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Once he’s left I wrap the long hair around and around my finger until the tip bulges out red and painful.
The fucking bastard, I can’t believe he just hung up on me. There’s no point ringing again; he’ll have registered the new number by now. I’d used my girlfriend’s mobile because I knew he’d only pick up if he didn’t recognize the caller.
“Robert,” I said triumphantly.
“Madeleine, are you okay? It’s past nine. You know it’s difficult for me to talk after nine.”
“I’m not okay. I need to see you; we need to see each other.”
“Oh, baby, I’d love to but it’s really hard at the moment. Work’s crazy as you know and Georgina’s still housebound—”
“Fuck Georgina. I have needs too.”
“I know. I’ve been a real shit, I’m so sorry. But it’ll all be back to normal in a couple of weeks.”
“And what’s normal, Robert? Me hanging around waiting for the phone to ring? Meeting twice a week for a couple of hours so you can screw me and then go back to your wife?”
“Madeleine, I can’t talk about this now, Georgina is in the other room. How about we do lunch tomorrow?”
“Lunch! I’ll give you lunch—”
Bleep. The lonely sound of the hang-up.
I squeeze my eyes shut now and count slowly as the rage curdles into a bitter grief. This can’t be good for the baby. Then, deliberately, I reach for the hair shirt.
It was ugly, asymmetrical, red with a darker spot in the middle and raised—just like a picture in one of those pamphlets—and it appeared, bang, just like that on my cheek, itching like mad, screaming out, scratch me, scratch me. Which I did, until it started bleeding. It was then that I drove straight to my dermatologist.
Melanoma. If you didn’t know what it meant you could just about imagine it was the name of one of those dusky beauties with old-fashioned hips and melon breasts who used to hang, immortalized in fluorescent paint on velvet, over your
bachelor uncle Jack’s vinyl couch. I tried distracting myself with this vision until I realized I was speeding down Oxford Street and had forgotten to take the handbrake off. Not great for a fifty-thousand-dollar car.
My dermatologist stared at my face, then, sighing heavily through the gap in his front teeth, hit the phone to ask his assistant to get a biopsy slide ready immediately. By that time I’m calculating the cost of my own funeral and wondering about life insurance.
“Mr. Tetherhook, I have to confess I’m a bit perplexed. I’ve never seen a skin cancer so advanced pop up overnight like this.”
“How advanced?”
“For reasons of litigation I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess. Are you sure you saw me last year?” he asked.
“Check your records if you doubt me.”
“It’s not entirely unheard of; sometimes extreme stress can manifest in strange ways, like lesions on the skin.”
“Doctor, cut the polite subtext. Will I live?”
“Again, for reasons of potential litigation I can’t really answer that, but it is safe to say that if the cancer is contained and hasn’t spread to the lymph nodes you have an excellent chance of survival. Of course, if the cancer has spread it’s an entirely different scenario…. I’ll ring you by tonight to let you know whether you will need further tests.”
Terror is not a fast-moving animal; it is a slow creep through the entrails up to the back of the throat where it repeats like bile through the waking day, eventually accumulating to a series of high-speed flashes of the phrase “I’m going to die,” blinking on and off like an epileptic fluorescent bulb.
By the time I got back to the car I was ready either to cry or to crawl into a snug, warm, wet place where I could forget my own mortality.
“Hello? Madeleine?”
Pause; self-pity rattling down the line as I choke on my own grief.
“Can I come over?”
Cock, cunt, the thickness of him pounding inside me, wet tightness engulfing both of us, filling my very pores, as he loosens the fibers of my flesh. Oh yes, over and over, everything swelling, my labia, my lips, my nipples, my clit, deliciously shooting down the whole length of him as he, with the confidence of love, of time spent together, of knowing, enters me over and over until both of us scream out, first me and then him, shuddering together as life roars across us like a huge jet intent on its ascent.
