By Catherine McNamara
As best as we could, we both cleared our calendars for the three days before we left for Istanbul. I had a batch of singing lessons that most of my students were happy to shuffle around, and Riccardo told his clients that he had put out his shoulder and would see them later in the month. It felt like a pre-holiday holiday, given we’d taken the dogs to my sister’s and both of my bags were packed. Riccardo was slower with these things, and his junk was still in undecided piles on and draped over the bedroom sofa.
I thought I’d give him a hand in this while he was out for a run. Compared to some, Riccardo and I hadn’t been an item for so long, and we found each other late in the day, so I wasn’t always comfortable putting my hands through his belongings. I folded his preferred jeans, and put away the trim pair that sat uncomfortably across the belly he was out there whittling off, and brought down a pair of linen pants he’d overlooked that made his rump stand out. I’d never been afraid of a guy with round cheeks.
In all fairness, I should have stopped there. For I felt the shape of a key in the left pocket which I pulled out and held in the palm of my hand. It was a lone door key. I wasn’t going to try to see if it fitted the doors of our apartment, because I knew that it didn’t. In the other pocket I found an herbal sweet in a twisted wrapper, that was starting to soften so I threw it into the waste bin. I was pretty sure I had happened upon Riccardo’s jardin secret.
We flew out from Fiumicino to Istanbul. We made love, we took photos, we gorged ourselves and wandered back to the hotel to shag again. There is something to be said about being two years into a frank marriage and a fit, enduring husband whose body confidence has come roaring back. I used to wonder what fucking a twenty-five-year-old Riccardo would have been like, but now I thought I was getting the best version of Riccardo that there would ever be, and I ought to take some credit for it. We tried some new noisy things as the city rattled around us, some of them freely inspired by porn. We woke up wet and degraded to resume kissing again, and the kissing had become a type of mortal, fetid consumption, as though we were the last survivors on a wreck, about to surrender up our souls.
But there were slow, galvanising moments of tenderness, of glazed nipples and nuzzled armpits, of tickled necks. We saw zilch of Istanbul, no more than a smattering of streets.
On our last night I went downstairs to buy two beers, also to walk off the garlic that kept flaring up my throat. I had Riccardo’s secret key in my pocket. The plan was to drop it into a drainage grill and imagine it swilling off into the gullet of the city. Then maybe confront him in the dissolved core of the night, maybe not.
None of our quaking horniness had passed by our final morning, which saw me fanny up on the bed, buttocks beckoning. Riccardo went in hard and my convulsions took hold, delivering utter erasure. We cupped together for the time it took for the alarm to begin buzzing, then Riccardo staggered to the bathroom, bringing over toilet paper to wipe me down, even the last cascade that spilled onto the sheets.
He pulled on his linen trousers and I could just see the outline of the key there, pressed to his thigh. I zippered up the smart red dress I’d worn on the plane and we left the room.
Catherine McNamara grew up in Sydney, ran away to Paris to write and ended up running a bar in Ghana, working in Mogadishu and Milano along the way. She is the author of the short fiction collections The Carnal Fugues, The Cartography of Others, Love Stories for Hectic People and Pelt and Other Stories. She is Flash Fiction Editor and a Masterclass tutor for Litro Magazine, and Guest Editor for the Best Small Fictions Anthology 2023. Catherine lives in Italy.
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