by Les Zig
When the bell rings to signal the end of class, I jump out of my chair. The kids file out. They’re too quiet. Every one of them looks at me. I’ve already been convicted in a court of opinion. I consider ringing Jane now, but there wouldn’t be time to unload everything. I’ll have to wait.
In the final period, I have social studies with the kids I see most often through the week, my Year 10s. I expect them to hate me. Bianca was one of their own and now the belief is that I’ve done something to her.
I get up, open my mouth. I want to tell them that whatever stories are circulating are just that: stories. Of course, they’re kids. They’ll put circumstantial evidence together to fit the most spectacular scenario.
It proves almost impossible to run the class. The kids are distracted. I assign them reading to do and several of the quizzes from their exercise book, but they chat in hushed whispers. I don’t push the work, and monitor that their quiet discussions remain just that—quiet. Throughout, I keep expecting the door to crash open and for the detectives to haul me out.
My phone rings. It’s Jane. I grab it, about to answer it and charge out. Kids look at me. This isn’t the time or place. I decline the call and send her a text: In class. Talk later. She responds: Okay. I put the phone away. Kids condemn me with their eyes.
What if Bianca blames me? I don’t know why she would, but this sort of stuff occurs. Wrongful accusations are made. She might want to cover up for somebody else—perhaps a boyfriend none of us know about. My mind races with worst-case scenarios.
When the bell rings, I have to stop myself rushing out of the room before the kids. I let them filter out while I pack my bag. Maya casts me one last forlorn look.
Then I head out the door myself.
I stride down the hallway, planning to jump in my car and go home. But I stop. I can’t do that. That really will look suspicious. So I detour to Principal Hetrick’s office. She’s at her desk—she’s always at her desk—going through some paperwork. I knock on her door.
‘Come in.’
I open the door and poke my head through the doorway.
‘The police …’ I begin.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m unsure what I should do. Should I go home or should I wait around in case they want to talk to me?’
‘You can go home.’
I hold my breath. Is she tacitly telling me I’m okay?
‘We have your address if they need it.’
I nod and close the door.
24
When I get home, I sit in the car, parked in the driveway. Wallace barks from inside the garage. There’s nobody else out.
I’m unsure what comes next in a situation like this. I should talk to Jane. Jane. Whose eyes I want to look into when I tell her, whose scent I want to smell, whose warmth I want to feel when she holds me and tells me it’ll be okay, as she did when Roger barged in.
The whole week evaporates, condensing into a shadowy paranoia that I divorce myself from, that I hate myself for creating. My head always works overtime. Maybe that’s the part of me responsible for whatever creativity I nurture, that wants to transform a blank page into something wonderful and breathtaking, only to ever find something pedestrian.
I drag my phone from my pocket, but this has gone beyond a phone call. Maybe I can swing past Web Myriad a bit earlier when I pick Jane up for dinner tonight. I shudder thinking how she’ll deal with this. But she’ll be strong. She is whenever she needs to be—or needs us to be. She always has been.
I get out of the car because Wallace’s barking is insistent. There’s a break in the clouds directly above me. The sun blinds me. I shield my eyes. It’s been cooler these past two days, but tomorrow’s meant to be hot again. I dread it, especially because of all the anniversary stuff we’ll be doing.
I open the garage and Wallace leaps at me. I catch him and hoist him up to my chest, pivoting back and forth on my heels. Wallace licks at my neck and his cold nose nuzzles at my cheek. I scratch him between the ears and tell him he’s a good boy, swaying, trying to work out what to do next.
I’m there for a couple of minutes. If anybody were to walk past the house, they might think I was trying to rock a baby to sleep. It’s not until Wallace starts squirming that I move again.
I put him down, follow him into the garage, and grab the sledgehammer.
The wall is stubborn. I heave the sledgehammer at it. The stone chips. The reverberations run up the sledgehammer’s head, along the handle, jarring my whole body. Wallace zooms around the yard barking, like he’s worried I’m going to hurt myself. But I keep at it until my shoulders are sore and I’m drenched in sweat. I’ve made no headway, but feel better for my efforts.
