Thornbeetle
Venus De Mileage
CHAPTER 1
‘He who cuts bread unevenly
has been telling lies.’
Old Superstition
Today would be the same as yesterday and the same as the day before that. He would
write the first lines of a novel, then backspace over them until the screen was
blank again. That was what he did. He wrote. He was creative. Always had been.
It was what he was. He had managed to make a job of it, of his fictions.
But none of these, none of his published books, was so strange as truth. Was
his truth stranger than other people’s?
The words erased, he’d pour
himself a drink, something warming - it was heading for winter after all - and
spend the rest of the day in aimless recollection. He’d think about his next
book, visualise himself three quarters of the way through it; a satisfying
chunk of the manuscript already written, already bled into existence, and he
would think about her.
These famous (un-famous) first lines were always to do with her. It
had been like this for an age now. The novels, as mapped out in his head, would
have been about her, had he ever written them, bled them out. Everything was
about Her.
This house.
The creeper at the sitting-room window, the creeper she had
planted a few years before, had flourished with unreasonable enthusiasm and now
stole the light from what had once been her favourite room. She had said the
creeper was Virginia
He felt like night. He liked night. It
somehow absolved you of all responsibility. He had come recently to dislike day
– too much guilt associated with the waking hours. Guilt if you fell asleep, if
you didn’t work, if you didn’t go out, if you had a drink at an unreasonably
early hour. Guilt if you didn’t shower or get dressed.
The silly plastic ducks in the bathroom. Her silly ducks. He
could just throw them in the bin – they’d hardly quack protests. They didn’t
speak now, the ducks – she had been their voices. Quack. Crank!
That had been the problem, (had it? Was it so simple?) she wasn’t
like a grown-up, wasn’t a real woman. She was an adult child, idiotic. She had become
a child. She wasn’t what she seemed. She was ever-changing. She had become
infuriating, with her dolls and their houses - miniatures made him delirious -
and her fucking ducks. And now she was gone. But the dolls and the houses and the
fucking ducks remained. A torture. A reminder. A memory trigger he didn’t want,
didn’t need, couldn’t handle.
Some things you just couldn’t write about. There weren’t the words.
Yes, today would be the same as yesterday, and the day before that.
Erasing the words he had written had become a ritual. A symbolic rubbing out of
her. He’d start with some too obvious ‘body on the first page’ bollocks. Make
them want to read on, turn pages. Abandoning that, he’d sometimes be more
vague – stylishly odd and seemingly unstructured writing appealed to him – but
nothing held him. What was it to be, this novel that threatened? A weapon? All
the little words forming swords, barbs. Perhaps, but who would he slay with
them, with his mighty pen? Her? No. She was slain already. Had she existed
ever? She was gone. Not forgotten. It might be an exorcism, this phantom book,
but such bitterly constructed works always left a nasty taste and rarely reaped
financial rewards, unless of course you were monstrously famous and then, then
kiss-and-tell was a valuable commodity. But this was untellable, this tale, the
tale of him and the tale of her. The tale of them. It was too true – and
therefore too unreal, unbelievable. Too strange.
The scotch tasted cheap – it was cheap. But it worked its hot
magic on him. He knocked the first one back with a sigh. The second never felt
like that, but he would drink it anyway.
He made lunch, what she (at one point) would have called a
‘typical boy’s sandwich’, devoid as it was of garnish, consisting only of ham,
the white frills of fat left on, and lumpy pickle which forced holes in the
unevenly cut bread. Food made entirely for the stomach, nothing to thrill the
eye. Unfanciful. Undressed. Just fodder. Real. It didn’t matter, he wasn’t
going to stare at it, or admire it, or try to analyse it. He would eat it
standing up. He would eat it as he wandered through the rooms of the house. He
would drop crumbs down the front of his sweatshirt (weeks overdue for washing
and bearing the stains of his solitude and despondency). She wasn’t
there to tell him, jokingly, affectionately, that he was disgusting. She wasn’t
there to rush with kitchen paper to his aid when he smeared shit-brown pickle
on his jeans. She wasn’t fucking there. Not anymore. Where was she? Was she
anywhere? No.
He had expected to feel at least some sense of relief at her
absence. Things hadn’t been easy. Understatement.
He reminded himself, as no sense of relief could be felt: I can
drink beer in front of the TV, let the cans pile up. Behave like a real bachelor.
I remember how. I was one, once. I can watch laughably corny porn, read the
papers without being told I’m too serious. I can have one-night stands. I can
be free.
