The Night Following Read online

  Ah! Here is Jeremy again, tipped back in the grey suede driving seat of his prized yellow Saab convertible. He is not alone. A woman who is not his wife is stroking a condom over Jeremy’s erect penis, in accordance with the instructions on the packaging, which almost certainly call it that, although this woman is using other words for it. Indeed, she is dallying, taking Jeremy’s aforementioned between her lips, whispering playful threats and promises of what’s going to happen. See here? Jeremy again. His eyes, shiny with joy, are fixed unseeing on the roof of the car. Yes, here it is, here’s the ecstasy now. She’s across him like a crab, claws waving, impaled. And here is Jeremy’s wife, is it days, weeks, months, or even years further along in her married, leafy, cream-carpeted, cul-de-sac life, sitting in the yellow car alone, holding the condom wrapper that Jeremy left in the glove compartment. What does she make of this?

  The parade of images faded. I pulled down the sunshield and looked at myself in the mirror, wondering if the calm I felt inside couldn’t be what I was feeling at all and my face might reveal actual distress. Perhaps I wanted to watch myself deciding what to feel. But my face bore no more than a shadow of preoccupation. Should I not feel at least mild consternation? I was surprised. I hadn’t expected it of Jeremy, or rather, of a Jeremy; from a Jerry, from a man of my mother’s type, with many rings and a leather coat, grey hair over the collar, maybe. But this seemed an implausible story for any Jeremy to have got himself into, let alone an anaesthetist Jeremy of fifty-eight suffering from problematic nasal hair and occasional tinnitus, a Jeremy with meaty, antiseptic hands and a quasi-surgical attitude to sex. (Not clinical, exactly, but with a fastidious emphasis on equipment, technique, and procedure: always in bed, straight to the relevant sites, and nothing said-he working reliably, I respectful of his concentration-until afterward, when he would express satisfaction not so much at passion spent or even appetite sated but at a job done. It’s surprising, really, he didn’t talk about outcomes.) At least that was how he was with me, and with diminishing frequency. Was it possible that he had discovered, squashed up with this woman in the yellow Saab, that sex-that he, Jeremy-could be grand and wild and dirty and magnificent?

  How much younger than me was she? I ruled out her being a prostitute-Jeremy would never have compromised the dove grey suede on the backside of a common tart-so what made it necessary for them to do it in the car? Simple unstoppable urgency?

  I turned the wrapper over and over in my hand and felt traces of the lubricant from the silvered inside soften the pads of my fingers. Did they wrest the condom from it with hands intertwined and fumbling? I checked its torn foil edges for teeth marks. Did he hiss at the sight of her long nails, groan as she eased it on, instruct her, take over? Did they cry out at the ludicrous little pulsating moment of crisis as they came, and afterward, capsized and contorted across the upholstery by the frantic passing squall in their groins; did they smile? Joke about where her knickers had got to? Or did he talk-really talk-to her?

  I rubbed my fingertip and thumb together to feel that strange, clingy slip, neither oil nor powder, between them. I dipped my hand in the pool of bright cold slime on the passenger seat and rubbed that between my fingers, too, squashing a handful of raspberries and egg together, letting clear slippery albumen and creamy orange and grainy rags of fruit run down and stain my arm. With the engine switched off the car was already warm, and now the air filled with a new smell that quite overwhelmed the silicone tang of Jeremy’s dashboard cleaner. It was raw, and tight with sweetness, fat with yolk and seed and juice. I thought of heat, of skin licked bare of perfumes and smelling only of itself, salty and animal, and I thought of teeth and saliva and damp hair. I thought of the shoving and sighing, the sucking and shuddering, of sweat and come. And I thought, thanks to her husband, here is the anaesthetist’s artistic wife pausing in the car park after the supermarket shop, thinking so intensely about fucking of a kind she’s never experienced that it is making her wet.

  And I felt grateful, if a little envious and excluded. I did not even take any avenging pleasure in the Technicolor ruin of the passenger seat. Normally the raspberry and egg disaster would have upset me to the point of nausea but it aroused no feelings I could put a name to. All I could do was study the colours. I sat and watched them seep into one another for a while. Here is Jeremy’s wife contemplating a major spillage. Jeremy’s wife considers that these marks will never come out.

