by Byers, Sam
‘Are you being facetious? Because it’s unattractive you know. And not entirely mature.’
‘I’m being honest. Is that mature?’
‘That depends entirely,’ said her mother, ‘on what you’re being honest about.’
She met with Keith only on selected evenings. They fucked and drank and rarely spoke, which suited Katherine. He bought her a vibrator as a present: gift-wrapped, with a heart-shaped tag that read ‘Think of me’. She donated it, tag and all, to her local charity shop on her way to work, buried at the bottom of a carrier bag filled with musty paperbacks and a selection of Daniel’s shirts she’d found amidst her archived clothes. She never saw it for sale, and wondered often what had become of it. She liked to think one of the elderly volunteers had taken it home and subjected herself to an experience so revelatory as to border on the mystical.
‘Keith,’ she said one evening, deliberately loudly, in a crowded restaurant she’d selected precisely because she knew it would be crowded when she asked the question. ‘How many people are you fucking right now?’
‘Including you?’
‘Excluding me.’
‘Three,’ he said calmly. ‘You?’
‘Four,’ she lied.
‘Is it Daniel?’ her mother asked during one of her interminable phone calls. ‘Because I understand, you know, I really do.’
‘It’s not Daniel, Mother.’
‘He sent me a birthday card last week. He always sends me Christmas and birthday cards. Isn’t that nice?’
‘It’s not nice,’ said Katherine. ‘It’s anally retentive. He sends you cards because you’re on his list. It’s basically an automated response. It never occurs to him to change anything.’
‘Does he send you cards?’
‘No.’
She hated the idea that she might be the sort of person who had mummy issues. She was, or so she liked to think, much too alternative and free a person to find herself constrained by an unimaginative inability to slough off all those childhood hurts. That said, she wasn’t entirely above the occasional girlish fantasy of dying and yet somehow still being able to watch her own funeral, where her mother would, she hoped, hurl herself, weeping like a Mafia wife, onto her coffin. As a child, Katherine had almost always imagined her death to be the result of suicide. Now, older as she was, and so much more aware of the utter lack of romanticism in killing herself, she imagined instead that some tragic external event would be responsible for her passing; something sudden and only just within the realm of possibility, such as being struck by lightning or pancaked by tumbling furniture.
One could, Katherine was aware, come to all sorts of dim GCSE-level psychological conclusions about her mother, her father etc. etc. Needless to say, Katherine drew none of these conclusions for herself and was so resistant to their application that few people tried to draw them for her. Daniel, of course, being Daniel, had been one of those few, and it had caused such an almighty argument, which snowballed from an exchange of words into an exchange of crockery, that he had never dared go near the subject again unless, as was sometimes the case, he quite consciously wished to start an argument. He had once, in a display so petulant and pathetic that Katherine had merely stood aside and laughed, flounced around the lounge in what he clearly thought was an excellent impression of Katherine – all pouty lips and flappy hands – saying in a put-on baby voice that forever afterwards severely limited his sexual appeal in Katherine’s eyes, My mummy doesn’t love me. This was, of course, towards the end of their relationship, and while not exactly a contributing factor in the split, certainly didn’t work in his favour.
