The Other Side of the Screen - part 10

The silence in their lounge has become heavy, pressing against the walls like something living and malevolent. Don moves through a flat that once felt like sanctuary, their bedroom, the kitchen where they'd shared morning coffee for eight years, the sofa where they'd planned their future, and finds them transformed into a mausoleum of a marriage he's no longer certain ever truly existed.

It's been a week since he found out. A week since the careful architecture of their life together crumbled with the elegant precision of a controlled demolition.

I've never loved anyone the way I love you.

Such a simple sentence to destroy everything he'd believed about love, about Lizzie, about himself.

He catches himself touching surfaces as he moves about... the bannister, the doorframes, the table's edge, as if testing whether anything is still real. The wedding photo on the shelf above the television mocks him with its optimism, that young woman in ivory silk who believed so fervently in forever.

Lizzie hovers at the edges of his peripheral vision like a penitent ghost. He hears her awake at night, ponderimg or just lying there next to him... he can't tell which and finds he no longer cares enough to wonder. During the day, she moves with the careful deliberation of someone walking through a minefield, every word, every gesture calculated not to cause further damage.

"I've made tea," she says from the kitchen doorway, her voice carrying the strain of manufactured normalcy they've both perfected.

Don doesn't look up from watching the telly, which is turned on but it could as well be a blank screen. He wouldn't notice the difference.

"I'm fine, thank you."

Fine. The word has become his armour, though they both know it's tissue-thin. He's anything but fine. He's hollowed out, scraped clean, existing in that peculiar liminal space between the person he was before and whoever he might become after.

She sets the mug on the side table anyway, and he notes with bitter precision how her hand trembles slightly. Good, he thinks, and he doesn't hate himself for the cruelty of it. This capacity for coldness is just another justified consequence of her betrayal.

"Don, I..."

"Don't." The word cuts through the air between them. "Please don't."

Because what is there left to say? I'm sorry has become meaningless through repetition. It meant nothing only makes it worse. If it meant nothing, then she's destroyed their marriage for sport. I love you feels like blasphemy now, a sacred word made profane through misuse.

Lizzie retreats, and Don returns to pretending to watch the latest stock market updates. The irony isn't lost on him. He's living in his own volatile market now, surrounded by the debris of good intentions and failed understanding.

"So this is all my fault then, innit?" Lizzie suddenly starts. 

If gazes could kill, Don's would have been extremely effective at it.

"No, it was me fucking that bloody old perv on cam!" He lashes out at her. "What the..."

"Christ, I know!" She interrupts him, raising her voice even more than he did in despair. "How many times do you want me to say I'm sorry?"

It comes out harder than she intended. Maybe because of the sarcastic way Don described the one man who had ever truly touched her soul. But there's no room for niceties now and especially not as far as Michael's concerned. Don's staring at her in complete disbelief. One week and she's already reneging on her promise that she'd make up for the hurt she had caused. One week and the guilt has evaporated like morning mist.

"Okay, I'm sorry," she lowers the tone to a more acceptable level, "I'll say it again, I'm sorry for what I did..."

"You better be," Don fulminates. "Frankly I don't see..."

"But why won't you see how desperate I had become? Why haven't you wondered why things got so out of hand? Do you really believe it was just a whim?"

Don's speechless. He finds himself studying her, searching for a lingering trace of humanity in the woman he once vowed his eternal love to, who then decided to show pussy pictures of herself to a man almost twice her age. This woman who still folds her shirts with geometric precision, who still dunks biscuits in her morning coffee,... how did she become capable of such sustained deception and now apparently doesn't recognise right from wrong anymore? His mouth falls open but words are failing him. If there was still a slim chance for reconciliation, that appears now dead and buried.

Lizzie doesn't care anymore. The sleepless nights have taken their toll on her and she feels she has nothing left that's worth clinging to.

"Have you never even wondered why?" She repeats after the dust of their previous exchange has settled. "Have you never even tried to consider my perspective? The hurt I've been carrying for all of these bloody years, the..."

Don can't believe he's hearing this.

"Oh, let's have it!" He spits. "What crime did I commit that makes you think shagging an old man counts as overtime?"

Lizzie’s jaw tightens, and for a moment he thinks she'll back down, retreat into her usual pattern of avoidance. But something in her has hardened.

"You left me first!"

She breaks down in tears and her voice carries a rawness he hasn't heard in years. "You just... disappeared. You were right there, in our bed, in our house, but you were gone. Completely fucking gone!"

