The Adulterants Read online

  “Wahey!” he said and took the bottle from his wife and drank.

  I slipped out of bed sideways and stood where the ceiling of the room slanted down. I had to crouch slightly, which was a useful position for me. Lee crawled over the bed into the warm patch where I had been and kissed his wife. His shirt rode up. We were not the kind of friendship group who valued muscles, which made his commitment to them all the more remarkable. He kissed Marie and reached under the covers between her legs. Then he came over to where I was crouching and put his hand toward my face, and I thought he might hit me so I winced. He just dragged the wet side of his finger along my upper lip.

  I slid along the wall, my back hunched over, mouth-breathing. I understood that to take in the smell would be to receive Marie’s private secretions. The line would be long gone if I inhaled through my nose.

  Lee reached down and prodded the lump in the crotch of my trousers. He pressed it like a doorbell. “Ding-dong!” he said.

  If Garthene were here.

  “Ding-dong!” He poked my crotch-lump then laughed.

  Marie was watching herself in the mirror.

  I maneuvered along the built-in wardrobe toward the door. In all likelihood I was absorbing tiny Marie particles anyway, becoming minutely contaminated, so I wiped my upper lip with my sleeve. Lee saw that and his jaw hardened. I thought he was going to hit me, which he did. The first was in the mouth and although he punched in a way that didn’t seem especially powerful—because Lee was standing a little far back, he had to take two steps as he swung, had to carry his fist across the room—he still connected and my mouth filled with the taste of coins. Then it made sense that Lee, having felt, I think justifiably, that the first punch had not been satisfying, took a wide stance, set his feet, bent his knees, and—with his wife behind him saying something along the lines of “Oh, come on,” as though his behavior were nothing more than a little impolite, like hogging the binoculars at the opera—had another go. I believe the phrase is I saw it coming from last week. Time slowed or, to be more accurate, it gained texture. We retain more detail about traumatic events. No surprise that those few seconds between the first punch and the second have come to stand in for probably three months of my thirties. That I had never been punched in the face before seemed faintly ridiculous. How could I claim full maturity without ever having jumped through that life hoop? There were the obvious feelings you’d expect— pain, shock, fear that my average looks could not carry off a characterful nose—but also pride that I no longer held the burden of innocence, this virgin face, and relief, too, at being damaged, because that was realistic, that was something to build on, and so I hoped for minor disfigurement, not anything massive but a cute little scimitar-shaped blue-white ridge of scar tissue working with the shape of my cheekbone, something to mark my arrival in adulthood, and I remember thinking I could have dodged the second punch, could have ducked or weaved so that he would have hit the mirror, which would have cracked, and he would have been left looking at a fractured vision of his wife and himself, sliced into thirds by a knife so sharp they could not feel the blade pass through and it might have been the kind of metaphor that can save a marriage—seeing himself with bleeding knuckles, Marie trapped in a web of shattered glass—and things might have ended differently, but he connected sweetly, and in that moment before I blacked out, I knew there must have been great satisfaction in finding my left eye socket, which I should say was a tremendous home, shape-wise, for the adult male fist.

  If you have ever walked in public covered in blood you will know it is a wonderful feeling. I drank from the bottle of rum and texted my wife in the bluegrass style: Walkin’ the streets / taste o’ blood in my mouth / on my way to see my wo-man.

  I entered Homerton Hospital with the bottle in my sock. In the busy waiting room, there was a young couple crying and holding hands on the easy-wipe chairs. He was so tall and she so tiny I couldn’t help feeling they had got together not from any profound attraction so much as an instinct for the perverse. Everyone else was sitting politely with their avoidable injuries, waiting for a free dose of medium-grade healthcare, completely unaware that outcomes go way downhill on the weekend.

  “Head wounds,” I said, stepping up to the reception desk, “always look worse than they are.”

  “Name, please?”

