She avoided thinking, but that did not stop an inner voice that prattled on, that she could not silence. What for? Who for?

THE UNBEARABLE WEARINESS OF THE MIDLIFE WOMAN BY AMANDA MARPLES 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 107

Marion did her level best to avoid thinking.

She avoided thinking when her mother, in her china-brittle voice asked yet again who she was, while Marion hoisted her or rubbed her feet.

Again, she avoided thinking when she got home from another day of fetching and carrying, and fixing the gaffer’s mistakes, to find a sink full of plates, and the milk spoiling on the side after Zach had no doubt drank it straight from the carton.

Again when she straightened the cushions, the budget, her eyeliner.

When she lay awake in a pool of menopausal sweat each night listening to the rattling glottis of the lump sleeping beside her.

She avoided thinking, but that did not stop an inner voice that prattled on, that she could not silence. What for? Who for?

+

On Tuesdays since the kids were little Marion visited her fracturing mother. She wasn’t so far gone back then, still able to complain about the neighbours, and read a story to Zoe, or tie Zach’s laces.

But now her mother was like candyfloss in the rain. Who are you? I know your face. Your hair needs a trim. Look at the state of you. Who taught you to make a bed? Nobody good. Who are you?

But Marion had to visit. Aside from the carers who called in twice a day to slap a sandwich together, shove some pills down her neck, and roll her into bed, there was no-one else.

Her mother’s bones were as moth-eaten as her mind and a tumble in the kitchen had put her a week in hospital and two weeks in intermediate care. It had made a hole in the savings and her wrist had not been the same since. Or her temper.

She checked that the carers hadn’t overlooked a pressure sore, or stolen anything. Marion half crippled herself giving her mother a proper wash while she wailed querulously and slapped at her with fluttering hands.

Marion went straight to her mother’s place from work instead of going home first for dinner. Breaking down on the inside lane of a roundabout she looked at herself in the rear-view mirror, fingered the puffy area under her eyes, and waited for the breakdown people to answer.

She had just got off the phone when an overweight man in a polyester suit with eyes the colour of the pilot light in her combi-boiler tapped on her window and did the wind-the-window-down hand signal. The man leaned, one arm on the car roof, and peered in at her.

“You know who I am,” he said, in a voice like an oil spill. A statement, not a question.

She blinked. “I think so, yes. Do we have to do this right now?”

“I’m afraid we do.”

“But why?”

“Because.”

Marion’s face folded itself into the grooves of scorn she usually kept for Zoe’s inane commentary on celebrity fashion. It was the face she wore when Zach claimed not to know how to use the washing machine.

“Because what?”

The Devil sighed. “It’s dark. It’s a crossroads. Your life’s a mess,” he shrugged. “No better time.” He stood back and gazed down the road, allowing her to consider.

“But this is Collinwood Roundabout,” she said.

“Four exits. That’s a crossroads in my book.”

“What happens now?” she said.

“Now we make a deal.”

Marion rolled her eyes. “My earthly desires in exchange for my eternal soul? Is that it?”

He pointed two fingers at her like a gun. “You got it.”

Meeting the Devil at the crossroads didn’t surprise Marion, although she had not considered herself in the market for making deals.

The Devil was also unsurprised, having seen all the reactions before, ad nauseam. Sometimes they wept. Sometimes they were slack-jawed and mute, an important neural fuse blown somewhere up in the melon. The majority gabbled tirelessly, as though they expected him, upon hearing the chewed-up contents of their stupid minds, to be persuaded of their uniqueness and charm and grant them safe passage. A fair few had promised faithful allegiance if only he would leave their souls alone.

They were all so attached to their sense of themselves. This was a constant, no matter where they were on the moral spectrum.

There was never anything new. He had sucked the juice out of this thing way back. Millennia back. These days it was just part of the job.

He didn’t have much else to do. The rest of the time he spent in the burgeoning dark of a rain-cloud or slotted in the brain of an ant, or tangled up in the roots of some old oak, thinking. It wasn’t a trait he was proud of. Thinking was a dirty, human habit. Pointless, but so compelling. Like nail biting, he supposed.

