Alison Wells Author

Housewife with a Half-Life

Alison Wells

1

It was when she was scrubbing down the toilets that she heard the noise, a soft plopping noise. Well you know what she thought of course but that’s not the kind of thing nice people talk about so let’s move on. Susan was the kind of person who happened to have an ensuite with a separate shower, not that she set out looking for that sort of thing. But sometimes, if you’re extremely lucky in life, you wake up one day, hear a soft swishing noise, realise that you live in suburbia and that the sound is your husband having a good old scrub in the ensuite shower with the floor to ceiling wall tiles. You try to imagine that he’s the kind of metrosexual that never burps, farts or scratches himself in the wrong places and that when he comes back into the bedroom with the hand towel fastened around his middle you will think to yourself YES! This is the crazy motorbike toting, sex god of my dreams, the hard man with a soft centre.

Susan turned around. She was wearing Marigolds, two left ones. She looked like a deformed toilet brush; such was the style of her uncoiffered standy up hair. She was on her knees – not at all in the position to welcome or deflect a visitor – who happened, as far as she could tell, to be some kind of man who had appeared, dropped or plopped, as we have already mentioned, in the separate ensuite shower fully formed.

He was wearing an outfit that consisted of a biker jacket, a t-shirt with the logo ’42 – not as bad as you think’ and a kilt. His legs, of which there were definitely just two, were truncated by a pair of purple iridescent Doc Martens. His hair was, well, the stuff of nightmares. I don’t want to name names, but let’s just say that the lead singer of Status Quo would have been the ideal poster boy for this gentleman. There was a ponytail, a receding hair line and a shiny pate that Susan had a compulsion to draw a question mark on. Why the hair style? Who the hell are you? What are you doing in my shower with the very nice Italian handmade tiles?

So she said ‘what are you doing in my shower matey?’ thus referring in a postmodern ironic kind of way to a popular children’s bath foam from the 1970’s that came in character shaped bottles and that she kept in a very squidgy place in her memory. I don’t know if it was this referential resonance but Susan knew immediately that this man kind of thing was someone she could end up being fond of. He wasn’t at all threatening and the only thing scary about him was his moustache.

When she spoke to him the man kind of thing lit up. I mean it. The insides of him glowed so you could see the shape of his lungs and his heart as if in an x-ray and then the glow went again as if someone was fiddling with a dimmer switch. And his face, his smile. She thought immediately of chocolate box grannies, Werther’s originals, hot cocoa by the open fire, the Virgin Mary looking into the middle distance. He came at her like a puppy, he couldn’t contain himself. The ensuite wasn’t large – by no means as large as Sandra Gleeson’s purpose built one. He bumbled and tumbled about; sending the toilet roll holder flying and making the toiletries on the open shelf skitter and revive like the bridge crew on the Starship Enterprise after a collision.

‘May I hug you?’ he asked, making for her with arms as wide as King Kong. ‘You are shorter than I realised and your hands are made of…’ he gave them a little squeeze, ‘some kind of polyurethane – a petroleum product – which, although it shouldn’t be a problem – he turned his head to the side in a moment of pathos – ‘is a little disappointing in the current climate.’

He shook himself and came closer. ‘Now.’

Susan watched him with an uncomfortable fascination.

‘Now,’ he said, putting his hand inside his jacket. ‘Which one?’

If this was a film he would pull out a gun thought Susan. Here I am on my knees on the bathroom floor wearing marigolds and a strange man is in front of me putting his hand into his jacket.

From his pocket this strange individual with the glowing insides took out a little book with a light blue cover. It was The Little Book of Hugs. ‘A-frame hug, side to side hug, smash and dash hug,’ he murmured.

He put the book back in his pocket so suddenly that Susan wasn’t sure she had actually seen him do it, although it seemed to her that she remembered. The memory was already so far in the past when surely it had happened in the last few seconds. It was the same feeling she had about this man kind of thing –  that he had somehow come from very long ago but that he was already in her, embedded in the cells, laid down in her memory like a sleeping giant.