  But then came a realization, and with it a flood of pleasure as pure as anything sexual. The realization was that my calm did not require justification. Quietly and naturally I accepted that I did not mind about Jeremy’s infidelity and so need not pretend to. Quietly and naturally I understood that my discovery severed a redundant bond, not because I cared where Jeremy’s penis had been but, very particularly, because I didn’t. I need not pretend that anybody’s safety or happiness was at stake; nothing at all, finally, depended upon the continuation of our marriage to each other, and this was not a calamity. Rather it should be celebrated; here is proof of a union’s unlooked-for but unmistakable meaninglessness, its sudden, clear freedom from having to go on appearing to have a point. This seemed so simple and unambiguous I did not feel it was something I had concluded for myself. It felt like a truth nesting within our marriage all this time like a late and overprotected egg. Now at last it was hatched, and emerging from it was something perhaps ungainly, but unmistakably itself.

  I could not wait to tell Jeremy. I was sure it would be such a relief to him, too, to be let off any more of this. My desire to share it with him was, I think, wholly generous. I was sure that when I saw him and explained it all I would, albeit a little bitterly, thank him. I would go straight to the hospital. I could wait and perhaps catch him between the day’s -ectomies: splen- or hyster- or append-, whatever bits of offal came out on Thursdays, I had no idea. We didn’t talk about his lists anymore.

  27 Cardigan Avenue

  bed

  still 9th May

  day after

  Dear Ruth

  Today is taking much longer than usual. After all the recent coming and going it’s very quiet. They’ve all told me I “must be exhausted.” They’ve all told me I have a right to be angry. They are, they say.

  I can just hear what you’d have to say to all this.

  Arthur

  PS Actually I can’t. Not a word. It is very quiet.

  Maybe I was a little upset and distracted by the mess on the seat beside me. As the car moved, the colours wobbled and pulsed like blood flooding the corner of my eye. I began to feel almost afraid of it, this wet heap beside me. I didn’t dare stop noticing it, as if I could keep it from getting bigger by concentration alone, as if, should my awareness falter, it would bulge and swell and fill all available space, leaving nowhere that was not lurid with colour.

  I had taken one of the winding back routes to Salisbury, not specifically to avoid the main road, but for something like privacy. I wanted a little time to get used to myself as a wronged wife-as the phrase applicable to me, rather than the fact-because I was bemused at the cliché of it. I wasn’t driving faster than usual. Between villages, the road rose and fell between fields and hedges, and here and there narrowed to a single lane. As always, it was almost deserted.

  Up a hill on the left side was an orchard bordered by a low wall. I drove towards an overhanging line of trees in blossom whose ornamental acid pink was pressing hard into the blue of the sky. Set back from the road before the trees stood a pair of modern pebbledash cottages, each with a carport and a satellite dish. In the garden of the first one stood a caravan; in the other the sun was glancing off the glassy, dead surface of an artificial pond. Unremarkable as the houses were, I noticed them particularly, as if I knew I should later be unable to forget any detail of the moments just before. I passed by them and up towards the trees whose moving shadows cut like slate across the tarmac. The road was rising towards a bend beyond the trees and an even higher stretch of ground between garish sprin
g fields. The green of these fields in the distance stung my eyes with almost chemical sharpness, the fresh bitterness of sap in new leaf, new grass. Green can be too green.

  Perhaps I did wince as the pink branches bobbed above, almost in my face, or I may have blinked as a splinter of sunlight sliced at my eyes. And I’m not sure if I truly remember this or have constructed it after the event-after learning what the event must have been-but I can describe a jolt and a bang and the car bucking like an animal, and a black bulk thrown up and looming at me and blotting out the sky, and two or three ghastly, weighted thumps and then noises of scraping and rasping all around me. The windscreen crackled and crumped inwards. The bulk disappeared and the sun burned back through the crazed glass in fragmented darts of light that pricked my eyes like a fistful of thrown needles. I have no idea how I stopped the car.

