Distorted Days

Lisa opens the front door in a dressing gown. Silky smooth, straight out of a B-movie. A pink-lipstick mouth opens but there’s no sound. Bizarre ventriloquism happens when, from someplace inside the house, John’s horrible omnipresent voice says, ‘Who is it, love?’

Doris hasn’t run for years. Never athletic, even as a child. The sight of her best friend’s bare feet follows her home to 42 Utkinton Street, to her and John’s home.

Inside, she’s surprised there aren’t dust sheets on the furniture. The clock on the mantelpiece ticks a hollow sound, so she vengefully removes the battery from its insides. Disembowelling it gives her a strange pleasure, but time hasn’t stopped soon enough for the empty oven, which she’d switched on hours ago. It has cut out but it’s warmed the kitchen up nicely.

She chooses red first, then rosé, then white. She likes the little clouds the red and rosé leave in the glass, streaking the colour a little.

It feels like there should be damp, dirty patches on the wall where stuff like fridges and wardrobes used to be. It annoys her that the furniture is in the same place as if nothing has happened, so she drinks in the bathroom. Sits on the lid of the toilet seat.

Downstairs, John’s Christmas present stays unopened beneath the artificial Christmas tree – one they bought in B&Q in a January sale early on in their marriage. Every year John said the tree didn’t owe them anything. Her present is just a small box wrapped up nicely because what matters is inside on a cream piece of card which tells him: We’re expecting a baby girl.

As she listens to herself piss, she sees there’s only one toothbrush in the pot by the sink. She thinks she hears a weight on the stairs, a hand turning a door handle, but there isn’t. There’s only Doris. Doormat Doris. The chanting continues in her head over and over. Through onion tears, she remembers through a gauze sentences, words, promises, as insignificant as the shopping lists and till receipts for the presents in her handbag, the food, the wine she’s bought to celebrate the Christmas period. Doormat.

Her voice has walked out and left her too; carried itself down the stairs to someplace else where it might be listened to. ’Your fucking wife! That’s who it is, love.’ That’s what she should have said to John, but she’s never been good at thinking of a comeback on the spot. Besides, she has no courage to fight back, to admonish, because she is a damp firework.

If she could speak to them, she would say they have exploded her heart, released firecrackers through her senses. She wishes she could call the police, the ambulance, the fire brigade, to arrest and anaesthetise and waterboard the bastards.

If she screws up one eye, she can see the colour of the glass rolling pin on the bathroom tiles. It’s a noisy one because it was expensive, carefully chosen by Doormat with the aid of an assistant in Tesco called Freda who had a nasty twitch in one eye. Freda’s twitch got excited when Doris loaded her shopping trolley with twelve bottles of wine, four colours of each hue. She and John used to go on alcohol percentage and special offers but Freda opened her eyes to the aromas and blends and whatnot.

They make her drink. Guzzle until her stomach is a well, so full it begins to pour over the top and trickle down Utkinton Street, a red rivulet, an S shape all the way to the corner shop and back. They still make her drink, sip it if she has to, faces at the bottom of the glass. She keeps drinking, swaying, and they are still watching. Then it is dark, the colour of a drinker’s liver.

This hurt is like a lit cigarette dabbed across the ribs. A grenade in her chest. Cock John and Twat Lisa stir cocktails with the linchpin. She breathes air through a damp handkerchief. Delirious, she lies on the cold tiles; sleep wants to take her.

As her mind swims in and out of consciousness, she sees herself driving, rain glistening on the road and smearing the windscreen. She swerves to miss a cat. John is a backseat driver, throwing commands out of his loose mouth, and Lisa’s bound hand and foot in the back of the van with the paintbrushes he’s left there after a job. She imagines herself driving to the middle of nowhere. No other cars and no other sound except John asking, asking, ‘Where are we? Why are we here? Where are we going?’ No one can see them for miles and miles.

The telephone rings in the downstairs kitchen. Doris washes her face in the sink, a vial for her tears. The sound of the water splashing on her skin takes her back to the trip the three of them took to Abersoch beach just a week ago, to the ancient cry of gulls above and their secret white bodies playing tunes in the churlish sky.

***

They stopped for a packed lunch in a layby just outside Bala. A wedge of cheese, Branston pickle and salad cream, just as John liked. He was wearing one of his best shirts, which fit his once rugby-playing physique rather well. Lately, even on weekends, he has liked to wear a shirt.

The three-hour journey to Abersoch in John’s van was worth it when they saw the sea open its arms out wide, without limits. John accelerated at the vision and they let out a loud yell of excitement. Then the road shouted ‘ARAF’ so he did, and Doris was glad because she was carsick by then and he’d taken the last bend like he was on a racetrack. She’d opened the window and rain gently touched her bare arm like the caress of thin lips.

They could see the sea out of almost every window in the caravan, like a gallery of watercolours. Doris had packed three bags: one for John, one for herself and one for food. Lisa, tottering on her high heels, carried in a sage-green suitcase. Doris hoped she wouldn’t be wearing them for the whole holiday, tapping away on the floor like a typist with a deadline when they should be relaxing, switching off from all that.

The walls were thin; they could hear John emptying the bagpipe of his bladder. They shared a look.

‘The fish and chips are bound to be good here,’ Lisa said from her bedroom with the door wide open. Doris caught a glimpse of her stuffing something black into the top drawer; it must have been underwear because Lisa only wears green or taupe clothes. Gold on very special occasions.

‘Let’s get some for supper,’ John said from the bathroom, then he started singing ‘The Reasons I Love You’.

John and Doris were in the largest bedroom because they’d paid for the caravan for a long weekend, then invited Lisa last minute because John said she’d pay for the petrol. Although Doris knew the caravan didn’t cost much because it was out of season, she liked Lisa so she didn’t grumble. Lisa didn’t like sleeping in a bunk bed so she chose the other double room. Doris smiled privately: if she weren’t with John, she’d have slept on the top bunk and wished Lisa was on the bottom one.

On the beach, John rolled up his trousers for a dip in the sea, exposing his tender white skin marbled with blue veins, which surprised Doris because he was normally shy about his body. The wind played with the sea, and black slimy seaweed was spewed on the beach as if the sea had eaten too much of it.

Lisa looked for shells and pebbles, then wrote her name in the sand in capital letters, except for the ‘i’ which was lower case and had a love heart for a dot. Doris watched the clouds move. She would have been happy to stay on the beach and make an omelette later for everyone but John and Lisa had fish and chips on their mind and, even if there had been a vote, she would have been in the minority. That’s how it was for her.

John said he was too tired to drive and, because Lisa had hurt the back of her leg doing a yoga pose, Doris was pushed into taking her first driving lesson. Lisa had taken up yoga after her mum passed away. The strain was caused by a cat- or dog-related pose, or something related to an animal – she couldn’t remember which. John said he knew a good physio who could sort it out, and laughed like a hyena.

There was a strange smell coming from the engine of the van as Doris drove down a one-way street. ‘You need to change gear,’ he sniggered, like she was a fool.

Doris fumbled the van into a parking space behind a pub. It was painted a sickly yellow hue. From inside the van, she watched John and Lisa chat and gesture. Her legs had turned to jelly from the drive.

‘Two for one on them, love,’ an assistant said, wearing a necklace of yellow-and-white beads that reminded Doris of daisies in her mother’s back garden.