The Other Side of the Screen - part 6

She opens the video at nine, as usual.

He is there immediately, as he always is, and the sight of him does what it always does, which is to make Lizzie’s flat feel less like a place she is trapped in and more like a place she happens to be for now.

And then she takes in the rest of it.

He is ready for her, in the way he has been ready for her every morning this week, naked and utterly unashamed. He offers her his big, hard cock with the ease and generosity that she has come to understand as simply how he is, how he is with her, the particular world they have created together in five days. He smiles when her face appears, that good, slow smile, and raises his hand.

She does not raise hers back.

She is sitting upright, fully dressed. A grey cardigan, dark jeans, her hair done with a care that means she has been thinking about this for some time, and something in her face makes his smile shift before she has said a word.

"Lizzie..."

"Michael." She looks at the camera, and then away, and then back. "I need to... I need to talk to you."

A beat. Then he reaches off camera for something and when he comes back he has pulled something around himself, a shirt, unbuttoned, and he has turned the camera away from his desire, a small and discreet adjustment, and this consideration that he does it without being asked, is so characteristic of him that it almost breaks her before she has even begun.

"Talk to me," he says.

She has rehearsed this. She has been rehearsing it since approximately 3 a.m., lying rigid beside Don's sleeping bulk, staring at the ceiling, assembling and disassembling the sentences. She knows what she wants to say. More or less anyway. But she still isn't sure that it is what she wants for herself.

She opens her mouth and none of the rehearsed sentences come out.

"I can't," she says instead, "I can't keep doing this."

He is very still.

"I'm being consumed by it," she continues. "The guilt. It's not... it's not a background thing anymore, it's not something I can brush off and manage. It's everything, Michael. It's all the way through everything I do."

She looks at him steadily, because she owes him that, she owes him the looking. 

"Last night Don was kind to me. And I sat there and I felt... so ashamed. And this morning I woke up and the first thing I thought was you, and the second thing I thought was what I'm doing to him, and I can't... I can't hold those two things anymore. They're too heavy."

Michael says nothing. He is listening with his whole face, in the way he always listens.

"I understand," he says at last, quietly.

"I'm sorry," she says.

"Don't be sorry."

"I am, though." She presses her lips together. "I'm sorry for... I feel as if I've taken something from you. These five days. I feel as if I let you..." She hesitates. "I let us both go somewhere and now I'm saying we have to come back and that's not fair. I know it's not fair. I've given you... false hope."

"Lizzie..." He leans forward slightly. "Can I say something?"

"Yes."

"I knew..." He says without bitterness. "I knew from the beginning that there was no... that it couldn't go anywhere. Not because of what we are to each other, but because of everything around it. The marriage. The miles. The..." He makes a small gesture. "I knew. I went there anyway." A pause. "We both did."

"Yes," she repeats, "we did."

He is quiet for a moment, and she watches something move through his face, something she hasn't seen there before, or hasn't seen this clearly, and he looks, suddenly and unexpectedly, tired. Not the tiredness of a single night but something older than that. The tiredness of a long time.

"Can I tell you something?"he says.

"Always."

He looks at the camera, and then away, and she recognises the gesture because it is the one she makes.

"I've never had it," he says. "What we've had this week. In my life... my whole fucking life... I've never had it." 

He says it without self-pity, which makes it harder to hear than if he had. 

"I keep thinking about that," he continues. "I keep thinking about how... I'm forty-eight years old and this is the first time I have felt this. Isn't that something?" He exhales. "Claire was... she's a wonderful person. She really is. But what we had was... we worked well together. We were kind to each other. We were..." He searches for it. "Comfortable. And I used to tell myself that comfortable was good. That comfortable was what lasted. That the other thing... the thing I kept waiting for... was just something people invented to sell films."

"Michael..." His words are piercing through her heart because she's feeling exactly the same remorse.

