He half-opens one eye. From under the brim of his straw hat, he watches a brown lizard with an orange stripe. It moves across the pebbly path like an illuminated message on a dot-matrix information board.
Arms and legs tingling in the direct sunlight, he hears footsteps on the pebbles, sees the lizard dart into the grass.
“Hello, my love,” Isabel says as she bends down to deposit her book and towel on the sunlounger next to his.
He pushes the brim of the hat up a little. She leans over him, sarong falling open against her thigh. He watches his hand rise, his finger touching the exposed flesh. The weight of her breasts pulls against the elastic material of her tankini top.
“Coming for a swim?” she says, taking half a step back as a bee lumbers between them.
“No,” he says, watching the bee. “I’m not much of a swimmer.”
“I love swimming.” She backs away, unwinds the sarong.
He hears her enter the pool, one careful step at a time, then the sound of her pushing forward into the water, arms outstretched. The physical reaction he’d had to their momentary closeness begins to subside, and then returns as he pictures her body moving through the water.
He pokes at the brim of his hat so that he can watch the movement of the top of her back and pale shoulders as she swims. He can’t make them out at this distance, but she has the faintest freckles on her shoulders and back. The first time he saw them, as he and Isabel undressed each other in her bedroom on a weekday afternoon, he had traced his finger over the random patterns.
They hadn’t had long; he’d been expected home.
When she reaches the far end and turns around to come back, the kicking of her legs splashes pool water on to a bricked-up doorway in the nearest wall.
He looks at the doorway. At some stage in the past it had, presumably, led somewhere.
After a while, he realizes the noises have stopped.
“It’s thirsty work this, darling,” he hears her say.
He smiles and gets up from the sunlounger. The garden of the house is criss-crossed by paths, some of which lead only to flower beds. He takes one that he knows leads to the house, passing between two beds of lilac festooned with butterflies and abuzz with bees. He walks under the archway and enters the gîte, which is attached to the side of the main house. He pours a glass of orange juice and returns the carton to the fridge, then looks at the glass he has poured and picks it up. Condensation forms on the outside of the glass as sweat runs down into the small of his back. He lifts the glass to his mouth.
The glass now half-empty, he places it back on the work surface and stares absently at the wall behind the wickerwork sofa in the lounge area of their studio room. There’s a watercolour in a gilt frame above the right-hand end of the sofa and a curtain hanging from a rail covering the wall behind the left-hand end. He approaches the sofa and pulls the curtain to one side. Behind it is a glass-panelled door with another curtain on the other side – in the main house.
In his pocket his phone vibrates. He takes it out to find a text from his daughter.
Hi Dad. I swam 10 lengths xx
He smiles as his index finger picks out his reply.
Well done darling. More than I can manage! xx
He stares at the curtain behind the sofa again, his smile fading.
He returns to the garden with a fresh glass of orange juice to find Isabel floating on her back in the pool absolutely still.
“I don’t know how you do that,” he says, appraising the outline of her body in the water.
“It’s easy.”
“I couldn’t do it.”
“Anyone can do it.”
“Not me,” he says. “Not without moving my arms and legs.”
She keeps her legs together and her arms outstretched and lies perfectly still.
He smiles at her as sweat runs from his hairline.
He kneels down, placing the glass of orange juice by the edge of the pool. Isabel turns on to her front and kicks out behind. She approaches the side, her fingers alighting on the tiled rim. He covers her hand with his and she smiles up at him. He looks down at her breasts, wondering if his sunglasses will conceal his wandering eyes, but knowing they won’t. He feels a tightening in his shorts.
“I want you,” he says.
Her lips part. She grabs his wrist and is about to try to pull him into the water.
“My phone,” he says, resisting.
There’s a hoarse scream or a cry from somewhere beyond the confines of the garden. It sounds like an animal in sudden, unbearable pain. It sounds like the same scream that he has heard before.
“What is that?” he asks.
“A donkey?” she suggests. “Every time I hear it, I think it’s being sawn in half.”
“I know how it feels,” he says.
Her face hardens; she looks down, her grip on his wrist abruptly relaxing. Then she lets go and drops beneath the surface. She twists around under water and when she kicks to propel herself away from the side of the pool, she gives him a good soaking.
He takes his phone from the pocket of his shorts and places it on the nearest sunlounger, then removes his sunglasses and puts them down next to the phone. He checks her position and dives in.
With his eyes closed he reaches for her as he moves under water. She twists away, trying to free herself from his grasp, but he holds on. They surface and he rubs his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he says, gasping for breath. “I’m sorry. Really. It was a silly thing to say and it’s not even true.”
She struggles a bit more, but he senses the fight has gone out of her.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, and he moves her hair out of her face as they tread water. He draws his legs up and encircles her waist, tightening his grip, but she tips forward, taking them both underwater. His protest emerges in a stream of bubbles.
Isabel is lying on her back on a sunlounger. He is standing a few feet away, wondering if it’s forgivable to have sex in a swimming pool. The sun has already dried the remaining droplets of water from her legs, and now the dark patches on her tankini – which she has put back on, since they don’t know when the owners might reappear – shrink even as he watches. She is breathing regularly and he thinks she might be asleep.
