Image: © Courtesy of Manchester City Galleries
Ahead of them, the road lays out broad and straight. Tulips on the embankment are holding strong; clouds high and stratus smeared. Jack is driving, as he always drives, because Mary’s migraines are rare but unpredictable, and because Jack, they both know, has problems ceding control. He is a bad passenger; it is a role in which she excels. Her legs are bare, her eyes a bright salad green. Clots of pollen in the air. The sun occasional and robust. And the radio plays J S Bach, and Jack, who’d received a most classical education, hums along.
When they met, they were each of them involved with someone else, which was a minor inconvenience, easily remedied. A simultaneous detachment and fresh attachment: harmony in the universe restored. And when they met, almost five years ago exactly, he was at what he thinks of, privately, as a point of spiritual and metaphysical impasse; she was mostly taken by his height and blunt intelligence – his frequent and filthy laugh.
The petrol tank is three-quarters full; Mary holds two warm coffee cups between her thighs, applies an exact amount of pressure. Liquid bubbles around the spout, occasionally spills and runs toward her crotch. No matter. She counts fifteen motorcycles as they pass, the riders leather clad and fearless. The final one turns and waves, and though she can’t see their face, Mary experiences a rush of something – a fizz of sherbet in her blood. She will be thirty next month, but still feels light footed, listless – seventeen years old. Emptied coffee cups are crushed and dropped to the floor. When Mary places her ankles on the dash, Jack swallows his complaint. He is deathly dull about road safety, or at least he knows Mary thinks so, even though he told her about those boys from his year. Black arm bands over school blazers. The flag at half-mast. And the radio plays David Bowie, and they both think about Berlin for a while.
The hopeless man Mary was dating when she met Jack flourished in her absence. He finished his PhD and started running triathlons – cut his wiry hair very short. How strange life is; how very variable we are. Funny to think their last contact was on the sofa in his basement flat, and that he is now engaged to a brilliant woman who hosts a podcast about gender equality in STEM. But Mary believes she could still turn his head. Not simply because she is better looking than his fiancée – which she is, it’s just a fact – but because although their connection was not very deep, it was intensely physical. Most of their time together was spent alone, nude, and when she looked at him, Mary saw no future, no past, nothing of substance, only that single moment. Each heartbeat at a time.
Was that yellow plant gorse? Do you get hawks around here? When do the clocks change? When is Easter this year? Is ossobuco beef or pork – do I like it? Did we water the plants? What is the capital of New Zealand? How did the Mughal Empire fall? They pose questions without requiring a response; sometimes it isn’t clear whether they get so far as to say things aloud. Their simpatico is borne through exposure, repetition. And the radio plays Coldplay, and Mary changes the station without Jack having to ask.
Jack is in casual, quarterly contact with three of his four previous girlfriends. Which isn’t a secret, exactly, though Mary doesn’t know about it, exactly, and if she ever were to ask, he has confidence he would tell her something approaching the truth. It’s not as if he’s keeping his hand in, exactly, but more that he is monitoring developments. He is a scientist, coolly observing his specimens; he has a clinical detachment about the whole thing. Because, Mary is the best of them. Witty. Easy going. She never sulks. And she is beautiful, in a small and fine way – in a way that will age well. She still looks the same as when they met, though Jack has gained two inches on the waist and is thinning at the temples.
Mary takes out a slim European novel, which she will stare at for fifteen minutes before complaining of motion sickness. She won’t bother trying to tell Jack about it – outline the characters, precis the plot. She won’t, God forbid, read out sections to him. The red polish on her fingernails is chipped; she wears three silver rings on the central finger of her right hand. A money spider picks its way across the steering wheel. There is a tightness in Jack’s throat – a strange and sombre pressure – which is a thing that happens intermittently and started six months ago when his cousin died. Mary is an extroverted introvert, and Jack the exact opposite. It is a sliver of important difference – a little spice in the soup – and the radio plays twelve seconds of static as they temporarily slip out of range.
Shortly after they met, they took a trip such as this one – Jack in the driver seat, Mary happily by his side – and the whole thing had been so easy, so entirely pleasant, that they long believed journeys showcased the best of them. That they rubbed along together to an almost embarrassing degree.
Mary swallows two aspirin, circles her temples with her thumbs. Sometimes, Jack wonders what would happen if he steered the car into a concrete wall, if he let his body fall from somewhere high, or if he placed a pillow over Mary’s sleeping face, exerted pressure. Which are all things he would not do, though sometimes, he does wonder. They have shared their tawdry mistakes, boundaries and kinks – have compiled an Encyclopaedia Brittanica of the other, starting with academic achievements, ailments and aversions, ending with the zoo animals that make them most sad. And the radio plays the song they agreed they would dance to at their wedding, though they also agreed there would never be a wedding, but if there were, this would be the song.
They put on mirrored sunglasses, share a granola bar, sticky with honey, far past its best. They are going to be late. They count red cars, yellow cars, tractors, lorries; remark on roadkill as it blurs in their periphery. Jack’s family keep taxidermy in their country home, play literal parlour games at Christmas. Mary does not speak to her parents – neither they nor Jack know she legally changed her name at twenty-two. The bikers have congregated at a rest spot, freed of helmets they are young and old, and universally masculine. Mary reaches over, pips the horn, and when she sees Jack’s face, she laughs. Five minutes later, Jack glides past a service station, with full awareness Mary said she would need to get out soon, to take a piss. They pass a field with the smallest of lambs. It rains for ten seconds, a scatter of water, and then sun again. A rainbow appears. And the radio plays Elton John, and they both know all the words.
Though the years have stacked up, there is little tangible holding them together. No property. No children. They have never even owned a fish. The car is registered in his name, the lease on their flat monthly rolling. Furniture, sure, but the sofa is losing its composition, and all the tables have stains. She never liked the rug he picked; he’d let her have the espresso machine, now the temperature gauge is on the blink. They’ve lost interest in the plants they bought – are instituting a regime of slow but undeniable neglect. They could pack it up in an afternoon, part at the doorway. So long. Farewell. His parents’ house has many rooms; though seemingly feckless with money, she has accrued a secret mass of high-interest savings.
Jack sneezes. Mary worries at a scab. Be-dump. Uh-oh. They look at each other, stock expressions of horror a-piece. She tells him to stop the car, but he says you’re not supposed to stop. She says stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, until he actually does. A hundred meters behind them a small, brown mound. Then she is out of the car, walking along the hard shoulder, and he has no choice but to follow. The pheasant, it turns out, is only someway dead. Jack, who cannot bear such confrontations, turns toward a shrubby area, admires the yellow flowers which may or may not be gorse. He doesn’t see Mary pick up the bird and tenderly wring its neck. When it is over, shared glances, and something new. Something revealing. And in the distance the radio plays, or it doesn’t, because in the excitement Jack can’t remember whether he turned it off.
Eloise Poole is a writer and researcher based in Manchester where she is studying for an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her short fiction has been published in Banshee, Short Fiction Journal, Lunate and elsewhere. She is working on her debut novel.