Nor were there any presents, although her parents had given them money to travel. Not that this was a wedding gift: it was a present to her, her father had insisted, as congratulations for the PhD and the job, so she could have a holiday before she started work.
‘You could have just lived together,’ he told her, and she felt ashamed of the foolishness of it all.
‘I know.’
But she never would have just lived with Charles. If he’d asked her to move in, rather than marry him, she would have said no. She didn’t want to live with him now. This wasn’t about her feelings for him, it was more about her own strange inclination to try on the clothes of another woman, someone more colourful than she had ever been. And yet, as she took the cheque from her father, she felt like a silly child again, this time in an outfit that was too large, and — quite frankly — embarrassing in its glary flamboyance.
‘It was just a wedding,’ she said.
He took her hand. He was a gentle man who had always loved her with a calm kindness. ‘Perhaps I’m old,’ he said. ‘And foolish or superstitious. It disturbs me to simply flout tradition, with no reason or thought.’
And although she didn’t admit it, Emma knew exactly what he meant.
They’d spent her parents’ money on two economy airfares — London, Lisbon, Madrid — and booked cheap rooms in hotels with websites that promised far more than they were ever going to deliver. At first the thrill of travel had been enough to keep her buoyant in pretending she was happy, but soon his constant presence had begun to close in on her, day and night, night and day. Just the two of them. A married couple. On a honeymoon. Even he had begun to stop uttering any of those phrases as she shrank away from words that had quickly become too large in their emptiness.
Now, in their Madrid hotel room, she switched her phone on to see the time. She’d been asleep for just a couple of hours. She drank a glass of water greedily. She was parched, like the sunken hide of a cow dead in a ravine, she thought, skin like leather, collapsed on bleached white bones, and she glanced quickly in the bathroom mirror, relieved to see that this spectre of death didn’t return her gaze. It was just herself, blotched and red-eyed from too much drink. Nothing more, nothing less.
In the bed, Charles shifted in his sleep.
She studied him, his fleshy bottom lip, the line of his jaw, the stubble that peppered his cheeks and the fine crust of sleep in his eyelashes. She turned away, and then back again, surprised at the wave of repulsion she felt when she contemplated how familiar and yet unfamiliar he was to her.
The previous night, they had drunk too much, wandering the streets and stopping to have another (often two or three for him, thrown back with increasing speed as he talked — ludicrous flights of fancy — while she sat in silence) and then another.
In the third bar, they found themselves wedged in a corner with Jose and Lois, two Puerto Ricans from New York who were doing Europe in a week. A country a day, and they counted those they had done and those they were yet to do, leaving Emma wondering how you ‘did’ a country.
Charles had insisted that they all call him Carlos.
‘This is who I am now.’ He stood on his bar stool, pointing at his chest. ‘Carlos.’
‘You’re no Carlos,’ Jose had told him. ‘You’re as white as …’ He’d grinned as he’d tried to summon up a suitable comparison, until his gaze settled back on Emma. ‘As white as she is, man. As white as she is.’
Charles grinned back. ‘Ah, but I’m Mediterranean on the inside.’
Lois wanted champagne, not wine, and she shouted across the bar, her Spanish fluent, her accent causing considerable confusion. The barman turned to Emma as he poured Lois’s drink, his wink slow and deliberate. She looked down at the counter in embarrassment.
‘Pity you’re married.’ Lois fished an olive out of the bowl in front of her, bright red fingernails flashing against her lips. ‘Cos he’s got eyes for you, honey.’
‘But I’m not married,’ Emma said. ‘I’m just pretending.’
Lois flung her head back and laughed, throatily. She tapped her fingernails on the coaster, the sharp rap in time to the music. ‘Jose,’ and she called his name insistently, ‘let’s dance, baby. Let’s get outta here and dance.’
He ignored her.
She stood, towering in heels that provided so little balance, yet she managed to defy this, swaying over to Jose, who continued to ignore her. She turned to Charles. ‘Carlos, baby, I wanna dance.’
