Marian Keyes - Watermelon (8 page)

Then I started to feel extremely angry at James.

The humiliation arrived gradually. It sidled its way in and one day I turned around and it was there, grinning at me. "Hi there," it said, as though we were old friends. "Remember me? And I'm sure my friend Jealousy needs no introduction."

I was with my mother one afternoon when she put a video on. Some film that was supposed to be a romance, but it was really an excuse for porno- graphy. She was engrossed in it, and "tut-tutted" energetically. I tried to pay attention to it and feed Kate at the same time. I kept losing track of the plot. "Who's that he's having sex with now? Is that the woman from the elevator?"

"No, silly," said Mum. "It's the woman from the elevator's daughter."

"But I thought he was found in bed with the woman from the elevator," I said, confused.

"Yes, he was," explained Mum kindly. "But he's being unfaithful to her now, with her daughter."

"The poor woman from the elevator," I said sorrowfully.

Mum gave me a sharp glance. Oh God, no. I could feel her thinking in alarm. Was I going to start crying? I bet she was sorry that she hadn't gotten something innocuous like The Amityville Horror or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

I watched the two people on the screen, having sex, enjoying themselves at the cost of the woman in the elevator's happiness. I suddenly thought of James and Denise in bed.

They do this, you know, a voice in my head told me.

They go to bed together. They have sex. They lose themselves in their passion for each other. She touches him. She sleeps with his beautiful body and his delicious skin and his silky black hair. She can wake up and watch him sleeping, his spiky black eyelashes throwing little shadows on his face.

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What are they like together? I found myself wondering. What way does he treat her? What's he like when he's with her?

Does he gently scrape his stubbly jaw across her face in the morning, the way he used to do to me and then laugh at my shout of outrage, his even teeth showing very white in his handsome face?

Does she go to sleep with her head on his muscular chest, her arm thrown across his stomach, his manly arm around her neck, smelling the faint scent of Tuscany from his lightly tanned skin, the way I used to?

Does he wake her in the morning by trailing his hands along her thighs, the way he used to with me, and instantly turn her on, the way he used to with me?

Does he pin her down in bed, his hands holding her arms above her head, his legs locking hers, grinning down at her, leaving her deliciously helpless as he moves slowly against her, driving her mad with desire, the way he used to with me?

Does he kiss her with an ice cube in his mouth, turning her mouth cold and her body hot with desire, the way he used to with me?

Does he gently bite the curve of her neck and shoulder and send shivers of lust through her whole body, the way he used to with me?

When she wakes up in the morning is her first thought, "Jesus, he's beautiful and he's in bed with me"? Because mine always was.

I was insane with jealousy.

Or do they do it differently? I wondered. Is she different from me in bed? Is she better? What's her body like? Has she a smaller butt, bigger tits, flatter stomach, longer legs? Is she really adventurous and does she drive him crazy with passion?

I wondered all this, even though I knew Denise and could have answered most of those questions myself. (Smaller butt? No. Bigger tits? Yes. Flatter stomach? Unlikely. Longer legs? Hard to tell. We're probably neck and neck.)

She didn't act or behave like a sex kitten. She had always seemed so nice and well...ordinary, I suppose, but now in my head she was Helen of Troy or Sharon Stone or Madonna.

I was being torn apart by jealousy. It was like having a

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burning spiky ball in my chest that was sending out green poisonous rays all over my body, choking me so that I could barely breathe. My head was filled with pictures of what I imagined they were like together in bed.

I just couldn't bear the idea of his desiring her. It filled me with powerful and impotent rage. And fury. I felt like killing them both. I felt like sobbing hysterically. I felt ugly with jealousy. Disfigured with it. I felt my face was twisted and green with it.

It's such an ugly emotion. And it's so utterly pointless. And it has nowhere to go.

If you lose someone or something, you feel a loss, then after a while you fill in the hole in your life and the loss gradually gets smaller and smaller and eventually goes away. There's a point to the pain. There's a reason and a direction.

