Blue eyes, blonde, body of Adonis. He is beautiful but I know what he truly is the moment I see him. Wife, blonde. Both obsessed with appearances, body image, into weights. I visit the house twice, once for a barbeque. This day, daylight, suburbia, asbestos fence, the salmon brick I despise so much. Cold, alien. Everything that should be in a home is there but nothing belongs. The couch, the dining table, the barbeque area out the back for entertaining guests, complete with corrugated plastic for when it rains. I am left with her. She is allowed to talk to me because I am female, no threat. I don’t know what to say to her, there is no-one there, nothing I can hang onto, a bland shell. My life blood is drained away.
She has a five-year-old child, it is not his. The boy has a mother and he doesn’t so he quietly hates it. He controls every aspect of this child’s being with a viscious yet measured oppressiveness I can taste. The child is terrified of him.
They have some 'horticultural' business to attend to. I hate the stuff so am left to amuse myself, told I can read the magazines on the blonde-wood coffee table. They are about body-building, there are so many of them, nothing else to read, a large stack, two. I try to look at them, just to fill in time. They alienate me further.
Some time later she goes missing, at the Gap. Some story that they had been fishing and she lost her footing. He has all the stage props there to convince the police, fishing gear, clothing, torches? They went early, it was still dark and that is why she lost her footing. There is a search of the Gap, the back yard of the house. There is an enquiry. A body is never found. He gets away with it.
Local myth says she had decided to leave him. No one really believed she ever went to the Gap that day, that instead she is buried under the grey cement patio slabs in the back yard. I imagine her there, still being walked on every day. At last he has her where he wants her, controlling and punishing the mother who abandoned him at birth.
Three years later he commits suicide, confirms his guilt and steals a place for himself in pergatory.
(The image is a detail from my pastel drawing Centaur)
