The Truth, the Whole Truth

by Ann-Marie Swift

a mug of strong builders tea

He went down so easy, said Jason. Must have been pissed. A big bloke like him doesn’t fall so easy. There was a paving stone behind him, he might have slipped back on that. And being pissed, he’d have slipped easy. 

Jason’s crying a little, bright blue eyes, redrimmed with tears and fear. 

I thought he’d come back up and hit me, says Jason. Christ knows, it was him that wanted the fight. I don’t fight.

Big hands, in his lap now, big hands covered with cuts and bruises. They look like a fighter’s hands to Alicia, the policewoman sitting opposite him. But what does she know, she’s only been in the job a few weeks.

I’m a scaffolder, he says. It’s rough work. Some of them boys like a pint and a bit of a ruck, but I’m not like them. I have a cup of tea and go home to my bird. We’ve got two kids. They’re my world. I don’t do the boozing. I’ve seen what it does. 

He looks down at the hands, a couple of stray freckles in among the cuts and bruises. A mark where he pulled a splinter out the other day. The rough planks of wood you use on the scaffolding. They ought to wear gloves, but nobody does. Slows you down. It’s dangerous work, but then you can get hurt anywhere. 

His hands, back on the table, look strange, as if they belong to someone else. They’ve been acting out of character. 

I’ve never hit anyone before. I don’t go in for that. He’d been on and bloody on at me for years. Ever since me and Stephanie got together. He couldn’t bear that. It was her choice though, weren’t it? He didn’t want her when he was with her, treated her rotten, and then he didn’t want anyone else to have her.  Serves him right, he didn’t deserve her.

I mean, he adds, it serves him right that she left. 

A little silence hangs in the air. 

He looks back down at his hands. The police woman opposite him, a slight Asian-looking slip of a girl, is taking notes though the whole thing is being recorded.  He can’t look her in the eye, she’s so fresh and innocent, big dark eyes, soft as an animal. He finds himself talking to the table. 

He was on at you? Alicia asks. She’s heard about the no comment interviews. This one couldn’t be more different. The words fall out of him, as if he’d been saving it all up.  

Phoned me, Jason tells her. Phoned me at home, phoned me on the mobile. Sent me text messages. Emailed me. I told Steph about some of them, couldn’t tell her about all of them. She’d have told her dad and he’d have gone crazy. He’d of killed him 

Jason slaps his hand over his mouth, realises how bad this sounds. Beads of sweat on his forehead where he’s trying not to cry. Alicia wonders if it’s the same for men, the pain across the front of your head when you’re trying not to cry. 

Takes his hand away, takes a breath. 

I didn’t want him dead, he says, I didn’t even want to hit him. I’d have put up with it for ever, rather than hit him.  All he was, was jealous. 

What changed, Alicia asks. What made you stop putting up with it?

Jason takes a breath. He’s a burly bloke, pale and gingery, blue eyes, heavy round the shoulders. Lovely rosy cheeks, weather-beaten skin. He should have been a farmer.

He leans forward to her.  She can smell fresh sweat. 

It was the last one that got to me, he says. Before, he always used to say stuff to me, said how stupid I was, how thick I was, how much I didn’t deserve Steph. I let it run off me. Steph’s dad said I should have it out with him. But you know what, Dick was right, to call me thick. I couldn’t ever have been a teacher like him.  I can’t hardly spell. I can just about keep the books straight. Steph’s dad gives me a hand. 

The young policewoman gives him a puzzled look. I’m a scaffolder, he says, got my own team. We do all right. I have to pay them, keep the books straight, get my taxes in. You know. 

She doesn’t, really. She nods anyway. 

I’m lucky to be with Steph. She’s a lovely girl. Dick used to say all those things, go on at me all the time, about how thick I was and I didn’t deserve her. And I just thought, yeah mate, you’re dead right. 

Another quick intake of breath on the word, dead. 

I’d listen to him going on, on the phone, and I’d think, well mate, who’s laughing now? Me with Steph and the kids or you with your pints of beer, no job and your crap house? 

I thought you said he was a teacher?

Was, says Jason. Got the sack, or whatever they get. Drunk all the time. After she kicked him out he drank more, just did nothing but drink. Tell you the truth, I was sorry for his bird, his new bird. 

A silence falls. Alicia is pondering what a woman would see in a drunk ex-teacher but is aware that this isn’t a pertinent question to ask. Though maybe he’s lying about how much this man Dick was drinking. She takes a breath and asks the question. 

Dick’s new girlfriend? Who’d want to go out with a guy like that? Drunk all the time?

Jason raises his eyes. A wry smile. She notes his lips are dry and cracked. Kissable all the same. She moves her thinking back to the question. 

Christine? She was glad of him. If you’d been around here longer you’d know about it.

He doesn’t look as though he’s going to say anything more, but then he does. 

Last bloke was a bastard when he was with her and a bastard when he wasn’t. Half the time he was in prison, the other half he was hitting her. If you’d of been around you’d most likely know him. In and out of the police station. Broke her arm once. Hit the kid, Christine’s kid. Broke a rib. She was happy with Dick, didn’t mind his drinking, he never hit the kid, hardly ever hit Chrissy. 

