Dead Lovely (6 page)

I don’t know when my Catholicism left me, but it did. Soon after, I stopped lying to Mum and Dad about going to mass, and eventually – just to make sure they knew I was really lapsed – I got pregnant to some fellow in a Tenerife toilet.

What I realise now is that Catholic guilt gave me the best sex of my life. I had at least five years of refusing to go the whole way with my devoted boyfriend. What I would do now to have someone like him work on me day in, day out, work and work and work! I will never find such attention,
motivation
and dedication again. And I will never feel such scintillating sinful guilt. When I think of that boy – his name was Stewart – I think of someone with incredible knuckles.

After I told my folks that not only did I not know what Father O’Flaherty said in his sermon last Sunday, but that Father O’Flaherty was probably sleeping with his housekeeper, and that I had no intention of going to mass ever again, I went through something of a moral revolution. I put guilt about sex in a box, wrapped it up, and threw it away. Instead of going to mass, I decided to do nice things on a Sunday, like bike-riding and shopping – and I banged away at pretty much anything, ever-skilled at not getting too close. I decided that I should not worry about being respected. Sex was sex was good and proper and I figured any guy who thought a girl should be respectable was a chauvinistic waste of space anyway.

As we walked from our idyllic lunch retreat towards Loch Lomond, I wondered if my moral
revolution
had been ill advised, if I’d gotten it all wrong. I was a single mother. I hadn’t had a long-term relationship since I’d split up with Stewart at nineteen, never having properly consummated our
relationship.
I was lonely as all hell. Would things have been different if I’d stayed respectable?

Sarah had known for a long time that she and Kyle needed to get away, though her idea of ‘getting away’ was more along the lines of an all-inclusive
bubble-wrapped
five-star resort with hundreds of people in similar clothes. Her favourite holiday memory was of Dubai, where she and Kyle had been allocated their own private section of the swimming pool to lounge in all day. She had plenty of time of an evening to buff and fake-tan, and the risk of nail breakage was negligible.

Sarah’s therapist had suggested that she let Kyle take control a little more, but when Kyle told her he’d organised a walking trip in Scotland she’d wanted to throttle him. She was not the sporty type, and had spent most of her childhood making up excuses to get out of PE. She’d never camped in her life and worried for many nights before they left
about the logistics of her ablutions. Usually, she packed two suitcases for a break of any length, but Kyle had confiscated her hair-straightening tongs, electric toothbrush, Clarins cleanser, toner, night moisturiser and day moisturiser. He’d whittled her luggage down to one rucksack.

But walking in the sunshine through the quaint villages south of Loch Lomond, she decided that maybe this was exactly the right holiday for them. As Kyle and Krissie laughed about their old friends, she decided it probably was. After everything they had all been through, the fresh air and exercise and beauty of the trek was just what they needed. On that first day, Sarah was surprised to discover she felt happy, and went for seven hours without making a silent prayer.

Sarah hadn’t lost her faith like Krissie had. Every Sunday she went to mass and prayed for things to happen or change or be better. She’d then say sorry for anything she might have done that made things not happen or not change or not be better. She truly believed that Mary was a virgin, and that God and Jesus had an elusive relative called the Holy Ghost. And she believed if she prayed hard enough
everything
would work out. She would be fulfilled.

Each Sunday after mass, Sarah would go home to Kyle feeling positive and enlightened. She was part of something big and great and this big and great thing would look after her. She’d cuddle up to Kyle
on the sofa and touch his collar seductively and try not to think about making a baby. Then she’d
accidentally
initiate sex, and spend the following week not thinking about her period, and the week after that not thinking about her period, and when she was officially overdue fifteen days after the sexual encounter, she would not think about her period so much that she felt ill with a sickly combination of powerlessness and hope. Of course, her period came. It always did.

It’s when an overwhelming disappointment like this happens that Catholicism really kicks in. It lets you be angry and unreasonable because as long as you pray, as long as you seek forgiveness, any kind of behaviour is okay. So Sarah would spend at least a week being angry and unreasonable – her prayers became expletive-filled thrashings; her seduction techniques were more like self-flagellations, using Kyle as her whipping rod. In such circumstances, Kyle started to find it difficult to produce the seed his wife craved.

Sarah knew Kyle was a good man, the first good man she’d known properly, and she’d stopped
worrying
about his lack of ambition. She’d stopped being angry at him for their childlessness. It wasn’t his fault, apparently.

