Read by Katy Darby
I leave work early, find the bus-stop and stand watching old ladies smoke and feeling jealous. I guess once you’re seventy-odd you got nothing to lose. The smell of cigarette smoke reminds me of Sam now, especially Marlboro Reds. The old lady I’m standing next to is smoking a Winston, but still, I think of him. Waiting, in the motel room. Smoking on the balcony, maybe, bourbon in hand. I don’t let him smoke in bed in case David smells it on me. Smart, huh?
Plattsburgh is a small town in Clinton County, north New York State, made up of strip malls and ranch-style new-builds: you may even have driven through it once. Plattsburgh achieves the geographically impossible by having no centre; just mile after mile of suburbs and outlets. If you choose to live here, it’s tacitly understood that something inside you has died and lies quietly desiccating, and it’s either your sex life or your soul. Every ranch-style home has a soccer mom, every mom has an SUV. Even if you’ve never been here, you’ve been here, you know?
Technically Plattsburgh’s a city, but us residents know better. It’s the place you stop when you can’t go any further. It’s the last place before you have to choose once and for all: America or Canada? North or South? David, my husband, is at home here, and I must admit that in a weird and grudging way, so am I. Neither of us likes making decisions.
*
The day I realised I had to find someone or something to stop me going insane was a Monday. David came home late from work. He kissed me dryly on the mouth, his moustache itching my lips, and asked me about dinner. I’d eaten hours back: his was cold in the refrigerator. I could hear him humming and whistling like a retarded bird as he clanked around in the kitchen, and then he started to sing. Our song, in fact, which he always, always gets wrong.
I admit the words aren’t the easiest to remember, but still, you’d think after 24 years he would have got them down. It used to be a joke between us, the way he’d make up half the lyrics and sing the rest wrong, but now it’s something else. Now I can’t bear to hear him do it: it drives me crazy, literally crazy; I have to leave the room. I vacuum the bedrooms even if they don’t need vacuuming, hide in the guest bathroom until it’s over. David does not – cannot know this (surely?). He still thinks it’s cute, or maybe he doesn’t think about it at all. Maybe he’s just completely, blissfully unaware of how his murdering that song is killing me by inches. Driving me into another man’s arms, just to hear somebody hum a different frickin’ tune.
*
The song is “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel. Like I say, not easy lyrics. It was playing the night we met, at our mutual friend Kacey’s birthday at a karaoke bar, back when karaoke was new, and I impressed everyone with my perfect knowledge of the words. I loved that song so much I could reel it off in my sleep:
"Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex,
JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say?"
Everybody applauded when I sat down, out of breath, and David looked at me with his head tilted that way he has, his brown eyes crinkled up like he was winking at me. Maybe he was. I raised my beer and he came over.
“That’s so messed-up,” he told me, “I never knew the words to the chorus before. I always heard them different.”
I laughed. “What part of ‘we didn’t start the fire’ did you not understand?” I asked. Close-up he was cuter, and younger, than I'd thought. I could listen to his stupid-ass mondegreens if it kept us talking.
A mondegreen is a misheard song-lyric, by the way. Like when Jimi Hendrix sings “excuse me while I kiss the sky” people always hear “kiss this guy”. It comes from a Scots ballad called “The Bonny Earl of Moray”, the last two lines of which are “They have slain the Earl of Moray/And Lady Mondegreen.” They didn’t really kill Lady Mondegreen, of course, because she doesn’t exist, except in our ears: they “laid him on the green”. But that’s where it comes from. Stick with me, it’s important. And someone who stubbornly clings to a mistake after being corrected (like David) is committing mumpsimus. Thanks, Wikipedia.
David grinned and sang,
“We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Said the worst attorney.”
I laughed aloud, it was so ridiculous. Everybody looked around at us squashed-up on the banquette, shouting into one another’s ears over Kacey’s massacred version of “True Colors”, and they knew before we did, that we were going to be together.
*
Sam likes hard rock and thrash metal: he has a voice like a corncrake. We met when my car broke down and he drove the recovery vehicle. He tried to overcharge me and I wouldn’t let him: he liked that. I don’t think he cared about my wedding ring: I don’t think he even noticed. He has a moustache, like David, but his sits better on his face, like it’s at home there, bedded in; on David it looks like a joke, a party favour, something you could just rip away. God knows why he grew it, but it freaks me out. Every time I see David out the corner of my eye these days, I panic for a second that he’s Sam.
I know I’m not coming across well. I apologise. Why am I cheating on my perfectly adequate husband, whose only crime is to mangle the words of the song we share? There’s more to it than that of course, there always is, but I don’t want to bore you, and the lyrics thing is what makes me maddest. He knows it’s wrong but he keeps on doing it because he doesn’t care. Look who’s talking, right? I’m aware of the parallels.
