They had lived together for forty years,
and for the first five they loved each other.
The next five, they tolerated
each other, but for the last thirty
or so years,
they had grown to despise
one another.
He worked every day at the docks,
he mended boats that had moored there,
and made quite a tidy profit from it, so they were never in need of any of life’s necessities,
and often had enough left over for a few luxuries. However
the dullness of their lives,
and the dreams
they had both missed by being with each other had driven
them to petty acts of spite and malevolence.
Today was a day like any other,
it was early November, and the rain was hitting
the window panes,
and dripping from the gutters.
She had set breakfast out as she usually did, and it being Friday,
they were having
kedgeree.
“You’ve put far too much salt in this and not enough
spice. How after being married
for an eternity,
can you still never get my breakfast
right?” He barked,
flecks of rice clinging to his waxed grey tash. “And where the blazes
is my tea?”
“I make it like I always make it, you never usually
complain!” Said she, coming up behind him and bringing
the tea pot down to the table with a thud, compromising
the stability of everything on there; “You know full well we cannot afford
more spice, right now, the prices are much too high!”
“To hell with the prices,
you never put enough in, and I’m sick to death of it. I go out every day and work all the hours our lord gives me to pay for this family
to be able to live comfortably, all I ask you to do is run this house, and you seem unable to even do that properly!”
“Family? You call me and you a family? In all our years together,
you have never been able to father
us a child! This is not a family; this is just me and you in a living
hell!”
At this the husband leaves
the table, food half eaten,
tea left to go cold. He grabbed
his hat and slammed the front door behind him to go to work. That single
fleck of rice still firmly
embedded into his facial hair, as it would remain
all day, his colleagues far too polite
to inform him.
As the wife sat down to eat her dry slice of toast (she hated both fish and spice, so kedgeree was never eaten by her) she began to think.
Then she cleared
the table, and then washed
everything, made the separate beds they slept in and swept and mopped the floors on the ground
floor of their house. By this time it was midday, and she sat in the bedroom, in front of the once fashionable dressing
table, he had bought her as a gift when they first got married.
She looked at her face, at its wrinkles, at the dry, brittle hair, the colour
of iron, and she continued
to think.
That evening, she had a smile on her face as she layed the table for the meal she had prepared for them both; lamb chops with potatoes
and Brussels sprouts.
She made extra thick gravy,
added extra spices
to it. The husband seemed
vaguely pleased. She could tell because he said nothing
to her, the only noise coming from him was the occasional
satisfied grunt.
They had a quiet night,
he read the newspaper, and she knitted,
both in silence.
Then with barely
a word to each other,
they went to their separate
beds.
The next day, he arose after her, despite waking
at the same time, but that was how things
always were, as she needed
time to set the breakfast
table up. But eventually, he did. Dressed
himself, and made his way to the kitchen.
The scene that confronted him as he reached the stares was one that shocked him right to the core. Despite it being something
he had dreamed
of in his darker moments,
the reality being too much to bear, he vomited
in the corner,
a small puddle
of bile coming
from his empty stomach.
Swinging, clumsily on the rafter above the stairs, she was
hung from a noose made of
there best linen
tablecloth. Her face
had gone blue,
her eyes had
not yet lost the lustre
of life he
saw as she crudely swung round
to face him, almost
as if she was staring at him.
He sat there in
the corner, with his clear
vomit for nearly half an hour. Curled up,
like a child,
before he had the scene
to inform the
authorities.
He himself was hanged
for murder on
a fine spring
day, five months later.
