For The Mess He Made

“You should always brush your teeth after you’ve vomited,” she tells me. “The acid from your stomach rots the enamel.” She pauses and somehow I know she’s inspecting a fingernail. “That’s why bulimics have such bad teeth.”

I want to say, “Shut up you stupid cow, I’m dying here,” but instead I just spew some more beer and spirits over the wall. I watch it falling in part-coagulated slow motion from the top of the bridge we’re standing on down to the river that flows under us.

She is leaning against the wall, her back to the action. If this were her disgorging the contents of her stomach after one drink too many, one toke too far, I’d be holding her hair away from her face. I’d be rubbing her back and shushing her, telling her everything will be okay, she’s not going to die.

She’s harder than me, though. Less concerned. Her opinion at times like these is that I get myself into these states, I can deal with them myself.

She hangs around, though. I suppose she doesn’t want to be responsible for me choking on my own vomit.

“Do you still think eatin’s cheatin’?” she asks me.

I groan. It’s the only form of communication I’m capable of at the moment.

“I’ll take that as a no,” she says.

Her hair has been gorgeous tonight. I don’t know why I’m thinking this, as I bring back every single drink I’ve had over the course of the evening, but it’s true. Her hair has been long and dark and shiny and straight and soft to the touch. It frames her face; the layers and the fringe. All night I have indulged my need to touch it, and she has indulged my need to indulge.

“I think I’m done,” I say, still leaning. My stomach muscles ache from all the retching. My forehead is cold with sweat and I can feel myself shaking. I burp and taste the acid reflux of too many drinks and too much vomit.

She gives my back a token rub. The pressure from her hand turns my sweat-dampened shirt to ice against my skin.

“Where’s my jacket?” I ask.

“It’s here. I brought it with me, don’t worry. Everything’s here.”

From the sound of her voice, the direction it travels, she must be looking at me. I still can’t quite manage to look up or to leave my half crouching position against the wall.

“You might need to clean up a bit, though, if we’re going to get a cab home.”

“Can we walk for a bit?” I say. “I think I could do with the fresh air.”

I try to push myself back from the wall, to stand up straight, but I fail. She gets up from where she’s leaning and pulls me upright, moves me round, so that I’m half-sitting, half-leaning against the wall, facing the other way. She sits next to me and rubs my hand.

“Let’s sit here for a bit, eh? Plenty fresh air around us. Get your breath, then we’ll get a cab.”

She rubs her hand across my forehead and it feels good. She does it with the same brutish tenderness my mum always used on me as a child, when she was administering the spit-wash. A mixture of love and annoyance; love for the grubby-faced child of her loins, annoyance that he can’t keep his face clean. That’s how Sandra rubs my forehead now.

I haven’t done this since I was at University. I’m old enough to know better. I’m not even in my early thirties any more, let alone my twenties.

“I’m sorry, love,” I say.

“It’s alright, you daft bugger,” she replies, and I almost believe her.

“Your hair looks lovely,” I tell her.

“Oh, you. Shush.”

“Well, it does. And I am sorry.”

She looks at me and sighs. She looks tired. Too old for this game. I made her come out with me. Work Christmas party, nobody she really knows, nobody she’s really interested in. She’s not your typical corporate wife. She doesn’t dress like them; doesn’t talk like them; doesn’t think like them. She doesn’t suffer them easily.

She looks away from me again. I wonder if she’s storing all this up somewhere. Not to use against me, you understand. Material. Something to draw on.

We’re a long way out of town, in one of the villages that dot the Saddleworth Moors. At this time of night, this close to Christmas, it’s going to cost us a lot to get back to town in a taxi. Most of the partners live out this way, though; and it has made a change from the usual.

“Thanks for coming,” I say.

She doesn’t respond. We sit in silence for a while.

“Make sure you clean your teeth when we get in,” she says, when sufficient time has passed for responding to my gratitude to be ridiculous.

“I will. I promise.”

She looks at me and laughs. She squeezes my hand. “You won’t,” she says. “You’ll forget. We both will.”

We both look at the pub across the village square, where my colleagues are still attempting to raise the roof in the function room upstairs.

She has a pale hardness to her. She’s off at an edge somewhere, I used to think as an observer, but she’s not even that. She’s detached. She doesn’t really care. There was someone she cared about, I know that. I also know that he’s still around, at the other side of that edge. Present without intruding.

I observe her sometimes, usually when she’s washing up. She stands at the kitchen sink and her focus is apparently on the dishes in the water, in the methodical nature of washing and rinsing away the suds. She knows that I’m observing, but she doesn’t care. Her universe is her own, and I’m only in it because I’m a relief from that hardness that used to tell her she was on her own until the end. I’m that warm body, that voice on the other end of a phone, that face that greets her each night when I come home.

Her hardness is pale like the shell of an egg.

No children. We neither of us wanted children and besides we met each other too late. Careers and ambitions had taken us over. This was only ever about comfort in the face of life’s wide reality. Take it while it’s there. Her body carries with it the surprise of still being tight enough, of not having fallen by the wayside of parenthood. Her mind thinks she is still young because she doesn’t have the stark contrast of permanent responsibility for another’s life. Worrying about your husband’s vomit-induced death one night out of a million doesn’t count.

“You stink,” she says. “I can smell it on your breath.”

“It might be on my shirt,” I reply, looking down, trying to see in the half-light from the street lamps. I have to close my eyes to stop myself from falling.

She stands up and steps out into the road, one arm raised. She’s seen a cab drop someone off up the street. He drives towards her. She leans in through the open window to have the conversation about ringing the number, booking the call, before he’s allowed to pick her up. She does, and he circles the block, waiting for the job to come through over the radio.

“Come on,” she says. “On your feet. I’d better get you home.”

“Sorry, love,” I say again, and this time she doesn’t reply. The taxi returns and she opens the door.

“He’s alright now,” she says, bundling me in. “He’s done.”

She walks round the back of the cab and gets in next to me. She gives the driver our address.

“You sure you’re alright, mate?” the driver says to me through the mirror.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Just had a bit too much.”

“And nothing to eat,” she adds.

The driver laughs and leaves us in silence.

At the house, she pays the fare and helps me up the path to the front door.

“I’ll sleep in the spare room,” I say.

“Too right, you will,” she laughs, ushering me into the house.

“Teeth,” she reminds me, having forced me to drink some water and eat some toast. “Clean all that acid off.”

The mint makes me retch again, but I persevere. There’s nothing left to come up anyway. These are just dry heaves. She has gone straight to bed. I shuffle pathetically, full of self pity, into the spare room where she has left a bucket at the side of the bed, for just in case.

I take the spinning world to bed with me and we whirl there in the darkness for a while. I leave the door open and the stairs light on. It’s something I’ve carried from childhood, that feeling that if I wake in the night feeling ill and the light is there, it means I can’t be dead.

She is asleep in our room, wrapped in her dreams. I’m grateful to him for not loving her enough, for encouraging this pale blue hardness to develop. It keeps her alive, gives her something to hold onto, a fixed point on the horizon. I’ve never met him, and she has never spoken of him, but I know that he’s there. I feel the hatred and the anger and the love. I see it in the straightness of her spine and the way she looks out on the world. I know it in the detached, hard way we fuck; in her closed eyes that stare at something inside her head that has nothing to do with me or what we are at.

The room spins and I close my eyes, waiting for it to slow, to stop, to let me fall asleep.

I am grateful to him for the mess he made that brought her to my bed.

© J R Hargreaves December 2006