Read by Max Berendt
I'm making an effort to keep deadly still. It's a game I play with the bath water. I hold my breath and the water begins to flatten. A calm glaze spreads over its surface and, as I fixate on the ceiling tiles, faces begin to appear in the imperfections. It seems that options have run out for me. This is where I've been all afternoon, sat in the bathtub ignoring the phone. The incessant ringing. Suddenly I swish the bubbles and inhale deeply, ruining my game. She would have been the phone-caller. She has been calling here all day - probably after her contact lenses. I can see the abandoned packet on the sink right now. She probably wants to apologise too, some mumbled excuse. The ceiling faces blur out of sight when I submerge my head. She drinks hard liquor – that's her problem.
Now I'm pressing my fingers into my eye sockets and watching the purple sun shapes on the inside of my retina – they dance. The water in the bath is lukewarm and suddenly there is a new sinking-feeling in my stomach. The front door slams, and then the definite thud of a drunken body against the coat rack in the corridor downstairs. She has the house keys. The water in the bath is lukewarm and growing colder. A drop of water plinks out of the tap and onto my big toe. I squint up at the strip-light until it hurts my eyes, and then I shut them tightly and watch the long shape recede. 'The sun is a thumb in the river wave sky,' –a strange line comes to me. I think about how water looks in oil paintings. I watch my reflection warp in the big taps, and then I rub my hands all over my face in an effort to make the decision.
The bathroom is old. All around the edges of the bath the sealant has begun to brown - and chips of paint are stuck in the cracks. It is definitely worth noticing. I tried to split the stuff with a pair of nail scissors and pull until it snapped. It wouldn't snap. It just remained jagged and frayed. I pick at the edges of the paint. This house has always been a tip – and there is no hope now of putting my impression on it. Not even to straighten out a piece of sealant or the broken edges of bathroom paint. Everything just comes away more hopelessly 'fractalic' than ever before - cracking into the shape of new edges like the side veins on a leaf, or the back of a grasshopper. In a way I think it's kind of pretty like that - but there is no resolution in these small things - and no order whatsoever.
When I got into the bath the idea was that 'I had until the water went cold to make the decision.' Usually I don't enforce ultimatums like this upon myself and in general I'm sceptical about 'internal' games. I imagine it's a bit like picking off the petals on a flower - she loves me she loves me not - or waggling the ring-pull on a beer can, counting down the letters of the alphabet until it breaks off on one. That's how you get the letter of the alphabet which gives you the answer to your question. These childish games stay with you, but they're false and made-up things which have somehow hardened into superstitions - and there's not much difference between a magic trick and a stubborn superstition. Meaning I will jiggle the ring-pull that little bit harder on the letter I know I want - a self fulfilling prophesy. It's like people who call it bad luck to miss the bus. It's all to do with your particular reading of a situation, and the decisions you make which dictate the parameters of that reading.
Whatever.
I stick my big toe into the tap and wiggle it around. It feels nice. A 'proper' decision would definitely need more time. It would need its own time to evolve - to crystallise. I think I have a vague hope that often important decisions are made automatically, and so after a while you'll just find yourself preoccupied with another thing. She won't wait for that though. I can just see her gappy teeth breaking into a smile in front of me right now. I can almost visualise her face in the watermark shock of blue and red behind my eyelids - in the fading bulb patterns. And my hair is falling out of my head, she said. Onto the pillows as if we had a pet. Funny it never made her sneeze. The grey water breaks aside on the hump of my pink belly, so maybe this means there is no decision at all. Sensibly ordered thought is draining from my mind - and it's comforting to imagine that in about fifteen minutes I will be wrapped in my towel and drying my legs. By then I will have decided. I will have made the decision - but it isn't so simple.
So it goes.
