by Mason, Carol
‘Thank God,’ she says. ‘For a moment you had me really worried for you two.’
I tell her I’m at the till so I have to go. I hang up, abandon my basket in the aisle, and flee. I keep running until I’m half way down an unpopulated side street, bending over in a painful pant, allowing the crowds of shoppers to dissolve into a blur behind me.
I can’t go home. So I walk around the town, full of the ailing state of my marriage, wondering if I’m blowing us out of perspective, if there’s a bright, light side I’m not seeing because I’ve convinced myself I can’t. It’s a sunny evening. Stores are closing, metal shutters clanging to the ground. Somebody is picking expensive watches out of a jeweller’s window, and the barrow boys are loading their things-unsold into vans. Suddenly, the sky goes very dark. In about three seconds my white T-shirt looks like it’s been lifted out of a pail of water. I pelt past Grey’s Monument, as people who’ve been sat there soaking up the sunshine, run into Eldon Square for cover. Under the awning of a pie shop, I stand and watch it coming down in one long spectacular sheet, bouncing noisily off the ground like grey lightning. Behind me, people disappear down the slippery steps of the Metro. Everybody going home. To their families. Why don’t I want to go home to mine?
My phone rings. I want it to be Rob, telling me that he’s suffering like I am, but it’s Wendy. Her voice anchors me again though. ‘Actually, Wend, I’ve been ringing you all day but your mobile’s been switched off,’ I tell her.
‘Oh I’ve just bought a one like Neil’s,—a fancy one with all the bells and whistles—only like everything we seem to buy, there was a problem so it’s being fixed. How was your anniversary?’
‘Not great. We had a fight.’
There’s a pause. ‘I thought you sounded flat. Is it anything you want to tell me about?’
Yeah, my husband has withdrawn from me. But then again, you could have cancer, so I can see how my problem might pale… ‘Not really. How did your appointment go?’
‘Alright. Although you know me, I find that whole business of people looking down there so unpleasant. You’d never think I’ve had three kids.’ There’s a pause with the obvious reference to baby Nina. ‘But they were very nice at the clinic.’
‘When will you find out?’
‘Not for a few weeks. They also did a biopsy.’
‘A biopsy?’ She’s still so vague and it worries the hell out of me. ‘Have you told Neil yet?’
‘Not yet. And I won’t until I need to.’ The rain turns from noisy to quiet. ‘By the way, the naked scramble for a bag of free clothing at the Metro Centre is back on again. Leigh has convinced Clifford it’ll make him a national name like Antony Gormley. Because Gormley did it in Domain Field—had people of all shapes and sizes strip naked before wrapping them in cling film and covering them in plaster. That was art. This is exercise pants. But Clifford doesn’t see a difference. Leigh’s busy writing the press release.’ There’s a pause. ‘Oh Jill, it’s a silly little place to work.’ We ring off, the rain eases off, and I go home.
~ * * * ~
‘Don’t go,’ I say unconvincingly to Rob on Saturday, when he announces he’s off to York to do a job for a few days. ‘Send somebody else.’
‘You know I can’t do that Jill.’
‘Can’t or don’t want to?’
He’s honest enough to shrug.
As our front door shuts I think, That’s it. You desert me and whatever I do from now on is your fault. I even go as far as to tack, You bastard, onto the end, but it doesn’t fit. In my car I have every intention of going to see my mam and dad. Only at the Board Inn, instead of turning right, I keep going straight.
I sit on the wall, hugging my knees, a little bit mortified to be here. A part of me still seeing those roses on my doormat. With these dark sunglasses on, I can pretend I’m just looking around. But my eyes keep sliding past him up there on his lookout post. He has seen me. He keeps glancing back over his shoulder at me. He hasn’t made any effort to come over. It’s rapidly feeling like the end of my world.
The beach is busy. Kids and dogs, and an advancing tide. Plenty for him to keep his eyes on. And he’s doing just that. The longer I sit the more embarrassing this feels. At the very least he could come and say Hello, couldn’t he? Or wave. If he doesn’t come over in the next ten minutes, damn it, I’m leaving.
Is he making some point? The point that he isn’t interested anymore.
