As she put her key in the lock, May realized she didn’t have a plan of action. Even if she had, she would have ignored it, though. Her head went into a spin as she heard his cheery
call.
‘Hiya. I thought I’d make a start on dinner. Found everything in the fridge.’
May took off her coat and hung it on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, on top of Michael’s. Then she doubled back, removed her coat from touching his and hung it on a peg on the
wall instead.
May walked down the hallway towards the kitchen. Every step taking her closer to a confrontation she didn’t want to have – but knew she must.
Oh, please, please make him have a
plausible explanation. I’ll never put another foot wrong in my life, God, but please do this one little thing for me.
Michael looked so carefree and happy as she stepped into the kitchen. He was wearing her apron and taking the top off the potato dauphinoise carton. She didn’t know where to start, what
words to use.
‘What’s up, darling?’ He noticed the expression on her face and hurried around the table to embrace her.
When her hand shot out to stop him and her voice delivered a fierce ‘Don’t!’ he looked at her as hurt as if she had slapped him across the face.
‘May?’
‘How old did you say Susan was?’ She hadn’t known what she was going to say until she said it. Her words were as much a surprise to her as they were to him.
‘Thirty-five,’ he said, without a quiver in his voice or a nervous blink of the eyes. ‘What makes you ask that?’
‘She isn’t in her nineties, then?’
‘What?’ He angled his head, like dogs do when they are trying to understand what is going on.
‘I said,
Auntie
Susan isn’t in her nineties, then?’ Her voice was trembling.
Michael’s eyebrows arranged themselves into an arc of confusion but a flickering tic under his eye had appeared. He was holding his composure, but only from the nose down. He had been well
and truly rumbled and he knew it.
‘I know,’ said May, sounding a lot stronger than she felt. ‘I know that Susan Hammerton is in her nineties and that you are her great-nephew. I know that you go and visit her
with a blonde – your real wife, I presume?’
God, this sounded like an episode of
Jeremy Kyle
. All that was missing was a three-toothed best friend brandishing the results of a DNA test.
‘You can’t know that because it isn’t true,’ Michael blurted out.
‘I do know it because I went to The Pines this morning. To see if there was anything I could do for your wife.’
He gasped. ‘Why did you do that? Don’t you trust me?’
‘What?’ May’s jaw dropped so low that it was in danger of hitting the floor.
‘I’m not married,’ he chipped in quickly. ‘I’ve never been married.’
May stood there in the sort of shock that follows a bucket of iced water being tipped over the head. He had admitted one lie. How many more would come tumbling out behind it?
‘Who was the red-haired woman in the photo you showed me, the one you told me was Susan?’
‘Just an ex. An old ex. I’m sorry.’ Michael sank to the chair and his head dropped into his hands. He began to sob and May’s upper body instinctively lurched forward to
hold him – a habit established over the last nine months of emotionally propping him up – but her more sensible legs remained rooted to the spot. ‘Oh God, what a mess. I’m
so sorry, May. Everything got out of hand.’
Got out of hand? What the heck did that mean?
Michael rubbed his eyes but May couldn’t see any moisture on his cheeks or fingers. Were his tears false as well?
‘Okay, okay, here’s the whole truth. Oh, May . . . I . . . love you so much.’
Instead of making her insides as soft and squidgy as a newly baked cookie, those words now made May’s heart freeze. They were like getting a cheap, wilted garage bouquet by way of an
apology.
‘Promise me you’ll listen and not leave.’
May didn’t speak. She couldn’t have moved even if she tried. Plus, where would she go? This was her house. Eventually she nodded slowly. ‘I’ll listen.’
‘Okay . . . okay,’ began Michael with a pronounced shake in his voice. He was pressing his hands down as if he was trying to tell someone to shush, but the only person speaking was
him. ‘When we first got together, I was scared of getting too involved too quickly, do you remember?’
May nodded again slowly but she couldn’t clearly recall it because her thoughts were wrapped up in thick fog that sense couldn’t penetrate.
‘I didn’t mean to say that I was married,’ he blurted. ‘But once the words were out, I couldn’t take them back. I thought if I said something like that to you, you
wouldn’t get involved with me. I didn’t intend to fall in love with you and for this to be such a big mess.’
