(Shortlisted for the V.S. Pritchett prize a couple of years ago, but ultimately never published anywhere – until now!)
1.
Mathew and his wife Debbie haven’t had sex for over a year. Any kind of sex. And it’s nearer two years than one, if anyone is counting.
Mathew is counting.
Mathew and Debbie haven’t had sex since Debbie’s brother’s second wedding, which was twenty months ago. And they didn’t even finish that time. They were so drunk that it took them ages to get going, and then Debbie fell asleep.
The hotel room was nice, though. And the food at the reception was great.
Mathew is sitting in his car, in the middle of the afternoon, in a business park off the A678. He’s just come out of an interview for a job he won’t get. On the other side of the car park, a middle-aged man, not much older than Mathew, is walking back and forth in front of one of the glass office buildings. He seems to be trying to make a decision about something. Mathew watches as the man takes a cigarette out of the packet he’s holding and then puts it back again.
When Debbie and Mathew first started having sex they were both still smokers. Those were the days. Mathew still misses smoking. But not as much as he misses having sex with his wife.
Behind the glass office building there is a grass ridge that blocks the view of the farmland beyond. Stands of trees are placed in groups of five and six at regular intervals around the car park. Mathew doesn’t know what kind of trees they are, but he recognises the mathematical way they’re scattered. It’s been the same with every other business park Matthew has visited in the last three months.
As the man stands in front of the building the sun briefly lights him up, reflecting his image back to him, along with the car park and the giant spring sky behind.
And then he turns and walks past the building, past the glass panelled walls, continuing until he reaches the grass slope of the artificial hill at the edge of the business park, where he begins to climb.
2.
“What did he do when he got to the top of the hill?” Debbie asks Matthew. They’re having a drink in the kitchen. Debbie has just got back from teaching her photography class at the sixth-form college. Mathew has cooked dinner.
“He lit another cigarette,” Mathew says, “and looked around. As if he was surveying his kingdom. Or saying goodbye to it.”
“I didn’t know people still smoked,” Debbie says.
Debbie has only been teaching for a couple of years. She didn’t pick up a camera until she was forty. Then her photo series documenting the ravages that motherhood had inflicted on her – from the physical toll on her body to the daily pile of Things Left on the Stairs – won a prize and went semi-viral and suddenly she’d found herself with an entirely new career.
The photo series was called A Mother’s Life.
“And then what happened?” she says.
“Then he disappeared down the other side and off across the fields. He might still be walking now.”
“Maybe he just went home.”
“The nearest town is at least ten miles away. In the other direction.”
“Did anybody else see him?”
“There’s nobody around at that time of day. Everyone’s at work”
“Except you.”
“Yes,” says Mathew. “Except me.”
Mathew and Debbie have been together for almost twenty years. They have three children and a mortgage and lots of other excuses. Debbie’s mother died a couple of years back. It looks like Mathew’s father might have dementia. And so on.
Mathew misses the intimacy as much as anything. Sometimes it feels like it’s only the memory of his beautiful, middle-aged wife, naked and star-fished across that hotel bed, that keeps him going at all.
“You’ve got to imagine there are others,” Debbie says.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what are the chances of that man being the only person to ever walk out of one of those offices like that, just when you happened to be there in the car park to witness it? There could be hundreds of them. It might be happening every day.”
“I suppose,” Mathew says. He doesn’t tell Debbie just how many car parks he’s been sitting in over the last few months, and for how long.
He wonders what it would take to make her excited by him again, if he should grow a beard or get some tattoos.
“You’d think there’d be fences to stop them,” Debbie says.
3.
Mathew does his best to keep himself busy.
He repaints the house, hangs new doors, installs a home network. When he explains to the kids how it works, they don’t even look up from their tablets. He remembers how they used to creep into his bed in the middle of the night when they were tiny, back when he meant something to them.
Every morning, he still gets into his car and heads out toward the bypass.