It seems like a game of snakes and ladders to Alicia, still single, hoping to meet the right man, somewhere, sometime soon. Dick slides down, meets Christine on the way up. Jason’s been going up, might have to slither right back down again, depending on what happened, what really happened with Dick. 

So what happened? 

He looks bewildered for a moment. She’s thrown him. She can see the schoolkid Jason once was, the cloud across his face when he’s forgotten what it is he’s supposed to be doing. 

Oh, yeah. Well, he said he’d go to the police. 

Dick was going to go to the police? Alicia puts her pen down. She isn’t sure she’s heard right. He was harassing you night and day, and then he said he’d go to the police? What was he going to do? Turn himself in for harassment? 

It’s Jason’s turn to look baffled. No, he says. One of the kids is his. The eldest of Steph’s kids, our Emily, that’s his kid. Steph lets her go over to Dick’s place weekends. She doesn’t have to, she’d get custody if she wanted it. We were going to stop it. Em gets bored there, they don’t do anything with her. She just sits and watches telly. Comes back full of sweets and smelling of smoke. 

Right. Alicia is straining now to follow Jason’s thread. 

He said he’d tell the police I’d been fiddling with her. Or Social Services, I dunno. So, I had to go and sort it out. 

Let’s take a break, Alicia says. She needs to think about this. It could be murder after all, if he’d thought about it ahead of time, if he’d gone over there thinking about hitting Dick. She needs to talk to her colleagues, see if a superior wants to take over the questioning. Now that it’s more complicated. Now there’s a kiddy involved.

Cigarette? The new police person is a man. He’s older, carrying weariness and experience somewhere at the top of his shoulders. Grey hair, tired greyish eyes. Alicia, the young policewoman, is still there, sitting next to the older bloke. 

Jason doesn’t smoke. 

Right, he says. Tell me about you and Dick. 

Jason starts to cry again. Alicia produces a tissue, one of those with a pretty flowery pattern, which she passes to the older policeman, who hands it across the table to Jason, who regards it with mild surprise, carefully puts it in his pocket and continues to wipe his eyes and nose with the back of his hand. 

The police-woman whispers something to the policeman. 

Okay. Let’s start with the lovely Stephanie. What happened there?

Jason doesn’t know how far back to go. He’s known Stephanie, to some extent, at least since he got his first job scaffolding for her dad. Years back. Ten years, maybe. She’d just met Dick then. Her dad didn’t think much of Dick but then he didn’t think much of anyone who wanted to take his princess away from him. Used to see her now and again, if he came round to the house to sort things out with her dad. Pretty girl, more than pretty, narrow shoulders, long grey eyes, high cheekbones, that white-blonde hair that sometimes turns dark when you grow up, but hers stayed white-blonde. A deer, you’d say, shy and graceful. Or a flower, an orchid maybe. Something a bit rare, not showy, but lovely when you looked close. A lily of the valley. 

Wilted a bit though, once she’d got together with Dick. 

Dick by name, prick by nature, said her dad. Not when Steph was around of course. She thought the sun shone out of him. Jason met him a few times. Steph’s dad liked Jason, invited him out to their family things sometimes. Jason didn’t have family of his own.  In the pub once, what were they all celebrating? Must have been her dad’s birthday. Let’s have a go at the pub quiz, said Dick. 

Let’s not, said Stephanie’s dad. They moved into the room with the pool tables when the quiz started. Dick showing off at pool, dark floppy hair, black track suit bottoms, a bit sloppy already, a bit loud. Good at pool though. PE teacher, so they said. 

Track suit bottoms, said Stephanie’s dad. You’d think he could do better. He’s supposed to be a teacher. They were dirty old ones too, the kind you’d use for work, not for a night out. Dick’s voice got louder, his games of pool got worse through the evening. 

What then? He’d seen Steph in town once, he was halfway up a building clinging on to the scaffolding, Stephanie walking along pushing a pram. Funny, he could recognise her just from the top of her head, how she walked, small steps, her slim shoulders rounded behind the pram. He wondered whether to call down, thought she must be used to it, after all her dad’s a builder. 

Lovely smile when she looked up, lovely radiant smile, small pearly teeth, no make-up, no lipstick. “Jason!”

Well, the older policeman asked. What about you and Stephanie? How did that start?

He hadn’t started the answer yet, but at least he’d found the right moment. When her dad was doing that job in Cornwall – never usually travelled so far from home for work, but it was for a friend.  

Her dad sounded desperate, panicky even. Can you go over? He’s hit her. She’s got rid of him now but he’s out there, pissed, shouting stuff, calling her all sorts. Just get in there, would you? Just spend the night there, I’ll be back in the morning. 

Why you, the policeman wanted to know? Why not get someone else?

I don’t drink, said Jason. I already told you. He knew I’d be sober enough to drive. 

She could have called us, says Alicia. She should have called the police. 