"That's not..."

"No, you wanted my perspective? Here it is." She's not holding back anymore, the words spilling out like they've been dammed up for too long. "Do you remember three years ago? Four? When you stopped coming to bed at the same time as me? When you'd stay up until two, three in the morning, and I'd wake up and you'd be on the sofa, and I'd ask if you were all right and you'd just say 'fine' in that voice that meant 'leave me alone'?"

Don feels something cold settling in his stomach, but he won't give her the satisfaction of seeing it.

"I was watching the telly. Since when is that a crime?"

"It wasn't about the fucking telly! Or the bloody races! Or the fucking pub!" Her voice cracks. "It was about the way you'd look straight through me. Like I was furniture. Like I was just... there. Taking up space in your life but not actually part of it!"

"So you thought you'd find someone who'd look at you properly? Is that it?"

"I tried, Don..." She raises her head, faces him directly with her tear-streaked eyes. "For years, I tried. Do you remember when I suggested we go away for the weekend? You said you were too tired. When I asked if you wanted to talk about what was wrong? You said nothing was wrong. When I reached for you in bed? You'd turn away. Every. Single. Time!" 

She starts sobbing. The worst part is yet to come.

"Bleeding hell, have you got any idea how this made me feel as a woman? How you made me believe I had become unattractive, undesirable even? Not to mention your 'suggestion' about the boob job! How I felt neglected, discarded, reduced to a mere servant who'd do your laundry, your cleaning and your bloody cooking? Your..."

She breaks down. The memory surfaces, unbidden. Her hand on his waist in the darkness. The way his body had recoiled instinctively, not from her but from everything. From the expectation, the performance, the need to be present when he had more important things on his mind.

"I was going through a rough period," he says, but his voice has lost some of its edge, the thousands he'd squandered weighing hard on his mind. And Lizzie doesn't even know half of it.

"I know." Her voice breaks properly now. "Christ, Don, I know. And I tried to be there. I asked you to see someone. I offered to go with you. I made your favourite meals, I gave you space when you needed it, I picked up the slack. I did everything I could think of... and it was never enough! You just kept sinking further away from me, always staying away longer from home, and I was drowning trying to reach you!"

"So you gave up."

"No!" The word comes out sharp, defensive. "I held on for years! Years of having someone come home who couldn't even look me in the eye anymore! Years of sleeping next to someone who'd flinch if I touched him. Years of eating dinner in silence, on my own, because any attempt at conversation felt like I was bothering you!"

Don opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. Because there's a truth in what she's saying that he's spent a whole week refusing to acknowledge.

"I didn't..."

"You didn't what? Cheat on me?" She laughs, but it's hollow. "No, you didn't. You're too principled for that. But you disappeared into your head, into your fucking horses, into this fantasy world where I wasn't even a character anymore. Do you have any idea what that feels like? To be invisible to the person you love?"

"That doesn't excuse what you did!"

"No." She sits down heavily, suddenly looking exhausted. "No, it doesn't. Nothing excuses it. But for fuck's sake, Don, at least acknowledge that I existed. That I was here, trying, failing, but trying. That this marriage didn't die the moment I fantasised about someone else. It had been dying for years, and you were just as responsible for that as I was."

The silence that follows is different from the one that's haunted their flat over the past week. This one is fuller, weighted with things neither of them can take back.

"I know I was difficult," Don says finally, and the admission costs him something. "I know I wasn't... present. But you don't get to rewrite history to make yourself feel better about what you did. You don't get to turn my rough period into a justification for your fucking affair!"

"I'm not trying to justify it." Her voice is quieter now, tired. "I'm just trying to explain that you weren't the only one who was unhappy. That you weren't the only one who felt neglected and lonely and trapped in a marriage that stopped working years ago."

"Then you should have said something!"

"I did!" The frustration flares again. "I said something dozens of times! But you never heard me. Or you heard me and decided it wasn't important enough to address! I don't know which is worse, honestly. You shut down every conversation! What was I supposed to do, drag you to therapy kicking and screaming?"

"You were supposed to not fuck a pervert!" Don's voice breaks. "You were supposed to mean your wedding vows! You were supposed to love me enough to not destroy everything we'd built the moment things got difficult!"

"My excuse is that I'm human!" She shouts back at him, and there's something cold in her voice now. "My excuse is that I was dying inside, and someone actually saw me, actually wanted me, and yes, I made a terrible choice. But at least I'm being honest about it now. Can you say the same?"

