The Judge and the Plastic Surgeon

Tightly squeezed into a black polyester M&S suit the woman was a conspicuously overachieving lawyer; the man was a frantic registrar in a sweaty hospital, white-coatedly dashing about. An unlikely couple, she was tall and bristling, he was short and smooth. They were ambitious, that much they had in common.

She eschewed marriage as a construct of the patriarchy so they never wed, buying a large, neglected house in London as their cement. It remained chaotic and unfinished for all the following decades.

After ten increasingly dull years the man decided he wanted children, the woman was busy being successful and really did not, but she knew that she would lose him if she chose otherwise.  After a morning cup of tea and cursory sex, the girl was conceived and delivered perfectly on time. Not content, the man wanted a boy; he studied fertility experts and took pills; she took her temperature and after long frustrating months of regimental sex they constructed the boy.

The family was complete. The man and the woman became more important. She was a fixed-grin barrister, weighty and intimidating; he was a plastic surgeon making tight arms and money out of sucking fat. Showily altruistic, he donated his time to charity when not sculpting expensive women; she wore bright red lipstick on her fixed grin, bought expensive glasses and became a judge.  They were cultured and popular, most of the time.

Sidelined, the perfect girl and the constructed boy got older.  And troubled. The girl was clever and despondent and went away to other countries. The boy struggled and went away to school and started deconstructing. The man and women grew apart and did not notice the unravelling family. Singular hobbies like skiing, swimming, cycling and sailing obsessed him. Curiously, the woman was gripped by Tottenham Hotspur, when not listening to cricket and refined music on EarPods.

The man chanced on an old school friend, they fucked for a while until she ghosted him. He found a lonely woman on an app and they kissed. At a party he met a jolly fat woman, sassy and beautiful. They fell in love, spent joy-filled days and got found out.

In the big house the man decided to stay with the woman and deconstructed son, who was ill. Sometimes he thought about the jolly fat woman, who was now sad and thin. Time was filled with joined-up hobbies shared reluctantly with the woman he had chosen and imagined himself happy; she took out the EarPods so they could make efforts to talk.

From her loneliness in other countries, the girl came home. Waiting was the woman with stretched-out arms, obscuring the man hovering behind. The smile of the girl was sucked into the vacuum of the house and dissolved. The deconstructed boy was in bed upstairs. Skimming past her parents, the girl climbed the bare stairs and slid into the dark space of the boy. She lay down beside her brother and was paralysed by helplessness.

In the bowels of the big house the couple stood, nervously not showing their nerves, disquieted at being displaced. Striding into the kitchen he chopped angrily at the shiny organic vegetables, she loitered, juggling her gold-cased lipstick between sweaty palms.

Next to his sister, the brother was lying still as a still thing, hating the touch of the girl, but she did not know. His flesh had not been touched for so very long. The slightest brush of a fingertip skimming against a hair made him recoil. He pressed his knuckles into the bone between his ribs. He pressed very hard to stop shrieks of anguish hidden behind the bone exploding. The girl sensed his discomfort and created a wafer of space between them. That was better.

The hearts in the house were shattering, one after the other, unheard by the out-stretched woman, unheeded by the man, sensed by the girl; only the deconstructed boy was listening. Whispered, splintered, jumbled, words fell out of the hearts, barely audible. Through the jabbering he heard a low, terrible sound coming from the cavities in the walls. It hissed, “Do it.”

In his room, puffs of air swelled the flimsy curtains, fuzzy stale twilight sharpened into shards of electric orange. Slithering off the bed she stood and waited, whilst he scrabbled with ragged nails at the edge of the mattress to pull himself up. Giddy after hundreds of hours forgetting to breathe, he slumped. Snatching breath through his dry lips he sucked hard, grabbing at the air. Unfolding his frail body he stood gingerly on tender feet and started to move.

“Let us go.”  There were other words, just a few, more were not needed.

The scuffling of stifled domesticity stopped as the man and woman hoped to catch the words of their children, intently listening to the sounds of the descent, slowly, slowly. Standing it no longer the man, tied into an unfunny apron, came to greet them, the woman chewing her red lips was behind him.

“Let us have supper together, to welcome you home.” Not knowing not to, the man hooked his arm with that of his son, who felt terribly, awfully sick. Rapidly blinking in the glaring kitchen, the boy shuddered. His sister, not touching, comforted him. The man and woman jerked puppet-like, screeching with tension, unable to help themselves, barraging the girl with questions. Tongues, lips, mouths, skin, hands, bodies, noises and movement non-stop everywhere.

Syncopated breaths, phew, in out, two smiles, a knowingness. Instinct, not planned, no, never planned. She was nearest, so it should have been her. Swift, sure, trusting the long Japanese blade, still with bits of carrot on it. Slipping in easy, out even easier and in again, easy.

Blue flashes pulsated into the bruised night, plastic tape POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS slapped in the wind. Red shiny rubber bag-encased bodies wended through the thrill-seeking crowd, red woolly blankets shrouded hunched figures, red wet sticky blood-stained wooden floors inside. Watching through the broken gloom, the grandmother who lived next door could not see how many bags or how many figures.

Stricken smiles and uniformed efficiency, abject horror and confusion. “Who?” queried the desperately-trying-to-be-sympathetic police officer, his beard quivering.  “Who?”

Amanda says: Having lived all over the world, I have settled in the West Country. My stories grow out of lived experiences, the remarkable histories of my extended family and finding life funny. Writing is exhilarating, energising and frustrating.