Both Jason and the older policeman look at her with something approaching surprise.

Right, says the older policemen, breathing out. He could really use a cigarette. What happened to the good old days when you offered them a cigarette, got down to the nitty gritty? What happened to good cop, bad cop? They were all good cops now. 

So I’m guessing, says the older policemen, good cop. You stayed with her, slept on the sofa, all very nice. And then it happened again, and she called you, and so on and so on. 

No matter what he says, the bloke starts crying. 

I love her so much, says Jason, superfluously. 

Right. 

So what I don’t see, says the older policeman, trying to ignore Jason’s tears, is why you went round there one sunny Saturday afternoon and killed him. You’d got the girl, you’d got his house, you’d even got his kids. What more did you want?

Kid, says Jason, looking up. Eldest kid is his, second one is mine. Both call me Dad though, he adds with some pride. 

I told her what happened. He nods towards Alicia. He was on my case, night and day. He’d let up for a while and then he got back on it. Drove me mad. But I put up with it. Then he said he’d tell them I’d been fiddling with the kid. 

So you went over?

Jason’s hands almost cover his face. 

Yeah. His voice is muffled. 

Take your hands away, says the older policeman. 

For the tape, adds Alicia. 

I went over, says Jason, looking up now, meeting their eyes. 

What time did you leave your home?

Christ, says Jason. I’ve no idea. Two o’clock? Saturday afternoon. It was hot. Steph was out in the garden with Timmy. Timmy’s the baby. He rang on the landline. He’d got Emily.

I said, do you want me to come and get her?

He said, no she ain’t going back to you. I’m keeping her. 

I said, let me talk to her. 

He said no. He was drunk. I could tell from his voice. I thought he might be doing her harm. I said, where’s Christine? 

He said, you don’t need to know.  He said, you needn’t come round, Emily’s staying here. I’m not letting her back to you. 

I said put her on the line. 

He said that thing then. Jason stops. There’s a silence. 

He said, says Jason. He said, I’ve rung the Social and told them you’ve been fiddling with her. 

So you went round? 

Yeah. 

You went round and you were going to kill him?

No. Jason’s head’s on the table now, muffling his voice. His hands over his head, protecting the back of his head. Now there’s a bloke who got hit a lot as a kid. The older policeman knows the signs. 

You need to sit up. We can’t hear you. For the tape. You need to talk to the tape. 

Jason sits up, looks directly at the tape machine, talks to it as if it were a person, as if it were the only person in the world who could understand. 

I ran round there. Steph said go on, have it out with him. It’s been brewing, that’s what she said. Went in through the back gate. He lives, lived on the first floor. It’s a shop underneath. 

Tattoo parlour. Shabby old flat. Chrissy does what she can. Dirty back yard, belongs to the shop. They don’t do nothing with it, couple of plastic chairs, bits of stuff, lying around. He’d been looking out for me, he was in the back yard as soon as I got there, prancing around. Those dirty old tracksuit bottoms, bare chest. 

He had a tattoo. He’d drank every penny he earned, drank every penny Chrissy got and then he’d gone and got himself a bloody tattoo. 

Got their names on it. Chrissy, her kid Darren and Emily. All wrapped up in each other like a bunch of snakes. He was sticking his chest out at me with all them names on it, all bright and fresh. He said, look at me, look at me. He said, you couldn’t even spell their names, you thick shit. He said, Emily’s staying with me. He said, hit me then if you want. 

He was dancing around like he’d been watching boxing on telly, all dancy and jabby. Jabbing away at me like he thought he was Mohammed Ali. He’d got fat since they sacked him, belly like a sack of potatoes. And his arms all thin and pale. 

Came right up close, breathing in my face, whisky and beer. He said, ya pervert. I’m reporting you. 

So I hit him. 

I hit him and he went down, and he stayed down. 

What did you do?

I didn’t know what to do. Jason’s still talking to the tape recorder. I was trying to think what I knew to do. I’ve done First Aid, there’s been a few boys fall off the scaffolding, I thought, should I move him or what? 

Then I looked up and I saw them. Darren and Emily. I couldn’t hear nothing, just saw their faces at the window.

What were they doing? 

Jason turns round to look at the young policewoman. 

They were crying. What do you think? They’d just seen me kill their dad. 

Fireworks

by Anne-Marie Swift

an espresso martini

“I used to know her,” I tell the girl I’m with, though it’s not strictly true. Turns out I didn’t know her at all. Her, or her friends, that big, bold group of men, mostly gay, all loud and comfortable and confident. 

It’s five years, maybe more, since it all broke up and now there she is, sipping an expresso martini in the bar I always go to. 

“Go and talk to her”, says Charlotte. And so I do. It’s surprisingly easy. She sips her drink – she didn’t use to drink at all – and I ask about her friends. She talks to me as if we’ve never been apart. 

"Alex and Vesey, it was a mess. Remember the Bonfire Night part? I think that evening was the beginning of the end. When someone puts themselves deliberately right in the way of the fireworks like that, they're either unhappy with their relationship or unhappy with life."

She pauses. 

