169. Right. He’s gone. Good.
170. Make a timetable and stick it up on the wall.
171. Write down what is left to get through and start thinking about the order in which you’re going to do it.
172. If you’ve now given yourself a deadline, you will have to do a bit of work on yourself in order to speed the process and ensure completion.
173. Start thinking of your stomach as a pit. Try to imagine, sitting with both feet flat on the floor on a kitchen chair, that the pit is being opened, as if by a machine in a quarry.
Lynn from the hotel made a call to her mobile.
Driving with the phone on the front seat of the car, Lizzie saw the screen light up blue. She put her indicator on, and pulled onto the verge. She was near the lake, and water dripped from the trees onto the windscreen of the Volvo.
“We like you,” said Lynn. “We think you’ll be a perfect fit.”
Lizzie sat very still, like a mouse, her nose twitching in the hood of her raincoat. Her feet were on the pedals still, resting there in Wellingtons, ready to drive on.
“We’d like to offer you the job. Starting as soon as we can get the paperwork done. Give us a few weeks. We’re thinking of a little bonus structure to add to the equation. You get lunch here, and use of all the facilities, of course. Pool, sauna, Jacuzzi, health club, car park.”
There was a breath. Lizzie clung to the phone.
“Steven is saying well done, Liz!”
Lizzie felt anxiety ripple through her stomach, and a tingling in her hands. They all called her Liz now. Even Tom Vickory had said it.
“Bye, Liz. See you.”
Lizzie sat back in the driver’s seat.
More drops of rain plopped onto the windscreen. In the garden the soil was mulched and wet and rich with worms from rain in the night. The garden was churned up; and the house was clean. In the back of the car, the dog barked. For a moment she had it all. She had her health, and she had a home with a garden. She had a car she could get about in, a correspondent, a neighbor. And she had something to do. She clutched hold of the phone still and pressed it into her ear.
174. If, when driving, or walking, you need to stop to be sick, simply try to accept that this is happening and try not to fight it. Slow the car down, pull over, open the door, and get out. Leaning out, in the hope that you will be able to do it in this position cleanly, is hopeless. If you have the time, take the key from the ignition, shut the door behind you, and bend right over. Be sick properly.
175. Get some mints, some tissues, and a bottle of water from the petrol station, and keep these items in the car at all times.
176. Take the car through a car wash. Stay in the car for the duration of the wash. When the horizontal pole dispensing a torrent of water and soapsuds comes slowly towards you inciting terror and an urge to cry, simply go with it.
177. While the wash is on and you are inside the storm, feel free to bawl and scream and howl.
178. Obviously, you’re not going to be able to take the job!
“It’s all mine,” he’d said about the house and garden. His face had crinkled as he smiled. He’d taken a cigarette out from behind his ear.
Upstairs, the bed for her had been made up with soft blankets. It was a small, narrow room, and dark. It had a window overlooking the back of the house with its huge, unkempt garden which gave way, eventually, to trees. She’d stood at the window, looking out into the wet, dark woods. He’d called her down, offered her whiskey for her throat.
“Think breasts,” he’d said, and got some paper out to show her what the lane was like. “Two breasts, and both are covered in sandy soil. Conifer on one,” to which he added diagonal lines, “and then a mixture,” scribbled, “of oak and broadleaf on the other.
“We’re in the middle, in the cleavage,” he’d said, pointing to hers. “It’s dark and damp and the woods down here are mostly alder.” Then he’d drawn two wiggly roughly parallel lines from the cleavage up to the head, which was where the farm was.
“I don’t really know them,” he’d said. “But they might be looking for someone to help out. And I was thinking maybe I’d get a dog at some point.”
There was an opportunity here then. They might be looking for someone up at the farm. The man in the house on the bend might get a puppy. Maybe she’d warm up, Lizzie had thought. Maybe she’d be safe. Maybe here she’d become less numb.
Tom
She’d left the key for me under the mat. There was a note on the kitchen table with instructions. Nic hadn’t come back and things were grim and snappy up at the farm. I was glad to be out of there. I told them I’d do what I could to help if I was needed, and that they could get hold of me at the house on the bend. My grandfather had a chest infection. He’d been up all night coughing in the kitchen. Something wrong with that place, he said. He was dying. Something wrong with ours too, I replied.
I was excited, nervous, determined; I felt like a kid who’d come across a hideout and was going to make it his camp. I felt like the world could just go on and I was going to be all right because I had this thing to think about, to fully occupy my mind. I went in. It was cold in there. I put the lights on. Lizzie had kept the electricity running. I switched them off again to save it. Rita was sitting on her bed in the kitchen, waiting for me to come.
Lizzie had burned or dumped almost everything else in the house—out of revenge, I think—and I loved that sense of emptiness and space. It was like walking into a brand-new studio and crouching down to plan a life. I looked around to see if she’d left anything for me. There was a vase of tulips on the table, and a note. Otherwise, there was nothing. I jumped up and down. I threw my arms in the air. I went into the garden and shouted at the trees.
Dear Tom,
I don’t know how long I’ll be, but here is my mobile number in case you need anything.
