One Hit Wonders

by Patrick Warner

  He sighed as he retrieved three Weetabix briquettes from their white paper sleeve and dropped them into his favourite bowl. He poured in low-fat milk and stood at the kitchen counter watching a junco peck millet seeds from the hexagonal bird feeder that hung from the lowest branch on their laburnum tree. From upstairs came the thunk of water pipes as Lola turned on the shower. Frank always showered first because otherwise she would drain the water tank. There never seemed to be enough hot water for Lola.

  Above the sound of household plumbing he could hear the kettle rapidly coming to boil. He knew that by the time it began to bubble and roll, his Weetabix would just about have reached the state known to him alone as “maximum sog,” the point at which the briquettes lost all semblance of shape and blended together into a thick paste. There was a critical window of only a couple of minutes during which they would remain at this peak of edible perfection. He would have to hurry and make his tea.

  Walking to the cupboard, he flipped open the lid of the tea canister and fished out a single gauze sachet which he dropped in his mug at the same moment he lifted the kettle and poured in boiling water. He then returned to his Weetabix, noting contentedly the tell-tale shadowy lines of demarcation that indicated where the mass of cereal had once been separate shapes. He dipped his spoon, knowing that the time it took him to consume the contents of the bowl would be exactly equal to the time it would take for his tea to steep to tarry perfection. Tarry Tarry Night, he liked to call it. The clockwork precision that he had imposed on his breakfast routine over the years was deeply satisfying.

  Lost in bliss, he did not hear Lola enter the kitchen. He did not hear her—he concluded afterwards—because he had not been expecting her. Most mornings she was still in the bathroom when he left, her sing-song “bye-bye” coming muffled from upstairs. So he was startled when she spoke, her voice coming from immediately behind him: “You’re like a baby with your dish of mush-mush,” she said, in her husky early morning voice.

  How long had she been watching him? Perhaps long enough to hear the subtle farting sound the Weetabix made as he sucked it through the narrow passage between his top gum and cheek? Her words stung. He felt his face flush. In his urge to swallow quickly and make some reply, he gulped a breath; the bolus of food, driven by a piston of air, crunched in his gullet with such force that he wondered if he hadn’t cracked a piece of cartilage. His eyes watered.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Did I hurt your feelings?”

  “Of course not,” he answered, and cackled, hyena-like.

  But she had, in fact, hurt his feelings. There was a Freudian weight to her utterance that registered in him with the force of a slap. He was suddenly the child and she the admonishing adult. His sophistication was revealed as a veneer, under which there lurked a semi-idiot. He felt caught out. It was so unfair. If anyone was the adult in their relationship it was him, and he had been for more years than he cared to remember.

  “You surprised me. I swallowed wrong. That’s all.”

  She caught her breath as if to speak, but then changed her mind.

  “You’re up early,” he said, “and dressed, too.” She was wearing grey track pants and a zip-up tracksuit jacket. Her hair—recently dyed in streaks of honey blond and reddish blond—was tied back in a ponytail.

  “Going for a run?”

  “I am, as a matter of fact.”

  “Giving up smoking again?”

  It was Lola’s turn to look embarrassed. “Had my last one yesterday at lunchtime,” she said.

  Frank watched her hand undulate inside her tracksuit jacket pocket, the knuckles suddenly visible through the stretch fabric as she reached and curled her fingers around something she didn’t want him to see. “Glad to hear it,” he said, “a good run always helps with cravings. Just don’t forget your trainers.”

  “Shoes,” she said, looking down at her feet, “right.” She was wearing her black-canvas flats.

  “Not much shock absorption in those.”

  “Not so much.” Her face flushed and almost as quickly blanched. Frank braced himself. Lola’s temperament was such that she could mill any emotion into anger in seconds. She took a deep breath.

  “My tea,” he said, lurching from his seat towards the counter.

  “My makeup,” she said, turning to leave the kitchen.

