The Mistress's Revenge (11 page)

“She’s very damaged,” you’d airily pronounce about anyone with a hesitant manner, or a nervous laugh, or a less-than-firm handshake. Anyone in fact who annoyed you, or puzzled you, or who wasn’t as outgoing as you or as able to meet strangers’ eyes (God, how good you are at that—the whole unflinching eye contact. Must have been what made you such a hit with the younger, stroppier musicians). You could probably run workshops on how to do that, you know. “Eye Contact Skills—Beginners,” you could call the course. You’ve always loved a lucrative sideline.

You know what’s funny though? Lately I’ve been feeling like I’m the one who’s damaged, like every part of me where you’ve ever laid a finger (and let’s face it, there are very few parts where you haven’t) bears an ugly black splaying bruise. Does that seem melodramatic to
you? I’m so sorry. I see you now, wrinkling your nose in distaste. “A bit OTT,” you might sniff. Or, worse, “a bit obvious.”

Damaged in transit. Maybe I’ll have a label printed up, or a T-shirt.

A bumper sticker might be fun.

Damaged goods.

Silleeeee Salleeeee

S
ian called me today. Like I say, she has felt awkward since all this business happened, as if those years of being “a friend to the affair” (incidentally, that’s what they call it on infidelity forums—isn’t it wonderful?)—providing alibis, joining us for cozy dinners out—makes her somehow responsible for how it has turned out. She raises her eyebrows meaningfully at me when no one else is looking, silently asking how things are going. Am I over you yet?

She thinks we should go out tonight, the two of us, get dressed up, head to Hoxton, hang out in a bar or pub, trying to blend in with the young things. Flirt with some men like we used to do twenty years ago. Sian has never conceded that we might not be quite the same people as we were when we used to traipse our twenty-something selves around the hotspots of late night London. “I don’t want to be surrounded by twenty-eight-year-olds,” I tell her now. “It makes me feel old.” “Speak for yourself,” she retorts, smoothing back her carefully highlighted hair with a gym-toned arm. How you used to enjoy mocking her, with her underage boyfriends and designer wardrobe. You refused to see the exposed heart underneath, looking for love in unsuitable places, just like all of us.

Did I ever tell you about the time I met up with Sian a few years ago, the day she’d finally taken possession of a £1,000 Birkin handbag she’d been lusting after for years? When she arrived at the restaurant, she was like a doting mother, unable to stop fussing over the new arrival, stroking the soft camel-colored leather and cooing over its shape, its contours. Over the course of the meal, however, the pleasure in her new purchase drained steadily away alongside a couple of bottles of
good Chenin Blanc. Yet another romance had just bitten the dust and Sian’s usual armor-plated self-belief was slipping. “I’m fed up with it all,” she said eventually, and I remember how shocked I was to hear her admitting to defeat. “What’s wrong with me?” she asked me. “When did this become my life?” I tried to cheer her up by reminding her of all the gorgeous young men, all the money she earned as a store buyer—money that she was free to spend on designer handbags galore. She looked at me then, a smudge of mascara scorched black across her cheek. “A Birkin bag won’t care about me when I’m old,” she said. Do you know, Clive, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite so sad?

But today Sian wasn’t in the mood for self-pity. I think she believes the mourning period should now be over. I think Sian believes a bit of male attention will cure me of you. Well, I can’t pretend it wouldn’t be wonderful to be cured, finally, of this embarrassing, debilitating affliction. What relief it would be to wake up in the morning without subconsciously flinching in anticipation of the hammer blow of awareness of loss, or to step lightly through my life free of the tumorous mass of you. So tonight I will take the waters of Hoxton in the hope of a cure.

In deference to my imminent restoration to the ranks of the living, I have dressed with particular care, pulling a floaty top on over my suddenly too-baggy jeans to hide the worst of the Misery Diet ravages. Tilly came in just now as I was putting on my makeup.

“You haven’t worn makeup in months,” she told me, all suspicion. That girl sees everything, you know. Remember how it was always her who’d want to know who I was emailing late at night, or how you always used to call when Daniel was out?

“I’m combating the seven signs of visible aging,” I told her. It’s always good to connect with my children through advertising slogans, I find. It’s like a shortcut to understanding. “I’ve reached sign five.”

