CONTENT NOTE
Tom Campbell’s ‘Eggy and I’ makes mention of recent mourning, and features depictions of sex.
After work, trudging home from our bus stop, I decide I’ll tell Eggy about it first thing. At this dusky hour, he will be hovering in the front garden.
How should I phrase it to him? I haven’t begun to see clear to my own feelings just yet.
Thinking of anything else, I enjoy the spongy buoyancy of my brand new shoes. Ugly and functional, they’re joggers that are ‘disguised’ as business shoes. I remember once, at the uni bar, I had launched into a polemic against people who wore their comfy shoes to work and kept their heels in their handbags for the office. Now I adore my comfort. I will bounce along home in my fashion-less shoes, forgetting all gruesome facts. I will see my Eggy and I will explain.
By the time I’m near, the joys of springy shoes—even the afternoon autumn-light—starts to lessen. Nick. His small, insistent charm. His daringness. I wonder if that diminished.
Eggy is weeding. I see him from the hilltop. He’s handsome, expansive. Skinnier since retiring, his limbs are still strong and capable. They are bare in the fast-cooling evening. He appears more bird-like lately. Carriage often forward, eyes flickering alert about the garden bed. Like he’s searching for a tasty beetle to snare in his long and lovely beak.
‘Is that my Eggy?’
Immediately he gives me a wrinkly smile. His arms are around me. Grassy stuff is on his stubbly neck.
I should say, Nick is dead, or, Nick has passed away. Instead, I say:
‘You smell good.’
‘I must stink something.’
No, no. He smells good. I decide that I must turn away from grisliness—Nick, history, death—and get Eggy to bed. Dirt and grass and everything. Take him inside to make love to me.
‘You come here to me, mister.’
I’m dragging off his singlet in the corridor, unzipping my tricky skirt zipper, and looking at him, tender. His grey and hairy chest. He tilts us towards the bathroom to shower.
‘Uh-uh,’ I say.
‘No?’
‘Come on. We can wash the sheets.’
He is a giddy and smiling. And then he is above me, kissing—long-bodied, beautiful.
‘Come inside me,’ I say.
We sprawl.
Once, Nick had ribbed me for calling it making love. I had spoken tentatively, very hopefully. We would have been in second year then, woken up in the afternoon by roommate noise.
‘I suppose you mean, “let’s fuck.”’
‘Yes,’ I’d said, looked away. ‘Yes. That’s what I meant.’
Well. Now he’s dead.
Out of our bedroom, I notice what I hadn’t before. Eggy and I had kissed and groped our way into the house and passed the paper bags of produce in the kitchen, the Chilean wine that I like on the table. It’s delightful. So, why is it that I’m still holding this in? Staying silent and avoiding the chance to unburden myself? Perhaps I am trying not to ruin a mood. Or do I want to keep this news from Eggy, let it by mine alone? And if that’s so, why?
‘Pardon me, love,’ he says. He brings my eyes to the room.
‘Look at this. I didn’t know I was coming home to be made a feast over.’
‘Oui. The menu is planned, the courses…’ he says, scrutinising an eggplant, distracted. ‘…await.’
When we were in our forties, parties shifted. We started to wear dark suits. We spoke to each other more candidly and with less showing off. Music would play, sometimes everyone danced. But the tone, striving, and sometimes succeeding, to feel like chic cocktail parties, was always intruded on by the reality of professional drudgery, familial complaints, communal weariness.
‘You aren’t serious, I assume,’ Nick had said at one of these events. His eyes were set, semicircular, in the way that meant he was going to be nasty. ‘This guy. This fella. You can’t be serious.’
‘What? What about him? Please don’t, Nick. I don’t have the stomach.’
‘I spoke to him. I only needed three minutes. Less. I heard and saw all I needed… Naturally, I understand it. Naturally. He’s a sexy bugger. I see that. But you must know you can’t be serious about him. Not really.’
‘You’re being tiresome. And who says that I’m being serious?’
At the time, he was shoveling cashew nuts into his mouth.
‘You are. You’re trying awfully hard to be serious, in fact. It’s funny to see.’
‘Why shouldn’t I be serious?’
‘Oh, come on. Need I be explicit? He’s not exactly cultural.’
‘Cultured?’
‘Cultured. Cultural. I’m just saying. He’s not on the same level as we are. Not in, you know, his capacities.’ Nick tapped his temple with his skinny fingers.
My memory of how I responded to him is lost now, obscured by later imagining what I should have said to him. Fantasising about how to shut him up, shut him down. He is the kindest man, the sweetest thing or You will never truly know another person, Nick. What I really wish I’d said is; He is the best lay imaginable. The very best. But no. I am ashamed. I did not defend my good, sweet Eggy.
