Trippin'

April 2003

Joyce, her friend from the office, had recommended the hotel in Bermuda. She and Colin had renewed their vows there the year before...

Joyce had raved about the margaritas, the nightlife, the quality of the service...Colin had described the golfing set-up as first-rate, if a little prosaic. Then they'd made us sit through the whole video of the beach-at-dusk platitude slam of their ceremony...Yet both of us had agreed that it was lovely and had complimented them both on how well they'd looked in the afterglow...She'd sounded like she'd meant it as well...

I checked out the hotel's website one evening after she had gone to bed early with a headache or rather a waxing of her eternal one. Her recent fondness for her bed seemed to be directly proportional to my aversion to it. And thus, yet another evening of just me, the dog and an overheating PC...

The Imperial Resort and Spa...Five Star Luxury...Whatever Your Heart Desires...The ambience of the site was consistent with those of the images in the hidden folder of porn I had open in another window. Still hidden, I hoped...She wasn't stupid. She knew I was up to something down here on the computer every night...

Overcome with paranoia and born-again resolve, I deleted the folder but then immediately restored it. How hard had I searched to find those exact images? That correspondence to the essence of my own corrupt and shameful wishes? And anyway she knew, on some level, one whose implications she wasn't as yet prepared to consider. I was still her husband. A good man...And a phase was just that, a transient thing, a simple matter of a working through.

Four years and counting...

The dog farted, licked his vacant sac and fell back asleep as I checked the hotel's availability for the following April. Our twentieth, for Christ's sake...It sounded ridiculous, a catastrophic miscalculation...Naturally, she would have assumed I'd forgotten. And wasn't she forever saying I lacked spontaneity...?

The butterflies in my stomach achieved an uneasy equilibrium with the gunmetal weight of my balls as I booked us a fortnight. The figures on the screen tweaked my sphincter but I resolved to find the money from somewhere. Twenty years demanded propitiation which was never cheap, materially or otherwise.

But we need this...We've earned it, haven't we...? And this time will be different...

The hard-drive fan roared in a Shed End chorus of disdain...

***

I sprang it on her over dinner in Ottavio's that Friday night. It had been a while since our last visit, hence her terseness. I think she was expecting the worst...

She tried to act pleased when I told her but it was hard work. She took my hand and squeezed it on the tabletop but her smile failed to reach the top half of her face. Jesus, but her eyes were still glorious in spite of their indifference...

Ottavio agreed. A bloody fortunate man, he called me when he came out of the kitchen to welcome us back with a bonomia as overdone as the veal we'd just eaten. I feigned humility, trying to summon up that old sense of smug proprietorship but it felt inauthentic, shameful to recall. Her smile was all sugared venom as she tapped her ring finger against her wine glass, each chime a summons to his dismissal...

He got the message eventually. She wrinkled her nose as she watched him leave and said we'd have to get someone in to look after the dog while we were away; asked me where I'd got the money from. I said that we could ask the neighbours; and that it didn't matter...

Our desserts arrived and she snapped into focus. Her handclasp was limp, easily withdrawn...I was thoughtful and it was a lovely gesture and all, but none of that was Neapolitan lemon cake...

I let her have mine as well. There was an unhinged quality to her delight in sweetness that always made my stomach close up...

***

As we neared our departure date, the prospect of a fortnight abroad in my company seemed to become less repellent to her. She was willing to suffer my perennial traveller's diarrhoea, crapulence and heat-stroke as long as there was sun and oil, seafood and cocktails, siestas and dark thrillers by the poolside...Unlike me, she was good at making holiday friendships, especially with compatriots. The obscene subtext to her forthright charm was ghastly yet compulsive. She'd long since stopped apologizing for her husband's surliness...

She went on a diet and hit the gym with what passed for earnestness; allowed her vanity to overrule her anxiety about skin cancer and started on her base tan in Blockbuster; reamed our M&S card in hypermaniac sarong and sandal acquisition. Her hair, nail and wax appointments on the week of our departure were booked months in advance. She wasn't leaving anything to chance...