There’s been nothing back from Mike and Nic about renting the house because of her going off, but it probably wasn’t going to work anyway and it doesn’t matter to me just at the moment. I’ll find someone in due course.
Rita’s food is in one of the green bins in the garage. If you could take her out for a walk in the morning and in the evening that would be great.
Do what you feel like doing in the garden. I’ll leave it to you.
The shed could do with clearing still, just a few things left that I didn’t have time to take away. You’ll find three small figurines in there. These are my husband’s sculptures. I’m going to try and organize for a woman who liked his pieces to come and get them. Perhaps just keep them on the kitchen table for the moment.
The freezer in the garage is being collected on Wednesday. It seems huge, but it’ll fit through the big metal door. The button for that is on the right wall, as you go in from the kitchen. You’ll see the number for the freezer men. Feel free to call them if there are any problems.
“Let go,” I said to myself. It sounds easy. But try living in my head. Same old shit as everyone else. Same old clichés. And sooner or later we have to let go of the stories, because they make everything worse. It doesn’t matter, all that shit. Stay with what’s here, what is. All that green, and the feel of my naked feet on the tarmac, the muscles in my legs, and the smell of trees.
I wanted to be away from all that crap we tell ourselves. Up at the farm they were all quietly rotting, being pulled down by something no one could explain. “Let go,” I said, over and over.
It was my day off. I moved around her house, opening drawers and shutting things. There wasn’t much there—she’d left kitchen utensils, knives, tin opener, saucepans, a single vase, an apron out drying on the line.
I spent most of the first day in the garden. I raked over the ashes from the bonfire, and spread them out through the grass. In the week I’d be laying down new turf and putting compost under the azaleas and the rhododendron. Lizzie had said to spend a little money on some new tools for the garden, so I put some hooks on the back of the shed door in pr
eparation for the rake, and the spade and trimmer and a nice new broom that I’d get for her. The shed was mostly clear. I took the last bits out and filled a couple of bin liners, and I found the figures and put them on the table as she’d asked me to do, and then I gave the shed floor a good sweep. I didn’t really think it would make a proper room, but I hadn’t seen it yet with a bed, a lamp and chair. For the moment I slept upstairs in her room. She’d left a mattress, and a sheet, a duvet, two pillows.
12
In the sink were the liver, spleen, kidneys and lungs, fully defrosted and ready to go into sausages. Some she would have for breakfast. The rest would go in the cassoulet with fat from the buttocks defrosting now on the garage floor.
His crown jewels were going in the cassoulet too. Boiled, then chopped.
She felt the sneer on her face; there was a muscle by her left nostril that seemed permanently stiffened, as if it had been on recoil now for thirteen days.
She put the liver, spleen, kidneys and lungs in a glass dish organizer she had used for crisps and dips.
The spleen was dark and bloody, and small. In her mind, his organs had been larger than this, lurking around inside him like dark fish. But here they all were: little ordinary lumps spinning round in the microwave.
She took them carefully out of the dish and laid them on the sideboard. Each piece would be cut, seasoned, and blended with shallot, sage, breadcrumbs and plenty of salt and pepper.
Lizzie peeled and chopped five shallots. The back door was open, and she could hear the rustling of a fresh, early morning wind in the leaves, the twittering of birds. She hadn’t slept much, but it didn’t matter. It was a new day.
The dog sniffed around her feet. Lizzie promised a walk.
“Just as soon as this is done, Rita,” she crooned. “Just as soon as this is done.”
She sliced the organs on the chopping board and mixed them in a large glass bowl with the sage, shallot and seasoning. It was too lumpy for sausages. The mixture went into the blender in three stages. She rolled and shaped the sausages, plopped four in the frying pan, to be eaten with a piece of white bread. The rest went in the fridge.
Accomplishing things, Lizzie was starting to realize, meant putting yourself in the right state of mind. “I thought I could do it,” she whispered, “and then I found that I could.”
From the cupboard she took a tin of duck confit and warmed it through. She’d looked on the Internet for a good recipe using up lots of offal. In Italy and Spain, to make ends meet, people had started eating shoulder, blood and lung of pig.
Cassoulet de Castelnaudary
100g white haricot beans, presoaked overnight
1 medium onion, stuck with a clove
1 stalk celery, washed
50g carrots, peeled and quartered
1½ tablespoons tomato purée
500g ventrèche salt belly of pork; remove rind and
keep
2 tablespoons duck fat, from confit
2 confit duck legs
350g Lautrec sausages
bouquet garni
1 liter stock
The hip section had fully defrosted in the shed overnight and was now on the kitchen floor, on newspaper. Kneeling beside him with the carving knife, Lizzie sliced four large fillets out of his buttocks. There was dimpling on the skin and a thick layer of white-yellow smelly fat beneath, then flesh—pale pink, like the color underneath an eye. She put the pieces on the sideboard, cubed them like lardons; then she sliced five cloves of garlic, two more shallots, and seasoned the mixture in a glass bowl.
