The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Volume 3

The Two Hellos by Michel Faber

She didn’t phone him directly after she got off the coach, because she was hungry and her bum was very sore. She phoned him about an hour later, after she’d had some breakfast and wandered around the city for a while.

“Hello?” she said, into a public telephone receiver that was cold and damp with other people’s breath.

“Yes?” he said back, having no idea, apparently, whose voice it was – as always.

In the pause before she identified herself, she felt that little prick of irritation which is merely the tip of a giant hypodermic full of fermented hatred. They’d argued about this so many times.

“Why don’t you ever know it’s me?” she would exclaim when she got him alone.

“For Christ’s sake – what do you expect when all you say is ‘hello’?” he would say, or (even worse): “Look – in the course of a day I’ll get calls from any number of women…”

“But I’m your wife,” she’d insist.

“I know that,” he’d assure her. “But what happens if I say ‘Hello, darling!’ and it turns out the woman on the line is a client for data management software?”

“If you knew my voice, it wouldn’t ever happen.”

“Look, lots of women sound… uh… similar. Especially on the phone.”

“No more so than lots of men. And I know your voice.”

“OK, so you’re better at recognizing voices than I am!” he would offer, as a concession that was at once exasperated and sarcastic. “Microsoft should develop you as a piece of voice recognition software.”

Such comments would enter her through the softness of her flesh, and harden inside her – in all the wrong ways.

“When Carol calls, you don’t hesitate: you instantly respond.”

“Carol’s my sister.”

“OK, then: Patricia.”

“Pat’s an old lady. She has a very distinctive voice.”

“Maybe I should take lessons from her.”

“I didn’t say her voice was a particularly nice one – just distinctive, because she’s old and she’s got a mouth like a… like a… uh… an old person.” (Similes – or indeed anything creative – were not his forte.)

“OK,” she would say at this point, if she felt compelled to push the argument to its climax. “What about the times I phone you up, and I say ‘Hello’, and you say ‘Yes’, and I don’t say anything, and eventually you say, ‘Is that you?’ ”

“What about them?”

“If you know it’s me, why don’t you just say so first off?”

“I don’t know… I can’t be sure… I have to think about it.”

She could never win, precisely because she always won. On the defensive every time, he was more reasonable than her, kept things in proportion, observed the rules of debate, only ever raised his voice if she did it first, tried to keep emotions out of it. In the absence of an impartial adjudicator, his expression was her only mirror, and it showed her a reflection of herself behaving irrationally, unfairly. He would stare at her, hurt and at a loss for words, like a quiz show contestant who’s been led to believe he would be questioned on Roman history, and was suddenly being interrogated about the human nervous system.

Yes, she was being unfair. Probably. But it had happened more than once, that in the middle of this same stupid argument about recognizing voices, the telephone had rung and he’d answered it, caught one second’s worth of distant greeting, and immediately replied, “Oh hi, Lynne!” or whoever. The bastard just couldn’t help it.

“It’s me,” she said to him now. “Your wife.”

“Where are you?”

She couldn’t tell yet whether he was worried or angry about her being fourteen hours late.

“Princes Street. Near the station.”

“Well, I’m sorry but I can’t pick you up now.” He still didn’t sound unequivocally worried or angry, merely pained. “I have to leave for work in a few minutes.”

“I know,” she said, secretly pleased that she’d timed her call so well.

“I met the plane you were supposed to be on yesterday evening,” he said. “It came in bang on time, but you weren’t on it. Where were you?”

“Still in London,” she said. “My handbag got stolen at the airport, just a few minutes before the plane was due to leave. Some teenage kid just ripped it off my arm. I chased him, but I was still in the same shoes I wore to the wedding, so it was pretty hopeless.”

“Why didn’t you get on the plane anyway?”

“My ticket was in that bag, my credit cards, mobile, everything.”

“It’s an e-ticket. The number is just for your reference. Your name is in the computer system, that’s all that matters.”

“I was flustered. They’d already started the boarding calls. I didn’t feel I could just talk my way through.”

“You could have phoned me then.”

“Will you listen to me for once? My handbag was stolen. It had my mobile in it; everything. I didn’t even have change for a public phone.”

“I – I’m sorry, it just didn’t click for a moment…”

“I’m a woman,” she reminded him bitchily. “I don’t walk around in a dark-blue suit with wallets and phones in the pockets.” She knew her bitchiness was uncalled for, but she forgave herself because she was sure he would say something equally insensitive to her any moment now.

“Hang on… You had about… God, how much money did you lose?”

“About £500,” she replied. “In cash.”

There was a sharp intake of breath at the other end.

“You said you’d put it straight into your card account!” he reminded her accusingly.

“I know. I didn’t. I forgot. And didn’t feel like it, anyway.”

“I told you not to carry that sort of money around.”

“Well, I did, and it’s lost. So what?”

