Read by Beverley Longhurst
The flat came furnished with the bare essentials and the sofa was hardly even that. It was short and firm and sat in the corner. It took up only a small portion of the wall, leaving the rest exposed – an ocean of white, apart from squares of pale darkness where pictures must have hung before. There was a flimsy layer of padding covering the sofa and as one began to sit down, the illusion of softness would immediately give way to stiff rejection, a refusal to bend.
It began one nondescript evening, after his wife had stood in front of the stove, one bare foot on the other, stirring a pot of sauce, and he had waited, shuffling through the letters on the counter, touching their sharp corners, assuring himself that things had happened that day in other parts of the world. They ate their spaghetti and then he did the dishes, while she padded soundlessly into the living room – she was not a small woman, but she moved through the world quietly, as if to apologize for it.
He washed the remaining bubbles of suds down the drain and scrubbed at the rusty metal of the sink. He glanced over through the arched doorway into the living room and saw his wife on the ground, shifting her body around, trying to find a position in which she could be comfortable.
“Will you please just sit on the sofa?” His voice was sharp, and it was only the sound of it that made him realize he felt angry.
“You know I hate it,” she said. “I can’t stretch out up there.” Her eyes were the brown of a mule.
“Put your feet on a chair,” he said.
“No.” She went back to her book.
He felt a swelling in his throat, a small hysteria that rose from his chest and into his face. He needed her to sit on the sofa. He composed himself. She would. He had practice moving her, a power that he had never thought about or asked for. But to want things from another person was to throw them off their course. To simply stand an inch closer to her would pull her into a different orbit.
He went and sat behind her. He began massaging her shoulders. She shrugged him off. Her first impulse was always this when he touched her. It was unclear if they had enjoyed this dynamic in a distant past or if it was some ingrained female behavior, that a woman needed to be convinced. He slid onto the floor to face her and noticed, not for the first time, how the skin around her eyes had become thin and now revealed a darkness beneath the surface. It unsettled him to look at her so closely. To think of her was different – when he pictured her face, it was a pleasant approximation, an averaging of all of the times she had smiled or cried, all the times she had looked at him. That seemed more correct than this frame of her face in a single moment. He removed her shoes. “Sit up there,” he said.
She sighed, but put her book on the floor and moved herself up. The couch emitted its usual plastic groan, its injection of judgement. There she sat, straight-backed, and he began to massage her feet, digging his thumbs into the arch of her left foot and then her right. He expected her to relax, to melt into the sofa, but she continued to look at him as if she was waiting for something else to happen. It was a look he recognized, one she had been giving him for years. With her leg in his hand, he lifted it slightly and felt the weight of it. That was when it occurred to him. He was already kneeling, and he put his hands on the ground. Before she had a chance to protest, he pushed his body up under her legs, so they rested on his back.
“What are you doing?” She laughed. “Stop it.”
“Are you comfortable now?”
He tried to turn his head to look at her face but she had shifted to the side and was out of sight. In a way, he preferred it. He imagined her smile fading, her hesitation as she pulled on the hair at the back of her neck.
“This is ridiculous,” she said. “I feel ridiculous.”
“I’m serious – just let me do this for a while.”
“Fine. I really don’t understand, but fine,” she said and she leaned over and picked up her book. She crossed one foot over the other, pushing harder into his back. The carpet was thin and he could feel the floorboards beneath it with his knees and hands. It made him feel solid. He heard a page turn and a hostile sniff. After only a few minutes, his body began to ache. He focused on the reassuring weight of her legs and tried to make himself perfectly still.
They passed a half hour in this way, before his wife insisted that he get up.
“You’re very silly,” she said as she took his hand and led him upstairs to bed. That night, she slept fitted into him, her soft, regular breath warming the crook of his arm.
