“A year looking for a place, three months planning, six months of work, all that money, and we’re next to this.”
Listening to him, Veronica felt a sudden wave of concern for her husband. It was rare to see George so defeated. He was the kind of man who controlled a room. If he had moments of despair or fear, even after all these years Veronica wasn’t immediately party to them. She tried not to reproach him for this, understanding well the importance of self-sufficiency. She may have been sent to boarding school at twelve, but he went at eight, the instructions of his father on parting – be a man – set hard and fast in his head. In any case, self-sufficiency was her hallmark too. She managed, despite change. She achieved, despite unreliability. If there was a problem, she fixed it. They were both fixers. Both good at ushering the world before them. Doubly powerful when their forces were combined. Until the doctor had told them that there was no heartbeat, and neither one of them could fix a thing.
“Do you think she’s okay?” said Veronica.
George looked up. “Maybe I should go round.”
“No, don’t.”
“She might be hurt.”
“What are you going to do? Demand to see her? Tell him we’ve just heard him pummelling his wife? You can’t do that, and I don’t want you squaring up to him.”
“I think I’d be okay,” George prickled.
Veronica sighed. “I know, I know you would, but he sounds crazy. Besides, do we really want to start a confrontation with our new neighbours our first night in? We have to live next to these people. I think either we do nothing, or we call the police.”
“So maybe we should call the police,” said George.
Veronica nodded. “Maybe. But, what if we’re wrong? Maybe it sounded worse than it was. We don’t really know what happened. Maybe that was just them having sex.”
George strode back around the bed to his side of it and unplugged his phone from the charger. He started searching on the screen. “Perhaps there’s a noise pollution unit or something. Maybe we can get them to check it out without actually getting the police involved.”
“Good idea,” agreed Veronica. It had been a while since she and George had been drawn together by something that wasn’t related to their own ‘situation’, and it felt good to be so united. “Although, do you think they’d tell them it was us who complained?”
“You really don’t need to worry about them,” assured George, puzzled, she supposed, by her anxiety, her new weakness. “I’m here. Besides, men who batter their wives are usually cowards.”
“I just don’t want to feel awkward every time I leave the house,” Veronica attempted to rationalise.
George nodded. He had found a number to call. “I’ll ask them to keep it anonymous.”
Veronica moved nearer to him and rested her hand on his shoulder as he called. She listened to him explain the situation to what turned out to be an answering machine, and then call another number and repeat the same thing to a respondent. She listened too to the still blaring music and wondered if the slip of a woman she had met earlier was lying on the floor somewhere, unconscious of its beat. Veronica felt herself shaking a little. She wondered what she would say when she saw the woman again. What was her name? Christ, she hadn’t even asked it. If the woman was dead and the police questioned her, she wouldn’t know what to tell them. They had talked about building work. She had given her chocolates. She should, surely, have noticed that something was wrong.
“They’re going to drive by,” said George.
“Pardon?”
“The noise unit. They’re going to drive by, and if they can hear the noise from the street, they’ll knock on the door.”
“Oh okay, that’s good,” breathed Veronica. “Well done.”
George had always been tirelessly practical. He always got things done. In the low gleam of the bedside lights, they lay back in bed. The music continued to blare and there was no longer any pretence that either of them were asleep. Nevertheless, they remained on their far sides of the mattress. George’s chest rose and fell in a strained, artificial attempt at breathing deep. Veronica’s legs itched. She was starting a new teaching position the following morning and would surely now be a mess for it. At least she had already narrowed down her outfit – either a long red dress, or a shorter blue. But she’d wanted to be bright, sparky. Every now and then the man next door would explode into a short bout of shrieks, and Veronica’s breath would stick in her chest, and she would sense George tensing. Occasionally there was a lull in the music, and he would gradually relax, but then like a stab to the gut the music and the man would return with their abrasive beat.
“If it was Sinatra or Fitzgerald, it wouldn’t be so awful,” Veronica mused at one point, and George laughed gratefully at her attempt at humour, reaching his hand in a rare gesture of affection across the bed. As their fingers intertwined, Veronica felt a sudden surge of tears rushing to her eyes, but she resisted the heaving in her chest, and in the dimness, George didn’t seem to notice.
Nor did he notice Veronica slipping into recollection of another night, many years ago, when she had steadied her breath and gripped the edge of another bed in much the same way. She had been sixteen, at her parents’ house in Oman. There was a party to mark their imminent departure for Nairobi and a friend of her father’s had been gallantly swinging her from room to room. He was much younger than her father, perhaps thirty or thirty-five, and she’d had a crush on him for years. That night he talked on and on about how mature she was, how beautiful she’d become. When he led her to her bedroom, it had seemed inevitable almost, natural…
Cutting into her own musings, Veronica wondered why she was suddenly remembering this now.
Brushing the thought aside, she laid a hand on top of her empty stomach. George didn’t notice this either, and it no longer surprised her to catch herself this way, but familiarity didn’t stop the sadness. With her other hand, gently, she squeezed George’s still intertwined fingers, and he squeezed back, but she didn’t feel bolstered. The intimacy of skin seemed only to illuminate its more usual absence, and without intention, tears threatened again – hot, burning, laced this time with a feint fury directed squarely at the man next to her. Because it was him, after all, who had made her feel this way. It was his doing – he with his cool, constant composure, his pulling away from vulnerability, his pulling away from her. It was his fault that she had become so pathetically grateful for the fleeting touch of skin, for these scraps he threw to her.
Veronica glanced at the clock. It was 4.13am. “I can’t believe he’s still going,” she said. “It’s getting light out.”
“I can’t do anything else.”
A slight curtness had appeared in George’s tone and he withdrew his hand from hers. She moved her head to study him. They hadn’t spoken in many minutes now and she wondered what he had been thinking about to shift his mood. Had he somehow sensed her tear-tipped anger? Something in his mind had quite plainly hardened, like clay left too long unattended. It was a pattern that seemed to be growing increasingly frequent between them. What had once been malleable and soft and waiting for the tender imprint of the other, was all at once brittle and breakable and cold to touch. Often now, they found themselves this way, slipping without warning between alliance and combat, unspoken thoughts erecting themselves between them, and once begun, neither of them could stop the hardening in the air.