Short Story: She's Leaving Home

Short Story: She's Leaving Home

He never thought about it much, but if he’d ever directly asked himself the question, he would have said, yes, his wife had gone to seed. They both had. It was, he supposed, to be expected. Although she still had bright blue eyes, her face had become jowly, lumpy, and as her blood pressure had increased with age, she carried a more or less permanently flushed look about her. Now in her sixtieth year, the wavy hair had become wiry and iron grey and because she never fussed with it much, it always seemed to him, a little unkempt.

In the early evening he came in from his days travels; signing on then a slow pint in the pub followed by walking around and nosing in shop windows at flat screen TVs, shiny motorbikes, sunny holiday destinations, all things he could never seriously contemplate. Anything was better than having to spend too long in the same room as her. He found her as he expected, slumped on the sofa, the rolls of fat hooping her middle and hips like the Michelin Man’s sister. As usual, she was watching some energetically inane game show on the telly.

He said hello. Said it clearly and audibly. But she barely made the effort to turn her head from the screen. Instead, she gave him a slight wave, a dismissive flutter of a gesture, roughly in his direction, the hand, invariably holding one of her king size cigarettes. This is how things were nowadays. He had grown used to it but he could remember a time, not long after they were first married, when he came in from work and she had unzipped him in the hall. Breathlessly she had told him, kissing his neck, his ear, that she couldn’t wait till they got to the bedroom. She took him, right there and then, on her knees at the foot of the stairs. That must be over thirty years ago, he thought. They did everything together then. They were a couple. They even had baths together, not for any erotic purposes, though naturally, these could develop, but purely for the closeness, the oneness of it. Now she could hardly be bothered to acknowledge his presence at all.

Later, after he’d cooked, eaten and washed up his own tea, she said she wanted to talk. He thought nothing of it, heard no alarms go off. And when she told him that she was leaving him for another man, who, she informed him, was a hard working postman called Barry some fifteen years his junior, he wasn’t sure how to react. He knew, obviously, once it had sunk in, that there must have been some sort of sexual liaisons going on. People didn’t run away with each other before trying out the goods. So there must have been some sexual couplings behind his back, between his wife and this other man. And there must have been some lies told to cover these events. But he didn’t form any pictures in his head. He just couldn’t think of what to say, so just sat looking at her across the kitchen table and watching her cigarette smoke dribble upwards and hang under the florescent strip light.

Of course he knew that the stock answer, according to South London custom, would be to beat the living daylights out of her and then dish out the same, with the help of friends if necessary, to the interloper, the man treading on his toes. He thought about this as she listed his shortcomings, the justifications she felt as to why she was leaving him. He wondered about giving her a meaty backhander. But he had never hit a woman. He hadn’t hit anyone since he was a schoolboy. He wasn’t sure how to go about it. So he didn’t move.

Instead he just felt mildly depressed. No, that was too strong a word. He felt inertia. Felt it spreading through him. As if he were a pint glass of clear glistening water that someone had placed on the kitchen windowsill in the sun, and then had gently introduced some droplets of jet black ink. He could feel the slow seepage of it as it twisted and branched down through him, then clouded and blossomed into his system, making his belly feel light, as if he were hungry but had no appetite, making his arms heavy and weak. And he found it difficult to concentrate, to listen to what she was saying, as if he were trying to work out a complex mathematical formula while trying to lift some enormous weight. He felt that if he did take the ridiculous step of bunching his fist and cracking her one, the punch would be ineffectual. It would just bounce off of her and she would look mildly surprised, might even laugh and think him a bigger fool than she already did. Such was his lack of strength.

He sat there and took it as she poured her reasoning all over him. He felt that she must have rehearsed this, it was too pat, too unemotional to be off the cuff. She must have been practising for a long time because she spoke without rush, without venom. Instead she sounded casual, chatty, had an assured matter of fact manner. He had the image of a concrete mixer skilfully offloading its cargo, letting it slowly slide over him, covering him in a precisely measured blanket of grey shit, till he was encased in his own failure and couldn’t move.

His failure to get a job after he’d been made redundant the year before. His easy, ‘what can you do?’ acceptance of it. His subsequent loss of interest in his own personnel hygiene. How it had become obvious recently, that he no longer washed regularly under his arms and did he have any idea just how scruffy he looked when he didn’t shave? His general lack of ambition that had dogged them since the day she’d met him. His complete failure to ever get out of the poverty pay bracket. Did he honestly think that this ghastly little house, this two bedroom terrace, miles from the station, their first and only home, did he honestly think this was all she ever wanted?

