A Chip Off

By Craig Dobson

Fiona is sitting with her back to the window, a semi-silhouette against the village’s winding main street. The weather has been hot for days. Farm machinery blunders along the narrow lanes, great round bales balanced precariously on splayed trailers. Wisps of straw litter the hedgerows and pavements. In the warm evenings, check-shirted farmers drink outside the pub, their dogs idling in the shadows. As they have been all day, swifts veer over the roofs in small groups preparing to leave, their sickle screams arcing through the blue like formulae.

“Is there nothing left to say?” asks Fiona. I shake my head fractionally. “I want to stay here.” She says this quickly, but it’s clear she’s rehearsed it; her words have none of their usual hesitation. “I’ve made friends here. I feel a part of it. I’ll buy out your share. I can now, with Mum’s money.”

A tractor roars past, its driver bouncing on his seat, the great rear wheels a blur of black rubber treads. There’s been a diesel stink in the air for days. Farmers have a proprietorial air, as if the rest of us don’t really belong in the country. When they need to make hay or move livestock, what are our scampering urban concerns to them? Fiona has taken to the life, though. There’s a reddening in her cheeks, a thickening of her physique and a wide settling to her handsome features which I think will morph imperceptibly into those of an equine vet or bucolic parishioner.

“I’ll sleep in the other room tonight, get the train tomorrow. It won’t take long to pack. I can come back for the rest later.” I smile at her as I say this. By and large, we’re still kind to each other, as if we’ve come to realise that the mistake has been a shared one.

***

As the near empty train prepares to leave, a worn ochre light slants across the empty seat opposite me. Flecks of dust idle through it, dipping or rising. I exhale, scattering them but drawing others in, illuminated in their drift. Five years since I got off another train, carrying this same suitcase across this same platform, at the end of which Fiona, newly arrived herself, stood with one hand raised and a broad smile to greet the beginning of our married life.

***

My parents’ titanic erosion of their life together began before my sister and I were born. Thereafter, separated from us at best by a garrulous wall, they butchered their marriage relentlessly throughout our childhood. Combining vindictive regret, lack of imagination and a shared sense of frustrated entitlement – liberally fuelled by drink and occasional infidelity – they spread before us not a map of love but a campaign plan, a grim record of the brutal slaughter of romantic hopes. 

At the end of it, I wandered out into a world of love songs and romcoms feeling – without either irony or pause – uniquely prepared to say I do. 

***

I once wrote a poem to Sally on the back of a postcard of Caravaggio’s ‘Medusa’. We had visited the Uffizi that day. Unable to sleep, I penned my verse. It was our honeymoon. Very romantic, very Shelley. 

If love has a country, then for me it’s Italy: both of them timeless, showy, unsustained, inexplicable, addictive and thrilling. I took all my marriages there at some point, neither state prevailing as I’d hoped. Fiona was left wistful and saddened at the gorgeous dilapidation that seemed to threaten the security she most valued in life. Jane flew back envious, wanting more of the style she saw: more clothes and handbags, more chic villas, restaurants and yacht-bedazzled bays. Sally just found it hot, chaotic, frustrating and overrated. She hated the ‘Medusa’. Neither the poem nor the honeymoon worked. Our guidebook was a friend’s old one and most of the prices had doubled. My primitive financial plan soon dissolved. We failed to book far enough ahead and, in that antediluvian age of landlines, spent much time clustered round public phone boxes making desperate calls to increasingly dingy pensioni.

In a rainy Padua we wandered down a side street hoping for a vacancy, only to come across two junkies shooting up in a deserted doorway. Days of shouting and misery later, it ended with me walking from a bank with the remains of our budget converted to a comically large wad of lire gripped in my hands to buy our flights home, and then hurrying back to Roma Termini where Sally was waiting at the station bar, in tears. An Italian businessman, taking pity, had bought her a brandy. I never saw the postcard again.

