by Rob Palk
Rob Palk has previously published work in Litro magazine and the Erotic Review. This is his first novel, written in London, Burgundy and Haifa. The author now lives in Leicester with several other writers and a cat.
First published in Great Britain by
Sandstone Press Ltd
Dochcarty Road
Dingwall
Ross-shire
IV15 9UG
Scotland
www.sandstonepress.com
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored or transmitted in any form without the
express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © Rob Palk 2017
Editor: K.A. Farrell
The moral right of Rob Palk to be recognised as the
author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Badger sketch by Elee Kirk, by kind permission of Will Buckingham.
The publisher acknowledges subsidy from
Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.
ISBN: 978-1-912240-03-6
ISBNe: 978-1-912240-04-3
Cover design by Two Associates
Typeset by Iolaire Typography Ltd, Newtonmore
Contents
Title Page
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
Acknowledgements
For Sarah McInnes
One
Let’s start with her leaving, with Marie, my wife of four months and girlfriend of four years, dashing round our little flat shoving her clothes in a case. She had a look of regretful but necessary purpose, as though she were packing for a lengthy stay in hospital, scooping up armfuls of clothes, letting stray items fall upon the floor.
I was lying on the double bed, shifting occasionally to check my phone, pretending to read a book. It was difficult. I didn’t want to seem aloof, unconcerned, glad for her to go. But if I plunged into the business of bargaining, of pleas, I’d have dignified something I’d much rather not take seriously. She was leaving, she said, for the badgers. She was off to the woods to protest against the badger cull.
‘You’re being ridiculous,’ I said.
This didn’t seem quite the right tone. She was struggling with an especially recalcitrant blue dress and when she stopped to look at me, it was like she had a new face, a face I didn’t know. There was no love in this face. Fondness, true, and the sort of camaraderie you might find among hostages, but nothing close to love.
‘You’re obviously not going to leave. You love me. We only got married a few months ago, remember? We had cake. All your friends came. Why don’t you go and have a run, come back and we can talk?’ I could hear myself sounding pompous, stiff, Gladstone addressing the Queen. A run though, a run would set her all straight. The wind in her hair, the marshes under her feet, the wonders of nature in her bones, and all this talk about badgers would be done and she’d come back, sweaty and exhausted, and be Marie again.
I didn’t resent the badgers. I liked her having found something she loved. I just didn’t see why it meant she had to stop loving me.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. Her voice didn’t sound like her own. It was metallic, unnatural, steel-lined, as though she were speaking down into a thermos. ‘It’s, I don’t know, it’s a calling. I need to feel I’m doing something. I can’t stand by and watch this cull just happen.’
‘You’ve stood by enough other stuff. We both have. We’ve both stood by and watched Syria or homelessness or the . . .’ I tried hard to think of something weighty. ‘Listen. I need you. To look after me. I’m still not out of the woods.’
‘Oh, you’re well on your way,’ she said, in her old, friendly voice. There was a smile there too. Panic started to form in me, at how I would miss that smile.
‘I’m not in the clear yet. Look. Don’t go.’
‘I’m going.’
I followed her through to the front room. ‘For badgers. Badgers! They don’t need you like I do. They aren’t even fucking sentient, Marie.’
‘They are,’ she said, softly. ‘Sentient has a dictionary definition. They just are. Sentient. Factually.’
‘Jumped up fucking weasels is what they are. Please don’t go.’
‘There’s no point getting angry,’ she said. As though I were standing selfish in the path of the inevitable. ‘Goodbye Stu.’ She was going then. This was really it.
Four months of marriage and I’d been displaced by another species. I wished I hadn’t told her to choose between me and the badgers. I couldn’t even challenge one to a fight. Instead, I had to make her realise that the cull was unimportant. That what really mattered was me.
Not me. Us. The essential unit, us. ‘Do you want to go back to bed?’
She ignored this, stepped across the floor and kissed my cheek, whispered ‘be well’ like a faith healer, knelt to ruffle the cat, flicked a few stray hairs behind her ears, and vanished from the room. She didn’t even slam the door.
‘Don’t go,’ I said again, but she wasn’t there to hear it. There were fierce winds outside and I didn’t know what to do next. I went into the front room, which was far too full of plants, and I sat down on the sofa to wait for her return.
Two
That night, our flat, with no concern for subtlety, fell apart. A storm sent chunks of our building’s roof flying into the street and left five cold streams of rainwater gushing into the front room; I only had four plastic basins to catch them with. Chunks of plaster lay across our wooden floorboards like snowflakes turning to slush. Mould bruised over the cracked and sagging ceiling, yellow and black and green. Our cat, Malkin, sat in a corner, shivering reproachfully. Whenever there was a noise from outside, he would run to the front door and scratch it in anticipation. This struck me as manipulative.
