He would spend hours working on his most convincing, animated voice, just like the one he’d hear Sylvie use when spilling her secrets to him.
Upon his shower curtain two tall palm trees climbed high into the glossy turquoise sky, towering above his head. The white tiles of the surround were plastered in a collage of pictures with the contrast turned up; all ripped from holiday brochures and newspaper travel supplements. Rope bridges through lush jungles, brightly-coloured drinks served in coconut shells with umbrellas, dolphins curling through ocean waters and lines of curvaceous youngsters wearing nothing but smiles and grass skirts.
The girls in the pictures did not look like Sylvie, but that is who he dreamed he was spending his trips with. He would picture her smooth, translucent surfaces turning pink under the hot sun. Rob looked more like a beached sea lion; his white folds of skin crumpled and creased with new wrinkles, and fell heavily around him in the tub. He snored in mews and roars which caused the neighbours to strain with glasses at the vibrating walls, wondering at his sexual practices.
The holidays of Rob’s mind were – he was sure – more entertaining and exotic than anything that would happen if he were actually away on wild tropical islands, or white-walled Costa del Sol resorts. Certainly more entertaining than his days pushing papers in the concrete council offices of his normal nine-to-five. But not as entertaining as the images that Sylvie had conjured up in the dark basement of walled files for him. The wide and wonderful world that she was going to travel…just as soon as she left school.
Sylvie’s dad worked upstairs. She used to come to meet him from work on Wednesdays after school, and after her piano lesson on a leafy street just around the corner, so that she could get a lift to their clean, suburban home. The first time Rob saw her he had jumped. Sort of. She had been skulked in a ball on the steps to the basement fire exit, a feral creature. After the initial shock he had seen that she wasn’t an animal at all but a girl – all delicate, petite features and big, nicotine-laced exhales that had dwarfed her even more. They had fallen into the easy conversations that all smokers can, aided by the air of the illicit. He had ignored her school uniform and she had ignored his make-it-a-large-one size
Rob had liked Sylvie, and he had found this strange because he didn’t generally like many people. Anyone, in fact. Not even his mother. But then who would like a mother who drank her own weight in Lambrini and ran off with the mobile hairdresser? Especially a mother who only got as far as opening a blue-rinse salon two streets away and never visited, although Rob’s Dad could often be found there making a scene. Sylvie was different. She talked to Rob for ages and about every little thing that popped into her head from how she’d quite like to look like Amy Winehouse, before the major tumble from grace, to why chickpeas were called chickpeas when they didn’t contain any meat? Her mother was one of those upper middle class eco types who’d die if she saw Sylvie wolfing down a McDonald’s, which meant she could have died more than 300 times over. And when Rob spoke, telling Sylvie his stored facts and rehearsed holiday tales, the tinkle of her laugh didn’t seem to jibe like others’ previously had.
At school Rob hadn’t had any human friends. He’d quite liked the croaky toad in the pond at St Fagin’s Primary, and the biology teacher at sixth form, because she let him eat his lunch in the labs while reading illustrated science books about aquatic life. There he had washed away his loneliness with watery facts: sea lions do not mate for life; young male Steller’s sea lions, known as bachelors, remain isolated until they are large enough to compete with mature adult males for a territory. Unlike Rob’s dad.
Sylvie liked Rob because he let her talk – with her friends she couldn’t get a word in, well, rarely, and her parents would hate to know what she thought about all day long. It was hardly rocket science: boys, rock music, smoking, and escaping from said parents and their crappy town. As soon as she could. On a jet plane.
Sat in his bathtub Rob was sweating. His heating was turned up to 11 – tropical – while a desk fan perched on the windowsill, pointing its meagre breeze at the quickly cooling bathwater to create gentle waves, but failing to produce his much-desired surf and spray. No relief. His thoughts were turning more feverish with the rising temperatures. He could feel his temper bubbling, a kettle about to boil. A phrase caught like a stuck record in the soundtrack of his torrid mind – I haven’t done anything wrong.
It was Bethan who had discovered the pictures. For some unfathomable reason she had been sent down to the basement to find a document. Rob had been on one of his many sneaky fag breaks, and not around to consult, and so this irritable, incompetent busy-body had tried to find it herself; nosing about and causing all sorts of chaos that would have taken Rob weeks to sort out again. Would have. If the stupid fool hadn’t unearthed his collage of ripped pictures, some with the contrast turned up, some not, but all featuring a silvery-skinned girl smiling. The same young girl, in each and every raggedy-edged one. Rob had kept it in the top drawer of his desk to bring comfort during the dull, dark days. He remembered the afternoon they were taken. She’d turned up brandishing a digital camera, all shiny and new, a crooked smile on her lunar face inviting him to try it out. She’d said that she was no good with gadgets, and she pulled the same Am-I-Bothered pose in each shot. Had wanted some new profile pictures for her Facehack or BimBo or whatever it was called. And perhaps for someone else; a scribbled email address on a fag packet. Her boyfriend. Rob hadn’t sent them there though; he’d pretended there must be a problem with his bandwidth; or perhaps new IT restrictions at work. His tales stretched to anything but the truth; his jealousy.
