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Author: Kirsty Lewin
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The Breast Clinic – Part 2
Two weeks seems a long time to wait with a breast abnormality red flagging for cancer. But many women in the UK wait much longer. And women in low and middle income countries face an appalling scarcity of facilities for detection and diagnosis, as well as poor access to treatment.
You ponder this on your wait. You consider women in Afghanistan, in Yemen, in Sudan, in the DRC, in Pakistan, in Somalia. You imagine finding a lump or an inverted nipple as you shelter from a bombardment in Ukraine, as you trudge a scurfed track for water in Bangladesh, as you queue for food aid in a Syrian refugee camp years from your own home.
These thoughts, along with a twice daily mindfulness practice, dial down your anxiety. You find, to your surprise, you can put things in perspective. You stop catastrophising. Here in Scotland, in the capital city, you have access to health care. You have a close circle of supportive friends. You’ve lived already. That’s right. You’ve lived. The fear fizzles, flattens, fades.
You are permitted to take a support person but you choose not to. Going alone normalises it. Going alone says there’s nothing to fear. It’s just another medical appointment. And anyway, you want to cycle through the two parks and along the tree-lined paths with the robins and the chaffinches and the thrushes. You want to smile at the jittering blackbirds. You want to belly breathe the lucidity of the light.
You arrive at the hospital and there’s no cycle parking so you lock your bike to the Cancer Centre sign and you hope this isn’t disrespectful.
You walk in.
You walk and walk. Through the Cancer Centre, up one floor in a lift, down a listless grey corridor, past the cafe, down another indifferent corridor, turn right, into a narrow opening, up a tight set of stairs, and there it is. Your tummy tumbles. Name. Date of birth. You are ushered to a door on the right.
The waiting room is bright, fresh and awash with whispers. A TV on the far wall presents the news. A story about a woman suing a rape crisis centre for not providing a female only support group. A ferry procurement scandal. Grief worn statistics from Ukraine.
How does anyone decide where to sit? The closest chair? A chair with no next door neighbour? A chair on the far side by the window involving a walk past Other People who will look at you or not look at you and either of those outcomes will be utterly shameful? You choose, wrongly it turns out, a seat close to the entrance.
A poster on the wall explains that men get breast cancer, too. You know that but this is largely a women’s place. Nearly all the people waiting are women. A few have men with them. Others look like mothers and daughters. And yet others have female partners or friends.
Hands entwined. Phones scrolling. Fingers twisting. Reading the posters. ALLOW FOUR HOURS FOR YOUR APPOINTMENT. One woman, alone, young, her head in her hands. Another woman, elderly, deaf, a red anorak, can’t hear for the television. You get your book out. Names are called. You can’t hear the calling. You get up, move to another seat closer to the callings. You do the walk of shame without the shame. You’ve got this. You grin.
You are called forty minutes after your appointment time. You drift into the process. Catch the tide. It is efficient, compassionate, and thorough.
- Interviewed by the nurse practitioner.
- Examined by the nurse practitioner.
- A mammogram of both breasts and an ultrasound of one breast by a female consultant.
- She gives you the results.
- All clear.
- Back upstairs to wait for the nurse practitioner.
- Book out, reading. (Check the woman with her head in her hands).
- Feedback on your results from the nurse practitioner.
- Another physical examination by a male consultant.
- ‘Wear and tear’, he says.
- ‘Shy nipple’, she says, laughing.
- Nothing to see here.
- Patient discharged.
You walk back through those listless, disinterested corridors. You smile at the peeling paint, the curling posters, the automatic doors. You unlock your bike from the Cancer Centre sign. On the bench beside the sign a nurse sits with a patient. The patient, a gaunt woman perhaps in her fifties, is wearing a headscarf. Her skin is grey amber. She tells you she has cancer. The nurse tells her not to bother you. But you are not bothered. She is the first person you tell about your all clear. You are uncomfortable in the telling. Why you and not her? She wants to talk. You struggle to understand her. Her words are all swollen lips and rasping tongue. She gives you a thumbs up.
You get on your bike and bump down the kerb. Turn and wave to her. You want her to live.
