by Lette, Kathy
When she stormed into the converted boat shed to confront her husband, he replied, nonchalantly, ‘Sorry. Thought I’d turned the right knob. They all look so alike.’
Amber stared at her husband in astonishment. ‘You mean we’ve been married for twenty-five years and you don’t know how to switch on our oven?’
He shrugged. He shrugged!
‘I could make my signature quiche . . .’ he suggested, barely looking up from his paperwork. ‘Although the recipe says to beat twelve eggs separately. That sounds too cruel, don’t you think? Maybe I could just reprimand them sternly,’ he joked. He joked!
‘No.’ Amber went into full persecuted, burn-me-at-the-stake Saint Amber mode – as he knew she would. ‘I’ll just rustle something up.’ Sitting duck, or sacrificial lamb? she thought darkly. Underdog in a chump sauce? Turning to head back to the scorched earth that had become her kitchen, she paused. ‘But why wasn’t the smoke alarm going off? Did you change the batteries like I asked?’
‘Oh, shit. Meant to, but then this case came up and it’s been all-consuming . . . Refugee crisis.’
Amber was very restrained – after all, she didn’t stuff Scott’s briefcase up his nose. She merely retreated to the kitchen while her domestically impaired legal eagle husband was in mid-humanitarian flow.
The second blow was delivered when her seventeen-year-old son, Justin, and fifteen-year-old daughter, Bella, trailed in from swimming training, hungry and on the sniff for supper. Amber, way behind schedule, asked them to help out by putting their dirty sports clothes in the washing machine.
‘Which one is that?’ Justin asked. ‘The top one or the bottom one?’
Mother looked at son, aghast. ‘Wait. You’re seventeen years old and you don’t know the difference between the washing machine and the dryer?’
‘Is it the one on the wall or the one on the floor?’ her son drawled.
‘Bella, will you please show your big brother which machine is which.’
‘Um . . . I would, but . . . I’m not sure either.’
Ruby was right; she might as well have ‘doormat’ stamped on her forehead.
Amber, who’d always maintained an attitude of detached and courtly irony towards her family, suddenly transmogrified into Attila the Mum. ‘I am sick of being taken for granted!’
‘Take a chill pill, Mum.’ Her son’s tone bordered on surly. ‘What’s wrong?’
Amber sighed with exasperation, ‘Oh, you know, life.’
Justin looked perplexed. ‘But I am your life, Mum.’
It was true that the kids were the glue that kept her marriage together, but, of late, things were coming unstuck. Perhaps it might help if she were to actually sniff their homework glue a bit more often. Amber loved her children with a passion, but tonight she found herself considering the guppy approach to parenting – that is, eating your young.
After the kids and her husband had disappeared to go wherever it is they vanished whenever dishes piled up in the sink, Amber thought about her life. Not only was she running a boutique hotel for all the people in her radius – people who apparently believed the dirty crockery levitated itself in and out of the sink of its own accord – she was also expected to quietly guide and advise her kids and her hubby and the pets and her employees and her clients and her demanding mother and her mother’s maligned manicurist/gardener/pool boy/etc. with the patience of a police officer talking someone down off a ledge.
After putting the laundry on, stacking the dishwasher, defrosting a big tray of lasagne for tomorrow’s dinner, checking that all teenagers’ electronic devices were off and putting the cat out, Amber finally crawled, exhausted, into bed. The one thing she was fantasising about was sleep – and then she felt her husband’s hand groping for her across the sheets. As he tweaked her left nipple, she found herself contemplating a subtle hint to let him know she wasn’t in the mood – such as smashing the ceramic bedside lamp on his head.
It wasn’t that Scott was unattractive. While many of her girlfriends’ husbands’ six packs had become blobs of mozzarella dangling there over their dooverlackies, Scott was still fit. He didn’t have time to help around the house, but he miraculously found hours to jog and cycle and play squash. Scott was the kind of man who would hire a gardener to cut the lawns so that he had time to play golf for the exercise.
