by Alison Moore
‘You know,’ Ida said, still holding Ester’s arm as if she were weighing it, ‘you are not the one Bernard loves.’
Ester, standing between the empty cubicles and the sinks, sweating into her wedding dress, her cheeks burning through her blusher, blinked.
‘The only girl Bernard has ever loved,’ said Ida, ‘Conrad took and then rejected. This is just revenge.’ A speck of saliva flew from Ida’s mouth onto Ester’s lower lip. When Ida released Ester’s arm and left the toilets, Ester wiped her mouth and reapplied her lipstick, but still she felt it there, the fleck of spit. In the hours which followed, Ester put her mouth to the rims of countless champagne glasses and wine glasses and shot glasses, but still she felt that speck of saliva clinging on. And even hours later, when Ester and Bernard were alone in bed and he was kissing her, all she could think about was Ida’s spit on her lip, as if it were still there, pressed between her mouth and Bernard’s like a cold sore.
Bernard emerges in a cloud of camphor-scented steam, the bath draining noisily behind him. Ester chats to him while he dresses, watching him in the mirror as he chooses his clothes, inspects his nails, snaps his watch back onto his wrist, checks his shoes. He does not reply, and she does not say anything which requires a response, and he does not look at her.
After Bernard has gone downstairs, Ester gets dressed, putting on cleaning clothes, and goes into the bathroom. She rinses away the tidemark which Bernard has left in the still-warm tub. With a towel, she mops up the puddles on the floor, a patterned lino which she likes because it does not show the dirt. The wall tiles and the bathroom suite are white and show everything, every speck, but at least the tiles are porcelain, hardwearing.
She opens the bathroom cabinet and takes a cigarette and a lighter out of a box of tampons. She has a few little hiding places where Bernard, who does not like her smoking, will not look. Opening the window, she lights her cigarette and smokes it with the sun on her face, inspecting a Venus flytrap on the windowsill, talking to it. She finds the plant fascinating and sometimes pokes at the expectant leaves with the handle of her toothbrush, just to see them in action. Bernard does not really care for houseplants and finds the Venus flytrap vulgar, a little ugly.
She leaves the apartment and follows Bernard down to the bar to have breakfast with him. As she sits down, he asks her whether she has remembered to lock the apartment, and even as she tells him that she has, she knows that she has not.
They eat their breakfast and Bernard reads aloud from his paper when he finds something interesting, but he does not look at Ester as he does so.
Ester stays in the bar, the dining room, while the guests have their breakfast. The ones who are going check out, leaving her with their keys and their petty complaints. Then she cleans the first of the empty bedrooms, a family room downstairs. She could go up to the apartment and lock it now, but she does not. Before going upstairs, she allows herself a break, returning to the bar and sitting on her stool, having a drink. She watches Bernard working, although in between the breakfasters and the lunchtime crowd, it is relatively quiet. Even when there is no one to serve, he stays at the other end of the bar reading his paper.
At eleven o’clock, the new girl arrives, relieving Bernard, who goes off to do some other work. Ester goes upstairs to clean the remaining rooms. When she finishes, it is almost noon.
She and Bernard rarely eat lunch together. If Ester is hungry she has bar snacks, peanuts. Bernard likes to make his own lunch in their private kitchen upstairs. He has a thing about other people handling his food. When Ester returns to the bar, he is there, sitting at one of the tables, eating his meal. He does not look up when she comes in but when he has finished eating he walks over to her, leaving his plate behind on the table. He stops beside her and leans in front of her so that his arm is on the bar in between her and the drink she has fetched for herself. He puts his face very close to hers and tells her again about leaving the apartment unlocked. He says, ‘You’re asking for trouble.’
In the middle of the afternoon, when the new girl is on a break and Bernard is in the cellar and Ester is finishing off a drink, a tourist comes in. He approaches the bar close to where Ester is sitting. She does not find him attractive, but that is not important. Leaning towards him, she says, ‘Buy me a drink.’
