The Adulterants

by Joe Dunthorne

  Now I was inside the room. Light was coming in through the blinds and I could see Lee at the end of the bed, searching the pockets of the man’s jeans, the steel-capped tip of a thick leather belt lolling schlongishly. Lee found what he wanted, then there was a clunking sound—belt buckle on floorboard—and the man in the bed rolled on his side toward me. To see him change position was to come to terms with his musculature. It was actually offensive to me that Marie had not lowered her standards. Did it never cross her mind to get with ugly or weak men? He was probably not a model but only because he had another, more fulfilling career, as a researcher into sea pollutants, or a director of a halfway house. He snored in a tremulous way that sounded like someone carefully peeling masking tape off a valuable package. His clean white shirt was crumpled on the desk. Good-looking people and their clean white clothes. Splayed on the floor were Marie’s velvety leggings, inside out, and it was hard not to visualize the rabidity of their undressing. Not that they were even drunk. They had not finished one bottle. Why dilute perfection? And this all well within the M25. Zone Two. The marital bed.

  Lee opened the man’s wallet, pulled out a driving license, and took a photo of it with his phone. I tried to disapprove with my eyes but a part of me, a large part, wanted him to enjoy himself. He lifted the bottom of the bedsheet, made a show of peering in, then did a “this big” action with his hands out wide. I was smiling now. Lee shuffled around to the bed’s far side and I saw his head dip as he noticed something on the floor. There was a sticky sound. Lee crawled back with a condom, neatly tied off as you would a balloon, hanging limp in his teeth.

  When we got him back to the flat, he pinned the condom to our cork board so that we would never forgive or forget. It was impossible to ignore the unseemly weight that hung in the reservoir teat.

  “Five hundred million hardbodies frying in spermicide,” Lee said.

  Garthene gave him warm water in a dimpled pint tankard, allowing him to enjoy the illusion of heavy drinking while getting hydrated.

  “It’s bedtime,” she said.

  “Maybe for you,” he said.

  He pulled out his phone, found the photo of the driving license and read out the man’s name: “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you William Colin Garfitt. Born in 1974. Lives on Well Street.”

  In the photo, William was staring directly out, slight smile at his lips, tremendous jawline casting a shadow on his neck. Below that, there was an intimidating fluidity to his signature.

  Lee opened the laptop at the dining table and, without pause, searched for William Garfitt.

  “Oh God,” he said. “No social media, and you know what that means.” Lee shook his head in horror. “Too busy living his worthwhile life.”

  As Lee carried on searching, I looked to Garthene for guidance. Was this a situation where we should be providing a strong moral framework or was it best to let Lee make his own mistakes? She didn’t seem to know.

  “Oh, I’ve found his job,” Lee said. “He works for, wait for it, Thames Water.” Lee roared with laughter. “Infrastructure!”

  Neither Garthene nor I was sure whether this was funny or reprehensible.

  Lee clicked Play on a video titled “Tour of the Walthamstow Reservoirs.” A fourth voice entered the room.

  “Hey, guys, my name’s Will and I’m going to show you round the reservoirs today. Welcome to my office!”

  “Nice,” Lee said. “Because it’s not an office.”

  We watched William’s broad shoulders shift beneath his polo shirt as he walked backward between trees.

  “All sorts of wildlife thrive here. Trout, bass, and barbel; herons, geese, and moorhens. Our moorhens winter in Morocco. It’s all right for some!”

  “Ha ha ha ha ha, great joke,” Lee said.

  Garthene and I looked at each other.

  “Meanwhile, we work hard to keep the reservoir healthy, from monitoring algal blooms through to mechanically oxygenating the water.”

  Behind William, the water in the reservoir blinked. Lee’s eyes widened.

  “We should probably stop stalking this man now,” I said, and I looked at Garthene.

  “Lee, I think Ray’s right,” she said.

  We were united. What a feeling. We were just like real parents with our consistent ethical boundaries.

  Lee was not listening.

  “If you live in East London—from every bath you take to every cup of tea you drink—it all starts life right here. Though of course we recommend you take showers, not baths!”