  I gave her my details, knowing, because Garthene had told me, that now I was registered with the receptionist a communal file would be created with notes on my condition (query: drunk?) and if her colleagues recognized my name, they might contact her and, if she found me in A&E, I would have to explain myself in public, which would invoke her terrifying professional voice. I knew that in order to give my wife a fair and nuanced picture of why I was bleeding from the face, I would need to speak to her alone, deploy the full range of irony, theater, special pleading. That meant getting out of A&E and visiting her ward.

  At the edge of the room, I located an ethanol gel dispenser. Garthene had taught me the correct way to clean one’s hands—concentrating on the tips of fingers, not the palms—and I felt this motion lent me authority. I moved toward the double doors that led into the hospital proper, pretending to take an interest in the painting hanging nearby. Local artists donated their work, this one a sunny acrylic of the Mare Street bus depot. There was a clear sense the artist had enjoyed creating it, which I found embarrassing. In the reflection in the plastic glass, my bloody lip and half-closed eye brought a needed sense of conflict to the work.

  “Omar Badji . . . Carla Montemaggiore.” Nurses kept calling unusual names.

  As the receptionists turned to look toward a sharp cry of agony from the woman in the mismatched couple, I took my chance—pushing through the rubber-edged doors into the corridor beyond, into the hospital smell of bleach and potatoes. Many parts of the building, I knew, were empty at this time, and security understaffed. A few weeks ago they had found students on temazepam jellies riding tricycles through the Diabetes Center. I walked with purpose over the pale linoleum, finishing off the rum, following the signs to the intensive care unit. I know it’s not a competition, but I like to tell people my wife works on the scariest ward. Heart failures, pneumonias, road accidents, suicide attempts. ICU makes A&E look like a fucking wellness spa is the sort of thing I say. Once the bottle of rum was empty, I dumped it in a red pedal bin marked Offensive Waste.

  When I got to ICU, I looked through the strip of reinforced glass. There were two nurses at a station in the middle of the darkened ward, facing each other, like a dinner date. I buzzed the intercom and positioned myself so the camera would see only the good half of my face, the unswollen zone.

  “Who’s that?” the nurse whispered.

  “It’s Ray. Garthene’s husband.”

  “Oh, Ray. The man of the moment. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  “A spontaneous act of romance,” I said.

  “Aw, young love,” the nurse said.

  “I’m nearly thirty-four,” I said.

  “Aw, middle-aged love,” she said. “But you know she’s on her sleep break.”

  “Darn,” I said. “I’ll just wait.”

  “That’s sweet,” the nurse said, sounding impressed, then, presumably talking to her colleague: “He’ll wait.”

  I went down the corridor and stood outside the staff coffee room, where Garthene and her colleagues took naps. I put my ear to the door but could hear nothing. It was bad form to disturb her, but it felt vital to deliver the news now while the wounds were still bleeding. I ran my tongue around the hatch of split flesh inside my mouth. Everything in there seemed massive. Since I probably still had some residual Marie microbes on my upper lip, I used another ethanol gel dispenser and smeared a little in the space where my moustache would grow, if I could grow one. Inhaling through my nose, I enjoyed the light-headedness, and while that feeling was with me gripped the coffee room’s door handle. I made a point of turning it fully so that the bolt did not clip the escutcheon. I was careful in that
loud way of drunk people trying to be quiet. I slipped through narrowly, closed the door, then stood in the dark and the warmth, listening to the sound of breathing, the spooky low hoot of my wife’s congested sinuses. There was the scent of bad coffee and hot shoes and, deeper than that, sick people’s night sweats and particulates being exhaled, death gusts swirling the room.

  As I was waiting for my eyes to adjust, a phone shone in the darkness. It was Garthene’s, vibrating silently. I had recommended she keep the handset’s microwave radiation away from our unborn child, but it was right beside her. It up-lit her bump. I saw a backlog of texts. There was my message in the bluegrass style and then three from Lee: need to speak to you / i’m a fuckup / please call xxx. In the phone’s diffuse blue glow, I could see she was on her side on a low sofa, had a pillow under her head and another between her thighs.

