Read by Louisa Gummer
By my age, all the good men are either married or gay. Luckily for me, I'm married to a good man. Unluckily for him, he's married to me.
On Mondays, Andrea has gymnastics. On Tuesdays, Josh has under-nines football. On Wednesdays both of them have music lessons (Andrea plays the flute, indifferently; Josh is learning guitar). Friday's our family night; the kids watch DVDs, we order a takeaway from the organic pizza restaurant or the ethical Chinese or the authentic Indian, and Michael and I have sex, unless he's too tired. I'm never too tired; bored, yes, never tired. There's nothing more important to children than a stable home; there's nothing more crucial to a stable home than a happy marriage, and there's nothing more essential to a happy marriage than a healthy sex-life.
If you would like to read the rest of this story, please check out Lovers' Lies, the Arachne Press anthology in which it, and many other sexy and lovable stories from the League archives, appears.
On Thursdays, I have a healthy sex-life. All happy marriages have a secret, and this is mine.
I first met Ron in the car-park of Basingstoke Leisure Centre in March last year, at about 7.45pm. I'd just hustled Andrea and her Bratz sportsbag into her badminton lesson, and I was leaning on the Passat underneath a burnt-out streetlight, smoking my weekly cigarette and staring into the suburban shadows. The sun backlit the bombastic early-Nineties business architecture of Basingstoke Ring Road; my smoke curled grey into the tungsten-tinged darkness. The passerby cars streaked towards something better, bigger, far away at the end of wherever they were going.
I'd been watching a lot of road-movies and reading Cormac MacCarthy for my book-group, and I felt a sort of wistful affinity for the industrial parks, the speeding, meowing cars, the empty concrete and tarmac. But I was too busy to be romantic; I was too tired to be sad.
A man's dark silhouette strode towards me. I thought he might want change for the parking meter. I couldn't see his face, but I could tell by his walk that he wasn't begging, or mugging. Slim pickings either way in Basingstoke on a chilly spring night. He walked like a man with a question. He stopped in front of me: lean, not tall; well looked-after. Thirty-five or forty, cropped hair, clean-shaven, clean. He smelled minty-fresh.
“Do you have a light?” Ron asked. His accent was Londonish; I don't watch enough TV to know which part. I nodded. I use matches because it's less suspicious. I collect them from hotels and bars; that's my excuse for Michael, anyway. He brings them back for me from his trips abroad. Sweet.
I gave Ron the matches. He grinned like he had a punchline.
“Do you have a cigarette too?”
Smiling, he was almost good-looking. Black wet eyes like a puppy. Thin lips, strong teeth.
“Does Silk Cut count?” I wiggled the battered ten-pack out of my coat-pocket. Underneath I wore my second-worst leggings and a cranberry-stained t-shirt, but he wasn't to know. A long coat covers a multitude of sins.
“It'll have to,” he said, and took the cigarette from me and lit up. We smoked in silence until I finished mine and threw it over the steel barrier into the road. It sparked once on the tarmac and lay glowing and dying for a while. I reached for my gum and breath-spray.
“Your kid in badminton class?” he asked me.
“Yeah. Andrea.”
“Blonde ponytail and Bratz bag?”
“That's her."
“She looks like you.”
Was that a compliment? I didn't know. I think both my children are beautiful, but who doesn't?
“And yours?”
“Nicky.”
Nicky was short with bright-blue eyes and a borderline hyperactivity problem. On the one occasion I'd sat on the sidelines to watch the game (Christ, badminton is dull) he'd stood there vibrating with impatience as he watched the slo-mo plummet of the shuttlecock towards the ground, clearly eager to have the whole damn thing over with. I knew how he felt.
“Oh,” I said. “Doesn't his mum usually bring him?”
“Yeah,” said Ron, “but she's on honeymoon. Besides, she says she wants me to get more involved.”
I didn't discover his name until three weeks later. Parents are defined by their children; Michael became Daddy and I became Mummy a long time ago, even to each other. All I knew was the man I was sleeping with was Nicky's Dad. And all Andrea knew was that Nicky was her new carpool-buddy.
*
One of us drank and the other drove; we'd take turns. Ron and Nicky picked Andrea and me up in his leather-scented Rover, we'd offload the kids at seven and drive to the big empty car-park behind the closed-down discount-furniture warehouse.
I'd knock back the vodka I'd brought and we'd smoke my secret Silk Cuts in the car with the aircon on. We'd talk about whatever came into our heads; favourite bands, childhood injuries, the best brand of washing-machine, and we'd have sex, or sometimes just kiss and fumble. “Making out”, the Americans call it; “getting off” is the unlovely English version. He had a soft, smooth body tangled with dark hair, and his hands were always warm.
He was a software engineer and was learning about Chinese cookery and medicine in evening classes on Fridays and weekends when he didn't have Nicky. He wanted to qualify as a practitioner and retire from IT, but his maintenance payments to Nicky's mother were, he said, “crippling”. Listening to the bitterness in his voice every time he said her name, I felt a shudder of gladness that Michael and I had such a happy marriage. I couldn't imagine feeling that way about somebody; not even somebody who'd betrayed me. Sometimes we just lay together in the back seat, curled like hamsters or sprawled like kittens. I laid my head on his stomach and listened to the beat of his blood. We were always back before the class finished, to greet the kids as they tumbled out, sweaty and pink.
The one time they had a fire-drill we said we'd been at McDonald's. We had to take Andrea and Nicky for a burger after, and watch them eat at the fluorescing formica tables as our own stomachs roiled and mewed with hunger.
“Food is like life,” Ron used to say, “it's about balance.”
