Husband Replacement Therapy

by Lette, Kathy

  ‘I don’t know . . . a stubbed toe? Diphtheria? A vampire bite, maybe?’

  As we walked along the jetty, Brody Quinn put his warm hand on my shoulder and an electric current zapped straight down my body and mowed a lightning bolt clear through my lady garden.

  ‘You know it’s totally unprofessional for a doctor to flirt with a patient,’ he flirted.

  ‘Well, I’ll just have to stop getting sick, then.’

  He then ran his hand down my bare arm, so, so slowly and softly and for such a long, lingering time, that when he finally pulled away I had to check that I still had my bikini bottoms on. Even though we were now on land, I felt more at sea than ever.

  Brody gave a slow, honeyed smirk. ‘Make sure you stay well, though, otherwise things will just get weird for you, me and my potential parole officer.’

  After I caught my breath, I replied, ‘Sure. In fact, I seem to be feeling one hundred per cent better already.’

  18

  By the next morning I’d come to my senses. The last time lust had triumphed over prudence, I’d ended up with a space-hopper for a labia and a fear of overhearing comments from cubs about my pudenda being awarded national park status. Clearly the windsurfer encounter could be explained away as a severe case of mutual sunstroke – our brains had simply broiled in the tropical heat.

  When Brody rang my cabin, I told him, ‘I need to talk to you about yesterday.’

  ‘Yeah, I wanna talk about that too,’ he said. Great – it seemed the good doctor had also come to his senses. I agreed to meet him on the quoits deck at the back of the ship. Nobody ever went there. Amber had ordered breakfast in bed – possibly the first such meal in her life – and Emerald had nicked out to the boutique to try on more strapless, asymmetrical, off-the-shoulder, bodycon and bandage dresses; of late, my once-frumpy sister was having more costume changes per day than Cher at an arena gig. With my sisters otherwise engaged, it was the perfect opportunity for a rendezvous with the doctor to apply an emotional tourniquet.

  Judging from what the doc had told me on the broken sailboard, both our wheels of fortune had run over rusty nails of late and gone very, very flat. There was no need for us to create an even bigger accident. My tummy-compass told me that getting together with Brody Quinn wouldn’t just be a car crash but a head-on collision between two flammable oil tankers.

  But when I pushed open the big, heavy deck door, Brody waved wildly, as though summoning rescue. He was leaning up against the rail, gazing out to sea. As I approached, he ran a hand through his turbulent hair. The gesture was oddly enchanting.

  ‘I think I just saw a dugong. Have you ever seen a manatee? Sailors of yore thought that they were beautiful mermaids, which shows how long those guys must have been at sea,’ he joked, nervously. Nerves, from the misanthropic medic? What was going on?

  ‘So, what did you want to tell me?’ I asked.

  ‘Something weird happened this morning. When I woke, I was in a good mood. You may have noticed that I, um, have a gravitational pull towards melancholy. And then something else bizarre happened – I heard myself singing along to a song on the radio. It gets worse – I did a weird little dance in my cabin. This is very concerning behaviour. I mean, I must be coming down with something. I was trying to diagnose myself but then I thought that you might have the antidote, or may even be the cure?’ The look he gave me was amused, sexy and tender. This was not what I’d been expecting. ‘Anyway, what did you want to tell me?’ he added.

  There’s something about the sea; the way you can inhale it and feel its transformative properties slipping into your bloodstream. I was standing near to him now, breathing in the lovely ocean scent – tangy, astringent and seductive. His half-smile made me desperate to touch him, to caress his neck or, even better, run my fingers down his tanned arms and lace my fingers into his capable, dexterous hands.

  Instead of delivering my prepared speech, I found myself leaning in to him. Brody bunched my bright curls in his hand and drew me closer. And then, ever so slowly, he put his mouth on mine. His breath was sweet as caramel. I kissed him back and was soon floating upwards, brushing the clouds, light-headed and happy.

  Whereas Harry was muscled, with big thighs, powerful shoulders and calloused hands – a durable man – Brody was lean and lithe, but wiry. There wasn’t a hint of the gym here. No vanity pec-flexing. Just effortless and easy masculinity. There was a caged energy about him that set my pulse pounding. His fingernails were gnawed and his shoes scuffed, but he had a worldly, hard-won edge that excited me. And what excited me the most was his apparent longing for me. There was a certain priapic affability concerning his trouser area that was both flattering and compelling.