Then with a lack of malice that he found disturbing, because he wanted her to have an edge, anger or spite or something, something he could bat against, she calmly told him about his lack of sexual technique. After thirty years of marriage and time not being on her side, she wanted, needed, more. She was speaking with an almost professional veneer of sympathy, as if she were a doctor informing him that the unpleasant disease he had contracted, which though not life threatening, could never be cured.

The missionary position, she told him, was, quite frankly, boring. His lack of consideration, lack of invention, made him feel like a dead thing on top of her. And worse, the half hearted efforts that he made to satisfy her, when he could be bothered, didn’t do the job. Of course, she went on, it wasn’t entirely his fault. But he had let himself go, he had got old and he had got thin. Inhaling deeply, she told him that there was no point in pretending, it wasn’t practical or fair on either of them, but she just wasn’t attracted to his stick like body anymore. His face, as she put it, didn’t turn her on. The thought passed through him that this expression, this turning on, must be one of Barry’s. Through the good fortune of her meeting Barry, she said, blowing out a line of smoke, she had re-discovered herself as a woman. Apparently, Barry could give her an orgasm just by looking at her in a certain way. On and on it went, her words assuming a dullness, a heavy sound that sat on him, pushing him down into his seat, and he did, he felt belittled.

Suddenly she stopped and looked mildly irritated because she had run out of things to beat him with. Screwing her cigarette into the ashtray, she stood up and informed him that she was going to take a soak. It was the end of their one sided conversation. A full stop. There was no right of reply, no come back.

Still sitting, he watched her go into the bathroom, which was a tacked on extension of their kitchen, and close the door. She didn’t lock it. Immobile, he knew what this meant. Wouldn’t most women, after confessing to their husband that they had been having a ding dong with another man, that they were leaving, wouldn’t they be just a little nervous? Wouldn’t they be just a little afraid that, after due consideration, their husband might have his own conflicting views on this state of affairs? That he might just break the door down and tear her limb from limb? His wife was unburdened by any such concerns. She didn’t need the protection of a locked bathroom door, however flimsy it might be. She knew that he was incapable of doing anything.

He stared for a while, pondering. What was expected? How did a person tell friends, family, or even just the neighbours, about this sort of thing? Was he supposed to get roaring drunk and cause a scene, have the police round as he reclaimed what was his? No, and anyway, he didn’t feel like drinking. Maybe later. Make a cup of tea? Yes, that would be the thing to do. But still he couldn’t move. His hands lay flat on the white cloth of the table. Heavy, cumbersome and obsolete. His fingers like grey sausages, useless to him. They didn’t even look like his hands. All right, he thought. I will count to ten, then I will make tea.

It was as he reached seventy and still hadn’t moved, that he heard her singing. Singing? She was sitting in the bath and singing. In thirty years he had never once heard her do this, not so much as a ditty. And she sounded, what? … happy. He could feel something tighten inside him. Something hot, like his gut was being given a Chinese burn. At last his fist was clenched and for some reason, and he would never know why, he thought of a Tommy Cooper gag that he couldn’t have heard since he was a young man. He could even hear the great man’s voice as he recited it under his breath. I found a lump of plastercine in my pocket the other day. I didn’t know what to make of it. He sniggered very quietly like a schoolboy and without effort found he could stand. Everything was going to be all right.

Stepping into their tiny lounge, from a low level cupboard he pulled out a small electric fan heater. Back in the kitchen, from the drawer that was always full of junk; empty carrier bags, adverts for take away pizzas that they never ordered, a torch, a handful of pegs, he found what he was looking for. A nice, thick, very long extension lead. He connected everything up and switched on. The heater immediately made a satisfying whirring noise and gave off the smell of burning dust as it warmed up. Placing it on the floor, he slipped off his shoes and removed his clothes. Not bothering to fold them, he let them stay where they lay on the floor. Standing naked in his kitchen, he could feel the unaccustomed coolness of the tiles on the soles of his feet but it didn’t feel strange at all. It felt good, soothing and relaxing because now there was nothing to worry about. As he picked up the heater by its carry handle, he heard from the bathroom the sound of gentle splashing and tra la la’s.

He didn’t bother to knock as he opened the door.