Plat! The water continues to plat and dribble onto my feet, and I'm looking at the edges of the doorframe where it is warped and a coldish breeze comes in. There is no light from the hallway gleaming through. Maybe she has passed out. I'm wondering whether it would be cheating to add some more hot water. After all I'm not used to putting myself into these kinds of situations - and so I don't know if it's wrong to change the rules. But who would know if I changed the rules? I feel like somebody else would know. Like God. The God of games, of skip rope or touch base, a God who'd know if you lied about reaching home when the chaser hadn't seen your fingers, or if you'd dropped the ball before slyly picking it up and carrying on. I run some more hot water anyway because I understand that part of the problem is with my own mind. I know I can't completely trust my memories to give me enough evidence for one move or another. And again I can't trust my mood now or my feelings to stay static long enough to base any real kind of decision on them alone. Maybe it is best just to look at my actions. The things I've done can't change. But even when I try to trace the events of the last month or so – everything becomes too complicated for me to bother with. I turn my head and click my neck. I squeak my finger on the tiles.
It goes like this.
I found her in this bathroom. We had a party last night. She was over by the toilet, lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling, laughing. Her hair was spread out in a pool of beer and her mouth was slipping around. Crouched beside her was some badly dressed local boy with his hand on her thigh. This boy I'd seen downstairs earlier on in the evening, drinking cheap vodka and hitting on every girl in the kitchen. The party was full of idiots I neither knew nor remembered inviting. She must've invited back half the pub. This guy was shoving an empty cigarette packet under her head as a sort of 'joke-pillow' and she was screeching with laughter.
Funny thing is it wasn't this sight which got to me the most. And it wasn't the smell of booze and sick - or even the sight of her skirt pulled almost down to her knees. It was just as though I were suddenly looking at her through a glass from the bottom of a puddle. She had become a splayed out mannequin from a film or dream. When I was a child trying to sleep, I would stare at my bedposts in the darkness, cut out with the crescents of streetlight coming in, and they would go back, they would shift away from me like ghostly totem poles.
She hadn't noticed me standing in the doorway - watching the whole scene. She hadn't even noticed when I coughed and clumsily backed out of the room. She seems completely unaware of everything these days, and when I laugh, I feel like I come away from my own face. Like I'm a puppet somehow hanging around - and making her laugh is all about pulling strings. It's as if I'm playing an old record on slow speed. There is a measure of distance which seems like a loop of time delayed. Odd thoughts and connections. So it goes. Walking down the road feels like the legs I'm using aren't mine. I'm not walking, they are. She creeps into my thoughts and I remove myself somehow. She is a trigger mechanism - like a plug.
I look down at my belly, my purplish genitals splitting the skin on the top of the water. There are tiny bubbles of air clinging to the hairs on my body - making them look pale and faint. I brush my hand through them and the bubbles rise to the surface. My hairs look like an underwater garden. I have been trying not to drink so much. I'm sure I can't hold it so well these days and my jaw is definitely beginning to look blurred. 'Fat belly, fat belly!' she always calls me and giggles before she passes out asleep. In the mornings she curls her hands in the folds of flesh and calls me 'Big Bear' if she feels guilty. I can watch her brain ticking through her eyes, but it no longer charms me.
So it goes.
The sensible thing it seems to me now - is to 'uncoil' the incidents of the past month or so like a snake. Then, if I trace my hand up its belly, I can diagnose where the crease or lump has begun and determine what has been swallowed. I can begin to smooth it out and digest it. This is how decisions are made. Before the hot water runs out.
--
The Decision by Tom McKay was read by Max Berendt at the Liars' League Boys & Girls event on 10 April 2007
Tom McKay was born in 1977. He has lived and studied in Bangkok, Seattle and Aberystwyth. He is a qualified lecturer in Film and English and recently left Buckinghamshire University to pursue a full-time PhD. He lives in North London and is a gangster.
Max Berendt studied drama at Manchester University and trained at Mountview. Max’s theatre credits include The Trial (BAC - Total Theatre Award), Peer Gynt (Arcola), Journey’s End (West End), The Devil is an Ass (The White Bear). Max works regularly as a voiceover artist. He always enjoys reading for the Liars’ League.
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