I always thought that if I was cheated on, if the man I loved slept with someone else behind my back, I would lose the plot. I would shout and scream and throw him out. I would then hurl his stuff out the window, still screaming abuse, still making my feelings known, and then, when he was removed from the house, I would call a divorce lawyer. I never thought that it would happen with Scott, of course, but it’s one of those things that crosses your mind; that you’d talk about – like you’d imagine what you’d do if you won the lottery even though you don’t buy tickets. It’s a hypothetical situation that wouldn’t ever happen, but if it did you’re pretty sure, knowing your own personality, how you would respond.
So why am I sitting here, a chain of knots linking my chest and my stomach, my body frozen in horror, my mouth filling and refilling with bile, my mind racing and suspended at the same time?
‘I didn’t ever want you to find out,’ Scott is saying to my silence. I have been unable to speak since he started to because every word has been slicing me apart; dismantling everything I thought about us, about our lives, about him, about me.
‘Do you love her?’ My voice has asked this all on its own. I don’t remember instructing it to, it just did it.
‘No. God, no. It was a horrible, horrible mistake. Especially with what’s happened in the past few days. I’ve been hoping that she’ll go to the police and tell the truth. That’s why I didn’t get a solicitor. I know she’s not going to let it go that far. She’ll tell the truth and all this will go away. I really didn’t want you to find out like this.’
‘How many times did you make love to her?’ I ask.
‘It wasn’t lovemaking, it was … It was stupidity. A hideous mistake.’
‘How many times did this hideous mistake happen?’ My lips feel odd, like they’re not attached to my body; numb and cold.
‘You don’t want to know that,’ he says.
‘I do. How many times?’
‘Tami, believe me, you don’t want to know.’
‘Stop telling me what I do and don’t want to know. How many times?’
‘I don’t remember,’ he replies.
‘When was the first time?’
He shrugs, looks away. ‘I really don’t remember, Tami.’
‘You don’t remember the first time you slept with the woman who you’ve thrown your marriage away for, but you’ve never once forgotten your boss’s daughter’s birthday? Don’t give me that. When was the first time?’
‘Eighteen months ago,’ he replies. More than a year. More than a year ago he started to lie to me. He started to deceive me. And I’m sure he remembers how many times, too. Even if it was once a month, it would have been at least eighteen times. Eighteen times. And I know what Scott is like, what anyone is like when they start something new, it wouldn’t have been once a month. It would have been more. It would have been as many times as possible.
‘Where was the first time?’ I ask. I need to get the picture right in my head. I need to fix it there so I can understand all this. Because until I hear it, I don’t think I’ll really believe it. I don’t think I’ll be able to frame this as something that’s really possible.
He stares at the fireplace in response to my question. He’d wanted that fireplace. I’d thought it was too big and imposing, the marble too wishy-washy amongst the cream walls, beige carpet and tan leather sofas. I’d wanted a solid black one, one that would stand out, make a statement in this otherwise bland room. But no, Scott had insisted. ‘I know best,’ he’d said. ‘It’s going to look fantastic.’ And it hadn’t. It’d looked bland. I’d never said that. I’d never say that. I have a sudden urge to tell him that now. To put him in his place. To let him know that he wasn’t always right. In fact, sometimes he could be downright wrong.
‘Where?’ I ask him. I have a horrible creeping suspicion that it was here. In our bed. I have a deep, seasick-type fear that the first time he cheated on me he used my sheets, my pillows, my home. She probably showered in my shower afterwards, as well. Dried herself on my towels. Probably went through my belongings and had a laugh about my assortment of dull, ordinary black knickers. My range of dull, ordinary black bras. My average clothes. My run-of-the-mill hair products. If I was screwing someone’s husband, I would probably go through her things and laugh at her too. What would stop me when I’d already crossed such a huge line?
‘Where?’ I ask again. The feeling is coming back to my lips. Feeling is flowing through my body again, crashing and crashing through me in hot, foamy waves of anger.
He hangs his head, a puppy dog in need of some reassurance that he isn’t completely bad, he isn’t totally naughty.
‘Where?’ The word is forced out through gritted teeth and burning lips.
‘I don’t think you—’
‘Where. Just tell me where. Why is that so hard? You did it, so now tell me about it. Where, where, where, where?’
‘In her kitchen,’ he says loudly to drown me out. ‘Up against the sink. Over before it even started. Does that make you feel better? Is that what you wanted to hear?’
Colours are exploding behind my eyelids. That truck has hit me again. The hole where my heart should be has exploded again. My body is numb and on fire at the same time. I cannot get air into my lungs. I cannot breathe in one smooth movement. Every breath is a short, forced gasp. I press my hand over my chest, I push the other hand over my stomach. I cannot breathe.
One year ago
‘Is Scott a good husband?’ Mirabelle asked me.
‘What an odd question.’
‘Not really. Just wondering if he is or not. I might ask him one day if he thinks you’re a good wife.’
‘Go right ahead. I have no worries that he’ll tell you I’m the best wife a man has ever had. Why wouldn’t he?’
‘But you can’t say the same thing about him as a husband?’
