ISSN 1758-6488
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Rustle Fiction |
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After that she started finding ways to spend less time at home. She’d take Molly round to my mother’s, her sister’s, or a neighbour’s house almost every night. She volunteered at a charity shop on a Saturday. She started doing yoga on a Sunday evening, even tried going to Church in the mornings but that didn’t take.
She decided it was very important to celebrate half-birthdays. When Molly was two and a half she wanted a big family reunion down south. She’s younger than I am so she still has both parents and all four grandparents. She had a party at her mother’s during the week, hired caterers that I paid for. I couldn’t go. I couldn’t get the time off work. She should’ve known that.
She’d still sleep with me every night. I mean she’d sleep in the same bed every night. She’d sleep with me in the other sense a lot less often.
Her problem kept getting worse. It seemed to become part of her daily life, not just our nightly one. She’d drop things in the kitchen, stupid things like rolls of clingfilm, but sometimes she’d drop knives and potato peelers. It was dangerous what she was doing, with Molly crawling around by her feet. She’d drop them and then she wouldn’t bend to pick them up normally. She’d crouch slightly and she’d go for the object, the knife, the cucumber, what have you, with her right hand. She’d rub the back of her fingers, then the back of her hand, then the soft back of her arm against her crotch, through whatever clothes she was wearing, even through jeans. I swear she’d do that ten times just making dinner. She’d do the dishes by hand even though we’ve got a dishwasher and she’d drop the Fairy, and then the scourer, every time. Then she’d bend to pick them up in that horrible way. I’d see her.
She was giving Molly a bath one night and I came in with a cordless.
‘It’s your mother for you,’ I said.
‘Tell her I’ll call her back. We’re too soapy to talk. Aren’t we, Molly?’
She said all this without looking at me once. She’d used bubbles from a bottle shaped like Homer Simpson and she was waving the bottle in Molly’s face. She had Molly balanced on her knees, held steady with one hand. I don’t know where the other hand was. There were bubbles like I said. I couldn’t prove it but I was pretty sure. She denied everything.
That night, when I was trying to get off, I couldn’t hear any rustling.
