The One That Got Away: Stories by Zoë Wicomb

Author:Zoë Wicomb [Wicomb, Zoë]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press

FRIENDS AND GOFFELS

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Julie is married to a pig. That is how it comes to Dot, as a message flashing on a screen, a full sentence that clinches things. There is nothing to be done. She hears the click of a bulging briefcase that brings a long friendship to a close. Or is it an echo of a click? Should she not have known that that’s what marriage brings: two people closeted together with no room for a third? Has Julie put the past, which is to say Dot, behind her? And what will she, Dot, do with their history bundled up in a briefcase? Cast aside, she is bereft; her head is in her hands; she doesn’t know a thing, except that her heart is broken.

The author of her misery is European, from Scotland, which does not, of course, make him a pig, but he is a pig all the same. And a sadness dense as tonight’s starless night wraps itself around Dot who sits at her kitchen table, fighting tears. Light spills from the bedroom so that her shadow on the wall has the hunched, undefined shape of a person parcelled in grief. She might as well make a cup of coffee, no chance of sleeping tonight. Besides, Julie will know that she is now sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, fighting tears, so she will surely want to come over, to talk things through. But Julie is married to a pig. As he stretches, grunts, gets ready for bed, she will not be able to say, or – Dot winces – ask permission to leave. No point in finding a euphemism for a wife’s wheedling explanation, the half-truths that must placate a husband – it is no less than asking permission. How could any sensible adult in this day and age buckle down to marriage? Surely this is the point at which Julie would have to choose. Either she would have to announce with car keys in her hand that she’ll have to go and see her dear friend, that is Dot, even if it is midnight, and so incur Alistair’s anger, or persuade herself that all is well, and thus will not appreciate that she, Dot, is weeping at the kitchen table. Which amounts to no less than casting her aside, dismissing their long history of friendship. By now tears are spilling freely onto the oilcloth. The cloth is her prize possession brought back by Jules last year, a print of lush Rousseauian jungle, the kind of thing you don’t find in Cape Town. Never, never, she promises herself, will she marry.

Julie and Dot have known each other since starting at high school. In the hideous blazers of blue, green and red stripes, with hats stuffed in their satchels, they waited for each other at Wynberg station and, stripping ribbons of bark from bluegum trees, dawdled down the wide avenue in order to reach the school gates just as the bell rang. They walked close together, bumping shoulders; they would have liked to hold hands.

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