Figments

Andy doesn’t eat. For rages like this one, it’s better that her stomach is empty. She can taste the bile better that way.

John sits on a chair across the room from her. All the bitterness of regret mixes in dark swirls of acid in her stomach as she looks at him. For two days she has been paralysed by a migraine, and she knows that it was for this reason. For the moment they have come to now. She has had two days of mind numbing pain and nausea, unable to see, unable to speak; casting him off into some distant sea.

The stench of her own sweat makes her want to retch. Andy tries to ignore the sharpness of her body’s chemicals.

John sits there, watching the tv, one leg crossed nonchalantly across the other, tapping his fingers on the arm of the chair.

She irons furiously, steam hissing out of the holes in the metal plate, raising a smell of too crisp cotton and fabric softener.

In her mind’s eye, the room is bare, stripped of all furniture save his chair. One of the wooden ones from the kitchen. Variation on a bentwood theme from IKEA. He is sitting in the chair and she towers over him in all her rage, bile racing up her oesophagus to focus her mind and salivate her mouth. She stands and looks down at him and their hatred for each other is equal. Their eyes say so.

She puts another shirt onto a hanger; she hooks the hanger onto the bookcase with the others. She begins to iron a skirt. She wants to pick up the iron and throw it at his stupid head. She wants to see the hot metal plate burn its imprint into that ridiculous flesh.

She pulls the skirt off the ironing board, then pulls it back on to iron the other side. She has not eaten for two days. She has vomited, and her mouth tastes acrid and stale. She has brushed her teeth, her tongue, too many times to count to try to rid her mouth of its decay. She had sweated as she heaved over the toilet bowl and he held her hair back from her face; to the untrained eye, an act of tenderness. It hadn’t always been this way.

Her coat is where she left it, on the arm of one of the sofas. The pink satin lining gleams slightly, like a jewel. It reminds her of a skirt her mother used to have. Her evening skirt, from Jaeger, that hung in pleats from a belted waistband and was so soft to touch. Her childish fingers would stroke and feel the fabric as she hugged her mother’s legs. Not there to hug her mother. There to feel the fabric. There for the sensation of luxury against her skin. It made her feel alive.

And when they used to fuck, that made her feel alive as well. The luxury of skin against skin. The softness of his unworked fingers against her belly, against her breasts. The weight of him, bearing down on her, threatening to overwhelm her. The strength in his arms; the smoothness of his muscles beneath her fingers, the hardness beneath her nails.

She puts the skirt onto its hanger and adds it to the collection of shirts hanging from the lips of the bookshelves, like commuters waiting for a train.

She thinks of all the ways she used to like him best. Under moonlight. Laughing. In smoky bars. At the kitchen table. Walking in the dark of a summer night. All of it gone.

She unplugs the iron, leaves it to cool down, sitting there on the ironing board. She takes the results of her hard work from their hanging places on the bookcase and carries them upstairs.

After she hangs the clothes in the wardrobe, she sits on the edge of the bed. Memory has taken the edge off her anger. Now she just feels tired and weak. Andy Costello. Too young to be feeling like this. Too old to do anything about it. She lets her body fall backwards onto the bed and she lies there, staring at the ceiling, her hands folded across her belly. She feels muscles and tendons in her back stretch out of shape. She knows that lying like this does her back in, but she also knows that, if she could, she would curl backwards and form a circle with her body. She would lie curled with her head touching her feet and everything that is vulnerable about her body exposed to the world around it. She would form an ‘O’, a hole, a space she could fall into, like a well.

She would fuck him now, for old time’s sake, but she knows it’s not on offer. She would fuck him for the feeling of belonging, with her head turned away so he could not see her eyes, and she could not see his.

Some footbridge between them has rotted and broken. Andy would not build another one. Her head on one side, she unfolds her hands, lets one slip down and feels the old familiar warmth. Her eyes are open and unfocused, fixed on some point in a universe parallel to this one. Her eyes close, and she bites her lip, keeping her own counsel, sharing this knowledge with no-one.

She sits up slowly, easing her back into position, feeling the twinges, welcoming them. She goes to the bathroom, cleans her teeth again, washes her hands, turns on the shower and undresses.

Standing under the water, she pretends that she doesn’t exist. She pretends that she is soap, that the water will wash her away. She turns the setting to full pressure, so that the water feels like needles against her skin. She turns the heat up as high as she can bear it, and allows it to scald her body.

The next-door-neighbour flushes their toilet, and the airlock in their pipe groans on, boring its way into her head so that she wants to punch her fist through the dividing wall and wrench their pipework from the walls, just to make it stop.

It stops. She turns off the shower. She wraps herself in towels, dries her hair.

She goes downstairs. She stands in front of him. He waves her out of the way, not touching her, just waving his hand, trying to see round her, to continue watching whatever is on the screen. She doesn’t move. Over the sound of the television, she hears the fridge-freezer motor switch on. It buzzes and matches a frequency in her head. She stands in front of him and lets the towel drop to the floor.

Naked.

He ignores her.

She demands that he look at her. The fridge-freezer buzzes louder, as though it is building up power to launch itself off into the stratosphere. He tells her to stop being ridiculous, that he’s trying to watch the tv. She demands again that he look at her.

He doesn’t.

She punches him. Andy pulls back her fist and releases. She lands the ball of flesh and knuckle on the side of his jaw. Her other hand comes round and connects with the underside of his jaw. She hits him over and over as though he is a punchbag. Some natural instinct takes over, and every punch connects. Her rhythm is perfect. Caught off guard, John can’t even raise his own hands to defend himself. Her fist rams into his eye socket and somewhere within the fraction of a second that her hand is against his eye, she feels the movement of his eyeball.

Eventually, his arms reach out and grab her at the waist. He grips her tightly, pulling her towards him, preventing her ability to reach, buying himself some time. He pulls her onto his lap, and her hands unfurl, holding the tops of his arms. She straddles him. She kisses where she thinks his mouth might be, within the bloody mess she has made of his face.

She whispers to him that he should have looked at her. He tells her that he knows.

She fucks him. Not for old time’s sake, because this is something new. She fucks him, and as she does, Andy knows that she will leave. Everything has been burned up.

He tells her that she’ll need to shower again. Andy laughs once and asks him why.

Because, he says. Because.

Because my husband will find out? Because your wife? She tells him that both are already in the room. Reminds him of the fact.

Andy holds John’s swollen face in her hands. Her wedding ring, that white metal band, cuts into his already torn flesh. She presses it in and watches him wince.

She tells him that they are married and no other husband or wife on earth can stop that from being true. Andy looks into John’s stupid face and tells him that marriage is about hate, and their hate will never go away. She bends and whispers softly to him that her hate will never go away.

She slides off him and picks up her towel. She tells him he needs to clean his face up, that she’ll help him if he likes.

He doesn’t accept the offer.

Andy shrugs and wraps the towel around herself again. She tells him to suit himself.

Her head is clear now. Her appetite returns. Andy goes to the kitchen, takes the roast chicken carcass from the fridge and sits down at the table to eat.

John continues to sit in the chair. His head is turned back towards the tv, but Andy can tell that he isn’t watching. She smiles and rips another piece of chicken from the bones.

© J R Hargreaves October 2006