All they want to do is get out of their wet clothes but the key doesn’t work. As Hannah struggles, Joe stands behind her sniffing the warm, musty air of the corridor.
‘Stinks of mice.’
Hannah tries pulling the key out a little as she turns it. She tries pulling up on the door handle. She tries pushing the key harder into the door.
‘Let me try,’ says Joe.
He pushes her aside, reaches for the key, and turns it without the slightest trouble.
‘Easy, see?’
The flat is smaller than it looked in the photographs on the booking website. The laminate flooring is scuffed and there is a vegetal smell.
Joe lugs his bag into the bedroom leaving Hannah to carry her own.
‘Fucking rail replacement fucking buses,’ says Joe, more to himself than to her. ‘“Let’s spend Christmas somewhere different,” she says. Oh, yeah, nice one. I don’t know why we ever bother going anywhere with the state of the trains in this country.’
‘Never mind,’ says Hannah. ‘We’ll have an early night tonight and explore the city properly tomorrow.’
Joe hangs his sodden black trenchcoat over the back of a chair and pulls his wet shirt away from his bony torso. Looking around he puffs out, despairing and disbelieving.
‘Merry Christmas to us, and happy anniversary.’
‘This is just a base, though, isn’t it?’ says Hannah, her voice beginning to crack.
‘You’d better change,’ he replies. ‘You look like a drowned cat.’
Hannah pushes a snake of dyed black hair behind her ear, her bangles rattling, and slides her glasses up her nose.
Joe won’t look at her. As he heads to the bathroom with their shared toiletry bag he slides past without making contact.
Alone, Hannah listens to the room for a moment. It has no sound at all. It’s too small and too full of furniture to reverberate. She wonders how many flats they managed to squeeze into the former warehouse when they converted it. Too many, anyway.
She hears the sounds of Joe using the toilet, the flush, the shower. Bathroom smells, shit and lime-scented gel, fill the small flat.
She removes her dripping dress and stands in her underwear, shivering and goose-bumped, while she unpacks her bag. She puts on pyjama bottoms and an oversized t-shirt and heads to the combined sitting room and dining area.
There are two windows looking out over an office block. Only a few lights are on – a meeting room on the first floor, an office on the sixth – so the wall of glass forms a blank, black mirror. She moves and spots her own reflection, sees herself doubled, distorted, reflected, shadowed. The flat’s windows open a few inches, not enough to jump from, but enough to let in frosty air and sounds from the street below: a whisper, a shrieking laugh, and the crunch of broken glass.
Joe emerges from the bathroom wrapped in a towel. His fine white hair is plastered to his head and his body looks thinner and paler than ever.
‘All yours,’ he says and disappears into the bedroom.
Hannah goes into the bathroom and locks the door. She can’t use the toilet because it’s not private enough for her to relax, but she sits on the seat for a while. There’s no window, only an extractor fan that hums at an irritating frequency. After a while she gives up and gets up to wash. Before she picks up the soap, she removes her wedding ring. It’s a struggle to get it over the knuckle, over the swell of flesh it pushes before it, but sheer force does the job. She places the ring carefully on the glass shelf above the sink. The metal clicks into place as if magnetised. Hannah washes her hands, neck and face, then dries herself with the only other towel in the flat. She flosses, cleans her teeth, and ties her hair up with an elasticated band.
When she reaches for the wedding ring, it is gone.
Her fingers crab and scrape around. She inspects the full length of the glass shelf. She drops to her knees and looks beneath the sink, finding only a tangle of cobwebs and hair. She looks under the bath and behind the toilet. She checks the plughole. No, it couldn’t have fallen down there, the strainer would have caught it. She pats the pockets of her pyjama bottoms. Finally, she looks into the toilet bowl where perhaps, she thinks, it might have rolled, which would be just her luck. Nothing.
‘What are you doing in there? Come to bed so I can turn the light off.’
Hannah feels a flutter in her heart.
She opens the door and, hesitating, steps across the hall to the bedroom.
He is already curled up beneath the duvet, his head almost buried.
‘I’ve lost my wedding ring,’ she says in a weak voice.
Joe emerges and peers at her, blinking and small-eyed.
‘What? When?’
‘Just now. Freshening up.’
He groans.
‘It can’t have gone far. We’ll find it in the morning. I’ll find it.’
She climbs into bed and reaches out for Joe.
‘Christ, you’re cold,’ he says, when her hand brushes his back.
He turns off the bedside lamp.
Exhausted but awake, Hannah lies and listens. Apart from Joe’s soft snoring, there is something else in the silence – the non-sound of someone holding their breath and holding still.
The morning is bright and Joe’s mood has improved a little. He even makes the coffee, bringing two cups into the bedroom.
‘Four sachets they’ve given us, and four little pots of fake milk. Stingy bastards.’
Hannah draws her knees up beneath the duvet and hugs them with one curled arm, the other lifting the steaming coffee cup to her mouth at intervals. Joe stares at his phone which, perhaps subconsciously, he angles so that Hannah can’t see the screen.
‘Can you have a look for my ring?’ she asks.
‘What? Oh, yeah, sure. In a minute.’
After a second or two he looks up from his screen and turns to her.
‘Why do you take your wedding ring off at all?’
‘It’s more hygienic,’ she says. ‘I don’t want it to get dirty under there.’
