by Jan Carson
‘What about the book?’ his wife asked, stirring her breakfast cereal to mush and mumbling nonsense in order to keep her anger occupied.
‘There’s nothing in it. Nothing worth keeping anyway.’
‘But it’s enormous,’ cried his wife, pointing to the towering stacks of foolscap, like Babel, nestling in all four corners of the dining room. ‘We haven’t had room for anything else.’
Silence settled over the breakfast table as they considered all the specific examples of everything else which had fallen victim to the book.
‘Dinner parties,’ he confessed apologetically.
‘Hobbies,’ she mumbled. ‘Sewing, for example, and possibly gardening.’
‘The loft extension.’
‘Summer holidays.’
‘Babies,’ they both agreed, though her voice was barely audible behind his.
When their losses had been lined up like fine cutlery, it seemed a terrible waste to disregard all those words, all those bloated sentences and paragraphs.
‘What about poetry?’ his wife suggested. ‘It’s smaller but it’s still made of words.’
And, because he did not want to disappoint her again, twice in a matter of meals, he agreed to try poems
After breakfast he kissed his wife on the lobe of each ear and finally on the forehead; she was prettier when he could not see her face.
‘Throw the novel in the recycling bin,’ he said with forced bravado, ‘see if it comes back as a dictionary or something useful. I am a much diminished man.’
The box room beckoned. Once the patio furniture had been evicted, the space was perfectly adequate for a poet of limited ambition. He locked the door, double-barred himself against claustrophobia and, snug as a wool-knit sweater, wondered why he’d bothered with anything as Continental as a novel. The box room shrunk in approval, demanding clipped thoughts, neatly written. The ceiling pressed for concision, the walls constricted, too tight to tolerate anything bigger than a medium-sized sonnet. In the corner by the radiator, the vacuum cleaner hovered, ready to devour every wasteful word.
For company, he kept a Moleskine notebook and a sharpened pencil. For food, he starved. For inspiration, he lay on the carpet and watched the summer jets ascending and descending the city airport like wide-winged, tropical fish floating in the box room’s skylight.
On the fifth day, his wife beat the door down with the blunt end of a steam iron. She found him greatly reduced and grinning like a television set.
‘I’ve written a poem,’ he said, thrusting the Moleskine under her nose. ‘It’s everything I’ve ever wanted to say.’
She took the notebook from his hands and flicked from front to back, finding no stanza, no sentence, no single, sharpish word upon which to hang a compliment.
‘The box room helped,’ he admitted, flinging his arms as wide as the walls would allow. ‘There’s no room for self-indulgence here.’
She stared at him, frowning as she paged the notebook slowly, finding nothing more than a single, concisely printed letter ‘A’; perhaps this was the beginning of everything else.
Three: Hobbies
‘Perfect for a home office,’ explained the estate agent, opening the door to reveal a space roughly the shape and size of a disabled toilet. ‘It’s amazing what you can do with shelves.’
‘Ikea,’ replied his wife, knowingly. He was unsure if this was a question or an answer, but was certain that they did not require a home office, and said as much, forcefully.
‘Room for a baby?’ suggested the estate agent. ‘If you don’t have one, you could get one now you’ve got somewhere to put it.’
He answered with great conviction on behalf of his five children (already planted in several cities), and his wife (the third and youngest of his three), who was clouding over, threatening rain at the first mention of babies, and also his own fragile wit, which was too old and life-dull for the joy that such things required.
He glared at the estate agent. His mouth said, ‘No thanks.’ His eyebrows, pitched in furious consternation, said, ‘Look what you’ve done,’ and ‘Have a bleeding heart,’ and, ‘Don’t be opening that barrel of monkeys, mate.’
‘A great wee space for hobbies,’ suggested the estate agent somewhat desperately. ‘Do you have any hobbies, sir?’
