Rinse. Then repeat.

Her life is perpetual motion. She wakes up to small children jumping onto her bed. Leaning into the sweet smell on their skin, then rolling out of bed to start the day. Ben stretches and continues sleeping. Looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, she notices the wrinkles and the silver hair that washes her face out. Her cheeks look flat. Sliding her hands to her waist, her fingers pinch the fullness, that once gave her face its youthfulness, but has now gravitated around her hips.

 

 “Hurry up, eat your food! John! John! Are you awake yet?”

William has rushed upstairs and started eating his breakfast, he looks up between mouthfuls that are eaten too fast, “He’s doing his morning exercises.”

She’s washing the pans as her coffee goes cold.

“What do you mean he’s doing his morning exercises?  We have to leave the house in 5-minutes!  John! Get up here now!!!”

 

Fifteen minutes later they’re running out the door. She all but flings the kid's bags onto the sidewalk waving goodbye as she indicates into the bumper-to-bumper traffic. Twenty minutes later she arrives at Harvey Norman's head office. She started there straight after school. First as a sales assistant, then as floor manager and now she works in the bedroom buying team. She’s been in the same position for seven years.

---

As the sun starts to sink in the cold winter sky, the kids are collected and the Mommy's personal taxi service chauffeurs them to their various co-curricular commitments before heading home.

 

Ben walks in the door at 6 p.m. He likes to decompress on the couch after work.

 

“Hi sweetheart, how was your day?” She asks with a fixed smile.

 

“Ah, it was ok.  I still feel a bit hungover after the weekend.”

“Oh, yeah. Did you guys have a good time?”

“Yeah, it was great. We ended up just staying in the whole weekend, shooting the shit.”

“That sounds lovely.” Ben’s too tired to take the boys down to the park, but he finds the energy for his getaways.

 

Upstairs in their bedroom, his clothing is all over the floor. He has left everything in his ‘intermediate zone. That special area where clothing that isn’t dirty and isn’t clean gets tossed. Funnily it also never gets worn again, nor packed away. Not by Ben at least. She indulges in a long sigh and picks his jeans up off the floor. There’s a card in the back pocket Kim Diya, kim@trickein.com, 0431678002 with a lipstick kiss printed on the back. She walks downstairs holding the card between her fingers. He’s asleep on the couch. His phone is on the coffee table. They’ve known all each other’s passwords since they were twenty-three. She feels a sudden hesitation and then takes the phone typing the number into his texts. 

 

A whole conversation thread comes up. 

 

How much for an hour?

$300 for a full service, $ 170 for a happy ending massage. XOXO

I’ll see you in an hour???

O.K. XXXX

 

Time becomes like a rubber band, stretching endlessly around her. She sees him on their first date, flowers in hand, later he leans in to kiss her sliding his tongue between her lips. They’re holding hands in a church, their eyes filled with expectation. She sees her body swelling and then sagging as she delivers their children into the world. The band stretches and stretches until without warning – it snaps.  Everything is too loud. From his snoring to the water pumping through the faucets of the kid’s shower. The air is thick as she struggles to suck enough into her lungs. There is a tinny taste at the tip of her tongue with little lights flecking across her vision. Everything feels wrong, looks wrong, sounds wrong. She puts the jeans down on the couch. She steps over the Lego cluttering the floor. She leaves the lunchboxes unpacked and the dishes in the sink. She goes upstairs and climbs into bed.

---

Three weeks of rinse and repeat. Three weeks of waking up next to Ben. Three weeks of Ash saying nothing, until she knows what she needs to do.

 

“I’ve got to go to Melbourne for the 25th and 26th,” she says while placing the chicken schnitzel in the oven. Ben is on the couch checking his emails. He looks fat to her; she finds it curious that she hadn’t noticed the double chin or the thinning hair until recently. 

 

Ben looks up from the screen he was staring into: “Oh, yeah, what’s in Melbourne?” he seems to only be vaguely registering that she’s spoken. This is the genesis of all their arguments.  She tells him something important he ‘listens’ to her while his mind is focused on something else.  Later he can swear that they never discussed it at all.

 

Persisting she continues, “The furniture expo has started up again, the company wants me to see what some of the new trends are.”

