2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie

by Brian Gallagher

  But his eyes said: “Julie, this isn’t you speaking, it’s your hormones: don’t fuck up your life over a hormone.”

  It was clear that Ronan was in no mood for a steamy lay in the soft folds of our marital bed, or even on the leather couch in full view of several innocent tropical fish. To him, ‘steamy lay’ meant one thing and one thing only: twenty-year-long child-rearing horror.

  (Incredible the way sex can make a man so nervous.)

  Undaunted, I slid up to him and started pressing a few buttons of my own. I slid my arms sexily (or so I thought) round his neck and made these purring noises, which normally worked whenever I purred them. I pressed my hand under his shirt and started squeezing and massaging, and I buried my lips into the tight bristle under his jawbone.

  But he drew back – ever so politely – escaped to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a brandy. He didn’t feel like me right then. No problem, I told myself, I’m a reasonable person. I could make allowances for these embarrassingly unmanly displays of impotence.

  “Julie.” He sighed heavily, examining his brandy glass. “We’re far too young to be doing ridiculous things like having babies.”

  “Twenty-nine. The older we get the more ridiculous it will become.”

  “We’re professional people: we have an image to maintain. And I really don’t want it soiled by a baby.”

  I laughed.

  “They consume time, energy, food, money,” he observed. “They download on your peace of mind. They puke on carpets. They piss on armchairs. They do worse on car seats. They grin like clowns, they chew rugs. Babies bring disease, according to recent research. The whole thing is sordid.”

  He emptied his glass, then extracted his silver cigarette case. After a series of deft movements the space around his head was billowing with smoke. Then he sauntered to the french windows and stood there gazing out to sea, indulging his Camel cigarette in that sophisticated je ne sais quoi way of his, a handsome figure silhouetted in his all-black trousers, jacket and polo-neck sweater against the deep-blue mid-summer evening sky, his gold Raymond Weil wristwatch glistening like a miniature sun on his dark-haired wrist. “As Louis Armstrong once said,” he mused, “we’ve got all the time in the world.”

  “If he was singing about getting pregnant, then he had all the naivety in the world.”

  “Come on, Julie, you know what having a child would do: it would tie us down. I’d lose my freedom. You’d lose your figure.”

  “No man wants children until they arrive.”

  “No man wants children when they arrive. Anyway, what do you expect? To have them delivered by taxi? Have you any idea what childbirth is like?”

  “Yes.”

  “I suggest you read up on it.”

  “Books are your solution to everything.”

  “Books could turn out to be an inexpensive method of contraception.”

  “When you see its lovely pudgy face and tiny squashy fists you will fall in love with it.”

  “Falling in love with a woman is quite enough, thank you.”

  “It will change your life…”

  “That’s true.”

  “…you’ll adore it! You’ll end up ignoring me. Besides, you can teach her everything you know.”

  “I know nothing.”

  Actually, he regards himself as a bit of an intellectual.

  “You’re sensitive to art and philosophy, Ronan. Don’t deny it…”

  “Yes, and I’m sure a baby would be thrilled to be introduced to Kant and chiaroscuro on its first day on earth.”

  “Just think about it, Ronan, that’s all I’m saying.”

  “Fine, I’ll think about it. Anyway’ – he sighed – ’the holiday is booked. Go away for the week and enjoy yourselves.”

  Yourselves?

  “What do you mean ‘yourselves’?”

  He told me he couldn’t go himself: his dental appointments book was full up. I was to take a friend. “That ball-busting friend of yours, for instance.”

  “There’s no need to talk about Sylvana like that.”

  “Take a girls’ week out: renew your friendship. Do you both the world of good. Think of it. Sauna and plunge pool, aromatherapy massage, reflexology, seaweed treatments, muck treatments, facials, electrolysis, manicures, exfoliants…”

  “Of course. What more could a woman ask for?”

  “You talk enough about needing to relax and destress.”

  He’s right, I do. “But Ronan,” I purred, “it’s you I want to go with.”

