by Jan Carson
In the kitchen he filled the kettle and placed four slices of white bread in the toaster. The bread was too tall and even with the lever depressed fully, the slices peeked out of the individual slots: round crusts lined up, one behind the other, like marble headstones. He found two mugs unused in the cupboard and a single knife in the drawer. He placed them, with a pair of side plates, on a tray they’d been given as a wedding present. The milk had gone off but his wife often drank her tea black and he could manage without milk for once. The butter was still on the table from two evenings ago. A soap-sized remnant remained, still discernible as butter. The rest, subjected to the central heating’s demands, had returned to oil and now swam around the butter dish like last night’s piss lingering in the toilet bowl. He lifted the dish and tipped it into the kitchen bin and, having instigated an eviction, found himself progressing around the table as he pitched everything into the rubbish: plates, water glasses, salt and pepper, green salad weeping at the bottom of the salad bowl, bread, breadboard, lasagne, soldered as it now was to the casserole dish, cutlery and, when the table was finally bereft of even the most inconsequential item, the red gingham cloth which had previously held all their meals together.
There was little logic to Steven’s actions. Tomorrow he would be faced with the choice between purchasing replacements for these lost items or fishing through the rubbish bin to retrieve them. They would not last long without cutlery. There were only so many meals which could be eaten from their hands like wolfish dogs. For the moment, however, it felt good to throw everything out, to acknowledge, in condiments and broken glassware, that nothing was permanent or worth leaning upon. Without so much as a second thought, he binned the contents of their cutlery drawer and then the spice rack, stopping just short of the larder, for he knew he should not offer his wife any excuse to starve.
He was just deliberating between a frying pan and the good corkscrew when the toaster reached the end of its cycle and spat all four slices of bread high into the air. He pinched them out of the toaster with fickle, dancing fingers and laid them across the countertop. There was no butter now, and they were not the sort of people who kept margarine, so he fixed two slices with peanut butter and a second pair spread thickly with his mother’s strawberry freezer jam. Triangling them with a cheese knife, he split all four slices between the two side plates, wet the tea and carried the tray carefully into the living room.
‘Tea,’ he said, announcing his entrance, ‘and a wee slice of toast.’
A wall had descended between Steven and his wife, and though he had, over the last five years, entered and exited this same room several thousand times unannounced, he understood that this evening and for many evenings to come it would be necessary to beg permission every time he approached her.
His wife was not on the couch where he’d left her. Neither was she sitting on the comfortable chair by the bookcase where she often sat at this hour, watching the work-day people return from their offices with laptop cases and lunch bags, long since defeated. Her hospital slippers had been arranged neatly, like two commas coupling underneath the coffee table, and her sweater lay open-armed across the footstool.
From where he stood, tray in hand, Steven could see through the open door to their bedroom and the en-suite bathroom beyond. Both were empty. His first and most obvious fear was the nursery, but he had not left the kitchen for at least five minutes and it was impossible to arrive at the baby’s room without first passing through the kitchen and dining area. It was a small apartment, awkwardly arranged and never intended for the safe housing of children. Just two weeks earlier, the box room – barely six feet square, and advertised, somewhat fraudulently, as an office space – had been hastily converted into a nursery. The baby was to have slept there in a flat-pack cot Steven had yet to remove from its packaging.
Tomorrow he would get up early and drive around town until he found a skip capable of accommodating the cot, and he would buy white paint from Homebase and cover over the pink, pink walls. He would shove each individual teddy bear to the bottom of the wheelie bin, cover their plush faces with vegetable scraps and newspapers, do everything he could to keep his wife from coming across her loss unexpectedly in a cupboard or corner.
