May_11_It's_Not_About_The_Coathooks
Read by Kim Scopes
Marilyn felt like the type of woman whose husband was having an affair.
If he’s not having an affair, she thought, he should be. She closed the bedroom door and looked at the coat hooks hanging lop-sided on the back of the door. It meant she had to hang her robe outside the bedroom. It made her feel bad.
Martin would never have hung hooks like that. Martin was the Bank of England to Marilyn’s Leaning Tower of Pisa: he was as solid and as steady as one of his pieces of furniture, unwavering in the face of adversity, where she always seemed as if she might collapse. Although she’d only done it once and that was when they told her she was unlikely to need a nursery.
She was clumsy and heavy-handed, she dropped things, not deliberately; it was as if she’d forgotten she was holding them in the first place, her mind was already on to the next thing before she’d dealt with the present.
It made Martin frustrated. Not that he said anything. There were lots of things not to talk about, and not talking about being childless was their priority. There wasn’t much room left to not talk about anything else.
People liked Marilyn. Women liked her because she had a pretty face but she wasn’t thin. You could tell she had her own issues; it was comforting. Men liked her because they wanted to sleep with her; her perfumed, well-upholstered bosomy-ness meant that she’d had lots of boyfriends before Martin.
And women liked Martin: they liked his height, his big, carpenter’s hands and the fact he looked them in the eye when talking to them. It was as if Martin and Marilyn got together, each recognising in the other their appeal to the opposite sex, and not wanting anyone else to have it. Marilyn and Martin had been together ten years. They had been equals in the relationship; there was no dynamic, it had just worked.
Marilyn told people: ‘I’m an HSP. A highly sensitive person. Like Princess Diana.’
Marilyn was five foot and nearly ten stone. Named after her mother’s idol, not only did she not resemble Monroe, but she didn’t look especially sensitive either. She said it came out in ways you didn’t expect.
A patient said to her: ‘Why do I always feel worse after I’ve seen you, Marilyn?’ Then she knew she was doing her job properly. At least she made a regular living and she made it from her passion: other people’s problems.
This thing between Marilyn and Martin was what she called ‘silent rage.’ And there was the irony: for someone who loved to talk, when it came to Martin, Marilyn had lost the power of speech.
‘My partner won’t talk to me,’ said Marilyn’s client.
‘You need to get them to try’, stressed Marilyn, ‘you need to coax them into sharing their thoughts with you.’
She and Martin hadn’t had a normal, two-way conversation for several months, not that her clients needed to know that. If they clammed up in a session Marilyn had a unique way of getting them to open up: she just charged them more. It wasn’t helpful to them if they didn’t talk and it made her feel so much better. She didn’t suffer from compassion fatigue, but she did get bored when they didn’t talk.
If Marilyn couldn’t communicate with Martin, she could control other areas of her life. Two plums for breakfast, followed by glasses of watered-down coffee all day. She loathed the diluted drink, but it was like smoking or heroin: you could make yourself like it. She ate a meal with Martin every night and that was their way of showing normality. If they were eating, they didn’t need to talk. They’d sit at the breakfast bar in front of the TV, chewing, swallowing, pretending not to look at each other. Most of all, they were concentrating on not speaking, which required effort.
She sleep-ate. She denied it, but there was often dark chocolate on the pillow where her mouth had dribbled its silent thanks for another piece of the sweet stuff. It was on the fridge door, on her t-shirt and stuck around her mouth, like lipstick that had been kissed off, leaving its traces in a mucky stain.
The downstairs neighbours knew. Graham and Jake’s bedroom was directly under Marilyn’s kitchen and they could hear the fridge door opening and closing every night.
No wonder she hasn’t lost weight, they’d say, feeling smug, slim and safe in their own world, looking up at Marilyn’s kitchen as if it were the Devil’s pantry.
Where Marilyn used the living room as her consulting room, Martin had what would have been the nursery as his workshop. He also had a garage for the big stuff, but this was where he did his thinking and creating.
It’s full of crap! she’d scream silently to herself.
It’s the only place left that I can be myself, he’d reply, but not aloud.
Then, one day, Martin got a call.
‘Can you make me an armoire?’ said Angie, hoping, longing, pleading.‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I can.’
At least I think I can, he thought. He hadn’t made one before. Wardrobes, cupboards, sideboards, yes. Chairs, recliners, rocking chairs and even a chaise lounge, but not specifically an armoire. He would create the armoire and relish the challenge. Angie’s armoire was to be a one-doored, mirrored cupboard, painted an aged rose-pink to go with the rest of her off-white furniture.‘It needs to be elegant and antique-like, think Louis XIV’, Angie said to Martin.
