after the boy

I found Sarah at the breakfast table, halfway through a bowl of Special K. Her hair was tied up very high and neat, certainly retied after she’d gotten up, and she was wearing the pink satin singlet and shorts I’d bought her from Peter Alexander around the time of the move. I realised then that there were no firewheel flowers in my hands. When she saw me she used one of her hands to hide the chewing taking place in her mouth, as if I was oblivious to the fact of her needing to eat.

“Phil! What are you doing back?”

It took me a second, and an acute pang of anxiety, to comprehend that my entrance into my own house was unexpected, that I should have been out until four or five. Much the same time as it came back to me I told her that Steve had never shown.

 “Steve? That’s weird. That’s so weird. Did he call?”

“No”

“Did you?”

I shook my head. “I waited a long time. He’s never late”

“Time’s money, right?”

The way she said this, repeating verbatim something I’d said to her about Steve, made me flinch a little bit, but I nodded. The newspaper on the table was still rolled up in the plastic, like a roulade about to be cooked sous vide, and the orange juice bottle had almost nothing left in it. I picked up the newspaper and unwrapped it messily and then skulled the last drops of orange juice and then put the bottle in the recycling bin, which was in the laundry. From the laundry I heard her ask if everything was okay.

Was it?

On hearing Sarah’s question I knew, from the indefinably wretched way it made me feel, that I wouldn’t say a word to her about the boy. I read something invasive into the way she’d asked, and something pathetic into my face’s inability to turn away the orders sent it by my mind. Had I no recourse other than to dumb faithfulness? But it was uncharacteristic of me to react like that; I didn’t believe that. For a time I looked at my hands and my arms, turned them, swirled them as though they were curlicues of ash instead of flesh and bone, tried to trace the long blonde hairs, which glistened on certain angles, to their roots. The thought of ripping them out like a sick dog started to eat at the back of my eyes, and I found that I was slapping myself in the face and miming pull the fuck together.

“Of course it is, babe,” I finally responded. Maybe the voice I used was louder than was called for, I didn’t know. “Actually a magpie swooped me, so I’m, yeah, a little racy over that, but…”

I didn’t have time to reiterate that I was all right: Sarah was on me with all sorts of feminine ministrations, she was planting a lot of kisses on my lips and forehead.