I said I didn't see much balance in most Chinese food, even from the ethical takeaway, just a lot of MSG. He sighed and smiled and said that was different.
“One day I'll cook you a real meal, with all five flavours. In China, food is medicine. Eat well, live well.”
I imagined him at his desk, forking up a Pret salad or a canteen lasagne. I imagined him at home: the lonely walls of his bachelor semi, the only decorated room Nicky's, chaotic with toys. The hardwearing beige carpet still smelling of newness.
It was his night for drinking and my night at the wheel. He ducked his head, catching the tip of my little finger between his lips, enveloping it with his hot mouth, sucking. I felt a nauseating twinge of arousal.
“We have to get back,” I said, though we still had half-an-hour. I'd started to worry that Michael could smell Ron on me. I showered as soon as I got home. Peppermint for my guilty smoky mouth, Original Source tea-tree and mint for my guilty sweaty body. Happiness is so important. I'd do anything to keep it.
“Mmm,” Ron said, around my pinkie. “Salty.”
I pulled finger back and sucked it. It tasted of nothing; maybe Ron had licked all the salt off.
“That's one of the five flavours,” Ron told me. “Bitter, sweet, salty, hot and sour.”
“Which one do you taste of?” I asked, although I knew well enough.
“All five,” he said. “I'm a very balanced person.” The way he said it, I was pretty sure he'd used that line before on someone, somewhere.
“What are you going to cook me first?” I asked. His eyes were dark smears of shadow in the grainy half-light.
“Hmm,” he said. “Bitter tastes help you to see things more clearly. Spicy is cleansing. Salty intensifies and enhances. But I'll cook you sweet-and-sour.”
I made a face. “Why?”
“Sour is for passion; blood and vigour,” said Ron. “Sweet's a tonic; it raises your morale. You're both.”
“We have to get back,” I said, and turned the key in the ignition, but in the darkness I was smiling.
*
Next week, Ron was working late and asked me to pick Nicky up from school rather than his place. I'd never been inside. Nicky spent the journey chattering to Andrea about Dad's new enthusiasm for cooking, all the meals he was going to make which would be even better than takeaway. My stomach turned slow lazy circles as I drove. I wanted to eat Ron's food, taste his flavours. I imagined dinner at his, making love in his plain white bachelor-bed, but I knew it would have to be foil containers in the back of the car. I didn't care. I couldn't wait.
*
The week after that was Ron's turn to drive again. I didn't drink so as not to spoil the flavour of his food, but he hadn't brought any, and he looked confused when I mentioned it.
“Where's your vodka?” he said. “It's your night, isn't it?”
I drove to the corner shop, bought some miniatures and drank them in silence while Ron asked me what was wrong. I thought of Michael at home, and how he always compliments my cooking, even though Mum goes to Iceland more often than he'll ever know.
*
The next week Ron was ill. I picked Nicky up from school.
“What's wrong with your Dad?” I asked him in the rearview. His Transformer was fighting Andrea's Brat and he didn't look up.
“I hope it isn't catching,” I said, more loudly.
He shrugged. “Daddy's tummy's upset,” he said. So much for a balanced diet.
I stood outside the car while the kids batted their shuttlecocks, smoking Silk Cuts between wads of Wrigley's, thinking about the meal Ron would make me. Despite the mint and the smoke my mouth tasted hot and salty, like blood.
Ron's Rover eased into the space opposite. He got out and looked across at me with a vague, puzzled expression, like he was startled to see me here.
“I felt better,” he said. “Thought I'd pick up Nicky. Save you the round-trip.”
“Thanks,” I said. I thought about crossing into the darkness and kissing him, but then the swing-doors opened and the squeal and clomp of the kids spilled out of the sports-hall towards us, like an incoming tide.
Andrea skipped up, her ponytail bouncing.
“Hello Mummy!” she said. “I won two games! I'm starving!”
“So am I,” I said. I hadn't eaten all day; I'd wanted to be hungry for Ron. The nicotine was starting to make my head spin.
“Hi Dad!” said Nicky, across the car-park. “You better now? What's for dinner?”
“Leftovers,” said Ron, slinging Nicky's bag in the back.
“What kind of leftovers?”
“Chinese.”
I don't think he knew I'd heard, because he waved as they drove away, as if to say same time next week. Like everything was OK, in perfect balance.
Bitterness helps you see more clearly. I stopped in a lay-by on the way home and called Michael. I had a throat-tightening terror that he wouldn't pick up, but he answered right away, a note of surprise in his voice. Nobody calls us in the evenings, unless it's a wrong number or an emergency.
“I thought we'd get takeaway tonight, love,” I said, and my voice wasn't even shaking. “Save you cooking. My treat.”
Andrea yipped with excitement, pummelling the back of my seat. “What sort of takeaway, Mummy?”
“Pizza,” I said, and started the car.
Takeaway by Alison Willis was read by Louisa Gummer at the Liars’ League Sweet & Sour event at The Phoenix, Cavendish Sq., London on Tuesday 9 March 2010
Alison Willis has been writing stories for a long while, and getting them published for a considerably shorter one. She has attended evening classes in fiction-writing and dreams one day of doing an MA: in the mean time, she writes mostly in her lunchbreaks.
Louisa Gummer trained at Mountview. TV includes EastEnders (BBC1); The Sitcom Trials (ITV), and various commercials and independent films. Theatre includes Girls’ Night (UK No1 Tour); Listen to My Heart (Brockley Jack); and The Sitcom Trials (Edinburgh 2004 & Tour). Louisa is also an experienced voice-over artist.
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