‘You’re so pretentious.’ William had laughed, but his voice was heavy and when he kissed me I could tell by his urgency how turned on he was. It had been funny, at the time.
Samira. That was who she looked like, William’s mystery girl. The piercing, the long curtain of hair, that golden skin. At least, I thought more reasonably, she looked like my description of her: the one I’d given him all that time ago on a humid night in Avignon, our sweat glistening and scented with aniseed.
If you’d asked me any time over the last six years how I’d react to William’s infidelity, I would have laughed and told you William was no more capable of infidelity than he was of alchemy. Finding the photos had shaken me, but not in the way I would have expected. I felt energised, curious. That same feeling of elemental wrongness persisted, and I couldn’t put my finger on why, and until I could I didn’t feel like I could confront him. I felt like I needed to know more. Knowledge is power, after all.
That night I cooked tarragon chicken (a memory of Avignon still lingering, perhaps) and Will noticed as soon as he came through the door. He put his bag on the sofa slowly, telling me how good I looked. I’d tidied my hair and put on the simplest thing I owned – a mid-length black dress with spaghetti straps – because William liked things simple. Or so he’d told me. Now, though, who knew?
We ate sitting close to each other, not opposite one another but side by side on the floor, our backs against the sofa, legs stretched out in front of us. I’d lit candles, and the dreamy scent of next door’s roses washed in through the open window. The rain of the last couple of weeks had given way to a clear, bright warmth.
‘I noticed you’re not sleeping very well at the moment,’ he said, spearing a piece of chicken with his fork. ‘You having those bad dreams again?’
It’s happened before. Me, running through my dream, heavy and ugly and slow-moving as molasses, chased by a man with a hammer raised over his head. I don’t know where this image has come from. A film maybe, or a story told to me as a kid by my older sister. The finer details of the dream change from time to time; sometimes I’m a kid with scabby knees and a bowl haircut, sometimes I’m in the jungle, sometimes I’m underwater, but it’s always a hammer and it’s always the kind with two hooks on the back, a claw-head. When I have these dreams William tells me I start to twitch and then cry out, clawing at the air. I wake in a panic, close to tears. It wasn’t the dreams, though. Not this time.
‘Do you love me, Will?’
He paused, fork halfway to his mouth. I watched him carefully and sipped my wine. Waited.
‘Of course. What kind of question is that?’
‘You don’t sometimes wish things were different?’
‘No!’
‘Ever miss being single?’
‘Jesus, Frances.’ He picked up his own glass and drained it. ‘What’s brought this on?’
‘Sometimes I feel like you’re not really here.’
‘I have to work, babe. It’s all I do. We’re living off one wage right now until you get another job.’ He held up a hand to ward off a verbal attack. ‘I know, I know. Employment is tough to find at the moment. I’m not blaming you. It’s just tiring, that’s all. And now you’re having a go at me for not being present—’ His phone vibrated in his pocket, just once. A message. He put his plate to one side and reached for it. ‘It feels a little unfair.’
‘I suppose I’ve just been thinking about the old times recently. Before.’
‘Before what?’
But he wasn’t listening. He was looking at his phone. Whatever that message was, it was holding his attention. He stood up, still staring at the screen.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked him, my heart beating too fast. I wanted him to stay, I wanted to claw at him and drag him back towards me so I could bite the soft sides of his neck until he gasped with pain. He flicked his eyes up to me, just once, then back to the phone, scrolling.
‘Email from Phil at work. I need to go upstairs and get some information for him. I’ll be two seconds.’
His hand strayed to his hair and tugged at the curl there, just once. You lying bastard, I thought.
That night I waited until I heard his breathing soften and then I slid out of the bed and into the box room, swiping the USB stick from its usual place at the back of his computer. I loaded it into my own laptop and locked myself in the dark bathroom. There were more photos. I thought of that message he’d received earlier and a bitterness rolled through me. I clicked on them all the same. She was in a different room this time, and it was daylight, but the poses were the same, the looks she was casting towards the camera hazy-eyed, glassy almost. Stoned or bored, it was hard to tell. She wore sheer black knickers and no bra, holding her breasts in her hands as if she couldn’t contain