He passes under the archway to the front of the property. Their hire car stands on the gravel drive. To the left, the single-track lane leads back to the road, the only route to Villefranche de Rouergue. To the right, the lane peters out into a cinder track, which runs into a high hedge. He remembers when they came out for a walk the night before, hearing the creatures in the fields and hedgerows. The churring and chirruping of birds, he had said; the chiming of cicadas, Isabel had thought. He wonders who was right.
He looks down the lane, which Isabel had described as a cul-de-sac. He had pointed out that the phrase, although French, was not used by the French. So the phrase itself was a linguistic cul-de-sac, n’est-ce pas?
“Not so much cul-de-sac as mise-en-abîme, in that case,” he remembers her saying.
He stares into the distance, the skin under his right eye twitching.
In his pocket, his phone vibrates for an incoming text message.
They are in Villefranche, walking through streets of grey stone.
“We could be in Yorkshire,” he says, taking her hand and enjoying the warm, damp hollow of her palm.
“Except for the sub-tropical conditions,” she says.
“And the French graffiti,” he adds, pausing by a stencil of a skull signed, apparently, TOMBO. “And the brasseries and patisseries, and the smell of Gauloises, et cetera.”
By mutual consent they turn down an alley that looks as if it will offer another way out. It doesn’t. They stand and face one another at the end of the alley, each taking the other’s hand, and kiss.
Eventually the medieval town surrenders its main square and they wander around the market. He stays by her side, either holding her hand or touching the back of it. Som
etimes their legs come into contact and he presses against her hips, whispering into her ear. She smiles and makes faint noises of pleasure and encouragement.
She stops at a stall selling a variety of dry sausages. “What’s ‘myrte’?” he asks, pointing to one labelled AVEC MYRTE.
“Myrtle, I expect. Sounds delicious.”
“I know what ‘cochon’ is,” he says, looking at another label. “What about ‘âne’?”
“Donkey,” she says, catching his eye, before they both turn to look at the looped sausage, a deep reddish brown colour speckled with chalky white mould.
“That explains a lot,” he says.
They stop in a café for a glass of wine, then walk back slowly to where they had left the car, parked in a line of vehicles overlooking the railway station. There is a languid quality to Isabel’s movements that he finds exquisitely erotic and as he lowers himself into the driver’s seat he finds that he is aroused. She fans herself as he starts the engine and he buzzes down her window as well as his own.
The houses lining the road soon fall away and he changes down to second as dictated by the gradient, the car traversing the contours, first one way then the other, to reach higher ground. As they turn left on to the narrow lane down to the hamlet he unclips his seat belt and allows it to loop back on to its spool. She looks at him and raises her eyebrow.
“Last time you waited until we were halfway down the lane,” she says.
“I’m relaxing,” he says with a smile.
Together in the kitchen they prepare ingredients for dinner.
“Is the sun over the yardarm?” she asks.
“Pretty much.”
He opens the fridge and takes out a bottle of wine and a beer. He pours a glass of wine and passes it to her.
“Cheers,” they both say.
He pours his beer into a glass. He’s always done this since reading in a magazine that being able to smell your beer as you drink it enhances your enjoyment.
He tops up Isabel’s wine glass and takes the empty bottles outside and stands them with the others that have accumulated by the side of the gîte. At the end of the week, if not before, he will take them into Villefranche and recycle them. As he looks at the line of bottles standing to attention he suddenly has a very clear memory of his son asking him why, when he had swept up a broken wine glass at home, he had dumped the broken glass in the regular bin rather than the recycling bin for glass, metal and plastic. He had told his son that he believed broken glass couldn’t go in the recycling, but had to go in the general waste, and his son had asked about bottles breaking when being dropped in the recycling bin. Was that a problem? he had asked. Did those broken bottles then have to be fished out of the recycling? He hadn’t answered, he now realizes. Something else had happened, some distraction had intervened, and they had all moved on and the question had remained unanswered, and he now realizes that it’s not that the wine glass is broken that’s important, but that it’s a different kind of glass, and he feels an urgent need to tell his son, to explain, so that when his son eventually finds out one day, perhaps from someone else, the truth about glass, he won’t think back and remember how his father misled him. Lied to him, really. He wants to text him now, his son, text him and tell him about the different types of glass, but it further occurs to him that he doesn’t really know enough about it. He doesn’t know why the fact that it’s a different kind of glass is so important. Surely glass is glass. Surely it all gets melted down and remade, doesn’t it? What does it matter if some of it is thin and clear while some of it is green or brown and quite a bit thicker? Although not that much thicker – it depends on the type of glass.
He becomes aware of Isabel standing in the doorway of the gîte with an anxious expression on her face.
“Darling, what’s wrong?” she says, approaching him now, arms outstretched. “Why are you crying?” She wipes his tears away. “Darling, darling,” she murmurs as she holds him.
In the morning they need bread.
“I’ll go. You stay in bed,” he says.
“No, I want to come with you.”
