Addition (9 page)

‘We can…would you rather…How about something to eat? That chicken won’t age well.’

I shake my head. I lean forward and kiss the side of his throat.

He bends his head back a little and groans. Now he kneels and I can feel his lips and tongue on my side, sliding around towards my navel. The trace his tongue leaves behind is cold when the air hits it. Then he says, ‘Get down here.’

I kneel down so that I am almost eye level with him. He has both my breasts in his hands now. Please God don’t let him take off my sweat shirt. He’ll see they’re not even, that my breasts are not even. The left one hangs down lower than the right. 5 millimetres. My collar bones aren’t even either. They don’t align. One sticks out further than the other. No reason—not a legacy of a childhood accident. No genetic deformity passed from mother to daughter like a bone china tea set. Misaligned, that’s all. Surely when he sees that he’ll stop. He’ll give up.

He doesn’t give up. When he takes my sweat shirt off over my head he doesn’t seem to notice the misalignment, and doesn’t seem to measure my breasts at all, either with his eyes or with his hands. I try and count his kisses, the little nips as his front teeth graze the underside of my breasts, but then he takes my nipple in his mouth, and, oh, I can’t count. Not a number will go through my mind. It’s deathly still in here. I haven’t even had a chance to open the window when I arrived home. I can’t even think about what the time is, about what time I’m supposed to be in bed, about how unhygienic it is to be lying on the kitchen floor with this man sucking my breasts.

All I can feel is a small thin line, like an electric cable sparking, burrowing through my flesh hot and cold, from my nipple to between my legs. The taste of him is in my mouth and in the air and in my hair. The taste of him is under my nails and wherever he kisses me he will taste only himself.

Looking back, what’s hardest to believe is what he didn’t notice and what he did. He didn’t seem to notice that my tummy has a little rounded bulge. But he did notice the thick white scar on my right knee from when I fell off my bike when Mrs Jennings’ dog was chasing me. He kissed it and bit it. I’m sure he noticed my pubic hair needed a trim, because at one point he wound his fingers through it and gently ground his knuckles into the padded part of me until I could feel a slick wetness on the top of my thighs and I knew I could no longer bear his touch.

When he fucked me he started off very patient, very slow, and only when I started begging did he speed up. I felt my orgasm begin a long way away as a kind of stillness encroaching on my whole mind and body. Soon he could feel my muscles squeezing and shivering and he held me tighter and kissed my neck. It started small and shy but at the end I tried to pull away because it’s all too much, too much feeling, too much tensing. My back arched. My thighs squeezed him. It’s always like this, but I don’t always have a heavy body trapping me with the sensation. This time there was no escaping. This time it went on and on.

I didn’t notice how many strokes he took or how many times he said my name. The numbers scattered from my fingertips and ran across the floor. I was pinned under him and could not chase them.

After we finish and catch our breath, the cold of the kitchen floor tightens my skin. His semen is smeared on my thighs. His semen is on the floor too, in a series of rounded droplets, some large and some small. The edges are crinkling, already starting to coagulate. It does this so it’s less likely to run out of a vagina before it’s done its job. After a while it liquefies again so the happy sperm can swim until they find their egg. I’d never noticed how beautiful semen is. It’s pearlescent, and slippery like skin lotion. It’s warm from being inside his body and mine. I should clean it up before someone takes a fall.

I pull my tracksuit pants up and pull my top back down. I refuse to think about how I look, or about the stains on my pants. I’m not feeling self-conscious; too late for that. Only a little cold. He buttons his shirt and pulls his underpants up. I don’t know if this was because I did or because he was cold too. I take his hand and lead him to my bedroom. He doesn’t seem to notice I only have a single bed. He doesn’t say one word and his eyes never leave me. His shoes and trousers are still in the kitchen. He is wearing only his shirt and underpants when he lies down, and he falls asleep almost straight away, curved with space for me to sleep beside him. I lie down next to him without brushing my teeth, or flossing, or changing into my pyjamas or washing my face or making a cup of tea or putting my slippers beside the bed or rearranging my pillows. If he noticed how tight I was or how quickly I came, he didn’t say anything.

