Kate O’Riordan - The Boy in the Moon

On a straight run approaching a green light, he braked in anticipation of a change; for the same reason, she pressed her foot to the floor. After ten years of marriage, this was the most significant difference she could cite if they ever had to face a divorce court. Not less than everything – she smiled ruefully at her own reflection, and wondered if she would know herself if she met herself in a crowded room. The features were familiar, of course. But expressions were entirely a different matter. What did she look like laughing? Crying? Sad? She had no idea. She was really a composite of someone else’s perceptions. The thought saddened her for a moment. Then the thought of the two weeks ahead saddened her even more, stretching out like the concept of purgatory Brian had grown up with. A spartan fortnight full of everything her middle-class credenda told her was character-forming, wholesome and true, but which in reality inevitably proved to be wearisome, harsh and boring.

Sam was asleep when she tiptoed into his room with the towel around her. She could see his face from the crack of light which the landing offered, and his head: a miniature universe. Beside him lay the spaceship, contrived to tug at her heart, which was by Sam’s and Brian’s standards made of granite or something entirely extra-terrestrial, a Plutonic ice-ball. Sam snuffled in his sleep. Brian hummed from the bathroom. They were so entirely dependent on her. Awake, asleep, she ruled them. She gazed at the spaceship. It was full of tiny men and women. For a moment, she swelled like a god.

Sam’s dark hair stood up, electrocuted. His long eyelashes cast spiky talons on his cheeks. He was plump, like Jennifer. Julia could see him, years from now, like some tiny Nero, all white curls and cherubic smiles, fiddling while London burned as she, maternal mentor, looked on approvingly. Sam snored. She went to him and stroked the demerara freckles along his cheekbone. He sighed. All softness and light and complicated layers which gave voice to the man he would become. A man. Sam. It was an impossibility. He was too innocent to belong to either sex. She bent to kiss him and his curled fist opened slightly to indicate that he knew she was there.

Thus far, a self-contained little boy, content in his singularity, with an adult vocabulary holding forth in a high-pitched squeak. The gusts of her anger sometimes pinning his ears back, making him blink before she uttered a word. His silent disapproval thereafter sending her panting to the fridge for comfort.

He resisted her embrace for a moment, as she knew he would. But then plump arms wound around her neck and he breathed sweet, unpolluted breath on her. She felt ashamed of her own scent. He tugged at her neck and inhaled deep within her hair.

Outside his room she stood for an instant recalling his first day at school. She had stood by the classroom door and watched him melt into an alien world of masculine declensions that she could never decipher for him. Nudges and back thumps and rushes for the door, each boy trying to outdo the other. The girls huddled in sinister little groups of twos and threes, the boy group swelling to encompass more and more until they heaved in one great throbbing caterpillar, chewing up the playground. She was excluded. After years of being there, the only thing, the only one, she had to be satisfied with nothing responses.

‘What did you do today?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Who did you play with?’

‘No one.’

‘Where did you play?’

‘Nowhere.’

She had found it extraordinary that he was already inculcated in the language of silence, of non-committance, of secrecy, at the age of five. What was there to hide at five? Everything, it appeared. Even more secrets now that he was seven. Sometimes, she felt envious of the silent vocabulary that passed between father and son.

‘Sam.’

‘Dad.’

Everything reasserted by the vocalizing of one another’s name. Sometimes, she felt very alone, stretched out on a rack of inarticulacy. And then Sam would turn to her with one of his blistering, knowing smiles, the ones reserved for her alone, and she felt a renewed confidence. Confident enough to direct them again. For that was what they seemed to want of her.

Not so bad, really, she thought, forcing moisturizer into the parched pores of her forehead. On a good day, in her lemon suit, the grey nubuck pumps and seven deniers, she could still draw herself up, stretch herself out – so taut she could hear herself ping.

In the other bathroom, Brian was humming louder and louder which meant that he was expecting – no, inviting her intrusion any minute now. She pursed her lips and left him to it.

Brian wondered what he had been thinking about for the past half-hour – the blanks were growing longer these days. Nothing much most probably. Some old crap about his own reflection or his sense of self. It worried him mildly that he had succumbed so easily to the self-absorption of Julia’s class – anomalous to his upbringing, he thought with satisfaction. There was grit and hard grind for you. He gave himself a flinty look in the mirror and pulled the towel between his legs, just rough enough to smart a bit. Now so.

He padded, still dripping, into the bedroom. The suitcases were stacked up neatly by the door. His clothes for the morning lay draped across one chair, Julia’s across the other. She was already in bed, reading. Glasses perched on the end of her nose. ‘You’re wet,’ she observed, turning a page with a licked thumb.

He stood by the end of the bed and slapped his palms against his chest. ‘And yourself?’ he asked hopefully.

‘Dry as in Gobi, Sahara … Martini.’

‘No change there then.’

She peered at him over the rim of her glasses. ‘We have to be up at the crack of dawn,’ she said.

‘So?’

Julia sighed, allowed the book to drop to the floor, folded her glasses shut with a click. She studied him for a moment with her head cocked to the side. Is it love, she wondered? After so many years, she felt what she could only describe as ‘shy’ on occasion. There was something slightly embarrassing about making love with your partner. Snorting like a zebra one minute, rubbing Ariel Ultra into the skid marks on his underpants the next. The groping hands of night that would not dare to fondle by day. Waking from an erotic dream in the half-light of a winter’s morning to grab your partner’s frayed pyjama collar – ‘You’ll do.’

Middle-aged sex was nothing if not safe; no need for health exhortations there. It was comfortable and reliable, warmth and familiarity tinged by a certain something unpleasant like the smell of your own sneaky fart under the bedcovers. And safe, God, safe as houses.

There had been moments. They had tried whispering obscenities or, in Brian’s case, little affected grunts, nothing earthy or guttural, no uhhhs, and so patently out of sync that she had bopped him on the back of the head one night: ‘Shut up.’

Understandably perhaps, he was very quiet for a long time after that. Not so much as a gruntlet to dilute the lonely sound of two bodies wearily shunting into each other in the dead of night.

She wondered if every marriage was as smelly underneath the perfume sprayed on for friends and family. Below the surface: strata of unresolved, residual odours – like decay – so that the simplest gesture or caress took on a thousand resonances, rekindled a thousand rancid grudges. Briefly dispelled by ropy buttocks pumping up and down in mechanical despair, beneath which slappy thighs spread just wide enough for entry. Tentative arms reaching out under as yet unsoiled sheets, always ready for rejection – as if it were the only thing that could be counted on. Keeping each other company in the end as if that were an end in itself. She often thought of all the miserable elderly couples out there keeping each other company. Now, for a brief moment, she wanted to cry. She felt that she should – for the passage of love, or what passed for love, or something like it.