Steven set the tray on the coffee table and went to check the cloakroom, for this was the only other place his wife might be. She was not in the cloakroom. He had not really expected to find her there amongst the coats and outdoor boots. It was a tiny closet, barely big enough to contain his golf clubs and funeral umbrella, and his wife always became anxious when presented with an enclosed space. As he opened the door and leant into the pillowy darkness, the smell of old rain and perfume fell upon him like a blanket fog. The comfort of it dragged on him with lines and tiny anchors until he found himself uncomfortable in the empty hall. He stepped into the closet, parted their various coats and, once tucked inside, drew all the coats around himself like curtains or a medieval cloak.
Just for a second, he told himself, and felt his lungs unfastening for the first time in two days.
Fumbling through the blackness, his hand found the pocket of an anorak. In the dark it was impossible to tell whether it belonged to him or his wife. He slipped his fingers inside the pocket, skirted the edges of a crumpled tissue and, nestling in the crease where one piece of fabric met another, found a single key and two copper pennies. Forced together, in the palm of his hand, they made a noise like sugar spoons colliding.
Steven drew his hand back, shocked by the sensation of cold metal in a padded place. Instinctively he raised the hand towards his face. It smelt of rust and wet October mornings; damp leaves clogging up the drains outside his office. He rubbed his hand against the thighs of his jeans, hoping to wipe away the stench and wondered if they would make it to October. Shortly after October there would be Christmas and, if this did not kill them, another mean year beyond. For the first time in at least twenty years he wished that God was still a problem he could believe in. He needed something solid to crash into, something beyond himself to blame. Lowering his weight to the floor he sat cross-legged amongst their wellington boots and tennis racquets. He reminded himself that it was not in his job description to fold under this or any other disappointment.
I must put my wife first, he told himself firmly. I am here to look after her. But his feet did not move and his shoulders showed no inclination towards leaving the cloakroom.
When he was a child, his mother had often dragged him along on her weekly shopping trips. Though money was tight and she’d rarely bought anything which could not be eaten or used in some practical manner, she’d liked to pat clothes in British Homes Stores and C&A. Occasionally she’d left him sitting beside her handbag and the carrier bags containing the evening’s dinner whilst she darted into the store’s dressing rooms to try on skirts and fabulous blouses she could not afford, even at Christmas. ‘Don’t be telling your dad,’ she’d say, and Steven never had. He’d been old enough to understand that adults kept secrets from one another: his grandfather’s cigarettes, his mother’s lonely moments in the Marks and Spencer’s changing room, the lady his father kept for typing and other important jobs. These secrets were not the same as lies.
While his mother paraded up and down in front of the dressing-room mirrors, young Steven liked to crawl between the clothes racks in the children’s department and hide for as long as he could, holding his breath against discovery. He’d grown particularly fond of bathrobes, the way they furred against his face and arms like soft toys, whispering. Also, little girls’ frocks, for the rustling noise they made as they settled back into position. Perched on the metal bar which held these clothes racks together, only his feet remained visible to other shoppers and Steven could pretend that he’d slipped the seams of this world, arriving somewhere strange and far removed from 1970s Northern Ireland. He had not the faith necessary to believe in Narnia and could only stretch his imagination as far as Disneyland or the Butlins’ holiday resort he’d once seen in a broch
ure at the travel agents.
As their coats and anoraks swung gently backwards and forwards, grazing his shoulders like a blessing deferred, Steven felt, for a brief moment, insulated from the previous day’s events. He had not slept properly in almost three days. The desire to close his eyes and sleep for an hour or so began to blur his resolve. Just for a second, he told himself and, leaning against his golf bag, allowed his eyelids to droop. He was just beginning to forget his wife when the sounds of loud drums and synthesizers, came rushing through the air-conditioning vents and he was all of a sudden bolt upright, crowning his head on the coat rail. Outside the cloakroom the music was just as persistent. Without the muffled protection of coats and winter scarves he could hear actual voices, laughter and singing, rising through the floorboards from the apartment below.
