“Don’t you care? Doesn’t it matter to you?”
I shrug. I have no idea what is going through her mind right now. I am clueless as to what it is I’m supposed to care about.
If it’s her, then the answer is yes. Of course. I care about her. She’s my wife. I love her.
If she’s asking about anything else, then I don’t know how to answer, because I don’t know what else there is. By default, then, it doesn’t matter to me. She could be talking about the price of cabbage for all I know. It doesn’t matter.
There are shoes littered all over the house. Clusters of them in the hall, under the stairs, tumbling out from the shoe racks she has pushed them onto in haste and disarray. Clumps of them underneath the coffee table in the living room, crawling out across the rug and into the doorway, like a chain of giant footwear ants trying to join the rest of the battalion in the hallway.
There are stray ones upstairs in the bedroom, lying gauchely knock-kneed where she has pushed them from her feet, lazy in her haste to take them off, too lazy to untie laces or unfasten buckles.
I pick my way through them daily, like I’m picking my way through her questioning now. She has moved on, left “Don’t you care and doesn’t it matter” behind. Now the questions have taken a different tack.
What do I think about it? She seeks an opinion, and now I have to seem as though I have been listening, as though I am interested in whatever itch she is asking me to scratch. My words could be the calamine lotion to the chicken pox irritation of today’s obsession.
I try to distract her. “Are those shoes new?” I ask, looking at her feet. Not even a heartbeat’s break in her drive. She doesn’t even pause.
It’s too late to fall back on that other trusty diversion. “Have you had your hair done?” won’t wash now.
She saves me, in a way, with her next query, which is actually a statement.
“You haven’t been listening.”
“No,” I agree, “I haven’t.”
This is where she surprises me. I have come to expect that my lapses in concentration will be met with one of two responses. Anger or sadness. Fury or tears. Rage or withdrawal.
Today she laughs. A proper laugh, nothing false, nothing intended to signify “I’m laughing for now, but this isn’t over.” She laughs and it’s also in her eyes, which dance and sparkle with amusement. Her giggle makes me smile, even though I don’t quite understand why it’s there.
She starts to pick up shoes and pair them up. She takes them into the hall and carries out the same exercise on the abandoned and wantonly jettisoned items that range across the floor. I follow her and stand to watch as she brings together shoes long separated and stows them neatly away on the shoe rack. I see the bend of her spine, its curve as she kneels and crouches and leans her way around the footwear she is imposing order on. Her skirt waistband gapes a little as she leans forward and across. It stands proud of her back so that I can see the creamy smoothness of the skin and the tiny freckle that lodges at the base of her spine.
She straightens and the waistband fits back to her body. She kneels on the floor and looks at me over her shoulder. She is still smiling, half laughing.
“That’s better,” she says. “And yes, these shoes are new.”
I laugh, too, then spoil the moment by asking the wrong question, grinning all the while like the fool that I am.
“So what is it I’m supposed to care about?” I ask, and her eyes darken.
She looks away, still kneeling on the floor in the hall, in front of the now full shoe rack. Her hair falls forward with the movement of her head, and it covers her face, obscuring it from my view.
“It’s nothing,” she murmurs. “It doesn’t matter.”
I walk closer, then crouch down beside her, trying to see her face, raising a hand to pull back the hair that covers it, and tuck it behind her ear. But she stands before I have the chance, and walks past me, smooth legs and new shoes all that I can see.
I’m still crouching but I turn slightly to watch as she opens the front door and walks out into the garden, down the path and through the gate. Her skirt sways as she walks, and those new shoes make her legs look good. As she knows they do. I’m struck by the sudden realisation that we have been having a row without me even knowing it. Now she has walked out and is striding down the street in her new shoes. She will make it to the corner and turn and I have no idea where she is going, or whether I’m expected to follow.
I get up from where I’m crouching and shut the front door. When I turn back to walk through the hall into the living room, the hallway seems an alien place. The clutter of shoes, now tidied away; the space and expanse of floor that seems to stretch on forever into the distance; it throws me for a moment.
