She
wakes within displacement and the knowledge of herself as the bedroom’s alien
everything, not even his residual heat in the sheets beneath her palm. Her
fingers rub the skull beneath its less than day old haircut, then back into
blind doze for his return until her hands paw themselves awake upon the blue
woollen blanket, and she rises from the understanding of his unbroken absence.
ache1: Well look if it’s
going to be, if it’s a problem for you in any way, we can just book ourselves
into a hotel.
Skunk: It isn’t that it’s
ache1: Come on. Skunk, come
on
taking his arm.
ache1: Do you know any
of the hotels here?
Skunk: I don’t know that it’s... I think
I’d prefer to stay at the house, it’s just that
ache1: Come on, we’ll just
stay at a hotel. It’ll be, look at it like an adventure or something. We’ll
book ourselves in as Mr and Mrs
a sudden choking back at the family
name, the name damn near spoken before she’s even aware.
She
wills this to be the last drunk of her pregnancy, justifying the whiskey shotglassed
as salve for his bereavement and for her soporific, a lullaby to the bladder
that’s woken her for nights and a credible surrogate to which she might
convincingly ascribe the dawn’s nausea. They should both be asleep.
Instead,
with the Jack Daniel’s still sediment to her blood, she descends the stairs in
weak light and the lingering irritant stink of many months’ dust disturbed and
singed from off the radiators, aware of the pyjama top shifting across her
breasts, and aware now of her pupils’ sudden and furious occlusion in the
kitchen, itself harsh and burnt beneath a too-bright bulb.
ache1:
We should be asleep.
She
should not be watching him standing barefoot in depredation, confounded by an
inability to discard anything upon which his mother had written: magazine
cuttings she had dated, labelled storage jars, recipes, and in his hands a flat
box of translucent Tupperware; she can read the words “Christmas cake” scribbled across the sticking plaster clung to its
lid.
Skunk
(looking up): I wonder how old this is. Jesus.
ache1:
It shouldn’t matter, should it? It’ll be... Sugar’s a preservative, so it should
still be... We can have it at Christmas. It can be her gift to us, Skunk,
regretting
the glib flippancy of her statement even as she says again
ache1:
it can be her gift to us.
He
is at remove, unhearing.
Skunk:
She used to make it every year from the same recipe, from a little booklet
thing that was... not sponsored by a baking soda company, but... it
wasn’t like, it was just a little recipe book, maybe they gave it away with the
stuff I don’t know, but every year I’d see this little booklet and the thing
that really ehm, there was a little, the, Jesus, and you know, I have no idea why
a baking soda company would, I don’t even know what it’s for, but the
wrapper on the tins was a picture of a tin of baking soda, with its own
wrapper, and on that wrapper too there was another little tin of baking soda,
which itself had the same wrapper, and so they just got smaller and smaller,
and I remember always looking to see if I could see the very smallest image of
a tin of baking soda.
Sighs.
Skunk:
Oh and there was something else too, even though these were all drawings, I was
always confused as to the reality, not the reality, but the... trying to
figure out which image was real and which was the... That doesn’t make any
sense.
He
swallows and begins again.
Skunk:
If you had an actual tin of the stuff, then that would be real, but the
image on the tin wasn’t, that was just a picture, and then the image on that
tin wasn’t real either, obviously... but when your original is only a drawing itself...
Prised
open, the plastic’s own bastard must is interrupted by a delicate crescendo of
pale blue penicillia, cake and icing both sick with the pervasive downy mould.
Skunk moans, his head bowed in acknowledgement of absolute defeat.
ache1
lifts the box and lays it upon the worktop.
ache1:
Hey!
She
holds his hands.
ache1:
Hey Skunk! You know what makes everything better? Everything better,
guaranteed, cast iron in toto? Skunk, Skunk lookit me
lifting
his face with outstretching fingertips
ache1:
lookit me. Hey.
She
watches the breath resign from his lungs.
ache1:
Know what makes everything better?
He
looks exhausted.
ache1:
Tucking in your pyjamas
and
scoops both hands full of her shirt’s hanging flannel; plunging it down inside
the elasticated waistband hitches the trousers up across mere weeks of
pregnancy to just below her breasts, her body now foreshortened with the
exposure of her calves.
Brother
Skunk finally yields, and in accomplishing the ditto surrenders her his
discomfiture. She shuffles forward and with her bare feet elevated now upon his
own, holds him tightly as she can.
ache1:
Come on Skunk. We can do all this stuff tomorrow.
He
lifts each foot a little and she helps a deal as required, dancing thus a
while.
ache1
(mumbling into his shoulder): We should be sleeping now, cowboy. We should be asleep.
