Trippin'

I psyched myself up in front of the bathroom mirror - You haven't done anything...You are sober, come on...I'll have his fucking job if he...I'm a force, I'm a force, I'm a force, I'm a force... - and after a further application of Diesel, lurched out into the corridor.

Grant, who I met coming out of the lift, had been at the information session. Fuckall information beyond stating the obvious, mind. Hotel covering their arses veese aw vee insurance, he reckoned...

He seemed concerned and kept suggesting that I go back to the room but I prevailed in the battle of wills...

See how easy it is...? I'll fucking shit them...

The lift stopped at the fourth floor and Eli got on. I stared straight ahead of me, barely able to breathe as the doors closed. He was off duty, dressed in white shorts and a polo shirt, his shorn head glistening, strip-lit...He smiled professionally but didn't have to say a word. I wasn't worth the effort...

We descended in slow motion. I sweated like a wanker's taint as he breathed through his nose, standing one pace behind me, a distance that was respectful of my personal space and yet close enough to ensure that I got the message...

Gentleman, aesthete, killer...I could see now that his demeanour was not just military but pure Sandhurst. As such, he understood the necessity of hierarchy, the callousness upon which all ambition is predicated. What chance would I have had? They teach them how to kill with their bare hands. They teach them that equality amongst men is a pious fiction. That the majority of the latter are born only to serve...

And her, with her juvenile attachment to the concept of chivalry, a hangover from the Disney binge of her childhood...Well, the day was here and her prince had come, possessed of all the qualities that the usurped tyrant had foregone or had lacked in the first place. Charm, front, vigour, appetite...Appetite above all, a counterpart to the vitality of her own. She'd been forced to to suppress it as a method of coping with her husband's bloodlessness. It was a crime against nature. I could scarcely conceive of the virulence of its reanimation...

The doors sighed open on to the lobby. She was sitting in a wicker chair by the fountain behind a brand new pair of shades, Femail open upon her crossed thighs. She looked up and smiled as Eli came towards her...

***

She hummed along to Mark Morrison as she did her make-up. A steadier hand than mine. The ice in my glass rattled when I picked it up. Her lip brush paused for an instant before resuming...

The dress she'd chosen was barely there, a wisp of lilac cotton. When had she bought that? She hadn't picked it up with me in mind. I knew that much...

How many others had there been? How many three star hotel rooms in twenty years, how many SUV backseats, occult SIMs, perfectly maintained charades...?

She had form at this lark. I could see it in the strangeness of otherwise familiar mannerisms. It was as if she was backlit all of a sudden, her new regions of shadow more revealing than the features that cast them...

She turned sideways in the mirror to check the configuration of the X formed by her straps against her back before stepping into her heels. A pill to efface the last of her inhibition and she was ready...

Ever practical, ever highly organized, she scattered condoms, draped the lamp in perfumed chiffon, set the area about the sofa. Blue skins, Astroglide, water, wipes...Both of us jumped when the phone in the bedroom rang. Her silence insisted I answer it. I didn't mind. I was relieved to have something to do at last...

Eli didn't sound phased by the sound of my voice. Fifteen minutes, he said. He was waiting on herb...

His knock was like a copper's. Rhythmic, officious, resonant with dire news...She primped gravely in the vestibule mirror and let him in. Half a head taller than her, he stooped down into her embrace, glancing up at me from beyond her shoulder just for an instant. Threat assessment. Even I had to smile...

Both of his hands laid claim to her, right and left, above and below, with the intrigue and aspiration of an improving colonist, faithful to a manifest destiny. His knuckles were pink, like the faces of young capuchins. The brown of her hair faded into that of the skin at the crook of his neck...

I took my cue from their uncoupling and went to the bathroom where I sat on the closed lid of the bowl and stared down at the tiles, jeered by the howling of the wind in the vents. My presence was yet required. She'd made that much clear. But I didn't understand why until I looked up...

She'd left the camcorder bag hanging upon the hook on the back of the door. She used to say I had a good eye...I took it down and opened it. A full battery and a spare, tapes still in cellophane, a cloth for the lens...She was nothing if not thoughtful...

She wanted a legacy; the offence to be forever before us. So be it...

I turned it on and checked the settings. I had some form of my own...Family gatherings, weddings, concerts...Their essence hidden their midst, the passing shots that lingered on some woman or other for just long enough to be inconspicuous; a steady hand ensuring pristine freeze frames. I wanted them oblivious, unaffected, luminous in moments that dawned unexpectedly, that demanded vigilance. I was a naturalist. In other aspects, it's actually a virtue...

Lighting, angles, the protocols of distance and discretion...It was something for me to focus on. Within the viewfinder, it all becomes fiction. The distance makes it bearable...