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Maisie – a short film about happiness
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The Breast Clinic – Part 1
The day you find an abnormality in one of your breasts, breast cancer is everywhere. On Women’s Hour. On Twitter. On the back of a bus. On a leaflet dropped through the door advertising private health care. A smiling woman in a white headscarf holding hands with a smiling man who still has hair. Magaluf tans.The ‘Big C’ they call it. Monstering and terrifying. Everyone smiling. Everyone holding their breath.
You know you shouldn’t but you do it anyway. Surge through the Internet. NHS Inform. Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer in the UK. Fingers trembling on the scroll bar. Click click click through the links. Breast Cancer Awareness. Five Deadly Signs. The tumour pulls the nipple inwards, inverting it. Six questions to ask your GP. Double mastectomy and chemotherapy. YOUR BRA CAN KILL. Connecting patients, survivors and loved ones. BE BREAST AWARE. About 8 out of 10 cases of breast cancer occur in women over 50.
You plough through the symptoms again and again. You (YOU) should speak to your GP if you notice any of the following:
- a lump or area of thickened tissue in either breast
- a change in the size or shape of one or both breasts
- discharge from either of your nipples (which may be streaked with blood)
- a lump or swelling in either of your armpits
- dimpling on the skin of your breasts
- a rash on or around your nipple
- a change in the appearance of your nipple, such as becoming sunken into your breast.
You are an animal. Prodding and plucking. Staring in the mirror. Teasing and fooling. Promising (you’ll not look for another hour, really, yes, or even two.). You want to bounce your head off the bedroom wall. Maybe you do. You decide it’s time to write your will.
You pull and haul on the future you’ll never have. Coil it round an arthritic finger, Twist the threads, burn off the ends with a candle scented with fresh figs. You sneak another look. Maybe it’s not as bad as you thought. Maybe it’s worse. You try different lights. Unusual angles. Your breast will not be tricked. It waves its red flag.
There is no other explanation. The Big C. You focus on those you know who’ve survived and flourished. But the faces of those who didn’t, those that were buried and lamented, they boss and push to the front, stepping on toes, scheming and leering.
As with the vet, it’s always at the end of the working week. When it’s not possible to get an appointment with a GP. Even though you know, you understand, a couple of days isn’t going to make any difference. But YOU MUST FIND OUT.
You phone the GP practice anyway. Maybe god is on your side.(She isn’t). Call us first thing on Monday morning the receptionist says. She is both kind and resigned. You imagine she’s had a hard week. That’s she’s straightening her creases. Not raising her voice to the deaf. Forty-eight hours. What will you do with forty-eight hours? With immense discipline, you stay off the Internet. Do not engage, you say to yourself. There is nothing for you there. You phone a friend. Two. You climb down from the ceiling. Eat pasta straight from the pan. And lemon curd straight from the jar.
Mindfulness is sorcery. You do it exceptionally well.
You spend forty-eight hours attempting the right thing. You go for a cycle. You walk round the block. You hold a book in front of your eyes. It’s even the right way up. You meditate meditate meditate. You also do the wrong thing. Lie n your bed wishing it all away. Hour after misting hour. You make it to Monday. On speed dial to the GP. at 8am. You get through on the fifth attempt. The GP phones you back an hour later. And an hour after that you are in the surgery. Naked from the waist up. The NHS does not prioritise arthritic knees. It pins a lot on breasts.
The GP is kind, considerate and professional. Maybe, when she’s investigating the breast tissue through clever, experienced fingers, she has her eyes shut. Or maybe that’s you. You can’t remember. You hang onto the things that need hung onto. This can be part of the ageing process. But I’m making an urgent referral to the Breast Clinic anyway. The waiting time is no more than two weeks.
No more than two weeks. You will meditate meditate meditate. On Tuesday, or maybe the Wednesday, either way you’re at work, you have a missed call. A number you don’t recognise. The Breast Clinic. They’re calling you in.
To be continued in Part 2. (Spoiler – you get the all clear at the clinic.)
The image is from a Scottish Government campaign on breast cancer.