“I don’t work for nothing, that’s what.”

“You insisted on giving me the money. Another few days of my card being overdrawn wouldn’t have killed us. I could’ve taken it out of my wage next week.”

“We agreed: your wage is for the house repayments.”

“Fine. So are you happy now?”

There was a pause while he digested the fact that they’d once again proved their ability to cook up an argument in three minutes or less, using only minimal ingedients. Then he said, “I have to go to work now.”

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll see you this evening.”

“Are you going to work yourself?”

“How can I?” she said. “I’ve just spent all night sitting on a bus, I’ve had no sleep.” She knew she’d perhaps forfeited her right to any sympathy from him, and she also knew she wouldn’t value it if he showed it, but she wanted it anyway, if only because she was angry that he lacked the imagination to figure out how she must have got back to Edinburgh in the circumstances.

“On a bus?” he exclaimed, as if she’d just told him she hitchhiked back, clinging to the tarpaulin of a lorry.

“Yes, on a bus,” she sing-songed. “Do you think I’d ask my sister on the first day of her honeymoon if she could lend me the dosh for a private jet?”

He sighed; the whole affair still didn’t quite make sense; but he was smart enough to bite his tongue on further demands for explanations.

“You could at least have rung me. I was worried about you.” Ah! Here it was, at last – too late as always, a whole argument too late.

“I tried,” she said. “Several times.”

There was another pause, while he decided whether she deserved to be felt about any differently from the way he was currently feeling about her. When he spoke again, she noted he was aiming for a neutral, tolerant tone.

“So you’re not going to work. Do you want me to ring them for you?”

“I can ring them myself, thanks. I’ve got 70, maybe even 80 pee. The kindness of strangers…”

“And… uh… You must be tired. Do you think you’ll be able to sleep today?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve got a pile of washing. If I don’t do that I’ll have nothing to wear.”

“What are you talking about? You’ve got wardrobes full of clothes.”

“No, I don’t mean that sort of clothes. Underwear. I used up all my underwear during the trip – I’ve got my period.”

He laughed, attempting to repair their disharmony with a good-humoured expression of shared intimate knowledge. “Say no more,” he said.

“Fine. See you later,” she said, and hung up. If he thought she derived any comfort from his intimate acquaintance with how copiously she bled and how usual it was for her to soil her panties at the gusset edges, he was mistaken. Again. Nor did she get any thrill out of the other little details he knew about: her creamy discharges mid-cycle, the yellow stains she sweated into the armpits of her spencers, the pale brown stains caused by farts whose constitution she’d misjudged, and so on. She could live without his knowing these things, though being married to him made that impossible. For a week every month, by mutual arrangement, she would sleep in the guest room, to spare the expensive linen on the double bed.

“I’ve married one that leaks,” he’d commented once, as a sort of mawkishly well-meant joke. They’d argued about that one, too, until she started leaking from the eyes.

On the bus home, she dozed over her suitcase, her matted hair falling over her face. She hadn’t had time to have a shower before leaving London. She must have a shower when she got home – but not right away. First things first.

She walked in the front door of her house at a quarter to nine, dumped her suitcase next to the living-room sofa, and got the call to her boss over with. It was painless. Concern was expressed about the shock and outrage she must have felt at the theft, the inconvenience of her all-night trip, and the loss of the £500. There was even some suggestion that this day off might be treated as sick leave, a possibility which did not interest her just at the moment, though she made an effort not to sound too blase.

“Thanks, see you later,” she said, and hung up.

On the dining room table she found the remains of her husband’s breakfast: dregs of orange juice in a tall glass, an empty coffee cup, a bowl plastered with bits of milky cereal. She cleared these things away, washed them properly in detergent and hot water, dried them and stored them in their appointed cupboards. Then she filled the blue plastic laundry tub with warm water, poured in some pink liquid described on its label as a “super dirt dissolver” and “stain shifter”, carried the tub into the living room, and set it down in front of the sofa.

Her bum was still sore: she noticed it especially as she leaned over from her sitting position to pull her dirty clothes out of the unzipped suitcase. Not one of the garments was bloodstained, of course, because her period was only starting now, or to be more precise, it had started last night on the bus.

Out of sudden curiosity she rocked back on the sofa and pulled off the panties she was wearing. She tossed the lightly soiled pad aside without even bothering to roll it up; it was the crotch of the panties that interested her. She had been certain, when she’d first settled into her seat on the bus, that she had felt another little trickle of come seep out, but had decided it wasn’t possible: it must be some sort of nervous tickle.

Now, in the warm light of mid-morning, she held the gusset of her panties taut and stared at the uneven, elongated diamond-shape of semen, like a primitive painting of her own cunt. She held it up to her nose: it still had a smell, though nowhere near as strong as the smell she’d got on her fingers when she had pointed her rear at him and, in lifting the cheeks of her arse for his easier penetration, had found her flesh slippery with his come from earlier on.