*
The bus is hot and sticky and stinky. I don’t enjoy sharing my space with other people unless I know them well or am going to sleep with them imminently, and that does not apply here. I plant my purse on the next-door seat like a protective charm and stare through the greasy toughened glass at the Dunkin Donuts and Taco Bells and tire-warehouses and carpet-showrooms until I reach my stop: Motel Malibu just off the interstate. Dumb name for a New York motel, right? Malibu, for Chrisssake! Why not just call it Motel Mars? At least the color would be right.
Motel Malibu is a dusty red two-storey U-shaped building enclosing a central parking court: it looks like something a kid with a lot of Lego and no imagination would build. There’s a balcony around the second floor boasting a view of Romero’s Macaroni Grill (which always sounded pretty disgusting to me) and, of course, the interstate. But that’s OK: Sam and me aren't there for the view.
Sometimes Sam brings a bottle of whiskey and a little coke and we do it while listening to Planet Rock turned up loud. Sometimes he’s in a mellow mood, or maybe not so flush, and he brings weed instead. We smoke it out the window at the back, the one that looks onto the flat Plattsburgh fields of brown and grey. I have to clean my teeth twice when I smoke, though, so David won't smell it. That's why I prefer coke: it makes me horny instead of sleepy, and it’s untraceable.
The problem with the Motel Malibu is that it’s a well-known place for people who don’t want to be seen together to be together. The parking lot is full of midrange sedans just like David’s, belonging to midrange men having midlife flings; this is why I take the bus. And the rooms either side of Sam’s and mine are usually occupied by couples doing exactly what we’re doing, only louder, weirder and sometimes a lot nastier. These Lego motels have pretty thin walls, and over three months we must've heard it all. “Baby” and “Daddy” in an incest-porn scenario so hoary it’s some kind of classic; Slave and Empress; Mr. and Mrs. Smith; even Smokey and the Bandit one time. Yeehah. Sam made the obvious homophobic joke about that one, but I let it pass. I don’t fuck him for his liberal views.
Sometimes these snatches of other folks’ love-lives are kind of a turn-on, sometimes they’re freaky and sometimes they’re just sad. The one time I arrived early I had to sit for an hour listening to some poor guy crying and pleading on the phone for his girlfriend to take him back. He was such a mess I could barely understand the words, but I knew that tone and it got right up under my breastbone and pulled down my heart.
“I shot you. I know I shot you,” he seemed to be saying, over and over. I damn near called the cops when I heard that. But after a few more minutes trying not to listen to the poor fuck I realised he was saying he’d shocked her. Now that’s a mondegreen for you. Electrically or emotionally I cannot say: maybe he came out to her or something, who knows? Eventually I couldn’t listen anymore: I turned up Planet Rock and lay on the bed in my stockings and Victoria’s Secret babydoll nightdress Sam liked. I jerked awake two hours later with his face buried in my crotch, and he started laughing. That’s why I like him. David would never do something like that, or laugh when I accidentally kicked him in the middle of it.
A little blow, a little Jim Beam and a high-energy fuck later, I lie twirling my fingers idly in the whorls of Sam's sweaty stomach hair and wondering how long I can keep this up before David finds out, and if he’ll leave me if he does. I think about David’s crappy mustache and feel a stab of tenderness. Here I am, in a dreary sleazy motel with a repair-truck driver and he’ll never know. I feel sorry for him and protective of him, like he was my kid. I'm not normally sentimental, but drifting through the flimsy next-door wall, I slowly realise, is our song.
You know the way music gets you all at once and completely, like vertigo through time? I never play that song at home even though I love it, because it sets David off. But here it is, Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” turned up to 11, and some cheating couple banging away to it like rabbits with their tails on fire. He’s grunt-gasping her name and she’s squeaking a little; her name is Kay or Lacey or Katie.
I remember how David said my name like a mantra the first time we made love, and after I looked him in the eye as I kissed him and said “I’m glad you you heard that right”.
I turn on my back abruptly to keep the sudden tears in my eyes, but eventually Sam feels me shaking and leans up on his elbow to look at me, his blond brows knit. Now the guy next door starts singing along.
“We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning
Said the worst attorney,”
And that’s when I stop crying, and start to laugh.
(c) Esther Cleverly, 2013
Esther Cleverly is a writer of short fiction and scripts. Her stage work has been performed at the Broadway Theatre, Barking, and short stories have been read at Liars' League London & Leeds, and are published or forthcoming in Vintage Script magazine and The Alarmist.
Katy Darby has appeared in over 30 stage productions, and won a Ronny Schwartz scholarship to the Oxford School of Drama. She’s also directed several London shows, including the Time Out Critic's Choice comedy Dancing Bears: a modest creature, she prefers being behind the camera but sometimes steps into the limelight.
Comments