  I wanted to wake Garthene in a peaceful way. If her body produced adrenaline it would travel down the umbilical cord and create panic in the fetus. Stressed mothers produce stressed babies. Some pregnant women avoid current affairs altogether, delete the newspapers from their phones. Happily, Garthene and I had always maintained a high level of political disengagement.

  I got out my phone and rang my wife, at the risk of increasing local radiation. One of those moral compromises for which parenthood is famous. Her phone lit up, shuffled beside her on the sofa cushion, and she shifted in her sleep. I could just make out two other nurses, one man, one woman, lying across padded chairs on either side of the room. The man, I noticed, was very tall, unable to stretch out on the seats, resting his head on his hands. It occurred to me that he had given his pillow to my wife and I felt a mixture of gratefulness and rage. It seemed important to know whether his pillow was the one under her head or the one between her legs. I rang her again and watched her shoulders stiffen, her fingers contract. She was swimming up through layers of consciousness.

  They had these sleep breaks every night shift and if she always clamped his pillow between her thighs, let it marinate there, soaking up the gonadotropins, then did that not cross a line? I tried to become outraged. If she was having an affair, then that made my indiscretion with Marie laughably slight. To think I came here to apologize when in fact you are the evil one was a pleasant sentence, and I let it bob around behind my eyes a moment before calling her number again.

  On the sixth ring, I watched Garthene reach for the phone and look at it, her eyes half closed, puffy and luminous in the screen light. It was a unique experience to see her unguarded expression while receiving my call at three in the morning. She squinted at the phone as it rang two more times before placing it gently on the floor, face down. Perhaps it was not even my child, I thought. Perhaps it was the love child of my wife and her colleague.

  “Garthene,” I whispered. “Garthene.”

  •

  Throughout our twenties, nobody in our friendship group had been willing to admit they wanted to procreate. It was a shameful, secret pursuit, like skiing. From the age of eighteen to thirty-five, Garthene had taken the combined pill. We used to joke that she had all her unused eggs backed up inside her, and if she ever did come off the pill they’d all come barrelling down at once with a rumbling sound, like when you release the balls on a pub pool table. Then Michael and Kamara’s twins broke the deadlock. The first day we met them they dozed on our laps, pinned us to our chairs with happiness. Garthene, I think I want one. She said she needed more time. She still felt too young. I made the point that, in the eyes of modern medicine, a thirty-five-year-old mother is officially geriatric. And anyway, there was a nine-month built-in waiting time, not to mention the whole conception palaver, which could easily take half a decade, particularly given my lifestyle. All those years with my laptop on my actual lap. Hot baths. Tight trousers. Everything pointed toward a devastated sperm count. Instinctively, I just did not feel fertile. I got myself tested. It turned out that I had a low sperm count but excellent morphology and motility. Quality, not quantity. Garthene came off the pill, not because we were going to try for a baby straightaway but just to check that she too had a healthy reproductive system. Baby steps toward baby steps. We bought a fertility-tracking app called Ovulator. Each morning it asked Garthene whether her cervical mucous resembled water, raw egg white, or school glue. This was a new intimacy, knowing my wife’s inner texture, updated in real time. It messaged us with :-) on a fertile day and :-( on the infertile ones. Garthene disapproved of the regressive suggestion that people without children are not happy. I disapproved as well, while privately fearing it true. We had unprotected sex only on the sad days and, just once, very drunk on duty-free schnapps, on a happy day, after which Garthene was immediately pregnant. One and done. Garthene took the news badly. Since drinking alcohol was inadvisable, she went for long walks alone, out across the marshes, gloveless even though it was January, coming back with her hands turned to claws, eyes streaming. For a week, she slept only in two-hour blocks as though road-testing future sleep deprivation. I told her that I would absolutely respect and support her decision, whether she wished to go ahead with the pregnancy or terminate it, and, with this display of loving maturity, I was building a case for myself as a father.

