His Other Lover (4 page)

I
carry my steaming mug of milk into the cold, still sitting room and perch on the edge of the sofa in the dark. It’s burning my hands slightly and as I raise it to my mouth, trying not to breathe in the smell of the liquid, the first touch of it scalds my dry lips. I have to pull away sharply, setting the cup quickly down on the carpet to cool. I put my head in my hands and massage my temples tiredly. I can feel the heat of my fingers and the sharp edge of one slightly too long nail as it digs into my skin. Was it really only last night that I was down here, having tripped over his phone? It feels like that happened an age ago. I can see myself now, confusedly picking up the phone and staring at the screen reading “New Message: Liz,” and the information just not computing.

My first thought had innocently been, Why on earth was a client texting him so late at night? It must be an emergency.

But Pete is an architect, not a banker brokering a deal or a doctor on call. There was, of course, absolutely no reason why a client should be contacting him that late on a Sunday night.

All the same, I had stood there for a moment in the dark and wondered, Should I go and tell him so he could take a look?

But he was tired, I didn’t want to have to disturb him. I decided I’d open it and if it was that important I’d wake him up.

I clicked open and read:

And in that split second, it was as if the room flipped upside down and shrunk all at the same time. An instinctive chill crept across my shoulders like someone had draped a cold, damp towel round me. My heart did an extra thump thump.

Get her what in the same brown? Night night? And kisses?

My brain couldn’t seem to catch up and work fast enough, I just stared at the type dully. Finally my fingers got fed up with waiting and darted to his inbox. I stood there, wearing just knickers and one of his old T-shirts, with the neon screen lighting up my face as I started to scrawl through names that I mostly didn’t recognize, apart from my own.

An icy, bony hand clutched around my heart and squeezed tightly as I saw “Liz” roll into view.

With shallow breath, I opened it. It simply read:

I scrolled through some more names and there was Liz again:

Hurriedly I rolled through the rest of the list, my eyes darting to her name again:

And with that, my legs suddenly turned into hollow bendy tubes under me that wouldn’t support my weight. I wobbled over to the stairs, not taking my eyes off the small screen, and sat down heavily. My throat had started to constrict. I could hear my own heart pounding like waves in my chest and blood crashing in my ears.

I desperately clicked on some other names. In contrast, they seemed incredibly businesslike.

Paula:

Seb:

Then there were ones from me that read things like:

and

The lack of kisses jumped out at me straight away.

I scrolled back to the list again and then I noticed what times Liz had texted him: 1:20 in the morning and 11:45 at night.

Hardly the time to be talking shop.

I took a couple of deep breaths and tried to calm myself down. There would be a logical explanation, a good reason for some woman to be texting my boyfriend late at night.

But at the same time, as I stood there holding Pete’s phone, I got a rush of pictures of him in my head. All the times I’d seen him with his mobile lately—just finishing a call, snapping it shut, throwing it casually on the bed as I came into the bedroom, checking it as I came out of the bathroom in the hotel…

A small ripple of fear coursed through me and I started to feel dizzy and sick, the same nausea as when you realize you’ve got way too drunk and you don’t want to be any more; the room is spinning and you’d give anything not to be feeling so foul and out of control.

Acid started to gurgle in my gut. I took some deep breaths and tried to think rationally and calmly. Don’t jump to stupid conclusions, I told myself.

I looked again at the texts. After all, that one could just be her running late for a meeting with Pete to talk business, couldn’t it? And she was probably one of those addicted-to-her job types who worked into the night, hence why they were sent so late.

But that didn’t explain
what
had been very sweet of him, and “night night?” It was so familiar, relaxed and suggested such intimacy. Something was very wrong.

I went back into his outbox, his sent texts. There were a lot, but I soon saw what I was looking for: To Liz, sent at two in the afternoon:

I felt a wash of relief when I realized he hadn’t put any kisses. I scanned furiously up and down the rest of the list, but there was nothing else. That was the only text to her.

