‘You’re going to make me violent if you talk like that. Haven’t you got anything you can sell?’
‘Everything’s in his name –
everything
.’
‘How did that happen? Did you learn nothing from Guy Ritchie and Madonna?’
‘I’m his wife,’ I explained, ‘love, honour –’
‘–and get everything you can lay your hands on. Expecting cashback isn’t much to ask for ten years of terrible sex. Actually, you told me about the sex on the night of my thirtieth birthday.’
‘I remember. We drank two bottles of Slivovitz in the garden and you were sick into our fishpond. I wish I’d never found that earring.’
‘It’s better than having to pretend you still love him.’
‘But I do still love him.’
‘Darling, he was draining his dick into the flying waitress before slipping home and pressing it into the small of your back. We can take him down.’
Lou was happy to take revenge for all the wives in the world if necessary. She cracked the cap from another beer, slid it across the counter and patted my arm comfortingly. The radio DJ began to play Love Is In The Air. ‘God, this song’s such shit. Love songs are all lies. There’s only suffering and death in the air once a woman stops looking like she’s fun. That’s why you spend all your waking hours cruising malls, because you let shop-smiles replace the respect of a husband. If he ever showed you any.’
‘He did. It’s just... he’s busy and angry all the time. I’m at home, so I don’t have the kind of problems he deals with.’
‘Of course you do, you just don’t see them, sitting over there in your frilly little house full of frilly little things, burying yourself in books and TV shows. I’m not being rude, darling, but you’ve got absolutely no fucking idea about what’s really going on in the world. It’s changed a lot since you were locked up in the marital penitentiary.’
‘I’ve wasted my life. Seneca said that there’s nothing so ruinous to good character than idling away time at spectacles.’ I always remember things I’ve read when I start to get drunk. ‘Although I imagine he was talking about gladiatorial games rather than shopping.’
Lou started mixing a fresh cocktail. ‘If you’d spent as much time on a StairMaster as you have reading, you’d be able to split walnuts in your butt-crack by now instead of quoting somebody who’s been dead for fifty years. I really don’t get it. You’re the smartest person I ever met, you know shitloads of really long words, you could have been anything you wanted. I’ve seen you get a couple of drinks in you and go all lyrical and passionate, quoting Byron and shit, it’s like a cloud that comes over you. You could have done something special. You could have got out. Yet you settled for this. I just don’t understand.’
I stopped listening to Lou. Her words wavered past me like moths. I knew that once Gordon had made a decision there would be no negotiation with him, and that without money I would have to find a job. But I had no skills to fall back on. I didn’t dare go and see my mother, because she was waiting for affirmation that I had failed to keep my marriage together. When she heard that I had lost my baby boy, she called me and said: ‘If you can’t give him children, you can’t expect him to stay with you.’ Besides, Ruth was becoming lost inside her head. She tried using the phone to change TV channels, and put catfood in the washing machine. Her mother had been a cold Englishwoman of the old school. Ruth had confused distance with privacy and would let no-one, especially me, help her.
‘I don’t even want to go back to the house,’ I told Lou.
‘Well, darling, you can’t stay here. Mr. Charisma will be home in an hour, and I’ve got a fight booked with him.’
‘I don’t have the talent to hold down a real job. I’ll have to work in McDonalds or something.’
‘You’d be the oldest person there. They only employ easily duped children.’
‘Then I’ll do something part time. Something from home.’
Lou tipped the remains of the blender into her glass. ‘This isn’t the Victorian era, you can’t sew dolls for sixpences. Besides, you haven’t got a home any more, you haven’t got any money and you haven’t got a marriage. He’s got it all, including a new sex life. What are you going to do, go back and stand in the middle of the room again?’
Alarmed, I looked at the tiny gold watch Gordon had given me as a wedding gift. ‘I have to go home and cook his dinner. Just in case he comes back.’ I climbed down from my stool and made my way unsteadily across the road.
‘I want you to know you’re being pathetic,’ Lou stood in the middle of her front lawn shouting after me. ‘Stand up for yourself. Give him the divorce he wants, then get yourself a good lawyer. Have a massage and a joint an hour before the hearing, lie your tits off in court, I’ll coach you through it and we’ll split whatever we make. If you don’t, you’ll just stay here with a wandering husband and no money until you end up like one of those old dears who creep around Sainsbury’s with a fucking tartan wheelie-basket complaining about the price of fish, except that most of those are still happily married because they snapped up the last decent men in the sixties. I’m serious, June. You’re thirty next week. It’s a sign from God. This could be your last chance to get out alive. Don’t fuck it up!’
