3 Mars Bars, chopped
75g butter
1tbsp golden syrup
3 cups Rice Bubbles
150g dark cooking chocolate
Melt the chopped Mars Bars, butter and golden syrup. Stir in the Rice Bubbles and press into a slice tin. Refrigerate for ten minutes. Melt the cooking chocolate and pour over the Rice Bubble mixture. Refrigerate again. When the chocolate has set, cut into desired number of pieces and serve.
‘Here, Shirley,’ I say. ‘Let me cut you a slice. Mars Bar Cake. Yum yum.’
She waves her hand at me. Pats her tummy, engagement ring flashing in the cold fluorescent light.
Oh, but I won’t accept no for an answer. ‘Come on, have a piece, it’s my last day.’
‘Yes, come on, Shirley,’ says Melanie. ‘It’s her last day.’
Shirley de Young smiles at me. A wince of a smile, my final one.
‘You are quite horrendous at this,’ I would like to say to her. ‘You should get another job.’ Anticipating the instinctive arch of her head – back, back – the thin laughter stretching emptily from her Colgate-clean mouth. Thinking of her lathering up her pale body in the shower, soaping her freckles. Stepping out. Putting on her happy face.
I cut her a thick slice, much bigger than anyone else’s, hand it to her on a white paper plate, plastic fork stuck right in the centre.
A Grand Leap of Stupid Faith
I lived in a share house then with embossed gold paisley wallpaper in the living room and rising damp in the hall. One Saturday my housemate, Miguel, rented Dead Poets Society and watched it eight times in a row. When he finally returned it, it would have been cheaper to buy the video than to pay the fine. He took to wearing green ribbed tights around the house. I took to calling him Puck. He was thirty-seven and worked as a process officer for the Victorian Public Service. Some weekends his friends would come over (Jason, Clive, Benny and Jim) and they’d shut themselves in his bedroom where they’d dress up in berets and cravats and white knee-high socks and take turns reciting Walt Whitman, just like in the movie.
The rent was so cheap neither of us was going to move. I was a student earning a hundred bucks a week dressing salads at Tacoz Amigoz. The cooks would set the meals onto heated steel shelves and it was my job to finish them off with a splash of vinaigrette or a spoonful of tinned mandarin segments, depending on the order. Sometimes a cockroach would find its way onto a plate and I’d have to extract it from its sticky burrow before the waitress ferried it from the kitchen. If I missed one and an infested Hacienda Special ended up out on the restaurant floor the boss would have a fit. ‘How could this have happened?’ he’d yell. ‘We’ll get the fumigators in first thing,’ pitched just loud enough for everyone in the restaurant to hear, and then Simon, the bartender, would fix a tray of complimentary pink margaritas poured into oversized glasses rimmed with kosher salt, as though free drinks could persuade the customers to forget that there were bugs in their enchiladas. Still, I kept my job.
This was before I met my husband. Mostly Miguel and I didn’t see each other, and if we did it was rarely for more than a minute here or there as we passed each other in the hall. Very occasionally I might leave him a note, some scrap of paper on the kitchen bench scrawled with either Rent! or Electricity! or Phone! But basically we kept to ourselves.
In life one passes through stages where different things seem possible, and this stage seemed to last for the longest time. It was like I was there and I was happy, and then Emily came and I was gone. Not that Emily’s the point. She was unbearably boring, with mousy brown hair and mousy brown eyes and no self-esteem, so that her posture was terrible and she came across like a complete caricature of herself, but her presence upset the balance at Ferry Road.
‘Miguel’s got a girlfriend,’ I told Sunil, my cousin, on the phone.
‘Puck’s got a fuck?’
‘Please.’
‘What are you going to do?’ he said.
I thought I’d probably move out. That Sunday at ten pm, after my shift was done, I went out the back to the employees’ bathroom and took off my clothes. My skin smelled of cheese and beef fat. I washed my hands in the cracked rust-stained basin, wiped out my armpits with the damp hand-towel hanging on the nail by the sink, and applied a thick line of black kajal which I smudged into the lashes at the outer corners of my eyes. Then I slipped on the dress I had folded in my bag and took off down the alley behind the shops so I wouldn’t have to explain my business to everyone inside.
