ISSN 1758-6488
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Dirtybed Fiction |
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Instead she let things in. She let them, then, come in, allowed them – is a word she might say – in the way Uncle Robbie hadn’t allowed things before on the farm. For now it was a house, not Uncle Robbie’s farm any more and when I saw her again drawing on that lipstick in the mirror one night and then smiling at herself, at her refection in the glass… I knew then what Bill in his room with all his things around him might never know. Even with the house all tidy and the door wide open into the summer night. Even if I was to tell him myself what I’d seen down at the beach while he lay in his room, with the door closed, and his father’s jersey with him in the dark.
But would I tell him? Ever? That the man who was around the village that summer, a visitor from town Bill reckoned had been down on the beach a lot of times, just sitting on a rock or walking around, flicking stones into the water, came over to me that night, after I’d followed Aunt Pammy out the open door, gone out of the house myself, and asked me, “Have you seen your aunt?” and I looked behind me and she was right there. With her pretty dress and her bare brown arms and her hair let long, and smiling in that same way I’d seen her smiling in the mirror so I ran away then, without answering him or even saying hello, back up the hill and fast, back to Bill but not saying a word to him even then, though I might have, because in the end there was something in the house that might have been familiar to him after all.
That if you had looked, Bill, if you had been able, you would have seen too – and more than the house tidy and the floors all swept and bare. And more than the scent and lipstick in Aunt Pammy’s room - but that her bed when you opened it up and looked inside was dark with something, dirt I thought, like from down their bodies and on their legs from them being together like I’d seen when I turned at the top of the hill that day and went back down the beach and they were there, your mother and that man. And understood as well, perhaps, if I had been there in the bedroom with you to show, that what she had been doing, your mother, out in the open nights, in all that wide shining air, bringing it back into her bed and leaving it there through her white sheets…Was a mess like another kind of killing. But if you never asked me where your mother was those nights when your father had gone… If you never asked me, then I would never need to tell.
