A Better Answer Than That

She was tired from yet another restless night. She had spent the day trying her best to avoid her colleagues, scared that the slightest hint of kindness would set off the tears again. She needn’t have worried.

She hadn’t really wanted to come out with them for a drink after work, but she didn’t want to go home yet, either.

So she sat there and listened to them laughing at how seriously she took things, how easy she was to wind up, how her sense of humour was more often off than on these days. She didn’t say what she was thinking. She just sat and looked down at her knees, stroking her skirt smooth, enjoying the feeling of the fabric. Cord. It had always been her favourite.

The days were growing longer, and that should have been a good thing. More daylight was supposed to make you feel better. The knot at her centre and the feeling that everything was falling away from her stopped that happening, though. That was the thing they didn’t understand.

She didn’t want to be this serious about everything. She remembered a time when she was flippant and sarcastic and ripped the piss out of others, too. Her skin had been less thin back then. She also remembered a time when getting up and leaving the house and working through the day wasn’t such a chore. It didn’t help that she got home at night and he was either slobbing on the sofa or out.

Last night, for example. She had trudged up the road to the house, feeling dull and grey. ’Frowdy,’ she had thought, possibly inventing a word. ‘Frowdy like a brown nylon dress.’

She had seen the flicker of the television through the living room window. He was home.

She had let herself into the house.

“I’m home,” she called out.

“’Lo, love,” he had shouted back through the living room door.

The cat had come stretching from the kitchen, stopping just in front of her and falling into the dog stretch. She had bent down and picked her up, then carried her through to the kitchen with her.

He had risen from the settee and shuffled into the kitchen behind her.

“Shall we get take-away tonight? I just fancy a curry,” he had said.

“Sure. Whatever,” she had replied, feeling weighed down by his presence.

He had taken the menu for the Indian take-away off the fridge and gone back through to the living room.

She had gone upstairs to change out of her work clothes. Hanging her suit up in the wardrobe, she had caught sight of the outfit she was wearing to the wedding. It was a beautiful skirt in dip-dyed silk that she had bought on impulse one miserable Saturday while he had been at the football. She had bought the top later, when she knew they were going to this wedding. She wondered when she would ever wear it again after this weekend. She had sighed, then, and hung it back up, then pulled on her jeans and a t-shirt.

He had looked up at her from the TV as she went into the living room.

“All right, love?”

“Yes, just a bit tired. You?”

“Great. Work okay?”

“Not bad.”

They had lapsed into silence.

‘All over Manchester,’ she had thought, ‘couples just like me and him will be having equally scintillating conversations.’ The thought of her monotonous life echoing the monotonous lives around her depressed her.

“Is your suit ready for tomorrow?” she had asked him, nagging, like a mother.

“Yeah. It’s hung up in the wardrobe as usual.” he had paused at that point to take in the antics of the American couple on the TV screen, laughing inordinately. “I could do with a shirt ironing, though,” he had continued.

She had got up and gone back upstairs, pulled a shirt from the pile of clean laundry and taken it downstairs. She had set up the ironing board, filled the iron with water and plugged it in, then decided that she might as well make an evening of it, so went back upstairs to bring the rest of the clean laundry down.

He had lolled there on the sofa, snorting at the American couple’s zany antics. She had pulled his shirt onto the ironing board and begun ironing the back.

Then the doorbell rang.

“That’ll be the curry,” he had said, showing no signs of movement.

She had moved towards the door, pausing in the hall by her bag to pull out her purse. She had opened the door. The delivery man had grinned at her.

“Chicken mirchi, chicken moglai, saag aloo, Bombay aloo, Keema naan, Peshwari naan and two onion bhaji, love?” he’d said, reading from a piece of paper.

“That’s right,” she’d said, reaching out a £20-note with one hand and taking the bag with the other.

“It’s £20.55, love.”

Apologising, she had opened her purse again and extracted the change.

“Here you go.”

The delivery man had taken and pocketed the cash.

“Thanks, love! Enjoy your meal,” he called over his shoulder as he made his way back down the path.

She had served up all of his chicken mirchi. She did not know how he could stomach his curries that hot. She had placed his Keema naan on one side plate, the onion bhajis on another and loaded them all onto a tray. Then she had taken a spoon and a fork from the cutlery drawer, added them to the tray and carried it through to the living room.

He was channel flicking. He heaved himself up from his semi-prone position on the settee and took the tray from her.

“Ah, cheers, love. That looks magnificent.” He had begun eating straight away, looking at the TV all the time.

She had gone back into the kitchen and served up half of her chicken moglai and tore off half of the Peshwari naan. She put her plates onto a tray and poured herself a glass of water. Then she had gone back into the living room to join him.

When they had both finished eating, she had gone back to the ironing and he had returned to his semi-prone lolling on the sofa.

She had finished ironing his shirt and taken it upstairs, holding it carefully to avoid creasing it again. She had found a hanger and put it in the wardrobe next to his suit. Then she had sat on the edge of the bed. Sometimes she just wanted to cry until she could not breathe.

She had gone back downstairs and had looked at the laundry still to be ironed.