"Aren't they?"

Silence. She's waiting for an answer from me. This was always her trick. Throw the unanswerable question at you. I can't believe she's referring to that night as if it was just a part of the flow, just another evening. 

I haven’t forgotten that Bonfire Night. It was me that wanted a fireworks party. I wanted the show if it, now that we had this fantastic house. I wanted the neighbours to look out over our big garden and see fireworks going off and dozens of fashionable people drinking champagne and having a fantastic time.

I needed her to make it happen, though. I didn't have enough friends. I had the money, I bought some great fireworks. I needed her to make the fireworks speak. 

She carries on talking to me about that evening. She thinks she's reminding me of what happened, what was going on that evening but it’s all new. I didn't see anything except her, and as it turns out I wasn't even seeing her clearly.

"You noticed, didn't you, Mark, after all his suicide attempts, right at the other end of the garden safely away from the fireworks? He told me that night, told me about his suicide attempts and how ashamed he was when he failed. He'd taken all this booze and pills and then he woke up and realised it hadn't worked - that's what he said, he said it hadn't worked. So he rang the ambulance service, and when he got through to them, he told them what he'd done and he was so embarrassed that he'd done this thing, and they had to come out to him, and there were people dying of real illnesses, and so he said "Don't put the sirens on or anything, I don't want anyone to stop their cars for me".

She laughs, and takes a hard drag at her cigarette. “I think he wants to live." she adds.

"So everyone's still alive then?" I say.

"Oh, yeah" she says, witheringly "They're still alive".  As if alive was not really much of an achievement.

We are quiet for a moment and I think of going back to my table. 

It was her best do ever. This group of people that would have travelled to any party she gave, her posse, they were all there.

I think back to her friend Mark. I see his cat-shaped face, pointy front teeth discoloured from smoke. I see him running his hand over his baldy head with sensual pleasure, drawing attention to the masses of holes in his pierced ears and the one single long long black painted fingernail on his little finger. 

And then he sees me looking, knows how gauche I am, how uncool, how Stella is the only cool thing about me and he says "So, Harry, wanna shag?" and they all fall around laughing. I was lost with those people, their smart humour, their way of laughing with you but also, just a little bit, at you. 

I think back to Alex and Vesey. They were the long-stay relationship of that flighty, movable, troubled group. They'd been together for ten years and their relationship was a source of wonder, amazement, and constant gossip for the rest of the group. They were an extrovert open couple, having people over to dinner six nights out of seven, their phone ringing constantly, and talking talking talking. It seemed to me that there was nothing they didn't talk about, and nobody they didn't talk to. Even I knew what went on in their bedroom. I wondered just how much Stella told them about what went on in the bedroom she shared with me.

Alex and Vesey arrived late, which was usual and separate which was not so usual. Vesey came first, with a couple of young gay guys nobody recognised, and pissed, well-pissed, that kind of risky-drunk when you know that anything could happen. It could be brilliant or awful. Vesey and his new, drunk friends were like fireworks themselves. They could flare up in beauty or take your eye out. 

Alex arrived later, alone. He had walked. He didn't want to go with Vesey, Vesey was too pissed to be seen with, he said.

Alex and Vesey met in the kitchen, our beautiful blaring white kitchen now full of people I barely knew, all making the house look untidy and yet more beautiful. There was Vesey, short dark hair, pale skin, those Celtic blue eyes slightly bulging with excitement, drink, defiance. Denim jacket, tight shirt, expensive jeans. 

There was Alex, face to face with him, eye to eye, nose to nose. Alex also with short cropped hair, ginger-blonde, light blue eyes against Vesey’s dark blue, they glared at each other. The whiteness of the kitchen glared back. 

"I'm going home" Alex said clear and sober to Vesey “if you have another drink".

There were just enough people around to make it humiliating for Alex when Vesey slowly, deliberately, poured a pretty long, pretty strong drink into his glass. His eyes were hard. One or two laughed when Vesey said “Shame you won't be around for the fireworks."

Later, Alex has gone, the new drunk friends are leaving and Vesey's too pissed to be funny. He's scary instead, stumbling down the steps to the garden, the beautiful landscaped garden, crushing the expensively planted future flower beds, swearing at the firework display. 

"We've had Prozac" he shouts, across the London gardens "and that was no fucking good either". Was anyone watching? 

He was wrong though. The fireworks were good. I’d spent a fortune on them, and I did stuff I don't usually do. I read the backs of all the packets. I shut the door to one of the many, many rooms in our fantastic house and I read all the packets and I really tried to visualize how each firework would look in the night sky above our beautiful garden, and I choreographed them. I actually fucking choreographed them.

I did it for Stella, of course. She loved fireworks.

Not long after we first met, we were sitting in the cosy little house she rented. It was a Saturday evening, it had been shovelling it down with rain all day and now we were lying on the sofa, the telly on, smoking a gentle spliff, as she lay in my arms. Suddenly we heard a succession of loud dull bangs from outside.

I thought it was a car backfiring, and then I thought it was a bomb.

