic laughter beneath the euphoric trance. They dim their full beams; four TV screens of static light remain burnt on to my sight line.

  I walk up to the driver’s-side window of the small Fiat. They turn their courtesy light off. I stand there for a while, unable to see anything through the glass.

  The window lowers slightly; a pair of half-closed eyes appear.

  ‘Wha’s the password?’ he shouts above the music.

  The question is too open and the thought of my mother rutting with Graham comes rushing in to fill the empty space. I imagine the smell in their tent, like when you sneeze in your hand and then sniff your palm.

  I try and focus. I make out empty packets of Monster Munch and an unopened Petits Filous on the dashboard. I can’t see Jordana.

  ‘Monster Munch,’ I say, into the gap.

  They laugh. I have no idea why. The window lowers jerkily. He passes me out a crooked spliff.

  ‘I’d get in the back of the other car if I were you. Miffy’s trying to cop on to your girlfriend.’

  I walk around the back of the cars, carrying the joint aloft – Olympic-torch style. The bass churns from the boot of the Fiat. Next to it is a red Mazda; I make out two stickers on the rear windscreen: Surfers Against Sewage and No Fear.

  I pull open the back door and peer in. It’s dark inside but I can make out Jordana, sitting in the front passenger seat. She’s talking intently to the driver. She doesn’t stop to introduce me.

  I wait for a little while to be invited to sit down – it doesn’t happen, so I slide in along to the middle of the sand-gritty seat and shut the door gently. There are no seat belts. The smell is of drying towels, burnt plastic and tobacco.

  ‘… and when she woke up, she kept tasting metal,’ Jordana says. ‘It was so weird.’

  ‘Fuck,’ the boy-man says, nodding his head slowly.

  Eventually, he turns to me: ‘ ’Right? I’m Lewis.’

  He has short strawberry-blond hair and a pancake-freckled face.

  ‘Hi, I’m Olly.’

  ‘Are you gonna smoke that spliff?’ he asks.

  I’m still holding it upright, not casual. I am a lawyer.

  ‘Oh yeah, yeah,’ I say and put it in the corner of my mouth. I am careful not to pull too hard. I have seen enough films where choking on a spliff automatically loses you your girlfriend. My lungs strain like a microwave-popcorn bag. I breathe out quickly, my nostrils burn. I tense my gut and take it.

  I pass to Jordana as a kind of reconciliation. She looks at me briefly as she grips it between all five fingertips. She seems subdued. She pulls hard, before exhaling a Superman ice-wind of smoke.

  In the adjacent car, they are nodding to the music: two lads in the front and one on the back seat.

  ‘So, was she different afterwards?’ Lewis asks.

  Jordana takes a moment to consider the question, which, in my experience, is an unusual thing for her to do.

  ‘I mean, a bit,’ she says. ‘Mam said some stuff, like she thought that they had left a pair of scissors in her brain from the operation. She actually believed that.’

  ‘Wee-ud,’ Lewis says.

  ‘You never told me that,’ I say, leaning forward between them.

  She looks at me for a moment and then carries on speaking.

  ‘But the worst thing is that I felt sorry for her, like I was the grown-up. I hated that.’

  I watch Jordana talk and it feels like she might be acting, like she has just invented a whole new persona. This is not to say that she is unconvincing, just that I’ve never seen her speak in so many full sentences. Then I remember that she’s drunk a bottle of blackcurrant Mad Dog.

  ‘Yeah, bad one,’ Lewis says.

  I nod. ‘Yeah,’ I say.

  ‘Nobody wants to think that their mother is vulnerable,’ she says. As she speaks, I notice her tongue is stained violet.

  I want her to keep talking. Because even if Jordana is pretending – this brand-new personality – I still reckon we could get on, me and the new her. After that time in the botanical gardens when she compared flames to tear drops, I thought that was it – game over – she would soon be arranging flowers, noticing the elderly and working Saturdays in Oxfam. But this is different.

  I realize that Jordana and I have never got drunk together. And I realize that there are questions I want to ask her.

  I start speaking: ‘I’ve been wondering, do you think your parents get on better since the op –’

  ‘Oi, fuck-sake!’ The boy in the front passenger seat of the adjacent car leans in and interrupts. ‘ �
�Nuff fuckin’ sorp op’ra right. Talk ’appy.’

  Jordana stiffens in her seat.

  ‘There, there, babs,’ Lewis says to the driver, speaking in a baby voice. Lewis takes the spliff from Jordana – I expect him to take a toke but he doesn’t – and then he passes it through the window to the other car.