In the moment he could only recall whiskey, football and last summer’s fleeting affair with the golf course, none of which could be coerced up the poky staircase to settle in a space less than two metres square. His wife’s eyes were already turning bloodshot blue, her nose blurring in the familiar fashion. ‘Allotments,’ he said, with hurtling enthusiasm, ‘I’ve always wanted an allotment but there’s a terrible waiting list for the ones down by the embankment. This space would be perfect, don’t you think, sweetheart?’
It was a brute lie. All three knew it, but bound by the walls and the thin air staling around them, they would believe any fool thing for a fire escape.
‘We’ll take it,’ he said, and within a week he was ploughing up the carpet, planting carrots and tiny seedling potatoes in perpendicular drills. After Christmas, he hoped to plant flowers and strawberries in individual grow bags. Originally he’d planned on tomatoes, but his wife was afraid they’d stink the place out with their green, metallic smell.
He carried a kitchen chair up the stairs, installed it in the corner with car magazines and a thermos flask and never felt quite comfortable in his own space.
‘He’s so happy in his allotment,’ his wife told her girlfriends. ‘Most evenings he’s just up there pottering away. It keeps him out from under my feet. The allotment’s the best thing that ever happened to us.’
No one believed his wife. She no longer believed herself and did not care so long as the friends continued to come and go, drinking her coffee and occasionally laughing, never once asking how she really, honestly was.
Upstairs in the box room the walls began to fur. His beard grew out in sympathy. He no longer recognised himself in the bathroom mirror. The plants, sensing his desperation, refused to sprout.
He tried new tricks, stolen from the Internet. He spread manure, thick as cottage cheese, over the topsoil, drifting in and out of consciousness on its meaty stench. Occasionally he sang. He kept the curtains closed for heat and tacked black bin liners across the windowpanes. The sprouts failed and the cabbages were sprouts, barely bigger than his thumbnail.
He lit the room by means of Christmas lights and a carefully strung network of desk lamps. He played records, purposefully selecting softer tracks: ballads and love songs which might coerce the smaller shoots into peaking. Nothing grew.
He fed the plants daily, a measured blend of whiskey, water and his own sodden rage. The plants drowned, permeating the floor to leave drip marks on the ceiling below.
‘Your allotment’s leaking,’ his wife pointed out, barely lifting her head from the breakfast cereal. He willed her to suggest another hobby – embroidery, stamp collecting, basket weaving – anything which would not feel like a door had closed firmly between them. But she said nothing as she helped him place buckets and saucepans beneath the worst of the drips.
Later he would find things buried in the allotment: baby shoes, a teething ring, two dozen nappies still packaged. Holding them to the light he could no longer recall if these sadnesses had been planted or had sprouted unbidden like weeds in an untended field.
9.
Swept
There were six brown leaves and an empty Twix wrapper lying outside their door. It was only the third week of August. June hadn’t been expecting leaves yet.
‘Will you look at that,’ she said, retracting the venetian blinds to give Bill a better view, ‘there’s leaves on the doorstep already and it’s not even September.’
Bill lowered the News Letter and slipped his reading glasses from the bridge of his nose to the front of his forehead, where they spent most of their time, scrutinising the ceiling. It was almost five minutes since he’d last read a sentence, thoug
h he was anxious to preserve the illusion of reading. Since his retirement, a frugal half hour with the paper was his only respite from June’s hovering attention. He was loath to compromise his own alibi.
June was a tiny teaspoon of a woman. The whole of her, sitting down, could fold into the space between Bill’s armpit and his arse. In the past he’d liked to sit like this on the living-room sofa, two jigsaw pieces perfectly fitted, watching the telly or asking the homely questions which bridged the hour between dinner and bed:
‘How was work?’
‘Did you get out of the house at all today?’
‘Anything strange or startling with yourself?’
Their answers could be copied and pasted from one evening to the next but it was a liturgy of sorts, to ask and be answered and almost always (except on Saturdays and Sundays), make tentative plans for the weekend: roast beef and a run to Bangor, her mother, his sister, a Chinese on Saturday night. Bill had always found something to look forward to in a weekend.
