Page 12 of Vine

We had reached the end of work for the day. I looked back along our row. Much tidier. I mean, still depressingly dead-looking, but tidy and dead. Emma wiped her shears dry on a rag. “It’s quite a long-distance relationship,” I pointed out.

“Last time I checked, it was about 16,000 kilometres,” she agreed. “And it’s not getting any shorter. She’s invited me to visit in the summer so we can work out whether it was just a holiday romance or whether there’s more. Not for a fortnight trip, but to stay a while, like three months. She says I could get a work visa; there are loads of winery jobs north of Sydney, in the Hunter valley. Which feels like a massive step.”

“Huge.”

Old me would have said it was worth it, take a chance, follow your heart. Divorced, unhappy me was a tad more sceptical. “What have you told her? Are you going?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Is that because you’d miss me too much?”

My manicure inched closer to a full-on amputation. “No.”

“I’d miss you.”Dreadfully. I’d found a friend, ally, and a person prepared to tolerate my twitchy fretfulness all rolled into one sweet, bossy bundle. And from the way her voice softened every time she said the name Stella, I was going to have to let her go.

Misophonic sounds widely acknowledged to stimulate negative visceral reactions include the following: the inexpert scrape of a bow over a violin string. An unanticipated burst of microphone feedback. A cacophony of vuvuzelas. Violent retching. A cluster of indignant cats fighting their way out of a sack, a.k.a. a chorus of Scottish bagpipes.

Okay, maybe the last one was just me.

Anyhow, a few minutes after midnight, a noise trumping them all jolted me awake: the unmistakable rhythmic thump of a wooden headboard against a thin wall, in synch with my ex-husband’s familiar copulatory vocalisations. And each bang chased by the clap of Jonas’s balls against Leigh’s arse, like a fucking round of applause. Granted, it was the closest I’d got to sex in over a year, but give me a ceilidh rammed with kilted Scottish pipers any day. Jonas’s accompanying high-pitched moans of pleasure were the fucking ice on the cake.

I slept poorly at the best of times—thanks, venlafaxine. With my throat on fire and a blocked nose, I hunched lower under the duvet, screwing my eyes shut, seeing as I couldn’t seal up myears. No use. What the hell did French people construct their houses out of? And their duvets, come to that? Tissue paper?

Loathe to credit Jonas with a single positive attribute, nonetheless, after twenty-two minutes of listening to the pair of them fucking like greased hogs, I had to hand it to the guy; he had buckets of stamina. As my replacement pounded my ex into a happy pulp, I masochistically pictured Leigh’s slack, flushed face, and my traitorous dick hardened against the lumpy mattress. Then softened again, as I recalled my one and only experience of Jonas’s sex face, like he was drinking vinegar through his eyeballs. A little bit of sick regurgitated into my mouth.

Pointlessly, I stuffed a pillow over my head. Instead, I imagined the slapping sound was Jonas jogging in sandals, his wide unattractive feet flopping against the pavement. Total waste of time; Leigh’s vocal gymnastics pierced through like Mariah Carey warming up for a Vegas gig.Thump, scream, slap.Thump, scream, slap. Jeez, had Leigh always been so loud? Or had I never wrung that much pleasure out of him? Fuck, had he gone to Jonas because he wasa better lover? Talk about kicking a guy when he was down.

I cowered in the dark, convinced I was the most miserable wretch alive.

Thump, scream, slap. Thump, scream, slap.Twenty-four minutes in. My blood pressure skyrocketed. Surely, they must be on the home straight. At twenty-five minutes, their poorly sprung bed joined the party too, mewling like a kitten left out in the rain. All that was missing was a fucking drum solo and they’d be signed up with a record label.

Two elongated minutes later, after a belter of a key change and an eardrum-shattering crescendo, it was all over. At last. Blessed silence, punctuated by panting. Which wasn’t surprising; I was knackered myself.

Bunching a pillow under my head, I spreadeagled extravagantly across the entire bed and kidded myself that sleeping alone was much preferred to sleeping with someone who slept with someone else when you weren’t around. No one rolling over and accidentally thumping you in the middle of the night. Or quietly getting up for a piss, then knocking their phone off the bedside table. No snoring. As the panting receded, my pulse calmed, my anger seeped away, and my thoughts drifted. Sleep beckoned.