The Devil never asked himself questions such as what or who or even why. The answer to all the questions was just because.

This was the most bewildering feature of humankind for him, this search for meaning where there was none to find.

How could they look through a telescope at the cold unfathomability of space and still imagine there was some point to it all, some design?

It killed him to admit it but Our Father was due a round of applause for inventing faith. Faith. Nice work, pal.

“They still think he’s the paterfamilias, got his eye on every sparrow and all that, like we’re not equal competitors, you know?” he would mutter to a passing wraith.

A panicking mother lifts a car off a kid and it’s all praise this and hallelujah that, like it’s not completely random.

At the end of the day, fishes swim. Prisms refract light. Devils meet people at crossroads. There’s no reason. It’s just because.

“What if I don’t want to make a deal?” Marion asked.

The Devil laughed. It really was quite funny. Marion laughed too. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d laughed, and after all, she reasoned, this might be her last chance.

She checked her phone, and then her face in the rear-view mirror. She dabbed at a smudge of mascara. “The thing is, I have no desires,” she said. “Not any more. Sorry.”

“Aw.” He pooched out his bottom lip. “Life knocked all the fun out of you, has it? Cut the shit, Marion. I know your soul better than He does,” he said, cocking his head to the sky. “Never had an eye for detail.”

He looked away again, over the centre of the roundabout studded with skinny birches and beyond into the barren desert of the dual carriageway. The air trembled with his pent-up energy, and hers, he realised. The woman, sitting in her 12-year-old Nissan, was ripe with resentment. Exciting.

“I’ll wait,” he whispered.

Marion frowned. “The mortgage is almost paid. We go on holidays. The kids are okay. Selfish, but okay. Really, there’s nothing.”

The Devil waited. A cloud crossed the moon. Let eternity begin, he thought.

“You know the breakdown man’s going to be here any minute,” she said, wondering if the Devil had a time limit.

“No, Marion. He won’t. He’s been delayed. We have quite literally all the time in the world.”

“Of course,” she said. “Silly of me.”

“You used to make more effort,” he said.

“A bit personal, isn’t it?” Marion looked back at the rear-view. She wasn’t wearing any lipstick, but if she did it would have bled into the fine lines around her lips. She traced a finger down the deep crevices that disappointment had carved into her face from nostril edge to outer lip. She felt like one of those old-timey puppets. She wondered who had their hand up her back, making her move and talk.

There was no point. The what-for-who-for soundtrack had slipped into the deeper layers of her brain where she couldn’t hear it so much as feel it perpetually dragging at her.

The Devil caught hold of her vibration, stronger now. He dared to wonder if this woman might be fun to play with. She certainly had all the material.

Just then her phone rang. It was her mother, the mother with the wrist about to snap like a breadstick again. He knew she would call every 15 minutes or so, her daughter’s number, and the routine of Tuesdays arbitrarily engraved in her memory, while that same daughter’s face and name had long since burned away like dead leaves in a bonfire. He smiled and clicked his fingers. The ringing stopped.

“Don’t mind her,” he said, grinning.

“You’re very cruel.”

“I’m the Devil,” he said, and rubbed his chin. “How’s the marriage?”

“Oh, stop it,” she said. “You know exactly how the marriage is. The thing is I’m past caring.”

The Devil shifted the weight of the body he had hijacked. Richard Tomlinson was pre-diabetic, smoked like a chimney, and made difficult decisions in rooms full of similar-looking men, all of whom he was secretly afraid. The heart could go pop at any time. The Devil had expected to be on his way by now, but he smiled and waited.

“Think, Marion,” the Devil murmured, lowering his head to the window again, breathing hell into the little car.

He prodded around in her, looking for a lever. Not strictly fair, but life was not fair and that was not his fault. Then he felt the penny drop into its slot, as she slid into a memory.

