Privilege
Pietra got ready in the bathroom because it was the room she hated the most. Or would that be the master bedroom? The orangery, maybe? The second study? She had such a wealth of choice.
The bath and sink were marble, a style called Rosso Laguna, deep red with grey veins, which looked to her like huge slabs of steak. There were mirrors on all the walls. An endless meat room.
She waxed her bikini line. She always put it on a little too hot. Counted to three, then ripped. She liked the feeling after, those breathless seconds before it started to throb. As she watched, the bare chickenish skin beaded with blood. She didn’t know if it was meant to do that but didn’t know how to stop it happening. Perhaps it was that she struggled to get a decent grip on the wax sheet. No one’s fault but her own.
From a distant room, a thud. Something falling; she didn’t go to investigate. There was always something that needed to be propped up, repainted, trimmed back. She pressed a damp cloth to her labia and waited for the bleeding to slow. Her husband had bought the house. With her family’s money, mostly, but he chose it. A project for her. A treat. Something to keep her occupied. Busywork for her mild and meaningless life.
At first she’d agreed. It was an important house. Historically important. She was part of something that mattered. Every change to the house required masses of paperwork and permissions, and she’d liked that too; liked signing her name over and over, an autograph.
She removed the cloth, the blood smearing. It was fine. She’d put some nappy rash cream on and hope for the best.
She’d joked with her husband that the Rosso Laguna was a good investment. Marble lasts for centuries. When she was dead, they could hack the bathroom counters out to make her headstone. He hadn’t laughed, but she suspected that if she died before him, he’d remember and seriously consider it.
The bedroom walls were marble too. Not real marble; there was some reason, some bit of paperwork that meant they couldn’t be, the centuries-old walls or the floor wouldn’t support the weight in that part of the house. Instead she’d been instructed to make it look like marble by drawing lines with a soft pencil and slightly smudging them with a velvet cloth. The lines shouldn’t be too straight or too curved but should look, said a needlessly precious website, like the gently meandering tracks of rain down a windowpane.
Her hands already ached, and she hadn’t even done her mascara or blow-dried her hair yet. She ran her hands under the hot tap to loosen the crooked knuckles, but the water came in cold. It only took a minute to numb her fingers completely.
‘It must be a real privilege,’ the man said, his jaw chiselled, his aftershave cloying, his latte, horribly, barely even begun.
Pietra tried again. She regretted starting. Not just this story, not just this Tinder date, not just her failed marriage, not just the house, not just her adult life, but everything, all of it.
‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘even the stream at the bottom of the garden is protected. They sent me a leaflet telling me what I can and can’t let grow around it. I have to buy certain plants, and pay for them myself. I can’t feed the voles, but I can’t let them die either. They asked me to count the ladybirds.’
He’d put his hand on the table between them, at the midpoint. She read in Grazia that’s an invitation, a respectful courtship: not invading her half of the table, but not keeping only to his half either. She knew she could reach out and take his hand, but instead she held on to her espresso cup, already empty. If she kept her fingers pressed together, they didn’t look crooked. She didn’t know if she was playing hard to get, an expert in the dating game; or she just couldn’t bear to even acknowledge this game, never mind play it.
‘Incredible,’ he said, and finally, mercifully, sipped some of his latte. She looked at the line it made on the glass, willing it to go down, like when she’d lived in a flat share and felt-penned lines on her milk, wanting to catch her flatmate stealing it so she had a reason to yell. ‘What a privilege,’ he said. ‘A real privilege. I can’t imagine.’
He sipped again and grimaced; the coffee was bad, or that’s just what his face looked like. The cafe was playing the Ally McBeal theme tune; if she’d been asked ten minutes ago what the Ally McBeal theme tune is, she wouldn’t have had a clue, but there it was, and she instantly knew it. She wanted to say to him: well, could you try to imagine? Could you just fucking try?
‘It took me two weeks to draw those fake marble lines on the walls in pencil. Two full weeks, and that’s working weekends too, and evenings if it wasn’t too dark. And when he got home from his work trip, he didn’t even notice.’ She might as well have shat in her hand and smeared it on the walls, for all the difference it made, she thought but didn’t say.
Pietra’s mother did that once. Not on purpose. In the big supermarket. She felt it coming and slipped her hand down the back of her Chanel skirt suit and caught it. It was small and hard and didn’t smell much; this was because she was always dehydrated and ate mostly persimmons, both in a bid to remain thin. She’d been retired from dancing for over two decades by then, but still retained a prima ballerina’s figure, despite her three children. She used that word a lot when talking about her children: despite . She straightened her skirt and held her full hand casually by her side. She’d never taken her other hand off the trolley.
