Dark Roots (9 page)

The Home Preserver
, I hasten to add, was quite clear in its application. Per quart of liquid (American measurement) you are meant to add the merest pinch, a half of a flattened teaspoon, to achieve the pickle of your dreams. This, they point out, reacts with the acetic acid in your herbed vinegar to prevent that rubbery effect that can so easily spoil a good cucumber. And I had the teaspoon ready, I honestly did. But I was listening to Macka and Chooka and Barry hooting and crashing in the living room, horsing around in their tracksuits and liniment, and I suddenly thought,
Well, who the hell knows what a quart is anyhow?
And my hand sort of ... slipped.

Calm down. It's not going to kill anybody. But it's interesting, isn't it — ironic even, when you consider its long-term effect — that a chemical which does so much to keep cucumbers firm and non-flaccid has quite the opposite effect on the male organ. It doesn't occur suddenly, the book had said, and you'd no doubt need to injest a fair amount over a period of time before you started noticing any changes, but wilt it will. Oh, yes. You'll be looking at that space between thumb and forefinger in a whole new light.

I watched the powder dissolving into the vinegar and drifting around the cucumbers, smiling to myself because it reminded me of one of those kid's souvenirs where snow falls in a little dome on some little landscape; a desert island, say, or — in this case more appropriately — the Big Banana. I shook a jar. The cucumbers, warty and ghostly in their vinegar formaldehyde, bobbed around like specimens. This many pickles were going to take months and months to eat. And suddenly I realised I had no intention of being there.

Barry, after seeing my defection as an admission of guilt, will hold me no conscious grudge — I've left him and the boys a huge supply to be going on with. It'll take them an entire football season to get through what's left, marinating gently in their dill-flavoured broth. I was generous with the herbs and spices. I was unstinting.

I hum a tune to myself as I pull out of the driveway, hearing the china clink in the back as I hit the tarmac. It'll be weeks, probably, before any of them notices anything a little ... amiss. But never, never, never would they mention it to each other. And I doubt they'll think to change their diets. Nothing like a crunchy, firm, green cucumber pickle, thrusting proudly up from your fingers, no bigger than that. Perhaps with a little cheese, a few dry biscuits, a celery stick. I have left the jars in the fridge, lined up as impressively as show exhibits. Pickled cucumbers, dill cucumbers, pickled onions, artichokes, vegetable medley, baby beetroot. Always have them chilled and crisp, advises
The Home Preserver
, and I tend to agree.

They are a delicacy. How shall I put this …? They are a dish best served cold.

Dark Roots

You'll be fitting your key in the lock when you hear the phone start ringing, and straight away your hand will be fumbling with haste. The answering machine will kick in and when your heart squirms up around your throat somewhere, you'll know. Call it what you like, we think it's love, but it's chemical. It's endorphins, that high-octane fuel, revving the engine and drowning out the faint carburettor warning sound in the back of the head, the out-of-tune chug that says
wait
,
wait
, in its prim, irritating little voice.

At the doctor's, you'll keep your eyes on the package of contraceptive pills made into a desk paperweight. Your doctor will look over your card, tapping a pen, then reach for the prescription pad, and ask you if you've been on these before.

‘Oh, many years ago now,' you say.

‘Any side-effects?'

You remember being twenty-two, going on the pill for the first time, and lock onto the memory of your own body in a swooping rush. You remember your long thighs in those slimline jeans, and your flat stomach which effortlessly stayed that way, hard with muscles you'd done nothing to deserve. You remember — and what woman over thirty-five doesn't? — pulling your long hair up over a sun visor and sitting on beaches with boyfriends for hours, squinting into the glaring, ruinous sun, glorifying in being tanned.

‘No side-effects that I can remember,' you say. ‘Maybe an increased appetite.'

The doctor smiles briefly. ‘Yeah, they'll give you the munchies all right, you'll have to watch that. You're not a smoker, are you?'

‘No.'

‘Only because if you were, at your age, I'd never be prescribing this brand.'

And you feel that little swoop again, hear the
at your age
like stepping on a sharp piece of gravel, a wince of ludicrous defensiveness.

