The woman at the pool’s edge didn’t know where to climb into the engineered water, so she wandered back to where her husband was reading, something spiralbound branded with work. She toyed with the SPF in its complimentary tube, then presented him with her tinted spine, cupping the middle-age nape of her tasteful hairstyle. Everything about the passage of his hands said boredom. With his task dispatched he slapped his palms, one, two, but it wasn’t enough for his documents – he followed up with a serviette, sighing in brisk inconvenienced scrubs.
I remembered taking both boys with us once to one of your conferences – a vast concession, letting our son take a mate, letting kids attend at all. But I’d begged – I was always at odds with the corporate circuit, the women who weren’t wives but operatives. So I dodged the Machiavellian teambuilding and cocktails, and spent my days herding the boys through revolving doors, to hit laser-tag or climbing walls, to chug budget burgers. The whole time they were a riot. One night they even staged penalty shots in the hall: you lined us up like crims on the couch and issued a red-card threat to ship us home. Right to the end they’d gone on causing havoc. They’d coveted the cellophaned loot of the room, banked their pockets at checkout time, edged past the desk in goofy eight-year-old stealth, their cargo pants crammed with crinkly contraband, stupid Earl Grey and useless slugs of gel. And then I thought of how, before we left for this trip, you’d ushered them into our son’s bedroom, pointed out the precautionary condoms you’d stocked up in his undies drawer, no questions asked, just patting the foiled squares with an informative nod. I thought of the brief you’d given them, brisk and man to man, a summary of what you expected in our absence, basic standards, an airtight don’t-cross-me look. Then you’d grappled them both close for a second, laughed the ultimatum off. I watched the stamp of your trust on his shoulderblade, tousling his t-shirt with its delta of sweat. How I envied the ease, the gruff allowance of that touch – your hand, permitted, deep on his trapezius, resting there in benign massage. And then all I wanted was to lie back down in our room with its made-to-measure blackness, formulating how I’d undress him, how his spine could bump like the links of a rosary through my open mouth.
*
Once I lived in a scody villa flat and I knew how to fuck. I fucked at shin level on a legless grey bed we’d tag-teamed home from the Salvation Army, a scuffle of flatmates humping its bulge uphill, tripping on its padded satin scallops. I fucked boys I’d blundered into at parties, long brainless snogs to the boom of the right indie tunes – A-side LPs, B-side boys, that’s who I was in those days. I comfort-fucked the relay of boys who hunched on our front step mooning over my flatmate, a D-cup princess who was always out exercising her right to be cruel and untouchable and blond. I perfected the art of the consolation fuck, no-repeat, string-free, cooperative and warm, a fuck like a glum favour – after six dates (her average for dumping them), I would simply leave the door to my room ajar. I learnt from them that I was middling, I learnt to observe my limits, stick to them – on the perimeter of student raves I learnt to spot my match in boys, to love the meek, to love their sinews and band tees and hair-parts and ill-fitting elbows and bleak smirks as they waited on the outskirts of the cool throng for a cue that wouldn’t come. I knew my level – I knew I was strictly temp – but irrelevance just made it easier: the mattress was stippled with earlier lives and somehow smelt like waiting rooms, and it was a cinch to climb on it naked and give a performance, limber, animal, more than a little bit stoned. Because it wouldn’t last, because I wouldn’t take, I clowned and choreographed. I was a more-than-passable lay – I just got demoted when they opened their eyes. But I didn’t really mind. I got used to them sloping the walls on their furtive predawn exits, used to their fumbled bashful sounds as they tried to regain their clothes. I didn’t mind not counting. So I could not comprehend what to do when I woke with you – and you had stayed. Mid-morning, even though my face was flood-lit, its special effects smudged off on the pillow, you stayed and stared down, companionably, at my plain shape. I feigned a yawn, lay there in stalemate. You looked resolved and leaned down to give me a steady, focused kiss. I remember turning inside out with gratefulness. You breathed a hangover into my mouth that has lasted an obligated lifetime.
