August 2021. Passion, prosecco, and psychopomps ~ GDH
Turn off the lights. Admire your handiwork. Funny, the capability of light to not only reveal but transform. Now the flickering candles have inverted the bathroom’s usual cool palette of pale blues and whites to a glow of warm oranges and maroons, calling to mind a photo that has been turned negative, only the inversion is renewing, invigorating, instead of uncanny. What is normally stark and frank and overly exposed by day is now dark and mysterious and inviting and, you hope, seductive. Everything must be perfect, down to the last rose petal. The final touch is to add the two champagne flutes like two happy friends, and between them, the bottle of Prosecco. You place these carefully on the rim of the bathtub. As you stand back again and take in the scene, you realise you have constructed a kind of temple; a shrine to the relationship that you both can interact with, take part in. You are satisfied. You head back into the bedroom. He reclines on the bed, resplendent in his nudity, casually glazed over at his phone.
“It’s ready!” you trill.
He grins at you and stands up, complete, self-consciousness a stranger to him, making nakedness his element as he does all things. He swings his way over and doesn’t pause when you drop your towel to match him. Your breath flutters as he brushes past you to enter the bathroom and you hurry in close behind.
Steam caresses the hot air in loops and curling wisps drawn up from the soapy surface of the water. Rose petals adorn the fluffy mountains and valleys of bubbles. The bottle of Prosecco, fresh from the freezer, melts rapidly in desperation to be allowed to burst open and the droplets slide and trickle into the bathtub to be one with the heat. The walls are bathed in the hush of candlelight. He casts a mighty shadow as he lifts one leg and lowers himself into the water, letting out a delightful little sound that causes you to bite your lip intensely.
“How is it?” you ask.
He exhales and stretches out, the water swelling and churning to find room to embrace his ample body.
“Perfect,” he grins. He opens one eye to you. “Are you just gonna stand there?”
Not needing to be asked twice, you get in. The warmth is liquid bliss, a full-body welcome from your little en-suite in your new flat which until this moment you had found only generic and not your own. Now you get the feeling of coming home. As your legs intertwine with his, a vision of the future flickers into focus. You will unspool your life in this place for many years, grow older here and have many wonderful times with him; tonight is only the beginning.
“This must be what the womb feels like,” you murmur.
He chuckles. You tickle him with your toes and he gazes at you curiously. Your hands explore the bubbles to find him, expecting an emerging hardness, but it is soft, floating limply in the water in an unusually sexless fashion. He looks at you, feigning ignorance.
“Can I help you with something?” he smirks.
“No, I think I’ve got it,” you retort.
You gently squeeze your soapy breasts together and massage him with all your fingers but neither his expression nor his frigidity are changing. He shuffles out of your hands and you stop abruptly.
“Is everything alright?” you ask, hiding your disappointment.
“Everything’s fine, I’m just not…” He glances elsewhere. “Let’s just go easy, yeah?” he decrees.
You sit back again. He remains spread eagle, his penis continuing to bob lifelessly before you as if in mockery. For a minute you are unsure of what to do, then you see the flutes.
“How about some Prosecco?” you offer.
He scrunches up his face in consideration.
“Umm… I think I’m alright, y’know,” he concludes.
You stare at him and again receive that nonplussed expression that asks what do you want from me? that you are trying not to take as an insult now. He somehow reclines even deeper, laying his head to one side and closing his eyes as if he actually intends to begin napping.
“I’m just a bit tired from the day, you know?” he explains.
You want to say ‘but we haven’t done anything all day’ but your mouth just opens and closes again. You sink back, defeated. You blink at the pair of champagne flutes standing in wait and consider having a glass to yourself, but the thought of one flute left alone and empty is too unseemly. And the bottle is probably getting warm, you worry vaguely.
He is still lying there with his eyes closed, a happy smile on his face.
“So… what do you want to do?” you ask.
He yawns loudly before replying.
“Ummm… we could watch some TV?” he says, eyes still closed.
You slump in faint disbelief. As if someone else puppets your limbs, you rise diligently out of the bath and patter out into the bedroom to retrieve the laptop sitting on the bed. Now you couldn’t feel less sexy, in the cold, stark brightness of the world outside your delicate love nest. Now you are just a silly naked idiot. You return to the bathroom but its romance is all but gone and presently it feels almost dingy, damp. You set the laptop down on a folded towel atop the closed lid of the toilet and squat in front of it, finding and setting up his favourite reality TV show. Shivering, you clamber hastily back in the bath to the tinny tune of the EDM theme, inadvertently having to shove aside his long limbs. He seems to be taking up the entire bathtub. He opens one eye again, irritated.
“Hey, quit pushing!” he says.
“Sorry,” you reply.
He opens both eyes now, watching the laptop contentedly. You watch the episode too but you can’t remember any of it. Or else it’s not an episode, it’s hidden camera footage of you two, the two of you, in the bath, the candles flaring nearly on their final gasping push of light and a horrible hairy shape in the dark corner of the room advancing closer to the unseeing couple. Your eyes jump over to the corner, but there is nothing there but shadow.