She loves me she loves the knot in the hedgehog’s halter. It was their battle cry, you said, BACKWARDS, DOWNWARDS. The hog wore a purple silk cumberband encrusted in cod. Everyone was into fish those days, even the evangelists. You poured prickle into my eyes and held my land in the cup of yours. The sea was too high and too wide for your upper lip. Later, the hog kicked up hell about the purple, less so about the cod. It’s hard to take a fence over a salted fillet. You leant in, whispered about an array, said it would calm it. The waiter had FUCKU tattooed across the fingers of his right hand. In red. Upside down for those of us who weren’t him. Did he want to fuck himself? I made a mental note to ask the hog. The hog was big on skin art. You were still going on about arrays. And then shoals. For someone just out of solitary that was quite the ticket. They found the hog on an atoll, hunting babies with a butterfly net. Exported it with all the others in wooden wine crates. You demanded to know if I’d been loyal. Huh, I said. A ladybird, trapped on the waiter’s C, couldn’t get past either end of the capital.
We’ve been talking about women. Taking a chance. Loose promiscuous women. All of their sadnesses, our sadnesses, captured in that conversation. I said thank you for the music. He said women were demonic beings. It was stupid and naïve thinking. Especially coming from Caliban. At some point he took the stage, the pulpit, called us all a bunch of wrinkly rodents. Why did it have to be me, I said, knowing me, knowing you? He said you could be frosty sometimes, an unusually diplomatic recollection of the atmosphere in those days.
I stood up. I said, let me be nothing if within the compass of myself I do not find ephemeral magic. (That digital recording cut out all the hiss.) I sat down. We all admitted we’d become tired. We were worse than any other woman, helping the corporates destroy the fruits of wombs. We cried to dream again.
Next up was the real gold on the visitors. The hunt for visitors was a turning point in women’s lives. Torture and terror were used to force us, the conversationalists, to deliver other names. Did we deliver? We did. How could we resist? Dum Dum Diddle. Be not afraid, we said to those we landed in the fray. It was a strange and strangely irresistible conversation about totalitarianism. Any man could now destroy a woman by declaring she was a conversationalist. And so he did. They do. Dobbed us in to the Met. Who let the man in? Who’ll let the women out?
When you go, when they slam the door, be not afraid, the isle is full of sounds and sweet airs that give delight. They promise it won’t hurt.
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Coiled Snake Inn
It hangs there, the sign, you know, like in the movies. A bullet hole through the centre of the o. Peeling green paint and its corking curls. The left hand chain rusted through, swinging loose, free. The sign cockahoop and clanking.
She digs wax out of her ear and rolls the soft orange yellow into a ball between her thumb and forefinger. Flicks it to the ground with a spit and a whistle. Squeezes her thighs into the horse’s flanks. She hadn’t meant to bring the gun, not this time. Christ, she barely knows how to hold the thing never mind load it but she’d said, her mother had said, ‘Laura he’s dangerous, that husband of yours,’ and so she’d saddled up, grabbed the gun from her father’s safe, and ridden into town cloppety clop, clippety clip.
Grit blows up into her eyes, she rubs, rubs again, the sun is a pink scald on the back of her neck, and she is across the road from Coiled Snake Inn with its o shot out and its S bleached out and the dot above the i lost in a crack or a flake or a gun blast or maybe all three.
Picture the scene. An empty dirt street lined with wooden shacks and their wildly-painted jaunty lean-tos, a dark-haired woman with thin lips and a smooth moustache in a blue check shirt astride a palomino or a bay or a fleet-bitten grey, take your pick, her gunpowder eyes fixed on the batwing doors of the only saloon in town, a bunch of tumbleweed rolling on past (that perfect gif), the rifle loose in her lap, the horse dancing, up on its toes, cloppety clop, clippety clip.
The tumbleweed is in amongst the horse’s hooves and the horse rears and Laura drops the rifle, metal on metal as the gun and horseshoes spark and clash, there’s a shout and a scream, the audience grabbing at each other in the dark, sucking salt sweet popcorn into gloating cheeks, a middle-aged woman choking on a Malteser, actually properly choking, CALL AN AMBULANCE someone’s shouting in the velvet pitch of the old town cinema, the one with the horses tethered outside, even someone’s pig, I mean Jesus H Christ who brings their pig to the movies?