It takes forty minutes to walk from this house up to the shops and back down again, whichever way you walk the circuit. She is wearing new shoes, so I decide to give her an hour to stomp the anger out of her system without crippling herself.
I sit on the sofa and take a couple of the red and white mints she brought back from
I pick them up, these photographs that do not depict my finest hour, and hold them in my hands like foreign currency I’m about to use to buy my way out of jail. There are at least a dozen, and are smaller than I thought surveillance photographs would be. They are more like holiday snaps in size, and the images on some are as badly framed and blurry.
I am still holding them and staring at them when she returns. She hasn’t been gone long. At least, it doesn’t feel like she has.
“It doesn’t matter to you, then?” she asks, “You don’t care?”
“I wasn’t listening,” is all I can say, as I sit there staring in disbelief at the photographs I’m holding in my hands. “I didn’t realise this was what we were talking about.”
I look at her, and her face is blank. There is no anger there, no pain, no sign that she feels betrayed.
The silence stretches on until I say, “I don’t know what to say,” after which the silence continues, uncluttered by sounds, or shoes, or any sense of reality.
She takes a mint from the dish and unwraps it. The rustle of the cellophane becomes the only sound in the room. She pauses, before she puts the mint into her mouth, and addresses me.
“I thought you said that you were a country boy.”
I look at her, unable to fathom what that has to do with these pictures, with what I’m suppose, or not supposed, to care about. I grew up in what might be called the countryside, the commuter belt version of it. Son of a solicitor and a teacher. Brought up in relative affluence in the sanitised country on the edge of the town where she was raised. A sticking point that I have never understood. A thing that is always flung at me in arguments, this accusation that I come from the country and yet am so useless.
“Daddy didn’t teach you how to skin a rabbit, then?” she says, the mint still between her fingers, suspended, waiting.
There’s more than one way, I almost tell her. There’s always more than one way. We can go on like this, talking in riddles, edging around the subject, or we can be straight and to the point.
She smiles and puts the mint into her mouth, pursing her lips into a pout as she begins to suck. She is still smiling and the curve of her pursed lips makes me smile too. I begin to think I know what she is thinking.
“Why don’t you teach me how to do it, then?” I say.
Her eyes are filled suddenly with wicked glee and she has to look away. She crunches into the mint; one, two, three, four bites, a swallow, and it’s gone.
She looks at me. She’s trying not to laugh; trying to suppress a giggle; a wave of laughter and relief and excitement filling her from her toes up to the top of her head.
“I thought you were having an affair,” she says.
I look down at the photographs that are still in my hands. The trick, apparently, is to use a really sharp knife and to take your time. You’re also supposed to keep them alive. It makes it easier. I read about it in a novel. The Manchurians were experts at skinning a man alive. In the novel, a Russian Army Officer captures a Japanese spy and his Manchurian War Lord ally skins the man alive. Murakami wrote the description well. I shivered when I read it, repulsed but at the same time excited by the idea.
We do it now because if the body turns up afterwards, it’s better that there is no skin on it. It makes it harder to identify. No fingerprints. No blemishes. Birthmarks harder to discover. It’s a practical thing. We’re not sick, and we’re not trophy hunters. We’re just paid to do a job.
She isn’t offended by the act in itself, I realise. She’s offended that I don’t take care to do it well. Consideration of style and appearance. Even when you are meting out a violent death, a death that is a crime, even when the death is deserved, reparation and revenge. Under her rules of play, you have the right to have your skin peeled from your body with skill and with care.
Doesn’t it matter to me, don’t I care? The fact of her asking, the realisation that her concern is an aesthetic and not a moral one repulses me and I feel the bile rising from my stomach into my throat.
I can’t look at the photographs any longer. Somehow I had managed to separate my mind from my body when I was carrying out the task. It was a job. Her excitement about it makes me see things differently. I can’t hold the vomit in any longer, and I run to the kitchen and empty the contents of my stomach into the sink.
She stands in the kitchen doorway as I splash my face with water and wash the puke away down the plughole.
“What’s the matter?” she asks.
I look at her. She means it. I look at her and I realise that I do not know this woman at all, and I probably never have.
© J R Hargreaves 2006
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