Once again his head dropped like a lump of lead into his hands and then he sniffled, wiped his nose on the back of his hand, raised his head and smiled. ‘I’m so glad it’s out
in the open now. Come and give me a hug.’
May’s emotions were in a tailspin. She looked at Michael with his arms opening like the petals of a big tropical flower, and a sensible voice inside her reacted to the scene and asked,
Is that it, May? Is that all you’re going to get? Is that all you deserve?
When she didn’t leap instantly into his arms, his expression changed from relief to confusion.
‘May, what’s wrong?’
If May’s heart hadn’t been in lockdown, she would have laughed at this point. Was he serious?
‘Are you for real?’ she asked.
‘May. I’ve told you the truth now. And it’s better for you because I know you didn’t like the idea of me being a married man . . .’
Now she did laugh. One humourless, confounded hoot of laughter.
‘And how long was Susan going to stay alive? Were you going to have her die and then go to the funeral?’
‘May.’ He actually had the nerve to appear shocked that she could suggest such a thing. May looked at him but didn’t recognize him. It was as if someone had taken her lovely
Michael, stripped out his insides, put something dark and nasty back instead and then re-presented him to her. How could he even hope to shovel such a big putrid heap under the carpet as if it were
a crumb that he couldn’t be bothered to pick up? This was like one of those Internet romances where people fell in love but it was all a hoax and the person they thought they’d met
didn’t really exist. Susan Hammerton had become a real person to her. May had felt truly guilty about her, sad for her, angry for her; she had even wanted to give some money to the home to
make her last days as comfortable as possible. She had no doubt now that Michael would have invented a funeral and had her cry buckets over a woman who had never inhaled one single breath. He would
have walked into her house with a black suit on and a sad basset hound face and let May cook for him, massage him, comfort him and then take him to bed. Whatever he said in protest, she knew
that’s what would have happened.
‘I . . . I didn’t think that far ahead. I was getting more and more tangled as the days went on . . .’
‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave,’ said May to herself. And
boy
was Michael one trussed-up spider.
A rush of anger swept through her like a forest fire raging over dry twigs. ‘And
who
was the woman you took to see your wi— aunt?’
He waved his hand in the air. ‘Ah, that was someone I had a couple of dates with. Ages ago.’
‘At the same time as me?’
‘No.’ His eyes flickered left. He was lying.
‘Why did you tell her the truth and not me?’
‘I didn’t like Kim as much as I liked you.’
That made sense. Not. Her name was Kim, then. That detail hurt.
‘Is it really over with her?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Michael, were you really in Derby for most of the weekend, or were you with her?’
There was a definite pause before he answered: ‘Don’t be silly.’ It was a very telling pause. It wasn’t over with Kim at all.
May’s fingers raked through her long brown hair. Was she in a bad dream? Was she Alice in some kind of horrible Wonderland? If she stepped backwards, would she fall down a pissing rabbit
hole into a pack of living, breathing playing cards who wanted to chop her head off? Her brain was dizzy with so many questions; she truly believed that even if she did have her head chopped off,
that wouldn’t stop them coming.
‘So . . . let me recap,’ said May, spinning her finger around in the air, because she needed to summarize the situation for herself more than for Michael. ‘When we got
together, you were scared of commitment, so you said you were married to a dying woman.’
He nodded vigorously, before saying, ‘Correct.’
‘At the same time you were also seeing another woman but you didn’t like her as much as me so you were able to take her to visit your ill aunt in The Pines.’
Now he was smiling –
actually smiling
–as if this analysis was a big step towards all this silliness being over and done with. ‘That’s it.’
‘Then when you realized that it was me that you wanted to be with, you dropped the other woman.’
Again that pause. ‘Yes.’
‘The woman you were with this weekend.’
‘Yes. I mean, no.’
But they both knew that he was leading a double life. Kim wasn’t part of his past, he was two-timing them both with each other.
‘If I hadn’t gone to The Pines this morning, I wouldn’t have known any of this.’
