The Other Side of the Screen - part 8

She is still buttoning her dress when she hears the lift.

The sound goes through her like cold water. She freezes for a moment in the middle of the living room, one hand at her buttons, listening, and the lift stops at their floor and she moves... quickly, without thinking, her body already ahead of her mind... rushing to the bedroom to drop the dildo into her bedside drawer, then back to the living room to grab the laptop from the coffee table and put it back on her desk.

She falls into her desk chair when the front door opens.

She's had approximately four seconds to compose herself. She uses them.

"You're early," she says, and her voice comes out almost right. Almost, a fraction too bright, a semitone too carefully casual.

Don stands in the doorway and looks at her.

She has known this man for ten years. She knows his looks the way you know colours, the gradations of them, what each one means, what follows which. This one she cannot immediately read, and that is itself a reading.

"Meeting finished early," he says.

"Good day?"

"Adequate." He doesn't move from the doorway for a moment, and she is aware of his eyes. They're not on her face but on the laptop, on her hands, on the general atmosphere of the room, which she realises with a cold, dropping sensation is different. This is a room that has recently been a different kind of room and has not quite finished becoming the old one again. 

He pretends not to notice and moves towards the kitchen.

"Beer," he says, to no-one in particular.

She clicks. She clicks as fast as she can without making it visible, without the clicking being audible over the sound of the fridge opening in the kitchen. The Facebook conversation... gone. Clear history. Clear cache. She navigates the menus with the muscle memory of someone who has done this before, which she has, which is its own kind of indictment, and she can hear him in the kitchen, the crack of the can, unhurried, and she clears and clears and clears.

By the time he comes back she has the spreadsheet open.

Column G. The product codes. The blinking cursor.

She looks at the screen with the focused attention of someone absolutely engrossed in data entry.

Don stands behind her now, holding his beer, and he's staring at her.

She can feel him staring. She can feel the specific piercing of it. This is slower, someone who's actually paying attention, and she is aware, with a fear she is trying very hard not to let reach her face, that he has not been fooled. Not by the spreadsheet or the performance of absorption or the carefully managed expression.

She can feel panic radiating off herself like heat. She can feel, beneath it, the relief of having cleared everything in time, and beneath the relief the fear that she has missed something, and all three of these things are happening simultaneously in the surface layer of her while underneath she is just: please. Please.

"Just finishing up," she says, and closes the laptop. "Been staring at a screen all day. I need a drink."

She stands. She walks into the kitchen. She feels his eyes following her.

He is surprisingly easy company, in the kitchen.

This is the thing about Don that she has never been able to adequately explain to anyone, not to herself, not even to Michael: that he can be, when he chooses to, when some internal weather system shifts, good company. He has the charm he was born with, the original charm, the one she had fallen in love with at seventeen at a party in Lewes when he'd made her laugh twice in the first ten minutes and looked at her like she was the most interesting person in the room.

He deploys it now, and she responds to it with gratitude and suspicion in equal measure.

They talk about small things. His colleague's incompetence. A noise the boiler has been making. Whether it might be worth going to the market on Saturday. Normal conversation, the domestic furniture of a life, and she can feel her own nervous energy slowly, cautiously, beginning to subside as the minutes pass and nothing detonates.

He doesn't know, she thinks. He came home early and you scared yourself and he doesn't know.

She smiles at something he says. She pours herself a glass of water.

Tomorrow, she thinks, you close the call earlier. You are more careful. You have been reckless and you got lucky and now you are more careful.

"I might have a shower," she says. "I feel like I've been sitting still all day."

"Enjoy," he says, and takes a sip of his beer, and she goes to the bathroom and closes the door and stands for a moment with her back against it, eyes closed, breathing.

Safe, she thinks. You got away with it.

She turns on the shower.

But in the sitting room, Don suddenly moves.

