The SECRET TO NOT DROWNING

by Colette Snowden

  “You’re a genius,” she says as I serve up the now vaguely edible-looking slices of lentil bake. “I totally love you.”

  And she grabs me round the waist and plants a big kiss on my cheek, just in time for Guy to walk in and say: “Wow, you weren’t kidding about the lesbian action!” The two of them fall about laughing.

  But no-one’s laughing at the dinner table, which is more of a coffee table with a table cloth and we’re all sitting cross-legged on the floor.

  “Sorry we didn’t bring any wine,” I say as Guy fills up my glass.

  “Oh, that’s fine,” Guy says, reaching across to fill the other glasses up too. “I only drink vegan wine and it can be a bit tricky to find in the ordinary supermarkets.”

  “Yeah, we thought that, didn’t we Marion?” He says. And He leaves it at that. Innocuous enough that it can’t mean anything, but said in a tone that clearly tells everyone that He’s accusing me of something.

  Sod Him. Change the subject.

  “So, how long have you been vegan, Guy?”

  “All my life....”

  “Poor thing!” Mandy interrupts and He guffaws like it’s the funniest quip he’s ever heard.

  “My parents were total hippies. Grew their own veg, made their own clothes. It was like The Good Life without the pigs. Not that I knew about The Good Life until I was much older, we didn’t have a TV.”

  “God, Marion would never have survived,” He says.

  “Neither would I,” says Mandy.

  “Neither would you,” I want to say but I don’t, not this time. This is not my house and I’m not going to let Him make me into the paranoid hysterical one.

  “So you’ve never, ever eaten meat?” I ask.

  “Never,” he says, actually puffing out his chest in pride.

  “Marion’d never survive that either, would you Marion?” He smiles. “You like a bit of meat, don’t you love? And she’s not fussy, any old meat will do.”

  Mandy gives me one of those I’m-on-your-side smiles and I wonder what Jaclyn Smith would do now. Karate chop Him through the window perhaps? Stab a fork in his hand and pour a glass of wine over his head? I go for the advice my mum always used to give me when I came home from school complaining that other girls were teasing me because I had knee socks and they all had ankle socks: just ignore them and they’ll go away.

  “So did they meditate and have crystals and all that?” I continue to Guy.

  “Not so much crystals,” he says, “but definitely meditation. We used to meditate together every morning and I still do that now. It gets you in tune with the day…if that doesn’t sound too off-the-wall.”

  “Not at all,” I say.

  “Not much sounds off-the-wall to Marion, does it love?” He says. “In fact, the more wacko the better: it makes her feel like she’s the normal one.”

  “She is the normal one in our office,” says Mandy. I’m glad she’s on my side.

  “You must be a funny old lot then.”

  “Less of the old, if you don’t mind,” says Mandy, who must be ten years younger than me. Or at least eight.

  She’s good at shutting Him up. She’s good at changing the subject. She’s good at talking.

  And that seems to be her strategy from here on in. Just keep chatting, don’t let Him get a word in edgeways and He can’t be obnoxious.

  But she doesn’t know Him. He can still be obnoxious. He can drink all the wine. He can yawn in their faces. He can drum his fingers on the table. He can stare at her tits while she’s talking.

  Eventually, she stops talking about nothing in particular and says “pudding?” and I get that sinking feeling when I think about my voodoo apple heads.

  “Give me a hand will you?” she says, and I stand up to help her clear the plates and bring the pudding in but sitting on my own ankles for the best part of an hour has cut off my circulation and when I stand up the pins and needles have got to me and my jelly ankles won’t take my weight.

  I stumble forwards, fall onto the table, land with my arm on Guy’s plate and it flips up in the air and crashes down right in front of Him, spattering Him with bits of half-eaten lentil and Marmite bake. It’s worthy of Laurel and Hardy, or Frank Spencer or the Chuckle Brothers. I couldn’t have choreographed it better if I’d spent a decade at RADA.

  There’s a comedy silence. I look at Him, He looks at the mess all over his trousers and they look at me. And then they laugh like maniacs and I can’t help but join in.

