I hate myself for thinking it, but I hope it was me you were picturing in her bed.
I had a little nose about the place while you were taking a shower. Who wouldn’t? There were inspirational mottos dotted around, including a framed print that said: YOU GET WHAT YOU WORK FOR, NOT WHAT YOU WISH FOR and – my personal favourite – BE THE PERSON YOUR DOG THINKS YOU ARE. I didn’t know she had one. There was also some unopened mail on the doormat, and two of the envelopes I picked up were addressed to an R. O’Brien.
‘I didn’t know October was married,’ I said, putting the post on the dressing table, and having a quick peek inside her drawers.
‘She isn’t,’ you replied from the bathroom.
‘Then who is R. O’Brien?’
‘What?’ you asked, shouting over the sound of the shower.
‘These letters are all addressed to someone called R. O’Brien.’
‘October is just her stage name. It helps keep her private life private,’ you said. ‘Good thing too the way the press sometimes go after her. That business about the speeding ticket and all the headlines it generated, you’d have thought she killed someone.’ Then you immediately changed the subject, and I was glad, because I wanted this time away to be all about us. Only us.
I gave you that iron key because I want to tell you the truth about everything. All of it. We’re so happy at the moment, and I don’t want there to be secrets between us anymore. But when you unwrapped it, and held the key to everything in your hand, something felt wrong. Why ruin our present or jeopardise our future with my past? Better to let us live this happy version of us a little while longer.
All my love,
Your wife
xx
Adam
I take better care of myself than my wife, she spends too long taking care of others. By the time we reach the top of the hill, she is red in the face and more than a little out of breath. I could have made it easier, gone a little slower perhaps, but I wanted to get us both as far away from that cottage as soon as possible.
‘I can’t see anything,’ she says.
‘That’s because there is nothing to see.’
Strictly speaking, neither of these things are true.
There is a full three-sixty-degree view of the valley from up here – just as I predicted there would be – with only snowy mountains and wilderness as far as the eye can see. It’s stunning, but a view of another house, or a petrol station, or a phone box, might have been preferable, given the circumstances. A beautiful but barren landscape is exactly what I feared: nowhere to run. Or hide. We are completely cut off.
I did see something, though.
Back at the cottage.
It’s been bothering me ever since.
I didn’t recognise the woman – I never recognise anyone – but I did get a strange sense of déjà vu. I try to tuck it away in one of the darker corners of my mind – out of sight – and look at my wife instead. She has her back to me, busy taking in the view of the valley. I can tell she is trying to catch her breath and gather her thoughts, both seem to have escaped her. I wish I could see my wife the way other people do. I recognise the shape of Amelia’s body, the length and style of her hair. I know the smell of her shampoo, her moisturising cream, and the perfume I give her for birthdays or Christmas. I know her voice, her quirks, and mannerisms.
But when I stare at her face, I could be looking at anyone.
I read a thriller about a woman with prosopagnosia last year. I was genuinely excited at first – not much has been written about face blindness. I thought it might be a good premise and make a good TV drama, as well as help raise awareness of the condition, but sadly not. The writing was as disappointing and mediocre as the plot, and I turned the job down. I spend so much time rewriting other people’s stories, I wish I was better at rewriting my own.
Sometimes I think that I should have been an author. An author’s words are treated like gold, they’re untouchable and get to live happily ever after inside their books – even the bad ones. A screenwriter’s words are jelly beans in comparison; if an executive doesn’t like them, they chew them up and spit them out. Along with whoever wrote them. My own real-life experience would have made a better thriller than that novel. Imagine not being able to recognise your wife, or your best friend, or the person responsible for killing your mother right in front of you as a kid.
My mother was the person who taught me to read and fall in love with stories. We would devour novels from the library together in the council flat I grew up in, and she said that books would take me anywhere if I let them. Kind lies are the cousins of white ones. She also said that my eyes would turn square from all the TV I insisted on watching, but when our battered old set broke, my mother sold all of her jewellery – except for her beloved sapphire ring – at the pawn shop to get me another one. She knew that the characters I loved in books, films and TV shows, filled the gaps left by absent family and non-existent friends when I was a child.