“How does one tell a story like this? One that is so full of love and excitement, connection, without featuring all the bad parts.
Or, is that the game we’re supposed to play?”
– Unknown
Almost every morning for a whole year, Sadie Ramirez would sit at the kitchen table and eat breakfast by herself. Usually the night before, she would buy all the provisions, and roughly two hours before she went to bed she’d set about the peaceful task of getting everything prepped and ready for the big feast, assembling first the delicious ingredients – the onions, the chives, the lettuce, and bacon – into one neat and tidy pile on her countertop.
“Now.” she said, when all was done, wiping her hands on a cloth. “That looks good. This will hit all the spots I need.”
After this, as a way to commence her nighttime ritual, she would make her way into the bathroom and fill up the tub. Sadie loved her baths, for as long as she could remember. Especially in the evenings. Real hot ones. Long. With loads of water, candles and plenty of aromatic bubbles.
“Ah.” she said, lowering her tight naked body into the tub. “This is the life I wish I had all the time.”
Getting into the bath, as good and all as it was, could frequently be the most difficult part of the evening for Sadie. Typically, it took around twenty five minutes for her to run a good bath for herself and most of the time, this part was easy. The hard part would come later, surely, when deciphering the actual temperature of the water.
This was like a tic.
Something she just had to keep perpetually satisfied. An odd indulgence, developed during lockdown, where the water in the tub had to always be right on the precipice of what her body could naturally handle. In her mind, if it didn’t sting, then it wasn’t worth it. And each night she would test herself. Almost to death. Just to see how far she could push her frail body into the deep heat before it broke.
“Fuck me.” she said, settling herself into the water. “That’s hot.”
Sadie would often apply this practice to cold water too. Ice baths. Plunges. Anything extreme. Just to prove something to herself. That she could follow one simple thing. A consistent way of life. A routine. One that would show you who you really were. Through simple sufferings, and basic examinations of mind and will.
Lying there in the bath, calm and adjusted, with the tops of her toes peeping out through the foam, Sadie quickly realised something – that the scars on her arm had been far less agitated by the heat than they were ever by the cold. The discovery stopped her in her tracks a little – the fact that she only became aware of this now.
“But the cold.” she said. “From what I’ve read in magazines, is far more beneficial to a person’s health than the heat could ever be. So, what do I do?”
Scraping a razor down her leg, Sadie made a deal with herself right then and there, to do more cold therapy. This was for her mind more than anything else. Only because she had to get HIM out of her head, fast and so far, nothing was fucking working.
“What about religion?” her mother asked one afternoon at lunch.
“What about religion?” said Sadie, forking anchovies off of her pizza and onto the path.
“Have you ever thought about turning to our lord for guidance?”
Sadie laughed at the notion.
“God is nothing.” she said. “Only a made up character there to scare people. To stop kids from killing each other. And if you’ve seen the news lately mum, you’ll see all the good God is doing.”
“Grim?”
“More than that. Blatant lies.”
Sadie was still tipping anchovies onto the street for the birds long after her mum had finished eating. Mum Jane was sat there now with a clean plate in front of her. Quiet for the most part. Calmly exuding that ‘special aura’ women of that age tend to exude when they are being a little overindulgent so early in the day. It turned out the bottomless ‘picky bit’ charcuterie board and the constant flow of white wine had draped a slight arrogance over her. Like she had, just now, become a newly appointed Queen or something.
“The luxury of something different.” she thought, finishing her third glass. “To be able to tip a crisp Chardonnay down my gullet and have such service available where I can promptly ask for a fresh one at any time, is a version of Nirvana I don’t experience often. Not forgetting this perfect little sun trap here, only adding to the perfection of it all. I’m just sorry.” she said. “That I didn’t bring my glasses.”
“Can I ask you a question, mum?”
“Of course, luv.”
Folding a slice and bringing it to her mouth, Sadie asked “What is your fascination with religion?”
“What’s my fascination?”
Sadie nodded, her mouth full of lukewarm food.
“Well.” said mother Jane. “I wouldn’t call it a fascination. More like faith.”
