TRAFFIC AND BLAME – MARTYN SULLIVAN
The girl squeezes into the back of the car. She crumples her brightly coloured shopping bags up as she goes and slides the combined haul off the seat and into the footwell, her mother follows her in and exhales after the car door has closed.
‘Not much cooler in here than out there!’ she smiles.
She’s right, I’d only been driving for half an hour that afternoon and already the old car felt like a hot oven. I’d taken one of the by then lukewarm water bottles I had bought ice cold from the garage earlier on that day and splashed about half of it over my face before deliberately spilling more down my front while my two passengers were still climbing in.
My phone plays a familiar trill of notification and the girl in the back lights up at the sound.
‘She’s playing dad’s game!’ She looks up at her mother who nods and touches her daughter’s nose. The little girl giggles and turns to look out of the window.
I sniff but don’t respond, instead I pull the car out into the road and wonder what sort of man keeps the notification for a dating app aimed at would-be adulterers on his phone audible for his family to hear.
‘Where to again? Twenty-five, Whitchurch?’ I call through the speaker to the back.
‘Yes please!’ They reply together. ‘Can you go alongside the park if you don’t mind?’ Adds the mother, smiling every word at the reflection of my eyes in the mirror.
I make the turning and begin to coast the length of the park. The park is of course so, so busy on a day like this. The window is down, and I choose to pretend that I cannot feel the traffic fume breeze on my face, in its place I imagine the vapour from the lake in the park blending with fresh sap falling from the trees. It doesn’t help with the discomfort from the heat or the monotony of the drive but between my imagination and the sound of the city as we pass dissolving into the car stereo I am able to tune my passengers out. After a few minutes, the traffic slows and we sit idle in the jam, I find my eyes drifting back to the mirror.
The little girl is blonde, fair skinned and must take after her father as her mother looks a lot more like me, perhaps somehow, we are very distantly related, cousins of cousins however many times removed; I know intellectually that just isn’t possible, not really. I have no family, and I haven’t for an age, not for such a very long time. Still, her hair is dark, she is on the lighter side of olive skin and her eyes are nearly as black as mine. I wonder if her stretched humble face of white teeth framed inside chocolate curls is what I would look like if I ever come to be just a little older.
I decide to speak again through the car intercom. ‘Big shopping day, today?’
‘Yes, that’s right! We’re going away in a few weeks, and you know swim things, beach sandals…that sort of stuff. She’s shooting up all the time at the moment, and she’s half outgrown everything already by the time we get her in anything new!’
‘Going somewhere nice?’
‘Greece! Or one of the islands anyway, Ithaca.’
‘I know Ithaca!’
‘Do you? We’ve not been before. My husband has to fly back halfway through for work, so I think we’ll just have to have a week of quiet beach time after he’s gone.’
I do know Ithaca. I used to love Ithaca and I’d had to promise to never, ever go back there. Without thinking I slide my tongue between my teeth and stare at the little girl in the mirror for what might be a few seconds too long. It would be if either of them had been paying any attention to me. I envy the little girl, and I consider what the warmth will feel like on her skin and how it would feel on mine, the heat of next month’s Ithacan sun washing over me in theory and her in practice. Later all the broken and built-up stone would reflect the heat back out into the darkness that had replaced the flown away day. I ache inside at my surging memories. I blink and snap my tongue back and carefully close my mouth.
It had been an odd year; we had a late summer that had stretched on and over well into what was traditionally reserved for autumn. I had felt the edge of fever all through the night whether I left the windows open or not. I’d absorbed it all and it meant I couldn’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time, always stuck in endless shallow phases of sleep to heat, and I became angry. I knew all the tensions of the city had begun to slip inside me to accompany the heat, the heat that boiled the moisture in the air clamouring slick to skin. I’d felt this special anger so many times in the past, but since it had last taken me, there had been a prolonged absence and I had cautiously begun to believe after all this time that I wouldn’t ever feel it again. I dared to consider that I might be free.
I snap my sunglasses on and try to smile with some feeling at the faces in the mirror. If the traffic keeps up like this, by the time we come to Whitchurch it will be less dusk and more pitch dark.
