It was time to be better again. There were spa treatments and cinema nights and yoga retreats. Her nails were in a permanent state of smooth glossiness. And there were morning rituals. Affirmations. Cold water on the face. A slow, thin line of coffee from the new machine.

Life’s simple pleasures were endless. These days, everything she did was holy.

Recently, she had got the kitchen renovated. It seemed like the right thing to do. Men had come, gutted the whole room and put a new one in.

The fridge had an ice machine in the door, but no ice ever came out. The kettle, when boiled, made a hoot like a train from the distant past, then forgot to turn itself off. The taps were beautiful and shiny, but no water passed through. A plumber had done some investigation but couldn’t figure out a reason why.

‘It looks perfect to me,’ he had said.

She had blinked and nodded and eventually agreed. ‘You’re right. It’s perfect. I love it. It’s not how I imagined at all.’

 

Socializing was important. On Thursday nights, a former work colleague came over to drink wine. Sometimes, they decided their husbands might make good company, so they dragged them out from behind their screens.

Last Thursday, when the men were in the other room choosing an after-dinner whiskey, the friend had said: ‘I’m sleeping with a twenty-two-year-old.’

‘What?’

‘I know it’s wrong. But I think every woman should be desired by a man who’s bad for her. They’re available on the internet.’

‘Does Rob know?’

The friend crumpled her face. ‘I got it into my head he was gay. God knows why. He’s not gay. I just …’ She glanced towards the door. ‘Young men are so shy. Did you ever notice that? But then something comes over them and they’re so brave.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Sorry. My issues are the last thing you need.’

‘No. Please. This is the most alive I’ve felt in ages.’

‘Oh, honey.’ The friend put a hand on her hand as the husbands came down the hall.

 

When had life gone so weird? It felt like a series of random scenes – all cause and no effect. It was probably just her. She’d been on sabbatical too long after the babies.

The babies no longer existed. Both had come out as little purple creatures no one seemed to believe were babies at all. Stillbirths, they called them.

Her husband was the only person who believed in them. He named them: the boy, after his granddad, Peter; the girl, after a singer he loved, Joan.

He felt pain. He was seeing a therapist about this pain.

She was not someone who believed in therapists.

‘I can assure you, this woman is real,’ he sometimes said.

 

She liked to imagine wanting things: cars, TVs, a new face. The internet provided wildly specific suggestions of things she should desire: hand-crafted jewellery, ethereal-sounding body creams, dashcams, teeth-whitening kits, three-layered foam mattresses, 240-piece drill sets. Money could buy all sorts. Money was the answer, if you had the stomach for it. Children could be bought using money. There was IVF. There were other people’s wombs.

*

Neither she nor her husband knew how to sleep anymore. Sometimes, late at night, she would touch the line between his eyebrows and rouse him. It felt contrary to the rules of getting better, this awakening, but he never told her to go back to sleep. They would go downstairs to the cold front room and play his old Nintendo, reaching levels they never knew existed.

One night, she sat up in bed and said: ‘The people who live behind us are easy to see into.’

‘Are they?’

‘They never close their curtains. Not that I watch them. There’s nothing much to see. They’re so …’ – she paused, lovingly – ‘normal.’

She felt him nodding, maybe even smiling.

‘The man likes to sit on a hard chair in front of the TV. He must have a bad back, sitting on a hard chair like that.’

‘He must. Or maybe he has a very good back. Maybe he has never once slouched in his life.’

She considered this. ‘Are people sensible like that?’

‘I don’t know.’

They stopped talking. Sounds came loudly from their noses as if they were snoring, but they remained awake.

She said: ‘They’re always watching weight-loss shows, these people.’

‘Really?’

‘Day and night. Twenty-four seven. I don’t know where they get these weight-loss shows.’

He sat up and lifted the curtain behind them. She sat up too, and they both peered out. The sky was a cloudy dark and there was a sheen of wet on the garden walls and sheds and shrubbery. There was no weight-loss show. The neighbours’ window was a dark rectangle, only barely visible from the smoulder of streetlights nearby.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘I swear. First thing tomorrow. Weight loss.’