  “Sorry, Julie, but teeth come before love.”

  He actually said that.

  I figured Ronan was using the health farm idea as a tactical manoeuvre to make me drop this ludicrous egg-sperm creation thing. His theory was: baby blues are aggravated by stress overload, therefore they will be sedated by stress management. His ploy was this: send me away to be cured.

  But I reasoned: go anyway. A chance to rediscover the sunny oasis of well-being trapped within that arid human wasteland called work. Destress, detox, depox. Read literature and sniff perfume samples from magazines. Eat abstemiously, but with plenty of liquor and conversation added. Concoct paybacks for all those people we love to hate, draft avoidance schemes for those we hate to love and bitch about the rest. Resort to the local bar and cackle till closing time like a couple of cauldron witches. On the more spiritual side, perhaps, experiment with yogic communion and, yes, muck treatments. Sleep like pigs in space, buy some new clothes, return home looking absolutely amazing.

  And…get him pregnant.

  Very simple, very basic, very effective.

  He bent down, then, and kissed me on the forehead, assuring me that Sylvana and I would have a wonderful time together. “She’ll love it,” he offered, like he really cared about her welfare.

  I reluctantly agreed. He smiled, thinking he’d won the day.

  And now?

  I know better.

  He moved in his little whore while I was away. He swapped me for a few days’ marital cost-benefit analysis. He imaginatively transformed her into his wife, comparing and contrasting at every turn. He even tried her out in my bed. If she turned out good, he’d dump me.

  Very simple, very basic, very effective.

  I go back inside and pull the thick wine decanter from the drinks cabinet. It weighs my arm down like a ball of lead. I could use the empty bottle of Jameson’s instead, but although it might well be sufficiently sturdy to interface with one skull, it could splinter on the second and I don’t want to create a mess of glass shards around the place. Bone I can take. But not glass.

  I drop the solid stopper into my jacket pocket and I close the door of the drinks cabinet. I pause on my reflection in the glass.

  I look horrendous.

  My face is thin and bony as a scarecrow, pale as milk gone off. My mouth is vexed and stark, my eyes small shiny discs. I had my black shoulder-length hair trimmed and further darkened by the resident coiffeuse at the Cliff Castle Hotel. The red lipstick and purple eyeshadow make me look weird: two elongated canines and I’d be perfect.

  Sylvana often tells me how beautiful I am. I often tell her how crazy she is. She frequently adds that ‘even men think so’ but I know she’s only being ironic so I don’t have to go and stab her.

  Once in the bathroom, I stand in front of the mirror and wipe the ugly-looking smear tracks from my face: no point in resembling a crazed madwoman even if I feel like one. I refuse to let the bitch see that I’m upset, even though I will have no choice but to let her experience a little-known alternative use for crystal glass wine decanters: cranial removal. By the swimming pool.

  I finish tending to my face. Good. I feel instantly better. I am going to make an impression now.

  In someone’s skull.

  I go back out to the lounge to close the french windows.

  Suddenly I stop dead.

  On the floor, leaning semi-concealed against the side of the leather couch I spy a slim burgundy envelope
case.

  I pick up the case and place it on the coffee table. Inside are a fitted notepad, pens in pen holders, a mobile phone, a diary, a brochure of some sort, a tube of deep-red lipstick, a bottle of Issey Miyake eau de toilette and a packet of condoms. Unopened. Meaning that they are using ours.

  Or using none.

  There’s just one newspaper: last Monday’s. Unopened. Today is Thursday. What does that say?

  I smash my fist down on the coffee table. A sharp pain runs up my inside arm but I don’t care because I’ve just seen something. A sketch pad. I take it out. It’s seven by five inches. On the first few pages there are a few detailed sketches of tropical marine fish. Did she sketch these from our aquarium? If so, how come there’s one variety I’ve never seen before?

  The next few pages feature sketches of a man. In one, he is reading a paper. In another he is smoking a cigarette with his legs crossed. This is Ronan. She has perfectly captured his elegant, effortless posture and his trademark sexuality: pensive and intense. In another sketch he is asleep in bed, a study of serenity.