Ten minutes turns into an hour. ‘Oh God,’ I mutter under my breath, my eyes are sore from looking in one direction, at him, while I’ve got my head turned in the other. ‘Please come over. Please, please…’ I need his attention like I need a drug.
He’s snubbing me. I’m certain. But if I just get up and leave it’s going to look like I’m bothered by it. So I make the quick decision that I might as well be adult about this, just go over there, say a casual hello, and then leave. And then never, ever show my face here again.
‘Never again’ makes me barely able to breathe. I’m right on the verge of getting up, but then… he’s climbing down from his steps. My chest tightens. He walks on a direct course for me. My heart crashes in my eardrums. I quickly pretend I don’t notice him coming, to hide my rabid delirium. But he’s smiling. That smile I only have to think of to get nothing done with my day. It registers in me with the quick, stomach-lifting thrill of being on a small boat bumping over a large wave. I give up the act, smile back with pleasurable painful relief. ‘Hi,’ he says, looking me over quickly and plonking down beside me on the wall. His leg touches mine. His eyes go straight to my two-inch high green slip-ons with their criss-cross spaghetti uppers. ‘Nice,’ he says, in that charmed way of his. ‘Can you walk in them?’
Walk. Valk. ‘Not really. But I give it my best try.’
He smells of sunscreen, has a white trace of it that’s not rubbed in on his neck. ‘I have looked for you every day, you know,’ he tells me, while he gazes out at the waves and I make a quick study of his profile, engraving it in my mind. ‘I have want to see you again.’
‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’
He meets my eyes. ‘No. Actually, I don’t. I have not felt that for a girl in such a long time.’
My heart lifts. I look out to sea and I feel him study my face now. ‘Do you want to go have cup of coffee, my shift is nearly finished?’
I don’t answer and he says, ‘Maybe you’d like to think about it. For an hour. Maybe two weeks. How about I go away, give you some time, and you come back in three years…’
I grin and his eyes smile back at me. ‘I wouldn’t mind an ice-cream.’
‘I did not think you would come back,’ he tells me as we stand in line at the van. ‘You are too nice a girl.’
I’ve missed the lilt of his sentences. ‘So my coming back makes me not a nice girl?’
His eyes look at my mouth like a man does before he kisses you. ‘An exciting girl I think.’
We get our ice-creams—he orders and pays, and I stand there sneaking looks at him. We claim a bench on a jetty of rock that overlooks the sand. The monkey’s blood on his cornet runs down the side of his hand and he licks it quickly, and his wrist hairs flatten and stick to his skin. He asks me how I’ve been. Then he says, ‘It was with regret I said last time those words, Jill. Those words of you married.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’ He watches me eat, taking occasional glances at my legs. ‘I imagine it must put a lot of men off when the woman’s married.’
He shrugs those hefty shoulders. ‘Some men.’
‘Nice men.’
‘Some men.’ He grins roguishly.
An engine starts up in my stomach. His eyes go down my legs, to my shoes again.
‘You know, Jill, I take my lead from the woman. If she give me sign…’ His eyes meet mine. ‘But then sometime, you know you just think, to hell with sign.’
‘You’re a To hell with it guy, aren’t you?’ I feel utterly nauseated with bravery.
He lo
oks at me, surprised. ‘No. I am not.’ He shoves the end of his cone in his mouth, licks the tips of his fingers. ‘But it’s the old competitive swimmer’s instinct. It will appear when there is something it wants.’
My mouth goes dry. ‘I don’t want this,’ I tell him, holding up my half-eaten cone. ‘Here,’ he says, and takes it off me and stuffs it in his mouth.
And then I say it. I will never know where I get the nerve, but I do. ‘I’ve never had an affair before. I wouldn’t know where to start, what to do.’
He doesn’t even flinch. Just looks at me long and truthfully, while my heart pounds. ‘You don’t have to do anything. I would do everything.’ His eyes roam over my mouth. ‘All you would have to do is show up.’
Then his gaze meets mine. And without a second’s warning, he leans in and he kisses me.
Chapter Eleven
Next, I am in his car. I am sitting in a beaten-up white VW Golf outside a block of flats. Mortified. Terrified. Electrified.
He drove with one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding mine. I sense he’s treading carefully. We are sitting here as the engine turns, his foot doing a discreet rapid tapping. I’m sure he knows that one clumsy move will scare me off. His gentlemanly consideration for me helps.