I went to his call list. Nothing at all. No incoming or outgoing. The relief started to ebb away…for a man who spent so much time on the phone, why was it all clear? What did he have to hide?

I stared so hard at the screen that her name started to swim in front of my eyes. I needed more information.

Phone bills. That was what I needed. His phone bills. I grabbed a pen and scribbled her number down on the inside of my hand. Then I had to decide what to do with the new message…I couldn’t leave it, he’d know I’d seen it. I clicked delete and it silently vanished without trace.

I plugged the phone back in and quietly began to creep upstairs. Having tiptoed past our bedroom, I listened carefully for any letup in his snoring and then opened the door to his office. Slowly, I pushed it shut until it clicked gently behind me. Then I switched the light on, took a deep breath and began to look around.

T
he small room was an absolute tip. His drawing board was covered in sheets, the bin overflowing with balled-up bits of paper. Books were spilling out of shelves, half-f cups of coffee were glued with sticky bottoms to piles of files and as for the desk, it was a total mess. The curtains were half open so the darkness could nose in. I made myself jump when I looked up to see my reflection staring guiltily back at me in the glass.

Pulling the curtains shut I looked around disbelievingly. It was far from the room of someone with an uncluttered mind, that was certain. More like walking into a teenage boy’s pit of a bedroom, or the lab of a mad professor. How the hell, I thought as I stepped over a pile of magazines on the floor, was I going to find
anything
?

I sat down gingerly at the desk and started to leaf through a pile of loose papers, but they slid through my fingers and cascaded on to the floor in a slippery mess, making what sounded to me like a
huge
noise. I froze and held my breath…but there were no resulting footsteps across the landing, no opening door
and no accusative Pete standing there saying, “What the hell are you doing?”

And what
was
I doing? I knew I shouldn’t be snooping in his stuff, but I’d gone past the having morals stage: it was proof I wanted. Proof that I was wrong, that I’d made a stupid mistake and could go back to bed feeling a little bit silly and bloody glad I hadn’t woken him up.

But there was nothing to reassure me. Just a list of quotes and notes for a job, tile quantities and wiring requirements.

I opened a filing box: nothing much in there either. Accountants’ letters, tax receipts. I turned back to his desk and another stack of papers.

I came across the receipt for our weekend away and on careful inspection realized we’d been billed wrongly—there was a room service order on there we didn’t have. I tucked it in my dressing-gown pocket and made a mental note to ring the hotel in the morning and get it refunded.

I still couldn’t find the phone bills, though, and that worried me even more than the prospect of finding them. He
had
got something to hide. Otherwise why weren’t they on view with everything else? I sat at his desk wondering what to do next, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the light of his laptop was still on. I lifted the lid up and it whirred loudly as it restarted. My heart stopped again and I froze but, after a second of sitting there holding my breath and waiting, he didn’t appear at the door. Cautiously I looked at the screen.

There were a number of files on his desktop, but it was all work stuff. There was one called personal, but it was just his CV.

I clicked on his e-mail icon and scanned through hundreds of mails, but there was nothing from or to Liz.

So if she was a client, I thought to myself quickly—
if
she was a client—where was the correspondence from her? There were no quotes, no nothing. Doesn’t everyone use e-mail for work these days?

I looked in some box files round his desk; none of them had anything that made reference to Liz. Who
was
this woman?

I stood up and accidentally stood on a slippery magazine that resulted in my nearly doing the splits on the carpet. When I glanced down to see what I’d trodden on, I saw the program for the show he took me to on our weekend away.

My heart softened. We
had
had a really good time…I picked it up and ran my fingers down the spine of the glossy cover. It was such a great weekend. I started to absently flick through the pages, glancing at the pictures. Perhaps I could just talk to him about the text? Surely it could be explained…

But just as I was on the brink of dismissing it all, resolving just to ask him who she was in the morning and going back to bed, something caught my eye.