***

My father’s boomtime was short but credible; he was part of an architectural firm that was itself part of a larger conglomerate owned by a fearfully wealthy American who adored Mrs Thatcher. In her New Britain he staked his claim, alchemising its industrial relics and rationalised high street banks into trendy hotels, wine bars and flash flats. He made fortunes before falling foul of vast and ruinous lawsuits back home. 

Time enough, however, for my old man to nail his managerial colours to one of the American’s projects transforming a run-down hotel near the South Coast into a yuppie complex. We got to live in one of a pair of charmless modern bungalows near the service road at the back entrance. Our neighbour was the old head gardener, a widower soon to be retired along with the old hotel’s equally anachronistic rose borders. He kept golden pheasants in his little back garden, doting on them. In their cramped, poultry-stink pen they scratched among the bare mud for corn or pecked at the cabbage stalks he hung up for them. 

I was too distractedly young to notice my father’s credulous hope thinning when the corporate whispers finally trickled down to him; all was not well over the pond. When the project first began, the boss’s third-in-command had been helicoptered in for a whistle-stop tour and grinning photo op, but no more bigwigs came now. The whole thing slowed, leaving my parents enough time and juniper vat to indulge again in the temporarily interrupted murder of their marriage. 

Mornings after their latest evisceration, I would stand in the still-echoing silence and watch the cooped pheasants parade their gorgeous captivity next door. Round their unfree shimmering the old man shuffled and murmured, lavishing what corn and care he could. I left home soon afterwards.

***

I just don’t understand why you didn’t tell me; why you didn’t talk to me before doing it. It feels like I had no chance, no say in it.

Fiona and I are in the final, box-packing stages of separation. I’m back for the afternoon, hired van at the ready to take my stuff. I’ve just come across some letters from Sally, squeezed into an old notebook at the bottom of a carrier bag. They were from a time just after I’d first been unfaithful to her. She’d gone to live with her sister for a few weeks, from where she’d written half a dozen of them, exploring not just the emotional consequences of my betrayal but also the questions raised by it. 

Not unreasonably, she wanted to know why. After all, there’d been no obvious signs that our marriage was in trouble, no simmering dissatisfaction noticeable on my part. It was only a few months since we’d enjoyed a holiday (Devon, this time) and our new flat – our first owned home together – was already half-decorated, magazines full of interior décor tips littering our brand-new coffee table. Our life seemed bursting with plans. Her neat, slanting hand reminds me that we’d even broached the topic of children for the first time though, by the last letter, she was considering whether it was that very topic that had frightened me into what she termed ‘a relapse’, as if my action hadn’t been an irregularity, but some plaguing recidivism.

I find myself wondering what more my letters had said than the few lines whose hurtful inadequacy she chose to quote back. Later, I was unfaithful to Jane in revenge for an indiscretion on her part with the man she would leave me for when it became clear that my wealth wouldn’t outlive our marriage. Later still, I betrayed Fiona to convince her that we really didn’t have a future, and only then after a number of long, eviscerating heart-to-hearts had failed to shake her belief in us. But as I fold Sally’s letters back into their envelopes, I’m aware that their questions remain unanswered as when she first penned them.

***

By the time Jane and I separated, my parents too were bringing down the gin-soggy curtain on their affairs. I’d had little contact; my sister – who, despite inheriting their love of gin, had braved the empirical prophecy of our upbringing one better than me by having a child – saw more of them. It was she who’d informed me of the various drying out attempts and then of the divorce. Dad spent his half of the settlement on a health club manageress he’d been seeing on and off (he never did a day’s exercise in his life), while Mum invested hers in her only nephew’s failed attempt to become an entrepreneur. 

Not that it ended there; they were too enmeshed in a shared doom. For one brief and, from what my sister said – I went nowhere near – unimaginably grim period, they then tried, though broke, alcoholic and bitter as never before, to make it work again. Seven months in, neighbours found Dad at the foot of the stairs one morning, a splintered rib through his lung and a look of mild surprise on the bruised features above his broken neck. Mum was in the empty bathtub, fully clothed and crying. 