Yet he wasn’t free. He might’ve been if she’d simply walked out, if
she’d gone, dolls and ducklings marching and waddling behind her, but it hadn’t
been like that so he was stuck with her still; as a memory, a memory evoked by
a thousand different reminders. And she’d never be back for her things. She
wouldn’t need them. Her things.
The sandwich swallowed down, he went from room to room. She was in
every one of them. The sitting room, aside from the clawing creeper at the
window, had her mark on it. A large porcelain doll in a glass case stared at
him. Suspicious crystal eyes followed him. A cushion - now definitely to be
categorised as ‘scatter’ for the way he’d just flung it at the sofa instead of
placing it with deliberation as she had used to - was embroidered with
the words Home Sweet Home. God it made him sick. He could, he
supposed, burn the cushion, throw the ducks out. Or would that be wrong? Odd.
He didn’t know. He wasn’t used to this, hadn’t experienced anything like it
before. No, he couldn’t get rid of anything. He had to live with it. All of it.
And the memories. Let go. I can’t.
Why not?
The kitchen.
She was on the fridge. A witty, wordy magnet. Another dreadful
slogan - Toys, Not Just For Children. And a promotional flyer for some
lunatic fayre she’d been planning to go to. It’s always a fayre with a y, isn’t
it? The Big World of Miniatures - somewhere on the South Coast
“Why not come with me? I
know you say it’s not a man thing but you know lots of the girls’ husbands go
along. Some of them make things, miniature little cars, lawnmowers, garden
benches.”
Pretence.
He’d said no, but admired her for trying.
How manly that was… lawnmowers, cars, benches. Amidst all the
shrunken femininity of the ‘little housey’ world were men who made mannish
stuff. Bullshit. Yes, it was a nice try, but she’d annoyed him with her ‘miniature
little’. Why use two words when one would do? The writer in him cringed at
her mistake, a mistake made all the worse, more grating, for its having been
made on purpose. Everything about Dolly was, and had become, increasingly, ‘on
purpose’.
The dining room: her choice of furniture, his choice of paint on the
walls. So, faux Chippendale then, against a backdrop of rough terracotta. A
mismatched room. But the one he liked best. It at least had the comforting
merit of housing his desk and his beloved if temperamental computer and his bookcase
of dog-eared reference books. She’d complained about the desk. It disturbed her
eye. She wouldn’t have minded, she’d said, if the desk, like her chosen dining
table and chairs, had been something stylish. “But that old thing,” he recalled
her words with a horrible clarity now, “is only fit for the rubbish tip.” Her
little joke; he’d acquired the piece from the rubbish tip in the first place.
It was of oak, bleached now by time and lack of attention, and had the dry look
of a neglected elephant, or a rhinoceros. It seemed plaintively to plead for
wax or linseed oil and yet was perfectly itself, perfectly real. An unmade-up
piece. Nude. No deception. He loved it. Its runners had collapsed and so the
drawers were awkward, groaning when you opened them, groaning louder upon being
forced shut. The leather insert, evidently once a rich red, like wine, was
parched of pigment now. His computer system sat atop this relic of a desk with
a smug incongruity. Old meets New. Old doesn’t always like it, but New seems to
gain a youthful innovative power from the union. For the most part they’d lived
in peace, the ancient desk and the modern computer. A harmony of sorts.
Yesterday hand in hand with today. Amity. It was only the people in the house
who hadn’t lived so united. Him and Her. This made him laugh. If
He were the old desk, with the worn edges and the see-able, knowable, history,
then She was very much the new computer, a modern invention, its systems constantly
in need of updating, renewed every year or so, or sometimes every few months if
an unexpected need for an upgrade occurred. No, he and she had not lived
entirely harmoniously, not from the start, and not, certainly not, at the end.
The house was hollow with their presence, with the way they were, the way they
together, but separately, seemed to occupy its rooms and not-quite fill its
spaces. The way they slept, together, but so very apart. They hadn’t even had
the diffuser of animals - a dog, perhaps a cat or two. Weren’t cats renowned
distracters? Couldn’t they be relied upon to skitter up the curtains during a
marital row, or fall, mewling madly, into rubbish bins, baths, bowls of fruit?
