Desertion

Desertion.

At seven forty-five, George Capstick stood next to Kenny Upchurch and
Ray Honiton and the collection box for lifeboatmen at the far end of
the public bar of the White Hart. He always stood with his back to the
wall, foot resting upon the bottom rung of the corner stool, never
sitting or allowing anyone else to sit. George was a celebrity today.
What a man; able to sire a beautiful, healthy baby boy and still drink
pint after pint after pint with his pals, laugh at all jokes and create
rude, warm innuendo with Patsy behind the bar. The veiled but smutty
references never needed to be reinforced, particularly now, with his
rigid manhood unchallenged: a screaming miracle in a crib. Here was the
archetypal masculine fa?ade; strong, able to cope with women behind the
bar and men outside with jackets on the ground, come one, come all, the
undisputed world champion of life, unbeaten in thirty-eight years, from
Chiddingstone West Sussex, in the bar corner, George Capstick (a round
of applause and a round of beer).

Twelve pints of porter to wet the baby's head and George and Ray and
Kenny spun raucous and rasping from the frosted glass door of the
public bar on to Bridge Street, smoke-breathing their back-slapping
alcohol wisdom from gaping mouths and flared nostrils. Their bellows
and cackles bounced from the damp-walled houses as they reeled towards
St. Nicholas's and pissed over the untended gravestone of Ethel Linton,
'died 6th. August 1909, missed by her beloved Henry' but no one else.
Responsible husband and father George Capstick, shaking his cock at the
dead and giggling like scout full of Tizer, the same cock that had sent
his shrew-like wife Helen into a demon, bucking dumb in the dark
bedroom on the right, wringing tears from her eyes and involuntary
cracks from her toes in her internalised passion. That same cock,
attached to a leaning tower, pissing on the lichen.

Helen Capstick, asleep beside her beautiful baby in the bedroom on the
right. George Capstick, behind the marble angel in the far corner of
the graveyard with Patsy; three minutes of unbuttoned flies and
concertina petticoats, animal lust masquerading as passion in the
undergrowth, with Ray and Kenny accessories to the fact.

It was nearly a year before, one day, Helen found a tube of lipstick
while collecting clothes for washing. He could have simply found the
lipstick on the street but Helen sensed something deeper and altogether
more sinister as she twisted the base and watched the scarlet dome poke
in and out, in and out. Lewdly in and out. If the truth were known, she
not only suspected George of infidelity but would have continued in her
meek acquiescence, occupied by her newly acquired role of caring
mother. His sexual interest in her had not returned following Harry's
birth but a lady in the corner shop had confirmed this as 'normal' and,
perhaps, even a blessing. "You don't want to be bothered with all that
messing if you're happy with one baby." But Helen did want to be
bothered. She needed their frenzied coupling in the cinema dark of the
bedroom on the right, occurring at his bidding, suddenly and
irregularly, as one might urgently require a toilet if inflicted by a
germ. George was not unkind but his knowledge was a mixture of
playground and farmyard and Helen believed it was how she preferred
it.

She replaced the tube in his pocket and chose to say nothing.

As months passed, his return from the White Hart became later and
later; Helen without a speaking part, lying slumber-silent beneath an
eiderdown hill as the clumsy man, made clumsier by drink, hopped
unsteadily on his patch of carpet by the bed in farcical silhouette
undress. His explanation of 'a lock-in just for the locals' was a true
one but the cast list always included a stand-in. There were other
tell-tale signs every woman will recognise; changing underpants and
cleaning teeth before visiting the pub being the most plainly obvious
but Helen's fortitude in the face of humiliating adversity did her no
favours. George was caught in that dreaming confidence, germinating in
an alcoholic twilight where everything can be lost, even a country's
freedom, to flattery. Helen's home-guard and home fires burning were no
match for an enemy in fancy French silk cami-knickers and, one day, the
cardboard suitcase was missing from its dusty perch on top of the
wardrobe where it had lain since their return from their honeymoon week
in Brixham.

George and Patsy's expedient association lasted for three-and-half
months before she found another, then another to squirm beneath her
skirts and admire her conic chest and for the suitcase to return to
rest upon the kitchen flagstones of Billings Farm Cottage. He cast a
pathetic shadow across the dresser as he stood, neither asking nor
daring to sit.

"Tired of you now, is she?"
"Something like that", admitted George, great slates of stone eroding
and sliding from his shoulders as he spoke.
"There's no point in you coming back here. There's nowhere here for you
now." Helen's words were pointed, sharp and confident but she did not
look at their target for still there existed a vestige of deference
within her that a desperate man can scent in a sentence.
"I know I was wrong love?. I was wrong, but for Harry's sake, it might
be better if I was here, with you? both."

Helen poured a symbolically single cup of tea. "Leave George. There's
nothing for you to do here. Nothing has changed without you. It carries
on without you."
"What about money? How are you?."
"It doesn't matter. It's up to you. I really don't care. I can manage
without you. We." Now she turned and looked at him. It was all over. He
looked down. He reached down and grasped the handle of the cardboard
suitcase. He may as well have ceased existing and twisted away in a
hiss of steam. Even Kite, the Belgian Shepherd whose innocent, bounding
reception had been in marked contrast to Helen's glacial fa?ade, had
stolen away to his hairy corner upon sniffing his master's crotch; a
spurned lover with the rival's bouquet in his nostrils.

George Capstick left without another word. He left mortally wounded,
whipped, walking to the gallows on slivers of glass, his shiny-arsed
trousers never to touch the seat of the high-backed chair again.

But later, with beautiful baby Harry asleep beside her, she would
squeeze her eyes walnut shut and immerse her head into the duck-down
pillow, imagining George on top of her. Like a monolith.