Fly in the Ointment Read Free Page B

‘Well,
are
you?’
    â€˜What, going to keep on at him and shoo off his druggy friends?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Well, yes I am,’ I said. ‘He can come home, but only when he’s finished with whatever crap it is he’s ruining his life with now.’
    â€˜Oh, right,’ she said.
    And that was that. Frankly, I couldn’t see why she hadn’t grasped it first time around, unless she was blasted, or her brains had been rotted by glue fumes. I went into the shopping centre and got the things I needed, along with four big fat juicy and expensive sandwiches and two large bottles of peach and mango juice – Malachy’s favourite – to hand over on my way out.
    But they were gone, with only a couple of cigarette ends rolling about in the draught from the doors to show that they’d ever been there. I drove home rather too fast, in some distress about my son and irritationat the wasted expense of the food I had bought them.
    If I am honest, it was probably only because this extra shopping was on my mind – could I perhaps pass the beef and mustard sandwich off, with a salad, as Stuart’s supper? – that I even noticed that my husband had gone.
    Yes, gone. And not just with the jacket he’d have taken with him in case it turned chilly later, but with his long black coat. Curious, I looked in the cupboard under the stairs. His boots weren’t there – only the running shoes I’d bought after Stuart’s ticking-off at his last routine check-up for not taking any exercise, shoes he’d neither wanted nor worn.
    I went to the desk we’d built in under the stairs. At first glance it looked as cluttered as usual. But when I studied what was lying about I noticed it was only paperwork to do with the house. Directories. Bills. Receipts. Nothing of Stuart’s and, most unusually, nothing at all to do with his work.
    I opened the drawers. One looked suspiciously empty. I tried a sort of test, rooting through for his driving licence or passport – any paperwork to do with Stuart.
    Nothing to be found.
    I went upstairs, and into the bedroom we shared. I opened the closet to see a couple of suits he never wore, a few shirts that he hated, and shoes I’d boughthim that he had always complained felt as uncomfortable as walking round in cardboard boxes. I pulled out a drawer to find a pair of golfing socks I’d meant to send to Oxfam, a heap of handkerchiefs, and one or two of those sorts of weird little leather straps that are something to do with wearing trousers with braces.
    I looked in the pretty raffia bin. Right at the bottom, under a heap of smeary tissues I had dropped in there, he’d shoved a crumpled paper bag. I opened it and found a couple of foil-wrapped condoms he’d clearly tidied out of the back of the drawer while he was packing, and dropped in there to save me (and him) unnecessary embarrassment.
    The shame of it! I sat on the bed and watched my face go beetroot in the mirror. To have a husband leave, and not even notice! When had the bloody man gone? It couldn’t have been that morning. There hadn’t been the time. The day before, while I was working? Or could it even have been the day before that? I was so used to paying no attention to Stuart’s comings and goings, his calls to say that things were running late, his talk of cancelled trains and nights in the city. No doubt before he bought that microwave oven (for my birthday!) I might have had some vested interest in actually listening to his excuses and his explanations. These days I tended only to mutter‘What a shame’ and ‘How annoying for you’ and hope that the call would be over before
The Archers
.
    I finally worked it out. It must have been the day before, because when I’d come home from work there’d been a note from Stuart on the table letting me know that Martin Tallentire from next door had come round to borrow our