The Adulterants

by Joe Dunthorne

  It’s quarter to one. There’s just enough time to lie on the short grass and let Bobby attack me. He rakes my nostrils with his sharp fingernails, prods my eyes, and strikes me, open-palmed, again and again, across my nose bridge. One of life’s true pleasures. The more wounded I sound, the happier he gets and the faster he hits me, and so the more noises I make. Onward, upward, the two of us in perfect sadomasochistic union, until he is laughing and slapping, slapping and laughing, while I howl at the sky. A young and obviously childless couple are judging us from the entrance to the park. Bobby and I are not remotely embarrassed. In fact, we get off on their watching.

  At one o’clock exactly, I strap Bobby to my chest like a bomb then head to Garthene and Peter’s grim, mostly basement-level flat, which they own. Even though it is small and damp, it must have stretched their nurses’ salaries, and it’s hard to get away from the thought that they are in crippling debt together, and what could be more romantic. Bobby and I do fly-bys of Peter’s Astra. The dent in the bonnet has still not been sucked flat.

  “Don’t crash,” I tell Bobby, as he banks hard, laughing wildly, clipping the wing mirror with the soles of his knitted booties. There’s now a pleasing note of desperation in Bobby’s happiness, laughter as a prelude to something bleaker, sadder, more permanent.

  “Hi, Ray,” says a voice behind me.

  I give Bobby one final, slow orbit of the Astra, vibrating him in my hands, making his laughter judder while I do the rocket noise. “Approaching destination,” I say, in a robot voice. “Population: two, possibly human. Atmosphere: self-satisfied.”

  I let Bobby’s laughter fade before I take the three slow steps down the stairs to the basement front door so that, by the bottom, my son is silent and there’s a melancholy weight inside him that I know won’t shift.

  “Here you go,” I say.

  “Hello, handsome,” Peter says.

  “Earn,” Bobby says. “Urn.”

  His first word was either earn or urn or, I’d like to believe, an intentional play on both earn and urn, illustrating his central theme that wealth cannot forestall death.

  Peter thanks me and shuts the door behind him. Through the strip of wire-reinforced glass, I see Peter stop and tug a tissue from his back pocket, wet it between his lips. I know he is going to clear away the crusted greenish snot from around my son’s nostrils. He always wants to clean him up, his love is that shallow. I see the swing of Peter’s elbow as he tries to wipe in a swift and light-hearted way, but Bobby will always call him out on his bullshit. As they disappear from sight, there is pleasure in hearing a rising noise, the tremulous wail of my son’s true sorrow. My darling bomb.

  Above us, Garthene is crouching at the slightly open bedroom window beside Melina, Peter’s daughter, who I like a lot more than him.

  “You remember Ray?” Garthene says to Melina. “Ray is Bobby’s daddy.”

  I wave. Garthene and Peter are completely honest with the children about our disastrous adult relationships.

  “And you’re Bobby’s mummy?” the girl says.

  “That’s right.”

  Garthene looks haggard from sleeplessness, cheeks hanging loose from her face. The more broken she looks, the more I think we should be together. She has her hair cut boy-short. Just a little swipe at the front, shaved at the sides. It looks uneven and I can tell Peter cut it himself, mapping her head with clippers, an intimacy I will never know. She turns her head to listen to a sound from downstairs. Bobby is in full meltdown now, his screams entering their second stage, more raspy, dry and quivery. Peter has many undeniable qualities but, in this case, I feel certain only a blood relative can bring Bobby comfort. I watch this realization pass across Garthene’s face before she disappears from view.

  It’s just me and Melina now. She has brown curls and a notable forehead. The windows have stoppers so that she can’t throw herself out.

  “Why is Bobby always crying?” Melina says, bringing her face to the gap.

  “Because he doesn’t like your daddy,” I say.

  “Why doesn’t he like my daddy?”

  “Could be any number of things.”

  There’s always this weightlessness, once Bobby’s gone. A son-shaped hole in the middle of my chest. For this reason, I like to plan my Thursday afternoons carefully, because otherwise it’s easy to spiral. I am on my way to meet Marie and Lee at a pub called O’Malley’s. We are friends again because it’s hard to make meaningful new relationships when you’re over thirty.

  I walk along the canal wearing shorts, showing off the skin where my ankle tag used to be. A little patch of hairless innocence glowing in the sunshine, if it were sunny, which it isn’t. It’s another kind of weather I don’t care to record.

  At the back of the pub, they have a big drink waiting for me on a small round table. I’d always assumed this pub was just Irish-themed, but now I know it is real. The landlady is called Mhairi and she’s from Galway. There are gloomy booths along one wall, Chinese students doing karaoke in the back room, a screen showing Gaelic football, and another, bigger screen for football.

  We glug down pints of strong, bland lager—“Mhairi, which is the one that tastes of nothing?”—then move to whisky. There must be UV light somewhere because I can see layers of sun damage on Lee and Marie’s faces, submerged freckles, sunspots. It gives Marie a lovely, almost supernatural look, as though all her younger selves are with her, fading back into the skull. Lee’s head soon turns its ripest color and we start playing a game, retelling each other’s traumatic life events as if they are our own.

  “Did I ever tell you about the time I found my wife in bed with one of our closest friends?” I say.

  “I don’t think you did,” Lee says. “Sounds awful!”

