Plastic

by Christopher Fowler

  After shopping, I always wanted a cigarette and a soapy wash, because obviously the entire process was about sex. Buying an inappropriate dress is the equivalent to a thoughtless one-night stand, whereas designer shoes constitute a long-term commitment filled with recrimination and at least one decent orgasm. I hadn’t been penetrated for over eighteen months. At first the dull ache of desire would not go away, but after a while it no longer bothered me. These days my clitoris was located somewhere near the top of Harrods.

  As I swept through Oxford Street’s great cathedral of expenditure, I pondered on the verb ‘to spend’. It had a sexual connotation, of course, to empty the juices, to flush out, but I wondered why people talked about ‘spending days’, as though everything was currency. I felt spent. The world felt spent.

  On I went, past the TV monitors of starved catwalk girls dipping at the turn of the runway, up into menswear, a square acre of wood, chrome and marble where everything smelled of citrus, musk and leather, all the things I never smelled on Gordon, who only smelled of cigarettes and computers. Soon I was carrying so many purchases that the bag ropes left Japanese-prisoner-of-war marks on my arms.

  On through the food hall with its aged hamhocks hanging like the thighs of long-dead chorus girls, past rows of shocked fish arranged on ice like jewelled purses, past the jars of exotic pickles as mysterious as foetuses in a medical museum, to the perfume counters patrolled by women like bony cats, where I stood paralysed, breathing deep the smell of frangipani, honeysuckle, gardenia, jasmine, lavender, carnation, eucalyptus, lemon, sandalwood and ambergris. The atomisers, sprays, sachets, pomanders, powders, potpourris, balms, gels, oils, soaps, lotions, sticks and fixatives pumped such a sweet cacophony into the air that the hall shimmered and slipped in my vision.

  On through departments of casual wear that looked as though the clothes had been randomly assigned pages of a Pantone colour chart, through to the designer collections so monochrome that I wondered if my eyes had suddenly switched to cat-and-dog vision. By now I was carrying enough purchases to stock a third-world department store.

  I made it home, and set about cooking a meal to calm my nerves, a plastic M&S box containing a chive-coated fish-brick surrounded by concrete yellow sauce. I heard Gordon stop in the hall to check the bags I had dumped inside the front door. The longer he took to examine the dresses, shoes, CDs, jewellery, makeup, underwear and the furry rabbit pyjama-cases I’d bought for no reason at all from a shop in Kensington Church Street, the more I knew we were in for a fight.

  I could tell he was angry by the way he walked into the kitchen, with his heels going down first. I hoped he wouldn’t see the rest of the bags wedged under the table.

  ‘You can’t control it anymore, can you?’ he said. The last time he had pointed this out, I’d tried explaining to him that shopping was citizenship, an essential part of belonging to the consumer society. It didn’t wash then, either. I knew we were about to have the kind of fight all addicts have with their partners. ‘This time you’re going to take every last one of them back.’

  ‘No,’ I told him, affronted, finding things to do in the kitchen, keeping busy, rearranging spoons with all the dignity I could muster. ‘I can’t return them.’

  ‘You can, June. You’ll have to. I’ve had enough of this.’ He strutted out of the kitchen and into the lounge like an angry Methodist. If he’d been a pipe smoker, he would have whipped it out and tamped it by the fireplace.

  Gordon was in the wrong for having an affair and I wanted to corner him about it this time, even though the exposure would damage us. As I’d handed back the earring earlier that day, I had looked into Hilary’s eyes and known that this tangerine-faced woman was Gordon’s lover. Hilary had studied me with the inner-knowledge one woman has when she’s been told secrets by another woman’s husband. I was mortified to be watched in such a way, a way that said I know all about your unsatisfactory sex life and your problem ovaries, your tendency to fat around the tops of your legs and that ill-advised butterfly tattoo you now regret. Gordon was in the wrong and I was the one hiding in the kitchen.

