I wrote this week's Friday Flash story for a competition entry last summer. Looking back now, I know why it didn't win. I was trying too hard to write the kind of story that I thought won competitions.
Perhaps you'll enjoy it despite that...
Pile Up
At what point do you realise you’re married to the wrong person, Alicia wonders. Is it the point where you hear about the sixteen car pile-up on the M62 and you think, ‘Brian’s on the motorway now’, but you don’t think, ‘I hope he’s OK’. Instead you start imagining a knock on your door and a sombre-faced policewoman:
“Is there anyone we can call?”
They met seven years ago, at a B&B in York. It was high summer, but they were the only ones there. Brian was up from Wolverhampton, attending a conference on The Future of Social Networking at the Barbican. Alicia was sightseeing. Since breaking up with Don, she didn’t mind holidaying on her own. Going where you wanted when you wanted without having to worry whether your partner really wanted to be there, or whether they’d rather be somewhere else, doing someone else. Don had been shagging that waitress from the Bull's Head for three months by the time they went to Crete. Why keep up the pretence for two whole weeks then drop the bomb the moment they got home?
“I didn’t want to spoil the holiday.”
Yes, because now Alicia had such great memories of it.
She turns off the radio when the adverts come on and goes to the fridge for Ocean Spray. It’s good for your bladder. She had an infection last year and Brian made her drink it. She was never a fruit juice person, but she’d grown to love it. Now she even drank it with vodka. It was weird the way living with someone changed basic things like your diet, what time you went to bed and when you did the washing. She’d never watched The Simpsons before meeting Brian. Now she watched it every night. Even the ones she’d seen three, four times. Would she still watch it if they split up, or would it be forever tainted by them?
Ah, but who was she kidding? They wouldn’t split up. Not on her instigation, anyway. Sometimes she pictured Brian’s face with that curled lip, does-not-compute expression he got whenever she had the temerity to disagree with him. Besides, it was complicated. She might not love him anymore, but she did still love him. One word, so many different definitions.
Sometimes she wishes Brian would have an affair too. But that was insane. Catching Don with that tart was the worst thing that ever happened to her. Worse than the time she broke her nose ice-skating, worse than the time she thought her dad had cancer (it turned out to be polyps), worse even than the abortion. At least that had been her choice. And yet if she’d arrived home tonight to find Brian shagging a floozy from someone else’s local, would part of her not have been relieved? What - she didn’t love Brian the way she’d loved Don? No, you couldn’t compare. All those definitions rendered comparisons worthless. Besides, Brian wouldn’t ever do that. He didn’t have room in his heart for another woman. He barely had room for her.
As she peels the potatoes, she thinks again of York. Arriving for breakfast to find her future husband sitting alone with his muesli. He’d caught her eye the moment she walked in.
“Good morning! Isn’t it a lovely day? I think we’re the only ones here.”
That appeared to be the case. Alicia had been intending to sit over on the other side of the room, but might that seem rude now?
“Why don’t you join me? I’m having the full English, what about you?”
When the waitress arrived to take her order, Alicia realised she didn’t have a choice. She asked for a grapefruit and some toast, thinking suddenly of her figure. Why? That was when Brian started telling her about his conference.
“To be honest, I could have done without it. We're so busy back at the office. But people are coming from all over the country – even abroad. Amsterdam, Iceland, one bloke from Czechoslovakia, or whatever they call it these days. I’m the keynote speaker. Can’t do it without me.”
Alicia had never spoken in front of an audience. Wasn’t he nervous?
“I’d only be nervous if I didn’t know what I was talking about.” His laugh defused the arrogance. No, it wasn’t arrogance, she remembers thinking: it was confidence. Such a scarcity in her own life, she hardly recognised it. Yet when she was with him, his confidence became hers. “I can do anything” became “we can do anything”. “They can’t do that to me” became “they can’t do that to us”. And so on. For a time, it was irresistible.
He should be home by now, she thinks, peeking through the blinds. It’s still raining. A car goes past the end of the drive spraying water from the puddles. It’s not Brian. She turns down the gas on the potatoes and checks her mobile. Sometimes he texts if he’s stuck in traffic.
Nothing.
She imagines herself in a solicitor’s office, Grantham, Surley and Braithwaites, talking over the particulars of her late husband’s will. His life insurance would pay off the mortgage. Then there’d be his pension and death-in-service benefits… but it wasn’t about the money. It was the long term benefits that really excited her.
These are only thoughts, she tells herself. Everybody has thoughts. Bad thoughts. Mean thoughts. Bleak, fatalistic, inappropriate, just plain evil thoughts that blow through your head like thunderclouds but don’t actually bring rain.