*
You liked to spend time with the handbills, get our next day’s itinerary mapped. Ruminative and topped up with supper, you muttered off to a nap on the beige king bed. I lifted the swipe card and padded barefoot to the foyer. I took the postcards you’d tried to prohibit and wrote the last one in the minimal lobby. My printing no longer looked sane, but I handed them across the counter for the next day’s post. I don’t think we’d been married for long before I started to think about it: checking into a hotel room and leaving a sign out saying DISTURB.
*
The hotel didn’t have everything. Bad weather wasn’t in any of the brochures, and on our fourth luxury night when a cold front came in there wasn’t a library. The woman at reception didn’t look pleased when I inquired, but led me to a cubicle with a few colour-coordinated spines. Most were new-age business manuals, that blend of pop-psych and quasi-spiritual capitalism you’ve always liked, seven stations of guaranteed prosperity. The rest were titled in blousy metallics, heroines swooning on mutinous decks with windswept men brooding over their décolletage. The kind of books I was brought up wanking over, rigid on my teenage bedspread, cast up on one hand, fingertips working along to swashbuckling detail. I’d always plundered myself to pure fantasy. I sat in the cubby and laughed until staff came to check on me.
When I got back to our room you’d given up and powered down the lights. My memory of the floor plan was useless and it had been therapy to unplug the clock. I went for the bathroom but couldn’t get it lit. The door buckled on its frosted slide and made sounds of big dollars coming unwelded. By the time I got the three-way mirror into focus I was faced with seven of me. They moved in pieces either side of my twin, a triplicate of jawbones and elbows. I leaned and crawled to see what he would see. I knew of course that she’d never have the courage, that cornered woman, to take off her clothes. Why would she take out her four lax breasts, their nipples inexact and low, why would she think he’d run the pouch of her downgraded abdomen with his tongue. What could he see in us but give and hang, the skin tone of long-term apathy. I talked sense but that didn’t stop her. Into the fork of her slackened thighs she still wanted to misplace his mouth. I watched her laughter wet five faces, shake a trio of wasted obliques. Only two of us could look each other in the eye, equilateral, sobbing with jazz hands. I tried to choke her, but the cistern just fizzed discreetly, in sanitary eddies. She swore, almost, on the body of our son that she would stop. She almost meant it.
*
We were paired in the ark of the restaurant when I asked you what aftershave you wore. All through that last meal, with its tinted tease of meats pinned onto panoramic plates, I’d leant into the scent and felt accused. You completed your mouthful of eye fillet before you proffered the name – Swagger – and you kept your glance on your cutlery, edging it surgically through the silky steak. The brand of that woody spray-on vapour with its low notes of diesel and twist of coarse spice was not news to me. I’d been gulping it for weeks. I’d lifted a can he’d let slip from his gym bag, coveted it in the quiet of the laundry, running its cylinder for dents, thumbing the nozzle, and huffing its discount spurt of sex. It was the reek that would be patterned on his ribcage, primed with saltwater and resins and glands and scrum and I snorted it, like I’d upend the last blue slurp of his Powerade when tidying up, hoping a shiver of saliva survived in that last chug. I was gone, and I can’t begin to say how far gone. There’s no point telling you now. You severed the fibres of your next course and reported the model of his cheapo smell – such a dumb bombastic word – and I thought it was your way of issuing a warning. So subtle: gaze still averted, you separated strands of morsel and savoured. You didn’t reproach or gnash. The blood under my hips ran cold. I sa
id I wanted to leave the table. But you’d prepaid for the degustation so we stayed for another unpalatable hour, supping from dish after ugly signature dish.
*
The scale of my wrong made me fear that our plane home would be struck from the horizon. The kindergarten God I still half believed in was the kind who smote and did not joke. But then I recovered – I dreamt of his suited lats sobbing at our burial service. Still, for a long time in flight I found the ‘Domestic Safety Instructions’ in my hand – the line-drawn couple, transplanted from the hotel, braced in their storyboards for a modest oblivion.
