aining. My wife comes in from work. I’m resting, thinking, after six straight hours at the keyboard. I hear the door, roll off the couch, just about look alive as she shakes rain off her coat in the hall.

I manage a smile. “Hi, hon. How was it?”

She’s holding up her blue coat, detached, as if a dresser is about to whisk the coat away or there’s some hook floating in space. She tells me, same day, different shit. She means different day, same shit and I make the mistake of saying so. She’s moving towards me and I say, “Different day, same shit, you mean?” and she pauses like she’s hit glass between us. She says she’s going to take a bath, would I break open some wine?

“OK,” I say. I’m thinking, if you have to speak in clichés, you can at least get them the rightways round but she is gone and I’m surrounded by her absence.

The rain is getting worse. Outside, the gazebo is straining in the wind, threatening to fly away. In my den Chapter 17 stinks like a backpacker’s jockstrap, I’m blocked, and now Dee is home, full of corporate angst, another “blue” day. Virtually on her own she will get through best of two bottles of Shiraz tonight and, about eleven she will hit me with the couch potato jibe. It’s a litany now, evensong, the blues. I should write it up and she could pass me copies, save her wicked tongue.

I hear the water running. Dee will leave it in and later, when I go upstairs, it will be cold and scummy. I will be told she shouted down, “Do you want the water?” and told that I shouted back, “Yes!”

I reach the bathroom door just as I hear the flush. The door isn’t quite closed but I knock anyway, step in bringing a mammoth glass of the Rosemount and balancing it on the corner of the bath.

“Wanna talk?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “I just want a bath and a drink.”

A flurry of windswept rain rushes over the bathroom window and Dee looks up. The look in her face is almost fear, but something else.

“You OK, babe?” I say. She says she’s fine and steps into the bath.

I go downstairs.

I wander through to Chapter Seventeen. I know it smells, but this last week, knowing hasn’t been enough. Why it smells is the problem, and for once I just can’t figure things. I’m kind of cold, running on old emotion, out of gas, waiting for my me to return. As the wind picks up some more I wonder if it’s this work-thing with Dee, the nightly blue drunks, the displaced, misplaced, re-directed anger. I know it’s my job to absorb it for Dee, let her let it out, and once that worked, like punching a bag or running ten miles; but somehow, about a week ago, it turned into being me, as in, as if, she’s unhappy because of me.

I know chapter seventeen will work itself out – shit times pass – and anyway this is nothing meaningful. (I ghost for an ex-jockey for thirty thousand a book, one a year, then it’s back to being a writer, hah-hah) but I’m getting blue myself now. This thing with Dee, somehow something shifted and now I am the bad guy.

Upstairs water slaps, outside rain lashes, and here I tap-tap-tap. I know I should be aware of the drip-drip of something draining from us, that I should be repairing small tears, eliminating scar tissue, preventing adhesions, but fuck, somewhere down the line all this corporate bullshit pissed me off once too often and now I just echo, speak my lines, stand there heavy and leathery waiting to be hit.

This is how it goes:

	If you’re so unhappy, why not quit?
	It’s what I do.
	But what you do is making you unhappy. Do something else.
	I don’t want to do something else. I’m good at what I do.
	But, baby, it makes you unhappy.
	Don’t call me baby.

I have this theory. It’s not PC but what can I do, it’s what I think. I think that women weren’t designed for corporate life. I think somewhere down the line, God or Nature got it figured and women became nurses, teachers, mothers, poets. I always thought the great poets and writers should be women.

But there’s something missing in the female makeup, when it comes to the corporate life, the baboons-on-rocks tango, the grinfucking, the slap on the back as the ides of March approaches. Trouble is, saying so gets picked up, flipped and twisted like an Olympic dive. What I mean is they are above it, the ladies, better than the shit things men evolved into. But it always ends up with me slagging (they say) arguing that women can’t cut it in a man’s world.

We’ve all been here, right? What you mean is a banana, someone says you said orange, everyone argues about apples; the argument goes pear-shaped. Well that’s me, this woman I love who right now lies in steam, steaming, fuming, and just an opinion, just a thought that maybe, just maybe, men and women were made different.

She’s unhappy, I’m unhappy, too blue. I love her, but now she is upstairs in a hot bath, and I’m a million miles away, stuck in chapter seventeen and trying to figure out where we go from here. I see I didn’t say she loves me. Can you love a punchbag? No, I think she does, but she’s got so used to using me to sound off at, to rage against, I think somewhere a wire or two sparked, fused, crossed over. Me, I have nothing to do all day – writing isn’t stressful or difficult – I just knock together a few chapters for McLintock’s agent, watch Oprah the rest of the time. Yeah, right. The wind howls, lies down, howls again. I see I’ve written three pages and it says Chapter 18 at the top of the screen. Upstairs I hear Dee moving about. I go through to the kitchen, turn the oven up a tad (something I prepared earlier) grab the bottle and stand there. Dee enters in a white dressing-gown thirty seconds later. She holds up the glass, I pour. She says, “I’m sorry but it was a shitty day at work, and I come home, the place isn’t clean, I have to cook, and – ”

The house gleams like a clinic. “There’s a moussaka,” I say quickly, cutting across her. “I’ll jump in the bath, be back down in five and serve it up.”