As her husband’s hand moved down her belly and under the elastic of her pyjama pants, she wondered how it was that a man who hadn’t spoken to her all day, and had nearly burnt down her kitchen, could think she’d be in the mood for love. No. She was in the mood for garrotting him with his jockstrap. As he prodded away at her clitoris as though it were an ATM machine, all she wanted to say was ‘Out of order. Not dispensing. And definitely no deposits.’ There’s so much emphasis on women faking orgasms, Amber thought, but what about men faking foreplay? She’d toyed with starting a His and Her orgasm chart to highlight discrepancies, but would he even care? Her husband was so self-obsessed, Amber often thought Scott should have just asked for his own hand in marriage. But part of Amber’s ‘happy marriage’ mirage meant keeping her husband content, and so she rolled towards him.
She never felt that Scott made love to her. It was more of a naked mugging. No finesse, no tenderness, a hit-and-run romance. If he did talk at all, it was to feed her lines for some legal sexual fantasy that was playing out in his head: ‘Say “I yield to the authority of the bench,”’ he’d urge, or ‘Fondle my gavel.’ He clearly had no idea that a busy mum’s top bedroom fantasy involves discovering that her husband has picked up his underpants off the floor.
While Scott thrust away, Amber contemplated menus for two future events she was catering. Scott had no inkling of her distraction. The night she’d conceived their son she was mentally planning a Moroccan lamb recipe with fennel and garlic. Their daughter? Mango, crème and ginger meringue.
Scott definitely had his turbo-booster rocket thruster on tonight, with no moon landing in sight. The metronomic regularity of his lovemaking was inducing sleep. ‘Were you faking it last night?’ she imagined him asking her over breakfast. ‘No . . . I really was asleep,’ she’d reply.
Bored rigid and beyond exhaustion, Amber now used her emergency guaranteed ejaculation technique and tickled her husband’s prostate with a finger. It was disgusting but effective. In her mind she pictured herself just shoving stuffing up a bird’s bottom.
After scrubbing her hands in the bathroom, she returned to the bedroom to hear Scott snoring cacophonously. Great. Now she still wouldn’t be able to sleep. Exasperated, and at the end of her familial tether, she stomped back into the bathroom and rang my mobile.
‘I’m in, Ruby,’ she said as soon as I answered.
‘What?’
‘I’m coming on the cruise. I mean, how bad can it be?’ Amber rationalised. ‘If Emerald annoys me too much I’ll just make her walk the plank.’
‘Oh, Amber, that’s wonderful! What made you change your mind?’
‘Well, don’t tell Emerald, who will just gloat in a most nauseating fashion, but having sex with Scott puts me into a coma. And that whole doormat thing? It’s true. I am being walked all over.’
‘Don’t worry, you coma-sexual! You’re not alone. Perfect marriages are like orgasms – a lot of them are fake. Just look at Harry and me,’ I said, sadly. ‘I thought we were happy.’
‘And I also really want to be there for you, Rubes. I love you.’
‘I love you too. And. . . .’ Now was the time to tell the truth, I thought, as I lay all alone in my empty house, cradling the phone, looking up into the darkness. How could I continue to lie to my dear sister, especially after Amber had uncharacteristically revealed a vulnerability of her own? If not now, when? Just spit it out . . .
‘I’ll see you aboard HMAS Hedonism!’ I heard myself say.
You are going straight to hell, Ruby Ryan, I chastised myself. But, at least by going on a cruise with my sister first, I’d be taking the scenic route.
/> 6
In our post-summer post-mortem, when we were scrubbing the metaphorical blood out of the shag pile, Emerald also confessed to me what really happened after our lunch at the Convict Cafe that day . . .
Sliding into bed beside her dozing husband, all Emerald craved was some carnal comfort. Alessandro’s tousled mass of curly hair on the pillow was nearly as dark as when they’d first met, with just the odd fleck of grey at his temples. Daily gym workouts meant that he still sported the whole Greek god look – the man looked seriously underdressed without a plinth.
She played with him gently, rubbing her nipples up against his chest while trying to forget her shitty day. After her poor little sister’s cancer confirmation, Emerald had dashed back to work to deal with a kangaroo that had been hit by a car in the national park. It had been lying on her table, concussed, when all of a sudden it leapt up off the slab and jumped around the surgery, smashing up everything in its path. Shelves of fish food and chew toys and dog toothpaste all went flying, including a glass tank that contained a cantankerous brown snake. Emerald was torn between catching the venomous viper or tackling the roo before it bounded onto the busy road.