Weren’t they like worried little children who tried to make jokes if the Mummy
and the Daddy were cross? Were they? He didn’t know. They hadn’t had cats. They
hadn’t had children. It wasn’t like that. They weren’t like other
‘couples’. He wasn’t sure now what they had had, what they were like, or what
they had been. A couple. Two people. One plus one equalling… what? There
was a vague sense, a distant feeling, that he and Dolly had once been
affectionate. But bitterness ate the greater part of this sense away now, so
although he could vividly remember first meeting Doll and even remember that he
thought her very lovely and intriguing, he could no longer make his heart jump
or his stomach lurch as he thought it must once have done, at the thought of
her. His heart only ached. And his stomach turned. It was all too sickening.
The realities of the relationship, those long drawn-out, daily-suffered
realities, had swept the first desperate blood-thumping days of imagined passion
and very real love quickly and efficiently away. Love was dead. Did love
actually die or just reach, after a series of blows, a state of torpor? What
was love anyway, it is varying forms? And passion? The passion never quite –
well, thank God for that. This death, the death of him and her, had brought a
sort of mourning. But there had been no body to bury or burn. It hadn’t been a
time for flowers. He felt… what? Bitter, guilty… Confused. Sick. Unreal.
There were fewer
doll-related objects in the dining room than elsewhere in the house. Not so
much of the twee, but some evidence of it in the astragal glazed oak cabinet
behind the door. Dolls’ shoes, as in shoes for dolls. Not her
shoes. Would you believe it? A child, he thought, might enjoy a moment’s
intrigue with such things. Look, see, fairy footwear. Spoken in a
conspiratorial whisper. Magic. But fairies probably didn’t wear shoes made of
leather, diamante sling-backs or the like. And there had been no child to
delight. It was just sick. Sickening. Some invented childhood desperately
caught, trapped behind glass.
They’d eaten God-knew-how-many meals in this room that overlooked
the garden. At first breakfasts, lunches and dinners. Then, later, horrifyingly
staged teas during which she would pour Earl Grey from a cottage pot and offer
him another cake with the gracious airs usually put on by small girls who are
entertaining teddy bears. She had taken to wearing an apron. A floral one. It
had been a gift. From Mrs Ranger next door.
“I always wear a housecoat or an apron, but people don’t these days.
Heaven knows why. People seem quite happy to ruin their clothes.”
He left the room, slamming the door angrily on his way out. The
small shoes in the oak cabinet shuddered on their shelves. Cats, had there been
any, would’ve been running up the walls by now. A dog, a dog with any sense at
all (and they all had sense didn’t they?) might now be sitting, ears pricked
up, eyes fixed on a particular spot, freaked.
Thankfully there was no dog, no cats.
The hallway,
nothing so her here.
The paintings on the walls were his.
She hadn’t minded that.
She didn’t sit in the hallway. Didn’t have to look at the ‘heavy-handed’ works
he had both collected and painted during his bachelorhood. Bachelorhood? The
wrong word really. For he and she had never married. Of course not. Singledom
then. Yes, singledom would do if indeed it was a word. He wasn’t sure, he
wasn’t sure of anything much these days. His mind was woolled over, his thoughts
wadding-packed inside his head. He was seeing all the words as underlined red
in his mind. He had, for as long as it mattered, struggled with words. It was
as if, even now, when writing, he had to spit them out. Work on them, roll them
around in his head, in his mouth, see them, before typing them, speaking
them, thinking them. Puking them up and out. Bleeding.
Kipling had said, Words are, of course, the most powerful drug
used by mankind. And what a drug, he thought. One that could intoxicate
you; or choke you with an ‘and’ or a ‘the’, one that could make an adjective
stick tight in your throat, a noun look stupidly invented when written, a vowel
appear ridiculous and misshapen on the printed page. And wasn’t it ironic (he
went on like this in his head) that he, he who had struggled with words,
now made his living stringing them together, endlessly stitching one to another
and then to another, to write stories. To make things up. Created worlds. The
unreal made real. Illusions. The unreal – so much more believable, saleable,
profitable, than truth.
The stairs.
Her blue carpet, was it Alice
He’d read somewhere, or heard – he couldn’t recall the source - that
individual writers each had a tendency to a particular sense. The ‘visual’
writer would devote a higher percentage of words to how things looked. The
‘audio’ writer paid more attention the sounds around him. And, he surmised,
reaching the top of the stairs, there must be writers who innately gave
themselves, and their creativity, over to the smells of the world.
He was most definitely
visual, had to work hard to give descriptions of sounds an authenticity, and
yet the blue of the carpet defeated him.
No. Wrong. Alice Blue was paler, peacock more vibrant. This was, if
anything, Crayola blue. Unsubtle. The
sort of blue the kinds of women who hadn’t thought, or couldn’t afford, to go
to colour consultants wore slicked over their eyelids.
