Love Your Enemies (9 page)

He frowned. ‘How come?’

She finished her mouthful and curled some more chow mein on to her fork, ‘I don’t gain weight any more. It’s connected to something called symbiosis.’

He grimaced. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means that I don’t gain weight any more but I can eat what I like.’

The flame on the candle flickered for a moment as the door of the restaurant opened. His eyes focused on the flame for a second, then returned to her face. ‘How is that possible?’

She sighed and put down her knife and fork and then leaned forward on her elbows and whispered, ‘I’ve got a tapeworm.’

He wasn’t sure that he’d heard her correctly. ‘What?’

She smiled as though what she was telling him caused her infinite joy. ‘I’ve got a tapeworm, Sean, it’s symbiosis. We both depend on each other to carry on.’

Sean shook his head in disbelief. ‘What do you mean, Shelly? Is this a joke or something?’

Worms disgusted him. He had seen part of a nature programme on television a few weeks before which had featured something about worms that had made him almost physically sick. He had turned it over straight away.

Shelly returned to her meal, unperturbed. After a mouthful she said, ‘I got him by eating raw mincemeat. It took a while and obviously I had to specify certain parts of the animal, you know, stomach, offal. I actually told the butcher that I wanted meat minced for my dog. As I said though, it took several attempts.’

Sean’s lip curled in disgust. ‘You ate raw dog meat?’

She shook her head. ‘No, low quality meat, not from a can. Lots of animals get tapeworms. Obviously though there are many different varieties. It’s very complicated because I think they reproduce in lots of different ways. I went to great lengths to get mine.’

Sean still couldn’t be sure that Shelly wasn’t joking. He said, ‘What do you call it? Trevor?’

She laughed. It was the first time that she had laughed properly all evening. ‘I don’t have a formal name for him – I think he’s asexual. I haven’t read all that much about them.’

The waiter returned to the table to make sure that their meal was all right. Shelly answered, smiling, ‘It’s absolutely delicious, thank you.’ Sean just continued to stare at her face. Once the waiter had moved away he picked up his fork and tried to eat one of the lightly battered prawn balls on his plate.
As he chewed Shelly said, ‘You see, the tapeworm consumes my undigested food so that it doesn’t have the chance to turn into fat. That’s my theory anyway. He then uses the food to grow and reproduce himself. He sort of develops another segment which divides away from his body after a certain period. This segment, I’m slightly confused on this point though, this segment then either stays in the stomach, hooking on to a prime place, or it’s flushed out with your body fluids.’

Sean said nothing. He was pushing prawn and batter around his mouth but he couldn’t swallow. Shelly took this silence as an indication of interest so she added, ‘I’m glad you’re not a biologist, Sean, because I’m explaining this very badly.’

Sean carried on chewing. On his forehead were slight beads of perspiration. He picked up his napkin and blotted them. Shelly took a sip of wine and said, ‘I have to be careful about alcohol. I sometimes think that it must be bad for him so I don’t drink very much any more. That’s something else good that he’s brought to my life.’

Sean pushed his mouthful of well-chewed food into his cheek and said, ‘What happens when it grows, Shelly?’

She shrugged and picked up her knife and fork again, ‘I’m not absolutely sure. In general I think they just get bigger and bigger until they fill up all your tubes. I think they can grow to an enormous size. They just grow bigger and bigger and reproduce.’

Sean shuddered. ‘And what happens then? I’m sure they’re harmful.’

Suddenly an image flashed into his mind, an image that he had seen accompanied by the voice of David Attenborough. There had been a snail on a leaf. As it ate the leaf it had consumed some sort of worm the size of a pin head. The worm lived and grew inside the snail, created a home for itself in this new snail-stomach world. After several weeks the maggot had grown rather large. It became visible inside one of the
snail’s two feelers. It grew and grew until eventually it filled the feeler entirely. After a while it looked as though, instead of a feeler sticking out of the snail’s head, it had a large, independent, squirming maggot whose movements were curtailed only by a thin layer of the snail’s translucent skin. The maggot moved, squelched, writhed under the snail’s skin, eating, growing.

Several days later the snail’s other feeler began to fatten up, to grow pale, to move against its own will as another maggot appeared in this feeler. Sean hadn’t been able to tell whether this was the same maggot or a different one. They certainly looked like two fully formed and independent creatures. Eventually the snail had no feelers left, just two white maggots sticking out of the top of its head, living on its juices, eating it while it carried on moving and living and breathing. The maggots shuddered and vibrated inside the snail’s feelers, its eyes, prisoners in its skin, eating him.