Now we come to the part where I meet my husband, because he is sitting at the table with my cousin, Sunil, at the pub that I go into. It is a bar really, more than a pub, with a few sad ferns in large beige plastic planters stuck around the edges of the dance floor where nobody is dancing. The table is one of those long, rectangular folding ones topped with chipped timber-patterned laminex, intended to be lined up with other such tables at hastily assembled wedding parties and assorted conference functions.
My husband is primarily fleshy. I notice this before Sunil has a chance to introduce us. He is fleshy and white looking with what I guess is a tendency to male-pattern baldness. He shakes my hand as he says hello and it is a pudgy little hand which seems quite ill-suited to the daily grind of hand-shaking that goes on in the business world. Yet this is what he does, day in and out, in a successful family-run enterprise which offers some protection from the general corporate rough and tumble, I surmise, and a salary generous enough to afford regular manicures, balustrades against the chapping.
I lean forward, long enough for him to take thorough inventory of my cleavage. At the wedding the dress is also low-cut and he beams proudly at my bosoms, touching them whenever he gets the chance. I have no proclivity for children but I don’t mention this right away (nor do I like dogs, but they don’t seem to come up). Instead, I eschew beer for summer wine – a fruity special of moselle and lime cordial served in a tall glass over crushed ice with a cocktail umbrella balanced on the rim – and smile and say, how do you do?
The way he tells it, it happened just like love. We met, we courted, we married, and here we are, a decade on, in our four bedroom faded-salmon Victorian terrace home with its rose garden, iron-trimmed balcony and spectacular view of the ocean. I don’t know how the gardener maintains the roses, notoriously difficult to grow in such sandy soil, but I don’t need to know. They bloom, I am happy. On Thursdays, Sunil comes for tea – either on his own or with his latest paramour – and the three of us (or four) will sip aperitifs on the balcony as the sun sets, watching it close in on us, slowly, like a great eyelid caught winking on the world.
Sunil has two children, Ravi (8) and Mel (6), and he calls me the devil for encouraging him away from them. I say you are just like television and it’s not up to me to get you started because you were already on, but he says maybe if I didn’t enjoy watching so much he would stop with the girlfriends and the racketeering and go home to his wife and to his family.
‘That’s not fair,’ I tell him. ‘You make your bed. I don’t instruct you where to sleep.’
But Sunil says ‘fair’ is hardly the point. ‘Were it not for our relatedness, who knows what might have become?’ And then he stares at me, and stares at me and stares at me some more.
Before I was married (before I had even met my husband) – not so long after my mother had taken off with our accountant, skipping back to the home country, my father in hot pursuit – these overtures might have held some sway. Sunil’s mannered intensity was less tutored then, and his exuberance played across my horizon like real possibility. Now, of course, I know better than to be taken in by such sophistry, seeing this device for what it is, an old and tired trick; Sunil would no sooner be married to me than he would willingly give me up.
In winter my husband gets sick and becomes a giant tubby baby wanting to stay home from work and loll around in bed and have me bring him hot
soup and rolls and rub his back with eucalyptus-smelling liniment. He pulls my hand under the covers where it is damp and warm and his erection butts at the sheets like a blind hairy mole.
Sunil is a craftier lover, but I feel a loyalty to my husband. He provides for me and keeps regular hours and because of this I allow my hand to be drawn under, where I stroke his penis until he comes, noticing the easy way my gold wedding band rides across it with each motion.
This is how his illness passes, through quiet sets of small bedside rotations: breakfast, television, lunch, hand job, nap, snack, television, sleep. I fend off his mother via telephone. She calls repeatedly in various states of distress, desperate to deliver tubs of homemade chickpea stew and steaming pots of ginger tea, favourites from his childhood. But it is only the flu, not much more than a cold, I say, and besides, he is always sleeping.