Mrs Ranger, he annoyed himself by even thinking of her, jazzed up
her crepe-skinned lids in this way, achieving nothing more in his opinion, than
to give herself the appearance of an aged mandrill. Lips wine-red like new
bruises pursed in condemnation, plumb-coloured cheeks dusted over with powder
that showed her facial hair as peachy down, and the eyebrows, the natural ones
at least (had they been scraped away or simply disappeared with age?) were
replaced daily with startled arches – always drawn on with a pencil - too dark
and heavy to simulate nature. Not real. A fake look of surprise.
Mrs Ranger was in her neat garden now. He could see her from the
landing window that overlooked his and the next-door plots. She was retrieving
long-crisped sheets from a whirly-gig washing line, standing in pink slippers
on three stone slabs inset into the lawn for that very purpose. She didn’t
‘hold’ with tumble dryers – they encouraged germs. She wasn’t ‘a believer in’ washing
machines, either. He’d been told countless times that she’d done her laundry by
hand for forty years and never saw anyone get sheets whiter. “Bit o’ Blue,” she
told him one day. And when he hadn’t listened or appeared remotely interested,
she said, “I’ll pop some through the door - for Dolly.” And she had. About a
week or so later. The Bit o’ Blue had arrived with a disapproving thud on the
doormat, a small disc of something wrapped in striped vintage style paper. Reckitts Blue. For making sheets whiter,
bluer. For making things look fresh, clean, desirable. Mrs Ranger must’ve
thought herself solely responsible for keeping him and his ‘better half’
sleeping on whiter-than-white sheets. No matter that their sheets were pink,
(Christ), Dolly’s choice, obviously. Mrs Ranger, or DeRanged as
he had sometimes privately referred to her, was on a mission to up
standards.
He’d thrown the rather
damp looking little packet of Reckitts
into the junk draw in the kitchen and made himself a coffee. He’d thought no more
about it. It was months ago, in the summer. Last summer? Whatever. He’d never
told Dolly about it. No point. They didn’t have white sheets, and Mrs DeRanged
wouldn’t be any the wiser, they didn’t hang their washing in the garden to dry,
they used a tumble dryer - may all the Gods strike the pair of them dead - and
anyway, Dolly had said it was embarrassing to put your clothes outside.
“Especially your smalls. I mean, we’re overlooked here, I wouldn’t want the
neighbours looking at my smalls.”
He hated the term ‘smalls’ but it sounded right from doll-like,
doll-loving Dolly. As she was then, the Dollyish person she had become. Smalls.
Those tiny pairs of knickers made of string that she couldn’t possibly have
found comfortable, and the hardly-worth-wearing bras she’d favoured, all hung
on a line - like secrets you’d forgotten to keep safe - for all the world to
see. No, that wasn’t Dolly. She wouldn’t have wanted her secrets out, blowing
in the wind. She was too private for that, too guarded. She had even used to
conceal herself from him for fuck’s sake. He who knew – he who knew so many things - pretty well everything, he
supposed - about her. He who was the person closest to her in the world.
Despite this, Doll always got changed into her nightie (her term) in the
bathroom before coming to bed. She locked the door when she bathed lest she’d
have to suffer the horror, the indignity, of him seeing her ‘privates’, a
privilege reserved only for the un-quacking troop of plastic ducks. He laughed
now, a resigned laugh, remembering the times he’d knocked on the bathroom door,
the faint aroma of rose and lavender creeping out in a steamy mist from under
the door, begging to be let in. He’d needed a pee, or worse, and this house had
no separate WC. He imagined others with lovers - sensual open beings who would
rise, willing, from the foam of their tubs to let their partners into their
sanctuary, for a piss or otherwise. But no, such people, those lovers of his
imagination, would not in the first place have locked themselves away with a
trio of ducks. Those women, whose privates would not always have been
kept private would bathe with abandonment, probably in champagne or some
sensual glistening oil in full view of him. In full view of the world. Real
women.
Dolly never opened the door, never let him in. She would finish her
ablutions (again, her newly adopted terminology) pull the plug and scurry,
be-turbaned and be-towelled, past him into the passageway and along to the
bedroom. There were never complaints, neither from him, nor from her. It was
just the way things were, the way they had become. It was what the two of them
had grown to be.
He thought, If I wrote this
no one would believe it.