Sean had yelped his horror and had snatched for the remote control to switch it off. He couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards though. He was sure that the snail must’ve died, but after how long? He felt like gagging.

Shelly had almost completed her meal. She was saying, ‘Sean, eat something. It’s such a waste.’

He spat out his masticated mouthful into a napkin. She said, ‘I haven’t been so happy in a long time, Sean. The only tiny way that I notice the worm is when I go to the toilet. Often when I go now a segment of the worm comes out in my urine.’

One of Sean’s main rules of love was that women didn’t go to the toilet; or if they went they did different things there than men. He refused to have his idealism shattered. Shelly had always been very circumspect about her personal habits in the past. She had always called the toilet the Little Girls’ Room. When she said it he liked to imagine that women kept dolls and horses and perfume and lipstick in the Little Girls’
Room, that they popped in there for a bit of fun and then came out again, beautiful, perfect and squeaky clean. He was a firm believer in the use of feminine deodorants.

Shelly was saying, ‘I think the segment is just part of the worm that is dead because when I’ve studied it it doesn’t move or anything. It’s not like an independent life form …’

Sean couldn’t believe that Shelly was saying these things; he interrupted, ‘This is all a tiny bit intimate, Shelly.’

She shrugged, ‘I don’t know. I think I’ve really changed in that respect over the past few months. I used to be embarrassed about my body before and the things that it does naturally. My tapeworm has changed all that. It’s like I’m now involved in a very natural and obvious relationship. It’s like I can see at last how I relate to the world as a creature; to trees and grass and cows and pigs, and the moon’s cycles and the sea. We all are alive in a similar way. It’s all connected and we all depend on each other, in a sort of chain of existence.’

As she spoke the waiter returned to their table and took away their plates. Shelly smiled at him as he completed this task and said, ‘I’d love an Irish coffee.’

He nodded and looked at Sean. Sean said, ‘Just a plain coffee for me, please.’

Shelly straightened the table cloth and picked up a few crumbs to put in the ashtray. Sean felt inside his jacket pocket and took out a couple of cigarettes. He offered Shelly one. She shook her head. ‘I’ve given up.’ He raised his eyebrows then stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. After inhaling he said, ‘Shelly, you’ve got to get rid of that worm.’

She smiled. ‘No.’

He exhaled vigorously. ‘Well, what’s going to happen when it grows to an enormous size? I’m sure you eat enough to treble its size every other day.’

She ignored this insult and said, ‘I’m going to keep this one for ten months then get rid of it. Afterwards I’ll get another
small one and start from scratch all over again. That means it’ll never get out of control.’

The waiter brought them their coffees. Shelly thanked him and took a sip of the hot, sweet, creamy liquid. Sean was momentarily quiet so she said, ‘I’m going to have to read up on the whole thing because I’m not one hundred per cent sure how they reproduce. If the little segments that come out in my urine are baby worms then maybe I’ll have to try and swallow one of those.’ She paused and then added, ‘They aren’t very big but they’ve got hooks on them. When I pee they hang on to the lip of my body with their hooks and I have to unhook them myself. It’s quite simple when you know how.’

Sean’s expression was full of an incredulous horror. She smiled. ‘It’s all right, Sean, it doesn’t hurt and it doesn’t bother me.’

Sean’s mind was now turning over very rapidly. He was thinking of the sex they had indulged in an hour or so before. He couldn’t stop himself; he said, ‘I couldn’t have caught one earlier, could I?’

She frowned. ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

Then she smiled. ‘I think you would’ve seen it if it had hooked on to the end of your prick.’ She started to laugh. ‘Imagine if the entire worm had hooked itself on, all eleven or twelve inches of it. You’d have become rather confused when you went to the bathroom!’

She spluttered with laughter as she sipped her coffee.

Sean was stony-faced. He said, ‘You don’t give a shit about me any more, do you? About my feelings in all of this?’

She stopped laughing and shrugged. ‘You’ve never given a shit about me in the past, Sean. In fact I think that I can honestly say that I have had more help and support from my tapeworm over the past five months than you have given me in the last four years.’ As she said this she tapped her stomach with her left hand and then took a swig of her Irish coffee.

Sean didn’t know whether he wanted to live with her any more, whether he loved her, but he was damn sure that he wasn’t going to be compared to her tapeworm and come out of this comparison at a disadvantage. He said, ‘That thing is eating you up inside. It’s a parasite.’