‘Of course I can,’ I replied. ‘He’s wonderful.’
She grinned at me. ‘You went all gooey when you said that.’
‘Well, I’m allowed. He’s, you know, he’s my man. He does that to me.’
‘I was married once,’ she said.
‘You? How come you’ve never mentioned that before, Mirabelle Kemini?’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘What went wrong?’
She stared off into the distance for a while, looking at where we’d just come from on our run. ‘Lots of things. But mainly it was my fault. I got married too young to the wrong person. I was bound not to stay, always chasing the impossible dream, me.’
‘Which is?’
‘Love, of course. What else is there in life that is worth chasing?’
‘And you didn’t love your husband?’
‘Oh, I loved him all right. Just not enough. Not in the right way. Especially when my impossible dream was out there somewhere.’
She stood upright, stretching, and as her running top rode upwards, it showed off her smooth, flat stomach and the diamond body bar inserted into the skin below her belly button.
‘Come on, we’ve got to get showered and on with the day. Have you finished your stretches yet?’
‘Did you cheat on your husband?’ I asked.
She stopped her final stretches and lowered her arms to look at me, a haunted look on her face. ‘I suppose I did, if I’m honest. But not necessarily in the way you mean. I do know I did some things I wasn’t proud of. And I need to come to terms with that. Which I will one day. I’m trying not to be the sort of person who would do what I did back then. I’m trying to be a better person.’
‘I think you’re a great person,’ I said.
‘Thanks, honey,’ she replied, tugging affectionately on one of my twists that had escaped my ponytail before securing it behind my ear. ‘You’re great too. I hope Scott knows how lucky he is to have you.’
Beep-beep-beep-beep!
My phone in my pocket makes me jump. My eyes go to the clock on the mantelpiece. Two-fifty. My ten-minute warn
ing, a reminder that I need to be on the way to pick up the girls from school in no more than ten minutes.
Scott has his hands in his hair, staring down at the carpet. I need this to be over. I need to rewind time and for him to have not told me, or further, for him not to have done it. I remember that first time we did it. He always called it making love. He always made it seem special, like he’d never do that with anyone else. He always said he didn’t want anyone else. Liar.
LIAR!
My legs felt like jelly when he first told me, my body seemed carved from stone, too, but now I am standing, I discover my body can support itself, my limbs can move.
‘I have to go and get the girls,’ I say. I have to put this all in a box because I cannot handle this right now. If I think it through any longer, if I talk any longer about this, I will not be able to do anything else. I will not be able to keep on walking and thinking, and the girls don’t need that. They don’t deserve to have me falling apart because I was stupid enough to marry their father, and befriend his mistress.
‘I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,’ Scott says as I am about to leave the room. ‘I really didn’t mean for you to find out.’
I’m sure you didn’t, I think to myself.
He didn’t say he was sorry. He didn’t beg forgiveness for sleeping with someone else. In Scott’s mind, our biggest problem was me finding out he’d been cheating.
That was the thought that haunted me as I hurried to school.
My husband was sorry to be caught, not for doing what he did in the first place.
Tami
‘Where do the clouds sleep, Mama?’ Anansy asks.
We’re at the beach, eating fish and chips for dinner. I am a bad mother, yes, for doing this to them, but the thought of going back to the house with him is unacceptable at the moment. It’s slightly chilly, especially with the wind down here on the front, and night will start to ink itself onto the sky soon, but a few more minutes here, and then home and straight upstairs for homework and then bed will help me.
I look up at the clouds above us and those suspended over the sea.
‘I don’t know,’ I say to her. ‘Do you know, Cora?’
‘No, I don’t know either,’ she says.
‘Maybe Dad will know,’ Anansy says.
‘Maybe,’ I reply. ‘Maybe.’
I relieve them of their greasy chip papers and scrunch them up, place them on top of my untouched chips. ‘Let’s go, homework, bath, bed.’
‘Is Dad going to read us a story?’ Anansy asks as they gather up their book bags and normal bags. My hands are cold, almost numb. The girls are cold to the touch, but not cold. They never seem to feel the cold, it’s always a battle to get them to wear coats or do them up because they are always so warm.
‘Maybe,’ I say, as non-committal with the word as I can make it. Maybe he’ll read you a story, then come back to finish torturing me with the story of his affair.
Tami
He didn’t know where clouds sleep, apparently. They asked him and he didn’t know. He also didn’t read them a story because that would mean leaving the safety of the loft room where he has been hiding all this time.
I’m curled up in the dark, waiting for something.
I’m not sure exactly what, but I am waiting, my breathing pausing and waiting with me until I have no choice but to breathe out.
I can’t quite bring myself to think about it. It is too big, too scary, too unreal. Maybe that’s what I am waiting for. Maybe I am waiting for the reality to hit so my mind will accept that Scott cheated and Mirabelle lied. It doesn’t seem possible.
