After The Fall

by Sarah Goodwin

  “Skip the meeting. Come home with me.”

  I shook my head, like it was surrounded by stinging insects.

  “Please Con, I want...” Nate stumbled over the words, pushing close to me, his body so warm it made me ache. “You’re the only person in my life...you’re it, OK? And, just, come back with me.”

  I’d thought that Nate was a wild cat, easy with his time and body, that he’d had a string of men back to his flat. But, if I believed him, which I found it almost impossible not to, then I was the only man he’d taken back there.

  In my head I could already see us there, feel the way his bare skin brushed against mine. The touch of his hands, the bites and kisses on my body, the desperate, heightened moans already ringing in my ears.

  I shook my head, softly at first, then harder.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m married.”

  “You don’t even know her.”

  “I don’t know you either, not really.”

  Nate’s eyes were miserable as leaves piled in a wet drain. “You know enough. You could know the rest, just come back with me.” He came closer, nose rubbing against mine, I let my eyes close, felt his breath on my face, the warmth and closeness of his body. I wanted so badly to say yes, to go home with him, be contained in that tiny, cosy flat and be with him.

  But, it was a mistake I’d made before, and one that I had regretted. Just because I couldn’t remember my first affair, didn’t mean I couldn’t learn from it. I’d loved Emma more than my random encounter, and I owed it to myself, whoever I had been, to stay with her.

  I stepped away from Nate.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He looked away, up the street, and then down, as if only now aware of how out in the open we were, of the possibility of being seen. Unexpectedly, he asked, “Do you think, if you weren’t married, or if things were different...if we’d met, like, years ago - would you still be saying no?”

  No. No I wouldn’t be. I knew it better than I knew anything else.

  “I don’t know,” I hedged, “maybe.” I didn’t want him to hope for something that I couldn’t give, but I could tell from the set of his face and shoulders that he wasn’t about to give up.

  He nodded, hands stuffed deep in his pockets. “Alright,” he said.

  “Nate...” I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t want to resort to we can still be friends. I didn’t know if we’d ever really been friends. This had been sitting between us since that first night.

  “I’ll be seeing you then,” Nate said, and then he was gone, walking past me, away from the school, from the meeting.

  “Nate!” I shouted after him, my voice ringing and buzzing off of the walls of the tunnel. He didn’t turn around, just walked, on, hunched and colourless against the concrete of the houses.

  I went to the meeting, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do. My lips felt swollen, and I was worried that they might see, and know what had been going on, why Nate wasn’t there. I needn’t have worried. Only Cora and Sal were sitting in the little meeting room, Gregory and Margery hadn’t come back, and since the group was voluntary, there was nothing much that Sal could do about it.

  “Still, never mind,” she said cheerily, “we can still get on. Cora, how’s this week been?”

  Cora looked bright and alert today, and there was a new piercing in her ear, a tiny silver woman hugging the outermost bit of cartilage.

  “Good. I got a job.”

  “That’s great, where is it?”

  “Indiana Ink. The tattoo parlour off the high street? I go in there to clean up every night, wipe down all the chairs and surfaces.”

  Sal’s supportive smile looked like it was trying to eat itself as disapproval scrunched in the corners and made her lips thin.

  “Sounds cool,” I said, and Cora offered me a short, sharp smile.

  “It is, and Leprosy, the owner, she said that I could get my ear done there on a discount, even though I’m not one of the artists.”

  “It’s wicked.”

  Again that smile, whip fast and star bright, “Thanks.”

  Sal regained her composure and flipped through some notes. “And how’s school, Cora?”

  Cora shrugged. “It’s school. Everyone’s still looking at me like I belong in a case in the biology labs – The girl with no memory. Katy Fullen got suspended though, so it was an OK week.”

  “That’s the girl who...” Sal glanced at me, as if worried about voicing the next part.

  Cora didn’t seem bothered. “Lied to me? Told me I was really into this guy, that I was going out with him. And the whole time he was paying her to get me into bed for him? Yeah, that was her. The bitch.” She looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “Everyone at school’s tried it on, not really bad shit like that, but they’ve put on that I owe them favours, or that they lent me CDs and they want them back, when really they’re mine. Fucking septics, the lot of ‘em.”

  It was the most I’d ever heard her say, and, from the way Sal was looking at her, and not even bringing her up on her swearing, it was the most she’d gotten out of Cora as well. Cora examined her plum coloured nails and fell silent. Clearly she felt that she’d shared enough.

  “And you Connor, how are you adjusting?”

  I thought for a moment about all things that were weighing on my mind – work, Emma, the mysterious C, the fact that I’d had an affair, and now Nate. All of it a constant pressure on my mind.

  “I’m doing fine,” I said.

  Whatever happened, I wasn’t going to spread my crisis around. I was going to handle it myself. In-house.

  Despite Nate’s assurance that I’d see him, he remained hidden all that week, and into the next. I didn’t see him at the meetings, or on the street, or on my weekend trip to the supermarket. He’d vanished from the face of the world, or at least, of my world.