But I had already closed my front door.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Proposition
T
HE HOUSE HAD
changed. The pastel rooms with their bright corners, as soft and decorative as patterned paper towels, now looked alien and comfortless. It was like going back to someone’s house after attending their funeral.
When you’re just a housewife, you end up watching too much television, and I’ve watched a lot: celebrity makeovers, comedy quizzes, Top 100s, reality TV, chat shows that consist of TV personalities with the depth of balloon animals. I could run a restaurant or an airline from the knowledge I’ve gained. Worst of all, I got addicted to documentaries. Secrets Of The Pharaohs, Killers Of The Serengeti, Unexplained Weather, Jet Engines Of The 20th Century, Hitler’s Flying Saucers, The Boy Whose Skin Exploded, The World’s Heaviest Teen Mother. I’ve watched so many pseudo-science documentaries that I feel like I’ve been to a third-rate university. I leave the rolling news on all afternoon. I’m sure they interview the same people every day. Woman Outside School, Fat Girl On Sofa, Man In Shop Doorway, Welsh Pensioner In Strange Hat. I see the Sky anchorman reporting from Africa and think ‘horrible John Lewis shirt’, because I’ve touched a John Lewis shirt on a man but I’ve never been to Africa.
The tanned BBC weather girl was wearing a navy blue jacket with gold buttons and no blouse underneath. Lou was right – even she looked like she might be fun when she wasn’t pointing out incoming cold fronts. She waved an oracular claw across the British Isles to reveal a dirt-streaked whorl: wind, rain and plunging temperatures for the coming weekend. I opened a window, placed my hands over my heart and took a deep breath. It seemed hard to catch the air. The smell of frying steak sharpened the cool evening outside. Through next door’s kitchen window I could see Gordon sitting at the dinner table with his back to me, enjoying someone else’s cooking.
Shaking slightly, I returned to the lounge and emptied out the rubbish bin, then neatly arranged the pieces of credit cards on the table so that they looked whole once more. I don’t know what I thought I was doing. The one thing on my mind was what would become of me. I only knew the house and the few streets that constituted our neighbourhood.
I could recall every inch of the view from my windows, the threadbare limes and hornbeams against low-pressure skies, the dusty box hedges, the shadows condensing with the arc of the day. Every morning, the old lady opposite would kneel on a pink rubber pad in her threadbare front garden and snip invisibly at the grass surrounding a solitary rose bush. My home, like hers, had become my fixed point on earth. As a child I had fantasised of distant travel; instead, all movement had gradually ceased until I had almost reached a full stop. I existed in a handful of routes, from the house to the shops and back again, like a chicken or a bus, or an electrical circuit for a very basic appliance.
I patiently waited for Gordon to finish his dinner, hoping that he would come and talk to me. Some awful camp comic was on television asking a woman about her most embarrassing sexual experience. He wasn’t listening to a word she said, and kept repeating ‘A dildo?’ Mechanical laughter punctuated his lines as he greedily eyed the camera. I went to the window. In the street outside, an old man slipped on the kerb and fell over. There was no-one to help him up. I could have gone to his aid, but remained frozen on the spot. He managed to get himself onto his knees, but the contents of his grocery bag had spilled across the road.
A few minutes later, Gordon walked into the kitchen and stood at the sink surreptitiously picking his teeth. ‘I can’t stop,’ he told me. ‘I just wanted to let you know that it went very well.’
‘What went well?’ I asked, dreading the answer.
‘The people who saw the house. A middle-aged couple, they want to make an offer. Not proper Chinese, Asians or something. I wonder if I put it on the market too low. I thought you might prefer to stay with your mother for a while.’
‘I can’t go all the way to Leamington Spa.’ She had been living with her cantankerous sister since my father died. ‘Besides, I haven’t told her about us.’
‘Well, it’s time you did, isn’t it?’
‘Why can’t I just stay here?’
‘Well, you can...’ Gordon looked doubtful. ‘Only most of the furniture’s going tomorrow.’
‘What do you mean? Where’s it going?’