Meanwhile, I bought some flip-flops in Asda when I went in to pick up the good tabasco for Bloody Marys. And they had Immodium on special offer...I took it as a good omen as I cleared the shelf into my basket, noting the prudent retreat of the woman who had been standing next to me. I threw in a packet of Fetherlite, just for the hell of it. Hot sauce, rubbers, diarrhea medicine...Picture that fetish...

***

This time will be different...

She was better suited to leisure. Our reflections in the window of the cab that brought us to the airport bore out the fact. Upswept shades, French tips busy upon the keypad of her phone, the smirk she wore when texting with Joyce...My ungainly frame in sports casuals evoked a HIV positive caddy. I looked like an impostor next to her, a guilty conscience made flesh...

This time will be different...

I trailed her as she stalked the perfume aisle in Duty Free, staring at the outline of her thong beneath her linen slacks, trying to remember what it felt like to physically desire her. Remembering Faro in '97, the last holiday on which we'd...

...One day she'd come down to the pool in that electric pink bikini, running a gauntlet of braised and priapic German accountants, self-conscious yet exhibitionist, flattered by the blatant scrutiny even as she professed indifference...She'd pulled a face at me as she lay down upon the lounger next to mine as if to say, "Creeps...You and all..." She'd known what the towel on my lap had been hiding. The ramifications had never seemed to phase her...

...Her nostrils flared over the mouth of a tester bottle, her eyes fierce and distant. Hungry for sensation, insistent upon it...I aped her expression, hoping for a reaction, but she blanked me, looking straight through me to the bottles of the YSL display...

I left her to it and went to look at cigars, watching her reflection in the glass...She shopped like a stalking cat, poised, hyperalert, every sinew of her tense in anticipation of imminent violence. It wasn't too much of a stretch to recall another incarnation of the same demeanour...

This time will be...Oh, fuck that...

My hope, no less than my wistfulness, was a delusion, wholly unjustified. I'd made my choice. I had no-one to blame but myself...

She was overjoyed at finding 120mls of Opium for half nothing. I bought pralines, rum, a travel adaptor...We paid separately, even though I offered. She wouldn't hear of it...

***

The hotel upgraded us in honour of our twentieth. A penthouse suite of crystal and billowing white. We drank complimentary champagne upon the balcony, looking down at the glittering kidney of the pool six floors below. The clinking of our glasses sounded hollow, somehow ironic...

She came out of the shower naked, trailing wet footprints, her amplitude of a piece with the luxury of our surroundings. She checked her phone. Still no network...I watched her from the bedroom, touching myself through my cargo pants with a familiar sense of deflation.

Nothing...

I knew she'd picked up on the gravity of the insult. She didn't understand it. She never had, though God knows she'd tried...It doesn't matter...It happens to everyone ...Because I know that you love me...At one time, when we used to talk about such things, we had used the word as a catch-all palliative. Love is all that matters, a kinship, a merging of souls...An appeal to metaphysics is ever the last refuge of a dickless scoundrel. Her gumption, no less than her vanity, refused to be taken in...

The champagne irritated my bladder. I pissed twice before we took the lift down to the restaurant and had to go again just after we were seated. She was talking with the sommelier when I got back, both of them intent upon the wine menu. She had a weakness for the self-possession of specialists. I knew that intent angle at which she cupped her face; that eagerness to be informed...

Do you have a preference, sir?

He was early middle-aged, upper-caste African rather than West Indian. Held himself like a soldier. I deferred to my wife's expertise. He commended the refinement of her palate. Her booze flush crept into her thorax...

The floor staff were exclusively male. Over half the tables in the restaurant were exclusively female and middle-aged. Couples, groups, mostly Americans...We watched the arrangements being made over coffee and digestifs...Room numbers slipped to waiters and barmen, details fleshed out...

Um, if you could bring something to smoke, that would be awesome...?

She sipped her grappa, attuned to the gathering restlessness, the drinks abandoned, the jittery exodus towards the lobby...Here it was, as promised, a latter day Sabbat...An opportunity to exercise one's birthright of choice in an entirely new realm...

We shared the lift with the sommelier. He looked at me but addressed her as he told us that his name was Eli and that he hoped we'd had a satisfying evening. The whiteness of his shirt, now undone at the neck, was blinding. I looked down at his shoes as I slurred our compliments.

