Wreckage
Molly lies, staring up at the ceiling. The lights from the Ferris wheel strobe across her face: now red, now pink, now green. She wonders if the colours are highlighting her wrinkles, or smoothing them out in a flattering glow. She realises she doesn’t care. She also realises that Albie is pumping in time with the changing colours. Red – pump. Pink – pump. Green –
He slips a pillow over her face, and she’s glad: because the smell of frying doughnuts is making her feel hungry and sick at the same time, and because that means he’s nearly finished. He presses the pillow down and all she can hear is her own heartbeat, that low, slow boom. She holds her breath and lets the hot red throb fill her ears. He thrusts a final time, shudders, and removes the pillow.
‘All done, love,’ he says, unnecessarily. Molly smiles; reaches out and pats whichever of Albie’s body parts is making that lump in the duvet. She used to love his body parts, she really did. He recently read in a Good Housekeeping article in the GP’s office that vaginal dryness is common for women in their fifties. Molly is forty-nine but she let him buy the lube anyway.
She opens her eyes. She can smell doughnuts. She’s hungry and sick. Aroused and repulsed. Complacent and furious. She watches the lights strobe across the ceiling; hears the clatter of the roller coaster, the blaring hurdy-gurdy tune, the recorded cackle of the ghost-train skeleton.
She tunes it out. Under it all, somewhere in the depths, is the sound of the sea. The waves shush in and out, in and out. A languid slow-fuck, a wish made real.
Molly wakes in silence and black. For a second she thinks Albie has put the pillow over her face again. But she reaches out and the air before her is clear and cold. She feels her way to the window and pulls back the curtain. Pale orange velvet, like fondant inside cheap chocolates. The fabric feels damp in the January chill and she crosses her arms, tucking her hands under her breasts to warm them.
There must be a power cut. No lights, no sounds but for the stars and the sea. She doesn’t know how she and Albie both slept through the storm; it must have been a big one to knock out the whole town’s power. The rain has stopped now. The wind, the hail, the thunder and fuss and noise.
Outside their bedroom window is the high street, then the darkened carnival, then a strip of sand, then the restless sea. All is still in the winter dark. Everything is covered in a sheen of ice, as if it’s been sugar-glazed. The mechanical arms of the carnival rides look like the bleached skeletons of long-dead monsters. Even the litter on the high street is frosted white like bonbons.
Molly slides her hands from her breasts to press against her belly. Albie called her stretch marks silverfish , back when he used to look at her and she used to like him looking. And he was right, they did shine silver, the tiny indents where something grew in her before the rest of her was ready.
Clouds uncover the moon and suddenly Molly sees: beyond the carnival, the beach is covered in starfish. Hundreds, hundreds of starfish. Frozen solid, they shimmer like fallen stars.
Then she sees something else.
A woman.
In the moonlight she gleams silver, brighter than every bulb at the carnival. She picks her way across the beach, draped in what looks like a length of starlight, and goes into one of the empty caravans by the rocks. The caravan door clicks shut and the moon is covered again. Molly keeps watching, but the show is over.
Nothing in the restaurant ever changes. Nothing in the restaurant has changed since Albie’s mother Albina died ten years ago. The red tablecloths and garish leather booths, the CD of tarantella songs, the tackety suck of each step on the chequerboard lino floor.
Each table holds, of course, a candle in an old wine bottle layered in melted wax. The candles provide little light; they’re for ambiance, and so that Molly can burn her elbows as she passes plates; the coloured lights from the carnival outside make the restaurant dazzlingly bright. The power was out for a full day after the storm. The local newspaper columnist called it, rather grandly in Molly’s opinion, ‘The Night of a Thousand Stars’.
The starfish are still there a week later. They’re still frozen, but when the thaw comes they’ll start to rot. No one wants to walk on them and the beach is deserted. Molly assumes the council will come and remove them at some point. She wonders if they’ll be swept back into the sea, or chucked into a bin lorry. If it’ll be the black bins for landfill or the brown bins for organic waste. A thousand frozen starfish in a municipal compost bin.
‘Can I interest you in any of our specials?’ she asks a couple on a date. The man’s hair looks like it’s been fried in batter. The woman’s red patent heels are plump and greasy like lipstick. ‘We do a discount for true love,’ Molly says, and the couple light up.
