Remember Why You Fear Me (30 page)

And he wanted to help her. He’d always tried to agree with her, to like the same films she’d liked, to enjoy the same food. He’d always thought if it mattered so much to her that he shared her opinion, he’d do his level best to accommodate. But he couldn’t now. Not this time. And he wished he hadn’t let go of her hand so easily, because it began to dawn on him that he might never get the chance to hold it again.

“I’ve got something for you,” she said. “I want you to take this back.” For a moment he thought she meant the wedding ring, and said so, and she told him no, it was a
beautiful
ring, they’d chosen it together, and it symbolized seventeen years, seventeen wonderful years, she’d always treasure it. He felt a little better for that. And then she plonked a Tupperware box down on the table.

He peeled off the plastic lid.

“Do you recognize it?” she said gently. And no, he didn’t, of course he didn’t, he’d given it to her all those years ago.

He wasn’t sure if he was meant to inspect it, but she gave him a nod of encouragement, and so he prodded it gingerly with his finger.

“Seems in pretty good nick,” he said.

“Oh yes,” she said. “I’ve taken good care of it. Do you know, I’ve not so much as looked at another man all the time we’ve been together. No, that’s in good working order, that’s as new.”

“Well done,” he said gruffly.

“Thank you.”

“I don’t want it back. You can keep it.”

“Oh, darling, you say that now. But you might need it again.” She looked a bit embarrassed, then said, “And there’s no rush, but at some point I’m really going to need mine . . .”

“Oh yes.”

“In your own time. There’s no rush.”

There wasn’t much to say after all that. They waited out the time it took her taxi to arrive with conversation as polite as it was artificial; he wished they could simply have retreated into those happy silences they were used to, but now even that seemed too intimate. And then the doorbell rang, she let him carry her luggage out to the car—she’d hidden it, already sorted and packed, in the spare room, so that he wouldn’t see the evidence of her leaving him before she’d had a chance to explain, and later that night as he lay in a bed which seemed much too big and much too still, he wondered whether that had been a kindly or a cruel thing for her to have done. And then, promising she’d be in touch, and exhorting him to take care of himself, she got up on her tiptoes to peck him on the forehead, as if all this time he’d been not so much a husband as an infant, got into the cab, gave him a wave, and was driven away.

He didn’t expect to sleep that night. He surprised himself and drifted off fairly easily, and, yes, he had nightmares, but they were only the nightmares he
usually
had, ones about aging and unpopularity and ugliness and spiders and his mother and pressures of work, nothing at all about being abandoned by his wife. When the next morning he lay in bed on his own he felt so perfectly normal that he even thought maybe everything was all right, that he didn’t
care
. And then it occurred to him that this was his first day waking up into a world in which no one loved him, and he felt something very like a pang himself.

He got up, shaved, washed, dressed, went downstairs to pour himself a bowl of cereal. He’d forgotten about the Tupperware box sitting on the kitchen table, and seeing it there, lid off, its grisly contents exposed, made him lose his appetite. He didn’t want to look at it, he’d put it in a drawer somewhere, eat his Corn Flakes and have done with it. But something about that little pang he’d felt made him think he should give it a closer look, and reluctantly he poked at it with his finger once more.

And to be fair, it wasn’t
especially
grisly. He just wasn’t comfortable having body organs lying around the breakfast things, he was squeamish like that. His heart lay, fat and gleaming, in a pool of thinly pinking water. He put his nose to it, gave it a cautious sniff: he didn’t quite know why, because he had no idea what hearts ought to smell like, and all he could detect was something slightly stale and coppery. He felt a thrill of alarm, but when he raised his head and sniffed again, he realized that it was even stronger away from the heart—the kitchen always smelt a bit funny, there was something wrong with the fridge. No, as far as he could see, his heart was fine. He probably should have kept the lid on overnight, though, as a couple of moths were floating inside the tub, drowned in the bloodied water. He fished them out, wondered why they’d been attracted to the heart in the first place, did hearts glow in the dark? He decided that, in his lunch hour, he’d pop over to the library and find a book about biology and see.