‘The heart to heart hug,’ I think, he said, ‘May I?’

‘Ok…’ said Susan, not at all sure.

He put her arms around her and held her close to his chest. She was inside the leather jacket in the dark, breathing that muggy snugness and she could hear his heart beat. He had only one heart, not two or none at all, and his heart went dum de dum de dum de dum in her ears. She thought of the pillow soldiers that marched when she had the measles. Hot happy tears slid down her face and most inconveniently but inevitably down the side of her nose. They conglomerated uncomfortably at its tip. She lifted her Marigold hand to stem the drip. But there is something that doesn’t work about polyurethane and mopping, so she took off the glove with the other hand and it was then that the kind of man thing screamed, swooned and clunked onto the cold floor.

She had a walk around him. She had a look. He had no visible weapon. He had put the Book of Hugs away. He looked bulky but Susan was no girly girl, she didn’t know her Uggs from her Manolo’s. She lifted sofas with one hand while hoovering, she ran half marathons with her babies under each arm and she once singlehandedly moved a hundredweight of wood pellets for the new boiler from the driveway to the back shed. In a tight spot she could clamber up a ladder without putting a ladder in her 15 denier tights. In short, she was the housewife for the job and in less than 75.2 seconds she hauled him out of the bathroom and hoisted him onto the bottom bunk of the children’s bed, where he lay groaning.

Susan pressed a flannel to his head. She removed her other glove and dabbed cool water on his brow admiring the luminescence of his face which resembled the relentlessly optimistic light of midmorning, the sort of hot, comforting light that a cat sits in.

He quit the groaning, opened his eyes and said exuberantly ‘Oh they’re hands!  I hadn’t any idea what they were dishing up to me. I’ve had some freaks in my day, but no-one so far with removable appendages.’

Susan raised an eyebrow. That’s what you do in stories when you want to signify surprise. But Susan wasn’t derivative, she came from a long line of eyebrow raisers, her mum of course, Geraldine, who used the technique to punctuate her husband’s spiels and then there was Susan’s granny who could stop a flying fib at twenty paces with the merest hint of an eyebrow lift.

‘I’m sorry, you’ve obviously no idea what I’m talking about and I’m not even sure I do,’ he said, sitting right up and banging his head on the underside of the bunk. ‘Argghh,’ he clutched his head.

So far, Susan thought this has been an eventful visit, lots of head banging but not in the way his biker jacket and ponytail would suggest.

‘Sorry,’ he said again ‘you’re Susan right?’

He held out his hand which looked like any other hand except that the fingernails were very long and white and appeared to have had a professional manicure. Susan half expected him to have LOVE and HATE tattooed across his digits. ‘I’m your Fairly God Father. You can call me Fairly.’

‘What?’ said Susan, patting the underside of her bob. She was in every way, the perfect mother, even though we know nothing at all about her children and what kind of angels or monsters they might turn out to be. She looked as if she had been cut out from a 1950’s magazine. She had a pleasing face, a broad smile, gentle hazel eyes with demure eyelashes. Fair enough, she was wearing trousers, but they were slacks in a pale beige. She wore a V-neck sweater with a collar and over it she had a sort of housecoat apron thingy. Looking at Susan made you think of warm apple pie, oven gloves, tea cosies, open fires, toasted marshmallows and slippers.

‘I’m your Fairly God Father,’ he repeated. ‘I’m here to look after you.’

‘I’m Susan, Deacon now, but I usually go by my maiden name.’

‘Which is?’ the Fairly God Father asked.

‘Susan Strong,’ she replied

‘Strong, that’s good,’ he murmured, rubbing his head.

Susan ignored him ‘Now what you need is a nice cup of tea.’

2

In the kitchen the Fairly God Father paced as Susan put on the kettle. He took three or four steps in one direction then pivoted suddenly and then took off in the opposite direction. He almost bumped into Susan as she took out some cups from a high cupboard.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I always get a bit hyped up after travelling through hyper-space.’

She laid her hand on his arm. ‘You’ll feel better after the tea,’ she said.

