Behind Her Eyes(3)

The thing is, I’d liked him – really liked him. I can’t tell Sophie about that. How I hadn’t talked to anyone like that in a long time. How happy I’d felt to be flirting with someone who was flirting back, and how I’d forgotten how great that excitement of something potentially new was. My life is, as a rule, a blur of endless routine. I get Adam up and take him to school. If I’m working and want to start early, he goes to breakfast club. If I’m not working, I may spend an hour or so browsing charity shops for designer cast-offs that will fit the clinic’s subtly expensive look. Then it’s just cooking, cleaning, shopping, until Adam comes home, and then it’s homework, tea, bath, story, bed for him and wine and bad sleep for me. When he goes to his dad’s for a weekend I’m too tired to do anything much other than lie in and then watch crap TV. The idea that this could be my life until Adam’s at least fifteen or so quietly terrifies me, so I don’t think about it. But then meeting the man-in-the-bar made me remember how good it was to feel something. As a woman. It made me feel alive. I’d even thought about going back to that bar and seeing if he’d turned up to find me. But, of course, life isn’t a romcom. And he’s married. And I’ve been an idiot. I’m not bitter, merely sad. I can’t tell Sophie any of these things because then she’d feel sorry for me, and I don’t want that, and it’s just easier to find it all funny. It is funny. And it’s not like I sit at home bemoaning my singledom every night, as if no one could ever be complete without a man. In the main, I’m pretty happy. I’m a grown-up. I could have it way worse. This was one mistake. I have to deal with it.

I scoop up a handful of Doritos and Sophie does the same.

‘Curves are the new thin,’ we say in unison, before cramming the crisps into our mouths and nearly choking as we laugh again. I think about me hiding in the toilet from him, full of panic and disbelief. It is funny. Everything is funny. It might be less funny tomorrow morning when I have to face the music, but for now I can laugh. If you can’t laugh at your own fuck-ups, what can you laugh at?

‘Why do you do it?’ I say later, when the bottle of wine is empty between us and the evening is drawing to a close. ‘Have affairs? Aren’t you happy with Jay?’

‘Of course I am,’ Sophie says. ‘I love him. It’s not like I’m out doing it all the time.’

This is probably true. She’s an actress; she exaggerates for the sake of a story sometimes.

‘But why do it at all?’ Strangely, it’s not something we’ve really talked about that much. She knows I’m uncomfortable with it, not because she does it – that’s her business – but because I know and like Jay. He’s good for her. Without him, she’d be screwed. As it were.

‘I have a higher sex drive than he does,’ she says, eventually. ‘And sex isn’t what marriage is about anyway. It’s about being with your best friend. Jay’s my best friend. But we’ve been together fifteen years. Lust can’t maintain itself. I mean, we still do it, sometimes, but it’s not like it was. And having a child changes things. You spend so many years seeing each other as parents rather than lovers, it’s hard to get that passion back.’

I think of my own short-lived marriage. The lust didn’t die with us. But that didn’t stop him leaving after four years to be with someone else when our son was barely two years old. Maybe she has a point. I don’t think I ever saw my ex, Ian, as my best friend.

‘It just seems a bit sad to me.’ And it does.

‘That’s because you believe in true love and happy ever after in a fairy tale way. That’s not how life is.’

‘Do you think he’s ever cheated on you?’ I ask.

‘He’s definitely had his flirtations,’ she says. ‘There was a singer he worked with a long time ago. I think maybe they had a thing for a while. But whatever it was, it didn’t affect us. Not really.’

She makes it sound so reasonable. All I can think of is the pain of betrayal I felt when Ian left. How what he did affected how I saw myself. How worthless I felt in those early days. How ugly. The short-lived romance he left me for didn’t last either, but that didn’t make me feel better.

‘I don’t think I’ll ever understand it,’ I say.

‘Everyone has secrets, Lou,’ she says. ‘Everyone should be allowed their secrets. You can never know everything about a person. You’d go mad trying to.’

I wonder, after she’s left and I’m cleaning up the debris of our evening, if maybe Jay was the one who cheated first. Maybe that’s Sophie’s secret at the heart of her hotel-room trysts. Maybe it’s all done to make herself feel better or to quietly get even. Who knows? I’m probably over-thinking it. Over-thinking is my speciality. Each to their own, I remind myself. She seems happy and that’s good enough for me.

It’s only a little past ten thirty, but I’m exhausted, and I peer in at Adam for a minute, a soothing comfort to be found in watching his peaceful sleep, curled up tiny on his side under his Star Wars duvet, Paddington tucked under one arm, and then close the door and leave him to it.

It’s dark when I wake up in the bathroom, standing in front of the mirror, and before I’ve really registered where I am, I feel the sharp throb in my shin where I’ve walked into the small laundry basket in the corner. My heart races, and sweat clings to my hairline. As reality settles around me, the night terror shatters, leaving only fragments in my head. I know what it was though. Always the same dream.