Before and After by Laura Lockington Page B

she nor Archie were keen to pay the whacking insurance that Hal’s age and their post code demanded), Archie might have paperwork to look over, Bella would certainly need help with some school project or other. Then there were the smaller, more pleasurable tasks. Re-stocking the wine cellar, maybe a trip to a gallery, tickets for a play, taking Marmaduke to the park, all of those dull domestic duties that made up the week fell to Sylvia to vaguely organise.
    I knew this without having read any of the now scattered notes.
    I knew that Sylvia dreaded weekends, when she felt obscurely denied . Her children didn’t need her. Her husband didn’t need her. Maria looked askance at her if she ventured into the kitchen or picked up a duster. Sometimes Sylvia wondered what it was that other women did at weekends, women in her position. Which was, she was only too well aware, horribly privileged. What did they do in the lonely hours of the long days when all around them was the ticking of time and space? Sylvia had tried many things to occupy the time, but nothing had taken root in her heart. Things were either too trivial (tapestry, pilates, growing African violets) or too hard (oil painting, yoga, learning Spanish) for any success rate.
    Sylvia was a woman on the edge. On the edge of what, she didn’t quite know, but she felt the ground crumbling beneath her feet and was staring into an abyss that she didn’t know was there. Of course, she’d seen other women fall. There was the unfortunate case of a neighbour whom she’d seen furtively unloading crates and crates, or so it had seemed, of vodka from the back of her Range rover. The woman had caught her eye and had laughingly explained that she was expecting some Russian visitors, but Sylva had felt her tension and humiliation. The encounter had chilled her to the marrow. It had also set her thinking. What was it like to crave a drink mid morning? She couldn’t imagine it. Sylvia had never drunk to excess, the mere thought of it made her panic, she’d never smoked, never been wild enough to try any sort of recreational drug (not that there was much on offer in her youth and her social circle, but there had been daring mention of something called a purple heart or a black bomber when she’d been much younger). She was not what you would call, the possessor of an addictive personality. She certainly didn’t have the ‘let’s-get-blasted’ gene in her anatomical make up. But she did wonder now and again.
    She’d seen a programme once on BBC4 about Shamanism, where the men of the tribe hunted animals in a forest with blow darts and believed that by taking a drug made from the sap of some unpronounceable tree gave them an insight to the hunted animal. The men had become wild eyed and fierce, looking to Sylvia as if they had tasted a pinch of feral paradise. Staring at the dark brutal men, dressed in scraps of fur and vibrant feathers sticking from their matted hair, Sylvia marvelled that they were even from the same species as her. It seemed impossible. The trembling dark limbs of the hunters didn’t compare the slightest to her feeble extremities. What was it like to feel as alive as that? Sylvia doubted that she’d ever know.
    Archie had watched the same programme, sitting next to Sylvia on an extremely comfortable sofa. All he had thought, if he had thought much at all, was a fleeting thank you to a god he didn’t believe in that he hadn’t been born in a third world country and have to scrabble about in a forest for food.
    The children had been otherwise occupied, but perhaps if Hal had watched he might have understood his mother’s rapt attention to the screen.
    Oh, how the Sylvia’s of this country are ripe for the plucking.
    I do what I can of course, but I am only a single individual, and can in no way take on the world (although given unlimited funds and a willing army of hand picked protégés…) Still, I have often wondered if some sort of universal league of