After The Fall

by Sarah Goodwin

  Emma was trying, I knew that. Trying to get to know me, to let me know her. The only problem was, I had to fight to find her engaging, and I hated myself for my lack of interest. She was my wife, and I had loved her only a month ago, surely there had to be a part of me that remembered that?

  On Friday, when I got home, not really looking forward to spending two days away from work, not thrilled at the prospect of returning there either, Emma had a surprise for me.

  She’d set up the living room with a folding table, and put out bowls of sliced up baguette and crisps, plastic pots of dip, plates of carrot sticks, mini sausages and cheese on toothpicks.

  “Go and get changed,” she said, grinning, “people’ll be arriving soon.”

  “Who?”

  “I invited our friends over, so that you can get back in touch.”

  My first instinct was to turn around and leave. I was tired, already itching to get out of the house, and annoyed that she’d planned this without telling me. But, I knew I had to make an effort and not get Emma angry with me.

  I went upstairs, ignored the thought that I could just climb into bed and go to sleep, and changed into a clean t-shirt and jeans. I didn’t have that many clothes, I’d noticed before, but now it was bothering me, surely I had to have owned more than two pairs of jeans?

  Downstairs, Emma put on a CD and, as I came back into the living room, she was getting out bottles of wine, Coke and beer.

  The front door rattled in its frame as someone knocked. Mick barked insanely, and Emma scooted him out into the hallway and shut him between the living room and the kitchen.

  “Can you get that, Connor?”

  I opened the door and stared into the red face of a very round man with equally round glasses. Behind him, a fragile looking woman with hair and clothes the colour of a brown paper bag smiled hesitantly at me.

  “Connor,” the man thrust his hand at me, and after a moment’s uncomfortable pause I shook it.

  “Nice to meet you,” I offered.

  He looked hurt. “It’s me, Terry, I service the machines at the leisure centre...you came to mine and Pamela’s wedding last year.”

  “I have amnesia,” I explained, “from the car accident.”

  “Oh, I know that,” Terry said, making me wonder why he’d thought I’d remember him. “Emma told us you were acting a bit strange.”

  “I don’t think I am,” I said politely.

  Terry laughed slightly uncomfortably and slapped my arm. I let him into the house, though I would have liked to shut the door in his face, and watched as he greeted Emma, and shot a cautious look over his shoulder at me.

  This was feeling less and less like a party and more like an intervention.

  The guests all turned up in pairs, Carol and Pete (both dumpling like and bespectacled, wearing sweatshirts) Gary and Lotte (who looked, to put it bluntly, like heroin addicts who’d rolled through a Primark) and Mickey, with his girlfriend Mikkie, who both had no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever, except their many tattoos.

  Once everyone had arrived, each couple taking the time to talk to me like I was a naughty child and drooling coffin dodger simultaneously, we sat down on the sofa, and chairs. Everyone had plates of food, and a glass or bottle of something to drink. I had a beer, and then another, while they all chatted, and Mikkie admired Emma’s hair.

  Eventually, Mickey turned to me and said, “So, your brain’s scrambled then?”

  “My memory’s gone.”

  He whistled through discoloured teeth. “Must be weird not knowing anything you’ve done.”

  “Like the Bourne Identity, only not as cool,” I said.

  “How do you remember that?”

  “What?”

  “The film?”

  “I only saw it this week, my friend Nate had the DVD.”

  This little exchange had attracted the attention of Terry and Mikkie. “Who’s Nate?” Terry asked.

  “He’s from my support group.”

  “Connor’s been stuck for company this past week,” Emma said, sotto voice, to Terry.

  “He’s a good mate,” I said, “took me out for a drink after our first meeting, back at his.”

  “Well then, he should come to the next party, with his girlfriend,” said Mikkie, who, despite her vicious tattoos, actually seemed quite sweet.

  “He doesn’t have one,” I shrugged.

  “Even better, Mickey’s sister’s husband just ran off with some woman he met at that bondage shop, Anthraxx last week. She could use a date.”