  It was obvious from William’s unselfconcious laughter that this man loved his job, was proud to have a measurable impact on everyday lives. And though Lee had a good job too, at a creative agency called Kindness, there was no competing with someone who worked in the proximity of trees. Furthermore, Lee’s office was ostentatiously fun—with Ping-Pong and hammocks on the roof terrace—a work environment so clearly meant to free the imagination that it constantly reminded him that, as website manager, his particular role was mundane and mechanistic, perhaps second only to the accounts team, with whom he shared dark looks of joyless detachment across the stand-up meetings.

  “Now follow me as we meet some of the fascinating wildlife—”

  I closed the laptop, locking William Garfitt back in his box.

  Garthene put a hand on Lee’s shoulder. “You’re better than this,” she said.

  He turned in his seat to look at her. “I really don’t think I am,” he said.

  We finally put Lee to bed with the curtains drawn, but they let the light in, so I strung up a blanket as a blackout, knotted its corners to the rail. He slept right through into the night and did not rise on Monday. This happens to some patients in hospital too. They call it sundowning, when the body clock drifts, along with the mind. Since Garthene was starting a run of night shifts, she and he became synchronized. I was the odd one out, still committed to the hours of daylight.

  On Tuesday afternoon—while they both slept—I had time to dwell on my situation. I wondered if Garthene was ever going to get angry with me. I didn’t like the idea that she was storing up her rage, letting it pickle. Or worse, that I might have been prepunished but did not know about it. That my incident with Marie was nothing when compared to what she had already done with a tall, pillow-generous nurse on a gurney. Or even that Garthene was simply not that bothered. Which was perhaps the most frightening of all.

  On Wednesday morning, I woke to find them having dinner together in the still-darkened kitchen-lounge which was now, also, Lee’s bedroom. He raised his glass of beer to me as I came out in my dressing gown.

  “Evening!” he said.

  At his feet there was a row of empty cans and on top of the table was his laptop, open and glowing.

  “Morning,” I said.

  Garthene smiled, apologetically. They were eating supermarket sushi with their hands. I made myself a cup of tea, tried to ignore the condom on the cork board by the kettle, how the sperm had cooked down to a single translucent pearl.

  “You feeling any better, Lee?” I said.

  “Much,” he said.

  “Have you been awake all night?”

  He squeezed some wasabi paste on to his index finger and rubbed it into his rear gums.

  “What have you been doing?” I said.

  “Catching up on admin!” He slapped his laptop shut.

  The swing in his voice was unsettling.

  While I cleared away the sushi boxes and the little plastic soy sauce fish, they brushed their teeth. Lee scrubbed his tongue until he retched. Then he did it again. By the third time it was clear he was enjoying it.

  Once he was in bed, I went into our room to speak to Garthene. I shut the door and, with my hand outstretched, felt for the edge of the bed and sat beside her.

  “What’s he been doing?”

  “I’m not sure. He’s on his computer a lot,” she said.

  “I know you’re talking about me,” Lee yelled from the lounge. “I’m totall
y fine and happy!”

  We lowered our voices.

  “I feel like we never get the chance to really speak to each other.”

  “I know,” Garthene said. “I’m sorry. I’m just so tired.”

  “How was work?”

  “Long.”

  “I hope you had a sleep break?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “Borrow any nice pillows?”

  I was trying to find a way to have fun with the idea of infidelity, making it something we could laugh about, but she didn’t seem to understand, or didn’t want to.

  “Sorry,” she said, “what does that mean?”

  “When I came to the hospital, I saw that a tall, handsome colleague of yours had lent you his pillow,” I said, letting the tone of my voice indicate light-heartedness. “And I can only imagine what you and Mr. Thoughtful get up to while your patients are sedated.”

  It’s hard to make her laugh when she’s tired.

  I leaned forward and, navigating by her breath alone, kissed what felt like her eyelid in the gloom.

  Back in the dark kitchen-lounge-bedroom, I sat at the dining table. There was nothing for it but to repress all worries and focus on work.

