A big girl told me, that autumn, “She went to another school.”
“Reform?”
“What?”
“Is it a reform school?”
“Nah, she’s gone to daft school.” The girl slobbered her tongue out, lolled it slowly from side to side. “You know?”
“Do they slap them every day?”
The big girl grinned. “If they can be bothered. I expect they shaved her head. Her head was crawling.”
I put my hand to my own hair, felt the lack of it, the chill, and in my ear a whisper, like the whisper of wool; a shawl around my head, a softness like lamb’s wool: a forgetting.
* * *
IT MUST HAVE been twenty-five years. It could have been thirty. I don’t go back much: would you? I saw her in the street, and she was pushing a buggy, no baby in it, but a big bag with a spill of dirty clothes coming out; a baby T-shirt with a whiff of sick, something creeping like a tracksuit cuff, the corner of a soiled sheet. At once I thought, well, there’s a sight to gladden the eye, one of that lot off to the launderette! I must tell my mum, I thought. So she can say, wonders will never cease.
But I couldn’t help myself. I followed close behind her and I said, “Mary Joplin?”
She pulled the buggy back against her, as if protecting it, before she turned: just her head, her gaze inching over her shoulder, wary. Her face, in early middle age, had become indefinite, like wax: waiting for a pinch and a twist to make its shape. It passed through my mind, you’d need to have known her well to know her now, you’d need to have put in the hours with her, watching her sideways. Her skin seemed swagged, loose, and there was nothing much to read in Mary’s eyes. I expected, perhaps, a pause, a hyphen, a space, a space where a question might follow … Is that you, Kitty? She stooped over her buggy, and settled her laundry with a pat, as if to reassure it. Then she turned back to me, and gave me a bare acknowledgement: a single nod, a full stop.
THE LONG QT
He was forty-five when his marriage ended, decisively, on a soft autumn day, the last of the barbecue weather. Nothing about that day was his plan, nothing his intention, though later you could see that every element of the disaster was in place. Above all, Lorraine was in place, standing by the cavernous American fridge, stroking its brushed steel doors with one lacquered fingertip. “Do you ever get in it?” she said. “I mean, on a really hot day?”
“It wouldn’t be safe,” he said. “Doors could swing shut.”
“Jodie would miss you. She’d let you out.”
“Jodie wouldn’t miss me.” He understood it only when he said it. “Anyway,” he said. “It’s not been that hot.”
“No?” she said. “Pity.” She stretched up and kissed him on the mouth.
Her wineglass was still in her hand and he felt it roll, cool and damp, against the back of his neck, and make a creeping down his spine. He scooped her against him: a motion of ample gratitude, both hands around her bottom. She murmured something, stretched out an arm to put the glass down, then gave him her whole attention, her open mouth.
He had always known she was available. Only not found her alone, on a warm afternoon, her face a little flushed, three glasses of vinho verde from complete sobriety. Never alone because Lorraine was the sort of girl who moved in a crowd of girls. She was round, kind, down-market for the neighborhood and easy to like. She said droll things, like, “It’s so sad to be called after a quiche.” She smelled delicious, and of kitchen things: plums and vanilla, chocolate.
He let her go, and as he relaxed his grip he heard her tiny heels click back on the floor. “What a little doll you are,” he said. He straightened to his full height. He was able to picture his own expression as he gazed down at her: quizzical, tender, amused; he hardly recognized himself. Her eyes were still closed. She was waiting for him to kiss her again. This time he held her more elegantly, hands on her waist, she on tiptoe, tongue flickering at tongue. Slow and easy, he thought. No rush. But then, crudely, his hand snaked around her back, as if it had a will of its own. He felt for her bra strap. But a twist, a flinch told him, not now, not here. Then where? They could hardly shove through the guests and go upstairs together.