The episode deals with infidelity. The woman in the episode is crying as her group of friends surround her, blaring reassurances that he is nothing, that he is a stupid little boy, that she can come back from this so much stronger. The boy in question is nowhere to be seen.
You look down again at his flaccid member, then back up to his face. He gives you a cheeky glance, raising his eyebrows exaggeratedly at the commotion on screen. Then your stomach sinks like someone has pulled the plug out of you and all that you are will soon be draining and gurgling out through your belly button. You are sweating; at first you thought it was just the steam. The heat of the room is pressing painfully against your head.
“Are you cheating on me,” you mumble.
There is no response. He is engrossed in the episode, eyes wide and beaming.
“Are you cheating on me,” you say again, the words hanging sickeningly in the air, nowhere to go, unnoticed. “Hey,” you start to sob. “Hey.”
Your words are like sludge. He finally reacts, not to your voice, only to the gentle waves encroaching his enjoyment produced by the heaving of your shoulders as you shake with panic and horror. He frowns.
“What are you doing?” he demands.
“You – you – you -”
A darkness dawns on his face as he realises. He is transforming, he is transforming in the stuttering candlelight. There is a hardness to him now.
“Look,” he says. “This… this doesn’t have to be such an ugly thing. Stop crying.” He clenches his jaw, grimacing. “I was going to tell you. Of course I was. I was… I was going to tell you tonight, honestly. Before you did all this.”
That hits like a punch to the stomach. That takes the wind out of you. Before you know it the heavy Prosecco bottle is swinging into his temple, shattering both in a flurry of frothy soap and blood. His face did not have time to change expression; its grimace remains as he sinks down into the bath and his body scrapes a high squeaking sound against the porcelain. His head disappears underwater. Sparkling wine glugs out of the broken bottle whose neck you still clasp, splashing and mixing with the growing clouds of red which are spreading towards you. You leap to your feet and slip painfully out of the bathtub onto the floor with a wet smack.
Silence, save for your heavy breathing.
Dragging his body to the canal through the dark and the mud, you wonder whether he was dead before he sank or if he drowned in the bath. In which case he drowned partly in his own blood. You hope that it will look like he drowned, or that he hit his head as he fell and then drowned. You pause to vomit in the woods several times. The night sky whirls above and around you. You are helpless, caught in an updraught pulling you up and up, towards the bright, accusing moon.
The corpse hits the black canal with a tremendous splash and is gone. Self-awareness returns suddenly in a wash of biting cold. You are still wearing only your dressing gown, a skimpy little thing, now smeared with dull grime and blood. Your slippers are mangled and your exposed legs show many cuts and bruises. Every muscle and joint aches relentlessly.
You stagger your way back through the forest in a daze, the edge of the suburbs arriving into view at your emergence from the trees in a barrage of lights that makes your filthy fingers fly up to cover your eyes. But not a soul in sight. Thank God.
The bath is still full when you return, that awful cocktail of wine and blood and soap that was stewing and fermenting in your absence. The smell makes you gag, somehow sweet and sour and bitter all at once. You need to reach into the water to release the plug, but you cannot bring yourself to get any closer than the doorway. Then you see them. The two champagne flutes, still side by side, still happy and shiny and smiling like a pair of old friends. Or lovers. Now never to be used, never to be wanted. And you sink broken into the floor, below the floor, into the dirt, letting the pain take you far, far away.
Weeks later, you are having breakfast with your mother. She is busy scolding you for your taste in men. As is often the case since it happened, you are leagues away, though keeping sure to nod periodically, and contemplating suicide. The waiter brings over your coffee and offers many apologies that your table’s candle is not lit. When he returns, he corrects this. The smell of the burning wick drifts up into the back of your throat, meeting the rising vomit, and you sprint to the bathroom with your cheeks bulging.
A few days after that, you are still vomiting often. And now you are sitting on the toilet in the room that you have not been able to use, instead making excuses and stealing opportunities to use your flatmates’ showers, becoming an eager regular of public toilets, even purchasing a gym membership for this sole purpose. But this is where you had to be for this. The seconds pass in agony before your result arrives:
| |
And then, quite swiftly, everything falls apart. The bathroom tiles come unstuck and float away before your eyes. The drain gurgles sickly. After all, you cannot be sure that he is really dead. He could still be there somewhere, under that murky, stale water, somewhere within that black lake that you have still not unplugged, that you cannot even see the bottom of. Something is in there after all. You often hear it at night, and you often wonder, and you often think about whether the canal would embrace you like an old friend, whether you two are really meant to be together. You three.
This.
This is what happened.
Isn’t it?
Or perhaps things went differently?
You need to get your story straight.
Yes — people will have questions.
Show me.
You open my eyes. There you are, resplendent in your nudity, a sparkling beacon from the waking world. Looking like a painted saint in the candlelight. I must have dozed off. Gosh, lucky I didn’t drown! I tease. That Prosecco really went to my head… I laugh. But you aren’t laughing. You aren’t anything; your face is not right. You speak from a world away:
“The person you love is going to leave you.”
I don’t understand. I don’t want to. But I see the bathwater is a deep red. And, cradled in your arms, I see that the baby is already here. And only then, when I see your real face – only then do I scream.
