Nobody was more surprised than I.
* * *
Mary in the shower after sex: her soft hands move delicately across her body and I recall my own hands fifteen minutes before crimping her nipples, pinching, clumsy and graceless, greedy in the face of bounty. She turns her face into the falling water, eyes closed, head tilted back and turning again she washes between her thighs, lathering the soap in gentle motions over her groin and through her dark pubic hair. She reaches behind and washes her bottom unselfconsciously. More circles under her arms. With her hands she raises and lowers her heavy breasts, soaping the lovely skin underneath as I watch her from the bathroom sink, toothbrush in my mouth like a gormless twit. From time to time she looks up and watches me watching her, pauses, and resumes. I remember thinking, ‘What in God’s name does she see in me?’
* * *
The telephone woke me at 5am on a mid-week morning and I rolled onto my back and lay there for a few seconds in that unreal sunless light of dawn toying with the idea of closing my eyes on it. In the end I answered on the seventh ring and instantly recognised Jenny’s panicked voice. Jenny from prayer group. Jenny, worshipper of the spiteful God. Jenny, abused wife, beaten with the bread board by a drunken husband the previous year. Her voice was a breathy whisper, a mix of fear and embarrassment, and I could hear her shushing one of her children gabbling beside her but the hush was a hissed rebuke, not soothing mummy-talk. She begged me to come over, pleading before I had even begun to respond and through the rush of sobs she whispered that Patrick, her husband, had come home drunk, and had collapsed in a stupor on the lounge. ‘I’m frightened for the children if he wakes up’, she told me. ‘Please come. Please come. Please come.’
I dressed quickly and ran to the car. Twenty minutes later, the sun still low in the sky, I pulled up in the street outside Jenny’s house in time to see her burst through the front door shrieking in fear. She held her youngest against her body, a small boy of three, snatched up from the floor and held like a sack against her hip, her left arm across his chest and his feet dangling. Jenny was running. The child flopped limply but his face was rigid with horror, his eyes wide and wild. Too young to understand, he had fallen back on the deepest instincts. No crying, just silence. As Jenny charged down the front steps she saw me at my car and, altering her course slightly, ran toward the side of the car furthest from the house. She was a mess, clothes and hair dishevelled, her eyes were red and swollen from lack of sleep and weeping, and she was barely coherent. I recall a moment frozen in time when her mind formed words and she gave voice to her fears. All she could say was, ‘My Danny. He’s got my Danny.’ She pointed me towards the house.
Danny was Jenny’s other son, a thin child of about seven, a quiet boy with patient suffering eyes and pale skin and blue veins. I turned away from Jenny and took in the little front yard. It was a picture of suburban bliss with a tricycle at the foot of the stairs and next to that a cricket bat. I opened the low front gate and walked slowly towards the door but halfway there I turned and told Jenny in a hissed whisper to call the police. She showed me her empty palms in despair as if to say, ‘With what?’ Before I could reply the security screen squeaked open and Patrick filled the doorway. Patrick was a big man, a builder with callused hands and a body hardened by aggression. He was wearing nothing but a pair of underpants all saggy in the crotch. He looked absurd but he still managed to scare the shit out of me. He looked me over with a sneer of disgust and levelled his hairy belly button at me.
‘Hello Patrick,’ I said softly. ‘Get fucked, cunt,’ he growled. I could hear Jenny sobbing from behind the car. I could think of nothing to say. I stood there for long seconds as the atmosphere clotted, then there was movement behind Patrick’s hip and I saw Danny ease out from behind his father. He walked carefully through the door, down the steps, and trotted across the front lawn to Jenny who grabbed him by the upper arms and held him to her body aggressively. With incredible relief I watched Danny’s progress then turned back to Patrick who hadn’t taken his eyes off me. Drunk, angry eyes. I held his gaze for a moment too long, making his mind up for him. ‘I’m gunna fuckin’ do you,’ he stated flatly and advanced down the steps.
The first punch caught me on the forehead, bumping my head so far back that I remember seeing the sky. I landed on my arse with my ears ringing. As I got to my feet the second punch caught me on the left eye. I saw stars and fell onto my hands and knees with the world whirring. I looked up to see Patrick ranging like an animal about the yard, searching for a weapon, something hard and heavy to hit me with, something to finish me off. A brick. A fence paling. But he had missed the cricket bat. I got to my feet and snatched it up. It felt beautiful. A big solid weighty thing. I looked at Patrick whose undignified saggy-underpanted drunken back was to me and it suddenly occurred to me that the fucker wanted to kill me. I felt the most pure of emotions. I swung the bat with all my strength, aiming for the side of his head, aiming for the soft part of his temple, surging with hate and anger and not caring if I killed him. As the bat swooshed through the air Patrick turned slightly and it smashed his nose across his face. He howled and held up both his hands. Blood seeped between the fingers but I was riding the swell. I knew what I would do. I’d kill the bastard. I’d make him pay for all the shit that he’d ever made Jenny and her children eat. Her fractured bones. Her bruised eyes and crushing humiliations. He would pay for this with searing pain and broken bones.
I swung the bat a second time, bringing it down on his shoulder, wanting to hurt and snap and tear. I heard the hot breath knocked out of him and another howl as he crumpled to the ground. He raised both hands over his head, cowering on the footpath and I saw the soft bone of his bald patch and thought about it for a moment, the coup de grâce, but I knew I could never do such a thing. I let the bat fall to the ground and was about to turn to Jenny, was about to ask if she was alright, and whether the children were safe, when I felt a hot slash of pain across my face: the streaky sting of Jenny’s fingernails as she attacked my eyes like a cat in a spit-fight. I reeled back in agony and as she launched herself at me a second time I caught her by the wrists. She writhed against my grip, lashing out at me with her feet, saliva flecking her lips but I caught her off balance and I threw her to the ground. She crawled towards her husband. I could barely see. My right eye burned where her nails had cut me. Tears streamed down my cheeks. My face was on fire where she’d taken the skin off in four deep slash lines, one for each of the fingers on her right hand.
Through the whole thing, Jenny had watched me from the car, she had seen Patrick go for me on the front step and punch me in the head, had seen me take him down with the cricket bat, and like a lioness in defence of her cub she had tried to wound me dreadfully. She had raked her claws across my face, gouged at my soft vulnerable eyes, sought to maim and blind me with a hatred that neither Patrick nor I could ever have dreamed of mustering.
* * *
On the following Sunday, Mary saw me at church. My face was red and sore and swollen. After five years of artful deception we came close to blowing our cover that day. Without thinking, Mary hustled across the church hall to me and in front of a room full of God-botherers she reached out her hand in a motherly gesture to touch and to heal my scabbed and puffy cheek with the tips of her fingers. You see, if there is one thing that cannot be dissembled it is the look of a person who wants to hold, and the look of one who needs holding.
* * *
Three days later Mary came to my place when her daughter was at school and Donald was at work. With hardly a word she held me and kissed me and took me to bed. We made love, Mary on her back, her left hand resting on my right shoulder, her right hand on my hip. She lay quietly under me as I enjoyed the warmth and sex of her body, her vagina as slippery as a peeled lychee. She encouraged me gently with touch and look as I thrust against her pelvis. As I came she accepted the shift to sudden forcefulness, bearing the weight of my body as the climax subsided by enfolding me in her arms. She stroked the small of my back. On reflection I remember that throughout our love-making she never once looked like coming, she never looked like wanting to, her orgasm not being the point of the exercise. Afterwards,