A photo was smiling out of the page. It was a girl with long, blonde hair and a familiar face. I knew I’d seen her before. I was frowning and puzzling when it dawned on me. It was the gallery girl, the one with the tattoo from the film about exploitation that I’d seen that very afternoon.

I studied the picture. She looked different, as she would in a contemporary outfit—in an outfit full stop—but it was definitely her. Same full lips, almost feline features and arched eyebrows. My eyes dropped down to the bio under the picture. It read:
Teasel—Elizabeth Andersen.

It took a moment. I stared at the picture and the words for what felt like a full five minutes before my brain ground into action: Hang on a minute…
that’s
a coincidence…A girl you
recognize from a gallery exhibit that
Pete
took you to is in a program in
Pete’s
office and it just turns out that her name is
Elizabeth,
just as you happen to be searching for
Pete’s
phone bills to find out who a mystery
Liz
is…whaddya know? Whadda the chances, eh? Pete and Liz, Pete and Liz, Liz and Pete…

I looked at the photo again and she stared back at me, a knowing, seductive smile. I slowly started to realize that this was the woman I was looking for.
This
was Liz. Scanning disbelievingly through her bio notes, my eyes flickered and skimmed over the words:

It was then I remembered a dancer throwing a rose at Pete at the end of the show. It was her.

Pulling at the pages of the program frantically, I flipped through them, but there was nothing else, just her smug, diamond-hard little face staring back at me.

I sat down and tried to think. Someone called Liz was texting Pete at odd times of the day. Inexplicably I had found a program in his office with the picture in it of a girl I know threw a rose at him—a girl we happened to have seen in a gallery installation. It was just too much of a coincidence.

I needed his fucking phone bills.

After an hour of searching I finally found one. It was shoved inside a book called
Truss Construction,
deliberately hidden. It had been opened.

My hands trembled as I slid it out of the envelope and unfolded it. The date revealed it was his bill for the month just passed. The list of numbers ran over several pages, but it didn’t take long to spot what I was looking for.

Like clusters of little poisonous berries, I could see bundles of one number. I checked the number on my hand—it was hers. In one afternoon alone he had texted her ten times.

I let out a gasp and my mouth began to go dry. I could feel a sticky coating on my lips.

Flicking quickly to the week before, again, I could see over and over:

And all of the numbers my boyfriend had texted were hers. My eyes scanned the page; it was full of her.

Then I noticed the calls. An hour here, half an hour there and on one afternoon a call lasting two hours.
Two hours?

It suddenly occurred to me that the night before, when I had done 1471 thinking I was going to get his mum, I’d got someone else. A girl. Was that her? It must have been.

I realized that he hadn’t been on the phone to Shirley at all, he’d been talking to
her
while I was in the bath. That was why he didn’t want me to call Shirley back, because I’d have caught him out. He was never on the phone to his mum in the first place.

He had lied to me, and Liz was very obviously much, much more than just a client.

Standing frozen in the small room, at last my mind began to gather speed like a runaway train; wheels started to steam, metal ground on metal, whistles shrieked warnings as it started to hurtle out of control downhill…I stared wildly at her picture in the program…What about the trips to the gym and him not getting much slimmer…him getting me nice but unusually thoughtful treats, suggesting days out…but things had been good lately…we’d hardly been going through a rough patch…had we?
Wooooo! Woooooo! Get out of the way! Train with no brakes!
I tried to stand up but the room had started swirling and spinning in the opposite direction…we’d had sex only hours earlier…I felt like I was being whirled down a plughole. Things hadn’t been perfect, but what is?
She could still be a client, she could still be a client…Couldn’t she
? Even when I knew, I knew that I had nothing left to cling on to, I still wanted to believe that I was wrong. Not Pete, not my Pete.

