Tessa Hadley: Married Love and Other Stories

By the time the men came in at eight, Shelley and Pam had finished the kitchen and Shelley had just got going on the toilets. One man barged in, despite the notice she’d put on the door, and then looked surprised to see her scrubbing on her knees with her backside in the air.

— What d’you need to go for already? she said, pulling out one earphone from her music player. — You only just got here!

He was sheepish. — Two cups of tea for breakfast. Bladder control’s not what it used to be.

— Use the one upstairs.

— Don’t tell me they piss the same stuff as we do?

— You’re not coming near my toilets until they’re spotless.

It was better when the men were in, there was always the opportunity for a bit of a joke. He probably liked the sight of my backside better than my face, she thought when she got up to refill her bucket and caught her reflection in the mirror above one of the sinks, a square of polished tin screwed on to the wall. Once upon a time, the idea of the man enjoying looking at her would have started something, one of those games, looking out for him among the others, bantering with him. She used to make herself dizzy, imagining other men, though it hadn’t gone further in reality, or not very often. She could remember once, not all that long ago, when she would have fallen to the bedroom floor if Roy hadn’t held her up while they were kissing — she’d been dragged down so powerfully by her own sensations. If it wasn’t the thought of Roy that had started her off that night, he hadn’t known it — he’d got lucky anyway. In the last year or so, those dizzy fantasies and their sensations had stopped, cut off as abruptly as if someone had pulled a switch, only the memory of them left like markers on the surface above deep water. She supposed that it was her time of life, though it felt more as if she were holding herself apart from her own body, afraid to leave off being vigilant for a moment.

There were worse things than going to fat like Pam, Shelley thought. In the mirror she looked sharp enough to cut something, hard fixed lines beside her mouth, her eyes too big, her cheekbones jutting like knuckles under her skin, up to her elbows in dirty work, cleaning toilets. The wall behind the urinals was tiled to about halfway up: at first it didn’t look too bad, and she thought she wouldn’t need to wash it all. But once she began to scrub, the contrast between the cleaned area and the rest was just too obvious; she saw that she’d have to go over the whole lot. She squatted to get at the run of tiles between the urinals and a little gutter along the floor. The caustic fumes caught in her throat, and she pressed her nose into the sleeve of her old tracksuit top. Pam meanwhile was covering the rooms upstairs. The office workers warmed up soup in the microwave, Pam reported, and left the dirty bowls out on the desks.

There were nine or ten men at work on the warehouse floor, mostly middle-aged, all wearing blue overalls with the company logo; the forklifts trundled up and down with armfuls of the insulation wadding packed in plastic wrap for dispatch, beeping when they reversed. The younger men listened to music through headphones as they worked, which was what Shelley did too. Her MP3 player had been a Christmas present from Kerry the year before. She’d wanted at the time to give it back; she’d never have an occasion to use it, she said, and Kerry shouldn’t have been spending her money on presents, anyway — she’d have enough to spend it on when the baby came.

— You’re such an ungrateful cow, Kerry had said cheerfully. — Just wait and see.

Roy hadn’t seemed to mind the sight of his seventeen-year-old daughter with her pregnant belly swollen out like a football. Like a bomb, Kerry put it.

— She was so clever at school. I wanted her to do something better, Shelley had said. — Not just what the rest of them around here do — shelling out more kids.

— Not so clever at biology, Roy said.

— I will do something better, Kerry reassured her. — Later.

— Don’t think you’re going to be leaving it for me to look after. Just when I’ve got my own life back.

But the baby — Morgan — was so alert, twisting her head in her pushchair to follow where the conversation went, her eyes drinking everything in. She’d walked at only nine months, right from the kitchen into the living room the very first time; you had to watch her every moment.

When Shelley went for a fag break in the car park, she switched her phone back on for a few minutes. There was only a text from Roy, who drove a courier van — something stupid. He was always on the lookout for the funny names they gave to hairdressers’ and fishmongers’ and so on: A Cut Above, The Plaice to Go, that sort of thing. She supposed it passed the time.

— Anyway, I took my net curtains down, Pam said, when Shelley went through the side door into the canteen. Teabags were bobbing, leaking colour, in two mugs of milky water. — I don’t know when I’ll get them back up again.

— Why’s that then?

— Didn’t I tell you my washing machine’s bust? The whole kitchen was flooded. John sent me a picture of it on my mobile while I was at the back of the queue in the post office — it was the last day for mail-order returns. Now I’ve got this pair of trousers I can’t get into.

— I can’t believe he just sent you the picture.

— He claimed he didn’t know where I kept the mop.

Roy said that Pam had to be getting something out of her relationship with John or else she wouldn’t keep on with it. Is that how it is? Shelley wondered. What we get is what we really want?

Back in the toilets, she started on the sinks. The fibrous wadding the men worked with got everywhere; it had stained the enamel orange-pink. She had to use a toothbrush to scrub where it had mixed with green soap from the dispenser, then caked in mineral crusts around the base of the taps, around the plughole and the overflow. One of the young ones hurrying in the door, hanging on to himself through his overalls, stopped short at the sight of her; she told him to use a cubicle.

— Don’t go dripping on my floor, she said, — or there’ll be trouble. I know what boys are like.

When Anthony was a teenager he’d been as tense as a whiplash, swaggering around with his shirt half unbuttoned and his eyebrows pierced, stinking to heaven of Lynx aftershave, hanging out with all the worst types on the estate. Even when he was a tiny boy and really did look like an angel, he’d always given her trouble. She’d had to wrestle with him just to get his clothes on in the mornings, she’d been called in to school by his teacher time and again because he was fighting or disrespectful. But sometimes when Shelley dropped him off in the junior playground he’d put his finger on his cheek to show her the exact spot where he wanted her to kiss him goodbye — their little joke from when he was a baby. She and Roy had split up for a while when Anthony was eighteen months, and after they’d got back together she’d had Kerry. Anthony was the one who looked like Shelley, not how she looked now but how she used to: skinny and fair, with big hungry eyes. She hadn’t been able to believe it when he’d got into the Army. She couldn’t understand why they’d want a boy like him.

— They’ll soon have him sorted out, she said, but actually she’d been so angry that she couldn’t forgive him — or anyone else, either. She’d blamed Roy for reading war books and leaving them lying round the house. Or it was Anthony’s girlfriend’s fault: Leanne only wanted the money for those two kids who weren’t Anthony’s; she didn’t care what he had to do to get it.

— He’s going to make a proper career for himself, Roy said. — You ought to be proud of him, working so hard to pass his qualifications.