*

Days and nights came and went. Weekends passed like planes overhead.

One late night, he shook her and said: ‘Come on.’

She felt a soft breeze as he lifted the duvet and sat up. She wasn’t asleep, but she wasn’t awake, either. ‘What are you doing?’ she mumbled.

He reached for the bedside lamp, flooding the room with hard brightness.

‘Come on,’ he said again. He stood up. From the wardrobe, he retrieved a pair of shoes for each of them. He laid hers by the side of the bed, then sat back down to put on his.

‘What time is it?’

He didn’t reply. He left the room and moments later returned with two coats. ‘I can’t lie here any longer.’ He offered a coat to her.

She sat up, blinking.

He shook the coat.

‘All right, all right,’ she said.

Her coat went on over her nightdress, and her shoes went on sockless.

Downstairs they went, the house groaning like a thing that had aged without warning.

‘Where are you taking me?’ she asked.

He opened the front door. ‘Where do you want to go.’

 

They walked. They walked and walked. The streets, so late at night, seemed troubled and dangerous.

They entered a park.

‘We shouldn’t really go walking in a place like this at a time like this,’ he said. But they kept going.

Eventually, he said ‘Stop’ and she said ‘What?’ and he pointed to a cluster of cars in the distance.

She shrugged, and again said ‘What?’

He taught her the word: ‘dogging’. Apparently, couples met with other couples in cars at night and got up to all sorts.

She stared, stunned, at the lights of the cars that shone in every direction. He, too, looked on in awe. You sometimes forgot what obscure natural wonders lay on your doorstep.

‘People are strange creatures,’ he remarked.

She nodded, and he took her hand and they turned and wandered away. The trees made a suggestive, panting sound. Insects chirped. The moon gazed down, bright and bald and comical. She began to laugh. It was a wide, open laugh. ‘Wow,’ she said. The air was cold on her skin.

He laughed too, and his face looked beautiful and slightly clownish in the dark. It was as if nothing were real. They had pulled back the skin of realness and uncovered a different layer of existence.

It took some time to get home, and even more time to thaw, clutching each other under the covers. They removed their clothes and felt skin, but it was so soft it didn’t feel like skin at all. It felt like something vanishing.

 

The next day she made her announcement.

‘I’m going on one of those shows.’

She said it to her husband at breakfast, then later to her work-friend, on the phone.

‘What shows?’ they both asked.

‘You know the ones where the people lose the weight.’

‘Fantastic,’ her friend said.

‘What are you talking about?’ asked her husband.

The radio was on and he reached out to turn down the volume.

‘You know the ones where the people lose the weight.’

‘You want to go on a weight-loss programme.’

‘A weight-loss show. I’ve seen our neighbours watch them.’

‘You want our neighbours to watch you on TV.’

‘No. Well, maybe. I just want to go on a weight-loss show.’

‘But – why?’

‘I don’t know, to lose weight.’

‘You don’t need to lose weight.’

‘There are things I’d like to get rid of. Have you seen the one where it’s a life journey? It’s not just weight loss. They make you a better person.’

‘Couldn’t you go on, like, a quiz show? What’s the capital of Kazakhstan?’

‘I couldn’t even tell you my own name.’

He laughed. A warm gush of sunlight entered the room and then passed.

‘A weight-loss show,’ he said, as though he were tasting the words in his mouth.

She looked down at her body then back up at him: ‘I want it gone.’

 

He agreed to make some calls. He knew people who knew people. ‘There’s nothing less fun than losing weight,’ he warned, as he made his way through his contacts.

They were in what doubled as a study and a clothes-drying room. He was at his desk. She was perched on the windowsill.

It had rained through the night and all afternoon, and with the window open the world smelled damp and human.

‘Being fat is less fun,’ she said.

‘You’re not fat.’

She was fat. Every woman was fat: that was something the friend had understood.

‘It’s just something I want to do.’ She reached over and took a sip from a Diet Coke can he had set by his laptop. ‘Call it a feeling, a premonition, a sign from God.’