He tries to persuade her to stay, but she refuses.
It’s warm but hazy. The haze will have burnt off by the time they get back from Villefranche with the bread.
They park in the same spot overlooking the railway station. Isabel is wearing a white short-sleeved top that gapes at the front when she leans forward. That she appears innocent of intent and oblivious to any effect only makes the effect all the more powerful.
“This is our space,” she says.
“I don’t like to drive any further in,” he says. “Feels like there’s no way out. That one-way system.”
When they return to the car carrying a baguette and a bag containing two pains aux raisins, he fastens his seatbelt but then unclips it almost as soon as they start climbing the hill out of town. Isabel looks at him with that same raised eyebrow.
“Feeling even more relaxed?” she says.
He just smiles.
When they get back, they are standing on the gravel drive when a familiar scream rips open the now vivid blue stillness of the morning.
He turns and looks at her and pulls a sad face, then looks away at the line of empty bottles standing against the wall of the gîte. A bee investigates the neck of one bottle after another, then seems to have a better idea and veers off towards the garden.
He walks around to stand behind her and threads his arms through hers, around her waist, then allows his hands to settle on her wide hips. She leans her head back against his shoulder.
“I think I need a lie down,” he says, taking her hand.
He’s undressed her before they reach the bed. He kneels down and kisses the gentle swell of her tummy, tasting salt, chlorine, sun cream. He runs his hand down over her leg, almost but not quite making contact. She makes a low sound that tells him she likes what he’s doing. He stands up and steps out of his shorts, feeling the weight of his phone in the pocket as he throws them the short distance to the armchair. She lies down on the bed and he goes to lie down next to her and he asks himself if he will be able to lose himself in the moment, or the next series of moments, or if he will be visited by thoughts of his children, if he’ll be interrupted by the buzz of his phone’s text alert, if he’ll be assailed by worries about the hopelessness of the situation in which they find themselves, if he’ll be distracted by images, which he realises just at that moment have begun to crowd in on him in the last few days, of dead ends. But, in spite of these thoughts and worries and images, he finds he can actually lose himself in the moment, because, from the first moment he touched her, from the first moment they kissed, he has known there is something unprecedented and different and unique about that touch and that kiss. What he feels for her is overpowering and he senses it’s the same for her and she has told him it’s the same for her and together they seem to have found something that means something profound to each of them, to both of them, and this meaning appears to be communicable by touch. They want each other, they desire each other, and when he is making love to her – which he is doing right now, right this very moment, and even his being aware of it is not enough to break the spell – it feels, it really feels as if he is doing something, going somewhere, feeling something he has never done before or been before or felt before. He knows it’s the oldest feeling in the world, or one of them certainly, but to him, and to her, he thinks, it feels brand new, it feels like nothing they’ve ever felt before, like something they’ve never done before, it feels like somewhere neither of them has ever been before. Above all it feels like they are going to this place, performing this act and experiencing this feeling together and at the same time and even as he experiences it he thinks it feels like an out-of-body experience despite the fact it’s all about his body and her body and their two bodies coming together and even this awareness does not impinge on the sensation or adulterate his happiness and even that word somehow does not have the undesired effec
t he so feared, when really you would expect it might, and he thinks to himself that it’s a little bit like climbing a mountain, as you keep climbing and you see the summit disappearing ahead of you, a series of false summits, and then you see the real summit just a short way ahead and you know there’s no way you’re not going to make it and you do make it and you stop and look beyond and the view is the most amazing view you have ever seen and it’s the first time you have seen it, this particular view, and it is in no way disappointing or predictable, but is breathtakingly beautiful and bathed in some impossible golden light and even as you think this, even as you think it’s the most banal cliché ever to have entered your head, even as you think this, the vision doesn’t darken or start to break up or become unstable, but persists, and a new feeling comes over him, one of great calmness, a feeling he can’t remember experiencing for a long time, a calmness that fills him like the tide fills an estuary. And while they lie together on the bed and the sweat dries on their skin and they slowly become unstuck, he doesn’t worry about his children or even about his wife, he doesn’t worry that he and Isabel might be heading down a dead end, he doesn’t worry about the screams of the donkey or the premonitory dream of the siren or the close-up of the terrified driver’s eyes in the film he would for some reason always be reminded of when he went to the dentist as a child, he doesn’t worry about the bee that will return to the empty bottles lined up outside the gîte and, attracted by the sticky residue inside one of them, probably one of his empty beer bottles, stumble inside and perhaps become stuck in that residue, and he doesn’t worry that later when he loads up the car with the recycling he will fail to notice the bee inside the bottle and he doesn’t think for a moment that when he releases his seat belt only a short way into the journey into town and Isabel raises her eyebrow at him that he might be about to need his seatbelt when the bee becomes unstuck at the bottom of the bottle and bumbles out of the bottle into the car and barges about, a bee in a car seeming so much bigger than normal, the size of a bat or a bird, and the interior of the car seeming so much smaller than normal, like the interior of a car after a horrific accident rather than before.
Best New Horror, Volume 25 Page 13