Marbella with the girls, a shared 50th birthday. A villa. White stucco. Roses and wisteria swaying in the breeze. No demands for clean football kits, mascara not mysteriously missing, no carrots to peel. No rattling glottis. Tipsy at three in the afternoon, her shoulders speckled from the sun. Laughter. Beach barbecues and brief discussion of inconsiderate men but just in light-hearted passing, never the focus. Real conversation at dusk while stars emerged, and eagles cried in the Sierra Blanca. Dreams. Art. How to do swordfish. A whole week of it.

The dreams faded to grey within a day of getting back home, her mother prattling on, Zach’s muddy football boots in the kitchen, Zoe–raging with hormones–demanding money, the lump’s glottis. Marion sat in the downstairs toilet and cried. “What for? Who for?”

The Devil coughed in a pretence of politeness. Marion shook her head. “A couple of months. That’s all. I just want a bit of peace and quiet. And don’t you take that as an excuse to kill them all off in a car crash. ”

“Deal,” he said.

She nodded. “When can I expect you to collect? On my deathbed?”

“Oh God, no. I take it now. This is not television.”

“Will I still be able to feel things?”

“I don’t know, can you?”

“You’ve taken it already?”

He smiled. Smoke began to rise from him, and she noted how the whites of his eyes were turning slowly black.

“You’ll find everything you need in the boot,” he said in a thickening, swampy voice. “Your tickets are in your purse. You can go now. The car is fixed.”

The Devil watched her drive away. “Good luck feeling thing,” he laughed, and slipped out of Richard Tomlinson’s disintegrating executive flesh, just as the overburdened heart gave out.

Marion did not need to look at the ticket to know where she was going. She expected they would find a note in her handwriting on the kitchen table. They would squawk about it for a while and try to call her. They’d find her number blocked. She surmised that her mother would either be transferred to a nursing home, or she would pass away in her sleep, perhaps tonight. It didn’t really matter.

“Peace and quiet,” she whispered as she drove, streetlights sliding over the surfaces of her eyes and wondered why–if she could still hear the waves and sift sand through her fingers and taste lemon on her fish–she had ever needed a soul to begin with.

*

The Devil was already feeling uneasy. He had in fact felt uneasy since he’d bled it from her and was thinking it might have been better to have approached someone more obvious, someone facing trial for insider trading maybe, or a youngster dealing with end-stage renal failure.

“Aren’t there things you ought to be doing?” Marion’s soul asked. “When was the last time you did any reaping?” He had to confess the soul was right about that. He’d just not had the heart.

“You know the faith problem needs some attention. There’s no wonder you’re losing votes.” He sensed it shaking its head.

“But I stand for idleness and demotivation,” he said, with a touch of pride.

The soul rippled at him. “Might as well give up then,” it said. It was smirking at him.

“It’s just a soul,” he said. “Just a heap of useless emotion and history.” He scratched his belly and looked around to see if anyone had seen him arguing with himself.

He harangued a few molesters. More burning, more flaying. But the screaming and begging did nothing to soothe him. He found himself flitting from one heart to another, trying to get comfortable. Before long he was sighing. Like a mortal. Thinking had been bad enough.

+

The Devil showed up at the fork in the dirt track and Marion said, “I didn’t know forks in the road were your thing”

She’d hiked all afternoon. On the hillside were skinny trees bleached bone-white, salamanders darting over rocks, the occasional bleat of a goat. The Alboran Sea was azure on the horizon.

The man with the dark orange eyes, who had appeared with a sharp crackling sound, sweating in overalls, snapped, “I do what I want. You can have it back.”

She look at the Alboran, the blue of which she was able to acknowledge if not appreciate. She laughed. “I don’t want it.”

“I can just put it back.”

“No, you can’t,” she said, her eyes appraising the scenery, tasting salt on the air.

“I can,” he said, trying hard to keep his feet still, his face composed.

“I don’t think so. Otherwise, you would have done it already.”

He shifted position. The flesh suit was hot and tighter than usual, and he longed for a crow, or a snake. A rat, even.

She turned away from the sea and looked at him, her head to one side. “You look uncomfortable,” she said, and held out her water bottle.

