Case Histories (20 page)

Amelia was flattered by the fact that Andrew Vardy enjoyed her company, because no one else seemed to, and so it was that when, at the fag end of a wearisome day, when they were the last two people left in the staff room, and he spoke his honeyed words of seduction (to recap—“You know, Amelia, if you ever want to have sex, I’d be happy to oblige”), she had thought, yes, why not?

Not right away of course, not there in the staff room—how awful would that have been, if he’d ravished her among the crumpled newspapers and the old mugs with their dregs of Nescafé while she wondered if the janitor was going to put his head round the door. But, no, he simply picked up his rucksack and said, “Good-bye, then, see you tomorrow,” as if nothing of any significance had passed between them.

B
efore Andrew Vardy, Amelia imagined that sex would be (somehow, God knows how) an amalgam of the mystical and the coarsely animalistic, a warm and blurry experience that would transcend the mechanics. What she hadn’t imagined was that it would be banal and rather tiresome. Although, unfortunately, still vaguely disgusting.

“Be bold,” she thought and invited him round for “a cup of coffee, one evening,” she was pretty sure that both of them knew what that meant but if it turned out to be just that—a cup of coffee—then she wouldn’t look too stupid. She bought a woman’s magazine that had a sealed book on the cover announcing that it contained “Sex Tips to Drive Him Wild” and tried (and failed) to learn some of them off by heart. She felt as if she were preparing for an exam that she was bound to fail. And why would anyone want hot candle wax dripped on their nipples anyway? Would he do that to her? Surely not. “Undress slowly,” the book advised. “All men appreciate a sexy striptease.” Amelia had rather hoped that they might keep their clothes on throughout the whole process. Nonetheless, she shaved her legs and armpits, although for the life of her she couldn’t see what was wrong with body hair, and painted (rather badly) her toenails, and showered and perfumed herself with something French that Julia had left behind after a visit. She felt as if she were preparing herself for a sacrifice. She kept ready a very good bottle of Bordeaux and bought stuffed olives and peanuts as if she were readying herself for a Tupperware party. She had been to a Tupperware party once, at the invitation of a woman who was a tutor in the beauty and hairdressing department, and had bought a very useful cereal dispenser. It was the only party of any description that she had been to in five years.

The olives and peanuts were not a sex tip, although the book did suggest doing something with popcorn that Amelia considered belonged in a blue movie, not a front-of-counter woman’s magazine. You would never think that sex was meant for procreation of the species, that it was simply about male and female organs accommodating each other for a biological purpose. Certainly not according to the authors of “Sex Tips to Drive Him Wild,” for whom it seemed to be a case of stuffing every orifice with anything that came to hand.

For five nights in a row, she waited. By the sixth night Amelia began to wonder if she had misheard him, if he had offered to “oblige” her with something else, the loan of a book or a computer program. In the staff room, no mention was made between them of coffee or sex, the only conversation of any kind they had was about how you had to pretend that the slaters had fulfilled all their criteria-based topics of learning in order to get them through the course and off your hands. She stopped preparing herself every night, her legs grew bristles, and she had forgotten all the sex tips, so, of course, Sod’s Law, Andrew Vardy turned up at the door when she was in her oldest clothes, painting a little bedside table she had bought in an auction.

No flowers, no chocolates, no wooing—she had rather expected some wooing—and when she said, “Would you like a cup of coffee?” he actually smirked and she offered the good wine only because she knew she couldn’t go through with the experience in a cold-stone-sober state. She emptied the peanuts and the olives into glass dishes and put them on the coffee table. Is this what other people did? Other women, preparing for a lover? Didn’t they rub themselves with perfumed oils and unguents and comb out their hair, lie down on silken sheets, and present their pomegranate breasts for their lover’s kisses? Not put out hors d’oeuvres, surely?

