by Sam Anthony
“Do you agree?” I said.
“Hmm. Are you saying I shouldn’t buy you a World’s-Greatest-Lover award for Valentine’s Day with my credit card from the www.havinganaffair.com website using my home computer, as that might be a bit suspicious?”
“Now you’re getting it,” I said.
◆◆◆
What is it with my obsession with sex? Some people might say I should just count my blessings and be content with what I’ve got: a near-perfect marriage with regular rumpy-pumpy which happens to be not quite as often as I’d like, and lacks a bit of enthusiasm and variety. I’m an incredibly lucky guy. I should just suck it up and be grateful. Is there something wrong with me? Is my brain wired incorrectly? Am I suffering from a chemical imbalance? What’s so hard about being faithful to the woman you love? I have no idea. I wish it was otherwise, because I don’t like myself anymore.
◆◆◆
“Lee!” Tamsin squeals as we stare at my phone sinking slowly to the bottom of the toilet bowl.
It’s face-down. There’s a small stream of bubbles coming out of the microphone-end.
“You’re such a klutz!” she chuckles, shaking her head in disbelief. “Well, I’m not fishing it out.”
I’m in no hurry. It’s essential that when I retrieve my sodden phone, the screen is blank.
◆◆◆
“No contact when we’re with our families. That’s an obvious one, isn’t it? It pretty much means we can only communicate with each other during work hours.”
“What about weekends when Joe’s out playing golf all day?” Sophia asked.
“Well, the chances are I’ll be with at least one member of my family, so it’s probably best if we just stick to weekdays and work hours. Don’t you agree?”
“If you say so, Lee.” Her tone of voice informed me that she was beginning to get rather bored with this process.
“Also, no public displays of affection,” I continued. “We have to stop hugging at work. If somebody saw us, it’d look highly suspicious.”
“What if I start hugging all my colleagues; not just you? For the sake of consistency. Once I’ve developed a reputation as the girl who hugs everyone, nobody would think twice about seeing me hugging you.”
“Yes, that could work too,” I replied, deadpan, stroking my imaginary beard thoughtfully. “Of course, I’d have to do the same, but I’m not convinced our colleagues would welcome my hugs as much as yours.”
“You’re probably right. Okay, no PDA. I’ve got it.” Sophia tried, but failed, to hide her disappointment.
“Anyway,” I said. “I’m hoping we can make up for it with some serious naked, sweaty affection when we’re alone together.”
“Me too!” Sophia replied, eagerly. “When can we start? I’m horny already.”
“Hold your horses,” I said. “I’m barely halfway through my list.”
◆◆◆
I used to consider myself to be a good person. I’d never murdered anyone. I’d never committed rape or sexual assault. I’d been faithful to my wife. I’d tried to be kind to people and animals. I’d given money to a few charities. I’d stayed on the right side of the Ten Commandments, apart from a bit of coveting. Yes, I’ve broken the law a few times: underage drinking, driving at 80mph on the motorway, not being totally honest with HM Revenue & Customs. But on the whole, I’d always tried to do the right thing.
The moment I committed adultery, I ceased to be a good person.
I’m an atheist. I don’t consider committing adultery to be a sin, but I do believe it’s morally wrong, and I wish I hadn’t done it.
It’s a bit like losing your virginity. Once you’ve done it once, your identity has changed from one binary state to another. From virgin to non-virgin. From a good person to an adulterer. You can’t be in both of these states of existence, and you can’t be somewhere in between. It’s one or the other.
I’ve had many conversations with Jake about this. Jake’s parents are Jewish. According to the Bible, the Talmud and Rabbinic law, a Jew is anyone with a Jewish mother, but Jake describes himself as a non-practising Jew and an atheist to boot, but he grew up in a household in which there were regular debates about ethical and moral issues, so if ever I require moral guidance, he’s the man I turn to.
Jake and I are in agreement that adultery is just plain wrong, but I’ve never shared with him that a little voice in the back of my head keeps whispering, “What’s the harm if nobody gets hurt?”
