MASCARA

by
Maurice Gartshore

The road rolls under me, pulling me towards something horrendous and I know I have to pull over. I can’t face her. Can’t let Em look into my eyes.

I sniff her perfume on my sleeve, her smell on my finger. The car’s full of it: on the seats, on the door handle, on the clip to the glove compartment. Thank Christ she didn’t smoke. I have to wash again. I showered like I’ve never showered before but the smell’s still there. Water isn’t enough: ask Lady Mac-fucking-Beth. But the traffic drives me on: tailgating lunatics with their cases full of whatever shit they peddle and cropped twenty year-olds with their skinny girls showing the pads of their feet on the dashboard.

I come to a side road and turn hard left. It’s a quarter-past-eight and the sun’s edging each cloud like a drunk’s morning eyes. I pull into a parking spot with a sign. I need more time to think. There’s a choice of walks: two, three, or six miles. I take the three. Fuck this. Here I am in the middle of nowhere on a summer evening when I should be sitting out the back having a beer and watching the kids on the trampoline.

I walk, feeling the muscles in each thigh shouting at me. They’ve worked enough in the last twenty-four hours Christ knows, without this. A woman passes with a white Scotty dog and smiles. What is it with middle-aged women that they have to fucking smile at everyone? You don’t need to smile, just pass by. Go back to your cosy house and watch the dog lap from its bowl and call to your old man that you’re home. He’ll be so fucking grateful. Jesus, my language. Can’t help it. My head is just away somewhere. Why did I do it? Why didn’t I think. That’s what makes me fucking human. There I go again. My tongue is a very angry organ today, either that or my brain is a very angry brain. Something’s angry that’s for sure.

Another couple, another dog. A Weimaraner loping along like a wolf, sniffing every tree but keeping to the path. That’s a good lesson- sniff trees but keep to the path. Maybe it’ll smell me. And they’re arm in arm, just away with each other. Young. Lucky bastards. Just you, just me darling, on this lovely evening in these lovely woods and back home to the lovely telly. And me getting that weird feeling of being where I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t be here now. I can imagine some hi-tec camera in the sky and you can get it on your computer. Not so much Google-Earth as Google-Man. Just key in “Daddy” or “Hubby” and then watch as it scans the globe whirling round and round and you drag that wee mouse getting closer and closer towards the earth and then you see Scotland and then you move in to the centre and then you’re in Perthshire and bingo you’re coming in to land on a lone figure walking along this track and…

“Look, it’s Daddy, mummy!”

“No, it can’t be daddy. Daddy’s on his way home from Inverness. He’ll be here any minute.”

“It’s daddy. It’s his jacket. Look mummy…”

“God. So it is.”

“Let’s talk to him, mummy.”

“No, we can’t do that …”

Thank Christ. It’s only a dream. Ten years down the road? Who knows. Then we’ll all be so scared of putting a foot wrong that we’ll all be just fucking perfect little people. And wouldn’t that be good right now. That’s what I need. Needed. To be so shit scared of being caught that there’s nothing left to be caught for. A bloody great moral dome that covers every moment of our lives like an Eden Project. The Salmond Project, a moral umbrella, free to the people of Scotland.

I stop and lean against a tree. I can feel the regular gouges in the bark like some crust-forming disease that has made a pattern and become beautiful. Funny how it takes something like this to make me stroke the bark of a tree. Last time I did this I’d been dumped by a fat girl I thought I couldn’t live without. And now I’m seeing another woman, the pock- marks on her face still visible under the makeup.

I could see her at the bar, just leaning there amidst the hubbub of chatter and TV adverts and the clink of glasses and the bursts of laughter. And I was bored and alone. I’m often alone. It’s my job to travel alone, to do the talking, get the orders and then be alone again in some grotty B and B with nylon sheets and stains on the wall by my head. Each room is its own story but it leaves wee signs here and there: the spots on the ceiling where a can exploded in a gush: the fag dropped from the washbasin on to the carpet and left for a second or two to burn in before being noticed by the smell; the fag stains like wiped shit on the bottom of the shower. I mean, what sort of cretin showers with a fag in their mouth? With me it’s the light more than anything. The light at night may come through the thin curtains from a streetlamp or a neon sign from a building opposite or there may be no light just a city darkness that’s without stars or hope. And in the morning you wake dimly to objects that are in the wrong place: a wall that shouldn’t be there your brain tells you, till it clicks into gear for another day and you know where you are.

