by Tom Vowler
I saw you on that documentary last week, the ten years on thing, and it brought it all back, as if it happened yesterday. You looked so much older, I mean more than how someone would after that long. Sorry, that sounds rude and all. I’m no spring chicken myself now, although Preston says I’m still more beautiful than any girl he’s ever seen, which is why I’m not allowed to dress all tarty, as it gives men the wrong idea and then they think it’s OK to come over and talk to me, try to buy me a drink. Only want one thing, he says, so best not to encourage them. When he’s out nights catching rabbits or fishing, I go upstairs and open the box of clothes hidden under the bed, things I’ve bought in charity shops, real pretty stuff that some elegant women must have given them, a long open-backed dress, a silk scarf that I try to make look nice but it never sits round my neck right. I pretend we’re going to a ball or some big party, where all our friends are drinking fancy wine and passing round trays with those small pastry things on, and couples are dancing or playing party games. I tie my hair up, put some make-up on and a few pieces of jewellery Preston let me keep, and I walk all sophisticated round the bedroom, pretending to talk to everyone, who all laugh at my jokes, which ain’t really funny, but it don’t matter cos we’re all friends and nobody judges us.
You looked so tired on the telly, as if you needed a really long sleep. You still have the same dog, I see. Or is it a different one? We have a Jack Russell, which Preston takes out rabbiting. It bit me once, so I didn’t feed it for several days. Not that I told Preston, he loves that animal more than anything. I want to get a cat, but it wouldn’t last five minutes with those two. Did you have any more children? The man on the programme didn’t say. I shouldn’t ask, I suppose. Me and Preston don’t have any. He says it’s my fault, that my insides don’t work properly, but how would he know? Perhaps he’s the one what’s broke. I get sad, knowing I won’t be a mam. Some-times I follow the pretty women along the seafront as they push their prams, making sure they don’t see me looking, or if they do I pretend I’m one of them, tell them mine is at nursery, which if I say enough times I believe it myself. Sometimes they let me put my hand in the pram, where if I’m lucky I’ll get a finger squeezed and a big gurgling smile, although one woman started shouting at me when I kept my hand there too long, and I tried to calm her down but there’s no helping some folk. Did I say, we live by the sea now, one of them little terraced cottages with a pretty garden? Each year a bit more of the coast falls into the sea, so nobody can sell them now. Our landlord tried to put the rent up last year, but Preston stood firm, told him no one else would live here, what with the damp. It’s the salty air apparently. If you walk out on the headland, it’s like you’re on an island, and there’s this blowhole you can stand by at high tide, and if you’re brave enough you look down in it until the last minute, the water explodes out and drenches you and your face tastes of the sea. Mostly though I just pick flowers along the path there. Apart from the wood burner, the house isn’t heated, so we snuggle up under a blanket with the dog on us. In winter Preston takes the truck out nights, fills it up with logs from people’s yards or from the pubs out on the moors. He got caught once, I think, cos the police came round, but nothing happened. I mean how do you prove a load of logs are someone else’s? I tell him we should be grateful for what we’ve got, that we don’t need to thieve stuff. I suppose everyone wants a little more than they have. He doesn’t know I’m writing this, he’d probably get one of his rages on. He’s better than he used to be, but when that red mist comes over him. The first time I seen his meanness was down by the allotments, you know, the ones off Cecil Street? Our Dad had one before he ran off, nothing fancy and not that he grew anything, just went there to get away from Mam. Used to just sit in his chair, watching the day go by. We used to go down there in the afternoons, when it was quiet, have a smoke and drink whatever Preston had taken from home. He told me he had something to show me that day. Like a present, I said. Yes, like a present. I was supposed to be in school still, but Preston said teachers had nothing to learn me that he couldn’t. They wrote my Mam, but I think she just gave up in the end, short of marching me there and tying me to the desk, there was nothing could be done. I wish I had gone to classes a bit more though. There’s a library few streets from here, a poster in the window saying free computer lessons, and I tell myself I’ll go in and ask, and learn stuff about the world, so I can better myself and come home and impress Preston, but I never do. That sounds funny, don’t it, impress Preston.