  ‘You know I don’t trust easily. And I’ve been burnt recently, as I told you, betrayed by someone I confided in – which is how I ended up losing a job I love. I swore off women after that. But there’s something about you. I feel as though I’ve known you for a long time. That sounds ridiculous, right?’

  No, I thought. The really ridiculous thing was that I felt the same way. Clearly the abrasive Mr-Darcy-repulse-and-infuriate trope doesn’t only work in Regency novels and clichéd rom-coms. I promptly realised Jane Austen had been right all along.

  ‘Sorry, Ruby, I keep interrupting you. What did you want to say to me? The thing is,’ he went on, not drawing breath, ‘yesterday I felt something I haven’t felt for ages. Hope. It was like finding an air pocket in a ship that’s going down . . . It must be how prisoners feel when they walk out of the gates. Shit. You’ve got me mixing my metaphors now. Sorry, I interrupted you again. I’ll shut up. If doctors talk, you know, we have to charge,’ he said, eyes twinkling. ‘What did you want to say to me?’

  I wanted to tell him everything I was feeling – my qualms, the fact that I was unstable, nuts, possibly in the middle of a nervous bloody breakdown, dodging friends, alienating my kids, pretending to have cancer, lying to my sisters – that, in fact, the Sphinx’s riddle was less confusing than I was to myself right now – but I felt the words float away.

  When I said nothing, he kissed me again – a kiss that left me misty with desire. He moved in front of me this time and leant me back against the railing, and kissed me for a long, luscious time. Kissing Brody was the most aerobic thing I’d ever done. His kisses required a lifeguard.

  What was happening? Who was this man? In between kisses, never letting go, he kept opening up. He told me more stories about his time in Africa, when he’d escaped vigilantes by running through a forest fire, and, another time, by wading through rapids. And then there was the day out jogging when he didn’t quite escape.

  He also specialised in slightly crooked smiles and possessed a velvet touch that could make a woman’s skin tremble. He was wild, reckless, anarchic, anti-authoritarian and, yes, he also had a gloomy, pessimistic, Eeyore streak, so at odds with the kindness and humanitarianism he displayed in his job. As a doctor, he’d devoted his life to those who were suffering in conflict zones – apart from the time he’d ‘accidentally’ castrated a warlord rapist, of course.

  Nor was he gloomy all the time. When we sat in the deckchairs and ordered tea, his medical anecdotes made me laugh so hard that at one point Earl Grey shot out of my nose. Not my best look, especially as the warm wind was already making a comedy of my coiffure, but it only made us both laugh harder. And then there was the fact that I felt I had so much to say to him.

  Best of all was his penchant for puns. When it was time for Brody to report for duty in the medical centre, he called our parting from the quoits deck ‘quoit-us interruptus’.

  How, I wondered, was I to convey all this to my sceptical sisters?

  ‘I don’t know what this is,’ Brody said, his hand on the heavy deck door. ‘But whatever it is or isn’t, you can’t tell your sisters.’

  ‘But I tell my sisters everything.’ Well, I thought with a sharp pang of guilt, not quite everything. ‘Maybe this is all a ruse on your part just to get your severance pa
y,’ I joked.

  But for once Brody did not smile back. ‘Getting romantically involved with a passenger is a “chicken or beef” offence – as in, that’s what the air steward offers you when you board the first flight home in disgrace, because your contract will be terminated.’

  ‘No redundancy package?’

  ‘Shit, no. In fact, I would probably have to pay them hush money. Or face getting struck off. I don’t mind getting the sack – in fact, I hope I do – but I don’t want to lose my medical licence. The board code of conduct prohibits relationships between doctors and patients, for obvious reasons. And, I hear that prison libraries are chronically short of Hemingway novels like The Middle-aged Man and the Sea,’ he said, his eyes gleaming with playfulness once more.

  ‘Is that right? Well, you could go on the run, but those police composite sketches can make a man look ten years older, which would be awfully cruel for a bloke your age,’ I teased him.

  ‘Ha-ha. You’ll pay for that later,’ he said – a fairly innocuous comment that, for some reason, set my nipples on fire again.

