‘I’m not joking!’ Rosemary said. ‘Just do your job. The quicker you do your job, the quicker you can go.’ She shrugged for dramatic effect. ‘Simple!’
‘How am I meant to do that?’ the man said. He yanked his arm towards the keyboard and the metal cuff grazed the soft black leather again. ‘I’m right-handed. I can’t do anything with these stupid things on me. Get the key.’
Rosemary was stumped. She hadn’t thought about this. She was silent until the man said, ‘You know, you’re not the first female client who’s tried to come on to me like this. Once, on the council estate in Ely, a girl put a pornographic video on. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t encourage it. I was kneeling down on the floor trying to fix her phone socket.’ There was an impish grin playing on his face. ‘All she had to do was ask me for my number.’
‘Why the hell would I come on to you?’ Rosemary said. ‘I’m a married woman with two teenage children.’ As the words hit the air they sounded unfamiliar. She was a married woman with two teenage children, and she must have used that sentence a hundred thousand times. But now it sounded like a lie. Her husband was at work. He was a partner in an accounting firm in St Mellons. These days he was in work even when he wasn’t in work. He’d come in around seven in the evening and sit at the dining table poring over other people’s tax returns. When he wasn’t there he was at his mother’s house. She was seventy-five and suffering from moderate dementia. Often she mistook her son for her late husband and she’d ring their house in the middle of the night, demanding he leave his whore of a fancy woman and go back to his long-suffering wife.
He refused to put her into a care home. He’d suggested once that she come to live with them and Rosemary refused outright. She was the one who worked from home. She was the one who would become primary carer, attending to her mother-in-law’s whims, emptying her commode. She and her mother-in-law had never got on. When they’d first met she’d called Rosemary a ‘mumper’, a West Country description for a gypsy. And now Rosemary suspected that she was exaggerating her symptoms, causing trouble for the sake of it, because that was the kind of woman her mother-in-law was. She demanded attention every minute of the day. She’d worn a white dress on the day of her only son’s wedding, for Christ’s sake.
Rosemary and her husband barely spoke any more. It was as if they lived in a house that was haunted by the ghosts of themselves. They’d become one of those couples who sat at the table of a restaurant reading the menu over and over, staring out of the window, or at the other customers, wondering what to say to one another. They’d become the sort of people they used to laugh at when they were in their early twenties, when it was just them against the rest of the world.
She didn’t feel much like a mother any more, either. Daniel was sixteen. He already had a girlfriend. Her parents let him stay at their house in Llandaff on weekends. ‘In the guestroom, right?’ Rosemary had said when she’d found out. For a few months he’d hidden it, claiming to have been staying at Jason’s, his friend from English class. ‘No, Mom,’ he’d said, talking in an American accent that had made her cringe. ‘In her room, duh. She’s got an en-suite as well.’ When Rosemary had tried to talk to him about contraception he said his girlfriend had been on the pill since she was thirteen. He said they’d already slept together in a tent at a music festival the previous summer. Rosemary had slapped him hard across the face, something she was ashamed of now. She’d always planned to be a liberal parent, someone her children could talk to, no matter what. ‘I was only joking,’ he’d said, holding his hand over his jaw. ‘As if I’d tell you anyway. We’ve got sex counsellors at school for that.’
Rosemary’s daughter, Chantelle, was fourteen. She was a child trapped in the body of a fully formed woman. Her breasts were already bigger than Rosemary’s would ever be, but she was still determined to get an enlargement as soon as she was old enough. It was a subject on which they could find no compromise. Rosemary was strongly opposed to plastic surgery. She’d tried to teach her children that all human beings were beautiful in their own way. She couldn’t understand how she’d managed to raise a daughter whose only goal was to bare her fake breasts in a tabloid newspaper.
No matter how hard you tried, outside influences always thwarted your attempts to control your own life. Sooner or later, you turned into your own parents. The tracks stretched out before her were the ones her mother had left behind. Everything that she had hated about her mother had become characteristics in herself: her anxiousness, her impatience, her bad temper. She giggled at the irony of it. ‘Time turns us all into cantankerous old bats,’ she said quietly, thinking aloud.