The toilet was in the far corner, near the exit. She was in the opposite corner, in the bakery. Perhaps the smell of the bread was what had brought it on. Apparently the smell of books can do that; she’d read about it recently in a magazine article, libraries and bookshops could both bring it on, the uncontrollable urge. Some kind of chemical in the ink, or the tendency to squat to look at books on the lower shelves, perhaps. She hadn’t squatted. And she didn’t even eat bread. It was for the children’s lunches. She made her way to the far corner.
But the problem was Sophie from the next village. And then Rachelle from the club. And then Imogen whose son, David or Daniel – perhaps she had two, David and Daniel – had been round for dinner with her own son a few times. ‘I must tell you about the church fete,’ they said, ‘it’s a scandal, it really is, and nothing will be done about it,’ and she didn’t want to admit she didn’t give a stuff about the church fete, that she didn’t even go to church, she hadn’t even had the children christened. ‘Do say hello to your husband,’ they said, and she wondered if they’d forgotten his name, which was understandable. ‘And how are the children?’ they said, and usually she’d rankle at the odd emphasis, as if the children would be anything other than small gods walking the earth, miniature miracles she’d produced with her own body.
But she was distracted. The thing in her hand had grown cold. She tried to hold her fingers loosely so it wouldn’t squish through, but not so loosely it could fall out. Though perhaps if it did she could kick it quickly under the refrigerated units without anyone noticing. She shuffled closer to the cheese section, ready to relax her hand, ready to casually kick out her foot.
That was always the end of the story. Pietra’s mother had told it several times, but always broke off there, laughing at the thought of herself kicking a little nugget of shit under the cottage cheese. Probably she made it to the toilet and flushed and washed without anyone knowing. Possibly the whole thing had never happened at all. Or possibly her small shit was still there, lost under the refrigerated units, deep inside the supermarket, fossilised, a coprolite.
There were other people in the cafe where Pietra agreed to meet the man. People on laptops, people artfully photographing their muffins, people coaxing scraps of toast into their offspring.
‘There’s a statue in the centre of the hedge maze,’ she said. ‘A sphinx. Do you know what a sphinx is?’ The man smiled and sipped his latte, then grimaced again. ‘It was very damaged by the weather,’ she said. ‘Almost entirely eroded; you could barely tell what it was. I worked so hard to restore it, and it looked great, and it was a privilege to do that work, it really was.’ She went to sip her own coffee before remembering it was finished. She forced her face into a smile. She could taste his aftershave. ‘I took it out of the maze and put it in prime place in the garden, so you could see it from the French doors. It looked great. The haunches lion-like, the wings bird-like, the head and the breasts …’
The head, actually, was very like hers, and the breasts too, she’d thought. And she hadn’t made it like that. It was already like that, underneath all the moss and bird shit. Her face, but smoother. Expressionless. Ready to present a riddle and then tear a man to pieces with her claws, or cast herself off a mountainside in despair, depending. She was familiar with sphinxes from her Classics degree, but she’d looked them up on Wikipedia anyway. She waited for him to say that it was a real privilege, but he just held his latte glass and smiled benignly at her. He was probably thinking about breasts. Men liked breasts, she knew that much, even if they were on eroded statues of sphinxes.
‘The thing is,’ she went on. ‘The thing is that everyone thought it was a hare. A hare! Everyone who came round for dinner, work friends, neighbours, everyone, said: what a beautiful hare . Not the sphinx with its questions and its danger, but prey. A pretty little prey. Isn’t that funny?’
He laughed obediently and mumbled something, again, about privilege. She wanted to say to him, to scream at him: can’t you see? Can’t you see the incredible burden of all this? Can’t you see that all these business trips and Fallow though he was always a minor character, never the lead. Often he was the murderer in a crime-of-the-week show. If you watched a lot of these types of shows, which Pietra did, he was immediately identifiable, as he appeared to be just an uncle of the victim, just a neighbour, just a guy from work; but he was on-screen a little too long and spoke lines that were a little too unusual, and also didn’t you recognise the actor from something?
Over the years his roles dropped away, and he devoted himself full-time to creating a museum of Kirstie Allsopp memorabilia. This had started with the usual signed photos and annotated scripts, but expanded to include the entire contents of her kitchen – including spatulas and chipped Le Creuset stock pots and an egg slicer – which seemed to Pietra a strange thing to have been put on sale as Kirstie Allsopp wasn’t known for cooking especially and also she wasn’t even dead. She wondered if Kirstie Allsopp had bought a new egg slicer to replace that one, or if she was glad to be rid of it.
