Suzy Joinson

Evidence

    He tucks the dictaphone recorder under the bed, every night, whilst she is in the bathroom.
    Always in the same place, down on her side, under the bedsprings, so that it is only about 6 inches from her head.
    Most nights she works her way through three or four of those cotton pads to grease mascara from her eyes. Usually a smudge of it stays on her cheek or just above her eyebrow. He walks in and sits himself on the edge of the bath to watch her. She hates it when he does that, he knows. The bathroom is too small. The string of floss seesaws through her tooth-gaps, he can see the flecks of white-stuff and the spots of blood. The pulling off of clothes comes next. A ritualistic moisturising of the toes. He knows she won't say anything to him about being in there, in the tight, tiled space, because this is the sort of thing that couples are supposed to do.
    She always wears a long, blue cotton nightie that seems ludicrously old fashioned to him. He has approached the subject a number of times. Would she wear a different one perhaps? Or stay naked even? Similar with underwear. Other women, he knows, spend money on this kind of thing, care about how they look. She doesn't even wear contact lenses these days. Just those glasses every day, crooked. Whenever he mentions it, the underwear or the glasses, she gives him a steady look that means no way, shuts him up.
    She usually gets in before him, laying herself down like a mannequin and talking about something from the radio; she is obsessed with Doctor Pam on LBC. Doctor Pam, who is always being phoned by men whose wives have slept with their best friend. It is the same story nearly every night: this bloke from Leytonstone, this bloke from Essex, standing outside of pubs, telling their troubles to a radio lady.
    Before he gets into bed he has a glass of whisky or two, to wind himself down and keep himself contained. Whisky relaxes the tight feeling in his chest, a restrictive, trapped sensation that he seems prone to. After he is sure she is asleep, he walks into their bedroom, stands for a minute, to look at the shape of her, a body humped up under a too-big duvet. Then he slips off his socks, his clothes, and slides into bed beside her. He is always naked. Before turning over, he snakes his hand down under the bed, where they keep the condoms, and clicks on the remote switch that he has devised to connect to the longplay dictaphone recorder. He bought in on Ebay. It has the capacity to record up to seventeen hours.

    She had become obsessed with cooking, this past year, in a way that didn't signal maternal giving or domestic peace to him, but was more aligned with an obsessive compulsive twitchiness. With her hair tied up high and mascara flecks on her glasses, she had perfected curries, casseroles, lasagnas, roasts, most poultry dishes and chilli. She'd branched out into exotica: Catalan Aubergine sauce; marinated dogfish; stewed snails with figs; sardines and salt cod tartine with white beans. And even more recently her choices had grown steadily meatier. A leg of lamb stuffed with crab meat, or kidneys, cooked in their own fat. These enormous dinners she was now cooking at the weekend were starting to make him feel nauseous, as if he were filling up gradually with blood and muscle. He was beginning to have some trouble with his digestion, which was a new thing. Heartburn was now common, and he noticed that own skin had started to smell tangy, a bit pig-like.
    Every morning she fries them bacon, sausages, sometimes even black pudding for breakfast, then sets off to sell virgin real estate in the new EU member states. After she has gone he walks with his cup of tea into his studio, clacks heavy-footed across the wood panelled floor and sits himself down at his drawing board. Pinned to the corner of it is a postcard that says 'Back to the…'
    He grinds his pencil in the sharpener and confronts the squares in front of him, blank and ready for the continuation of his cartoon series. His current sequence is called Why do literary goddesses always have a bad end? Although he hasn't yet secured a publisher. It is cold, as always, in the studio, but he doesn't bother to put the heating on. He plugs the dictaphone into the socket under his desk. Fastforwards the tape at least half way through, then presses play. Nothing, for a long time. Just the scratching sound of his pencil drawing the ovals and swoops of the cartoon expressions. Minimalist gestures are the key. Summing up fear, horror or loneliness in a couple of lines. Nobody can really compete with Schulz's Charlie Brown on the incarnation of human sadness in cartoon form, he knows this, but he doesn't even aim that high.
    As he is shading, the sound of muffling comes from the speakers, her sleeping noises, followed by a mutter. Coughs. Then her voice comes and he can hear, the same sentence as the night before, and the night before that: Graham are you there? Silence, then again, her voice raspy from sleep, but clear enough and loud, Graham fuck me. And then from him, a snore, loud and gutteral, followed by the shunting, ruffled sound of both of them turning over, back against back.
    He flicks the tape out of the machine. Sticks a label on it with the date and puts it in a shoebox, alongside the ten or so other tapes in there. He carries on drawing and doesn't even stop for lunch. Eventually, the light coming in at four o'clock is too grainy, his eyes are straining. He stops working. Turns on the late afternoon television instead and settles himself down. She is usually back by 5.45.

    She comes in with runner beans, in the mood for experimentation. She puts her coat onto the back of the chair and immediately pulls out her cookery book.
    Beans go with what, do you think? Lamb? Mustard? Her voice is skittery, he notices, she isn't pausing between sentences,        
    Wouldn't it be good to have one of those literal names, like Grace, or Verity or Ivy she is saying. And, why would it be, do you think, that the name of sunflower tubers is Jerusalem artichoke rather than simply sunflower tubers?
    She looks over at him from the chair, looking down at him with her face dull and half cut out in the grey thin light, finally connects her eyes with his for the first time since walking into the house.
    I don't know, he says, did you have a nice day at work?
    Not bad, she says, not bad, flicking through the recipes, each page landing silently on top of another, not bad. I had lunch with Graham. Apart from that, nothing to report.