  “Makeup to go jogging?” Frank asked, unable to resist.

  “A girl should look her best.”

  He watched her walk away. The tight tracksuit material covering her backside showed no visible trace of an undergarment. When she hesitated at the base of the stairs, he steeled himself. Self-control was always an issue for Lola. Just because she resisted her first impulse to explode didn’t mean she would continue to resist. He could think of plenty of instances when a storm that seemed to have blown over suddenly backtracked. He expected her to come stomping back into the kitchen, spitting invective. But she surprised him.

  If Frank was relieved to see her take the stairs at a half run, he was also painfully aware that his defences had been triggered. As he stood in the kitchen, his psyche began to inflict damage on itself. Married life with Lola had taught him to keep close at hand a store of the injustices she had perpetrated on him over the years. It was a shorthand way of reminding himself at any given moment that he was the better person. It was a dirty trick, and one he concealed from himself by wrapping it in a maxim, a famous one borrowed from Thomas Hardy: If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

  It was suddenly three years earlier, the early hours of the morning, at the end of a very drunken dinner party. Hot and clear in his ear came Lola’s Cameo-ravaged voice: “Brad and Emily want to have a foursome with us. Right here. Right now.”

  Frank pulled away from his wife and, turning his back to her, walked half the length of their galley kitchen. It was all he was capable of in the moment. As appealing as the idea of group sex may have been to him as a fantasy, the actual prospect made him shrink. It was more than just fear. He was grief-stricken at the thought that Lola would lie down with another man in front of him, and especially with Brad, with his wet-look hair and his shredded fingernails.

  Frank turned to face his wife, shook his head. No. Under no circumstances.

  Lola took a step backward, fixed him with a calculating stare, as though gauging the firmness of his position. She then nodded several times, indicating perhaps that it was an ah-ha moment for her; that she had arrived at the answer to some question she had long puzzled over.

  He did not follow when she walked out of the kitchen and back into the living room. He remained rooted to the spot, his mind all pins and needles of anxiety. What would he do if she carried on without him? Was he capable of the violence of mind it would require to shout her down, to kick his guests out? Would he capitulate to the scene of orgy, making a flaccid attempt to participate? Or would he—and this was the course of action he knew he would most likely take—meekly walk upstairs and leave them to their games?

  Her voice came to him from the living room, her words inaudible, drowned out by the blaring horns on Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. Whatever she said was immediately followed by a burst of coarse laughter from Brad and a titter from Emily. In the kitchen mirror he watched them stumble to the front porch, struggle comically with coats and shoes, leave without saying goodbye.

  He was expecting a scene, a real dish breaker. But he was wrong about Lola that night. “I’m so sorry,” she said, just as soon as they heard Brad and Emily’s Corolla pull out of the driveway.

  “Needs a muffler,” said Frank.

  Lola walked to the stereo and changed the CD to one by Marvin Gaye. She beckoned to Frank to come to her. Putting her arms around his neck, she slow danced with him through the ground-floor rooms, stroking his hair, kissing him on the neck, gently pushing her pelvis against his groin until she felt his response. When the first song came to an end, she led him by the hand up the stairs, murmuring to him that he was such a goo
d man, such a strong man, that she was so glad to have him. Slowly she manoeuvred him along the second-floor hallway, stopping every few feet to open another button, remove another piece of his clothing. They bounced against the walls. She stood on the cat’s tail; it howled and scratched her. But Lola was not going to be distracted. She danced her husband through the bedroom doorway, backing him across the cluttered floor until he was standing next to the full-length closet mirror. She finished undressing him. Still fully clothed, she knelt on the floor and took his erection into her mouth. She lingered, wetting it all over with her tongue, savouring it as though it were a delicious meal, pushing her mouth down on it until her gag reflex kicked in. She salivated wildly. She watched her magic act in the mirror, but mostly she watched him watching her. He already had that panicked look he always got when he was close to climax. He held the sides of her head and began to fuck her gently in the mouth. She hummed her approval when he asked if what he was doing was OK. When he closed his eyes she watched herself, saw how her eyes filled with tears when he thrust too deep, saw how her cheeks hollowed out, became concave, like the figure in Munch’s The Scream.