She nodded. ‘Yes it is, and the two of you have a whole lot in common. Unfortunately, you didn’t improve my self-image like this tapeworm has. It needs me. You never needed me. It’s helped me. You never helped me.’

She finished her coffee and he stubbed out his cigarette. She started to put her jacket on. ‘I’ve got a new direction in my life now, Sean. I’ve learned that I can survive without you, that I can be attractive and desirable and funny and interesting without needing to have you around to tell me what I am or what I can be.’

He shook his head. ‘You’ve got a real problem, Shelly.’

She stood up. ‘No, you have, Sean. I’m leaving now and you can pay the bill.’

As she left the restaurant she winked at the waiter.

Anthony Bland stared at the assembled company with his rather murky, pink-tinged, morose eyes and said miserably, ‘I’ve put on two stone since the split. Sarah always used to call this part of me’ – he patted his significant gut with tender regretfulness – ‘her waistline. She’d say, “Anthony, it’s my waistline too. I’ve fought to keep you in trim. I feel as though I own that part of your body. I’ve looked after it for so long.”’ He shuddered, and then sniffed mournfully.

Hetty Thompson unconsciously tensed her buttocks and pushed her hips forward. This small gesture had been adapted into her day-to-day life by her Holistix teacher, who said that it helped to mould the body into a more beautiful shape. Now she did it, almost without thought, whenever she was forced to stand still for more than thirty or forty seconds; in shopping queues, doing the washing-up, cutting up vegetables in the kitchen. As she made this tiny gesture she said to Anthony, ‘We’re sick of this, Ant.’ (Most of Sarah’s friends abbreviated Anthony’s name to ‘Ant’. He had secretly always hated it. It made him feel as though they simply couldn’t be bothered to expend more than half a lungful of air on pronouncing his name, as though he just wasn’t important enough.) She continued, ‘We know that this is none of our business, but the four of us couldn’t bear to stand back and let this farce continue any longer. Please Ant, you’re only managing to hurt yourself. It isn’t dignified.’

As she finished speaking she glanced over at her husband, who was standing to her right looking rather stern. He nodded. ‘Hetty’s right, Ant. You’ve got to get on with your own life. Sarah’s behaved badly, but so have you. Life is full of difficult
situations and terrible decisions. We’ve all had our share of them …’

Anthony was sitting uncomfortably on a small apricot chaise longue. He wasn’t lying on it, but was perched upright, both feet on the floor, at the leg end. The colour of the room – a paler apricot to the furniture – reflected on to his face and made his pasty features look like an expensive almond tart from Selfridges Food Hall. His face seemed round and sticky, slightly grainy.

He shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose with a large pale finger and thumb. When he spoke, his voice sounded muffled. ‘I suppose you’ve all come to get Silver.’

Nobody replied. He sighed. ‘He’s in the kitchen.’

The four visitors exchanged significant glances and then turned towards the doorway. Hetty said quietly, ‘This is for the best, Ant. You know it makes sense.’

Anthony could feel a warm tickling in his nose, a now familiar sensation which felt like tears were being wept inside his brain, hot, internal tears which were searching frantically for all available exit routes. He knew it would end in ugliness.

He listened as the small group walked without speaking down the hallway and towards the kitchen door. When he heard the door being opened, he sprang stealthily to his feet and tip-toed after his unsuspecting predecessors in his soft leather moccasins. As he made his silent way down the hallway, he listened out for what was being said. First of all he heard Hetty’s high and slightly nasal intonations saying, ‘I can’t see him. He must be inside his indoor kennel. Get down, Michael and have a look.’ He heard Michael’s stiff hip-bones clicking as he bent down on his hands and knees, then Michael’s voice. ‘There’s a lot of hair in there. I think that’s him at the back. Come on, Silver, come on!’

The group began calling and cooing and making silly kissing noises to try and encourage the dog to come out. In
fact, the dog was not in the kennel at all, only a white, synthetic-fur rug.

Anthony restrained his keen impulse to keep looking in at them, and instead quickly slammed the door shut and turned the key, which he had furtively moved to the other side of the door at the start of their visit. He grinned to himself and rubbed his hands together.

Hetty was the first to react. Hearing the loud slamming noise and the key turning, she ran to the back door of the kitchen – which led into Anthony’s very large and grand back garden – and tried to get it open. It appeared to have been effectively blockaded from the outside. Gasping with horror she turned and ran towards the door that Anthony had just locked, and tried the handle. All means of exit had been thoroughly curtailed.

