Joe Schwartz was the first guest to arrive. He was early, nervous, drenched in aftershave.

Stanley answered the door.

“You look amazing,” said Joe.

“Thanks,” said Stanley, his nose twitching. He hoped he wasn’t allergic to Joe. It was too early in their relationship for hypersensitivity, aversion, turning into his parents. “Come in.”

Joe began to take off his shoes.

“Oh no, you don’t need to do that.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely. Can I get you a drink?”

“That’d be great.”

“Lager?”

Joe grimaced. “I’ve tried to like lager, but I can’t get into it. It tastes old to me, and not in a good way.” He adjusted his black glasses, pushed his fringe away from his eyes. “I know it’s lame. Everyone likes lager don’t they?”

“So what do you like?” asked Stanley, trying not to smirk, trying not to make it sound like he knew exactly what Joe liked because he had done it to him eight times last week.

“Black tea, milky coffee, diet Coke, apple juice, Vimto.”

Joe Schwartz was weird. He looked like a model and was always serious, even when he was joking. He remembered things, unusual things, like the name of every character in a film, like the local cafe’s entire lunch menu, like everything Stanley told him. He spoke in lists. He was a walking archive. He was earnest, immaculate, Canadian.

“I think we have most of those things,” said Stanley.

“Great,” said Joe.

 

Two weeks ago, Sadie had written another letter to Suzie the agony aunt. She slipped it in the cardboard box while Suzie bent down to pick up a tray of rhubarb muffins.

Dear Suzie,

Thanks for reading this. I don’t know why I feel the need to write to you. I’m an intelligent, self-aware woman, Suzie. But sometimes even the smartest of women need advice don’t they?

I think I’m in love. In love with my best friend. I sound like a teenager. I feel like one too. “Do you love your husband?” I hear you ask. Well yes I do. But I also hate him and I don’t know why. I’m flummoxed. He’s done nothing to evoke this so where did it come from? I’m not a hateful person, Suzie. I’m not aggressive. But there I’ve said it. Sometimes I hate him.

One of my sons is so angry and I worry that it’s all my fault. Can he be carrying my anger? And to be perfectly honest, I’ve stopped liking people. I’m a people person and I find people tedious. Where does that leave me? It’s like saying you’re an adrenaline junkie who doesn’t want to leave your sofa, or a painter who loathes the smell of paint. Where does that leave me, Suzie?

My husband is a psychotherapist and I can’t talk to him about anything. Ironic, hey? I blog, Suzie. You’ll probably have read my blog. I have a high number of followers. I keep track of these things. You have to, don’t you? It’s the new kind of watching your figure. Companies send me products and I rave about how good they are. So what with the blog and Twitter, I rarely get much time off. I love it, I really do, but you should read some of the shitty comments people write. People are so mean when you can’t see their faces. They suck up to you, make sure you direct your hard-earned traffic their way, then slap you in the face. So now I’m a people person who’s starting to hate other people. My husband doesn’t know about the blog—he thinks I win a lot of competitions and that’s why all these products keep arriving in the post. I kind of like that. I like the fact that he sees me as lucky. Luck is contagious, isn’t it? If I’m lucky then he’s lucky. Why burst his bubble? It’s nice to give him something.

Anyway, this wasn’t supposed to be an essay. Let me get to the point. If I tell my friend how I feel and she happens to feel the same, my small corner of the world is about to go up in smoke. If you see smoke rising, Suzie, you know where it’s coming from. She and her partner are like family to our sons. I love her partner, she’s been good to me, to all of us really.

Suzie, tell me this: do you think I’ve been full of hate since I was born and it’s only now erupted? Do you think I desire my friend because I don’t hate her, and the only reason I don’t hate her is because I haven’t slept with her, and if I do sleep with her, will I hate her too? Do you think the person I actually hate is myself?

Thanks for your time, it means a lot. I know you’re a busy lady.

Very best wishes,

SS

PS My puppy really loves your home-baked cheese and broccoli dog biscuits.

Sadie was shocked by Suzie’s reply.

How dare she? thought Sadie. Who the hell does she think she is? She’s no Frasier Crane, that’s for sure. What are her credentials? Does she have any qualifications? That’s the last time I buy dog biscuits from her. I reckon she’s had a boob job. Nobody’s boobs are that upright, it’s disgusting.

Earlier, while Ralph waited outside the bathroom door, Sadie set fire to Suzie’s letter and watched it burn in the sink. She was scared that someone would find it. It was embarrassing and full of lies. Now she took a bottle of Prosecco from the fridge and poured herself a glass.

“Mum?”

Sadie turned to see Stanley and the Canadian boy from Bennetts Lane. “Hi, Joe.”