 

Bingo! Ben looks up, chewing on this new piece of information deciding how it tastes.

 

“Maybe the kids and I should go with you?  Make a weekend of it.”

 

She stops mashing the potatoes. He’s never looked after the kids for a whole weekend before, his parents are on some god-awful cruise, and he’s done the math.

 

She’s anticipated this though, “It’s John’s big rugby game and he will be devastated if he misses it.  I’ll be at the furniture show all day long. It’s not like you’ll see much of me in any case.”

 

“Yes, you’re right. John can’t miss his rugby. We can plan a proper trip during the school holidays.” Swoosh, he hits send on another email.

---

Walking through the lobby of the Meridian hotel, she feels like she’s wearing a hi-vis vest with flashing lights attached to her ears.  She gets into the elevator and presses the button for the fourth floor.  Room 403 he said.  She got his number from the internet.  She’s read all his interviews and stalked his social media posts.  She hasn’t watched any of his porn movies though, somehow seeing him with twenty-something-year-old porn stars is more than she can handle.  She is determined to go through with this. Plus, she’s paid the deposit.  The rest of the money is in her purse.   She told him her name is Michelle, she doesn’t want him to know anything about her. 

 

Standing outside the door she feels too hot, too sticky, too old.  She wishes that she had dyed her hair. She has gone for a wax, refreshed her Botox, whitened her teeth, but getting her hair done might have been a bit too obvious. She knocks on the door and a gorgeous 37-year-old man opens. He is wearing a button-up black shirt, tucked into tight jeans. His short blond hair is brushed into place, and he smiles and greets her in a low sexy voice. She feels a warm surge of arousal shoot through her body, her hands are shaking uncontrollably but as she steps into the room and brushes past him, she smells an intoxicating scent of soap, aftershave, a muskiness that reminds her of cinnamon and vanilla, he reaches past her to close the door behind them.

---

A day later she’s back home, she’s glowing. She feels alive. She feels sexy. She feels worshipped. It’s like this huge weight has been lifted off her shoulders. Free from years of living on autopilot, the daily rinse and repeat, boring scheduling conversations, slowly asphyxiating every piece of her personality.

 

As the taxi pulls up to her front door, she catches herself smiling over nothing and makes a mental note – snap out of it!

 

Ben is sitting on the couch. He looks wrecked. She almost starts to feel sorry for him but then notices the overflowing sink.

 

“Hi honey, how was your weekend?” he says.

“Oh, you know, boring. I don’t know why they send me. There’s never any furniture. Just crappy wall art and side table lamps. I didn’t even bother going out, I just curled up in bed with a good book.”

 

“I tried calling you on Saturday night. You’ll never believe what I found out.” Ben leans forward, suddenly animated.

 

“What?” She’s packing the dishes into the dishwasher. The cleaner will come on Tuesday, but she still hates it when the house looks like a pigsty.

 

“Jane caught Hunter cheating on her!”

 

The hair on the back of her neck seems to propel itself away from her body whilst a chill runs up her spine.

 

“What are you talking about? Hunter would never do something like that.”  She’s wiping the kitchen table, round and round.

 

Ben stands up, suddenly animated by his role as a storyteller.

 

“Apparently, he cheated on her with a pro during the boy’s weekend. He used my phone to text her!”

 

“I don’t understand?” The table has taken on an unnatural glossiness, she moves to the stovetop turning her back on Ben.

 

“Yeah, Jane noticed him acting weird and looked at his credit card statements.”

 

“She looked at his credit card statements?”

 

 “Yeah. Turns out he had paid $300 to some company the Saturday night of the boy’s weekend. She Googled the name, and it came back as a brothel on the Gold Coast.”

 

A warm flush fills her face, she needs to consciously unclench her teeth. She turns to Ben.

 

“How do you know this?” 

 

Ben’s brow furrows.

 

“He just messaged all the boys on the chat group. She kicked him out. I can’t believe he used my fucking phone!”

 

“She kicked him out,” her voice has gone down to a whisper; she can barely hear the words she’s croaking out, “but why?”

 

“Well, he cheated on her. Wouldn’t you do the same if I cheated on you?”

 

“No.

No, I wouldn't.”