Free Precocious by Joanna Barnard

me?’
    ‘I know what you’re going to say.’
    ‘Maybe you don’t.’
    ‘I do.’
    (I had been surprised to find out only a few days before the wedding, at the rehearsal, that during the ceremony you don’t actually say ‘I Do’. You say ‘I Will’. Makes sense, really. It has a greater air of permanence. ‘I Do’ sounds like ‘I do at the moment, yeah’, or ‘Well alright then – for now’. ‘I Will’ has another word hiding in there somewhere: it has ‘always’ under its breath.)
    Fights don’t fit patterns. Do they?
    We try to contain them in rounds. We put them in a ring, which is actually a square, with a bell and a referee and a barely dressed girl flashing up numbered cards.
    When we were first married, Dave had a failsafe way of deflecting arguments just as they were about to begin. He could see me coming. He would distract me into laughing, by shouting, ‘Ding a ling a ling: Round One!’
    But now there is no laughter. Looking around our home all I can see are
things
. Washing machine, vacuum cleaner, fridge freezer, dishwasher. I’m surrounded. I’m a housewife in a 1950s TV commercial. I feel applianced in. Everything has been bought together or bought by parents-in-law, sitting looking at me whitely, quietly, waiting to be divided, fought over, split. All the work we did on this place, the paint colours, the sanded floors, the carefully chosen mirrors and vases and blinds, they’re reminders I don’t want, can’t look at.
    I’m starting to fill with an irrational hatred. He’s the block, the barrier to me living the life I was supposed to have. I curse the vanity and greed that led me down that stupid aisle. Dazzled by diamonds and the promise of nothing more than the same kind of life as everyone else has. Why had I gone along with it? How could I not have known that this day would come, when I would be bored and he would be frustrated, and in you would swagger to rouse me from my anaesthesia?
    I hate Dave.
    You start off seeing everything that’s there in a person,
wanting
to see and know everything. Next you see the faults, the pieces that don’t quite fit. Then you start looking for what’s not there.
    I found a You-shaped gap, unfillable.
    ‘I always feel there’s a little bit of you that’s unknowable,’ Dave said once, in a matter-of-fact way that made it seem like this didn’t trouble him.
    I shook my head at it but he was right. The only bit of me he couldn’t have was the bit where you still lived. You carved a nook inside me that no one could see.
    Language is unpeeling from me. How is it that these lips, this tongue, all the apparatus of kissing, that once formed the words ‘You are my angel’, now struggle to generate anything but lies?
    Each lie is smooth and round, like a marble in my mouth. And it isn’t just the words: my clothes are a lie. The laptop case I bring through the door and set down with a sigh, implying I have been working late. The mints I eat to mask the smell of the cigarettes he wouldn’t approve of. The baths I know I will take to wash you off me, when the inevitable happens, as it must.
    I’m planning for it. I find myself in a department store, under unforgiving lights, buying lingerie for a man I’ve barely kissed (this time around, anyway).
Adultery underwear
, I think to myself, laughing in a giddy, guilty way, swinging the bag on the way back to the car, sneaking its contents into a separate drawer, away from my usual things (white and black only; cotton, mostly; utilitarian), as if to prevent cross-contamination. I touch the new satin and lace reverently, bury the violent jewel-colours – ruby, emerald, amethyst – under innocuous towels and sheets. For now.
    I’m preparing for something that is coming towards me, unstoppable as a train. Separate drawers, separate lives; these are the necessary precautions and I perform them with the cool precision of a surgeon. I’m almost certain Dave won’t find out, and if he does, my