He got out on the floor below ours and I saw her watching him through the closing doors, drawing up, his knuckles raised to tap...

She glanced at each door we passed on our way to the room, laughing occasionally, shaking her head in disbelief...So all of those rumours were true. Now she understood why Joyce had looked ten years younger when she got back. The fucking mare...

I couldn't get the key card to work. She clicked her tongue as she pushed me aside...

She poured herself a glass of wine and turned on the radio while I stumbled towards the bathroom with a squinting colon. Red wine went through me like drain cleaner but complicity was equally as laxative.

Because it's not like you haven't thought about it...

I gazed into the depths of a putrid bowl which gazed right back at me, the water an obsidian mirror in which the unspeakable pith of fantasy was made manifest...

They break into the house while we sleep...They subdue me with little or no effort, drag her pleading, screaming, from the bed on to the floor...

"Help me...Stop it...Oh please stop it..."

But I don't and neither do they...

There is blood in my mouth, a knife at my throat. My crotch is warm with helpless piss...Their laughter is simian as they take turns sodomizing her and fucking her mouth, their cocks soiled with her own shit. Her eyes are full of deathless hatred when she looks at me...

When I got back she was staring into the night out on the balcony, her arms folded, her shoulders moving in time to lovers rock. I told her I was going to bed. She raised her hand in acknowledgement but didn't look around...

I pretended to be asleep when she came in. I lay there in the dark, my occipital pounding to the point of nausea, smelling her cocoa-buttered flesh, her mouthwash...Listening to her breathing above the click track of her masturbating and the cascading acid of my guts...

***

I played a four-ball the following morning with two Belgians and a Brit. If we mentioned our wives at all, it was only in passing. We talked about the fall of Baghdad, the humidity...There was a tropical storm brewing which was unusual for the time of year...

Nine holes was a decent enough prologue for the bar. The Belgians made their excuses...

Two drinks in, Grant - a tool hire operator from Park Royal - and I were bullshitting like lairy teenagers. I embellished on a porn movie I had seen and offered up a threesome with two Thai bar girls. Grant was a walking compendium of antique wank mag clichès. Randy housewives, raver schoolgirls, posh city birds partial to a bit of rough...His missus, his second, was called Doyann. Love of his life, to be honest. Good as gold, really. He never mentioned his first. Nor could I be bothered to I ask...

Eventually we devolved into stupefied reticence, as if crushed under the weight of our own falsehoods. We both knew why we were there. The truth was back at the hotel, on the beach and by the pool...Oiled up bodies, topless, chilled out...Evaluating the bloodstock in their midst from behind outsize shades...

She wasn't in the room when I got back to the hotel. Housekeeping had been in, the sterility they'd left in their wake that of an erstwhile crime scene, effaced of all traces of the deed. Fresh linen, the bowl I had soiled blue and serene, like an ocean seen from space...Her bed knickers were in among her washing, their gusset squamous, stiff as bakelite...Whiskey on an empty stomach had me bent out of shape. It was good to feel something, however preposterous...

I found her at a wine tasting in the ballroom. She didn't notice me come in...Her dress was saffron, a colour that had always suited her...Never failed to draw in the eye...She was animated, voluble, her feigned connoisseurship irritating out of all proportion. Eli was peripatetic amongst women, a benign and inspiring humanities tutor...When he came to her, I saw how she looked at him, the steadiness of her gaze upon his hierophant swirl, his terse expectoration. I knew her tactility, her pleasure in all things smooth...The refinement of her palate...

My hands shook in the lift on the way up as my self-righteousness metastasized. I focused on the streaks of turned-milk white in my scorched reflection that looked like duelling scars...

She's my fucking wife. She's going to listen to me...

Back in the room, I set the anticipated scene with more than a degree of wishful thinking. I rang down for ice and limes and sat out on the balcony with a bottle of rum. The inquisitor's stance...In my fantasies of how it would play out, she remained mute while I was irrefutable. Yet all it took was one more drink for the sham of it to reveal itself...

She has the ordnance...Destroy you before you get off the ground...Who the fuck are you kidding...?