‘To auction. I told you, I have to act quickly. You’re not the only one who’s out of cash.’ He made a half-hearted attempt to look apologetic. ‘I have to go. Hilary’s got a stopover in Amsterdam and said I could go with her.’ He couldn’t get out of the house fast enough, as excited as a schoolboy on a date. ‘I’ll move the rest of my stuff out tomorrow, and I’ll leave you a couple of suitcases in the bedroom. Don’t worry about the house. I can keep an eye on it from next door.’
‘I thought perhaps we should talk about practicalities,’ I whispered.
‘You mean the money. Look, I’ll be fair, okay? I’ll help you out with the debt, get you into a rented flat. Don’t worry, just go to your mother’s and read your books and I’ll sort it all out when I get back. You might want to go through all your designer clothes, see what you still need. Put the rest on one side and I’ll include them in the auction. The cash could be useful for you.’
‘What else is going?’
‘They’ll take the furniture if we want them to. Why don’t you just leave out the things that have sentimental value?’
‘What about the things that have sentimental value for you?’
He thought for a hasty moment. ‘There’s nothing I want to keep. I’m going for a fresh start.’
He was whistling as he went out of the front door. I had never seen him so happy, caught up in the energy of making new plans. I wondered how we had managed to misjudge each other to such a degree. Across the street, I saw Lou’s front door open. She emerged carrying a Nike gym-bag with a rolled towel sticking out of it.
‘Can I come with you?’ I called.
‘I’m well over the limit,’ she warned me, throwing open the passenger door of her silver Saab. ‘If I go, you go.’
‘I just need some air.’ I climbed in and unrolled the window to let the smoke out.
‘Darren just came home armed with a bunch of fluorescent daisies and a box of Terry’s All Gold. I have a feeling he may be after intimacy. I had to get out before I was tempted to put ground glass in his coffee. Did you reach a decision about your future?’ Lou looked for a flat surface to stand her Rum Sour on and dug out her keys. At least she’d had the sense to pour her cocktail into a McDonald’s shake cup.
‘I guess that’s up to Gordon now. I’m not going to my mother’s house. She’d worm the truth out of me, and then we’d just fight.’
‘You can’t go on living in the house until he kicks you out. Have you no pride?’ Lou started the car and lurched away from the kerb.
‘I think he’ll just spend his time next door. He wouldn’t auction off the bed, would he?’
‘So that’s okay with you, is it, him flogging the furniture and moving in with the next door neighbour? You need to get away for a while, at least for the weekend.’
‘How? The weather’s going to be horrible and I’ve got no money.’
Lou flicked her cigarette end out of the window. ‘Listen, there’s someone I want you to meet. A girl at the pool, she works for some telecommunications firm out of town. Her name’s Julie, she’s off red meat, potatoes, bread and pasta because she’s having an affair with Malcolm, her boss, and she doesn’t want him to see her naked with the lights on until she hits target weight. They’re both married. She was moaning to me about not being able to go away with him because he’s paranoid about burglars. He’s supposed to be in New York on business over the weekend and she wants to be with him, but he doesn’t want to leave his flat unattended for some reason.’
‘I’m not sure I follow you.’
‘Let’s see if she’s there.’ She crunched the gears and turned out of the street. The old man who had fallen over was sitting on a wall, trying to get his breath back. His bag had toppled over again, sending apples and peaches into the gutter.
The gym was housed on the first floor of a converted Victorian swimming baths, a grimly beautiful building banded by frescoes of cavorting maidens. Instead of repointing the graceful sworl of late-nineteenth-century plasterwork in the reception area, the council had chosen to hang sagging plastic banners for sports drinks over it. There was an expensive modern gym in Hamingwell, but Lou had been banned from there for taking a kebab into the sauna.
‘Malcolm and Julie want to go away together,’ explained Lou as we headed for the cafeteria, ‘but the alarm system in his apartment building will be off. Malcolm wanted his wife to come up and stay there but she lives out of town and has to look after the dogs. They have this big house in the country. Malcolm’s loaded, runs some kind of consultancy on the side and has always kept a city flat as a shag pad, but his wife suspected so they had to stop using it. He bought a brand-new place to fool her, but the wife found out about that too, so the only chance they’ve got to be together is on business trips. Julie’s been on at me all week to find – hey, Julie.’