The man turns towards her and gives her a wary look.
Ester smiles at him and says, ‘It’s my birthday.’
He smiles back then, although he continues to look nervous. ‘Well, sure,’ he says. ‘What would you like?’
Bernard, returning from the cellar, sees the man and comes over to serve him, and Ester says to the man, ‘You’re offering to buy me a drink?’
‘Yes, I am,’ says the man. ‘What will you have?’
Bernard looks at his wife, although he is speaking to the man when he says, ‘Is that right? You want to buy her a drink?’
Once more the man agrees to this. He looks in the fridges and at the pumps, choosing a beer for himself. ‘And whatever the lady would like,’ he adds.
Bernard, still staring at Ester, says, ‘Get the fuck out.’
The man is confused. He laughs. Bernard, turning his head, looking directly at the man this time, repeats himself. The baffled customer backs away from the bar and leaves as quickly as he can.
Bernard resumes his position at the far end of the bar, picking up his paper again. Ester, who has no guests to wait for today, goes upstairs for a rest.
Sometimes she sleeps, and sometimes she just reads a book or a magazine, tearing out pictures of hairstyles she likes, tearing out party eyes and red mouths.
Later, when Ester goes to Bernard and says, ‘I won’t be here tomorrow lunchtime. I have an appointment,’ he says, without looking up from his crossword puzzle, ‘It makes no difference to me.’
CHAPTER NINE
Oranges
Futh wakes in pain. His swollen brain is throbbing and the light hurts his eyes. He closes them and goes back to sleep. When he next stirs, it is late, mid-morning, and he has missed breakfast again.
He goes into the bathroom. Feeling fuzzy, holding on to the edge of the sink, he turns on a tap and splashes his face, his bed-warmed and sleep-steeped skin shocked by the cold water. He drinks straight from the tap, daring to touch the end of it with his lips despite the germs which his Aunt Frieda has told him flourish on taps and drinking fountains. Without looking at himself in the mirror, he returns to the bedroom. Going to the window and opening the curtains, he is pleased to discover a dreary morning, an overcast sky, the prospect of a cooler day.
He does not remember looking out of this window yesterday, either when he arrived or when he went to bed. He does not recall checking for an escape route. It is just as well, he thinks, because this room is on the third floor and there is nothing to climb out onto and nothing to break a fall. Had he realised this, he would have spent half the night worrying about it and the other half having bad dreams.
He sits down on the bed, next to his suitcase. It was his honeymoon suitcase, a wedding present from his father, who was his best man.
Futh had first asked a man at work, who turned him down. Gloria said, ‘Aren’t you going to ask Kenny?’ So Futh asked Kenny, who just laughed.
Then he asked his father, who, shaking his head, said, ‘Have you got no one else?’ But he did it, and he took Futh out for a drink and said, raising his glass, that the French called this ‘l’enterrement de vie de garçon’. ‘The burial,’ he said, ‘of a boy’s life.’
They held the wedding reception in the function room of a local pub. There was a dance floor on which his father slow-danced with Gloria, and onto which Angela’s mother kept trying to persuade Futh, and which Angela repeatedly refused to leave despite Futh’s preference for an early night. And there was a buffet which was drying out by the time Futh left Angela on the dance floor and went out into the corridor to get away from the disco’s noise and flashing lights.
At the far end of the corridor, a bac
k door was propped open and through it he could see one end of a patio in darkness and rain beginning to fall. He stepped outside and a security light came on, illuminating him on the empty slabs. There was a square of lawn, edged at his end by the patio and the wall to which the security light was attached. Running down one side of the lawn was the outside wall of the corridor, and on the opposite side a hedge screened the garden from the road. At the far end was the wall of the function room which he had just left, and above that the bedroom which he had booked for the night.