It's the same when you break the news to your friends.

‘Come on then,' they say. ‘No one
cares
, Mel. Just tell us how much younger the guy is.'

‘Thirteen years,' you answer. You want — no, you
need
— one of them to come in on cue now, with something sisterly about nobody even
commenting
on the difference if it was the other way round. Instead there is a surprised silence. Come on, somebody.

‘Well,' says Helen abruptly, ‘I mean, for godsakes. If he was thirty-nine and you were thirteen years younger nobody would turn a hair. I say go for it.'

You will crush the lemon slice in your drink with the edge of your straw. You need more.

‘I mean, look at you, you're gorgeous. No wonder,' says Sandy. ‘I bet the guy can't believe his luck. What is it you said he did?'

You wonder, later, why you lie here. Why you say Paul is an academic, even though he's actually just finishing his PhD and tutoring. Why you have to add: ‘And he writes movie reviews.'

Then later, standing in your bathroom, about to perforate the foil package and take that first pill of the cycle, you will glance up into the mirror and notice what people at work have been stopping to comment on: how good you're looking lately. You can see it yourself. That fuel pumping through the body, firing up the colour in your face. It's lust that'll do that to you, every time. Being the object of desire. Three weeks into it, and just look at the difference.

Once upon a time you would have said, confidently: show me someone who says they've never had a fantasy of being the Older Woman, and I'll show you a liar. It's like one of those dreams where you're walking through your ordinary familiar house feeling its confines and thinking nothing's going to change now, might as well accept it, when you notice a door you've never seen before. And you open it and on the other side is another whole possible living space, another alternative route through each day.

Before you get up, now, you think about what you're going to wear. You find lipstick, and put it on. You keep eye contact for longer than you need to.

Here's a dead giveaway: in the supermarket, in that third week, your hand will reach out and take a box of hair colour and it's the easiest thing in the world to appear the next day with red highlights. Who can blame you? This will induce recklessness: a 26-year-old guy ringing you up every night and saying he misses you when you're not together. Telling you you're beautiful and you shiver, feeling his hand move under your linen shirt (ironing clothes again!) and across your stomach. Sure, a little more effort's needed at thirty-nine. Of course you want that stomach to be as concave as it had been on the beach at twenty-two, back when you were busy prematurely ageing your skin, carefree and oblivious and immortal. You have to suck in your breath, under that hand. You have to stay on your guard.

You tell your friends where you met, at a film screening. You can't wait to talk about him.

It had been an industry preview with complimentary tickets, you say, and people seem to chat more when nobody's paid for their tickets. ‘He asked me if his backpack bag thing was annoying me next to my feet, and I said no.'

‘They're not called backpacks now,' Sandy interrupts. ‘They're called
crumplers
.'

‘Well, whatever. When the film ended he was taking a few notes and I asked him about it, we got chatting and went out for a drink.'

‘Out for a drink where?'

‘Mario's. And just talked for an hour about the film.'

‘Aha,' said Helen. ‘Mario's. Over-thirties lighting.' But you see she's listening as avidly as anyone, to learn how to chance it, getting something started gracefully.

For a while now, you've avoided looking at yourself in the full-length mirror in the bathroom by neglecting to put the ventilation fan on. You hurry to dry yourself and get out of there before the mirror unsteams. Life, if we hold it up to the light, contains many of these foolish rituals. Like the one you notice lately where you always turn off the bedside lamp before you slide into bed with him, and the way you don't wear your glasses at the movies.

You want his appreciation newly minted, you want to believe he actually can hardly believe his luck. The endorphins must bathe your brain with these possibilities. With every phone call, every new plan he proposes for the two of you, you start to believe you could maybe leave the bathroom fan on sometime soon, and deal with that scrutiny. You start thinking you actually have those rich chestnut highlights in your hair naturally. Well. You know the rest. You know how it all goes.