I take out my phone. It’s 4.05—I’ve only been going at it for about fifteen minutes. God knows how I’ll ever manage to take this wall down.
I put the sledgehammer back in the garage, go into the house and have a quick shower and change. When I check my phone, I find I have two texts. The first is from Beth, telling me she’s sorry she missed me after school and asking if I’m okay. The second is from Luke, asking how things panned out with Jane.
I tell Beth I’m okay and Luke Okay. They’re unsatisfactory answers, I know. Beth will understand. Luke will think I’m short-changing him, the way both Stephen and I have short-changed our friendship with him since we each got married.
I should explain things better and promise myself that I will when things have calmed down.
Right now, I want to get moving. I need to be out of here.
When I get in the car and swing out of the drive, I get another text from Beth telling me she’s around if I want to talk. I send her a Thanks. Luke doesn’t get back to me.
The drive to Web Myriad is a crawl. It’s 4.33. People are finishing early and eager to get home or go out.
I think about this unspoken allegation festering at school now. If it hasn’t been settled by Monday, teaching will be unbearable. There’ll be innuendo and suspicions will filter back to parents. Parents will complain about me teaching their children, particularly if those children are daughters.
At some point, I’m sure the police will want to talk to me. What will the neighbours think if they show up in a marked car? It’s bad enough what’s going on at school. I don’t need it at home, too.
A beer would be good right now. Maybe several. It’s a pity I have to drive.
Tonight, I want to let go.
25
It’s 4.44 when I park outside Web Myriad—way too early, but I don’t care. I want to talk to Jane. Hopefully, I can pull her out of work or whatever meeting she’s in, or see her before it starts. If I can’t, I’ll wait in the foyer.
I get out of the car and enter the building from the back. There’s a lift but I bypass it, jogging up the zigzagging stairwell the way Jane does—her ‘aerobic workout’, she once told me. When I reach the third floor, I open the door. There’s the small foyer, then the Web Myriad offices. Their name is emblazoned across a glass partition and the door.
I see Jane’s boss, Henry. I always think of him as rumpled, and not just because of his wrinkled shirt and loose tie, but because it seems life’s packaged him in a way where he can’t straighten himself out. He’s slumped in front of a PowerPoint presentation while talking to two men in suits. I stop before I reach the door, but he sees me. He frowns. Then it clicks who I am. He beckons me, so I open the door and pop my head in.
‘Casper?’ he asks, unsure if he’s got my name right.
‘Yeah.’
‘Jane’s already gone. She wasn’t feeling too well.’
‘She wasn’t feeling well?’
‘No. Cold maybe. It’s going around.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’
I close the door, start down the stairwell, and ring Jane. I stop in front of the exit to the second floor because I think I hear ringing. I put my ear to the door. It is ringing—Jane’s ringtone.
I open the door.
Hea
t blasts me, and I almost fall back a step. My breath becomes thick in my chest. It’s dark—gloomy, so it takes a moment to make out details. I remember Jane telling me the business here went bust, so the glass partition to the office is clean. Sunlight blares through the drawn venetian blinds in thin fiery slits, and bounces off the glistening form of Jane—naked but for her heels—bent over a desk, her butt thrust in the air. Kai fucks her. His right hand digs into Jane’s hair, the way a rider would twist his hand into the mane of a bronco trying to buck him, his left hand poised over her left buttock, which he slaps every now and again, like he’s spurring her on.
He’s scrawny—scrawnier than me. I’m sure I can see his sternum. He has a sparse tuft of hair on his chest. But he’s a powerhouse of motion. Jane’s whole body shimmies every time he drives into her. Her buttocks quiver, her breasts bounce, her hair—tied so tight this morning—tumbles free. A vein sticks out on her forehead. Her face is mottled. A guttural wail rises up from her throat.
I have never made her look like that.
I have never made her sound like that.