In a moment of bravery I hear myself say, ‘Let’s go inside then.’ A part of me is saying, you are disgraceful. Another part is saying it’s just a fling. People have them all the time. Leigh’s having one. For a lot less reason than I’m doing this.
My heart hammers up three flights of stairs, leaving me rattling like a windy radiator, which he jokes about. I notice how he keeps behind me; I feel his eyes on my legs and bottom. It does terrible things with my nerves. We reach the top floor and walk the threadbare carpet of a dim corridor that smells of stale cigarette smoke. The crackled reception of a radio filters under somebody’s door: Oasis; that song: something about Sally waiting. He stops at a brown door with the number six nailed on wonky. A number for my sins. He wiggles a key in the lock and the door squeals open. He gestures for me to go inside. I do, cringing slightly at this place.
It’s funny when you see a person’s home for the first time. It’s no palace. But what can I expect? He won’t make great money. The living area is no bigger than our spare bedroom. The blinds are dipped and the place smells of sleep. I take in the sparse furniture. A sofa. A portable TV with a crane-shaped aerial that looks like it was left behind from the 1970’s. A coffee table bearing a clenched can of Stella Artois. An armchair with his laundry dumped on it. The spare living of a single man. It’s very much him: paired down, nothing fancy. But empty, so empty compared to my own home.
He sees me having a good look. ‘Would you like drink? You know. I am meaning tea, of course.’ He’s awkward at this too. I feel strangely comforted.
I start babbling, ‘Do they like tea in Russia? Isn’t there a place called The Russian Tea Room?’
‘Ah yes.’ He nods over-enthusiastically. ‘Yes, in America. In New York. I have been,’ he says, keenly.
‘Oh,’ I say, keenly back.
That dies on the vine. I don’t know what else to say. Neither, apparently, does he. A sense of imminent conquest buoys up the room. A fridge clicks over, making me jump, and he sees. And I’m pleased. Because, insane as this sounds, it makes me feel more respectable. There’s about six feet of distance between us. He is standing in front of a scratched-up sofa that belongs in the Sally Ann window, covered in tartan slip-ons that don’t fit at the corners. I standing on a clawed-up doormat. I am barely in the door. As though only part of me wants to be. My eyes tick around in circles, like the second hand of a stopwatch.
‘You look like girl who is going to run.’
His telepathy makes me smile. I look at his face and experience a fresh reminder of how handsome he is, and how nice he is, and how much I’ve thought about being with him. ‘I’m not. I promise.’
He smiles warmly, his eyes make a slow sweep of me in a universal language, and I feel it in my gut. My heart starts clashing around, right and wrong in a big face-off inside of me. The note on my car, the meeting on the beach; all this had to be. He’s not just anybody. He’s the man who saw me around Newcastle and remembered me because he wanted me. I take a few steps toward him and feel the wood floorboards give slightly under my feet, unsteadying me, as though I am balancing barefoot on swelling waves. I stop close enough to feel the heat of his body, and look up into his eyes, which are keenly on my mouth. As I reach up on my tiptoes his arms go around me, sweeping me an inch off my feet. And then he is kissing me. Nothing like on the beach, when I was too startled to react properly. But easily, like he’s pushing on an open door. Amazing how instinctively we fall into a rhythm. We fit. I make small moaning sounds. Kissing a new man after all these years is like some delicious shock. He kisses my smile, fills me with this incredible feeling of being sexy, sexual and wanted. My eyes flutter open and closed, like I’m fading in and out of consciousness, noticing the open pores under his eye, a few wrinkles, dashing imperfections. ‘You saw me in my green dress,’ I whisper, into his skin that smells of sunscreen, salt and ice-cream.
‘Hmn. It did very nice things for your ass.’ His hands go there. He smiles against my lips.
‘That’s a terrible thing to say to a lady.’
For a moment our pupils bounce and bob with each other. And then…We collide, with doors and walls, stumbling over shoes, sending a small table scraping along the floor, making it, somehow, into a bedroom. He’s well-versed in this. His clumsy navigation has a swift expertise while his hands find the skin he’s yet to lay eyes on. As he pins me up against a wall and I say ‘Oops!’ and laugh, because a framed print slides to the ground, I say, ‘I think I’ve fallen for you.’ It comes out in a husky whisper. Strands of my hair stick on his lips, and I peel them away between kisses.
