We talk as she does my feet. Our words are cast outwards from our mouths to the sound of the pick-picking of her scalpel blade against my sole. I watch her as she works and talks as my discarded skin falls onto her plastic apron. She does most of the talking. I feed her discourse with questions which she takes up happily. We do we talk of? Her heart, her children, the painting of the shop, her husband and how he wanted to be an auctioneer. That leads us to talk of auctions and how she went in search of a small Moorcroft piece. “The auction turned out to be held in someone’s back barn. It was freezing, everyone else had blankets. And there was no coffee.” The Moorcroft was going for £500, and way beyond her affording at the time, she said. What then? Yes, the Royal Welsh Show. She’s already booked their caravan in. She loves watching the cattle auctions. She doesn’t care for the shops. She’ll sit for hours looking at the cows, the bulls. She has a favourite spot. Then she told me of her daughter almost breaking her neck falling off the bull at the Builth arena. Apparently, everyone has to climb it. She had to spend the night in hospital. “She could move her toes so I knew she’d be alright,” she said. There is no real exchange of intimacy. She calls me ‘Bach’ but then most Welsh women do. It’s a performance for her, as it is for me, I suppose. A mutual exchange, a way of dealing with the fact that we are in that little room together for almost an hour. I don’t know whether she likes me. It doesn’t matter. I see her struggles to be something, to match her father, her brother. There is spikiness and pain, I think. She removes some of the discomfort from my feet, though not all. But she isn’t as loving as she is, she has less to give, I suspect. She isn’t warm, and yet the other, she’s a performer too.
I will mark her day. Shall I write the envelope in capitals so that she will at least open it?
Do you think less of me? he asked. No, I said. How could I? He is my love.
