The Ex-Wives (20 page)

It was a big cinema, not one of the cupboards Buffy had complained about. She had meant to ask the manager if she could speak to India but
Citizen Kane
was showing, and Buffy had told her it was really good, so she simply bought a ticket and went in.

The ads were playing – a blue-jeaned rump was swaying on the screen, accompanied by loud music. Celeste paused in the dark. Somebody took her
ticket; it wasn't India. But in the darkness other torches were weaving and dipping, up and down the auditorium. Which one belonged to her?

Celeste was shown to a seat. Once her eyes had grown accustomed to the dark she saw that the cinema was only half full. The curiously meaty smell of popcorn was in the air. Up on the screen the film began; an iron gate, turrets against rushing black and white clouds. One or two people were still arriving; in the aisles the torches still swivelled, shining on an empty seat here, an empty seat there. They flashed like fireflies. Soon they would be gone; the usherettes would disappear to wherever usherettes went. Where did they go? They just melted away.

She had never thought about this. She had never thought about so many things. Up on the screen a voice spoke boomingly. The audience breathed; they sighed,
en masse,
like a great dark sponge, settling down. They had ceased to function; the actors lit their faces, dancing across their irises. Celeste didn't really watch the film. For the first time she wondered what it must be like to be an actor. She hadn't really thought about this before. This was what Buffy
did
. He put on fancy dress and became somebody different. He escaped into it, leaving his various families in the dark, fumbling around while he entertained everybody else.

This wasn't fair. The seat next to her was empty. If only Buffy were here, he would explain. He would sit there, his bear-hand on her knee; he would feed her pieces of Bourneville chocolate. He would lead her into the story, into an adventure. Perhaps he would protest that he wasn't escaping; that he was returning people to themselves. He was filling their heads with reflections of themselves, he was filling them with answers. If not answers, then dreams. Who knows? He wasn't here.

India was, somewhere. Celeste couldn't concentrate on the film; she got up and went to look for her. There was nobody in the lobby except a bored-looking man selling hamburgers. He lounged beside the bubbling tank of orange juice. She went up the wide, carpeted stairs to the upper floor.

India was standing in the doorway marked
Circle
. Celeste could recognize her from the back, even in her maroon uniform. She was watching the film. Celeste tapped her on the shoulder.

India turned. ‘Hi,' she said. ‘What're you doing here?'

Celeste shrugged. ‘I heard it was good.'

‘I've seen it about a zillion times. My stepdad – Buffy – ex-stepdad – he used to take me to the pictures all the time. Specially the old ones. He knew the names of the actors; he used to whisper to me
and everyone told us to shut up.' She tensed. ‘Watch this bit.'

Celeste watched for a moment. India took her arm and led her to a seat. They sat down. There was nobody else up here, in the circle. India glanced around and took out a pack of cigarettes. ‘Hope Mr Nathan doesn't see us. He's tried to sack me twice.' She lit a cigarette and sat back. She pointed to the screen, whispering: ‘People don't really get old like that. Poor old Orson Welles had no idea what was in store. Bunged on a few wrinkles and whitened his hair.' She exhaled smoke. ‘Little did he know that he was going to blow up like a balloon and his career crumble into pieces.'

Down below, actors bloomed on the screen. They lit India's face and her wreathing cigarette smoke. Celeste asked: ‘So you came to these films with your step-dad?'

India nodded. ‘It was our secret skive.
L'Atalante, Les Enfants de Paradis,
the only French I learnt was through subtitles.'

‘When did he meet your mum?'

India grinned. ‘At a health farm. Mum was meditating in the garden, and he was creeping out to go to the pub. He was trying to squeeze under some barbed wire but his trousers got caught. She had to rescue him.'

‘No, I mean how long ago?'

India put her feet up on the seat in front. ‘She was married to my real Dad then. To Alan.'

‘What about Buffy? Was he married?'

‘Oh, Buffy's always married.'

‘Is he?'

‘He's such a romantic. Rather sweet really.' She inhaled deeply. She didn't seem to think it odd, Celeste questioning her like this. Maybe she was full of drugs and everything seemed natural. ‘He was married to Popsi.'

‘Popsi?'

‘Popsi Concorde. Daft name, isn't it? Mum thought so, but I suppose she would.' She stopped, and gazed at the screen. Orson Welles was smashing up bedroom furniture. ‘She was obsessed with her for a bit. As much as Mum can be obsessed with anybody except herself. Retrospective jealousy, I suppose. She kept on going on about how vulgar and brassy she was.' She blew out a plume of smoke. ‘All I knew was Mum kept taking me to this pub.'