Once Dolly did call out from the bedroom. He heard her bath water
gurgling like a throaty monster on its release. “I think Little Duck is stuck
in the plug hole.” And she’d been right, the littlest duck, sucked down into
the discarded rosy water, had his beak in the hole and his arse up and
twirling. Releasing the toy had been strange. It occurred to him that this
garish thing had been closer to Dolly’s body, the workings of that body, the pulses
of it, the tick-tock of it, than he had been, ever. He lifted the plastic
yellow creature from the vortex, the plug monster groaned, then sighed, and all
was quiet for a while but for the sound of his own stream of urine hitting the
sanitised water in the bottom of the pan.
He and Dolly, at that point, had been ‘together’ three years. He
remembered working this out at the time, but wasn’t sure if she had made the
calculation. He shook himself, saw the final drips of piss off, washed his
hands and went into the bedroom.
Doll was already in bed. Only the dim bedside lamp (his side) was
on. She had the duvet pulled close up to her neck, her hands, Kilroy (Chad
He said, slipping in under the sheets beside her, “Do you want me to
make love to you, Doll?”
He didn’t look at her.
She didn’t look at him.
The question echoed in both their heads. Neither of them seemed to
breathe, then finally…
The answer was no.
And the answer was yes.
The answer (unspoken) was: I want you to want to make love to
me, with me.
The silent question was: Why didn’t he want that. Why?
He just couldn’t. That was all. Couldn’t feel that.
Three years. Three whole years together. Unmarried. There was never
an official anniversary, so they didn’t celebrate. It would have seemed
strange, false, to do so, to light candles, to make merry in respect of what
had become a farce, a sham. Three years. They had not had sexual intercourse.
They had not… well there had been nothing.
But he’d offered,
suddenly, without meaning it or wanting to, politely:
Do you want me to make love to you?
As if that was the
perfect way to mark their three-year union of celibacy.
Do you want me to make you a cup of tea?
That might have sounded more genuine.
Do you want me to re-grout the tiles in the bathroom? Even that might come across more passionate.
Do you want me to make love to you? He
did, then, feel love for Dolly. He just wasn’t sure how to express it.
He wasn’t even sure if he was capable of doing so, under the circumstances.
He turned off the light. Stared into the dark while his eyes
adjusted. He wanted to speak, to say: I would love you, that way,
if I could. Believe me, I would. But he said nothing, and after a while, a long
while, the silence turned finally to the half-hum of pre-sleep. Doll was
already away. In his dozing state he was aware of her talking, as she did when
she dreamt, in the voice that didn’t seem to quite fit her. It was an unguarded
voice that made her unknown and unreachable and yet somehow more knowable and
real. It was her natural voice, a hesitant voice, a voice with depth, and it in
could be heard… truths.
He’d wondered,
oddly, even at the time, what Mrs Ranger would make of such sexual abstinence.
She and her Ralph had enjoyed healthy relations. This knowledge, like the
advice about white sheets, the lectures about tumble dryers and washing
machines, and the warnings about germs, had been generously and eagerly
dispensed over the garden fence. She’d been enquiring as to the possibility
that he and Dolly might consider…children. “Not that I’d mind, like, but you
know I moved here, after my Ralph passed on, because it’s a lovely quiet place
and I like my garden kept nice. The thought of boys and footballs and all that
kind of thing is a worry.”
He’d wanted to tell her to shut up, to say, ‘Look Mrs DeRange, Mrs
ReArrange-everyone’s-fucking-lives, there’s no chance of boys and balls or girls
and balls for that matter because my wife, as you have mistakenly referred
to her previously, well, she can’t, I can’t, we don’t… ’
What would he have said?
Our union is unconsummated?
No, too technical, remote. It explained nothing.
She won’t have sex, then, or can’t? I won’t have sex. Can’t. What?
What could he have said? There was nothing to say. There weren’t the
words. No one, certainly not Mrs Ranger, would understand. It wasn’t like that.
He and Dolly – they weren’t like other people.
But that was, anyway, how he knew that Mrs Ranger and her Ralph
(bless his hale and hearty, well-sexed soul) had had healthy relations. He
didn’t speak about his nonexistent sex life, but she at least had had
one to recall. She did so now.
Her eyebrows seemed to have been painted on to make her look even
more surprised than usual and she said, very plainly, “We were very close,
enjoyed each other, but we never had children, it just didn’t take. I suppose
that’s why I’m unaccustomed to mess and noise, always striving for order, me.
People who’ve had little ones have to let go of the idea of proper tidiness or order.