Charles’s bow was low and sweeping. He took Lois by the arm, nodding at Jose. ‘She wants to dance.’
But Jose’s hand was raised in the air, his voice ringing out above the din of the bar, ordering another drink, another jug of wine for his friends over there and he pointed to a group of students in the corner.
‘Charles can take you dancing,’ Emma said. ‘We’ll find you.’
‘And leave you?’ Charles seized her, drawing her close and kissing her on the lips. ‘Carlos does not leave his woman.’
Later, as they walked home through the chill streets of Madrid, the four of them weaving from pavement to pavement, Charles and Jose had started singing, strange made-up harmonies that drifted through the night air.
‘You sing like’ — Jose kissed the tips of his fingers, gesturing towards the black sky — ‘angelitos negros.’
And they had made promises of breakfast, coffee and churros, the names of places thrown around, until Señora from the hotel had opened the door and shouted at them, and Emma had apologised, rushing towards the entrance before it was closed in their face.
Now, as Emma stood in the wash cubicle and rinsed herself, she saw her bag on the floor, passport and wallet tucked into an inside pocket, clothes for today neatly folded on top of her suitcase.
She brushed her teeth, taking care to be quiet, and dressed in the dim light. The door was heavy, and she kept hold of it as she let it swing shut behind her. Sitting on the tiles of the top step, she put her shoes on, her fingers shaking slightly as she tied the laces. Perhaps it was the cold, or her hangover, she told herself, not wanting to admit that this tremor may have been due to a fear of what she could do. Standing quickly, and without glancing back, she headed down the stairs towards the street.
Emma had never been in love. She had gone out with men, the relationship always dwindling away after a few months, the calls and dates becoming less frequent, the need to define the ending assiduously avoided on her part, but if she had to be dragged into such a talk, she was always reasonable.
She enjoyed her own company, and she liked her work. She could spend hours shaping and framing a clinical trial, lost in defining the questions, establishing the parameters, laying the paths that would lead to a conclusion.
As she stood at the entrance to the hotel, she wondered why she had turned so far from herself. Perhaps it was having finished studying, or maybe she had simply been lifted off the ground by the enthusiasm with which Charles had taken her hand, leading her in a direction she should have only glanced towards.
He was an AV tech at the university. She had walked into the lecture theatre to find him singing to himself, the timbre of his voice caught by the microphone, the slow rise of the song filling the room. He had been setting up the theatre for a presentation by the newly appointed professor in her department.
He was completely unembarrassed when he saw her, and asked how she would like to be miked, from the stand or on a lapel?
‘It’s not me who’s talking,’ she explained. ‘I’m just checking that the video conference is working.’
‘All in order.’ He switched the display between screenshots of the different campuses and showed her which controls to use. ‘Call me if you forget — or if anything goes wrong.’
She’d seen him later that day in the canteen. He’d brought his lunch over to where she
sat reading, and they talked, his voice lilting, his hands darting around as he told her about his family, his love of music and painting and writing, his sister who had died of an overdose, the first time he’d had his heart broken, his brief stint as a yoga teacher followed by a job as the personal assistant to a minor celebrity on the dive, his tales slapping up against each other like a choppy sea dancing under the light.
She’d loved the ease with which he’d entertained her, the colour of his stories, the wiry restlessness of his entire being as he talked, the possibility of a life that could constantly change direction.
Emma, on the other hand, was the only child of two doctors; she had studied hard at school, gone to university and continued with research, never once thinking there could be any approach other than a careful progress towards some kind of ultimate goal. She ate well to be healthy, she exercised four times a week to stay slim, she worked hard to further her academic career. Charles had been so foreign, she remembered. It was like being given an exotic animal, a species so rare and different that she had wanted to observe it closely. And yet at any other time she might only have taken a cursory glance, putting it back on the table immediately.
She thought of him now, up in that room, the shutters closed to the morning.
On their third night together, he had told her he had never left anyone. ‘I have always been left.’