  This I do remember. In silence I walked-I did not run-towards the shape on the road. It was sprawled a shockingly long way back. It wasn’t black. She was dressed in a russet checked jacket and navy trousers. She lay on her front, irretrievably broken. I went close enough to see that her head was the wrong shape, and I saw the crimson purée growing under it. It no longer fitted correctly on her neck. One side was flattened so it seemed to be lying in a hollowed-out bowl in the tarmac. I went close enough to see the off-centre rictus of a dislodged dental plate forcing a mad smile out of one side of her torn mouth. I saw on her face a look of slight surprise, a single backward glance arrested indelibly in an eye that was drowsy and glistening with the filmy, departing gaze of a drunkard, or a very tired baby. I did not hear if the spinning rear wheel of the bicycle on the side of the road was making the usual cheerful ticking noise. All seemed quiet until I became aware of a soft, lamenting whine coming from my own lips. Beyond us, the wind flicked some sheets of paper across several spilled books on the road. A ring binder lay splayed, its cover showing a cartoon of a quill pen and the words Woman Wise-Monkwell Women Writers Group. A shopping bag caught and torn in the fractured spars of the bicycle bore a facsimile of Shakespeare’s signature and the words As You Like It. Daffodils and clumps of grass at the base of the orchard wall shivered in little flurries of wind and I saw an empty blue hat on the side of the road begin to stir and roll among the waves of frayed yellow and green. Just then the silenced birds in the pink trees started up again.

  The wind got up, too. A sudden gust blew the loose papers on the road up into the light and shadow and for a few moments I stood transfixed by their swirling, indecent exuberance, the loveliness of bright white paper as the sun caught each flapping page. Then, perhaps to stop myself from screaming, I chased after them through the scattering wind, grabbing them in midair or where they dropped momentarily to the ground. I don’t know what I thought I was saving, or for whom. All I saw was that every sheet bore the heading THE COLD AND THE BEAUTY AND THE DARK, and all I knew was that I could not bear that a single paper should be swept into the dirt and blood. I would not let a single word be smirched. By the time I’d picked the pages all up and bundled them in my arms, I was weeping.

  I think my whimpering stopped in the second or two before my mouth dried. I didn’t faint or fall but all at once I wanted to be down on the ground. I was clutching the papers against my body and they were suddenly unbearably heavy. I was going to have to sink down next to her and stay there forever, or I was going to have to move. I ran back to the car, opened the door, and threw the papers into the back. With my hand reaching for my handbag-I was about to get my telephone, surely I was?-I turned and looked up, hearing a raucous hacking sound above me. A crow swooped out of the trees, skimmed over the wall, and alighted in a tatter of wings on the small of the woman’s back. Two more landed on the road nearby. The first one, watched by the others, lifted its wings and tidied them over itself like a pair of oily folded hands. It hopped up the length of her body until it stood on her hair. Prayerfully, it dipped its head and began to peck. In the sunlight its feathers gleamed rainbow black. I drove away.

  27 Cardigan Avenue

  kitchen

  lunchtime

  Dear Ruth

  For obvious reasons it’s no good me asking where the pressure cooker is. I wish I knew. I’ve never understood the new microwave. I could cope with the last one, this one really gets my goat. Far and away too fancy.

  kitchen later

  Window cleaner’s just been here. Cheeky bugger. Acted like he hadn’t heard the news. Actually whistling. Well, I wasn’t about to enlighten him. I’m sure he knows and he’s taking advantage. How much is he supposed to get? He told me £15. I paid up, just this time I told him, I won’t be ripped off like that again.

  I’ll have something to say if he tries that again. The situations some people are capable of taking advantage of. Unbelievable.

  A.