The truth is Pete Crab Feet wanted to bring the sow in, even offered to pay her ticket, ‘Come on, love,’ he’d drawled to the usher ‘she’ll sit on my lap Daisy she’s as good as old gold,’ and the usher saw red and banned them both and now there’s Daisy and Pete Crab Feet both haltered up on the railings outside the One Tree Dominion in amongst the horses, and inside the woman who chokes on the Malteser has heaved it out with venom-spiked phlegm.
Laura’s horse is rearing up and bashing its pure white head on the Coiled Snake Inn sign with the o shot out and the sign falls with an alrighty clatter and the audience roars and Laura’s man staggers out through the batwing doors, out of the saloon, out into the platinum scald of the afternoon, bow-legged and randy-eyed and he trips over the unloaded gun and falls under the flashing hooves of the rearing wall-eyed horse and takes a fatal blow to the head and the cinema audience roars and cheers and the usher shouts LIGHTS UP FOR ICE-CREAM SALES.
Wrapper rustles fade out, the light dims, the audience shifts and shuffles, eyes blink and pupils adjust, the usher heaves open the plum velvet curtains and there’s Laura on the dirt eye to eye with the dead man who raises an arm, raises a fist, a flash of steel, and Laura’s horse drops to its knees, down on the road, puts itself between the dagger and sweet Laura and the audience sucks in an audience-size breath and there’s a pig-shaped squeal and in bursts Daisy, Daisy the sow, Daisy settling herself in the front row in the best seat, directly in front of Malteser woman right at the critical point and someone’s calling the manager, the usher, anyone, and on-screen there’s blood all over the horse’s white head, and Daisy the sow has found the choked out Malteser and has sucked it straight up her left nostril, all attention’s on the pig, what do you know, what do you know?
Credits roll.
I am writing this to you, no for you, you would be god could be god if I believed, permitted you to believe, cast you in that role but I don’t, don’t grant you how could I? he maybe she they, if you insist I’ll get over myself gift you the belief all seeing knowing mining reams of baleful show don’t tell you’ll have to interpret what I mean without words.
(Even if I don’t know myself.)
You, like I, must read between the lies I put down scrabble around spending more time on rhythm than hues although your hue, who? is glimmer dark, just one fold away from bewilder but maybe you, she slides her hand between the silks, feels for the real I’ve hidden there, biding myself, all of me, I and all of us, the singular us a rabble of letters I’ve yet to join up.
You’ve always had such lovely joined-up writing you say to me I blush and sometimes I can’t make it out one of the singular us just wrote it down a moment or so ago and now none of us can make it out, one of us titters when reading it out, I can’t bleed my own writing the you in me says what does it all mean do you think you could help us out?
This week I didn’t get a job. It took five weeks from starting the application process, through the two interviews, to learning the result. It struck me during the process that it might be interesting to share the various emotions I experienced through those weeks. Some of those emotions will be universal, some are more likely to be experienced by women, and a few no doubt, are just mine.
Stage 1 – Discovering the vacancy
I see the advertisement on Twitter. Yes, I think. I’d love to work with those people! After all, I already know some of them, so I know what I’m getting into. And it’s part-time so I can manage my disability. And it’s with an organisation doing something I believe in. I am excited. I start to imagine myself in this organisation. Out and about at events with them. Plotting and planning with them. In shopping parlance, I’m already wearing the outfit. Looking in the mirror, checking myself out in this fabulous new cloth. Yes, my bum looks good in this. Yes, it suits me. Yes, I’ll take it. Oh – how much does it cost?
Stage 2 – The person specification
How much does it cost? In other words, do I meet the criteria, and can I live on the salary? Let’s leave the salary to one side for the moment. Many person specifications have three columns. The first has the criteria, the next is the column for ‘essential’, the final is the column for ‘desirable.’ I can tick off most of the essential criteria. There are perhaps two or three that I can’t. But two of these criteria are knowledge-based. In other words, if I think about it rationally, I can learn what I’m currently missing on the job. I can also tick off most of the desirable criteria. No problems there. But, perhaps because I am a woman, I pause at not getting a perfect score. Perhaps I shouldn’t apply. Doubts set in. Then I remind myself how I look in the new outfit. And that I need the money. Surely it’s worth a punt. And anyway, the average man I tell myself, wouldn’t have any doubts at all.
