Open Short Story Competition - Winner

‘I’ve just calculated how many miles away you’ll be. I feel sick,’ my internet lover writes.
‘I know,’ I write back, ‘I feel the same.’
The Lake District is miles away from anywhere. It is academic, though. We haven’t met. Yet. But he loves me. And I love him. We are voracious. Pavlovian responses to the ping of a text message. Carefully muted at 5pm sharp.
This trip is a bit of a do. Husband’s work thing; yawn-inducing and simultaneously terrifying. Conversation must be made; ends kept up; drink must be taken but not too much; no cutlery may accidentally be catapulted; on no account may breakfast be missed.
As each mile rolls under the wheels of the Alfa, I believe that my heart is stretching like mozzarella on an extra cheesy pizza.
At Keele services, I find solitude in a toilet stall.
‘I think my heart is breaking,’ my lover writes.
‘I know,’ I write back, ‘I feel the same.’
How did this happen? Sitting in a cubicle pretending to pee and saying lines like I am an understudy in the drama of my life? When was the last time I said what I felt instead of what someone wanted to hear? A person pretending to be a wife; a person pretending to be a mother; a person pretending to mean her vows, to like every single thing that everyone else suggested? How did I get to be so damn amenable?
‘I thought you’d fallen in,’ my husband quips, proving he knows his lines too.
The hotel stands on the edge of Windermere; twenty blissful steps to oblivion. If you are that way inclined. My working husband has vital work-related tasks, so I feign a headache and scamper up to our room until it is acceptable to indulge in a spot of dutch courage. Once there, I fret about the wifi passcode.
‘I’m here,’ I write.
‘Te quiero,’ my lover responds. He likes to make me work for it.
There will be dinner at a bistro. We assemble at the steps of a coach like children on a school outing. Two by two. Except some of us are just ones. How did these others manage to escape? The only excuse I have found that works is being nine months pregnant. I can’t do that every year.
I never know how to dress. Informal, I am told. I plump for black trousers and a white shirt. I am not one for heels or make up. I feel like I am trying to be someone I don’t want to be, but can’t help but strive to succeed at it.
‘I look like a waiter,’ I write.
‘I’ll give you a tip,’ he writes back, adding a winky lascivious face.
On the coach, the lights stay on; all I can see out of the window are other people’s faces and a distorted version of my own. At the restaurant, I go for a smoke.
The moon hangs large and low. Not a full moon, nor a half moon, nor a sliver of new moon. A something and nothing moon with an edge shaved off its perfection.
‘Look up at the sky,’ I want to write, ‘we’re under the same moon.’ But he will write something about my bottom and I will have to accept that he is not my soul-mate. I’m not ready for that. Yet. I’m a something and nothing girl. Something needs to save me from this nothing. In the end, it might have to be me.
One of the single guys presents me with a flower he has picked. His eyes seem sincere, if glitteringly inebriated. Dear God. He must have been pre-loading since the lunch I avoided. Still, I am momentarily charmed.
Back in the busy restaurant, my husband is already seated to my right. His eyes flick up as I approach. The man to my left stands as I wriggle into my seat. The trousers – it turns out – were a good call. My name card is spelled wrong. My steady northern name has been middle-classed, smoothed out. Classified.
Someone across the table is yelling to his preferred companions further along and my husband is next to his boss’s wife, so that’s the last I will hear from him this evening. To my left, sits a man I usually keep my distance from because he gets loud when he drinks and my husband – that excellent judge of character – considers him ‘unsuitable’. Someone has filled my wine glass; I reach for a precautionary bread roll and tear it up on my side-plate.
‘Hungry or nervous?’ I am asked by the man to my left. I am surprised into making eye-contact; the question insists on an answer. I hate making eye-contact; I’m afraid I might see the other considers me repellent.
‘Neither,’ I say, ‘but I should eat before I get drunk.’
It’s the truth. Dear God. The truth spilled out and I haven’t even dutch-couraged yet. Or maybe that’s why. He laughs. Then abruptly starts talking to the person to his left – a young woman showing a lot of skin and married (recently it seems; the ring is flashed) to a tattooed youth across the table. He sits back with his arms folded to accentuate his multi-coloured biceps.