  “Actually, Nate’s gay,” I said.

  A kind of...stiffness went around the room. Like someone had just put their foot in it, or puked over the buffet. Even Mick stopped his whimpering to be let in from the hallway.

  “Oh,” Mikkie said quietly, then shot a quick look at Emma.

  “I didn’t know,” Emma said to her, and then to me, “you didn’t tell me.”

  “You didn’t ask,” I told her, “I don’t see the big deal.”

  Terry cleared his throat with an almighty cough. “Another beer?”

  While he helped himself and got one for Mickey, Emma, Mikkie and Carole all disappeared into the kitchen. As soon as the door opened, Mick bounced into the room and took up a place under the abandoned buffet table.

  I knew they’d gone to talk about what had just happened, to make sure Emma was alright and to ply her with rosé. I got up to go after them, but Terry took my arm.

  “They’re just having a girly chat, nothing to do with us.”

  He was probably just trying to keep the peace, but I could see from the way he was looking at me that he was hiding something. The same thing that they were all hiding, and it pissed me off. That this man, who I didn’t even know, thought he had the right to keep things from me. I shook him off, and bolted out to the kitchen.

  I could hear them before I got near the door. It was Emma’s voice that reached me first.

  “I can’t believe it, I just can’t...I thought I was done with all this.”

  “It’s just his mate, he’s not-” started Carole.

  “But that’s how it started last time,” hissed Emma, “and you know where that led.”

  “It’s not going to happen again though, is it?” Mikkie put in, “I mean, he’s not...you know, any more. Not since the accident. He’s changed. He can’t even remember.”

  That was all I heard before Terry pushed past me and into the kitchen, breaking up the chat and leaving me with a stack of unanswered questions flying around my head.

  I went upstairs into the bedroom, locked the door, turned the CD player on and ignored the sounds of the guests downstairs while I added this latest little bit of information to my journal.

  From what they’d said, I was in little doubt that I’d had a gay friend before, and, that it had somehow led to something. Maybe to something like what had happened with me and Nate the night we met.

  I also knew that Emma had been keeping it from me since the accident.

  Could that friend be the C in my phone? The email address on the computer? If so, and if he was still able to phone me, then why was he avoiding me?

  At some point, the party downstairs ended, and Emma’s friends left. I heard her banging around in the kitchen, the whoosh of washing up water, the clatter of pans as she put them away. It was quite late by this time, around ten, and I had finished writing in my notebook, and put it away at the back of my sock drawer. I had a detective novel open, but it wasn’t really holding my interest.

  I went downstairs and found Emma sitting in the living room, a cup of tea in front of her.

  For a moment I stood in the doorway in silence, while Emma ignored my presence. I felt like a naughty kid, creeping downstairs to see if he’d been forgiven.

  “That was really fucking rude,” she said.

  “So was getting them all over here to ambush me.”

  She looked up sharply at that. “Ambush you?”

  “What else do you ca
ll having six strangers come in to tell me that I’m ‘acting weird’.” I couldn’t help it, I was angry, and my voice grew louder. “Just because I’m going out with my friends, and not spending my every waking minute with you, in this house. I’ve been trying to get on with you, to remember how it was, and you’re keeping things from me.”

  “You’re being so horrible to me,” she whispered.

  “And you’re a fucking liar,” I shouted, refusing to back down, “I heard you in the kitchen, I saw how you reacted when you found out that Nate was gay – so tell me, tell me what the big secret is?”

  She stayed silent, her mouth a thin, wobbling line, her eyes big and wet.

  “Am I gay, is that it?”

  “No!”

  “So what did I do!?”

  “You...” she looked for a moment like she was going to be sick, or cry, or both, “you slept with someone else...a man. Once. Just the once.”

  Somehow, having it said out loud was worse than just suspecting it. I had had an affair. I’d cheated on my wife, with a man, and she knew.

  Worse than that, only I knew that I’d done it again.

