His Other Lover

by Lucy Dawson

  Teasel—Elizabeth Andersen

  Lizzie trained at the Doreen Lightfoot Academy in Woking, having grown up around song and dance from a young age. On graduation, Lizzie took on her first role in Annie Get Your Gun at the Left Way Theatre in Rhyl, then the title role of Aladdin in Croydon. Lizzie has toured extensively with Princely Cruises and has appeared in the tour of Night of a Thousand Voices for Tin Pot Productions. Lizzie has performed at numerous trade fairs and appeared in pop videos for A1 and Sam and Mark from Pop Idol. The role of Teasel is Lizzie’s first West End appearance and she is thrilled to be part of such a demanding and respected show. She would like to thank God for giving her the gift of song and dance, her parents for their support and endless love and her special boy for just being him, love ya always! xxxx

  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:

  Text Message

  Text Message

  Text Message

  Text Message

  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.

  The free-falling hurt and confusion was almost unbearable and it froze all of my anger. I just stared at him lying there and, despite knowing for how long and how much I had loved him and how he had broken it all, how he had ruined everything that was so precious and real to me, had taken it all away without giving me any say in the matter—despite that, and knowing he had been so careless with us and our lives—when I should have been outraged and angry, all I saw was him simply lying there, breathing softly. All I wanted—all I needed—was to be in bed with him. To hold him and have him hold me.

  I wanted to blot her out, have it not be real.

  So I went and got into our bed and felt the warmth begin to spread through me as I pressed silently up against him. In his sleep, the chill of my skin made him shift gently, but he eased his back into the crook of my body. We fitted together and as he slid back into deep and restful sleep, I tried not to get tears on his back.

  I attempted to force away the image of him lying in bed with her. There was someone out there so powerful, with such a pull on his heart that he had forgotten about me and risked it all for something with her.

  My hands reached out and I clung helplessly to him.

  SEVEN

  By 4:07 I’ve given in and have quietly put the TV on, but I’m so paranoid about waking Pete that I’ve got the sound down so low I can barely hear it. Despite a relentless search, there is nothing worth watching on over thirty channels. Finally I settle for a repeat of a property show and lean back into the sofa, pulling my dressing gown tightly around me as the pictures flicker and light up my tired face. I must look appalling. Oddly, though, I can’t say I feel very much worse for two nights of no sleep, just more numb, perhaps.

  Yesterday morning, however, I had felt raw when my eyes opened to the sound of heavy rain. There was a deep, taut knot in my tummy that somehow seemed to have been there since before I woke up, and a pulsing ache raged behind my dry eyes.

  I had lain completely immobile in our bed, my mind already running blindly down corridors. I stared through the chink in the curtains at the chimney pots and roofs and wondered what I was going to do about what I had found on his phone and in his study, and how it was going to be all right. The alarm clicked on and I automatically reached out and slapped my hand down on it. Pete stirred, but we stayed in silence; me afraid to say any of the hundred things I wanted to, him barely awake. Finally he heaved himself out of the bed and, seeing him leave the imprint of his body behind on the sheet, it was all I could do not to shout hoarsely after him, beg him to come back and hold me while I cried and cried.

  So I just lay there, very still, listening to my boyfriend move around our house as if nothing was wrong. After the shower stopped there was the hiss of the iron steaming over his fresh shirt, a clatter of a cereal bowl, breakfast TV, the gush of the tap and whir of his electric toothbrush. All I could do was stare at the ceiling and wonder how this could be happening. Finally he appeared next to me.

  “Are you okay? How come you’re not getting up?” He looked at me in concern.

  I rolled my head listlessly toward him. “I feel sick,” I muttered, which wasn’t a lie.

  “Poor baby.” He sat down on the edge of the mattress. “Would you like some water or anything?” He reached out and stroked my face.

  I wanted to grab his hand, to hold it to me fiercely and smack it away both at the same time. I shook my head. “No, thank you.”

  “Are you going to work today?”

  I shook my head again. “Will you phone them for me and tell them I won’t be in?”

  His face clouded over slightly before he smiled sympathetically and said, “Yeah, sure.” I suddenly realized my being ill was inconveniencing him in some way. Had he been planning to see her? Just as the horrific thought occurred to me that she might have already been in my house, in our bed, he said that he was sorry but he had a meeting that he couldn’t move so he wouldn’t be at home all day.

  I shrugged wordlessly and turned my head away from him because I could feel tears flooding my eyes and I didn’t want him to see me cry. He leaned over and kissed me lightly on the forehead.

  “I’ll be back this evening. Try to get some sleep and call me if you want me.”

