Conversations 14

"Sonja said that you would—"

"Who the fuck is Sonja? You're fucking women now, as well?"

"No, let me explain. Sonja is a friend from work. That's her husband in the photograph."

It still didn't make any sense. My heart was pounding so hard I could actually hear it pulsing in my ears. I didn't remember ever being this angry before - at anything. She hadn't just torn my heart out. Now she was stamping on it with her high heels.

"You're fucking your friend's husband? Some friend you are!"

"No, she was there. Watching."

"So you're fucking both of them!"

"No!" she screamed. "Let me fucking explain!"

Wow. God was going to come down heavy on her for that one. I imagine swearing like that would mean some real penance was going to be due.

I parked my butt on the arm of a chair, and then sprang up again. What if she'd lain over that arm to get fucked from behind? Jesus, now I was getting paranoid. I took a few deep breaths to try and calm myself. At this rate she'd be a widow, rather than a divorcee.

She sprang into the silence.

"I knew you were following me. You were supposed to. It was part of the plan."

"Oh, I have just got to hear about this... this plan. This great plan to get you fucked outside your marriage," I said, trying to inject both laughter and disbelief into the statement.

"I was talking to Sonja at work and feeling sorry for myself at you being gone so often. She was sympathetic and said I should demand you stay home more often. I told her about our agreement to you taking the insurance assessor's job, and that you had to travel to wherever the claim was.

"So she pointed out that if you weren't 'taking care of business', I should let you know that it would be easy for someone else to take care of it, and it would shock you into looking for a new job."

So that's where the expression came from. I didn't know this Sonja woman, but I decided I definitely didn't like her.

I sighed deeply. "So that's where this started. You claiming I wasn't 'taking care of business'? You've been listening to work colleagues and taking their advice - advice from someone who has absolutely no stake in our marriage. Clever move, Tracy. Really bright!"

She blushed. It was too pink to be just a flush this time. "Well, we talked. And the idea came up for me to pretend to have an affair, with enough clues that you would find out and—"

"And what?"

"And it would shock you enough to get out of travelling all the time."

"Oh, right. So this was all to force me to leave a job where I have good prospects of promotion and increases in pay and... do what?"

"Well... I don't know. Some nine-to-five office job."

"Which I'm qualified for... how exactly?"

"I don't know. Something would come up."

"Something would come up." I almost laughed. She had an office job - assistant to the financial officer of a medium-sized company that made parts for the auto industry. But then she had an accounting degree. Mine was in English, with a minor in history. That qualified me only to be a teacher. The problem was, in this economy, a teacher's pay just didn't cut it - not if you wanted to get on the property ladder and own your own house. She'd wanted a house, and I loved her, so I'd wanted it too.

I'd been lucky to get into the insurance business with those qualifications. I think they liked the fact that my test reports were nice and clear, with good spelling and grammatically correct English. With a foot in the door, I'd worked my way up the ladder - slowly and carefully. Ladders could be very slippery things, and the higher you climbed, the further you fell.

We had discussed all this ad nauseam, neither of us happy, and both frustrated at the situation. She couldn't go any higher in her job until the fairly young and healthy financial officer resigned, was fired or died. So it was up to me to earn more, which meant travelling, and which in turn had got us the little semi-detached in which we now lived, but we were right on the edge and were only ever just four or five weeks from starvation - just like most other lower middle class workers in Britain. Our mortgage payments had hardly touched the capital loan at all over the eighteen months we'd had the house, and the prospect of resigning to wait for something to come up was laughable, at best.

But she had an accounting degree, she had to know that.

When I pointed this out, she looked nervous again and my stomach gave a lurch. More idiot advice from good old Sonja?

"Well, I thought that we could have a baby, and you could stay at home and look after it. The tax credits and child benefits would take up the slack of you not working."

"Woah there, tiger! You want to have a baby and then leave me to look after it. If you want to be a mother so badly, why don't you want to look after it?"

"Well, Sonja pointed out that many men are becoming house husbands now, so you might enjoy doing that. And I'm in a very good position to—"

"Oh, just stop with all this Sonja this, and Sonja that!" I said, suddenly sick and tired of all this rambling around the back roads instead of looking at the jammed up traffic on the motorway: the tailback behind the lethal car crash. If I heard the Sonja's fucking name mentioned one more time, I was going to throw up. "This is all well and good, and I really appreciate your understanding of how little value my career is in our lives, and how much more valuable I could be to your ambitions if I stayed at home all day to became mother to your child."

She opened her mouth to protest my words, but I raised a finger to her and she closed it again.

"But," I continued. "We don't even have to think about that anymore, as there's never going to be a child of ours for me to house-husband for."

She reared back in shock and real horror. "No, I explained. I didn't cheat on you. I love you completely. It was just a pretence to get you to—"

"To do whatever you wanted me to do," I finished for her. "I get that. It's mean and really low-spirited and lacks any respect for me whatsoever, but I get what your plan was. Unfortunately, my reality is very different. In my reality, I discovered you were about to cheat on me, followed you and witnessed enough to know what was happening. So that's it."

"But that's not what happened," she squealed.

