One Careful Owner
I don’t know how long I stood there looking down at her body, the sledgehammer held high over my head. Long enough for the muscles in my arms to start telling me to either damn well do something or put it down. I do know that.
I remember more than once determining to go through with it and making that little movement backwards with my hands that would start the swing downwards.
And really it was only the newspaper that stopped me. There, stacked in the recycling box catching my eye, was our over-excitable local rag. I saw myself in a week’s time pigeonholed in a punning headline and unflattering photograph.
“Jealous wife’s revenge!”, “Years of neglect led to moment of madness.”
I thought of staring up at a legion of rabbits and cats’ behinds; being wrapped around Lord knows what; sniggered at by those halfwits at the book club.
And after all, was it really fair to take it out on this particular model? Why should she suffer because she was the most recent in a long, long line? At least this one had class, even I could see that. I lowered the sledgehammer with difficulty, laid it down on the floor and then walked swiftly back into the house. Away from the nauseating smell of oil and petrol.
Two large glasses of Bordeaux later and the tremors in my arms and hands have stopped. Holding something heavy over your head will do that to your muscles. Or perhaps it was the thought of what I could have done, the malevolent violence, that had made me shake.
When really, not all of it was his fault.
After all, I had married a man whom I had imagined was Heathcliff, only to find that underneath all that granite, there was simply more granite. Not a seam of poetry or passion anywhere. Not even a fossilised footprint.
Except, of course, when it came to his beloved, his soul mate, his car.
Not just one car, of course. Fifteen years of cars; a newer, sleeker model taking the place each time of the one that only months before had fulfilled all his heart’s desire. A new rictus grin from me to greet each arrival on the drive.
A fresh mistress to get used to, to work around. More demanding little ways.
Of course, if I’m honest (and after two glasses of red, who isn’t?), the signs were there at the start. Screeching to the kerb, his arm along the passenger seat and the top down, telling me how it handled, how it performed. Erotic in its way; his enthusiasm hinting at underlying depths of passion that surely would be transferred to me. I even found the engine oil under his nails exciting. I had bagged an engineer and a Northern one at that. Well, that was practically double points and a thumbed nose at Grace my sister with her accountant from Swanage.
Even sweeter so many years after they had all put me neatly in the spinster box.
Finally, the sky was blue above me, the air was warm. We would travel through a new life together.
Except we stalled.
I upend the Bordeaux bottle into my glass again and hunt down a jar of olives in the fridge, skirmishing about among the packets of ham and ready-meals.
I know, I know. But if you’re planning a fast exit, cooking a casserole from scratch isn’t uppermost in your mind. And cramming the fridge with easy-cook stuff means he won’t starve when I’m gone. Old habits and all that.
So, at the start, at the offset, I took all this car love in my stride. Normal manly behaviour. And it has to be said, I had previous form.
A father in love with steam. Years of him being half there, half in the loft with his train track. Holidays planned around the last outposts of the steam engine.
So how was I to know what was “normal” and what was not? Although to be fair to my father, he did find time to sire five children and put a large smile on my mother’s face. Even when he asked her to help with his train layouts and make those awful, fiddly little trees from that sponge stuff.
How was I to know that this was a step further than my father’s obsession?
That my husband would spend more time lying under cars than on top of me?
It took me about four years of marriage to really understand what I was up against. In fact, I can remember the date exactly. January 12th. It was my thirty-ninth birthday and we’d been out for lunch. A long drive there, a quick meal and then a long drive home. We came back here and I made us a cup of tea. By the time the tea was in the cups, he was out in the garage. Again. He must have positively raced up the stairs to strip off his clothes and get safely into those nasty snot green overalls of his. Everything neatly zipped up out of harm’s way. Out of my way, more like.
I carried his tea out to discover him already elbow deep in that hideous Jag he had at the time.
“Oh,” I said, “so you’re here then?”
He looked at the cup of tea. “Just put it down over there.” He nodded at a space on his workbench. Well, I hadn’t spent all those years as a primary school teacher not to be able to recognise when somebody was avoiding answering a sticky question.
I put the tea down and went and stood by his side. I remember leaning against him, for once not really caring if the oil from his overalls rubbed off on my clothes.
“Only I was thinking we could just waste the rest of the day in bed. You know. As it’s my birthday.”
He gave me a look as though I had suggested having sex in front of his mother. Or even with his damned mother. Then he dipped his head under the bonnet. Not, I believe, because he wanted to see something close up.
“There’s no call for all that,” I heard his muffled voice say. “It’s not a special birthday.”
In anybody else’s mouth it would have sounded like a very funny joke. But it was his mouth, and I was not laughing. That was all he said. Just that. End of discussion. I had suggested spending the entire afternoon in bed with him as we had once done, right at the start, and that was his response.
I almost hit him with a wrench. Was I going to have to wait a year for the next time he might want to go to bed with me? Until the big four-oh? I mean, it was my birthday, you would have thought, wouldn’t you, that he might have wanted to please me; even if he found the whole thing distasteful. Sorry, even though he found the whole thing distasteful. You would have thought that he could just have made the effort.
Like I always did with his birthdays; steeling myself to attend some damned car rally or another. Sitting there in a fold-up chair with a paperback while he preened and buffed the latest ruddy lump of metal to within an inch of its life and showed her off like some eager pimp. I would often look around at the other wives all sitting in their little fold-up chairs and think I should run screaming from the place. But you don’t, do you? All those ideas about “give and take”, about accommodating your loved one’s interests.