The bedroom door opens and he slides in through the gap, trying to keep the room dark and not wake me. Usually, lately, he hasn’t been that bothered about waking me when he comes to bed after me. He didn’t want me to go running with Mirabelle. He’d sulked and complained about it when I told him he had to get the girls ready one morning a week until I said, ‘What’s wrong with you looking after your children for two hours one morning a week?’ and since the only answer was ‘nothing’ he’d let the matter drop. Instead, it felt as if he had been trying to sabotage my running but didn’t quite have the courage to go all the way: he didn’t mind waking me up so I’d be tired and might cry off the run, but he stopped short at doing something overt like arranging an early meeting. Of course, now I know what that’s been all about. He wanted to keep us apart, scared that his secret would leak out.
Scott’s clothes rustle loudly in the quiet as he removes them and leaves them in a pile on the floor on his side of the bed. I can tell from here, without even looking, the order of the pile: shirt, trousers, T-shirt, underpants, socks. It is virtually the same every night – sometimes with a suit jacket, sometimes with a jumper, but usually as it is now. He takes off his clothes in the same order every night, then drops them on the floor for me to put in the laundry hamper. It’s not an overt act, of course, it’s simply a habit: he leaves them there because I will clear them away. It didn’t used to be like this. I don’t know when it changed, when he became too important to put his clothes in the hamper and when I became so unimportant I let him get away with it.
His body is warm in the bed. A familiar, solid presence I’ve come to expect over the years. Well of course I have, he’s my husband. He’s the man I’ve pledged to spend the rest of my life with. Where else would his lean, muscular body be at night except in bed with me? Where else? Up the road and round the corner, in the big house with the drive and gorgeous owner. Scott moves across the bed, edging closer and closer until his body is near mine, and then it is touching me, and then he is beside me, his body curled around mine, making the other part of the 99 quote we always used to be.
‘Remember the nights you used to come home after working in the bar and would curl up behind me, and I’d wake up for a second and then fall asleep again because now I could sleep properly because you were home?’ I want to say to him. ‘Remember how we were the perfect 99, then?’ And I want to say, ‘Were you fucking someone else then, too? Did you lie about working late nights so you could orgasm inside someone else’s body?’ And I want to say, ‘Can you finish cutting out my heart with a spoon and feed it to your dog because this job you’ve left unfinished is so incredibly painful? I’d rather you did it and it killed me so I don’t have to feel this.’ And I want to say so many other disjointed, unpleasant, hurtful, painful, desperate things that I’m glad I can’t speak.
‘I’m sorry I hurt you,’ he murmurs. We used to whisper when the girls were babies and slept in our room. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t think about what I was doing. It was a stupid, stupid mistake because I was so weak and lonely. I can’t think or function properly if we’re not getting on, if we’re not working together as a team. It was such a huge mistake … I’m so sorry.’
I want him; ache for him. In my chest, between my legs, at the back of my mouth I long for him. I need him to be a part of me so that he can be mine again and that will somehow undo him being with her. His body can belong to me again, as he pledged it to me on the day we got married, like it has been all these years. I reach for him, my hand knowing exactly where to touch to let him know what I want: him. I bet she doesn’t know. I bet she goes for the obvious place to initiate sex, but if I touch Scott there, he knows what it means.
In response to my fingers on his skin, to our physical shorthand, he moves from behind me, and as I roll onto my back, he climbs on top of me. He briefly kisses me, our lips meeting in an exchange of understanding, of acceptance of what is about to happen.
Scott, erect and firm, pushes into me and the ache doesn’t recede into nothingness like I thought it would once we were together. It explodes, becoming more urgent, more agonising. I arch my back, pull him closer to me, digging my hands into the flesh of his back as I try to claw him back. I want all of him. It’s what I had, it’s what I want back.
I want him back.
I draw him nearer still, the memory of the first time we
did this, the intensity, the closeness, the desperation to not allow anything to come between us flashes through my mind as he starts to move harder.
He did this with her.
The thought slams into my head, my chest, my heart at the same time. And then it ploughs into my hands, which rip themselves away from clinging onto him and are suddenly on his chest, pushing at him, while my body twists away, rejecting him, distancing him.
‘Stop,’ I almost scream. ‘Stop. Stop. Get off me.’
Without question, in an instant, he is rolling away and off me.
The tears are huge and constant as I grab the duvet, tug it up over me, hiding my body from him. I don’t want him to see me, not even the outline of me. I don’t want him to think of me naked when I know he’ll be comparing that image to her. And I’ll be found wanting, of course. Because I’m not good enough for him any more. Maybe at one time he looked at me and couldn’t imagine being with anyone else, maybe at one time he thought that my body and who I am were what he wanted, but now I know different. In this moment, I realise I am not enough. He looks at porn and he had an affair. I am not enough for him.
If I was, he wouldn’t have done what he did.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispers.
Scott reaches out to comfort me as I sob, but I shrink away from him. I don’t want him now. I don’t want him to touch me at all. I have heard half a story, have had half an explanation and I can’t let him touch me again until I hear it all. Until he talks and talks at me and I understand. Until I know why. And when. And how. How could he do this to me.
‘I need to have a shower,’ I say between sobbing breaths. I can’t believe I did that. I can’t believe I tried to reclaim my husband from someone else. I can’t believe I had sex with the person who has hurt me more than anyone has in my life. I need to cleanse myself of that. ‘I need a shower. Please look away.’