Except then, of course, after they’d got their collective breath back, an even worse sound started up. Hushed giggles and the private murmurs of post-coital petting, the human equivalent of a pair of chimps picking out each other’s fleas. The flip side of being accidentally thumped in the night was someone hauling themselves from sleep to fetch you a glass of water when your throat was sore. Or a tissue when your nose ran. Cuddled up and laughing together at the fearful crack of a midnight thunderstorm, not shivering alone. You were wanted, needed, and loved, and the only use you had for a razor blade was to serenely glide it across your chin every morning.

Two minutes later, to a background hum of tender murmuring, I perched on the edge of the bed with a sterile pad pressed against my bleeding arm. An unhealthy coping mechanism, but the only one I’d got. Adept with either hand, I’d selected my right forearm tonight. Experts like me always had tissues and dressings ready; otherwise, we’d get through a heck of a lot of towels and bedding.

Cutting wasn’t for the faint-hearted; taking a keen-edged razor to your skin, pushing on through the tingle and burn, required bundles of courage wrapped up in self-hatred. But the brief headrush of pain, of pleasure, of fucking glorious,manicalivenessas the blood beaded up and pristine skin split in twowas well worth the tsunami of guilt and shame. Some folk swore it gave them a sense of control. For me, it was more of a release of the evil humours, a good old-fashioned medieval bloodletting.

After the bleeding stopped, I tucked myself back into bed, feeling much calmer.

Just in time for the rimming session at 2.03 am. Obviously, the act of rimming itself wasn’t the noisy part. For the uninitiated, rimming isn’t the same as running a finger around the lip of a wet glass until it sings. But my ex-husband’s accompanying gasps of pleasure were as familiar to me as his arsehole.

At 2.06, I stomped out of my room, taking the useless pillow and a balled-up duvet. I stomped across the landing, stomped down the stairs and stomped through the kitchen into the living room. By 2.09, I concluded that not only did French architects favour wafer-thin bedroom walls, but uninsulated ceilings too. Every. Fucking. Squeal. Of. Delight.

At 2.10, after shoving my feet into a pair of trainers, I stomped to the front door.

Night greeted me, an impenetrable wall of solid black. And wet. So very, very wet. Did I mention cold, too? A black, wet, cold wall of nothingness. Hiding ghosties and goblins and things that went bump. Yet a million times preferable to being indoors. An insane urge to scream into the void enveloped me, and, like a madman, I stood on the doorstep and did just that, yelling into the wind at the top of my voice. Which did my raw throat no good whatsoever.

I felt better afterwards, if not a little chilly. Thus, I indulged in more satisfying stomping to warm up, marching across the crunchy gravel in the vague direction of one of the gatehouses, the unoccupied one to the right of the driveway. Emma and I had nosed inside earlier today during the endless downpour.Discovering the door unlocked, one of the tech guys stored some kit in there to keep it dry. A single room with a dusty kitchenette at one end, and a desk and a lumpy-looking bed behind a partition wall at the other. The sort of place where a grape picker might lodge for a few weeks. Not especially smart but not too dirty either. But, best of all, no happy couple banging away within whispering distance.

Stomping around was thirsty work. I could live with the electrics being switched off; I was only planning on watching the insides of my eyelids for the next few hours anyhow. But a swig of water would be nice. My meds left me with a perpetually dry mouth, not helped by my fit of screaming and strep throat. So it was a shame someone had turned the water off.

I was not so easily defeated. Unless the French did stuff differently, my crash course in plumbing told me the ‘on’ tap was generally located in the vicinity of a sink. Dropping to my knees on the cold stone floor, I thrust my head and an arm into the cupboard underneath the big old enamel one, in an endeavour to find out.

Things that ought not be awakened from sleep, in no particular order: miserably divorced husbands, imperious kings, angry hornets, colicky babies, other people’s dogs, and, um…snakes. One might argueespeciallysnakes. And especially big ones, neatly coiled like leathery rope and as thick as a man’s leg. Fleetingly, I told myself my fingers had brushed against a dry old log, or a pile of worn bicycle tyres, but last time I checked, neither of those hissed like a fucking steam kettle.

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