The truth, if there was such a thing, was that Katherine rather admired her mother. Daniel, clearly proud of himself at coming up with the metaphor, had likened this to Stockholm Syndrome. There was, Katherine would be the first to admit, an atomic element of truth in this, but it was also, or so she maintained, a rather gross misunderstanding of the sort of relationship she and her mother had enjoyed (yes, enjoyed) over three decades of mud-slinging, belittling, mocking and general one-upmanship. Katherine’s mother was, plainly, so utterly dysfunctional that it was a wonder she even managed to wash her armpits and find something to eat of a morning. But far from concealing this, or feeling any sense of shame about it, she advertised it, as if it were the very thing that set her apart from everyone else. Which, of course, it was. Katherine had seen her mother in almost every degrading situation in which it was possible for a mother to find herself in the presence of her daughter: drunk on Pernod at ungodly hours of the day; sprawled naked in Katherine’s bed having inexplicably led her latest conquest there instead of to the master bedroom; dumped in public by Julio, her swarthy squeeze of indeterminate Mediterranean origin. It was so predictable as to be banal. But oddly, Katherine felt rather proud to have come from such stock, and the whole picture reassured her that having children didn’t have to be the end of unpredictability. After all, she and her sister had both turned out reasonably OK, and her mother had maintained a verve and sense of daring usually reserved for women with zero in the way of offspring. It seemed, Katherine thought, a reasonable compromise. Indeed, she had to think this; there was no other choice. Opinionated as Katherine was, and as quick as she might have been to charge into the realm of near-total judgement and dismissal of others who failed to meet her own, admittedly rather warped sense of the world, she was not a hypocrite, and would not allow herself, no matter what her inward feelings of predictable pain might be, to castigate her mother for enjoying a lifestyle and attitude Katherine herself aspired to. Whatever effect her mother’s waywardness had had on Katherine, Katherine still had to judge her not as her mother, but as a woman, and this was convenient in that it simultaneously reinforced Katherine’s beliefs about all manner of subjects (motherhood, womanhood, men, relationships, and so on and so on) but also allowed her to completely ignore so many other issues which would, if she actually thought about them, cause not only inconvenience but probably also considerable pain.
The problem, though, was Daniel, and all the things that changed with his arrival. Katherine had managed, through stubbornness and evasiveness and distraction, to stave off introducing him to her mother for almost a year, and when she did, her worst fears were realised. Katherine’s mother, for all her flippant pronouncements about men and the ever-growing list of things for which they were no good, actually approved of Daniel in a way she hadn’t even hinted at when Katherine had introduced her to previous boyfriends. After a suitably dull dinner, during which all concerned did their best not to stray from the middle of the conversational road, Katherine had seen Daniel out to his car and returned to find her mother smiling happily, her glass of wine unexpectedly untouched beside her, her cigarette not even lit, filled with nothing but praise for the man whom Katherine had been so convinced she would hate. Not that there was, on the surface, much to hate about Daniel. He was personable and polite and oddly charming in a quiet, slightly under-confident way. It was just that Katherine had assumed, given the weight of previous evidence, that her mother would by her nature disapprove of anyone so sensible, so reliable, so (or so she’d thought at the time) normal. And from the moment Katherine’s mother pronounced Daniel the best thing ever to have happened to Katherine, everything that had felt so certain seemed to fall apart in Katherine’s hands, and there was already, so early on, a creeping sense that she and Daniel were doomed and, as a result, so were she and her mother. Because as she listened to her mother talk that evening – sober and calm and sensible in a way Katherine was sure she had never been before – Katherine realised that the things she admired about her mother were not, as her mother was so adept at convincing those around her, things her mother admired about herself. Her individualism, her rugged isolation, her mistreatment of the men in her life, were only, it seemed, worn as badges of honour because it was better than wearing them as the things they really were: flaws, injuries, failings. The telling remark was when she told Katherine that this w
as what she’d always wanted for her – a good man, a stable relationship, a happy home life. In that instant, Katherine could feel it all evaporating, rising ceiling-ward with the smoke from her mother’s cigarette, which she had waited for the duration of the conversation to light.
During the evenings she wasn’t with Keith, which were numerous given that Keith had three other fucks to squeeze into his week, Katherine read and watched the news. She rarely watched anything else on television. Like much of Katherine’s life, what she read and what she watched were governed by her sense of types of people: types she wanted to be versus types she couldn’t stand. She didn’t want to be the sort of woman who watched soaps and weepie movies. She wanted to be the sort of woman who watched the news and read the Booker list. She imagined herself at parties, despite the fact she never went to parties, being asked her opinion on world affairs and modern literature.