  He hesitates. He clearly doesn’t find it funny. He clearly doesn’t want to laugh. But I can see Him weighing it up. Laugh at Himself and give them permission to laugh or refuse to laugh and let them think that he’s a dickhead with a chip on his shoulder and no sense of humour. He laughs. Half-heartedly, but He laughs. And then He asks where the bathroom is and excuses Himself for a quick wipe down.

  “I’m sorry,” says Mandy, pulling herself together as we take the plates into the kitchen. “It was just so comical, I couldn’t not laugh.”

  “Why shouldn’t you? It’s your house and it was funny.”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t seem to think so.”

  “He’ll live,” I say, knowing that He’ll be in the bathroom trying to dream up ways of getting his own back.

  And He does try. When I bring out the baked apples, all nicely re-heated and smelling delicious, He says: “I thought this was a vegan meal – didn’t know internal organs counted as vegan.”

  But Guy says, “They smell gorgeous, I love baked apples.” And I think ‘ha ha, one nil to me.’

  Then when I bring in the pie, with a jug of ‘cream’ made out of oats provided by Guy, He tries to trip me up so that I’ll drop it and I do stumble but I manage not to fall or drop the pie. Two nil to me.

  “Great save!” says Guy, “you could be an air hostess!”

  “She’d have to brush her hair first,” He says.

  “Shall we tuck in?” says Mandy, smiling at me. And she and Guy make appropriate noises over their baked apples and I pour oat cream all over mine and am just about to start eating when He pulls a hair out of his bowl.

  “Speaking of Marion’s hair,” He says. “Bit of extra protein in mine, love – d’you want this back?” and He puts it on his spoon and then holds the spoon out to me as though He’s found the most revolting substance known to man in his pudding. So, it looks like the voodoo gods were not on my side after all.

  “Oh God, I think that’s one of mine,” says Mandy. “It must have fallen in when I heated them up. Give me yours, there’s another couple in the kitchen, I’ll get you a fresh one.” Three nil.

  So then He gives up. He just eats his replacement apple and tries a change of strategy. Compliments Mandy on her flat. Enthuses about the oaty cream. Offers to cut the apple pie and tells them that I make better apple pie than any restaurant in the country.

  They must be wondering what’s going on. It’s like the man who was here a few minutes ago has been snatched by aliens and replaced by a physically identical version with a much pleasanter disposition. But I’ve seen Him play this game before, the ‘I’m Mr Wonderful and it’s all in her head’ game. He can play whatever game He wants, I’m still three nil up and they’re still my friends and there’s no-one in this room that’s gullible enough to be taken in by his charm offensive, even if Mandy is a flaky pastry and her boyfriend was raised on space cakes.

  I just want to go now, but if I let Him see that then we’ll be here all evening. So when Mandy suggests we put some music on, I jump up to go and rummage through her CDs with her and he takes that as a cue to say that we should be going now.

  “What about the washing up?” I say, “I’ll need to give Mandy a hand with the washing up.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Guy smiles. “We normally just shut the door on it and tackle it in the morning.”


  “What he means is I normally just shut the door on it and he tackles it in the morning,” laughs Mandy.

  And I smile at her and try not to feel jealous of her confidence and her happiness and her lovely boyfriend.

  “Right then,” He says.

  “Right then,” I say back.

  “Right,” He hovers, waiting for me to move us out of the house.

  “Thanks for a lovely evening,” I say, and give Mandy a hug and a kiss on the cheek. She whispers “Don’t let him bully you” in my ear, then says, “Thanks for coming. See you on Monday.”

  “Thanks,” I nod to Guy and he comes over and hugs me and kisses me on the cheek too.

  “Any cooking tips you can give her, that’d be great,” he says.

  “Right then,” He says again. He gestures towards the door, we pick up our coats and we’re gone.

