134. Do all that you can to divert your attention from thoughts of giving up.
135. Resist any vague, absentminded impulse to check in the mirror for facial hair or brawn. Absorbing a man doesn’t make you…Just as eating beef or pork…
9
That night, while the bust of her husband was defrosting in the garden, Lizzie sat at the kitchen table in her nightie. She had her coat around her shoulders and a glass of white wine in her hand. She opened up the laptop.
Hi, Joanna. This is Lizzie Prain. I’m using his email account to let you know that Jacob has left me and gone to live abroad.
He met someone. She was an escort girl from a place in Guildford called the Pearl. They have eloped.
He won’t be coming back and I am closing his account down now. Goodbye.
She signed her name. Then she went back and deleted it. She pressed send. She went to his sent items and read the email through. An email came back with a ping. Under the table Lizzie tucked her foot under the dog’s stomach.
Hi! Good to hear from you!
I hope you’re all right. Thank you for letting me know. If I can do anything, or help in any way, I’d like you to be in touch. OK?
All best wishes,
Joanna
Lizzie read the email through. It had come back unbelievably quickly. She tried to run a hand through her hair. She looked around the little kitchen and lit a cigarette.
Thank you, she wrote. And sent.
A reply bounced back at once: No problem.
Lizzie felt her heart skip a little. She wrote: I hope you don’t mind.
Mind what?
That I have written at this time of night.
Lizzie sat and massaged her jaw.
Not at all. I’m doing a degree. Always do my studying in the middle of the night. I don’t get very much done, as it happens. I spend far too much time on the Internet reading articles that have nothing to do with my course. Are you all right?
Lizzie began to chew on a fingernail. She didn’t respond. Joanna sent another email.
Course you are. Sorry.
Sorry for what?
For asking. For prying. I’m too damn nosy for my own good. Do you want to go on to Chat?
Lizzie wrote: No. She didn’t know what Chat was. She wrote: Goodbye. Then she put sorry and deleted it because it made her sound foolish. She didn’t even know what she was sorry for. She hadn’t wanted a conversation with this woman in the first place. “Wasn’t I perfectly all right without?” she said aloud, and she shut the computer down.
By now Rita was lying at the top of the stairs with her belly sticking out like a football. As Lizzie came up the stairs Rita opened an eye and made a low whining sound.
“I know, Rita,” Lizzie whispered, as she stepped over her and went on into the bathroom.
136. No comment!
137. Actually, yes comment: of course you were all right. What on earth made you think you might like to talk to this woman, beyond letting her know that Jacob had gone and left you?
138. No feeling for companionship or intimacy at this crucial stage in your preparation for departure can be considered rational.
139. You are not having a normal human experience. Defrosting your husband’s upper body in the garden in preparation for roast and consumption is not “everyday”! Go to Guildford and shop if you have to. Buy a bra. Do anything. But do not try to make friends right now!
140. Resist!
By two the following afternoon the barbecue was once again lit.
Lizzie was sitting some way off from it on the end of a garden chair. The axe was at her feet.
She was drinking black tea, and smoking a cigarette, the ash of which she simply flicked into the grass. Her red lipstick was smeared now. The dog was lying at her feet, stomach still distended.
There was a bad smell all around them, and the day was gray and bleak.
In the kitchen, the lettuce was washed; it was in the colander, crisp, white and clean. Lizzie had cut two tomatoes into quarters. The rest of the cucumber had been sliced. She’d run out of dressing, but that didn’t matter. She was much too full of fat.
In the garden she put the axe in the air and brought it down right in the middle of his chest. It made only a dent. Gripping the handle, she knelt down on the grass; she looked at the sky.
Her mother had said: “You’re tall. You’re not going to fit in anywhere. Making art forces you to be different. You have to be. You can’t be the same as anyone else.”
She didn’t have talent for drawing. She hadn’t wanted to express herself. She’d found a job instead. And a house. He’d asked her to move in. She’d asked him if she could move in.
She had liked taking care of him.
They had walked in the woods, side by side.
Like a little girl taking care of a doll. On the lawn she looked in and up, and cut out the heart with the fruit knife.
Then the lungs came out. They were dark, purple jelly: two slippery pale sacs. She held them in her hands and then laid them on the grass before they were bagged and labeled and put in the freezer.
Split in two, his chest was still huge, like wings, and red with blood. She lifted his left side onto the barbecue.
She put her hands in her pockets and walked away as the barbecue caught and flamed. She smelled it. She turned around and looked at her feet and she looked at the gray light on the garden, and over the wall towards the trees, but there wasn’t anything to see or feel.