The Devil did not move. She shrugged and drank the rest down, her throat pulsing. “I think,” she said, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand, “that there’s some ancient cosmic rule that says I have to agree. Like inviting a vampire into your home.”

“Whatever you believe,” he said.

“Don’t try that with me. I raised teenagers. I know all about reverse psychology.”

“You’ve had your two months.”

“Good thing I got myself a job then.”

“But you have no soul.”

“You don’t need one to be a legal secretary. It turns out my qualifications are just as valid out here.”

“I’ll take your sensations,” said the Devil, realising that he was about to twist his index finger all the way off like a plucked bean.

“Take them. I’d rather be here without my sight than depressed in the Midlands.”

“I could lay waste your whole life and that of your children.”

She shrugged. “Everyone has to die, as you well know. And without my soul it’s hard for me to care.”

“You’ll come to me, after. You know that.”

“I’m already half-there,” she said. “Guess I’ll see you soon.”

Cicadas whirred, shadows lengthened. The sun began its descent. The woman looked at him with empty grey eyes.

The Devil thought about her being in his domain for eternity, reunited with her desolate, used-up soul. He thought about giving it away, but he’d already tried. Nobody was interested. Not the lower demons, not the evilest human he could find. He hadn’t wasted his time bothering God with it, who had become even more indolent than he remembered, more company rep than Divine Creator.

She was walking away from him, hiking sticks swinging, her rucksack bouncing lightly on her brown shoulders.

“You could have it back. Why don’t you want it back?” he called after her.

“Just because,” Marion said.

The sun was red and trembling in its own heat. The Devil had a sudden longing for the deepest ocean cavern, to feel the crushing weight of it on his spine, to be behind the blind eyes and hard bodies of the creatures that lived down there in the black.

He stood in the fork, knowing it did not matter which path he chose.

At first he thought he was dying, that the last flickering of faith had been snuffed out as another damaged human heart turned to stone. A murdered child perhaps. A car bomb. Maybe something as small as a repossessed home.

But he wasn’t dying. A tear, cloudy with cold mountain dust oozed out and he blinked and felt again the need to be out of this inadequate form. He didn’t want to remember what he had once loved about them, what they deserved, what they needed. He didn’t want to feel regret.

The Devil watched as Venus bloomed above the horizon, bringing the dawn like he once had. He’d been standing on a dirt track in rural Spain for twelve hours. He slipped into a passing scorpion and on into nowhere, while the used-up body of Esteban Rosales, mechanic and newly-wed crumpled to the ground. Rosales was found later by a coach driver returning from Malaga airport. The cause of death would be recorded as heart failure, which for a healthy 25-year-old was curious enough never mind how he came to be 30 miles from his garage where he should have been changing batteries and draining carburettors.

While his young widow Nina was burying him, Marion was eating fresh grapefruit and tortilla de patatas with a cup of good, black coffee that she could taste but did not care about either way. In the mountains behind her, an eagle cried.

AMANDA MARPLES

Having a head that never stops spinning can make it hard to pin anything down. I’m highly distractible, highly disorganised, a dopamine chaser. But thank God, right? Some of my best material comes out of this stuff. I have always put words on paper. It is just for me, compulsively talking to myself. I spool the contents of my messy head out into hundreds of notebooks. I never save any of it or even read it back. A notebook is filled and thrown out and I’m glad. There’s no sense of loss. It would be like hoarding jars of toenail clippings. I write because that’s how I get my chattering mind to shut up, to feel calm. It’s avoidance, I guess, but there are worse ways to avoid. I could be binge-eating, I could be high, I could be mired in co-dependency trying to fix other people’s shit in order to feel okay, but I’m not. Instead I’m creating imaginary people who do and say weird or dangerous or loveable things and then seeing what happens to them as though it has nothing to do with me. I’ve won a few competitions and been published in Writing Magazine, Free Flash Fiction, and Normal Deviation.

reconcilecreative.com

paypal.me/amarpleswriter

34MAG

But you have no soul.