The rooms directly below their own apartment were occupied by another, much younger couple. He was English and the crass donkey bray of his laughter often rose to greet Steven and his wife first thing in the morning and late at night. She had been raised in Belfast and they’d met, quite accidentally, during her studies in Edinburgh. This couple were planning to be married in the spring, after which they would wait at least two years before getting pregnant. There were things they wished to do around the house before a baby arrived and holidays to be taken in Italy and Greece. Steven and his wife knew more about this couple than they did about their own in-laws. They were the sort of forward people who wished to know their neighbours and cornered them for fresh news in the stairwells and corridors. That which they had not been told directly they’d gleaned in snippets and loud exclamations, as the young couple’s conversations rose like warm air through their own ceiling and into Steven’s apartment.
They were not the sort of young couple who held house parties, and this, Steven often reminded his wife, was something to be thankful for. However, they often, even on weeknights, had eight or more friends round for dinner. The noise of this was almost as unbearable as an actual house party. Steven could feel the hammers rising inside his gut. To play music on a night like this was absolutely inexcusable and, though he acknowledged in the small part of his mind which was still working logically that these neighbours could not possibly know, he still intended to go downstairs and shout at them loudly, through the letterbox, if they would not open their door.
Steven was just striding towards his own front door, reminding himself as he approached the doormat to grab his shoes, when he heard his wife calling his name from the living room. ‘Steven,’ she said, ‘come here a minute.’ He stopped by the open door and peered into the living room. There was still no sign of his wife but he could hear her shallow breathing like tissue paper rising and falling in the breeze. He stepped into the room, shuffled across the carpet and, having arrived at the coffee table, saw her naked feet protruding from behind the sofa. Her ankles were thin and porcelain white, the blue lines of her veins glowing through the skin like the luminous workings of a just-born bird. He was seized by the inclination to wrap his hands around her ankles and hold her down, lest she suddenly float away.
He hunkered down beside her feet and peeked around the corner of the sofa to make sure the rest of her was still there. She was lying sideways on the floor, knees curled into her belly, right ear pressed into the carpet, whilst her right arm and hand hooked the dead space above her head. He wondered if this was coincidental of if she’d consciously put herself into the recovery position. He placed a single hand lightly on the spot where her pyjamas had crawled up, exposing a foot or more of milky shin. She was warm to the touch and this surprised him. He was about to open his mouth and offer toast or ask if she was OK when she raised herself up on one elbow and held a finger to her lips, shooshing him like a fussy child. Curling her finger into a clothes hook, she beckoned for Steven to come and lie down beside her.
This was the first and only thing she’d asked of him in almost three days and so without so much as a heartbeat of hesitation, he put his shoulder to the sofa, shoved it into the coffee table and dropped down beside her. They lay face to face together like forks in a cutlery drawer. He was not touching her with any part of his body or clothes. He could smell her breath, stale from yesterday’s coffee and too much sleep. On the floor, with his wife’s eyes heavy upon him, Steven felt a separate kind of grief settle into his bones. He belted his arms across his ribcage, drew his kneecaps up to meet his chin and tried, as best he could, to hold himself together.
‘Listen,’ said his wife, ‘they’re playing music downstairs.’
There was no joy left in her, but the ghost of something which might in a month’s or several months’ time become a smile went flitting across her eyes like a dark-night moth. He understood then that they should not aim for Christmas or even October; the following morning would be mountain enough for them to conquer. He allowed his ear to fall heavily upon the carpet, to find the noise of the couple in the apartment below and press into it, splitting the sound, as it bubbled up through the floorboards, into individual components: laughter, music and passionate conversation.
‘Someone’s still happy,’ she said. They lay like this for hours, until their ears grew numb and their tea lost its heat. Around two, the couple in the apartment below fell silent, but they lay on, unwilling to sleep or to rise from the floor. It was easier this way. If they slept, they would eventually wake, and it would be morning or perhaps afternoon – a new day, moving forwards. They were not ready for tomorrow. They were not ready for any of this.
12.
Shopping
In October I began a love affair with a man named either John or Paul.
We met once a week on Tuesdays by arranged accident in Knocknagoney Tesco. (It would have been more convenient to meet in the Connswater store but they did not have a café and dinner was the only active element in our relationship.)