Dropping the panties into the tub, she rummaged in her suitcase for the slip she was wearing when she’d first hugged his prick inside her. She had observed the delight on his face when he felt how wet she was for him, and as she had guided him into her she’d laughed and said, “You’ve been getting me wet for hours.”

It was true. Foreplay had begun virtually the moment they’d been introduced to one another at the wedding reception, even though they had stood at a demure distance from each other and done nothing but talk.

And talk, and talk. Their talking was like nothing she’d ever been able to do with anyone else: free of pretence, free of condescension, free of dilution. There were things she was able to say to him that she’d ceased attempting to say to other people years ago, and he not only understood these things, but understood the way she felt about being able to say them as well. Some of the things he said to her, although she took them in with more intellectual attention than she’d given to just about anything ever said to her, had the additional effect of a warm middle finger sliding up between her labia.

After a couple of hours of this, she’d excused herself for a minute to dash up to her sister’s toilet, and, as she parted her legs on the toilet seat, she had heard (above the murmur of the reception downstairs) her cunt make a sucking noise. She’d decided then that she had to make love to this man.

Alone now in her house in Edinburgh, she held up her cotton shift. The stain on it was in the shape of a phallus, but that was coincidental, of course. The shape was actually created by his come being squeezed out, little by little, by the contractions of her own orgasm, and spilling into the cleft in her arse as she moved it beneath him. Similarly, the stain on her spencer was caused by her lying belly-down on a wet spot as he eased the head of his prick into her arsehole. He had moved too gently at first, until she’d begun to buck to give him the idea.

On the bus many hours later, sitting on the arse she had urged him to fuck deeper, she had almost regretted it, but later still, in her house in Edinburgh, she squirmed experimentally on the sofa and took joy in the vestige of pain and the memory of his hoarse cry as his pelvis fell against her buttocks for the last time.

It was her impression that he knew exactly what to do when they were fucking, though perhaps she was constantly letting him know what she wanted without really being aware she was doing it. If his hands were on her nipples just when she wanted them there, how did her breasts get uncovered in the first place? He wanted all of her, so she gave him what he wanted, but in the order she wanted it taken, perhaps. She couldn’t be sure. There were things he had done that she hadn’t been aware she wanted done to her, which she’d craved instantly and desperately as soon as she felt him begin.

It didn’t even occur to her to decide whether or not he was a good lover; that would be like a four-year-old child wondering if its sibling was a capable playmate.

She had just wanted to keep fucking and talking and laughing all night and all day, and (looking back at it now) she liked to fancy that at 7.35 pm yesterday afternoon, when her plane lifted off the runway on its way to Edinburgh without her, she’d been coming hard against his warm, wet fingers, cradling his head on her shoulder.

Pushed down into the tub of sudsy water, her underclothes relinquished their hold on his stains and hers. The house was quiet around the swirling of the water as she rubbed and wrung the submerged garments. Detergent and grey-brown water dissolved the difference between the sweating she’d done on the plane to London and the sweating she’d done while fucking her man. She would put these things in the tumble-dryer and they would come out dry and pale, while she herself would have a long shower and wash the last of his smell off her body until she, too, emerged dry and pale.

Later that day, very sleepy from the warmth of the shower and the hairdryer, she went out again, to the local shops. She could still feel him, ever so slightly, in her arse, if she walked really stiffly. She walked that way every now and then, when she thought no one was looking.

She bought a new handbag in the first shop she walked into. It was not even as expensive as her old one (which she still had with her), but she liked it better. She transferred a few things from the one to the other, things her husband would lack the imagination to be surprised had not been in her handbag when it was “stolen”. The rest, including her e-ticket confirmation and her credit card, she destroyed. She’d already thrown away her mobile phone in London, afraid of her husband catching her out making calls on a gadget she claimed to have lost. The empty, flaccid handbag she now deposited in a charity shop collection bin.

The post office had telephone cubicles outside, two in a row. She entered one of these and extracted from her new handbag one of the things she had not discarded: her address book.

Leaning against the side of the cubicle, she dialled the newest number with its 0207 prefix, getting as comfortable as she could in preparation for a long conversation. Running out of money was not a worry: on the cubicle shelf she’d put a small handful of pound coins. If they ran out, she had another four hundred-odd pounds’ worth she could convert to coin, and that was an awful lot of talking.

His telephone, six hundred kilometres south of hers, rang about eight times before he answered it.

“Hello,” he said noncomittally.

“Hello,” she replied, as fresh sweat prickled into her newly-laundered underwear. “This is -”

“I know who it is,” he said at once, in the same warm, teasing tone with which he’d told her, such a deliciously short time ago, that he was about to come inside her. “It’s so good to hear your voice.”