"And then," he goes on, "a woman in southeast England almost closes a browser window..." He looks at the camera, and his eyes are very bright. "And I think... I think that's the cruellest thing. Not the distance or the marriage or any of it. The cruellest thing is that I know now that it wasn't invented. It exists. I've felt it. And I'm forty-eight, and I don't know if..."

He stops.

"You'll find it," she comforts him immediately. "Michael, you will. You're..."

"Please don't," he interrupts her gently. "Please don't do the thing where you reassure me. I'm not asking you to reassure me."

She closes her mouth.

"I just needed you to know," he says. "That this was real. That I'm not... I wasn't performing any of it. Not one moment of it."

"I know that," she says. "Do you think I don't know that?"

"Then tell me it wasn't real for you," he says, and his voice is very quiet. "Tell me it was just the fantasy of it. The novelty. The thrill. Tell me it was just a dream. Tell me that it was just sex and there's a world between us and none of it was..."

She looks at him for a long moment.

"You know I can't," she whispers.

"I know," he says. "But I needed to hear you say it."

"I've never felt anything like it," she admits, and her voice cracks down the middle of the sentence like ice. "Not once. Not before you. Is that what you need? Is that..."

"No," he says. "No, I just..."

And then neither of them says anything, because there is nothing useful left to say, only the truth of it sitting between them on the screen, enormous and unmanageable, the thing that is real and cannot go anywhere, love with nowhere to live.

She is crying. She hadn't decided to cry and it doesn't feel like crying. It feels like something giving way, some load-bearing thing finally relinquishing and she presses the back of her hand against her mouth and breathes.

"I need time," she says. "I don't know what that means exactly. I don't know what I'm asking for. But I can't... I need to think. I need to..."

"Okay, I understand," he sighs.

"I'm sorry, Michael."

"Don't be sorry." His voice is thick. "Lizzie, don't apologise to me. You've done nothing wrong. You've been honest with me at every single turn and you've given me... you have no idea what you've given me this week." He stops. "You gave me the proof that it exists. Even if I can't... even if it doesn't..." He shakes his head. "I'll take that. That's not nothing. That's everything, actually."

She is crying properly now and she can see that he is too. He's not making a drama of it, just the brightness in his eyes and the effort of holding his voice level, the face of a man who is absorbing something painful with as much grace as he can manage.

"In another life," she says softly.

"In another life," he repeats, "I'd have been on that train platform in Brighton before you could finish the sentence."

She laughs through the tears, the way one sometimes does, the laugh and the grief finding they can occupy the same breath.

I know, she says. I know you would.

"Goodbye, Lizzie."

"Goodbye, Michael."

She raises her hand to the camera. He raises his. They stay like that for one long moment... two hands pressed to opposite sides of a screen, the most they have ever been able to bridge the distance between them, and then she closes the call.

The screen goes dark.

She sits on the sofa in the grey Friday morning and she cries without restraint for the first time in longer than she can remember. It's not the careful, controlled crying of someone who has learnt to do it quietly, but the full ugly graceless kind, the kind that comes from somewhere from the darkest depths of the subconscience. She cries until her chest hurts and her eyes are swollen and there is nothing dignified about any of it and she doesn't care, because there is no-one here to see, no-one to manage, no camera and no currency in composure.

She cries for Michael, for the look on his face when he said forty-eight years old and this is the first time. She cries for herself, for the recognition of it, the five days of being looked at by someone who looked and kept looking and found something there worth finding. She cries for the randomness of it... the thirty seconds, the trackpad, the algorithm... and she cries for the brutality of a universe that could arrange all of that and then arrange everything else too: the husband, the flat, the grey February, the twelve thousand miles.

She cries until she runs out.

She opens the spreadsheet at half eleven.

Column G. The product codes. The blinking cursor with its small, impatient heartbeat.

It would never have worked, she tells herself, and types a number. The distance alone. The distance alone makes it impossible.

She types another number.