It’s hard to know what to do when someone leaves you. For the first week I called in sick to my job at the animal charity, the job I’d been putting up with while I tried to write a book. (Marie, when I’d first met her, had been excited I worked for this organisation and her face had clouded when I told her it was only to pay the bills. I’d said I liked animals well enough but they were hardly a major concern. She’d said it was attractive in a man, if he got on well with animals. I’d told her that my job was mainly administrative. That animals were rarely, if ever, seen in the office.) My line manager listened to me explain that my wife had gone to save the badgers and begrudgingly gave me the week off.
On these free and lonely days, I looked over my manuscript, but somehow there was nothing I could do with it. It seemed, already, to be the work of some other person, a person with a talent for needless words.
I thought a lot about wha
t it would mean to be single. This was something I’d thought about before, only from my previous vantage point it had seemed kind of attractive. Single life, from the protection of being married, looked an awful lot like freedom. I’d pictured warehouse parties, an absence of responsibility, hospitable but undemanding girlfriends. Instead there was shabbiness and time. You develop a smell, an untouched smell. You smell like whatever love doesn’t. You turn over at night and it doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels cold. You’ve lost a section of you. The section that keeps you happy. The section that keeps you good.
On Wednesday my boiler decided to stop working. I got shingles, pinkish rings, like crop circles on my torso, echoing the mould marks on the wall. The plants Marie had bought began to die. They were all over the place, withering, their leaves becoming yellow.
On Thursday she came back and took what was left of her stuff. She waited till I was out. I don’t know how she knew. I got home to find the things I’d bought her left behind, the books and pictures and bric-a-brac. Most of what had come with her was gone. Half the dishes, half the pans. Half the cutlery, half the bed sheets. Self-pity became tempting. But this would mean admitting she had left me and I wasn’t prepared to do that. She was away for a while, I told myself, and would soon be back again. I called her and got no response.
After that, I started pouncing at people on Facebook, waiting for the green dots that showed they were online and waylaying them with the news, sticking to the script that she had gone but should be back before long.
Her friends first. Some of them knew already, others were surprised. All were sympathetic, without exactly offering to help. I tried my own friends, but most of them were married now themselves. They had wives and kids and jobs that sounded important. They played football on a Saturday morning and listened to music made by men in cagoules. They didn’t want chaos erupting into their lives. One wife gone and others would surely follow. I tried getting in touch with girls I remembered from before, but they were women now and reluctant to pretend the last four years hadn’t happened.
I finally got through to my old friend Alistair, from university. Alistair was one of those very posh English people who tell everyone they are Scottish. His own marriage had floundered and I felt he’d be sympathetic. The next day he came over, looked at me and shook his head as if I’d disappointed him. I told him Marie had gone to protest about the badger cull. He seemed shocked for a second before risking a smile. ‘Was she into badgers before?’ he said. ‘I know she’s been into them recently, but were they always her thing?’
‘She always cared about animals,’ I said. ‘But never as much as this. Only since the wedding.’ I shrugged.
‘No setts before marriage,’ he said and then laughed for a very long time.
‘Haha,’ I said. ‘Haha.’
‘It gets better,’ he said. ‘Look at me.’ Alistair’s wife, Lucy, had left him some months before. She’d come round ours in fact, not that Alistair knew. She’d drunk a lot of our whisky and said unflattering things about him. Marie and I had laughed about it, in a condescending way. The mistakes that others made. I’d sometimes lusted, vaguely, over Lucy. Since then I’d only seen her in a series of exotic locations on Facebook. She had lost a lot of weight and started using a lot of hashtags.
‘One day you’ll look at this as the best thing that ever happened to you,’ Alistair said.
I told him that I doubted this. ‘I am lonely. I am cold. I am stuck in a flooded room with an angry cat. It has to get better than this because this is like being in the Life of fucking Pi.’
‘Trust me,’ he said. He didn’t look very trustworthy. He had reacted to being jilted by purchasing a variety of floppy hats and growing a hypnotist’s beard. He’d told everyone he was going to live life how he’d always wanted. Aside from all the hats, I was unsure what this involved. Still, he did look happy. ‘For a start you’ll get more time for writing. More room in the bed. You don’t have any . . .’
‘Kids, yes, I’d already thought of that one.’
‘The main thing is to accept it. Accept that it’s all over. Accept that you are now a single man. You shouldn’t be scared of the future. I was, at first, but now, and I really mean this, I can honestly say that I’m happier than I’ve ever been.’ He got up and started making a cup of tea. This act of kindness was small on the scale of things, but it very nearly made me cry. ‘Oh, and there’s a room going at mine if you like. Don’t suppose you’ll want to stay here.’ I nodded and took a gulp. I was grateful for his offer and for what he said. But I wasn’t going to accept things, just like that.