A longtail screeched above the babble from the poolside below. American accents, whooping in triumph as the fallen fruit of their bodies hit the water...

***

I woke up to a brutal hangover. My phone said 11.00. The room behind me was in total darkness...

She was drunk and caffeinated when she got back, just after 1.30. I sat on the sofa, needled by the toxic silence, while she paced up and down, wearing only a black vest and thong, removing her make-up with wipes ripped from the packet she held...Her feet bore the trellises of sandal straps within their tan. There was a fresh bruise on her right arm...

At last, she said she'd been out with Karsten and Anna, the Swiss couple we'd met on the airport shuttle. I barely listened to the monologue, most of it concerning Karsten and his dynamism - his venture capital, his art world speculation, his tax deductible philanthropy...She could be so transparent...

She asked me how golf had been. I grunted. She asked what that was supposed to mean. I told her to leave it but she'd bitten and her jaw had locked...

What was the matter with me? What, exactly, had I expected? I'd booked the fucking holiday, hadn't I? Like I didn't know what went on in the islands. Like she hadn't seen my browsing history with its thousand fucking variations on a theme...

She was screaming, gone nuclear in an instant. I couldn't remember the last time she'd lost it that way. That Christmas, maybe, when she'd pelted me with handfuls of the fifties I'd given her and told me to stick them. Of course, she came down later on and gathered them up tenderly. Of course the money got an apology. It wasn't the money's fault...

The memory of her on her knees was plastic, morphing effortlessly into a scabrous correlate. Her fondness for slow jams, her liberal guilt, her middle-class authenticity fetish...All of it a pretext for a black cock that would fuck her as per her marauding sense of entitlement. A whore, at least, isn't obliged to dress it up as virtue...

She flamed out just as quickly. We stared at each other until she couldn't bear the sight any longer...

She shut herself in the bathroom, the click of its lock triggering the loss of my temper like a post-hypnotic suggestion. I upended the coffee table in my petulant ascent, stomped to pieces those shades of hers that I hated. I beat the door until my fists were as raw as my throat was from screaming at her. Slut, cunt, ingrate...It was ridiculous, a facsimile of the passion of a man who actually gave a shit...

Was she sobbing or laughing in there...?

My tantrum was even more short-lived than hers. I slunk away in search of ice for my hands but there was only lukewarm water left in the bucket from earlier on. The rising wind from the balcony set lens fragments skittering across the tiles. Fragments of potsherd with which to scrape my ulcerated flesh...

***

A half hour's shallow sleep, if even that, and she still managed to sneak out on me...

I pissed gratefully, showered, took in breakfast when it arrived. The boy told me, on behalf of management, that the Weather Service had assured them that the incoming storm would be short-lived and relatively benign but requested nonetheless that my lady wife and I remain indoors and away from windows for its duration. There would be an information session at 10.00 in the ballroom...

Other than that he was unusually reserved, free of his customary scripted unctuousness. I didn't think anything of it until he was gone...

She's already spoken to someone...Eli...She'll have gone straight to him, shown him bruises...Word will have got around...

The upper floors shook in response to their strongest buffeting yet.

I shut the patio doors and tried to eat but my grapefruit had the consistency of raw offal. Were they fucking already? If she had anything to do with it...How long had it been...? She wouldn't have been able to help herself. It was why she'd been so hyper on her return the night before. Adrenalized, sporting the imprint of a lover's fury like a slapped cheek...

Her dress, balled up on the floor of her wardrobe, smelled of weed and was dotted with wine stains at the breast. His woman...He'd be cuntstruck, bent on administering justice. My word against his woman's...I wouldn't even get the chance to speak. A woman beater, like a nonce, forfeited all rights to due process. Proper order. I'd been known to hold forth on the subject...

With the skewed logic of the damned, I headed straight for the minibar. An eye opener...Help me to think this through...Two snipes of champagne left, a dark chocolate Toblerone...

Even the fridge was in on it...

***

She stayed gone. Halfway into the second snipe, I decided that I needed to find her...I was innocent, for fuck's sake. She needed to explain that it had all been one big misunderstanding...