Kai must be huge. Or maybe he is fucking her anally—from this angle, I can’t tell.
I see her handbag inside the door, lying on its side—everything spilled out, the way all this began. Her phone’s still ringing, vibrating on the carpet like an overturned turtle trying to right itself. Alongside it is a little white bag from Joe’s Chemist.
I go to hang up my phone. My hand paws at it. Jane’s scream fills the office. I jump. My hand hits the phone and hangs it up. But my eyes are fixed on Kai. He pulls out of Jane. His cock gleams in the sheath of its glow-in-the-dark condom. He’s no bigger than me. Maybe thinner, too.
He jerks Jane by the arm. She spins, falls to her knees before him. Kai drags her head back by her hair with one hand. With his other, he tears the condom from his cock, flicks it over his shoulder—it whizzes haphazardly to the floor, like an errant firework—and masturbates himself to ejaculation.
The first spurt hits Jane’s cheek. I don’t know where the next goes. But the next hits her lips. She takes him in her mouth. Holds him, her face buried in his pubic hair, which is trimmed into a stupidly neat triangle. Then runs her mouth up and down his shaft. The cum lathers on her lips. Kai grins down at her, the way I would approve of Wallace after he’s performed a trick.
My feet move. I still have the door to the stairwell open. Now I trip back over the threshold. The door surges towards the jamb. Pauses abruptly. Gently closes.
Quiet.
It wasn’t Jane. Just some other raven-haired woman. Kai probably has a ton of girlfriends. Girls fall for accents and fuckwits. And Henry said Jane was gone. She’s probably already at the bar waiting for me, or on the way back home. Forget the fact that her phone was ringing and vibrating on the floor, that I saw her, or recognised the bounce of her butt.
I should go in there and confront them. Although I don’t know what the etiquette is. I suppose that as the husband of the woman getting fucked it’s to kill the fucker. But there’s nothing there. No imperative to do so.
I get up, stick my phone in my pocket, and vomit over the balustrade of the stairwell.
The vomit sails through the air like a meteor shower and splatters on the ground floor.
Then I bolt down the stairs.
I sit in my car, still parked in the lot behind Jane’s office building.
The same thoughts flit through my mind as before. There’s no way I could’ve seen what I did. The explanation must be simpler. I’ve had a bad day. I’ve imagined this. A breakdown. That’s it. This fear has weighed on my mind all week. Now I’ve hallucinated it. Surely that’s possible.
I start the car and pull out of the lot.
On the drive home, I consider another possibility. Maybe he was raping her. Her strained face suggests she was being forced. Maybe I didn’t realise it. Although if that were the case, she seemed more than willing at the end when he came all over her face and she took him in her mouth.
I clench my eyes to shut out the world, but only lock in the horror of her face buried in his pubic hair.
I open my eyes. There’s pain on either side of my neck. The numbness in my mind evaporates. The improbabilities are accepted for what they are: attempts to rationalise what I’ve seen. That leaves what I saw: Kai fucking Jane.
Jane fucking Kai.
26
I pull into my drive, reverse onto the nature strip. Sit there. Stare at the garage door through the windshield. I hear Jane’s wailing in my ears. My chest tightens. My breath feels like it’s not getting past my throat.
All the typical questions explode in my mind: Why? How long? How did it happen? Is Kai the first time this has happened? Have there been others? Are there others? The questions keep coming—the same ones, new ones, and variations of the same ones. But they’re not important—at least not right now. Nothing is important but what I do from here.
The typical responses present themselves to accompany the typical questions: toss all Jane’s stuff out. Pack my stuff and leave. Beat up Kai. But despite all the options, there’s a vacuum in my decision-making ability.
I get out of the car. There’s nobody else out in the neighbourhood—thankfully.
I round the garage, and there’s Wallace. He sits by the front door and whimpers. He gets up. Limps towards me, holding his right paw up.
