With Kisses on Both Cheeks by Elizabeth Kata

Author:Elizabeth Kata
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Fantasy

Seventeen years spent watching the handsome, lazy girl that I married deteriorate into a slovenly, candy-eating woman! This is what has caused my mind to become as a mansion, smouldering, always on the verge of crashing into flaring ruins. That should have frightened such a quiet man as myself, but I believe that I am concealing my true feelings, and that she is not afraid of me …

Always when my wife and I sit together in our dusty living room, after I have washed the dishes that held our unpalatable meal, I feel anger that she sees me only as a meek, underpaid, little man.

When she puts her hands up to her coarse dark hair and says importantly, ‘I must do something with my hair, hon,’ I answer, ‘What have you in mind?’ She spends the time telling me.

‘Wah wah wah wah wah …’ goes her voice, whilst I am thinking, ‘When you put your hair up, it straggles. When you let it down, it is too long. Put it up—let it down. Who cares!’

Beneath that hair I seem to see her bare skull, gleaming, and at the same instant I hear a high, sweet voice calling my name, calling me from outside in our weed-filled garden. In spite of the beckoning voice, I manage to keep my gaze on the woman sitting opposite me in the huge shabby chair that with the years has taken on her shape—the chair that smells of greasy kimono, talcum powder, cigarette smoke.

At ten o’clock—on the dot—she heaves her voluptuous curves from that padded throne, stretching and yawning, saying lazily, commandingly, ‘Put the milk bottles out, hon.’

‘How many?’ I ask.

‘Wah … wah … wah …’

Her busy, bossy voice is a calamity to my ears …

‘Calamity!’ shouts a young warrior as he rushes past our house on horseback.

She does not hear him. ‘One bottle, hon,’ she mumbles as she removes her upper denture, and holds it up to the light, examining the thing with intense interest.

I am possessed with horror, locked in! A prisoner!

‘Escape!’ cries a nightingale. ‘Escape!’ From outside the drab curtains of the narrow window the nightingale’s song thrills me unendurably. ‘Darling … darling … darling,’ it calls, ‘Escape …’

I rush to close the window in case my wife should hear the nightingale, for she would like to capture it and clip its wings, have it sit on her finger and make it say, ‘Pretty boy … pretty boy!’

This image makes me want to scream with pain.

She comes towards me, as I stand with my back pressed against the shut window. Her dark hair is tangled with the buttons of her blouse. ‘Untangle me, hon,’ she demands through the sleazy rayon veil.

As my dry fingers touch her hair, I hear a bell give a deep warning toll, and, as my fingers touch the skin on her neck, the room becomes dark with my hatred.

For years, as I have lain in bed at night, I have thought and thought; a hundred cares and dislikes have wrecked my heart.

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