Stella realised though, straight away. She was up and out of that room and running down the road, and I was running along with her, following the plumes of stars in the sky. It wasn't far to one of the greens they have in Cambridge where all the foreign students hang out in summer and people scurry across in winter.

And there were the fireworks. God knows what it was in aid of. The fireworks were pretty good, as far as I could tell at the time. Plenty of big bangs, some moments when the sky seemed to be ready to break. Lots of colours. Lots going on - you'd look over to one side of the sky as something exploded, then glance, for no reason, over to the other side and see some pink trail of stars just quietly making its way across the sky.

She was gripping my arm so tight and I looked around at her. Her face was turned up to the sky. She was absolutely and utterly entranced, as if she was flying across the sky, breaking up into a thousand pieces like one of those fireworks. Tears poured down her face.

I persuaded her to move in with me not long after.

We had a good relationship. Dinners out, dinners in, her meeting my friends - not many of them, it didn't take long. Me gradually learning to establish and respect the complex landscape of her friends and family, their lovers and interrelationships.

Sex. Loads of sex. She was tireless, indefatigable, sometimes almost desperate. But who's complaining? We never stopped having sex, every day, sometimes twice or more. The sex was always there, even right at the end. Even as our relationship was actually falling apart, she could still suddenly wrench my trouser buttons open and make me come in her hand, for no apparent reason.

And always her friends, that terrible bitchy glamorous group of friends. The midnight calls she took on her mobile phone. The long Sunday afternoons when all I heard was her voice saying "No ... but no   he must understand that, surely" and they would talk and talk and talk to her in between, and I didn't know and couldn't imagine what they were saying. She'd come off the phone and be weary and uncommunicative.

It wasn't that I was jealous. I just wanted to protect her from the demands of her friends. They asked too much of her.

Holidays together. I loved the holidays most of all, they were the times when I felt as though I really had her. The friends were far away, work was far away and it was just me and Stella, sunshine, food and sex.

On a Canary Island one New Year's Eve, we sat in an outside cafe on the main town square and whiled away the time till midnight. We had thought that there would be something happening in the town square but it quiet, and we were chilly and a little bored. I thought we could see the new year in back at the hotel, in bed. 

Then, about five minutes before midnight, they started to pour into the square. They came from every direction. All ages, every type of person. People in evening dress, glinting diamonds or something like diamonds, carrying bottles of champagne or fizzy Freixenet. Families with children. Young people in jeans.  They came pouring in, as if they had been held behind barriers somewhere and just now been released into the square.

It was still quiet, joyful but restrained, happy but quiet, when the church bells started to chime and the crowd went wild, counting down together until on the last chime every single one of those bottles of champagne was opened, and everyone in the square grabbed each other and kissed and laughed and shouted and pushed champagne at each other, at us. It was mayhem.

After that, just as the evening seemed so good, after that, the fireworks started over the sea. These fireworks were more than good. They were wild. They were amazing. There were times I thought the sea would explode. I've never seen so much colour, so many stars, such a total total mad riot of it. Stella was laughing and crying all at the same time. There was even the odd tear at the corner of my manly dry and tearless eyes.

When the sky had finally broken into a million pieces and the sea was a shattered mass of blue, when the families had stopped cheering and the kids had been rounded up to their parents, when the last speck of colour had disappeared out of the sky so that only the safe old stars sat up there, then she let me kiss her.

I had so much wanted to kiss her all the time it was happening. And now I was kissing her. A curious kiss, a remote kiss. She was kissing a feeling she had had about the fireworks, not me.

But of course I forgot it and a couple of hours later we were lying in bed and I'd just had my orgasm and we were both laughing.

We went on. We were back in England and we were living together, and I got this great job offer. The money was good and I’d travel away from home. I missed Stella but I wondered if she even noticed I was gone.  Her friends were around more. There were more phone calls in the middle of the night.

One time, we'd had dinner, been to this restaurant I knew she loved, and when we got back into the car, her mobile phone rang. She took the call, of course, and then she said to me “I’ll be a while”.  I thought she meant she’d call them back, but when we got home she took the car keys from me and disappeared into the London night. 

I hated that phone.

It was her new friend. When she had a new friend it was as if she'd met a new lover, she jumped to their every call. So, when Daniel rang and there was something going on, she didn't even stop to explain, she just got into the car and left me there feeling a fool.

I was good at the new job and I worked all the hours and then I got a better job and then I got us this flat, this immense crazy tall, empty white flat. And if you would have seen her face when she first walked into that huge white ballroom of a front room, with the January sun gushing through the windows and running around in pools on the wooden floor, if you would have seen her face, you would have lain down and died for her too.

She'd never had anything like it, had she? What had she ever had in her life?

I had to give her everything I could. We moved into that fantastic flat. We had phones in every room and she had her own line. We were happy. We had great sex, all the time. But when I wasn't at work and when we weren't having sex, I could feel her slipping away.