Sadie swallowed her food and nodded a few times while dabbing a white napkin on her mouth.
“Faith?” she said. “Even though he took a husband from you and a father from me?”
Mother Jane laughed at Sadie’s assertion and said – “Oh Sadie.” After that, she motioned to the waiter for another glass of wine, gesturing her hands in such a way that suggested she wanted a much ‘Larger’ glass this time around. “And keep them coming.” she said, doing the tumbling sign with her two index fingers. “Looks like we might be here for a while.”
The handsome Italian waiter nodded once, saying “Certainly ma’am” – and disappeared back into the restaurant, like a ballerina, with a skip in his step and a circular black tray tucked neatly under his arm.
Back in the bath, Sadie stared endlessly at the white tiled ceiling like a junkie. As of late, she had hated that clinical colour scheme but when it was captured under the soft light of a good candle it wasn’t too bad. For her, that was usually when the place came alive. As she herself would say, it wasn’t so much about peace and calm as it was about the anger. And finding the anger. And redirecting it somehow. To wherever she could. So it got the hell out of her bones. That’s why I stay in here so long. It’s like therapy.”
“He was not a bad man.” she said to herself again and again. “There’s good and evil in us all right? He was just, different sometimes.”
During these musings, whenever the water dipped too cold (and it often did), as a nifty trick, Sadie could, using only her feet, go about all that intricate business of letting fresh hot water in while draining out some of the cold stuff. Like some kind of foot symphony. Or the most perfectly harmonised duet you’ve ever seen. She would say “Water behaves differently after a while. Once you’ve been stewing in it. When it’s full of dirt and grease. After that, it does nobody any favours. Not when it’s full of the body’s dirtier offerings. This,” she would say. “is why I love the almost boiling heat. Not because of its capacity to soothe, but rather its capacity to kill.”
“You bring up very unnecessary things to me Sadie.” said Jane. “Don’t forget I am your mother.”
“I know you are my mother.”
“Then stop treating me like I’m one of your friends.”
Mother Jane finished the remainder of her wine, set it down and asked for more. At this point, night had started to creep in. The street was getting busy. People, more people, and children, were slowly but surely starting to appear out of the walls. From thin air. Like some kind of dream.
“Shit.” said Sadie, dipping her last piece of crust into garlic sauce and eating it. “I forgot today was Saturday.”
Mother Jane tried to laugh at this but her eyes were crossways now in a very noticeable way.
“You brought me here.” she said. “Because it was a Saturday. Jesus girl, what’s the matter with you?”
Sadie slammed her fist on the table, rattling everything.
“I brought you here so you could talk to me about certain things.” she said. “But look at you now. You are useless to me drunk.”
“So what if I am drunk.” said the mother. “Can’t a woman of my age have a good time for herself. I’m not going to be around for ever you know.”
“Pathetic.”
Sadie rolled her eyes at her mother and threw her final bite of pizza crust onto the ground for the pigeons who, surprisingly enough, had refused all earlier offerings of anchovies. Because of this, a smell had grown in the air. It was one of those undeniable honks that would draw in flies and make your skin itch. A thing so offensive it quickly attracted the attention of some staff along with a few managers.
Someone would have to clean it up.
“I brought you here for a nice lunch and a chat.” Sadie said to her drunk mum. “Now I have to drive you all the way back home. To your home. And then drive all the way back to my home. All this effort, and still you screwed me. Just like you screwed him. Typical narc.”
Sadie was speaking at an aggressive volume now, almost shouting, and the people had started to notice. Like a pit-bull, she was up out of her chair, speaking directly into her mother’s face and in that moment, it suddenly dawned on her that she hadn’t clenched her teeth this hard in a long time.
September 1991
“Daddy.” Sadie asked, looking out the carriage window. “How many minutes are in a year?”
Daddy laughed faintly at the child’s question, just the basic innocence of it. In his eyes, it wasn’t a ridiculous thing to be curious about. Far from it. He just didn’t have an answer. Thumbing through the pages of his newspaper, he eventually said “Oh lots of minutes my dear. There are lots and lots of minutes in a year, and guess what?”
