Fifty Pounds an Hour and Eighty Pounds for Extras

“And what if you disappear?” he asks.

Well, and, what if I do? Is it any concern of his? I suppose he’s thinking I have a habit of. I can sit in a room and disappear entirely. But that’s not actually what he means. He means, what if I really disappear?

I could. Take off. Buy that camper van. Leave it all behind. Pick up casual jobs and do the thing I want to do. Which is live, breathe, exist.

So what if I disappear? He is a comfort zone for me, and what am I to him? The same? Or more? Then that’s his look out if it is. I won’t be here to see him disintegrate. I won’t need to be here to see it, because it won’t happen.

I do not love him, and you can say that I’m hard, but it’s only the truth. He’s a cornershop boyfriend. The sort you pick up because you can’t be bothered going all the way to the supermarket and getting what you really want.

He’s a Happy Shopper boyfriend. Value pack. Comes with extra added loyalty.

I can still smell the one who was the bespoke tailored boyfriend. Even after all these years. He fitted me like the best cut cloth. And shame I never fitted him.

Am I supposed to say that I won’t disappear? Am I supposed to play the game according to the rules? He’s varnishing the table. I’ve watched him do it so methodically over the last couple of days. Sanding, varnishing, sanding, varnishing. I think he’s on the fifth coat now. It’s as glossy and as rich as a horse chestnut, freshly popped from its green spiked shell. The brush leaves no marks, and I hope that it will dry like this. Like a layer of amber on the surface of the wood.

We are out in the sunshine. It is perfectly still. No breeze, nothing to disturb the air. It’s like being paused. I sit on the doorstep with my chin on my knees, my skirt tucked around my legs, my bare feet peeping out, toes free to waggle if I so choose to exercise them.

Today I read, in one of those glossy women’s magazines that tell you what to wear and what to smear on your face and what colour eyeshadow to paint on your face, about a woman, younger than me, who paid a male escort for sex. I wonder what that would be like. No feeling. No engagement. I might know that I don’t love him, but there is feeling and engagement there. There is companionship. And is that better, or worse? Than no feeling, I mean. Is that hopeless half sense of knowing any better, or slightly worse, than just the pure febrile sex of not knowing? Fifty pounds an hour and eighty pounds for extras, is what I have learned. And is her name really Vanessa?

He has stopped working and is looking at me. I am crouched, still, on this doorstep, and I almost want a breeze to pick up, to blow some speck of dust into the impossible smoothness of the varnish. Trapped like a bug in sap, making amber a million years later.

I would have the breeze blow some life into this sterility, this ambient perfection. I would have a satellite crash out of the sky. I would call this what it was, if it only wasn’t what it is.

He won’t speak. He has asked his question and received no answer. He will bide his time now and hope. Tiny little in the scheme of things. Deserving of what he has. And what he gives falls short.

I’m not nice, am I?

I stretch out my legs, stretch up my arms, balance on the cusp of my behind, my arse, my derrière. I gather myself back together and then stand, turn, and walk into the shade of the house. Leaving him there, brush poised, staring at the space I used to fill.

And what if I disappeared?

His answer there. Nothing would change. His heart would still pump blood around his body. His lungs would still deliver oxygen to that blood.

I know this to be true. I am still breathing, aren’t I?


© J R Hargreaves 2006