Nicola Barker - Love Your Enemies

One of Sean’s main rules of love was that women didn’t go to the toilet; or if they went they did different things there than men. He refused to have his idealism shattered. Shelly had always been very circumspect about her personal habits in the past. She had always called the toilet the Little Girls’ Room. When she said it he liked to imagine that women kept dolls and horses and perfume and lipstick in the Little Girls’ Room, that they popped in there for a bit of fun and then came out again, beautiful, perfect and squeaky clean. He was a firm believer in the use of feminine deodorants.

Shelly was saying, ‘I think the segment is just part of the worm that is dead because when I’ve studied it it doesn’t move or anything. It’s not like an independent life form …’

Sean couldn’t believe that Shelly was saying these things; he interrupted, ‘This is all a tiny bit intimate, Shelly.’

She shrugged, ‘I don’t know. I think I’ve really changed in that respect over the past few months. I used to be embarrassed about my body before and the things that it does naturally. My tapeworm has changed all that. It’s like I’m now involved in a very natural and obvious relationship. It’s like I can see at last how I relate to the world as a creature; to trees and grass and cows and pigs, and the moon’s cycles and the sea. We all are alive in a similar way. It’s all connected and we all depend on each other, in a sort of chain of existence.’

As she spoke the waiter returned to their table and took away their plates. Shelly smiled at him as he completed this task and said, ‘I’d love an Irish coffee.’

He nodded and looked at Sean. Sean said, ‘Just a plain coffee for me, please.’

Shelly straightened the table cloth and picked up a few crumbs to put in the ashtray. Sean felt inside his jacket pocket and took out a couple of cigarettes. He offered Shelly one. She shook her head. ‘I’ve given up.’ He raised his eyebrows then stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. After inhaling he said, ‘Shelly, you’ve got to get rid of that worm.’

She smiled. ‘No.’

He exhaled vigorously. ‘Well, what’s going to happen when it grows to an enormous size? I’m sure you eat enough to treble its size every other day.’

She ignored this insult and said, ‘I’m going to keep this one for ten months then get rid of it. Afterwards I’ll get another small one and start from scratch all over again. That means it’ll never get out of control.’

The waiter brought them their coffees. Shelly thanked him and took a sip of the hot, sweet, creamy liquid. Sean was momentarily quiet so she said, ‘I’m going to have to read up on the whole thing because I’m not one hundred per cent sure how they reproduce. If the little segments that come out in my urine are baby worms then maybe I’ll have to try and swallow one of those.’ She paused and then added, ‘They aren’t very big but they’ve got hooks on them. When I pee they hang on to the lip of my body with their hooks and I have to unhook them myself. It’s quite simple when you know how.’

Sean’s expression was full of an incredulous horror. She smiled. ‘It’s all right, Sean, it doesn’t hurt and it doesn’t bother me.’

Sean’s mind was now turning over very rapidly. He was thinking of the sex they had indulged in an hour or so before. He couldn’t stop himself; he said, ‘I couldn’t have caught one earlier, could I?’

She frowned. ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

Then she smiled. ‘I think you would’ve seen it if it had hooked on to the end of your prick.’ She started to laugh. ‘Imagine if the entire worm had hooked itself on, all eleven or twelve inches of it. You’d have become rather confused when you went to the bathroom!’

She spluttered with laughter as she sipped her coffee.

Sean was stony-faced. He said, ‘You don’t give a shit about me any more, do you? About my feelings in all of this?’

She stopped laughing and shrugged. ‘You’ve never given a shit about me in the past, Sean. In fact I think that I can honestly say that I have had more help and support from my tapeworm over the past five months than you have given me in the last four years.’ As she said this she tapped her stomach with her left hand and then took a swig of her Irish coffee.

Sean didn’t know whether he wanted to live with her any more, whether he loved her, but he was damn sure that he wasn’t going to be compared to her tapeworm and come out of this comparison at a disadvantage. He said, ‘That thing is eating you up inside. It’s a parasite.’

She nodded. ‘Yes it is, and the two of you have a whole lot in common. Unfortunately, you didn’t improve my self-image like this tapeworm has. It needs me. You never needed me. It’s helped me. You never helped me.’

She finished her coffee and he stubbed out his cigarette. She started to put her jacket on. ‘I’ve got a new direction in my life now, Sean. I’ve learned that I can survive without you, that I can be attractive and desirable and funny and interesting without needing to have you around to tell me what I am or what I can be.’

He shook his head. ‘You’ve got a real problem, Shelly.’

She stood up. ‘No, you have, Sean. I’m leaving now and you can pay the bill.’

As she left the restaurant she winked at the waiter.

Anthony Bland stared at the assembled company with his rather murky, pink-tinged, morose eyes and said miserably, ‘I’ve put on two stone since the split. Sarah always used to call this part of me’ — he patted his significant gut with tender regretfulness — ‘her waistline. She’d say, “Anthony, it’s my waistline too. I’ve fought to keep you in trim. I feel as though I own that part of your body. I’ve looked after it for so long.”’ He shuddered, and then sniffed mournfully.

Hetty Thompson unconsciously tensed her buttocks and pushed her hips forward. This small gesture had been adapted into her day-to-day life by her Holistix teacher, who said that it helped to mould the body into a more beautiful shape. Now she did it, almost without thought, whenever she was forced to stand still for more than thirty or forty seconds; in shopping queues, doing the washing-up, cutting up vegetables in the kitchen. As she made this tiny gesture she said to Anthony, ‘We’re sick of this, Ant.’ (Most of Sarah’s friends abbreviated Anthony’s name to ‘Ant’. He had secretly always hated it. It made him feel as though they simply couldn’t be bothered to expend more than half a lungful of air on pronouncing his name, as though he just wasn’t important enough.) She continued, ‘We know that this is none of our business, but the four of us couldn’t bear to stand back and let this farce continue any longer. Please Ant, you’re only managing to hurt yourself. It isn’t dignified.’

As she finished speaking she glanced over at her husband, who was standing to her right looking rather stern. He nodded. ‘Hetty’s right, Ant. You’ve got to get on with your own life. Sarah’s behaved badly, but so have you. Life is full of difficult situations and terrible decisions. We’ve all had our share of them …’

Anthony was sitting uncomfortably on a small apricot chaise longue. He wasn’t lying on it, but was perched upright, both feet on the floor, at the leg end. The colour of the room — a paler apricot to the furniture — reflected on to his face and made his pasty features look like an expensive almond tart from Selfridges Food Hall. His face seemed round and sticky, slightly grainy.

He shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose with a large pale finger and thumb. When he spoke, his voice sounded muffled. ‘I suppose you’ve all come to get Silver.’