  “Who was he?” I asked quietly.

  “No one, just someone who went to the leisure centre,” she told me, “I don’t think you really knew him.”

  But still, as soon as she said it, it hit me, right in the throat, like a well thrown knife. The smell of Lynx.

  The white t-shirt.

  The logo of laurel leaves.

  That was all there was, but it made me prickle hotly all over, like someone was actually touching me, putting their hands on my naked skin. My mouth went dry, and my heart thumped twice, hard. That was all that was left of him, the man in the white shirt.

  Emma continued to speak as if I wasn’t caught in lust and confusion.

  “You told me about it almost as soon as it’d started. You felt so guilty, knew it was a mistake. And I forgave you – because I love you.”

  Aside from the mixed memory of sex and skin, the thin white cotton of the shirt soft and worn under my fingers, there was nothing more. No name, no memory of how it all had happened. I couldn’t feel anything else, like love, for the man in the white shirt. Maybe it had faded away, or maybe it had never been there for me to remember it.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

  “I didn’t want you to know, to feel guilty all over again. I thought maybe you wouldn’t want to know, that you’d just leave me and start again somewhere else.”

  Would I have? If I’d woken up and been confronted with this right away, would I have not thought it worth the bother? I thought of myself in a flat of my own, like Nate’s, alone, and knowing that in another life I had been married, that I had been an adulterer.

  “Where is he now?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, as far as I know he went back to his wife and kids.”

  I sat down, unable to believe that I was the kind of person who’d steal someone’s dad away. I was almost glad that my own, unremembered parents were dead, so I wouldn’t have to face them. Because they would have known, if all my friends knew, if Emma knew.

  “Why would you take me back?”

  “Because I love you,” she told me, “and because we’ve been married a long time.”

  I was silent for a while, mulling it over. If our marriage was strong enough to overcome that affair, it must be strong enough to hold under the burden of my memory loss. What I’d done with Nate was a mistake, an echo of that first infidelity. I was vulnerable, and my mind had tricked me, taken me down an old path.

  “What are we going to do now?” Emma asked, eventually. Her voice tiny and sad, expecting the worst.

  If I could recommit to my marriage once, I could do it again. I could learn to like my job, to sleep well beside my wife. Even if it meant losing my only real friend.

  “We stay together,” I said, “for better or for worse, all that stuff, right? We’ll be OK. And I promise, I won’t see too much of Nate if it worries you. I’ll put him off, stick to coming back home after the meetings.”

  She seemed happier at that, and she got up and hugged me, kissing me on the mouth.

  “Thank you, for trying,” she said, “I know you’ll be happy.”

  And I tried to know it too.

  I didn’t see Nate for the next two days, because I stuck around the house and tried to help Emma with the weekend jobs that kept the house running through the week – paying the bills, doing the laundry, buying in the food and cleaning all the parts of the house that had collected dust, crumbs and sticky marks throughout the week.

  While Emma went off to ASDA, I stayed home with a duster and a can of spray, doing my best not to baulk at the sheer amount of dust and dirt in the far corners of some of the rooms. I took the sheets off of the bed and put new ones on, and hoovered the thin carpets to within an inch of their lives.

  When there was nothing more to do, I sat down to watch CountryFile with a cup of tea. Emma cooked a roast, pork belly which was on offer, and potatoes, apple sauce and broccoli, all doused in Bisto. It was the first proper meal I’d had since Nate’s shepherd’s pie, though obviously I didn’t say that.

  Actually, we didn’t say much the whole weekend. I told Emma about some of the things I’d seen on TV, she relayed the goings-on of the supermarket, and some of her friends who she’d met and gossiped with. Then we watched Morse on TV, and went to bed.

  That night was the first time Emma had shown the least bit of interest in me in bed. Usually we lay on our own sides, read our books, and went to sleep. But that night she trailed her hand over my stomach while I was lying with my back to her. She traced the line of hair down my belly to the top of my pyjama bottoms, and then cupped me through the thin cotton. I kept very still, and breathed evenly, thinking what to do.

