Hinges
He wanted her to ride a cow.
He thought she would look good on one - at least that was her interpretation. She had lost the thread of this particular hair-pin bend of a conversation somewhere between Joan of Arc and the Slavic milkmaids that won Eurovision that one time a few years back. If each quirk was a tree, this man would be a whole Amazon rainforest of eccentricities. She suspected he was the type to produce one great work of art and then hang himself. Typical. She drew them like flies.
The bovine enthusiast sitting opposite her reminded Bethan exactly why she got off Hinge in the first place. With every word that left his mouth (which was an orthodontics building site, by the way), the night grew longer and the drink nowhere near long enough. Was it worth frittering away the precious time she had left on this planet for the sake of a free drink and a funny story for Monday’s lunch break? Her undisguised sigh was veiled - or more accurately, trampled - by the drum and bass that lent the bar’s inhabitants a second pulse.
The place was a museum of commitment on a Saturday night, offering table-top tableaus of just about every stage of romantic evolution. Behind her date’s shoulder (a mountaintop on which a tattoo blossomed in a shape that she feared might be a botched rendition of Munch’s “Scream” - either that or a corgi, it was impossible to tell), the most amicable breakup in history was unfolding. The pair held hands across the table and cried into empty glasses: tears on the rocks, make that two. Bethan made out that funereal quartet - “it’s for the best” - at least twice on their lips.
It’s what we do, isn’t it? We grow together, grow apart, and leave a fragment of ourselves behind each time - not enough to lament over, but enough that we will never quite be who we were before. And if the growing apart can be condensed into an evening of rum and reminiscence, a mutual mitosis, all the better. Meanwhile, the world around the couple continued its usual course of orbit, never pausing to grieve their lost little patch of what might have been. Newly-weds giggled over the house red, looking indecently hungry for each other; newly-divorceds smiled wryly across chardonnays, wary of the impending paperwork this next blunder might cost them. First dates like Bethan’s unrolled in all their awkward, innocent splendour.
She had been through almost every stage in the bar’s spinning wheel of fortune, and yet here she sat, making small talk with a man who looked about twelve and believed a tank top was appropriate attire for… Well, for leaving the house, let alone meeting someone who could be the next love of his life.
Bethan was long past expecting a relationship to change her. You could pretend to change, if it’d make you happy - contort yourself into the role of Loving Wife or Thrilled Fiancée. But you could only keep an act up for so long, and when it crumpled, your friends and family would claim they never saw it coming. Let them. Let them see it a mile off. Lead them on, just to disappoint them, in the way that only family can.
Across the table, the boy (for he was a boy) had moved on from cows and was now listing the various kinds of livestock that would fare well on their future farm. (For those interested, sheep were a top priority, accompanied by chickens, weed, and horses. And, of course, a small army of cows.) He had wrestled sheep, he told her, dark eyes blazing with pride and agricultural passion, and he had won. She doubted this feat was quite as impressive as he seemed to think, but obligingly nodded her approval and admiration, draining her martini and contemplating going home for the tenth time that evening.
Home - where the heart is? Bethan’s heart was a battered and bruised pulp of a thing, beating feebly, pitifully, in a darkened room with no windows and no doors, its once thunderous pulse reduced to an irregular pattering, like an indecisive summer rain or the footsteps of the mice who had fed on its tissue over the years. Home could, quite frankly, wait. Her heart could wait. As excruciating as the present situation was, she would rather stick a pin in each toe and do a tap dance than return to her bay-windowed, pine-floored crypt a moment before she had to. Her hand waved down a waiter of its own accord - her hands were loyal companions, and they knew the drill.
“Tell me about your childhood.”
The request jolted her from her coma of blissful indifference so suddenly she almost choked on an olive. Perhaps the man was more than a be-corgied automaton after all. She asked what he’d like to know. Did she have any siblings? Yes, a sister, older, but they didn’t talk, never really had. That’s a shame. Not really. What about her parents, did she get on with them? On their good days, she smiled, but its edges were tinged with a sadness that revealed just how rare these “good days” were becoming. She, out of politeness, volleyed his questions back: no, he was an only child (she’d never have guessed!), yes, he would like to marry a woman just like his mother (Sigmund, is that you?) - oh, and he had grown up on a farm just outside Buenos Aires (another shocker). He’s been here a month, he’s homesick, he’s chronically lonely, and suddenly, he’s something resembling a human being.
The girl at the table behind them, her face a web of blotches, has dried her eyes, asked for the check, and watched the man who might be the love of her life walk right out of it, the door still swinging in his wake. Digging shaky arms blindly into her coat sleeves, the girl stands, noticing that the couple across from her has changed posture, tilting ever so slightly towards each other, an unlikely/reluctant trapezium. With a gracious, watery smile, she buttons her jacket and leaves the bar before the tears have time to brim over.
