‘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.’
SANDERLINGS 