But at some point, her love for Kyle had started to wane. It hadn’t happened all of a sudden. Her love faded a little bit more with each piece of bad news –
whether it was delivered by a period, a failed fostering attempt, or an unchanged position on the adoption waiting list. Their love for each other was evaporating. They both knew it. And they also both knew that one more piece of bad news would leave them both dry.

A red sun was setting over Loch Lomond when they arrived at the campsite, which was nestled between the loch and the hills and was full to the brim with muddy, badly-dressed, heavy-drinking walkers.

Krissie, exhausted but proud of having walked so far, dropped her rucksack on the shore with a
satisfied
sigh. She noticed Matt setting up his red tent a hundred metres away, and nodded so slightly she wondered if he noticed, so did it again less slightly, then wished she hadn’t as it was obvious he’d noticed both (desperate) nods.

Sarah had a shower in the camp bathrooms. Her feet were red and her legs were aching and her new rucksack had cut into her shoulders, so a long hot shower felt fantastic. After that she dried her hair with the compact hair dryer she’d smuggled into her rucksack when Kyle wasn’t looking.

Meanwhile, Kyle and Krissie got the tents up, no hitches at all, and collected wood together to start a fire. By the time Sarah came back from the
bathroom,
they were sipping wine in its glow.

‘You did not bring your hairdryer!’ laughed Krissie.

‘It’s not easy, looking as good as I do,’ said Sarah, smiling as Kyle handed her a mug of wine.

Sipping his wine, Kyle wondered how it was easy for Krissie to look so bloody good, having spent no time on ablutions at all. She was covered in sweat and dirt from the wood and her hair was stuck to her head and her knee was scratched from a fall on the bank, but she looked gorgeous.

As Kyle moved on to his third mug of wine, he stared at Krissie. What with the relationship with Sarah having gone so awry, he had not had sex for months, had not so much as masturbated, and his balls were heavy with the burden of it. He had never talked to anyone about this because he found it mortifying.

As he sat looking at Krissie over the fire, he remembered having sex with Sarah and this calmed him a bit, because in the latter stages it had been truly dreadful. On one occasion when Sarah had been taking fertility tablets of some sort, he’d just given an elderly patient a prescription when his pager went off. ‘There you go Mrs Beattie, take that to Boots,’ he said, escorting her to reception.

‘Tickityboots?’ asked Mrs Beattie.

‘Take it to Boots. Boots!’

‘What about them?’ Mrs Beattie asked.

Kyle handed the befuddled Mrs Beattie over to his receptionist and read the message from Sarah: ‘Here, now!’

When Kyle arrived ten minutes later, Sarah was lying on the bed with her T-shirt on, trousers off, and underpants shoved to the side. She couldn’t even be bothered to take them off. She swiped some KY onto herself and then said hi. Most guys might have had trouble maintaining energy in this scenario, but Kyle nuzzled in for the duration, imagining himself to be with anyone else.

That was one of the last times they’d tried to
conceive,
and sex had seemed kind of sad since then.

Kyle stopped looking at Krissie and turned to Sarah. As she sipped her wine, years of tension and worry seemed to have been replaced by bright cheeks and enthusiasm. Kyle caught a brief glimpse of the woman he fell in love with, the woman who didn’t call him an idiot, who didn’t leave lists of jobs for him to complete by a certain date. She was smiling, and her whole face changed with it, came to life. Kyle felt a slight flutter, seeing her fresh and out of context, and wondered for a moment if he could return to a previous time, when her smile was the only thing he needed.

I rang Matt while Sarah, Kyle and I were playing ‘face up’. We were pissed after three bottles of wine, and we dared each other to face up to our worst fears.

I’m a big fearty when it comes to bloody injuries so Kyle dared me to cut his hand so that it bled enough to paint one small tissue red. He told me not to worry, he was a doctor, and he’d stop me if I went too far. Handing me his Swiss army knife, he then held out his hand. My sweat glands got to work immediately, as they always have, as I took his hand in mine. Warm sweat poured from my palm onto his. He pushed the blade of the knife tightly against his flesh. It was never going to work and I started to feel dizzy. I hesitated and looked Kyle in the eye. While I was doing this, he moved his left thumb under my hand affectionately and a sudden surge of adrenalin made me shut my eyes and cut into him.

‘Jesus!’ yelled Kyle, recoiling with pain.

