‘You’ve been fucking my husband.’ I said it as quietly as I could beneath the music, spitting the words into hard little bullets.
To my surprise she let out a bark of laughter. ‘What would I want with your dusty old husband?’ She clucked her tongue. ‘You better let go of my hand, yeah?’
I didn’t. I scrabbled for my phone. She watched me with nothing more than mild interest and pointed good humour.
‘This is you. Isn’t it?’
She looked over the picture I was showing her. ‘Yeah. I wasn’t well that day. Allergies. You can see my eyes are still red.’
‘Why does he have these photos?’ I spat. Her apathy was frustrating. She lifted those dewy brown eyes back to the counter and signalled to someone standing there. Just a finger raised. One minute. Then she sat in the chair opposite me, her back to the glass.
‘You want this tea or not?’
I shook my head. She pulled it towards her and tipped in packet after packet of sugar, lifting spilled grains from the table with the damp pad of her thumb and transferring them to her mouth. She examined me carefully.
‘Where you from?’
‘That’s not your business.’
‘I feel like you’ve come a long way just to confront me. Why aren’t you sitting your husband down and asking him these questions?’
It was a good point. None of this was going the way I’d thought it would. I felt myself beginning to deflate, anger hissing from me like a punctured tyre.
‘You been married a long time?’
‘Two years. But we’ve been together for six.’
She drew breath through her teeth, vexed. ‘Christ. That’s a third of my life.’
‘You didn’t answer my question. Why does he have these photos of you?’
‘He paid for them.’
‘What?’
‘He paid for them. That’s what they do. That’s the whole point.’
‘I don’t – I’m not sure—’
‘Here. Give me your husband’s name.’
I stared at her in frank disbelief. ‘You don’t know his name?’
She laughed again, but gentler this time. ‘Listen. Half these men, I don’t even know what they look like. Including your husband, probably. You know what this is, right? This arrangement?’
I shook my head, heart sinking. She sighed.
‘There’s a website. “Secret Sugar”. You heard of it?’ When she saw my blank expression she shrugged. ‘Never mind. It’s for men who like to give their money to girls like me who need it.’
‘What do you give in exchange?’
She nodded towards my phone. ‘Pictures. Nudes, if they earn it. You’ve heard of sugar daddies, yes? Paypigs? Men with spare cash and us girls needing to pay our bills and university fees – makes sense if you think about it. If you think me working in this cafe is paying enough for me to live in London, you’re wrong.’
‘How much?’
‘Like I said, depends. I’ve got a couple of regulars who give me a monthly allowance for photos and stuff. Sometimes I let them take me on dates. Others just drop in and out, send gifts, ask for underwear pics, you know?’
‘He – my husband, Will – he bought you a bag. A Miu Miu one.’
She smiled. It was so genuine it broke my heart. ‘Oh yeah. “Rattlesnake80”. That’s his username. He’s nice. Kind. Always very polite. He helped me with my credit card bills a few months ago. I like him.’ She looked at me with concern. ‘You’re not going to leave him over this, are you? It’s just pictures, that’s all. It’s not real life. None of it’s real life.’
On the train home I sat stiffly, bag on my lap, fingers pinching the top of it so hard the tips turned white. I kept thinking of the way Kim had looked at me, a mixture of pity and agitation. Why aren’t you sitting your husband down and asking him these questions? she’d said, and I hadn’t been able to answer. I hadn’t known how to tell her about my fear of losing him, his stability and humbleness and all of it, all of it; the velvet sofas and the granite worktops and the even keel, holding steady, not drowning in debt and waking up bilious and raw with self-loathing in the shadow of a three-day hangover – he is the weight that pins me to the earth. I can’t lose him. I’d float away.
Still, I thought as I got off the train at Swindon on legs that weren’t quite steady, still. We can’t have this secret between us. My mother had told me that these sorts of secrets were like a worm in an apple, destroying it from the heart out. She’d been drunk, of course. In the days before I’d moved out, one or both of my parents had been drunk, clumsily stroking my hair and pouring their twisted wisdom into me, how love was blind, was sour, was a lie. Their breath had been wine and cigarettes and rot.
That evening I made a lasagne with a brown and bubbling crust, and opened a bottle of Merlot as William walked through the door. I heard his coat and bag slither to the floor, his keys jangle into the dish. I knew exactly how it would feel to kiss him – the coldness on his lips from the outside air, the smell of the trains and all those other people, cigarette smoke and pollution. I waited until he was sitting opposite me before I spoke, passing him his plate.
‘I went into town today. London, I mean.’
‘Oh yeah? This looks great, babe. Did you get up to much?’
‘I went shopping.’
‘Uh-huh.’
I was watching him eat. I was slow. Deliberate. ‘I went to a place in Mayfair. Porters. It’s very fancy. Long way out of our price range.’
He looked up at me, chewing slowly. Something passed over his features in that moment, a ripple. Annoyance, maybe. Fear. ‘Did you buy something?’
‘No. Like I said, we don’t have the money to be shopping in places like that. They had handbags in there that cost nearly eight hundred pounds!’
His hand, straying to his hair, pulled at it gently. He drank some wine, leaned back in his chair. He was smiling. ‘And what would you do with an eight-hundred-pound handbag, beside trash it and lose it?’
It was a joke, I knew that. I’m forever losing things – leaving them on buses, dropping them in puddles and in the road. William used to call me an urchin because I dirtied everything up. But I wasn’t laughing, not this time. I picked up my phone, jabbing in the code so I could open up the photo I’d saved on there of Kim, the one she’d sent him with her back arched and her lips just parted, looking suggestively over her shoulder. Spoiling for trouble. At that moment William’s own phone rang. He looked at it briefly, then stood up, apologising.
‘Sorry, it’s my brother, I’d better take it.’
When he left the room I shoved my plate away from me and drained my wine. I massaged my temples, tried to steady my breathing. My pulse was ticking like a clockwork motor in my neck and outside, the car alarm, demanding, waa, waa, waa.
I know what you’ve been doing, Rattlesnake80. I’m so angry. It’s a bitter, acidic feeling that ulcerates me on the inside, the sting of deception. I can’t ignore it. It won’t go away. It will keep me awake at night, the poison of it infecting my sleep, making it toxic. Then the dreams will start again, that faceless figure with the claw hammer raised, drawing ever closer until their footsteps pound and their shadow spills over me like ink.