But there was nothing to be gained by feeling jealous. And I wouldn't have minded but the jealousy was caused entirely by myself. It was my own imagination that was causing me the pain.

And I was feeling the pain, not because something had happened to me but because something hadn't happened to me. Why did something that was going on between two other people and didn't involve me in any way hurt me so much?

Well, I was damned if I knew.

I just knew that it did.

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The time that followed is still referred to in our house as the Great Terror. Helen alludes to it even now by saying something like "Do you remember the time when you started behaving like Adolf Hitler and we all hated you and wished that you would go back to London?"

The change in me was terrible.

It was as though someone had flicked a switch.

I went from feeling sad and lonely and miserable to explosive rage and jealousy and desire for revenge on Denise and James. I fantasized about terrible disasters befalling them.

I was like a madman on a rampage. I had so much anger and hatred in me, and the person who should have been receiving the brunt of it--i.e., James--wasn't there. So my family, who were innocent bystanders, who, in fact, were trying to help me, ended up being shouted at and having their doors slammed instead of him.

When I first returned from London there had been a dignity to my suf- fering. I felt a bit like a Victorian heroine who had been disappointed in love and had no choice but to turn her face to the wall and die, albeit beautifully, surrounded by smelling salts, from her grief. Like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Liaisons.

Now I was more like Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter. Psychotic. Crazed. A danger to myself and others. Walking around the house with a mad look in my eyes. Rooms full of conversation falling silent when I entered them. Mum

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and Dad watching me fearfully. Anna and Helen leaving rooms when I arrived.

I wasn't wearing battle camouflage and didn't have a belt of bullets slung across my chest and wasn't carrying some kind of fearsome-looking auto- matic weapon and didn't have a grenade in my pocket. My face wasn't smeared with dirt (although on reflection it might have been; the baths went by the wayside completely during this terrible time). But I felt as powerful as if I had all those weapons, and I was treated with as much fear as if I did have them.

The Great Terror started the day I watched that video with Mum. (I won't go into the details of what happened there. I'm too ashamed of myself. And anyway the video shop agreed to drop the charges. It was totally true what the assistant said. They only stock the videos. It was no reflection on their personal opinions or morals. I was just a little bit overwrought at the time.)

The Great Terror continued for several war-torn days. Anything could trigger a tantrum in me, but especially romantic scenes on the television. My head constantly played a video of James and Denise in bed together. When I saw other loving couples on television I was pushed to overload.

Luckily I saw no loving couples in real life or I might not have been re- sponsible for my actions. Mum and Dad certainly didn't behave like a loving couple. And Helen had a steady stream of young suitors through the house but she made cruel, teasing fun of them and their puppylike devotion. Which pleased me in a grim, cold kind of way. As for Anna--well, that's another story, to be told another day.

I cried an awful lot during this time. And swore. And threw things.

As I said, television usually upset me. I'd see a man lean over and kiss a woman and immediately the green fire of jealousy would rush through me, excruciating energy would fill me. I would think of James. And I would think of my James with another woman. For a second it would just be a thought in the abstract, as if he was still with me and I was being silly and imagining "worst possible" scenarios. And then I would remember that it had happened and that he was with another woman. The realization hurt just as much each time. The tenth

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time it happened it was as awful and as shocking and as sick-making as the first time.

So I might throw a book at the television, or some shoes at the wall, or Kate's bottle at the window. Or really anything handy or close by at all would be thrown at a nearby surface. Then I would swear like a fishwife and stomp from the room, slamming the door so hard that slates probably fell off the roof. It got so bad that when I thumped into the sitting room and the television was on, Anna or Helen, or whoever was there, would flick the remote control and quickly change the channel from whatever they were watching to something inoffensive like the Open University program on applied physics or a documentary about how fridges work or a game show in which all the contestants had obviously had lobotomies.

"What's on?" I would growl at them.

"Oh, err...just this," they would reply nervously, indicating the television with a flutter of their hands.