‘You don’t believe in —’ His eyes caught hers then quickly looked away.

She looked out across the garden. Her eyes fell on a wet clematis that had grown despite all kinds of neglect. ‘Sometimes when people meet me on the street, they think I’m still pregnant. They ask how far along I am.’

He narrowed his eyes and stared at her. ‘Hello?’ he said, into the phone.

 

They came on a Thursday, early, because they wanted the good light. They walked around her rooms considering angles.

They were middle-aged people who still wore the clumsy guise of youth. They had beards and ponytails and cheeky grins. They moved through the refurbished space removing flowers she had put on the table for their arrival and sweeping imaginary dust from surfaces. They fluffed up pillows then threw them, incongruously, to the floor.

As the crew worked, a man took her to a corner near the window, sat her down and began interfering with her face. ‘I’m the make-up artist,’ he claimed. His purpose seemed to be to apply a mask of pale powder and some strange colour around the eyes.

‘There,’ he kept saying. ‘There you go.’

A woman stood to their left throughout, holding a clipboard and running through the questions that might arise during the interview. ‘How did you get to be this way?’ ‘What is your goal weight?’ ‘What are your problem areas?’

She was encouraged to repeat the question in her answer, as she had been taught to do in primary school reading comprehensions. I got to be this way because … My goal weight is … My problem areas are …

In the window, she scrutinized her reflection, preparing answers.

 

When they were ready to begin recording, she was led to a foreign patch of the kitchen and installed upon a high stool that did not belong to her. The crew sat behind their cameras and tripods. ‘She keeps disappearing,’ a voice harped often, and the make-up artist would come, adjust the angle of her stool and apply more powder until she was real again.

She understood that everything they recorded now would act as the ‘before’ shot, and so it was important to look and act sad, pathetic, fat. She fidgeted with her sleeves and tried not to look directly into the lens. A strong light flashed in her face. She could do it. She could show them something wrong, something fixable.

‘Whenever you’re ready,’ a voice said.

She glanced at her husband. He was at the far end of the kitchen looking hopeful and terrified. She wondered what he thought they might make her do. She felt a peculiar calm, an odd trust.

‘Just give us a sign,’ the voice said.

She raised the thumb on her right hand. A red light went on and the camera started rolling. A question was thrown at her. She blinked. Air filled her lungs, then came back out again, containing no words.

The director looked to the cameraman, then back at her.

‘Shall we start again?’ the director asked.

For a moment, everything went black. Then, a moment later, she opened her eyes on the cold, tiled floor of her new kitchen.

Her husband’s face was in her face. ‘Are you okay?’ he was saying.

She brought her hand to her head. The hand seemed to know there was hurt there, but she couldn’t feel it from the inside.

‘Water,’ someone was saying. ‘Get her water.’

‘MY THERAPIST!’ someone else screamed, and the whole room went silent. Then she realized the scream had come from her. ‘I want to speak to my therapist,’ she said, more calmly this time. She sat upright and brought her knees to her face.

A ripple of confusion spread across the room. Eventually a phone emerged on the end of a hand, and the phone had a voice inside it, saying ‘Hello? Hello?’

She took hold of it and drew it to her ear. ‘Hello?’

‘Hello,’ the voice said again. It was a woman’s voice.

‘This is not my therapist,’ she said, holding the device away from her.

Nobody in the crowd flinched, they just stared back.

‘This is his therapist,’ she said, pointing to her husband.

Her husband looked, for a moment, stunned, then opened his mouth and said, gently: ‘You don’t have a therapist, honey.’

She glared at him, then stood up with the phone in her hand and went into the other room.

‘Are you sleeping with my husband?’ she said to the device.

On the other end, the voice was low and calm. ‘Do you want to talk about trust issues?’

‘No. I just want to know. It might be nice if you were. He loves me. But I’m not much good for that. I think he needs someone else.’

‘I see,’ the therapist said. ‘Who’s your husband?’

This seemed to confirm all suspicions. She imagined the woman consulting a Filofax, checking which of her clients she was sleeping with. But no one would pass up a beautiful man like her husband.