Susan was surprised to see tears coming into his eyes.

‘Tea,’ he repeated.

Susan, smiled, her hair catching highlights from the erratic sun which flickered through the window. ‘What’s the matter? ‘Is it the bang on the head? Perhaps you need to get to a hospital for an x-ray? They are awfully good in the local A&E, I’ve been there several times.’

This made him smile. ‘That would be interesting experience for all concerned. But it’s not my head, it’s the tea. A cup of tea has been a long held dream of mine. I never thought it might really come true.’

They not only had tea but they had freshly baked scones and homemade jam. The cups came with saucers and the jam came in a china bowl.

‘Is the tea all right?’ asked Susan.

The Fairly God Father said nothing, he was staring into space, holding the tea cup aloft. Then he shook himself and answered.

‘Just perfect.”

Susan thought she must be mistaken but it appeared as if his chest lit up.

‘You mentioned A&E visits…’ said the Fairly creature. ‘You have twins don’t you? Two boys, mirror images?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Pluto and Rufus. They’e four now. How do you know so much? It’s as if you’ve been briefed.’

‘I have been briefed in a manner of speaking,’ he said, his eyes turning as black as the universe without stars, as the last drop of crude oil hewn from the ground. I’ve been coming for you for a long time, watching you forever through pinpricks in the universe, I’ve crossed your path in other guises, at other junctures. For example: once in this dimension at your father’s office party where I was the comedy magician, the crabbit with the rabbit. You were only about five or six. Did you see me?’

Susan looked through her fingernails at the memory. ‘Yes, yes. I can see you clearly. You wore a long black cloak and a top hat and boots with shiny silver bits at the end.’

‘Steel toe caps,’ he replied, ‘I had done a few kids parties by that time.’

A dust mote rotated in the air, descended and settled on Susan’s head. Fairly remembered how she used to suck her thumb when she was two and a half, a little snuggle munchkin in her cot with the afternoon sunlight sneaking round the crack in the curtain and playing around her toes. With all the parallel universe hopping, he didn’t age in the same fixed chronological way. He went in fits and starts. He was quite a bit older than she was then, but still only twelve. They only got him to watch over her while she slept. At the party he had fast forwarded to twenty seven while she was only five but as her life got faster his slowed and now there was not much between them.

Susan was smiling, swirling the milk around in her cup with a dainty spoon. She had set out the table with coasters and place mats and there was a jaunty oilcloth underneath picturing a teddies’ tea party.

‘You couldn’t get the trick with the hankies right. You stuffed them up your sleeve but one of them fell out, a little white triangle. I picked it up and I was awestruck because I didn’t connect it with your failure. I couldn’t believe I was holding a magic thing.’

‘Did you keep it?’ The Fairly Godfather asked nudging a crumb with the tip of his thick fingers, then squishing it and popping it into his mouth.

‘No I couldn’t. I was too afraid. I rubbed the silk until I thought maybe I’d collected some of the magic into my own hand. Then I sneaked up and left it on your table that was covered with the black felt cloth. When I went back down to my parents I was sure I could feel your eyes on the back of my head.’

‘Susan, Susan. My eyes have hardly been anywhere else. And just lately we’ve been so worried.’‘Who, who do you mean? Who sent you? Some secret government space agency?’

‘Nothing Earthly, not of this Earth version anyway. They are called The Higher Powers:Infinity to the power of anything over 100.’

‘You mean I’m being surveilled by a large number?’

‘I don’t mean to be rude, Susan, but it’s far too complicated for you to understand. The number is just the structure, the skeleton, of the higher beings. There are emotional, mental and spiritual components as well, generated by energy travelling through the system. They can straddle the divides between all the possible alternate universes just by plugging in different sums.’

‘Oh,’ she said ‘well that’s as clear as dishwater. Maybe you can do me up a quadratic equation later to illustrate….

The Fairly God Father took another sip of his tea and it seemed to Susan that every time he did that time became treacle, a great lovely gloop of it.

