any deeper than dating does. That’s what caught me off-guard with Ben – the need to spend time together was violently instant. I didn’t think we were playing games, although admittedly he was married, but he told me straight away that he was unhappy, and that emotionally it was over, and we only discussed her once. We were sitting in a pub behind Green Park, and we’d just played three games of drunken pool, and he’d won all three. We slumped down into the snug with dopey smiles and he said, ‘She doesn’t even like me any more, Scarlet’, and I said, ‘I won’t be a shoulder to cry on. We have something, Ben, you and I. We have a strange and certain chemistry. This is new to me. I have never felt like I’ve found a new best friend before. So I’m not just a cushion for you to fall onto when you snap your marriage apart and you’re thrown back by the blast. This already means more than that. I wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t.’
It wasn’t until later that she seemed to consume us both – like she’d slipped into the room silently and was a constant third person in the corner looking on.
I’m getting older, I’m thirty-one. My breasts have fallen an inch in the last year. I have stretch-marks around my bottom, and even a couple on my stomach. I have lines, plural, around my eyes. Last night I traced the lines with my middle fingers. These tiny red routes that map all my days spent in the sun, all the late nights that I didn’t moisturise, that I drunkenly swiped at my eyes and rubbed hard, too hard, to remove thick black kohl and mascara, with every swipe breaking every rule in my make-up artist’s manual. I pulled gently at the skin on my cheekbones, watching as it lazed back into place. The spring has sprung, my bounce isn’t what it was, my ball has deflated. It’s a fresh fear that has crept up on me, maybe it lives in the creases of laughter lines or crows’ feet, and it makes you scared to leave. Then you hate yourself for being a coward and staying without affection, and the lines get deeper, and the fear moves in permanently and brings all its bags with it. Soon you don’t even recognise yourself – who is that girl constantly on the brink of tears? Do I even know her? And who is that desperate exhausted girl picking apart every little thing that her boyfriend says, nagging and needy, clawing for some much needed sign that he cares? Oh Christ, it’s me. So then you convince yourself it would be crazy to leave, and that you expect too much and want what you shouldn’t. You convince yourself you’re crazy because it’s easier that way. You don’t know what else to do, when you don’t even know yourself anymore.
After four months of our affair, Ben left his wife for me. They had been married for a year, but together for ten. I’m obsessed with her now, significantly more than I am obsessed with him. I haven’t met her, but I’ve seen pictures. She’s all limbs. She played hockey for her school. She is elegant, and her smile seems to carry on around her cheeks to her ears, and she’s got a dimple in her chin. She doesn’t wear much make-up, and she wears cream round-neck T-shirts and black trousers to work, and low black court shoes. She is sensible and she smiles. Ben forgot to take the photo of them on honeymoon out of his wallet, or at least that’s what he told me when I found it and cried. They were standing on Etna smiling at the camera with their arms around each other, the volcano smoking in the background. It erupts every year, Ben said when I found the photo, and as if that was so interesting it might startle away my tears. And the eruptions occur along the same plate in the earth, so a series of sooty mouths smoke in a black ashen line. Sometimes the tour guides that work on Etna only get a couple of hours’ notice, he said, before their livelihood disintegrates again for that year; nodding his head, imparting the tidbit that he picked up in Sicily with his brand-new wife. I don’t know where he has put that photo but I have a horrible feeling that I will find it some day, by accident, stuffed into one of his computer books. I wouldn’t believe him if he told me he had thrown it away. I know that he loved her.
The night that Ben and I first kissed, we inched towards each other with smiles. We sat on stools at the bar facing each other. We were a human mirror, both with our hands propped on our stools between our legs. With another inch forwards our knees touched. Then I leant across and put my hands on Ben’s knees to support myself. Then he kissed me, grabbing a handful of the hair on the back of my head. We kissed for a minute, but then he pulled away and said, ‘But I love Katie’, and it’s the only time I have ever heard him use that word about another living person. Then he kissed me again.
I’m obsessed with what she does, what she likes, this woman I feel Ben and I have wronged together. I have a victim, and I want to know what makes her smile. I want to make her laugh, to know that she’s happy. I don’t suppose I needed Ben but I took him anyway, because I fell in love, and it was like nothing I had ever known. At the time it was full of promise. Now I realise that there is a bridge between us that we’ll never cross, and that maybe nobody ever does. He wants a tattoo on his thigh but it can’t just be a rose or an anchor or a Chinese symbol, it has to mean something. It has to represent something of significance to him. He’s been thinking about it for the last six months and nothing has occurred to him yet …
Keep walking along Piccadilly and you’ll pass the Royal Academy of Art on the left. You can only glimpse it from the road but it has a large courtyard with a fountain in the middle. In the summer you can sit out in that courtyard late into the evening – they have a bar and a jazz band, and you can see the sun set, sipping on a cold beer, surrounded by banners for exhibitions that aren’t ever as appealing as just sitting late into the night, drinking a beer or a cocktail or a glass of wine. Or sometimes all three …
Helen calls as I trip across Old Bond Street.
‘It’s definitely true,’ she says, sounding shell-shocked and numb, somehow absent from herself.
‘How do you know?’ I ask.
‘I checked his phone. He has texts.’
‘Who from?’
‘Her name is Nikki – with an “i”.’
‘How awful.’
‘I know. I suppose he could have spelt it wrong … or it might be abbreviated … not that it matters …’
Helen falls silent and I know what she is thinking – that the ‘i’ in Nikki means she is younger than we are. It’s the first time, really, that they can be younger than we are. I don’t think it should mean anything, while knowing that it does.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What do they say?’
‘Sex stuff. She calls his cock a dick. Apparently she likes licking it like a lollipop.’
‘How awful.’
‘I know.’
‘What about the babysitter?’
‘I drove him home last night when I dropped Deborah off.’
‘Does your sister know you’re having sex with her babysitter?’
‘Hmmm? No … I don’t think so.’
‘Did you do it again?’
‘In the back of my car.’
‘Okay.’
‘I have to go. I have a squash match in an hour, I need warm-up time.’
‘Helen, why don’t you sleep with somebody from squash, if you want something …’
‘I don’t want something, particularly. I have to
