Black Bread White Beer Read Online Free PDF Page B

in believing in organics.
    Six-lane traffic, its smoothness and gentle contours has a blank, hypnotic quality. Something about the road erases, forgives. He sees now why men drive and the attraction of long distances. How two hours on a clear road is probably more therapeutic than a year’s worth of visits to any shrink.
    The hospital offers counselling the way doctors hand out pills, automatically, by the handful. How much time did women in the past spend with a psychologist between their pregnancies and miscarriages? Were they given the luxury of a week-off from housework and radio silence from relatives in order to recuperate? People got on with things, then. Everything about their own upset, the clawing in his gut, her muffles, is by comparison lazy, self-indulgent, and most likely, deserved.
    But maybe it is in the nature of women to dust themselves down and carry on. He can see her back in the office next week, glued to the BlackBerry, allowing herself no time to reflect. Maybe it is only the men who have let the modern age weaken their resilience, crying into baked goods and wallowing into beer. But everything about her knotted sleep in the car makes that a lie. She feels it all.
    Trouble comes when he stops for a toilet break at a Road Chef a couple of miles before the A21. She wakes and follows him, half-running across the car park to catch up, which generates a pang of fear that something might be wrong with her insides.
    â€˜I need to change the dressing. Nothing for you to worry about.’
    It is the first he has heard about dressings. All this time he has avoided looking at her abdomen, as he fears this will wound her, though he badly wants to; to study the contours of her body, and look for evidence of smoothnesswhere a bump was once imagined and fussed over. But she is on to him, reads the unsophisticated voyeurism knotted across his brow, and keeps her hands folded over her tummy as she walks. Fingers locked, elbows straight, her moves are geisha, doll-like. She wears a t-shirt and the patterned mohair cardigan he bought her for Christmas. Mohair on mohair. The whole car park knows about it. When she made to get out of the passenger seat, the static squeal bounced from one vehicle to the next.
    Ignoring the tightness in his bladder, he stands at the entrance to the Ladies, as he is trained to do. He sees aqua tiles from floor to ceiling and detects the same family of smells as those from the hospital. He does not know what he is waiting for. All the damage has already been done. Besides, he is exhausted with having to be the man of the relationship. He is unsure how much reserve he has left if he is called upon for the second time.
    There is a reason Claud discharged herself before he arrived. She wanted to keep all the medical details between herself and the doctor. The dressing is only one secret they share. He suspects others.
    â€˜Wives keep secrets from their husbands,’ said his best man on his wedding day. Hari is the expert, shagging one frustrated wife after another; a Lone Ranger, regularly pulling up in his Land Rover at the cafés most of them use after the school run.
    Amal is unsure that secrecy can exist in a marriage asclose as theirs. When he has every breath pattern and face pore memorized, predicting how she will toss and turn in her sleep – right then left, curl and back; in the midst of urgent, concentrated sex, in sync, when the concept of possession is anathema, to the point where he feels that he actually becomes her; and when, as he cooks, he knows how each particular food will taste for her, where are the secrets? Where in their airy, uncluttered house can they be held?
    He was stupid to think that cleaning was the priority, obsessed as he was with staying busy with his hands. He should have camped outside the hospital, greeting the doctor with chair sweat and a furry tongue. He should have left no opportunities for secrets, not because he is possessive, but