Something More

In the crushing half light of this bedroom, where you can see bones through skin, she thinks of the plates draining in the kitchen; the way you can see your hand through them when you hold them to the light. Bone china, as thin and delicate as the bones in your hand. As translucent as the skin in this half light. She thinks of anything but him, keeping her eyes on the ceiling above and beyond his head.

Rachel thinks of the other one. The one who she will never be with. He offers her more and less than Richard ever could. She suffers Richard’s failure to be the thing she needs. The other one will never be the thing she needs, either, but he offers her far more and far less in the way of promise than Richard ever could.

She waits for this ritual to be over. She hopes for some semblance of passion, some sign of anger and hatred that will lift her above the banality of expression that is found in their love making.

That she has to refer to it as love making sums up, for her, the suburban quality of its disappointment. Rachel stares at the ceiling and feels Richard’s muscles moving beneath her fingers. Her hands are spread across his back, and his muscles ripple as he moves in and out of her. She thinks of swimmers, swimming the butterfly stroke, swimming the breast stroke, bobbing up and down. She thinks of swimmers, swimming the channel, a feat of endurance. She thinks of the sea, cold and grey and relentless, stretching on as far as the eye can see. No end to it, just a beginning on a shore, and a distant horizon over which she’ll never pass.

Rachel thinks of Steve’s hand in her hair, the way it pulled and the snap of her neck as her head was forced back. She thinks of the way that he pulled her top down and pulled her breasts out of her bra. She thinks of the way he left her gasping, panting for more, when he had done nothing, just threatened her with violence and hurt and indescribable pleasure. She feels her body heat rise. She feels herself become wet with desire. She knows it because Richard slips slightly, loses his grip, almost falls out of her. She grips with her vagina, with her thighs; she holds him in there and hates him, pushing herself forward into climax. She can’t look at him, bending her head back, arching her neck, her back, burrowing backwards into the pillow, looking at the wall behind the bed. Her shudders are silent. It isn’t enough, but it’s all that she will get tonight. All she will ever get from colluding in this pretence.

Richard strokes her hair, and Rachel pushes him off her, carrying traces of him with her into the bathroom, where she showers and washes herself clean of him. She imagines him lying in the half darkness, the half light, the summer darkness not fit for purpose, not creating a shield for what they have just done. Rachel waits in the bathroom until she is sure he will have fallen asleep, then she dresses and leaves the house.

There is no way of knowing what time it is, once she is outside. Her watch is on the bedside table. The clock in the car hasn’t worked for months, telling the correct time only twice a day, and never when she expected it to. She starts the car and drives away from the house. There is no purpose in her mind, all that she seeks is freedom from the prison of her life. She is sober, she is awake, she is no danger to anyone else on the roads at whatever hour this is.

Across town, she knows, he will be awake, smoking and drinking himself to death in a dark kitchen. He is scared of what he wants, and so pretends he doesn’t want it. He is scared of what she represents. She felt it in him, she tasted it on his breath. She has seen the look in his eyes, the way he searched her eyes for that same feeling, and when he saw it, he withdrew.

Scared little boy, hiding behind the notion that he is in control, that this is a nothing. Arrogant arsehole who pretends that she was just a diversion that he doesn’t need any more.

Rachel drives, barely noticing the roads she is travelling along. She drives away from the city, away from Richard, away from the other one. The sun is already coming up. There has barely been an hour of darkness, and it was a poor excuse for darkness anyway. Nights spent in twilight for two months of the year, either side of the 21st of June.

She pulls into the car park of a roadside caff, one that has been open all night. She orders tea and pours it, dribbling, from the spout of the stainless steel teapot. It is dark and strong already. She can smell the tannins coming off it. The milk is thick and oily, UHT. It leaves a swirl of creaminess after she has poured it into the tea. She stirs it round, and the swirl disappears, but the oily film doesn’t.

Staring ahead into nothing, Rachel waits for the tea to cool so that she can drink it. She waits for an idea to come into her head, as well. Everything is tight around her, but there is also too much space. She can feel every molecule of air against her skin, and it seems like she is floating in a void.

She sips the tea, which is bitter. Too strong. Too stewed. She considers going back to the counter and asking for a pot of hot water, but she knows it will make no difference. Red label tea bags from the nearest supermarket, no doubt. Dust left over from the quality blends, scraped together to fill teabags that make tea that tastes like the end of time.

She has brought nothing with her except house keys and purse. Her phone is still at home, in her handbag, at the bottom of the stairs. She knows that she could leave her house keys here, that she has all that she needs, and enough in the bank, for her to leave and never come back. Rachel doesn’t know how far she has driven so far, but she senses that it’s far enough to be a point where she carries on moving and doesn’t turn back.

Richard had ceased to matter long ago, and the other one only frustrates. Rachel leaves him behind every day, and with every day the thoughts of him grow less. It is a kind of love that she feels for him, this recognition of someone like her, someone who could offer her precisely more and infinitely less than anything she has received or wanted before. It is a kind of love that borders on hate. The surprising sentence “I could fuck his brains out” had fallen into her head not long after they met. The surprising thing was not that she thought it, but that she meant it literally and with violence. She had wanted to be the man, so that she could deliver great pain and physical tearing on him. She had wanted to draw blood, to rip him open, to spear him, castrate him, hang him on her wall as a trophy. She had wanted to subdue him, curtail him; he needed to feel what it was like; she needed to be the one who made him feel it.

He knew this, because he felt the same. It delighted her to understand this. It shocked her that it felt so normal.

Her tea is cold now, and the liquid in the pot stewed beyond recognition. She leaves it at the table and goes back out to her car.

A decision has to be made. Rachel knows that she can’t go back to Richard. To return to that life, to that stultifying existence, would be the end of her sanity. Her violence is better contained in other actions, not in the killing of her husband.

Rachel also knows that she couldn’t go to the other. It isn’t an option; he isn’t her future. He was a blind; an opportunity that opened her mind and her eyes to other opportunities. Even though he could have delivered more than Richard could even contemplate, he was too weak and unwilling. Rachel needs something more than him. Rachel needs something she will never have. She already knows that each encounter will only disappoint, the way all previous encounters, even before she understood what it was she was looking for, had disappointed.

Something stops her from driving on. Something makes her turn back, and head for the city she was thinking of leaving. Something more than the people that it contains.

She drives back, and arrives at the dark green door of a friend. She rings the bell. It is morning now. People are up and ready for work. Her friend answers the door, surprise the main expression on her face.

“I’ve left Richard,” Rachel tells her.

“Come in,” her friend says. As Rachel passes her in the doorway and walks down the hallway to the kitchen, her friend closes the door on the world outside.

“Do you want a cup of tea?” she asks.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006