She had ignored the alarm she felt, watching him lying next to her, staring at the ceiling as he spoke.
‘Well, maybe with me it will be different,’ she’d said, surprised at how fervently she hoped that it would be the case.
He had laughed, asking her what she planned to do to make him run, and she had made up scenarios in which she behaved abominably, forcing him away, disturbed by the relish she felt at these imagined renditions of herself.
Not far off she could hear shouts, whistles, the sound of a crowd, and she stepped back into the doorway as the noise grew in intensity. It was a demonstration, all women, waving placards, with one word over and over again: domicilio. Something to do with the home, she presumed. She had no idea. She just had to wait as they made their way down Calle Mayor, a rush of sound and feet, voices in unison. And then, as quickly as they had descended, the women were gone, leaving her on the edge of the street, ready to walk.
The air was sharp and clear with the last of the winter snows high on the mountains, as she followed streets she did not know. A group of children ran to the train; clustered close, they laughed and jostled each other, their uniforms clean, white shirts startling against olive skin, navy gabardine pressed in perfect pleats. And on each of the street corners, the blind waited with their canes, trays around their necks, selling lotería tickets.
Emma kept walking. At the Buen Retiro Park — or at least this was what she assumed it must be, having read about it in a guidebook — she stood at the entrance, the first of the spring leaves floating in the morning light, and the lake glittering slate smooth in the distance.
Old men played boules, women walked children in strollers, and there was a café where waiters in stiff white coats served coffee and iced lemon drinks. Despite her thirst, she went on, until finally, under the arches of the Rosaleda, she stopped.
In front of her was a statue. She would not have even noticed it if the women next to her had not been looking at it. Both middle-aged, both speaking with American accents, they stood, one with a guidebook, the other with a camera. It was a monument to Lucifer falling from heaven, the only known public statue of the devil, the woman with the guidebook explained, taking her glasses off.
Emma was surprised. He was just like any angel, powerful wings straining up against the sky. A serpent was pulling him back to earth. She stayed where she was, staring at it, tired now. She had walked for far longer than she had thought she would, the fear of what she was capable of fizzing through her blood, speedy with the sugar of adrenaline.
Closing her eyes to the morning light, she imagined finding her way along the myriad roads and streets and laneways she had wandered, returning to the stairs that led up to the room where the man who was her husband was probably still asleep. She winced.
In the hotel room there was a suitcase of clothes, and she went through them in her mind — jeans, T-shirts, swimmers, sandals, a favourite cardigan.
In her handbag she had money and her passport. She ran her fingers over the leather, feeling the shape of her wallet and papers. Her picture was the same on her driver’s licence as her passport, wide blue eyes staring straight at the camera, dark hair cropped short. The photo was taken a year ago, showing her as she was before she met Charles.
‘You look so serious,’ he had said.
‘I am serious,’ she had replied, taking the passport back from him.
‘I am, too,’ he had said and she had laughed at him.
‘But I am,’ he had protested. ‘Not in the same way you are. But no less.’
He was serious. She knew this now. His love for her was serious; his desire to marry her, flippant as it had seemed, weighed far more than her feeble attempt to pretend it didn’t matter. And she wanted nothing more than to abandon him — the cruelty of it far worse than anything she had ever done. To run from this mistake and pretend that it never happened. To get a taxi to the airport and book the next flight home, where she would let herself into her old apartment, still hers in anticipation of a moment that she had always known would come.
Next to her, the woman with the guidebook was quick to dismiss the statue. ‘I thought the devil would be far more interesting,’ she said to her friend. ‘But you wouldn’t even know it was him.’ She closed the book.
Emma didn’t hear what she said next.
She was seeing herself as she once was, there at her front door, the bay window at the end of the hall, and the jacaranda outside. The longing for home and her previous life brought it all into sharp focus: her desk where she had studied for years; her bookshelf, ordered with journals and texts and the dozen or so novels she had indulged in without ever quite understanding what point there was to reading them. And if she turned to her right, she could walk through to the kitchen, clean, bare, functional, ready for her to cook the few meals she knew, and beyond that was her bedroom, hers.