In the past, Bill had liked June best in these moments, tucked into his side like an Icarus wing, her words catching in his beard, condensing to form a warm, mumbling fug. He’d understood her completely even when he could not hear her. Her hair had not been permed then. It would crease against his face like embroidery silk and smelt of Vosene shampoo. While Vosene smelt crisp and medical on him, on June the same smell was Glenariff forest, and two nights before Christmas, the good soap his mother kept for visitors and family wakes.
In the past, Bill had left June and returned to find her still there, each evening, in the kitchen, not so much diminished as unknown. Every day, he’d taken great trouble to forget her whilst he worked, allowing the cut of her heels and the crush of her smile to slip down the back of his mind like loose change or paper clips. Each evening, the rediscovery of June, just as he’d forgotten her, was delicious.
Now Bill never left and June did not know how to leave, so there could be no returning. The house, which had, for eighteen or more years, quite comfortably accommodated two adults, three children and a rolling cast of incidentals, now seemed as tight as a two-day toothache. Everywhere Bill turned, June was already there, and on the other three sides were walls.
She liked having him around.
She’d waited years to have him all to herself.
She told him so much, every night over dinner eaten off a tray. She could not contain her contentment on the telephone to friends.
Bill felt like a thing you bought in a shop and kept on the mantelpiece. He hated the way June looked at him. There was no lust left in her, no mystery, nor fear that he might leave and never come back, only a clutching need to know where he was from one moment to the next. There was nowhere Bill could go to get away from her. The house was soldered to the house next door on both sides and did not have a garden. Even in the downstairs toilet with the door double-barred June pestered him with questions about the hand towels, and the soap, and his bowels, which were not as reliable as they’d once been and could not be doing with any undue harassment.
He still loved her, of course. He was too old to consider adapting his palate to another woman’s cooking and June was in better shape than most of his friends’ wives. She wasn’t doting and she’d not gone religious. Her legs were still roughly the shape that legs should be and when she wore her ‘going out’ pants, the spare flesh around her belly could be coerced back into something approximating the waistline he’d fallen in love with. Best of all, there was a particular spot on the back of her neck which had proven impervious to the aging process and still touched, tasted and smelt exactly as it had in 1965. For these and other meagre mercies, Bill was grateful. Yet he could not help but wish his wife would go away for most of every day and sometimes weekends.
Bill took every opportunity to leave. The door was the obvious route, but half a dozen tins of Tennent’s, consumed in quick succession, could provide the same result without requiring him to leave the sofa. Bill took every opportunity to leave, but it was not the same as before. There was nowhere to go and he knew he’d always come back.
Though he’d never been much of a newspaper man he began to relish his morning walk, up the Cregagh Road to the newsagent, for a News Letter and a jumbo Twix. He ate both bars on a bench outside the Post Office and, afterwards, licked the chocolate from his fingers lest June read rebellion in the spots where the Twix had melted onto his hands. He liked a Twix on weekdays and a Galaxy Caramel at the weekend and could neither explain nor understand this preference. June no longer tolerated biscuits or chocolate bars. She’d read an article about cholesterol in Take a Break magazine and had ever since outlawed chocolate, full-fat milk and proper butter. Bill had lost three pounds in the first week of June’s new regime and four in the second. Terrified that he might disappear altogether, he’d begun to buy, and consume, a jumbo Twix every time he left the house. Sustenance, he called it, when in reality he knew it was nothing short of mutiny. Sometimes, for sheer wickedness, Bill carried his Twix wrapper home and dropped it outside their front door. There was a deep pleasure, distinct and separate to consuming the chocolate, in the knowledge that this small act of selfishness would irritate June immensely.
Each time Bill felt guilty about littering, he considered the tub of Flora margarine which had, of late, ousted the comforting little brick of Golden Cow butter from his fridge door. He felt justified and inclined to spit when he dropped the next wrapper. It was easy to irritate June. She’d been raised pernickety by a woman who ironed hankies and dried her tea bags in the hot press.