At first I thought she was having an affair, of course. Original of me. I came home from work at odd times, tried to check up on her, but she never was in the bedroom shagging some guy. She'd be out at work, or if she was in, she'd look up from a book, puzzled, irritated. She'd go out with Alex or Vesey or Oliver someone and I'd quiz her when she got back. Where did she go? How many drinks, joints, whatever had she had? Exactly how many, I needed to know. I needed all the detail to reassure myself that she wasn't cheating on me.

But it didn’t help and anyway she wasn’t sleeping with anyone else. I could feel her going away, but I couldn't pin down what was happening. The sex was still great and she was mostly there when I got in. What do you do?

So we had the bonfire party. I thought it would bring us together. I'd do the fireworks and we'd kind of share her friends and somehow everything would be fine.

I guess I overdid it on the drink. She was right about that night, about everything breaking up, but the only person I saw was her.

I saw her so close and intimate with Mark. I saw her protecting Alex and Vesey. I saw her finally - this is the last thing I remember - standing on the steps down to the garden, Vesey's arms tight around her, like lovers. She was looking up, into his face, not into the sky where my fireworks burnt and hung uselessly.

I screamed. I remember screaming across the garden as the last and biggest of my fireworks threatened to smash every last window of my house and all the houses around, as the sky blazed for one last terrible time, I ran up the steps from the garden, pushing Vesey to one side so I was looking her in the face, eye to eye, face to face, almost lips to lips. I screamed, pathetic, "You don't love me anymore", and she said to me, calm and kind of tired,

"Harry, you don't even know the meaning of the word."

Flirting

by Ann-Marie Swift

a cup of bitter coffee

When I leave the house Luke is asleep, curled in a fierce ball, fists clenched tight in front of him.

It’s a cruel hard hack into work, from grim downtrodden Tottenham to wealthy riverside West London. Today is a good drive. I get to the office early – though you can never be early enough - and listen to a slew of messages on voicemail, all urgent, some desperate. Waiting for my computer to boot up, I start phoning people back. Nothing unusual so far today – forgotten passwords, computer doesn’t work, where’s my new laptop, there’s a new secretary starting in one of the project teams.

The rest of my Team start arriving, slotting into their offices across the different buildings.  I initiate the edgy daily process of trying to delegate jobs out to my team and them saying, ‘Well I’ll try’ and me saying ‘Yes, but when?’ and they then take the opportunity to pass things over to me that they don’t really want to do themselves, and by 9:30 I’ve got slightly more to do than when I made the first phone call.

After the unsuccessful delegation process, I make a jug of strong coffee, which I drink over the course of the morning.

All the time the phone is ringing and the emails are coming in and it’s not until 11:30 that I realise that I’m wearing a really old pair of opaque tights which are wrinkling and bagging around my ankles. Vesey is in my office explaining everything about a new brand of router to me.

When Vesey releases me, I go through the messages that have been coming in. Tim Briscoe, head of a lot of things including shoelaces, and who doesn’t like me at all, has left a message telling me that eight new people will start this afternoon, and will all need everything right away. I call him back to ask who they are and discover that in fact none of them have been hired yet and so Tim is embarrassed and seizes the opportunity to shout at me.

Claude Westmoreland’s message is self-consciously self-deprecating, his voice rather mellifluous and ever-so-slightly affected, I think. While ­perfectly wonderful, he has found that Alice – our dubious secretary/trainer – is unable to answer absolutely all his questions about the system and it appears that only I, Holly, in the whole of this marvellous company, am equipped to answer his complex yet interesting questions and would I mind coming over to the building where he works to rescue both him and the rest of his group from almost certain commercial failure.

If I don’t go, Claude Westmoreland may well tell Tim Briscoe that the computer department is unresponsive & Tim Briscoe will seize yet another opportunity to shout at me. Tim is recently back from a placement in Dubai where he – according to office rumour – lost his wife to a tennis coach and this is partly the reason for his constant bad temper. I must act.

I put on my coat– brown, shabby from too many years of being my favourite and only coat - and walk over to the building where Claude Westmoreland is waiting for me to set his world to rights and sponsorship for athletes’ shoelaces will be forever in safe hands.

The Shoelaces project team resembles every other Team here; two boys in their early twenties, a little spotty around mouths and noses, proudly wearing clothes that they appear to have been chewing all night; three girls of radiant, if largely interchangeable, beauty; two slightly older deep-tanned senior men in loafers, white socks, open-necked shirts, wearing expressions of utter emptiness.

As their project progresses, the spotty boys will develop passionate crushes on the beautiful girls and the beautiful girls will want to believe that the vacuous but wealthy men are in love with them, and quite possibly one of the vacuous men will actually leave his still-beautiful wife, causing heartache and scandal, and the other will stay with his wife, causing a cheaper and different kind of heartache and scandal.

Despite the urgency of his call, Claude Westmoreland is unavailable and occupied in another office for the next fifteen minutes.

When he does eventually emerge, he surprises me by not being a vacuous man with loafers. He’s tall and nice-looking, and is wearing a perfectly ordinary jumper and jeans, and his feet are in trainers not loafers. I can’t imagine how he has been hired.

