It isn’t a razor for shaving your legs. It doesn’t have a plastic coating, a moisturizing strip. It is a straight, a cut-­throat, an implement Jake has barely used. A fad, an Internet purchase abandoned almost at once.

It has a wooden handle, curved and smooth as a boat. A shimmering, five-­inch blade. Eco-­friendly, he told me. There were videos, he said, where men shaved successfully with it, day after day, flicking the blade in the light.

I remembered the way he’d practised with it one autumn afternoon, how we’d both winced as he cut his skin once, and again, the blood travelling in single drops, individuals landing in the sink.

•

He agreed to it as soon as he came home, his whole body defeated.

One last time. The third: the one that should make all the difference.

Do your worst, Lu. A slow, sliding movement of his mouth, the imitation of a smile. He looked at the ground, at his own fingers. He didn’t look at me.

I could still smell beer on his breath, couldn’t stop seeing Vanessa’s back, the piece of lettuce on her fork. Other details had emerged slowly, over the hours.

As I bought the disinfectant, I’d seen an expression – Vanessa’s – the same one I’d seen at the Christmas party, something between pity and a sneer.

As I’d put the boys to bed, I could see her skirt, under the table. Leather, I thought. And her boots: patent, knee-­high, a stout heel.

Her legs crossed. The architectural outline of her neck, the groove of her bra strap.

Her feet: were they tangled with Jake’s? However hard I tried, I couldn’t see.

•

It was Jake’s idea to do it on his thigh. A flickering unreality, as he took off his trousers, pulled up the leg of his boxers.

I felt the power I had always witnessed in reverse: doctors, nurses, midwives, hovering over my body. Free to do as they wanted. The seconds before they made their move, a masked intimacy, a blurred lack of recognition.

I always closed my eyes, as Jake does. I never wanted to see.

•

The blade presses harder. But. Something has gone wrong; instead of a drop, it is a swell. It is a wall, a wave, a tide. My fault.

Instead of silence, there is screaming, coming from neither and both of us, surrounding our heads, his body, my hands, floating out of the window, towards the sun.

34

34

At first, I tried to stem the bleeding myself. I pressed wads of toilet paper against the cut, but the blood was coming too fast. Jake was calling out, looking down, telling me to try something, then something else.

How hard did you press? he said at one moment, his eyes wide and slightly unsteady, as though they might roll back in his head.