  I forced myself to go after him. I had another reason for doing so. A few days earlier I had finished a new set of hospital tests, and much to my surprise the results indicated that I now had a 50/50 chance of maintaining pregnancy to full-term. It was news I had stopped hoping for, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

  Gordon was wearing a grey suit that was two years too tight. It was one he owned for wearing at work, but lately he had taken to wearing it at weekends as well. We had bought the suit together at Bluewater. The whole purchasing process had lasted less than ten minutes, although it had taken an hour to get out of the car park.

  I stalked him into the lounge. I meant to say: ‘I’ll take everything back tomorrow and try to be more careful in the future.’

  What I said was: ‘You’re shagging her, aren’t you?’

  He thought for a moment, and chose his words carefully so that there could be no mistake. ‘I’m having sex with her because I’m in love with her, June, and we’re good for each other. I’m not in love with you any more because we’re not.’

  A gentleman would at least have come up with a few pathetic and unconvincing denials.

  He made as if to leave the room, but returned to me in a fury. ‘Ask yourself why I should bother to stay with you, June. Look at you. You’ve let yourself go. For someone who spends so much of my money on clothes, you’re in a terrible state. The more time I spend with Hilary, the less I want to spend with you. Look at this house. Every square inch filled up with dolls and dogs and lamps and crap you stick on my account for the sake of shopping, just because you couldn’t have a baby. I daren’t turn around for fear of breaking something, all these bloody bows and ribbons hanging down.’ I knew what he meant. The place was like Elton John’s bedroom. ‘You’re frightened of leaving a blank space anywhere. They had more room to manoeuvre on board the bloody MIR space-station, for Christ’s sake.’ He waved his hands hopelessly at me, then at the room. ‘I can’t live with all this – upholstery.’

  He didn’t understand because we had never properly talked about the problem. For years Gordon had kept quiet and paid the bills, and I had turned a blind eye to his perambulations, but now the unspoken truce between us evaporated in a raising of war standards. Except that I couldn’t fight back. I had nothing to fight with. I had never won an argument with a man in my life. All I did was provide my husband with an apparently reasonable excuse for ending a ten year marriage.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  He shook his head in disgust, slammed the door and was gone. I watched him from the lounge window, growing smaller and more feeble with each passing moment. He hopped over the low brick wall to Hilary’s house like Atlas released from his burden of the world. I had never seen such a look of relief on a man’s face. I had never seen him hop before.

  My fingers closed around my charm bracelet, an adornment to which I took pride in adding pointlessly expensive dangly-baubles. The latest was a miniature version of the Qu’ran encrusted with 18 carat diamonds. To understand how pointless my purchase of this item is, you have to remember that I’m Church Of England.

  It’s not about buying expensive things, it’s about wielding power. Although it’s probably not as much fun if you’re over a size 12, and the assistants in Gucci are as intimidating as bouncers, which, let’s face it, is what they are.

  Gordon came back at eleven o’clock. Clearly, he was unable to make the jump to staying out all night. We slept at opposite edges of the bed, like children who had fallen out over a board game.

  The next day I went shopping again.

  And that was how things continued for most of the month, while the rainy gales of a London autumn scoured the streets and slapped leaves over the car, and the house grew so cold that only our anger could startle it back to life.

  Gordon stayed out, and my spending increased. But the pleasure it gave me gradually disap
peared. Drug addiction would have been a healthier option; at least I’d have lost weight and got regular sex from strangers.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Cancelled

  WHEN YOU’VE HEARD that Lady Gaga song about telephones for the fortieth time on tinny shop speakers it becomes inaudible, like the wheels of a train or aircraft engines. As the song finished, I reached the end of the floor and snapped a vacant sales assistant, who had been leaning on the counter studying the ends of her hair as if noticing them for the first time, out of her reverie.

  She asked me how I would like to pay. I whipped out my Visa card and placked it onto the counter with a sound like the snap of a gynaecologist’s glove coming off. The assistant rang everything up, then waited, tapping at the sides of her loose perm and staring into the middle distance in what was clearly an intermittent attack of mental aphasia. She glanced down at the till readout and winced.