  She has grasped his proportionality exactly: tall but not too tall. Slim but not gangly. Head and shoulders in proportion to his body, legs and arms neither too short nor too long. His stylish clothes accentuate this architectonic harmony.

  I pick up a final sketch of Ronan’s face – a close-up this time. He could be watching TV. He is concentrated but relaxed. The large eyes, the long thin face, the long elegant nose, the slightly protruding but well-proportioned lips, the small chin, the high narrow forehead, the thin black receding hair, short thin sideburns, the perfect ears, the thick but neatly trimmed eyebrows, the clean-shaven, nostril-plucked neatness.

  There are five nude sketches of Ronan. I stare at these for a long time. Then I replace them quickly, snap shut the sketch pad and fling it back into the case.

  I pull out the brochure next. A travel brochure? Paris, where Ronan and I honeymooned. Ronan’s favourite city.

  Now I grab the diary and plunge through her private scribblings. A name. That’s all I need. On the inside flap are scrawled addresses, numbers and short notes in blue, black, red and green ink. On the next page you get information on clothing sizes, birth stones and wedding anniversaries.

  I flick a page. Metric conversion.

  All I need is a name, a number. Something.

  Recommended daily diet. This looks more interesting. “Female, age bracket 23-28’ is underlined in blue, as is the ‘68in.” part. She’s five foot eight. I examine the calorie chart. She’s scored an impressive two thousand calories per day.

  I can feel my pulse steadily increasing.

  Next page ‘cocktails’ and ‘long drinks’. Then ‘distances’. Then ‘notes’, which is covered again in barely legible scribbles in black, blue, red and green.

  Then travel and currency information for countries around the world. Paris is underlined in green.

  Then finally I get to the ‘personal details’.

  Everything is there.

  Name, ‘Nicole Summers’. Address, telephone number, mobile number. I scribble everything down on the back of my hand.

  Replacing it all just as I found it and returning the envelope case to the floor, I stalk into the hall, grab my bag off the couch and leave the apartment, crystal glass wine decanter swinging in my hand like death in the air.

  4

  The warm sun slants on to my face as I walk through the car park. It’s so bright today that I have my shades locked tight into my eyes.

  When I reach my destination I place the decanter on the ground beside me and, like a drooling raptor, I glare hard at Ronan’s pride and joy. His principal pleasure in life after sex.

  I am talking about his car.

  The Porsche is almost new. It’s the first real sign of the accumulating wealth of his dental practice. I had the colour changed at the last minute from Ronan’s preferred Sherwood green to pale yellow – coincidentally. We’d had an argument over money: I demanded that he put the car into joint ownership. As a reprisal, he made me contribute one grand to the purchase price. I got even by changing the colour. He was not happy.

  It really is a wonderful machine, though.

  Now I’m slamming the decanter stopper hard into the windscreen. I start counting to twelve. Twelve seconds later there are twelve lunar crater designs on the glass, patterned around a wide cavity in the centre.

  Whew! This kind of manual labour takes it out of you.

  Halting, I eye the decanter, a shining monument on the warm carbon tarmac, a jewel blistering with a billion sun sparkles. I’m saving it for later. For my two friends by the pool.

  You should hear the crunching now.

  Expertly, I’m working my way through left side window number one. These decanter stoppers are exceptionally good battering rams. They’re terrific. To be recommended.

  You know, it annoys me intensely to think that if a man is violent he is described as ‘aggressive’, whereas if a woman is violent she is merely ‘hysterical’.

  I will damn well be aggressive if I want to be.

  I mean, what do you want me to be? A lady? Come on! Am I supposed to sit down with my husband at the breakfast table and discuss in a calm and appropriate manner the causes of his random sexual addiction? Or burst into tears? Or forgive his youthful, errant ways? Or slam the front door in a huff, suitcase in hand, and write frigid but tearful letters from Mother’s pad? Not me.