“I can’t face doing this tonight,” she’d said. “I think I might just go to bed.”

Silence from him.

“Night, then.”

She had climbed the stairs for the fifth time that evening and got ready for bed.

Now, her glass went up and down from table to mouth and back again too many times to count. Small sips, and she was still drinking faster than the rest of them.

She finished the drink and stood up. She picked up her coat and shrugged it on. She picked up her bag and put it over her shoulder. She squeezed past the person she had been sitting next to and walked out of the bar. She didn’t even bother to say goodbye. She doubted they would have noticed if she had.

She caught the train home and walked the twenty minutes from the station to her house trying not to think about the evening she had ahead of her. She didn’t want to think about what came after it, either. He wouldn’t be in, she knew that for a fact. Not on a Friday night.

She let herself into the house. She was right. He was out and there was a message on the answering machine.

"It’s me. I’m stopping out for a few beers with the lads. See you later."

The cat was weaving around her legs. Her bowl was empty. She picked her up, and she nuzzled into her neck, purring. Then she looked up at her and licked her nose.

She put the cat down and put some food into her bowl. The cat wolfed the food, purring all the time. She stooped to stroke her. She had to get out of this existence.

She opened a cupboard door, seeking inspiration. She was too tired to cook properly. She pulled out a tin of tuna and took the salad cream out of the fridge. As she opened the tin the cat went mad.

She took a saucer from another cupboard and forked some of the tuna onto it. She put it down on the floor and the cat almost fell into it.

She mixed some salad cream into the rest of the tuna in a bowl and boiled the kettle. That was a tip she'd taken ages ago from Ready Steady Cook - the one that had married the show's presenter had said he always boiled his pasta water in a kettle first to save time. It was probably untrue. It probably took just as long to boil a full kettle of water as it did to boil water in a pan.

She took the packet of pasta from the cupboard and, filling the saucepan with the water from the kettle, added a couple of handfuls to the pan. The cat had licked the saucer clean and was now busily washing her face.

The kitchen was filthy. She couldn't remember when it had last been cleaned properly. She was conducting a secret war of attrition which she knew was doomed to failure. He never did any cleaning up. Most of the stains and congealed blobs of food were his. She had decided that she wasn't cleaning either. Except every so often, while she was washing up, she would give the surfaces a quick wipe so that at least the build up of decaying matter was slowed down. They’d been together since sharing a house at University, and their attitude to each other had barely changed. She sighed and wondered when maturity was going to enter into their relationship.

She took her pasta into the living room and turned the TV on. She had missed the first half of Coronation Street. The adverts were on and she was just in time to be regaled with scenes of Ireland. It looked lovely. Shame they had that woman from the Cranberries wailing all over it. It would be nice to go to Ireland, she thought. Maybe Dublin. Even for a weekend. Or forever. She stopped eating, struck by a sudden thought. She could leave. Just pack up and go. She could book a flight tomorrow, check into a hotel and never come back. She carried on eating. It was a thought.

She was in bed when he got back from the pub. She was not asleep but she pretended to be asleep. He shuffled around the room, stinking of beer, trying to undress in the dark. Finally he dumped himself onto the bed and fell asleep almost instantly, snores rumbling deeply. She curled herself away from him and tried to bury her head in the pillow. She stared at the darkness around her, bang awake now and plotting her escape. Tomorrow she would go to the travel agents in town and she would book herself a flight to Dublin. She would worry about what to do next when she got there.

Decision made, she settled back into her duvet cocoon and fell into sleep.

At 2.30 a.m. she woke up. She would not be able to go into town and book a flight tomorrow. She was going with him to his cousin’s wedding tomorrow. There was no way she could get out of that, especially not as she had forced him to come with her to the out of town shopping centre on the hunt for a jacket for her wedding outfit. A jacket that had cost her £65 and was more of a cardigan really. She chewed the inside of her lip. On Monday she would go to the travel agents and book a flight to Dublin.

There would be the usual hints and questions at the wedding about when she and Gareth were going to be tying the knot. She was not sure that she could cope.

She knew that she wasn’t going to sleep for the rest of the night. She knew that she would be tired and uncivil at the wedding as a result. She thought about the medicine cabinet and the stash of migraine tablets and other headache tablets and painkillers galore that she could chop up and swig down with a good shot of cooking sherry. She thought about it, and then she got up.

She went downstairs. She walked past the bathroom on the way. She didn’t want to kill herself. That wasn’t the solution. There was a better answer than that.

She went downstairs and she opened the top drawer of the sideboard in the living room. She took her grandfather’s war pistol from the drawer, the one he had left to her in his will, because she had been interested in it when she was a little girl. Interested in it, and in him, and his stories of the war. She took the pistol, and she took the small stash of bullets, that he had always told her he shouldn’t have kept.

It was simple enough to load the pistol. It was even more simple to go back up the stairs and fire two shots (to be certain) into the back of his sleeping head.

She didn’t need to go to the wedding now. She thought she might drive to Anglesey and catch the ferry over the Ireland. Ireland seemed like a place where a girl could disappear.

© J R Hargreaves, 2006