When he is well again he proposes a vacation. He says let’s head out of town and get some sun. It’s not like my husband to be particularly forthright, but because he is enthusiastic I agree. We book a fortnight at the Capricorn Hotel, an old-style north coast resort with full cabin service and colour TV, where he sleeps all day under a listless palm while I sunbathe and browse magazines and have my nails done. Our bungalow fronts right on to the beach. At five they bring mai tais on a matted bamboo tray. I shower and change into a batik sarong, then head outside where I join my spouse to drink and take in the view.
Sunil is jealous. Although I send him a postcard of a topless blonde in a yellow bikini holding a bunch of bananas in front of her breasts ( Greetings from Paradise, it says, in matching yellow banana-like text), he can’t deal with me being away for so long. He is like a three year old the way he frets over two weeks, telephoning far more frequently than is politic.
‘I’ll be back before you know it,’ I tell him. ‘Click your fingers and I’ll be home.’ But Sunil won’t relent.
‘I think the bastard’s going to try to knock you up.’
‘That’s lovely,’ I say. ‘And ridiculous. You can’t think I’d go along with such a plan? Besides, he’s about as interested in breeding as he is in losing weight.’
To punish me Sunil falls in love. She has mousy brown hair and mousy brown eyes and is unbearably boring and sulks in my kitchen. ‘You should call her Emily,’ I say, though I know her name is Ruth.
Ruth hovers at my table like a maid. She eats small mouthfuls which she assembles first in tiny segments on her fork. Chicken, potato, bean. ‘You are very disciplined,’ I say, watching the way she layers my dinner like a trifle. Sunil tells me she screams when they make love.
‘How loud?’ I ask, not because I am especially curious, but because I know he is trying to taunt me with images of their passion and I refuse to be drawn in.
‘Loud,’ he says. ‘Very loud. When she orgasms it sounds like she’s in pain.’
It is hard to imagine so slight a person capable of generating that much noise. ‘If you were single I’d urge you to marry this girl,’ I whisper as they’re on their way out the door. Sunil bristles and comments on my tan.
That night I regale my husband with the tale. We are in bed and I am careful to speak breathily into his ear and to stroke his hairless chest as I bring up the topic of the screaming. What would it be like, I say, to sleep with someone so readily carried away? I carefully describe what Sunil has told to me, about the way her body moves once she’s aroused. She is skinny, but dexterous, I tell him. She pants a little and she moans. He says her belly becomes hot and slick against his skin. By the time I turn off the light we are both turned on. I fuck him like I mean it, the first time in years.
And so Ruth comes to tea. She brings sweet williams and petit fours. We sit outside on the terrace where I encourage my husband to flirt with her between mouthfuls of crumbs he’s herded up with his finger from the plate. It is difficult at first – she is just as slight in the daylight – but I’ve an army of reasons why I must continually step inside, and with me out of the picture they begin to take to it, at first quietly puffing and preening, then happily chirping away like the birds.
Sunil is beside himself with rage. ‘He’s your fucking husband,’ he yells at me.
‘Calm down. It’s only an affair.’
‘But I think I love her,’ he wails.
I picture my husband and Ruth thrashing about between cheap hotel sheets, going at each other like woodpeckers at soft oak. Unlike Sunil, I don’t envision my husband taking the trouble to acquire earplugs to better tolerate the volume of the screaming (heading off to the chemist with some story about cochlea infections and the pool). In the long run, easier just to end it, I suspect. Bye-bye Ruth.
The waiting is not difficult. I become more involved with the Women’s Guild, hosting several lunches and afternoon teas. I take up bridge, playing three times a week. I acquire more shoes than befits the season. And eventually my husband returns from work early one evening with an enormous bunch of tiger lilies and an avid desire to hear of my wellbeing.
As far as I’m concerned, this is what marriage is all about. The sense of stability that comes from knowing ultimately we all return to where we started. Like to family. And to notions of origin and home, which are constantly present no matter how far we think we’ve come. For example, one minute you might be standing in your kitchen contemplating what to prepare for dinner, then a scratch on one of your favourite Catalan plates distracts you and, without being aware of exactly how it happens or why, you might find yourself, like no time has passed at all, back in that musty bedroom trying to study for your exam on the Spanish Civil War as the sounds of O Captain! my Captain! reverberate through the wall; or sticking your fingers into a mass of brown guacamole and warm sour cream when you’ve got cramps and wish you could afford to take the night off work, spending the evening at home in a hot bath instead of here on your feet for hours on end feeling about in a stranger’s food for bugs; or even crying for your mother in the middle of some useless sleepless night, a mother who probably never loved you anyway and left without an explanation, much less a goodbye. And so the cycle goes.
