“I like it in there.” Mark smiled as they made a bolt across the street.
“Doesn’t fill you up, though, does it?” she said, grimly holding her breath as they passed the market’s wet fish.
“Not always.”
They found the café busy upstairs, one haggard, hennaed waitress with a glottal Austrian accent tending the customers in an atmosphere redolent of nuts and spices. Everything was olive green and pine. They went down to the empty cellar and sat at an expansive kitchen table.
“You’d think more people would come down here.” Sam drummed her fingers on the pine. “You can stretch your legs in the cellar.”
“Speaking of meals—” Mark scratched his nose uncertainly and took his jacket off. “Your mam stopped me in the park to talk about that dinner.”
She had the menu open, running a groove down its polythene innards with her nail.
“Sam. That dinner.”
She looked up. “I know. I’m sick of hearing about it. It’s still on.”
“Christmas Eve.”
“Right. But I’m not having them over on Christmas Day.”
“Right.” Mark still felt that a real reconciliation would involve Sam inviting her mother for Christmas Day.
“She’s not getting into my house on Christmas Day.”
“Why the fuck not?”
Her eyes flashed. He flashed his back.
“It’s Christmas Eve or nothing,” she said. “And you did look cross then. See, you can do it.”
“Fuck you.”
“I love you, Mark.”
“Mm.”
She did. But he made her cross. Especially when he was being effete. He hated being called that. The irony was, he had taught her that word himself. He taught her how to curse him.
She had been about to sling a plate across the bedroom.
“You think I’m effete, don’t you?”
She swung the missile back. “What does that mean?”
“Ineffectual. Poncy.”
“Yes.” She threw the garlic-butter-smeared plate, and it shattered against the wall. A startled silence rang between them.
“I can’t believe you did that,” he said quietly.
“I can. You effete!”
He dropped heavily onto the bed. “It’s an adjective.”
“Oh. You effete bastard.”
“I am. I am. Take me.”
And now he had given in—completely and utterly—to her mother. After all the ruckus, it had been Mark who slunk round to patch things up with Margaret. He never liked rows.
“I don’t like confrontations. It’s my upbringing.”
“Then you shouldn’t have married me, sweetie.”
He was supposed to smile at that. He didn’t.
While they were waiting for the Austrian waitress to descend to the cellar, Sam said, “This is all your fault. I could have been shot of her for good.”
“You’ve got your independence. There’s no need to cut all ties. You’ve got what you always wanted—your own place.”
She gaped. “Is that what you think of me?”
“I want to order now. I know what I want.”
“Do you really think that’s why I’m with you?”
“It’s not often I know what I want so early on. It’s quite unusual.”
“You ungrateful bastard, Kelly.”
“What?”
“You think I’m only with you to escape Peggy?”
“Of course not.”
“Good.”
“It’s part of it, though, isn’t it?”
“It’s a side effect. A good one.”
“And we stay together for the sake of Sally, the flat and the absence of your mother.”
“Fuck you,” she said.
“Not to mention Iris.”
“Don’t mention Iris. Where’s the fucking waitress?”
The waitress was at that moment taking cautious steps towards them. She surprised them both by leaning over the banister.
“Could you please come upstairs and be served there? I am by myself today and cannot leave the till unattended. Thank you very much.”
They glared at each other, the menu and the space on the stairs the waitress left behind. Upstairs they saw the café was still full. They pushed out again into the marketplace to look for somewhere else, avoiding the Austrian woman’s eye.
“I fancied something meaty anyway,” Mark said loudly.
It was at moments like these Sam discovered to her surprise that she loved him more than he made her cross. When they were being thrown out of places. When they had their faces to the wind, giving parting shots. They could wander about, nowhere special to go. Be children, sexless, with no particular home. They would find on, make a den, play mams and dads.
A market van slewed past in a kerbside puddle, splashing water up their legs. “Christ!” Her dinner hour was running out.
“I know—” Mark beamed, changing gear—”just the place.”
THE ONLY TIME SAM HAD EVER SEEN MARK KELLY COMPLETELY NAKED was in family holiday photos. A tubby blond child wading starkers out to sea. From the first meeting onwards she had known his body; yet as far as she was concerned, it was coated with a different flesh. A blue and green patinaed flesh, a chitinous second skin. The coloured shell of a Smartie. Something she hadn’t been early enough to penetrate.
Not that she hadn’t tried. It made her giggle. The second night of the crap honeymoon, alone in the half-decorated council flat.
He begged and wept, he had his comeuppance; she penetrated him quite literally, smearing a melted dinnertime candle in rose-scented hair conditioner, ramming it gently up his arse, back again. He begged and wept.
“Now we’re quits,” she had said, frowning slightly.
He thanked her, uncertainty rippling through the demarcated contours of his shuddering skin. But they didn’t do that again.
“It’s not the thing,” he said quite suddenly in the tenderest part of the night, “to be buggered by one’s new wife.”
In an obscure way, she found that touching. In those early hours the candle burned with a tang of rose, and something inscrutable and bloody.
Yet the moment she first clapped eyes on him, he was there in his peacock finery; jade and azure, standing on her mam’s front doorstep, the night of the accident.
Immediately she saw that between the slats of tattoo, his face was stark white in shock.
“Who are you?”
She left the catch on. It was past two in the morning. She had sunk half a bottle of whiskey, just as the doctor had ordered.