Bill had never hit his wife or even come close. He was not a cruel man, nor violent, and could not stand deliberate cruelty in others. However, as he approached his second year of retirement, the desire to make June’s life as tight and miserable as she’d made his, became one of his few remaining pleasures. He left the back door open and never replaced the toilet roll in either bathroom. He watched Sky Sports with the volume turned up and shoved used tissues down the side of the sofa. He dropped many small items of litter on their front doorstep, sometimes lifting things from the kitchen bin just to deposit them outside. These empty crisp bags and packets were not so much rebellion as love letters to the women June had once been, crumpled calls to clash and argue and reconcile as they’d once reconciled, furiously, with arms and teeth.
June never once linked Bill to the litter. She blamed the postman and the gang of young lads in tracksuits who lingered at the end of their street, huddled and whooping like old-time evangelists. She blamed the Polish family who’d moved in two doors up, on the other side. Bill realised that she no longer believed him capable of rebellion. Today, as he observed his wife over the top of the farming supplement, Bill finally admitted that there was very little left of June to like. He wondered, as he often wondered, if she was as disappointed as he was.
‘There’s leaves everywhere out there,’ she said, louder now, for she could tell Bill wasn’t really listening, ‘and some dirty fecker’s dropped a Twix wrapper at their backside. I’m going to have to sweep up. I don’t want the house looking like a tip when Maureen arrives.’
‘No point bothering yourself,’ muttered Bill. ‘Your Maureen’ll be quick enough to find fault whether you clean the place or not.’
June’s sister, Maureen was expected from Lisburn on the bus, sometime between four and five. She visited twice a year for no reason, and once again on Boxing Day. Lately, since the kids had left home and Bill retired, these visits had come to pass for occasions, thinly anticipated blips in the boredom of their everyday routine. In preparation for her arrival, Bill had repainted the downstairs toilet. June had baked three dozen shortbread and changed the spare-bedroom sheets on the off-chance that Maureen might take the head staggers, accept more than her usual half-glass of sherry, and be persuaded to stay the night.
Bill could not bear Maureen. He dreaded her visits and could barely stomach her from the far side of the room at family occasions. She was older than June, pinch
y in appearance and demeanour. She’d never approved of her sister’s choice in husbands and while she’d yet to vocalise her opinions, there was something in the way she left and entered Bill’s house which made her disapproval quite clear.
‘She thinks you’re common,’ June had explained to Bill on their honeymoon night after his new sister-in-law had spent the afternoon frowning at him from beneath the shadowy brim of her wedding hat. Maureen had, it was noted by more than one guest, worn the same dress to June’s wedding as she’d worn earlier in the year to their late grandmother’s funeral. ‘She thinks I could have done better,’ June continued. ‘She’d have liked me to marry a Presbyterian. Church of Ireland’s a bit papish in her book.’
At first he’d thought June was joking, but as she stepped from the en-suite into the thankless light of their bedroom, Bill noticed that his wife was on the verge of tears.
Everything in him rose in rage and, had the sister-in-law been with them, there in the tiny hotel room still wearing her funeral frock, he would have thundered and struck her hard enough to leave a mark. Instead, he’d picked June up by her tight-laced waist and carried her across the hotel room, gentle as a vase of shop-bought flowers. As her shoes peeled loose and her braids unwound, he flung her across the bed and she bounced, once, twice, three times like a skimming stone before coming to rest against the pillows. ‘I’ll show you just how common I can be,’ he cried, and hadn’t even bothered with the buttons on her wedding dress. It was a clumsy attempt to make light of the situation, but neither party felt particularly light. Maureen’s disapproval hung like a cloud canopy over their wedding bed, persisting all the way through the honeymoon until, on the third morning, June finally broke the familial ranks.
‘My sister’s an awful bitch, so she is.’
And Bill had felt for the first time, complicit, as if a line had been crossed and all necessary leaving and cleaving was now complete. Tempting her resolve, he’d asked, ‘You still love her though, don’t you, pet?’ and was justified when she answered quickly and earnestly, ‘Course, but not as much as I love you, Billy.’