When we pulled into our driveway nothing was strange except for a spasm of birds, a sudden pixelation of wings twitching up from the verge away from our grille. I’d not seen them before: more thinboned than sparrows, with yellow belly feathers. They wouldn’t flit clear of the car, kept highdiving back to spritz the grass between our oncoming wheels. Inside, we learnt where they’d surfaced from: the cat had clearly started dying, though she was doing it quietly, showing her tiny incisors in a soundless bleat. The boys weren’t to blame: she hadn’t been eating, though her plastic plate showed they’d tried to tempt her with steak. It sat there in dried grey snippets. She wouldn’t be cradled. She looked bored with her own pain.
The boys were on kill cam, the lounge rewired, as much sun as they could get hotboxed out. They couldn’t drop out of the gameplay to update us, so they barked details while they slaughtered, in league, long-range. You pulled the blinds on their gutted heaps of hologram but they went on gunning their way, giving one-word answers, spluttering in graphic slalom. I expected you to object, to order them to shut it down, get his gear packed into the car. But you didn’t intervene, went to the bedroom and unzipped your suitcase, stowed your possessions back in their appointed place. I stood in the doorway for a while and blinked at the vigilance of your refolding.
They had ploughed through the provisions we’d left them so we ordered a pizza. We made them unplug and sit to the table, stretching their slices from the pepperoni disc. They leant their heads back and lowered the meatlover’s into their smiles, the topping slithering in. Grease drizzled onto his t-shirt and you didn’t meet my eyes. I couldn’t offer to drive him home. I waited for you to clear your throat, pick up the keys. But you did nothing I anticipated. And I went on believing that this was my punishment, this cold, methodical divergence from the norm. I believed it when I got out of bed at 4am to try to find our ailing cat, queasy with guilt that I hadn’t soothed her more, hadn’t petted her down on some soft cardboard deathbed, tried answering her stricken miniature yawns. I believed it when I went to the garage and you were by the freezer in the kiss that I wanted, driving him back on the hood of the whiteware with a shiver I could not remember seeing. I watched you handle the curls at his nape to lever his skull, slide your palm under drawcord. I watched him freeze, like he was posed in another of our family photos waiting for the flash. What you don’t know can hurt you.
For the next few days I let you clear the mail.
compact
It’s a junkshop find that brings back the smell of them – a kind of sweetened pinky-beige topsoil my aunts would carry everywhere with them, gilded flip-open discs of powder, hard-caked, that still puffed traces over everything. A push-in metal tooth worked the clasp, then they’d unhinge it, anywhere they needed to, perched on a bus seat, queueing at the cinema, blotting off steam and suds over the sink. Inside lived another face. A swipe of coating for the wrinkles and pitting, a swab of glamour for the sweat and the soot, and they’d dab and polish with their onion-skin hands, and re-emerge, their smiles resurfaced, to take themselves off to a matinee or square off their seats in the cafeteria for a good old session of sip, hiss and gossip. Friends met them there, equally floral and bloodyminded. But it took my aunts to preside. And I pick the bronze disc out of the litter of the shop, and I fiddle with the rust of its scalloped fastening, and a gust of them wafts out, the sound of them cackling, the squeak of their complicated undergarments, the musk of their costumes, all dance-hall and armpit, the cumbersome tamped-down plenty of their blue-silk busts. Always jolly, until you crossed them. Thick as thieves, a formidable old-maid front, glossy and tough as they come. Mouths akin to fruit in their tropical acrylic, over a crooked assortment of teeth. Battlers. Hard nuts. And I used to be able to see myself in the circle of light when I rifled their handbags, I used to take a peek and think I could rub in their tint, could repaint myself robust, could frost my little face with a swish of their moxie, be brazen, bold-as-you-please. But I’ve disappeared in the mirror. It’s like dusting for fingerprints.
the deal
When the do-it-yourself coffin arrives, Dad calls me over. She picked it out, but he doesn’t want her to hear the hammering. So I tuck her chair with blankets. ‘Some anniversary. Too many years for plywood!’ she laughs. I wheel her out.