  The clock on the dashboard reads: 1:23. My father would already be halfway there by now.

  Looking up through the open sunroof, I watch stars blink on and off, gaps in the fast-moving clouds.

  ‘So, Oliver, do you surf ?’ Lewis asks.

  I think of Mum and Graham in the waves, rubbered up in wetsuits.

  ‘No,’ I say. Lewis looks immediately disappointed. I try and save things: ‘But my mother does.’

  ‘Oh. So how come yew down ’Gennith then?’

  Jordana turns round to watch me.

  I scroll through some replies, all of which sound ridiculous:

  I am the official adjudicator for my mother’s boyfriend’s sexual performance.

  I am drawn to the ocean; I find solace in its mystery.

  We needed to get away from the hustle and bustle of modern Swansea life.

  ‘I wanted to spend some quality time with Jordana,’ I say.

  Jordana cringes.

  ‘Fair dos,’ he says. ‘Can’t blame you. She’s hot.’

  He says this to Jordana, not to me. He has a little blondish cow’s-lick fringe, like a breaking wave.

  I look at Jordana, expecting her to blush, but she doesn’t.

  I try and think of a retort, a touché, but the clock flits to 1:24 and I get distracted. Six minutes in. My father would be trying to think of something repulsive by now – old people’s genitals – to buy himself some time.

  Laughter and shouting rise above the music. The boy in the passenger seat of the adjacent car pokes his head in. He looks ecstatic.

  ‘Oi, boys, Danno’s whiteying,’ he says.

  I look across at the boy-man in the back seat of the other car; his face is dead – a genuine, blue-white, mortuary-corpse colour. He looks at me emptily through the glass.

  Lewis starts laughing. Jordana laughs too, jiggling in her seat. I sit back in my seat and look around me.

  The two boys in the front of the other car turn in their seats to face each other and start to rap. It’s the theme song to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

  ‘Oh boys, leave it out, is it?’ the corpse says, but they don’t stop. The cadaver rubs his palms over his ears.

  Jordana and Lewis are giggling. I want to join in. I try and think of something funny. The only thought my brain will allow me is of Graham telling a joke to his mates: what’s the difference between Jill Tate and a wetsuit?

  I look at the clock: 1:25.

  You’re not supposed to piss inside a wetsuit.

  I think about tantra.com. Assuming that they’re going for the world record, it is about this time that Graham and my mother will totally surrender all mental, emotional and cultural conditioning, so that universal life energy will flow freely through them.

  Jordana and Lewis are still finding something funny. Their heads loll.

  I test-drive a laugh. ‘Hahahaha,’ I say.

  I look at the sky for a gag. I see a drab satellite moving slowly. I think of the things I would look at with a military spy camera.

  I remember that tantra is the cosmic union of opposites, to create a polarity charge that connects with the primordial energy from which everything arises in the universe… the totality of all.

  The boys in the adjacent car are into the second verse.

  The basic difference between unenlightened sexuality and tantra is that sex becomes sacred and divine when you approach it from your heart and body, rather than solely from your mind.

  I bounce up and down on my seat.

  1:26. In two minutes’ time, my father’s sexual record will be obsolete. That will be it. Once you are enlightened then there is no going back. You can’t shut the lid.

  Jordana is laughing so much that she’s having trouble breathing. Her chest vibrates. Her head seems loose on her shoulders.

  Lewis keeps looking over at Jordana and laughing. She wipes her eyes. Technically, she’s crying.

  I’ve got about a minute and a half. According to my personal best at last year’s sports day it should take me approximately thirteen and a half seconds to run the hundred metres to the stile.

  Fuck it.

  ‘You can have her!’ I tell Lewis.

  He’s still laughing. He cups his ear at me, pretending he can’t hear me over the noise.

  ‘Go for it! You win!’ I say.

  He’s still smiling.

  I slide along the seat, pull the door open and get out. I slam it, even though I don’t mean to, and then I start to run.

  My legs feel rubbery. My skull is glowing. I start running in what I hope is the direction of the stile, a dusky plus sign in the dark.

  I clear the stile with a hurdler’s aplomb.

  I stop at the remains of their campfire to catch my breath. A log glows among the ash. The empty beer bottles have been stacked neatly back into their cardboard casings.

  There are no wild sounds of adulterous fucking, which does not surprise me. At this stage in tantra, they do not need the superficial affirmations of groans and grunts. They are perfectly silent and perfectly still – a single point of light and focus, a slowly gathering offshore swell.

  I look at my watch; I wait for the big hand to sign the divorce papers.