The following evening, there was a formality to the easy silence they normally shared. She prodded a baked potato with her fork while asking him how work was, without looking up. After dinner, he watched her carefully as she went into the living room. Again, she sat on the floor with her book. But when he came toward her, she glanced up, and whether it was or not, he took this for a small admission of interest. He felt a tenuous thrill, that they might be drifting into a place they had not been. He got on his hands and knees without asking. She protested but less forcefully than before and soon her legs were resting on his back. At first she was careful not to move too much, but he could tell when she had relaxed, and she rolled around from time to time and jiggled her foot. His knees soon began to throb with pain and he made a note to stop in the shop the next day after work and look for a small pad to kneel on. Then he stared at the grains in the floorboards beyond the carpet and felt as though there was a pattern to them that he could almost understand.
Subsequent evenings continued in this manner. They never spoke of it – it seemed important that they did not speak. Each night, the time he spent in this position grew longer. She would read or crochet or talk on the phone with her sister, the idea that she was using her husband as a footrest seeming to fade in her mind. One night, as if she had forgotten entirely, she placed her tea saucer on his back while she went to the toilet. It was hot, but not unbearably so, and it pleased him to be able to remain so solid and still that nothing fell to the ground. He began to regard the experience as an imposed meditation. He would concentrate on the white buzz of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the small noises that the woman he’d spent fifteen years of his life with made when she felt unobserved, and he would feel a calm he was certain he had never known.
When the evenings were over and they went upstairs, she became shy, as though she was unprepared for the distance they had cultivated to close. She would shut the bathroom door, while she changed into her pyjamas and brushed her teeth and removed her makeup. And while he prepared to sleep, she would lie on her half of the bed with her reading glasses on the end of her nose, deliberately studying her book until the light of his bedside lamp was off and he was under the covers. But after she turned her lamp off too, she moved toward him in the darkness.
On the final evening he spent as a footstool, after they had assumed their usual positions and enjoyed an hour of silence, the telephone rang and she answered it.
“Hi, Mum,” his wife said pleasantly. “What?” She sat up, putting her feet on the ground. “Is he all right?” A few moments of silence. “Why didn’t you tell me before? It’s not serious? It sounds serious. It sounds pretty fucking serious. All right, all right, all right. Please call me back. Do you promise to call me back?”
She hung up the phone. He remained on all fours, not wanting to move. He concentrated on keeping his back very straight and waited to feel the heaviness of her feet on him again.
“My dad had a heart attack.” She was not crying. “He’s going to be ok. They said he’s going to be fine.”
Still he did not move. He breathed regularly, aware of the bristles of the carpet digging into his palms. The droning of the space heater in the corner seemed to grow into a roar. Finally he turned his head toward her.
“He’s going to be ok?” he said.
“You aren’t supposed to speak to me.” Her face was passive but when she blinked it was as though a curtain had been drawn. The sharp crash of a shutter coming down. She stood and left the room, her footfalls sending vibrations up his arms. And when he followed her upstairs, she was already in bed, close to the edge, facing the wall.
The next evening when he came home from work, his wife was not in the kitchen. He found her in the living room, sitting on the sofa and gazing out of the large window onto the green of the park across the road. Her legs rested on a piece of furniture. A footstool, upholstered with shiny burgundy fabric. It stood on four stained, wooden legs that were carved to look like feline paws. She rose and went to greet him, pressing her lips into his and holding onto him tightly. When she let go, she made a small gesture towards the footstool.
“I took care of it,” she said. And then she went into the kitchen to prepare their dinner.
The world had changed. He stood, and looked at the footstool, feeling disappointment and relief, the prospect of what he desired most gone. The sun was setting and the shadow it cast onto the carpet developed an increasingly hard edge. Finally he sat down.
(c) Sunny Teich, May 2015
SunnyTeich has an engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania and works as an artist in the visual effects industry, blowing fake things up with fake explosives. In her free time, she thinks and reads and writes as much as possible.
Beverley Longhurst (left) trained at Webber Douglas. She has worked in a range of theatre including All My Sons, Remembrance of Things Past and Mourning Becomes Electra (National Theatre), Way Upstream (Derby Playhouse), Shadow Language (Theatre 503). She has also worked in TV including the BBC sketch show Little Miss Jocelyn, and film. Beverley is a narrator for the RNIB.
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