He is at her laptop before he has fully decided to be. He opens it and his jaw tightens slightly at the spreadsheet, the innocent, waiting spreadsheet, which proves nothing and is therefore suspicious in itself. He goes through her work messages: the automated confirmations from the tech firm, a query from a project manager about a batch of codes, a reply from Lizzie, three days ago, correct and professional and entirely unremarkable.

He checks the browser history.

Empty.

Not sparse. Not the ordinary low-traffic history of someone who uses the internet for shopping and occasional news. Empty. Completely, recently, deliberately empty.

He stares at it.

His hand is very still on the trackpad.

There are reasons a person clears their browser history. He has cleared his own, on occasion, for his own reasons, and he is not going to think about that now. But the significance of this absence... the completeness of it, the freshness of it, the fact that the cache too is wiped clean in a way that takes deliberate effort... is not the absence of someone with nothing to hide. It is the absence of someone who has just finished hiding it.

He checks the folders. Downloads, documents, everything. Nothing unexpected. Nothing hidden that he can find.

He can hear the water still running.

Then it stops.

He hears the slight change in the acoustic of the flat that means the shower has been turned off. He pushes the laptop back to where it was. He straightens. His eyes move around the room, the rapid inventory of someone running out of time, and they land on the phone lying beside the laptop.

He picks it up.

It isn't locked. She has never locked her phone from him, which has always seemed like evidence of a clear conscience, and he has always accepted it as such.

The Facebook notification is the first thing he sees.

A banner across the screen, sitting there waiting, arrived not even half an hour ago:

I love you, more than anything.

Don is very still.

He opens the Messenger app.

He reads from the bottom up.

Michael. The love declaration. Then the promise of tomorrow. Then... he scrolls, and his face does something that moves through several extreme expressions too quickly to name... a photograph. A man he doesn't know, in his forties, short dark hair silvering at the temples, completely naked with a half-hard cock, blowing a kiss at the camera. Lizzie's response beneath it: You are so handsome. And the man's reply: You are divine.

He scrolls up.

He finds Lizzie's photograph.

He looks at it for a long time. His wife. His wife's body. His wife photographed in their sitting room on their sofa. Totally, utterly naked. With her legs wide open and her hairy pussy on full display. Her labia all red and swollen. Wet as if just used. And Lizzie's dildo lying next to her. And a man in Australia commenting beneath it in terms that Don reads with a nuclear explosion ripping through his sternum.

He scrolls further. The evidence of a video call, hours of it, the timeline of it visible in the metadata. He scrolls to the top of the conversation, to the beginning of today, to the message that started all of it, and he reads it slowly:

Michael. I know I don't have the right to just reappear after Friday. I wouldn't blame you at all if you didn't want to respond. But I needed you to know that I'm still here. And that I'm sorry. And that the weekend was very hard and I don't entirely know what I'm doing. I just know I needed to write to you.

He reads it again.

The photographs he can process. The video call, the naked man blowing kisses, even Lizzie's photograph... those he can file, however painfully, in the category of things that are about bodies, about weakness, about the ordinary failures of ordinary people. He is not a hypocrite. He knows he is not in a position to occupy the high ground with anything like comfort.

But this.

The weekend was very hard.

Their weekend. His wife, in their home, in their life, experiencing the weekend they shared together as something to survive and report back from to a man in Melbourne.

I don't entirely know what I'm doing.

The honesty of it. The rawness of it. The fact that this is how she writes to that man, openly, without the careful management she displays in every conversation with him, without the slightly raised shoulders and the words chosen for their defensibility. She writes to this Michael as though she trusts him completely.

I just know I needed to write to you.

He puts the phone down on the desk.

He picks it back up.

He hears the bathroom door open.

She comes out.

She knows.

She knows before she sees the phone in his hand with her naked pussy on it, before she clocks his posture in the doorway... that stillness, that particular way of holding back, the look of a man who has been sitting with something for several minutes and has decided how he is going to unfold it. She knows from the first second of coming back into the room, some animal register of danger, and her stomach drops completely.

His eyes go from her face to the phone in his hand and back to her face, and he turns the screen towards her.