But as the rest of the commuter traffic filters off into the business parks and retail parks and light industrial estates that are strung out across the county, Mathew keeps going.
Until it’s just him, alone on the empty arterial road.
One day he drives for a hundred and fifty miles before realising that if he doesn’t turn around soon, he’ll probably never go home again.
He pictures himself driving off a cliff somewhere along the north coast of Scotland.
4.
Hoping to pick up a bit of work, Mathew meets his friend Kieran for lunch. They two of them worked together twenty-five years ago, back in the wild west days of the internet. Back when the future was new.
When he checks in at reception, he has to stare into the camera on the desk so they can put his picture on a temporary pass.
“Please don’t smile,” the receptionist tells him, without looking up from the screen.
“Vegan food prepared on site,” Kieran says. “Massages. Therapy. It’s like the nineteen-nineties all over again. And in return they’re all expected to work sixteen-hour days.”
They’re sitting in the canteen, staring at all the young people. Mathew calculates that his email address is older than at least seventy-five percent of the other diners.
“Can’t do that if you’ve got a family,” he says.
“Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?” says Kieran. “They’re assuming I’m about fifteen years younger than I am. That’s the only reason they haven’t got rid of me yet. Did you hear about Graham Mackintosh?”
“No.”
“Moved to Cambodia to marry a girl he met off a website. Got stabbed to death in a bar.”
“Jesus.”
“Be careful what you wish for, right?”
“How’s Claudia?” Mathew asks. Claudia is Kieran’s wife.
“She’s retraining to become a yoga teacher. She says she’s had a whole new lease of life since the kids left home.”
As Kieran is talking Mathew briefly meets the eyes of a young woman walking past their table with her tray of food. Her gaze slides off Mathew’s without even registering him.
“Do you ever feel like nobody sees you anymore?” he asks Kieran.
“Of course they don’t. We’re almost fifty. Why should they?”
Mathew tells Kieran about the man on the hill.
“Debbie thinks that there might be others,” he says.
“It makes sense,” Kieran agrees. “An epidemic of vanishing middle-aged men. It’s about time we got out of everyone else’s way.”
“I’m not sure I’m ready to disappear,” says Mathew.
“I’m not sure it’s your decision to make,” Kieran tells him.
At the end of their lunch Mathew hands his pass back in to reception and he and Kieran shake hands across the automatic gate.
“I’ll see what I can do but I’m hanging on by my fingernails as it is,” Kieran says.
That afternoon Mathew drives to the bowling alley in the new development by the motorway and spends two hours trying to bowl a perfect game.
He’s the only person there.
5.
Debbie and Mathew have dinner together at home. Just the two of them. The kids are all in bed or out somewhere. Debbie has ordered a takeaway, opened a bottle of wine. Mathew wonders if this might be a prelude to the two them having sex.
It isn’t.
Instead, Debbie tells Mathew that she’s starting a new photography project.
“I’ve been thinking about that man who disappeared,” she says. “And all the others.”
“Well, we don’t know that there are others,” Mathew says.
“I’m going to call it What Makes a Man. I haven’t decided if it needs a question mark yet.”
“What’s the subject?”
“You are,” says Debbie, taking the fancy-dress fireman’s uniform out of the bag.
All things considered, Mathew doesn’t really mind dressing up for the pictures that Debbie takes in the spare room that evening. It’s nice to be looked at, at least. To be seen.
He’s happy, if embarrassed, to pose as a fireman, and a policeman, and a doctor, and a flamenco dancer. He doesn’t even mind when, over the next few days, Debbie gets him to pretend to be an astronaut, and a cowboy, and a Mexican wrestler, and a chef.
He does have a problem with some of the more revealing outfits. He tries to draw the line at the skimpy swimming trunks and a couple of skin-tight superhero costumes, complete with capes.
“Why do they have to be so tight?” Mathew asks, pulling the grey nylon batman outfit down over his belly.