Stage 3 – The salary
I cast the doubts aside. I am in the new outfit, striking off down the catwalk. And, as I have been on a career break for three years with no income at all, I start spending the money. Not actually spending it of course. But I plot. I fantasise. I’ll get the lights fixed in the kitchen, replace the linoleum floor, get someone in to help with the interminable silicon issues around the bath. I’ll pay off my missing years’ National Insurance. I’ll take the people out who’ve bought me lunch and dinner over the last three years. I’ll treat them and treat them and treat them to Edinburgh’s finest. Of course, during these fantasies I’m also sure I won’t get the job. I don’t meet the criteria. There’ll be someone better, younger, smarter, more suitable. So I’m spending the money and not spending the money because someone else better than me will be spending the money instead.
Step 4 – The application
Some vacancies require you to fill in an online form. In this case, it’s a letter and a CV. The letter needs to refer to the person specification – the essentials and desirables (here I’d like to say something amusing about deplorables but nothing obvious comes to mind). This is tricky. There’s an art to writing a succinct letter that covers a person specification. How much detail to give for each criteria? Detailed examples or one-liners? Should I write a short story about each one? Should I use the competency approach beloved of the public sector? Should I include my major strategic successes? Or stick to small specific examples? A two-year project taking a government’s climate change plan through from inception to publication? Or a blog for a local active travel campaign? Might I be considered overqualified for some of the criteria but underqualified for others? I decide that the letter must be no longer than two pages. And I rework my CV to suit the post. I submit.
Step 5 – The interview
The email arrives with the offer of an interview. It will be an online interview given the covid situation. More mixed emotions. The heft of success – hurrah, got through the first round! Then the anxiety. Since being run over by a lorry some thirteen years ago I’ve not been as effective as I might be at interviews. This, I discovered when taking part in some post cycle/vehicle collision research, is relatively common. I tend to overprepare, am overanxious at the interview itself, and don’t take enough time to pause and think when being asked questions. With this new self-awareness, I spend some time researching the organisation again, and rehearse some of the stories that I used in my essential/desirable criteria. Am I still trying the outfit on? Oh, yes. Am I spending the money? Oh yes. But I’m also talking myself down. Remembering other failed interviews. The interview with the Tramadol (not recommended but was essential medication at the time for pain control). The interview that was supposed to be online but the recruiter didn’t understand the technology so I only had audio but the panel could see and hear each other. That was, I believe, verging on the deplorable.
Step 6 – The wait
This interview is not deplorable. It is fair. As fair as an interview can be online. Of course, afterwards, I focus on all my negative aspects. The things I didn’t say but should have. My inability to read the room on Zoom. No facial cues to bounce off. No body language to check. Just thank you very much we’ll be touch. And then the wait. We are all waiting. I no longer dare to wear the outfit. I don’t spend the money. But I am caught in the coursing ebb of an unknown future now outside my control. Two futures. One in work, and all that that entails. And one that continues as is, free, loose, but without structure.
Step 7 – The second interview
OK – I absolutely did not expect this. I did not expect a second round of interviews that include preparing some content, doing a presentation, and answering more questions (provided). Initially I am surprised and perplexed. This hiatus of two potential futures is discombobulating. I apply myself to the task. Learn the basics of new software for the presentation. Prepare answers for the questions. I consider what to wear to the interview given 1) I’ll be cycling there and 2) what the panel are likely to be wearing. My choice of clothes involves entering my wardrobe for the first time in months or even years. I attend the hybrid interview in person (we’re all hybrid now). Once again the interview is as fair as an interview can be. It is a Friday. We’ll be in touch on Monday, they say. Thank you, I say. Thank you.