“What?”
“Each one of those minutes is a precious thing. More precious than any diamond or gem stone you could ever find. So you better do all you can to look after them. Promise?”
Sadie smiled at her father and nodded.
“Yes, Dad.” she said. “I promise.”
After this, when Sadie’s father sat back in the chair and ruffled the newspaper on his lap, the national headline on the very front page came into view. There it was, in thick black ink, staring back at her, and much to her surprise, she was able to read it all without much effort. It said: 5,000 year Old Ice Man Found In The Austrian Mountains. His Name Is Ötzi.
This was an amazing discovery for Sadie, just to be able to read such a thing. The fact that a 5,000 year old man had been found, alive and well, on the side of a mountain in a country she had never really heard about before. “How bloody cool is that? Hey Dad.” she said, bursting with excitement. “Look at this.”
Her father quickly flipped the paper down and when he saw what she was pointing to all he said was “Oh yeah. Right. Very good.”
After that, he smiled once into the air before promptly going back to whatever he was reading. Sitting there now across from his only daughter, father would take deep aggressive breaths in through his nose almost as a way of deterring the girl from interrupting him again. With not much else to do Sadie dropped her head onto the table, further killing the excitement. She’d sit in silence after that, hoping that maybe one day Ötzi (The 5,000 year old man) would come up in conversation again.
During these all too frequent weekends away, the sunshine seldom mattered to Sadie. All the girl ever cared about, really, was the condition of the hotel. Or better yet, the hotel room. “Is it nice?” she’d be asking. “Is it clean? Does it have a comfy bed, a big deep bath, room service and a beautifully ergonomic remote control for the television? You know, for my own sake.”
“Dad got loud sometimes.” she’d say. “Especially when he was in the thick of it next-door. Grunting. Heaving. Sweating. Cursing. Sometimes, with all that fuss, I could hardly hear anything that was happening on my cartoons. What a nightmare. In those situations, the plot would be totally lost on me. I’d have to sit there on my own, negotiating volume and blocking out sounds, just to see if I could make out what they were actually fucking saying. And over time, yeah, I suppose I got pretty damn good at it. Almost elite I would say. Who knew you could lip read live-animations but trust me, if you really have to do it, like I did – you absolutely can.”
The early 90’s, for Sadie, was a grim but solid education achieved through a series of dark turns and hard knocks. Or as she likes to call it, her “Perpetual Punishment’. Why?
“Because it schooled the shit out’a me. That’s why. And the lesson I learned in the end was to stop being so damn naive. So fucking stupid. I had to absorb these things early for, ya know, survival purposes. Jesus Christ, I didn’t think I’d get that attached to all that free, delicious food and cozy hotel linen. It was the best. Not to mention the big fluffy pillows. Yeah,” she said. “they slapped too. Along with all the complimentary robes and the sandals and the super deep bath-tubs if you were lucky enough to get them. I always was. As far as he was concerned, I could have anything I wanted on these trips. So long as it pacified me and kept me out of his trouble.”
But, bribes only go so far.
“Funny isn’t it? That through situations like this, I’d grow to love and hate myself in equal measure. My parents thought I was just young enough to not understand a single thing.
And the shock they got when they realised I knew everything. The whole thing sharpened me to a degree. And now, all of a sudden, as I sit here almost ready for my bed, I can finally understand the feelings Peter Parker felt when he was bitten by that spider.
Yeah, if only he was a real person. I think I’d love him.
And I think he’d like me too.
Honestly, I bet he’d talk to me for hours on end if he wasn’t off doing all that Spidermany stuff. And if that doesn’t work out, maybe in 5,000 years time, someone else will come along and find me.
Battered and broken.
Utterly nameless.
In a ditch someplace not far from here.
That way, I might be able to start all over again, just like my friend Ötzi.”
That night, Sadie went to bed with a full stomach, knowing full well as she closed her eyes that she would have to go through it all again tomorrow.