When Alistair left I took a bin bag and went round getting rid of the dead plants. Malkin had bitten the heads off half of them anyway. The rest hadn’t survived my neglect. Over by the little window near the sofa, a lone basil plant looked to be coping. It must have got some of the rainwater, just enough to keep it alive, not so much as to drown. I brushed a speck of dust off the leaves and moved it through to the bedroom.
I was thirty-three years old. I was partially blind. Or partially sighted, as an optimist might say. Since my illness my employers had moved me into an undemanding job taking calls, despite my protestations that I was ready for harder, better remunerated tasks. I didn’t think this marital development would persuade them. My manuscript was, it dawned on me, unfinishable, let alone publishable. And I seriously doubted I could find another wife. Not a wife like this one, a wife of such possibility. She was a fluke, my Marie, a never to be repeated stroke of luck. All that was needed was for her to stop caring about badgers – or at least, to stop caring about badgers quite so much – and to start caring about me again. What was needed was for me to win her back. I was going to do that, I knew. I was going to do it in no time.
Three
I would make sure, this being my goal, that I stayed who I truly was. I would not become embittered. Bad look on a man, embitterment. Alistair, say, was not exactly embittered, but you wouldn’t be surprised to hear him talk about ‘females’ or how things had ‘gone too far the other way’.
Alistair was wrong. There were to be no generalisations. Marie was Marie, and I loved her in all her uniqueness. (Christ, how I loved her! Christ, how I wanted her back!) She was typical and representative of nobody but herself. Nor would I make any claims on her. A man is nobody’s keeper. She was free to go if she wished. She would always have my support. In this, at least, I would be a good loser. If I could show myself a good loser then I might not lose at all.
I was going to get her back. I wouldn’t even risk becoming embittered because there’d be nothing to be embittered about. I would be patient, I’d be supportive, I would try to understand. I was going to win.
In the meantime, it was Friday, it was Halloween, and Alistair had invited me to a party up the road. I got off the mildewing sofa, filled a glass with water, poured it into the basil pot and went downstairs to the shop.
I shaved, carefully, as you have to when some of your sight isn’t there. I daubed my hair with viscous globs of gel and put on the dark suit I had worn on the day of my wedding. I had purchased, earlier, a cape. I reckoned I could pass for Dracula. I’d forgotten to get the teeth, but I was sure there’d be plenty of blood doing the rounds at the party.
The thought of a party scared me. It had been a long time since I’d been to one on my own. What happens now, at parties? Small talk, I imagined. Dancing. I hadn’t been much of a dancer in the days when I could see. I couldn’t imagine I’d got better at it since. The bathroom mirror showed not Dracula, but a ruined version of myself, a chamber of horrors waxwork that had been left against a radiator.
Marie’s old unguents and lotions sat on the side, collecting dust. I could still smell the waft of her in here, the one room that hadn’t succumbed to the stink of the damp elsewhere. I wondered if I could somehow will another stroke. Get myself out of this mess. A few minutes’ grimacing proved I couldn’t. I set off to the pub to meet Alistair.
He was in
the far corner, in a cream suit, under a shelf full of 1980s board games. He had the look of an unusually secure mediaeval monarch, one whose enemies have long since all been vanquished, leaving plenty of time for wassailing and tiresome fol-de-rol. He was talking to a squashed-looking man, with a face like a disappointed knee. This man wore a headless Scooby Doo costume, the severed head on the floor next to them.
‘Stuart,’ carolled Alistair. He waggled a glass of Brooklyn lager in the air as though it were a flagon of mead. I made my way towards them, trying not to trip. My eyesight kept reminding me it wasn’t what it was.
‘Block,’ Alistair said. ‘You met your new flatmate? Raoul, this is Stuart Block. We went to college together. Known him since I was, what, eighteen? We used to, Raoul, we used to go walking along the Greenwich foot tunnel at night. We’d look out over London, do you remember, and we’d say one day we’re going to take on this city? Do you remember we’d do that, Stu?’
I said I did and it was funny what you thought when you were young. Alistair told me he still felt like that. We had, he said, plenty of time.
‘Stuart, this is Raoul. Raoul is an American. He’s a Liberation Theologian.’ I told him this was an interesting thing to be and that I quite liked the new pope.
‘Oh, everyone likes the new pope. Gotta love the funky new pope. It’s like when your team does well and you suddenly get all these supporters. Where were you when we had the shit pope? I liked that pope. He just didn’t look as much like a pope. This new guy’s kinda like the Pope-Obama, says all the same shit, just looks more handsome saying it.’ Raoul had an unexpectedly mellifluous, womanly voice, a voice you could relax in. It offset his look of disappointment, made amends.
‘Stuart’s wife just left him,’ said Alistair.