And the age difference. Twenty-one years. That's not nothing. In ten years he'd be nearly sixty and she'd be...

She deletes the number. Types it again.

And Don. Whatever Don is and isn't, he's her husband. She made a promise. She stood in a church and she made a promise and that means something, it has to mean something, or what is any of it for. I will never leave him.

She stares at the screen.

It was a fantasy, she tells herself. It was a beautiful, impossible fantasy and it belongs in the category of things that are better as dreams than as realities and she should be grateful... grateful... that she found the wisdom to...

She puts her face in her hands.

She knows this argument. She built it herself, brick by brick, at 3 a.m., and she knows every brick and she knows which ones are solid and which ones are just arrangement, and she knows... she cannot stop knowing... that the one at the centre, the load-bearing one, the one everything else rests on, is not wisdom or maturity or the sanctity of promises.

It is fear.

She is afraid. Afraid of the size of it, of what it would cost, of the world that would have to be dismantled to get from here to there. And fear is a legitimate reason to step back from the edge, she is not going to pretend it isn't, but she should at least be honest about what she is stepping back from.

She is stepping back from the first thing in her life that has ever felt completely, terrifyingly real.

She types a product code. Deletes it. Types it again.

He'll be fine, she tells herself. Michael is kind and warm and funny and he will find someone. He will find someone who can actually be with him, in person, in the same room, someone without a husband and who's not a lifetime away...

In another life, he had said, I'd have been on that train platform before you could finish the sentence.

She pushes back from the desk and goes to the kitchen and stands at the sink and runs cold water over her wrists and breathes.

She has to pull herself together. Don will be home by six. They have the whole weekend... the whole of fucking tomorrow and Sunday stretching ahead, the two of them in the flat, and she cannot walk through all of it looking like this, sounding like this, carrying this visible and uncontained. He will notice. He has already noticed something this week. She has caught him looking at her with a slight unfamiliar attention, not suspicious exactly but aware, the way you become aware of a sound you can't identify.

She cannot let him identify it.

She splashes water on her face. She looks at herself in the bathroom mirror... the swollen eyes, the blotched skin, the evidence.

This is what you've done, she tells the face in the mirror.

The face doesn't argue.

He comes home at six-fifteen, and he is not yesterday's Don. Not the loose-shouldered, laughing, tea-towel Don. Though he's not the worst version either. Somewhere in between. The moderate weather of him.

"You all right?" he says, dropping his keys on the hall table, not quite looking at her.

"Fine," she says. "Tired. Head's been bothering me."

He looks at her then, briefly, with that new slight attention.

"You look pale."

"I'm fine."

He nods, apparently satisfied, and moves towards the sitting room, and she exhales carefully.

Dinner is quiet. He eats with his eyes on his phone, scrolling through something, occasionally making small sounds of reaction that require nothing from her. She sits across the table and she is somewhere else entirely, and she is aware of trying to come back and finding she cannot locate the way in.

He notices.

She can feel him noticing. He isn't dramatical about it, nor confrontational, just the slight calibration of his attention, the awareness of something that isn't falling perfectly into place.

"You've been quiet," he says over the washing up. She is doing the washing up alone; the tea-towel Don was yesterday's edition.

"I told you. My head."

"Not just tonight." He leans against the counter. She keeps her eyes on the sink. "Few days, actually. You've been... I don't know. Absent."

"Work's been dull," she says. "You know how I get."

"Mm." He doesn't push it. But he doesn't quite leave it either, and she can feel the shape of the thing he hasn't said hanging in the kitchen air between them, a question mark with no question attached to it yet.

"I'm fine, Don," she says, and she turns to look at him directly because direct is sometimes its own defence. "Really."

He looks at her for a moment. Then: "All right."

She has been asleep barely, the shallow unreliable sleep of exhaustion rather than rest, for perhaps an hour when she feels him move towards her.