Every night I lie between these sheets but now I feel the weave and the coolness and the tension of each strand of cotton. I can feel him down the back of my head, and down my neck, and down each centimetre of my spine, and across my coccyx and around the curve of my bottom and down the back of my legs and the hollow of my knee and the length of my calves. My toes tingle like currents are dancing on the surface of my skin. Like a wire has unwound from the socket near the floor, has arced to the leg of the bed and now my body is covered in a million tiny bursts.

The first electric chair was made using Nikola’s technology. Perhaps the chair feels like this, at the beginning. Perhaps the electricity starts like a warm glow. Maybe it grows stronger until it feels like ants crawling, then stronger again until it feels like bees stinging. Then, only then, does it feel like electrocution.

The first man to die in the electric chair was William Kemmler, a petty criminal who killed his girlfriend with an axe. His electrocution was not Nikola’s doing. He and Westinghouse fought against it in the courts. Electricity was too unpredictable, they said. It was Edison who arranged the first electric chair to show that Nikola’s type of electricity, AC, was deadly and that DC current, the one Edison promoted, was safe.

Kemmler was strapped into a chair and two electrodes were attached to his body: the first on his head and the second his spine. The machine began. The dials rose. The executioner directed the flow of electricity through Kemmler.

I wonder how Nikola and Westinghouse felt at exactly that moment. Everything they had worked for, everything that they believed in, was on the brink of ruin. No one in their right mind would want AC electricity in their home, around their children, near their wives. They would be trying to sell a product that killed people. Perhaps they were at Westinghouse’s home. He was a physical kind of man, so maybe he stood there with his hand on Nikola’s shoulder, both of them thinking their dream had died. Maybe the blackness that flowed through Nikola’s heart when the electricity flowed through Kemmler’s body was lessened by Westinghouse’s being there. Maybe Nikola also felt he was no longer alone.

The electricity on my skin doesn’t come from a chair or from my bed. Nikola is looking down on me, but it doesn’t come from him either.

It is amazing that I sleep. It is not so amazing that it is 4.07 a.m. when I wake. Four is the worst time to wake, as anyone with the normal human sensitivities will tell you. Far too late to make a cup of tea or to go back to sleep. Far too early to get up and do something constructive. There’s nothing on television but arrogant evangelists and people selling acne solutions and motivational tapes. For me, base 12 philosophy aside, midnight is not the witching hour. 4.00 is.

Up until this point, I slept beautifully. And for an instant when I wake I think: this is what happens to normal people. They can go to bed without flossing 10 times up and down between each tooth or rearranging their 10 pillows if they choose, and they can still sleep deep and wide. And I wake like I am still in a dream, in the arms of a handsome man who has just made love to me, and free to decide when and how I go to bed. In the shape of a spoon with Seamus curved at the back of me. But I wake up thinking of numbers.

Not dates or days. Not phases of the moon. Not my ovulation date. I’m on the pill. Have been for nineteen months. Not that there’s been any likelihood of sex until now, just because I can’t bear not knowing when my period is due. I was never horribly irregular—some poor women don’t know if it’s a fourteen-day cycle, or twenty-eight, or if it’s coming at all. That would send me certifiable. I was somewhere between 26 and 30 but now it’s like clockwork, every 28 days.

So I’m not worried about being impregnated by the 50,000,000 sperm per normal ejaculation of between 2 and 5 millilitres of semen. 50,000,000-ish. Depending on how long it’s been since he’s had sex. With someone else. Before now.

The numbers I wake up worrying about are statistics. 40,000,000 people world-wide have HIV. More than 3,000,000 people die every year. 60 per cent of all HIV infections are from vaginal intercourse.

Not to mention chlamydia. Gonorrhoea.

I refuse to be one of those germ-fearing crazies. Bacteria are everywhere, and they’re mostly good and they stimulate your immune system. People with no exposure to germs get cancer. Everybody knows that.

But unprotected sex on the kitchen floor with a man I barely know?

I would have asked the question on the walk home if I’d realised things were heading this way. I could have said, ‘So, given blood lately?’ or ‘Had a physical?’ or ‘Any recent anal sex I should know about?’

