Susannah has a secret.

Keeping it feels like a heavy hand across the back of her neck, oppressive comfort. It’s strange, because that’s not where she thought the pain would begin. She sits still in the family study, back stiff in front of the computer, and ticks off inside her head the areas of her body being eaten away: metastases, spreading illness in her blood, too many cells and not enough time remaining.

Silently, she googles the impressive terms her doctors slip into their simple English non-answers and clicks her way through page after page of information. Brief but telling paragraphs about prognosis (not good), and treatment (invasive, painful, not much use at all), and cause (everything, genetics, even nothing but chance; what does it matter now?), all in the comfort of her own home. She saves these pages - papers from well-known journals, puff-pieces by lifestyle writers, anything relevant - into a folder she leaves unlocked on the desktop, identified by her name only. It sits on the blue screen under a folder of her husband’s name, its contents unexplored by her.

An hour before he’s due home, she gets up slowly and awkwardly and walks through the quiet house to the immaculate kitchen, sleek fittings and efficient gadgetry. The lone ring on her hand, a gold band, flashes refractions on the blade surface as she chops parsley and smashes garlic cloves with sure violence, the ease of familiarity. She only feels a little weary.

*

Garry has a secret.

It creeps into his thoughts when he’s at work, raising an instant sheet of sweat across the back of his neck, where his crisp white shirt soaks it up beneath the line of his hair. Sometimes he catches a glimpse of schoolgirls on the train, shapeless skirts covering legs of all sizes and conditions - bruises and scabs, the hint of thighs and hips - and in his lap his hands still, as if caught in a vice somewhere else.

Late at night he clicks through a series of links, some bold, some so small they are easily overshadowed by more seemingly lurid ads, but always to reach the same goal. Cock in one hand, the sites and the scenes and the girls change but each time he’s gratified to watch some purported teen cream her panties to the fevered urging in his head, the rhythm of his palm. Wiping his hands clean on a tissue before he closes the window once it’s over, he’s already forgotten the tiny blissed-out face, letting it disappear into someone else’s fantasy and an extra line on his personal credit card statement.

He’s never cheated on his wife in the flesh, but every night he comes home from work to eat a mostly silent dinner across the table from her before retreating to the family study room, to the computer there. Sometimes, for the hell of it, he saves pictures, still captures of an act in motion he craves. He leaves them in an unlocked folder on the desktop, labelled simply with his name. He’s pretty sure his wife has never opened it to check out the contents, that she never will. They promised trust in marriage, after all.

*

Susannah has two secrets, then, and Garry has none. She already knows about her husband’s late night habit; has known, for some years. She’s never been as deep a sleeper as he believes, and the lone light of his sanctuary draws her on quiet nights. His groans, the sighs, his pleasure she’s seen and walked away silently from. But she says nothing and cares little now, for she’s never loved him as she promised to; nor anyone else, not even herself.

She doesn’t know how to bring up either secret with him, her only family. She has been on her own for so long that it seems odd now to be hurt by his infidelity, and strange to reach out for a comfort cold and borne out of a sense of duty. So she leaves her research into the fading of her body below the evidence of their failed relationship, and greets him as per normal every day when he comes home.

How are you? he asks, impersonal from the repetition, the ceremony. She busses her lips quickly over his five o’clock shadow, says dinner’s already on the table, love.

END

20/11/03

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