◆◆◆
I fetch some tongs from the kitchen and use them to rescue my phone from the bottom of the toilet bowl, then I rinse it thoroughly under the tap and wash my hands. As expected, and hoped for, the screen is black and unresponsive.
“Should I try to turn it on?” I ask Tamsin.
I’m not worried anymore. If I can switch it on, it will boot up to the home screen, not the dreaded photo, but I suspect it won’t switch on at all. However, to be on the safe side, I’d rather not have it come back to life while Tamsin is with me, as I’ve still got some deleting to do.
“Aren’t you supposed to leave it in a bag of uncooked rice to dry out?” she said.
“Yes. Good idea. I’ll do that.”
I go back to the kitchen in search of rice.
“I’ve found your phone,” I shout up the stairs.
“Where was it?”
“In your handbag.”
“Oh yeah,” Tamsin says.
This is getting ridiculous. Not only did my marriage nearly come to an ignominious end, but I’m also probably £600 worse off. If I’ve got any sense, I should end my affair at the earliest opportunity. Unfortunately, the little sense that I do have is currently being overruled by my penis.
It’s only now that I consider what must be happening from Sophia’s point of view. She sent me a lovely naked photo, but received no reply. Why not? Didn’t I like the photo? Was it so shocking it caused me to have a heart attack and collapse unconscious? Why haven’t I responded?
In my imagination, Sophia is lying in bed, naked. Always naked. She’s staring expectantly at her phone screen, hoping for a compliment about how sexy she looks in the photo, or possibly a suggestion about what I’d like to do to her the next time we’re alone together, or maybe a reciprocal naked photo of me. I picture her getting increasingly anxious as a reply doesn’t arrive. She starts to worry about me. Am I incapacitated? Dead? She sends me text messages, but I don’t reply. She tries to phone me, but I don’t answer. She dials 999 and requests an ambulance and the police to go to my address. She gets into her car, still naked, and drives to my house to make sure I’m all right …
Chapter Five
The Map
As soon as Tamsin leaves the house again, I try to contact Sophia. I know she’ll be wondering why I haven’t responded to the naughty photo she sent me. My phone is out of action, but I could use our land line to call and reassure her that all is well. I pick up the extension in our bedroom and then realise that I shouldn’t be using our home phone as Sophia’s number will appear on our next itemised phone bill. A public call box should be safe though. Unfortunately, there aren’t any of these near our house, so I get dressed, drive into town and park near the post office. There are two telephone kiosks located outside and neither of them is in use, unsurprisingly as nobody uses public phones these days. I keep a pot of small change in my car, primarily for buying parking tickets, and I grab a handful of coins from within it to pay for my call. I walk to the booth, pick up the phone and listen for the dialling tone. Then I feed in a few coins and stop, feeling stupid. It’s just occurred to me that I haven’t got a clue what Sophia’s phone number is. I reach into my pocket for my cell phone so I can look up her number in my contacts list. What am I doing? I haven’t got my phone. It’s in a bag of rice in the airing cupboard at home. How can I get in touch with Sophia? Send an email? That requires a computer, and even if I had access to one, I only know Sophia’s work email address, but she doesn’t log-on to that
account at weekends. How can I contact her now? Post her a letter? Carrier pigeon? Smoke signals? Go round to her house?
I realise that I’ve got no immediate way of getting in touch with Sophia and resolve to come up with a plan to avoid this happening in future, but in the meantime, I’m out of ideas and getting increasingly anxious.
I climb back into my car and start the engine. As I’m driving home, it slowly dawns on me that I’m completely overreacting. Nothing has happened. Nobody knows anything. The only issue is that Sophia must be wondering why I’m suddenly incommunicado. However, as long as she does nothing and I do nothing, we’re still in the clear.
◆◆◆
“We have to use condoms every time we have sex.”
“But I’m on the pill,” Sophia said.
