It’s one of my dating rules: always ask a woman in on the first date. Even if she turns you down she will know you want her.
21
HAND TOUCHES WARM SKIN
I wake up in bed knowing that something is different. I don’t have a headache and my mind is clear. I don’t feel like staying in bed all day or jumping in front of a bus, which is unusual. And nice.
I stretch out and my hand touches warm skin. It moans.
I open my eyes and see Denise’s long dark hair splayed over the white pillow.
God.
I remember the night before with a shiver deep inside my body. The sexual equivalent of someone walking over my grave.
I look at her tattoo, close up. Leaves, curlicues and hooks. A climbing rose with no blooms. It reminds me of the thorny branches that strangle the castle in the story of Sleeping Beauty. The prince has to fight his way through the dangerous weed to wake his princess.
I smile at the irony. I’m the one who needs rescuing.
I realise that I may never see this woman again so I decide to ignore one of my most important rules and make her breakfast. For the first time in a long while I feel hungry. On the way to the kitchen I fantasize about creamy scrambled eggs, gravadlax with dill and sour cream on toasted rye.
When I see the state of the kitchen my fantasies instantly grow mould.
Where is Francina? Instead of infecting myself with some rare strain of bacteria poisoning, I decide to nip out for the breakfasts. I call ahead the order in whispers and leave a note for Denise telling her to stay where she is, and she will be rewarded. I can’t believe that one night with a beautiful woman has made such a difference to my state of mind. Here I am doing a breakfast run at seven in the morning when yesterday it took me an hour and the promise of a pre-noon cocktail to get me out of bed.
I could take the easy route and say that it was the fabulous sex but I know it’s not true. Denise has something I need.
A young lip-glossed waitress is standing outside the glass doors of the café with my takeaway in her hands. She looks at me with Bambi eyes and warns me that the coffees are hot. As if her warning is not enough, the text on the paper cup reads CAUTION: CONTENTS MAY BE EXTREMELY HOT. I find this a little unnecessary. Surely if someone has the linguistic capacity to order takeaway coffee they will also understand that coffee is made with boiling water?
The fresh morning air is cool on my cheeks. Everything seems brighter. I reach the house and let myself in. Balancing my swag and a smile I go straight to the bedroom where I find a stark, empty bed. Unmade. After checking the bathroom, guest loo, study, all the bedrooms, the garden, the drained pool, I realise that she has gone.
I sink down on the Chesterfield in the lounge and flick on the flat screen. Greased-up wrestlers throw each other around and break chairs on one another’s heads.
I hope she doesn’t regret it. I hope she didn’t wake up with that one-night-stand-pure-dread feeling.
I unpack a croissant and pull it apart. Shove my fingers into its soft, warm centre, and rip it out. Swallow it down.
I didn’t get her number.
I leave the coffee for a while. Couldn’t bear the shame of scalding my mouth after all those warnings.
A peroxided box cut bounces a curly mop off the side of the ring. I shove the last of the croissant into my mouth and chew without tasting it.
She must feel guilty about Eve. Hell, I feel guilty about Eve. She’s not dead a week and I’m boning her backwater sister. And I’d love to say that she would understand, but I doubt she would.
My curiosity about her past, their past, makes me feel itchy inside.
I empty her coffee down the drain, like an addict, and wonder if I’ll ever see her again.
I decide to spend the day cleaning the kitchen. I don’t know the last time I actually did the dishes. Francina is my domestic fairy godmother. I can imagine that when I’m not looking, she swishes her sjambok and the dirt is magicked away. Where the hell is she? If I didn’t need her so damn much I would fire her. Okay, that’s not true. She knows I would never, could never. I have a tender feeling towards the old girl. Maybe this is why she has left: to teach me a lesson. To appreciate what I have. To show that there won’t always be someone around to pick up the pieces. But somehow I doubt it. Francina has never been one for pontificating. She isn’t answering her phone and the cops have turned up nothing. I miss her. I miss her chubby ankles resting on my kitchen table. I eat a rusk in her honour, off a side plate like she’s taught me. I put on bright yellow plastic gloves that smell like vanilla and fill the sink with hot water and detergent before I remember that I have a dishwasher. I wash everything in the sink anyway, thinking that it will be cathartic. The warmth and the bubbles soothe me. I look out of the window and see that the garden is lush and filled with summer. Inca lilies, arums, cats’ tails all jostle for the sun. The branches of a huge vintage pink rosebush are heavy with blooms. I feel like I went to sleep in winter and woke up now amidst all this life and pollination and colour.
I end up washing everything in sight, picking up empty bottles, sweeping up all the ash and broken glass, scrubbing the porcelain floor, shining all the brushed aluminium I can lay my hands on. After I’m finished it looks more like a scrub room in a hospital than a kitchen.
When there is nothing else to sanitise I decide to go for another jog. Get the old heart pumping again. The last run seemed to do me good. I put on the gear from two days before and head out; Sylvia’s voice chimes in: “You’ve run one kilometre.”
I try to stick to quiet roads where there aren’t a lot of cars to run you over. I like the peace of a run, the way it allows me to get to that mental limbo where thoughts and ideas just flood in one after the other. Nothing practicaclass="underline" that all just disappears as I go into autopilot. It’s one of my favourite feelings. I’m not getting there today though, I am too unfit. I do actually have to think about the distracting trivial things. Like holes in the road, and breathing. My lungs are tightly stitched leather.
In the shower afterwards (Tropical Storm™) I feel great. I feel as though Denise has opened something inside me. Like the first rupture in a hatching egg.
When I was a kid my dad took Emily and I to a farm somewhere in the North West. Those were the days when you could stop off for fresh milk and eggs. I remember tasting that milk straight from the obliging cow’s udder, how warm and sweet it was. And then later, when the glass bottle had been in the fridge, how the cream formed a thick skin on the top of the milk, thicker than any cream you can buy, like soft white butter. But most of all I remember going in to the hatchery where the farmer picked up an egg that was rolling around and held it out to me in his huge calloused palm. Soon a beak was pecking its way through. I could see that the chick was struggling and I wanted the farmer to help the little bird out. I wanted to take the thing from him and break open the shell like a chocolate Easter egg. But he was patient and eventually the chick was free; a perfect little ball of lemon which, oblivious to his previous labours, hopped away to his brothers and sisters.
Maybe this painful twisting inside of me is part of some kind of genesis, and I am going to emerge as a better version of myself. It’s an optimistic thought. It helps to believe in something.
Just as I am falling asleep the night after having Denise, a hovering weight settles on my chest. If she finds out about my bizarre plan to pseudo-murder Eve, she’ll think I’m a psychopath and have me locked up before I could explain to her that I only did it to save my own life, and that I never meant to take anyone else’s. Telling Frank was a mistake. Who knows what he has told the cops about me. God, I was an idiot to tell him. The police haven’t been back to visit since Saturday but I think that they are watching me. At least I hope it’s them. Every time I look out of the window or leave the house lately, I have the feeling that someone is out there, waiting, watching.