If the bar hadn’t cleared. If she hadn’t been left standing there with her back to me showing those legs. It was the way her calves swelled. And they were bare. I couldn’t help wanting to touch them. In my head I was, you see. I was stroking them and that told me how smooth they were. If I could have just touched them for the price of a drink I wouldn’t have needed any more. She was leaning on her elbows and her arse was sticking out too. A woman’s arse! I went for another drink and she turned and smiled at me. She broke into something like a burglar breaks into an empty house. She smashed her way into my loneliness with the silence and the skill of a smile. Christ. Why did she have to do that? And I was burgled. No, but that’s it. It’s not me that’s burgled. It’s Em. She’s been fucked by me. I’m what I’ve always been, but now I’m not what she thinks I am; what she thinks the core of me is. I’m not the guy she nags and fights and hugs and cooks for; buys oven chips for because she knows I like them, when she hates them. I’m not the guy she strokes when those tender moments come: when a glimpse of my neck or my wrist or my knee for God’s sake turns her insides to mush with love and I wonder what caused it. I’m not the guy she’ll be happy with when his hair goes, his back bows, his ears grow hairy, his eyes lose their light in a watery film and his dick can’t get up any more. What I was, I’m not now.

When I spoke last night and the old way of talking to a woman kicked in, it was so easy. She listened to my bullshit tales about travelling all the while staring at me with those made-up eyes. Funny thing was, her mouth didn’t seem to be as interested. It was as if it was telling the real story. Get me another drink, it seemed to be saying. I told her she’d smudged her mascara and she touched the wrong eye at first then laughed as she rubbed the other. That was the moment when something broke in me. Before that I knew what was happening. It was a bit of fun, chatting up some strange female in a strange town. Even her accent was strange; not the vowels I was used to. She wasn’t educated or smart, just nice and listening and it was fine. Until the mascara. I think if I hadn’t mentioned it, everything would have cooled down and we’d have gone our separate ways. I had booked a room, and it was pissing with rain outside. I just popped in for the sound of voices, and a couple of Guinesses before bed. But I crossed a line and couldn’t go back. It was like selling: you cross a line and then you know you’ll get the order. Well I got the order for a back seat job at the edge of some woods. Turned out she was married but the bastard was hitting her. That’s what she said. I asked about it but she wouldn’t say any more. She was lonely she said. Just like that. As she was about to tip a gin down her throat, she stopped, looked at me and said “I’m lonely.”

I’ve seen enough films to know the language. No subtitles required, thank you very much. This guy isn’t stupid. And we drove. She gave me directions through town out along by a sea wall and up a steep hill to the edge of a wood. There were lights out over the Firth as we moved into the back. It didn’t take long once I began to touch her. I remember thinking back to Em, even then as I came. To the time we were caught by a policeman.

She was very quiet all through as if what she’d hoped for hadn’t happened. Oh not the sex, it was more than that: it was as if this made the loneliness worse, this sitting slumped with a stranger with nothing to say that was tender. As if the touching, the stroking, the thrusting, had sharpened the senses and the last great sense, if it is one, if emotion is a sense, had disappeared. Emotion had left the cinema at half-time. There’s some latin thing about after love animals are sad. I felt it now. Not with Em. With her we’d joke about the wet patch and I’d cuddle her and she’d tease me about the twenty minutes not needing to be timed. Now words were running out. She wanted to get home she said, so we drove back into town and I dropped her near the pub. She opened her handbag and said “Shit, that bastard’s cleaned me out. You couldn’t let me have a couple of quid could you?”

I didn’t pursue the situation. I gave her twenty pounds and closed the door behind her. I knew then that it had been a game.

And now, game or no game I’m still at this tree as if it’s the only solid thing in the world. My car smells of her. My skin smells of her. My brain rumbles on like a thunder far off that goes and then comes again. Something I gave away last night will never come again. I know. I know, and that’s what matters. If Em never knows it doesn’t make any difference. All I can do now is go back; take what’s left of myself back and brush a tiny smudge of mascara from my soul.

© Maurice Gartshore
Reproduced with permission