2000 - The Feng-Shui Junkie (4 page)

S
taring at me through her car window, Sylvana’s caustic expression reads:
Well, I’m here now: what are you going to do about it?
“You forgot something, darling,” she drawls, eyebrow curled. “What?”

“The present you bought for Ronan:
Art and the Postmodern
.”

“Oh yes, that.”

It cost me sixty pounds.

“Now he’ll be able to bore us interminably on the nature of postmodernism,” she says.

I look away.

“Julie, is something the matter?”

I look back. “Can I have that book, please?”

“What are you doing with that decanter?”

“I’m throwing a party.”

She inspects me more closely. “Has something  – ”

“Give me the book, Sylvana.”

She looks worried now. Without taking her eyes off me she passes a plastic bag through the window. I place the decanter on the ground and take the book, lifting it out of its bag. It is large and heavy. It is truly a beautiful book. The plates and illustrations are of the highest quality.

Modern art is one of Ronan’s passions. If his father hadn’t forced him to do dentistry he would certainly have studied art. At twenty-three, he joined his father’s practice as an apprentice assistant, having studied anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, general medicine, endodontry, exodontry, orthodontry, pharmacology and a host of other tongue-entwining ologies.

When all he wanted to do was learn about art.

At twenty-four he left the apprenticeship and then, against his father’s wishes, he headed for the Sorbonne in Paris, where he received a diploma in aesthetics and history of art two years later. Then at last he got real (and poor) and returned to set up his own dentistry practice, his father retiring and sending forward his former clients. I was one of his first patients.

One of his first casualties.

I open
Art and the Postmodern
halfway through: page 186.

Completely ignoring my friend’s protestations, I start ripping out the leaves in chunks of five and six pages. I collect the twisted, loose sheaves in the same hand. I am careful not to drop any to the ground: it’s important to respect other people’s property.

Now there is a gap between pages 186 and 270. Quite a large gap: my palm is stuffed with eighty shiny pages including two chapters devoted to Jacques Derrida and post-structuralism. This should increase the value of the book considerably.

I am being closely observed by my friend, I sense. But, luckily for her, she doesn’t try to stop me. Perhaps she feels that this is somehow my prerogative? That it might even be good for me, therapeutically speaking?

“Julie, what are you doing?”

I glance down at her and put on this big frown. “Do you require a further demonstration?”

“But that’s for…Ronan.”

“
Was
.”

“But…”

Sylvana’s forehead is creased helplessly, like a person in great pain.

“I’m amazed that you’re so concerned about Ronan’s property. It’s not compulsory to like him, you know.”

“Julie – get in the car.” She reaches over and snaps open the passenger door.

“Why? Are you worried what the neighbours might think?”

My voice is shaking. Tears are welling up. “…I’m the one who has to bloody live here,” I sniff coarsely, “with that bastard!”

Sylvana’s eyebrows go right up. Her expression reads: what the hell is going on here? Of course, she can’t know.

She clambers heavily out of her car, comes up to me and tries to coax the remains of the book out of my hands, but I grip it all the harder, animal-like.

She starts talking to me as if I am aged four. Normally I hate being treated like a baby, especially when Ronan does it. When Sylvana does it, though, I’m flummoxed.

I allow her to usher me into the passenger seat. I feel like a semi-reluctant geriatric must feel: resisting but realizing you’ve got no choice. Sylvana picks the wine decanter off the ground, dumps it on the back seat, gets in herself, drives to the nearest parking enclosure and jams on the handbrake.

She inspects me and informs me that my hands are bleeding.

Very, very gently she asks me what the hell is going on.

So I come clean.

I tell her that I just smashed up Ronan’s car, which is presently lying in state in the next parking bay just over the low bush. Her face remains expressionless. She gets out of the car and walks to the corner of this section of the car park. She stands up on the stone border and peers. A second later her heels are snapping back towards me. I could be mistaken, but is that a suppressed smile I spy on her mug?

She gets in again. “Was that you, Julie?” she asks in a clear, pleasant voice.

“It was.”

