Maggie was standing at the sink slowly drying the dishes. More accurately she was taking a break from drying the dishes, standing with the tea-towel over her shoulder, smoking, staring over the bench into the room beyond, watching television—some reality show she wasn’t really interested in.
Walter went to the cupboard under the sink, pulled out the bin and took the lid off. Then he picked up a partly full ashtray and held it towards Maggie, making a distasteful little face. Maggie looked at him for a second then butted her cigarette out in the ashtray with two big stabs, leaving it smouldering.
Walter made sure the butt was properly out then emptied the ashtray into the garbage bin, tied off the rubbish bag and lifted it out of the bin. Passing through the laundry, he picked up the clothes that he had worn that day—the jacket, trousers and the shirt, the underwear even—and took them with the kitchen rubbish to the wheelie bin at the side of the house. He threw the whole lot in there and took the bin to the nature strip. Then, after a moment, he took each of the rubber gloves off with a snap and threw them both in the bin as well.
‘There,’ he said to himself. ‘Done.’
He could almost have dusted his hands symbolically, but he decided against it—he wasn’t one for extravagant gestures.
4.
KNIFE ATTACK ON CROWDED TRAIN
By the time Walter went to bed his mood had lifted slightly. His car had been broken into, sure, but it was now safely in the garage. His credit cards and licence had been stolen, but he had put a halt on them all and was getting new ones. Soon the car window would be fixed, the interior of the car cleaned. Tomorrow morning the garbage would be collected and the clothes he had worn that day would be gone, and with them any possible remnants, any last whiff of that smell would be gone also.
He lay there straight and still in bed, the sheet folded neatly over the top of the doona, his arms outside the covers, his hands folded together on his stomach.
Maggie was in the ensuite bathroom. She was humming a tune and obviously in good humour for some reason. Walter wasn’t really able to follow her moods much any more, but if she was humming it was a good sign and he was content with that. It added to his general lift in mood.
All he had to do now, Walter thought, was put that man and his ridiculous warning out of his mind. Don’t get on the next train. Walter lay there, thinking about it. Pondering. It wasn’t the warning that bothered him so much, it was his reaction. He had really behaved most incalculably, being so rattled by that silly warning. Safe in bed, calm and tightly tucked in, he thought back to his stick-insect-like indecision that morning on the platform, but he thought about it ruefully and without any heat in his cheeks. It was more, Walter knew, than just what the man had said, as unexpected as that was, it was the location in which he had said it—a train platform, with a train pulling up in front of them, the noise and the wind along the platform, the sensations. He had to hold himself in, as it were, especially tight when the train came in along the platform like that, even on a normal day, but he had been doing so well for so long now. He thought he was over all that, over, at any rate, the more overt symptoms. So perhaps his response, his behaviour, his reaction was not so incalculable, given the circumstances. Still slightly disappointing though.
Then his thoughts meandered off in another direction.
Funny. If it wasn’t for that man and his warning, he would never have driven to work, and none of the stuff with the car would have happened …
But before he could think more along these or any other lines, Maggie came out of the bathroom. Her face was glistening and moist with cream. She wore an old, thin, too-big t-shirt and actually, Walter thought, looked quite sexy in a daggy, not-trying type way, with her hair up in a messy bun and her face all dewy and glistening.
*
Maggie turned off the ensuite light with her elbow and took a step towards the bed, then suddenly stopped dead and made a half-laugh sound in her nose. Walter, she thought— look at him! Up and down, straight as a rod, tucked in neat and tidy and snug as a bug in a rug. What a sight. Suddenly, with a pang of surprise, she remembered how she had once found his sheer asexuality sexually attractive. It was a perversion of response she hadn’t experienced for some time and it delighted her, in and of itself, but also because she was glad she still had the capacity to feel it.
‘Comfortable?’ she asked in a light, teasing tone.
Walter looked nonplussed.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Why?’
‘No reason,’ she smiled and continued over towards the bed.
*
Not very much later that night Walter and Maggie were having sex. It wasn’t very exciting sex, perhaps, being as it was missionary position and strictly by the book, but it was sex all the same. It had been Maggie who had initiated it. Usually it was these days. She had been the one to initiate it their first time together, and that’s how it had been for most of their sexual life, apart from that brief honeymoon period when they were first married and Walter, well, lost his head really, with the whole idea of sex-on-tap. But after a while it had seemed only natural to Walter that he take his sexual-Greenwich-Time from her. When the opportunity arose, he was not one to say no.
Unfortunately Walter was unable to stop thinking about, of all things, Mick and the new guy at the office, and the silly conversation they had earlier that day in the kitchenette, the conversation about the odds of dying. They had asked, after the car accident odds, for another go. Mick had asked this, saying that ‘car accident’ was too simple, too easy. He wanted something more unusual, he said, something that would be harder, more of a challenge for Walter, something like autoerotic asphyxiation.
Walter was instantly sure that this was what they’d had in mind all along, that they had possibly even discussed asking this exact thing before they came to the kitchenette. Aware as he was that it was exactly the reaction they were hoping for, he was unable to stop himself from giving it—he blushed furiously.
‘We don’t … we don’t have st-stat-statistics for that kind of …’ Not only had he blushed, he also stuttered and stammered and left his sentence unfinished. His reaction was extreme and beyond his control, and obviously highly amusing to Mick and the new guy.
‘What’s that?’ the new guy asked Mick innocently—not very convincingly.
‘You know,’ Mick answered. ‘Choking yourself to make your orgasm more, you know,’ he made a fist, ‘intense.’
‘You’re kidding me. Does it work?’
‘Oh yeah mate. Yeah. Bit of pressure on the carotid—is it the carotid, Walter? And you’re off like a cracker, mate. Every time. Guarantee it!’
‘Come on fellas,’ Walter tried. ‘Come on … that’s enough …’
In bed, having sex with his wife, Walter squinted his eyes, concentrated on his thrusts and tried to think about something else, someone else, not Mick, not the new guy and not autoerotic strangulation, but he couldn’t help it. He kept seeing flashes of naked men with a stocking tied around their scrotum, hanging by the neck from closet doorknobs in anonymous hotel rooms. It was at this point that underneath him Maggie began to moan more convincingly. Apparently she was starting to enjoy herself—finally.
He couldn’t help himself, couldn’t help flashing back to one final thing from earlier in the day. He was back at his desk, his blush had subsided after the kitchenette episode and his breathing was returning to normal, but after a second or two he heard them, heard Mick and the new guy in the kitchenette. Whispering? No, not whispering. What was it? He cocked his ear and listened harder. Then he realised what it was—a soft, furtive, sound coming from the