‘Couldn’t have a look, could you?’ She watched his eyes move over her face, to her lips and back when she spoke. ‘Quickly,’ she said, letting him in and closing the door. She told him it was upstairs and watched him climb the stairs, never looking back to see if she was following. He rattled around, flushing the toilet a few times before shouting down that this kind of thing was normal in a storm. He spoke with an accent, as the wife had expected. She looked at her reflection in the hallway mirror, at her knotted hair and crumpled clothes, and told herself she was something fuckable. There was a long pause in which she waited with her ears pricked up, before she realised she could hear him taking a piss. The sound travelled down the stairs, full of intent, more direct than that of the husband.
When the wife appeared in the doorway, the boy turned to look at her. He shook it out and put it back into his trousers.
‘You’re alone?’ he said.
She nodded and he walked up to her, the smell of sweat.
‘I’ve seen your man. He likes his tight jackets.’
She told him the husband was no longer around.
‘Where is he?’
The wife looked at his arms, darkened by days working in the sun.
‘I’m a widow,’ she said, running her fingers along the tiles as though trying to feel the effect of that word through the stone. ‘You know I played with Polish boys when I was a girl. For a while I pretended I was one.’
He told her she couldn’t be from Poland.
‘They don’t know that,’ she said. ‘It’s harder for them to recognise your class if you pretend you’re foreign.’
He turned away from her and stuck his hands under the tap, splashing water onto his face and running his fingers through his hair. The wife didn’t move until he looked at her in the mirror and said, ‘So you’re a widow. What do you want me to do about it?’
The husband came home that afternoon. As though the wife had known, she’d sprayed the hallway and bedroom with air freshener. She was curled into his armchair and heard the door when he came in.
The wife thought he looked exactly as he had before he’d died.
‘What are you doing in my chair?’ he said.
‘I was waiting for you.’
‘You’ve got other chairs to do that in.’
The wife stood. She noticed a smear of mascara on one of the cushions and turned it around.
The husband walked up the stairs and the wife prepared lunch. She wondered what he might say about the state of the bedroom, the sheets tangled and his clothes on the floor. She knew he wouldn’t say anything.
The wife hardboiled two eggs and flattened them into mayonnaise, spreading it onto the stale bread she’d bought yesterday, or was it the day before? She sliced the sandwiches in half and slid them into food bags, then sat by the window to wait. Although she couldn’t see them from down here, she could hear the workmen: an occasional call, a tool being dropped.
The wife and the husband walked along the promenade until they reached the pier. The husband ignored everyone who greeted them and the wife answered with a meek hello. Without discussion, they took the steps hewn into the side of the pier down to the sand. The tide was out and the wife perched on a large boulder while the husband continued to stand. He didn’t touch his food and after a bite the wife realised she didn’t want hers either.
‘Where did you fish yesterday?’ she asked.
‘The river,’ he said. ‘We went canoeing.’
The wife had known that. On the River Bela. She watched the husband walk across the wet sand, his footprints fading as he moved.
‘Did you catch anything?’ she said, and the husband shook his head.
‘Probably just a cold.’
He smiled and the wife’s face crumpled. She remembered the girl in her bikini and thought about how she too had just wanted a real beach. You could hardly call it one when you couldn’t slide your toes between the grains, or make castles that washed away with the waves. The wife said she hated rambling and that she never wanted to come here in the first place, feeling she could say that now.
‘Everything here is grey,’ she said. ‘And this place was supposed to make us better.’
The wife stood and grasped a pebble between her fingers, mottled and brown. When she threw, the stone landed with a wet thud a few feet behind him.
‘You don’t think we’re better?’ asked the husband.
She turned away to look into the white of the sky and the point at which it met the bay. There was a thin, horizontal line between one world and the other.
‘What, now?’ the wife said.
She heard a stone sail past her ear. It skimmed the surface of a channel in the sand, touching the water four, five, six times before it disappeared. She stopped still and watched as another danced across the shallows. They seemed to skip on for ever.
When she turned to look at the husband, he had his eyes fixed on the line of the horizon, squinting at the light. There was a look on his face she’d never seen before. The wife watched the elegant flick of his wrist and the stones as they flew through the air.
The stones, each time, became weightless.
Cuts
STEPHEN SHARP
Once over 65 you need five hours’ kip a night. Princess Diana said in a letter, her 1981 honeymoon was an opportunity to catch up on sleep. Alastair Campbell used to drift off when Harriet Harman spoke. I changed my anti-psychotic because it was making me drowsy. The psychiatrist said the new drug would leave me more awake. It would not cause sexual dysfunction. She was correct. I got erections and woke at 2.00 a.m. The auditory hallucinations got louder. They kept repeating ‘Go on do it now’. The voices did not specify what the ‘it’ was. I could not put the radio on without waking my brother. So I read Alastair Campbell’s Diary. He punctuated the first four volumes badly, but in the fifth he seemed to have learned what he was doing. The Diary must be as long as Proust. Campbell started several sentences with E.g. Alastair had arguments with his partner Fiona about the amount of time he spent working for Tony Blair. He had a breakdown . . . Nurses are more likely to commit suicide than other women. One in five people in the UK cannot name one author. Anthony Burgess reviewed one of his own novels. The radio made a fuss about his 100th birthday. He created slang for A Clockwork Orange that would not date. It was partly based on Russian.
An online shopping supermarket substituted tampons for baby food in a delivery. Kitchen knives are used in 60% of UK homicides. Kubrick said description was the most boring thing in a novel. He would hurl tedious books against the wall. There was a red-handled sharp knife in the cutlery drawer. I didn’t like handling it. I feared I would stab my brother with it while his back was turned. Norman Mailer stabbed his wife. The alternative to succumbing was going to a mental hospital again. I didn’t want that. I was worried that I would be searched when entering the hospital and my pen confiscated as a potential weapon, with which I could kill myself. I have to write every day. Paul Theroux said you should not keep a diary but rely on memory. I don’t agree with him. Enderby wrote literature while sitting on the lavatory. Turkey expelled 40 Dutch cows. It is a country in which you cannot flush toilet paper. Ian Fleming publications endorsed denture polish and hair removal cream. Ring notebooks were not allowed in hospital. Burgess said anyone can write a first a novel, after that you cannot rely on memory and must use your imagination. Old tea bags were displayed as art at the Serpentine Gallery. I can only drink decaffeinated tea. They don’t have it in the hospital. The voices told me to do it now. I loved my brother. He was the only person I lived with. He gulped his tea loudly and took an hour to drink a mug. Every man kills the thing he loves. I did not want to kill him. But the voices seemed to emanate from him and the only way to achieve silence was to shut him up. A Japanese company hired out fake friends to pose in your photographs. I was almost 60. 59% of women think about their ex during sex. The mentally ill die prematurely by about 20 years. So I probably did not have long to go. But I could not bear another day of it. The shrink changed me back onto my old tablets. But this did not silence the voices. They told me to do it now. I instructed my brother to shut up. He denied saying anything and suggested we stagger our meal times. The schizophrenic who raped and killed women on God’s orders went blind in prison. Many mentally ill people hear God. Burgess said we had never had a Catholic PM. Tony Blair converted shortly after leaving office. My brother went to see Blair at the local town hall in 1990. Oliver Sacks didn’t know who Michael Jackson was. Sacks went without sex for 35 years. Burgess was Sexist Pig of the Year in 1980. He said the female orgasm played no part in the sexual process, that women were better equipped to be novelists and that Tolstoy the genius was inseparable from the man who abused his wife. Michael Jackson was born after me and yet he died years ago.