Michael – still on his knees and looking slightly ridiculous – cautioned Hetty against trying the windows. He said, ‘Remember, Sarah had the house windows alarmed after the break-in last summer. Let’s not cause a scene, it could be embarrassing. Humour him.’

Anthony heard these words of reason and shook his head disapprovingly. As he made his way back down the hallway and towards the large white box by the front door that housed the alarm mechanism he muttered under his breath, ‘Michael Pillow; always was the brains of the bunch.’

He opened the box, and felt around in his pocket for a tissue. He was a tissue man, never had time for handkerchiefs. He located a large man-sized blue tissue, slightly crumpled, and ripped it into two big pieces, then moulded them carefully and placed one piece in either ear. When he had completed this process he looked rather like a fancy fish with impressive, sprouty, decorative blue gill-shields sticking out on either side of his head. After finishing this task, he reached into the box and set off the alarm. Despite his makeshift earplugs, the high volume of noise made him wince. Nevertheless, he closed the box and marched resolutely towards the front door.

Outside in her white Mercedes, Sarah was sitting staring keenly out of her open window. She frowned when she heard the alarm go off, then let out a furious and unladylike grunt when she saw Anthony emerging from the house, ears stoppered and tissues waving on either side of his head. As he drew closer, she locked the doors and pressed the switch to wind up her window. Anthony broke into a trot to try and impede this process, and as he increased speed his bulk shuddered like a big, bold jelly in a bag. He stuck his hand into the top of the window and then screamed as the pane of glass continued to rise and then to violently crush his fingers. This short scream caused a flicker of joy to cross Sarah’s now somewhat disgruntled visage. Unfortunately, the scream also triggered the temperamental mechanism in Anthony’s brain which controlled the regular flow of blood around his anatomy. This switch turned on to nose-bleed mode and the blood poured forth from Anthony’s unsuspecting nostrils like a fountain of bright red ink, interspersed with the occasional darker, blacker clot.

Sarah screwed her face up fastidiously. She shouted, ‘Get away from my car, Anthony. Don’t bleed on my car!’

From inside the car her voice sounded round and hollow, as though it came from underwater. Anthony, his hand still caught and bruising inside Sarah’s window, shook his head. The blood spun from side to side in tiny spurts like the end of a troublesome garden hose. He said, ‘I didn’t have these nose-bleeds before, you know. The doctor said that they are stress-related. The living-room carpet will never be the same, nor the counterpane on our bed either.’

Sarah smiled grimly. ‘The counterpane on
your
bed, Anthony, not mine.’

He launched his bulk on to the front of Sarah’s car (his freedom of movement somewhat restricted by his trapped hand), and rubbed his streaming nose vigorously around on the large white bonnet, bloodying it, marking it, painting it
like a crazed expressionist with his nose-brush. Sarah screamed shrilly and pressed the dashboard button responsible for cleaning the front windows. Ineffective soapy jets shot skywards from the base of the windscreen and disappeared uselessly over the roof of the car. When Anthony had finished, the effect created on the bonnet was of a particularly gruesome hit and run accident.

At this moment, alerted by the alarm, the police arrived. A young-looking officer glared at Sarah and tapped in a businesslike way at the window on the passenger side. She smiled hollowly but professionally and reached over to open it. The policeman peered inside at her. ‘Mrs Bland, have you violated the court order again? If so …’ She shook her head, and her sweet blonde bob lurched around her heart-shaped face like a heavy drinker at closing time. Her face was demure, but her skin had been gravelly since adolescence. She always made-up very heavily. She said, ‘I haven’t been near the house.’

Anthony, at this stage, had sunk to his knees on the road next to the car, his hand still trapped. He howled, ‘Officer, I want to file another assault charge. Please encourage her to free my fingers.’

Sarah obliged without being asked again. Anthony clambered to his feet and pointed melodramatically towards the house with a blood-slicked finger, ‘I’ve rounded up some human detritus for you, officer. Pet-stealers, malcontents all.’

The police officer glanced regretfully at his watch. He’d bargained on an early lunch.

In the back garden, Silver started barking like a hound from hell.