His wife had always been a woman of firm resolve. Once she’d made a judgment—whether it was on shellfish, that b&b in Wolverhampton, or the decline of the Conservative party—it was not to be altered. So he certainly didn’t expect that she’d have changed her mind, that when he came back from work that evening she’d be cooking dinner in the kitchen, all forgiven, all forgotten, and his heart safely stowed somewhere away from his view. But as the day wore on, he began to allow himself a little hope, that her natural stubbornness would weigh against throwing over so many years of marriage, and by the time he put the key in the front door he almost had believed that all would be well. But it wasn’t. And the heart was still, unarguably, implacably,
there
, the only living thing in the house waiting for him to come home. He peered at it, and it beat a little harder at his presence, like a dog wagging its tail at the arrival of its master. Three more moths were floating at its side; he fished them out, binned them, and went upstairs to get changed.

That was the Tuesday. She didn’t come home on the Wednesday either, nor on the Thursday. By the Friday he’d stopped expecting anything at all, but there it was, a little neon flash on the telephone, he’d no reason to believe it was her, but it was—one click, and there was her voice, playing on the answering machine. His heart gave a little flip of excitement. (He heard it splash back down in its plastic box.) He called the number she’d left him straight away.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Oh, don’t ask, darling,” she said, “I’d rather not tell you. I need a little space to sort out how I feel.”

He realized that all hope was not lost, then. She might still come back to him. “So, all’s not lost. You might still come back to me . . .”

“No, darling,” she said firmly, “no.” And he thought, she’s just saying that, she can’t know. But this time he kept it to himself. “How are you, darling? I’ve been worried about you.”

“Oh,” he said. “Thank you. But I’m fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” he said. “Really.”

“It’s okay,” she said, after a pause, “not to be fine, you know. It really is. You’ve always been so big and strong for me, you’ve been wonderful like that. You don’t have to be strong anymore. Have you cried yet? You can cry if you want.”

“No,” he said, irritated. “Why, have you cried?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “Buckets.” He felt ridiculous, as if this were some sort of contest. “But then, I’ve been crying for
ages
, darling.”

“Right,” he said. “So. Anyway.”

“Anyway. I wanted to ask if it would be all right if I called around tomorrow.”

“Of course. You don’t have to ask. I mean, this is your house.”

“No, I
do
have to ask. I really do. I just want to pick up a few odds and ends, you know. Can you have my heart ready?”

He’d decided he had to be the one who hung up first, but somehow she still got her goodbye in ahead of his. He stood by the phone for a while, then realized he hadn’t yet taken off his coat, hadn’t closed the front door even. “Right,” he said, as he did so, “right,” he said, as he changed out of his work clothes into something slightly more casual, “right, best get to it, then. Best jolly well get to it.” And he began to look for his wife’s heart.

Realistically, there were only a few places it could be: the cupboards in the spare bedroom, the hatch under the stairs, a small chest of drawers in the room he’d privately felt it rather pretentious they called the study. His wife was not so sentimental that all the keepsakes and knickknacks she kept should clutter up the house—some married couples, of course, kept their hearts on the mantelpiece beside the wedding photos, but she’d found such public displays of affection in rather poor taste. “What is it they’re trying to prove?” she’d ask her husband after a dinner with friends, “if you truly love someone you don’t need to put it on
display
,” and now they were safely at home away from prying eyes she’d lean forward and give him a little kiss on the lips. He worked methodically through all the likely cubby-holes, but no heart was to be found. It had to be
somewhere
; he wouldn’t have thrown it out, surely; it couldn’t have been given to Oxfam, what would they want it for? And instead, pouring from these hidden pockets around the house, all the little remnants of his marriage. The Valentines cards he had given her. Long expired passports they had acquired for a single holiday in Tenerife they hadn’t enjoyed and never repeated. Their wedding certificate. And before he knew it he was crying, at last he was crying, but it wasn’t what you’re thinking, really it wasn’t—these were tears of
frustration
, of course they were, where was this bloody heart, why the bloody hell wasn’t the bloody thing where it was supposed to be? Emptying out old shoeboxes, spilling junk to the floor, but nothing beating, nothing alive. And as he sobbed he allowed himself to resent his wife, just a little bit—sod her,
sod
her, why was she disrupting his life like this, why was he looking for something she’d so freely given him only to demand it back again, you can’t do that with presents, it wasn’t
right
. He hadn’t asked for her bloody heart in the first place; she’d been the one who’d pursued him, she’d done all the pursuing, she’d chased him and hunted him down and told herself that he was to be hers, and she always got what she wanted.