He needed to get just the right kind of display cases and couldn’t open the museum until he had them. He put pine cones on the seats of Kirstie Allsopp’s dining chairs, so that no one would sit on them. The smaller items were stacked in disintegrating boxes in the stables. He seemed very sure that people would pay to visit the Kirstie Allsopp museum, when it was ready, and the location and disrepair of their remote farmhouse would be no impediment.
Pietra’s fingers were long and strong. Her mother loved them. She’d described them as pianist’s hands since Pietra was a toddler; she found them Pietra’s most beautiful feature, and although she never said it, Pietra knew they were the only valuable or unusual thing about her.
When she was sent away to boarding school at twelve years old, Pietra found herself sitting on her hands. The wooden benches were hard and her hands, squashed between the boards and her thighs, soon went numb. She kept sitting on them, for hours at a time, until the numbness grew to an ache and then into a sharp and pleasant agony and then back to numbness again. When she eventually stood up, her hands were as white as eggs and hung uselessly from her wrists. It took a long time for the feeling to come back into her fingers, but it always did.
She broke a few by slamming them in a door, then another by getting into a fight with another girl, then a few more with a hammer alone behind the greenhouse after lights-out. She once overheard her father on the phone saying that he’d stayed with Pietra’s mother for the sake of the children, but they’d all turned out to be disappointments, so it wasn’t worth it.
Her fingers healed twisted and weak. Still usable for holding espresso cups or pencilling fake marble lines on walls, but not for playing the piano.
Later, after he had finished his coffee, Pietra fucked the man. It felt strange to fuck sober. Not just sober, but over-caffeinated, hyper-alert. She didn’t want to do it in the bedroom because that’s where she pencilled the fake marble lines on the walls and either he’d remember that and feel the need to comment on them, to say that they look great or agree that they don’t look quite right, not quite convincing, or he wouldn’t remember at all and she’d realise that, again, she could have just shat in her hand and smeared it on the wall and it wouldn’t have mattered, he’d still have sipped his latte and loomed his aftershave at her and politely, mediocrely fucked her.
She took him instead into the bathroom. She didn’t know if she wanted him to comment on the Rosso Laguna or not. He didn’t. His inept fingers rubbing two inches above her clitoris, his neatly trimmed chest hair audibly crunching against her breasts, his long narrow penis jabbing her cervix. She closed her eyes so she couldn’t see his pale back in the wall-to-wall mirrors, pumping shamefully. She thought of the sphinx. Its spreading wings and strong haunches and bitter expression. It struck her suddenly that she never restored the claws. No claws, but no hands either. The sphinx’s arms just ended in weather-worn blobs. She tried to think of some riddles, in case she was ever asked.
The Rosso Laguna was fake. Like the bedroom walls, it looked fine from a distance, but as soon as you touched it, the illusion broke. It was just stick-on sheets, carefully applied with tongs and a spatula to push out air bubbles. At the time she’d seen it as a rebellion. She’d taken the money set aside for the real marble and spent it all on very expensive cocaine from a dealer who dropped unsubtle hints about the names of his celebrity clients. After he left she’d looked at the cocaine in its little bags for a long time before flushing it all down the toilet. A little bit got on her twisted pinkie finger and without thinking she sucked it into her mouth. She waited a while but felt nothing. It looked like icing sugar. Perhaps it was icing sugar. She’d only bought it because it was expensive and easily destroyed.
There was so much she could have done with that money. She could have given it to a homeless person or a food bank. She could have made an anonymous donation to an animal rescue shelter. She could have paid someone to fuck her properly.
Why hadn’t she just said no? To the piano, to the house, to the date? But you can’t really, can you? You can’t just say no.
He still hadn’t come and her vagina was dry and raw now so she took him in her hands until he finished. It hurt her knuckles a bit, but no more than anything else. She tried to look aroused but it didn’t matter as he had his eyes closed. He came on her belly. It seemed like he was about to apologise, but then he didn’t. It had been a daytime date; it wasn’t even 3 p.m. It would still be light outside.
She supposed it was a privilege, really. To have a home with a choice of rooms to fuck in, rooms that were all empty since her husband ran off with a woman called Bunny he met on the internet, since he left her alone with her hare and her fake marble and the cooling semen on her belly and the awkward shifting of the stranger beside her. A real privilege.