A shabby, lost and unsteady figure round town for a couple of years afterwards – brought back sometimes by other drunks sometimes by the police – one night she vomited up the overdose she’d hoped would kill her, only to inhale some of it which, courtesy of untreated aspiration pneumonia, did what the pills had failed to. The nephew went to both funerals; the health club manageress and I to neither. 

***

A few weeks later, my sister dropped round a couple of boxes of Mum’s things from which she thought I might want a relic. More to indulge her, I sorted through their pitiful contents, only pausing when I came across a dull yellow china clog, a tourist piece Mum and Dad had picked up on their honeymoon in Antwerp. Miraculously unscathed through years of drunken clumsiness and glass throwing, it ended up as an ashtray. It was decorated with a line drawing of a young couple in traditional Dutch dress, holding hands, dancing. 

I stared at its ash-smeared familiarity, remembering one dismal Sunday morning when I was twelve or thirteen. Mum dragged herself downstairs from vomiting audibly in their en suite to the sitting room where I sat watching a video. Treading among the debris of their Saturday night, she righted the clog which lay tipped, its butt-ends spilled onto the cracked glass coffee table. Looking wistfully at its dancing couple, she confided in me – her voice hoarse from retching – that she hoped one day I would find a nice girl and raise a family. 

My father never mentioned the subject, advising only the need for a steady career, as if, beyond the visceral betrayals and Pyrrhic garlands of marriage, your pension would always be waiting, faithful to the end. His was, their pledge broken only by his own stair-tumbling desertion. 

***

There have been many dresses: youthful budget ones for Sally; chic, ludicrously over-priced whisps for Jane; the middling, floral type favoured by Fiona, one of which is the only one that I can remember in any detail. I bought it for her at the village market in Umbria. It was our first holiday, her first to Italy. Though poorer and twice-divorced, I felt only lightened by my losses. The sun shone, the world blessed. We loved and ate and wandered through the beautifully civilised decay around us. Each morning I woke, born again to a bright new age. The past had been forgiven, bleached of regret.

It was the dress she wore when we visited the little church at the top of the nearby village. Climbing the steep steps, we were glad of its cool interior whose ancient stones lay golden in the window light, and whose saints and angels dignified the simple grace of their benediction. The candles at the alter shone with eternal certainty. We lit one of our own and walked back out into the blinding heart of those hidden days together in the hills, held safe a while longer, our flame still burning in the temple. 

***

When she was dying, I visited my mother. Once. For revenge. I didn’t want to be the sort who pees on graves or gouges the headstone, and my father’s sudden end had robbed me of any pound of farewell gristle. This time, a study in pre-death readiness, I took grapes and flowers and a cathartic soliloquy to whisper into her unconscious ear. 

Yet, when I found myself staring at her masked and tubed face, its pale, lined features shrunk beneath greasy, half-dyed threads of thinning hair, I felt nothing but a detached pity. She lay there, pointless as roadkill. I couldn’t believe that here was one half of what had so selfishly and ineptly built my early life and then left me to squat its failings. Surely this broken thing could never have had such power?

Though I knew I might one day feel cheated – though I tried to summon their warring faces back from my childhood’s booze-drenched mauling – I was trumped by the wax-skinned passivity before me. I couldn’t utter my revenge against this carrion. I left without saying a word, which only later struck me as fitting.

Craig’s had fiction published in Active Muse, The Adelaide Literary Magazine, Better Than Starbucks, Black Works, The Delmarva Review, The Eunoia Review, Flash, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Frogmore Papers, Halfway Down the Stairs, The Interpreter’s House, Literally Stories, Rue Scribe, Runcible Spoon and Short Fiction Magazine. He lives and works in the UK.