‘You said you’re here to look after me?’ Susan said as he lowered his tea cup. ‘But that’s my job, looking after everyone else. Why do I need looking after?’

‘There’s been some trouble, an anomaly, you might not even be aware of it,’ said the Fairly God Father. ‘You’re stuck in a relativity and you can’t get out of it.’

Susan nodded, she’d always had an inkling and now that he’d put his finger on it, it kind of made sense.

‘You’ve noticed then?’ he paused, ‘You’ve heard of the Schrodinger’s Cat experiment?’

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘experimental physics is my hobby. It’s an idea used to explain quantum mechanics. A cat is closed into a box with a radioactive element. At the moment a particle decays, some poison is released and kills the cat. But it’s impossible to predict when it will happen so no one can be sure if the cat is alive or dead without looking.’

‘That’s as close as clear as you are going to get,’ said the Fairly God Father. ‘What we needed to do was look into your box so to speak.’

‘You just thought you’d pop in and check? Well you can see I’m perfectly fine. Things couldn’t be better. I have 2.5 children,’ she said, patting her belly, ‘well two children and half a mind to have another, a four bed roomed semi detached home in a lovely well manicured estate. I even have a washer dryer.’

‘Yes,’ he said gloomily. ‘I was going to warn you about that.’

Susan smiled. ‘I’m beginning to get the idea that you worry a little bit too much. Perhaps you’d like to read one of the self-help books I have on thought stopping, they’re ever so good. You can’t let your life be stymied by fear, you know. And by the way you have a little bit of jam on the end of your nose.’

‘The trouble is,’ said the Fairly Godfather, wiping his nose ‘that while you are caught in this relativity, we think that you are breaking down.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We’re not sure exactly how it’s happened but we think that throughout your life time as you’re travelled through time and space, you’ve left elements of yourself behind in other dimensions. Your physical substance is disintegrating in sympathy. You are a Housewife with a Half-Life. The Half-Life is how long it’s going to take you to disintegrate by half. I’m sure you’ve heard it said before. ‘I’m not half the man I used to be.’’

‘Yes, but I’ve never heard it in relation to a woman.’

‘That’s the problem. It’s very rare. It’s not commonly known, but women are what’s keeping the universal fabric intact. All that multitasking and intuition, they are constantly weaving threads. We think that you’re the knot that’s keeping everything together but now the knot is fraying and,’ he swept his hand across his brow melodramatically, ‘and if we don’t sort you out…’

‘What?’ she said, putting her cup back into the saucer, ‘universal devastation?’

The Fairly God Father frowned. ‘Have you noticed anything unusual yourself?’

‘Well yes,’ she said, ‘I do seem to be stuck in a rut. Sometimes I wonder if there is really anything outside the four walls of this house. I seem to be doing the same thing over and over again and all the days blend into one another.’

The Fairly entity had taken out a notebook and was writing in it with a stubby pencil. He nodded for her to continue. ‘It looks like we’re right then. You are stuck in a temporal prison. That’s the way it is for a Housewife with a Half-Life. Everything is the same. You are stuck in groundhog.’

‘It can’t be all that bad!’ Susan said smiling. ‘I mean there are small changes. For instance yesterday I made roast chicken, today we’re having lasagne.’

‘People always make that mistake. They think that a temporal loop means everything stays identical. But there’s the question of entropy. Chaos within a stable system. Just the mere fact that you are disintegrating will distort the time line. These tiny differences give the impression of change but nothing really changes, does it? Can you even distinguish one day from the next?’

She puts down the teacup. There is a milky rim around the edge. She puts her hand on the tea cosy to feel the pot. ‘No, you’re right. Sometimes I don’t even know what month it is. You wake up in the morning and Christmas ads are playing on the radio. And you think ‘No! That can’t be.’’

The Fairly God Father nodded.

‘But, hang on,’ Susan added, ‘you said time isn’t moving. But the year is moving on, Winter follows Autumn.’

‘Yes I know. Time isn’t moving for YOU.’ he said.