His arm is becoming heavy and his breathing is blowing my hair. He does look a little pale. The tops of my thighs are sticky.

Whatever the disease is, I’ve probably got it. And not because of the sex.

It was the unflossing and the unbrushing and the unwashing and no tea. No place for my slippers, no order for my pillows. In the dark I can see my pyjamas waiting accusingly on the chair in my bedroom. These are not small, these wrongs disguised as nothings. They are somethings. They are tiny cracks in the world that run for miles underground. They cause earthquakes and landslides and in my mind I see the kind of people who suffer in disasters like these; an old woman, perhaps, or motherless children, wide eyes turned to a photographer they hope will tell the world and then someone stronger will come and lift them up. I can almost feel a tremor now as I lie here because I know this arm and this bed and this room and this house and this earth are not stable. There is nothing solid here and it will all crack and split and I will fall into the ground and there will be nothing but the fall and nothing solid not even an end to this crevice. And the worst is the knowledge that it is me. It is me who has shaken it. My foolish, stupid forgetting.

This is the world we live in; it’s cruel, endlessly cruel and unstable and accidents are everywhere and we can never escape them. Your pet could die or some stupid careless child cause never-ending grief with some small thoughtless act. People die, children die, through no fault of their own. When I think of the unravelling of my world I want to cry, and I start to cry, and I cry silently because I do not want him waking and asking me about my tears. My body starts to quiver from holding in my sobs and my breath comes in small snorts through my nose but I am still almost silent.

Is my mother all right? I suddenly know that she is not all right, she is dying, right now, lying on the bathroom floor with her stick arms outstretched, clawing, and she is calling my name to come and help her die. She dropped her hair dryer in the bath then reached in to get it; a piece of bread was stuck in the toaster and she levered it out with a knife. When I was six I had a fever and she stayed with me and sat on my bed and fed me vanilla ice-cream with a silver spoon from the set she used only for company. The feeling of lying ill, the air torpid, crickets singing, aluminium venetians drawn in a vain attempt to close out the heat that seemed to fill my every inch. I was as light as air then; I drifted away and I could almost see my own body on my bed from where I rested on the ceiling. I heard my mother’s soft footsteps, doing something inconsequential—folding laundry, sweeping. Breaking eggs. A sound that brought me back to my bed, tucked me in and kissed my forehead. I remember a thousand small gifts of her love, unthanked and unrepaid. And she is dying now because of me.

Or maybe it’s Jill. Maybe I’m feeling Jill’s death. She is younger than I am so it would be some kind of fall; people die all the time in falls, crack their heads open. Or a car smash, perhaps two or three hours ago but no one’s thought to call me until now because they’ve been so busy trying to push life back inside her, handsome people in white yelling, ‘Intubate now!’ or ‘Type B stat!’ It would be because of that fuckhead Harry; they would have gone to some tedious function for his job and he’s been drinking and it’s up to her to drive. She’s not a good driver, too timid, too nervous, and I don’t think that car the size of a small flat helps. It was probably raining— that’s rain I can hear outside—and in the dark she’s misjudged the right-hand turn at the lights and a black sedan, ridiculous colour in this weather, has run the orange and smashed into the driver’s side. Her side. Harry’s only shaken of course, the other driver’s okay and she’s crushed. I know she is. Her body is broken and her face is mauled.

With Jill gone, there’s so much missing. The games we used to play when we were little are gone now. We used to play a game where we picked our future husbands and then practised writing our new name. Designing our future life. From when she was ten she would pick some rock star; she’d know everything about him—middle name, favourite food, everything—from the fan magazines and I knew nothing about anyone except characters from books so my husbands would vary: Simon Templar, Peter Wimsey, Ellery Queen. I would convince her these were real boys who liked me; boys who lived just a suburb over and she, as the smaller one, would not think to question me. Back then her eyes would grow wider when she looked at me, as though the three extra years gave me wisdom. And I have done nothing but damage her.

All the games will die with her. Larry will have no mother and I will try to take her hand at the funeral but she will pull away from me and in her eyes will be the knowledge that it was me and I will never be able to be a mother to her.