A MAP OF THE PAIN by Maxim Jakubowski
IT ALL BEGINS in Blackheath, in South East London. They are in the kitchen, chatting aimlessly while preparing the evening meal. He drones on about the cutbacks at the BBC and his fears for his job. She isn’t really listening to him. Her mind is miles away, in a bed with another man who touches her in all the right places, in all the right ways, another man who has betrayed her so badly.
He moves over to the fridge. Opens it, searches inside.
The heat is oppressive. London has not seen the likes of it for years. And he still wears his tie.
“I don’t think we have enough tomatoes for the salad,” he says.
Her husband the vegetarian.
She fails to answer.
“I said we’re low on tomatoes.”
The information registers through a haze of mental confusion.
“I’ll pop over to the 7-Eleven on the High Street,” she volunteers. “They’re still open. I should have bought more stuff over lunch at the Goodge Street Tesco. It won’t take me long,” she says.
“I’ll come along,” her husband says. “Keep you company.”
“No, it’s all right,” she answers. “You can prepare the dressing.”
He’s always been good that way, willing to cook and do things in the kitchen. She picks up her shoulder bag, with her purse and the manuscript she’s working on and walks out onto the mews.
The night air is stale and sticky. She is wearing her white jeans and an old promotional tee-shirt.
She walks at her usual jaunty pace past the Common. Toward the shops. And breezes past the convenience store where a few spotty youths are squabbling by the ice-cream counter, and a couple of drab, middle-aged men are leafing through the top shelf girlie magazines. She heads on to the railway station. Network South East. The next train to Charing Cross is in five minutes. She uses her monthly Travelcard.
At the London station, she calmly collects her thoughts. Smiles impishly at the imagined face of her husband, waiting all this time for the final ingredients for the salad, back at their house. She catches the tube to Victoria and connects with the last train departure to Brighton.
Once, with her lover, she had gone there for a weekend, yeah a dirty week-end, she supposes. It was on the eve of a political party conference and the seaside resort had been full of grim-faced politicians and swarms of television journalists. She’d spent most of her time outside the hotel room where they had fucked more times than she had thought possible in the space of thirty-six hours, absolutely terrified of venturing across her spouse, or some colleagues of his who might be familiar with her, even though he worked on the business and economics side and she well knew he could not be in Brighton right then.
Katherine spent the night ambling up and down the seafront, enjoying the coolness of the marine breeze and sea air after the Turkish bath of her London suburbs and the publisher’s offices where she worked. It was wonderfully quiet; no drunks to accost her, just alone with her thoughts, the memories, the scars of lust, the mess that her life now was.
Her lover had betrayed her. And she, in turn, had betrayed both men.
She wanted to wipe her mind clean of everything, to erase the wrong-doing and the pain she had inflicted on them. To start anew, like a baby arriving into the world, free of fault, innocent, like a blank tape ready for a new set of experiences, a new life almost.
In the morning, she booked herself into a small bed and breakfast on a square facing the old pier. She shopped for new clothes, which she paid for by credit card. She ate fish and chips, like a tourist and even found the Haagen-Dazs ice-cream parlour she remembered from a previous visit to one of the backstreets. Maraschino cherry delight. The weather was warm but nowhere near as bad as London. On the promenade, she bought a floppy straw hat to protect her pale skin from the fierce sun. She took a nap in the afternoon in the cramped room of the small hotel. Before dozing off, she had switched the TV on and seen her husband on screen looking all jolly and smug on the business lunch programme, reporting from the car park of an automotive parts factory. It had been recorded two days earlier. She awoke later from a dreamfree sleep, enjoyed a leisurely bath during which she depilated her legs and cut her toe nails, and, clean and refreshed, slipped on the new lightweight dress she had purchased earlier, low-cut, dark blue with white polka dots, billowing away down over her long legs from a high waist.
“First night away,” she remarked to herself, as she walked out into the dusk.
She meets this guy in a pseudo-Texan Cantina. He says he’s from one of the unions. She’s had a couple of beers, and he offers her a glass of tequila. It burns her throat and stomach.
“I canvass for Labour locally, where I live,” she tells him, to indicate that at least they share the same political affiliation. She’s always suspected, despite his indifferent denials, that that bastard of a lover she’d been involved with had actually voted Tory. How in hell could she have slept with him?
He smiles at her, well, more of a leer really.
So what? she thinks.
She follows him, his name is Adam Smith, back to the bar of the Old Ship where he is staying for the conference. It’s already pretty late, and there are only a handful of people left in the penumbra of the bar. She has a couple of vodka and oranges. Her head feels light. Better this than the heavy burden of all the memories and the guilt, she reckons.
“Is that a wedding ring?” the guy enquires, pointing at her finger.
“Yes,” she answers. “Does it bother you?”
It all floods back. How her lover would delicately slip both the wedding and the thin engagement rings off her fingers before ceremoniously undressing her from top to bottom, before they would make love in the basement to the sound of the whirring fan and the light of the long-life candle she herself had bought near the Reject Shop on Tottenham Court Road.
“No, I was just wondering, that’s all,” he remarks.
“If it bothers you, I can take them off,” Katherine says.
“No, no,” he says, annoyed by this turn of events. But while he is still saying this, she has already wet her finger and slipped both the rings off, deliberately dropping them at the bottom of her glass.
“Satisfied?” she asks.
Is she drunk, he wonders? “They’ll be closing the bar any minute, I reckon,” he says, ignoring her earlier remark. “Can I entice you up to my room for a final nightcap?”
She isn’t drunk. Just a bit lost, she guesses. She looks at this man called Smith of all things. His tie isn’t straight, his shirt has a few drink stains, scattered across its front. She can read him like a map. But what the hell?
“Yeah, why not?” she answers, grabbing her bag still loaded with the manuscript from her old life, and stands up, abandoning the rings in the half-empty glass of booze.
As he inserts the electronic card into the door, he leers at her again. Why must he be so obvious, Katherine thinks?
The door swings open.
He stands aside and Katherine walks in.
The room is medium-sized, dominated by a large king-size bed. A door on the right leads to a bathroom. On the walls, anonymous prints of naval victories from the Napoleonic wars. She smiles; it might have been worse: it could have been the classic print of the Eurasian woman with the blue face. If it had been, she thinks she might have walked straight out again.
He follows her in and the door slams quietly.
He walks to the bedside table where a large bottle of scotch stands, no, bourbon. Four Roses.
He takes his jacket off. His shirt is straining at the waist, his girth stretching the button holes.
“Drink?” Adam suggests.
She hates the stuff but answers “Why not?” That’s how it’s supposed to go, isn’t it?
“So,” he sits down on the edge of the orange-brown bed-spread, loosens his tie. “How much?”
“How much what?” She hesitantly sips the harsh booze from the glass.