“It’s a metaphor,” says Debbie.
“It’s humiliating,” says Mathew.
“Ah, come on,” Debbie says, “you look great.”
6.
Mathew can’t stop thinking about the man who disappeared. He wonders if he was fired, or passed over for a promotion, or turned down for a job. He wonders if he has a family, and how he would have explained what had happened, and what he’d done, to them.
He wonders where he went.
Mathew drives back to the business park. It’s late morning, and he sits in the car trying to work out what he should do.
Everything looks the same as it did before.
Eventually he gets out of the car and follows the path the man took, past the glass office buildings and up the hill that marks the boundary of the park.
From up there Mathew has a view of the whole area.
He wonders what it would be like to work on the algorithms that specify the layout of all these parks, what the parameters must be. Installation cost per metre. Upkeep and depreciation. Aesthetic value. And so on.
These days, he figures, the algorithms are probably smart enough to write themselves, without help from people like him.
A security guard comes out of one of the buildings, and waves at Mathew to come down. He waits at the bottom of the hill until Mathew joins him.
“I was just checking to see if there was a fence,” Mathew says. “I don’t work here.”
The security guard narrows his eyes.
“I saw a man walk out of the park that way the other day,” Mathew explains. “I think he might have been made redundant.”
“There’s nothing out there,” the security guard says. “Just fields.”
“Exactly. The nearest town’s ten miles away. In the other direction.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” the security guard says. He’s trying to decide whether Mathew constitutes some kind of threat, and, if so, what to do about it.
“A person can’t just disappear, can they?” Mathew asks. “Not these days?”
The security guard ponders the question.
“They’ve developed invisibility cloaks now,” he says. “With tiny cameras and miniature projectors. So you can see right through a person.”
“If a tree falls in the forest…” Mathew says.
“Which forest?”
“Just a general, non-specific forest.”
“Right.”
They both look at the stand of trees at the edge of the park, as if expecting something to happen.
“Of course,” says the guard, “if a person really wanted to disappear, there might be organisations that could help them. Theoretically.”
“Theoretically?”
“Theoretically.”
“I suppose the security cameras would have recorded him,” Mathew says. “So, there’d be evidence. That he was here.”
“You seem very interested in the security cameras,” the security guard says.
“How do you get a job as a security guard?” Mathew asks, eager to change the subject.
“You need to get a license. Then you just apply.”
“Okay.”
“I can send you some information,” the security guard says, “if you want to give me your email address.”
7.
The model for one of Debbie’s evening classes falls off his bike and they can’t get a last-minute replacement, so Debbie asks Mathew to stand in.
“Come on,” she says, “It’s not like you’ve got anything better to do.”
As Mathew helps Debbie set up the lights, the students file in. A few of them glance at Mathew. They’re all women, from teenagers to a couple in their early eighties. Mathew smiles and gives a little, embarrassed wave.
He gets blank stares back.
Then he sees the sign that says Photographing the Male Nude, with Debbie Wallace.
Five minutes later he’s standing, naked and middle-aged, in front of a room full of women pointing cameras at him, as his wife talks them through the technical details.
She explains how to light a male model, wheeling the lamps around Mathew.
She describes how men’s bodies are traditionally lit differently to women’s, being usually more muscular and less round, and harder where women’s bodies tend to be soft.
“But not always,” she says.
She points out the details of the male anatomy – of Mathew’s anatomy – that might be interesting to focus on, from the shoulders to the chest, the hips to the buttocks, the throat to the belly to the groin.
Mathew’s groin.
“Think about what you respond to,” she says, “is it strength? Vulnerability? Mystery? Beauty?”
A couple of the woman laugh at that, which Mathew thinks is a bit harsh.
“Look at what his arms and legs are doing,” – putting a hand on Mathew’s shoulder as she passes – “does it project confidence or weakness? Or something else?”
One of the younger women raises her hand.
“Can we… could I ask him to do a different pose?”