  As he dashed off to work, I tried to get my head around what had just happened. Maybe I’d started my menopause and the doctor was my hot flush? Maybe he was a fantasist, and all his heroics were invented? Maybe he thought I was getting divorced and was after my settlement payout? He could be one of those guys he’d warned me about, who could suss out a woman’s bank balance with one look. This gave me pause. Because, come on, what red-blooded man could fancy me – a middle-aged, middle-class, boring suburban mum? I mean, not even my shadow wanted to follow me. Clearly the bloke was self-medicating from his doctor’s bag. And, anyway, wasn’t my new motto ‘All men are guilty until proven innocent?’ I made a vow to break off these shenanigans. I would call him after his shift and make it clear.

  And yet, catching my reflection in a nearby porthole, I noticed that I was beaming like I’d just had a vitamin B12 shot.

  19

  The Mexican monarch butterfly migration, the synchronous fireflies of North America, Chile’s flowering desert, the migration of the Christmas Island red crab, the treacherous odyssey of the Serengeti wildebeest – there are many great wonders in this world, but nothing amazed me more than the day I saw my sister Amber eat a carbohydrate. Not just one bite but a whole plate of gnocchi’s worth, followed by tiramisu, a Golden Opulence sundae, and two chocolate-truffle profiteroles. This was unbelievable behaviour from a woman whose dessert habits usually stretched no further than a lick of a sultana with a cup of skimmed air. The woman who’d spent her life lecturing the rest of us on the weighty subject of calorie intake, a monotonous mantra involving orders to take omegas and drink activated charcoal smoothies, was now mainlining cake and cocktails.

  There were other weird and wonderful things happening, too. By the second week of our cruise, Amber had packed away all her make-up and chic summer capsule wardrobe in du jour shades and taken to slobbing about in Emerald’s board shorts and Birkenstocks. By week three she’d stopped shaving her armpits and brushing her hair. Catching a glimpse of her one morning, I thought it might be time to schedule an audition for her in a reboot of The Witches of Eastwick.

  ‘I’ve discovered my middle-age superpower: I’m invisible! The cloak of invisibility is upon me. And it’s so fucking liberating,’ she exclaimed.

  She’d also started to swear with relish, and her shoulders now shook when she laughed. And when Amber laughed hysterically, it wasn’t long before she started snorting in the most deliciously unladylike manner. Our mother would have been horrified.

  Emerald, on the other hand, who was known for looking as though she’d dressed in the dark choosing items from a charity bin, had started sashaying around the ship in her designer clobber with the kind of walk that should always be accompanied by the brass section of a big band. She’d restyled her hair, too, dropped a few kilos and looked ready to run a marathon – or she would be if her feet were not clad in dainty, bejewelled slingbacks. Emerald had always berated Amber and me for torturing our poor tootsies in high-heels – she said it was akin to Chinese foot binding and other archaic cruelties – but now she clackity-clacked in vertiginous stilettos everywhere she went.

  ‘Well, I have been getting a lot of exercise,’ Emerald explained, flicking the loose elastic of her shorts as we took up our sunbathing spots on the pool deck. ‘Not from bloody gym sessions or dieting, ugh,’ she said, grimacing, ‘but from toy-boy dodging. Hiding from a cub you’ve shagged involves a lot of ducking and diving, which is incredibly aerobic.’

  I knew what she meant. That very morning, on the way to meet Brody, I’d glimpsed Wayve on the lido deck and immediately dropped to the ground and crawled out of sight, keeping my head down as if I were dodging enemy fire.

  ‘Oh, god, don’t look up. Here comes one now,’ Emerald gasped.

  I paused in my application of sunscreen to scan the row of board-shorted cavaliers barrelling our way. ‘Which one?’

  ‘The bloke I kicked out the other night, remember? I could put up with the tattoo on his bicep that read Death Before Dishouner – spelt D-I-S-H-O-U-N-E-R, I kid you not – but not the tat on his chest, which read Never Don’t Give Up.’ She lifted her open book to an inch below her eyes, watching his approach like a detective on a stakeout.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ I cringed, laughing. ‘That’s definitely a grammatical faux pas too far.’

  ‘Couldn’t he have just inked I’m an idiot on his forehead in a magic marker?’ Amber suggested.

  ‘Exactly. Anyway, he keeps coming back for more. I’ve rejected him three times now, quite vociferously. I’m “ghosting” him, I believe is the parlance, and he’s hoping I’ll “zombie” him, which means continuing where you left off with someone you’ve ghosted, apparently.’

