Alex drops his cloth. Holds out his arms to her. She nestles into his neck hollow. What a man!
Panther lithe, more solid than a grizzly bear. He presses her head into his smelly overall. Ripe but nice.
The front door bangs. Claire jumps guiltily, tries wriggling out of Alex’s embrace. His grip upon her intensifies.
Clive enters. Claire’s struck anew by his film star looks.
“Are you having a loan of my future wife, Alex? Unhand her, brute.”
“Claire needed comforting,” Alex keeps his arms around Claire.
“What is it, Angel? Didn’t we fall 98% in love?”
“Up to 98%, you said,” says Claire. “That means zero, probably.”
“You utter cynic! Didn’t I formalise our plight? Plight you my troth?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m plighting it now!”
Alex’s arms fall away. His eyes narrow. “Be serious, Clive,” he says, sounding like a midday soapie star.
“Claire is the answer to my life’s conundrum, Alex. She’s my what next?”
How can I be the solution to someone else’s problem? Claire wonders, seconds before she’s caught up in the moment. This must be a folie a deux, she thinks. She’d studied French at school.
Clive dumps the ice cream, picks up his car keys. Wrestling the keys from their ring, he drops down onto the linoleum, takes her hand and slips on the metal key ring. “I’ll eat my own cooking in the garage with the car running unless you promise to be mine.”
“Your…what?” Claire asks, wanting to seem obtuse.
“My, um, partner, wife,” he finishes in a whisper, as if the word once spoken aloud might hex him. He inserts her thumb through the key ring. “Please.” He looks so abject saying this that Claire starts giggling.
Despair and happiness are nearer neighbours on her emotional spectrum than she’d realised. She holds her hand out. I’ll have the Porsche key.
“Have the Porsche,” Clive says, rising to his feet and hugging her.
“Some girls might hold you to it.”
“I had a nervous breakdown queuing, Claire. The thought of you was all that kept me going.”
“Nonsense!”
“Well, I had an epiphany at the very least! I saw my future without you in it. It was ugly. Are you going to congratulate us, Alex?” He turns, but Alex has scarpered.
Chapter 8
Tango
Claire’s alone in Clive’s bed – where is he? She rests awkwardly on one elbow, and scribbles in her diary; she persists although it cramps her arm!
Last night after becoming engaged, they did dishes so he could bed her guilt-free. That bothered her – that a man in love could behave so temperately; that his frantic urge to bed her could be postponed for housekeeping. “Let’s do it,” he said referring to the dishes. Fair enough, she’d thought. Who wants a mess to face in the morning?
Clive had reinstated the dishcloth dropped by Alex, who disappeared after the proposal. He’d started slopping it over the soapy dishes. But she’s a conscientious nurse. Is this infringement of hygiene standards sufficient to trigger their first argument? Probably. But she hadn’t ripped into the delicate tissue of newfound love for the sake of a few billion salmonella bacteria. Their love should keep them safe from ills and chills.
They’d got stuck in, waging war on all germs a-breeding in the slops. They’d formed a neat ensemble. As kitchen sink productions go, theirs was classy. The Ken and Barbie of housework.
They moved as one. She’d happily spend her life tied to a sink with Clive keeping her company. Normally, she hated dishes. Did this mean love was a form of psychosis?
Then the hot water ran out.
“Let’s eat the ice-cream while we’re waiting,” she’d suggested.
“It’s refreezing.”
“But Clive! That’s no good. It crystallises into icy shards. It harbours bacteria.”
“Ooh! Harbours, dearie me! Who swallowed her nursing textbook? I’ve a better idea,” said Clive. “Let’s tango.”
“On an empty stomach?” She was dismayed. “Are we going to subsist on love alone?” she’d asked.
“You’re always hungry,” said Clive, as if she’d been banqueting for hours instead of surviving on two orecchietti. “I hope you won’t prove too expensive a wife to feed.” He’d sounded like a grazier restocking his pastures with cattle that did their own foraging, but he’d smiled.
She’d bitten her lip, refrained from nagging Clive about her hunger. “But dance without music?”