Tilly didn’t crack a smile.

“Why is your neck like that?” she wanted to know.

“Like what?”

“You know, like the top of the curtains.”

Ah, pleated. My daughter wants to know why the skin on my neck is pleated.

I look at myself in the mirror and see what she sees—a too-thin forty-three-year-old whose skin no longer fits wearing a top that drapes over me like one of those frilly round cloths on what my grandmother used to call an “occasional table.”

“Liz Hurley is older than I am,” I told her, defensively.

“Who?”

More and more I find I can’t even look at Tilly these days. Girls are so unforgiving, aren’t they, so critical. I remember being the same with my own mother. She used to wear the most overpowering perfume, the kind that creeps into your nostrils and solidifies there, blocking out the air. When we’d be going out anywhere, she’d get into the car last (she was always late, my mother), and the smell would hit me like a breaking wave, so I’d have to roll down the window and stick my whole head outside. One time I wanted to borrow a sweater of hers. It was black cashmere and kitten soft and I knew, in the way teenage girls always know, that it would look loads better on me. Finally she gave in to my wheedling and lent me the sweater to go out in, but when, after a long luxurious bath, I was finally ready to put it on, I found I couldn’t. The smell of that noxious perfume lingered in every fiber, every thread. It was the smell of my mother—cloying and heavy and invasive. Attempting to pull it over my head, I found myself gagging and flung it across the floor into the furthest corner of my bedroom. What do you think Helen would make of that, hey? No doubt she’d be able to find lots of ways in which that incident has shaped the person I am today. Myself, I can really see only one. I never, ever wear perfume.

Right, it’s getting late, so I must go. Off into the night to be cured. Who knows, this might even be the last journal entry I write. I shall come floating home, pick up this notebook and it’ll be as if someone else has been writing all these words—this autistic testament to obsession. I’ll gaze at it, puzzled, wondering how it came to be in my house, and who the rabid, ranting writer might be. I might even feel slightly sorry for her, now that I am whole again; this poor broken creature spilling her sour secrets across the page like yesterday’s milk. I will be magnanimous, I think. I will try not to judge.

*  *  *

S
tupid. Stupid. Stupid.

I’m sitting here in my stupid floaty top, and the paper is already blotchy with my stupid tears. You would be slightly repulsed I think if you could see me. Another damaged, stupid woman crying in the night.

Do you want to know what happened? I’m sure you don’t, but I’ll tell you anyway because it’s a funny story. A funny, stupid, stupid story.

So Sian and I went to Hoxton, to be where the young things are. We started in that pub we went to once with the dark green leatherette benches, and the one tiny toilet where girls in miniskirts squeeze, three at a time, snorting cocaine from the cracked tank top.

We were witty and caustic, and each successive vodka made us only more amusing.

“We’ve still got it!” crowed Sian, as a boy young enough to be her son showed us his new tattoo clinging to the sharp edge of his smooth hip bone. It was some kind of a Maori symbol if I remember. Or maybe not Maori, maybe Aboriginal. Something indigenous anyway. There was something a little unsavory about the way Sian looked at it, I thought, as if any minute she might flick out her tongue to taste it.

“It’s gorgeous,” I think I said.

But really it was stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

Then we fell out of that pub and trip-trapped across the road in our going-out heels, to that other one—much bigger and more convinced of its own superiority.

There were a couple of people inside who Sian knew from somewhere. I can’t remember where. The Citalopram and vodka mix seems to have done funny things with my memory. Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha. Funny stupid.

The people Sian knew were talking to the manager of the pub, a tall man with a dark brown topiary-neat goatee and an incongruous tan.

“I’ve just come back from Sharm el Sheikh,” he told me.

For some reason Sian and I found that hysterical. We shook with laughter about Sharm el Sheikh, and somehow ended up convincing ourselves he’d said something very witty.

“He’s funny,” Sian whispered to me—the kind of whisper that carries over the top of all the normal voices and arrives in your ear coated with spit.

“And I think he really fancies you.”

I looked at him with renewed interest. I hadn’t really paid much attention before to whether he was attractive, but now she mentioned it, I could see how he might be. And he fancied me? I felt ridiculously, stupidly grateful.

