The Mistress's Revenge (21 page)

I wish you the very best of luck, and hope you’ll concentrate on repairing your own relationship with Daniel before it’s too late.

With Daniel! Can you really be advising me to repair things with Daniel? Didn’t you used to spend whole days telling me he was holding me back, that his very “niceness” (the word came out of your
mouth already in fully formed quotation marks) was impeding my creativity?

Once again I’m asking you to leave my family and myself alone. It’s the best thing for everyone, especially for you. And believe it or not, I have got your best interests at heart.

And then, once again, the cruellest mantra of them all.

We must move on with our lives. Separately.

I
must have reread your message a hundred times, but still I can’t find the meaning I’m looking for. After my experience with the emails being sent from my account, I wonder whether it actually came from you at all. Maybe Susan sent it herself, or maybe she forced you to send it, standing by your desk dictating what you should say, while you sat mute with misery typing her bidding with reluctant fingers.

I need to speak to you. If I could just speak to you, we could sort this thing out. It’s only distance that keeps you from me. Once we are close to each other, all your resistance melts away. I need to see you. I need to make you see me.

I’m going to call you. I know it’s 3
A.M.
, but I have to make you remember who I am, how my voice sounds. I have to find out who has got to you between last night and tonight, because this isn’t you speaking. I know it isn’t. I know you like I know myself, and this isn’t you.

Y
our phone is off. I’ve forgotten how to breathe. Breathe in, stomach out; breathe out, stomach in. In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never turned your phone off, only ever to silent. Not even in the days when passion blinded you to everything. What if one of the kids needed you? What if there was a crisis at work? What does it mean? Why are you hiding? Please don’t... please don’t... please don’t...

*  *  *

D
aniel has just appeared in the doorway of the cubbyhole, bleary-eyed and blinking in the dark.

“What’s wrong with you, for Christ’s sake?” he asked, and then he crossed the floor and awkwardly held me around the shoulders.

(Luckily the notebook in which I “journal” was closed, and my screensaver was on. I didn’t do that on purpose, mind, I don’t care what he sees anymore. It just does that after it’s been idle for a while.)

It was only when Daniel’s arm was wrapped weightily around me like a pet python that I realized, from the sudden sharp silence, that I must have been keening to myself here in the darkness. Rocking back and forth and lowing like a sea lion.

I’m embarrassed. Really I am.

“You have to see someone, Sal, I’m really concerned about you.”

Nobody does concern in such a grudging, pained way as Daniel. Sometimes I think it must really hurt him. Even so, I had a sudden urge—a young child’s comfort-seeking reflex—to turn my head and burrow into his chest and allow myself to be held and rocked like a baby. What stopped me, I wonder? Was it you, Clive, denying me even those paltry scraps of relief? Instead I held myself stiff and unyielding in Daniel’s awkward embrace.

“I am seeing someone. I’m seeing Helen.” My voice scraped like underwater coral.

Daniel made a disapproving sound then. He thinks that Helen, like vitamin supplements, isn’t scientifically proven. He wants me to see someone with letters after their name.

“Come to bed,” he said.

I told him I would, just as soon as I’d turned off my computer.

“I wish you’d throw that fucking computer away,” he said, in a rare show of strong feeling.

“Who’d earn the money to pay the bills then?” I asked him.

“What money, Sal?”

He had a point, didn’t he?

So now he’s gone back to bed, and I’m left here, sitting in my swivel chair, with my legs tucked under me and the snot already crusting under my nose.

I wonder where you are at 4:12 on this fine May morning. Are you pacing around in your box room study thinking of me, hating yourself, sorry, despising yourself, for what you’ve done?

I don’t think so somehow.

What I think is this:

• You are fast asleep in your huge bed, next to your “wonderful” wife.

• You sent me that message last thing before you went to bed as a way of clearing your conscience so that you could sleep soundly, knowing you had “tied up all the loose ends.”

• You think you have “drawn a line” under the whole “affair” (unfortunate term. Sorry).

• You are so, so wrong.