 

Susan shakes her head as if she has just woken up. ‘Now you’ve said it there are all these things that have hit me. Why I miss people’s birthdays. Why I get ready to go out with the girls and then find out the night out was arranged for two weeks ago. Why Nigel and I schedule conversations and they never happen.’

‘Ah yes, well Nigel, that’s a different matter.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘He actually exists most of the time in a parallel dimension to yours. He can only get back over at certain intervals. It’s that ships that pass in the night phenomenon.’

‘Oh yes. Sometimes we feel that we never really see each other.’

‘That’s because you never really do. And sometimes when he’s here, do you feel that he may as well not be because he’s not really responding, not really on your wavelength? That’s because he’s just bleeding through from the other dimension. He can only half hear you. He’s trying his best but there is so much interference that he can only pick up a fraction of the decibels and about half the meaning. Sometimes he says something back to you that makes no sense, as if he hasn’t really been listening.’

‘Yes!’ said Susan.

‘Now you know why. His energy is able to physically manifest in this dimension but his full mental and emotional faculties cannot bridge the divide. He leaves some of them behind.’

She thought of Nigel, her husband, pale pallor, thin, in his business suit, staring into space. Sometimes she waved a hand in front of his face and he didn’t see it.

‘Gosh’, she said, aligning the butter knife with the side plate.

‘You know Susan. This might be a lot for you to take in all at once. But if you have another cup of tea, you might be okay. Most things around here are not what they seem.’

‘How do you mean?’ she said, as the Fairly person refilled her china cup.

‘Do you ever feel that objects have a life of their own – fridges that talk, for instance, washing machines with erratic spin cycles? It’s all feedback from the other side. Even the twins bunk bed, it’s an early model but quite capable of temporal hopping.’

Susan ate the last morsel of her scone, patting away the crumbs from her lips. ‘Housewife with a Half-Life, a half-here husband and strange kitchen appliances, I just don’t know. Are you sure this isn’t Candid Camera?’

‘Well now that you mention it, cameras can be very candid and they never lie, although they try to be polite as possible…’

‘Can you stop telling me all this way out stuff?’’ Susan said.

‘I could but it’s important,’ said the Fairly God Father. ‘More important than you can imagine right now.’

Susan sighed. ‘All right. Assuming that you are going to talk and I am going to listen, I’d like to give you a name. Something that makes sense in this world.’

Fairly slipped the saucer from under his teacup and spun it on his finger. He got it going so fast it became a blur. He seemed pretty pleased with himself but he noticed that Susan’s brow had become slightly furrowed, even though she maintained a saintly smile.  He caught it between his index finger and thumb, stopped it dead and replaced it under the cup.

‘What kind of name?’ he asked, keeping a careful eye on the dishwasher that was open behind her. ‘Something carefully considered that will indicate my extended intellectual capabilities; my debonair dimension leaping dexterity?

‘I think I’ll call you Dave,’ she said.

Fairly pressed his hands on the table.

‘Dave,’ he said. ‘It’s no-nonsense but kind of catchy. Fairly Dave it is then.’

‘No, I meant…’ said Susan, then stopped. A jack hammer started up down the street and a pool of sunlight on the worktop began to shudder. Fairly Dave said nothing but scribbled something else in his notebook. Susan raised her voice to speak but then the jack hammer stopped and she was shouting. ‘I have just one question. What’s the kilt about?’

‘I don’t know if you’re ready for that.’  Fairly Dave slowly drank the last drop of the tea and his Adams apple flashed amber.

3

Susan brought the delph to the sink, went out into the hallway and picked up her handbag and coat. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘I’ve got to go out to pick up the children from playschool.’

‘I’m not sure about this,’ said Fairly Dave. ‘We’ve had a nice little chat but I realise that I’ve skirted around the fact that you’re in mortal danger. Whenever you go out you are ripping a hole in the temporal fabric. Higher Power knows what might happen to you.’

‘There’s going to be a quest, isn’t there?’ she said wryly.

‘Yes, yes!’ he said, scratching his head ‘but if you’re in a hurry I can’t tell you about it now. We have to figure out how to get you to playschool and back without doing too much damage.’