‘Italy is for lovers!’ calls out Albie in his strongest accent as he passes, wielding two plates piled high with meatballs. Molly isn’t sure if it’s offensive, the accent, but she’s not Italian and Albie is, so she can’t really say anything. Everyone wants a story, and he’s trying to give them one. The couple order a special.
The restaurant should be called Mezzasalma’s, for Albie Mezzasalma. But ‘Mezzasalma’ translates as ‘half dead’. As in deadbeat. As in dullard. Molly has never made comment about this, not even jokingly, and she doubts that any actual Italian speakers come in here anyway, but Albie’s mother Albina called it Mezza when she opened it, which is what it’s always been called and what it always will be called.
If Molly were to name a restaurant in this town, she’d call it the Home Scar. It’s the mark that limpets leave when they cling to a rock. The longer the limpet sticks in the same place, the deeper the scar and the safer the limpet.
‘This restaurant,’ she says to a family of six, smiling, as she’s piling up their sauce-smeared dishes, ‘used to be called the Home Scar. We renamed it Mezzasalma’s when a mermaid came up out of the sea one day.’ Everyone wants a story, she knows. Albie once called her a compulsive liar, and she called him a hypocrite. The family all have wispy blonde hair, and the lights from outside dye it harlequin colours. ‘Because mezza means half, and the mermaid was half –’
There is someone on the beach. Someone beyond the roller-coaster screams and garish lights. Someone treading lightly across the backs of the frozen stars. It’s the woman from the night of the storm. Even from this distance, even in the dark, even in glimpses in the slow-strobing space left as the Ferris wheel turns, Molly is sure. Perhaps not a woman, but a teenage girl. She shimmers in the winter evening, translucent, colourless. The only thing not dyed bright by the carnival. She seems to exist behind it, beneath it. A thing from the deep sea.
‘Are you half?’ says one of the children, or at least that’s what Molly hears. She smiles vaguely and fetches the dessert menu.
The candy-bright lights. The candy-bright drinks. The candy-bright dresses on Molly and Trish and Dorota and Mia and Cathryn and Liz and Heather. All of the village wives, sucked in and pouted out, cheersing their glasses around a nightclub table at 2 a.m.
Molly’s shoes feel too tight and she wonders if her feet can have grown. Do feet do that, keep growing? She knows that ears and noses do; that’s why old people, old men in particular, always seem to have huge ears, like elephants.
‘Do you ever think your husband looks like an elephant?’ she yells to Liz under the pounding music, and Liz smiles around her straw and closes her eyes and sways happily to the beat. Molly doesn’t know if Liz actually heard her. Probably not. The music is so loud she can feel it in her throat. It feels like that time she suggested to Albie that he might like to choke her during sex. He didn’t like it, and never did it again. Molly doesn’t know if she liked it; he didn’t do it long enough for her to pass out, which was what she really wanted.
‘I rode an elephant once,’ Molly yells in Liz’s ear. ‘I was travelling in India and I had this boyfriend, not really a boyfriend actually, more like a maharajah who had taken a shine to me. He said I was worth fifty elephants. I don’t know if that’s a lot but it sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?’
‘Yeah, yeah!’ says Liz, her voice a press on Molly’s eardrums. She puts down her drink and tugs Molly to the smoking area. The door shuts behind them and the sudden drop in noise feels like a loss, a hollowing.
‘I don’t think he looks like an elephant,’ says Liz, accepting a lit cigarette from a man young enough to be her nephew’s boyfriend. ‘I think he looks like a fish. One of those deep-sea kinds with a light on their head. Every morning he opens the curtains and then just stands there blinking, like daylight is a surprise.’
Molly thinks of Liz’s husband. He’s got a name that sounds like a euphemism for a penis, Willy or Billy or Tony. She can never remember husbands’ names. He comes to Albie’s backyard poker games every fortnight. His glasses make his eyes look tiny, and now she thinks about it, he does blink a lot.
‘I can see that,’ she says. Liz tips the cigarette towards her. She accepts it, then wishes she hadn’t, and gives it back without inhaling. Then she wishes she had it, just for something to hold, but it’s too late.