  PS The police haven’t been back. Unless you count Victim Support Officer. So nothing to report there

  As I drove, I knew the sun would still be shining through the windy trees, painting the road in moving daubs of shadow. Daffodils and a lost hat would still waft together on the grass. Horror that should have quite overwhelmed me was somehow at bay, though I sensed that it was massing, growing in a place in my mind where it would wait and visit later when its full force had gathered. For the moment I was calm enough to know my calm for what it was: merciful, sedating shock, the kindly muffling of the brain that slows the world down following the rush of a disaster. And so what first horrified me was not what had happened, of itself, but that it was already receding, as a dream evaporates within seconds after waking. The event, though catastrophic, was already turning vague while new events, banal but new-a hat rolling in daffodils, clouds buffing and dulling the ground-claimed my attention irresistibly.

  I thought about the wind flipping the strewn pages on the road and teasing the woman’s hair. I thought about her wrecked body and my incidental, obliterating swipe that had punched the life out of it, and I realized that our being caught up in this together would never, ever be explained. How could two strangers be bound to each other forever as we now were by an event so haphazard, yet so crucial and so intimate? A husband was unfaithful. A shopping bag was punctured by the edge of a carton. A wife made too stark a discovery, on a day already angular and confusing with blades of shadow slicing through trees. But these were not reasons, merely circumstances: routine car maintenance, routine adultery, broken eggs, spilled fruit, a day of wind and sun. No divine or other congruence, no pre-ordained astral spinning, could possibly be in motion either to prevent or determine that this conjunction of trivia would cause anyone to drive under a flickering arch of pink blossom towards a single, injurious, cataclysmic encounter with a stranger on a bicycle. Why should it?

  People vanish as if they never had been more than apparitions and all the life in them little more than a movement that caught the eye. A woman invisible among the watery shadows on a lane in spring, my uncle walking away from me into a snowy night long ago. My grandmother in the early morning, pegging out washing and playing hide-and-seek behind the sheets: all vanished. Not a word comes back and not a breath remains, though the rippling of laundry on a clothes-line can still make me wonder if she lingers there, teasing me with that old game, not knowing it was years ago and I’ve outgrown it, for the dead have no idea how long they’ve been gone.

  But the sheets hang still after all, and so it was, of course, just a fancy to imagine she was there. And if we don’t believe in ghosts, how can we trust their opposites, real people with their loud voices and certainties, their intentions for the day, ideas about their future and their happiness, to possess the same reluctance to relinquish this life, to be any more fleetingly present than they? And so the world proves itself as shadowy, as unreliable as anything glimpsed and dismissed as a trick of the light, and people pass over the surface of it the way they tiptoe out across the edges of a memory, or a dream.

  And in the instant the dreamer wakes, already the separation is beginning from even the worst a
nd strangest of nightmares, and the infinitesimal moment has passed when the dream’s fragments might have all come together into something complete, albeit terrible. Revelation eludes us; even as our eyes are opening, the knife falls from the hand and voices expire on the shore of sleep. We are awake after all and alive in the solid world, and it seems so understandable and constant, and the time remaining to us so unwearyingly long. There are trees and fields all the way to the horizon and a pebble-sized heart beats in every flying bird. Yet we take only a moment to perish. We vanish under the surface the way a drop of water flicks from the tail of a fish, sparkles, and falls back into a river. Once you know that, you know that the will of a body to remain unbroken is itself piteously breakable.

  Perhaps the woman on the road measured the last minute of her life in a calculation of how long it would take her to pedal to the top of the rise. Perhaps there was no more than a minute between the thought that soon she would stop to rest and the moment she became carrion. Perhaps this is what an accident is.

  27 Cardigan Avenue

  Dear Ruth

  Sorry for silence, been busy.

  Re: pressure cooker, I don’t think it’s here at all. Obviously it’s not in stuff laid out for the Belle Aurore Atlantis, I wouldn’t expect you to take a pressure cooker on a cruise.

  I checked through all the stuff already packed in the spare room anyway, though. Not there.

  But it’s not in any of the boxes packed for next six months in Australia either-mistake, surely, as we could do with it there I’d have thought.

  Been right through the attic and garage and everywhere else I can think of, no joy. Uncovered other stuff that might be handy however, it’s amazing what you collect.

  Also came across pages of this-your writing group stuff I suppose, some novel is it?