Anthony Bland was the fortunate owner of one of Britain’s première dog-food companies. Sarah Bland was a petcare and grooming specialist. Her main initial involvement with Anthony (before matrimony) was as his dog’s hairdresser and chiropodist. She owned an exclusive grooming parlour in
Chelsea called Paws for Thought. Her speciality was Afghans, which she bred and showed all over the country. Early on in their relationship Sarah and Anthony had developed an exceptionally fine and exclusive dog shampoo together, which was soon to be sold across the country in pet shops and large supermarket chains.

Together they had worked to make Silver’s Scraps the bestselling and most desirable high-quality canine food in the western hemisphere. Silver, Anthony’s Afghan, nurtured and plucked and preened and directed by Sarah (she was to publicity what wax is to a candle) was a household name, was, in fact, Sarah’s bread and butter in reputation terms. Although Silver was Anthony’s dog, Sarah had dedicated the six years of their marriage to cutting his toenails and brushing his hair. He was her motto, her talisman, her mascot. He was to Sarah what a tin is to a can of beans, whereas Anthony was (to all intents and purposes) what an excess of hormones are to an adolescent; intrinsic but irritating.

Sarah wanted to put Silver’s great marketing paw on the label of their joint shampoo venture. She believed that Anthony’s success was her success too, but Anthony (rather selfishly) had insisted on dog food exclusivity. He said, ‘Silver is my dog when all is said and done, Sarah. I sometimes feel as though all this fuss and attention gets on his nerves. He’s just an amateur in this game, not one of your professional pampered pets. Use one of your own dogs instead.’

Sarah was convinced that Silver loved the limelight, and that Anthony didn’t care about the shampoo because the initial idea had been her own. She kept saying, ‘Why won’t you commit yourself properly to this project, Anthony? Everybody knows that a dog must look good both inside and out to be truly successful. Cosmetic factors are important. I need Silver’s face to make a success of this, not just me, we both do. This is a joint venture after all.’ Anthony would close the subject by taking Silver out for a long walk.

A firm basis of their marriage had always been competitive shows of affection towards the dog. If one of them bought him a collar from Macy’s, the other would buy him a jewel-encrusted pooper-scooper. The dog became a scapegoat, and somewhere along the line, in their generous displays, they forgot what it was like to be generous towards each other; they forgot what it was like to love each other. Sarah left the matrimonial home as a gesture of defiance. She didn’t return.

The Annual International Afghan Appreciation Society’s Summer Ball was to take place that Saturday night. This occasion was of great significance to Sarah in career terms because she had been chosen as guest of honour and was to receive an award (rumour had it, to be presented by someone in indirect contact with the Onassis blood-line) for her services over the years to the Afghan as a breed. An in-depth photo session – ‘The Silver/Sarah Story’ – with
Hello
magazine was also in the offing.

She needed Silver. She needed Silver at her side to open the ceremony – they had enclosed a small dog-biscuit shaped invitation with Silver’s name on it along with her own – but if she couldn’t have Silver (increasingly it looked that way), then she had to ensure that Anthony didn’t try and sabotage her by some ruse, as yet known only to himself. She couldn’t bear the idea of him bringing Silver along to the ceremony. It would look bad, especially if he hadn’t groomed him properly. For Anthony it meant nothing, but she had so much on the line.

As she left the police station Sarah swallowed back a wave of nausea. She was so desperate that she had even contemplated an attempted (and temporary) reunion during the weekend so that she might make use of Silver for the duration of the ball, but she knew that Anthony was too wise, too possessive, too paranoid. It was a big problem.

Anthony sat in the back garden brushing Silver’s long, golden hair and musing silently on the turn of events. He was satisfied
with his morning’s work. He said out loud – the sound of his voice causing the dog to start and pull momentarily on his lead – ‘I showed ’em, Silver. These professional animal care types are demons. The worst sorts. Care only for money and prestige and profit. I think I’m better than that. You’ve always been mine and I’ve always loved you, come what may.’

Suddenly a thought entered his head, a thought so intoxicating that the joy of it made him feel as though his brain was soaking in rum, floating in a sea of alcohol. He threw down the brush and ran into the house. Several minutes later he re-emerged holding a small electric razor, which was already vibrating in his hand.

Silver stared at the buzzing razor with his big grey-brown eyes and sighed despondently. He was a decent sort of animal, but lately had begun to feel rather stressed out.

As Anthony sheared away at Silver’s fur, he felt warm, salty blood trickling down his throat. He remembered the tissues in his ears and pulled them out, then, without needing to remould them, pushed the ear-stoppers up either nostril. He tried to remember to breathe through his mouth.