‘If you’d like, I can peel off and take us around. It will probably add a little distance but with all this traffic… I think you might get home sooner.’
The mother nods and I work the car out of the queue, turn and ride the curb for a second and then we’re cruising again, riding long streets that smell of charred meat and red wine, vivid scents beneath the new-born sunset. Exhalations and shrieks rise from family gardens and entwine in the snaps and sparks of new fire-pit flames, a long distance from the heavy horns and curses of traffic and blame.
I should say that driving, picking up jobs through a few different apps is the easiest way I have to make money, the easiest that I want to explore anyway. It means in addition to my phone being clogged with job alerts and suffering from an ever-shrinking battery life I have all sorts of logo stickers and laminated identity cards stuck up. I take the oldest ones down once in a while, but it still means there were enough wrinkled plastic icons, dangling images of my face swinging with the car’s motion for the whole vehicle to function like a shrine to me. Everyone who gets into my car, if I speak with them for too long reminds me of the things outside that I wish to forget. The more reminders of me in here that there are, the easier it is to concentrate and keep focus. It always feels like every little girl I meet is perfect and blond and the inseparable mother dark eyed, tan and smiling. It still hurts.
I tell myself that it is the same way that someone’s handwriting reminds you of another’s, that you will see the spit, the dead spit in some same faces repeated wherever you go, that there are only so many casts available, and it is inevitable that they will repeat. I tell myself what was singular and extraordinary is in truth common around the world and that is why I sometimes feel that I am in hiding from old ghosts.
Finally, we arrive at twenty-five, Whitchurch. The little girl has by now fallen asleep and her mother has to gently shake her awake. ‘Thank you!’ She yawns, half at me half at her mother. They climb out the car and wave back to me as they step through the front door. I sit for a few minutes outside the house looking at the nearby new jobs on my phone screen and check to see what my trill was from earlier. While I wait for my phone to respond I empty the rest of the by now unpleasantly warm bottle of water from the start of the journey over my already dry front and again across my face. The water rolls to my chin, and I count the drop-by-drop impacts upon my lap as I read my message.
I hadn’t been in the business of doing anything about this sort of thing for decades, I hadn’t felt the pull. I thought I’d lost it whatever it was. I hadn’t felt the painful fire and the consuming passion, and I’d thought just maybe that was it. I’d assumed that maybe vengeance and curses end after all, maybe there was forgiveness for everyone and every deed in time. I thought that perhaps I’d age again, and maybe if I had some luck one day I’d have another clutch of children, fair and golden haired and although I struggled to imagine it perhaps I would find someone to be happy with. I could return to Ithaca or any number of the places that had become labels for forbidden distance and destination, just two-dimensional descriptions of a full life that used to fit me.
Even though the anger has been gone for a long time I keep abreast of the developments in the field that concerned me. I was staggered when apps aimed at enabling people seeking to commit adultery became open and known. I of course maintained a subscription quietly just to observe and I watched as the messages flooded in, I was probably the only real woman on that site. I idly messaged back, I had no interest in ever meeting anyone but for all my concerted solitude in the front seat and in the rented tiny room I return to at night, I was of course also a two-faced liar, and I was desperate for half tastes and the second-hand stench of others’ wants and indiscretions. I had a yawning need inside for what I had given up and that felt beyond chemical.
Long ago I believed, and the problem was I still believed. More than that I knew. I was as they might say the original scarlet woman. I bore the children of another woman’s husband and the woman when she knew cursed me for all time. With my own hands she destroyed my children and left me to endure, I babbled alone remembering their red sore faces, and I became a monster. Only part woman now and part something else that crept about hungry in the dark. I was a creature that ate bad children, I consumed more in the stories told than I did in reality but still one is more than enough. I fought my curse, and I fought it until I could stretch it. Instead of children I became a hunter of young dissolute men and those not quite as young. I moderated my purpose, reined in my madness, and gave it new direction, implementing a meander of my own choosing. I was still what the curse intended me to be, a monster, but I picked my own path and I found there was less shame in travelling that. Centuries later, I realised that in my heart and mind I was still at war with that first man whose betrayals I had been punished for. Each time I pursued my purpose I saw his face.
