HUSBAND DUMPING DAY
Tony Riordan was reincarnated in his forty-second year.
The process began on Husband Dumping Day.
It was a Thursday.
For the first week after she left, he slept each night with the blankets pulled up over his head, so only his nose was out in the world. That's how he got through the worst of it, the really miserable part, the night-time alone-ness part that is in the highest category of being on your own.
The day hours he could handle - muesli, traffic, meetings, programs, analyses, drivetime, meals, dishes, newspapers, crosswords, TV. With all that structure driving him while the day-clock ticked the alone-ness was easy enough, but when the TV went off the silence was his biggest challenge. Dark is different. Dark isn't subject to analysis, it has no parameters, no variables, it just is. Dark is when the small child inside is free to wander about, to pick through the pieces ... listen to the voices ... see things in a purer light. Black light.
“Tony...”, she’d said, “...you have no soul - no - no - joyfulness! You're a calculating machine – it’s like you've become one of your own bloody programs – and if I don’t – if I - I'm going to – SUFF-ocate”, and she'd cried then, in her own unfathomable and private misery, and didn’t leave an opening for him to ask after the ‘if I don’t...’ part.
He should've been able to read the signs – godknows he made his living from having an instinct for indicators - but women don't translate easily. Not for him. She was gone by the time he got home that night. Didn’t even leave a note, as if everything had already been said.
He felt sort of angry, and sort of sad, but he didn't cry and he didn't rage. His machinery just slowed down, his processes simply drew back into arrays of dull discomforts. Tony Riordan prided himself on being an in-control sort of a guy. He’d always been paid well to be in control.
He thought he remembered that his first wife had also left on a Thursday, and amongst his clatter of thoughts he caught himself wondering - is Thursday Husband-Dumping Day in the secret by-laws of the world of women, in the Society for the Prevention of Female Neglect? In S.P.O.F.N.? Maybe there are whole leagues of Spoffeners out there - deciding about Thursdays and stuff - drawing up guidelines on required minimum degrees of male joyfulness. How often they should sing in the shower. Walk on the beach. Sleep naked. Stuff like that. Joyful stuff.
He didn’t remember Friday. Except for... no, none of it. A totally lost day. Like a passing bout of amnesia. Brought on by the concussion.
On Saturday morning he did a stocktake of the flat, made a list of what she must’ve taken with her, but other than her car it was mostly small things. He sorted the missing bits into high and low priority replacement order. Then one by one he crossed off everything except the microwave, wondered what they cost. Wondered if they came in different types.
It was a week before he realised the iron and the fold-up board were gone. He knew how to operate the washing machine but Lara always did the ironing. Not that it was rocket science - a hot flat thing, press down, back and forth, don’t burn your fingers. So he picked out an iron and a board at the same place he bought the microwave, found the same saleswoman who looked like his Aunt Dixie, who knew in a flash why he was looking like a mackerel stranded on the beach.
He attacked a pair of strides first, but within three minutes realised he was hopeless at ironing. The creases always finished up at wrong angles, because pantsleg creases have their own Laws of Physics, were outside of the real world of cause and effect. But maybe he'd just bought the wrong sort of iron? He didn't think to ask if there were left-handed irons.
After five tries at making the front creases come out right-looking he cracked, yelled - "Yeah well get fucking ROOTED then!”, and chucked the pants against the wall, and from then on he put all pants into the dry cleaners. He didn’t even attempt shirts, quickly discovered that by hanging them out to dry on a coat hanger, they more or less didn’t attract significant wrinkles in the first place.
Most of the other domestic procedures he rejigged as well. Like bed-making. His newly created night-cocoon arrangement on one third of the king-size barely ruffled its orderly straightness, so he built on that. With a couple of practices he was able to pull it all back together each morning with only a sharp tug or two and a tuck, then with one sweeping flattener over the duna it was done. I may not be fucking JOY-ful lady, but I’m fucking ORG-anised.
It was three weeks before he said anything to anyone at work, and then only to Rick over lunch at the pub on Friday, after one of the older women had made some oblique comment on his drip-dry shirt. But it wasn’t really the comment, it was because she looked at him with a knowing eye.
Rick was the other analyst-programmer in the place, and probably the nearest thing to a mate he had. Tony wasn't part of the Rick-And-Sal dinner-party circuit, because Tony wasn't an after-five sort of a mate, but they spoke the same weekday language. Fortran mostly. Sometimes a bit of Cobol. And every work morning each in turn would hand the other a scribbled note on their next chess move. They both knew the other had an own-design chess program on their home PC's, but neither said it out loud. That was all part of their kind of chess game - it was as much about a digital logic competition as anything else.
They rarely had Friday lunch on their own, it was usually at least a car-load of blokes, something of an office ritual. But this particular Friday there happened to be just the two of them.
Rick was clearly uncomfortable with his mate's little bit of domestic news, which sort of surprised Tony, and yes, he was disappointed as well when Rick even tried to shift the subject back to safer ground. The footy. Donald Trump. The legs on the cute new kid in Accounts Payable.
But Tony needed to break the Friday Lunch Man Rules. For once he needed to explore deeper thoughts, get just a little more analytical, about people-things.
“Men always think they're going to find the other half of what they need - whatever that is - in a woman. I wonder if women think the same? What d'you think Rick? Is it all just some biological trick? - Mother Nature getting even with Father Nature?”
Unlike kid-less and mortgage-less Tony, Rick had two of each. It was like he couldn't afford to have seditious thoughts, to start challenging the-way-of-it. To go deep. It was dangerous down there. He fidgeted with his cutlery, re-folded his paper napkin, made some throw-away one-liner. But Tony chose to ignore the message.
“I'm forty-two, Rick. I can do the job with my eyes shut – I at least do THAT well - and I earn good money – and I don’t chase after stray skirts - but it looks like I've now got TWO marriages behind me - you'd have to give me points for trying at least – but what do they WANT f'chrisake?! - she reckons I'm dull – JOY-less - SOME-fucking-thing...”, and he found himself stumbling about amongst his own inventory, randomly picking up one piece after another, looking for Rick to give it all some objectivity.
“Well, what d'you reckon mate? - am I a lump of computer junk? - no soul?”
Rick re-aligned his plate and jockied an offcut of pork fat around and jiggled his empty glass. It felt all too close to the bone for him. He wanted to ease his friend's pain, but all this delving just made him way too anxious.
“Hell, I dunno mate...”, and he picked up their glasses and went for two more beers. Tony leaned on his elbows and studied his half-eaten chicken schnitzel. He felt empty, but nothing more would go in. The half-eaten chicken schnitzel looked back at him.
It was at that moment Tony Riordan knew. Knew about emptiness. Knew what women wanted. Knew what he wanted. He put in his resignation that afternoon.
Ten days later Rick received an email from him. It had a photo attached, of his friend appearing to stand on rising ground, small green fields in the distance. He was wearing a backpack. The email just said “Tony Riordan is loose in the world.”
© T. R. Edmonds 2016
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