‘I just want some space in the bed,’ says Liz to the cigarette. No, not to the cigarette: to the light glowing at the tip of it, to the thin stream of pale smoke. ‘His feet are freezing and his toenails scratch.’
‘I could knit him some socks,’ says Molly. ‘If that would –’
‘Have you noticed Mia is looking really well?’ interrupts Liz. ‘She says she fancies rock climbing. She was into it before she got married. Do you ever think about that?’
‘Rock climbing?’
‘About what you could be without him.’ Liz takes a drag with an air of finality. ‘You don’t have to feel bad for wanting more, Moll.’ Liz flips her cigarette against the wall and watches the sparks.
The greenhouse is opaque with smoke. It coils and distorts, white on white, and Molly thinks of a length of starlight. Standing at the open back door, nipples hardening and nose starting to run in the cold air, all she can see through the greenhouse glass is eight feet: leather loafers, tatty trainers, canvas slip-ons and, optimistically for the weather, a pair of Velcro-strapped walking sandals. Someone shifts, waving an arm, and the smoke clears for a moment. Albie brays a laugh, eyes closing.
There is nothing green in the greenhouse. There is cigar smoke, and a floor of wobbly paving slabs, and some folding plastic chairs, and an old sawhorse as a table, and a pack of cards, and Albie’s boys. Except they’re not boys, of course, they’re fiftysomething men with hairy knuckles and sagging testicles. Still –
‘Boys!’ is what Molly says, pushing open the greenhouse door with her Lycra-clad hip. ‘Boys, here’s your snacks,’ and she almost wants – can she really, actually want? – one of them to make a pass, grab her arse, say something, wink even, behind Albie’s back. Her dress is tight and red and surely that’s enough. She told one of the boys once that she’d met Albie when she was working in a strip club; that he’d saved her. She’d told another that her parents were rich but negligent, that she’d renounced her inheritance and run away with her Biology teacher from her international school in Brussels. She’d told another that she’d grown up in a cult, though of course she didn’t call it that; just said her family had been ‘religious, but the bad kind’ and left the rest to his imagination. She’d even winced a little and raised her hand to her chest, wondering if he’d imagine some kind of whipping or pricking of thorns. Men liked saving women. She tried to be a woman who needed saving.
They’re just a group of tired, quiet men playing cards on a Tuesday night and she’s not sure she actually wants any of them. But she could. She should.
The boys don’t wink. They take the dishes of honey-roast peanuts and pickled lupini and nod politely at her. She almost expects them to call her Mrs Mezzasalma, and then she’d have to make a joke about how that’s her mother-in-law, and then she’d have to make sure Albie didn’t see her shudder at the thought of being connected to Albina. But they don’t say anything, and Albie takes her hand and kisses the back of it, absent-minded and gallant, tender and unthinking, without raising his gaze from his cards, and she squeezes his hand and leaves, and she wants to love him again. She wants to want to. But she can’t stop thinking about what Liz said. What could she be without him? What could they all be?
On her third date with Albie, she told him that she’d had a baby as a teenager and given it up for adoption. She’d planned to call it Stella if it was a girl. For a boy, Sol. But when the baby came out of her, they took it away, and she didn’t know if it was a girl or a boy, and she didn’t call it anything at all.
Albie held her hand between the salt and pepper shakers, looking into her eyes and not speaking. When they slept together, he always took care to kiss her belly, but never to linger.
Another version of the story is that she did see the baby, because it had to be six weeks old before it could be adopted. But she didn’t want to wait six weeks. She couldn’t. She turned her face to the window and said that if she was left alone with the baby then she would not feed it or clean it or look at it. She didn’t say she would kill it, or even that she would let it die, but that is what she meant. That’s why they took the baby away.
She thinks this happened. She’s told both versions of the story, so either one could be true.
‘Reckon he’s off with her from the takeaway,’ says a voice from the greenhouse.
‘He’d be so lucky,’ says another. ‘Daft sod’s asleep in his car somewhere.’
‘Bet he’s gone to see his sister over east.’
‘Without telling Mia?’
No reply, just the slap of cards on the table.
Molly hadn’t realised one of the boys was missing.
But now she thinks about it, there are usually ten feet under the smoke.
