marriage – SANDERLINGS

This story is dedicated to my good friend Liz Moir.

The white wafer is too dry, too big and too rice cracker for his taste. He’s just never got used to them. Ralph is kneeling on the thinning red rug, having had his turn, and his belly sours and boils. Kathleen makes him come to mass, she says, for his penance, the penance that he should have done when he met her five years ago. His knees hurt. Why they make them all kneel for so long is beyond him. He isn’t even Catholic.

Kathleen told him not to mention this to anyone. She said what they don’t know can’t kill them. She also says the same whenever she’s doing something she shouldn’t. It’s Kathleen that should be doing penance. What with crushing their wee Tommy’s favourite plastic roll-a-dog deliberately under the rear car wheels when she reversed out of the garage, or sprinkling chilli powder in the neighbour’s cat food when she thinks he, Ralph, isn’t looking.

Of course Kathleen isn’t at mass this Sunday. It’s your job to keep up appearances, she says, tickling his chin with her manicured violet nails. Tell them I’m sick, she says, every Saturday evening. Migraine. Or make something up. Kathleen’s been sick every Sunday morning four and half years now going on five.

Ralph shouldn’t have married Kathleen. She is garish, bilious, has disgusting piles, and laughs like a horse.

But when there’s a gun to your head, literally, what else can you do? It was ordained, Billy her father said, when you stuck your prick in her you little shit. Kathleen had leant back with her round belly and pouted and giggled and stubbed her cigarette out on Billy’s smoked glass nest of tables.

On reflection, Ralph doesn’t believe he’d had much choice in the matter. He’d merely been helping out a woman in distress. Coming back from the office late, still warm in the glow of a just above average performance appraisal, he’d seen her trip in the street. Fly off the kerb in her hefty platform soles and land spread-eagled face down in the loading bay outside Pizza Express. The early Tuesday evening drinking crowds had stared a bit and walked on past her. Assumed she was drunk. What was a civilised man to do? He’d helped her to her feet, picked up her bits and bobs that had strewn from her handbag, and offered to flag her down a taxi. Let me buy you a drink, she’d said. And he had. Remembers it so clearly. A whisky sour with a healthy handful of crushed ice. She had chosen it. Then put a hand between his thighs. And ordered him another.

The wedding had been fast, furious and full of men with shaved heads in sharp suits with bulges in their right hand pockets. The flowers had been sickly ivory and the food had been fried and guillotined and divined to play certain havoc with Ralph’s acid reflux.

There’d been a champagne fountain. A six tiered cake with a photo of Ralph and and Kathleen on the top and a photo of Billy and his third wife Irene on every other tier. A pyramid of presents, many suspiciously long and thin and heavy, greeted the guests in the great marble hall.

After Billy’s speech, which ran over by several chapters, Ralph had escaped out to the hall, and picked up one of the gifts, wrapped in red velvet with a luxurious navy satin ribbon bow. It was a large square box, heavy, and when rattled, it sounded like metal. Ralph had held it up to his nose. Tried to smell it. I wouldn’t do that, said one of Billy’s henchmen, wouldn’t want to blow your pretty lips off your face would you? The henchman had laughed and dragged some woman in a silver boob tube onto the dance floor. Ralph had put down the present, rushed to the gents to powder his nose, throw cold water on his face, and hide in a cubicle until he was flushed out by his brand new father in law Billy Menoza kicking the door in.

Ralph didn’t invite his own family to the wedding, he didn’t feel it was safe. It was just small, at the registry office, he lied, the day after he and Kathleen came round to make the announcement. Ralph’s mother had sighed, smiled at Kathleen, and turned the pages of her crochet book, looking, she said, for baby mittens. Apricot or peach she asked in a breathy voice. Ralph’s father poured them all a sherry, except Kathleen of course, and said we may as well toast the bride even if she’s pregnant. Kathleen had demanded a gin and tonic, she wasn’t missing out she said, and what they don’t know can’t kill them. Ralph, at thirty three years old and only now leaving his parents’ house for the first time to live in the penthouse apartment Billy was providing, could think of nothing to say in response.

