When I open my eyes, two things strike me. Firstly, that Fred isn’t beside me; and secondly, the room is spinning.
I don’t try to move, not right away. I close my eyes and will the room to stop. It doesn’t. I try shifting up on one elbow, wondering why Alice hasn’t burst in by now for her lift, yelling at me to hurry because her shift at the crepe stand starts in five. Five—that’s all she ever gave me.
Now I’d settle for one, because I remember that she’s gone.
If I keep torturing myself like this, I’m not going to survive. And alcohol isn’t the answer. What was I thinking? Liquid Viagras? I’m not eighteen. I’m not sure that even eighteen-year-olds would touch them. It feels like the clue is in the name.
Rolling onto my side, I force an eye open to look at the clock. Ten twenty? Where’s Fred? I check my phone.
Gone to golf. Didn’t want to wake you. Hope you had fun last night.
Flopping back onto the pillow, I stare at the ceiling. I wish I knew whether I had fun. I can’t remember half of it.
I text Jam.
Tell me I didn’t do anything last night.
I wait for her reply.
Not that I know of. Why?
No reason.
Still on for lunch?
Yep. See you at Lloyd’s.
Lloyd’s is a sea-facing restaurant that serves overpriced fish-and-chips to tourists. I’d have thought we’d be tired of everything about it, but it’s our favorite place to eat. Which just goes to show—
I put down my phone and run to the bathroom to be sick.
* * *
Jamillah looks at me as I pour my third glass of water. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Perfectly fine.” My hand’s shaking so I slip it under the table, clenching my knee. The restaurant is near Rumors. I can see the bar from our window seat—can see where I sat on the deckchair last night. With…someone. I was with someone.
How much did I drink? Memory loss can’t be good; I know it’s not good. And I’m coated in perspiration. I’m stopping myself from picking up the water jug and drinking from it.
“Well, I’m not buying it. Something’s wrong.”
“Yes,” I say, lowering my voice. “Something’s wrong. My marriage is dead. And I don’t know what to do about it.”
There are no spare tables today and they always cram everyone so closely together, which normally we like because we’re nosy. But today it feels claustrophobic, intrusive. Beside us, a young man keeps clearing his throat nervously as though about to propose to the woman opposite him. Out in the bay, the giant cruise ship responsible for today’s influx of diners is gleaming like a set of teeth.
“I’m being obtuse,” Jam says, picking up the menu, studying it, even though we’ve been here a million times. “Ignore me. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” I reply, my hand forming a fist on the table. “Never apologize.”
She stares at me. I’m a bit taken aback too, as though someone planted the words in my mouth. And that’s when I remember her.
I gaze over at the bar, at the deckchairs packed neatly away. No one uses them during the day—not chic or prominent enough. Instead, the clientele perch straight-backed on glassy stools, sarongs buffeting in the breeze. There are so many people there—a fusion of tropical prints, Ray-Bans and oversized jewelry glinting in the sunshine like bird scarers—that for one moment I think I see her. A beautiful young woman, too perfect to be real. A mannequin, a monster. Maybe somewhere in between.
“Gabby, what’s going on?” Jam says, setting her menu aside. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I look away, down at my menu, at the minuscule grooves in its leather cover, wondering how many hands have touched this today and over the years. Hundreds of thousands of hands, flicking the pages uncertainly, agonizing over choices like whether to have shrimp or cod, how many calories it contains, whether they need to lose weight, whether their lives are on track or about to veer off course.
Why does everything feel so exhausting, difficult? Why can’t I just have the courage to say it?
I don’t love you anymore, Fred. I want you to leave.
I could never say that to him, and I hate myself for it. I want him to say it first: to be brave and honest enough for the both of us. Because he has pushed me to this point with his behavior. And now he’s going to be a coward and let me be the one to end it and take the hit. And the hit isn’t pretty. I’ve seen it before, in the school playground and at work. Women who end marriages, causing damage to their kids, don’t fare well in the long run. I don’t know the stats but someone should run them because I think they’d find it’s a problem.
“Do you want my take on this?” Jam asks, not waiting for my answer. “I think this is about Alice. You’ve just said goodbye and you’re panicking and you need to give things time to settle.”
She sips her water, lips puckering. It’s so warm today, especially in here, we’re in sleeveless T-shirts—Jam wearing a bright orange one with sequins at the neckline. I’m all in gray, no sequins, not even a logo. And it feels to me then that this has been my uniform my entire life.
“I don’t think it’s just that,” I say, running my finger along the metal trim on the menu’s cover. “I think it’s really over.”
She scrutinizes my face as the waiter arrives, pen poised on pad. “What can I get you, ladies?”
Jam is still looking at me curiously, gauging how seriously to take me, and then she snaps the menu shut, her hair fluttering, and orders for us because we always have the same thing: fish-and-chips, with a side of salad that we never touch.
As the waiter withdraws, I glance at the young man beside me, wishing I could tell him to think very long and hard about proposing, if that’s what he’s thinking of doing, because marriage is hard to get out of for the conscientious and kind. And I can already tell that he’s both. He’s way too concerned with his girlfriend’s level of comfort, whereas she’s way too into her phone.
Don’t do it.
“When you said he was creepy…” I say quietly, watching Jam’s reaction.
She doesn’t look away, sets her eyes on me. She’s a truth sayer and it’s my favorite thing about her. Yet today her honesty is chilling my bones.