‘What pub?'

‘The pub Popsi worked at. She'd moved in there with her new boyfriend or husband or whatever.' The voice of Orson Welles boomed like Buffy's, boomed echoing from the past. It caressed the
audience. India tapped the ash off her cigarette and turned to Celeste. ‘Why're you so interested?'

‘I just am. My life's so boring.'

‘Don't you want to watch the film?'

‘This story's much better,' whispered Celeste. ‘Go on.'

‘We'd take the tube to Sloane Square. Gosh, I haven't thought about it for years. I was just little. Dunno why they let me in but Popsi was the easygoing type. It was called The Old Brown Mare, I remember the sign. I liked horses.'

They watched the film for a while. At least, Celeste pretended to watch it. Afterwards she couldn't remember a thing that had happened in it. She only remembered India sitting beside her, with the torch lying in her lap and the bluish light from the screen playing over her face. ‘What was she like, Popsi?'

‘Peroxide blonde, Barbara Windsor type. Buffy said she was the sort of woman who always had one too many buttons undone. I remember seeing her reflection in all the little mirrors around the bar. Mum would just sit there, watching her. She probably didn't even know who Mum was. I ate lots of crisps.' She laughed. ‘The funny thing was, mum doesn't even
drink.
She never goes to pubs. Not usually. But jealousy makes people do peculiar things, I suppose. They get unhinged.'

Celeste hadn't noticed that the film had finished. There was a stirring, downstairs. Just then a man appeared, in a dinner jacket. He seemed to be shouting something at India.

When Celeste turned round, India had gone. Just a gauzy layer of smoke remained, hanging in the air. And then the lights came up.

MILES PUSHED THE
trolley down the aisle. Muzak burbled, to sooth his troubled soul. Every now and then he consulted Brenda's list. Snicker Bars. Fiesta Kitchen Towels. Vosene Silk Hair Conditioner. Diet Tizer. He was never in the right aisle, but then her list wasn't in any sort of order. He kept retracing his steps and bumping into people coming the other way. Mostly women; it was the middle of the afternoon.

He was in a huge Tesco's just outside Chippenham. They were building a whopping Sainsbury's further up the road, too, in the middle of a field. They all had belfries and gables and clock towers; they were big brick leeches sucking the town dry. He'd said to Brenda: ‘Just think. In hundreds of years
archaeologists will say – what was that great religious revival? All those huge, huge churches. Vast car parks! We must have got it wrong, that it was a Godless age.' But Brenda hadn't listened, she had spotted a ladder in her tights.

Tesco Malted Wheats. He flung the packet into the trolley. Neither he nor Brenda ate Malted Wheats but that wasn't the point. He felt exhausted; his legs ached like a housewife's.

He made his way to the tinned fish. This was the big one, the one she had gone on about. Trouble was, they were clean out of pilchards. The word must have got around.

He loaded the groceries into his car and drove to Gateway's, the other side of Swindon. He searched along the maze of aisles. Pilchards. He almost whooped. He cradled the tin in his hand. To Brenda, this wasn't a can of Abbey Vale Pilchards in Tomato Sauce. It was a British Airways Round-the-World Trip of a Lifetime for Two, with £100,000 thrown in.

He must have spent hours shopping, driving along ring roads from one supermarket to the next. By the time he got home it was dark and Brenda was back from work. From the sound of it, she had her friend Gail with her. He heard their voices in the lounge.

‘So we're sitting in the cinema,' said Gail, ‘and he
started sort of sliding his hand up my skirt. Just a bit at a time. He thought I wasn't noticing.'

‘Was that your pleated skirt from Marks and Spencers?' asked Brenda.

He dumped the shopping on the kitchen floor. Brenda was beside him in a flash.

‘Did you get the pilchards?' she asked breathlessly. He nodded. ‘And the other things?' She kissed him on the cheek. As she did so he noticed that the sink was full of water. Bottles lay submerged in it, to soak off their labels.

She carried the tin of pilchards, like a trophy, into the lounge. Gail's voice rose. They started giggling.