So Ralph sits, the wafer refusing to melt in his mouth, staring at all the other pennants, the other hapless victims of Billy’s bilious daughters and nieces, and hatches a plan. Ralph will escape. He can’t take Tommy, that’s for sure. If he takes Tommy, they’ll come after him. And at the very least, kill him, Ralph. No, the boy will have to stay behind. They’re good to the boy at least. Treat him like some sort of heir. He’ll get a private education too. Billy had already paid the school for the next five years. In cash.

Ralph seeks out the eyes of the priest. The priest is busy down the end of the line. The priest has rather lovely shoes. Ralph studies his clothing. The vestments look soft and comfy. And Ralph has never had a problem cleaning, his mother always says that. He’d have to get up early, that’s for sure, and the food’s bound to be a bit boring, and it’s probably freezing in the winter, but one thing’s for certain, Billy Mendoza would not dare enter a monastery and neither would Ralph’s monster wife Kathleen.

Father, he will say later to the priest at the door of the church, I’d like to have a talk with you if I may, and Ralph will pause, drop his eyes, and continue, I believe, he will say, I really believe I may have had the calling.

‘Christ, don’t press so hard!’ Tim pulls his bare leg off Mary’s lap.

‘I’m only trying to help.’

‘Help? You’re making it worse.’

‘Could you be more grateful?’

‘It’s your fault anyway.’

‘How in God’s name is my fault?’ Mary stands up and throws the bloodied white towel at her husband. It lands on his lap. ‘Do it yourself.’ She picks his shredded trousers off the floor, takes them through to the bathroom and drops them in the wicker laundry basket. She returns, leans on the fridge, and folds her arms.

‘Oh come on, love.’

‘I’ve had enough.’

‘Pretty please? I was picking them for you.’ He smiles up at her from the kitchen chair. It’s a Shaker chair. Oak ladderback. One of six. Hope he doesn’t mark it. She’d saved for months to buy those chairs. Ordered them from an old bloke in Dorset who only makes a few sets a year. She had to buy them earlier than she should have just in case he died. Tim’s pale. Pallid even. Maybe she should take him to a doctor or a nurse or whoever fixes people up these days. But it’s a Saturday afternoon. It’s an hour’s drive to the hospital. There’ll be a massive queue at A and E. Most of them drunks.

‘No.’

‘Oh come on, Mary, I’d do it for you.’ It’s a lie. Of course he wouldn’t do it for her. He never does anything for her. Nothing. Amazon vouchers for Christmas and John Lewis vouchers for birthdays. That’s it. So lacking in imagination he’s never even switched them around. Amazon vouchers for her birthday. That would perk her up. What a surprise. She smiles. Pictures the scene. They’d be laughing together. He’d say look, got you this time girl, and he’d slap her bottom, and she’d pour him a tall glass of Whispering Angel Rosé and straddle his lap. He’d lift up her satin satsuma skirt (bought with the previous year’s vouchers) and kiss her white lace panties. And then…

God, what’s she thinking? Last couple of years he hasn’t even bothered with the cards. Automated emails coming in as regular and tedious as the dreadful mantle clock his parents had given them for their wedding. Still tick tocking its mean little rasp twenty years on. She’d knocked it off the mantlepiece with her elbow twice and still the damn thing wouldn’t die.

He puts a hand on his forehead. ‘I’m all clammy. I might faint.’ He doesn’t look right, she’ll admit that. She sits down across the table from him. The table is covered with loose battered apples. They are large, rose red and pale yellow. Pink Ladies. The Pink Ladies that Tim had been stealing when he’d fallen out of the tree. A forty-nine year old man with sciatica and a heart murmur what with the too much drinking, up a tree nicking apples from the next door farmer’s orchard.

‘Have some water. It’s superficial. Shins always bleed heavy like that.’

‘It’s not superficial, it’s spurting!.’ Mary mutters of course it isn’t spurting only arteries spurt and there’s no arteries there under her breath, gets up, fills a glass with tap water and slides it through the apples towards him.

She’d heard the scream but hadn’t recognised it. She’d put down her book (The Silent Patient by Alex someone if you really want to know the details – Only she knows what happened Only I can make her speak ) and had run out of the house, into the yard and down the lane and there he was. Face down, spread-eagled on the hawthorn hedge, the hedge that was supposed to keep the townie-incomers away from the trees. Their wooden IKEA ladder lay neatly on top of him. Tim, she’d shrieked, Tim is that you?