In the midst of the chaos, Emerald’s mother rang to say she needed her daughter urgently. Once the roo was corralled, Emerald had to leave her nurse to catch the snake, clean up the wreckage and cancel her cat hernia op as she sped to her mother’s house – only to discover that the ‘emergency’ was Ruth’s inability to work her Netflix account. Emerald was then dragooned into going through the mail, paying the bills online, untangling the pool sweep, weeding the flower bed, cooking her mother’s dinner then watching ‘a bit of telly’, which turned out to be an episode of Midsomer Murders – that was two hours of Emerald’s life she’d never get back again – only to be informed by her mother that if she dared to go on that cruise with Ruby, Ruth would change her will to leave everything to the Catholic Church.
Emerald’s nipple rubbing soon had her moaning with lust. She nibbled on Alessandro’s ear and stroked him faster. Sandro half woke up and moved towards her, aroused. He looked at Emerald, his eyes as bright and intent as they had been when they were first in love, back in high school. Then, as he woke more fully, a film of indifference settled over them. He kissed her on the cheek, then patted her on the shoulder – three pats, like you would give a trusty old dog. He pushed her leg off his thigh and rolled to put his back towards her. He couldn’t have made his rejection more obvious if he’d built a Trump-style wall down the middle of the bed.
She thought back to when they’d first wed; when the sex was so great that it took up her whole life. When she wasn’t in bed, she was planning how to get back there. Oh, how Emerald craved that deranged, rip-each-other’s-clothes-off, screw-in-the-hallway-then-the-living-room-then-the-hallagain-and-then-finally-the-bed kind of sex they’d once enjoyed.
Emerald had a penchant for the wilder reaches of sexual behaviour and, over the first few years of their marriage, had introduced Sandro to a number of new concepts that aroused and terrified him in equal measure. But even before their second baby was born, she’d felt he was making love more out of a sense of duty than any actual desire.
Now here they were, two drowning empty-nesters, clinging to their sides of the bed like separate life rafts.
Determined to rekindle their passion, Emerald crept her arm around her husband’s warm, naked body and stroked his belly. She nuzzled his neck and pushed her hips into his broad, strong back. She moved her hand lower down – to find him limp as a piece of wilted lettuce. Of late, she would only be able to locate her husband’s cock with the Hubble telescope. She felt like a dog trying to nudge its dead owner back to life.
Alessandro brushed her hand away with more resolve this time. Once more he kissed her half-heartedly on the cheek and said ‘Goodnight’ with the finality of a submarine hatch closing.
Emerald lurched to her feet, feeling furious. Weren’t men supposed to be the ones gagging for sex all the time? Yet here she was, with extremely erect nipples and wet as an oyster down below, and he wasn’t in the least bit interested.
She trudged down the hall of their blond-brick bungalow to the kitchen. Through the sliding glass doors she could see three or four cars waiting for her husband’s attention in their adjoining garage. If only the car whisperer would care for her the way he caressed those chassis – massaging the metal, teasing out bumps, coaxing out scratches, rubbing and petting and polishing the body to a satisfying sheen. Most of Alessandro’s clients were female. They came in secret, not wanting their husbands to know that they’d bumped into a bollard or that the kids had dinged the car during a driving lesson.
Emerald knew that they fancied him, too. ‘It’s his attention to detail I love,’ women marvelled, implying that if the Dent Boss took that much time and care over a car body, imagine what he could do to her body?
‘Hey, Dent Boss, can you polish out my cellulite too?’ flirted one.
‘I just can’t curb my enthusiasm for your gentle touch,’ bantered another. ‘How do you feel about my sassy chassis?’
As Emerald flicked on the kitchen light, the dog gave her a glottal bass bark of welcome. At least her kelpie was pleased to see her. She opened the freezer and was bathed in its icy blue light. Only a tub of salted caramel ice cream could hit the spot right now; sadly, not the G spot, as she’d intended. The kitchen was spotless except for a can of engine lubricant Alessandro had left on the counter. She read the label – it was cheekily branded Start Ya Bastard. She was momentarily tempted to rush back to the bedroom and spray it onto her husband’s flaccid appendage.