I pick him up. He whines and nuzzles me with his dirty nose, like he wants me to do something. As carefully as I can, I check his leg and paw to see if they’re cut. They’re not. But the lower half of his leg looks crooked, although I’m unsure if that’s how a dog’s leg is shaped. I try to compare it with his other leg, but he howls. I stop jostling him.
‘What did you do?’ I ask him.
Wallace continues to whine.
I carry him back to the car and place him in the passenger seat. He shakes, and lifts his head, his deep brown eyes soulful. I tousle the fur between his ears and tell him to stay, rush around to the other side of the car, get back in, and start the engine. My phone vibrates. It’s a text from Jane saying she’s finishing early and to come down now.
I pull off the nature strip.
Wallace’s vet is nearby. It’s a big clinic that usually has four vets on staff, as well as several nurses. Given it’s nearing six on a Friday, I don’t expect to find Wallace’s regular vet, Dr Lidia Dudek, still available, but she is.
Dr Dudek is maybe five years older than me and has a narrow face with an aquiline nose that makes her seem austere, but when she smiles I see the kid who must’ve loved animals so much she decided to become a vet. She wears casual clothes, as if she’s just knocked off and is preparing for a night out with her husband—the way things should be on a Friday evening. She shows me into the examination room and I put Wallace on the table.
She has me call to Wallace until he limps towards me, then checks his leg, feeling it and moving it gently—even when Wallace growls at her—trying to determine what’s wrong. She asks me how this happened. I tell her I don’t know, that I came home from work to find him like that.
She speculates that he has a mid-shaft fracture of the radius and ulna, saying some blunt force trauma must’ve been responsible—possibly a car. She decides to take X-rays—if Wallace will sit still for them. Wallace is docile now. I think he understands we’re trying to help him.
She shows me back out into the waiting room, then goes to organise Wallace’s X-rays.
Jane messages and rings several times.
I don’t respond.
I sit down, my hands shaking, and hope Wallace will be okay. Of course, he should. It’s probably a break. But there could be complications—maybe breaks are worse in dogs with their spindly legs. I hate the thought of him in pain.
I wonder if this is what it feels like worrying about a kid. Lucky Jane and I didn’t have any. Don’t have any. I don’t know which tense is applicable.
Jane rings again. I let it ring out. This time she leave
s a voicemail. I check it.
‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Where are you? Why aren’t you answering your phone?’
I delete the message, hang up, and consider texting her. At vet—Wallace has been hurt, I could write. She’d come here then, even if I told her not to. I don’t want that. I don’t know what I want. But I don’t want that.
Dr Dudek returns and tells me she was right and Wallace has a fracture. She discusses options—there are plates, like they’d insert for a person. But she tells me it’s an expensive procedure—upwards of four thousand dollars. I think of the money Jane and I have been slowly saving for IVF. This takes a big bite out of it. It’s a conversation Jane and I should have.
‘Insert the plates,’ I say.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Insert them.’
Dr Dudek goes on to tell me that Wallace will have to fast at least ten to twelve hours. I tell her Wallace probably hasn’t eaten since breakfast, but obviously I can’t be sure as he’s a dog and might’ve found something to nibble on. Dr Dudek suggests the best thing to do would be to feed Wallace a little something now, keep him in overnight, and operate in the morning. She says she doesn’t work on Saturdays, but will come in for Wallace.
I hate the thought of leaving Wallace here alone. He’s wary about the clinic, since it usually means examinations and vaccinations. Fortunately, he’s never had anything else really wrong with him. But he’s not comfortable here, although I don’t know how comfortable home will be either.
‘Come on,’ Dr Dudek says. ‘You can feed him something and settle him in.’
I get another text from Jane: Where are you?
I nod to Dr Dudek.
Out the back, they have a room with glass pens where they keep the animals. I put Wallace in one. He blinks at me, trying to work out what’s going on. Dr Dudek brings me a can of dog food. She opens it and hands me the can and a plastic spoon. I scoop out a chunk of meat. Wallace eats it from the spoon. We get through the can quickly like that.