You won't tell anyone, will you?
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She sensed the grin form upon his face as he spoke and had broken into a smile herself.
Our secret?
It had been a statement but for the last letter, the whisper of a question lapping at the tautness of his delivery. She seems to remember nodding, her lips pressed together, staring straight ahead. The ghost of his words had drifted inside the car and, heavy with moisture, sunk around the steering wheel. His breath had settled on the fingers of her left hand as she had closed the window with her right.
She remembers looking at her hands as she curled them around the wheel and slid them into the proper position; ten to two. She remembers admiring her long, slender fingers and her neatly cut thumbnails, the wedding band gleaming against her tanned skin. She remembers asking herself for the hundredth time why she had never insisted upon an engagement ring. If she remembers correctly, she was still nodding to herself as she drove off into the night. She had been vaguely aware at the time that it was not a meaningful response but a mere acquiescence to the lingering, open-ended question shooting back-and-forth between her eyes, fogging the road. What on Earth had they just done? That was the last time they had spoken.
That night, she lay in bed next to her husband, tracing the fingertips of her memory over the past. They had met on her first day at work. When she had walked into the office kitchen at lunchtime, there had been a young man lying on the bench. He had been oddly motionless, staring at the ceiling, and at first she had felt awkward. She knew it had been a green spotted mug that she had placed in the dishwasher before turning to face him. Captured in her mind, as sometimes the most obtuse things are, were the stains on the creamy white base as she turned it over. She still owned that mug; now handle-less and chipped, it was a constant coffee-bearing companion on her cluttered desk downstairs. She nearly got out of bed now to throw it into the bin. Or she could bury it in the garden alongside the bones of her child's rabbit; gone but not forgotten. Instead, she stayed unmoving, closing her eyes to the darkness, succumbing to the numbness of events that had already been concluded and could be quantified. In her mind, she turned to face him again in the dank office kitchen.
What are you doing? she had asked him. Or at least something along those lines. Fifteen years on, it was difficult to recall exactly.
Oh! He had sat up abruptly, putting his hand to his forehead as he looked at her, his face screwed into a mask of comic shock. I was asleep. You woke me up.
Asleep?
Oh, yes, I sleep with my eyes open.
Deadpan.
For years she had believed that he was one of those people that could sleep without closing his eyes. He laughed until tears streamed down his face when she finally realised it had been a joke. She didn't find it funny at all.
He had been there at her wedding and had brought his girlfriend at the time - a slim, pretty Japanese fashion designer who had been wearing feather butterflies on a silver head band. All day they had fluttered against her glossy black hair and had made it easy to pinpoint the exact moment at which she realised she was jealous. She, the bride, marrying the love of her life. How embarrassing, how childish, to still have feelings for an old work colleague. She was better than that, she told herself, and the feeling soon faded into the heat of the Caribbean sunsets and the sheets of the honeymoon suite.
Five years had passed since then. They spoke warmly when he called. They met up for expensive cocktails when he arranged them. She bought his children birthday presents and attended their parties before she'd even had her own child. He was on her speed dial. Her husband played golf with him on occasion. Despite all that, it didn't take long for her to crack.
Really, he should have known her better than to blindly trust her like that. He should have known what a risk he was taking. She was often considered by brief acquaintances as inconsiderate, Machiavellian even. Those closer to her spoke of her more lightly and would makes jokes about her occasional ignorance of the feelings of others. Her best friends simply accepted that she lived in her own, closed-off little world and it would always be up to them to make the phone call, to organise the dinner parties. It even amazed her how rarely she thought of anyone but herself. When a friend crossed her mind, she would start with surprise that someone could walk so freely, so suddenly, into her thoughts.
At first, she did very well at not thinking about it, or about him. Ignoring his calls was easier than she had thought. She didn't even listen to the voicemail messages he left but deleted them immediately. When her mind finally loosened itself up to confront reality, it was already a day to the week after she had driven away from that cold, deserted car park. Lying in bed, her husband snoring ever so lightly at her side, she realised she had no choice but to tell someone.