T
he sun is creeping on its belly under the door to the cubbyhole. I am slumped over my desk, my hand barely able to hold the pen, but anger keeps jerking my eyelids open, outrage fizzing through me like tear gas.

I can hear the next-door neighbors already getting up for work (how I hate them for thinking that this is a normal day. How can they be so obtuse?). This time yesterday my heart was limitless. Now it is a dried-up peach stone (how you’d loathe that clumsy metaphor. Layzeeeee Salleeeee, you’d scold).

Soon Daniel will be up and Jamie and Tilly and the whole thing will start all over again, the whole big bloody pulpy mess that is my life. Meanwhile you will be getting up feeling like you’ve had a narrow escape, and bursting anew with fresh good intentions to make it up to Susan. You will feel virtuous and reborn and humble (at least in your own mind). You will pledge to yourself that things will be different
from now on. You will push me down to the bottom of your mind like you are mulching compost. You will think that you are free of me. You will be wrong. I know about you, Clive. I know the inside of your head. I’ve licked every inch of it, probed my tongue into all its fleshy crevices. I know you, Clive.

I know you.

I
am feeling much better.

I really am. I’ve stopped taking the Citalopram. I think it was impeding my progress. Of course, withdrawing so suddenly has given me some strange reactions but I kind of like the pain. Do you know what I mean? It’s clean and it hurts and for a minute I forget all the other things that hurt. That’s a good thing, wouldn’t you say?

Another great plus is, I can drink again without blacking out! I haven’t told the young blonde lip-scrunching doctor about stopping the drugs. I feel I’d be letting her down in some way. Isn’t that ridiculous? I worry she might take it as a personal rejection.

But, you know what, despite the headaches, even after just three days I’m already feeling the benefits. I’ve stopped feeling like I’m disassociated from my life. I’m owning my own feelings again. Helen will be so thrilled.

Daniel is less delighted, however. He says I have—let me try to remember the exact wording he uses because it’s really quite funny—“emotional Munchausen’s.” (Can you believe he came up with that quite unprompted? I do think Daniel must have been doing some “work on himself” as Helen would say.) Daniel believes I’m deliberately putting the kybosh on anything that might make me feel better out of some perverse desire to suffer and, by implication, to make everyone around me suffer too. I tell him I’ve stopped the pills because my body is my temple and laugh to show him it’s supposed to be a joke, but he looks at me like I’m mad. He has taken to calling my friends up to ask them to “talk sense” into me. I know because sometimes they call me afterward and say “Daniel’s worried about you.” I
tell them Daniel approaches worry like a daily workout routine at the gym, something that’s slightly painful but ultimately beneficial, so if not to be embraced at least undertaken without complaint.

Sian came round yesterday looking very cross.

“I can’t accept this level of responsibility anymore,” she told me, and when she frowned I was able to see for the first time the full effect of the Botox she’s been having (did you know she’d started that? Or was that something that happened post York Way Friday? That’s how I divide my life now by the way—pre or post that Friday. It’s gratifyingly biblical, don’t you think?). It was a little disconcerting because it was like talking to two different versions of Sian, the middle-aged frowning one below the eyes and the younger untroubled one above. Anyway, neither of them seemed to like me very much.

“I’m feeling very compromised,” she told me reproachfully, sounding like a union rep at ACAS. “The secret of your affair has become a burden that I don’t think I can keep shouldering.” (I know you’ll think I’m making that up and no one talks like that, but she really did. I’m not lying. It was like she was reading from a script—a really bad one.)

“When I first facilitated (That word again. Has Sian been taking more of those motivational workshops, I wonder?) your affair, I thought it would be a positive thing for you, Sal. I could see that you hadn’t been happy with Daniel for a while and hoped the thing with Clive would give you a boost.”

A boost? She made you sound like a vaccination!

Sian went on to say that she could shoot herself now for not having tried to talk me out of it, or at least made it clear that she didn’t want anything to do with it. She told me she felt she’d been greatly misled by you, but that now we both had to put it behind us. She sounded so genuinely sorrowful I wondered if she might have been having an affair with you herself!