  Strange as the scene might have seemed to him in retrospect, at the time it felt like nothing more than a reward, a bonus for work well done. He had been tested, he told himself. She had given him a pop-quiz and he had passed. He did not ask himself what would have happened if he had said yes to her initial drunken proposal.

  All’s well that ends well, thought Frank, three years later, as he walked from the kitchen to the living room. He sat on the couch and sipped his Oolong tea. He could hear Lola moving about in the middle bathroom. Several minutes later, she bounded down the stairs. She stopped at the entrance to the living room, jogged up and down on the spot, and grinned at him. He watched her grab her car keys from the shelf on the little mirror they had bought at an orphanage, back in the day when they had flirted briefly with the idea of adoption.

  “Where’s the automatic starter?” Lola asked.

  Frank unclipped his key chain and handed it to her.

  “Thanks,” she said, standing on her tiptoes and pointing the remote control at the window, clicking the lower right-hand button. They heard the car wheeze, the engine catch and begin to burr. Someone up or down the street banged a door.

  “I thought you were going for a run.”

  “I am. But I thought I’d drive down to the lake.”

  “I see.”

  “There were still ducklings the last time I was down that way.”

  Frank looked squarely at his wife. Her hair was scraped back into a bun, and her straightened and slightly convex fringe fell just to above her eyebrows. What was the function of the fringe, he wondered, while deciding that the word fringe was a much prettier word than bangs to describe the shearing off of hair at the front of the head. How could it be bangs?

  “We should call it Angela,” he said, as she handed him back his key chain.

  “We should call what Angela?”

  “The car starter,” he said.

  She looked at him, her eyes beginning to twinkle.

  “You know,” he said, completing his feat of free association, “Angela Carter, car starter.” She began to laugh, her little fringe swaying. She got his humour; she got him; she always had.

  “I love you Frank,” she said, leaning down to kiss him. The winds that swirled around her smelled of citrus trees on a warm spring day, and if there was something small and dead among the mint plants that crowded the shady end of the grove, he would never say so. He tasted her waxy lipstick. He had acquired a liking for it over the years.

  “I’m terribly fond of you, too,” he said.

  She laughed again. “I’ll see you at lunch.”

  “I won’t be home for lunch today.”

  “See you this evening then.”

  Frank sat in the driver’s seat of his Mercedes as he had countless times before. Its familiar feel and leathery smell settled him a little. He rubbed the knuckles of his right hand. He adjusted the rear-view mirror. He looked right. The passenger side mirror was tilting towards the interior of the car. Lola had probably clipped the side mirror of a parked car. Oh, Lola, he thought, always favouring her left-hand side when driving, always nervous of oncoming traffic. He almost smiled. For a second he was able to entertain the thought that this was an ordinary morning and that he was simply on his way to work. But that particular fiction—bolstered as it was by familiar props—soon failed before the mental image of his wife lying in a heap in the corner of their living room, her head wedged at a modernist angle against the baseboard heater.

  20

  LAST NIGHT, I may have written the final chapter in this journal. Tired of watching TV, fortified by several glasses of red wine, I took down from the top shelf the Micky Mouse-covered photo album and removed from it an envelope of snaps I had been avoiding. They were too recent, too final. They were pictures of a Caribbean holiday I took with Lila shortly after she confessed to her affair, her addiction, and all the rest of it. The trip was meant both as getaway and a way to get down to it. We didn’t know if Lila could stay on the straight and narrow. Even if she did, could we still make it as a couple? Would the rehabilitated Lila still want me? Could I forgive her? And there were other factors to consider that were even more outside our control. There was Gosse (a known unknown): he may have felt we owed him something. Perhaps he would come and demand money. Perhaps one night there would be a knock at the door. Not knowing what he looked like, we were vulnerable. So we decided to get out of town for a while.

