Our Tiny, Useless Hearts by Toni Jordan

Author:Toni Jordan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2016-03-10T05:00:00+00:00

10

I wake to an inching, crawling sensation on my calf. It’s creepy. It’s either a spider or a scorpion. I’m not afraid of small creatures so I play possum, hoping it will mistake me for an inanimate object and continue on its way.

It’s not fooled. I feel it dance up past my knee. City insects are scared, grovelling things that know their place, like those strange lace-winged beetles that swarm dense clouds in late spring and disappear in minutes. This is a hardier kind of semi-rural bug, I can tell. Its course is determined, not meandering. It pauses before the hill of my thigh to steel itself for the climb, which it tackles with a strategic run-up. When it’s on the top of my hip, I crack open one eye.

It’s not an insect. It’s a tiny plastic car with a face, the kind given away by fast-food restaurants to incite children to badger parents into leaking money. Paris is in her princess pyjamas, sitting cross-legged on her bed beside me. She’s holding the car by the doors in a pincer and steering it expertly up and down the hills and valleys of me.

Now I remember. Last night Martha took Caroline’s bed reluctantly, in deference to her bad back which, as she explained with unnecessary detail, still gave her grief from the time she caught a seven-year-old who was trying to retrieve a cricket ball off the roof of the art building. Honestly, burden of care and all that, but I should have let the little treasure fall, she said. Young bones heal fast and god looks after innocents.

When I introduced Martha to Alec, he was charmed and charming, sympathetic because there’s nothing worse than back pain, nothing worse, and he would take the couch, he said, all the while smiling his complete disbelief. I tiptoed into Paris’s room by the glow of her pink butterfly nightlight. She was sleeping like a starfish, assuming starfish snore like miniature timber workers chainsawing old-growth forests. I manoeuvred her limbs together and rolled her over on her side, and then I crawled in beside her dead weight.

‘Steady on, Danica Patrick,’ I say to her now. ‘Watch the corners.’

She flies the car to my arm where it does a reckless 360 around my elbow before progressing up to my shoulder.

Alec is here. In this house. It’s been years since I woke up in the same house as Alec.

The life of the divorced person is hard enough without waking in the vicinity of your ex-spouse. It’s like your surgeon, sitting on your post-op bed and saying now that I’ve removed your leg, would you like it to stay over occasionally? The amputation might have been clinical and quick; it might have been a bloody, struggling rip. Regardless, no one wants the limb to visit. A phantom one is already in its place, throbbing away in the vacant air. Ex-spouses should have mandatory containment zones, like nuclear accidents. It’s difficult enough to retrain your brain. For months

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