Constitutional by Helen Simpson

Author:Helen Simpson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446413616
Publisher: Random House

The Phlebotomist’s Love Life

Sun slid early over the curtains and woke her still smiling from their victorious photo finish of the night before. They had been together for a year and together was the word. She saw now that without this private truthful allying in powerful pairs all over the globe, without this nothing would work and the world would come to an end.

Then came the tide of unease like a body blush, the flush of dismay. What had they done in the night? She flicked on the radio and he moaned in his sleep beside her.

‘Sorry,’ she whispered, remembering he was on a late, and slipped off to the kitchen with her work clothes. She put some toast on and filled the kettle. ‘Has he killed as many people as Stalin?’ came the voice from the radio, keen as mustard, ‘Proportionately, that is?’

How eager they had all been to step out of the blood-boltered twentieth century, she thought as she pulled on her tights; how sick to the back teeth of the fangs of history and misery they all were. Now look. Some belle époque. Not even one prelapsarian decade this time; not even one paltry year of peace.

Stopping at the corner shop to buy a paper, she scanned the photos beneath the headlines on display, palm trees and oily black cumulus clouds and silent howling faces.

‘Lovely morning,’ said Ahmed as she paid him.

‘Beautiful,’ she agreed. ‘Terrible,’ she added, indicating the front page of her paper.

‘Terrible, terrible,’ muttered Ahmed. ‘The poor people. What have they done? They have done nothing.’

She stifled the impulse to apologise. He too, presumably, had helped to vote in this government.

On the bus it was standing room only. It had always caused her trouble with men – war. She dreaded its approach, from the moment when they first mentioned its possibility on the news to the pretend discussion about rights and wrongs in the run-up. She remembered her first proper boyfriend, Ewan, and his rage at her objections to the Gulf War. True, her talk had sounded childish even to her, even then when she was only twenty – wishing that women could go off and live on another continent, man-free, war-free. Or at least, go to that neutral continent taking the children with them for the duration of any war the men had created. Without testosterone and the desire for phallic toys, she’d argued, the world would be a better place.

Bollocks, he’d said.

Who had she been with during the Kosovo conflict? With Dan, of course. War is the worst, she’d told him; living in a state of murder and the reversal of all things good.

What about the Second World War? he demanded. Eh? Wasn’t that a just war? You’d have been wringing your hands along with Neville Chamberlain, wouldn’t you, all out for appeasement.

At times like this, she cried, women get put in their place. They go horribly quiet. It comes down to rape and babies. Ah, ah, you don’t like me going on at you like this.

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