I nibble on the bread and drink the wine; it is red but thin. People seem to be receiving food and I am thrown into confusion. Have I missed the ordering process while gazing at the night sky and composing imaginary texts? I attempt to gain my husband’s attention, but he holds a hand up in my face without turning. From my left, a voice. And a forefinger momentarily on my wrist:
‘We all have the same starter. We choose between two mains after that.’
‘Oh. Thank you.’
‘I’m Phil, by the way.’
‘I know. We’ve met before.’
How else would I have experienced the loudness and the ‘unsuitability’?
‘I know. But this is different, isn’t it?’
Is it?
I risk another look at his eyes; he does not seem too repulsed.
Another glass of wine and, somehow, a waitress. I appear to have chosen mussels – which I never do – and appear to not be worrying too much about eating with my hands. I also seem to be laughing a good deal. Phil asks about my children and the food they like (none) and pays grave attention to my answers in a way that implies he is listening.
I jump up from the table with a jolt that makes even my husband look round.
‘Loo,’ I blurt out and flee. Downstairs – past the swing door to the kitchen – between two aggressively pointy aspidistras on plinths – to sanctuary. Femmes.
‘Hope you’re ok, Hun?’ he writes. As I expected. Our code for: ‘You haven’t contacted me in hours and I’m shit-scared you might be sleeping with someone else!’
‘All good,’ I reply. Then, ‘some nice guy gave me a flower.’
Why write this?
Because I want his texts to come thick and fast, full of questions and accusations; I want him unguarded, unedited, not deleted then re-typed. I want him to not be consulting a website full of synonyms for cunnilingus. I want real. Because my marriage is a like a room that two people have just walked out of.
I really do need to pee this time, so I sit, pushing hard, knowing I have already spent too long. As I stand, my phone clatters to the tiles; the back flies off behind the sanitary towel bin and the battery skids under the door. There is little signal in the bowels of this restaurant and my last text was waiting to send. The picture in my head that forms of my lover pacing, checking and re-checking his phone with increasing recklessness and – heaven forbid – feeling displeased with me, makes my heart thud. My palms are sweaty, fingers suddenly thickened and fumbling.
I manage to stuff all the pieces of my phone into my pockets and force my way back through hussling staff and meandering customers.
‘Could you – ‘ I clear my throat, ‘Could you put this back together?’
‘You could ask your husband,’ Phil says, inclines his head, ‘he’s right there.’
I sift through this statement for a question, but the question is only in the eyes. Why do I damn well keep looking in this man’s eyes? I become a terminal truth-teller under the weight of his gaze.
‘Because I don’t want him to see what’s on it.’
Phil holds out his palm and I place the three silver pieces there. They are dwarfed. They are like Lego in his hand.
The following evening, I wear my spotty dress and pumps for the formal dinner.
‘Picture please,’ my lover writes, and I obey, arm awkwardly cocked, in a bathroom stall once again.
It is not all that formal; people mill around, mostly drinking, swapping seats. There is no dancing, which bores me. I slip out to greet the moon with my cigs tucked into my knickers. I am not a one for handbags.
Phil seems to be in step beside me.
‘You don’t have anywhere to put this.’
‘What is it?’
I glance across. And then up. He is very tall. Very much there. And his eyes say:
It’s OK, you’re nice. Stop worrying.
‘My number,’ he says.
‘Oh – ‘
And I imagine my lover can hear this exchange and march firmly on, I even speed up so that Phil falls away behind me.
The moon lights a path across Windermere for the intrepid.
Back in our room, my husband sleeps off the alcohol while I sit up, naked, in front of the dressing-table mirror.
‘Picture please,’ my lover writes. I take a photo into the mirror, but I don’t send it. Instead, I write about my phone mishap and the man who fixed it. I don’t write that I felt he saw inside me to other things that needed fixing.
‘Silly Billy,’ my lover writes, ‘always ask the waiter.’
But I’m glad I didn’t ask the waiter.
I placed my broken pieces into safe hands. In the morning – when I am sober – I will remember that..