“Of course,” Debbie tells her.
“Could he-,”
“You can ask him directly. He’s quite safe.”
Mathew smiles and tries to look friendly and unthreatening.
“Could you…,” the woman asks him, “do you think you could do something… more feminine? Sorry. Like with your arm. And if you throw your hip out a bit?”
“Like this?” Mathew asks, shifting his weight.
“Well, maybe not that feminine,” she says.
There are more laughs, and Mathew grins, feeling his face getting hot.
“Sorry. How about this?”
“Yes, that’s… interesting, actually,” the woman says, putting the camera up to her eye.
“Could he… would you flex your leg muscles?” someone else asks. “If you sort of… squat?”
Mathew does as he’s told, feeling the tension in his thighs. He wishes, again, that he exercised more.
“And then bend forward?”
As he tries to give the woman what she wants, he’s aware of the sight of his cock and balls dangling between his legs, and the pain in his back.
“Don’t ask me to hold this for too long,” he says, looking back over his shoulder.
That gets a laugh too. Mathew wonders if he might, actually, be good at this.
“Could you arch your back?”
“Can you close your eyes?”
“Would you put your hand on your stomach, maybe a bit lower?”
“What if you smiled?”
“Can you stand on tiptoes?”
“Could you, sort of, cup yourself?”
“Will you get on all fours?”
“Maybe if you opened your mouth a little bit more?”
“And closed your eyes again?”
As he listens to the beeping of the cameras and pushes himself into various shapes, Matthew realises that he’s enjoying himself more than he has done in months. He looks over at Debbie. She’s watching him curiously, as if she doesn’t recognise him.
That night when she comes out of the bathroom and finds Mathew sitting naked on the edge of their bed, Debbie tells him, “Don’t you dare move a muscle”. Then she drops her robe and climbs on top of him and fucks him better than either of them has been fucked in years.
8.
For the next few weeks Mathew stops thinking about the man who disappeared.
Instead, he becomes the regular model for Debbie’s photography classes, and the two of them embark on a middle-aged sexual adventure that surprises them both with its intensity, quantity, and the number of different locations involved.
They have sex in car parks, and in their back garden, and in the bandstand of the local park during a thunderstorm. They have sex in posh hotels, and in bed-and-breakfasts, and in cottages that they’ve rented for the weekend. They have sex in the kitchen, and in the shed, and on the local golf course. They even try to have sex in the ornamental gardens of a stately home.
“Come here and fuck me,” Debbie says, grabbing Matthew by the front of his jacket, or “come here and let me fuck you.”
And Matthew does his best to accommodate her, either way.
They have quick sex, and slow sex, and funny sex, and filthy sex. They have gentle, romantic sex, and, when they can both manage it, wild, desperate sex.
Sometimes she hurts him. He isn’t getting any younger. His knees and his back take the brunt of it, but there are bites on his shoulders and bruises on his hips too. Once, she accidentally pulls a handful of hair from his head.
He tries to give as good as he gets.
Eventually they both end up at the doctors with urinary tract infections.
9.
The photographs that Debbie takes of Mathew start to change, too. There are no more outfits. Now she’s only interested in photographing him in the nude. Most evenings she takes him into the spare room and directs him through a series of different poses – each designed, it seems, to highlight a different part of his body.
He has to guess at that part. She won’t let him see the actual pictures.
“It’s a connected project,” she says. “The individual pieces don’t make sense on their own. Wait until it’s finished.”
Mathew considers his naked body in the bathroom mirror, wondering what his wife suddenly finds so interesting about it.
His sagging chest.
His thinning hair.
His weird neck.
The same forgettable physique that millions of other middle-aged men are walking around with, he supposes, across the world. Temporarily taking up space. Hoping to be valued by someone else, at least for a while.
He puts his hand under his belly and wonders if he should start going to gym.
He figures it’s probably too late now.
10.
