Nicola Barker - Love Your Enemies

Little Fiona took a mouthful and said, ‘I love you, Mummy. I hope I have a little baby brother to play with and that you won’t love him more than me.’

Steve’s dad collected some crumbs of walnut sponge together with his fingers and thrust them into his mouth as he said, ‘My wife never cooks properly for me. My son’s a real opportunist. He makes the most of every opportunity; at home, at work, with the girls in the factory. I suppose you don’t even know it. I wonder what sort of a father he’ll make this time around. He has his eye on the long term, on the main chance.’

Steve’s mum licked some cream from the corner of her mouth and said, ‘He says I never cook. Why the hell should I when I have to starve myself all the time to remain unnaturally thin so that he’ll look at me every once in a while. The kids ruined my figure, I’ve always resented them for that. They’ll ruin yours if you’re not careful, Anne Marie. You look such a frump already and you’re only thirty-seven. No wonder Steve plays the field.’

Anne Marie stood by the table and clasped her hands over her stomach as though she had a bad, bad cramp. She thought, ‘Is this cake the baby? Is this what I’ve made?’

Then little Fiona said, ‘Mummy, may I have some more of the Truth Cake? I like it even though it hurts a bit. It made me feel so light. May I have some more?’

Steve cut into the cake roughly and pulled out another slice for Fiona. He then said, ‘I don’t want another baby, Anne Marie, I don’t need these complications. When Dad dies I’ll own the company and I’ll be able to do as I please. I’m sick of your cookery, I’m sick of it and yet it’s the only thing about you that’s worthwhile. You’re so careful and slow it makes me laugh. I don’t know when it was that I started to find you so ridiculous, maybe I always did. Whatever happens, just keep the new baby out of my hair, that’s all I ask. Just keep it out of my way.’

Anne Marie watched everyone finish their slices and then cleared away the plates in silence. She took the cake to the kitchen and placed it on the sideboard. Almost half was left. She stared at it blankly and felt engulfed by a great wave of depression and confusion. She thought, ‘Why did I make this? I thought that I was expressing the new baby, but all I did was to bake a Hate-Cake.’

Inside her was a smooth stroking feeling as though the baby was rocking and soothing her. She touched her stomach. From within her something called. It said, ‘This isn’t hatred, it’s the truth. This is what feelings hide and show, disguise and reveal. Have some, have some.’ She thought, ‘Maybe the baby is the truth. I feel as though he is finally real, as though he made all of this happen. I wanted the baby because I wanted to find out the truth about everything.’

She removed her hand from her stomach and cut into the cake. Then she ate one slice, another slice and then a third slice.

She swallowed her final mouthful and suddenly felt as though a light was shining from behind her eyes. In her stomach the new child was laughing. She brushed her hair back in one smooth movement and walked towards the open door. Everyone sat around the dining table in silence. They turned towards her. She stood in the doorway and smiled. Then she said, ‘I want to tell you the truth, and the truth hurts.’

The first thing they did after saying hello was to move straight into Shelly’s bedroom and have sex. They had been voluntarily apart for five months. During this entire period Sean had seen Shelly on only one single occasion, and that had been at Sainsbury’s where he had been trying to get hold of some Turkish Delight for his mother. He had seen her by the bread counter buying a French stick. She was chatting to the young girl who was serving her. He couldn’t imagine what about. His first impulse was to think, ‘She’s lost so much weight, she seems so cheerful’, as an afterthought, ‘without me’. His second impulse was to duck behind a stack of soup tins as she turned in his direction and then to scurry away when he was sure that she would not notice him. He didn’t want to see her, to speak to her, but equally he didn’t want her to see him making a quick getaway. That would hardly seem dignified for either party.

He was twenty-seven and she was twenty-five. They had been ‘seeing’ each other for four years and for the last two of those four years they had been living together. She rented a flat in Wood Green close to the tube station. He had opted to move in with her and initially things had been fine.

She had never been thin. She was what most dietitians would call pear-shaped, but she was five feet and eight inches tall, which is a good size for a woman, and that height somehow undermined the size of her hips and made her shape seem less obvious. Unfortunately, within a year of their practical union she had begun to gain weight.

Sean knew that he was hardly the perfect partner, that his idea of faithful was to try and think of her when he was screwing other women. But he firmly believed that in other respects he was an excellent mate. He helped with the housework, he bought her flowers, he told her that she was beautiful.

It would be a lie to say that when she gained weight he didn’t find her any less attractive. Her eating was perpetual and compulsive. Invariably she had something in her mouth; if not part of a jam tart or a sausage roll then some chewing gum or a boiled sweet. Sometimes he felt that her eating was a way of distancing herself from him; as though the layers of fat were an attempt to keep him away. Even so, she was always saying that she loved him, always saying that she needed him.

Her doctor had recommended a trial separation, a cooling-off period so that they could both analyse their feelings at a sensible distance. By this time she was well over fourteen stone and what the medical profession might describe as clinically depressed. He had been more than willing to accept this new development in their relationship. His mother had clucked her tongue at him when he had arrived home again with a suitcase and several carrier bags, and had told him that he just wasn’t willing to stick things out, to sort things out.

Shelly had a theory about something called Symbiosis. She had learned about this word at school in her biology lessons. It had always been a word with great significance and relevance to her life. She loved the feel of the word in her mouth as she said it out loud. She thought, ‘Everyone has words that are particular to them, that are significant to them, and this word, this idea is the most important factor in my life.’

She dreamed a lot about love. She wanted to be in a situation in the future where she could literally not survive without the love, kindness and care of a man and he, similarly, would feel the same way about her. Symbiosis ( sim-bi-o’sis ) n. the living together of two kinds of organisms to their mutual advantage .

Shelly believed that men were altogether a different kind of organism to women. She had tried to make things work out with Sean but he had wanted everything his own way. He still told her that he found her attractive, but he also still told her that he found other women attractive too. After sex he would regularly disappear off into the bathroom with a girlie magazine and she would lie alone in bed and try to think of something else. She didn’t say anything because she wanted it to work out, she wanted him to need her and she knew that she needed him, someone, something, anyone, him.

She hated dieting so much. Since early puberty she had been on diets of one kind or another. After a while it became clear to her that her metabolism was so slow that eating a peanut added several inches to her hips, thighs and stomach. Her relationship with food, with that which could be consumed, was passionate, impetuous, exotic, erotic. She loved eating, she loved to swallow, she loved to taste sweetness on her tongue and in her mouth. She would happily have given a month of her life for a mouthful of sherbet or a meaty rib in bar-BQ sauce.