I opened the door, heard laughter, the rasp of a lighter. The smell of burning weed overwhelmed the rancid cinnamon of her perfume. His voice was low but its timbre was unmistakably sensual, as was the purr of her response. I could only pick up the odd word...

...nice...breezy...rhymes with...stop it...

I approached them slowly but they were so intent upon each other that they didn't notice. The frame about them contracted gradually, becoming ever more intimate...

She sat facing him with one leg drawn up beneath the other, sifting through the fringes of her necklace. Adult in every sense of the word; informed, courageous, complete...She'd had a vision of us once, she'd told me, of a patrician household full of wainscotting and books and slim, gifted children; of a south-facing bedroom window through which we'd spy upon the foxes who prowled in our garden at dawn; of an heirloom of a bed in which we'd still be making love in our sixties...The enormity of her misjudgement was yet a source of shame. It called down punishment from the gods...

Eli placed the roach between his lips with the coal facing inward. The sofa leather creaked as she leaned in to accept the blowback. Her fingers hovered alongside his elbow, the tip of her nose moving like a pungi above a cobra. She snapped back out of it like whipcord, laughing hysterically, leaking smoke...He called her lightweight. She told him to fuck off and poured more wine, hesitant as the dope got to work in earnest. It tended to make her suggestible, ingratiating. It didn't suit her...

Yet it suited him. He observed her in grids, a rat line to be covered and shut down. Standard Operating Procedure. Routine...His hands were already cupping her shoulders, sliding up in tandem to the base of her neck. Her sigh was audible above the elements.

She looked straight ahead, into the lens, straight through me, straight at me...

Be careful...

I knew she wouldn't pick up on it but I put it out there anyway. Fuck it. She was still my wife...

***

I woke up holding her. She had asked me to lie down with her after I'd helped her back from the shower and we'd fallen asleep on top of the sheet. No lust, no rancour, just one wounded animal clinging to another in the hope of succour...

Her breathing was ginger, her legs drawn up to her midriff. Cored, she'd said. I'd said nothing. Sometimes it's as much as you can do just to lie there with a person in silence and darkness and wait for sleep...

I pressed my nose to the down at the nape of her neck, my fingers hovering above her bruises. Her throat, her shoulders, her back...She wouldn't start to feel it properly until the drink and dope wore off. There was only one thing for it...

Vodka, lemons, celery, tomato juice...No, we had our own tabasco...The night porter made me repeat the room number before there was a momentary commotion at his end, a palm covering the mouthpiece, a facetious something in the voice that came back on the line.

Coming up, sir...

I hung up, weightless with indifference. Fuck their scorn. At this point, what did it matter? There's comfort in hitting the absolute zero of abjection. One can't sink any lower...

I sat on the sofa to wait. Though I'd cleared up after them the night before, there were as yet remnants...A cannabis seed in the carpet. The faint smell of mingled shit, lubricant and friction burns. Her palmprints stark against leather as upon the inner lid of the coffin of one buried alive...

I picked up the camcorder from the coffee table and turned it over in my hands before hooking it up to the TV and rewinding the tape. Relive those magic moments...Perhaps Hell is simply the inability to forget. Every squalid, mortifying second of your existence played and replayed eternally upon giant screens for the delectation of both the saved and the damned...

And it had started out with such tenderness. Deep fluid kisses, mouth to smiling mouth, her eyes moist and ovine when she glanced into the lens. Yet he was ever coarsening, growing into his dominance, a throwback to forebears adept in the lost discipline of slave husbandry. The booze, the drugs, the preconceptions...She made it easy for him. He made the stuff of her seem insubstantial, drained of all native volition in becoming serviceable to his own. She agreed that she was his white bitch. She said she wanted it in every hole...

From that point on, it was mostly close-ups of her face; the slow evolution of smile to grimace; the x'd eyes and ground teeth of transport or outrage. And it was thus that she spoke to me openly for the first time. Furious, wheedling, dejected by our mutual failure...Having had neither the means nor the will, I'd had no conception of the colour or the depth of her despair. I hadn't been able to see past the bullshit of self-pity. Yet there, in the midst of her anguish, I saw the light of recognition. She'd got through to him. He had it in him to listen after all...

I crawled across and paused the tape upon a motion-blurred frame of her face. The screen flickered as I touched her dimples, the breadth of her initiate's smile...

Gradually, I became aware of her reflection, a silhouette propped like a .303 against the bedroom doorway. She stayed absolutely still. I didn't turn around...

And this is my wife...

It felt strange to be able to say it without embarrassment or qualification. I wasn't sure if it sounded like a prologue or an epitaph...