Then, a week into the contraceptives, you're ravenous. Standing there in the kitchen eating spoonfuls of rice out of the saucepan, chewing and staring at the notices under the fridge magnets. Walking through the house gnawing on chicken legs, buying croissants at morning tea. Back at home you take the packet of contraceptives out of the bathroom cupboard and read the side-effects again —
increased appetite, tendency to hirsuteness, loss of libido, double vision, nausea
— and resolve to eat less, use sunscreen more, avoid alcohol except in moderation. This demands vigilance. Six weeks now, and soon you will be going down the coast for the weekend, like a proper couple on a romantic getaway, and all you can think about is how your thighs will look in a swimsuit.

Six weeks, and in two more months you will be forty, and the friends are making jokes about a party to run this new guy through his paces — this thinking woman's toy boy, as they call him — an event it is impossible to comfortably imagine. Forty, and Sandy knows what a crumpler is because she has a thirteen-year-old son, whereas you, you have to keep smothering a rising panic that you've missed the bus. Thirteen years ago you were living in London, fervently avoiding any chance of children. Now you're one of those nuisance women obstetricians must hate, waking up to the alarm on your biological clock just before it runs itself down.

So you find yourself at the chemist buying the sunscreen for mature skin, the moisturiser with concealer that guarantees a visible difference. Forty, and your fertile years are waning away in a dwindling flush of denial and negation, each lost month rushing closer like concrete pylons on the female superhighway, a marker of defeat, and if you were honest, you would admit that every pill sticks in your throat like a sugar-coated lie. Instead you swallow it with eyes closed, the better to avoid seeing details in that mirror. All those permutations, all those possible side-effects.

While you're at the chemist, you buy another box of hair dye promising those living colour highlights. Your hair needs a wash — you glance at it in one of the make-up mirrors. Dark roots are showing through, an abrupt line drawn against the scalp like a growth ring on a tree, exposing a weak moment where you succumbed to vanity. Since you dyed it the chemicals have lightened it; the auburn highlights have disappeared. It looks kind of yellowish. Brassy, your mother would call it. Time to go to a salon and have a cut and colour, she would say, with that complacent little sigh acknowledging the mysterious burden of female duty.

You should leave it there, to grow out. But there is grey amongst the dark hair, a nasty cigarette-ash colour you tell yourself you haven't noticed before. In the privacy of your own bathroom you shake together the contents of two ammonia-smelling bottles of chemicals and cover up those roots. Even as you sit waiting the allotted time, feeling vain and foolish but wanting lustrous highlighted hair for the weekend, you happen to glance in the afternoon light at your neck and see the downy hairs on your chin and throat are silhouetted, and they are dark.

In strong light you can see them perfectly clearly. Another side-effect, just as the contraceptive packet predicted. So, naturally, you grab the tweezers and pull them out. But when you tilt your head into that hard light you see dark hairs coming through on your upper lip, too. Jesus, no. If you start yanking these you'll never be able to stop, you'll be like one of those bristly old women with moustaches, stiff hairs you can feel when you kiss.

So. More vigilance, you think, grimacing. Pluck and cover. Smirking into the mirror, then deciding it's one joke you'll never be able to tell him.

It's a slippery slope, once you start on it, once you've ignored that knock in the engine for long enough and it starts to miss occasionally as you careen down some hill dazedly gripping the wheel.

At the beach the sun comes out and the sea glitters to the horizon, and Paul is content to sit and watch the surfers for a while. When you're twenty-six, obviously that's what you do, because it's still within the radar range of things you might conceivably try yourself. Then he goes and buys fish and chips and you eat them at a picnic table, everything dazzling and warm. But once that poison has started, once you're committed to giving yourself a measured dose of it every day, nothing's going to be enough. You have traded in your unselfconsciousness for this double-visioned state of standing outside yourself, watchful and tensed for exposure. You will despise yourself for every mouthful and for your insatiable hunger, and you will despise yourself more for breaking away from him as you walk out of the surf to hurry back to your towel to get your sarong and cover up. So that even as he grins at you sitting on the sand and says, ‘Isn't this great?', a small, snarling bitter voice will be sounding in the back of your head saying:
Yeah.
I'm sitting squinting into the sun getting crow's-feet and eating saturated fats. Great.