  22

  It’s something past two in the morning and I can’t sleep. That’s well over two hours of listening to Him snore and trying to reclaim anything vaguely approaching half of the bed. It’s not really the snoring that’s keeping me awake. If anything, it’s the spaces in between the snores, the waiting for the next one, the rhythm that keeps my thoughts flicking from one thing to the next...wait a moment...to the next...wait a moment... to the next. So my head is full of stuff, full of things that don’t matter, but the thoughts take no notice when I try to tell them that. They’re like double glazing salesmen, brazening it out even when it’s been made perfectly clear to them that they’re not welcome.

  And I’ve tried all the usual tricks. I’ve been for a wee. Twice. I’ve had two paracetamol and a bowl of Rice Krispies. I’ve opened a window. I’ve checked all the doors are locked, looked outside to see that the car’s still there and felt in my handbag for my keys, zipping up the pocket to make sure they stay put. But I still can’t sleep and now the sound of His snores is saying ‘caaaaaan’t... sleeeeeeep, caaaaaaaan’t... sleeeeeeeeep’.

  So instead of thinking about what I can do to help me sleep, I start thinking about what I can do while the rest of the world is sleeping. Might as well make best use of the time. And before I know it I’m on my hands and knees in the bathroom, cleaning the toilet with infinite care and attention as though I’m expecting a visit from the Queen. My mum always says that you can tell a lot about a person from the state of their bathroom. She says you should never eat anything in the house of a person who has a dirty toilet or no soap on the sink, because they’re dirty people who don’t clean up after themselves and don’t wash their hands after they’ve been. My entire childhood was spent proving that I’d washed my hands and my adolescence was an apprenticeship of helpful household hints and tips, all delivered with the words ‘you’ll have to do this in your own home one of these days.’

  So, just like my mum taught me, I’m taking out an old toothbrush from the cupboard under the bathroom sink and squirting bleach onto it and using it to scrub under the rim of the toilet. In the bit where it’s too narrow for the toilet brush to fit, the bit where the germs sit. And I’m killing them, every last one of them. Dead germs. They don’t stand a chance against me and my toothbrush of doom. They’re gonners, every last one of them.

  There’s something kind of addictive about cleaning once you get started, and here in the silence of the night it feels a bit illicit too. “Nobody cleans the bathroom in the middle of the night,” He would say. “Are you bonkers? Get back to bed.” But there’s no danger of that. He’s had more than enough wine to keep Him asleep until morning; He might notice the smell of the bleach when He wakes up but He won’t notice that the bathroom’s any cleaner. So I just keep brushing away with my worn-out old toothbrush, from the rim to the bit under the seat and the bit round the hinges where the dirt and the splashes of piss collect, and the underside of the lid, and the cistern and the base.

  I should feel tired after all that scrubbing but the bleach is like smelling salts, and anyway I’m not doing this to feel tired. I don’t want to feel sleepy any more. I want to feel wide awake. I want to clean and clean and clean until there is not a single germ left here. I want to be like the cleaner after a Mafia hit, removing all evidence of everything.

  I move on to the shower. I move all the bottles out, and the soap and the loofah, and I start at the edges with my bleachy toothbrush and brush it down the plug hole and pull out bits of hair and scum that I rinse off down the sink until the toothbrush looks clean again. Then I step into the shower and get going on the tiles, every last grouted groove and mildewed corner is scrubbed with my toothbrush until it’s white, white, whiter than white and smelling like the changing rooms at the swimming pool. This toothbrush has seen more active service in this one night than it ever did when it was actually used for brushing teeth, and produced whiter results, that’s for sure. But this could be its last stand. The bristles are all splayed out to the sides now. I need an upgrade.

  I also need a cup of tea, so I wander downstairs to make one and bring it back up with a couple of custard creams, just to keep me going. But when I eat them they’re tainted from the bleach that’s on my hands. It doesn’t taste great but it doesn’t burn. You’d think from the big skull and cross bones and POISON in capital letters on the bottle that you’d keel over dead if you let so much as let a drip past your lips but maybe you’d need to drink more than that for it to actually hurt you.

