nightshift

I flop out of bed steamrolled like a cartoon, two-dimensional with tiredness and stand watching her. The front door is locked, but the handle is a Gordian knot that confuses her more than the turning of a key or the passing of time.

It was like sleeping with a trampoline. Arms and legs poking into my face and no way of knowing which way was up. Certainly not for Alice. She flung a leg out of bed and was off running. Her oversized drawers were like Superman’s with her nightdress tucked inside -- I don’t like to call them nappies-- and her breasts flapping under worn pale-coloured  winceyette as the hall door made her more pedestrian. She carried with her an acrid and dispiriting stench that seeped into the walls and carpets and drained our life.

‘Alice,’ I coo. ‘Let’s run you a bath.’ Even though it’s 2.12 a.m. my tone is light and reassuring. I’m no longer sure she hears or understands me. Colour has drained from the pale-blue irises. Her eyes flicker past me, planning an escape route, but our house is a cage full of easy-to-wipe surfaces. Stalactites of drool hang from the corner of her chin and she scuttles lopsided, an ataxic spider missing a few legs. This strange creature, the sight of whom once  opened a postbox  in my stomach and my heart fell into it, is all that is left of me

I catch her in my arms as she tries to slam past me in the hall. I’m no longer as strong as I was. She wails --our downstairs neighbours the Currids no longer talk to us -- and jerks to be away somewhere else. I draw her in close and rub the top of her arms and bent back until she settles. Then I lead her to the bathroom, stepping over an oversized discarded bra lying on top of  a bath towel on the tile floor.

The bath is still half-full from earlier, water cold, but the smell of bath salts and rose water lingering. I backheel shut the door behind us and snib it. My brain is full of locks, thinking ahead of where we’ll be. I ease her onto the toilet pan. She looks up at me with her angry face. I rub behind her ear. She likes that and lets me take her pants off. The first time she let me take her pants off  we’d both been sixteen lying in her mum’s back bedroom when we should have been at Mass with the rest of her family. She wore the silver band of an engagement ring that made it alright. Her legs were shaking. I jiggled her breasts with my hand, wanted to dive in and cover them with my mouth and tongue, but I tripped stepping out of my pants. She stood up,  hands covering her breasts, pulling her knickers from the chair next to the bed. ‘We’ll have to wait Charlie,’ she said, looking up at the crucifix about our head hanging on the wall,  her face aflame with shame, saw it as some kind of sign. The smell makes me gag.  I am not in control of my face. I fling the towel on the floor into the bath, corner her beside the sink and toilet and clean her off as best I can. She shrieks and swears, slapping my shoulders and head. The hair on her vulva has retreated, like her mind, to girlhood and a time before speech.

I stand aside and let her run. Every cranny has not been disinfected but she is naked and clean and fit to be seen, but nobody wants to see the broken and the old. I pull the plug in the bath. Leave the towel soaking.

She’s at the door again, struggling with the key. I think of opening it and letting her fly. Misfortune doesn’t play by the rules and say you’ve had enough. I’m all out of self-sacrifice.  I stand waiting for the thought to pass like a slow-moving freight train at a crossing.

I go into our bedroom and pull the flowery quilted nightgown she likes off the hanger in the cupboard.

Standing in the hall I hold it out like an offering. ‘Alice, you’d look pretty fabulous with this on.’

She angles her head, my voice is teary. Our eyes meet. For a second she seems to recognise me.

‘Come to bed it’s cold out here.’