Marriage had been marriage—nothing more or less than what it had been—but the persistent feeling in Lizzie Prain had something to do with time wasted, seeing them both through their various depressions with food and the preservation of everyday life according to the body’s needs. Very little had been got for it. So, going to prison for manslaughter felt like more waste, she thought, tipping a bottle of rib sauce onto the side sitting on the barbecue. She watched the flames leap up and catch, and the air filled with the smoke. She feared the people in the prison as much as she feared the hours in a cell. She knew there were activities and projects for prisoners—initiatives launched by well-meaning citizens on the outside—but the idea that someone in prison would be able to use their pragmatism to any effect seemed too far-fetched. Lizzie lifted the ribs with tongs and an oven glove and carried them over to the picnic spot she had laid out on the cold grass.
10
She ate what she could that night and then went through the house to the porch. She stood for an hour in the porch but Mike didn’t come with the money for the cake. She kept thinking she heard the sound of his wheels in the lane, but it was only the wind in the trees and the cars up on the hill.
In the kitchen she put the light on and opened up the laptop. She had a tea towel wrapped around her neck, and the towel was covered in sauce. On the table was a cup of Earl Grey tea with milk.
Are you there, Joanna?
On the piece of paper beside her she wrote:
My name is Lizzie Prain. In a week or two I will be done here. And then I will be on a train to Scotland. I will find a room. I will find somewhere, a room somewhere, a bed to lay my head. It will be clean.
Yes, I’m here.
Lizzie breathed.
Oh good, she wrote. Thank God.
She deleted “God” and put “you” instead. She wrote Thank you twice more. And then deleted that too. How silly that writing words down and sending them out to someone made her feel so foolish.
Are you all right, Lizzie?
Yes. I am. It’s just that I’m trying to get away from here and start over again. It’s not as easy as I’d thought it would be. That’s all. There seems such an awful lot to get through.
There was a pause.
Is there anything I can do to help you?
Can I ask you something?
Course!
How was he?
Lizzie waited. She took a sip of tea.
When you saw him last?
Not himself. I
did know that times were hard. By that I mean I know that things had become tricky financially. He didn’t want to stay in the afternoon and talk, as he had usually done. We had a very quick sandwich. He asked if I liked the sculpture. I didn’t. He said that was fine, and just wrapped it back up in newspaper and made for the door. Then he turned and said he was thinking of going away. He said he hadn’t spoken to you about it because he imagined you wouldn’t care one way or the other. He seemed, I don’t know.
There was a pause. Lizzie waited, staring at the screen.
It was as if he’d been working on something and then just driven up in the car with the plaster and dust all over him still. I thought that if someone was going away to start again then shouldn’t there be some sort of vitality in that? Shouldn’t there be a spark?
He was right, wrote Lizzie. I don’t care. I don’t give a damn!!
That’s OK!
What is?
How long’s it been?
What?
Since he went away?
Some time now.
Do you know that I saw him again, after that time at Christmas? He came up on Boxing Day. I’d said on email that we were busy with family but he said he was coming up anyway, that you had people to see, or something to do. So he was going to be in the area, and he asked if he could pop in. I said we were tied up.
He came anyway, I know, Lizzie wrote. She took a sip of tea. She still had the cloth with the sauce around her neck.
Around four in the afternoon. He rang the bell. We had people for lunch. It was still going on. He just came on in and joined us.
He told me you’d invited him to lunch, Joanna. He went up first thing in the morning.
We hadn’t. But it didn’t really matter.
Another pause.
Really sorry, by the way.
For what?
That I never thanked you for that lovely lunch. It was so nice to sit in your garden. And the food was really delicious. But I should have returned the invitation and asked you to come here.
It’s all right.
It’s not really.
Well, it doesn’t matter now!
Last Easter, when he came up with the sculpture of the bucket and spade, he said things were really awful. That you’d started the cakes business together and that it was losing money. He said that if he were ever to leave and try and go somewhere to start again, then I could come to the house and just help myself to what was left in his studio.
His what?
His studio.
Lizzie smiled. She turned to the window and stared at the dark.
Do you remember a studio from when you came here?
No. I remember the shed, and the garage had some bits and pieces in. He said you’d had a studio built.
Not here.
No?
No.
A pause.
He must have meant that I could come and take a look at the shed. Do you think that might be all right? I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot since you got in touch with me, Lizzie. I wondered if I might come down this weekend if that’s convenient?
No. Not this weekend. I’m really busy. I doubt I can manage it before I go away. But if there is anything of his, I will make sure it gets to you. His stuff is of no interest to me since I think it’s all…
Lizzie flicked a tear from the corner of her eye and ripped the tea towel off her neck.
Are you there, Lizzie?
I have to go now, Joanna. I am sorry. Goodbye.
141. Consider putting the laptop in the back of the Volvo now and driving it first thing in the morning to the municipal dump off the A31. You could be free of it!
142. There will be a man there in an orange boilersuit who will gladly take it from you.
143. Wipe all emails. Shut down accounts.
144. Wipe all Word documents.
145. Pour yourself a brandy and get some sleep.
In the morning, she rang the gas board. The woman said she could do what she liked with the gas and electricity supply to her own home. She didn’t have to sound so apologetic. Yes, of course she could settle her bill now if she wanted to, or leave it till she was ready to go.