We head for shoreline, a sea that hisses louder than her oxygen. A breeze we can let stroke her balded skull.
Black-sand fingertips.
Thin boats shine on out-tide.
Hours blinking gulls.
When we get back, there are two caskets, pollen-coloured, propped on twin beds. ‘Two for one,’ he nods at her. ‘Got myself a good deal.’
if found please return to
She will forget the house. It will leave her one window at a time, breaking off in pieces of pine and lace and quartered glass. She will forget the feel of the rooms on her skin, the stir of their smell when she walked them. The cool of the hall, which held the scent of sour fruit and locked mahogany, so her footprints couldn’t help but slow in its long polished gloom. The sharp kitchen sunlight striking the steel bench with its rack of illuminated drips. The froth of the laundry, the soapy fluff churned from the tub, her forearms chugging in their glisten. She’ll forget she could never get through the weekly scrub without a cheeky song. Something sudsy, because she felt springtime, bubbly with showtune and get-go and sweat. The bugger of a wringer with its rubber cogs squealing, the slithery feed of shirts gushing into her bucket. She’ll forget him, scragging boots off at the backdoor, a stompy, gruff dance on concrete steps, shovelling his coat pockets for tobacco and stray tools. She’ll forget him saying hey up missus. Smoko. She’ll forget his dip, down into the pursed hair of her nape, her collar flustered, ooh leave off you. Forget his leathery sip. The roof of her mouth will forget their bedroom’s simmer of late afternoon dust.
*
She’ll forget the words. She’ll forget the name for the things her son stands in a jar by her bedside, ruffles of red that flag and bruise on their sticks. This new room is easily forgotten. It’s never sunk in. It’s only the smudge of linoleum, a yard of grey flecks, wipe-clean with loneliness. It’s only the grizzle of trolleys wheeled in to tip her head and rattle in pills. She’ll forget the use of the black balloon they strap and pump to her pulse-rate. She will forget the numbers on the glass stem they slot in the woozy vowels of her dentures. She’ll forget why they lever her over, a tutting struggle on the steel-bridged bed, why she’s sandbagged with white. She’ll forget how to work herself upright, except for wild starts in the night, when 3am seems to tug her wires, and she rumbles from her monitors, escapes a few muddled steps. Of course she’ll forget where she is, and the names of the people she meets in the nowheres she wanders to. Of course she will falter and two-step and turn and the loneliness will just stretch down new corridors, a grey route that empties in numberless doors through which she still remembers no one.
*
She’s forgotten her baby. She left him at the shops. Didn’t she? Had him swaddled, had him snug in his pram of peachy wool, had him drowsy with pavement-roll and dopey milk, had his snowflake bonnet on, had his plump chin shining in pleats of ribbon, the cleanest, chubbiest face of snuffled content you’d ever be likely to see, and she parked him in the shade, and she nuzzled at his thick vanilla sleep and she murmured Mumsie’s back in a trice my bub, and then she just popped into the butcher’s
, just popped in a tick, it was honestly only three shakes of a lamb’s tail, and then somehow, somehow she propped up her parcel like always in her astrakhan coat, cool with blood in its corded wrappings, and spongy with the comforting slouch of meat, and she marched with it all the way home, and her next-best heels on the pavement clapped a stout little singalong. She hummed, just in musing over putting the kettle on, just in portioning the pot with its few black feathers of tea. And then her nipple buzzed. The drizzle of what she’d forgotten burst out on her breast. And she dashed, she bolted, she raced back, a blat down the bricks, until the lane brought her up against the braked pram, its dark trunk hooded, its wide wheels glinting, and she stared down and down, slopping big tears into his snooze. She was the worst mother. Ever. But it was all right. The baby forgot.
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