He wandered onto the wet grass. Rain always reminded him of meeting Angela at the motorway service station, the smell of his wet coat in her car. He ambled down to the end of the garden. He reckoned that if he stood anywhere else he could be seen from the function room, but standing against its wall he could not. And moreover, the security light sensor apparently did not reach that far. The light went off and Futh stood in darkness outside the function room, in thick grass between patches of nettles, enjoying the rain smell and remembering Angela.
‘What you can smell,’ he had said to her on some rainy woodland walk, inhaling deeply, ‘is bacterial spores. They are stored in dried-out soil and released by rainfall and carried in the damp air to our noses.’
When Futh began to feel really wet, he headed back inside. As he crossed the lawn, the security light snapped on again and he felt like an animal in headlights, about to be mown down.
He did not go back into the function room but slipped past the open door and went straight upstairs to the bedroom. He heard the party continuing without him, and it sounded louder, he thought, than it had done when he was down there. He could hear the voices shrieking through the floorboards, feel the pulse of the disco music under his feet.
He went to the window and peered out, looking for his escape route. The room had a view of the lawn, and the patio on the far side. It was a dormer window – beneath it, the roof sloped away. Although he could not see down to the ground, he knew that if he had to jump he would land on grass, or at worst in the nettles near which he had been standing a few minutes earlier. Satisfied that he was safe, he drew the curtains.
He peeled off his damp clothes and hung them over the cold radiator and the backs of the chairs to dry. He took off his watch and put it down on the dressing table. Opening his new suitcase, he took out his wash bag and went to the bathroom. Angela’s wash bag was already in there and he rummaged through it. He smelt a few of her products, and tested them, scrubbing his skin with her exfoliating cream in the shower. After towel drying himself, he trimmed his fingernails and toenails. He powdered his feet and put some of Angela’s replenishing night cream on his face and neck, and balm on the thin skin around his eyes. He combed his hair and brushed and flossed his teeth.
Back in the bedroom, he looked through his suitcase for the outfit in which he would be going away, laying it out ready for the morning. He reassured himself that he had brought his wallet, the travellers cheques, the booking confirmation for the flight and the hire car and the honeymoon accommodation, lining all these things up next to his watch.
He put on his pyjamas, got into bed and switched off his lamp. He lay there, smelling of Angela, noting the total absence of light in the room – none coming in from outside, no little red dot from a television on stand-by, no digital display of red or green numbers on a radio alarm clock – and he waited for Angela to come up.
Some time later, he was woken by the security light at the back of the pub flashing on, glaring through the curtains. He got out of bed to look outside, reaching the window and drawing aside the curtain just as the light went off again. He stood in darkness, listening to the wedding reception still going strong down below.
He opened the window, appreciating the cool night air. He wondered whether there was anyone out there, in the garden, but he could not see a thing – there was not much light from the moon – and he could not hear anything due to the noise from downstairs. He stood there for a while looking out at the night, his duvet-warmed feet growing cold on the bare floorboards, before he caught the smell of cigarette smoke coming in through the open window. After a minute, the security light snapped on again and he saw Angela in her wedding dress, watched her crossing the patio and disappearing through the back door. Anticipating her now coming to bed with the cigarette smell on her skin and in her hair and in her mouth, he closed the window and drew the curtain again.
He got back into bed, meaning to lie awake and wait for Angela but instead falling asleep. He woke with no idea what time it was or if Angela was with him. It was dark, and it was quiet, the reception finally over. He reached across to Angela’s side of the bed, half-expecting to find it empty, instead feeling the mound of her body beneath the covers, touching her skin which was still cold from having been outside. He whispered, ‘Are you awake?’ but she did not answer. He went back to sleep.
In the morning, they had breakfast in the dining room. Futh took a small continental breakfast from the buffet and went to sit at a table with his father and Gloria. He poured a cup of coffee for himself and one for Angela, but he did not start eating, preferring to wait for Angela who had wandered over to the cooked breakfasts. Turning to look for her, he saw her standing talking to Kenny. Angela, glancing up and seeing Futh watching her, made her way back to the table without a breakfast. Kenny turned back to the buffet, filling his plate.