He knew Jodie was rattling about the house. He knew—and he acknowledged this later—that she might at any moment blunder in. She did not like parties that involved open doors, and guests passing between the house and the garden. Strangers might come in, and wasps. It was too easy to stand on the threshold with a burning cigarette, chatting, neither here nor there. You could be burgled where you stood. Picking up glasses, she would push through groups of her own guests, guests who were laughing and passing mobile phones to each other, guests who were, for Christ’s sake, trying to relax and enjoy the evening. People would oblige her by knocking back what was in their glass and handing it over. If not she would say, “Excuse me, have you finished with that?” Sometimes they made little stacks of tumblers for her, helpfully, and said, “Here you go, Jodie.” They smiled at her indulgently, knowing they were helping her out with her hobby. You would see her off in her own little world, her back to everyone, loading the dishwasher. It was not unknown for her to run a cycle before the party was an hour old. The time would come, after dusk, when wives got maudlin and husbands boastful and bellicose, when spats broke out about private schooling and tree roots and parking permits; then, she said, the less glass there is about, the better. He said, you make it sound like some pub brawl on an estate. He said, for God’s sake, woman, put down that wasp spray.
All this he thought, while he was nibbling Lorraine. She nuzzled him and undid his shirt buttons and slid her hand over his warm chest, and let her fingers pause over his heart. If Jodie did come in, he was just going to ask her quietly not to make a scene, to take a deep breath and be more French about it. Then when the people had gone home he would spell it out: it was time she slackened the rein. He was a man at his peak and must see some payoff. He alone by his professional efforts kept them in hand-built kitchens. He was pulling in an amount seriously in excess of anything she could have expected, and his shrewdness had made them near as dammit recession-proof; who could say the same, on their patch? And after all, he was prepared to be fair. “It’s not a one-way street,” he would say to her. She was a free agent, as he was. She might want an adventure of her own. If she could get one.
He dropped his head to whisper in Lorraine’s ear. “When are we going to fuck?”
She said, “How about a week on Tuesday?”
It was then his wife arrived, and paused in the doorway. Her bare arms were drooping stems, and glasses like fruit hung from her finger ends. Lorraine was breathing hotly against his chest, but she must have felt him tense. She tried to pull away, muttering: “Oh bugger, it’s Jodie, jump in the fridge.” He did not want to part from her; he held her elbows, and for a moment stood and glared at his wife over Lorraine’s fluffy head.
Jodie moved a pace or two into the kitchen. But she stopped, her eyes on them, and seemed to freeze. A tiny chime hung in the air, as the glasses shivered in her fingers. She did not speak. Her mouth worked as if she might speak, but only a squeak came out.
Then her hands opened. The floor was limestone and the glass exploded. The crash, the other woman’s cry, the splintering light at her feet: these seemed to shock Jodie into reaction. She gave a little grunt, then a gasp, and put her right hand, now empty, onto the slate worktop; then she folded to her knees. “Watch out!” he said. She sunk into the shards as smoothly as if they were satin, as if they were snow, and the limestone gleamed around her, an ice field, each tile with its swollen pillowed edge, each with a shadow pattern faint as breath. She snorted. She seemed dazed, concussed, as if she had smashed a mirror by putting her head through it. She reached out her left hand, and her hand was cut, and a springing well of blood branched into tributaries on her palm. She glanced at it, almost casually, and made a gagging noise. She folded tidily back onto her heels. She fell sideways, her mouth open.
He trod on the glass to get to her, crunching it like ice. He thought this was his chance to slap her, that she was faking to scare him, but when he dragged at her arm it was limp, heavy, and when he shouted Christ Almighty Jodie she didn’t flinch, and when he jerked her head round brutally to look into her face, her eyes had already glazed.
So it seemed to him later, when the night’s events had to be reprised. He wanted to cry on the shoulder of the ambulance crew and say, only curiosity and mild lust led me on, and a sort of childish defiance, and the fact that it was there for me, on a plate, do you know what I mean? He said, I meant to ask her to be French. Probably she wouldn’t have been, but I didn’t think she’d fall over like that … I mean, how would you? How would you imagine that? And kneeling, kneeling on the glass.