The same happened with the water. The water man was nice. And the woman at the council was on her last day before leaving to have a baby. No probs, she said. No probs at all.
“I’ll be gone by the end of the month,” said Lizzie. “I can’t say for sure when the new people will be moving in.”
Monday was bright. It felt like starting again. Lizzie put red lipstick on in the bathroom and drove like the wind to the Wild Oaks garden center. Jacob’s heart was in a glass bowl of water, in the fridge.
She saw Tom as soon as she arrived. He was standing outside the entrance moving bags of compost. Tom had been eight, his sisters ten, when she’d done the babysitting for them up at the farm. She had tried to be a proper neighbor and had made herself useful—tidying, washing, doing the laundry; more useful, perhaps, than she’d needed to be. She’d made a real effort with Barbara, using all sorts of helpful hand gestures to illustrate the words coming from her mouth. She hadn’t realized that Barbara was only partially deaf, and they hadn’t thought to stop her and explain this.
“You’ve been nice, Liz,” Erik had said, blocking her exit. “Ever so nice,” he’d said, and then he’d asked her to join them for a meal.
She’d run back down the lane in the dark on her long legs, clutching her cake tin.
A few days later Tom had appeared—a beautiful, dark-haired little boy—and asked if there were any more cakes. She’d bent down on the steps outside and given him some bread and jam that he’d devoured while she’d walked him back up the lane.
There had been one occasion when the family had come to the bend in the lane with three teenagers for a barbecue. The wasps had clung to the ketchup bottle. Jacob had come in and out of the house all day with that long look on his face. And Lizzie had darted in and out of the kitchen behind him, unable to say anything at all.
It had only happened once. She’d slapped him the night before. She hadn’t meant to hurt him. Of course she hadn’t. It had come out of nowhere, a reaction to something long gone, she’d thought. Something he’d said about her not needing more, not having the imagination to know what more there was in life. What more there was of what? she’d asked him, though he’d chosen not to reply.
Had he meant of love? Had he meant there was more love out there, like the love that came from a person like Joanna? Had Joanna become, in his imagination, a richer source of love?
Years later, when Lizzie had come to the garden center for the barbecue, she’d told the nice young man how she was getting on with her cake business.
He’d bent down and reached underneath the barbecue, showing her what to do with the gas pipe. She’d seen the skin on his back.
Days like that with the wasps and the faces and the light in the woods stuck out like a broken bone when you looked back, and Tom would have known that something was wrong with the marriage between the two people in the lane.
Now she sat in her car and watched him across the car park. His shoulders were big and round like knuckles, his arms dangling.
The best thing about not having too much imagination, Lizzie’s mother had said to her when she was a girl, was not having to take the extra disappointments. It had never been clear, then, whether she felt her daughter did have imagination. Lizzie had brought the issue into the marriage with her. She’d talked about it with Jacob. He’d not said that it was absurd, and wrong, and plain rude and “Who in their right mind could dream of saying that to another person? Who would have the gumption?” He’d shrugged instead. And when he started wandering off, Lizzie had the feeling that he was going off to imagine things, to be away from her so that his own wild figuring wasn’t stunted, or stifled, or crushed, by the great absence of hers.
It was weird. The way people behaved.
What people did to each other.
She rea
ched into the back of her bag for her lipstick and reapplied.
Then she got out of the car and walked towards the entrance.
Tom Vickory saw her coming, and shook a hand in the air, smiling. Her heart thumped.
“Hi,” he said, and he held out his hand. There was a flash of plaster on his finger.
“Blimey,” he said, and looked away. He jiggled his shoulders as if trying to shake something off them. He bent over, then straightened up and back, and took such a huge breath it looked like he was drowning. Lizzie looked back into the empty car park.
“Stuff will come up,” he said, as if he was reading out of a book. “When you least expect it.”
“Is there something wrong?” she asked him.
“No,” said Tom. He smiled. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” said Lizzie, frowning.
“Are you here for something in particular?” he asked her.
“I’ve come for barbecue tongs and rubber gloves. And firelighters, and a gas cylinder.” She also needed bin liners, dishcloths, steel to sharpen a knife.
Lizzie followed Tom through the shop, her eye on the desert boots he was wearing. He stopped in front of the drills.
“How is your sister?” Lizzie said. “How is Nic?”
“We think she might have freaked out a bit. She’s sort of gone. We don’t know where. She’s got her phone, but we can’t get hold of her. Mike took her to see a mate of hers. She took off from there, without the friend.”
Tom seemed to be in some sort of pain. He grimaced and put a hand up to his chest, and fiddled with a small white button on his Aertex.
“Man!” he said, and he made a little burping sound as if trying to release something from his throat. “Powerful energy,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
Season to Taste Page 9