When they were babies Matt was the beautiful one. I used to stare at him in the crook of my arm and look at the pearly bubble of spit on his sleeping mouth and wonder what he’d say when he began to speak. I couldn’t imagine being separated from him for an hour.
I roll over in the deep water, take a deep breath that lifts me, put down my head and kick out for the rim of land.
‘You know what it was I couldn’t take in the hospital?’ asks Michael.
‘No, I don’t know.’
‘It was the smell. All those guys packed in together like a Zoo.’
‘You’d think you wouldn’t notice it after a while.’
‘No. It was always there. You’d shower and an hour later you’d smell it on yourself again. And there’s the smell of the drugs. It comes out in your sweat. I used to think if I walked out and went into a bar everyone would know where I’d been. They wouldn’t know how they knew it, but they’d move away all the same.’
When Michael catches sight of me in the water he begins to run back along the sea-wall, even though he must have seen I was swimming strongly. He crashes down the bank of pebbles. I am in my depth already, and I stand with the water at my shoulders.
‘Jesus. I thought there was a problem there, Simone. What the hell were you doing out there?’
‘I’m fine. I’m used to the water.’
But I am tired to death. My knees hurt, and I have to climb the steep bank where it falls away into the water. I turn on my back and scull in until I’m right by the pebbles. They slide away underfoot as I try to stand. The pebble bank is too steep. On a rough day you’d be thrown up against the stones. My legs shake as I come out of the sea. The air touches me and the wet on my skin turns to cold. My feet are numb and slow, blundering for footholds.
‘Let me help you.’ He holds out a hand but I don’t take it. I look up the beach for the cairn of stones where I left my clothes, but I can’t see it. My skin runs into gooseflesh, and the wet tangle of hair at my neck sends shivers trickling down my back.
‘Where’re your clothes?’
‘I put them up there somewhere.’
‘You want my jacket round you till you find them?’
‘It’s too wet.’
I clamber slowly up the beach, lugging my legs as if they are separate weights.
‘Someone might come,’ says Michael. I turn and stare at him.
‘Someone might come? So what? Someone might see those photographs too, Michael. Isn’t that what you want? I thought that was what this was all about.’
I shake my hair back and squeeze the water out of it. The drops run down my shoulders in a domestic way, just as they do after I’ve washed my hair. It isn’t raining any more, and there is the cairn of stones, where I left my clothes. A grey heap that might have been there for a hundred years.
‘Aren’t you cold?’
‘I’ll get dressed in a minute. I need to dry off first.’
‘You’ve really changed,’ says Michael.
I laugh. ‘Michael, this is what having a couple of kids looks like. And being twenty years older.’ I know what he’s seeing.
‘You look OK,’ says Michael. You look fine.’
I kneel and begin to unpack the cairn of stones. I have my back to him for the first time. It’s not because I trust him. But it’s strange to realize that after all this time I can still be naked with him easier than with anyone else I’ve ever met. It’s strange that everything else can change, and that doesn’t change. He makes me feel easy. Easier now than then, too, because I’m not trying to please him any more. He is still the man I knew.
A pebble slithers out from under his foot. He is right behind me, but I don’t look up. I keep on moving the stones. I know he won’t touch me yet. I think how strange it is that another man can have all the qualities Michael’s never had, and yet it’s Michael I’m easy with, not him. I rummage my clothes out from under the stones. The stones fall on one another with a sharp, quick sound.
‘It’s pretty quiet around here,’ says Michael.
‘Yes, it always is. That’s why I like it.’
I pick out my jeans, T-shirt, sweater, bra and pants. They’ve all kept dry inside the waterproofs. My boots are full of little stones. I shake them out and the stones spatter on my thighs, sharper than I expected. I flinch. Michael comes forward. He is kneeling beside me, not close enough to touch. The ground rises a little in front of us, towards the cairn. Michael puts his hands on the stones, flat, palms down. He leans forward, rocking his weight forward. His head sinks down. There is the back of his neck, worn like the rest of his skin with years of tan. I shift a little. Some drops of water run off the ends of my wet hair and onto his skin. They trickle around the side of his neck and disappear.
