Alabaster Conjugal 3.1

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“Happiness is fleeting. Sadness, it can last forever.”

I turned round and saw the former CEO was behind me in the queue.

“Leave me alone,” I said.

“I had a vision for the future.”

“No one cares.”

I wasn’t in the mood for his introspection. I walked up to the counter and said, “Pump 2.”

The assistant scanned my bottles of wine, pack of scotch eggs and cigarettes. “Anything else?” she said.

I looked at her name pinned to the breast of her red polo shirt. It said, ‘Marnie.’

I wondered when her skin would transform into alabaster.

I paid and left, hearing the former CEO tell the fake Marnie that the future is asymmetric.

I walked across the forecourt, carrying my items. I sat in my driver’s seat, looking at the pack of scotch eggs on my lap, wishing my wife hadn’t tried to eat my last one. I had pleaded with her not to the night before she transformed.

“Marnie,” I said, “it’s my lunch for work. You can’t have it.”

She said she had been drinking with work colleagues. “I’ll do what I like,” she replied, lying on the bed and pulling off her suit trousers. She had already eaten my pack of salt and vinegar crisps with a flagrancy and disregard for my dietary well-being that filled me with disgust.

I thought I had talked her out of wanting a divorce. We had promised to give it “one last try”, but we both realised our attempt was failing miserably.

The sight of the crisps made me angry. I could feel my heart beating in my chest. We argued in ellipses, firing off short spiky comments that were building up the momentum to full-on shouting. I had this horrible, unsettling feeling in my gut that she hadn’t been drinking with “colleagues”.

“You could have eaten when you were out.”

“We went for drinks.”

“You’re drinking too much.”

“And you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?” She sighed and unfastened the clip on her bra and then swiftly pulled on a chequered pyjama top and bottoms. I realised she kept her knickers on. Usually, she took them off when going to bed or changed into a clean pair.

“You could have made dinner and I would have heated it up when I got home,” she said.  

“I didn’t know whether you had eaten already because you wouldn’t answer my calls or respond to my messages. Why couldn’t you answer me?”

“I don’t check my phone every five minutes when I’m out. Besides, I do let you know.”

“I wouldn’t be asking if you did.”

She lay flat on the bed, her slim legs hanging over the side. “God, why do I feel like I’m a teenage girl again, living with my parents?”

“I’m not your parents, Marnie, but I am your husband.”

She rolled off the bed and onto her feet. By her level of drunkenness, I estimated she had shared two bottles of wine at least. Probably a cocktail or two thrown in. She was one of those women who was excited by cocktails. She mimicked me as she walked to the ensuite bathroom, laughing cockily to herself, putting on a deep voice.

“But I am your husband.”

She went passed me and I was sure I caught the smell of a man’s aftershave in the delicate fibres of her hair. I listened to the sound of her running the tap and the buzzing of her electric toothbrush. I stood in the doorway of the bathroom, wanting to ignore her but also desperate to find out what was going on. “Who did you go drinking with?”

She frowned at me in the mirror, toothpaste decorating her mouth.

“It feels like you’re not telling me the whole truth.”

“The whole truth?”

“Something is up. You’re constantly on your phone, messaging, smirking and giggling.”

“You’re so condescending.”

“Me? Look at yourself. I remember the expression on your face when we first started dating and we went to that seafood restaurant and I asked you what the sauce on my plate was and you had to tell me it was celeriac.”

“I never did.”  

“I am fully aware you have the fancy career and come from a rich family.”

“I don’t come from a rich family.”

“Everyone who comes from a rich family says that because they mix in circles where people are richer than them.”

“It’s actually sad how twisted you are.”

“You’re ashamed of me because I’m working class.”

“You’re not remotely working class,” she said, spitting into the sink and wiping her mouth with a hand-towel. “I’m not sure what or who you are these days.” She yanked her knickers down to sit on the toilet seat.

I saw in the basin, mixed in with streaks of toothpaste, the mushy yellow flakes of my salt and vinegar crisps she had eaten. I sniffed the air, convinced I could smell the odour of another man’s pure alabaster soaked into the material of her knickers.

 “Can I pee in peace?” She gestured for me to shut the door.

“Do you care about me at all? Do you have a shred of respect left for me and our marriage?”

“Respect? What are you on?”

“I think that’s fair.”

“You want respect? You – the man who cheated on me with a fucking intern?”

Marnie craned forward, stretching out her arm to push the door shut.

“She wasn’t an intern. How many times do I have to tell you? She was a new starter in our graduate management trainee programme.”

All I heard through the closed door was the splash of her peeing. “She wasn’t an intern,” I muttered and then I undressed for bed, throwing my clothes on the floor.

Marnie left the bathroom and climbed under the duvet. We lay with our backs to each other. I remember the darkness of the room when she switched off her sidelight, and that ominous sensation of us lying there together, wide-awake and locked in total pre-divorce silence. I couldn’t recall the last time we had sex (with each other at least). I thought about going to the spare room and sleeping in there, or downstairs on the sofa, only I didn’t feel like I should be the one to leave. She was intent on punishing me for what had happened in the past. I had made an error of judgement and she kept using that mistake as a weapon against me. I knew I was in the wrong to have slept with the girl at work. That’s why I ended the affair and confessed. Marnie was then supposed to forgive me and allow us to move on. That’s how things worked in normal marriages.

I saw the infamous glow from her phone light and heard the gentle tapping of a message to her lover. I suspected he had a stare like Pablo Picasso and a handshake as muscular as Gustave Corbet’s, although she worked in media and maybe she preferred an emaciated, foppish type of lover, like Aubrey Beardsley, dreamily wandering through the opium-laced corridors of the newsroom with a tubercular air, reciting the poetry of Alfred Tennyson as police rushed the building to arrest her colleagues for phone tapping and illegal surveillance. I wondered what role my rival had in the media company. He was no intern or pronoun obsessed graduate trainee. That much I did know. She would aim high. Attracted to a star in the making, a nascent mogul, a hotshot who had struck on an idea that made money for the arts division. Bringing culture to the masses, such as a competition for a nationwide search for the greatest post-Impressionist, emergent-Expressionist painter. Whoever he was, he had now usurped me as the focal point of her love like I was yesterday’s news. I felt the sickness and jealously and anger swish around in my guts at the promises and sweet nothings they shared about a synchronised future.

“Don’t ever touch my pack lunch again,” I said.

I waited for a reply.

“I’m serious.”

She kept typing on her phone.

“Especially the scotch eggs.”

It was like I wasn’t there. He might as well have been spooning her in our bed as she told him how much she enjoyed her evening and that I was a monster and soon she would be rid of me and they could be together, sipping cappuccinos at dawn on the white veranda of a house by the ocean.

She gave him a long kiss goodnight.

“We used to be happy,” I said to her.

She put the phone down screen-side on her bedside table and the room went dark.

“What happened to us? We were so tight.”

“Nothing lasts forever,” she said.

“Except sadness.”

“That might be true in your world, but it’s not in mine.”  

I lay on my side, curled in the foetal position. Somehow, I kept control of the rage and violence within me until I drifted asleep.  

Still, I admit to having feverish, uneasy dreams.

The next morning, if memory serves me well, I awoke and was startled to see that Marnie was not lying next to me. This was a genuine surprise because she was not what you would call a morning person. I went downstairs to the kitchen to make myself a cup of coffee and saw that she was standing by the open fridge, a scotch egg in her left hand, and that she had transformed into a statue of alabaster.

It was a shame our last night on earth together as man and wife, in the classic sense, was spent fighting. 

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