married, Bess would have laughed at the fart, leapt on top of her husband, chastised him, kissed him and buried her face in the chest of this man who had pledged to love her for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. She tried to recall when she had stopped behaving that way, tried to remember exactly when it had first felt easier to curl up and reflect, harder to laugh and be silly. When she lost the baby, certainly. That was one marker.
It was the turn of Mario’s alarm to blast its greeting, and her heart sank.
How she hated the sound. Hated it more than the scratch of something on a chalkboard, more than the squeak of cutlery across the cheap metal trays of the kids whose lunches she served every day in the school canteen and more than bloody Smudge’s piercing yap. Smudge being the small Jack Russell that lived with Mr Draper (‘Call me Jonathan!’) over the way and who harassed Chutney at every given opportunity – the dog, that was, not Mr Draper. ‘He wants to be friends!’ Mr Draper would trill, while Smudge did his best to snap at Chutney’s one remaining testicle with his teeth bared.
‘Come on, lazy arse!’ her husband chortled. ‘Time to get up!’
‘I am many things, Mario, but I’m not lazy.’
‘I was joking,’ he sniffed, ‘or trying to. You’re not still a bit down in the dumps, are you?’ His intonation was heavy with judgement and impatience with her.
Her silence said more than any fake denial or forced smile that might have helped smooth the start of the day.
‘The thing is, Bess,’ he said eventually, ‘I don’t know if you know this, but your mood is catching – it’s a joy hoover. It makes me feel like shite; it even makes Chutney feel like shite!’ He ran his hand over the head of their beloved mutt.
It wasn’t news. Her moods balled the sunshine and lobbed it into the back yard to land with the weeds growing up through the patio and the discarded wood stacked in the corner, loitering without purpose. It put the house in permanent winter, which made her feel both powerful and guilty.
She watched him rise and stretch, his fringe sticking up at all angles, the grey hair of his chest wiry and long and his eyes bleary, picturing the man she had fallen in love with when he had come to talk to the manager of the supermarket in which she had been working. He, a young salesman, and she, a girl trying to find her place in the world, keeping her head down, working with tins of beans instead of flying the skies. The man who had held her hand as they fell asleep each night, as if contact was vital. The man who would creep downstairs in the morning, returning with a cup of hot tea, steadying it on her bedside table for when she woke. That man, who had thrown her a lifeline . . .
‘Do you know, I sometimes wish we could go back to those years when we were first married and you were so much nicer to me,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t have dreamt of saying something like that . . .’
His response was slow in coming. ‘I’d like to go back to then too, when I was three stone lighter and you were fun – remember fun? When I had the energy for great sex, and you had the inclination. And when you were much nicer to me too.’
‘I am nice to you!’
He scratched his chest. ‘You are, but that’s the issue, I guess, love. You’re nice to me in the way you are to anyone else, but you used to be . . . you used to be . . .’ He looked up and his mouth moved, but no words came. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I used to be what?’ On some level she wanted to hear it, like expelling a splinter or spitting out poison.
‘I don’t know what the word is, Bess. I don’t know how to describe it.’ He shook his head. ‘What I do know is I haven’t time to sit down and analyse it right now – time and my foreman wait for no man, as the saying goes.’ He laughed drily.
She watched him leave the room and remembered her husband, when the gold band on her finger had been shiny and loose, crawling up under the duvet, kissing her foot,