She knows what he wants. She has been married long enough to know the specific meaning of that movement and she lies still for a moment with her eyes closed and she thinks: not tonight, please, not tonight of all nights, and she waits in the hope that she has misread it.

She has not misread it.

His hand on her shoulder. Her name, spoken in that particular tone, lower than his ordinary voice. His erection pressing against her thigh.

"Don, I'm tired," she says, and her voice comes out convincingly, she thinks... the authentic flatness of someone recently woken.

"Come on," he says, not unkindly. "It's been weeks."

She calculates, rapidly, behind her closed eyes.

The whole weekend. Tomorrow and Sunday and his mood tonight already a degree below yesterday's, and how quickly a degree becomes ten degrees and becomes the atmosphere of an entire weekend, becomes accusations and the specific cold war of two people in a small flat who have nothing to say that isn't a complaint. She calculates the cost of the weekend against the cost of the next ten minutes, and she performs the sum that she has been performing, she realises, for years, and the answer comes out the same way it always does.

"Okay, " she says quietly. "Okay."

He takes this as what it is... permission, of a kind... and she stares at the ceiling as he raises her gown and climbs on top of her and she breathes and she is somewhere else, she goes somewhere else, she has always had the ability to do this and she has always hated herself slightly for it, the going-away, the being-present-enough and no more.

Tonight the somewhere else has a face. A lamp. A chair. A voice that says you are absolutely stunning with the care of someone who means it as coordinates and not compliment.

She closes her eyes.

Don is efficient, as he generally is, his attention already beginning to drift even here as he pushes himself inside of her. It stings. 

"You're so dry tonight. What's the matter?"

"Nothing. Just tired. I told you. It'll get wet."

He grunts. He's inside of her and that's all that matters to him. He starts fucking her. He might just as well be fucking a corpse, but he's used to that and he doesn't care.

"Oh fuck... oh fuck...," he growls.

She usually accommodates him once he's started, gets wet, encourages him, pretends he's the best and that she has the most shattering orgasm ever. Not this time. She just lies there and lets him get on with it. He notices that too. He's too absorbed by his own pleasure to really understand the significance of her indifference, but he registers it somewhere deep down. It adds to the other small changes he's observed and many small things are beginning to accumulate into something that sparks his vigilance. Something's way off, suspiciously off. But not now. Now his balls are slapping against her arse and her cunt is squeezing his cock so tightly that he's about to come. That's more important at this point. 

She, on the other hand, is grateful for the efficiency in a way that makes her feel something she doesn't want to name.

She thinks of Melbourne.

She thinks of Michael's eyes on the camera.

She thinks: I told him I had never loved anyone the way I love him. And she thinks: I meant it. I meant every word. And she lies beneath the weight of her husband in their bed in the flat in February and she thinks that this is the cost of things, of five days of being genuinely seen, of a love that had nowhere to live, of knowing, now, what the difference feels like between being present with someone and simply being there. But most importantly of all: she now understands the cost of betrayal.

Don grunts her name.

"Mm," she sighs.

It doesn't take long. It's not a particularly strong orgasm, but it gets the job done. He marks her with his cum the way a dog marks its territory. You are mine and you will be mine forever. The pressure's off for now and he rolls away content aand he's is asleep in minutes, the aggressive, uncomplicated sleep of him, while she has to get up to the bathroom to clean up the mess he's made between her legs.

Afterwards she lies on her side of the bed in the dark and she stares at the wall and she doesn't cry because she has used up all the crying and there is nothing left, just the dry, clear, wide-awake knowledge of it.

She has let the truest thing she has ever felt walk quietly out of the door this morning because she was afraid and because she is married and because the distance is twelve thousand miles and because the World is built the way it is built and not the way it should be.

She knows this was the right thing.

She knows it will take a very long time to feel like it again.

She turns onto her back and she watches the ceiling and she listens to Don breathe and she waits, without much hope, for morning.