It’s not unpleasant to answer computer questions when asked by a handsome man with very hazel-coloured eyes and a nice olive-y skin and a slim but quite sexy mouth. Claude Westmoreland’s computer problems are strange, vague and slightly irritating but it is fun to try to unscramble his spreadsheets and I find myself trying to place his accent and wondering about his home life, even while he asks me computer-related questions which I answer, or think I do. But whenever I think I have answered something, instead of moving on to the next thing, he shifts the question so that it isn’t quite the one asked in the first place and eventually I feel as though he is deliberately shifting the questions until he can find one where I definitely don’t know the answer, which finally is exactly what happens. However, I am protected from the shame and humiliation of not knowing everything about spreadsheets because my phone goes and a server crash in the main building forces me to rush back.

An hour later the server is restored to life and I have gone some way to calming the panic in the main building so revert to responding to emails and phone messages.

In among the mass of communication – mostly panicky, some actively angry as if I have personally engineered the brief collapse in computer functionality - is a message from Claude Westmoreland. In charming and relaxed tones, he tells me how tremendously helpful I’ve been, and could I possibly pop over again tomorrow as there are one or two things he still needs clarification on. I have seven meetings with suppliers the following day so call Claude Westmoreland back – getting voicemail of course – and leave a message that no, I won’t be able to do that.

At 7pm I ignore the ringing phone, get into the car, put on some T. Rex, loud, and try to get myself mentally organised for an evening of domestic harmony with Luke.

Next morning, I find myself – fearful of receiving another shouting from Tim Briscoe - heading back over to the building where Claude Westmoreland works. It’s a cold, icy day: I had a hard drive across London this morning, my favourite run-throughs iced over forcing me to stay on the slow and busy on main roads.  The wind is raw and bitter, making my eyes water and almost certainly my mascara will run. I am not uncomfortable in my clothes; the skirt and jacket are relatively fashionable, and my flat boots are comfortable, though the smooth leather soles mean I have to concentrate on not slipping on the ice.

When I get to his office, I find that Claude Westmoreland doesn’t really have a problem. He has questions and then more questions, and I end up building him a suite of frighteningly complex spreadsheets which I am not sure that he will ever use. I start to fret about all the other things I’m not doing especially as lunchtime comes and I see the afternoon stretching ahead with no prospect of food until dinner with Luke.

‘I really must go,’ I tell him, though I’ve enjoyed the slightly pointless challenge of the spreadsheets and he is nice company. ‘There’s so much I need to get done’.

Immediately he is grace, gratitude and concern. ‘I’m so sorry; I’ve taken up all your day. You should make sure to get some lunch – where will you eat? You should go to The Dove, it’s not far, they do a good pie there. You should go there. I’ll come with you.’

The way he says this leaves me feeling uncertain. I don’t know whether he’s proposing to come for lunch with me or if he’s thinking of just dropping me at the door, and the last thing I want to do is sit alone in a pub in the middle of the afternoon eating a pie, when I’ve got heaps and heaps of work to do.

So I tell him – untruthfully - that I can get something in the building I work in, not to worry, and he says that he’s just got a couple more questions and will walk down with me and out he comes in the raw wind, coatless and charming, doesn’t ask anything more about spreadsheets and instead makes small talk all the way to the building I work in. It turns out that he listens to the same music as me – all the stuff that Luke hates so much – and we spend a few cheerful minutes discussing our feelings about the Human League and I am utterly amazed when he mentions Cabaret Voltaire and then of course I am so enthused to be talking to someone about Cabaret Voltaire that I forget I am walking on sheet ice and suddenly I slip hard.

Immediately Claude’s arm is there, I grab hold and just about manage not to fall and feel really foolish and as I am righting myself, somehow I am looking directly into his hazel eyes and he’s half-smiling and looking directly into mine, and that’s when it happens.

In a flash I feel we are poised on the edge of a magical, life-changing kiss. I expect him to kiss me right away. I pull myself away from his hazel eyes. I thank him, hotly embarrassed, and keep my eyes firmly on the icy ground.

Since I met Luke again and we found that we loved each other more than we had before the terrible things happened, and I had – we had – decided to spend the rest of our lives together, I thought I would never feel this terrible love-desire-infatuation feeling for anyone ever again.

It’s just because of the way I slipped and where Claude’s arm was, I tell myself. it is a simple question of the physical correlation of our bodies in space. It was the first time our eyes had met so directly, at that angle and I mistook the angle of a glance for something else. It was the cold outside air playing tricks with me.

I can’t turn my mind to anything else. The combination of hunger, too much coffee and now this overwhelming desire for Claude Westmoreland, leave me incapable of attending to my work. I find myself thinking that I don’t want to fall out of love now, now that I’m happy with Luke. I don’t want to leave Luke and start all over again. I don’t want to hurt him and for us to have terrible rows and to feel sick all the time. I don’t want to fall in love with someone I hardly know.