‘You shouldn’t have,’ said Michael, with an admonishing finger-wagging tone in his voice.
‘So it’s my fault?’ May pressed her hand against her chest.
‘No . . . I didn’t say that. But . . .’ He sighed. ‘It’s obviously my fault. I’ve been an idiot. Although, if you think about it I haven’t actually done
that much wrong . . .’
May countered through gritted teeth: ‘Except two-time me. Or is it three-time me?’
‘Well, my wife doesn’t actually exist so I wasn’t being unfaithful to her. And Kim and I aren’t married either. And you and I aren’t married . . .’ His
argument petered out, so weak that it died on his lips.
May considered all the energy she had wasted thinking about his predicament, the heaviness of guilt. She was saturated with it, weighed down with it, exhausted by it. Maybe she deserved it all
– for taking another woman’s husband. Even if, technically, she hadn’t, she had believed he had a wife, and so, although he had nothing more than an invented wife, she had slept
with a married man.
But she loved him. She couldn’t just cut off nine months of real affection like that. And he was telling her that he wasn’t married to anyone after all. And maybe she was imagining
those pauses and Kim was in the past, as he said. If she could draw a line under what had happened and forget it they could carry on as normal. Better than normal . . . because it would be on an
honest footing.
May Elizabeth Earnshaw – where is your pride? Where are you from?
The voice which stabbed the idealistic bubble in her brain and burst it sounded like a mixture of her mum, her
dad, her granddad and two nannas. All good people, proud people, decent people.
May looked at Michael and his eager face. She looked at his kissable lips and those big soulful eyes. But with every pleasant thought came a large black stamp that flattened it. He came forward,
enclosed his big arms around her and smothered her face with kisses, but they felt cold against her cheek because the man who was holding her was no longer that dutiful, needy Michael. This Michael
was a bare-faced, two-timing bastard of a liar. She knew what she had to do; she had no option. He would cheat on her again because no man could respect a woman who put up with crap like that.
May extricated herself slowly, because there was still a big part of her that wanted to stay against this man who had shared her bed so many times, who told her he loved her and wanted to spend
the rest of his life with her. But she had been out with a liar before, she had experienced the dread of having her trust betrayed over and over again, and it had made her ill. Michael had mended
the heart that had been battered by that liar, only to smash it up even more. She had a pain in her chest as if something had split inside her, something which hadn’t quite healed from the
last time the two sides of it were wrenched apart.
‘You have to go,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to see you again.’
Michael just laughed as if she had told a joke, as if she didn’t mean what she said.
‘Look, I made a mistake. A huge one, I grant you, but come on, love.’ He held his hands out in supplication. ‘I didn’t kill anyone.’
May wasn’t sure about that. She felt dead inside. Her surprisingly composed exterior belied an interior chaotic mess.
‘Just go, Michael,’ she said wearily, raising her cold brown eyes to his hope-filled ones.
Still he didn’t believe she was serious and advanced towards her.
‘JUST FUCKING GO.’
That stopped him. He stepped backwards as if her words had physically winded him. He had never heard May use the F-word. She couldn’t remember ever using it herself. She was as shocked as
he was that she could sound so incensed.
He recalibrated his thoughts. She could almost see the machinations going on in his head:
I’ll leave her to cool down and think things through, then I’ll come at her with another
offensive.
Sure enough, when he opened his mouth to speak, he proved her right.
‘I know this has all been awful for you, May. And you’re going to need some time. Okay, okay. Here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll leave, go home and let you sleep on
things. I’ll come back tomorrow . . . Oh, hang on, I can’t. I’m on an over night in Der— Durham. Wednesday, I’ll definitely come back on Wednesday and we’ll talk
it all through. Just, please, hear me out, darling May. I love you. I never meant to hurt you – I trapped myself and didn’t know where to run to. I’m an idiot but it’s you I
love. We can recover this. I’m going to make sure we do.’
She remained impassive – at least on the outside; inside was a maelstrom of chaos.
Michael smiled nervously, picked up his keys and then hovered for a few seconds, deciding whether or not to brave kissing her on the cheek. Looking at her furious face, he thought not.