He swiftly hikes me up, puts my legs around his waist, grabs my bum. ‘You’re such a sexy girl,’ he tells me. In the soft of my back I feel the pointing finger of a light switch. Then his thumbs are under my knicker elastic and he pulls me into his pelvis.
I gasp and hope that he won’t move too fast. But his thumb is inside me with its slightly sharp nail.
It all happens so quickly. We fall onto a bed, which is hard when my back lands on it. He tugs at my shirt, grabs my breasts out of my black balcony bra. And then his mouth clamps on my nipple somewhat painfully. And I look down at him and disbelieve the strange face I see there.
And then I see them in my mind. Those red roses on my doormat.
Suddenly it’s as though this is not really me. I’m acting a role that somehow doesn’t fit. My body shuts down, turns off all electricity. He hovers above me, fumbling with his belt, a drunk passion on his face. ‘Bebe,’ he says.
Baby?
My eyes home in on a damp patch on the ceiling that looks like bodily fluid. ‘Bebe,’ he says again, turning me off more and more each time he says it. I am mesmerized by that stain. And then it’s as though I am up there, floating, looking down at myself. And I see this person—me—near-naked, breasts out, skirt hiked up, knickers askew, not much poetry to it at all.
This is a letdown. It sounds in me like a hard shock. I catch sight of his penis and think Oh Jesus, no! But he is in me so fast. I feel him now, chafing, because I’ve turned so dry. I shove his shoulders.
No!—I want to cry. I want to cry No!
I push with the heel of my hands, and his fingers dig into the cheeks of my bum, but he clearly thinks I’m enjoying it and he says, ‘Oh bebe!’ again, in that accent, and I want to yell NO! But I can’t. Nothing will come out. It’s all chocked somewhere far inside me. Heartache blazes in me, stopping my words.
His breath is thick all over me, coming in grunts. Mine is barely coming at all. ‘Stop,’ I say. ‘For God’s sake stop.’
Or do I say it? No. Only in my head.
Sadness is raging in me. All I can see is Rob’s face. And then he comes.
T
he tears pour out of me, and I wipe them, leave my arm there over my eyes so he won’t see the sad sight of me. He sinks on top of me like a spent athlete. And I want to throw up at the warm injection of a strange man’s fluid inside me. I shove him. He moves in to nuzzle me, but ends up smacking his face in a pillow, because somehow I’ve struggled out from under him and I am scrambling for my clothes. My head is spinning. I’m seeing stars. I’m seeing Rob. My marriage sits there like a burnt out fire in some warm place in my mind. I suddenly recover my voice and the sob that was strangled somewhere in me comes out now. ‘What is wrong?’ he asks, clearly oblivious that this has been anything other than a great time for me. ‘Where you go? Why you cry?’ He moves to get up. I hold up my hand to stop him. I can’t get the words out for my sobbing. The tears are rolling down my cheeks. His semen is trickling down my thigh.
The lonely music is still wafting under a door when I escape into the passageway, which is a fog of cigarette smoke. I hurry toward the Exit sign, my feet slipping out of these stupid sandals. I can barely make the stairs out through my tears. I take my shoes off and clip down them. Outside, it hits me.
I’ve left my bag up there.
My bag with my wallet, credit cards, keys… I pat my pockets. Oh thank God, not my keys.
But where is my car? He drove us here. I don’t know where I am. I wasn’t paying attention. I’m like some prostitute thrown back on the curb. My shirt is not even done up properly. I rub hard at my eyes and squint in the sunlight both ways up a street. A man is walking toward me. An elderly man, in a Hawaiian shirt, and bifocals. He is walking an obese sausage dog that has its head in one of those lampshade things. He looks at me then does a double take on my face.
‘Nice day for it,’ he says.
Chapter Twelve
I walk upstairs to our toilet and throw up. It cascades from me, nearly taking my eyeballs along for the ride. Then I sink to the floor by the bowl, hug my legs and shiver. The dog sits straight-backed and alert in the doorway watching me.