“Stick by me girl and you’ll never want for tunes.” He’d assumed the stance of a dancing teacher. She’d stepped up ready. He’d taken her in a boat-prow hold, arms pointed stiffly in the direction they were to head. He’d let go of her for a minute to pluck a dirty plastic flower from a vase on the window ledge; he’d stuck it between her teeth. Claire felt a gag reflex rising but she’d kept it down. He’d started in on a homemade song that went: da dum dada dum dada dum dum. Its lyrics went like this: “All lovers should learn how to tango. It’s better than eating a mango. Groove to each move. Because we’re in love. Here at last it’s a blast when we tango! Ole!”
Wow! Her beloved was capable of off-the-cuff witty spoofs. He sang he was inventive, impetuous, and hers!
They headed for the backdoor, high-stepping with the histrionic deliberation couples adopt when tangoing, a way of making love while staying mainly vertical. Clive’s fluency brushed off on her.
Once the boat prow of their arms collided with the door, they made a slick reversal involving a 180-degree realignment of limbs, then they’d stuck their noses in the air and headed for the sink.
On reaching the climax – the bit where Clive was meant to deliver her backward bending form to an imaginary point an inch from the floor and after a moment of suspense to raise her up again, they’d fallen in a muddle of limbs and gales of laughter.
“Oh, Clive,” she’d gasped, since he was pressing on her rib-cage, “I really do…love you.”
"Ditto mon ange!" he’d replied, in Franglais.
Gosh! He even spoke the language of love surgically! she thought.
Their romantic interlude was done, the dishes weren’t. They scrambled upright and rolled up their sleeves. The dishes seemed neither a chore nor a bore with her beloved helping.
He took each plate before it reached the draining board. Anticipated her every move. They were as one. Soapsuds drifted prettily, leaving only the faintest of smear trails for son amour to polish off with his Port Douglas tea towel. They were moving as if born to wash dishes forever.
No collisions marred their performance. Only love, a powerful instinct, could transform this boring chore.
Already this morning, with early light seeping like buttermilk through muslin, life seems more prosaic!
Claire didn’t go home last night. Clive was insistent that they start their lives together as they meant to go on. She’d have been happier taking it slowly but when Clive annexes you, then he must have you now! She feels a frisson of excitement to find herself so essential to this Clive guy, who, when all is added up and averaged out, seems admirable.
Why wouldn’t he let her go home? She’s wondering about this now it’s morning and her intoxication has worn off and he’s not in bed with her. Did he fear his resolve might weaken if allowed wriggle-room? Is she part of a commitment phobic’s 12-step plan, his hostage, his pledge to remain engaged, become a family man? But does she want to be the solution to someone else’s problems before she’s catalogued her own?
Last night Clive had had a note delivered to Suzy letting her know that Claire was fine, and that she’d see her in the morning. Is he buying her?
Chapter 9
Trying to Sleep
In love for the first time, Claire feels like Cinderella plucked from a life of drudgery by her prince. She pities her girlfriends, who mere hours ago were mocking her unworldliness.
After the love-making scene –
to which the reader wasn’t invited – they turn off the bedside lamp for sleep. At least, Clive is well and truly ready for sleep; it’s just one more bedtime for him.
For Claire, it’s different; her life has reached its water-shed. But why call it a water-shed, she wonders. Drab imagery. The water part is fine because water is to earth what air is to life.
But what’s the shed bit about? A water-shed would shed. Perhaps it’s to remind us we can’t hang onto joy nor store a reservoir of goodies in cupped hands. Happiness will leak out over time.
She steels herself to relax (an oxymoronic ambition if ever there was one) under the red counterpane, but with Clive a dead-weight pinning her to the bed, she can’t let go.
There’s something quaint about her fiancé. Last night, just before ‘shut-eye’, Clive turned to her with serious intent. Naturally, she was expecting some noble dictum, a summary of their life together so far, but instead he’d given her a lesson in the uses of ‘will’ and ‘shall’.
Didactic, but he’s preparing her to ‘fit into his family’ – too old a family to fit in with hers.
