Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 52, No. 7 & 8, July/August 2007

I have had some time to consider the question, and I have decided that it cannot have been a coincidence that almost the very week I decided to do away with Petunia, I found The Appliance on the Internet. Perhaps it was my unconscious mind working away as I wandered down that broad Highway. There is indeed a highway where most people travel in perfect safety, but pay attention: Stray once off that broad and familiar thoroughfare and you will also find yourself on side roads and country roads less well trodden. And there are paths and tracks, some of them weed grown, some of them stinking and muddy, smelly and grim, where bad things live. It was down at the bottom of one of these noisome side paths, far away from the comforting and homely thrum of the highway traffic, that I came upon The Appliance.

In the rather clever moving illustration, a stylized person sat inside what amounted to a cage composed of wooden and metal beams. It was a complicated structure with many cross bracings and supporting struts that went from hither to yon. This stylized person (the gender was problematic), wearing a rather insipid smile, sporting gear, and little else, was sitting on a sliding seat, pedaling with its feet, turning a set of overhead hand cranks, which in turn lifted and lowered sets of weights in cages behind — and was into the bargain also having its stomach muscles massaged by a wide vibrating belt, operated by an electric motor, which also appeared to move the sliding seat back and forth. The first question that occurred to the casual observer was, which muscle groups was this person exercising? The answer appeared to be all of them and then some.

My first thought was, golly, here’s something that Petunia would give her triceps to have, then my handyman’s eye spotted that it could be made to serve my purpose as well as, or as opposed to, Petunia’s.

Because Petunia was, is, keen on exercise. No, that is an understatement. She is fanatical about exercise. All her free time is filled with exercise, either alone or with the monstrous regiments of large, leaping, terrifying muscular women who form her entourage. She has explained to me that, given her large frame, exercise is vital if she is to prevent her muscle turning to fat. So, since our marriage our basement has become a sort of gymnasium; we have her weight machines, her rowing machine, and all manner of other arcane contraptions, the purposes of which are a closed book to me. But then much about Petunia is a closed book to me. To the dispassionate observer, I suppose, we might appear as the classic mismatch.

When I first met Petunia, I was a bookkeeper with the water company, already in early middle age and unmarried. Petunia was a shelf-stacker in Sainsbury’s. The very first time I laid eyes on her, hefting with nonchalant ease a box of two hundred fifty Twix bars from a pallet she was in the process of unloading, I was fascinated. I reached past her to take a Mars bar from the upper shelf (a Mars a day helps me work, rest, and play, I find). As I did so, I smelled her animal scent. She seemed to be surrounded by a miasma of vibrant glowing perspiration. The Mars bars were on a shelf a little beyond my reach, I being of compact build. Petunia, who is a foot taller than I, reached lithely up and plucked a Mars bar from the shelf and handed it to me.

“There you are, Titch,” she said, “chew on that. You need building up, you do.” And in that moment I knew that I had to marry this woman. Why? many people have asked. Why did I, a slender, bookish, bespectacled retiring person, seek to bond myself with this Amazon? The heart has its reasons, I usually say, without adding that it was to avoid marrying my mother, which is what most men do, or so the authorities on the subject have it. Petunia was as far removed as anyone could be from my mother, that genteel, faded, wispy creature, with whom I had lived (to the secret and not so secret amusement of others), and who had faded and wisped away at the end, quitting this life, leaving no visible trace. I lived on in the family house, rattling around it like a pea in a drum. Petunia was far from anything I had previously known, I was lonely, I had never experienced a woman like her, and over the period of my admittedly timid courtship she seemed to develop a genuine fondness for me. And, against all expectations, we married.

And now I wanted to kill her. Why? I have read many murder stories involving spouse killing, and most of the time the husband is a perfect swine, has a mistress, and is locked in a clearly unsuitable union, which, usually for financial reasons, he is unable to dissolve, save by bloody means. I could claim none of that. I had no mistress, in fact Petunia is the only woman I have ever really possessed. I could divorce her, but that would have been cruel, she would suffer dreadfully. No, in truth I had begun to think of Petunia simply as an unendurable burden of which I must disencumber myself. Life had become intolerable after a mere two years in her proximity: the smell of sweatsuits and socks, legwarmers, and other arcane items of athletic apparel; the sheer noisiness of living with this lumping creature forever in movement; and above all, the greedy physical demands that she made on me.

“Come on, Titch,” she would say, throwing me onto the bed, which is another thing I hated, “a growing girl needs her greens.” Then she would rip off whatever clothing I happened to have on me. Those were the days when I wandered dazedly and blearily around the house, barely able to walk or speak and clothed in rags.