She opened her eyes, to a world hovering on the edge of what she could do.
‘Shall we go?’ the woman with the guidebook asked her friend, already turning to head out of the Rosaleda.
Emma watched her, trim in khaki pants, a white T-shirt and flat leather sandals, her bag slung across her shoulder, unaware that her friend had failed to follow her.
The other woman had remained. Taking a few steps forward, she put out her hand, walking like the blind, towards a statue that held her attention. Emma understood it: that desire to touch, despite knowing just how the stone would feel, cold and smooth beneath the skin if you could, in fact, run your hands over it. But you couldn’t. To do so would mean crossing the carefully planted garden that surrounded the fountain, and then stepping into the water itself, only to discover that the devil was too high to reach. It was just a brief desire, and the logistics of carrying it out were far too troublesome. The woman let her hand drop, and then she saw Emma, watching her, and she hurried after her friend, embarrassed.
Alone now, Emma remained still in the face of her urge to run.
It was just a wedding, she’d told her father, hating how false her words were. It could be undone, Charles had said, his flippancy about the event also a lie. And staring up at the statue, Emma bit her lip as she imagined herself fleeing without a word, the temptation so strong. But she wasn’t the woman they’d both pretended she was. She let her fingers slide off her wallet and passport, the adrenaline gone now, and she tried to remember the path she had taken so she could return to say goodbye.
The Bad Dog Park
Each morning Pete woke, ready t
o feed Doris by seven a.m. He gave her a cup of dry biscuits and one hundred grams of mince, pre-measured and kept in plastic bags at the bottom of the fridge. There were times when he had to coax her to eat, and other times when she barked too eagerly, leaping up to lick scraps he left on the table, her hunger an indication that her blood sugar levels were wrong.
While she ate, he washed his face, splashing cold water on his skin to wake up, so that he could measure the dosage with a steady hand. The insulin needed to be gently rolled in his palms first, the cloudiness spreading evenly throughout the bottle. He liked to let it get a little warmer as well, to take the chill from the fridge out of the dosage. And then he had to slowly draw up the syringe, his worsening eyesight sometimes making exact measurements more challenging: fourteen intravenous units, no bubbles, no air pockets.
Over the last two years, Doris had never taken a needle easily. And nor had he.
When Sophia was a child, Kate took her for her shots. He had tried the first time, only to feel the horrifying lightness of panic flood through him, settling in his throat. The doctor had sent him out of the room, leaving Sophia screaming for him, terrified of being abandoned.
And then when Kate had been ill, there had been endless needles, her blood becoming such a familiar sight to him that he began to forget her surface: her bright eyes, pale skin and curly hair replaced by blood and vomit and shit and all the mechanics, the workings, like a toy pulled apart in a bad dream.
At seven-thirty he checked Doris had eaten all her food, and then he sat at the kitchen table and called her over, the syringe resting next to him. To his surprise she always came, eager-eyed, forgetting that the delivery of a liver treat invariably preceded the fright of an injection. Talking to her quietly, he fed her, stroking the wiry kinks in her fur, more in an effort to calm himself than her, her deep brown eyes fixed on him.
Sophia had brought Doris home five years ago. Thin, bedraggled and tucked in the folds of her coat, Doris had whimpered loud enough for him to hear her before he saw her. Unable to hide her any longer, Sophia had held her out in her shaking hands, talking too much as she usually did on the rare occasions she visited. ‘See,’ she said. ‘She’s sooo cute. Her little paws,’ and Sophia stretched them towards him. ‘Shake hands, Pete. There’s a good girl, such a good girl, such a cute, good, little girl.’ She burrowed her face in the puppy’s tiny body, squeezing her too hard, the dog yelping and nipping in fright. ‘Jesus. You fucking little bitch.’
The Secret Lives of Men Page 5