  Emerald pulled her sunhat down and buried her face in her zoology book, which, in terms of camouflage, proved as effective as a bikie hiding out in a nunnery. A toned hunk peeled away from his pals, strode up with the gait of a horse wrangler and placed one thonged foot on the end of Emerald’s sun lounger. This vantage point offered Amber and me a direct line of sight up the leg of his board shorts, which is how we discovered that he was going commando.

  ‘You’re ghostin’ me, aren’t ya, ya stuck-up cow?’

  ‘Well, as a vet, I have saved many a calf with this very hand.’ Emerald fluttered her freshly lacquered fingers in his direction. ‘So, that’s not really an insult to me, darl, more of a job description.’

  ‘Bitch!’ the big flummoxed bloke replied, demonstrating that the sun protection factor of his sunscreen was higher than his IQ. ‘You just used me an’ that.’

  ‘It’s a cougar cruise, kiddo. That is kinda the point. Just doing what it says on the box.’

  ‘Literally,’ I said, sotto voce, prompting a stifled giggle from Amber, who was supine on her sun lounger. That was another thing that had changed: Amber, who usually avoided the sun like a vampire, had taken to tanning.

  ‘And I won’t be haunting you, either . . . “Haunting”,’ Emerald clarified for her perplexed sisters, ‘means getting back in touch after a long period of silence in a noncommittal way, by following the guy on Twitter or watching their Snapchat stories.’

  This exchange made me feel so much better about Brody’s ‘whaling games’, ‘reheats’ and ‘freshies’ revelations. After the young stud had harrumphed away, I said, ‘Why don’t you give these guys marks out of ten and score them. You know, ratings on looks, performance, et cetera. I’m sure they’re keeping score on us . . .’

  Emerald chuckled. ‘You seem to have forgotten that I’m a vet, Rubes. Someone will call the RSPCA and report me for cruelty to dumb animals.’

  While I laughed with relief, Amber looked up over the spine of her latest unreadable, Booker Prize–winning hardback – one of those interchangeably turgid tomes with Death, Famine or Road in the title, and said, ‘Emmy . . .’

  At first I thought my middle sister was about to open up a discussi
on on the American awards for excellence in television, but then I realised, amazed, that she was addressing our big sis by an affectionate abbreviation she hadn’t utilised since childhood. ‘If you’re so obsessed with grammar and spelling, why don’t you join us for the quiz this afternoon? With our combined expertise, the Ryan girls will win hands-down.’

  ‘Thanks, possum, but I’m not really a quiz person.’

  ‘Trying new things is the best way to stay young. You never know what’s inside you.’

  ‘Oh, but I do, darl – Brendon, Cillian, Guy, Joaquin, Shane, Zane, River and Hanif.’ Emerald laughed. ‘And I know what’s inside you, Amber – almond croissants, spaghetti carbonara, crème brûlée and cake. It’s so great to see you getting an appetite for life.’

  ‘Literally,’ I interjected once more. ‘When we came aboard you were so thin, your pyjamas had, like, one stripe.’

  ‘It’s the chocolate soufflés. They’re like eating clouds,’ Amber said, dreamily. ‘I don’t know what’s come over me, but I feel as though for years I’ve subsisted on a diet of anxiety and insecurity, my hunger only occasionally assuaged by the smallest gulp of attention from my husband and kids. But not anymore! Now I’m stuffing my face so regularly at mealtimes I need to get a cab from the dining room back to the cabin.’

  ‘All I’m craving is a hunky spunk on a bed of lettuce; or, rather, matelot en croute.’ Emerald licked her lips.

  ‘Ah, the joy of being cooked for,’ Amber sighed, blissfully. ‘And cleaned for.’

  ‘So true. Any woman who says she gets high on housework has inhaled way too much cleaning product,’ I agreed.

  ‘The closest I’ve come to housework is giving my cabin a sweeping glance.’ Amber beamed serenely.

  ‘And the only bucket we’ve seen is the one with the champagne bottle in it,’ Emerald added.

  ‘I have raised the laziest kids,’ Amber said, slamming her book shut. ‘I don’t know how I’ve done it. But do you know what I just realised? I haven’t FaceTimed them in days. Not even a WhatsApp message or a text.’