We started talking together, me and Pete. Oh, didn’t I say he was called Pete? Stupid name, isn’t it? Really stupid.

I have no idea what we talked about, but I had another vodka. Or maybe more. I didn’t pay for them. Perks of chatting to the manager.

It’s a weird thing with the Citalopram and alcohol. You lose great big chunks of time, swallowed up in a black, bottomless wormhole.

The next thing I remember it was late, and the crowds of young people had wafted off into the night, and a grumpy French barman was stacking the chairs on the tables.

‘We’re going now,” Sian was saying, her pointedly arched eyebrows speaking a sign language of their own. “But you stay here if you want to. Have you got enough cash for the cab home?”

So solicitous, Sian—despite being back to her old facilitating tricks. And so drunk. But not, I fear, as drunk as me.

“Stay for another drink,” the man called Pete said. “I’ll make sure you get home.”

I sat there on a stool at the bar, in my stupid floaty top and my stupid going-out heels and I nodded obediently. It seemed like everyone was looking out for me and had come up with a very sensible plan of what to do next. I was actually quite grateful. Isn’t that ridiculous?

Then Pete and I were on our own. He said he lived above the pub and asked if I wanted to come upstairs for another drink. I nodded again like a stupid nodding dog and followed him up the stairs, my stupid going-out heels clicking loudly on every step.

Pete’s living room seemed huge, with big high ceilings and massive windows looking straight out onto the building in front. There was a leather sofa, some rather naff curtains, a framed print of a 1950s Fellini film (I only know that because Pete told me. I don’t want you to think I’ve turned into the kind of person that looks at a print and says “oh, that’s a Fellini, isn’t it?”).

I was on the leather sofa, and so was Pete. He was so unfamiliar. Every time I shut my eyes and then opened them I had to remind myself again just who he was. I saw him glance at his phone to check for texts and realized he too was probably wondering just who I was and whether he really wanted me to be in his living room. But by then we were embarked on whatever we were embarked on, and neither of us really knew how to get out of it.

When he kissed me, he tasted of red wine and roll-up cigarettes. His beard was scratchy and his tan, up close, alarmingly orange. As soon as I felt his tongue in my mouth, fleshy and slightly rubbery like an outsized mussel, I knew I didn’t want to be there, but by then it was too late.

He stood up suddenly and held out his hand to lead me into the bedroom. I followed unquestioningly like an abused dog that knows it is about to be walloped but goes along with it anyway.

The bedroom was small and dominated by that Edward Hopper diner print most people grow out of after they leave college. I tried not to look at the unmade bed, where a half-filled ashtray balanced on top of a book called Awakening the Buddha Within. Stupid fucking book. Stupid fucking print. Stupid fucking bed.

Pete sat on the end of the bed and pulled me toward him, undoing my jeans. Too late I remembered my hairy legs. I knew there was little chance that Pete would take them for a political statement. There was a fairly good chance that Pete might not know what a political statement was. Stupid fucking Pete.

As he undressed me, his face gave little away, and I suddenly realized that I might be the oldest woman this man called Pete had ever slept with. Even though he must have been approaching forty himself, the average age of the girls in the bar was about twelve, which probably
made Pete’s normal quarry not much older. I became agonizingly conscious of the puckered skin around my belly button (how you used to love to rest your tongue there, do you remember, burrowing your nose into the yielding flesh as if it were cheesecake?), the deflated breasts, the focaccia thighs. I saw myself through Pete’s dulled blue gaze and wished to be somewhere, anywhere, away from there.

“You all right?”

But Pete didn’t wait for a response. His mollusk tongue was roaming my body, leaving its snail’s slick on my skin.

And then, with a grunt, he was inside me, pressing down on me like a Breville sandwich maker. The edge of the stupid fucking Buddhist book was digging into my side and I knew the ashtray must have tipped over. When I dared to look up, Pete’s face was raised toward the wall so he was staring directly at the Edward Hopper as he moved up and down. A depressing thing to look at in the throes of passion, wouldn’t you think? I wondered what images were going through his head, who he was thinking of. I knew it wasn’t me.