Liz Jensen - The Paper Eater

All I know is, things seemed fine. They really did.

And then, not long after our marriage, something started to buckle and turn hopeless. Sex is always one of those dodgy things, isn’t it? I’m no expert, I’ll be the first to admit, but for every high, it strikes me, there seems to be a low. A sort of depression, even. Things were fine, to begin with – no, more than fine, they were crakko! We’d go at it with gusto, in that bedroom of mine with the dressing-table that had the angled mirror that, if you accidentally opened your eyes, reflected interesting parts of the anatomy as you were doing it. But then one day, soon after we’d bought the house in Gravelle Road, things went wrong. Just like that.

One minute we were at it, the next she’d wriggled off, leaving me bobbing about in thin air like a divining rod. She turned to me with this fierce and frightening light in her mother-of-pearl eyes. Angry tears glittered at their edges, then spurted to her cheeks.

– You were thinking about someone else just then, weren’t you?

How do women discover these things? Telepathic surveillance? We’d been married less than a year.

I covered my poor vulnerable genitals with the nearest thing to hand – a foam-filled slipper in the shape of a lobster. We had matching pairs, twenty dollars from Dreamworld.

– No I wasn’t, I go.

– Yes you were.

Impasse.

– Gwynn, I beg, pulling her back towards me with my free hand.

– It’s her, isn’t it? she says. You were thinking of her , weren’t you?

– Who? I go, like I don’t know.

She blushed. She didn’t want to say it, she was ashamed of even thinking it, I guess.

– Her, she mutters.

We both stare at the bulgy lobster slipper. It’s got these nylon feelers.

– Lola. Your sister.

– No! I say, with force.

At least it’s the truth. I haven’t been thinking of my sister.

– I swear on my life, I say. I was not!

Actually, I was thinking of my mum.

The telepathic surveillance thing must have kicked in again, at that point, because Gwynneth’s look turned to disbelief, then horror. Then revulsion.

– God, Harvey, she murmurs. So it’s even worse than I thought.

What could I say, except sorry?

We argued about the ethics of it for weeks after that. She went out every night, without me, on the razzle, and came home with wide, wild eyes and lemon Hooch on her breath. Sometimes, as she trundled about the kitchen liquidising tinned fruit and slamming cupboard doors, she’d call me a ‘pathetic worm’ and a ‘sicko’. But fantasising about the female members of my family was more a question of habit than malice, I pleaded. And anyway, it wasn’t as though they were there in the flesh, as true-life rivals to Gwynneth.

– Look, you know I don’t have any experience of relationships! I pleaded. I’ve had to make it up as I go along!

But that only riled her more.

– It’s them or me, she’d say when we were in bed, and turn her back on me, her smoky hair fanning on the pillow. You decide.

– It’s you, I went. It’s you!

– Then drop the Hogg family, she said. If you don’t – exorcise them – then I’m leaving you. You watch. One day you’ll see my bum shrinking, and it won’t be Weightwatchers, it’ll be me going like thattaway. Outa here. Gone.

But when you hear a threat repeated more than a few times, you realise it’s going nowhere. Which was just as well, because by then Gwynneth was pregnant. I’d read in True You about women’s hormones. It makes them weepy, having an embryo inside them. She cried when she told me. But I was thrilled. Thrilled! A family, at last!

– You want me to keep it then? she asked, snuffling into a Wet One.

What a question! When I came to put my arm round her, she sort of crumpled.

– Of course I do! I said. Of course!

I was completely baffled. Why on earth wouldn’t I want a baby?

– You know I’ve always wanted a family, Gwynneth! I’m longing to be a dad!

I couldn’t work out why she seemed so grateful about that.

The house in Gravelle Road was on the new estate near the site that was to become the purification zone. The road was actually going to be called Gravel Road, because the planners had put gravel on it. But they changed it to Gravelle to give it class. Another example of their imagination: it was on the junction with Tarre Street, near Pension Road. Anyway, it was a semi-detached with good feng shui, and we used the money from my family business to buy it. It was an up-and-coming area.

The property market wobbled for a while, when the Liberty Corporation was voted in, and work began on the waste crater which was going to feed directly into the porous rock on the seabed below and kick-start the economy. There were voices of dissent, I remember, but after a while you stopped hearing from the geologists and things went ahead. Once the economic success trickled down to us customers, living close to the source of Atlantica’s wealth suddenly became a positive plus, real-estate-wise. It was similar to being parked near any big man-made structure – like the Taj Mahal, I guess, or an Egyptian pyramid. I’d voted for the Libertycare package myself, I should say at this point. I was personally all for it. The fewer humans to screw things up the better, in my view. Plus I had a hunch that it would be good for trade, and I wasn’t wrong. The average Atlantican didn’t need much convincing. We’d always been willing to give new ideas a whirl. If a free sample came through the door, we’d try it. No one was sorry to see the death of politics.

Gwynneth chose a cherry theme for the lounge, and we went for marble-effect in the kitchen, with inset halogens above the hob. I installed a power shower in the bathroom and drilled holes for hooks where she said.

The new ‘hands-free’ system was even better news for me, business-wise, than I’d dared to hope, because by the time Liberty was servicing Atlantica, my fraud network was practically invisible. I even began to feel that, in my own small way, I was contributing something to society. If you’d asked me to put my finger on what, exactly, I might have had trouble, but I know that as Atlantica began to thrive I felt I was playing a role in keeping the economy buzzing.

As Gwynneth had builders come in and make a couple of alcoves in the hall, so she could put little fibreglass cherubs in there, backlit, and as I ordered turf, I began to feel proud of the way Atlantica was turning its fortunes around with the purification thing. When I was a kid, the rest of the world had looked on us with scorn. To live on reclaimed land was similar, in world terms, to inhabiting a trailer park. Atlantica was one of those forgotten places before; too small for the media to bother with, too remote for tourism. We had no role to play.

No one can say that about the kidneys of the northern hemisphere, can they?

Thanks to Atlantica’s unique combination of porous bedrock and porous landfill, no container would be turned away. All waste – be it industrial, organic, or nuclear – would be welcome, no questions asked. That was a pledge.

Gwynneth hesitated for a long time over the kitchen tiles, and eventually settled for a mock terracotta that was easier to maintain than real terracotta, and you couldn’t tell the difference unless you were an expert, plus it was wipe-clean and low-maintenance.

Once the crater was functioning, the first thing we noticed was the climate change right on our doorstep. Gwynneth’s window-boxes went ape. We planted a banana tree on either side of the patio area, and her mum gave us a bougainvillaea. There are certain water creatures that do what Atlantica does, I thought one day as I gazed across at the zone from the Osaka Snak Attak, where I sometimes went for noodles. You pass muck through them, and they decontaminate it, send it back into the atmosphere, the filth strained out. It makes you feel proud.