  “It was!” I say. “So I’m downstairs at one of our parties and I’m thinking I haven’t seen my wife in a while.”

  “Uh-oh,” Lee says.

  “Then on the landing I hear her voice calling ‘Lee-bo!’” As I sing his name, I watch Lee’s jaw tighten. “‘Lee-bo, I’m in bed with this average-looker and absolutely parched.’”

  “I hope you decked the guy,” Lee says.

  “Don’t worry. I smacked him. Down he went. Like a baby!”

  “Like a baby!” Marie says.

  Lee turns away to let his gaze be calmed by the big screen, a heat-map infographic rotating in his eyes. Marie leans over and puts her head on his shoulder.

  “Honey, why don’t you tell the one about the time you didn’t have a baby?”

  “You really want to hear that one?” Lee says.

  “I do,” she says.

  “Did I ever tell you about when I didn’t have a baby?” Lee says.

  “I don’t think you did,” I say.

  He turns over an empty whisky glass. Then he takes Marie’s right hand and together they start moving the glass around the circular wooden table, in the manner of a Ouija board, as though communing with the dead. The glass pushes beer slops onto the carpet and some on to my leg, which they don’t notice and I don’t mention. It takes me a moment to realize they are miming an ultrasound. Then Lee takes his hands off the glass.

  “Is there anything wrong, doctor?” Lee says.

  “I’m afraid, ma’am, we can’t find a heartbeat,” Marie says in her medical voice, which is American.

  “Can’t find a heartbeat?” Lee says. “I’m no obstetrician but that doesn’t sound good!”

  I realize I have never heard this story before.

  “Ma’am,” Marie says, “I’m sorry to say a heartbeat is a total must-have, baby-wise.” She puts her ear to Lee’s stomach. “And it’s utterly barren in there.”

  “Desolate as the tundra!” Lee says.

  “No, hang on—wait,” Marie says. “I hear gurgling!”

  “Oh, that’s just my stomach acid!” Lee says, and they both laugh.

  Lee lifts up Marie’s hand—the right one, ringless—and he kisses each knuckle in turn, which at first seems ch
eesy and over-demonstrative but by the last knuckle has achieved a transcendent privacy. Marie sits up and they kiss with tongues. They keep kissing for long enough that I find it necessary to look away and contemplate the history of the Irish-themed pub. How the companies who built Irish bars in Dubai, Bangkok, and Vancouver, in malls and airport lounges, then recognized Ireland as a viable market. So they opened Irish-themed pubs in Dublin and Galway and they did well. It turns out that the Irish enjoy having a drink inside a fantasy about themselves, and who wouldn’t? So the Irish-themed pubs in Caracas and Johannesburg have become authentic, retrospectively, an honest representation of the homeland, whereas pubs like this one, run by actual Irish, lack the true flavor.

  Marie and Lee are still going.

  “Marie,” I say, knocking on the table with my knuckles, “why don’t you tell us about the time your wife left you for a tall, dependable, and recently divorced ICU nurse?”

  They stop kissing. She smooths her skirt. Lee turns the whisky glass upright.

  “Not much to tell. Throughout her pregnancy, I made a series of poor decisions and she just understood this guy was a way better bet.”

  “A steady-day-to-day-realization-that-she’d-be-happier-with-him-than-with-you type thing?” I say.

  “Very much so,” she says. “And I completely respect that decision.”

  “No offense,” I say, “but she definitely upgraded!”

  “True,” Marie says, “and what’s more, they even asked for my approval before they bought a place together.”

  “Wow, that’s extremely, almost psychotically, thoughtful,” I say.

  “They wanted to make certain I felt stable, emotionally, before embarking upon their lifetime of loving sex and domestic equality.”

  “And when they finally did move in together, were you ready, emotionally?”

  “Absolutely not, but I told them that I was,” she says, “which was a victory.”

  “Nice one,” I say.

  Lee smiles, his neat teeth in the UV throbbing in his gums. We lift our glasses, drink to our damage. I never imagined for one moment that we could feel at once so broken and so at peace. Then the football ends and all the football-watching people exit the pub, leaving only those of us with a deeper commitment.

  It is dark when we head outside, arms round each other’s shoulders. In the car park, we see three children strapped in the back of a green people carrier. Standing outside it are their pink-headed parents in khaki shorts, both agreeing that he is under the drink-driving limit.

  “You’re fine.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re fine.”

  © TOM MEDWELL

  JOE DUNTHORNE was born and brought up in Swansea. He is the author of Submarine, which has been translated into fifteen languages and made into an acclaimed film directed by Richard Ayoade, and Wild Abandon, which won the 2012 Encore Award. His short stories and poems have appeared in the Paris Review, the London Review of Books and McSweeney’s. Dunthorne lives in London and The Adulterants is his third novel.

  Copyright © 2018 Joe Dunthorne

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any

  manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except

  in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For

  information, contact:

  Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

  Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon and Brooklyn, New York

  Distributed by W. W. Norton and Company.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Dunthorne, Joe, author.

  Title: The adulterants / by Joe Dunthorne.

  Description: First U.S. edition. | Portland, Oregon : Tin House Books, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017034982 | ISBN 9781941040874 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9781941040881 (ebook)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Humorous fiction. | Satire.

  Classification: LCC PR6104.U58 A67 2018 | DDC 823/.92--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034982

  First US Edition 2018

  Interior design by Diane Chonette

  www.tinhouse.com