It was raining that day at the allotments, big fat drops like someone had torn a hole in the sky, and I remember slipping on the ground and Preston laughing at me, at the mud all up my trousers, and I laughed too but really I felt like crying, sat there in the mud, looking up at him as he grinned and swigged whisky. We walked down the paths, and every now and then Preston would jump onto a vegetable patch and start pulling up everything, potatoes and parsnips flying through the air, swedes he liked to play football with, onions which he’d throw at me. Sometimes there’d be shouting from across the other side and we’d have to run till my sides hurt and I couldn’t breathe anymore and Preston would tease me, tell me he’d leave me behind one day, and that perhaps I wasn’t cut out for the sort of life he had in mind for us, which apparently would involve a fair bit of running away. We walked to the far corner that day, where there were some sheds, and I could see he’d broken into one from the back, a hole just big enough for a small person to get through, which in those days he was. I was glad to get out of the rain, and Preston lit up a couple of cigarettes, passed me one and told me to sit down. Want some, he said passing the whisky, and I pretended to take a big mouthful, but didn’t really, although the fumes alone made me cough, which he thought real funny. Watching him then, the rain dripping off his fringe, smoking hard like some film star, it was the first time I knew I really wanted him, and despite what happened I let him have me later that night, in my room, hoping my mam and brother were asleep. I remember wondering, apart from the pain, what all the fuss was about. Still wonder even now, if I’m honest, and I’d like to say it doesn’t hurt like that first time, but sometimes it does. Afterwards, I cried a bit, told Preston I loved him, saying it beneath my breath so he couldn’t hear, cos he don’t like talk like that.
That day, in the shed, he picked up this hessian sack from the corner, its top tied with a boot lace, and placed it by my feet, the bag moving a little from inside like it had a will of its own. Open it, he said, and my heart pounded away like a good ’un and I didn’t know whether to be excited or afraid. Go on, he said, it won’t bite. The knot was tight but I got my nail in behind it until it loosened. There was this awful smell that made me gag, worse than the whisky, don’t mind if I never smell it again in a 100 years. At first, cos the rain had made it dark, I couldn’t tell what I was looking at. The cat stared up at me, real scared, and I wondered why it didn’t try to get out, but then I saw its legs was all limp, and that it weren’t well at all, and I thought how nice that Preston had rescued it, even though there probably wasn’t medicine in the whole world that could fix it. Can we keep it? I said. Course we can’t keep it, he said. It’s a stray. Probably got fleas and all. Best we put it out of its misery. He picked the bag up, looking at me all the time, telling me to stop crying, which I didn’t know I was. I hated the noise it made, or the lack of noise now I think about it, when he brought that spade down on it again and again, but I think it was the best thing to do, not that I could have done it. Later, after I’d let him have me, I wanted to ask about how its legs got all limp, where he found it, but I didn’t. I guess meanness just gets passed down. Preston told me once his father used to make him take a bath before caning him, so his skin was softer.
Do you still see your husband? The telly said you ain’t together no more, which made me sad. To go through all that and then to lose each other. It’s weird, but I guess in some ways it keeps me and Preston together. It’s not like there’s anyone else we can turn to, or tell. I st
ill love him. He was my first, so I’ve nothing to compare it to, but we’re happy in our own way. He’s had others, a couple since we met that he thinks I don’t know about, and there’s this girl two doors down that looks at him like she’d let him do anything, and I can tell he wants to. Will you have more children one day? Perhaps you’re too old now, though I read somewhere about a woman in her fifties, which is a bit disgusting when you think about it.
I wish Preston had stopped after the cat, so we didn’t have to move away. Sometimes I hope they’ll find us, bring us back, even though it means never seeing Preston again, leaving our cottage behind, never looking down into the blowhole again or picking flowers on the cliff path. Would they let me see my mam and brother one last time, do you think? Preston says he’d go down fighting. Not built for prison, he says. Don’t suppose I am neither. He isn’t a bad person really, he just goes too far sometimes.
I should go now, pop this in the post before he gets home.
I wish you could write me back.
Susie
An Arrangement
It is one of those late summer evenings in England – heady and languid, the garden’s drowsy scent marshalling in me nostalgia for the dozen or so Augusts we have spent here, seasons laid down deep in the brain’s circuitry, more felt than known. Of droning bees, drunk on one of the colossal lavenders behind the old rockery, the day’s heat subsiding yet still irrefutable. I picture the summerhouse – where swallows nest each year, where we would converge as afternoons lapsed, to imbibe each other’s days – its exterior, I am told, in disrepair. And beyond this, quilted fields stitched with hedgerows of yellowing hawthorn, the sparrow-haunted rowan richly berried, fragrant walks that should have been more prized at the time. The radio said our summers will become wetter now, last winter’s flooding commonplace as our climate enters a new phase, one we have cultivated, if the science is correct.
The low sunlight illuminating my wife’s shoulder as she sits at her dressing table is somehow both mellow and scalpel-sharp, some trickery of the new medication, I suppose, which, whilst inhibiting some of the pain, distorts reality a few degrees. She is precise in her movements, a well-honed routine to enhance a beauty that was, she insists, late to flourish and which is only now perhaps beginning to wane. Men age so much better, she is prone to say accusingly, although perhaps there is altruism here, in case on some level I am still preoccupied with how handsome or otherwise I remain. I want to speak, to deny the reminiscing further indulgence, but the moment is paralysing me beyond my own body’s regard for this. Not because of her imminent departure, a vignette that has occurred monthly for the past year; but there is something to be marvelled at in this dance we are able to perform (it would be simple for her to get ready in another room), as if my involvement, albeit one of mere observation, is somehow vital, consensual. Some months she even solicits my thoughts on a particular dress, a combination of jewellery I think works best, and I advise with due sincerity, delicate in my judgement, fulsome in praise. Perfume, though, is her realm alone, as if it speaks to a level of intimacy neither of us can tolerate, its selection seemingly flippant, a final flourish of decoration rather than the olfactory manipulation it aspires to be. Whether she imparts more scent than the times we dined out together is hard to say; perhaps further adornment takes place in the taxi, a courtesy extended to me, one of several that have formed unbidden.