Step 8 – The news
I don’t think about it over the weekend. It is now, as they say, in the lap of the gods. My interview clothes are back in the wardrobe. I live my weekend without a possible new future. And then it is Monday. We all do it, don’t we? Make the calculations that is. We know that the successful candidate is contacted first. And that as the day wears on, we are less likely to be that candidate. My phone rings. This is it. But no, it isn’t. It’s the police (that’s a story for another day). And then, finally, the call. We know, don’t we. All of us. In the first second, we know. The gut punch. The rush of heat to the neck. We hear the explanation. We breathe. We are adult about it. We might take something positive from it. Or, if we are in the habit of beating ourselves up, we might not. In this case, the successful candidate has a different set of skills to mine. And those skills are the ones selected by the recruiting organisation. And that is fine. That is the best outcome for the organisation. And the things the organisation aims to achieve.
The gut punch doesn’t last. The almost future dissipates, dissolves, and disappears. For five weeks, my bum looked pretty good in it. But hey, there’s more than one way to dress a bum.
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Raspberry canes
He is under the tumble of the raspberry canes and the torn felt roof tiles behind the old kiln. The kiln with the protection order and the draggle of bats and the adder that slumbers, mostly. He is forty-eight, forty-nine in October and he is exactly the right age to be hiding under raspberry canes. His cheeks are flushed with the pleasure of holding the grudge.
They’re basically my parents, she said, after that first tentative kiss outside her flat three years ago, they’re desperate to meet you. Later the four of them sat at a discrete table in a private club. Eric’s hand lingering too long on Lexy’s shoulder. Iris looking everywhere but Eric. Lexy bubbling and smiling and calling for more bread, more olive oil, more pomegranate molasses, more of everything delicious. ‘So, you’re in finance,’ Eric said to George, sweeping imaginary crumbs from the table. ‘George is the head of his department,’ Lexy said, heaping English mustard onto her bleeding steak. George had opened his mouth to correct her, had changed his mind.
It’s warm under the canes, comforting even. George lies on his back, blinking at the shafts of sun that strobe through the foliage, stroking his fingers through the jots that jig and shimmer in the small space above his head. ‘George!’Lexy shouts. ‘George!’
‘Iris and Eric are gifting me the cottage,’ Lexy announced, wiping soy sauce from her mouth in the noodle place across the road from Tesco. ‘We’ll spend the summers there. Eric has done up the studio.’ George had frowned. The cottage had it in for him. That baleful squint of a building with its festering Aga, its subterranean potholes, its bawdy sea holly, its wanton apple trees, its provocative gingham curtains and its awkward attic bedrooms. Lexy had a perfectly good studio three streets from their flat. They didn’t need a cottage full of summers.
Or insects.
Or heat rash.
Or the interminable land.
Or the rats that scattered the attic walls.
‘Let’s sell it,’ he said. ‘Realise the capital.’ He ran the numbers on his phone. But Lexy was scrolling cottage garden herb sites. Ordering a hand-stitched lavender bedspread from Etsy for the bed with the too short too soft mattress and the source, he swore, of the snoring habit Lexy no longer bothered to deny.
He pulls his knees closer into his chest and rubs at the nettle stings vexing his scalp. Dock leaves, the village postmaster said. Rub them over the sting. George didn’t ask what a dock leaf was, or what would happen if he used the wrong leaf. He bought antihistamine cream. The cream made the stings bluster and pus.
He misses his fish. Lexy wouldn’t let him bring his fish. Nessie the Neon Tetra. Gary the Green Cobra Guppy. Lorna-Mae the Clown Loach. ‘No, George,’ she said, ‘they won’t fit. The colours are all wrong.’ She carried them across the road to the neighbour’s kids and he punched the wall and wept.
He checks his phone. Three hours now, and she hasn’t called, he checks, keeps checking. She shouts but she doesn’t call his phone. He shuffles down on the hessian flour sacks he’d taken from the kiln, rests his head against his water bottle and his packet of ginger biscuits, and checks his phone again. ‘George,’ she shouts, her voice drifting on the easterly. ‘George!’
‘You’ll be able to write,’ she said, cupping his chin in her hands as they lay naked on the living room floor in amongst half-packed boxes. ‘You’ve always on about needing space to write.’ It was true George talked about writing. Stroked his eyebrows, brandished literary reviews, signed up for expensive courses led by authors with beard creams and pronouns. But things got in the way, she got in the way, he never attended the courses, never managed more than a few sentences of the epic insights he yearned to share.