  I lift up the bottle and hold it to the light to see how much is still left inside. It feels quite heavy; it must be about three quarters full I think, so about a bottle of wine’s worth still in there. Would it hurt? Would it be worth doing if it didn’t hurt? At school we only studied two Shakespeare plays, Macbeth and Julius Caesar, and amongst all the carnage I always remember the wives committing suicide and no-one seeming that bothered about it. I don’t remember what Lady Macbeth did but the wife in Julius Caesar killed herself by swallowing hot coals. How could you do that? Could you actually do that? Even if you managed one, surely it would hurt so much that you wouldn’t be able to swallow any more? How many would it take? How much bleach would it take? If I took a swig would I be able to swallow it? Would it kill me? Or make me ill? Or would it just make me clean on the inside?

  I drink my tea. Drinking bleach is a stupid idea. Drinking tea might not solve all the ills of the world but it’s comforting in its own way. It’s the drink of ordinary days, days that pass and just get forgotten and it’s the drink of awful days when people don’t know what else to do, so they make you a cup of tea and look worried. And sometimes they put sugar in it, even if you don’t take sugar, and then make you drink it, even though you don’t like it. “It’s for the shock,” the neighbour told my mum when she asked why they’d put sugar in her tea when her mother died. There wasn’t much of a shock about it: her mother had had cancer for eighteen months and no-one had expected her to last past Christmas, but my mum didn’t argue, she just drank the tea and told me to close the curtains and hand round a packet of biscuits.

  I’ve eaten both of my bleach-infused custard creams and so far so good. Not so much as a hiccough. I wonder if you’d be able to taste bleach over the taste of cool mint breath-freshening toothpaste. I wonder if He would notice if I just squirted a little on his toothbrush. It’s petty, I know. It’s futile. It’s definitely futile. And if He realised I’d done it there’d be hell to pay. And if He didn’t realise I’d done it, what would be the point?

  The point would be I’d know. I’d be able to make Him do something vile and He wouldn’t be able to stop me. I take his toothbrush and I squeeze a little bleach out of the bottle onto the bristles. It’s a shame I didn’t think of this before I cleaned the bathroom from top to bottom. There’s no scum for me to scrape off with the brush now because I’ve done all that. There’s not a single germ left in the room for me to invite onto his brush because I’ve already killed the lot. I can’t believe I’m doing this. Maybe I should wash it off. I turn the tap on to wash the
bleach off again. It’s not worth it. But that’s what He wants me to think. She won’t argue because it’s not worth it. She won’t fight back because it’s not worth it. She won’t kick up a fuss because it’s just not worth it. I turn off the tap, I put a little more bleach on the brush, I scrub the floor with it where the toilet pedestal meets the lino and then I put it back into the toothbrush mug ready for Him to use in the morning.

  In the morning He’ll get up and He’ll pretend that nothing’s happened tonight. He’ll probably make some comment about how awful the food was or how lovely my baked apples were. He won’t mention the crumpled dress or the sex in the bathroom or what happened in the supermarket or what happened when we got home. He’s saving the next helping of recriminations for round two. He’s saving them for when Julie comes to our house for dinner next weekend.

  I don’t know whether He’d decided on inviting her in the supermarket or whether He just hit on the idea at Mandy’s house when things didn’t go his way. When we got home I tried to slope off for a shower before bed but He told me my shower could wait.

  “You had a shower before we went out,” He said. “It won’t be too long before we all have to start being accountable for our carbon footprint, you know, and if you’re having a bath or a shower every five minutes there’ll probably be some kind of fine to pay, or you’ll have to plant trees or something to offset your bad habits.”

  He thought He was still playing to an audience. He was playing it for laughs. I flattered Him with a smile but I wasn’t laughing. I just wanted a shower. I just wanted a fucking shower and a long, deep sleep. But I wasn’t going to say that to Him. He was waiting for the tears and the contrition and the desperate assurances that I have no more secrets and will never do anything without telling Him ever again. He’d have a long wait. I’d played along this far so a little compliant smiling and a sit down in the living room for five minutes was no great shakes.