  I would have thought more about Nate’s absence, but I was busy, studying the binders that had been gathering dust in the office, trying to learn months of pool health and safety, and guidelines, and requirements, until I could barely read the tiny print of the files through my throbbing migraine.

  At every dinner, Emma would ask the same thing, “How’s your revision going?”

  And I’d say, ‘It’s coming along.”

  Truth be told, I could barely take it all in. There were things that I couldn’t see myself ever having to know, things about water pressure in feed pipes and the growth rate of bacteria in water at a certain temperature. It was interminable drivel, and I couldn’t make it stick in my head.

  Five days into my rigorous regime of work-revise-sleep-repeat, I started slacking off. The pointlessness of the task made me feel sick, so I avoided it, trained myself not to think of the thick binders, of the test coming up in under a week.

  I spent quite a lot of time on the net. Mostly reading the news, watching iPlayer, looking through my favourites list and trying to learn about myself. I opened my email account every day, and found only spam. Nothing new from Coop. It took me three days to work up the nerve to send him a message.

  Why don’t you try talking next time?

  I didn’t know why I’d done it, only that the little mystery was annoying me, like a loose end in a TV detective series. I wanted it all rounded up, to know what was going on.

  It was while I was whiling away my evenings on the net, hiding from my revision and from Emma, that I found my porn folder.

  I suppose it should have occurred to me that I’d have one. After all, I was a man, and I had a computer in a lockable room. Still, I was surprised when I found a tab on the favourites list that was just P, hidden within a sub-tab (Car auctions) on another tab (Connors Stuff).

  There wasn’t a lot in the folder, six links in total, making me think that these were carefully saved favourites, a cherry picked collection. They weren’t just favourited as links either. I’d deleted the information provided by the website, and given each link
a number, so their content remained a mystery.

  I let the mouse hover over the first link, and hesitated.

  Even though I already knew what I’d find.

  It was all gay porn, of course, mostly big, burly, tattooed guys with cool hair and carefully tended stubble. I watched them, the sex itself like wrestling, a tussle for control, but without malice, almost a schoolyard romance – pulling pigtails, elevated to who gets to pin who. Who gets to lick and bite, and who wriggles and gasps in pleasure. Hard muscle, hard cocks, violent shoves and thrusts – but softness too, the slight roundness of hips and stomachs, the dark haired man who licks come from his partner’s face and kisses him like he means it. I was mesmerised, appalled at myself, and yet...the desire in me felt refreshing, like I’d been dry for years, and had just taken a hit of a potent drug.

  It felt good, and that scared me.

  I closed the page, minimized the web, looked at the black background of the computer and realised that I was breathing heavily. My hand, resting on my leg, twitched uneasily. I was half hard, my nerves flickering with half felt, empathic pleasure.

  Then a text box appeared at the bottom of the screen, with the cheery bing-bong of MSN.

  How’s this? it read.

  I read the two words twice before my eyes went to the name of the sender. C00p.

  I paused for a second, then lifted my hands to the keyboard. It was a moment longer before I could convince them to type.

  This doesn’t exactly count as ‘talking’.

  I waited.

  Close enough. C00p replied. What are you doing?

  Sitting at my computer, talking to you.

  Not watching porn then.

  It was a random comment, and still it made me feel uncomfortable, like he could somehow see me, judge me, when I didn’t even know his name. If Coop was even male.

  That pause says you were.

  I was just looking through some old files.

  Trying to jog your memory?

  How do you know about my memory?

  Why else would you be looking through old stuff?

  Did he know about my amnesia? Did he even know me, or was he just some chancer, a con, that had landed in my email inbox?

  Who are you?

  Who do you want me to be?

  It was only then that I realised what was going on, and his next words confirmed it.

  You know, I’ve missed you a lot. I need you so badly right now.

  It was an online sex chat. This guy, if it even was a guy, was someone from before the accident, someone I’d emailed and phoned to talk to.

  What could they tell me? What did he know? I was excited and almost nauseous with dread. Did I want to know the things that Coop could tell me about myself?

  Listen, I really was trying to jog my memory. I was in a car accident, and I have amnesia.

  A long moment went by, and even the little cursor in the ‘replying’ box didn’t move for a while. I was starting to think I’d scared him off, when a line of text dashed across the screen, typed so quickly that it almost seemed Coop was blurting it out.

  So you don’t remember me then? At all?

  I winced, I was disappointing so many people lately.

  Sorry, no. But...I want to know what this is...what I was doing with you.

  What haven’t we done?

  I felt my stomach clench. Shit. This wasn’t a one-off affair, this was longstanding, an arrangement.

  How long have we been...seeing each other?

  A while.

  The next question was entirely unexpected.

  Are you OK?

  In my, admittedly currently rather limited, experience of sex workers, or, being generous to him, of casual hook ups over the internet – they weren’t really supposed to ask questions like that. They were strictly interested in the hard, brittle surface. The part that time would dull and tarnish, making them uninterested, cold.

  But here Coop was, asking me if I was alright.

  More surprising still, I found myself telling the truth.

  No. I don’t think I am. But, I’m trying to be.