‘Yeah, but if you leave it on you’re putting it in hot soapy water. So it gets cleaned. It’s probably more hygienic that way, if anything.’
He turns back to his phone, chews his thumbnail to tidy the edges.
‘It’s supposed to symbolise eternity, isn’t it?’ he mutters. ‘Commitment. I never take mine off.’
‘What I don’t understand is how I lost it. It definitely didn’t roll and there’s nowhere for it to go.’
Joe puts his phone on the bedside table and limps into the bathroom groaning. She watches as he inspects the shelf, the sink, the floor, the plughole.
‘Probably got taken by the house elves,’ he says as he comes back to the bedroom. ‘Try asking for it back.’
‘How does that work?’
Stretching a t-shirt over his head and angular arms Joe says, muffled: ‘Hey, house elves – may I please have my wedding ring back? Like that.’
Hannah mutters the request under her breath. It doesn’t work, at least not immediately.
Joe spends another ten minutes investigating the bathroom before they go out and emerges with a shrug.
‘Sometimes there are gaps around the pipework but everything is sealed tight in there. I don’t know how you do it, I really don’t.’
Over an expensive breakfast at a cafe with oatmeal coloured walls and smashed avocado on sourdough toast Hannah says:
‘Let’s just forget about the ring and try to have a nice Christmas anyway. Just the two of us, somewhere new. We need to decorate the flat a bit. Brighten it up. And get some treats in.’
‘Beer. Wine. Gin.’
They spend the morning of the day before Christmas Eve shopping, buying a tiny tree with twinkling fibre-optic lights, a plastic wreath, and a candle that’s supposed to smell of fir trees. Joe lugs two heavy bags back from the supermarket and opens his first can of beer at exactly midday as he flips through channels on the TV.
As she lays out slices of ham, cheese and salami on a plate, and cuts a supermarket baguette into small rounds, Hannah looks at her hands. They look different without the ring, obviously, but do they look better?
‘We should go to the pub or something,’ says Joe after lunch, two cans of beer down. ‘While there’s still, like, an hour of daylight.’
They wrap up in coats, scarves, and hats and head out into the city. There are Christmas lights up in the centre and a busker is playing ‘Jingle Bells’ on an accordion. Hannah leads them to the cathedral which they circle, but Joe doesn’t want to go inside. The light begins to die and the grey sky turns flat, first, then begins to shade to blue. They drift back to the shopping precinct and its bright lights.
‘That place looks cosy,’ says Joe, spotting a half-timbered pub called Ye Olde Bear. He heads through the door and Hannah follows. It’s crowded and hot with half the customers in novelty Christmas jumpers. Joe pushes his way to the bar and raises a hand to get the attention of the barman. His wedding ring, a thick, plain band, glints amid the fairy lights. He orders Hannah’s usual half of lager and a pint of cider for himself.
Because it’s Christmas, when the usual rules don’t apply, they both drink too much. Hannah’s usual limit is three pints but she ends up drinking five. Dinner is two cheese rolls and a packet of crisps. Joe is on eight pints when he decides to switch to single malt whisky, because it’s Christmas, and Hannah agrees to have one, too, because it’s Christmas, and suddenly, it’s nearly midnight and the pub is closing around them.
They go from giggling arm-in-arm to arguing in no time at all. They both need the toilet but Joe insists on pissing behind a wheelie bin, prolonging her discomfort. He wants to find a kebab shop. She begins to cry, for no particular reason, just everything, and he raises his voice without meaning to.
‘Go back to the flat, then! Take the key! I’ll see you there when I’ve had my chicken doner.’
‘You want me to walk back on my own, in the dark, in a strange city?’
‘Fuck sake… Come with me, then!’
‘I really need a wee.’
He shoves the keyring into her hands.
‘I’ll see you there in, like, fifteen minutes.’
Hannah watches him stagger away and wonders what it is she feels, other than heartburn from the whisky and a pressing pain in her bladder.
The next morning, Christmas Eve, she wakes with a head that feels like concrete and a papery mouth. Joe is not with her. She croaks his name then checks her phone. There are several missed calls and messages from Joe, each more desperate than the last. She must have fallen asleep, or passed out, leaving him stuck in the street outside all night. The last message reads:
‘Will sleep in park. Fuck you.’
Dressing hurriedly, wanting to vomit, she rushes out and downstairs, trying to work out which park he might have meant. She calls him and listens to his phone ring as she walks over frosty cobbles. He doesn’t answer.
The nearest park is by the riverside. She makes a complete circuit, checking each bench and shelter, looking at the single-person tents concealed in the hedgerows and copses. She shouts his name, screams it, constantly redialling his number.
‘What if he comes back to the flat and I’m not there?’ she thinks after a while. She returns to wait for him.
Wide awake now, shaking with cold and adrenalin, she sits down in the kitchen. She closes her eyes, breathes out, breathes in, breathes out, breathes in, but calm never comes.
Her eyes pop open when something slams into the tabletop.
There in front of her something is spinning and shining. She is mesmerised. It slows to a teeter and then falls flat on its side. Her wedding ring.
She sees the second ring fall, seeming to appear from somewhere just above her head, before it hits the table with force. It is thicker and heavier and begins to roll. To stop it reaching the table’s edge she reaches out and slaps it flat.
It feels hot.
She looks at her palm.
A perfect red circle has been burned into the skin.
Image based on a photograph by Luwadlin Bosman at unsplash.com
Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart 