‘In the Custard’ by Rachel Mulholland

Jodie’s eczema always surprised him. When they were lying in bed after sex, he’d go to rub her arm and there it was, small scaly patches of dry skin. They weren’t particularly red – you could only really make them out in a certain light or at a certain angle. Except after her showers, when it would flare up, and she’d rub it herself then, slowly and deliberately, willing it with her eyes to die down. Or after certain foods, apparently; he didn’t believe in any of that though.

It was there now and he tried to avoid it, moving his fingertips up to the safety of her shoulders. He didn’t mind the eczema or anything, but he knew she got self-conscious about it. He didn’t want her to get upset. Her shoulder was pristine though, and so small; he walked his fingers down off the bone and cupped it with his palm.

‘I promise it’ll be fine,’ she said into the pillow.

‘Yeah, I know, I’m not worried.’ He squeezed the shoulder.

They were late and her mother had the front door open before they were even out of the car.

‘Lovely to meet you,’ he said, raising his arm to hug the woman. She leaned in but her arm was trapped. He could feel the fist that held the front of her cardigan together dig into his abdomen; he’d caught her off guard.

The house smelled like Sunday dinner and his stomach stood to attention, but it wasn’t ready yet so he got offered a beer. The younger sister joined them and a few minutes later, the father appeared. Mr Broderick shook his hand and then reached for the remote control to change the channel almost in the same movement.

Jodie stood by the window looking out at the garden. ‘There’s not much light left. We should shoot a few arrows now before it goes.’ Everyone agreed. He found a beermat to leave his bottle on, pressing the glass into the wood a little too hard. She’d promised him he wouldn’t have to.

They all filed out through the house and into the garage where the family’s archery gear took up an entire corner. He hung back and watched as Jodie started assembling her bow. It was all in pieces and he couldn’t tell which part was which but with some quick, fluid movements, fibreglass met metal and it started to take shape. Last of all, she attached the string and then double checked briefly that all was correct. Next to her, Mr Broderick was going through the same motions; his bow looked heavier though.

‘Will you be warm enough?’ Jodie asked him. She was pulling on an old Puffa jacket that had been hanging on a chair.

‘Yes.’ He was sweating.

Out in the garden, he was brought up close to the target.

‘You have to get the feel of it first,’ Mr Broderick said. ‘And we don’t want you shooting any sheep.’

‘I’ll shoot a few to show him.’ Jodie waved her hand for them to stand further back. He was half watching her, half scanning the boundary of the garden – no farm animals to be seen he concluded and was glad then he hadn’t had time to react.

Jodie was so close to the target that she couldn’t miss.

‘Nice grouping,’ her father called out.

With each shot her face folded up in focused concentration and he didn’t know if he’d ever seen her like that before. When she finished she beckoned for him to join her and proceeded in showing him how to place his feet, how to turn to face the target, how to set up the arrow on the rest and where to put his fingers when pulling back. He thought, yeah, that looks easy, and then did everything wrong.

‘No, no, like this.’ She moved his shoulders and nudged him in the middle of the back with her knuckle. ‘You’re pulling from here.’ He didn’t really understand but tried to do as he was told. He hit the butt but not the target face.

His left arm began to ache even though her bow was light. There were three arrows left; he had to get one in the yellow.

‘Don’t move your feet. Keep everything exactly the same.’ Mr Broderick’s voice came from behind his shoulder. He thought of the book Jodie had been reading. A slim black-covered volume called The Art of Repetition. She was finished it now but it was still on her bedside locker, like a talisman. Archery was much more than a sport, she had told him.

*

‘How did you do?’ Mrs Broderick asked.

‘Well he didn’t kill any sheep,’ Mr Broderick answered for him.

‘He did well,’ Jodie answered for him.

‘I didn’t get the yellow,’ he answered for himself eventually and it felt strange to be expressing disappointment to someone he had only met that day.

He was sore about it but too hungry to think, and the promised food finally arrived and hit his stomach, and he couldn’t have cared much about anything else until he cleared his plate. Then they had more beers and he forgot about the coloured circles altogether, except for the small tiredness in his left forearm when he lifted the bottle. Instead, he thought of Jodie and how quickly everything had happened between them and admitted to himself now that it was done, that he had, after all, been a bit nervous about meeting her family.

It was the middle of the following month when Jodie brought him out to her parents’ house again. They didn’t mention anything about archery but he sort of presumed it would just happen and he was secretly looking forward to it. He didn’t share his enthusiasm with her though, because he didn’t want to make a big deal of it.

But when they got there, Jodie just flopped onto the sofa beside her sister and didn’t get up again. He spent ten minutes perched on the edge of the armchair, in anonymous expectation. When she kicked off her shoes and let her head fall onto Laura’s shoulder, he knew it wouldn’t be happening.

That night when they were back in his house, he asked her about it. He had been worried for the past week and he thought that this attitude at her parents’ had something to do with it. Maybe it was nothing serious. Maybe she just wanted to keep the archery for herself. Was that it? She had removed the book from her locker not long after their first visit. Things were adding up in his mind.

‘I didn’t think you were that into it,’ she told him, shrugging. ‘It was just something for you to try once.’

‘I thought I’d get another chance is all.’ He shrugged in return. He knew he was being sulky now and that this would irritate her. Then she would sulk. And he would sulk some more – at her sulking at his sulking. They could lose entire evenings like this. ‘We might be too alike,’ she had confided in him once. ‘Two sides of the one coin is good. But two halves of the one side of the one coin? If we make it work, it could be better than anything though.’ This last bit had not reassured him.

That night they did not have sex, but fell asleep in their clothes on top of the duvet. The next morning, he woke up with his face to her hip in jeans. She was sitting up, passing the time on her phone, waiting for him. He pushed his nose into the side of her thigh and slipped his hand between her legs. The phone disappeared somewhere then and she slid down to meet him. He worried about his breath at first but then remembered she hadn’t brushed her teeth either.

The summer came and they began to sweat under their office clothes. They spent every night together now and he gave her a lift to work each morning even though it was on the other side of town. She couldn’t stop thanking him at first, then got used to it and took it for granted.

They both hated their jobs but all the alternatives were too daunting. At least they had money. One evening she announced she was going to buy a new bow and showed him a few options on the archery website.

‘What are you going to do with your old one?’ She shrugged. ‘Laura might use it.’

‘I’d buy it off you.’

‘Why?’

‘To use.’

‘You’ve nowhere to shoot.’

‘I’ll figure something out.’

‘You’d need everything else as well. There’s a lot of equipment involved.’ ‘Yeah, I’ll figure it out.’ He hadn’t planned any of this but he knew he had to follow through with it now. He couldn’t sleep that night and couldn’t remember the last time he’d stayed awake over something.

It was another two weeks before her new bow arrived. The metallic red handle shone in the sunlight when she held it up; the limbs were black and white. It was heavier than her old bow; she had built up strength for it.

‘I got you this,’ she said, taking another package from behind the box and presenting it to him with a small smile. When he opened it, he saw that it was a quiver he’d admired on the archery website. It was the most encouragement he’d ever received from her. ‘Thank you,’ he said, with genuine emotion.

He’d started reading The Art of Repetition and another one called Zen in the Art of Archery, but he still hadn’t figured out exactly where he was going to shoot. Jodie’s family belonged to a club that met up every Saturday morning in a community hall. They ran beginners’ courses but the next one wasn’t starting until the autumn.

‘I’m too terrified to shoot in my garden. It’s too dangerous.’

‘What about indoors?’ Jodie was sprawled beside him on the sofa, her legs crossing his lap.

‘There’s no space.’

‘If you open the doors there is.’

‘What doors? What do you mean?’

‘If you open that door’ – she pointed to the door leading out to the hall – ‘and that door.’ She turned to the one facing it, the one that led to the utility room. ‘You could have the whole length of the house. I don’t know what the distance would be, but it would definitely be enough.’

‘Are you mad? What if I shot the doorframe, or the wall? Or John, for Christ’s sake?’

‘You’d have to come to an agreement with John, that is true.’ ‘I don’t think so.’

In the end, he shot indoors. John, his housemate who was rarely there anyway, agreed to only enter the house by the front door. He seemed bemused by the whole thing and didn’t mind the target propped up on top of the washing machine. ‘Just don’t shoot the softener,’ he’d asked, shaking his head.

It had felt strange at first to be so confined, but once he’d got used to it, he had to admit that it didn’t matter. He stood by the front door, the stairs to his right, and faced down the hall, through the kitchen, and into the utility room.

At first he had been overly conscious of everything around him, everything that formed ‘the tunnel’. There was a pinewood banister to his right, the first doorframe, bits of the kitchen units peeking into his line of vision and then the second doorframe and the reflective circle of the washing machine. But after a few shoots, these things melted back and all he could see was the target.

‘You’ll be better than me if you keep at it like this,’ Jodie had remarked one day. He still couldn’t tell if she was pleased by his new hobby. He still sometimes suspected that she wished it had remained ‘her thing’. He found it strange that she never shot at his house. And she stored her new bow at her parents’, where she would go sometimes without telling him.

When autumn came and he finally started the beginner course, he realized that he had developed some bad habits. He argued that he still managed to achieve the objective – his arrows landed pretty well, much better than the other beginners. But the coach was adamant – in the long run, these bad habits would hold him back. He had to get rid of them.

‘Why didn’t you tell me I was doing it wrong?’ he asked Jodie after the class.

‘It seemed fine to me.’

He couldn’t have been more pissed off. That evening when he went to shoot at home he knew, before he had even taken one shot, that it was going to be terrible. He was suddenly conscious of every part of his body, each angle and tension and breath. It didn’t help that he was still in a bad mood. His mind sat on the arrow and sent it into the wall.

For the rest of the week he didn’t pick up the bow again and the following Saturday he went to class but without the confidence and enthusiasm that he had built up all summer. He knew he was being petulant but he couldn’t help it. Jodie ignored the whole situation; he wondered if she was secretly glad.

His shooting for the first hour was mostly average. He was still ahead of the other beginners but they were learning fast and he knew his advantage would soon run out. He started to get annoyed at their lack of manners then – how they didn’t wait their turn or how they encroached on his space when they had to shoot beside him. One girl was all elbows and he blamed her for every shot he missed.

Jodie and her parents were at the other end of the hall. Every so often he’d look down. He knew he could shoot that well too, even though their targets were like small dinner plates and his was the size of a life ring. In the second hour, he pretended that his target was smaller than it was and his shooting went from average to poor.

*

‘I think we should move in together,’ Jodie announced into her dinner one evening. They were out celebrating a small promotion he had got in work. He had surprised himself lately by doing well in the role despite not liking it.

She kept her eyes on the chicken she was cutting up and he pretended that his mouth was fuller than it was. He made loud chewing noises, then swallowed and coughed. A waiter paused by their table to make sure everything was in order.

‘It would be lovely, wouldn’t it?’ he said, as though talking about something that would never happen. It would be lovely the way winning the lottery would be lovely.

Jodie looked up from her chicken and squinted at him for a moment. ‘There’s no rush.’ She shrugged and returned to her food. He thought she’d fight him on it.

The following week at archery most of the better shooters were absent, attending a competition up north somewhere. The coach that had stayed behind had more time to spare for the beginners and announced that they would each be getting a brief one-to-one at some point that morning.

When his turn came he didn’t feel nervous. There was a thrill to have someone properly watching him and only him. And with the pressure, he shot better. The coach gave him some words of encouragement. It was the same coach that had picked his technique apart on the first day. His limbs tingled and by the second hour he was shooting better than he ever had before. Even the girl with the elbows seemed to sense the shift and gave him more space.

‘It’s a pity your parents weren’t here to see,’ he said to Jodie as they packed their gear into the car. ‘I got three in the custard!’

‘No better feeling.’ Jodie had bought a new bag for her bow. She flicked a speck of dirt off the front of it before shutting the boot and giving him a small smile. When they were in the car she checked her phone for messages. ‘Competition going well,’ she said in her reading voice. ‘Mum into next round.’

‘Fantastic,’ he said with a small nodding motion to show he meant it. It was so much easier to be happy for their good shooting now. The whole thing made him feel like an all-round better person.

*

‘We should look for somewhere with a long garden.’

Jodie blinked at him and tilted her head to one side. ‘You mean together?’

It had only been a few weeks since she’d first mentioned it but from her frown you would think she had forgotten or that the suggestion had never happened.

‘Isn’t that the plan?’

‘We don’t have a plan. I thought ...’

‘I mean, you’d want to shoot too, right?’

‘I go to my parents.’

‘But if you could do it from home, so much the better.’

‘I guess.’

‘A long garden, not backing onto anything. Or with a high wall. That would be ideal.’

‘Yeah, it’d be lovely,’ she said. Like the lottery, he thought. She didn’t pick up her end of the conversation then and went back to what she was doing on the computer, shoulders hunched up as she typed. He stayed staring at her for a minute and then got up and left.

The next day at work he didn’t get any messages from her like he normally would. But because they hadn’t technically had a fight, he didn’t want to acknowledge the silence. He didn’t want to ask her if everything was okay. Instead he found some article that he knew she’d find amusing and sent the link to her. She replied with a smiley face and said something about having a horribly busy day and he was happy with that. He was happy he hadn’t asked.

‘I heard you’re shooting well,’ Mrs Broderick said to him from behind her wine glass.

‘I heard you’re winning medals.’ He smiled broadly back to her.

‘Oh, that doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Don’t start, Mum.’

‘It’s true. There were barely enough women in my category to fill the podium. It was like a medal for taking part.’ She rolled her eyes at him.

‘I’m sure you deserved it,’ he said diplomatically.

‘Jodie here is the one who should be going to competitions. More girls her age there.’

‘Yeah, you should,’ he said turning to Jodie, wondering why they had never had the conversation, wondering if he should have suggested it to her before. She made a face of distaste.

‘Why not?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think it should be about competition. Not for me anyway.’ She looked at him quizzically and he felt like this was one of her opinions that he perhaps should have known. When Mrs Broderick picked up her glass and left them to it, he knew that that was probably the case.

‘I didn’t know you felt that way.’ He decided to go for the full honest approach.

‘I see that.’

‘How would you feel if I entered a competition?’

‘Entirely your business.’

‘You wouldn’t look down on me for it?’

‘What? No.’ She looked genuinely confused. ‘Archery is a sport to you. In fact, I think you should enter a competition. You’d really enjoy it.’

He felt offended, even though it was obvious that she didn’t mean to offend. Her eyes had glazed over slightly in the way that happened sometimes that made him feel like she wasn’t really sitting right next to him. ‘So archery isn’t a sport to you?’

‘No.’

‘What is it then? A way of life?’

‘Don’t mock me.’

‘I’m not.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Fine.’

‘I knew this would happen.’

‘What would happen?’

After that, they kept fighting and falling out. A month later they broke up and spent two weeks apart. During those two weeks he didn’t shoot at all. He would assemble the bow, put on the quiver and the arm guard and stand by his front door facing down the hall. But as soon as he looked at the yellow, he lost all desire to even try.

At the end of the two weeks he sent her a message to say he wanted them to get back together and to his surprise she agreed. On their first date as a reconciled couple, she confessed that she hadn’t been able to shoot either. He joked that they were just using each other to get back to their archery and she joked back that it wouldn’t be the worst reason to save a relationship.

They moved in together not long after. The new house was small, tucked into the corner of an old housing estate, and they spent the weekends making improvements. Her parents donated an old archery butt and her father made a stand for it. They ordered some fresh target faces online – he was on to the smaller ones now too so they wrote their names on them to better keep track. He had to resist the urge to take score or keep any kind of record of his progress against her.

She changed her diet that year and her eczema all but disappeared. He couldn’t believe it. He kept checking the bathroom cabinets for secret creams or pills, convinced there must be something else to it. He never did find any.

From issue #9: autumn/winter 2019

About the Author
Rachel Mulholland’s work has previously been published in magazines such as The Bohemyth, The Pickled Body and most recently, The Stinging Fly. She is currently working on her first collection of short stories and lives in Dundalk, Co. Louth.