“Hi.”

“How’s your mum?”

“She’s good thanks. She’s a brunette now.”

“Really? Since when?”

“Last Tuesday.”

“Wow, big change. Does your dad like it?”

“Of course. What are you drinking, Mrs Swoon?”

“Please, call me Sadie. I’m drinking Prosecco.”

“I’ve never tried Prosecco.”

“Would you like a small glass?”

“That would be lovely, thank you.”

“You’re very quiet, Stanley. Do you want one too?”

“Go on then.”

Joe squeezed Stanley’s bottom, which made his voice rise at the end of the sentence. His mother didn’t notice. She probably wouldn’t notice if the high note turned into a whole song from Annie, with Stanley singing as loudly as he could about the sun coming out tomorrow. She wouldn’t notice if Joe gave him a blow job right there in the middle of the kitchen. She was tweeting, pouring Prosecco, muttering about whether she had bought enough sausages. His mother the great multitasker, always in her own world, always oblivious.

“So where’s your dad?” asked Joe. “I bought him a card.”

“Did you? That’s thoughtful.” Stanley moved closer until their hands were touching. “I think he’s upstairs. Shall we go and find him?”

“Sounds good.”

 

Ten minutes later, Sadie was drinking alone in the garden, staring at her mobile phone. Arthur was in the bathroom, staring at a photo of Keeley Hawes in the Radio Times. Stanley and Joe were up against a locked bedroom door. Harvey was cocking his leg against the sofa. Ralph was nowhere to be seen.

Sadie Swoon @SadieLPeterson
Husband missing on his birthday. Party about to start!

Marcus Andrews @MAthebakerboy
@SadieLPeterson More champagne for us

Sadie Swoon @SadieLPeterson
Gone for sparkly silver vest and white trousers tonight. I have smokiest BBQ sauce!

Sadie looked around the garden. Soon she would be wearing her Keep Calm and Have a Cupcake apron while cooking sausages. Their friends would be standing in the usual groupings, together but divided. She would make small talk with Ralph’s parents. She would look like she was enjoying herself. Arthur would drink too much and get aggressive. Stanley would be charming but distant. Her lips would be on Kristin’s lips.

“Where’ve you been?” she said, as Ralph joined her, wearing the clothes she had bought him for his birthday.

“I’ve been up in the loft.”

“The loft?”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“Looking for my old guitar.”

“Oh no.”

“What?”

“You’re not going to play it tonight?” she said, wielding the strongest of marital superpowers: the ability to evoke shame in her husband, which dismantled his spontaneity. Stun-gun Sadie had just shot him between the eyes.

“Probably not,” he said. “Actually, I’m just going to run upstairs and get changed. These clothes are great but I feel a bit uncomfortable.” (There are two types of people: those who put on new clothes straight after buying them and those who like to save them for days, weeks or months, until the right time, which sometimes never comes. Ralph was the latter.)

Knocks at the door, one after another, the kind of knocking that goes on and on until you think you’re going to scream. Who had invited all these people? Arthur answered it every time, expecting to find his girlfriend. She was late. The garden was full of conversation and music and the sizzle of burning meat. Sadie was sweating. The barbecue was overpowering. Ralph’s parents were watching. Marcus and Luci were gossiping on wooden chairs beneath the apple tree. A group of psychotherapists were sitting around the old camping table, laughing wildly, topping up one another’s glasses with red wine. Ralph was unwrapping a birthday present from their friend Beverley—“Just a little something, thought you might like it, no worries if you don’t, I’ll keep it myself.” Numerous teenagers, friends of Arthur or Stanley, were dotted about in brightly coloured clothes (a new trend? Sadie didn’t know. How could she not know? She followed the dots, her eyes hopping from red to blue to pink to yellow, not knowing who most of them were). Beverley was flirting with one of the neighbours, the one whose wife was in hospital (Sadie had only invited him out of pity).

No one asked why Sadie’s face was swollen around her eye, they just helped themselves to salad, rolls, garlic bread, burgers, sausages, chicken, griddled vegetables, halloumi kebabs.

Marcus put the cooked food onto large plates and lined them up on the table.

Arthur’s girlfriend finally arrived—her sentences were polite, her face tight with venom.

Stanley fiddled with the playlist on his laptop, sending music around the house and garden.

Sadie cursed herself for forgetting to marinate the chicken as she noticed Carol and Kristin holding hands.

Ralph’s mother tugged a weed out of the garden and held it up to her husband as if he should know where to put it.

 

Yesterday afternoon, after a massage, haircut and highlights, Sadie met Kristin at Monkey Business for coffee. Kristin said they needed to talk, which made Sadie feel nervous. What did she want to say? Had she realized how Sadie felt?

