Clementine placed her book face down on her lap in the circle of lamplight reflected on the duvet. She listened to the rain and looked at the dark empty side of their double bed.
When Sam had come back from his ‘drive’, after her mother had gone home (‘Another time,’ she’d said robustly. ‘We’ll try again another time.’) they hadn’t said a word about their disastrous night out. They’d been polite and cool to each other like not especially friendly flatmates. ‘There is some leftover pasta in the fridge.’ ‘Good, I might have some.’ ‘I’m off to bed.’ ‘Good night.’ ‘Good night.’
Sam had gone off to the study to sleep on the sofa bed that gave whoever slept on it a sore lower back. (‘It was fine, fine!’ guests would always assure them the next morning, discreetly massaging their lower backs.)
It appeared the study was Sam’s bedroom now. They didn’t even go to the pretence of starting out in the same bed, and then one of them creeping off in the middle of the night, pillow under the arm. We sleep in separate rooms now. It gave her a shocked, sick feeling when she actually let the thought crystallise like that.
The last time she and Sam had slept a proper full ordinary night together in this bed, a night without twisted-sheet dreams or teeth grinding or tossing and turning, had been the night before the barbeque.
It seemed extraordinary now to imagine them going to bed, sleeping through the night and waking up together in the morning. What had that last night of extraordinary ordinariness been like? She couldn’t remember a single thing about it; except that she knew they’d been so different from the people they were now, just eight weeks later.
Did they have sex? Probably not. They so rarely got around to it. That’s why they were so susceptible that night. To the sex.
Her mother would have been hoping that tonight’s dinner at the fancy restaurant would have resulted in them coming home and ‘making love’. If they hadn’t come home early, if they’d walked in the door holding hands, Pam would have slipped off quickly with a wink, wink, nudge, nudge smile, and then she would have called the next day and said something horrifically inappropriate like, ‘I do hope you weren’t too tired to make love, darling, a healthy sex life is crucial for a healthy marriage.’
It would have made Clementine want to put her fingers in her ears and chant ‘la la la’ as she used to do when her mother delivered sex education lectures while she drove Clementine and Erika to parties. Erika, who practically took notes every time Clementine’s mother opened her mouth, used to listen attentively to the lectures and ask very specific procedural questions. ‘When exactly does the condom go on?’ ‘When the boy’s penis …’ ‘LA LA LA!’ Clementine would yell.
Her mother had always been far too open and jolly about sex, as if it was something good for you, like water aerobics. She used to have The Joy of Sex sitting unabashedly on her bedside table as if it were a nice novel. Clementine chiefly remembered the hairiness of that book.
Clementine wanted sex to be something subtle and secret. Lights off. Mysterious. Hairless. An image came to her of Tiffany in that crazy backyard, before all the fairy lights came on: Tiffany’s T-shirt bright white in the hazy light. A sweet taste filled Clementine’s mouth. It was the taste of Vid’s dessert. Now it was the taste of shame.
Two or three nights after the barbeque Clementine had dreamed she was having sex onstage at the Opera House concert hall with someone who was not Sam. Holly and Ruby were in the audience watching their mother have sex with some other man. Right there in the front row, legs swinging, while Clementine moaned and groaned in the most depraved way, and at first they just watched with blank concentration, like they were watching Dora the Explorer, but then they started to cry, and Clementine called out ‘Just a minute!’ as if she were finishing the washing up, not her orgasm, and then her parents and Sam’s parents, all four of them, came running down the aisle of the concert hall with disgusted faces, and Clementine’s mother screamed, ‘How could you, Clementine, how could you?’
It wasn’t a hard dream to interpret. In Clementine’s mind what happened would forever be tied up with sex. Skanky, sleazy sex.
Fragments of that revolting dream had lingered for days, as if it had been an actual memory. She had to keep reassuring herself: It’s okay, Clementine. You never actually performed a sex show at the Opera House with your kids in the audience.
It still felt more like a memory than a dream.