We would all sit there in silence, pretending to watch whatever program the remote control had found for us, me giving off palpably frightening vibes, Anna or Helen or Mum or Dad sitting stiffly, afraid to talk, afraid to suggest changing channels and waiting for a decent interval to elapse so they could leave and continue watching their program on the small televi- sion in Mum's room.

And when they would get up and start sidling to the door, I'd pounce on them. "Where are you going?" I'd demand. "You can't even bear to be in the same room as me, can you? It's bad enough that my husband has to leave me but imagine my own family treating me like this."

The poor victim would stand there awkwardly, feeling shamed into not leaving but definitely not wanting to stay.

And hating me for it.

"Well, go on then," I'd tell them viciously. "Go."

Because I was so terrifying no one, not even Helen, had the courage to tell me that I was being incredibly selfish and, in the vernacular, a right little bitch. I held the whole family at ransom with my wild tempers and unpredictable mood swings.

Kate was the only one I treated with any respect. And even that only happened occasionally.

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Once when she started crying I shouted sharply at her, "Shut up, Kate!" Quite unbelievably, she stopped immediately. The silence that followed sounded almost stunned. Try as I might I haven't been able to reproduce that tone of voice since. I've practiced with all kinds of different inflections, like "Shut up, Kate," or "Shut up, Kate," or "Shut up, Kate," but it makes no difference. She blithely continues to bellow, no doubt thinking, "Ha! You might have frightened me once, for about a nanosecond, but you can be damn sure it won't happen again."

I had so much energy. My body wasn't big enough to contain all the energy that flowed through me. I went from having no energy to having far too much of it. I had no idea what to do with it. I felt as if I was going to explode with it. Or go crazy with it. I was torn because I didn't want to leave the house but I felt as if I could run a hundred miles. That I would go crazy if I didn't. I had the strength of ten men. During those awful couple of weeks I could have won gold medals in the Olympic games in any sport you care to mention.

I felt that I could run faster, jump higher, throw farther, lift heavier, punch harder than anyone alive.

That first night that the jealousy kicked in, I drank half a bottle of vodka.

I bullied Anna into loaning me fifteen pounds for it and Helen into going to the liquor store for it.

Anna would have willingly gone to the store for me.

And Anna would have willingly come back from the store for me.

But when, is the question.

She might have reappeared in a week with some vague story about how on the way to the store she met some people in a van who were going to Stonehenge and how she thought it might be nice to join them. Or how she had some strange out-of-body experience and lost a week.

I could have told her that there was nothing strange about it. That if she went over to her boyfriend Shane's apartment and smoked a lot of drugs that was what generally happened. And that the correct name for it was an out-of-your-head experience, not an out-of-body experience.

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Not that it was an easy battle to win with Helen. "I'll drown," she grumbled, the weather still being inclement.

"You won't," I assured her grimly through gritted teeth, my tone of voice implying, "But it would be no trouble at all to arrange."

"It'll cost you," she told me, changing tack.

"How much?"

"A fiver."

"Give her another fiver," I ordered Anna.

Money changed hands.

"That's twenty that you owe me now," said Anna anxiously.

"Have I ever reneged on my debts before?" I asked Anna coldly.

"Er, no," said the poor girl, far too frightened to remind me that I still owed her for the bottle of wine that I "borrowed" from her the first night that she was home.

"And where are you going?" I asked Helen imperiously.

"Upstairs to change into my Speedos."

When Helen returned from the liquor store, a long time later, drenched wet and dripping water everywhere and complaining loudly, she handed me the liter bottle of vodka, which was in a soaking wet bag.

Change from the fifteen pounds was not asked for.

Nor was it offered.

By the time I discovered that the bottle had already been opened and about a quarter of it was missing, Helen was long gone.

As were her chances of making it alive to her nineteenth birthday.

My vengeance would be a terrible and awesome spectacle to behold, once I got my hands on her.