Over two flat whites and a slice of chocolate cake, they discussed the benefits of getting a regular massage, the golden stripes in Sadie’s hair, how Kristin was getting on with her prints, how Carol was still working long hours, how Sadie hoped it wouldn’t rain tomorrow night, whether the album playing was Buena Vista Social Club. Then Kristin paused. She looked down at her coffee. Sadie waited.

“The other night,” said Kristin, looking up. “At Mack’s.”

She was referring to what happened in the bookshop when Rosanna Arquette read about bedposts, bruises and handcuffs—love that felt like pain and pain that felt like love.

“What about it?” said Sadie.

“Something happened between us.”

“Did it?”

“Didn’t it?”

Sadie wavered. She could deny everything, put it all down to the highly charged atmosphere of the bookshop that night, or she could tell the truth. She glanced at the window. It was raining outside. She remembered Suzie’s letter: watch the rain.

“There was a moment,” said Kristin.

Yes, there was a moment, thought Sadie, seeing it once more in vivid detail. And I want there to be another. Let’s do it right now, in the park, in the rain. Let’s go.

“What do you mean?” she said.

Kristin sighed. She was supposed to be meeting Carol outside Pizza Express in half an hour. “We’ve been friends for a long time,” she said.

“Almost thirty years.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“That makes me feel old.”

“I know.”

“Anyway, we’ve never crossed a line, have we?”

“Crossed a line?”

“We’ve never flirted with each other.”

“No.”

“Until last week.”

Flirted with each other. Sadie replayed it in her mind. That was reciprocal, wasn’t it? They both flirted. She looked at Kristin’s mouth.

“And I think we should talk about it.”

Kristin had always been direct. It was in her nature. You knew where you were with Kristin, even if it wasn’t where you wanted to be, which right now, for Sadie, was in the bandstand in the park. She remembered the two of them walking Harvey, how they were drenched by the storm, how the water ran through Kristin’s long dark hair, how she turned up the collar of her mac and stood there in front of Sadie, laughing. She should have kissed her then, while they were out in the fields. It would have been memorable and dramatic. Carol can do that whenever she likes. She can kiss her in the park, in the fields, in town, at home. Carol the GP, who somehow finds the time to run marathons for charity, who always buys Arthur and Stanley the perfect gifts, who seems so stable and content. Can anyone really be that happy? Perhaps that’s what happens when you’re married to Kristin.

“Look, you don’t need to panic,” said Kristin, finishing her coffee. “That’s all I wanted to say. It’s no big deal. I think maybe the wine had gone to our heads and the poetry was crazy and everyone wanted to fuck everyone else that evening.”

Kristin flinched at her own words. Sadie raised her eyebrows.

“We don’t need to read anything into it. That’s all I wanted to say.”

“Okay,” said Sadie.

Kristin moved on to talking about her new screen prints and how Picador had commissioned another book jacket design. Sadie paid for their coffees and cake and walked with Kristin through town, but not all the way to Pizza Express. She wasn’t in the mood for Carol.

 

“That was an excellent barbecue,” said Marcus, watching Sadie untie her apron and lift it over her head. “You should set up your own business. You could have your own burger van in the middle of town.”

“Why thank you,” she said, exhausted. “That’s what I’ve always wanted for myself—to work in a burger van.”

“I meant it as a compliment.”

A quick half-smile. She had nothing else to offer.

“I think you need to sit down,” said Marcus. “You look knackered. Did you get time to eat?”

“Not yet.”

Sadie took a hot dog from the table, covered it in ketchup and went inside the house. She poured herself a glass of champagne and sat on the stairs. Two teenagers squeezed past, giggling. She had no idea who they were, but the giggling was too loud, she wanted silence and darkness, just for a few minutes, then she would be all right. She wandered from room to room, not wanting to speak to anyone she bumped into, and found herself upstairs, outside the cupboard on the landing. No one would disturb her in there—she could sit on the wooden box full of old photographs, eat her hot dog and drink her champagne in peace.

A woman’s voice. “Sadie, are you up there?”

The only voice she wanted to hear, but still she remained hidden in the cupboard.

“Sadie?”

Footsteps up the stairs and along the landing. Sadie carried on eating in the dark. She was starving. She wished she’d brought herself a plate of salad and some garlic bread.

“Hello?”

Come in, go away. I want you, I don’t want you. She drank her champagne.

“Sadie, is that you in the bathroom?”

Bloody hell. No, it’s not me in the bathroom, because I’m actually in the cupboard. Yes, that’s right, the cupboard. Don’t ask me why, I have no idea. Do you have any food?

