Read Online The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Adam Roberts
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sacrificed in order to make room for this corrective kit, and my team was at a loose end.
Four women. I could pretend to be blasé and claim that I can’t remember many of the details, but who would I be kidding? The most heartbreaking one was Molly. She worked as a secretary in the Registry at Lancaster University, and we were set up on a date by mutual friends. She was sweet-tempered and clever, and we had a great deal in common. We hit it off. We dated, and it got serious, and we moved into a flat together, a proper couple. And then we ended up separating, more in sorrow than anger. She didn’t mind that I had two slightly mangled hands, and that I was so self-conscious about the state of my toes that I never once (I think) took my socks off whilst we made love. She didn’t mind that my nose looked so weird, or that ever since Antarctica I had suffered from recurring nightmares, when they , or it , or whatever, congealed – palpably, visually – in my bedroom, resolving into the figure of a young boy, the old haunting, the yelling-aloud, sweat-flowing raging awakening in the small hours. I wept and apologised and she said, ‘It’s OK.’ She didn’t mind . That’s the kernel of the heartbreak, right there. She put up with these things . And I in turn didn’t mind her acne. I’m not talking about a few teenager-y spots on her face. This was an all-body affliction of red-purple bumps, about a third of which crusted into cream-coloured scabs. They were on her face, across her chest, inside her thighs. They turned her back into a Jackson Pollock, and for the ten days leading up to her period were so sore that she couldn’t lie supine. Without them she would have been a most beautiful individual: white-chocolate skin, red hair the colour of Tizer, eyes green as an old pound note, slender body. But with them they were all anybody could see about her. She told me that one of her earlier boyfriends had suggested, as he broke up with her, that in future she ought to date a blind man – the most hurtful thing, she said, anybody had ever said to her. And I nodded, and put on a sympathetic face, and consoled her, and agreed with her that the world was full of bastards. But inside I was as big a bastard as any, because I was thinking: well that wouldn’t work because Molly’s acne was a tactile as well as a visual disfigurement. Running my hands over her body at midnight, with the lights out, I could feel every bump and hollow, every braille-like scab.
But beggars can’t be choosers, we say, and the truth of the cosmos is that we are all beggars. Molly’s acne, a trick played upon her by some malicious deity, affected all of her skin, even in her most intimate places. On rare days, when her period was a long way away, we might manage some slow and delicately orchestrated penetrative sex. Most of her cycle such a thing was too painful for her to contemplate. We used one another’s hands, and mouths, and did all the things ingenuity suggested, and all the time I was secretly fixating, and I’ll bet she was too, only upon the things we didn’t do. If only we could do that , I thought, in my inmost heart. If only we could have a normal sex life of regular vigorous fucking. And that was what broke us up in the end – not the endless search for medical amelioration of her condition, the long drives to specialist clinics, the sitting in chilly waiting rooms for hours, the hand-holding, the new pills that made her sick (holding her lava-coloured hair out of the way of her face as she knelt at the toilet in our flat), the other new pills that made her so depressed she could hardly get out of bed and her libido vanished altogether. The ointments that I would apply, as she wept with the pain. The weird diets Molly picked up from online sites, and in which I would join her, in a spirit of, I now think, misapplied solidarity. All this was bearable. The secret fantasy of a regular sex life, though, was not. Our fantasies always
Four women. I could pretend to be blasé and claim that I can’t remember many of the details, but who would I be kidding? The most heartbreaking one was Molly. She worked as a secretary in the Registry at Lancaster University, and we were set up on a date by mutual friends. She was sweet-tempered and clever, and we had a great deal in common. We hit it off. We dated, and it got serious, and we moved into a flat together, a proper couple. And then we ended up separating, more in sorrow than anger. She didn’t mind that I had two slightly mangled hands, and that I was so self-conscious about the state of my toes that I never once (I think) took my socks off whilst we made love. She didn’t mind that my nose looked so weird, or that ever since Antarctica I had suffered from recurring nightmares, when they , or it , or whatever, congealed – palpably, visually – in my bedroom, resolving into the figure of a young boy, the old haunting, the yelling-aloud, sweat-flowing raging awakening in the small hours. I wept and apologised and she said, ‘It’s OK.’ She didn’t mind . That’s the kernel of the heartbreak, right there. She put up with these things . And I in turn didn’t mind her acne. I’m not talking about a few teenager-y spots on her face. This was an all-body affliction of red-purple bumps, about a third of which crusted into cream-coloured scabs. They were on her face, across her chest, inside her thighs. They turned her back into a Jackson Pollock, and for the ten days leading up to her period were so sore that she couldn’t lie supine. Without them she would have been a most beautiful individual: white-chocolate skin, red hair the colour of Tizer, eyes green as an old pound note, slender body. But with them they were all anybody could see about her. She told me that one of her earlier boyfriends had suggested, as he broke up with her, that in future she ought to date a blind man – the most hurtful thing, she said, anybody had ever said to her. And I nodded, and put on a sympathetic face, and consoled her, and agreed with her that the world was full of bastards. But inside I was as big a bastard as any, because I was thinking: well that wouldn’t work because Molly’s acne was a tactile as well as a visual disfigurement. Running my hands over her body at midnight, with the lights out, I could feel every bump and hollow, every braille-like scab.
But beggars can’t be choosers, we say, and the truth of the cosmos is that we are all beggars. Molly’s acne, a trick played upon her by some malicious deity, affected all of her skin, even in her most intimate places. On rare days, when her period was a long way away, we might manage some slow and delicately orchestrated penetrative sex. Most of her cycle such a thing was too painful for her to contemplate. We used one another’s hands, and mouths, and did all the things ingenuity suggested, and all the time I was secretly fixating, and I’ll bet she was too, only upon the things we didn’t do. If only we could do that , I thought, in my inmost heart. If only we could have a normal sex life of regular vigorous fucking. And that was what broke us up in the end – not the endless search for medical amelioration of her condition, the long drives to specialist clinics, the sitting in chilly waiting rooms for hours, the hand-holding, the new pills that made her sick (holding her lava-coloured hair out of the way of her face as she knelt at the toilet in our flat), the other new pills that made her so depressed she could hardly get out of bed and her libido vanished altogether. The ointments that I would apply, as she wept with the pain. The weird diets Molly picked up from online sites, and in which I would join her, in a spirit of, I now think, misapplied solidarity. All this was bearable. The secret fantasy of a regular sex life, though, was not. Our fantasies always
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