As soon as they sat on the sofa he started kissing her and she could feel how dry and chapped his lips were. He was wearing the same clothes he’d worn into college that day and he smelled stale. Then he was tugging at her paint-stained T-shirt and pawing at her breasts, kneading them as if they were lumps of plasticine, at the same time as he was undoing his trousers so that she wondered what had been the point of mugging up on all that foreplay. Squashed into the sofa cushions, she couldn’t really see what he was doing and when she realized he was putting on a condom she felt incredibly embarrassed (which was ridiculous) although part of her wanted to tell him to stop right there so that they could have a discussion about Catholicism and the ethics of contraception—he had five children, after all, was it one rule for his wife and one for his mistress (there was definitely a certain frisson in applying that word to herself)? And, in general, did he really believe in papal infallibility because she had often wondered how an intelligent person (Sylvia, for example) could believe such nonsense, but the moment for an argument over dogma had already passed because he was fitting himself inside her (so much smoother and colder than she’d expected) and she had to stifle the instinct to push him off because it felt so uncomfortable and unnatural. Then they rolled about awkwardly for a bit, scattering the peanuts everywhere and knocking over the wine (which was incredibly careless of him) and then suddenly he let out a low animal sound like a cow giving birth and the next second, his limp thing had slid out of her and flopped like a small dead goldfish on her thigh.

Amelia looked at the ceiling and saw a crack she’d never noticed. Had it always been there or was the house subsiding? She looked at the floor where the peanuts had been broadcast and where the Bordeaux had made a huge stain on the pale carpet, like weak blood, and she wondered if even professional cleaning would be able to remove it.

Andrew Vardy pulled himself and his clothing together—there was a patch of curdled white foam on the shoulder of his jacket that Amelia suspected was baby sick. Her insides seemed to sag. “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to go, Amelia,” he said, as if she’d been begging him to stay. “I promised Bernie I’d pick up a pint of milk.” Amelia supposed she had been fitted in with the groceries. Pint of milk and a quick shag. So she’d seen him to the door and he’d kissed her on the cheek and said, “That was bloody fantastic,” and then he tossed an olive into his mouth as if it were a party trick and then he was gone! Almost skipping down the stairs while Henry, the Pekingese, yapped furiously at him from somewhere down below. There was another darker stain on the sofa and it took Amelia a few seconds to realize that it was not the Bordeaux but her own blood. Her knees felt weak and she slumped down onto the floor. She felt damaged. She heard Andrew Vardy’s child-soiled Passat drive away and started to cry.

S
he wanted Jackson. Desperately. And yes, she did lie in her bed and think about him and pleasure herself. Christ, what a stupid term.
Mr. Brodie would save you,
Julia had said when she declared he was a German shepherd. Amelia wanted to be saved by Jackson, she wanted that more than anything. Jackson, the idea of Jackson, was a hope and a promise and a comfort, it was a sun-warmed pebble in the hand, the scent of wet roses in the rain, it was the possibility of change. Maybe she should just say to him, “If you ever feel like sex, Jackson, I’d be happy to oblige.”

She started to undress for bed. It was early, too early to go to bed really. There was still light in the sky outside and she remembered how when she was a child she used to like going to bed in summer when it was still light because she was afraid of the dark. That was before Olivia disappeared, after that there was no safety to be had in either the light or the dark.

She regarded her naked body in the foxed, silver-spotted mirror on Sylvia’s small wardrobe. Her flesh looked like curd cheese, she had rolls of fat, like the Michelin Man, her belly folded over, her breasts swinging with their own weight, she looked as if she’d borne a dozen children, she looked like one of those ancient fertility symbols carved from stone. Yet there was nothing fertile about her, was there? She was passing the point of childbearing, her womb was shrinking unseen inside her. “I’ve still got time to push one out,” Julia said to her yesterday in her usual disgusting way. Amelia no longer had time to push one out, soon the planet would have no further use for her. No one had ever found her attractive, no one had ever wanted her, even Victor hadn’t wanted her, her own father had found her too ugly to seduce—a howl cut into her thoughts, a terrifying noise as though Julia was having her bowels ripped out, a noise that presaged absolute horror and Amelia grabbed her dressing gown and ran downstairs.

J
ulia was lying on the floor in a corner of the kitchen and at first Amelia thought something dreadful had happened to her, but then she realized that she had her arms clasped around Sammy’s body. His eyes were dull, everything about him was dull as if he were fading, but when he heard Amelia’s distressed voice his tail gave a weak little beat. “I’ll call the vet, shall I?” Amelia said, and Julia, her voice muffled because her face was pressed into Sammy’s neck, said, “I think it’s too late. I think he’s had a stroke.”