Women
A few silent minutes passed and the repairman looked irritated, his eyes cast down to the floor. He was holding his head in his willowy, free hand, his clean, half-moon fingernails pressed on his temple. Rosemary kicked him again, the toe of her pump tapping his knee bone. ‘Do you prefer fake breasts, or real ones?’ she said.
He looked up at her, eyes impatient. ‘What?’ he said.
‘Come on, fake tits or real ones? Surely the thing that’s attractive about the female breast is the fact that they’re a source of nourishment for newborn babies. Who in the world would find two lumps of plastic appealing? Those girls in the magazines look like freaks. If you stuck a pin in their cleavage you’d expect them to burst like a pair of balloons.’
‘I’m not sure I’d know the difference,’ the man said.
Rosemary frowned. ‘Of course you’d know the difference. Fake breasts don’t move. You lie down, they stay sticking up. They stay there forever. When the woman has died and the body has decomposed, they’re still there.’ Just two sacks of jelly left buried in the ground, she thought. In millions of years, when explorers were raking through our remains, that’s all they’d find, bags and bags of white silicone caked in brown earth. They’d wonder what the hell we’d been doing with our lives.
The repairman looked thoughtful. ‘Did you ever hear about that murder case,’ he said, ‘where they found a prostitute chopped up and stuffed into bin bags? Her body was so badly mutilated, her dental records were useless. But her implants had serial numbers. They used them to identify her.’
‘How are they going to identify you?’ Rosemary said.
The repairman flinched, the chain between the handcuffs rattling.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Bad joke.’ Changing tack, she said, ‘What about vaginal surgery? Some women have that, you know. I’ve seen programmes about it. Mothers and daughters going to the clinic together to get their labia trimmed as if it’s some sort of normal activity, as if they’re off to have their legs waxed. Do you know how ridiculous that is?’
The repairman shook his head. ‘They’ll look for me,’ he said. ‘They know where I am.’ His eyes were dark, the yellow irises turning green.
‘I blame pornography,’ Rosemary said. ‘Women today think that they’re sexually free, so they watch porn, like your customer in Ely. Then they get this idea in their heads that there’s such a thing as a perfect vagina, and then they want one. They’re paying money to have parts of their genitals hacked off while human rights groups in Africa are working overtime to ban female genital mutilation. That’s how ridiculous it is! We’re not evolving, we’re going backwards.’
‘It’s not my fault,’ the man said.
‘I know,’ Rosemary said. While she’d been talking she’d thought of a way to improve the situation. She could fix the connection with directions from the repairman. It couldn’t be that difficult, could it? ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘you can leave any time you like, all you’ve got to do is fix the Internet connection and you can be on your way. I know that you’re sort of physically challenged at the moment but I’m not useless am I? Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. You can direct me.’
The repairman was silent, so she went back to her rant. ‘The other thing about pornography,’ she said, ‘is that it dictates the sort of sex people should be having. Jus
t the other day I was flicking through one of my daughter’s magazines. Know what I found?’
The repairman was staring at his bony knees.
‘A guide on how to perform fellatio,’ Rosemary said. ‘Not your average run-of-the-mill sort of fellatio though. The kind where you take the man’s member right down into your throat. That’s the way men like it, apparently. The journalist who wrote it was a woman. She reckoned there’s a knack to switching your gag reflex off. With a little practice you can teach yourself how not to vomit on your boyfriend’s penis! My daughter’s fourteen years old.’
‘I didn’t write it!’ the repairman said, voice sharp.
‘I know you didn’t write it!’ Rosemary said, annoyed. ‘I told you, a woman wrote it.’ She’d thought about writing a letter of complaint to the editor but knew it was a waste of time. They filled those kinds of magazines with sex on purpose. Sex sold, especially to teenagers, who were so curious about it. She wished now that she’d never found it. She wished she’d never been in her daughter’s room, going through her private things. She’d found her diary and skimmed the first three or four pages, another deed she was now deeply ashamed of. It was something she’d never forgiven her own mother for, until now. Standing there, surrounded by posters of near-naked men, with that wealth of secret knowledge in her hand, the diary’s blue cover plastered with love-heart stickers and band names, she just wasn’t able to resist.