Having the neighbours over for a bonfire on their first Saturday at the cottage was her idea. And, after they left, burning the vintage ship’s trunk they were using as a table was his. They sat and crouched, six of them, holding their hands out to the jumping flames, as Lexy expounded, explicated and aggrandised. Lexy and her ceramics, Lexy and the fertility of her creative visions, Lexy and the unleashing of her spiritual vibe, Lexy and her dawn duets with fairytale nightingales, Lexy and her three rescue hens plastered with love. When the half case of red was finally empty, she walked the neighbours down the dark lane to the gate, giggling and pointing to the moon. ‘Be a darling and tidy up, will you,’ she said as she linked arms with the two men. And so he cleared the trunk of glasses and bowls, then heaved it into the fire, surprised at how quickly it spattered and sparked and shrank into the night.
‘George,’ Lexy’s voice is softer now, tired, ‘I know you’re here somewhere.’ Above him, the crows that live in the veranda up their squabble with humanity. The crows have foiled every attempt by Eric to poison them. He mocks a silent victory sign, his fingers to his forehead.
He opens the packet of ginger biscuits. Scowls at the waft of cigarette smoke. She must be sitting down. She always smokes sitting down. Her right leg crossed over her left. Her eyes half closed. Each draw deeper, more salubrious than the last. He’s asked her to give up, cajoled, threatened, sulked. It makes me feel nauseous, he has to say to her at least three times a day. Why would you do that to your lover?
He launched his rebellion on their first day in the cottage and has maintained it ever since. Spends his mornings pitching too hard in the rocking chair in the scullery that squints out over the scrubby field with the bulls. Spends his Saturday afternoons visiting the local tip, a twenty-mile drive away. Spends his evenings rearranging his treasures in the long jumbled garden. Gnomic miscreants, twisted lobster pots, dried delphinium heads, a slot machine, a bleached merry-go-round horse, a rusted chicken hutch still full of vintage chicken shit.
A squeak and a drag of plastic and metal across wood. She must be sitting down on the plastic car seat he’d picked up at the dump. Dragged it out of Eric’s Land Rover with a flourish of dust. ‘Look, darling,’ he called to her. ‘A throne fit for a princess.’ Lexy came out of the cottage, her hands plaster ghosts, stared at him, and ground her heel into one of Eric’s rare petunias. ‘Take it back,’ she said, pointing at his treasure. He pushed past her, arranged the car seat on the sunniest aspect of the veranda and strode down the gravel path to the middle of the garden. Sat on the pile of red bricks that Iris insisted he, George, should use to build a barbecue. He watched the mass of raspberry canes shiver and shake, burst open and disgorge a rescue hen. The hen shook herself, pecked at the loose earth around his feet, and wandered into the kiln. He peered through the hen-sized tunnel, glimpsed the snug nest of covert eggs.
He is a dormouse taking umbrage. A man in his prime forsaken by a privileged hipster twenty years his junior with no imagination and no eye for the perfect reuse of modern urban decay.
He hadn’t planned to kill the chickens. Iris had driven him to it. Preening and petting them, gathering them in her arms like babes. All the time peering at him over their stupid little heads with her narrow eyes and porcelain teeth. Staring at his groin. Pointing at toddlers when the four of them were out in the village. He hadn’t planned to leave them bloody, headless, on the veranda either. But there they were, matted and mutilated, him swinging back and forward in the plastic car seat with a beer in his hand, when Lexy came back from the gallery.
The cigarette smoke is closer. A waft of Rive Gauche. A flashy crunch on the gravel beside him – her immaculate white trainers. He tightens his abs, throws his head towards his belly. The nettle stings rip and shingle. The click of her lighter. The faintest smell of petrol. Something wet, sprinkling on his shoulder. Raining? But the sun? A crackle, sparks, the snap snap of flame curling wood. The dark spoor of burning rubber. Hot then heat.
No, Christ, no. He is a dormouse taking umbrage. A record-breaking grudge. He can’t come out. He mustn’t come out. His hair on fire. His flaming linen suit.
SANDERLINGS 