"Look, we perceive reality through our senses, right? Sight, sound and touch etcetera. The nerves from all of those lead straight to our brains, so our reality is whatever is fed into our brain through our senses. And my sight saw you go into a services hotel room with some dickhead and get undressed to fuck him. You wanted me to think that, according to you, and you managed that really well. So well that none of my senses picked up on any pretence. So what's real to me is that you fucked a guy in a motel. That's in my head. That's what my brain sees. That's my reality."

I warmed to the subject. "Like the postman. In his reality he saw your tits when your gown swung open. I could see it on his face. But in your reality, you blocked his view before he saw them: two different realities about the same event. So which one is actually right? Is there even a right one?

I don't think that fucking bitch Sonja had seen that one coming!

"But that's wrong!" she protested.

"So show me it's wrong," I suggested.

"Look, what happened was, we laid out the clues for you to follow and watched the GPS on your phone to see where you were, so we could get the timing right—"

"You bugged my phone, too?" This was going from the bad to the ridiculous.

"No. We're on the same plan. Your GPS was already switched on, so I just activated the lost phone app on my phone. I knew you were on the way. And when you were close enough, I walked into the hotel. Then I drew the curtains but left enough space for you to either see - if you could climb up high enough - or photograph. I booked a downstairs room so that you could. It was all part of the plan."

She held up the first photograph, pointing to the man. "That's Linden, Sonja's husband. She was in the bathroom, watching your GPS on my phone. She was telling us where you were. When you parked close to the window, she said go and I started to undress. That's it.

"Aah," I said. "Now I understand. That little phone conversation that I overheard on Sunday was a setup to tell me where your affair was going to happen."

She nodded.

"You tricked me into going to the hotel, then allowed me to photograph the proceedings by not closing the curtains fully, and then didn't mention anything about it until today. Have I got it right?"

"Yes!" She was nodding hard now, desperate for me to understand.

"Well, that was certainly interesting."

I headed for the front door.

"Goodbye. Have a shit life."

She was on me in a flash, her arms around my waist, trying to pull me back.

"No, please! Don't leave. I love you. You can't leave me! You understood. You said you did!"

I sighed again. I really didn't want to drag the stupid bitch all the way to my car - too many neighbours with phone cameras all ready to video anything for a chance to get something on YouTube.

"Oh, I understand. I understand about perception and reality. I perceived you were a cheating cunt, but in your reality you were just teaching me a lesson, which in itself is so fucking disrespectful and contemptuous that I'd probably go ahead with a divorce anyway. But this crap you made up about a plot is very imaginative."

She dropped to her knees, her arms now around my thighs. I turned within their circle to look down on her.

"You can't go," she moaned. "It was just pretend."

"My reality says I caught you cheating and you came up with a half-arsed plan to explain it all away. Your reality... well, honestly, I no longer care about your reality."

"No! It's true. It's all true!"

"Prove it."

"Sonja and Linden will tell you. They'll explain it to you."

"So, as witnesses, you're relying on a friend of yours that I wouldn't know from a steamrollered teddy bear, and this guy..."

I flicked the last photograph at her. Tracy moaned. In the photo she was kneeling on the far side of the bed, naked apart from that thong. In the foreground, blurred but distinguishable was Linda, Lina, Lindy... whatever his fucking name was. He was closer to the bed, still with his back to the camera, but had turned slightly, just enough to reveal the bulge of an erection. The picture was out of focus enough that it couldn't reveal whether it was actually inside or sticking out of his pink trousers - and what type of moron wore pink trousers after the end of the seventies, anyway?

"He looks more than interested in you," I commented. "Probably not very reliable as a witness."

"Sonja was furious at him, although he confessed he just couldn't help it when I undressed."

"And that completes my reality," I said. "You talk of this plan, but there is no sign of any Sonja anywhere. All there is, is a certainty of you being pretty much naked on a bed in a motel with a man and his boner heading towards you. We both know that from this photograph.

"And even if they both came here and swore what you said was true, how and why should I believe them? They're friends of yours, I don't know them, never even heard of them before, so why should I trust anything they say? You say you and Sonja - who, by the way, is going to get some serious shit from me before this is over - cooked up this plan, but was it before or after I took the photographs? If you'd jumped out at me when I was taking the photos, it would be a different reality. But you only told me today when you got the notification of the divorce."

"But I love you! You know I do. I never cheated on you," she moaned.

I shook my head sadly. "Prove it! Ah, I'm tired and you just don't get it. I have to accept my reality. Otherwise all my senses are lying to me, or my brain is just processing everything wrongly. There is nothing whatsoever to show that my reality is wrong, so I have to accept it."

"You could just trust me!" she said mournfully.

"After hearing your call, which you later said you planned, and then seeing these photographs that I took myself, why would I?"

"Because you love me."

I laughed. "I think that that's maybe the worst possible reason to trust you. Loving you puts goggles on my face that apparently distort reality."

I wasn't actually sure if that was true or not. I would have to think on it later, when my mind and my heart and my soul weren't all at war with each other.

I opened the front door. "I can't stay. I can't. I'm sorry. Goodbye Tracy."

I didn't wish her a shit life this time. If she really did love me then, like me, she was already in one.

But I couldn't stay. Not in my reality.