  Again, that long pause, followed by intense typing, like it was too hard a sentence to get out, impossible to say, but just easy enough to type, if it was done fast enough.

  Why? If you’re not OK, why not try to fix it?

  A thought struck me. Do you know that I have a wife?

  Another long pause.

  No. No I didn’t.

  I couldn’t think of a reply to that. I mean, I’d been talking to this guy for a while, clearly, and about God knew what, and I hadn’t even let slip the most basic of details about my personal life. I was fast growing to hate the man that I had been. A man who lied, who cheated, staying safe in his tiny house, with his faithful wife, while he indulged in low risk encounters with strangers. A coward, a no one.

  His words skittered across the screen. Does she know, about you?

  She knows I had an affair, once. But, not about this, about you. At least I don’t think so.

  And she forgave you for cheating?

  Yes.

  Nice of her.

  The three words, no matter how innocent they looked, felt like barbs. They were designed to be light and pointed, telling me that he didn’t believe anyone could forgive that kind of betrayal.

  Did she want anything? He asked.

  Like?

  You know, a diamond necklace, holiday to the Algarve, a baby...? The usual offerings.

  No, she doesn’t want anything like that.

  Amazingly selfless wife you have there.

  Again, barbs. I tried to ignore them, not really understanding why I was still crouched over my keyboard, listening to this. The only reason I was still in the study was because I was hiding away from my responsibilities. Cheating again, just not in the same way.

  So, how did you remember? That you were gay?

  I let the cursor blink a little too long, staring at the white space, and he answered for me.

  Ooh. Someone showed you.

  I wanted to write something, to deny it. But nothing would come, no words in my defence, no denials.

  Does she know?

  No.

  And what about him?

  What do you mean?

  What’s he like? Does he mind?

  He...I started, and then stopped. How could I describe it, when I didn’t understand it myself? The way Nate seemed to pull at me without meaning to, like a dog bolting after an elusive prize, dragging its hapless owner behind it. Nate was a force, momentarily stilled. The tide that threatened my sandcastle life.

  He wants me to leave her, I think. To be like him, and not care what they think, what they want.

  And you want to stay with your wife?

  The funny thing was, I could have answered the other half of that question. If he’d asked, And you want to be with him? I would have said no, definitely not. But I couldn’t bring myself to claim that this, hiding in my tiny home office, while Emma cooked spag bol and planned what to buy at ASDA that week was what I wanted.

  It’s the right thing to do. I wrote instead.

  Thought not.

  Stung once too often, I whipped my fingers over the keyboard. Why the fuck do you care?

  He signed off almost immediately. The unspoken message being – I don’t.

  I sat and stared at the screen for a moment, then turned it off and went back to my binders. Digging into the life I’d had before had brought me nothing buy more unease. I found myself wishing that I could go back a few weeks, wake up with no memory all over again, only this time, I wouldn’t ask questions, or presume to decide what made me happy. I’d accept it all on faith, and live my life like everyone else on the planet – with the minimum of fuss.

  Chapter Eight

  Of course, I had to watch the DVD.

  OK, maybe ‘had to’ is pushing it. What I mean is...I don’t know what I mean. In truth I still don’t know why I did it. My only excuse was curiosity, I
wanted to know what it was that Nate wanted me to see.

  I wanted to see if it was anything like what I, the past me, had wanted myself to see.

  I went and got the disk from where I’d hidden it. I could have hardly left it at work, where Bradley already had enough reasons to mistrust and dislike me. So I’d brought it home and tucked it into the front of one of my revision binders, along with a CD of whale music that Janey had given me to help with my revision.

  Thankfully, Emma was downstairs, and I had no problems getting the DVD to play on the aged PC. Media player came up right away, and the film started up, going straight to the menu. It was, as I’d suspected was likely, gay porn, and not particularly classy porn at that. Not that I was much of a judge. But it was, if the pictures on the menu were to be believed, a kind of teacher-student scenario. Only the ‘teacher’ had a bleached blond buzzcut and massive tattoos over his shoulders and arms, and the ‘student’ was at least twenty-five, even if they’d tried to make him look younger with make-up and a fake American football team jacket.

  I pushed play, and the click was accompanied by the noise of someone getting spanked.

  I didn’t know whether to be disgusted, or to laugh. I settled for shaking my head.

  “I guess you know why you’re here?”

  “Uh....”

  “Your pop quiz results are real bad, but...I’ve thought of a way to get your grades...up.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Just a bit of...oral practice.”

  Thirty seconds later I was watching a really unenthusiastic blowjob, and wondering why the hell Nate had put such a shitty film in my pocket. The internet stuff I’d found had been much better, mainly because it hadn’t had any dialogue, let alone any that made me cringe.

  I was just about to turn it off, as the huge, tanned ‘teacher’ grunted his approval and moaned to his invisible audience. Then the film cut into another one, two normal looking, fairly attractive guys going at it on a sofa, one licking between the other’s legs, tongue working itself into places that I hadn’t considered as tongue-appropriate, but which made me feel hot under my thin shirt and jeans, my hand unconsciously fiddling with my fly.