Furnace. Muriel Gray
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and he realized that ‘glad’ was a weak and sickly word to describe the power of his sudden ecstasy.
Elizabeth watched the face of the father of her child as it exploded into rapture, watched his tense muscles melt into a slack, serpentine tangle of joy. Her lip trembled like a child’s as she braced herself. Then she spoke quickly to interrupt the acceleration of his emotion: ‘I’m not keeping it, Josh.’
His imploring arms fell.
‘What?’
‘I don’t have a choice.’
Josh looked at her for a very long time, then turned back to the table and sat down heavily on his chair. He leaned forward and cradled his head in his hands, his hot forehead pointing straight down to the table top.
‘Now hold up. This is going too fast. Talk to me.’
Elizabeth looked down at a hand which had become a fist, and when she opened it to reveal the brooch she had been clutching she could see two clear indentations that the scissors had made in her flesh. She closed her hand.
‘You weren’t here to talk to. I decided on my own. It’s impossible, Josh.’
He looked up from the cradle of his hands.
‘Why? For Christ’s sake we’re doing okay. Aren’t we?’
She swallowed back a sob, barely able to speak.
‘Nope.’
‘What do you mean?’
Elizabeth moved stiffly and rejoined him at the table. She stared into the yellow pine as though the words she was speaking were printed on it.
‘Commitment, Josh. That’s what a baby needs. It’s what I need too and I’ve never had it from you in any shape.’
He opened his mouth to protest but she silenced him with a sorrowful look.
‘I’m not complaining. This is an accident in a relationship that’s doing just fine. But it’s a relationship that can’t handle children.’
She was sounding rehearsed, but seven days to perfect a speech hadn’t been enough to stop it sounding phoney.
‘Welcome to daytime TV, folks.’
The bitterness in Josh’s voice was as alien to him as it sounded to Elizabeth. Any plan she might have had evaporated, and she looked at him like a frightened child.
‘Look at us, Josh. We live together but we’re not married. I see you for two, maybe three days out of every ten. I’ve just started a new business that needs all my time and energy. There’s nothing in this dumb life of ours that’s stable enough to make a good job of growing another human being.’
‘We love each other.’
‘Then why aren’t we married? Why aren’t you at home?’
‘Why aren’t you? Is sewing fucking Batman suits better than staying home and looking after our baby?’
She looked at him coldly. ‘Jesus Christ. You can take the man out of the truck but you can’t take the trucker out of the man. What next, Josh? The chorus of a Red Sovine song?’
He lowered his eyes.
‘I didn’t know you wanted to get married.’
‘You never asked.’
‘What if I asked now?’ His voice had an edge of desperation.
‘It would mean nothing. You wouldn’t be asking for the right reasons.’
There was a pause. A heavy silence that made Josh’s response startling.
‘FUCK!’
He slammed his fist down on the table so hard that Elizabeth leapt in her chair and caught her breath with the fright. Josh was breathing heavily, staring down at his hands, and she spoke softly when her heart had stopped pounding.
‘Next week. Wednesday at three o’clock. It’ll be over.’
He looked up slowly and her grief was almost uncontainable when she saw the film of tears that coated his eyes.
‘Then why even tell me? Does it feel good to give me a few moments of joy and then steal them back again? Huh? Make you feel big? Feel in charge? That what you call love?’
Elizabeth started to cry. Her chest heaved and she bent her head to her chest. Josh watched, wanting instinctively to comfort her but cancelling the order from his brain before it reached his arms.
She sobbed for a few minutes in silence, wiped her arm across her eyes and nose and then faced him again.
‘I told you because I was scared and lost. I always tell you everything.’
He looked at her tragic, puffy face and tried to feel the love for her he knew was there. But the imminent death of his baby, that terrifying appointment, the time already ticking away towards its execution as the baby’s cells split and multiplied inside her, was blocking it like a wall. He spoke quietly and with a malice he never knew he possessed.
‘You didn’t tell me you were a selfish bitch.’
Elizabeth stared at him for a moment, stunned.
‘Damn you to hell.’ She opened her hand and with all the force a close sitting position could afford, threw the brooch at Josh’s face and ran from the house.
As he sat still, listening to her car start and screech hysterically from the drive, Josh fingered the tiny scratch that his gift had inflicted above his eye. He bent to pick up the fallen weapon and closed his hand on the brooch’s innocent form.
There was no question of what action to take. He would do what he always did in a crisis. Josh Spiller got up and went to call his dispatcher.
Time. It was at the core of everything. To buy it. To control it. To comprehend it. And yet still, this night, this eve that had been so long coming, so long anticipated, had now crept up on her like a thief.
As always, she tapped three keys on the keyboard and watched the figures scroll up the screen. She knew what she would see, but it was important to remind herself why.
This was why. The golden, glimmering, shining reason for it all. The dollars, the deutschmarks, the pounds, yen and lire, all flickering before her, lighting her face up with their green glow.
More. The knowledge and power.
But no. She closed her eyes and clenched a fist against it. That thought was forbidden. Vanity was destruction. The power was in the humble and respectful use of the knowledge. And that was why tomorrow was no more and no less than the necessary function that it had always been. The others depended on it. Their world turned on it, because God made it possible. She moved the mouse and closed the file with one diagonal sweep and click, as the sound of soft spring rain tapping at the window won the battle for her attention over the buzzing computer.
And she smiled as she looked up, imagining it soaking new buds on the blanket of trees that separated her from the dull uncomprehending mass of humanity.
It had taken the surly teenagers in the loading bay over an hour to load his trailer. And that was after a two-and-a-half-hour wait in the damp Victorian warehouse. Josh had sat in the drivers’ waiting area, cradling a styrofoam cup of stewed coffee, watching the three bozos wandering around his truck like pimps on a Bronx street. One drove the fork-lift into Josh’s trailer and the others hung around the doors making flipping gestures with their hands and adjusting their baseball caps as they laughed about something secret.
Normally, Josh would have gone out and kicked their butts, but this time he sat immobile behind the glass partition, watching them waste his time. It was a shitty load, some metal packing cases for