AS I WRITE, I look out of the window and check with the corpse I have sitting in the Saab at the front gate. He is always there (it is always a he), a slumped figure in the front seat who turns out, on examination, to be the tilting headrest. But even though I know this, I am drawn to his stuffed, blank face, and wonder why he should be so patient. He lets his gaze rest endlessly on the dash, like a man who is listening to the radio and will not come into the house. A sign of the loneliness of men, and of their obduracy. He will not come into the house, my car corpse, the crash dummy in the front seat. He is waiting for the last of the football results.
I don’t actually want him in the house, but that does not mean I am happy to always see him in my car, this man who talks to me, quite bluntly, of patience and ability to endure. And the possibility that people don’t care about each other-or not really-that what they want most in life is sport.
I can stay up with him or I can go upstairs and sleep with my husband.
All night is a very long time.
I am in the horrors. It started sometime after the funeral, a week perhaps, after Tom tried to resurrect me by lying the length of my body and kissing and rubbing and all the rest. But I was over that-I had forgotten it. I was back to school runs and hoovering and ringing other-mothers for other-mother things, like play dates, and where to buy Rebecca’s Irish dancing shoes. Everything was sad, but fine-good food, fresh air, a few too many glasses of wine, and off to bed. And then.
Here it comes-the four o’clock wake-up call. It creeps into me and I wake to the slow, slick, screaming heebie-jeebies. What are they? He is sleeping with someone else. No, that isn’t the four o’clock call. The four o’clock call is a much older, and more terrible, thing.
I can not feel the weight of my body on the bed. I can not feel the line of my skin along the sheet. I am swinging an inch or so off the mattress, and I do not believe in myself-in the way I breathe or turn-and I do not believe in Tom beside me: that he is alive (sometimes I wake to find him dead, only to wake again). Or that he loves me. Or that any of our memories are mutual. So he lies there, separate, while I lose faith. He sleeps on his back. And one morning at-yes-four a.m., I wake to a livid tumescence on his prone body; a purple thing on the verge of decay. Tom is flung wide on his back, asleep like a dead saint, or a child. He is, anyway, beautifully asleep, with his palms turned skywards and loose by his sides, and a straining smile at the edge of his eyes, like what he sees in the centre of his blind forehead is so convincing, and fleeting, and lovely. I watch him for a while-so silly, such a silly idea to wake up to-but I can not check to see if it is true, the thing that I have dreamt on to the body of my sleeping husband; a cock so purple and dense it was a burden to him. He lies there, pressing his back into the mattress just to support it, this unbearable thing, that is stuck to him and moving away from him, while he sleeps on under it. Helpless. And full of pleasant thoughts.
And I turn around again and gather the covers about me, as the thing my husband is fucking in his sleep slowly recedes. A thing that might be me.
Or it might not be me. It might be Marilyn Monroe-dead or alive. It might be a slippery, plastic kind of girl, or a woman he knows from work, or it might be a child-his own daughter, why not? There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I am not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw a line.