“It’s still best if we use condoms as well. You cannot get pregnant! My sperm are determined little blighters, desperate to pass on as much of my top quality DNA as possible to the next generation, so we can’t be too careful. Two types of contraception should be enough. The pill is 99 percent effective and condoms are 98 percent effective so if we use both that’s 197 percent effectiveness. There’s no way you can get pregnant with those odds.”
“Er … I’m not sure it works quite like that, Lee.”
“I know, but you get my point. It’s better to be safe than sorry.”
“Fine.” Sophia said, with a sigh.
“Also, condoms are highly effective against HIV, chlamydia, gonorrhoea and many other STIs.”
“I can see you’ve been doing your research, Lee, but I haven’t got any of those diseases and I assume you haven’t either.”
“I don’t think so, but we don’t know for certain that Tamsin isn’t a secret, part-time, high-class hooker, who’s given me symptomless chlamydia. Or Joe might actually be a closet homosexual intravenous drug user – who shares needles – and has passed on HIV to you.”
She laughed. “I’m pretty sure you’re wrong, but I’m happy to err on the side of caution, if that’s what you want.”
“It is,” I said.
“Okay. Who’s going to buy them and where will we keep them?”
◆◆◆
When Tamsin and I first got together at university, we used condoms. She switched to the contraceptive pill shortly after we got engaged and remained on it until we decided to have kids. Two or three months after she came off the pill, Tamsin fell pregnant with Charlie, so I know my swimmers are pretty potent. We switched back to condoms in between kids until we started trying for our second child, and again within a matter of weeks Tamsin was pregnant with John. We agreed that we now had a perfect family – and two children was plenty –so after some discussion, Tamsin had a coil fitted. That discussion got pretty heated and led to our first real row. She wanted me to have a vasectomy, and I was adamant that nobody was going anywhere near my reproductive organs with anything sharp. I felt at the time that I had a genuine, well-reasoned argument for not having a vasectomy, but Tamsin disagreed. The main points of my rationale were the following:
THEY SLICE INTO YOUR BALLS!!!
◆◆◆
At work on Monday morning, I go into Sophia’s office first thing and apologise.
“I’m so sorry, Soph. I couldn’t reply to your message on Saturday because I dropped my phone down the loo.”
“What?” she says, bemused.
“It’s a long story. I hope you didn’t think I was ignoring you.”
“No. Not at all. I just assumed you couldn’t reply for some reason.”
“So you’re not cross with me?” I say.
“That depends.” She lowers her voice. “Did you like the photo?”
“God, yes! You’re so sexy.”
“Then you’re forgiven,” she says, smiling warmly.
◆◆◆
“I’m on the pill, so Joe and I don’t use condoms. I don’t mind buying some, but it’d be extremely suspicious if he discovered I had them.”
Sophia was correct of course.
“I hadn’t even thought about how to buy condoms,” I said. “We’d have to get them with cash, but we obviously can’t use cash for online purchases, so one of us will have to buy them from an actual shop, and risk being recognised. Every time I go into the local pharmacy, I see someone I know, so a distant one would be better.”
“I could nip up to Scotland with our big trailer and get a whole month’s supply?” Sophia said and gave me a wicked smile.
“How about I buy some the next time I visit my mum?” I said. “She lives miles away. No one will recognise me there. Then I’ll store them in a locked draw in my desk for whenever we need them.”
“Good plan,” she said. “Do you need to borrow the trailer?”
“Not this time. I think a couple of crates full should be enough for now. If it turns out you’re completely insatiable, we can always buy more next time.”
◆◆◆
“Where was that restaurant we went to with your mum and Greg?” Tamsin asks me out of the blue.
I’m relaxing on the sofa in the conservatory and enjoying a good book. The weather has warmed up considerably, and it’s a pleasant evening. All is good with the world.
“No idea. Wasn’t it about halfway between their house and ours?” I say.
“Pass me your phone. I’ll have a look.”