The train crashed through rickety wooden barriers daubed with red paint and a sign that said, “Warning, do not enter! Danger!” like a bad Wild West movie. It plunged over the cliff and sailed through the air, pistons pumping pointlessly, bell
clanging and smoke rushing out of its chimney up to the sky. It arched silently then plummeted to the dustbowl below. Everything went quiet for a moment, the moment of sterile calm before impact…then there was an almighty crash, a ball of fire as it exploded and then a billowing mushroom smoke cloud. No survivors. Couldn’t be. Just a lump of twisted, mangled metal and an eerie silence.

I looked at the evidence of the secret little conversations they’d had, conversations I had known nothing about, and felt like I was staring over the edge of that cliff into the wreckage of my life.

The man I’d lain next to each night, undressed in front of, cleaned my teeth with in the bathroom, had this secret little world that I had no part of and didn’t even know existed. How could this be?
How?

Through a chink in the curtain, I could see a sliver of my reflection. Hot, shocked, scared tears started to slip down my cheeks and her number on the bill swam in front of my eyes. I had a sudden image of her sitting in her flapper dress, swinging her legs, phone to her ear, waiting, phoning my boyfriend. I pictured him answering, them both smiling and laughing happily.

I looked again at the times of the messages and the calls he had made to her. They were all when I would have been at work during the day or very late at night when I would have probably gone to bed. I could see him in my mind, creeping into the bathroom, sitting down on the edge of the bath with the door locked, texting away while I lay sleeping in the room next door.

I had stepped into a parallel room, a reflected, twisted one full of the objects of my life, but all in the wrong places. In under a minute Pete, the man who I have spent not an inconsiderable part of my life with—the man I’ve danced in crappy discos
with, who sang
My Girl
to me at a friend’s karaoke party, the man with whom I have had both my best and worst holiday ever, the man who can recite most of the lines from
Dumb and Dumber
, the man who I chose sofas with, the man who can’t eat eggs because they make him hurl, the one who I never dreamed in a million years would do this to me—had become someone I didn’t know at all.

I forced my eyes shut and they burned on the inside with the tears that I’d trapped…all I could see was her fucking face, her smiling, laughing face. Looking at the bill again, I noticed there were even texts on the night of my birthday.
My birthday!

I tasted blood in my mouth. Reaching my fingers up, I touched my lip and realized that I had bitten it so hard I had noticed the skin.

I don’t really remember how long I sat there with tears escaping down my face, staring dumbly into space, wracked with a physical pain that I could barely breathe through, but it felt like forever. Finally, when I couldn’t cry any more and I had given up hope that he was going to hear me, come and tell me it was all a bad dream and take me back to bed, I tried to stand up.

My legs were stiff and my toes so cold they felt like stubs of ice.

I tucked away the bill just as I had found it and arranged the room so that he had no idea I’d been in there. Then I walked noiselessly to the bathroom. The small strip light above the mirror flickered on and my blotchy red face stared back at me, puffy and swollen. I could see her perfect face in my mind—lips that had almost certainly kissed him.

The thought of him touching this other woman made me literally sick. I retched silently, the half-digested chicken and red wine that we had for supper splashed quietly into the loo. I hung
there for a moment gasping, my eyes streaming. Then I stood up, glanced in the mirror again, brushed my teeth, blew my nose, wiped my face. There was nothing to do but go back to our bedroom.

I opened the door and stood in the doorway. From there I could see the outline of his body in the bed, hear his breathing, smell the fuggyness and sleep in the room.

“I’d boot him out.”

I could hear my own voice, laced with the conviction of a couple of glasses of wine, back in the bar with Amanda and Louise. We had tutted disapprovingly over a colleague of Amanda’s who was conducting an affair behind his very nice wife’s back, to the full knowledge of everyone in his office. “I’d absolutely get rid of him if I were her,” I’d said firmly as I passed my verdict—no room for error, no choice to be made.

But when it was suddenly real, not just a stupid idle conversation I hadn’t given any real thought to, I didn’t shake him awake, shout and cry and ask him how he could do it to me. I felt desolate. He hadn’t just drunkenly shagged someone else. This was obviously an emotional involvement, someone he had
feelings
for…someone he might have fallen in love with.