Angie Blunt and Rufus Jefferson had got hold of Martin’s number by chance. He was advertised first in the listings as ‘A Carpenter’ and he lived in the same postcode. Why wouldn’t they choose him? They lived in that part of North London that was still just about affordable. It was neither Heath nor Hill, but it still had that vaguely edgy desirability, exuding the aura that this was a place where things happened, where the people led interesting, worthwhile lives, while the rest of town looked up at it in envy.‘I have to be here for my clients,’ Marilyn would say to Martin when he suggested moving somewhere less pretentious, south of the river, or further out of town. ‘If it’s good enough for Freud, it’s good enough for me.’
Angie, of the armoire, and her partner, RJ, had been together a few months and were very much in love. That’s what Angie told her friends. And her mother. She couldn’t bear the humiliation. If she admitted that there was a problem, then it made it real. She knew their relationship was in trouble, she’d lied about her age which made it hard to get a good night’s sleep. She didn’t want to propel him into an affair by letting him know she was nearer his parents’ age than his friends’.
RJ knew something was wrong with Angie because he’d hear her weeping when she thought he couldn’t hear her, or he’d find the broken crockery badly packed in margin-bottom: 0cm; line-height: 150%;">RJ said; ‘We need to talk about why you’re feeling so unhappy, because I don’t want you to hide what’s really going on with you. I can’t live with lies, Angie, I'm not playing games any more.’
Angie denied any histrionics.
‘I’m an actress!’ she’d say. ‘I’m method acting.’
Rufus knew she was lying about something; he thought she was having an affair. He thought she’d met another actor in her new play. Or maybe it's that tall carpenter, he’d think. I saw his hands.
As Martin started to build the armoire, something wonderful happened. He started to look forward to getting up in the morning. He looked forward to discussing the progress on the piece with Angie. He had spent more time talking to Angie about the armoire than he spoke to Marilyn over the last few days about anything that was going on with them.
‘M?’ said Martin. ‘I am really proud of the way the armoire is shaping up. Why don’t you come over and see it for yourself?’ he said, and he meant it.
Marilyn was moved. She also had another visit from the patient whose girlfriend wouldn’t talk to him and she could do with clearing her head.
Armoire? she thought as they drove the mile to the apartment in Martin’s little white van, what is an armoire anyway? Why can’t she call it a cupboard like everyone else?
‘They’re not here,’ Martin said as he unlocked the front door. ‘Angie’s got a matinee’.
Inside the apartment, it smelt of sawdust and varnish and paint and newness. Marilyn breathed deeply: it made her feel nostalgic for Martin, even though he was standing next to her. She couldn’t remember why they weren’t talking. Martin pulled opened the door of the armoire with a flourish as if he was revealing a hidden treasure.
‘Here it is M, tell me what you think, I want your honest opinion.’
It was beautiful, she had to admit: it was solid and curvaceous, powerfully feminine, pale, but not washed-out. It stood in the middle of the room proudly like a ship waiting to be cast off, glistening in its fresh, rosewood paint.
Martin had an idea. ‘Get inside’, he said quickly, as opened the door, and climbing in himself.
‘What are you talking about? Why would I want to do that?’ she asked.
‘Because we can. Because it’s fun’. Before she had time to think it through, she let him pull her inside next to him. Martin took her hand as they stood inside the cool darkness of the armoire.
‘I feel weird,’ she whispered.
And then there was a sequence of events that could only happen in real life and not in fiction. There was a flurry of footsteps as Angie ran into the room. She stood in front of the armoire, roaring with fury. She’d seen the door close rapidly and she took this as proof that RJ already had another woman and she was in there.
‘Why are you in my armoire? Get out! I know you’re having an affair with my boyfriend!’
Marilyn stared at her in panic as RJ ran into the room, pulling open the armoire.
‘Marilyn?’ he said,‘Why are you in my bedroom?’, recognising Marilyn all too well, as she was his therapist. Angie looked at him in disbelief and then back at Marilyn, as she screamed at RJ,
‘Is this what happens when I come home early?’
Angie and RJ’s voices rose in argument as Marilyn quietly pulled the door closed.
‘Now I’ve finally got them talking!’ she said.
Martin put his arm around her shoulders, giving her a tentative hug.
‘I’m glad, M, I’d do anything to make things right again’, he whispered.
‘About those coat-hooks?’ she said.
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It's not about the coat hooks by Jo Hopkins was read by Kim Scopes at the Liars' League Pride & Prejudice event on Tuesday 10 May 2011 at The Phoenix, Cavendish Square, London.
Jo Hopkins is a communications professional who has been writing short stories for a few years. She has been published in Jackie magazine and has a BA in English Literature. She is currently working on an anthology of short stories and is studying creative writing at City University. It’s not about the coat hooks is her first story to be performed by the Liars’ League.
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