Instead she ripped off the lid of the ice cream container she kept hidden under the ice packs at the bottom of the freezer. Alessandro had no idea that she secretly snacked on the side. She pretended to like the mung beans and tofu he stir-fried for them each night for supper, but she gorged on biscuits, chocolate and cakes when he wasn’t around. If this rejection kept up, she’d soon be the size of an emerging nation. She was full of fast food, but starved of slow sex.
As Emerald licked the spoon, the longing to have sex with someone, anyone, felt like a raging thirst. She seemed to have evolved from tranquil, middle-aged mum of two to male-hunting predator. Within minutes of meeting a good-looking bloke, she found herself imagining him naked. At the beach, while pretending to be immersed in some learned tome, she was actually surreptitiously perving on the nearest chiselled pectoral, imagining herself bivouacking in the shade of his bulging bicep.
‘Just because a woman can hide the primal engorgement of her libidinous organ doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to discover the supple hydraulics of a love god’s manhood on a regular basis,’ she confided to her dog. ‘As a young woman I longed to meet the right man. But now, aged fifty-five, I’m wondering if I’ve had enough of the wrong ones.’ Emerald realised, with a slight shock, that she felt no qualms about making love to a perfect stranger except that she didn’t want him to be perfect – she wanted him to be really naughty and dirty and bad.
Yet the one man she really wanted did not want her. And she wasn’t unattractive, was she? The fuller Kardashian figure was in vogue – a peachy derriere was now de rigueur. Why, just last week a bloke on a building site had given her a long, slow wolf-whistle when she’d dashed across the road to pick up a tray of mangoes. And what a tingle of illicit delight it had given her. She reckoned it should be illegal to wolf-whistle at any woman under fifty, but mandatory for women over it. Alessandro’s rejection was so humiliating. She was too young to be tossed onto the sexual scrap heap.
Emerald had tried to talk to him about it but Sandro just shut down the conversation. She’d suggested some vitamin V, but he saw Viagra as an affront to his masculinity. She had slyly purchased a packet and left it lying by his side of the bed anyway. She bought him oysters by the bucketload. But still nothing. They were living like brother and sister.
Emerald stroked her kelpie as it nestled contentedly in her lap.
‘Ah, it’s so easy for you, girl, isn’t it?’ Animals are so much better at mating than humans, she mused. Her mind flitted to the female emperor moth, which simply discharges a perfume from her abdominal glands to be picked up by the long feathery male antennae, bringing him frantically fluttering to her side. Female red-backed salamanders choose male newts by inspecting their droppings. If she liked the bloke’s diet, she moved on in and copulated between courses.
Lacking a perfumed abdominal gland and a dung-detector, maybe she needed to migrate somewhere, forcing Alex to miss her? Creeping obsolescence flickered in her peripheral vision. From adolescence to obsolescence – it had all whizzed by in a heartbeat.
She dialled my number from the landline.
‘Does this cruise go to Bangko?’
‘Bangko?’
‘I don’t say “cock” – it’s not the way I was brought up,’ Emerald joshed.
‘No, we aren’t cruising to Bangkok,’ I said, laughing. ‘But Vanuatu, New Caledonia and lots of exotic Pacific islands.’
‘I’m eating double-choc mini rolls by the tub. We can only go to places where they don’t discriminate against fat people.’
‘Relax. Caftans are in this summer.’
‘Caftan? I’ll be wearing a bloody tarpaulin. Amber’s not coming, is she?’
‘She is, amazingly! Isn’t that fantastic?’
There was a pause. ‘She’s my sister and I love her, but you do realise we’ll have our teeth into each other’s throats before you can say “anchors aweigh”.’
‘And that’s exactly why we need to do this trip together. To get over all that crap. What changed your mind?’
‘I’ve decided that what I need is some equine therapy.’
‘Um, there are a lot of activities on offer on these big ships, Em, but I’m not sure about horses.’
‘No, I mean I want a man who is hung like a horse. That’s equine therapy for middle-aged women.’