Molly waits until Albie is asleep before slipping out. She doesn’t need to keep this from him, but there’s a thrill in having a secret. She shrugs on her green faux-fur coat and tips the collar up around her face, but still the wind numbs her cheeks and pulls tears from her eyes.
It’s 4 a.m. and the street is empty. Even the drunken stragglers from the 80s-revival nightclub have staggered home. Even the seagulls have had their fill of chips. Even the carnival sleeps. It’s just her and the starfish.
She thought they’d crunch under her feet, the way old bones do when they’ve been brought in by the tide. But instead they clatter like blocks of glass. She doesn’t know why everyone was so unwilling to walk on them; it’s like stepping on a glass path, right to the sea. Night of a Thousand Stars. It doesn’t seem so grand now.
She follows the starfish to where the sea starts. She stands on a pile of glazed bodies, feeling the chill through the soles of her Uggs.
A light blinks on at the corner of her eye. Not the multicoloured chaos of the carnival but a clear, white light, glowing steadily.
The caravan. Without thinking, she follows the stars to the caravan’s door. The metal is dented and sun-bleached. She goes to knock, and the door opens.
‘Martin,’ she blurts out, then adds: ‘Mark? Michael.’ She might not be sure of his name but she’s sure it’s Albie’s missing boy, bulky and broad, with his rectangular rimless glasses and salt-white goatee.
He moves into the light and he’s not any more, he’s a slight teenage girl, smooth-faced and blue-eyed, draped in a dress like a length of starlight which flutters in a wind that isn’t there. Molly blinks in confusion – are they both in there? Is that where he’s been, shacked up with some poor teenager in this freezing tin box? She should call the police, she should call his wife.
The girl moves to make space for Molly to come in and she’s not any more, she’s a man in his thirties, handsome but not intimidatingly so, dark-eyed and dark-haired, looking half like Molly wished she looked and half like her favourite ex-boyfriend.
‘Who are you?’ she asks, which is the only thing she can think to say.
‘Who are you looking for?’ The man’s voice is soft, with an accent she can’t place. He reaches for her hand and she lets him take it. She thought his skin would be cold and clatter like the starfish, but it’s warm. He doesn’t pull her into the caravan. He doesn’t push her away either. He just stands, her hand in his.
‘I want –’ starts Molly, but she doesn’t know how to continue.
‘I know you do,’ the man says, and his words come out cold, the steam from his breath coiling and distorting like the smoke in the greenhouse, and he blinks and his eyes are white, frozen through.
Molly slides her hand out of his and backs away. He doesn’t stop her. Frozen starfish clatter under her heels and she loses her balance, stumbling, twisting, and she turns her face to the funfair lights and she runs without looking back.
The council take away the starfish, though not before they thaw and the seagulls spread many of the half-eaten bodies across the town. The carnival adds a new ride: a small one for children, where you ride on a big plastic caterpillar and it rolls up and down, up and down, and through the hole in a big plastic rotten apple. Dorota’s, Cathryn’s and Heather’s husbands run away; the rumour is they got tangled in a bad investment scheme and emigrated to South America. Winter shifts to spring, to summer.
Pink blossom flutters down as Molly sits in the greenhouse with Liz and Mia. The air is full of the smell of tomato plants, which line the inner walls of the greenhouse along with lettuce, cucumber and sweet peas. Molly doesn’t know if all these things should be planted together, or if she’ll actually get vegetables from them, but at least the tomatoes smell good and the sweet peas are a dozen shades of pink and purple. She refills Liz’s glass.
‘There’s a questionnaire in here,’ says Mia, folding back the covers of her book. ‘What’s your sex personality? Are you a sexual daredevil or a little more subdued? Do you let yourself go or hold back? What are your notions of sexual normalcy and eccentricity? Are you sexually creative?’
‘Are we supposed to be answering these?’ Liz sips her drink and pulls a deadhead off a sweet pea, dropping it to the soil.
‘I used to be sexually creative,’ says Molly. She pokes her foot out of the greenhouse door to catch a falling blossom. ‘I met Albie when I worked in a strip club, did I ever tell you that?’
Mia looks up from the book. ‘ No . Seriously?’