Her own photograph looks back at her.

The silence lasts perhaps three seconds.

"How long," he says.

Not a question. A space left for information.

"Don..."

"How long, Lizzie!?"

"A week," she says. "Just a week. It's not... it wasn't..."

The silence is very long.

She waits for it... the volume, the controlled anger of him, the arms crossed and the voice that becomes quieter and sharp as a lancet as it becomes more dangerous. She had already braced for this moment, knowing that one day it might come, though she hadn't thought it would be so soon. She  had been running her lines internally, it was only a week, it didn't mean anything, I was desperate for attention, the minimising architecture she had been assembling, also to herself. 

But Don doesn't raise his voice anymore.

He sits down.

He sits down on the sofa heavily and puts the phone on the cushion beside him, then rests his head in his hands.

She's still standing in the doorway in her bathrobe and she watches and she does not know what to do with this. Her carefully prepared lines have turned into dust.

"Don,..." she says.

He shakes his head. Not at her. Just: no. Not yet.

She comes into the room slowly. She sits in the armchair across from him. She waits.

When he looks up his eyes are bright and she realises, with a sensation that's cutting through her, that he has been crying. Don, who she has not seen crying in ten years, not once, not at his father's funeral, not at anything. Don, who processes everything through control, is sitting on their sofa with red eyes and sex photographs of his wife and of another man on her phone

He nods, slowly, as though receiving a terminal diagnosis.

"A week," he finally repeats. "Right..." He looks at the phone. "Who is this man?"

"Someone I... there was a chat site. I wasn't... it wasn't planned, Don, it wasn't something I decided to..."

"A chat site?" He says it quietly. He is looking at his hands now. "My wife's on sex chat sites..."

"I was lonely," she tries, and the word comes out before she can choose a more defensible one, and she watches it land.

He looks up at her.

"Lonely," he murmurs.

"I know that doesn't..."

"I have been working," he says, and his voice breaks slightly on the last word, and she watches him recover it, "every day. To keep this... to pay for this place, to make sure that you have..." He stops. He looks at the ceiling briefly, the gesture of someone trying to hold something in. "I thought we were fine, Lizzie. I thought... I know we have our problems, I know I'm not... I know it's not always easy, but I thought we were fine!"

She opens her mouth but nothing comes out.

"I came home tonight," he says, "and you were sitting there and I thought... there she is. That's all. There's my wife. I got a beer and I thought we'd have a normal evening and I had absolutely no idea that..." He picks up the phone and then puts it down again without looking at it. "I had no idea what you'd been doing. In our home! On our fucking sofa!"

"Don..."

"Is it because of me?" He looks at her directly, and the look is raw in a way she has never seen on his face, and she finds she cannot hold it comfortably. "Just tell me honestly. Is it something I did? Because I need to... I'm trying to fucking understand how we got here, Lizzie! I'm trying to understand how my wife ends up sending photographs of her fucking pussy to a stranger and I need you to help me understand that!"

The question is so reasonable. The tone is reasonable given the circumstances. He is asking, not accusing, and the grief in his face is real enough that she cannot find solid ground anywhere in the room.

She thinks of everything she was going to say. You are never here. You are here and not here simultaneously. You told our friends I can't read a map. You have been telling me for years that I am the problem, that I get in my head, that I make myself sad. She had all of it assembled and ready and she finds now that she cannot say any of it, because he is sitting on the sofa with red, tearful eyes asking her quietly to help him understand, and what kind of person responds to that with a list of grievances?

"I was lonely," she whispers again, and it sounds smaller the second time. "I felt very alone, and I know that's not... I know it doesn't justify..."

"I would have listened," he says. "If you'd told me you were lonely, Lizzie, I would have bloody listened! Why didn't you tell me?"

I tried, she thinks. I tried in a hundred conversations and you told me I was getting in my head and I nodded because nodding ends it faster. But she looks at his face and the thought will not make it to her mouth, because the thought requires her to be the wronged party and he is currently occupying that position so completely that there is no room for her in it.