There are those who don’t, mind, but they make nervous creatures of their
young.”
He found Mrs Ranger,
suddenly, extraordinarily, fascinating. He wanted to laugh. These, in all the
years of their starched, neighbourly, over-the-fence civility, were the most
sensible words she had ever spoken, although he was struck by her use of the
words ‘creatures’ and ‘young’. All very wildlife documentary. There’d been a
spate of Attenborough and animals on TV recently, that might explain it.
She went on. “My sister Bess had children, two of them, dear small
things. I only saw them as very little ones. We, Bess and me, we didn’t see eye
to eye. Lost contact way back. She married more than once.
“But they weren’t happy, those children. I knew that, knew they
couldn’t have been. Not with her, and him and the way they carried on. Course,
they have help for families like theirs now, but it’s not right, is it?
Children should be able to play and get dirty. They should be allowed to make
mistakes. See, that’s what I mean… if you have any children, eventually.
I shouldn’t mind them coming in to look at the flowers, that sort of thing.”
He said,
“It’s not on the cards.” Then, stupidly, as if there could be any comfort in
the words, anything positive, he said, “It might have been a blessing that you
and your Ralph didn’t have children.” Immediately he felt like a bastard. He
was a bastard. He was, inwardly, stewing because he had no sex life, because
his life with Dolly was not what it appeared to be, because it was confusing,
and this woman who painted on a false face because she was afraid her real
feelings might show if unmasked, was confiding in him. He said quickly, “It doesn’t
suit everyone, having children.”
“No,” said
Mrs Ranger, “but it is lovely to think of them in a garden isn’t it?”
It seemed
an odd thing to say in the light of her fears of boys and balls. He said,
chirpily, “So long as they don’t savage your hydrangeas, eh?”
He noticed the way the flowers, living things, grew in her garden,
the way that wild birds were catered for with hanging bags of nuts, greasy fat
balls, and wooden houses. He saw frail half-given-up plants assisted by poles
and ties, and her waste-not-want-not compost heap on which the shell of her
morning egg and her pile of teabags had been religiously placed, as always. He
saw all this and he thought, Mrs Ranger is a nurturer; she might well have made
a good mother if she’d been given the chance. He thought briefly about his own
mother, and could hardly remember her face. It had been such a long time.
Mrs Ranger, her outdoor tasks for now attended to, went to go back
inside. Her brows still gave her the appearance of surprise but her distant eyes
conveyed something – alteration had taken place, and he saw something else, it
was pain, and he felt disgusted with himself for being, as he saw it, the cause
of it. She waved a farewell to him and said, quietly. “One is nearer God’s
heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth.”
Funny. He didn’t believe in God and he hadn’t wanted to cry at the
time. But now…
He was losing it. He was going mad. He didn’t want to think about
Mrs Ranger. Which was why, all this time later, he was annoyed that he could see
her from the landing window. He felt a twist inside him – conscience. It had
been a stupid comment and he’d made it thoughtlessly. Since then he’d not
exactly seen less of Mrs Ranger – she was daily in her garden tending to either
leaves or laundry, close to whatever god it was she thought watched over her -
but she’d seemed less willing to make conversation. Their communication had
been reduced to the odd nod or comment about the nip in the air. He watched as
she folded a tablecloth and two anti-maccasars. She placed the items with pride
on top of the pile in her laundry basket before hurrying inside. He heard her
back door creak open and shut with a bang. The annoyance in him swelled. There
was the sudden urge to confide in her, but he couldn’t. She wouldn’t understand
such things. She wouldn’t. He hardly understood them himself. He didn’t
understand his life, or his feelings.
He went downstairs. There was a piece of the pickle from his
sandwich stuck in his tooth. He’d have to see the dentist, something felt amiss
there. A piece of filling slipped loose maybe. Something odd there, anyway.
Back downstairs the white of his computer screen awaited him
expectantly. Write something, it screamed.
He did.
He wrote: My wife is dead
Then he erased the words and poured himself another drink.
He wrote the same words again, this time changing the font from
Times New Roman – standard typescript stuff – to the more comic childish Chiller.
My wife is dead
It looked ridiculous. A gory pun. Like a fake severed finger with
the too-red blood and the too obviously plastic sinews spilling out.
He backspaced the words away. Removed the joke. It wasn’t funny. He
wasn’t laughing.
The words weren’t true anyway – she hadn’t been his wife. And she
wasn’t exactly dead.
The second scotch never was as good as the first but he would drink
it anyway.
To be continued
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