How could I have loved this man, this Nick, I wondered that evening as the party lost its momentum. I thought to myself: I never did. Never truly. I watched him slowly stroll towards where the nuts were in the middle of the room, slender hips swaying and arrogant. He put his whole fist in the bowl.
But of course I had loved him. His wit, his bursts of fun. A lot of things. I realise.
Eggy really has things cooking and wonderful aromas draw me near. Shirtless and stirring, he says ‘Hello, love,’ without turning when I touch him. I squeeze furious-looking pimples on his back. They ooze blood and pus and sometimes black gunk. Some splatter and all the tension in my neck and shoulders goes slack and easy. Occasionally, he exhales with pain. He never tells me to stop.
‘Here.’ He pours rosé into one of the beautiful, long-stemmed glasses that his dad gave us. His own little tumbler sits untouched among the onion peels.
It gets me crimson and embarrassed, thinking how Nick and I were both thirty-six when we finally went bust for good.
‘I don’t like to fall off the wagon,’ he had said at the small dinner party that we arrived at late. It was the night before I left him. ‘I prefer to jump off it. Cascade from it. With a bit of style, with a bit of panache.’
That evening he was rare and shining, then hilarious and loudly drunk, then outrageous and pushing boundaries. Inevitably he became slurringly cruel and pathetically maudlin.
‘You fucking idiot,’ he said to me at home before he passed out, ‘you really are such a fucking idiot.’
Later, much later, I headed a team that oversaw the redesign for the city gardens.
‘I love how open you’ve made it, how inviting,’ I told the landscape architect. Outside in the sun, the plans and papers kept blowing out of her hands. She spoke affably and with enthusiasm. Ten or so gentlemen were with her. I was energetic, excited by their smiling attention. One of them looked at my shoes when I wasn’t speaking and then directly at me when I was. His shirt collar was open and his skin was sun wrecked. He had appealing, invitingly grey eyes.
When I told my mother about him she said, ‘Eggy. Eggs. A dozen eggs… Bad egg.’
I’d looked at her severe mouth, her aquiline nose—forever ruined, she said, from a horseriding accident. I was worried about sharing news with her, that she would taint my elation.
‘Beckett said something about eggs,’ she told me, ‘sorrow…’ Her monologue must have continued inward.
‘Mhmm. Did he?’
‘Sorrow… “You can add to sorrow all of your life. Like a stamp collection. Like an egg collection.” Something like that.’
I thought, Egg collection? but I said:
‘Well, this Eggy isn’t like that at all. He’s exquisite.’
She continued staring ahead. ‘Sorrow. You can add to it all your life without feeling much worse for it, is it not?’
‘Now Eggy. That,’ I say, patting my belly, ‘was spectacular. Spectacular.’
‘I’m glad.’
‘Good enough for one of those TV competition shows.’
How to share my sorrow now, my newest item in the collection, with this wonderful Egg? I can’t hold onto the memory of the ‘disappointing-Nick’ for long, and joyful memories, the loving ones, will come up and out. The sorrow is lurking down there, the loss. Its murky shadow already cold and beneath me.
Eggy goes to pour me more.
‘No, thank you. I’d like a little break.’
He starts to clear up.
‘And leave all that for later. Can you come with me to the couch?’
I stretch my legs, rest my tired head in his lap. The Velcro of his favourite old shorts—the ones with countless pockets for stashing fruit and tools—is prickly on my face. I’m turned away from him, looking at the blank telly screen.
‘Nick died today.’
I say it wobbly-voiced, while salty taste rushes into my mouth. Nothing is lost, of course, in saying it. I realise that. Truthfully, I must have known this would be a relief.
His thigh hardens. He breathes in, steadying, then the whole of him softens with gentle concern. His hand finds the nape of my neck. I imagine him, furrowed, searching me for cuts and bruises.
‘Oh. Oh dear. I’m so very sorry.’
I fiddle with the Velcro. These ratty old worker’s shorts which have held and carried everything for me over many years and many places. Coin purses and peppermints. Hair ties, tampons, and pencils. Still-wet swimmers, more than once a cruel and crumpled letter from my mother, broken earrings, and medicine bottles. Of course, too, his elegantly bowed member. Dutifully, happily, without any hint of that bitter sorrow.
Now he talks. Long, sonorous Eggy-comfort. And soothed by his chattering sympathy, coddled by the gentle flow of his voice, I don’t hear a word. I weep freely. He rubs my back. I let myself fall asleep.