She took a small onion from the box in the garage and pierced it with a clove; then she took a stick of celery and three carrots from the fridge. The wind was picking up; she shut the back door. The carrots were washed, peeled and quartered; the celery rinsed. Lizzie wiped her hands on her apron and filled a large saucepan to boil the beans. She waited, tapping her fingernails on the sideboard, and then decided to get to work on the rest of him, cutting more slices of fat from above his hips. She stopped humming and straightened the newspaper under him. The dog was out in the garden, running in circles and barking at trees.
Lizzie got two pristine white tea towels out of the drawer to lay over the wounds on Jacob’s hip area. The willy was still to come. Then the testicles, and knowing people ate them made her feel better. She could do them like dumplings, in a quick slick of hot oil. Then add to the cassoulet, or eat as they were. In, out, chew.
She drained the beans. She took the two Tupperware containers of feet and hand stock out of the fridge, and boiled the stock in the casserole dish, adding the beans, garlic, buttock fat, shallots, carrots, onion and celery, with one and a half tablespoons of good tomato purée and bouquet garni: everything except the duck fat, salt and meat. She brought the casserole back up to the boil, then turned the heat down and left it to simmer.
At the sideboard, she removed the sausages in cling film from the fridge. These she quartered and added, with the cuts from his hips, to the beans. Very quickly she bent down to the floor with the carving knife, flipped his hips over, whipped his willy off at the base and plopped it on the chopping board. She pulled his balls away from his body, sliced through the scrotum and tucked these in too. Then she turned him back over and laid the two tea towels over his bits and wounds. She had been jealous of his visits to London to see Joanna. She had felt something when he came back from the Pearl, too. Jacob had gone to the place in Guildford where he could get “a little time and companionship” for one hundred and fifty pounds an hour. They’d not had that kind of money. Not ever. He’d left the card in the glove box of the Volvo and Lizzie had looked online to see a page of lovely-looking young women glancing backwards at the camera with their shiny, smooth bottoms on show. Every single one of them had long hair to the waist. She’d wondered how they got that, how they all managed to have that kind of hair. He’d gone there, once in the first year, then again the next. One hundred and fifty pounds.
“Where’ve you been?
“Jacob?”
He hadn’t said anything, but he hadn’t been uppity from it either. He’d slunk back in with his shoulders down, and she had known that whatever he’d gone and done, it had been grim and desperate, and not something he’d enjoyed very much. She had gone out to the garden and buried her hands and feet deep in the soil and the smell of the roses and she had felt self-contained and relieved, in a way, that she’d not had to sink so low, and hadn’t ever felt that kind of awful desperation. She’d never needed to romp around to feel alive. She didn’t need to romp with Tom Vickory to feel young and desirable either. She’d never, in fact, felt desirable to anyone, which, on balance, was probably a good thing. At least she was going to be able to get away and keep things to herself.
179. Without a shadow of doubt, the most sensible thought you’ve had all morning.
“You’re just not feeling it,” Jacob had shouted, once, writhing on top of her, trying to yank her sweater down.
“I am!” she’d said. “Please! I am.”
The following week she’d asked him if they might try again sometime.
He’d said, “Of course we can,” and put an arm around her; then he’d turned the television on.
180. Passive-aggressives are also master procrastinators. While all of us like to put off unpleasant tasks from time to time, people with passive-aggressive personalities rely on procrastination as a way of frustrating others and/or getting out of certain chores without having to directly refuse them.
181. They can’t say, No. But they will make your life almost intolerable while you wait for the yes.
182. Or they will make very sure that you regret ever having asked.
Yes, Lizzie had been able to feel it; and it wasn’t so far from the surface as he might have supposed. But it was buried, she thought, melting the confit, under not feeling very good about herself.
How quickly love shrank into the tiny space it was given, she thought, as she turned the pieces
in the fat with a dessert spoon. She smoothed her hands on her apron. She took the cling film from the sausages and added these to the heavy-bottomed pan where the slices of his privates were browning in the duck fat. She opened the back door. She browned, and pushed with the spoon. Then she tipped the lot into the beans to boil.
Convincing oneself that anything was not just possible but also probable was an excellent way of persuading the conscious mind that the unconscious was in control. She smoked in the garden while the beans and the meat pieces came to the boil, and soon the kitchen was filled with steam and the smells of garlic and herbs.
Hell it had been, actually, to love a man who couldn’t help himself. How many women all over the world had done it, though, and not said a word, but carried on smilingly while behind the scenes, in the spaces between conversations, between rooms, between what was said and what wasn’t, a space was growing, like a sad face slowly coming into view on the wall behind the marital bed.
But what if he hadn’t needed saving? What if the problem had been her, and without her he’d just been terribly cheerful? How well he’d bundled out of bed in the morning and bustled about pretending to do things; how cheerfully he’d gone off to the supermarket and come back holding aloft a bottle of wine, or the cheese crackers she’d pointed at once before.
Look at how well he was!
It was her, then.
“I think it’s you, Lizzie.”
“What is?”
“The problem. To be honest. With drink and everything. And the whole attitude to life. I think it’s you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“What doesn’t matter?”
“Nothing.” Smile. “Nothing at all.”
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