‘Well I’m sure you can think of something. I was actually going to nip into GroceryLand on my way past.’

Now that they were standing beside each other Susan got the full impact of his size. He was more than six foot tall. Meanwhile she was a pint sized thing. She fell just below the legal requirement where booster seats are recommended in cars. She was just about level to the bit on his T-Shirt that said ‘as you think’ and uncomfortably close to the level of his jaunty kilt.

‘You are tall,’ she said, breathing in leather jacket again.

‘I used to be much smaller but all that space and time travel have stretched me by quite a few inches’. Being tall has its advantages and disadvantages. The vantage point is terrific, I can see trouble at a distance, including head lice.’

‘How terrible,’ said Susan.

‘Talking of terrible,’ said Fairly Dave. ‘Going to GroceryLand. Bad idea. It means you are out of your house bound temporal loop for far too long and things might get tricky.

‘But I go shopping regularly,’

‘Not on a Monday as far as I recall,’ he said taking out his notebook.

‘Yes yes you’re right. How big is that notebook?’ Susan reached out but he stuffed the notebook back into his inside pocket quicker than the boys could spot a lollipop.

‘Besides,’ he said. ‘There are the Geezers with the Freezers’.

‘Geezers with Freezers. What on earth do you mean?’ asked Susan, her face distorted with confusion.

‘I didn’t want to scare you yet.’

‘Yet?’

‘Yes, I mean we’ve only just met – face to face, although I knew you already. I thought we might get up to page eleven in the hug book first, just to steel you for what lies ahead.’

‘You can’t tell me that and just leave it,’ Susan said, clutching her keys.

‘Oh all right. When we discovered your persona was disintegrating and we might need to come over, we tried to keep it a secret. But it was too late. Thinking creates a wave like the ocean, it’s relentless, the energy slips everywhere, travels across temporal continents, flows into the wrong hands…’

‘So what about the Geezers with Freezers then? What do they do?’

‘When the word gets out that someone is disintegrating, the Geezers get on the lookout. You are giving off mortal energy. If they get their hands on you they scoop up the energy with their entropy hoovers and sell it on at an extraordinary price. You begin to feel a little out of sorts, a bit all over the place, your mind goes, your organs play tricks on you, heart gallops and you begin to wear out quicker and quicker. Eventually you can’t get out of bed, it’s like the worst flu you ever imagined, you eek away bit by bit, fading and fading, the energy moving to your extremities and leaking out. Then all of a sudden poof! You’re gone. As if you were never there.’

‘Do you mean I’d be dead?’

‘In a manner of speaking. Well yes, actually,’ said Fairly Dave ‘but it’s best not to mention the war, especially when Schrodinger is involved. Saying that you’re ‘you know what’ too often might actually make it so.’

‘How do the freezers come in?’

‘What?’

‘The Geezers with Freezers?’

‘The difference in temperature between a freezer and the surrounding air creates an unstable environment. It allows the Geezers to fashion a temporary chute between universes. Of course, they have their own versions that have magnetic fields for chute stabilisation. They hop over here with their briefcases and clipboards and sell their refrigeration solutions to the major supermarkets. So off you go to GroceryLand, you lean in to get the oven chips, they suck you through. Going through divests you of energy and when you arrive on the other side you are like putty in their smarmy hands.’

‘I don’t make oven chips. I hand cut my own,’ said Susan.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Fairly Dave. ‘The petit pois work just as well. I don’t want to take that risk, do you?’

‘All I want is a sliced pan, a couple of litres of milk and some bin bags.’ Susan glanced at her watch. ‘That’s strange, we’ve been talking for ages and it doesn’t seem like any time has…’

Fairly Dave, nodded. ‘See what I mean? Well we better get going and see how we get on…’

‘We? Are you coming with me? Well isn’t this going a bit far’ said Susan, setting her feet wide apart and leaning her hand on the hallway wall. ‘I’m hardly going to fall apart or whatever you call it…’

‘Disintegrate’

‘….In the next half an hour.’