“…Were you talking about the letching?”
She nods. “Yes.”
I’m relieved, my shoulders dropping. I gaze out of the window at the sea that looks like a worn-out tea towel, dappled with dull sunshine like a checkered pattern. I was worried she was going to say something worse. Creepy is one of those words. It could have been much worse.
Yet, my despair is growing—a ball of knots inside my tummy which is tightening, calcifying, on the hour.
“You’ve noticed then?” I can’t look at her, but feel her eyes on me, still.
“Yeah, I have,” she replies.
I well up, bite my lip. She reaches for my hand and we sit like that for a while as I absorb this. Ordinarily, I might have been embarrassed, but today I’m too hungover to care if people think I’m unhinged.
And besides, I am.
We’ve never really talked about it before, which might be surprising for two women who discuss their libidos in shocking detail, but there’s something about this particular issue that’s made us tiptoe around it.
We dissected the affair in even more shocking detail as it unfolded. Seven years ago, we spent the summer stalking his mistress on High Street and saw her buying socks (we were expecting more). Yet, we haven’t touched on the way he looks at other women.
“When did you notice it?” I ask.
She considers this. “About two years ago?”
“Okay.”
That figures. I noticed it then too. There was a lot of head-turning the summer we went to Cornwall. He barely knew what I was wearing—that I was even in the same room. And then when he met Will’s girlfriend for the first time, I thought he was going to fall down her camisole.
Jam squeezes my hand. “I didn’t want to say anything. I thought it might be a passing thing, a middle-aged crisis. It still could be, you know. By next month, it could all be different.”
“Yeah. Of course.” Nice try.
That’s the thing about this situation. Checking out other women isn’t validating in the same way that an affair is. It’s a betrayal that can’t be quantified—one that makes me look like an uptight old bag. The general opinion seems to be that a woman should just put up with it. It’s a twinkle in an eye, a totally natural clandestine hard-on. After all, I’m all dried up, and she’s twenty-two. Of course he’s going to be into her. What’s the big deal?
“So, what are you going to do about it then, Gabs?”
I can hear her voice, but it’s muted, blocked by my own thoughts. I would love to believe it’s a phase, but I know it’s not. He’s available; his green light is on.
“Gabby…”
I used to obsess about him and Daisy Day. That was her name, like she was a cartoon character. I don’t know what her parents were thinking, or what Fred was thinking, but the day she rang to tell me about the affair, she sounded so young I thought it was one of Alice’s friends. I never did find out her age, but someone told me she was older than she looked—in her thirties. All I knew was that Fred was sleeping with her within six weeks of her joining Pixel8D Designs.
Bullshit name.
“Gab,” she whispers.
“What?”
Jam narrows her eyes at me. “Put the fricking knife down.”
I’m holding my fish knife upright. “Oh.” I drop it with a clatter, the nervous man next to me jumping in surprise.
I remember everything then—that girl, that stranger, what we were talking about… Pushing back my chair, I excuse myself, the man looking up at me with baby deer eyes.
“Gabby, where you going?” Jam shouts after me. “The food’s here!”
In the quiet of the ladies’ bathroom, I enter a stall, standing with my back against the door, my heart racing.
I told her I fantasized about Fred dying. I told her that I would be better off if he were dead.
Something else comes to me then and I reach into the lining of my bag, feeling around for the sharp edge of a card. I take in the curly script, trying its hardest to look stylish.
Ellis
Mobile PT services
I don’t even know what that means. What was I doing, forming a connection with this person—telling her my secrets? Ripping up the card, I drop it into the toilet bowl, press the flush. Flapping the back of my T-shirt, I apply a futile dab of lip gloss before returning to Jam, trembling all over.
She’s glowering at me as she attacks the golden batter of her cod. “Seriously, Gab, can you just sit down and have a proper conversation with me, instead of this…” she’s trying to think how to describe it—waves her fork at me, cod dangling “…this weirdness.”
It is weird. I never drink that much, but these are extreme circumstances. I have an empty nest and I’m trying to navigate it with grace and failing. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe this is about Alice and it’ll blow over. Maybe I am imagining things.”
She looks at me with a strange expression. “Did I say that?”
“Well, yeah.” I pluck up a chip, nibbling it, testing my appetite.
She sets her cutlery down. “Look, Gabby… It’s real, okay? The checking-other-women-out… It’s real. I just didn’t want to hurt your feelings. But Alice is also a factor. You’re feeling vulnerable, bereft. But…” She glances around the room, even though everyone here will be a tourist “…That’s even more reason why you should feel close to him, not more distant, you know? I mean, your actual words last night were that he makes your flesh crawl. And if that’s true, then you have to deal with it. It’s that simple.”
Simple? Maybe it is.
Dear Fred, you make my flesh crawl. It’s over.
“Now eat something,” she adds. “You look like crap.”
Sighing, I’m nibbling another chip, when my phone lights up. I glance at it, so stunned that I swallow the chip prematurely, burning my throat.
It was great to meet you.
It’s not the message that shocks me, but something else. It takes me a moment to work it out in my current state, and then I’ve got it. Her name—it’s in my phone.
She’s there: Ellis. Snuggled dangerously close to Fred in my contacts. I don’t remember adding her, which means there are other things I don’t remember too.
Fear seizes hold of me and I freeze, staring at her name until it blurs. What did I do last night?