  •

  Sitting alone beside the nurses’ station in ICU, I held an antiseptic gauze to my mouth and waited for Garthene. She had broken hospital protocol to let me sit here outside visiting hours. It felt good to be an exception. The ward was dark and calm, just the sound of soft footsteps and ventilators steadily wheezing, the occasional bleat of an IV alarm. It had the atmosphere of a long-haul night flight—low light, interrupted sleep and a psychotic trust in machines. A sign on the wall said Shhhh because noise, particularly human voices, can be stressful in the drugged and paranoid half-dreams of patients on the border of life and death. It occurred to me only now that there were few places less appropriate for my in-depth confession.

  I spotted the tall, pillow-lending colleague as he emerged from behind a partition. I tried to catch his eye but he walked politely around me, head lowered, as one might avoid being given a free newspaper. Whether he was silenced by immense guilt or simply busy caring for the very sick was impossible to say.

  Eventually, a blue curtain slid aside and Garthene appeared. She sat at the desk across from me, mouthed the words just wait, then started typing with her index fingers. I used this time to observe her in her natural habitat, keeping records, saving lives. In fact, I did not observe so much as gaze upon her. That made her a little awkward and she ran her hand through her hair. I loved that she was already elegantly silvering. Little glints like when you open the cutlery drawer. Her brown hair was so thick that it disguised the rectangularity of her skull beneath. Garthene’s head, at a guess, had the dimensions of a child’s shoebox. I adored this about her and looked forward to our retirement when her hair’s thinning would reveal further nuances. The fact that I would never guess the exact shape was one of the ways in which our marriage would stay fresh. To think my younger self thought your skull resembled a child’s shoebox when now, I see, it much more closely looks like a deflated plastic football that a child has been sitting on.

  “Stop looking at me like that,” she whispered, without taking her eyes off the screen.

  “It’s just I love you so much,” I said, and even I could tell how poorly I was able to control the volume of my voice.

  She stopped typing.

  I rolled my lips inside my mouth.

  She found an empty bed on one of the bays. The fresh sheets still showed the grid pattern where they’d been recently folded. In ICU, a newly vacated bed means either someone’s got better or died, health or death. I tried to discern which one this was. Health, I decided, based on nothing. Health.

  She pulled a curtain around us. “Don’t speak,” she said.

  “You’re probably wondering what happened to my face.”

  “I’m really not.”

  “I was punched in it for a very good reason.”

&nbs
p; She sprayed my mouth with something that tasted of batteries.

  “Just tell me in the morning,” she said, her mouth at my ear.

  She put on latex gloves and pulled a metal tray from a cupboard. I watched her pick up a device that resembled a pair of pliers and with the pair of pliers pick up a sterile needle that resembled a fishing hook. She looked like a woman ready to take vengeance on a husband. It was just a shame she did not yet know that I deserved it.

  She switched on a bright surgical lamp and hovered it above me. I lay back on the bed, mouth open, enjoying the way the light gave her a halo. As she made the first stitch, I suffered almost no pain, drunk on love and also drunk on alcohol. It was an intimate thing, to feel her at work, tugging tight the dissolvable sutures. I wanted her to sew me up forever. Close the wound, then close my eyes, ears, and so on, all nine orifices, make me whole again. Instead she sent me home.

  I woke on the sofa, which I had elected not to fold out into a bed, as a way to establish a tone of further penitence. I got up and made Garthene a cup of decaffeinated tea the color she likes it, wet sand. Pushing open the door to our bedroom, I let the hot drink lead. In my face I tried to communicate somber regret but my mouth was huge and strange and I could not say for sure what shape it made.

  I saw straight away that Garthene was in bed with another man and, in that moment, learned something rather disappointing about myself. Though I was holding a cup of freshly boiled tea that I could have easily let fall onto his side of the bed—which is to say my side—thus causing him life-changing burns, I did not do that, because I was not a man of impulse or passion. Instead I put the tea down without spillage because maybe there was a good reason for the muscular man in my bed, which is when I realized it was Lee.