I swear I detect a glimmer of admiration in her eyes.

She asks me why I did that, so I tell her everything, trying my best to remain calm. She falls silent, then looks away. With a dark, forbidding grimace, she is analysing the situation, dissecting it into small pieces.

Just witnessing Sylvana turn bad-tempered on my behalf is in itself a supreme comfort. It’s like she’s transforming my problem into her own personal crusade. She is one of the greatest get-the-shit-off-your-chest friends I’ve ever had because she refuses to weep and flutter over the minutiae of your misery. No. Instead, she aquires this dark, brooding, apocalyptic expression on her mug like she’s just discovered rat entrails in her burger and she’s planning a secret hit against the manager.

This can only lead to good.

At last the oracle turns to me, her eyes gleaming diabolically, branding the air with one black-smoked word:
reprisal
. She wants me to confront husband and lover by the poolside.

Like I need to be told.

“The hose,” she says.

“What?”

Oh yes, the hose. Beside the pool is a hose used by the caretaker to wash down the stone slabs each day.

She explains what we are to do: we are both calmly to enter the pool area, grab the hose, point it at the two sunbathers, smile, twist the knob and windscreen-wipe them off the face of the planet. We will watch them dance and scream like a pair of rats drowning in their sunglasses.

Getting out of the car, she suggests that I might then give the woman a good smack across the cheek and warn her (pulling my well-practised vampire countenance, which she insists was inspired by Dracula, although in actual fact it was inspired by Hannibal Lecter) that if I ever see her ugly mug again I will tear it off, dry it in the sun, frame it and hang it over my mantelpiece.

I swing my arm to the back seat and grab the neck of the wine decanter. Then I hop out after her.

“What on earth is that for?” she inquires.

“To fill up with her brains,” I explain.

She says she’s sympathetic to this approach, but in the same breath she calmly advises me to put it back down. I cannot understand the ridiculous logic that says: “confront your adulterous spouse, yes, but take care to avoid aggravated assault.”

In the end, though, I replace the decanter in Sylvana’s car. I hate being managed like this.

Empty-handed and dumb, I follow her to the pool along a narrow path located between our apartment block and the one next to us. She reminds me of a fearsome headmistress dragging me to her office for some discipline. Soon we connect with the pathway that leads to the pool. A six-foot-high hedge encloses the sizeable swimming-pool area. There is a small wooden gate set into the hedge.

Sylvana opens it. She is about to step through.

“Wait!” I whisper furiously, teetering on the brink.

“What?” she whispers back.

Confrontation.

This is not the right thing to do. I sense I am making a mistake. A mistake I will pay dearly for.

A mistake my mother made and paid dearly for.

“Sylvana, don’t go in there!”

“Julie, if I have understood you correctly, they have both been using your bedlinen to get to know each other a whole lot better.”

But something is tugging away at me, telling me no.

“Come on,” she whispers seductively, smiling mischievously.

“No!” I counter.

The whole time she is whispering urgently at me to accompany her through the gate and be my husband’s worst nightmare. She is assuring me that she will be with me every second of the way on this joyride to Ronan’s ruination.

But I can’t. I’m standing here making these crazy hand signals. Then my cellphone rings.

We stare into each other’s eyes as if we’ve just been caught pilfering a safe full of banknotes.

“H
ello there! You called, I believe?”

Cretin.

I don’t reply.

I move surreptitiously to the left, hugging the hedge that conceals us. Sylvana follows me away from the wooden gate. I stop and peep through a tiny gap in the vegetation.

“Julie, are you there?”

I can just about make out the two of them. Still in their shades, skin textured like golden syrup, glistening like eels from sun lotion or water or sweat. Ronan is on his stomach, phone to ear. She’s still on her back, casually reading her book, her long golden hair tossed over her shoulders. Her figure again. I can actually feel my fingers closing in round her neck and squeezing.

Sylvana is still inciting me to follow her into the pool enclosure and give Ronan an afternoon to cherish for the rest of his life.

But I resist.

“You’re breaking up.”

“Hello, Ronan, where are you?”

“Where am I?”