I was not a woman to be trifled with.

In spite of the vodka I still couldn't sleep. I roamed the house from room to room late at night when everyone else was asleep. Carrying the bottle and my glass. Looking for somewhere that I felt safe. Hoping to find a place where those horrible pictures would stop running through my head. But my jealousy and hatred kept me awake. They kept prodding at me and I couldn't settle anywhere. I couldn't find any peace.

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In desperation, I thought that perhaps if I tried a different bed or a differ- ent room I might be able to sleep.

I went into Rachel's old room. (You know, the room you'll be staying in when you come on your starvation week.) I turned on the light.

The room had that same ghostly feeling that my and Margaret's room had had when I first arrived back from London, the feeling that no one had slept in there for a long time. Although clothes still hung in the wardrobe and posters were still on the wall and a plate was still under the bed. Then I came across the exercise bike and the rowing machine that Dad had bought about nine years ago in an enthusiastic but short-lived attempt to get fit.

There they were, on the floor of Rachel's room, covered in dust, looking old-fashioned and creaky and cobwebby, a far cry from the exercise bikes and rowing machines of today, with their computer programs, their video screens and their electronic calorie counters.

I looked at them affectionately, prehistoric and all that they were, and memories came rushing back in waves.

The excitement the day the van delivered them! Dad, my sisters and I were thrilled.

Mum was the only one who wasn't excited. She said that she couldn't understand what all the fuss was about, that she had no need to go courting pain and suffering. That she already had a surfeit of that in her life, what with being married to Dad and mother to the five of us.

The rest of us were beside ourselves.

We all clustered around oohing and aahing as the chrome-and-metal machines were unloaded and installed. We all held great hopes and high expectations. We thought that we would have bodies like Jamie Lee Curtis (she was very in then) from the briefest contact with them, and naturally demand to use them was high. Dad also said that he wanted a body like Jamie Lee Curtis, and Mum didn't speak to him for a week.

We all jostled and fought to use the machines in the beginning. Like a wartime munitions production line, they were in use around the clock, and more than one tear was shed and more than one harsh word was spoken in the pitched battles about who was next.

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We especially loved the bike. Margaret, Rachel and I were obsessed with the size of our butts and thighs, and we spent the best part of our teenage years standing with our backs to full-length mirrors, almost breaking our respective necks as we tried to swivel our heads around without moving our bodies to see what our butts looked like from the back.

Asking each other anxiously, "What does my butt look like? Really big or just mediumly big?"

We wasted so much time torturing ourselves and worrying about the size of our butts.

It was so sad!

Because we were beautiful.

We had such lovely figures.

And we had no idea.

I'd now pay very large sums of money indeed to have the body that I had then. This made me think in alarm, "Jesus, will a day come when I look back at the body I have today and wish that I still had it?" Although I couldn't possibly imagine ever being that desperate.

A combination of accidents and disappointed expectations eventually caused the novelty of the madness to wear off.

Although Helen was only nine, she decided that she alone knew how the rowing machine worked. She assembled us all for a demonstration. To impress us, she set the weights far too high and then attempted to lift them without doing any warmup exercises. She promptly pulled a muscle in her chest. And caused an almighty fuss.

The poor creatures who suffered at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition didn't screech and carry on as much as Helen did. She claimed to be para- lyzed down one side; the only thing that relieved any of her symptoms was huge quantities of chocolate and around-the-clock attention.

Helen was Helen from a very early age.

According to her the pain was unbearable. She asked Dr. Blenheim to put her out of her misery. The rest of us also found her pain unbearable and agreed that she should indeed be put out of her misery.

But Dr. Blenheim said there was some kind of law against doing this. Murder or willful manslaughter or something, I

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believe he called it. Dad assured him that we preferred to call it a mercy killing.

And, as none of the rest of us ended up looking even remotely like Jamie Lee Curtis, in spite of all our exertions, we felt a little bit let down and disappointed and decided to get our own back on the bike by ignoring it.