‘Look, it doesn’t matter,’ she said.

She was in the small front room where the mess from all the other rooms had been dumped. It was quiet there, and cool. Before her eyes, splodges of black appeared, like when you go inside after sitting on a sunny terrace too long. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ she said.

The therapist made a sweet acquiescent sound.

She took a breath and then another. She lowered herself down between a computer chair, a buggy and an unopened box containing the pieces of a construct-your-own cot. Where had these things come from? Had she really bought them? Had she really believed?

‘I feel like doing something I’ll regret,’ she whispered.

Again, the therapist did not sound confused, or alarmed, but rather confusingly and alarmingly calm. It was as if she knew everything. She could have asked this therapist whether God was real, and she would have had an answer. She could have asked her what happens after we die, and she would have had an answer. She could have asked her what happens to babies who die before they are born, and she would have had an answer.

‘Just keep talking,’ the therapist said.

She opened her mouth, but words seemed to die in there.

‘People care about you,’ the therapist said. ‘I want you to know that.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I do know that.’

 

The training period was demarcated by a calendar on the noticeboard in the kitchen.

The trainer taught her how to meal-prep, how to do a perfect squat, how to count to ten any time she felt she might inhale a Dairy Milk. She didn’t deviate. She stuck to every inch of the plan.

On dark nights, the trainer took her jogging. Often it was wet and cold, and the air smelled like other people’s dinners. As she moved, her body came alive like a Picasso painting. Too real. Contorted.

From time to time, the camera crew would text to say they were coming around to gather footage. She always tried to tidy and fix herself in advance of their arrival, but they were always already standing at the door.

They had a nose for when she would be most irritable. They had snatched many clips of her snapping at and bickering with her husband. There was a snarkiness growing in her – a hatred towards herself. If thinness felt like anything, it was this.

But she was not thin.

Every three weeks, there was a weigh-in. She had to go to the studio – usually on an evening, or a Saturday. She was told to wear all black: black leggings, black T-shirt, black sports bra, black knickers. Just before she went onscreen, she always had to take off the T-shirt, so she was clad in just the sports bra and leggings.

At the first weigh-in, she hadn’t lost a single pound. Not an ounce. Nothing. Her trainer was there, and he told her this was completely normal. He told the television presenter, too, who was very nice and sweet about the whole thing.

But it was her reaction they were going for, really. She could feel the zoom of the camera towards her face, the instant the new weight (which was really also the old weight) was revealed. Did she look disappointed? Baffled? Angry?

The second weigh-in was similar, except this time her weight had gone up. Was that even possible? With her sticking to the programme so rigorously? The trainer told her it was. He told everyone. He spoke to the camera and told it not to worry. He said if you, too, were in this situation, it was completely normal. There was still hope. You could still lose the weight.

She trusted and continued. She looked towards the third and final weigh-in. Friends and family would be invited to this: a live reveal. She would be a different woman. She would walk down a special catwalk in her new skin. They would state her new weight – a number.

 

Her husband was the one who was shrinking. The trainer had taught him how to do a handstand, how to do claps in the middle of press-ups.

She took to staring at him – his taut midriff, the healthy veins on the backs of his hands.

‘What?’ he would say, as he emerged from the shower, dripping and gorgeous. She would swallow, blink.

Meanwhile she brandished her own flesh in mirrors, shop windows, the sides of cars. She would take an inch or two of flab and just look at it. Once, he found her halfway up the street staring at the gnome-like creature her reflection made on the side of a grey Micra.

He laughed. ‘What are you doing?’

She nodded towards her reflection in the car. ‘What do you see?’

He smiled. ‘Something beautiful.’

She closed her eyes. He put his hands on her. Softly, at first – smoothing over her belly. Then more firmly – over her waist and breasts and neck.

‘Are you sleeping with someone else?’ she asked.

He pulled back and looked at her, confused.

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ she said. ‘You can.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It wouldn’t hurt me. Nothing would hurt me.’

