Michael Robertson: Crash

Chris didn’t do any exercise, and his slightly portly and soft frame was evidence of that. Sometimes he felt fat next to her; sometimes, when she was slimming down for the summer and turned skeletal, he felt positively healthy. She always made him feel physically sick. “You’re talking to me like I have a choice in the matter. Maybe you could help the family by not buying any more pairs of shoes? We could auction your wardrobe and pay the mortgage off.”

Were it not for the layer of Botox, he’d have seen the hatred twisting her face, crumpling it like a paper bag. Instead, she looked like a mildly surprised snake. This made it even more unsettling when she released her venom.

“How fucking dare you?” She pointed at the door that led from the kitchen to the garage and said, “You’ve got two Ferraris in the garage.”

Sitting at the breakfast bar, he rested his elbows on the granite worktop that, like their relationship, was cold and hard. Looking out of the window at their beautifully manicured garden, he twirled his pudgy thumbs. “With Greece in the state it’s in, I’m lucky I have a job at all. Rather than lose my job, I’m more likely to have to work more hours to get on top of things. As a company, we have to do what we can to protect against the fallout from Greece.”

“What’s Greece got to do with anything?”

One of the many things Chris hated about his wife was that she was stupid. He married her because she used to be beautiful until the aging process had frightened her onto a quest to be thinner. She’d taken to the task with gusto, losing her hips, bottom and any trace of a personality. She now had the body of a fourteen-year-old boy with buoyancy aids, the demeanor of a captured Jew in Nazi Germany, and the brain of a hamster. To be fair, she’d always had the brain of a hamster. Because trashy right-wing tabloid papers and idle coffee-shop gossip informed her politics, she didn’t have a clue about the world other than which bikini was in style, what celebrity was having a meltdown, or which demographic to currently hate.

“You understand that Greece is in a bad way, right?” Chris said.

Snorting like a pig, she pulled her peroxide hair away from her sweaty face. “Yeah, they’ve ruined their economy.” She looked pleased with herself. “They should be forced to pay the price for that.”

“Pretty much everyone has ruined their economy, Diane.”

“Labour ruined ours.”

Drawing a heavy sigh smothered him with the smell of disinfectant. The house always smelt of disinfectant. Diane couldn’t cook, something that Chris thought every mother should be able to do to some degree, so they always ate readymade meals. What she did know, however, was how to clean a house, so she took to this task with obsessive compulsion. “We’ve had a global economic crash because greed was encouraged without consequence. Our economy was ruined by banks being incentivized to give out bad loans.” She didn’t seem interested so he said, “Anyway, what matters is that Greece is in a bad way. It looks like they’re just about to leave the Euro, and the police over there are stopping people from withdrawing their money from the banks because it’s worth much more than their new currency will be. The amount of money that has been withdrawn so far has destroyed the banks, and now they’re skint. With people unable to access their money and no work, riots have broken out all over the country. The worst of it is in Athens. The body count is increasing daily.”

With a sneer of disgust, judgment always the predominant lens that she viewed the world through, she said, “It serves them right for fighting the government.”

Chris hated his wife, but the bulk of his hatred was aimed at himself. Why had he married such a shallow and stupid woman? Why had he had kids with her? Why had he taken the city job when he’d have been happier working as an electrician? A small amount of water sat on the worktop, so he stuck his finger into the cold droplet and drew shapes with it on the shiny granite. He didn’t need to look up to see her face because he could feel her tension thicken the air, and he was surprised that she’d managed to hold herself back from coming over and wiping it up.

“They’re fighting the government because their decisions are likely to lead to poverty for most of the people in the country. The government want to keep the Euro, and to do that, most people will have to suffer.”

Watching his gliding finger like a hawk on a mouse, she said, “They elected them.”

“Not necessarily; I didn’t elect this government.”

“But we needed this government to sort out the mess from the last one.”

Chris simply shook his head and said, “You just don’t get it, do you?”

Diane’s eyes glazed over, and he knew her daily glass of wine would come earlier today, and would be followed by several more. As a functioning alcoholic, she never saw it as a problem. She got things done, she didn’t drink until the end of the day, she only had one or two… There were a million and one reasons to justify her drinking, and none of them ended with, “I’m an alcoholic.”

“So,” he continued. “With Greece failing, confidence in other economies is vanishing. The Spanish and Italian banks are being crippled by the daily withdrawals from their citizens. Seeing what’s happening with Greece, they’d rather have their money in a shoebox than in a bank. Because one in two houses have a big stack of cash in them, crime is soaring in those countries. They think the mob could take over from the government in Italy before long. This chaos could spread out across the world, so we need to do what we can to protect against that. We’re currently pulling all of our investment from unstable economies and reinvesting in places like China. We’re making the problem worse by depriving the economies that need it most, but capitalism is inherently selfish, and it’s what we need to do.”

The slightly surprised, plastic face of his wife was still blank. He’d lost her a long time ago. Picking up the tiny weights that she’d placed on the large oak kitchen table, she spoke from behind glazed eyes and in monotone. “I’ll stand by you, Chris, I know you’ll make things work for us—you always have.” She then spun on her heel and walked back through the double doors leading to the living room, a gust of wind throwing her sweet perfume at him, but it was quickly swallowed by the smell of disinfectant.

Sat in his huge kitchen and grinding his jaw, Chris was reminded how alone he was in this life and, as he did most days, considered divorce. As the sound of an over-exuberant fitness freak blared from their sixty-inch television, he watched his wife ping about in front of it, following the routine without thought or enjoyment. Before his mum had passed away fifteen years before, she said, “Marry someone for the conversation, not the body.” How he regretted ignoring that piece of wisdom.

Pulling an over-ripe banana from the fruit bowl, he opened it and took a bite. The sweet and mushy flesh was a bit too sweet and a bit too mushy, and it made him heave. Looking at the flaccid piece of fruit, he then smeared the rest all over the black worktop in the shape of a huge penis, hoping it would harden before she noticed it. Spinning around, his stomach dropped as he saw the twins, Matilda and Michael, stood at the kitchen door, their little confused faces hanging slack by what they’d just witnessed.

Feeling like his stomach had been torn from his body, Chris bent over double, falling to the floor into a pile of bed sheets next to Michael. Like everything else in the room, they were freezing and damp, the smell of mold impossible to ignore. It took a few seconds for him to notice that Michael was shaking and fighting for breath. Having been a sufferer in his younger years, he recognized the panic attack for what it was. He understood they couldn’t harm him, even if Michael didn’t realize that himself, so Chris did what he thought was necessary and put his hand over his boy’s mouth to silence his ever-increasing hysteria. Applying a pressure that pinned Michael’s head to the floor, he watched his blue eyes flash wide, confusion and fear tearing through them in equal measure as he looked from one of his dad’s eyes to the other, searching for justification for his actions. To be looked at like he was a monster made Chris’ arm go weak, and he nearly pulled away. He hated how this new world forced him to do things that went against who he was as a person. He felt like he was losing sight of who he used to be. However, in spite of his guilt, he continued to overpower his scrabbling boy and kept his hand where it was, gritting his teeth as he pushed down hard.