Molly knows the place in her mind: the blare of ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’, the watered-down drinks, the row of lockers containing body glitter and tampons and deodorant. She can feel the ache in her feet from the platform heels, can smell the baby powder she pats on her inner thighs. She’s seen it in a dozen films. She knows it’s a risk, telling a story to more than one person. The trick is to only ever tell one person at a time, and make sure they won’t confer with someone who might have heard a different version. But she couldn’t resist; she thought Liz and Mia would like it. And she’s right. They’re gazing at her, half doubt, half wide-eyed interest.
‘Albie saved me,’ says Molly.
Liz snorts and rolls her eyes just as Mia says, ‘That is so romantic!’
‘I had to work there to escape my parents,’ says Molly. ‘They were rich but negligent and I grew up at an international school in Brussels. And I also grew up in a cult because my parents were religious, but the bad kind. I had a baby and they made me give it up.’
‘What the fuck, Molly.’ Liz puts down her glass.
‘Is that true?’ asks Mia.
The breeze shifts, and Molly catches the smell of frying doughnuts. Another pink blossom falls.
‘Kidding,’ she says, with a smile. ‘Or, actually, no, it’s that game. Where you say one thing that really happened, and two that you only wish.’
‘Who the fuck would wish for any of that?’
Molly doesn’t know what she wants to wish for. She could go back to the caravan and knock on the door and see what the shapeshifter has become. Would she prefer to see her child, or her lover?
She thinks the caravan would be colder inside than out. She thinks it would be completely empty, the inner walls smooth and pale, nacreous like the inside of a shell. The tiny windows would be steamed opaque on the outside and everything would gleam pearlescent and Molly would think – if I broke apart one of the frozen starfish, is this what they’d look like inside?
She wants to serve meatballs and tell outrageous lies, and the next night lie in the empty bed and wonder aloud where Albie could possibly be, whether he could have fallen asleep in his car or run off with her from the takeaway. She wants to want something – or the absence of something, of someone – as intensely as the other wives in the town.
‘I guess when you don’t know what …’ Molly trails off. ‘When you don’t know what you want, exactly, or you make a wish and it’s not really clear, or if you …’ She fiddles with a tomato plant, tugging at an unripe tomato the size of her thumb-tip. ‘If you don’t know what you want, then the tides change, or the wind, and you get pulled along and you end up …’
The tomato comes off in her hand and she pops it in her mouth. It’s hard and tart and she swallows it without chewing it properly. It hurts going down.
Molly gets out of bed after Albie is asleep, which is a thing she does semi-regularly now, the secret like a bonbon she keeps tucked in her cheek. She goes to the pale shell of the caravan, and knocks, and sees who emerges. They’re different every time, but every time she recognises them. Sometimes they shift even as she watches.
She follows them down to the end of the beach, the frothy flotsam part where no one goes because the rock pools are full of what the seagulls won’t eat.
Together they wade into the water and swim around the bay, out to a deep cave in the rocks. They dive deep, down, down almost to where the light stops. There’s no colour here, no smell, no sound. The water weeds are dark, anchored to the seabed, their fronds thick as forearms and restless in the slow waves.
Tangled up in the weeds are the husbands. They sleep, calm and still, desireless. Molly strokes each of their faces in turn. Not for them the smoky, poky greenhouse and the palm-size slap of cards. Not for them the line of house-street-carnival-sand. Their world here is vast and boundless, unknowable.
The next time Molly sees Dorota and Cathryn and Heather and Mia she could reassure them that their husbands are doing just fine here. But Dorota and Cathryn and Heather and Mia have never asked.
Molly watches the husbands, sleeping still with smiles on their faces, wrapped in the umbilical water weeds, and she thinks: I could ask for this. I could want this. I could wish for it, and I could get it.
Then she thinks: no. This is what I will do. I will go home to Albie, and I will take his hand and lead him to the carnival by the sea.
Together, in the pale light of the morning, she thinks, they will board the Ferris wheel. They will circle and circle until the wheel stops with them at the very height of it. The highest place in the town; the furthest point from the dark water weeds, from the thing that gleams colourless in the deepest part of the sea. He will take her hand and kiss the back of it, absent-minded and gallant, tender and unthinking.
‘Want to go round again?’ Molly will say, and Albie will nod. They will sit together as the lights flash on their skin. They will wait for the garish flamingo sunrise, the bright yolky day.