Meanwhile, Tank Top Man had naturally segued from his chicken-related childhood trauma to the number of children he would like to have - enough to carry on his agricultural legacy, naturally. He added, as ambiguous as it was ominous, that he would raise them with “a lust for conquest,” whatever that meant. Bethan chose to laugh, albeit rather nervously, and informed him that she was too old to provide him with that many offspring and he’d have to look elsewhere. That’s alright, he comforts her, they can compromise with a slightly smaller farm - ditch the chickens.
His next question was not quite as inspired as his last, but he was on a roll and she was willing to follow him. If Spiderman can shoot webs, does Batman have corrosive urine? Yes, she decided. It’s the only logical conclusion.
Another drink in, and Bethan was on the cusp of enjoying herself. If the night was destined to be a stand-alone pilot episode, they could at least make it a memorable one. He was regaling her with a morally dubious account of how he had repeatedly scammed the Korean embassy when a shadow fell across their candlelit island. The shadow’s voice was piercing, manicured nails down a familiar blackboard, and Bethan craned her neck to see the ski-jump nose and probing little eyes that she’d known would be there.
“Daaaarling, how ARE you?” Bethan’s blush spread like a rash down her neck, wildfire catching her entire complexion, as she mumbled a generic response that was apparently unsatisfactory for the telegraph pole of a woman who continued, “No, really, how ARE you, dearie? It’s been forEVER, not since - well, you know - are you - is he - who’s this?”
Bethan focused her gaze on the wilted flowers propped like decorative corpses in the vase between them - proof that fresh fades and is no substitute for fake.
Seeing her sorry excuse for a date through the eyes of this intruder, shame kicked in afresh and she found she loathed him almost as much as she hated herself in that moment. He stood, shook hands and mercifully refrained from invoking the word “date” - otherwise Bethan would’ve had to seatbelt every fibre of her being to stop herself from tearing his eyes out.
The stranger wipes her soiled hand on her silk skirt with all the subtlety of an arson-prone nun. “Pleasure… Well, anyway, look, love, if you need anything - ANYTHING.” Her eyes widened in an expression that was presumably intended to convey sympathy, but instead came across rather threatening, and her shadow receded, the eclipse temporary.
Pressing “play” on a conversation is hard enough with a blip of an interruption. Resuming casual chit-chat after the detonation of an atomic bomb in stilettos is all but impossible. She closed her eyes and massaged her temples with the two fingers you’d use to perform infant CPR, explained to her date that Hiroshima of a headache had descended and she wanted to go home now. He offered her water, put on a decent display of concern, but she knew it was hollow. He was acting, just like the rest of them had been. Just as they always would be.
Her chair screeched back, announcing her intentions, and he scrambled up to help her, guiding her shaking hands into her jacket and leading her to the door by the elbow as one would an elderly relative. An agitated waiter caught them on the threshold, waving a card machine, and her brow became a canyon as she focused every ounce of concentration on digging for her wallet. She felt a warm hand on her icy one. “Please - this is on the Korean embassy.” The ghost of a laugh tripped from her mouth, but one look at his face showed he was serious.
He offered to get her a taxi, begged even, but she insisted that the walk would ease her throbbing brain. The pair walked in silence, allowing the night to press against their eardrums in all its indigo majesty, caressing all it touched with its stillness, an intimate balm for two. Its song was velvet and ran at a frequency only detectable a handful of times in our lives, if at all. They heard it that night for the first - perhaps last - time, swaying with the imaginary breeze that floated over the homogenous rooftops and into the distant darkness that lay beyond, the wild, tenebrous frame of suburbia: a land where middle-aged women played tennis doubles by day and downed Pinot Grigio by night. A world where, as a teenager, she had gotten high in her friends’ attics after long days of Latin and Economics classes, considering herself another troubled soul swept up in the human tide. And here she was, sharing all of that, in silent communion with a sartorially challenged stranger.
They pulled into a neatly paved driveway with a large bay window. On the wall perched a dead bee, its yellow tailored waistcoat useless to it now, each stripe a sunset. There was a tree growing from the concrete, its ancient trunk bent over backwards. Only something long dead could be that accommodating. Beyond it, sprawled across the back of a couch in the window and lit up like the screen of a cinema was a small blond child. She pressed her nose to the glass and waved at them with the type of hesitancy that should be reserved for adulthood. A tall, solid man opened the door, an oak tree, lined and all, letting the sunshine of their private world spill out onto the doorstep to puddle in the evening’s gloom. The night had stopped singing, silence resuming its reign. The man’s posture suggested some cruel god had reeled in all the threads that held him together, tightening his grip on them until the poor bloke could hardly breathe.
Bethan’s date, who had been on the verge of inviting himself in, pulls up short and blinks rapidly, dazzled, backing away, looking from Bethan to the man to the child and then back, in a Bermuda triangle of misunderstanding.
She almost felt sorry for him, and for just a moment considered calling out to reassure him: they’re paid actors, all of them. But then, what’s to say he wasn’t one of them? Instead, she thanked him for the drinks and pulled the door shut behind her, drowning the tree in darkness once more.