Yesterday's Weather

REVENGE

I work for a firm which manufactures rubber gloves. There are many kinds of protective gloves, from the surgical and veterinary (arm-length) to industrial, gardening and domestic. They have in common a niceness. They all imply revulsion. You might not handle a dead mouse without a pair of rubber gloves, someone else might not handle a baby. I need not tell you that shops in Soho sell nuns’ outfits made of rubber, that some grown men long for the rubber under-blanket of their infancies, that rubber might save the human race. Rubber is a morally, as well as a sexually, exciting material. It provides us all with an elastic amnesty, to piss the bed, to pick up dead things, to engage in sexual practices, to not touch whomsoever we please.

I work with and sell an everyday material, I answer everyday questions about expansion ratios, tearing, petrifaction. I moved from market research to quality control. I have snapped more elastic in my day etcetera etcetera.

My husband and I are the kind of people who put small ads in the personal columns looking for other couples who may be interested in some discreet fun. This provokes a few everyday questions: How do people do that? What do they say to each other? What do they say to the couples who answer? To which the answers are: Easily. Very little. ‘We must see each other again sometime.’

When I was a child it was carpet I loved. I should have made a career in floor-coverings. There was a brown carpet in the dining room with specks of black, that was my parents’ pride and joy. ‘Watch the carpet!’ they would say, and I did. I spent all my time sitting on it, joining up the warm, black dots. Things mean a lot to me.

The stench of molten rubber gives me palpitations. It also gives me eczema and a bad cough. My husband finds the smell anaphrodisiac in the extreme. Not even the products excite him, because after seven years you don’t know who you are touching, or not touching, anymore.

My husband is called Malachy and I used to like him a lot. He was unfaithful to me in that casual, ‘look, it didn’t mean anything’ kind of way. I was of course bewildered, because that is how I was brought up. I am supposed to be bewildered. I am supposed to say ‘What is love anyway? What is sex?’

Once the fiction between two people snaps then anything goes, or so they say. But it wasn’t my marriage I wanted to save, it was myself. My head, you see, is a balloon on a string, my insides are elastic. I have to keep the tension between what is outside and what is in, if I am not to deflate, or explode.

So it was more than a suburban solution that made me want to be unfaithful with my husband, rather than against him. It was more than a question of the mortgage. I had my needs too: a need to be held in, to be filled, a need for sensation. I wanted revenge and balance. I wanted an awfulness of my own. Of course it was also a suburban solution. Do you really want to know our sexual grief? How we lose our grip, how we feel obliged to wear things, how we are supposed to look as if we mean it.

Malachy and I laugh in bed, that is how we get over the problem of conviction. We laugh at breakfast too, on a good day, and sometimes we laugh again at dinner. Honest enough laughter, I would say, if the two words were in the same language, which I doubt. Here is one of the conversations that led to the ad in the personals:

‘I think we’re still good in bed.’ (LAUGH)

‘I think we’re great in bed.’ (LAUGH)

‘I think we should advertise.’ (LAUGH)

Here is another:

‘You know John Jo at work? Well his wife was thirty-one yesterday. I said. “What did you give her for her birthday then?” He said, “I gave her one for every year. Beats blowing out candles.” Do you believe that?’ (LAUGH)

You may ask when did the joking stop and the moment of truth arrive? As if you didn’t know how lonely living with someone can be.

The actual piece of paper with the print on is of very little importance. John Jo at work composed the ad for a joke during a coffee-break. My husband tried to snatch it away from him. There was a chase.

There was a similar chase a week later when Malachy brought the magazine home to me. I shrieked. I rolled it up and belted him over the head. I ran after him with a cup full of water and drenched his shirt. There was a great feeling of relief, followed by some very honest sex. I said, ‘I wonder what the letters will say?’ I said, ‘What kind of couples do that kind of thing? What kind of people answer ads like that?’ I also said ‘God how vile!’

Some of the letters had photos attached. ‘This is my wife.’ Nothing is incomprehensible, when you know that life is sad. I answered one for a joke. I said to Malachy ‘Guess who’s coming to dinner?’

I started off with mackerel pâté, mackerel being a scavenger fish, and good for the heart. I followed with veal osso buco, for reasons I need not elaborate, and finished with a spiced fig pudding with rum butter. Both the eggs I cracked had double yolks, which I found poignant.

I hoovered everything in sight of course. Our bedroom is stranger-proof. It is the kind of bedroom you could die in and not worry about the undertakers. The carpet is a little more interesting than beige, the spread is an ochre brown, the pattern on the curtains is expensive and unashamed. One wall is mirrored in a sanitary kind of way; with little handles for the wardrobe doors.