‘He’ll be hungry,’ said Gloria. ‘He didn’t get here until all the wedding food had been cleared away.’
‘I didn’t know he was coming,’ said Futh.
‘Of course he came,’ said Gloria. ‘He wouldn’t have missed this for the world.’
Kenny came to the table and sat down with his full English breakfast. ‘I don’t get this at home,’ he said, picking up his knife and fork.
‘You would at my house,’ said Gloria, but Kenny ignored her, cutting into his sausage and egg.
Futh began to say to Angela, ‘This is Kenny,’ but he was interrupted.
‘They’ve already met,’ said Gloria. ‘They met last night.’
Futh said, ‘They met before last night,’ and Angela looked surprised. ‘You met at the university open day,’ he added.
Kenny, forking a piece of black pudding, wiping it in the spreading yolk of his egg, said, ‘Do you remember that, Angela?’
She nodded, but gingerly, as if it hurt.
Futh said to Angela, ‘I’ve known Kenny since infant school.’
‘We were neighbours,’ said Kenny. ‘He pissed himself in my bed.’
Futh broke open his croissant and looked with annoyance at the way it fell apart, at the brittle, greasy flakes covering his fingers and his plate.
Angela seemed dazed. She pushed her black coffee away without drinking it, putting her forehead in the palm of her hand.
Futh looked up and said, ‘You should have come to bed when I did.’
Angela, without taking her head out of her hand, said, ‘Yes.’
When everyone had finished, Kenny took out his cigarettes and offered them around the table. When Angela declined, Futh, thinking that smoking was something she had learnt to do in secret, said, ‘Have one.’ He was more than happy for her to have the occasional cigarette. It would be months before he came to dislike the smell of it on her.
Looking confused, she said, ‘I don’t smoke.’
Kenny lit up and Futh excused himself, wanting to call the taxi company to make sure that the taxi was not going to be late.
When the taxi came, late after all, it was raining again. Futh held his coat over Angela’s head as they hurried from the pub to the waiting taxi. They got in the back and Futh opened his window to smell the rain. After a few minutes of riding along like that, Angela leaned over and closed it and Futh caught a whiff of Kenny’s cigarette smoke on her. He sat there in his damp coat looking out at all the rain and it was, he thought, a bit like the night he and Angela met at the motorway service station.
The honeymoon was dreadful – they had
delayed flights and lost luggage, twin beds and upset stomachs, bad weather and arguments about Angela having to do all the driving, and then the hire car broke down.
‘It was bad,’ Angela told people afterwards. ‘I’m not sure you could have a worse holiday.’
With the exception of their honeymoon, for which Futh was responsible, Angela took care of all their holidays. Even at Christmas, it was Angela who arranged for them to visit her mother, her father, his father, and Futh just went with her. Last Christmas, though, for the first time, they made separate arrangements and Futh went alone to his father’s flat, which was really Gloria’s flat, chosen for its proximity to Kenny and his family.
Futh drove over on Christmas morning. He had only been driving for a few months, had only ever driven to and from work, and never in the snow, which had fallen unexpectedly overnight. Angela had been picked up by her brother after breakfast and taken over to her father’s house. Futh, leaving soon afterwards, found that his car refused to start in the cold weather, so he took Angela’s. Searching for a scraper with which to clear the windscreen, looking in the glove compartment, he found a small towel. He took it out and found it all crusted up. He sniffed it and put it back, clearing the windscreen with a credit card.
He could not see how to change the heater settings and a fierce jet of initially ice-cold and then increasingly hot air blew directly onto his toes as he drove up the empty motorway.
Gloria let him in with a smile. ‘Come in out of the cold,’ she said, taking the hat from his head before he was even through the door, slipping his coat off his shoulders, unwinding the scarf from around his neck. When the front door shut behind him, the hallway seemed very narrow; the space in which he stood, between the closed door and Gloria, seemed rather small. He felt naked without his outerwear on.