  It’s one-twenty-nine. Our home is broken.

  I stand in the ashes of the campfire.

  I close my eyes and focus on my breathing.

  I match my breaths to the distant sound of the tide.

  I experience a slowly dawning sense of perspective…

  I was wrong to think that Mum doesn’t understand the decisions she is making. If I wasn’t so caught up in the details, I would be able to see – at this precise moment – the rare beauty of two autonomous beings in perfect alignment, an eclipse by torchlight. It’s not so hard to imagine Graham and Jill’s nomadic life together, following the swell, in tune with the cycles of life and death, mind and body, moon and tide.

  And Dad even, maybe this is just the break he needs. To be screwed out of his routine, forced to make a new start. I see him taking up carpentry. He’s got the face of a carpenter. He’ll be alone but he’ll be content, living in the Brecon Beacons, surrounded by his own sculptures. His themes will be rebirth, history and the body. And when I’m grown-up we’ll talk wood, meat and Welsh devolution.

  I am so well adjusted.

  I quietly walk closer to their tent.

  There are still some sounds: ‘Ahh,’ my mother says.

  The grass is wet and, since I have the feeling I might be here for some time, I lie on the ground and shuffle underneath Graham’s Volvo, where it’s dry.

  There’s the smell of grease and petrol. I stare straight up at some miscellaneous piping. From their tent, I hear rustling.

  ‘Well, thank you for that,’ Mum says. ‘I feel two stone lighter.’

  Sex is excellent exercise.

  More rustling.

  ‘I need the practice. I want to learn reflexology as well.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘It’s surprisingly technical – all the different pressure points. I think you can do a course that’s about the oils and aromatherapy side of it, but the one I’m on’s more practical.’

  I wonder if that spliff was laced with formaldehyde. My dawning sense of perspective was a trick of the light.

  Chips has studied seduction techniques. Massage or other physical contact is one way in which a woman can be made to reach ‘buying temperature’. This means that she has been physically or mentally aroused to make her ripe for the picking.

  ‘It’s really interesting the sort of people who are on the course. There’s an old gay couple wh –’

  He is interrupted by something.

  ‘
Jill? My god, what are you do –’

  Again, he’s plugged.

  ‘Jill, this is not a good idea.’ Graham sounds like someone reading an autocue.

  She sighs, as if the explanation is a chore, then says: ‘Oh, come on, Graham, it’s been there all along.’ She speaks a little too quickly: ‘We both knew this would happen.’

  ‘Right, you’re right,’ he says.

  Graham is very trusting.

  There is the popopop of his button fly being jerked open.

  ‘Christ,’ he says, sounding slightly terrified. ‘We should talk about this.’

  He is badly scripted.

  ‘Shh.’ She makes the sound of the sea.

  He inhales sharply.

  ‘Oh fuck, Jill. I don’t this is.’

  She moves him beyond language.

  There is the sound of sleeping bags crinkling.

  ‘Oh,’ he says.

  I get that feeling again. Like I’m full of the foamy stuff they pour down sinks.

  ‘Jill, fuck, Jill.’ He keeps using her name.

  In the faint light, I make out the poles of the tent straining against the material. They look like bones in an X-ray slide.

  ‘You want me, you want me,’ he says, whisperingly, talking in pairs. Dad would never be so presumptuous.

  She says nothing, focused.

  ‘Oh, oh,’ he says.

  There is a quiet but steady sound, like someone inflating an airbed. It goes on for some time.

  ‘Uh. Uh. Mm,’ he says. He said ‘Mm’ not ‘Mum’.

  She says nothing.

  ‘You-want-me-you-want-me-you-unh,’ he says.

  And again: ‘Unh.’

  ‘There,’ she says.

  He breathes like someone in shock.

  ‘There.’

  There’s the sound of zipping. My breathing stays steady.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ he says, sounding bereaved. There’s the sound of more zipping. They’re into bondage. That’s fine.

  I put my head on its side. A bare arm throws back the outer tent flap. A hand reaches out and wipes itself, knuckles then palm, on the grass. It is Mum’s hand. The sleeve on her right arm is pushed up to the elbow. She crawls out on all fours: under-evolved. She’s wearing a grubby grey T-shirt. She has some trouble standing up. I see that she’s not naked, she’s now wearing jogging bottoms. She is more-or-less fully dressed. Except her feet are bare. And she is having some trouble using them. She steps in small wonky circles, trying to keep her balance. She reaches back into the tent porch and yanks out a fleecy jumper. It drags on the ground as she stumbles out of sight.