‘You can ask me anything and I will tell you,’ she said at the start.
‘I know.’
And I have been tempted. Not from a rising paranoia or raging jealousy. More that I fear hearing such detail would arouse me on some level, allow a vicarious lust to play out, despite myself. But I don’t ask. As lovers in our thirties, I would have tore open any such rival, or at least threatened to, confronted him with animalistic fury before collapsing a tearful wreck. Such confrontation is beyond me now, but I sense no real desire for it. I am not so naïve to mistake this for some Zen-like enlightenment, or worse still a Sixties openness to communal loving. I always wondered how that played out in reality, unadulterated by the rose-tinting of hindsight. Was everyone who partook accepting of such frivolous hedonism, the sharing of orifices and organs, or was homicidal behaviour only kept at bay narcotically?
‘Are you OK?’ she asks. ‘You seem distant.’
‘I was just thinking,’ I lie. ‘Do you regret not having children?’
This isn’t a fair question and could be construed as my attempting to mar her evening.
‘Oh, darling, we’ve spoken about this.’
‘I know, but you might have changed your mind.’
We were trying, right up until I became ill, which I suppose was rather late in life, at least for her. Careers had consumed us, the time never right. And then when it was: not enough blue lines in the little window. Tests showed no reason for our fallowness; it was simply a matter of perseverance, of sending enough seed swimming in the right direction. But the next batch of tests we endured – I endured – were of another order entirely.
‘I’m content,’ she says. ‘I don’t really think about it these days.’
Absent of all segue she speaks of the dinner awaiting me, cauliflower cheese, that she’ll bring it in as she leaves. I make a joke about it being my turn to cook, but it’s an old, well-worn line and goes unacknowledged.
‘You’ve got your baclofen,’ she says.
‘Yes.’
‘And you can take more naproxen at ten o’clock.’
‘All two of them.’
Six months ago, when my mood found a new nadir, I began hoarding pills, with no more intent than to experience the sense of control it offered, some small reclamation of autonomy. Ever since she found them, their administration has been piously governed.
‘You never ask me,’ I say.
‘What you want for dinner?’
‘Whether I regret not having children.’
She sighs, a minute outbreath escaping.
‘Can we talk about this when I get home?’
‘Will that be before or after the sun is over the yardarm?’
I can’t help myself. I don’t even feel the level of spite this implies; it’s as if I want to try it on – being a shit – like a jumper.
‘I can’t cancel now. We agreed. If you don’t want me to go, you have to give me a few days’ notice. It’s courteous.’
This word seems to me inappropriate, their arrangement requiring a more squalid lexicon.
‘I want you to go,’ I say.’ I can sort myself out if you pass me some tissues.’
‘Please don’t be crude.’
It’s true, I can just about still, yet the thought fills me with weariness, the exhaustion of the thing, my mind the only reasonable place for sex to occur these days, and then only from habit. In the early years of incapacity we continued to make love, content in its gesture however unsuccessful the deed itself. And later, when this became impossible, she would use her hand, whisper lewd contrivances that led more to despondency than climax. Abstaining came wordlessly, a relief to us both.
And so my emasculation was complete. A man, in any true sense of the word, no longer. Whilst hardly the athlete, it has always been the loss of physical more than cerebral activity that I’ve felt more keenly. Who’d have thought batting at ten or eleven, plus eight overs of regulation off-spin for the village side ranked higher in my sense of worth than an associate professorship? Nothing like total debilitation to furnish a little perspective.
The blurred vision came at the end of a stressful week, where rumoured redundancies became reality, our department likely to bear the brunt, and so the early symptoms were neatly aligned with events at work. Medicine, I have learned, is a patient creature, never rushing to judgement, content in the knowledge time will out. And so a series of hoops must be passed through, each one narrowing, each one ruling out potential, usually less condemning causes. None of this was helped by my mild but well-documented hypochondria, which in the end even I clu
ng to. Tingling or numbness? Almost certainly nothing of concern, came the counsel. Fatigued? Aren’t we all. Even the disturbed balance prompted only rudimentary scrutiny, blood tests, talk of an MRI. But after the first seizure a neurologist thought it prudent to tap my spine for some of its fluid, a joyous procedure, which suggested my body, far from suffering the slings and arrows of modern life, had in fact turned on itself. Later a new vocabulary evolved: bedsores, converted bathroom, managing expectations. And how many people experience cannabis for the first time in their forties?