She hadn’t been looking for anything in particular, and she hadn’t found it either. There wasn’t any writing, only blue biro doodles of gargantuan breasts, like bulbous figures of eights, lying on their sides, bold dots dabbed in the middle to represent nipples. Had she been working, she wouldn’t have gone near the room. She hated the awful smell of patchouli oil that Chantelle insisted on pouring on to her bedclothes. There wasn’t a laundry detergent strong enough to get rid of it. Instead, the oil contaminated the other items in the cycle. If she didn’t spend a good fifteen minutes separating the family’s linen before a wash, the whole house smelled of it. She wondered now if there was a film or a play that she could take her daughter to see, something that would educate her about the diverse nature of breasts.
‘Have you ever seen The Vagina Monologues?’ she said.
The repairman rubbed the side of his face against his shoulder, like a sheep trying to scratch itself on a fence post. ‘Please,’ he said, mortified. ‘Stop talking about breasts and va, vag–’ He couldn’t say the word. ‘Women’s parts,’ he said finally. ‘I’m not sexist, all right? I’m all for equality. If it’s any comfort, I ran away when I saw what that woman was watching.’
‘Did you?’ Rosemary said.
‘Yes.’
‘But you can’t run away now, can you?’ she said. ‘You’re handcuffed to the chair.’ She noticed the name tag on his overall pocket for the first time, the letters punched into the plastic. Aaron, it said. ‘You’re in my house now, Aaron,’ Rosemary said. ‘I’ll talk about whatever I like.’
The repairman sat up, about to say something. His full lips formed around a new word, but then he closed his mouth and slumped back into the chair.
‘There’s no such thing as equality, Aaron,’ Rosemary said. ‘So what if women become plumbers? So what if you have to call a manhole cover a person-hole cover? That doesn’t mean jack shit. Women still aren’t paid the same wage.’ She pushed a bulky French-language dictionary out of her way and sat back against the wall, pulling her legs up on to the edge of the desk. ‘I’ve got a theory,’ she said. ‘I think the suffragettes got it wrong. I think the bra-burners did more harm than good. We should never have started work. Now we have to work, because you need more than one wage to run a household. People look down on you if you don’t work. If you live on your husband’s income, people call you a
gold-digger, a scrounger. Or they think that you’re a bimbo, too brainless to carve
out your own career. So fine! We go to work. We work the same hours as our husbands.
We put up with all of the same workplace pressures. Somewhere along the line
we give up a promotion or two in favour of taking maternity leave to bear a couple
of kids. Men can’t have babies yet, can
they? Doesn’t stop them wanting them, though.’
‘I don’t want kids,’ Aaron said.
Rosemary ignored him. ‘So now we’re working. Now we’ve got spending power, choices. We can buy a pair of shoes without asking our husband’s permission. So we’re equal, right? Wrong! Who does the cooking and the cleaning? Women. They spend all day in the office and then they come home and cook the food. Not any sort of food. Oh no! It’s got to be home-made, hand-cooked from scratch. Every time they turn the TV on, there’s Nigella bloody Lawson stirring coconut milk into a beef and aubergine curry. Cooking is sexy. Baking is cool. Feeding your family on fresh, organic ingredients is the least you should do. Don’t even think about taking the kids to McDonald’s or dropping a handful of frozen chips into the deep fat fryer. You do that and Jamie Oliver will be on the doorstep with the food police, quicker than you can say Turkey flippin’ twizzler!’
Rosemary wrung her hands. ‘Look at you,’ she said. ‘You can fix a computer, you can hold a screwdriver. What’s so difficult about the “on” button on a washing machine? I know exactly how many steps it takes to get from the washing machine to the washing line. Ten. I know it by heart. My husband doesn’t even know where the pegs are kept.’
