Yesterday's Weather

THE PORTABLE VIRGIN

Dare to be dowdy! that’s my motto, because it comes to us all — the dirty acrylic jumpers and the genteel trickle of piss down our support tights. It will come to her too.

She was one of those women who hold their skin like a smile, as if she was afraid her face might fall off if the tension went out of her eyes.

I knew that when Ben made love to her, the thought that she might break pushed him harder. I, by comparison, am like an old sofa, welcoming, familiar, well-designed.

This is the usual betrayal story, as you have already guessed — the word ‘sofa’ gave it away. The word ‘sofa’ opened up rooms full of sleeping children and old wedding photographs, ironic glances at crystal wineglasses, BBC mini-series where Judi Dench plays the deserted furniture and has a little sad fun.

It is not a story about hand-jobs in toilets, at parties where everyone is in the van-rental business. It is not a story where Satan turns around like a lawyer in a swivel chair. There are no doves, no prostitutes, no railway stations, no marks on the skin.

So there I was knitting a bolero jacket when I dropped a stitch. Bother. And there was Ben with a gin and tonic crossing his legs tenderly by the phone.

‘Thoroughly fucked?’ I asked and he spilt his drink.

Ben has been infected by me over the years. He has my habit of irony, or perhaps I have his. Our inflections coincide in bed, and sometimes he startles me in the shops, by hopping out of my mouth.

‘Thoroughly,’ he said, brushing the wet on his trousers and flicking drops of gin from his fingertips.

There was an inappropriate desire in the room, a strange dance of description; as I uncovered her brittle blonde hair, her wide strained mouth. A woman of modified adjectives, damaged by men, her body whittled into thinness so unnatural you could nearly see the marks of the knife. Intelligent? No. Funny? No. Rich, with a big laugh and sharp heels? No. Happy? Definitely not. Except when he was there. Ben makes me too sad for words. I finished the row, put away my needles and went to bed.

Judi Dench came out of the wardrobe and decided that it was time that she had an affaire herself. She would start a small business in the gardening shed and leave her twin-sets behind. And just when she realised that she was a human being too — attractive generous and witty (albeit in a sofa kind of way) — some nice man would come along and agree with her.

Mrs Rochester punched a hole in the ceiling and looked at Ben where he sat at the end of the bed, maimed and blind. She whispered a long and very sensible monologue with an urgency that made the mattress smoulder, and we both had a good laugh about that.

Karen … Sharon … Teresa … all good names for women who dye their hair. Suzy … Jacintha … Patti …

‘What’s her name?’ I asked.

‘Mary,’ he said.

My poor maimed husband is having sex in the back of our car with a poor maimed woman who has a law degree and a tendency to overdress. She works for a van-rental firm. You would think at least she could get them something with a bigger back seat.

My poor maimed husband is seriously in danger of damaging his health with the fillip this fact has given to our love life. And while he bounces on top of his well-loved sofa, Satan turns around in the corner, like a lawyer in a swivel chair, saying ‘Go on, go on, you’ll wake the children.’ (Or is that me?)

She is the silence at the other end of the phone. She is the smile he starts but does not finish. She is the woman standing at the top of the road, with cheap nail-polish and punctured ears. She is the girl at the front of the class, with ringlets and white knees and red eyes.

The phonecalls are more frequent. It is either getting serious or going sour. He used to head straight for the bathroom when he came home, in order to put his dick in the sink. Then they stopped doing it by accident and started going to her flat instead, with its (naturally) highly scented soap. Should I tell her the next time she rings? Should we get chatty about Pears, fall in love over Palmolive? We could ring up an agency and do an advert, complete with split screen. ‘Mary’s soap is all whiffy, but Mary uses X — so mild her husband will never leave.’ Of course we have the same name, it is part of Ben’s sense of irony, and we all know where he got that from.

So Ben is tired of love. Ben wants sad sex in the back of cars. Ben wants to desire the broken cunt of a woman who will never make it to being real.

‘But I thought it meant something!’ screams the wife, throwing their crystal honeymoon wineglasses from Seville against the Magnolia Matt wall.

I am not that old after all. Revenge is not out of the question. There is money in my purse and an abandoned adolescence that never got under way.

I sit in a chair in the most expensive hairdresser in Grafton Sreet. A young man I can’t see pulls my head back into the sink and anoints (I’m sorry) my head with shampoo. It is interesting to be touched like this; hairdressers, like doctors, are getting younger by the day. My ‘stylist’ is called Alison and she checks my shoes beneath the blue nylon cape, looking for a clue.

‘I want a really neat bob,’ I say, ‘but I don’t know what to do with this bit.’

‘I know,’ she says, ‘it’s driving you mad. That’s why it’s so thin, you just keep brushing it out of your eyes.’

I am a woman whose hair is falling out, my stuffing is coming loose.

‘But look, we’re nearly there,’ and she starts to wave the scissors (like a blessing) over my head.

‘How long is it since you had it cut last?’

‘About ten weeks.’

‘Exactly,’ she says, ‘because we’re not going to get any length with all these split ends, are we?’

‘I want to go blonde,’ says the wet and naked figure in the mirror and the scissors pause mid-swoop.

‘It’s very thin …’

‘I know, I want it to break. I want it blonde.’

‘Well …’ My stylist is shocked. I have finally managed to say something really obscene.

The filthy metamorphosis is effected by another young man whose hair is the same length as the stubble on his chin. He has remarkable, sexual blue eyes, which come with the price. ‘We’ start with a rubber cap which he punctures with a vicious crochet hook, then he drags my poor thin hair through the holes. I look ‘a fright’. All the women around me look ‘a fright’. Mary is sitting to my left and to my right. She is blue from the neck down, she is reading a magazine, her hair stinks, her skin is pulled into a smile by the rubber tonsure on her head. There is a handbag at her feet, the inside of which is coated with blusher that came loose. Inside the bags are bills, pens, sweet-papers, diaphragms, address books full of people she doesn’t know anymore. I know this because I stole one as I left the shop.

I am sitting on Dollymount Strand going through Mary’s handbag, using her little mirror, applying her ‘Wine Rose and Gentlelight Colourize Powder Shadow Trio’, her Plumsilk lipstick, her Venetian Brocade blusher and her Tearproof (thank God) mascara.

I will be bored soon. I will drown her slowly in a pool and let the police peg out the tatters to dry when they pick up the bag on the beach. It affords me some satisfaction to think of her washed up in the hairdressers, out of her nylon shift and newly shriven, without the means to pay.

My revenge looks back at me, out of the mirror. The new fake me looks twice as real as the old. Underneath my clothes my breasts have become blind, my iliac crests mottle and bruise. Strung out between my legs is a triangle of air that pulls away from sex, while my hands clutch. It used to be the other way around.

I root through the bag, looking for a past. At the bottom, discoloured by Wine Rose and Gentlelight, I find a small, portable Virgin. She is made of transparent plastic, except for her cloak, which is coloured blue. ‘A present from Lourdes’ is written on the globe at her feet, underneath her heel and the serpent. Mary is full of surprises. Her little blue crown is a screw-off top, and her body is filled with holy water, which I drink.

Down by the water’s edge I set her sailing on her back, off to Ben, who is sentimental that way. Then I follow her into his story, with its doves and prostitutes, its railway stations and marks on the skin. I have nowhere else to go. I love that man.