After a while Michael pushes himself upright. He turns and I see the pupils of his eyes shrink as they meet the light. He must have had his eyes shut. He is too close now for me to see any expression on his face. Only the spread of the lighter iris as the black pupil retreats. He puts out a finger and tracks the silvery stretch marks on my left breast. He runs it around the stiff coldness of my nipple.
‘Two kids,’ he says.
‘You didn’t have any children?’
He shakes his head. ‘I took care of that,’ he says. You’ve got those marks on your belly too.’
‘I got really big, with Joe. He weighed nearly ten pounds.’
He is following the marks, where my skin goes into folds. His knuckle grazes my navel and I jump.
‘You OK?’
I nod.
‘I think skin’s the thing that changes most. I can’t tan any more, my skin won’t take it. It’s the drugs. Can you move your knee?’
I move my knee, opening my thighs.
‘You want to go in there?’ he asks, inclining his head towards the pillbox.
‘No. I don’t like it. It feels shut in.’
‘Me neither.’ He didn’t say any more about it then, but later on I understood what he was remembering. ‘So this is OK?’
‘I don’t want any more little babies, Michael.’
‘That’s no problem. I’ve got something in my pocket.’ He feels me stiffen. ‘I always carry them, Simone.’
‘Well, that’s nice.’
‘And you’ve got these little marks on your thighs too. Where’d they come from?’
‘I don’t know. They just came each time I lost weight after the babies were born.’
‘You know, Simone, if I take off this wet stuff I’m afraid you won’t like what you see. I’m not like I was. I’m forty-eight years old and I’ve got a big beer belly.’
‘Do you like what you see?’
‘You know I do.’
He stands up. A shudder of cold passes through him as he kicks off his trainers. He’s been in his wet clothes too long.
He is right: he is not the same. He is a heavy man now, the kind of man you’d find in a diner, eating fast before driving on. He has a blue-collar body that would fool anyone who didn’t know him. He has thick shoulders and a belly that spreads over the belt of his jeans. Under the jacket his clothes are drier than I thought they would be. There are stains of wet on the shoulders where the water’s come in through the cloth of the jacket, and his jeans are sodden from the thigh down.
He undoes his belt and flies, and pulls off his jeans, then his underpants. He unbuttons his shirt slowly, as if we’ve got all the time in the world, then tugs his T-shirt up over his head. There is a moment when his head is caught in the cloth and he can’t see me. I stare at the place where his heart is, covered with flesh. His body is exposed, his penis thick and erect. Then the T-shirt drops on the pile of clothes and he hunkers down on the uncomfortable stones beside me.
‘I’ll spread out the clothes so we can lie on them,’ I say. ‘These stones are too sharp.’
I have never fucked a fat man before. But this fat man was waiting for me, inside the bones of the Michael I used to know. His flesh draws me into it, as
if I am entering him too, coming into him at the same time as he comes into me. He is much warmer than I’d thought he’d be. It’s the weight: a fat man doesn’t get so cold. He smells of last night’s beer and smoke, and this morning’s sea air.
It’s awkward, arranging ourselves between his weight and the pebbles. He folds up his jeans and puts them under my hips, and we have his shirt and mine to pad my shoulder-blades. You’re pretty thin, Simone. I don’t want you to get hurt. That’s where you get the pressure.’ He is very practical. And then he is right there, his eyes open, pinning me to the moment and what we are doing. His pupils are wide now, as if we’re in a dark room. He moves a little sideways to adjust his weight and then he plunges deep into me as if he doesn’t know where he is or where I am, as if he might be going anywhere. I remember that he has always done that. I remember how he swam towards me in the dark, in the tight embrace of the sleeping-bag. He breathes the same, his breath rising, catching. That’s how it always was. His flesh laps over mine, thick and warm, smelling of motel shower gel. And under the bland lemony scent there’s his body smell, that hasn’t changed at all.