Here we go again. A squirt of adrenaline sets my heart beating faster and I can sense my anxiety levels climbing. I try to relax and breathe normally.
Surely I’m safe.
After three days in a bag of rice in the airing cupboard, to my great surprise, my phone switched on as normal as soon as I charged it and pressed the power button. In fact, it’s been fine ever since, except the speaker now sounds a bit crackly.
I’m confident that there’s nothing incriminating for Tamsin to discover on my phone. I’ve long since deleted the naked photo and the accompanying messages. Before leaving work this afternoon, as has become my habit, I removed all traces of any messages or emails from Sophia, and I scrubbed the search history. I know Sophia won’t try to contact me now, not while I’m at home with my family, but I can’t help feeling a touch of trepidation as I hand the phone over to Tamsin.
She starts tapping away on the screen and I pretend to be nonchalantly reading my book, although I’m merely scanning the same paragraph over and over again.
I assume that she’s trying to locate the restaurant on the internet somehow, but I’m not sure why she’s using my phone and not her own.
“Wasn’t it around your birthday?” she asks.
“I honestly can’t remember, Tam.” I frown, confused. How is the date of the visit going to help her find a restaurant on the internet?
“Here it is. Told you. Two days after your birthday,” she says.
I’m really confused.
“Well done. How did you find it?”
“You’ve got Location Services enabled on your phone. I just looked at the map to see where you’d been on the days around your birthday, and there it was.”
I’m not one for using swear words, I’ve never seen the point, although I’m reliably informed that a good Anglo-Saxon expletive can actually reduce the pain after hitting your thumb with a hammer, or the equivalent. I say nothing out loud, but I’m certainly thinking a few choice ones.
“The map shows where I’ve been?” I say, a noticeable tremor in my voice.
“Well, it actually shows where your phone has been, but, assuming you have it with you, it plots your movements. It even identifies the restaurants and shops you’ve visited. I find it all a bit Big Brother, so I’ve switched it off on my phone,” Tamsin says, smugly.
Why did I not discover this in all my research? While I was assuming I was being really careful, my phone had betrayed me by keeping a record of all my movements, including my visits to Sophia’s house.
“Well, I never knew that. Can I have a look?”
I reach for my phone.
“I’ll show yo
u.”
Tamsin sits down next to me on the sofa, still holding my phone, and points at the screen.
◆◆◆
“Next rule,” I said. “No cosmetics when we’re together. That includes perfume, aftershave, lipstick, body lotion or anything else that’ll leave a trace or an odour. It wouldn’t be good if I went home with lipstick on my collar, or you walked around smelling of my aftershave. To be doubly sure, it’s also essential that both of us have a shower before going home.”
“Together?” Sophia said, hopefully, and winked at me.
“I like the way your mind works,” I said, smiling.
“I always get home hours before Joe, so I can shower as soon as I get back from work.”
“Sounds good. There’s often someone in my house when I get home, but I guess I could shower at the gym if necessary,” I said.
“Sorted. What’s this rule about alcohol and drugs though?” Sophia asked.
“Well, I don’t know about you, Soph, but after a few drinks, I tend to lose my inhibitions, and sometimes I say and do all sorts of inappropriate things. I’m even more erratic when I’m high on cocaine and heroin. I just think it’d be wiser if we remain in control of all our faculties when we’re taking risks.”
For a second, I thought she’d taken me seriously.
“But it’s my lifelong dream to have somebody snort cocaine off my buttocks,” Sophia said, pouting.
“Mine too. But we’re going to have to make some sacrifices if this is going to work.”
◆◆◆
Why now?
I’ve been happily married for sixteen years. Has something changed recently in my relationship with Tamsin? Not really. The passion has been gradually waning for years, but it’s been a slow process. Has it suddenly crossed some sort of threshold? Not that I’m aware of. I don’t recall waking up one morning and thinking: ‘The tipping point has now been reached; I’m no longer getting enough sex in my marriage, so it’s time to have an affair.’