Confronted with such topical discussions, however, she found herself adrift and exposed. It wasn’t that she didn’t know what was happening, or that she didn’t, in some distant and largely hypothetical way, care: it was simply that she felt unable to muster appropriate levels of distress. Once this fact became clear, it seemed to spread its tentacles into the rest of her life in such a way as to make her question, not for the first time, exactly how human she could lay claim to being. Watching the news was, essentially, watching life, and the manner of her watching unnerved her. She thought of it as a certain lack of connection, a phrase, coincidentally, that she often used about men with whom she hadn’t gotten along. Others saw it as coldness, a phrase men Katherine hadn’t gotten along with often used to describe her. Unmoved was a word that came up a lot, both in Katherine’s head and in other people’s descriptions of her. Emotionally hard-to-impress, was the way she preferred to think about it. Just as declarations of love were not enough to stir the same in her, so footage of, say, starving Haitians was not enough, in and of itself, to cause the kind of damp-eyed distress that seemed so automatic in others. Swollen, malnourished bellies; kids with flies in their eyes; mothers cooking biscuits made of earth. It was faintly revolting. Sometimes, when in a particularly quarrelsome mood, Katherine asked people exactly what the relevance was. For some reason, people tended to find this question offensive. They cited vague humanitarian criteria. The word children came up a lot, as if simply saying it explained everything.
Kath, Keith wrote in an email from an undisclosed location where he was holidaying with an un-named and un-gendered companion to whom he was almost certainly not related. I miss you bad. I don’t think I can live without you. Love me?
Keith, Katherine wrote back. I will never live with anyone who can’t live without me. Grow up. PS: who the fuck are you on holiday with?
Something had to be done. She was stagnating. For all she knew, she might already be dead. She needed a decisive act, she told herself, something that would galvanise her. She decided to quit her job. The fear of not having a job would force her to find a job.
She ambushed her manager while he was unpacking a sandwich.
‘However did my wife manage to stop the mayonnaise soaking into the bread?’ he said. ‘Do you know? Is it a womanly secret? She doesn’t return my calls any more.’
‘I quit,’ said Katherine.
‘Again?’ said her manager.
‘This time I mean it.’
‘OK,’ he said, tossing his limp excuse for a sandwich back in the box. ‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing. I want to quit.’
‘I can’t give you another pay rise. People will start to think you’re sleeping with me.’
‘I don’t want a pay rise,’ said Katherine, who found it difficult to believe anyone would think he was sleeping with anyone. ‘I’m handing in my notice.’
‘Two days’ extra holiday.’
‘No. One month’s notice.’
‘OK.’ He held up his hands in defeat. ‘One month. Hey, you know, that would mean there was no longer a conflict of interest in terms of us …’
She closed the door behind her as she left.
‘Fuck me like you’re a child,’ said Keith, back from holiday and fucking her in a way that reminded her of an animal in a veterinary collar – as if she were something to be shaken off, a constraint out of which he needed to reverse. ‘Fuck me like you’re scared of me.’
It proved to be too much of an imaginative leap. She fucked him like she pitied him and then told him afterwards he was pathetic.
‘You’re right,’ said Keith. ‘You’re so right. Next time fuck me like I’m pathetic.’
‘Maybe you should join a group of some kind,’ her mother said. ‘That’s how you meet people. You’ve got to get out there.’
‘By people do you mean men?’
‘Well who wants to meet women?’
She told herself that what she couldn’t feel in life she could at least feel watching the news. Emotion was like exercise, she thought. You didn’t want to do it but it was good for you. You had to push yourself.
She told herself she would be moved by the very next story that came along. She would really try, she thought. She’d look so closely at the flies in that little kid’s eyes. She’d picture them on her own face. She’d conjure the heat and the dust and the stink of rotting goat. She’d imagine how that pissy, cholera-riddled water would taste as it edged its way down her dry little throat and pooled malignantly in her horribly distended belly. How awful to have a belly like that! How awful that must feel! It was wretched, she thought, a wretched existence, and she knew, now that she’d given it such close consideration, that the second she saw one of those poor, poor children, she’d erupt into hot sweet tears, just like any other normal human being. She’d cry so much it would more than make up for all those other times when she didn’t cry, when she just stared, dead-faced, at the wall of suffering … God, how she’d cry … if people could see her …
Then the news cut to talk of the virus, with grim-voiced narration over montages of men in boiler suits and face masks fork-lifting cattle onto smoking pyres, and Katherine sobbed like a baby and then ran to the bathroom to purge, the vomit hitting her fingers before she could pull them free; second-hand coffee and chunks of doughy matter spraying the bowl and turning her tears to nothing more than a gag reflex.