He stood there in silence. In the water the labels uncurled; some of them had already risen to the surface. The plastic bags sighed as they settled themselves around his feet. More and more strongly, nowadays, he felt as if he had wandered into the wrong house. These little starter homes all looked the same, it was an understandable mistake. He had actually done it once; he had sauntered, whistling, into the house next door and surprised the Widdicombes eating a fondue. He could just walk into another front door and begin all over again.

Did other men feel like this? He hadn't been a husband for long, only two years. He should have got used to it by now, but in fact the opposite seemed
to be happening. Maybe it was the inside-out nature of their lives, Brenda working and him not. That was the most reasonable explanation. But he had started to feel this some time before he had been made redundant.

He started to put stuff away in the larder. On the shelves sat rows and rows of tins, stripped of their labels. They glowed, dully. Large ones, smaller ones, flattish ones. Choosing something to eat made him and Brenda seem like a blind couple; there was a dotty sense of adventure to it. You opened a tin and what would it be? Sponge pudding? Butter beans? There were ten cans of Bachelor Mushy Peas amongst that lot which nobody was ever going to eat. Brenda had only bought them for their labels – ten, so she could send off a multiple entry.

The whole house was silting up with things they were never going to eat, or condition their hair with, or squirt the furniture with. By now the larder was so packed he could hardly close the door. It made him feel breathless and congested, as if he had indigestion. Her craze for competitions was getting out of hand; it was an addiction, really. She quite cheerfully admitted that. And how could he have the heart to stop her?

She had such a boring job. Eight hours a day she sat at a console, tubes plugged into her ears as if she
were in intensive care, staring at a screen that gave her a headache. How could he cut off her escape routes? All her friends at work were compers. During their lunch hour they scratched away at their scratch-pads of magic numbers. They washed butter wrappers. They collected bottle-tops as proof of purchase and squashed them under their chair-legs to make them flat enough to send off. They dreamed of cars and dishwashers and holidays for two in Bali; they dreamed of trips to the stars. They dreamed of the Long White Envelope sliding through their letterbox; they spoke of this in hushed and reverent initials –
the LWE
.

In the evenings they sat in each others' lounges and made up slogans.
Hovis and Half-Fat Anchor taste so good together because . . . BP Lubricants are the sportsman's choice because . . . It Asda be Asda because
. . . If they were in his house he could hear the sudden bursts of laughter, the excited voices as one of them was suddenly possessed with what they called
Winspiration.
Before he met Brenda he had presumed that slogan-writing was a solitary activity, like masturbation, but she and her girlfriends did it together, a chaste orgy of voices chiming with insincere tributes to the goods they never used. . . .
because their porkers are corkers . . . because it keeps your food eatable at a price that's unbeatable
. . . They were experts. They
knew the combinations of flattery and humour that would win; they sneered at the tired old clichés like
Experts perfect them and connoisseurs select them.
One had to admire them for it. He did, actually. They won a lot. Only last September one of them, Phyllis, had calculated how many packets of Opal Fruits were piled up inside a Ford Escort GTi; she had won the car and all the sweets
and
had her photo in the local paper.

Oh, yes, they won. Brenda, in particular. That was the trouble. She was always hauling him off to presentations in hotels hundreds of miles away in the north of England, Stockport, places like that, where toupéed TV personalities whose programmes he had never seen put their arms around Brenda and called her
my love.
Then there were all the deliveries. Last week he had had the fright of his life when he had answered the doorbell to a man in green overalls who said: ‘Hi there, I've come from Mars.'

That time it was a microwave cooker. Lucky he was home all day to take the stuff in. The house was filling up. At the top of the stairs was the little bedroom where he pictured their child would be; he had even papered it with a frieze of teddy bears. But they didn't seem to be able to have a baby and now the room was stacked with things he could never imagine anyone wanting, more and more of them,
piled up: a thermos-gas barbecue, a Phillips foot spa, a digitally-controlled hostess trolley. In the corner was heaped £250-worth of Marley Cushion Flooring, consolation prize in the Shake'N'Vac competition. It was impossible to open the window anymore; it was wedged shut with a boxed set of Dunlop Maxfli golf club and balls. He had never played golf. ‘Get on with you,' said Brenda, ‘you could learn. I'll win you lessons!' She kept winning things for him; she thought they were in on this together and that they'd become Comping Couple of the Year. She didn't seem to notice his lack of interest. He had hidden some of the stuff in the cupboard – trouser presses, things like that. There was £ioo-worth of Denim Men's Toiletries in there; he got a whiff of it sometimes, when he passed.