  I didn’t look at him, I just heard the bedroom door close quietly.

  He bounded downstairs and then the front door slammed. As I heard the window frames rattle, a flood of panic set in. I hadn’t asked where he was going, or who the meeting was with! I leaped out of bed, grabbed my dressing gown, rushed to the spare-room window and watched him drive down the road. I wanted to ring him straight away, tell him to stop the car, turn around and come back. Stay with me, comfort me, tell me I was wrong.

  I craned my neck for the last sight of him as the car turned right and then slipped out of view. He was gone. Where was he going? Where was he going?

  I started to weep and leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the window, forcing my eyes fiercely shut. But as I did, Liz seeped unwanted into my mind, smiling smugly. I gasped out loud with the pain. My eyes flew open; anything, anything to get her out.

  It was pouring outside; straight, determined rods that battered off the leaves. There were no signs of life in the street apart from one small bird miserably hunched on a branch, trying to keep dry.

  I could still see her, laughing, sparkling in her dress. I couldn’t believe I’d actually spoken to her last night. I dashed to the phone and dialed with shaking fingers. I had to know that it had definitely been her. I had to.

  It rang and I waited with a thumping heart, willing her to pick up.

  “Hello?” said a female voice.

  “Hello,” I said, forcing the tremor out of my voice. “Sorry to disturb you, I know you’re probably a bit rushed, but I wanted to catch you before you left.”

  “Well, you’ve got me, Mia,” said Pete’s mother. “How can I help?” she asked in the tone of voice that starchily meant, “I’ve got a hundred and one things to do, so hurry up.”

  “It’s just this wedding,” I said carefully. “When Pete spoke to you last night I wanted him to ask you if there’s a gift list, but I don’t think he did, did he? I was going to ring you back, but it was a bit late, so I just wanted to check this morning before you went.”

  There was a bit of noise in the background and she said bossily, “Not that one, Eric, that’s the hand luggage bag. Oh just leave it! I’ll do it in a minute!” Then she snapped back to me. “I didn’t speak to Peter last night,” she said irritably.

  “Last night?!” I forced a merry laugh. “Listen to me! I meant morning. When you last spoke to him…”

  It was painful, it really was. I can’t believe that someone as sharp as her didn’t realize that something was wrong. She probably would have done if she hadn’t been so distracted, but she had other things on her mind than her son’s girlfriend wittering on about wedding presents.

  “I told him to tell you not to worry about a gift. I bought one from the list several weeks ago and put our names on it. Didn’t he say anything?”

  “No, he didn’t.” I tried to sound bright. “He is dreadful! Well, thank you for that.”

  “Not at all,” she said with a slight snort, to indicate my mistake at thinking she made the effort for me.

  “Well, thank you anyway. Have fun on safari,” I said as sincerely as I could manage.

  “Thank you,” she said stiffly, and hu
ng up.

  I sat there in the silence of our room. Funnily enough I felt no better at all for having the irrefutable truth that he lied to me last night. He had called her from our phone. On our bill.

  I didn’t know what to do next. I just sat there thinking this must be what being in shock felt like: a numb, empty, frozen space.

  Sinking back on to the bed, I heard the crinkle of paper. Reaching into my dressing-gown pocket, I pulled the receipt for the hotel out and stared at it. Room service that I never had. I wasn’t paying for that too. I suddenly felt irrationally angry. I wasn’t having it! How did people think they could get away with things like this?

  I dialed furiously and a very well-spoken man answered. I told him in no uncertain terms that an error had been made on our bill and I wanted him to sort it out immediately. He apologized smoothly and asked me to hold while he checked his records. Then he came back and said kindly, no, madam, there was no error, a bottle of champagne had been correctly charged to room 105. Angrily I told him that was ridiculous. When had it been signed for and by whom? It certainly hadn’t been me! He asked me, in a slightly less kindly tone, if I could hold the line again.

  I clutched the receiver tightly to my ear as thoughts jostled for room in my head. An affair, Pete was having an affair. What had I done wrong? How long had it been going on? I stared at the rain and waited.

  “Hello, madam. I’m sorry to have kept you.” The clipped voice sliced into my thoughts and dragged me back to the room.

  The champagne had been signed for at 4:30 in the afternoon by Pete, apparently. I explained hotly I knew that was not possible, because I was definitely having a massage at that time and I think I might have noticed if my boyfriend had drunk an entire bottle of champagne. But then, just as I was about to ask to speak to the manager, a horrible, dreadful thought slammed into my head. With a sickening sense of foreboding I asked slowly where he was when he signed for it.