Don feels rage burning behind his eyes.

"Even if that's true, even if I did feel lost and unhappy, I didn't betray you. I didn't break our vows!"

"No, you just made me feel worthless every single day!" She turns away from him. "Honestly, Don, I don't know which is worse. At least my betrayal was quick. Yours was slow and constant."

"You don't get to do this," he says, his voice trembling with fury. "You cheated! You! Not me! You made that choice!"

"I made a choice," she agrees, facing him again. "But you made choices too. Every time you turned away from me. Every time you chose the betting shop over talking to me. Every time you made me feel like I was an imposition in your life. Those were choices, Don. And they have consequences."

"Get out!" The words come out low, dangerous.

"This is my living room too, you know."

"I don't care. Leave me the fuck alone! Now!"

Lizzie stares at him for a long moment, and something in her expression becomes almost pitying.

"This is exactly what I'm talking about. You can't even have this conversation without shutting down."

"There's no conversation to have! You cheated. That's the end of the story."

"If that's what you need to believe," she says quietly, and walks towards the door. She pauses at the threshold. "For what it's worth, I am sorry. For the affair. For hurting you. But I'm not sorry for finally admitting that you hurt me too. Even if you'll never acknowledge it."

The door closes behind her, and Don stands in the wreckage of their sitting room, shaking with rage and something else he can't quite name.

---------

The weeks that follow settle into an awkward, fragile routine. They maintain a careful distance, like strangers sharing a railway carriage. They're excruciatingly polite, passing the salt at dinner, asking about each other's days, discussing whose turn it is to do the washing up, which by councidence always seems to be Lizzie's.

It's as if they've both decided to pretend the argument never happened. To pretend the affair never happened. To pretend years of unhappiness never happened. They're playacting at marriage, performing the rituals without any of the substance.

But Don can't seem to help himself.

At Caro's birthday drinks, he is charm itself. He holds Lizzie’s coat, refreshes her wine, laughs at her friend's jokes. To anyone watching, they're the perfect couple, comfortable, affectionate, solid.

"You two are so lovely together," Caro gushes, slightly drunk. "Relationship goals, honestly."

"Oh, we have our moments," Don says, and his hand finds the small of Lizzie's back. To anyone else, it's a tender gesture. Lizzie feels the pressure of his fingers like a brand. "Don't we, darling?"

"Everyone does," Lizzie manages.

"True," Don agrees. "Though some moments are more challenging than others. Lizzie went through a rough patch recently. Quite difficult, actually." He squeezes her waist. "But we got through it. Together."

Lizzie's smile feels like it's carved from stone. He's doing it again... packaging her affair as a shared hardship they overcame, when what he means is: you cheated, in my fathomless generosity I forgave you, and everyone should see me as the good guy.

Later, during the drive home, he says, "You seemed tense tonight."

"I was fine."

"You barely said a word to anyone."

"I was tired."

"You're always tired." There's that edge again. "Must be exhausting, carrying around all that righteous anger. Tell me, does it weigh more or less than the guilt you should be feeling?"

Lizzie turns to look out the window, watching the lights of the town blur past. She doesn't answer. There's no point.

---------

Sunday morning, Lizzie is washing up when a mug slips from her hands and shatters in the sink. It's the blue one, from their honeymoon in Cornwall. She stares at the pieces, feeling something crack inside her chest.

Don appears in the doorway. "Brilliant. That's the second thing you've broken this year."

"It was an accident."

"Everything's always an accident with you, isn't it?" He leans against the doorframe. "The broken mug. The broken marriage. None of it's ever your fault."

"Don, please..."

"Please what? Please stop reminding you that you're the one who destroyed us? Sorry, but I spent weeks being quiet, being understanding, being patient. I'm done with that. You wanted honesty? Here's honesty: you killed what we had!"

Lizzie's shaking as she picks up the broken pieces. One of them cuts her finger, a thin line of red appearing on her skin.

"You're bleeding," Don observes. "Should probably take care of that. Wouldn't want you to neglect another wound."

He walks away, and Lizzie stands there with her bleeding finger and her broken mug, wondering how they got here. Wondering if he's right. Wondering if she's destroyed everything, and if her affair was just selfishness instead of a desperate cry for understanding.

Next week they're going to see a therapist. Don didn't see the point at first but in the end he caved saying: "At least I care about this marriage." 

And Lizzie vaguely remembers that, not so long ago, she viewed the stars not as distant light, but as a destination.