Afterwards we don’t move away from one another for a while. One of his arms lies across me, and the bulk of his left side weighs me down. He turns his head and says, You feel a lot different now you’ve had kids.’
‘You’re joking. You don’t really remember.’
‘Sure I do. That’s the kind of thing I do remember. You really let me into you this time.’
‘There’ve been two babies going the other way, that’s what makes a difference.’
‘It’s not just that. Hey, you’re shivering.’
‘I stayed too long in the sea. I’m going to have to get dressed.’
I dress quickly, though I don’t want to. I am cold and clumsy and aching, as I struggle into the clothes. I’ve been much too long in the sea. With a nicety I didn’t expect, Michael is burying the condom we’ve used, under the stones. He doesn’t seem bothered by the cold. He lies back, folds his arms behind his head and says, You know what it was I couldn’t take in the hospital, Simone?’
That’s when he talks about the smell of men packed in together, making their lost circuits of the garden among the flowers that someone has planted to cheer them. I can guess what kind of flowers they would be. Too stiff, too bright, without a scent to trouble the senses back to life. The patients would troop back indoors and the smell of the wards would cover them.
‘My father wouldn’t go into hospital,’ I say abruptly. That’s why he died.’ For the first time it occurs to me that my father didn’t have a choice either. He didn’t choose to leave us. I’ve been told it so many times, but always I’ve received it with a sour reticence in my spirit. This time it goes home.
‘There’s a smell men have,’ Michael goes on. ‘You don’t notice it outside, not even when you’re jammed up together in the subway. Because when you’re inside all you’ve got is your smell and your shit. You’re a piece of meat. Sometimes you believe you can smell yourself rotting.’
And there’s his body, stretched out on the stones. The same body that went through those years, and somewhere in there the body I knew twenty years ago, and recognized as soon as it touched mine. He is right: those are things you don’t forget. Michael could make me feel like velvet. He could draw the juice out of me like syrup running down a tree.
He has a ridge of scar on the fleshy ball of his right shoulder. I touch it. ‘Was that from smashing up the store?’
He moves his head slightly, sideways. ‘That was before. Some kid out of his head on crack. I didn’t see he had a knife. He said he thought I was someone else.’ He smiles without opening his eyes.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Sure I’m serious. You know me.’
‘That’s why I don’t know what to believe.’
‘I just tell you what I think you want to believe.’ He stretches up his arms as if to embrace the sky. ‘I like it here. I could really get to like this place.’
‘It’s not your place, Michael. You’ve got to go.’
‘You don’t have a knife there, do you, Simone?’
‘A knife?’
‘Somewhere down in the pocket of your jeans maybe. Or in your jacket?’
‘If I had, you’d have seen it before now.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Why would I want to hurt you?’
‘Don’t be a hypocrite, Simone.’
‘I don’t think I’m a hypocrite.’
‘You’re not a hypocrite when you’re fucking, for sure.’
I kneel beside him. ‘Listen, Michael. I’m not a game for you to play with. What I am is a woman who’s got two children to bring up, a husband without a job, bills to pay and work to do. You don’t like it, but it’s my life and it’s none of your business. I’m not going to let you screw it. I can’t see any reason why you’d want to screw it.’
‘We want to screw each other, and that’s the truth,’ says Michael. ‘Isn’t that the truth? Isn’t that the best truth you’ve heard in a long while?’ He looks at me straight, and I think he’s entirely serious, then he smiles his teasing, lazy smile. I sit back on my heels. ‘Not for me,’ I say after a time.
‘I really, really liked it with you, Simone. If there’s a knife in your pocket, now’s the time. I’ll die happy.’ He shuts his eyes.
‘I’ve told you. I’ve got nothing.’ I hold my empty hands wide. ‘Nothing.’
‘Then why don’t you look in my pocket and see what I’ve got?’