  ‘Do you have alternative credit?’ she asked, returning it. ‘You might want to call your bank about this one, it’s probably just a fraud check.’ She didn’t believe it for a second, and wanted me to know that she didn’t, despite the necessity of maintaining customer service policy. I knew her type. Only a tenth of her emotion showed above the surface, like an iceberg.

  Insolvency was a new experience for me. I casually riffled through my purse and submitted a less scorched card, and when that didn’t work, a third. In a mounting state of mortification, I went through all seven of my credit cards, but none of them registered. I was forced to explain to the assistant that she would have to put everything back.

  My shopping rush climaxed and faded. I felt cold and sticky. It wasn’t as though I’d been looking forward to taking everything home – that part of the process was a post-coital duty, like remaking the bed – so I mumbled some excuse about having accidentally demagnetised my strips and fled. I suddenly felt like my mother, who passed her entire life in a miasma of embarrassment.

  Out on the street, I felt stripped bare. My purse yielded a handful of change, not enough for a taxi, so I was forced to use the Tube. I hated being packed in like pencils and arrived home veiled in a sheen of sweat, to sit in the kitchen staring at the spot where my crisp, calm white cardboard bags should have stood. What could have happened?

  Gordon walked through the door and went straight upstairs to change, as he always did these days. I listened to the shower pattering as he washed Hilary’s intimate deodorant from his loins. A few minutes later I heard him emerge from the bathroom and make a phone call. My heart was beating too fast to follow his conversation. I hovered in my usual position by the sink, randomly moving cups and plates, picking at my nails, unsure what to do next. The call went on for ages. I fancied a drink, and had lately taken to keeping vodka and orange pre-mixed in a bleach bottle under the sink, a trick I had learnt from Lou, my neighbour, but now I needed a clear head.

  I’ve read about domestic violence, seen it often enough on the soaps, but it was never a part of our marriage, although I had once thrown a slice of wholemeal bread at Gordon. My husband specialised in injured sighs and low-volume sniping, but mostly avoided confrontation. We had barely spoken for a month. Finally the atmosphere was so bad that I wondered if he was going to come in and slap me. Gordon’s family comes from the south coast; his parents are the kind of people who still tut when they see more than three black people standing together in the street, and whose exaggerated respect for money prevents them from buying anything luxurious. For them, I had brought the concept of financial embarrassment colourfully to life. The longest they ever stayed on a visit was forty-seven minutes. They couldn’t understand why their son would ever give me access to his bank account.

  I waited for Gordon to enter the room, but when it became clear that he wasn’t going to, I forced myself to head for the lounge. He pretended I hadn’t come in, but couldn’t resist making huffing-noises intended for an audience. Finally he spoke without looking up. ‘Well, I’ve finally taken care of your little problem.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked timidly, dreading the answer.

  ‘I’ve cancelled all your cards and reported your purse lost to the police.’

  ‘My purse isn’t lost.’

  He threw the wall a look of theatrical astonishment. ‘I cannot believe I was paying off seven separate accounts.’

  ‘You weren’t. I was paying some.’

  ‘The joint M&S and your fitness card, the rest are billed to me. I’ve stopped the lot, all except the Connect card for your personal current account, which you’ve hardly anything in.’

  ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘Can’t I? I should have done it a long time ago. When my mother was younger it was still illegal to put a woman’s name down on a hire purchase agreement. Now I know why. And I know why you do it, you can’t help yourself, it stops you from thinking about anything important. Now you’ll have to do some thinking.’

  ‘Gordon, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to do it but perhaps I’m under more stress than I realised, I mean about us –’

  ‘You were doing this when you had no stress at all, June. God, all you have to do for a quiet life is make the bed and vacuum occasionally, buy a few bits of shopping. It’s not brain surgery, is it?’

  My immediate reaction was to wonder if Gordon would force me to pay my debts. All I had in my current account was what I entered by standing order every month. I had spent all my savings. I had no idea how much I owed. The thought that I was suddenly accountable was frightening because I had seen the shoes on my last little outing.