She waves some paper at me and grunts. More corporate crap.

I am in the bath one minute, already climbing out, stepping onto the bathmat when I hear the car-alarm, the useless bee-bee-bee sounding way off, underneath the wind. I hear Dee, something. I pull on a shirt, pants and go down.

“The gazebo,” Dee says, like it’s important, like it’s a sinking ferry, a thousand children on board. “It’s blown across the garden, hit my car.”

I think, “I have to go out there!”, but I try to make a silly face, crack something light, always look on the bright side, dah-dah! This is when Dee begins to cry.

“Hey, sweetheart,” I say, “It’s not thatZ bad. It’s an old gazebo and the car is insured.” But she won’t stop crying. Outside, the gazebo is batting up and down on the company Volvo like a humping dog. I should be out there doing my storm scene, but I can’t, Dee is too upset. This is bad. This is worse. This is heavier somehow.

“What is it?” I say, trying to walk her to a chair. “What is it?” and Dee won’t answer, just cries, racking the cries higher, rougher, heaving, almost asthmatic.

I get her into the chair. She keeps looking away from me. I have to go sort the garden.

“I’ll be as quick as I can,” I tell her.

The storm is filthy, nasty. I’m rushing, I want to go back to Dee, so instead of trying to save the gazebo I clatter at it, breaking it down so it has no surface to catch the wind, stamping, pulling, violent.

When I get back in I have blood on my face, another cut on my hand. Dee doesn’t even look at me. I can smell the moussaka about to burn. I open the oven, grab at the dish, drop it painfully on the stove top.

Dee gets up. She’s going to bed. Doesn’t she want dinner? No, she says. Another night I might argue, but I don’t now.

“I’m sorry,” Dee says. I ask sorry for what?

“Just sorry,” she says. I let her go.

There are two ways this particular game works. I can chase after Dee, who will insist there is nothing wrong. We go through that script about how can I help if she won’t talk to me. Her part is “Stop badgering, I’ll be alright”.

Or I can just take the anger, grab the Jim Beam, slither away to the den. Sometimes I get to write (not the ghost-work) but sometimes I just drink the JB.

But tonight I decide to follow. In the bedroom Dee is lying with her knees up to her chest, writhing. I once saw her like this when she had an ectopic pregnancy, the only one we managed. Then it was a life-threatening, physical thing. Now it turns out to be just grief. But it’s way-off-the-scale grief, bitter, “go-away!” grief, a grief I cannot understand or relate to. It’s too-much grief, too extreme grief, too blue. Suddenly, I don’t know where the thought comes from, but I think is it something else, someone else, some affair that’s collapsed. I’ve been asking questions, getting no answers. Now I ask, “Dee, is it work?” My wife nods and the way she nods, I know it’s work.

She wants me to go away. She wants me to leave her in bed. I could, but I lie next to her, try to pull her to me. Eventually I have to manhandle her, hold her, compress her like way back, when I was a medic, I dealt with a deranged child.

“Shush, shush!” I hear myself saying. “Baby, nothing is this bad. Go to sleep.”

She fights me for a while, rants, rages, hits my chest feebly. I just stay there, be there, and at some point she seems to relax. She snuffles, goes heavier on my chest.

I wait. She is sleeping. It’s only about ten o’clock, too early for me, and I go down to my work. I write for hours, chapter eighteen, and then joyously, some of the big novel, all darkness and truth, the thing that fills me up and makes me whole. I write, print, write, print. Then some time in the wee hours, reading the product of this, my purple rush, I fall asleep on the couch, the Jim Bean on the floor beside me.

It’s later, this is a week later. It’s too late.

I woke up that morning, went through to the kitchen, put on some coffee. Dee was quiet and when I went upstairs she ignored me. I left her the coffee, went downstairs, cleaned up round the couch, picked up my manuscript, started with the blue pen.

Dee still hadn’t come down. I went back upstairs, wondering what today’s script was. The coffee was untouched, and Dee, when I shook her, she was cold.

They found the bottle, stuff I knew nothing about. I think, maybe it was all my fault. You think banana, someone says apple. All I know is, here, in the rain, the people in black filing away, I think – I know – Dee should have been a dancer.

© Alex Keegan