“I don’t give a damn what you do with your mind and body, but you bring it in my house and I’m going to call the police. Which is what I did this afternoon.”
I looked for a reaction to this lie. His brow broke.
“Police?” He grunted a disbelieving laugh. “For God’s sake, Nat, I can see why you’re angry, but this is way overreacting. Have you never seen this stuff before?”
“Dear God, Adrian, don’t tell me you think this is in any way tolerable. It’s still up there. I’ve done what I need to do. Now get up there and get it out of my house. And then get out of it yourself.”
He was back at the door, staggering back under the force of another thud from the balls of my palms. He turned and lurched from the room. He was like a humiliated child as he stumbled up the stairs, not sure where or why he was going, but I had no pity. Humiliation was what I wanted.
I sat again and began to process his reaction, what he had said. I turned the radio off, but not really to hear what was going on upstairs. It was like inside me something was speaking to me, and I needed to listen, to concentrate anyway. But I suppose too that I wanted the atmosphere to be sparse when he returned. I wanted him to feel he was facing his judge, not a probationer. No, that’s not quite right, I wanted him to be entering his condemned cell.
Right now, he would be learning quite how much I’d discovered, I thought, hoping that I’d just stumbled on some fetish or adult site, if adult is the correct alternative to what was up there. I imagined him closing his eyes and dropping his head as he raised the images from the download bar, not so much out of the shame of discovery as the disappointment that this was indeed what I had found. Maybe he’d sit for a moment on the sofa in there to prepare his response. Maybe he’d kill himself.
It certainly took some time for him to reappear. Longer than I expected anyway. Perhaps he’d thought I would follow him. I heard a foot on the landing, then heavy steps on the stair. They bore the weight of guilt, I thought. I was sitting again and he came further into the room this time. I said nothing. If I’d smoked at home, I’d have been holding a cigarette.
“Nat, that stuff,” he started and his voice was weak. “You can’t believe that has anything to do with me. Can you? It doesn’t. Really. Please.”
As the words started to come singly, I noticed he was even paler and there were tears in his eyes. His jawline trembled. I had expected denial; I hadn’t expected self-pity. I felt nothing.
“So who got them up, Mrs Pug?”
Mrs Putt was a weekly cleaner provided by the Chapter. She had a squashed and wrinkled nose. This was engagement and I immediately regretted it. However absurd, I’d let an alternative possibility into the narrative. He jumped on it and started forming sentences. They tumbled out as if their quantity gave them credibility.
“I swear, I have never ever looked at child stuff. I never, ever would. That’s just vile.” He struggled for other words. “You must know that. Anyway, I just looked, just now, and it’s from behind a paywall and I’ve never paid for anything like that – you can check my credit card if you like, if you must. The other stuff, the tame stuff, the stuff I checked on in the spam, must have linked to the other pages somehow, I don’t know. But I had nothing to do with that stuff. Oh, for God’s sake.”
He half-turned away, sighed and stared at the ceiling. The humiliation was complete. I stared at him, waiting for something else. It didn’t come. I think he was waiting for some comfort, for some evidence of anything between us that could bridge this. I didn’t feel sorry for him, but I did feel some sorrow for him, I see that now. I see also that, had I felt something for him, I really might have stood and taken his arm in some sort of gesture of familial solidarity, shared the pain, offered some grace, if not forgiveness.
But I knew then that I wasn’t that person, we weren’t those people, and it came as no surprise, as I’d known it all along. It couldn’t compare with the shock of the discovery upstairs, after all.
And something else. Something more mildly shocking, but of the moment and this room we were in. The something that changed everything. To my surprise and shock, I wanted to believe him.
An alternative narrative began to form. I examined it briefly, turned it over to make sure it wasn’t counterfeit, satisfied myself that I wasn’t indulging in wishful thinking.
“Have you also taken to listening to Classic FM on the radio upstairs?” I asked softly.
“Of course not,” he said sulkily, his back still turned. “Why would I do that?”
“I know,” I said, by way of cold acknowledgement. I said it calmly, the energy sucked out of our confrontation by this new banality. The kitchen was still to this little epiphany and I realised I could hear, or could imagine, the whirr of the computer fan again upstairs.
The revelation continued to unfold itself to me. I examined how every part of it fell into a well-formed place. How everything previously now looked awkward and ill-fitting, how this new idea had brought order to all that before had been random and chaotic, how it made all things new.
“I really can’t believe that you believe this of me,” Adrian was saying, or something similar.
“I know it’s not you,” I said in my new voice. “I’m sorry.”
He looked at me. He must have been surprised. I know I was.
“It’s just