  I prefer to be the dragon he’ll never forget.

  In three tough blows, left side window number two disappears. The two right side windows go down. I seem to have more energy than there is window surface. In one single blow, the plastic sunroof surround cracks.

  After a second short mid-afternoon break I take to the shiny yellow bonnet like a tiger in heat. I’m battering away at the soft metal until I’m swimming in an ocean of yellow paint dust.

  The wing mirror takes a hit.

  I think I’ve had enough now. Besides, I might be seen. I smooth down my trousers. I check my hair in the reflection of a nearby car window – there aren’t any left in the Porsche to speak of.

  How do I feel?

  Terrific. Alive.

  I pick the decanter off the tarmac and stride back through the car park towards a narrow path that leads past our apartment block to the swimming pool at the rear. I know I must look odd with the wine decanter and the scarecrow scowl, but you can’t always look your best, can you?

  This is where the fun begins.

  Just as I reach the edge of the car park, a bright red BMW 318i screeches to a halt several inches in front of me, blocking my progress.

  The tinted glass window rolls down.

  It’s Sylvana.

  Sylvana is big, brash and impatient. She’s stylish, rich and confident. She’s incredibly generous to those she loves: with her crippled father, for instance, she’s like an angel. (To those she hates she’s a nightmare.)

  She’s as blunt as a Celtic gravestone. She’ll tell you if you look like crap or if your make-up resembles muck veneered with poster paint.

  She has just one genetic defect: she’s pathologically incapable of taking shit from anyone. Especially men, which is one reason I love her so.

  On men: dump them. With no second chances, because nobody needs even a first chance to prove who they are. A chance is just a licence to cause further hurt. Better to enjoy, use and abuse. Crush and consume the grape but spit out the pip. Rinse your mouth afterwards. Above all, don’t commit if you want a varied and exciting life filled with pleasant surprises and odours. It’s time, she says, we stopped craving to spend our whole lives with three-year-old automatic pilots.

  People say she’s a stuck-up dragon.

  Jealousy – such a terrible burden.

  How does one describe this truly weird and wonderful woman who is my best friend and whom I have adored since the days we used to rip off her mother’s lipstick to smudge our faces, and paint our toes with her purple nail varnis
h?

  It’s like Sylvana was born with dogshit in her mouth but to her friends up close her breath smells like roses.

  She has always been a supportive pal.

  Or so I thought.

  “I’ve decided to have a baby,” I told her just before lunch today, anticipating a supportive reaction.

  We were sitting in the pleasant carpet-faded Gothic seventeenth-century drawing-room of the hotel to which Ronan banished me in order to spend time with his side shag.

  I was tinkling away on a piano, eighteenth century by the feel of it, while Miss Impervious Herself sat nearby on a commodious nineteenth-century armchair, venting her sublimations on her favourite novel, Interview with the Vampire, which she regards as the greatest literary event of the twentieth century – carelessly omitting a whole range of interesting personalities from James Joyce to Salman Rushdie and a hailstorm of Nobel Laureates, but that’s Sylvana for you.

  “Did you hear what I just said?”

  She acknowledged my query with a dead grunt.

  “I’m going home today instead of Saturday.”

  “Shush! I’m coming up to a good fang part.”

  “You’ve already read that book three times.”

  “Multiply that by two.”

  I hit her with it again: “I’ve decided to have a baby, Sylvana.”

  This time she heard: I knew this because her eyeballs moved.

  I’d just stopped playing the piano, so the atmosphere was weighed in favour of speech. Eventually her head followed her eyes and she spoke, frowning at me. “Nice one, Julie.”

  “I’m not joking.”

  My voice was casual, but my pulse beat with annoyance. I had half expected her to say this was wonderful news. But no, she was behaving like I’d just betrayed her.

  I felt her sunburning glare on my skin. I rebegan my battered rendition of Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata. After a while I heard her voice slide over the piano sounds: was I actually going to have a baby, the voice politely inquired, or had I merely decided that I might one day have a baby?