Eventually Mathew gets an email from the security company, headed This May Be of Interest. The email contains a series of timestamped images, apparently taken from security camera feeds.
There is the man who disappeared, standing in the car park on the day that Mathew saw him. And there he is possibly lighting a cigarette. And there he is standing on top of the hill.
There’s a picture of a ploughed field next; maybe a farmer keeping an eye on his crops or watching for fly-tippers. Mathew can make out the business park in the background, the stands of trees. And the lone figure, walking toward the road in the distance.
The last image seems to have come from a traffic camera out on the bypass. It shows a stretch of road with a bridge going over it. Mathew recognises the graffiti on the bridge. He used to drive under it every morning.
And silhouetted against the sky, walking across the bridge, out in the middle of nowhere, is a man.
The same man, or another one?
How many of them are there?
The picture was taken yesterday.
Mathew gets in his car and drives out to the bypass. It’s late in the day and the traffic is already started to build up. He has no idea what he expects to find. Certainly not the same man in the same place, twenty-four hours later.
And, as he drives under the bridge, he sees that it’s empty.
Still, he turns off at the next junction and drives over the bridge, just to make sure. And then back onto the bypass again.
He repeats the manoeuvre a further four times.
By now the homebound commuter traffic is filling the road. Feeling slightly ridiculous, Mathew decides to join the flow and head home again. He’s satisfied that he’s done what he can. He feels like he’s borne witness – even if he isn’t exactly sure to what.
Glancing in the rear view mirror, he almost doesn’t see the figure in the far distance, walking along the hard shoulder, headed in the opposite direction.
And by then it’s too late to stop.
11.
The night of Debbie’s show, Mathew puts on a suit that he hasn’t worn in five years. Debbie has bought herself a new outfit. She looks fantastic. Mathew is proud to be associated with The Artist.
The show is in the college atrium. It’s full of well-dressed people. There’s a bar, and canapés. Debbie introduces Mathew to some of her colleagues, and he says hello to Kieran and Claudia, neither of whom looks him in the eye.
Then Mathew downs his glass of champagne and braces himself to see the photographs, which are six feet high, printed in black and white, and grouped together under a title which may or may not be ironic.
And there he is, in all his glory.
Eyes.
Arse.
Forearms.
Calves.
Hands.
Belly.
Cock.
“Oh, I love the penis,” Mathew overhears someone saying.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” their companion agrees.
“So vulnerable!”
“So irrelevant!”
Mathew examines the pictures, trying to see what Debbie sees; what everyone else sees, or doesn’t see.
It’s all him, up there in extreme close-up.
His skin. His wrinkles. His muscle and bone. His thumb that sticks out at a funny angle. His weird ears. Some parts that he doesn’t recognise.
And in front of every picture, a group of people trying to work out what it means to them – and making their own judgements.
Too fat or too thin. Too old. Too hairy. The wrong shape. The wrong size. The wrong colour.
Mathew is public property now, and everyone is an entitled to an opinion.
“Oh, God…”
A couple of teenage girls are staring at the giant picture of Mathew’s cock in embarrassed horror. He can’t blame them.
The older guests seem to look at the pictures with more kindness, or at least more understanding of what it means to spend a lifetime in a body.
Debbie comes up behind Mathew and kisses his ear.
“Did you have some of the food?” she asks.
“I will,” he says. He’s still staring at the gigantic, wrinkled cock, thinking, is that really what it looks like to everyone else?
“Look at this,” says Debbie, showing Mathew her phone. Just a couple of hours after she put them online, the pictures of Mathew have already been shared over a hundred thousand times. Mathew recognizes the names of a couple of major celebrities who have shared Debbie’s original post.
“You’re famous,” she tells him. “Sort of.”
Mathew doesn’t know what to say.
Debbie looks at him, considering something.
“What?” he says.
“How would you feel,” is what she asks him, then, her champagne glass still half full, “about posing naked in a business park?”
– End –