A sudden pain in his chest. It only lasted a couple of seconds, maybe not even that. But it took him a full minute to get his breath back, to rise to his feet, step over the debris of the past, and make his way down to the kitchen.

He looked at his heart. It was still beating, of course—if anything, it seemed to be beating rather faster, which was reassuring perhaps. He idly picked out the fresh moths it had acquired, and thought to go. But as he looked more carefully he made out little pinpricks of white, spotted all over. Had they been there before? He couldn’t be certain. He remembered his heart being a perfect sea of rich pink, but he had to admit that when he’d looked at it, his mind had always been on other things. Maybe it had always been a bit . . . well . . .
speckled
. He fetched the book he’d borrowed from the library, wondered again why diagrams on the page never look remotely like the real thing when it’s sitting in a Tupperware box. Yes, see, the line of spots started at the tricuspid valve, then spread up to the . . . right atrium. He flicked through the book but could find no mention of white spots at all; he supposed he could have looked the white spots up in the index, if only he could have guessed what on earth to call them. So he looked up both Tricuspid Valve and Atrium (Right) in the index instead, but had no joy there either. He put the book away. Rather nervously, fearing another spasm, he pressed down on a cluster of spots gently—then harder, then harder still. Nothing.

He could take it to a doctor, he supposed. Sit in a waiting room for a couple of hours, only to find out that the white spots were perfectly normal. And, by doing so, show the whole world that his wife didn’t feel it was a heart worth keeping anymore. Most likely the pain was because he hadn’t stopped to eat before he’d gone hunting through the cupboards upstairs; now that he was in the kitchen he realized he was ragingly hungry. He rinsed his bloodied hands under the tap, opened a tin of baked beans, and tried to work out what he should do next. And as he filled his stomach, and began to feel so much better, the answer became clear.

The next morning he got up early, and was standing outside the butcher’s when the shop opened. “I want a heart,” he told the girl behind the counter, “as close to a human’s as you’ve got, a thirty-nine year old woman having pangs.” When he reached home, and opened it up on the kitchen table, he wondered whether the girl might have looked a little harder. He compared it to his own, side by side, and even allowing for the growing proliferation of white specks across its surface, his was clearly in better nick. For a start, this pig heart was unashamedly
blue
. It had its pink bits, to be sure, but only as little islands in these vast oceans of discolouration. It was the wrong size as well, just a little too small, and had bits sticking out its side which he was quite sure shouldn’t be there in the first place; after he’d trimmed off some of the weirder looking crags, the heart looked even more pathetic. He considered nipping back to the butcher’s, getting a second heart—maybe he could bolt it on to the side, somehow, give the whole thing a bit more body—but even in his rising panic he realized that wouldn’t fool anybody. The greatest problem, though, was the heart’s texture. His own, beating away softly in the tub, fairly gleamed; this pig heart looked as dry as death. He rooted through the cupboards, trying to find something he could glaze it with to give it some extra sheen; with great care he painted the pig heart with vinegar using the back of a soup spoon. Most of the vinegar ran off the sides, but enough of it got between the cracks that after a little while the whole thing fairly sparkled. Of course, it now stank. He tried to mask that by spraying it with old perfume he found on his wife’s dressing table, and that was so strong he was forced to paint the whole organ with a new coat of vinegar to try to take the edge off.

The doorbell rang.

“Hello, how are you?” she said, and there was a smile of practised cheer as if they’d just been introduced at a party. He asked her if she’d like a coffee. “No, no, I won’t stay, I’ll just pick up the . . . is this it? . . . thanks.” And she dropped the bagged heart into her handbag, without bothering to look at it or sniff at it. He was relieved, of course, but also a little hurt.