“Then we have to call the vet,”

“No, really, Milly, he’s on his way out, he’s an old dog. Don’t upset him.” Julia held one of his paws and kissed it. She murmured soothing words into the dying dog’s ear, she kissed his ears, his nose, his mouth, rubbed her face on the white hairs of his muzzle. Amelia hated her for being the one who thought she was doing the right thing. “Just stroke him,” Julia said but Amelia was raking through the yellow pages looking for the number for an out-of-hours vet and so she missed the moment when the dog died and only realized he was gone when Julia got up from the floor, covered in dog hair and her face all creased. She looked as if she had been hanging onto the dog for a long time.

S
he couldn’t bear it. She had phoned Jackson because she wanted him to stop the pain. She didn’t want anyone else to stop the pain, just Jackson. She wanted him to take her in his arms and soothe her the way Julia had soothed the dog. (
“Please, Jackson, please come, I need you.”
There had been something thrilling about speaking such passionate, desperate words. She had felt passionate. She had felt desperate.) What she hadn’t wanted was for him to arrive on the doorstep looking pissed off (oh, God, slater language) and she certainly hadn’t wanted him arriving on the doorstep with a small child in tow.
His
small child. She had never imagined him having a child, of course, she had never asked. Did he have a wife? She asked him that, when he was hardly over the threshold, accusing like a madwoman, she knew she looked like a madwoman, her hair all over the place, her face ravaged by crying, her breasts flapping around inside the oversize dressing gown. “I didn’t know you were married,Mr. Brodie,” spitting out the words as if he had betrayed her. The girl looked upset and Jackson was even more annoyed because she was upsetting the girl and it was Julia who calmed the situation, saying, “I’m sorry, Mr. Brodie, we’re not ourselves tonight, I’m afraid poor Sammy passed away.” After that it was all a little shadowy, Julia kept pouring from the brandy bottle, and the child had been almost unnaturally interested in the dead dog, stroking its lifeless fur, saying, “Poor dead dog,” until Amelia wanted to slap her because the dog didn’t belong to her, forgetting that it was actually Victor’s dog. Jackson had explained to the girl that the dog was happy in dog heaven and then Julia had helped Amelia up to bed and that’s where she’d been ever since, sobbing her heart out in a quiet but nonetheless ugly fashion, and it was a crying that wouldn’t stop because it encompassed too much.

She was crying from a general sense of wretchedness (which everyone was allowed now and then, surely), and crying for herself and her dried-up meaningless little life. She couldn’t bear it, she really couldn’t. Crying for Victor and Olivia and Rosemary and for Rascal (who died two years after Olivia disappeared). And she was crying because she’d only ever had sex with Andrew Vardy and because Mozart had died young and Sammy had died old, and because she was fat and ugly and had to teach the slaters and was never going to be wrapped in the comfort of Jackson’s arms.

And she was crying because she didn’t believe in Jesus or dog heaven and no one was ever going to lie in bed with her on a Sunday morning and read the papers or rub her back and say, “Is there anything I can do for you?” And because there was no happiness, only emptiness. And because she wanted to be sixteen years old with long shiny hair (which she’d never had), and she wanted to be looking anxiously out of an upstairs window and hear her mother downstairs shouting, “He’s here,” and then she would run lightly down the stairs and climb into the car where at the wheel would be her good-looking boyfriend and they would drive away and have warm, blurry sex somewhere and then he would bring her back home and her family would be waiting. Victor would acknowledge her with a gruff paternal nod as she came in the door, contrary teenage Julia would ignore her while willowy first-year student Sylvia would smile in a superior manner. Somewhere, in the guest bedroom perhaps, the vague unformed shape of a five-year old Annabelle could be found sleeping. And Rosemary, her mother, would ask her, in a womanly, conspiratorial way, if she’d had a nice time and then would offer her hot milk and honey (which she was sure she had never done in real life) and perhaps before she dropped into the sweet untroubled sleep of a pretty sixteen-year-old, Amelia would look in on Olivia, eight years old and safely asleep in her own bed.

Sometime in the night, Julia came into her bedroom and lay down on the bed, putting her arms around her and holding her the way she had the dying Sammy. And Julia said, “Everything’s all right, Milly, really it is,” which was such a huge, wonderful lie that it wasn’t even worth arguing about.