For the first day or so he was not coherent. But nobody was interested in his state of mind; not in the way they would have been, if he had been in custody for killing his wife in some more obvious way. A doctor explained it to him, when they thought he was ready. Long QT syndrome. A disorder of the heart’s electrical activity, which leads to arrhythmia, which leads, in certain circumstances, to cardiac arrest. Genetic, probably. Underdiagnosed, in the population at large. If we spot it early, we doctors can do all sorts of stuff: pacemakers, beta blockers. But there’s not much anyone can do, if the first symptom is sudden death. A shock will do it, he said, or strong emotion, strong emotion of any sort. It can be horror. Or disgust. But, then again, it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes, he said, people die laughing.
WINTER BREAK
By the time they arrived at their destination, they could no longer recognize their own name. The taxi driver stabbed the air with his placard while they stood gawping up and down the line, until Phil pointed and said, “That’s us.” Little peaks had grown over the T’s in their surname, and the dot on the i had drifted away like an island. She rubbed her cheek, numbed by the draught from the air vent above her seat; the rest of her felt creased and gritty, and while Phil bustled toward the man, waving, she picked the cloth of her T-shirt away from the small of her back, and shuffled after him. We dress for the weather we want, as if to bully it, even though we’ve seen the forecast.
The driver laid a hairy, proprietorial hand on their baggage trolley. He was a squat man with the regulation mustache, and he wore a twill zipped jacket with a tartan lining peeping from under it; as if to say, forget your sunshine illusions. The plane was late and it was already dark. He flung open a rear door for her and humped their bags into the back of his estate car. “Long way,” was all he said.
“Yes, but prepaid,” Phil said.
The driver plumped down in his seat with a leathery creak. When he slammed his door the whole vehicle shuddered. The front headrests had been wrenched off, so when he swiveled his body to reverse he threw his arm across both seat backs and stared past her unseeing, an inch from her face, while she examined his nostril hair by the giddy flash of the car park’s lights. “Sit back, darling,” Phil told her. “Seat belt on. Away we go.”
How suited he would have been to fatherhood. Whoopsie-daisy. There, there. No harm done.
But Phil thought otherwise. Always had. He preferred to be able to take a winter break during the school term, when hotel rates were lower. For years now he had passed her newspapers, folded to those reports that tell you how children cost a million pounds before they’re eighteen. “When you see it set out like that,” he’d say, “it’s frightening. People think they’ll get away with hand-me-downs. Half portions. It doesn’t work like that.”
“But our child wouldn’t have a drug addiction,” she’d say. “Not on that scale. It wouldn’t be bright enough for Eton. It could go down the road to Hillside Comp. Although, I hear they have head lice.”
“And you wouldn’t want to deal with that, would you?” he said: a man laying down his ace.
They inched through the town, the pavements jostling, the cheap bars flashing their signs, and Phil said, as she knew he would, “I think we made the right decision.” A journey of an hour lay ahead, and they speeded up through the sprawling outskirts; the road began to climb. When she was sure that the driver did not want conversation she eased herself back in her seat. There were two types of taxi man: the garrulous ones with a niece in Dagenham, who wanted to talk right the way out to the far coast and the national park; and the ones who needed every grunt racked out of them, who wouldn’t tell you where their niece lived if they were under torture. She made one or two tourist remarks: how had the weather been? “Raining. Now I smoke,” the man said. He thrust a cigarette right from the packet into his mouth, juggling a lighter and at one point taking his hands from the wheel entirely. He drove very fast, treating each swerve in the road as a personal insult, fuming at any holdup. She could feel Phil’s opinions banking up behind his teeth: now that won’t do the gearbox any good, will it? At first, a few cars edged past them, creeping down to the lights of the town. Then the traffic thinned and petered out. As the road narrowed, black and silent hills fell away behind them. Phil began to tell her about the flora and fauna of the high maquis.
