There is a place where Martin takes his memories. Each day he drops off more and more at this place. He will never pick them up again. Those of his first wife, Melinda, were the ones that went first. “The Two Ms”, her mother used to call them. Everyday. Every time she saw the two together. Dead now. All she called me was my own name. The memories went into the place without a struggle – a Cornish church, its clock struck dumb by a wartime bomb; a door rotting around a polished seven and an equally-polished number nine; caravanning in Edinburgh in the pouring summer rain, the noises of each raindrop like millions of children's fingers tapping incessantly on the thin roof. Was the roof made out of tin? I asked Martin, but of course he wouldn't know an answer to such a stupid, irretrievable question. And another he told me before it went – holding hands, rings on either side shining in sun now, holding hands tightly and facing the salt-spray rising up from Whitby bay, eating fish and chips – the best meal he's ever tasted, laughing at a Goth grandma pushed along by a morose-looking, non-Goth granddaughter. They pissed themselves laughing. I tried to laugh too. My bruises cover the shame. I have become quite good at producing laughter.

Martin takes more with him each time he leaves the house. Vomiting down his shirt on his first wedding day. The suit is first-hand Christian Dior and stained with faint purple lapels. It is easy to see the change. He is getting lighter, more translucent, with each journey. I expect he thinks there is a certain amount of heroism in his actions. I don't think anything of the sort. I wish I never married him when he proposed. I wish I could follow him to the place and discard all knowledge of his form: his eager eyes, his violent hands, the way he looks at me like he is unsure where I should be placed in his narrative.
He is getting lighter, and each time he comes back I know exactly where he's been. I feel strength in knowing what he refuses to tell me. He never admits it, just tells me to stop bugging him. He has forgotten what “mithering” means. When I asked him last Tuesday, he showed me how fast his hands still were. He's retained his anger. Sometimes I forget myself. He is getting lighter and I know what it means. I know what happens when a line is erased. I know what finishes when we decide a full-stop is necessary. He never mentions divorce, but he scares me all the same. I twiddle my ring just thinking about it. This one never shines in summer sun or grows loose in rain like children's fingers. It sucks the life from me. In the evenings I try and cook a meal that will make his smile grow deep and lifelike when he moves dead meat to his mouth and looks at me over the rim of a glass burning with our silence. He trying to think about fish and chips. I clean his fucking boxer shorts until they are rags. I let him put it in my arsehole or whatever he wants, whenever he wants.
He has stopped wanting. The night is dead.

A ghost is what he is becoming. His eyes almost fully black now. The eclipse parts our domestic situation and breaks through our windows. It is an intruder, cannibalising our routine for its own comfort. When I look into the black I feel afraid. There is no light reflected back. I cannot see myself or anything else. I am a strong woman, but when I feel like this my mind throws out our wedding picture – I am in a red velvet dress and Martin is so handsome in a grey, second-hand Christian Dior suit. The lapels are bleached and starched a clean grey. We are smiling out from the glass and we get spat on and shat on and we are still smiling and it seems like maybe it is someone else's wedding; Martin has never looked so different to the man who almost broke my wrist. I am drowning in a place I cannot reach. Even if it was substantial, he wouldn't hold my hand to pull me up from the waves, the salt-spray of laughter.

On Tuesday evening he arrives back but stays outside the house. I watch him from the window as he walks around the garden inspecting the flowers. I almost said impaling the flowers, but that wouldn't make sense because I can't see him carrying a knife around. He hasn't impaled anything in a long time. All the same, he is covered in blood. The blood stains his Christian Dior suit until it is almost as black as his eyes. The purple of vomit is a dark, muddy red. From this distance, I cannot see any white in the pupils. The sky has taken on the grey of the sky, sucked it up around the stain. I can't tell whose blood it is, obviously I can't, not from the window, so I move to the front door and make-believe it is a summer on the coast and all our rings are shining and the whiff of cod sizzling in the fryer and the salt-spray hits me in the face as I open our wide front door and the sound captures Martin's attention, holds it like it is strangling our life. He looks up slowly from the Hydrangeas he's sniffing. I have to hold up my hand to shadow my eyes and see him properly in our sleeping garden.
“What have you done?” I ask him.
His skeleton stands in our garden without response. It is the outline of a rose bush without colour. There cannot be much left to give, to hand over.

His mouth is limited to food intake and sucking his lungs from exterior to interior. Will to communicate is an effort for lovers. When he walks, he carries no weight. My strength is in his weakness. I cook the dead meat and I destroy the boxers and I scrub my mouth until it reddens into a grin and I vomit out chips baked in sea-spray and I keep taking the pill that Dr. Masondyke requested I take twice a day, twice. Twice I bite into it and crumble the bitterness down my dry throat. I double or I triple the requested recommendation in hopes that everything will be fixed doubly, triply as quick.

Like Hell.
Like Hell.
(Like Hell).

In the morning, my heart stops beating when he tells me where the blood is from. My quiet heart makes a small child's fist and crawls up onto the roof of the caravan that could never be tin and this is what he says, dramatic and sturdy, like we are in a film that has bored the rest of the audience into submission:
“Of course I killed her, you dumb bitch. Impaled by my prick why would I have married you otherwise?” And I want him to keep speaking. I want him to say: “The best meal I ever had and now my suit is ruined.”
I am unsure if I'm dreaming. My mouth is empty and I cannot see where the place could be located. There is a shallow grave in a torn-down cemetery, there is a church without time, so I close my eyes tightly and count to seventy-nine. Horses ride past my vision with their jaws clamping wildly. Their drool spits into my face and I wipe away my eyes and when they reopen themselves, I am in bed alone in a nightgown bought for me by my mother who lives elsewhere, who is dead and called me always by my name. There are no blood stains anywhere. I check the room twice, three times. Same as my pills. The sheets are as clean as a newborn lamb. A newborn lamb after it has had all the mess from its mother wiped off.

With Martin away, I go for a walk into the cemetery that is torn into fragments of laughter. There are children running around like those wild horses, tapping their fingers on graves of strangers. The priest is always respectful and Melinda's grave is always nice at this time of the year. Shallow but nice. Fresh flowers  keep its appearance comforting and mildly amusing (I find freshly-kept graves mildly amusing). When is rains and the children run around tapping their fingers, I can sometimes hear her moving. She is looking up at the roof and wondering if it isn't made from tin. A stupid, irretrievable question.

He has been gone for six months, seven. A man with a badge comes to the door and demands to know certain things I cannot possibly have the answer to. This is management. It is another part of the film which colours the grey. It is an explosion lighting up the audience's closing eyes.
“I cannot remember,” I tell him. As simple as that, without poetics: I cannot remember. He is tall and ruddy-faced. Authoritative-looking. This is management deciding where things should be placed. In the Sunday light he looks like Martin when he was healthy. Each week it is the same. He begins to come ever Sunday and he eats the dead meat and wears the ragged boxers without complaint. I wish he would leave us alone. The idea that anything can be gained is less than mildly amusing. I let him go wherever he would want to, I let him put it wherever he wants. He is polite, obliging, but a degenerate. He crawls into me on Sundays when I can do nothing but cut up this dead meat and take the boxers from the bin. This is management. If he got married to someone like Melinda, it would be better for all concerned.
When Martin has returned, this is what I'll suggest. Marriage as a bond in sickness and in health. It will be the two Ms and then it will be me with my own name. This is what I will suggest.