He had dropped his hands now; let a space form between them. ‘It would hurt me.’

‘Oh.’

He frowned. Something was coming up from beneath. ‘Don’t you think I—’ he said, and then stopped himself.

‘Say it,’ she said, but he shook his head.

‘Fuck you.’

‘Fuck you.’

 

The day of the final weigh-in came. It was a day of waiting – of sitting in hair and make-up as people tried to improve her.

Her perfect outfit, according to the stylist, was a knee-length black dress with heels. She didn’t know how to walk in heels. She was like a foal wobbling about. Her husband wore a blazer. He looked like he was born to wear such things.

There was a catwalk, as promised. The contestants strutted up and down to the sound of music as their friends and family clapped and whooped.

When her turn came, a person dressed in black ushered her onto the catwalk. She felt light-headed and far away. She had taken Valium beforehand, for the nerves. At the end of the catwalk, the red-haired presenter asked how she was feeling.

She looked into the camera. When she had gone to the doctor after the first baby he told her there was no reason – no medical reason – she shouldn’t try for another. Everything appeared perfect, there was nothing to indicate her body wouldn’t work.

‘There’s actually nothing wrong with me,’ she said now, and the presenter looked startled.

‘Can we try that again?’ said a member of crew.

The make-up artist ran up to her, swept a brush over her face and, as you might with a young child, tucked her hair softly behind her ears.

‘There,’ he said.

 

Her work-friend came over that evening and gave her flowers.

Wine was poured. ‘To health.’ They clinked glasses.

The friend gave a short, sad smile. ‘He told me he loved me.’

‘The twenty-two-year-old?’

The friend tried an affirmative laugh, but it came out deranged.

‘Do you love him?’

The friend considered this. ‘Don’t you think it’s impossible not to love someone who loves you?’

 

Much later, woozy with wine, she lay in bed watching her husband undress.

‘What are you staring at?’

‘What, I can’t stare at my own husband?’

He shrugged. He climbed into bed beside her, gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. ‘Night,’ he said. ‘I’m so proud.’ He turned off the light.

She lay there. She could feel the rise and fall of his torso, the heat of his body. ‘Oh god,’ she said, to no one.

She listened to the maritime rhythm of his breath. She tried to coax herself into sleep, tensing all her muscles then releasing each one in turn, focusing on her breathing, almost getting there. She got up and went to the bathroom. She stared at the lining of her knickers. A red globule of blood had appeared there. So vivid and so ordinary.

Back in the bedroom, she touched her husband lightly on the cheek. He didn’t wake.

‘I love you,’ she whispered. Then she put on her shoes and coat and got in the car.

She wasn’t leaving him. It was nothing like that. She was just going outside. The car began to move. It was raining lightly, and the moon was almost full. She breathed deeply, feeling goosebumps line her skin. She heard what she thought was a faraway gunshot, but then she saw the pink explosion of a firework.

‘Oh,’ she said. She kept going. She wasn’t sure where, until she arrived in the park. She came to a clearing where other cars were parked haphazardly, headlights on.

She watched two figures emerge, from separate cars, parked near each other. They were dark and shadowy, but she could see them come together, lean over one of the cars, and tug at each other’s clothes and hair and flesh.

What am I doing, she asked herself.

The holy show went on.

She uncurled her fingers from the steering wheel and stared, for a moment, at her shaking hands. When she looked up again, she was startled by a figure at her window, knocking.

He gestured for her to roll it down.

She hesitated, pressed the button.

His face was ghastly white, his hair and beard dark.

He came close, put out a hand.

She put hers, trembling, into his palm.

He squeezed.

She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again. That’s enough, she told herself.

Another firework exploded, but she did not startle.

She could feel his dark heat leaning over her. And the rot of his breath – that sweet badness.

And at her core, something seemed to loosen and release. She felt so, so light. She felt like a thing that might blow away.

From deep inside rose a desperate, animal sound.

‘That’s right,’ he was whispering, wet in her ear. ‘Let me in, you dirty thing.’

 

To read the rest of Dublin Review 84, you may purchase the issue here.