And then I remember that all it was, was a look, a movement, a moment not even of chivalry, just a person being humanly concerned, and that this is extremely unlikely to lead to me leaving Luke even for half an hour. I try – and fail - to put the whole small event out of my mind. I leave work at 6pm, which is early, and drive home slowly, listening to Cabaret Voltaire, thinking of Claude Westmoreland’s hazel eyes. When I get home, I am almost immediately overwhelmed by a devastating migraine. 

After two days I return to work safe in the knowledge that I will never again answer Claude Westmoreland’s phone calls and that even if I did, everything would be okay because now I am over it. I get into the office, take my jacket off and sit down. The phone rings and it is Claude Westmoreland.

By spring the situation is that I have lunch with Claude Westmoreland pretty much every day. We don’t always eat.

Sometimes he wants me to go to the shops with him, to help him choose something; a pair of shoes; a belt; a book; a CD. I like this, it makes me feel kind of wife-y, as though we have a long, established, relationship. ‘Thanks for your help’ he’ll say afterwards ‘I owe you lunch’

So then, we might go out to a pub where we are likely to bump into some of the people he works with. Claude becomes very involved in his conversations with his colleagues or whoever we happen to bump into and takes less notice of me - in fact sometimes he takes almost no notice of me at all.

What with the walking over to Claude’s office and the waiting for him to be ready and then the walking back to my office, lunch can take as long as a couple of hours. I never used to take a lunch break at all and even then I was only just on top of my work, so I have to make that work up somewhere, somehow and I think that Luke will be suspicious if I start to get home late every day – but what could he be suspicious of? What is there for him to suspect?  I try to work harder, faster, smarter, get in earlier in the mornings but I am always tired, and weary of thinking always and only of Clause Westmoreland and some evenings on the way home, down one of the side streets, I pull the car into the side of the road and turn the music up as loud as it will go and lay my head on the steering wheel and cry for a while.

Which doesn’t help. I arrive home late, and Luke tells me I am working too hard.

Claude phones me a lot in the summer. He phones me in the mornings while I am in the car to see when I will be in the office. He phones me at the office, in the afternoons to discuss Excel. He phones me at home when he knows that Luke will be out (because I don’t talk about Luke, but I do somehow mention when he won’t be there) to talk about nothing in particular and ask me what music I am listening to.

I am sent to Paris, where the only time I can work on the servers is when everyone has gone home. Late at night, while I am alone in the empty office, Claude Westmoreland phones and we talk while I wait for the servers to upgrade, until the early hours of the morning and the first glimmers of grey light are showing across the roofs of the sixteenth arrondissement.

The magic is, we haven’t kissed. We haven’t done anything. I am faithful. I have not betrayed Luke.

Though I have found a thousand reasons to bicker with Luke. Though Luke tries harder and harder to make me love him, with treats and surprises. Although I spend every waking minute either with Claude Westmoreland, talking on the phone to Claude Westmoreland, thinking about Claude Westmoreland or dreaming of the moment when something finally will happen with Claude Westmoreland.

I want him to make the move. I believe, sometimes, in my naïve and lying heart that we will have one kiss, or maybe even sleep together once, and then somehow I will be over Claude Westmoreland and will return to Luke from whom I have never been away and everything will be fine.

I want Claude to declare his love for me and then I can refuse him.

I want Claude to declare love for me and I will accept. In these scenarios Luke has gone painlessly away and I am waking up in the beautiful house of Claude, next to Claude in the white and beautiful bed, which I have never seen but am sure exists, sleeping in the arms of Claude, smelling the daily smell of Claude, Claude’s loving and treasured partner for ever. I will live, forever, in Westmoreland, a fabulous country where the sheets are always white, conversation flows endlessly, and love is all around.

It’s August, a hot summer morning. I’m driving into work when Claude phones me. ‘I’ll come over and meet you for lunch’ he says. ‘I need to do something over there’.

I’m so pleased that he will come to my office. Until now, I have always walked over to the building where he works. He has never come over to where I work. He will sit in my office and wait for me and we will be laughing and joking and the people I work with will be surprised and impressed at how much I am liked by handsome men in the company.

At 11:30 he calls me on the mobile and says that things are running a bit later than he’d planned but what about 12:30? I agree and try to find something useful to do with the unexpected time.

By 2pm I am exhausted with the stress of not having lunch with Claude Westmoreland. He phones, again ‘I’m on my way’ he says, ‘why don’t you just meet me outside Reception?’

Disappointed that now he won’t see my cool taste office décor or meet my Team, I hurry down to reception, hurrying like I always do as if I think he might go away and change his mind.

And so, arriving just before I am expected, I see him at the corner of the road; standing just as he stood when I slipped and gazed into his eyes and haven’t been able to sleep properly since. The girl has her back to me; she’s standing where I stood that icy slippery day, her beautiful long red hair cascading down the back of her cream blouse. She’s not stumbling or falling, the ice is long gone now, and she doesn’t look the type to stumble and fall.

Claude Westmoreland takes her hand, just for a second – but a second more than he has ever taken mine. He leans down and kisses her briefly, his lips barely brush hers, but they brush hers more than they have ever brushed mine.  I fix my smile and walk towards him.