She is embarrassed about the shriek now. What if Bob the farmer had heard. He’d be furious. He is angry enough. Forever complaining that they didn’t keep their garden just right, that they were introducing pests to his trees, that they used up too much water, that they shouldn’t keep hens if they couldn’t stop the slaughtering vermin foxes etcetera etcetera. Except Bob wouldn’t use the word etcetera. He’s not an etcetera sort of man.

Tim holds the glass with both hands and sips the water. Just in his shirt, pants and socks, his upper body is all wrong for his thick lardy legs, like someone had taken the top half of one doll and stuck it onto the bottom half of another. He’s no Action Man but Mary can’t think what other doll he might be. Maybe dolls are the wrong simile. But Mary can’t come up with another one.

‘Weird,’ she says, after a few moments of silence. ‘See the shape of the wound?’

‘What do you mean?’ Tim looks down at the large bloody laceration on his right shin.

‘Can’t you see it?’

‘No?’

‘It looks like a dinosaur.’

‘A dinosaur?’

‘Yes.’

‘Christ, Mary, I’m bleeding to death. And,’ he paused, ‘it’s probably infected.’

Mary stands up and walks around the table to hover beside him. ‘Look,’ she says pointing, ‘there’s the head, and the long jagged neck. It even has those spiny things running all the way down its back. What do they call those ones? Ameg something.’ Tim slumps forward. His eyes are shut.

‘And there,’ Mary continues, ‘look at its big belly, how did you manage that, Tim? I mean it’s perfect. Even its feet and its long tapering tail.’

‘Mary, please. I’m going to pass out,’ Blood leaks down from the dinosaur wound blotting Tim’s white ankle sock red. Be hard to get that stain out. Mary has several bottles of stain remover. Each one has a different coloured label. Each one a different level of toxicity to the environment. All of them over-promising and under-delivering. Not one of them has ever removed a stain. Not properly.

Not that she’s obsessed with stains. It’s just that Tim is a stainer. Better stainer than stoner though. Olive, Mary’s sister, is married to a stoner. Olive sprays her house with Febreze Vanilla Flower (300 mls) every time Mary and Tim visit. Before their visit that is. Olive must think they’re stupid. Mary found a box of the empty aerosols once when she was rooting around in Olive’s garage for pictures of their parents. Olive is such a hoarder. But keeping empty cans? Maybe she’d wanted Mary to find out? To help her with Trevor’s addictions? But you don’t mess with Olive. So Mary just checks that box of aerosols each time and ponders why Olive never tries another brand or fragrance. So many lovely ones to choose from.

‘Can you put something cold on my neck?’ Mary goes to the sink, rinses out a clean dishcloth with cold water, and hands it to Tim. He drapes it over the back of his neck and moans.

‘I wish I could remember the names of the dinosaurs,’ Mary says. ‘Your one there, it’s on the tip of my tongue. I can see it now. Beginning with A. It had two lots of spines, I’m sure of it.’ She leans down and rubs a spot of blood off the chair leg with a finger. Tim pushes her hand away.

‘Mary, for Christ’s sake. You care more about those chairs than me.’ He puts the white towel over the wound and presses down hard. A tight whistling bird-like sound forces its way out through his clenched teeth. Mary goes back to the fridge and leans into its warm steady tremor.

‘If we’d had children we’d know all the dinosaur names,’ she says, folding her arms across her chest. Tim stands up. The bloody white towel falls to the floor. His dinosaur shin is bare. He is half-naked with his lardy legs and a wet Lakeland dishcloth around his neck.

‘Every time,’ he says, ‘you twist things round to that. Every bloody time.’ Mary’s stomach tightens. Her pelvis contracts.

‘And why do you think that is?’ she says. He takes a step towards her, stops when he sees her lips twisting, the reddening scrunch of her eyes.

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he says. She leans down, picks up the bloody towel and throws it into the sink.

‘That’s right. It was my fault. Every time. Every time. Your bloody wound is nothing. But mine? It just bled and bled.’