Rob had been sent home early on the day of Bethan’s meddling, he had been told that some routine building work had been scheduled in, and that he needn’t come back to work until Monday. Oblivious to the truth he had treated it like another holiday: turned up the heating, filled the bath, dug out his Bermuda shorts; happily splashy-splashy. But then, on Monday, when he was called into the office and told that perhaps he might like to take a longer holiday from work; that perhaps, under the circumstances, that might be appropriate. That he wasn’t being accused of anything; he wasn’t being sacked. Rob found that he didn’t really want another holiday. Not one alone, at any rate.
He had tried to find the enjoyment he used to gain so easily goofing around in the bathtub… but he couldn’t conjure up Sylvie’s moon-face, round and beaming above her tiny body. He hadn’t been allowed to collect any of his things from the basement, to seek one last glance at his collection of photos. To tamper with what was now referred to as ‘The Evidence.’
Huffing and puffing, Rob hauled himself out of the tub, and decided to change tack. He typed ‘Eskimo Music’ into the internet search engine box on his tool bar, before clicking, once, twice, and three times to get the first new tracks to play. He turned the volume up, and drained the bath. Next he poured in cold water and opened all three windows in his compact living space. He pulled open the fridge and began to chip away at the ice from the freezer compartment, sprinkling his goods into the bath tub like tiny splinters of iceberg. He needed to cool down, to gain some clarity of thinking.
Rob wasn’t one to run away from trouble. He didn’t have such impulses in him. He couldn’t jump that fast, physically or mentally. He knew that he should try and remember the things that Sylvie had said. About her boyfriend. The ‘Boyfriend This’ and ‘Boyfriend That’ stuff. But the thing was he hadn’t listened to those bits. Not properly. He’d replaced the boyfriend’s name with his own, or just zoned out completely; imagining what he would do if she were his girlfriend. Though it turned out that he wasn’t entirely sure; he’d never actually had one. He figured it involved going places together, and perhaps, once in a while, holding hands. He would have liked to hold her hand.
Sylvie’s Dad wanted somebody to blame for his daughter’s recent spat of bad behaviour. All the smoking and shagging around and skipping school. The getting pregnant and showing. It being obvious to anyone who looked, and right before her GCSEs, with the council-bloody-elections in just a few weeks. He knew that his daughter had her mother’s brains, but he’d hoped she may have taken on some of his sense. Instead of running around town with that Aaron Pryce. Luckily for him there was a scapegoat – a scape-whale – in the Supersize-Me form of Rob . He’d been seen with her on many an occasion, by the basement fire escape, and, even better, Sylvie’s Dad’s secretary Bethan had discovered the crushed-heart collage of photos, and then planted some more unsavoury ones into the collection. As he’d instructed. There’d be a local media to-do, once he’d made the right phone calls; the town paper loved a good paedo story. They would probably print Rob’s name and address shamelessly, before any court case even needed to happen, leaving Sylvie’s Dad’s election campaign bacon saved. It was child’s play.
Rob was halfway through running himself a cold bath when the water suddenly stopped, leaving the tap spluttering and then screeching; a high-pitched wail. He turned the tap off and the noise eased. He turned the tap on again and the noise returned, louder, but no water came. He tried the hot tap. Nothing. He could hear the boiler struggling, the thud and clatter of low pressure in the pipes. Wearily standing up, both feet partially submerged by H2O, he began hauling his fleshy paws at the taps, frustrated. He realised that he would never be able to go on holiday with Sylvie now, and not only because he was absolutely petrified of flying.
He swiped at the high contrast collage of dream holidays on the tiles, and they dropped to the bottom of the tub, shrinking and shrivelling all around him. He emitted a low, strangled mew and angrily kicked the side of the bath, and as he did so the desk fan, still twirling, flew off its precarious perch and knocked Rob into the tub, flipping him flat onto his back like a hooked fish, twitching in the shallow puddles of a boat deck, once, twice, and then dead.
© Susie Wild Taken from The Art of Contraception (Parthian Books) Reprinted with kind permission of the author. |