Anyway, I digress (and who doesn’t after three glasses of red?). So, that was the first sign, having my offer of an afternoon of sex turned down. Or was it the culmination of a lot of little first signs? Him staying downstairs long after I had gone to bed with his filthy, much pawed car magazines. The way he wouldn’t let me drive “his” cars. That time he made me walk back from a hospital appointment as it was raining and he’d just given the car a special wax? It was as though he was absenting himself from more and more of our marriage, as if he had just slipped into the garage and was never really, fully, coming back.
I haul myself up from the kitchen table, open the fridge again and dig out a block of cheese. I know there are oatcakes somewhere.
Well after that, things got steadily worse. Children might have helped, but they were not to be. It would have been something of a miracle after all.
Perhaps if we had produced a herd of boys who loved cars our lives would have been different. Then again, perhaps it would have made it worse.
The car seats and the crumbs; the bikes scraping along his paintwork. I cannot imagine how he could have coped with that. Or with the bigger questions: “Daddy, Daddy, can I pretend to drive?” “I need some practice for my test, can we go in yours?” “I’ve got a date, mind if I borrow your car?”
At least they were arguments I never had to watch or referee.
I don’t really know what I was staying for. Some sign that it was over, perhaps? And I am a sticker not a bolter. He wasn’t a bad husband. There were no bruises and some kindness. You could take him anywhere and he would blend in. Perhaps a different woman would have ignited his passion and kept it lit. I watched it gutter and spit and finally die.
Sometimes I would get in from work and just yearn, positively yearn for someone to scoop me up and give me a long cuddle. I wasn’t demanding “swinging from the chandelier” passion. Just a bit of warmth, a bit of skin against my skin. But you can’t pick an orange and then be disappointed it’s an apple, can you?
Then there came the day.
I walked into the garage and saw him with yet another car and stood transfixed. Later, when I registered that I was feeling dizzy, I knew that what I saw must have made me hold my breath too.
There he was, making love to his car. This man who, as far as I was concerned, might as well be dead from the waist down.
It was not the literal act of course, thank the Lord. I never actually caught him doing that. There was no horrible scene involving an open petrol tank and a guilty, hasty withdrawal. No, he was caressing the bitch. He was running his hand along her sides, down her bonnet, around the edge of her wheel arches and the look on his face was one of ecstasy. Well, I supposed it was, not that I had ever seen it anywhere near our dull bed. He looked overcome by something huge, completely swept away in it. The warmth in his eyes as his hand moved over her stabbed me right in the heart. She was speaking to him in a language I had never mastered and he was listening intently.
I could see his lips moving; I could almost hear the sighs and whispered endearments.
The overwhelming smell of sweat and oil caught in the back of my throat.
I should have left him then, realised it wasn’t ever going to get any better for me.
I look down at the packet of oatcakes in my hand and see they are now no more than crumbs. I put the packet down and refill my glass with wine.
Not long after that incident, I joined our local walking club.
Yes, I do understand irony.
And there I managed to walk right into John. A walker and a talker, thank goodness.
At first I only saw him as a bulky man in a kagool. Then one day, after a particularly long walk, I got cramp in the calf of my right leg. He stayed back to help me, and the way his hands felt, smoothing out the pain, caressing it away; well, it was soft rain on my drought.
John and I walked rapidly through companionship and friendship and then arrived at the outskirts of lust. John was keen to go further, but I was a good girl. Always a good girl. I told him everything, but I could not take that final step.
A vow is a vow, after all.
I turned my back on John and reapplied myself to my marriage.
Determination could be the glue that kept us together. I borrowed money, suggested a holiday, a second honeymoon. We discussed where we should go and I was firm. Not Le Mans, not the Nuremburg Ring, or Monaco or Detroit, but Venice.
“Why?” he asked.
“No roads,” I said.
He gave me his look. He knew it was a test, I knew it was a test.
He nodded his head and I felt such relief. Everything was going to be all right.
But as ever it was what he had not said that I should have listened to.
I get up and throw the broken oatcakes into the bin along with the remainder of the jar of olives. I put the cheese back into the fridge. I wash up the plate and leave it to dry in the rack.
Of course, it was not a new start. Two weeks ago I went to pay the deposit for the holiday, only to be informed that there were not enough funds in our account. I knew before I got home what I would find.
There she was in the garage. Shiny, svelte, expensive-looking.
He was already fiddling under her bonnet. I watched the infinitesimal adjustments he made to her. He fumbled and swore and could never locate anything with any precision where I was concerned.
I stood there for quite a while. He knew I was there, I could tell. And then I left the house and did not stop walking until I reached John.
I have walked over to his house quite a few times since then, while my husband tinkered and fine-tuned another. And during those visits I learned that John was passionate about many things. India, wine, Mozart, but mainly, me. Not me after Mozart, or second to Mumbai, but me up front, in front, first, first, first.
I learned that there are many ways to die too. Like John’s wife, quickly and unexpectedly, or like me, over time, unnecessarily.
Today I will not walk to John’s. I have too much to carry.
I take the empty wine bottle out into the garage and drop it in the box marked “glass”. Then I say goodbye to his latest; the one he finally left me for.
She is quite, quite beautiful. And completely heartless.
He would do well to remember that.
Read more entries from our 2008 short story competition