Even before he opens his mouth I know what he is going to do. Before he utters so much as a word, something tells me that all is lost. Ronan is about to re-enact the haunted ghost of my past. He is about to lie.

I’m gripping the hedge, squashing and twisting sharp twigs in my hand. I thought I’d finished with it for ever. But no, my family history has returned with a vengeance. For years it shackled me in a cage. Then I met Ronan and I believed that chapter of my life was closed.

Father’s lies.

I was eight or nine when my mother first learnt about his mistress. He stepped into a car outside his workplace one day. There was a woman inside, only it wasn’t Mother. She was in the taxi directly behind, wearing shades and a scarf, telling me to make myself scarce in the back seat.

She confronted him, but he made an art of evasion. The next six months were filled with demands from her and lies from him, although at the time neither she nor I recognized them as lies. The woman was a business contact: that was his excuse.

Mother so badly wanted to believe him. There were late-night bedroom arguments, early-morning breakfast rows. There were tears – always hers. There were pleadings for truth and reassurance – always her pleadings. There were angry remonstrations – always her anger. The broken glass issued from her own hand, the broken dreams were sourced in her heart alone.

Then, six weeks later, I saw Father with that woman again. I was, unknown to him, on a school trip to the Law Courts. He exited High Court number two holding her hand. He spotted me, placed her to one side, and came up to me. One minute later he’d sworn me to silence.

From then on I sat back, witnessing him spin around Mother his golden web of deceit, his silken tapestry of lies. I hated my secret knowledge. I hated Mother’s attempts to discover the minutest signs of infidelity – searching his pockets for clues, smelling his clothes, analysing his habits. I could have told her everything she needed to know and I would have told her if only she’d asked me. I detested her weakness. I was repelled by the trust and faith she reposed in him, revolted by her belief that honesty and confrontation could cure infidelity.

All it did was alert him.

Hand him the advantage.

Her openness cost her a further wasted year of her life, until she was finally tipped off: he was seen again with the same woman. This time he was without excuse. She threw him out.

“You know where I am, Julie.”

“Where’s that?”

“It’s Thursday afternoon.”

“So you’re still in your surgery?”

“Is it a problem?”

Sylvana is pressing her ear into the phone, her hair tickling the side of my face.

“On such a beautiful day?” I reply. “You’re crazy not to be spending it by the pool.”

“Some people have to work, honey, while their little wives play.”

“Husbands are allowed to play too.”

“Extracting teeth isn’t much fun.”

I snatch out a branch from the middle of the hedge like some crazed anarchist type and I fling it on to the path beside me. That’s better, I can see him now. As he speaks through his phone, he is surveying Miss Bosoms, who is still on her back sheltered from the sun by her book.

“You’re extracting a tooth?”

“Yes.”

Pause.

“Is it sore?”

“Not my own tooth, Julie.”

“So because it’s not your own, that means it’s not sore?”

Pause.

“Well, if there’s nothing else…”

“Is it the sixth molar?”

“Julie, have you been drinking?” He sighs, a reference to my slightly slurred consonants.

“Or the bottom left wisdom tooth?” I suggest.

I am trying his patience.

“It’s okay, Ronan. Don’t mind me. Go and extract her tooth.”

“Who says it’s a she?”

“You mean you don’t inspect the insides of women’s mouths?”

“Men’s mouths, women’s mouths – they’re all the same.”

“Do you kiss men?”

“Julie, I have to go.”

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist, Ronan. I was merely checking up on you.”

There’s a slight pause.

“What do you think I’ve been doing in your absence?” he quips. “Laying some sexy blonde?”

We both watch as the Nicole woman raises her left arm and slaps him in jest. Grinning, he shields himself. She returns to her book. Sylvana, grim as death, blinklessly studies the scene.

I hit him with it: “I’ll be home in an hour.”

He jerks his body on to his side and flurries on to his behind, holding up his other hand as if telling Nicole not to move. “I assume you’re joking, Julie,” comes his calm voice.

“I’m not joking. The Cliff Castle Hotel was haunted.”