"I should have told you,... more clearly..." she admits.

He looks at her for a long moment.

"The messages," he says. "I read them." He pauses, choosing something. "You told him you love him."

The word between them. Love. The full weight of it.

She says nothing.

"Do you?" he says. "This... Michael." He says the name with difficulty, as though it is a foreign object. "Do you fucking love him?"

She looks at her hands.

"It was..." She stops. It was real, she thinks. It was the realest thing. "It was seven days," she says. "I don't... I was overwhelmed by the attention. The feeling of being... I don't think it was real, Don. I think it was..."

"You wrote it," he says quietly. "Multiple times. Today!!! I saw it..." He pauses. "Has my wife been in love with someone else and I didn't even know..."

The sentence lands not as an accusation but as a bewilderment, a man genuinely trying to find his way through a landscape that now appears unlike anything recognisable, a scorched and barren wasteland and the reality of it becomes unfathomable. She feels the guilt move through her in a long, devastating wave.

"I'm sorry," she says in tears.  "I'm so sorry, Don."

He nods, very slightly, and looks at the floor.

"I don't..." He stops. Tries again. "I don't know what to do with this." He rubs his face with both hands, and when he drops them he looks, suddenly and briefly, much older. He breaks out in uncontrollable sobbing. "I don't know what I'm supposed to do. People don't... Lizzie, people don't come back from this. This isn't... this isn't forgetting to do the shopping or having a row about money. You've..." He gestures at the phone. "You declared your love fir him..."

"I don't," she says, and the lie tastes of everything it is, but she says it because she has made him cry and she cannot make it worse, she cannot add to this, the guilt will not allow her to. "I don't love him. I was... I was running from my own life. I was confused and I made an enormous, terrible mistake and I know that and I'm sorry... I'm so sorry..."

He looks at her. At her face covered in tears.

She meets his eyes, and what she sees there is something she has not seen in years. She sees something genuinely wounded. Something that, if she is to be completely honest, she is not entirely sure she is not responsible for.

You did this, says the voice that has been narrating her life for years. Whatever came before it, you did this. You went looking for something and you found it and you brought it home, and now look at him.

"I need you to block him," Don suddenly exclaims. "Everything. I want to watch you do it!"

She picks up her phone.

She does not let herself think about what she is doing. At this point she'd do anything to mitigate the wrong. She navigates to Michael’s profile... the outdoor photo, the easy smile, the antipodean light... and she blocks it, cleanly, and then the other social media platforms, methodically. Don's watching from the sofa with the quiet of a man who is maintaining his composure through effort, and she does not cry anymore as she severs the ties with that other life, she will not cry, she has no right to cry about this.

"I want to check your phone," he says. "And the laptop. Every day, for now."

"All right," she says. Losing what littlest left of her privacy. It's a price she's more than willing to pay.

He looks at her, and she looks back, and he says: "I need to know if you want to be here, Lizzie. That's all I need to know tonight. Do you want to be here?"

And she looks at him... this man, who is sitting on their sofa having cried for perhaps the first time in a decade, and she says:

"Yes. I want to be here."

She says it because she believes it is the right thing to say. She says it because his pain is real and her guilt is enormous and the alternatives are unimaginable. She says it because she has been told, in a hundred subtle and unsubtle ways over ten years, that she is the problem, and tonight has confirmed it, tonight has put her nude photograph on the screen as evidence, and the evidence is hard to argue with.

She says it, and some quiet part of her notes the distance between what she has said and what she's feeling.

They go to bed without resolving anything, because there is nothing to resolve tonight, only the fact of it to sit with.

She lies in the dark, inches from him, and the inches could be miles, could be twelve thousand of them, and she stares at the ceiling and she thinks about a notification she will never receive now, a name that no longer exists on her phone, a lamp in Melbourne that is on or off without her knowing.

I want to be here, she had said.

She lies in the dark and she waits for it to feel true.