I watched the blood spurt from his hand …

‘Krissie! Krissie! Kriss! Hello! Are you okay?’ Sarah’s face was blurry as it came into view. ‘You fainted.’

She helped me sit up and it took a few moments before I fully regained consciousness and
remembered
what had happened. Kyle held up his hand, which was fine, and dangled a bloodstained tissue in front of me with a huge smile.

‘It is SO your turn!’ I said to Kyle.

Kyle had always been an arachnophobe. He cut his gap year in Australia short after an incident with a hairy huntsman, and jumped when a spider so much as showed itself on television. I always thought this girly attribute was rather fetching. I liked it when men were vulnerable, when the macho facade melted, which is probably why I liked it on top, and why I secretly had a fantasy about watching two men doing it together.

Anyway, I set about finding the largest spider in the vicinity. It took a while, but eventually I spotted one about five centimetres across, sitting happily between two branches of a rowan tree. He turned to flee from me, but I managed to scoop him up. Kyle closed his eyes and held out his hand, but as soon as he felt a tickle on his palm, he catapulted backwards and squealed like a baby. I wonder if the spider made
it back to the rowan tree, or if he became some kind of spider refugee.

Sarah was next. Her greatest fear was being
confined
in small spaces, so we put her in her sleeping bag, did up the zip, and told her to stay there for ten minutes.

‘Don’t forget!’ she said, as the zip closed in around her.

That was when I rang Matt. He’d climbed his hill, and was just about asleep in his tent. ‘Get up and get over here,’ I said.

As I hung up, I saw the photo I’d taken of Robbie in his buggy, sleeping soundly by the duck pond, and I rang Mum.

Robbie was fine, they were all fine, Mum told me. I shouldn’t worry about a thing.

Kyle poured me another wine, and we chatted for a while before realising that fifteen minutes had gone by and we had left Sarah in her sleeping bag.

‘Shit! Sarah!’ I said, and turned towards the sleeping bag. It was motionless.

‘Sarah!’ I said loudly.

No movement or response at all. I slowly unzipped the bag, and opened it out. There, white as a ghost, eyes closed, and still as death itself, was Sarah.

‘Sarah?’

Nothing.

I shook her.

‘Sarah!’

Not a breath, not one sign of life.

‘Kyle! She’s not … moving.’

Kyle dropped his drink and moved closer. Our faces moved towards her until we were about one centimetre from her. What had we done? Had we killed her?

Way worse than my fear of blood was my fear of doing something really bad, of hurting someone unintentionally. I would have my terrible actions on my conscience forever. I would have to go to jail, or worse, not go to jail because I’d not confessed or not been caught, and so I would have to just live with the guilt all by myself in a dark smoky room with eerily vacant eyes and bedraggled hair …

‘AAGGHH!’

Sarah’s scream sent us both flying into the air. When we picked ourselves up from the ground, she laughed so hard that we could only stop her by tossing her into the loch. When she surfaced with an angry face we knew we’d overstepped the mark. Nervousness overcame Kyle and he held out his hand to help her out. Sarah took it, and then hauled him in with all her might.

What the hell, I thought, and jumped in too for a splashy, giggly, freezing swim.

We were still splashing about when Matt arrived. It was an unseasonably mild night, but not mild enough to wear next to nothing, which is what Matt
wore. He’d taken off his yellow T-shirt that said
I AM NOT GAY!
in black italic lettering and walked along the jetty beside us, stood over me with a smile, and then dived in.

I’d promised myself earlier that day that I must try to be respectable and that I must never again sleep with a man on the first date, but as Matt swam over and pushed my head under the water playfully, I decided that holidays and Matts must surely be an exception.

We dried our clothes by the fire and drank beer. Sarah and Kyle snuggled up in the firelight and seemed so relaxed and in love that I hardly
recognised
them.

It was nice to see them like this, but after five minutes or so I gave Sarah long significant stares, which she didn’t seem to notice. I started getting a bit annoyed that they were hanging around for so long chattering away, and then, when Sarah asked how Robbie was, I nearly died. Why did she want to stuff it up for me when Matt and I were obviously well suited?

To my shame, I clarified the Robbie comment to Matt with: ‘He’s my budgie. Mum had to take him to the vet.’

After the long uncomfortable silence that
followed
I had to say something.

‘I’m off to bed.’ I turned to Matt. ‘You coming?’

He seemed surprised, and then delighted as I took his hand and walked him towards my tent.