Claire knows she should sleep tonight. Tomorrow is her moving day. A day already bound to be stress-filled. But instead she has decided to celebrate her life’s change of genre; she’ll farewell drab kitchen-sink realism, welcome her rom-com days. She’ll watch and wait and think and breathe for both of them.
First-time sex shouldn’t be celebrated by doing what you do every night of your life – falling asleep. No! She’ll claim her womanhood by keeping vigil. She’ll feel crap tomorrow but at least she’ll have squeezed pungent eucalyptus oil from the gum tree of life.
She’ll run the movie of their love-making through her mind, replaying it over and over, until it’s a worldwide event, worthy of being relayed on a looped tape forever on TV, like the moon-landing!
She’ll milk it for all it’s worth, evaluate each gesture, enumerate each endearment, each caress. She cannot rate her own performance. And to be fair, Clive’s is unrateable by her – she can only say that he seemed diligent.
So here they are, curled up like twin crescent moons, quiescent as imagoes awaiting their transformation into something altogether other. The pair of yoked bullocks on ‘Farty’ Artie’s farm next door to her family farm springs to mind but she repels the image.
She resolves to make a break for independence once Clive’s breathing has steadied into its regular whoosh and snort: the soundtrack to a marriage, she supposes.
At last his breathing settles. She wriggles her shoulder out from under her lover’s chin.
She shoves off the heavy arm that pins her down. She rolls onto her side. Gasps. How long has she waited to breathe normally, deeply, naturally. Phew! It is obscene the relief she feels flying solo again. She wedges the spare pillow under her left knee. At last she’s resting on a level plane and not clinging to a crater, about to plummet into a black hole.
Claire falls asleep eventually. She awakes to find she’s clinging to the piping around the mattress-edge. Having always slept alone, she is unused to the minute adjustments a heavy proximate body forces one to make. Is she a mattress-pea princess?
She lies and stares at the ceiling. Despite the heavy curtaining, it’s already dawn and as her eyes adjust, she can make out the decorative rose on the ceiling. Luckily, the upended coffin in the corner becomes a wardrobe or she’d have taken it as an omen and skedaddled.
In the milky film of morning light, there’s nothing to exercise her superstitious side. But what of Clive? Claire’s probing fingers find no evidence of life.
Chapter 10
Morning After
A note on Clive’s pillow informs Claire that Clive’s at the hospital. Shouldn’t he have told her she’d find herself abandoned as soon as she’d thrown in her lot with him?
Claire had slept after all. Her romantic idea of a vigil had failed through sheer exhaustion.
This morning, she can hardly believe in last evening. She’s alone again. Were Clive’s feelings for her a mere low-grade affection? She feels she’s been married and divorced in one evening.
His note says: ‘HOSPITAL’.
She’s awakened to someone else’s décor. It’s all Mexican whorehouse-style ox-blood reds and silk fringed lamps. She’ll have to din it into her head that his belongings are now hers, whether she likes his stuff or not.
Her life started at 10 pm last night. It was a sharp-edged transformation. No wriggle-room, he declared. Claire feels as if her life’s Dark Ages have travelled express to the Enlightenment, ignoring all epochs in between.
Claire’s hardly exhilarated. She has a panicky fluttering in her stomach, as if she’s losing her grip on the crumbling cliff of life and is about to slide into a void. Have all twenty doors of possibility that had been standing ajar slammed shut? Have her life’s choices been whittled down to one? Is love a loss of opportunity?
A knock sounds at the door.
“Yes?”
“It’s Alex. Are you decent?”
“Yes.”
The door opens. His grinning visage adorns the slit between the jamb and the door, making his face seem longer than ever. He opens the door, gives a mock-courtly bow and says: “Greetings, Sister-in-Law. Your fiancé has charged me with the honour of organising breakfast for you.”
Oh, so Clive had remembered the semi-homeless waif abandoned in his bed. “Thanks Alex,” Claire says, “but I went foraging during the night; already I know there’s nothing in the fridge.”
“How about bacon and eggs from the corner shop?”
“Great! I’m famished,” Claire admits. “All I had last night was ears.”