‘Where did you go on holiday?’ she asked Keith mid-fuck, having suddenly (but with careful premeditation) kicked him off her at his most vulnerable moment, sending him sprawling to the floor with only his hard-on to break his fall.
‘Jesus … fuck, I think you … what?’
‘Your holiday,’ she said, lying back on the bed and eyeing him coldly. ‘Where did you go?’
‘Tenerife,’ he said, inspecting his rapidly shrinking cock for permanent damage. ‘Do we have to talk about it now?’
‘No, we don’t have to talk about it now,’ she said calmly. ‘If you like I can just get dressed and go and we don’t have to speak about it ever again.’
‘I don’t understand why this is suddenly such a pressing issue that you have to …’
‘Who did you go with?’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘You see?’
‘Yeah, I see. I see what this is all about. You’re jealous.’
‘I’m not jealous. I just want to know. Who did you go with?’
‘Is it possible to break a dick? I’ve heard it is. I’ve heard they can snap.’
‘Was it someone from work?’
‘I’m going to have to go to work with my dick in a sling, you fucking …’
‘They’d never find a sling small enough. Was she blonde or brunette?’
‘Blonde,’ he said miserably. ‘Her name’s Janice. Are you going to make me stop seeing her?’
Katherine was repulsed.
‘What do you mean make you?’ she snapped. ‘How could I make you?’
‘I don’t know I just …’
‘How come she gets to go on holiday? That’s what I want to know. How come
she gets to go on holiday while I have to make do with intermittent screwing in your shabby little flat?’
‘We can go on holiday,’ said Keith. ‘If that’s what you want.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘Well … I mean, yeah, of course, but …’
‘Because I’m not sure now. I’m not sure I’d want to go with you. I’m not sure I could bear it.’
This was in fact true. The more Katherine thought about it, the more going on holiday with Keith sounded like an awful idea. All those inane conversations in sunnily bland surroundings. His sweat-shined love handles; his shrivelled ball bag in Speedos.
‘Why not?’ said Keith. ‘What’s wrong with me?’
‘You want a list?’ she said.
He called her two days later and begged, offering a last-minute booking. No one at work would think anything of it, he said. They’d stagger their days a little. Katherine agreed, victorious and relieved.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘Malta,’ he said. ‘God I’m fucking haemorrhaging money.’
In Malta, everything was clearer and more muddled at the same time. They fell into an easy routine of lazing, drinking and eating, then fucking and sleeping, which after the drinking became somewhat indistinguishable. For Katherine, everything seemed to pass not so much in a blur as in snippets. Here she was sitting alone on the balcony, staring out across the bay at the huddled, stone-cut splendour of Valetta, feeling both calm and deliciously lonely. Here she was by the pool, either drifting with her thoughts or squinting through one eye at the array of flesh around her. Brown flesh, reddened flesh; German and English and Italian flesh, all pressed together and sizzling under the sun. It was erotic and vile at the same time – the only kind of eroticism she seemed to experience these days. Here she was at dinner with Keith, exchanging heavy clods of conversation so deadening she was tempted, at times, to cause physical injury, either to him or to herself, just to have something distinctive to discuss. He said things like, It’s hot, and then followed that statement seconds later with a clarification (It’s really hot) and then, after a bit of thought, some further exposition (It’s so hot I feel like I’m melting in my seat) until finally his thought processes reached their natural conclusion and he ended with a sort of ruminative coda (So hot …).