  I opened my laptop and typed in the light from my screen, tapping the keys quietly, doing my best to ignore Lee’s presence on the sofa bed. He didn’t snore exactly but his open-mouthed breathing was tangible, musky and warm, like the exhaust vent of a vacuum cleaner. I tried to concentrate. I reminded myself that I was going to be a father soon and that was expensive. Also, Techtracker.co.uk only paid ten pence a word. In the old days, I enjoyed sneaking a sentence of exclusively two- and three-letter words into an article as a way to wreak utterly futile vengeance on my employers. Do buy it if—big if—the men at LG can fix the bug in the Blu-ray. That sentence works out at almost four pence a letter, suckers. But at some point you have to put away tiny rebellions and just get on with your worthless job.

  As I tried to write a three-hundred-worder about how smart thermostats now link to smart watches that track your body temperature, thus making your home an extension of your own flesh, the smell in my actual room became richer, more intimate. My eyes adjusted to the dark and I noticed the pile of baby objects beside the sofa. A bouncer, a basket, a sheepskin and a handful of toys so ugly they seemed specifically designed to appal my sense of aesthetics. I imagined Lee’s downcast gases seeping into it all, the hypoallergenic fabrics marinating in his adult sorrow, the Octoplush’s eight cheerful melodies suddenly bluesy and minor. Consider the stink of a grown man’s melancholy through a newborn’s gleaming nostrils. I had this feeling that Lee would live on our sofa forever, that our child would call him Uncle and find his lifestyle inspirational.

  I received a message from our estate agent, Dan. He rarely brought us happiness. Hey, dude, I’ll need your final bid by 5pm today. It’s between you and the cash buyers now. If you want a last look, let me know. I’ll be there this afternoon. D xx

  I got double kisses from our agent. We’d been through so much.

  Garthene and I had agreed that we could not afford to raise our offer. So it was clear we would now lose the horrible maisonette and go on renting until death, needing a flatmate, needing Lee to sleep on our sofa, to fill our lives with his sad smells and functional alcoholism and necessary contribution to the bills.

  I closed my laptop and went outside, into the daylight and the fresher air of Clapton’s most congested arterial thoroughfare. Many journalists swear a brisk walk helps them come up with irresistible feature ideas. I walked north, thinking absolutely nothing. By the pond I examined the tall, terraced Georgian houses. Most of them had five or more buzzers for each front door, which was acceptable, but a few of them had just a single doorbell or, in the case of number 8, which was a huge detached house with wide gates and a graveled loop of driveway, a lone knocker in the shape of a human hand. Nobody deserved that much space in London. I fundamentally hated these people while simultaneously wanting to be them.

  Throughout our twenties, it had been embedded in our world view that to even talk about property was death itself—the clue was the word mortgage, “death pledge” in French. Then we hit our thirties, Garthene got pregnant, and we started going to viewings. Though we tried to maintain a moral superiority, soon we found ourselves rapping our knuckles against partition walls and saying, without irony, “We could knock this through.”

  I continued north, watching the houses get smaller, meaner, cheaper. A young boy saw my colorful face and stopped kicking his ball. There was pleasure in being the scariest person in the street. I walked alongside the Lea, one of the country’s most polluted and slow-moving rivers, full of stringy weeds that stretched out beneath the surface like the hair of drowned children. Children who had drowned, I decided, because they’d grown up in rented top-floor flats with no outside space, faux-uncles watching pornography in their play zone during daylight hours, and so they’d ended up down here by the river, depressed, and look, now they were dead.

  I arrived at our former future home, the horrible maisonette, one among many in a joyless four-story block. Though it was unquestionably ugly, it was impossible not to love the private front garden and braced wooden gate. The gate was wholesome. I couldn’t help but imagine our child, whom we loved, coming in from school through it. Our child, whom we loved, opening it to receive their charmingly disreputable friends.

  I sat down on a bench by the river and watched birds circling the wetland center. They looked like seagulls, but probably that was just my ignorance and they were something more profound. We had never visited the wetland center but were working hard at wanting to. The front gate. The river. The swans. The marshes were the third biggest park in London. I closed my eyes and thought of everything we were about to lose.

