Jerry Mandible stopped the lawnmower with a sigh and, shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun with one hand, turned back to look at his bedroom window. It was the middle of the day but the curtains were drawn, and inside the room he could hear his wife. She was receiving sexual intercourse from one of their mutual friends, an arrangement that had been going on for some time now. It wasn’t that it bothered Jerry as such, or upset him, or even made him particularly angry, it just seemed to leave a slightly unsavoury taste in his mouth and a nagging sense of discomfort about his person.
The sun was pounding heavily on his faded baseball cap, and Jerry wiped a handkerchief across his brow that glistened moistly under a film of sweat. He thought about his wife there, flat on her back with her legs spread wide apart to accommodate Bill’s salesman’s cock, gasping in a way that he had learnt over the years was almost definitely false. Should I feel stupid?, he wondered to himself. That’s my wife in there with another man, in my house. And Bill wasn’t the only one, not by a long way.
He could never decide whether knowing about all of this actually made it worse. It took away all of the deceit and the lies usually associated with such extra-marital liaisons, but still left him burning with the embarrassment of what other people thought about him. He daren’t even imagine how it must look to anyone else. They all knew what she was up to, everyone in the street (in fact she was up to it with most of them). How weak must he look? Oh dear, he said with a sinking despair, but he couldn’t tell whether it was out loud.
Carefully he started the ignition of his sit-on lawnmower and manoeuvred it dexterously into the left hand garage. He dismounted and pulled the door down behind him. It was stifling in the darkness, and he could see thick particles of dust illuminated by the erratic shafts of light that broke through the slit windows running along one wall of the garage. He pulled open the fridge, his fridge, and stood in close to its feeble coolness. He could murder a beer, but when he crouched slightly to see what the fridge had to offer he felt his heart sink a little when he saw that it was empty. Completely empty. He pushed the door closed, his fingers resting on its rust-flecked white frontage for a few seconds longer than perhaps they usually would. He caressed the empty fridge as though it were his empty life.
It smelt like mild labour in the garage. Jerry pulled of his cap and hung it up on the allocated hook. He felt suddenly nauseated by the meticulous organisation of the workspace. Screws were separated according to size and stored in individually labelled boxes. Hammers rested with hammers, screwdrivers with their kind, a variety of handsaws were organised according to the dimensions of their ascending sizes, and all there under his own stringent regime of clear and comprehensive labelling. He yearned for chaos, felt it boiling up inside of him like a pending volcanic eruption, as though it might explode from him at any moment. Looking at the cap he felt his breath quicken, a slight tremble initiating in his biceps. He grabbed the cap with a quick rough yank, and threw it defiantly to the floor. With a breath, as of an almost erotic release, he walked through the side door and into the house, but was back in the garage and had replaced the cap with the exaggerated gestures of a scolded child before the door had even had a chance to close.
Bill was in the kitchen drinking milk out of the carton, naked apart from a small pair of underpants. He saw Jerry walk in but didn’t seem surprised, or perturbed, despite the underpants. Bill knew Jerry, knew that Jerry knew about him, and knew that Jerry wasn’t the kind of guy to do anything about anything anyway. He took another long swallow of the semi-skimmed and slung the carton back into the fridge. Jerry saw that the lid was still left on the surface and narrowed his eyes.
“Jerry,” said Bill, as if he were greeting an old friend.
“Bill,” said Jerry, coldly. “How’s Susan?” Susan was Jerry’s wife.
“Fine, fine.” Bill lit a cigarette from a packet he had set down on the top of the fridge. He offered one to Jerry, but Jerry didn’t like to smoke. “She wanted you to know that she won’t be in for dinner.”
“No?” said Jerry. He stepped past Bill’s bare flesh and pulled a beer out of the fridge, which he opened up and drank from thoughtfully.
“No,” Bill went on, eyeing Jerry with a look more of intrigue than concern. “Bit early isn’t it, Jer?” Jerry looked at his wristwatch. It was lunchtime.
“No,” he said. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Whatever you say buddy, whatever you say.”
“Yep.”
The two men looked at each other, one with his beer, the other his cigarette, one in his house clothes, the other his underpants. Bill dragged hard at his cigarette, trying to finish it up without losing face, which he did, letting the smoke trickle from his nose. He put the butt into the sink, and Jerry flinched.
“Well,” said Bill, running a confident finger under the elastic leg band of his underpants, which seemed to be digging into his thigh, “Good seeing you, Jer.” He extended his hand for Jerry to shake. Jerry shook it very slowly. “I better get back up to her.” Bill spoke as if he were talking to a raunchy pal in the office about some mindless physical conquest, not the husband of the wife he was screwing. Jerry picked the butt out of the sink, turned the tap on it and threw it in the dustbin.
“I’ll come with you,” he said. “I need a word with Susan anyway.”
“Hey, you’re the boss buddy,” said Bill, clapping a hand on Jerry’s shoulder. He started off for the stairs, and Jerry watched his buttocks and their hair walking off ahead of him with waves of vibration from the footsteps. Bill then stopped, as if he had suddenly been struck by a single thought, and turned to Jerry. “After you sir,” he smirked, like everything in the world was his joke.
Jerry walked silently past him and up the stairs, past the photographs of their little boy, his beautiful smile. They shouldn’t have lost him. It wasn’t fair.