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
‘Your jacket pocket?’
‘That’s the one.’
I turn over his jacket.
‘Right pocket.’
My hand digs down, and brings out a packet wrapped in plastic.
‘What is it?’
‘Those photographs you were talking about. Why don’t you take them out and have a look at them?’
‘No.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘No, Michael. There’s no sense in it. It’s the past, it doesn’t mean anything now.’
‘Then tear them up.’
‘You mean that?’
He watches me through eyes narrowed against the increasing light as I unwrap the plastic and take out the sheaf of photographs. I turn them over so I can only see their white backs, on which Michael has written dates. I never want to see those faces and bodies again. There are too many photographs to tear at once. I take a few and rip them across and across until they are a shiny confetti of bright colours, with the images unrecognizable. I take more, and go on tearing until all the photographs are destroyed, then I clear a patch of beach until I’m down to coarse wet gravel, and dig a hole where the water seeps. I bury the remains of the photographs and pat the sand down over them. Michael watches me all the time.
‘You’ve got copies back at the motel, I suppose,’ I say, as I wipe my hands dry against my jeans.
‘I checked out of the motel. My bag is at the station.’
‘With the rest of the photos in it.’
‘No. These were all of them.’
‘But you’ve kept the negatives.’
‘He rubs his forehead hard with a fist. ‘Sure I have the negatives, back in a drawer. Don’t you keep your negatives?’
‘So I’ll never be safe.’
‘Simone. Why is it that you believe all the bad things and never believe anything good? What do you want me to do? Hand my whole life over to you to tear up so it’ll never get in your way again? I can’t do that. That’s one thing I finally learned.’
‘That’s what you want to do to me.’
‘You’ve got it wrong.’
I sit down beside him. The increasing whiteness of the sky suggests that some time the sun may come out. A pair of terns dances over the water. The tide’s turned, laying bare a strip of fine shingle where there’s a sandpiper looking for food. It’s quite warm now.
‘You don’t b
ite your nails any more,’ says Michael. I glance down, already knowing the smooth, clean crescents at the end of my fingers. It’s not reassuring if a lawyer bites her fingernails down to the quick. It’s unthinkable in a judge.
‘I don’t need to,’ I answer.
‘You used to make the skin bleed. You remember how I tried to stop you? What was that stuff I bought for you in the drugstore?’
‘Bitter aloes.’
‘Yeah, that was it.’
‘We’d better go. I should be home already.’
‘I thought you were going to show me that boat.’
‘The ship. It’s another mile or so down the coast.’
‘Let’s go now. I really want to see it.’
Of course he wants to see it. I remember the hours he’d spend in the yard, working on that catamaran for nothing, while I bit my nails and brought to mind all those things the magazines used to tell you about how not to lose your man. Michael wants to see a boat, not black ribs and spars sticking out of the bog. They rise and fall to the swell of something that isn’t either land or sea. You wouldn’t know it was a ship, unless you’d been told. You might think it was the wreck of a house.
That’s a lonely place. No pill-box, no graffiti, no steps down to the beach. It’s not safe to swim because there’s a bank of quicksand that shifts each winter. There’s only land petering out into marsh, and the sea-wall rearing up over it, and the pallor of sea meeting the pallor of sky. It’s beautiful. A beautiful, naked country. Not a tree, not even a thorn bush. Just cotton grass, and reeds, and bright spongy patches of green where the bog is deepest. And the light moving in wet bright splashes, with nothing to cast a shadow on it. Like the light on naked flesh, the beautiful shivering shadows. I look at Michael. He seems oblivious of me, staring into the sky, his flesh slack, as if there is no life left in it.
Michael pulls on his clothes, rolling the wet jacket into a bundle to carry. Suddenly he stops, and tenses.
‘What’s that?’
I listen too. ‘It’s nothing. Only a sheep.’
‘Sounds distressed.’
‘It might be caught somewhere. Once they’re trapped they panic.’
The sheep cries again across the marsh.