  I poured over each white-edged image of Lila, taking in her sunburned freckled face, the curve of her body under her sarong, her elegant hands as she raised a cocktail. In one frame in particular, she seemed to be genuinely smiling, her expression one of uncompromised love for the photographer, for me. It could have been the last time she ever looked at me that way. A month after our return home she became secretive and distant. Six months later, she was dead.

  I looked through the pictures twice. About to start in for the third time, something powerful and unexpected happened. I felt an object pull away from the top of my stomach. Like a hook dislodging. I knew—don’t ask me how—this was the last time I would feel my loss so physically. It was a realization that recent journal entries had pointed toward. My writing had become impatient, more sketch than analysis. It was as though the exercise of remembering had hollowed out, become pointless. I had the feeling that I was running over the same old ground and was in danger of turning my grief into some kind of fetish.

  For a second I felt both empty and peaceful. Could it be this easy? I wondered.

  But then the memory of the pain returned and with it came intense feelings of guilt. How could I forget her when forgetting felt tantamount to violence, when it felt like an act of murder?

  I put the album away and began to write for the last time.

  I hear the heavy tread of boots coming towards me. I brace myself for another kick in the face: “Hey, Canadian. Wake up.”

  “I am awake.”

  Someone loosens my ankle and wrist restraints and a strong pair of hands lifts my legs, swinging them out over the edge of the bed. The same hands roughly grab my arms and pull me into a sitting position.

  “We’re going to take you on a little journey.”

  I picture the two men I first saw yesterday—was it yesterday?—when I stumbled into their jungle compound. Who is speaking now, the squat man with the aquiline nose and the bandana or the tall bearded man with the hollow eyes?

  “You better piss. Is a long way.”

  “I don’t want to piss.”

  “You piss.”

  They take me outside, walking me to where I can smell human shit. “Go here.”

  I dutifully squeeze out a few drops. “Where are you taking me?”

  “We’re taking you to see a little piece of your country here in our country,” says one of the men, before he horks up a gob from his sinus cavity
and spits it out. I picture the spit ball rolling through the dust, forming a round bead.

  “We’re going to see how much you will fetch on the free market. If no one will pay a ransom for you, we are going to kill you. We’re going to cut your throat and feed you to the pigs on my uncle’s farm.”

  “No more questions,” says the second man.

  They take me to a vehicle. I assume it is the white Toyota I saw at the back of the compound when I first arrived, the one with the capital T missing from the branding on its tailgate. They push me inside, sandwiching me on the bench seat. The driver starts the engine and we exit the compound, tires spraying gravel. I hear chickens squawking excitedly.

  “Where are we going?” I ask again, deciding it is better to repeat myself than it is to remain quiet. Speaking gives me courage.

  “I told you already, gringo.”

  I try to track our movements, but after six successive right turns, followed by two lefts, followed by two more rights, I give up. Jostled around between the two men as we travel over dirt roads, I begin to feel nauseated. Every time the driver gears up to fourth, his closed fist on the gear shift makes contact with my groin, making me jump. It is a source of amusement for both men. After the third time, I learn to discern from the sound of the engine when I should adjust my position.

  It is hot. Dust blows through the open windows into the cab. I ask for water and they pass me a bottle. I take a few swallows—it tastes of some additive or perhaps something that should have been filtered out. My stomach begins to squirm. I ask for food and they give me a soft biscuit that tastes faintly of maple syrup. Much to my surprise, it instantly settles my stomach.

  I ask again where they are taking me but the men refuse to answer. I ask the men to tell me their names but they just laugh.

  To keep my anxiety at bay, I run through the chain of events that begins with my arrival at the airport three days earlier and ends back here, where I sit wedged in the front seat of a Toyota truck between my two sweating captors, on my way to some unknown destination.