According to Sian, I’ve been “wallowing” in my misery for too long.

“You need to put your head up above the parapet for a minute and take a good, hard look around you,” she told me.

Well, when she said that, I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. It was that “head above the parapet.” It made me think of that scene in
Alien when the thing’s head bursts out of John Hurt’s stomach and peers around. But my laughter just made Sian’s bottom-heavy frown even more pronounced.

“Your kids are suffering, Sal. And when was the last time you did any proper work?”

Well, she had a point about the work, but you know even while I was docilely nodding, inside I was thinking about something completely different. I was thinking about how you looked at me when we were in the hotel room last week and whether you knew even then that you were going to dump me again as soon as you got home. And I was thinking about you and Susan in your tasteful house, and how you’d be making it up to her, the presents you’d be buying her, the trips you’d be planning. I was the alien that bursts bleeding and slimy and screaming out of a ruptured intestine, and meanwhile you were poring over brochures for beach bungalows in Mauritius or villas in Corsica.

It didn’t seem right. It isn’t right.

It is wrong.

I
t’s 3
A.M.
and here I am again. I find myself curiously attached to the cubbyhole these days. I fear I have become institutionalized.

I am staring at my reflection in a magnifying mirror I found in the back of the filing cabinet drawer. I am fascinated by the changes I see drawn large on my face. There are hairs sprouting from my chin like Jack’s giant beanstalk. Were they there before and I just didn’t notice? Or have grief and tears fertilized their growth? The shadows under my eyes have become great pools of black big enough for a person to drown in. I let the muscles around my mouth go slack and notice how the skin droops down like melted wax. I have a spot on the side of my nose, where no spot has stood since adolescence. I pick at it with vicious pleasure, watching the skin break and enjoying the sudden squirt of pain.

I am becoming grotesque.

Don’t worry, I’m not about to start going on about Alien again. I do apologize for that, incidentally. I blame the lack of sleep. Daniel
thinks I might be getting menopausal. Not that I think he has much of a clue what menopausal might be. Sometimes I think he imagines going through the menopause as something akin to passing through the railway junction at Crewe—not very pleasant while it’s happening but a relief once it’s over. I have a sneaking suspicion he imagines I could be “cured” of the menopause by that nice blonde doctor and it’s sheer stubbornness that stops me presenting myself in her consulting rooms for tests.

He doesn’t have the first notion what’s really wrong with me. Nobody knows that but us. It’s yet another bond we share.

I haven’t told you yet, but I met Liam again today. Isn’t that a coincidence?

I was strolling through the West End, I forget exactly why, when suddenly it occurred to me it might be fun to pop into the Royal Gallery. Well, I’d enjoyed it so much the last time, it really seemed silly not to take advantage of being in the area. I wandered around the new exhibition, which seemed to feature lots of big things in primary colors and a room of what looked like concrete excrement. There was a great big cannon there shooting out massive globs of red wax against the white wall. It seemed unnecessarily violent to me, although all the other crowds of visitors seemed terribly pleased every time it happened. To be quite honest, I didn’t really like it but the funny thing is I couldn’t stop watching it. It only happened every twenty minutes, but each time it was over, I stood and waited for the next one, and the next. There was something in the way that wax splatted hard and red against the wall that made me think of you and me.

After a couple of hours I’d had enough. I looked at another exhibit that was like an enormous vulva and one that was a pregnant stomach looming obscenely out of a blank wall (remember the pregnancy that wasn’t real?). Then I decided to go and have some tea.

Of course I remembered Liam worked nearby, but it wasn’t as if I went in just to see him. Why, he could just as easily have had a day off, or been working a different shift, or been recruited to cover in the kitchens. I had no idea if he would be there, nor was it a major
concern. I just want you to know that, in case you start thinking things.

But I can’t say I wasn’t pleased to see him. It was nice to see a familiar face after all that angry red wax. I’m sure you can understand that.