  After some time I heard a voice: “And I’m sure you two know this is pretty much the last family home at this price point anywhere within the M25.”

  I opened my eyes. I heard the sound of a gate clinking gently shut.

  I waited a moment before turning around. In the residents’ car park I saw Dan’s Volkswagen e-Golf, a car he charges from a three-pin domestic socket. Next to it was a Qashqai. I felt something shift inside me and two words bubble to the surface: cash buyers. It just wasn’t fair for a young family like us to have to compete with these people. Though I didn’t have my baby yet, I already had my righteousness. I stood up, walked to the front gate. The buyers were out of sight but I could see Dan, in short sleeves, leaning against the pale kitchen counter which needed updating.

  I went around to the back of the block, the loose paving stones clunking behind our former future neighbors’ homes, their tropical pot plants and bikes with missing wheels and sad little zones of gravel. I slowed as I reached number 5 and peered into the empty lounge. The buyers were presumably upstairs, and I knew Dan would not see me. He had an Antipodean no-pressure style and would hang back in the kitchen, checking his phone. The walls in the lounge were two-tone: navy at the bottom and baby blue above. The thin municipal-looking carpet was speckled with dots, possibly slug pellets, and had a scald mark from a clothes iron. During our viewing, I had bent down and touched where the burn had blackened the carpet to hard plastic. We had enjoyed the blemish, Garthene and I, had imagined peeling back the carpet to reveal the floorboards beneath. Just the thought of discovering floorboards. Bourgeois archeology. And even if it was concrete under there, no problem. We would polish it.

  As I looked into the lounge I saw the hands of the cash buyers on the banisters as they came slowly downstairs. The word banister filled me with an ache I could not name. I had never lived across two floors in London. Newel post, I thought, with longing, as they reached the bottom step. They were our age and looked like us, she in a denim dungaree dress and basketball high-tops, he in a light pink shirt and deck shoes. The woman made a two-handed signal, something like a breaststroke, that seemed to indicate knocking a wall through. That made th
e decision for me.

  I put up my hood and stepped close to the window, my bruised face at the glass. The sun stretched my shadow ghoulishly across the room. I raised my right hand and pressed it softly, fingers bent, against the glass. That was damn scary. Perhaps I had seen it in films.

  The woman’s stomach entered the lounge. Let me be the first to say I did not set out to terrify a woman in her third trimester, though her life was repulsively comfortable. Then came the rest of her. She looked up, saw me, yelled, just once but loud—“Oh!”—like a tennis umpire, then put one hand to her stomach and the other to the panel of the door. Her husband’s head appeared and his eyes widened as they met mine. Given that I was presenting no immediate threat, I was impressed by his willingness to act. His face retreated and a moment later I watched the back-door handle turn frantically but it was double-locked. A moment later I saw him run back down the corridor. He was ready to defend his wife, unborn child, and future community. These were the kinds of people you want as neighbors.

  I turned and ran south down the street, into Millfields Park, toward the wildflower meadow. The topless drunks on the outdoor gymnasium equipment raised their cans as I passed. At the basketball courts, I glanced back and saw the man, the father-to-be, following at full pelt. That his shirt stayed tucked in as he ran was intimidating. He had a prospective new dad’s insane motivation. Performance-enhancing emotions. I wanted to tell him I empathized completely with his need to perform elaborate heroics. We are brothers, I wanted to say, but he could really run—was conceivably an athlete—and so I had to focus on pumping my arms and legs.

  I kept going until the homes became unaffordable again. It was a hot day and my scalp bloomed with sweat. It was reassuring to know that, at this speed, the horrible maisonette was not more than nine minutes from the amenities of Lower Clapton. I stopped outside the leisure center, where my heavy breathing had an acceptable context. I looked behind me. He was gone. At some point, the man’s desire to chase me through the streets had been overcome by the realization that he had left his pregnant wife alone in an ungentrified neighborhood, a neighborhood too full of unstable, swollen-faced men for them ever to live there. I stood on the pavement, the salt of my sweat stinging my wound. This was my city, my pain. I was the winner. We had won. Our child would get the happiness.