  They weren’t Jimmy Choos or Manolo Blahniks, just a French designer I’d never heard of. But they were the most beautiful pair of shoes in the world, pearlised stilettos, a catwalk one-off in my size. I knew I was too fat-legged for them, and had nowhere to wear them anyway. Logical thinking doesn’t belong in the world of women’s footwear.

  The electronic shutters were already coming down in the shop window, and in the time I took to prevaricate over this podiatric pulchritude, the store shut. They weren’t even expensive – although now, of course, they were far beyond my downgraded purchasing power. There aren’t many perfect things created in the world, but the sight of them gave me hope for humanity. Men have as much chance of understanding the sex-appeal of impractical shoes as I have of grasping quantum physics, all that stuff about the non-binary existence of numeric multiples. Actually, I did watch some programmes about that.

  I didn’t want the shoes. I needed them. It was like crack. And now I would never have them. I would remain a housewife only more so, shopping at discount supermarkets and buying clothes in economy shops while my husband doled out housekeeping and openly philandered and I’d never own anything nice again, and all the lack of stress in the world wouldn’t make up for being turned into a prisoner. I don’t know much about prisoners, but I know they don’t have lots of nice things to compensate for being incarcerated.

  ‘Go and get me the kitchen scissors,’ Gordon instructed.

  He sat in front of me cutting the credit cards in half and then in quarters before dropping them in the bin with a flourish. I managed to keep one back because it was tucked in my bedside drawer. Unfortunately it was a World Of Wood discount card, due to expire in a month’s time, but until then it was good for all my urgent beech flooring needs.

  ‘I’m leaving you, June.’

  ‘Is it because of her?’

  ‘No, it’s because of what’s happened to us.’

  ‘But we’ve never tried to talk about our problems.’

  ‘There’s nothing to talk about. I’m selling the house. I made an appointment with an estate agent.’

  ‘You’ve already put this place on the market?’ I was aghast.

  ‘I’ll be showing the first prospective buyers at six o’clock tonight. They’ve got a Chinese name, but you can’t have everything.’

  ‘You can’t just suddenly do that. This is my home. We need to talk about it.’

  ‘I’ve been th
inking about it for some time, I was just looking for an opportunity to tell you.’

  ‘I’ve been here. You’re the one who’s always working late. I can’t believe you could do this.’

  ‘I’ve been having money troubles. There’s been a credit crunch on, or haven’t you noticed? The pound’s in the toilet, nobody’s buying our shoes.’ His defensiveness returned to anger. ‘Why did I put up with this for so long? How could I have been so stupid?’ He indicated the white china clowns, silver-plate candlesticks, opalescent leopards and poodles, the little glass windmills and water-wheels, the ruffled regency ladies and dandies I had made it my duty to collect and keep clean, and managed to sound hurt and betrayed. ‘You are not the little girl I married.’

  ‘No, Gordon, I’m a woman.’

  ‘You’re not, you’re – I don’t know what you are anymore.’ He glanced distastefully around the room, as though wondering if I might possibly be a representative of the Franklin Mint, but I knew that he meant I was childless and therefore as unfinished as Schubert’s eighth symphony. Hilary had a teenaged son. Her lack of depth was offset by her childbearing hips and her success as a single mother.

  When you become a pilot, the hardest part is learning to trust your instruments, apparently. You have to ignore the information your senses feed you and rely solely on readings. I always imagined that being a good mother required the same ability. Hilary had put theory into practice and raised a child by herself, while I had been left behind on the ground without a flight manual. I should have used the extra free time to strengthen my personality, but I hadn’t, and now it was too late; I had gone into retrograde and someone else had stepped in.

  ‘Try fending for yourself for a while, see how you get on. You’ve never had a job in your life. You’re going to need one now. I’m through doing everything for you, June. Do you have any idea how much you owe?’ He threw the card pieces on the floor in disgust.