It had been a Saturday when she decided to make the call and her husband had been in the kitchen, preparing lunch. Although she'd felt strangely logical, no more than two steps at a time would present themselves: Firstly, find somewhere private to make the phone call. Secondly, make the phone call. Although it was frustrating behaviour on the part of her brain, what happened after those two immediate actions could not be imagined. She refused to imagine it. She had slipped her mobile phone into her pocket, the number scribbled on the palm of her hand. Not on the back, not where it could be seen - a clue. She left the house. She could not risk her husband overhearing the conversation. He could not be dragged into this as well, it would be grossly unfair. They play golf together, for goodness' sake, she heard herself whispering. Secrets like this could be kept, couldn't they? But, in the end, she had decided that she could not live with the guilt, even if he could.
She had left the front door on the latch. To her touch, the white paint still felt tacky although she had painted it two days previously. Staring intently at her fingertips for signs of paint, she had walked down the path and seated herself on the bench at the end of the garden. There, she had been shaded from the windows of the house. The house into which she had poured her savings, the house that protected her and her family from the darkness of the world. It had gazed down at her that morning, passing its judgment over her in a shadow as grey as its walls. Maybe, after all, the house needed protecting from her. Even as she had dialed the number, she relentlessly questioned herself. She would never know if this was the right thing to do. Her friends would alienate her, she thought, her husband would blame her. But, nevertheless, the call was made.
As she stepped through the door the following day, she noticed she was wearing her walking boots, still muddy from her solitary walk through the fields a fortnight ago. What had she been thinking, putting these on? She knew she had been trying to dress down when she had put her clothes on that morning but some pumps would have done the job perfectly well. She was wearing loose jeans and an old sweater. She had not applied her make-up. She had not wanted to feel like an accomplice.
She walked up to the reception desk and the man standing behind it greeted her with a cheery Hello ma'am. She could see that his shirt was untucked on one side. Once she'd noticed that, other things sprang to her attention. For instance, the scattering of short hairs around his collar. Perhaps he had been to the hairdresser at lunchtime. Perhaps the one across the road there. She glanced at it over her shoulder.
“Ma'am? How can I help you?”
She sensed he'd already asked her more than once. She licked her top lip and folded her lower teeth over it. Did he really deserve this?
“I called,” she said as she stared at a patch of skin above the policeman's eyebrow. “I requested to talk to someone.”
“Okay.” He leaned down to move the mouse and clicked a few times. “And what's your surname?”
She wondered why he had begun the question with 'and'. Did he already know who she was? Was he the one who had taken the phone call? Did he recognise her voice? She studied his face as she replied, careful to enunciate each syllable, fearful of wasting nervous tension on having to repeat something as mundane as her name.
“Capel, Emily Capel.”
Inside the room, a lady sat waiting on a sofa. She was not dressed in a uniform. The woman looked entirely unofficial and the thought presented itself that she could probably still get out of this, could still turn and walk away without anyone knowing anything. Instead she followed the lady's gesture and sat down upon the sofa opposite.
“Are you comfortable, Mrs. Capel?” the lady asked. “Can I get you a drink?”
She shook her head.
“Thank you for calling us. I'd like to take this moment to just let you know that we take these matters very seriously and that for the moment, whatever you say in this room is completely confidential.”
For now, she thought, and nodded.
“Can you tell me the name of the man concerned?” the lady asked.
She had thought he wanted to borrow their spare toaster. She had thought it strange that he should want to collect it there but he had pointed out that it was both near her house and on his way home from work. Emily looked down at her nails, at the thumbnails that she had pressed into the steering wheel until perfect white crescents appeared in their beds. The nail tips were still perfectly filed, as they had been then. But now, the other eight were splayed across her thighs and she felt herself start to shake as she saw, as if for the first time, that they were split and broken, the nail of her index finger torn off halfway down. She wondered how her husband had not noticed how filthy they were. She acknowledged now, for the first time, that she had not washed them since she had torn at him, scratched at him, tried desperately to force him away. These nails had been her only weapon and they had failed her. She knew that underneath them lingered traces of his skin and the guilt shuddered up through her finger bones and into the pit of her stomach as she uttered his name.
'I'm a freelance science writer and part-time pub landlady. My Dad was a writer and I've loved writing ever since we used to sit together and write stories on his typewriter when I was a little girl. With a degree in Biology and a MSc in Science Communication, I usually write about science - both fact and fiction. However, after taking over a pub six months ago with my boyfriend, I've been keen to write more about people and their relationships, thanks to all the comings and goings I see in my 'weekend job'. This short story is a rather dark interpretation of the idea that outsiders can never see the truth in peoples' relationships.'