We were careful to arrive alone: him first and me three to five minutes later, clutching a handful of carrier bags like the ghost of a crumpled alibi. We sat at a table by the condiment station and ate our dinner off plastic trays still sweating from the dishwasher steam. I was a vegetarian by birth, yet in his company rode a rare carnivorous streak through steaks, sausage rolls and reconstituted-chicken products. At the time I enjoyed the sensation of flesh resisting teeth in that stringsome, sinewy fashion rarely found in vegetables. Afterwards, I vomited in the car park, discretely, by the trolley station. The colour of it was brown and red and burgundy-brown as it pooled on the greasy tarmac. Poking through this muck-toned mess, I discovered that evil things had grown inside me and were leaking out: doubts, lies, premeditated lust and an almost insatiable appetite for cocktail sausages. On the drive home I picked the last of it from between my teeth with the corner of my Tesco loyalty card. The taste persisted, requiring the attention of toothpaste and medicated mouthwash.
Our love affair lasted for approximately eight months, petering out and finally ending towards the middle of May, just as the city was beginning her annual attempt at good weather. Though I did not feel particularly guilty from one Tuesday to the next, I found myself wondering about the contents of his fridge every time I opened my own. Medium cheddar, I presumed, for I’d watched him buy it every week, by the half pound, along with tomatoes on the vine, iceberg lettuce and three litres of semi-skimmed: a cold, wet monument to an unmentioned other, waiting at home with a bowl of dehydrated muesli.
We did not talk about our other lives. We did not talk or even look directly at each other. We hoped the other diners would ignore the very many empty tables circling the walls of the café and suppose us thrown together by chance and spatial limitations. Traditionally, I took the north-east corner of the table and he, the south-west. We were compass points, straining for a good-sense separation. Even after a month, we did not talk and seldom broke the silence which sat between us like a second cousin once removed.
‘Is this seat taken?’ I asked the first time I saw him. He was the only person eating alone in the café at the Knock
nagoney Tesco. At first I felt sorry for him and thought we might talk about the rain or the road works on the Sydenham Bypass. Then I became attracted to his sweater and the way he held his fork, high and adamant, like an American film star. When he spoke, his accent was almost entirely East Belfast. I was disappointed and also reassured. It was a relief of sorts to find we spoke the same dull, doughy language.
He told me his name was John or perhaps Paul. (Distracted by the ring on his last but one finger I could never remember his name, but retained a vague awareness that he was named for a Beatle, and not a minor one.)
I offered my name and asked what he did. He never replied. I presumed him a teacher or a civil servant. He had the shoes for it, also a nervous habit of running his hands through the back of his hair in erratic tugs and spurts as if being subjected to a series of small electric shocks. He was not a handsome man but he knew how to wear a sweater.
‘Do you want to have a love affair with me?’ he asked. In all my years of shopping at Knocknagoney Tesco, I had never once been asked this question. It felt impolite to refuse. I might never be asked again.
‘I only come here on Tuesdays,’ I replied. ‘Wouldn’t you like someone more committed?’
‘Tuesdays suit me fine,’ he answered, ‘I can get the groceries while we’re having our affair.’
It was a perfect storm. We shook on it, our hands finding each other across the table top. Though I did not realise it at the time, it was to be the longest and most intimate conversation of our relationship.
We always began with dinner in the café. Anxious not to raise suspicions, I ate before leaving home and ate again in his presence, the second dinner sitting like a beached beluga in the pit of my belly. I was almost always bloated in his company, and on Tuesdays wore loose-fitting shirts and jumpers, hoping he would not presume me pregnant. An unplanned pregnancy was the last thing our love affair needed. I bought my own dinner. He bought his. We were, in this and other matters, terribly modern. Later, when we’d grown accustomed to one another and familiarity had made us daring, we used vouchers – two for one on fish and chips or cardboard-crusted quiche – splitting the cost of a single meal concisely and alternating on the leftover penny.