  In the end, I knew I’d have to do it, and there was no point delaying it any longer.

  I turned over, towards her, and kissed her as she kissed me. I pushed her nightdress up, and my bottoms down, and as she ran her hands down my back, I kissed my way down her throat, down over one of her pink, pointed nipples, terrified that I wouldn’t get hard.

  But I did, and it was over quickly, much to my relief.

  Afterwards, lying next to her sleeping body, I wondered if this was how it was supposed to feel.

  Chapter Seven

  I saw Nate two days later.

  My first thought was that he looked tired. Not tired as if he’d spent the day actively, but completely exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept since I’d seen him last. His fingers were yellowish with nicotine, and when he appeared at my side on the way from work to the AA meeting, he started talking fast, hyped up on caffeine.

  “Hey mate, haven’t seen you in a few days, been up to much?”

  “Not really.”

  “Bit of a boring weekend then? Go to any good garden centres? Watch Some Mothers Do Av’ Em while she darned your socks and you smoked a pipe?”

  I bristled. “Can’t you slow down? You sound like you’re on speed.”

  “Wish I was, would work better than Nes-fucking-café,” he grinned, “what’s up, touched a nerve? Not getting on so well with the missus?”

  My shoulders stiffened automatically. “Actually, we’re great.”

  “Really?” Nate looked disappointed, practically gaunt with it, like he’d just gotten some terminal news back from the doctor.

  “Yes, really,” I don’t know why, for some reason it just came out, “we had sex a few nights ago.”

  Nate looked at me for a moment, his face ashen with dismay, or maybe just with cigarette smoke

  “So...do you think that makes you straight?”

  A dart of anger, quick and sharp as exploding glass, struck me in the gut. “What?”

  “Oh come on, you’re paper thin – you reckon, now that you’ve got it up and stuck it in your wife, that somehow makes you ‘normal’, now you’re a football watching, lawn mowing, Cheryl Cole loving straight, A
lpha male.” He shook his head, exasperation making him terse, “It doesn’t work like that.”

  I refused to rise to the bait, or to let the stinging anger in me break free. “If you’re saying that I think I’m straight because I enjoyed sex with a woman, then, yes. I do believe I’m straight.”

  Nathan made a loud, derisive noise. “Enjoyed? Please. You, did not enjoy shagging her. You did it – you got a fucking hard on, you came. Big deal.” He got closer to me, his voice dropping low and serious, even the bitter playfulness of it falling away. “What you and I did, that you enjoyed, that, you wanted.”

  “You, don’t know anything. And you’re talking, bullshit,” I spat, glancing up and down the street, glad that it was dark and deserted.

  “I know that I didn’t have to try and get you hard, you already were,” he murmured. We were stopped on a wet street corner, just under the railway arch, where rust and slime dripped down the concrete and made the walls shine poisonously.

  “I know that you fucking wanted it, just as badly as I did,” he continued, “from the way you touched me, the way you moaned for me, came all over my fucking hand.”

  I swallowed, and realised that my lips were dry.

  Nate fixed me with his insolent brown eyes. “Don’t to tell me you ‘enjoyed’ her. Before you even knew the first thing about yourself you wanted me, you want, me.”

  A train screeched along the tracks, screaming over the bridge and filling the tall, dank tunnel with the echoes of its chunking carriages and shrill wheels.

  Nate kissed me, and it wasn’t anything I could describe as gentle. It was raw, like the smell of his cigarettes and the cheap alcohol that stripped his throat. Concentrated, vital. His hands seized at my clothes, sliding over my sweatshirt, cupping my arse and pulling me towards him. My own hands found his shoulders, snaking up to rub against his neck, the stubble that crept onto it from his face. I felt lower, hands searching out soft places on his whip-thin frame.

  When he pulled away from me, we took breaths like drowning men breaking the surface. My breathing turned shallow and uneven, and Nate gave me a determined look.