Despite the horror of the curse, there is a certain dignity in knowing your place in things. Once I was a judgement of the gods, a terrible being to keep from your door but then just like that, times changed, and I became dislodged. New religions and philosophies came to Greece and regardless of what had been done in years before, new ideas are never patient with those they replace and all at once I was confronted and forced out. Banished. They sent me to the edge of the world where they said they had sent others of my kind though across centuries I had never had the chance to meet another quite like me.
The edge of the Greek world was a different boundary for every generation and its maps. So, I travelled, I endured. I found that my condition was unchanged by the years and while I was anachronism, I still functioned. I would feel the pull and call, something biological that I could not ignore. The low vibration of the city would thrum and beat louder and increase in volume, rattling in my ears until it felt that my head would explode, and I would have to find an appropriate way to act. It would ease and I would be adrift again until once more the vibration elected to become louder.
That brings us back to the blond little girl and her olive skin mother’s closing door. I drive away but from then all I think about is them and their lives and I feel the hum in my ears begin to grow and grow. It continues like this until I feel the vibration buzzing in my head become indistinguishable from the red fury of heat and temper that seethes up from all about the city, that pours through the speaker of my trilling phone into me.
Once I’d decided that I was going to do something, when I was sure I really was angry enough, full of enough stored up heat and spite, it wasn’t so hard to identify the father’s profile and set up a new one of my own. I creep about online, sweating from my intentions and concentration and the late dead of night heat. I find pictures of a pretty young woman, unlike me, far away in America, some everyday images of her pouting, sun-kissed from social media for my initial false approach, and some far more salacious, candid shots from a web forum she frequents, the images explicit and inviting, that is where I first find her and from where I connect up her realities, backtracking from window to window. In pursuit of peace, I temporarily steal her life and make it my own. I know he will respond when I send a message out of the blue. I sound human, I have practiced for years at seeming inviting, insatiable yet passive and so, so grateful for a reply. I speak of wants and urgent, sharp desires and I make it clear that I would be free in around a weeks’ time, unfortunately he says that is when his wife and daughter will be back. He whines and pleads through repeated messages to me to make space in my schedule and I pretend to give it due consideration. He responds to the naked images I send with one of his own and it solidifies my decision. I send all but one of the young woman’s nudes to him and promise I’ll think about his intriguing suggestion to bring our meeting forward. Instead, I drive to the family’s home and park up far enough down the street so as to not be heard as I approach.
The streetlight struggles against the night. Weak. Its changing, inconstant flickering registers to me as a nervous heartbeat and reminds me of things I’ve seen before; aching candle flames that grow and diminish while I sit on the other side of a room, the wax and wane relative to my careful breaths as I sit folded in the shadows waiting for an oblivious late lover. There was that loud trill again, and again. I slide my fingertips across the screen and send the final image and I listen, intently listen, straining to hear. And there is the sound, pattering through the letterbox, tittering through the open downstairs window.
I step up to the front door and touch the cool metal of the knocker, I hesitate and move my hand to the doorbell. It lights up in warm amber as I thumb the button down and press on it, three long peals of electric insistence demanding attention from the hallway beyond. The lights inside move and through the frosted glass in front of me a figure approaches, unlocks, and opens the door. It is clearly the little girl’s father, blond, recent honey tan, in fairness to him rather handsome and with the build of a swimmer. Shirt open to the base of his sternum, red wine around his lips. He looks irritated at the disruption to begin with but smiles once he has had a chance to look at me. I am at my best, all dressed up tonight with exactly him in mind.
‘I’m so sorry, I know it’s late but I’m from down the street. I’ve locked myself out and my phone is out of charge. I’ve tried a few other houses, and no-one is answering. I don’t suppose I could charge my phone up enough to call a cab, could I? I’ve got a bottle of red as a “thank-you” if it would help?’
‘Sure! Of course! Come in neighbour, yes, do! Do! Please, be my guest!’ All tipsy charm and grace now, he sweeps his hand to the side beckoning me forward and then he steps back and opens the door wide, gesturing me through and towards the escaping sounds, flash, and flicker of the television in the back room. I walk in being sure to brush past him and sit down at one end of a comfortable looking brown sofa. I plug my phone in at the nearby socket and smile as he sits down next to me, a new pair of wine glasses in his hands.