Sadie listened to the music coming from the kitchen and garden—‘Hit’ by the Sugarcubes. She used to love this song. She remembered dancing to it years ago in the student union bar with Alison Grabowski. This memory had the same effect on her body as Rosanna Arquette’s poetry. She saw Alison Grabowski, there in the cupboard, dancing in her black jeans and suede jacket, dancing so close. At university, Sadie and Alison were inseparable. They walked through the park holding hands, smoked their roll-ups in the bandstand, laughed dismissively when people called them a couple. She remembered watching Alison getting dressed, and how Alison just smiled when she noticed her watching. Then she recalled something else—how could she have forgotten this? Alison lying beside her on the bed, suggesting that they have sex just to see how it felt. Sadie wanted to say yes, that’s a very good idea, and really we should do it twice, just to make sure we got it right, but she wasn’t sure whether Alison was being serious or sarcastic and she couldn’t take the risk. “Yeah right, as if,” she said.

The moment was gone.

(Because I couldn’t take a risk.)

In the days that passed, everything felt hollow. Then she met Ralph Swoon, who distracted her from the hollowness. She knew what he meant when careful words came out of his mouth. He was sensitive, serious-minded.

Among the old clothes and shoes, Sadie wanted to cry but she couldn’t. Missed opportunities flew at her in the dark, one after the other, the chances she never took. What had her mind done with these moments? Was it a kind of sexual amnesia? Would she forget Kristin too? Forget that she ever felt anything at all? That process had already begun—just days after it happened, she had forgotten the incident in the bookshop until Kristin brought it up.

There was a moment.

She heard a faint tapping and ignored it. The outside world could wait. She groaned, hoping it would release her tears, but it didn’t.

The tapping sound again, louder this time. Someone knocking on the door. Sadie reached out to open it, but there was no handle on the inside. She was stuck.

“Who’s in there?” said Kristin.

“It’s me.”

“Sadie?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you in a cupboard?”

“I’m stuck. Can you open the door?”

And then there was light. Sadie didn’t move.

“Are you okay?” said Kristin, stepping inside. “What’s happened?”

An opportunity. A chance. Kristin sat beside her on the wooden box. Sadie leant forward and closed the door. No running away now, Sadie Swoon, Sadie Peterson, whoever you are, whoever you were.

“What’s going on?”

“I’ve realized something,” said Sadie, not wanting to waste another second. She put her hand on Kristin’s leg.

“What are you doing?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” She moved her hand higher.

“Sadie, I—”

She touched Kristin’s face, pulled her closer. Then she kissed her.

A first kiss. Every kiss that should have happened. A hundred kisses rolled into one.

It grew darker. Sadie felt the darkness all over her. “I want you to fuck me,” she said.

Kristin pulled away.

“Please.”

“No.”

“No?”

Kristin stood up. “What on earth’s got into you?” She started banging on the door. “Hello? Anyone out there?”

“Kristin, don’t. Don’t go.”

“Hello? We’re stuck in here. Hello?”

Footsteps. The creak of floorboards. Then light from the hallway, cold and intrusive. Sadie’s chance had escaped. It was gone. She felt hollow again.

Ralph looked confused. “Why?” he said, holding the door open. “Why are you two in here?”

Kristin stepped out and stood beside him. Now they were both on the outside, looking in at Sadie in the half-light, her head buried in her hands.

How quickly things change, thought Sadie. It’s nauseating.

Ralph looked at Kristin. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing’s going on. I found her crying.”

“I have a name. And I wasn’t crying.”

“Why were you crying in a cupboard? You were fine a moment ago, I saw you talking to Marcus. Did he upset you? Did he say something?”

Keep talking, thought Ralph. Keep talking to your wife and we can all ignore the fact that she stepped into a cupboard and closed the door and—

He remembered Jilly Perkins: “Do you ever worry that Sadie’s having an affair with her friend Kristin? I’m a little suspicious.”

“This house has so much storage space,” said Kristin. “It’s the ideal place to have a breakdown, when you think about it.”

“A breakdown?” said Sadie, standing up. “Is that what you normally say to women you’ve been flirting with? Do you accuse them of being mentally unstable?”

“What the hell?” said Kristin.

“How dare you,” said Sadie.

“How dare I what?”

“Blame it all on me.”

“Blame what on you? Nothing happened.”

“That kiss was nothing was it? Well that’s charming.”

“Ralph, this isn’t how it seems,” said Kristin, shocked by what was occurring on Ralph’s face. Had he taken something? He was laughing. No, not just laughing, he was hysterical, he was bright red, tears were running down his cheeks.

Sadie and Kristin looked at each other.

The laughter stopped.

They were surrounded by a wild silence.

A wilderness.