The Art of Preservation

By Kerry Byrne

Content warning: Addiction & domestic violence

You’re not the punky weed on your pegged-out sheets. Empty cans of liver-killing lager on the garden wall. Or Big Mac boxes floating like lily pads on your pond. You’re not the needles puncturing the green where you walk the dog. Or the daily FUCK YOU, WANKER ranting of Adidas Man, his tracksuit limbs moving to amphetamine beats. You’re not the shifty transactions in souped-up Subarus, pumping Techno out of tinted windows. Or the pre-dawn stutter of Call of Duty shooting through your postwar walls.

This is not your world.

You disguise the non-standard construction of your new home with wisteria. Plant cottage garden flowers along its cracked concrete path. You paint each poorly plastered room a shade of Farrow & Ball, lining the walls with literary fiction, poetry and plays, classics to the contemporary, your shelves better stocked than the local library. From MDF picture rails, you hang one or two originals by local artists, the rest prints of fenscapes, always a smudge of a figure in the background. You dress the radiator-free lean-to like a Scandi snug, with a faux sheepskin rug and a blanket basket beside an old reading chair only you will use. On the side table, a blank notebook and pen.

In the early hours, when you can’t sleep, slip out of bed, the heat tumultuous, and your husband turns over, pulling the extra duvet around him, cocooned against what it is to be fifty and female, you sit in its chill and pour a shot from one of the bottles wrapped in a blanket then another and another and stare into the moonlight of your phone at photos of the kids and the dog and the kids and the dog and you scroll back five years before you find one of you, the you he would have noticed struggling to sleep, pulled back to bed, his arm around your thinner waist, switching on the bedside fan before getting up naked to fetch a glass of cold water and climbing back into bed, cooling your skin with his and stroking your face in the dark until you drift off.

In a haze of scotch and hormones, you create an account on an app you despise. Make a profile with a photo of your younger self with pert breasts and a promising writing career. With zero followers, you use AI to post that freelancing is the best decision you’ve ever made rather than the only one left. Advocate balance and positive lifestyle changes to the void. After a second glass of chardonnay, you copy and paste the post into a group chat in reply to the backlog of concerned voicemails from ex-colleagues. You don’t share your new address or send invites for housewarming drinks. Not because you’re embarrassed. Or to save them the stress of parking on the estate. But in case they choose not to see through the ghost of a woman you’ve become.

– – –

When the doorbell rings, you know who it is without checking the security app your husband insists on. You take a screenshot and save it to the album ‘Monday 4–5 pm’. Shouting to the kids to stay in the living room, you stop in front of the hallway mirror and paint lipstick over the rouge of merlot outlining your lips before opening the door.

“What’s the weather like up there?” you say, resisting the inevitability of another polite, empty exchange and regretting it immediately.

“Good afternoon, Mrs—”, the delivery driver checks his paperwork. “Collins. Only one substitution today.”

You check his badge as he hands over the printed shopping list. The aspirin has been replaced with ibuprofen.

“That’s fine, thank you, William.”

You watch as he walks back to the van. Wonder if his hands would swallow yours or if you’d reach his lips on tiptoes. He carries the trays back to you one at a time, the curved bodies of bottles chinking in cheap carrier bags. You’re beyond feeling embarrassed. Find hope in the sound, the strain of alcohol on his arms, want to invite him in for drinks, lock the kids in a cupboard, see what happens, but you’ve got your daughter’s Times Table Rock Stars to finish and a conference call at five.

– – –

With the kids in bed and another empty bottle in the basket, your husband returns home from work and asks to look at your phone. He’s still wearing his cycling helmet and bicycle clips when your skin translates it was inside his mouth one moment, pooling and frothing on his tongue as he grew it, and now, it’s on your face, the warm gob landing just under your right eye, slug-trailing down your cheek. You should feel shocked, but there are only so many times you can say you’re too tired/don’t feel yourself/ want to stop, it hurts/ have a migraine/ your conversation reduced to flashing and flushing/ sweating and swearing/ before it changes you.

You usually deny checking out the delivery guy. The Williams. The Toms. The Franks and Eddies. But there’s only so many times you can say that you’re sorry/ it’s not him/ it’s you/ when you don’t know who you are anymore. So just this once, you’ll lean into the oblivion that alcohol affords, find form in the rush of semantics/ twisting truths/ undermining/ ridiculing/ binding your husband in his inarticulate ire/ as you light up with language

Kerry Byrne lives and writes in the Fens, with a backdrop of sky-filled water and endless horizon. Her words have been published in BULL, Ellipsis Zine, Frazzled Lit, Lucy Writers, National FlashFlood (2024), Paragraph Planet, Pidgeonholes, Roi Fainéant Press, streetcake magazine and other fine places. She is currently a reader at Frazzled Lit and holds a Masters in Creative Writing (Distinction) from the University of Glasgow.