‘I’m Phoebe by the way, is it just yourself?’ I put the bottle of red on the table and he swiftly arranges the glasses, opens the bottle, and begins pouring generous amounts for us both.
‘Just me, Jack, just me, I’m separated you see.’
By temporary geography maybe, you liar. I think to myself.
‘That’s a shame. I’m so sorry.’ I reach for my glass and take a sip. It’s not so bad, but he’s not worth the money I’ve paid.
‘Oh it’s alright, it’s been quite a while now, in a lot of ways it is for the best you know, sometimes things just come to an end but she has my daughter is all and they’re in another country, Greece as a fact, and you know what they always say about international custody things, well you see it’s all true… so it’s in the courts or rather it has been for the past year and then there’s the language as well, translation costs, you know? And it just won’t resolve itself quickly. I just miss her, my daughter, Sarah.’ He looks at me, a model picture of wounded paternity.
I don’t know if he is telling the truth about the little girl’s name, but I take the cue and do my best to look so very unhappy for him. I reach my hand out to his and squeeze.
‘It must be very hard.’ I sympathise. I take care to scrape my teeth back across my lower lip and will my eyes to be as big and round as possible.
‘You’ve no idea.’ He whispers.
We drink the bottle of red very quickly and with each quick top up of a glass he edges closer to me on the sofa until one of his arms is around my shoulder and I can feel all the strength housed within his frame. I look up and breathe in the warm fog of wine running off the blonde mountain of him above me. As per each and every time before, I can’t stop myself imagining the silver beard and hair to the shoulders overlaid in place of this man’s features. He inclines his head down and to the side, our lips meet, and he gently touches the side of my face before more firmly running his hand down my front and side. I kiss him back and squirm and stretch my legs out twisting around onto his lap until I am straddling him face to face. He slips his hands underneath the back of my top and begins to work it up and off while reaching for the clasp on my bra and that is when he hears the sound. He initially pulls his head back I think to ask if I am alright, but my mouth is far bigger now, and I have already begun to yawn.
Like a cat that has managed to get its head stuck in a box, he begins to half stand half scrabble back into the sofa but neither his head nor any other part of him is going anywhere. The strength in him that I had felt before is applied to me by his frightened, thrashing arms but no matter tomorrow’s bruises, I am immovable. My legs have clamped firmly in place and my arms are already constricting him. My hands still pretend to the passion and stroke and grip his shuddering, shaking body. A few moments before he could have thrown me about the room to his heart’s content, but it has begun now, and it has been too late ever since he reached over to kiss me. I give a satisfied grunt as I get his head into my stretched wide and extended windpipe, and I begin to push in on his shoulders. Briefly, far deeper inside me than he had bargained for he emits an immediately smothered howl that reverberates through my body and makes me think of the trill that had filled my car. As his shoulders collapse in and fold to meet one another he falls silent and stops moving. It is then a case of waiting as different sections of my body stretch to accommodate or crush him into something manageable to consume.
I sit still on the couch nursing my now massive stomach, surprised as ever by how little blood there is. I look about the room at the recent traces of a little girl playing, her mother watching her while a husband and father searches for illicit encounters. There are toys tucked here and there. There are recent women’s magazines under the coffee table. They will come home and wonder where he is and what has happened, but they’ll be spared the pain of hearts broken by betrayal. Still, that’s not the point of what I’ve done. I am sacred vengeance even after all these years, even if it has in time become vengeance sacred only to me, my way of remembering and marking the cost to my life. My record of fury at who had done what to me and how they had been let off the hook, and how even if no-one believed in them anymore, somewhere else, some of the old gods still watched and they still judged. They had created me and made my name Lamia mean something, and still centuries later I am useless for any other purpose. Quietly, and from all the way inside of me, I hear a smothered sound as within the site of my recent hunger.
A phone trills.
Martyn Sullivan
is from Swansea, South West Wales and spends his days wrangling spreadsheets and battling the man, in the evening he does a little writing. When not writing weird stuff, he enjoys hiking, growing chillies and spending time with his cat. Just like everyone else he is also working on a novel. He can be found on Twitter @ribenademon