September is the month for hyacinths. The gardener has set numerous vases about the house, their fragrance as evocative as my grandmother’s perfume. Even this morning there is every chance I will leave my husband. I might rise and breakfast, pack a small bag and go. But then again I reserve the right to change my mind. There are so many factors to consider – all the whys and wherefores of late departures – like no longer being very young but being a single woman again out on her own, and not having someone around in the evenings to bump into in the living room or to go to if I find a spider in the house. Because what would happen if that happened say, in the bedroom, for instance, late at night? I’d get no sleep. I’d be worried sick, watching it, making sure it didn’t crawl off and hide somewhere else only to sneak up on me as soon as I’d forgotten about it. And who would care? Not Sunil, at home in bed with his wife, and Ravi and Mel safely tucked in their beds too, the whole family all soundly asleep. Sunil loves me, but he is not committed. Not in a steady way like a spouse. And we are way beyond that. We are way beyond a lot of things.
Last time I saw him he was still huffy with me about Ruth. ‘Are you ever going to get over this?’ I asked, because it was getting so tiresome, the reviewing, every single time – examining each detail of my role in the demise of their romance as though it could change anything (as if I would) – and I was trying to encourage him once and for all to draw a line under it.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I’d prefer you didn’t ask.’
Which makes me think maybe he really did love her. He continually says things about her being a good person, how at the end of the day she had an innocent heart.
‘You know, if you don’t want to be here you can leave,’ I told him. ‘No one’s making you stay.’ I slipped my bra back over my breasts and reached around for the hooks and ey
es.
‘Cousin, wait,’ Sunil whispered. ‘Let’s not fight,’ and he teased the straps off my shoulders and softly stroked my neck.
‘All right, all right. Just don’t call out her name,’ I cautioned him. ‘Don’t be that dumb.’ I lay down on the bright quilted bedspread and let him climb on top of me. Outside the sky was milky blue, its wan light pooled across the scratchy motel carpeting like paint spilled through the venetian blinds.
Sunil vowed to comply, murmuring his acquiescence as he fiddled with my underpants, negotiating the elastic down the backs of my thighs. Which was comforting, I suppose, such easy concession, given recent circumstances, though in a way I wish he hadn’t been so agreeable. Nobody wants that kind of power. More remarkable, I think, were he to have refused me, were he to have refused and then to have screamed for her, loudly declaring his wild allegiance: O Ruth! my Ruth! For that would have been dramatic and real, something completely new about him. And I could have found that interesting, that kind of lunging forward into the unknown, a grand leap of stupid faith on his behalf. It might even have carried me along for a while – the heat of all that optimism – like a touring exhibition chugging from town to different town. I have a sense it would be fun to visit like that, being the one with the collateral for a change, not the audience but the source of the entertainment, the kind people would gladly pay to see.
Mick, Agapanthus, the Unfinished TV Stand...
‘Mummy says you don’t love her enough.’
‘Mummy says or you say?’ asked Nathan, digging into the hard plot of earth, soon to be recast as the vegetable patch if he had his way with it, as his eldest daughter, Olivia, continued her solitary weeding beside the agapanthus, the one plant Joannie expressly hated, but the only flower sturdy enough to withstand their family’s benign neglect. It had begun the moment they bought the place, the prevailing sense of disrepair. He surveyed the half-painted spouting, the partially sawed timber now stacked in the corner that he was determined to transform into a new TV stand, the spotty, untended lawn strewn with abandoned toys and enormous possum droppings. He couldn’t fathom why the creatures insisted on traversing their garden each night – there was nothing more interesting for them to eat than shrivelled figs from an overhanging tree, and the parrots had beaten them to most of those. Still, he couldn’t have them scurrying about like they owned the place; if the citronella didn’t work he was going to have to get someone in to remove them.
Like Being a Wife Page 3