“One cannot love on ears alone; one needs heads, elbows, fingers, brains…pasta tubes or pipes; an excellent invention the water pipe; viz the Romans, their aqueducts. I love pipes, I’m a plumber.”
“Weren’t there always pipes?”
“No. Like the wheel, they had to be invented.”
“So how did prehistoric men water their lawns?”
“Now you’re teasing me.”
“Maybe. I feel like all Clive’s duped and desperate women, Alex. He decided a proposal was the only way of…you know,” she says blushing. She feels a wave of self-pity rising from whatever low swampy pit such feelings come. She presses her lips into a straight line, cracks hardy. But her inconvenient shoulders start to shake. Claire hopes Alex will think she’s laughing.
He hurries over. Sits on the bed. He envelopes her in arms so long they look like nana forgot to stop knitting his birthday jumper. She breathes him in along with gulps of air that fuel her sobs. His smell is fresh and very male. He unearths a hanky from his jeans pocket; he lifts Claire’s chin to dab at her eyes. She pushes all thoughts of microbes clean from her mind and submits. He’s like a painter preparing a canvas for a seminal art work. Thinking this, Claire starts to laugh but her gulping giggles and the intensified shaking of her shoulders convince him of her distress.
He hugs her to him tighter still. “Listen, Claire,” he says, “I gave you the wrong impression last night about Clive’s philandering.”
“Alex,” she says. “Already I know that as witty and charming, as he is, Clive will be hard work as a fiancé, if that is what he is. I half expect to find myself back home tonight. He’ll blame all this”, Claire indicates the disarray of the bedclothes, “on strong drink.” “And do you know what, Alex? I wouldn’t mind too much. This was an adventure, but can it be real?”
“Claire, I don’t know what to say…I’m sure he loves you.”
“Thanks Alex, you’re a kind, sweet man.”
“Stop telling me I’m kind, Claire,” he says sounding pissed. “Okay, some breakfast?”
“Yes, please! I was so hungry in the night, I sneaked to the kitchen and polished off some milk that was on the point of going off. Clive thinks I’m a doll that doesn’t need to eat.”
“Clive doesn’t get eating; his nourishment comes from fluids.”
&
nbsp; “Yes, he even brought a night-cap to bed with him.”
“When he’s married, he’ll eat more, drink far less, I hope.”
“We tangoed! I didn’t think I could dance but…”
“He wafted you about the room?”
“Not wafted, it was more like a fascist’s stomp.”
“Good simile.”
“I love English. I’m a philologist,” Claire admits, bashfully, then wishes she hadn’t skited. “Don’t tell Clive.”
“Your secret’s safe with me. I am one too.”
“One two what?”
“Another philologist, dummy. I love Shakespeare.”
“Me too!”
“Do marry Clive. We’ll make totally compatible in-laws. We’ll talk at Xmas and birthday parties.” Alex strokes his chin thoughtfully. “He needs you, Claire. He’s lonely.”
“Lonely. But he’s popular at work. I asked around. I reckon he exaggerates; thinks it’s cool to seem vulnerable. I’m the lonely one,” says Claire. “I mean, fancy accepting a proposal from the first man…”
“Well, get un-lonely. Don’t marry just to cure your loneliness.”
“But Clive is a catch; he’s handsome, fun.” Claire’s trying to convince herself. Her words thrum in her head. She’s wobbling all over the joint, a spinning top on the wane. But…No.
“You’re right. Make me a strong coffee, Alex. I’ll bail right now and no harm done.”
“What’s the hurry? Claire. Hang around. Keep me company today.”
“Oh, gosh! That foreign man who called. He said he had…a footstool or something.”
“Ah! Sergei. Come to his shop with me – it’s amazing.”
“But there’s Suz, my flatmate, waiting.”
“She nice?” he asks. Claire nods. “We’ll take her too. But don’t move in yet. You’ll get stuck.”
“By moving in, I’ll get to know him faster.”
Alex sighs. “Is that a book you’re leaning on?”
“My journal,” Claire says proudly.
“You take your journal on dates?”
“Don’t tell.”
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