‘Ding Dong,’ said the doorbell. Malachy let them in. I heard the sound of coats being taken and drinks offered. I took off my apron, paused at the mirror and opened the kitchen door.

Her hair was over-worked, I thought — too much perm and too much gel. Her make-up was shiny, her eyes were small. All her intelligence was in her mouth, which gave an ironic twist as she said Hello. It was a large mouth, sexy and selfish. Malachy was holding out a gin and tonic for her in a useless kind of way.

Her husband was concentrating on the ice in his glass. His suit was a green so dark it looked black — very discreet, I thought, and out of our league, with Malachy in his cheap polo and jeans. I didn’t want to look at his face, nor he at mine. In the slight crash of our glances I saw that he was worn before his time.

I think he was an alcoholic. He drank his way through the meal and was polite. There was a feeling that he was pulling back from viciousness. Malachy, on the other hand, was over-familiar. He and the wife laughed at bad jokes and their feet were confused under the table. The husband asked me about my job and I told him about the machine I have for testing rubber squares; how it pulls the rubber four different ways at high speed. I made it sound like a joke, or something. He laughed.

I realised in myself a slow, physical excitement, a kind of pornographic panic. It felt like the house was full of balloons pressing gently against the ceiling. I looked at the husband.

‘Is this your first time?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘What kind of people do this kind of thing?’ I asked, because I honestly didn’t know.

‘Well they usually don’t feed us so well, or even at all.’ I felt guilty. ‘This is much more civilised,’ he said. ‘A lot of them would be well on before we arrive, I’d say. As a general kind of rule.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t really drink.’

‘Listen,’ he leaned forward. ‘I was sitting having a G and T in someone’s front room and the wife took Maria upstairs to look at the bloody grouting in the bathroom or something, when this guy comes over to me and I realise about six minutes too late that he plays for bloody Arsenal! If you see what I mean. A very ordinary looking guy.’

‘You have to be careful,’ he said. ‘And his wife was a cracker.’

When I was a child I used to stare at things as though they knew something I did not. I used to put them into my mouth and chew them to find out what it was. I kept three things under my bed at night: a piece of wood, a metal door-handle and a cloth. I sucked them instead of my thumb.

We climbed the stairs after Malachy and the wife, who were laughing. Malachy was away, I couldn’t touch him. He had the same look in his eye as when he came home from a hurling match when the right team won.

The husband was talking in a low, constant voice that I couldn’t refuse. I remember looking at the carpet, which had once meant so much to me. Everyone seemed to know what they were doing.

I thought that we were all supposed to end up together and perform and watch and all that kind of thing. I was interested in the power it would give me over breakfast, but I wasn’t looking forward to the confusion. I find it difficult enough to arrange myself around one set of limbs, which are heavy things. I wouldn’t know what to do with three. Maybe we would get over the awkwardness with a laugh or two, but in my heart of hearts I didn’t find the idea of being with a naked woman funny. What would we joke about? Would we be expected to do things?

What I really wanted to see was Malachy’s infidelity. I wanted his paunch made public, the look on his face, his bottom in the air. That would be funny.

I did not expect to be led down the hall and into the spare room. I did not expect to find myself sitting on my own with an alcoholic and handsome stranger who had a vicious look in his eye. I did not expect to feel anything.

I wanted him to kiss me. He leant over and tried to take off his shoes. He said, ‘God I hate that woman. Did you see her? The way she was laughing and all that bloody lip-gloss. Did you see her? She looks like she’s made out of plastic. I can’t get a hold of her without slipping around in some body lotion that smells like petrol and dead animals.’ He had taken his shoes off and was swinging his legs onto the bed. ‘She never changes you know.’ He was trying to take his trousers off. ‘Oh I know she’s sexy. I mean, you saw her. She is sexy. She is sexy. She is sexy. I just prefer if somebody else does it. If you don’t mind.’ I still wanted him to kiss me. There was the sound of laughter from the other room.

I roll off the wet patch and lie down on the floor with my cheek on the carpet, which is warm and friendly. I should go into floor-coverings.

I remember when I wet the bed as a child. First it is warm then it gets cold. I go into my parents’ bedroom, with its smell, and start to cry. My mother gets up. She is half-asleep but she’s not cross. She is huge. She strips the bed of the wet sheet and takes off the rubber under-blanket which falls with a thick sound to the floor. She puts a layer of newspaper on the mattress and pulls down the other sheet. She tells me to take off my wet pyjamas. I sleep in the raw between the top sheet and the rough blanket and when I turn over, all the warm newspaper under me makes a noise.