She had to imagine the fragrance of herbs crushed underfoot. The car windows were sealed against the still, cool night, and she turned her head deliberately away from her husband and misted the glass with her breath. The fauna was mostly goats. They tumbled down the hillsides, stones cascading after them, and leapt across the path of the car, kids running at their heels. They were patched and parti-colored, fleet and heedless. Sometimes an eye gleamed furtive in a headlight. She twitched at the seat belt, which was sawing into her throat. She closed her eyes.
At Heathrow Phil had been a pain in the security queue. When the young man in front of them bent to pick laboriously at the laces of his hiking boots, Phil said loudly, “He knows he has to take his shoes off. But he couldn’t just have slip-ons, like the rest of us.”
“Phil,” she whispered, “it’s because they’re heavy. He wants to wear his boots so they don’t count as baggage.”
“I call it selfish. Here’s the queue banking up. He knows what’s going to happen.”
The hiker glanced up from the tail of his eye. “Sorry, mate.”
“One day you’ll get your head punched in,” she said.
“We’ll see, shall we?” Phil said: singing it, like a child in a playground game.
Once, a year or two into their marriage, he had confessed to her that he found the presence of small children unbearably agitating: the unmodulated noise, the strewn plastic toys, the inarticulate demands that you provide something, fix something, though you didn’t know what it was.
“On the contrary,” she said. “They point. They shout, ‘Juice.’”
He nodded miserably. “A lifetime of that,” he said. “It would get to you. It would feel like a lifetime.”
Anyway, it was becoming academic now. She had reached that stage in her fertile life when genetic strings got knotted and chromosomes went whizzing around and reattaching themselves. “Trisomies,” he said. “Syndromes. Metabolic deficiencies. I wouldn’t put you through that.”
She sighed. Rubbed her bare arms. Phil leaned forward. Cleared his throat, spoke to the driver. “My wife is chilly.”
“Wear the cardigan,” said the driver. He slotted another cigarette into his mouth. The road now ascended in a series of violent bends, and at each of them he wrenched the wheel, throwing the car’s back end out toward the ditches.
“How long?” she asked. “About?”
“Half hour.” If he could have concluded the statement by spitting, she felt he would have.
“Still in time for dinner,” Phil said encouragingly. He rubbed her arms for her, as if to give encouragement. She laughed shakily. “You make them wobble,” she said.
“Nonsense. There’s no flesh on you.”
There was a cloudy half-moon, a long scoop of fallen land to their right, a bristling treeline above them, and as he cupped her elbow, caressing it, there was once more a skid a
nd slide, a rock shower rattling inconsequentially to the road before them. Phil was just saying, “It’ll only take me two minutes to unpack.” He was beginning to explain to her his system for traveling light. But the driver grunted, wrenched the wheel, stabbed the brakes and brought them lurching to a halt. She shot forward, jarring her wrist on the seat in front. The seat belt pulled her back. They had felt the impact but seen nothing. The driver swung open his door and ducked out into the night. “Kid,” Phil whispered.
Gone under? The driver was pulling something from between the front wheels. He was bent double and they could see his bottom rise in the air, with the frill of tartan at his waist. Inside the body of the car they sat very still, as if not to draw attention to the incident. They did not look at each other, but watched as the driver straightened up, rubbed the small of his back, then walked around and lifted the tailgate, pulling out something dark, a wrapping, a tarpaulin. The chill of the night hit them between their shoulder blades, and fractionally they shrank together. Phil took her hand. She twitched it away; not petulant, but because she felt she needed to concentrate. The driver appeared in silhouette before them, lit by their own headlights. He turned his head and glanced up and down the empty road. He had something in his hand, a rock. He stooped. Thud, thud, thud. She tensed. She wanted to cry out. Thud, thud, thud. The man straightened up. There was a bundle in his arms. Tomorrow’s dinner, she thought. Seethed in onion and tomato sauce. She didn’t know why the word seethed came to her. She remembered a sign down in the town: The Sophocles School of Motoring. “Call no man happy…” The driver posted the bundle into the back of the car, by their luggage. The tailgate slammed.