‘A woman’s work is never done,’ the repairman said.
Rosemary huffed. ‘You’re telling me,’ she said.
‘Listen.’ The repairman sat up in the chair, his free arm balanced on the leather arm. He was trying to look confident, but he just looked absurd. The black ostrich feathers had caused some sort of reaction. There was a pink patch on the skin on the back of his hand. ‘You’re clearly stressed. Don’t take this the wrong way, but your doctor could help you out with that, give you something to relax. Or you could go on holiday. When was the last time you went on holiday?’
‘How can I afford a holiday?’ Rosemary said. ‘I can’t afford a weekend in a tent until I get my assignment e-mailed. And I can’t do that without a working Internet connection, can I?’ She looked up at him. ‘When was the last time you went on holiday?’
‘The summer,’ he said. ‘Prague.’
‘Nice,’ Rosemary said. ‘I hope you enjoyed yourself. Might be the last holiday you get for a while.’
Aaron sneaked a glance at the wall clock above the desk. If it was right it was almost eleven o’clock, the short hand pointing at the elegant XI Roman numeral. He’d been here for just over an hour and he’d made sixty quid but he wasn’t sure how long he could keep up the act. He couldn’t take any more talk about pornography or body parts. But if he could keep a dialogue going, he could stretch it to a hundred and twenty minutes.
‘You know you’ll have to let me go at some point,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with your connection and I can’t figure out the problem while I’m handcuffed to this chair.’ He yanked at the chain between the cuffs, testing the strength of the metal. He wouldn’t be able to break out, but he expected her to hand the key over when she’d got whatever was troubling her off her chest.
He was sure he wasn’t in any immediate danger. He could feel the weight of his mobile phone in his shirt pocket. He’d be able to reach it in a second flat. ‘What’s going to happen when your husband gets home from work?’ he said. For some reason he’d never imagined that she was married. Divorced, perhaps, but his colleagues had never mentioned there being a man in the house. Usually, when there was a man in the house, trivial faults like loose wires were checked before a request for a call-out was made. ‘Or when your children get back from school?’ he added, trying to keep the momentum up. The woman’s eyes were glazed. She didn’t seem to be listening. ‘I’m sure there would be jail time for kidnapping.’
‘What do I care?’ she said, frowning down into her lap. ‘T
hat would be a holiday, wouldn’t it? Someone could feed me for a change. The taxpayer could take care of the rent. I could do classes, woodwork, creative writing.’ Her voice was composed, her tone level. She didn’t seem to think that she was doing anything wrong. For the first time in a whole hour, Aaron felt a trace of fear deep down in his belly. He glanced around again for a window, knowing there wasn’t one. He missed daylight, and the heating was on full. He was sweating. ‘Listen,’ he said.
The woman looked up from her manicured fingernails.
‘What’s the real problem here?’ It seemed obvious that there was more to all of this than a broken Internet connection.
The Truth
‘What do you mean?’ Rosemary said.
She was suddenly alert, sitting up on the desk, her arms clutched around her knees. She wondered if he knew something. Perhaps her Internet Service Provider had kept all of her movements on record. They could intercept e-mails. That’s how criminals got caught. She believed ‘cookies’ was the correct term for the tracking devices stored on a computer’s hard disk. It was a fitting name.
She should have been aware of this. She could often detect that Chantelle had been into her office, looking at plastic surgery clinics online. She could type ‘land’ into a search engine and the address of the Landauer Cosmetic Surgery Group would pop up. Once she’d seen a computer programme advertised on an American infomercial on cable TV. The presenter claimed it could make a copy of text typed on any given keyboard. They were aiming it at bored and mistrustful housewives who suspected their hubbies of looking at porn.
No! She was being paranoid. She was always being paranoid. Internet Service Providers couldn’t give away any personal information unless it was part of an ongoing criminal investigation. She giggled, her throat dry and tight, her conscience pressing down on her like a vice. She wished she could cut it out of herself like a tumour. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. Not really. She hadn’t broken any laws. She hadn’t broken any commandments.
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