She remembers being a little girl, lying in bed, unable to sleep until she heard her dad come home. The later it got, the more she worried. It didn’t matter what Mum said to reassure her. Uncle Alan hadn’t come home one night; he’d been run over on the way back from his club by a drunk driver. Mum said that had been a tragic accident, but with something like that already happening to somebody in their family, it was far less likely to ever happen again. That was something called probability, though it turned out Mum didn’t really understand probability at all. Alicia’s maths teacher told her that if you tossed a coin nineteen times and it came up heads every single toss, it still didn’t change the odds of it coming up heads again on the twentieth. So Alicia had to learn to beat the odds and find another way to protect her dad. People said bad things happened when you least expected them, so every night she expected the worst. A crash, a fire, a shooting, a kidnapping… another drunk driver. By picturing it, she denied it. And every night her Dad walked in the door, that was one more victory over fate.
By those rules, wasn’t she now protecting her husband in exactly the same way? Ruling out the possibility of an accident by imagining it first? She ought to feel good about that. Why didn’t she?
When Brian asked her to marry him, it’d been a foregone conclusion. She’d thought about saying no, but she’d only have been doing it to see the look on his face. He’d probably think she was joking anyway. He’d already booked the church, and two weeks off work. “The difficult thing’s going to be the guest list. Narrowing it down. If I invited everybody who thinks they’re going to be invited, we’d have to hire the Albert Hall.” Brian had 2476 friends on Facebook, and few were mere acquaintances. Alicia could think of maybe six people she wanted on her side of the church, and that included her mum, dad and brother Ray. She ended up inviting people she hadn’t spoken to in years, in a vain attempt to balance the numbers.
Vain – there was another word that lost you in its definitions. A word that could have applied to both bride and groom that day, in entirely different ways.
For their first dance, Brian serenaded her from the stage. You’re Every Woman In The World To Me. They didn’t actually dance, she just stood there like a lemon and let herself be sung to. At what point do you realise you’re married to the wrong person? God help you if you’re still wearing your wedding dress.
She didn’t wish Brian ill. She certainly didn’t want him dead. She didn’t even hate him. She just didn’t ‘love him’ love him. The ironic thing was, if he didn’t walk in that door soon… if fate actually won this round…
When she hears his car in the drive, her emotions are all a tangle. Relief tied up with regret, twisted into guilt. Always guilt. What does she have to be guilty about? She was only thinking. This is all his fault. If he’d been home on time, none of this would have ever entered her mind. She takes a deep breath and forces the frown from her face, ready to greet him. As she does every night, she laments the passing of her time alone and readies herself for another evening of cohabitation.
The look he gives her as he opens the door wipes those thoughts away. She doesn’t even have time to say, “you’re late,” or “what time do you call this?” or ask if he got stuck on the motorway because of the accident. She knows something’s wrong.
“Sit down,” he says, and yanks off his tie like it’s the real reason his face is so white, his eyes so red and rubbed bloodshot. “Just sit down,” he repeats when she tries to ask why, and even now hope flickers in the dread. Has he met someone else? Was he with her tonight? Is he going to leave? She pulls out a chair with a scrape.
“Ray called me on my way home. From the hospital. He didn’t want to tell you over the phone, better someone told you in person. Obviously he though I was best…”
He crouches in front of her and takes her hand. Behind him, the cat flap goes and Mandrake squeezes through, bedraggled from the rain. He lets out a crabby meow and rubs himself against the tea towel that’s hanging from the radiator. Then he glares at Alicia like it’s all her fault. Where’s the summer gone?
“It’s your dad,” Brian says. “He was in an accident. There was a crash on the motorway…”
The cat’s right, Alicia thinks. It is all her fault. Her daddy’s dead, her mum’s too upset to talk, even her brother doesn’t want to be the one to break it to her. It’s all her fault. She hasn’t been protecting him like she used to. When she heard about that accident, all her thoughts were for Brian. No, not for Brian. They hadn’t been for Brian at all. Selfish cow, she thinks, look what you’ve done now!
Her husband’s still talking. Of course he is. He’ll take care of all the arrangements. She doesn’t need to worry. It’ll be the best funeral anybody’s ever had. A testament to the man, a great man, a man Brian had a lot of love and respect for. Everything he deserves, we’ll do him proud.
“I have to go pack,” Alicia tells him, “I need to be with my mum.”
Brian says he understands. He thinks it’s a good idea. A few days at her mum’s, that’ll do them both some good. They can grieve together. He’ll drive her over there now, fetch her back at the weekend.
“No,” says Alicia. “I might have to stay longer than that. Quite a bit longer…”
Brian doesn’t understand, she thinks. But he will. She’ll make him. This is her chance. He asks how much longer and she answers without hesitation.
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