In the bedroom, Susan was reclining on the bed also smoking a cigarette, gazing out of the window. Jerry would have said contemplatively, but he knew she wasn’t that kind of person. He didn’t know she smoked, or rather he had never actually seen her smoking. It made sense. She had a light sheet pulled half over her body, but her breasts were exposed at the top of it, the nipples still dark and hard following Bill’s efforts. They looked somehow different from the way Jerry had remembered, heavier, like she was getting older too. She turned to the door when it opened and saw Jerry, with Bill grinning behind him, but she didn’t say anything, just sucked on her cigarette in a way that Jerry thought made her look profoundly unattractive, that limp-wristed way that smokers tend to hold their cigarettes, as if their whole body has been overtaken by a ghastly debilitating nicotine paralysis.
“Can I just squeeze past?” asked Bill, shuffling past Jerry. Without shame or thought he slipped out of his pants and under the sheet, right there on Jerry’s side of the bed, next to Jerry’s lamp and book and reading glasses. He dick had looked thick, heavy and red, and Jerry found it odd to imagine it nestled between his sheets.
“Susan,” he said quietly. She didn’t speak, dropped her cigarette into a used teacup by the side of the bed. It hissed acutely as the residue of the morning tea extinguished the life of its burning tip. “Susan,” he said again, a bit louder.
“What do you want, Jerry?” she asked. Her voice was nasal and sour, and she and Bill looked at Jerry with equal measures of amusement and thinly veiled disgust.
“I…” he said.
“You what?”
“I think you might need to talk to someone. It’s okay to miss him. I miss him. I miss him so much.”
“Shut up Jerry.”
“But it is,” he persevered. “It’s okay to miss him. It shouldn’t ever have happened. God shouldn’t have let it happen but…”
“God!” she snorted.
“We need to talk about these things,” he said. He sounded like he was going to cry because he was trying to stop his bottom lip from quivering. Bill just sat there.
“We don’t need to talk about anything.”
“We have to, Susan. I can’t do this. I… When I see his pictures hanging on the stairs I… I miss him so much.”
“Then don’t look at the pictures,” she said, so coldly. When did she become so cold?, Jerry wondered. Had she always been like this? She was running her hand up Bill’s leg on top of the sheet, but she looked Jerry dead in the eye.
“Just don’t look at the pictures Jerry,” said Bill in his salesman’s honk. “Think about something else.”
“Think about something else?” said Jerry.
“He’s gone Jerry. He’s dead,” said Susan. Jerry bucked with the tears that he cried. In front of his wife and her lover his shoulders jerked with their sadness.
“But I miss him,” he mumbled between the sobs.
“Just go, Jerry. We’ll talk about it some other time. When we don’t have company.”
Jerry wiped his eyes with his sleeve and raised his downcast gaze to the bed. Susan was frowning with such hatred and Bill was smiling. He would relish telling his friends in the pub about this, thought Jerry. About old Jerry the loser. The crying loser.
“Right,” he said. He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, and threw it onto the bed. Then his car keys and his house keys. He unbuttoned his blue overalls and stepped out of them, unlaced his shoes and tossed them into the corner, took off his grey slacks and his comfortable shirt and put them all on the trunk at the foot of the bed. Finally he removed his cotton boxer shorts and his socks and stood naked in front of the two of them. Bill’s face was turning red as he struggled to hold his sniggers in.
Jerry turned and walked out of the room, pulling the door behind him. He could hear the terrible drone of their laughter as he took a picture of his dead little boy from the wall on his way down the stairs and, still entirely naked, unlocked the door to the garage and mounted the hot leather seat of the lawnmower.
Jerry drove slowly as the equipment demanded. He had balanced the photograph by the steering wheel, and he looked at the picture as he drove. The sun felt good on his body, and he didn’t have to pass many people on the quiet residential streets that neighboured his own on this short drive to the cliffs. The few people he did see would only stare in disbelief, before picking up the phone to regurgitate the gossip. Jerry Mandible, nude on a mower in the afternoon sun. Hadn’t been the same since the incident. They couldn’t say it, couldn’t even say the word. Accident.
It wouldn’t be a police issue though, which suited Jerry. He didn’t want any trouble now.
Turning off of the quiet cliff top road and into the primary car park, Jerry edged his mower past the parking attendant, whose eyes couldn’t help but drop to Jerry’s genitals with a blush, even a grown man, and rode it to the farthest parking spaces, right by the edge of the cliff.
He shut off the engine and climbed from the mower, taking the photograph with him. When he peered over the edge he could see the brilliant blue sea below, crashing with minimal force but maximum constancy onto the sheerness of the rocks. It was a pretty straight drop.
He could hear the muffled shouts of the parking attendant, who was running across the length of the car park towards him. Jerry’s bare back was glaring white in the brightness of the day, white like the milk that Bill had swallowed, white like the door of the empty fridge in his garage. Distorted by the wind as his voice was, Jerry thought the attendant was shouting “goodbye! goodbye!”. Jerry turned and waved, waved the photograph of the little boy high in the air.
And then quickly, without delay, or consideration, or fear, Jerry stepped over the knee high wire fence that ran along the cliff edge and threw himself over, still clutching the photograph, and even as he fell he didn’t feel like he was falling but soaring up into the sky, through the clouds and to heaven itself.
He was flying at last.
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