Waiting For Ted by Marieke Bigg

Author:Marieke Bigg [Bigg, Marieke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: waiting for ted, marieke bigg, dead ink
Publisher: Cinder House
Published: 2022-10-12T21:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

I’m waiting for Ted to come home. I wait. I wait until the pitch-black night has cloaked my meticulous masterpiece entirely. Ted won’t see a thing. He’ll leave the lights off when he finally gets home, sneak in like he usually does, and will probably walk right by me. If he does decide to switch the light on, though, I realise, he’ll see my heavily made-up face in the bright artificial light, and it will look more ghoulish than demure.

Maybe I was my mother’s daughter after all. I want it to look like I am trying hard for the relationship, not to be beautiful. There’s nothing more unattractive than a woman trying too hard. That was the one thing both my parents would always agree on. Although with them it was hard to tell if they’d tried at all. It was hard to imagine what trying between them would have looked like. It was enough to make you severely uncomfortable. They were proud, so stubbornly defensive it was like they were trying to protect something, themselves, probably, from each other. So dysfunctional, I used to think.

I get up and stumble to the bathroom, remove the red lips with a wet wipe, replace it with a lighter tint, the eyelids back to brown. I touch up the highlights for good measure. I look at my shadowy face in the mirror. Dark circles under my eyes somehow looking puffy and sunken at the same time. Like me. How could a person be simultaneously so bloated with the fight, so proud and defiant, and yet agonisingly fragile, excruciatingly empty? I want to understand it, to wrap my mind physically around these contradictions splitting me in parts, to swaddle them into the wholeness I’d lost. I want to blame my parents, or Ted, or myself. I want one enemy – one problem. I want to fix whatever it is and my own brokenness. But any attempt makes me light-headed, pulling me into a nauseating tornado of cosmic colours, all constellations knotted with wormholes, shaking up my sense of reality like metallic stardust trapped inside a sand-timer. Easier to fix my face, now incredibly itchy. I refrain from scratching, resolutely adding more foundation under the eyes.

The sun had already set by the time we arrived from our faux hunt. There was a peace between us, the kind of peace that comes with early autumn dusk.

I turned on the kitchen light. The house glowed yellow. I put the kettle on. Ted went upstairs to shower, this time, I trusted, only to warm up. I poured hot water into a pot and put it on the familiar tray along with the biscuits I knew he liked – hobnobs, bland with a bit of crunch. Very fitting.

The whole experience has been so immersive, I hadn’t checked my phone once, and was only tempted to take a snap when I looked down at the teapot on its tray, the image of a domestic autumn night. I resisted. Today, I would be present for Ted.

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