Setting a Land Speed Record

As I lay down next to her, my face not six inches from hers, taking in her scent like I might die without it, I thought not for the first time that her face, even her whole body could have been designed by one of those car designers working lovingly with clay and a sharp knife. Her profile was contoured for speed, it was aerodynamic. I wanted to lay down on top of my wife and break a land speed record at Bonneville Salt Flats.

I remember the first time I said it out loud to her, becalmed after making love and opening up to her and just blurting out whatever it was that came into my head, like I had heard you were supposed to do with women, to get them to love you. Maybe it’s the only time when men do talk like this - that and when they’re drunk. There’s a peacefulness up to a certain point and you eventually want to sleep. The first time I told her. We were on our honeymoon, or at least on the way back and we stopped over to see her grandparents in Kenton-on-Sea up the coast from Port Elizabeth, as they had been unable to fly out for the wedding. We had been to a strange night club, recommended no less by Ouma as she could sense that we couldn’t stand to sit in the kitchen with Afrikaans TV blaring on our second night. It was the only open nightclub in the town, being off-season but there were young people there, younger than us and they were dancing a waltz. To this awful cacophonous traditional music they waltzed around, all stiff armed and formal. We thought we had stumbled into a parallel universe but no; this is what they apparently did. So when in Rome… And I guess with the closeness, the intimacy of the unfamiliar dance and the fact that we were fucking like rabbits then anyway, we went back to the house and with me holding one hand over her mouth to stop her from making noise, we slowly made love under the heavy and slightly damp covers. As we lay there, with her face turned away from me, I told her. Your face, I whispered, it could have been designed for speed – it’s aerodynamic. She laughed and punched me on the arm, pretending to be offended but she knew what I meant. She was like that. It’s why I loved her so because I didn’t have to explain it to her beyond the bald statement, the peculiar way she knew my mind worked, the way I saw things. She was happy then, we both were. We made love all the time, wherever we happened to be. We’d be out somewhere and one of us would catch the other’s eye and we’d just know: Friend’s backyards, cars – both inside and out – cheap hotels, shopping centres. Wherever. It faded after a while of course, as it always does I suppose but we still wanted each other. Whenever we lay in bed, she’d have to put her feet up against my leg or both our thighs would be touching as she listened to music or watched TV as I worked. Always just that slight touch.

Look at her now. Cancer. I hear it whispered. She can’t bear to have any blankets touching her. She says her skin feels brittle and the heaviness of the blankets makes her feel as if she is suffocating. The thinnest, oldest, crappiest sheet we could find, that’s all she’ll have on the bed at the moment. It lies across her like tissue paper so that in silhouette I can make out her shape, even like this. She’s aerodynamic; she’s a beautifully made machine, built for speed. And I want to lie on her and go for that land speed record on the Bonneville Salt Flats still, lie atop her and spread my legs out over her and grip her between my thighs and speed off. The way her breasts loll to the sides over her pronounced rib cage, which stands up like the tail fins of a 1950’s Cadillac and then dip down to her flat tummy, where my hand would never find a resting place so smooth was it to the touch. I gently pull back the sheet to reveal her completely. She doesn’t stir, her breathing still shallow and quick, her mouth closed, those lips. How can she lie there like that, me the gaping mouth breather at night? Her hip bones, protruding now more than ever, like wheel dams, the neat little triangle of dense hair – my welcome mat, she said once. Beyond, rolling down to her thighs, still muscular but smaller now. She is a machine built for speed, she is aerodynamic, and she is so beautiful. I pull the sheet slowly back up, careful not to let it touch her, until it’s almost to her chin where she likes it. Even with the pills, taking ten of them to get her to sleep. She begged me to keep giving them to her. She didn’t want it to go on like this. That look in her eyes; my girl, what she has come to.

My girl, the one that brought a two litre screw top jar full of what had been vacuumed from young women who’d been in for Day Only where she worked, her righteous anger waiting in the dark until the man accused of interfering with her two baby nieces returned home with his proud new car and when he went inside dashed the contents of the jar, the clots and blood and tissue all over it, spitting on it and then walking away and me watching, knowing that she would go through with it despite my reasoning and imploring her, watching her storm past me, that look on her face, so determined, so fiery, that I looked down and expected to see gouges in the earth where she had trod. My girl who flew to earthquakes; my girl who loved her beautiful clothes and shoes and couldn’t walk past a David Jones counter without clouding herself in Chanel and the price of that smile on her face and would fly to those places and immunise 400 children in a day and each of them gifted with a smile and a genuinely felt word; my girl who could hate like poison; who built mud brick houses in Thailand and who taught herself to use a radio and relieve a man who was dying of gastro in Papua and stayed with him for four days as they hacked a runway out of the jungle to get them out. My beautiful, beautiful girl. Look at her lying here.

It was brightening up now, so I quietly got off the bed, careful not to wake her and pulled open the blinds so she could feel the sun across her face and belly. I don’t want to get up today, she would say and we would lie there together and watch the light change the escarpment and listen to the raucous parrots and their conversation. They are gone off now already this morning, as if they knew and are giving us peace. I stand and watch my girl like this for a few more minutes until my vision blurs with tears and there is no more than a kaleidoscope and mirage. She has asked me to do it. She has begged me and we have talked about it often. If ever one of us gets…and then we would look at each other and know, we didn’t have to finish the sentence. I’d do it for you, she said when I had given her the last of the pills.

I pick up the pillow from the floor beside the bed and scrunch it at the edges between two hands. I am shaking as I press in into her face, and lie down on top of my baby, my beautiful aerodynamic girl and ride her off to the farthest horizon on the salt flats, until she disappears, a dot lost in the shimmer of the early morning light.