Truth

It's one in the morning. All I've done today is go to work, hate myself for working where I do, come home and chat to (or argue with) friends. It's been pretty uneventful.
With that in mind (and mostly because I want to go to sleep) it's time for me to post a fiction here again.

The piece I'm posting today is called Truth. It is about a breakdown in a relationship after the husband admits he is having an affair. Its part of a quartet of stories I wrote while living in Russia and I'll be concentrating on posting these over the next few days.



Truth

The wine bottle lies smashed on the wooden floor of their living room; there’s claret everywhere. He lies unconscious next to the full-length mirror at the far end of the room, his hair dyed red from a mixture of wine and his blood. The truth hurts.

The wine is the fuel for the fire. They’ve already argued tonight; he doesn’t like that her job requires such long hours. He suspects that she’s having an affair. She suspects nothing.

It’s seven in the evening when they sit down to a meal she slaved over all afternoon. He does nothing to help; but then, he does nothing at all. Since he was made redundant, he sits in front of the television, dead-eyed, his face expressionless. Sometimes he goes for hours, sometimes days, without saying anything to her, and he never turns off the television either. He goes out at night about twice a week, and on these nights, he leaves his mobile at home. It’s almost as if he doesn’t want her to be able to contact him.
They haven’t had sex for three months now, but occasionally, using the TV as inspiration, he masturbates when he thinks she’s not looking, his hands down his trousers or in his pockets, fingers fumbling more and more frantically until he comes and they rest.

The meal is a lasagne, home-made chips and a salad, during which they say barely a word to each other. Afterward, still not really having made up from the previous argument, they retire to the living room. He opens a bottle of wine and pours the first glass. The stage is set.

By nine-thirty, he’s drunk. She sips a glass of wine, her second, and watches his poor attempt to pour his fifth. Some of the alcohol spills from the bottle to the wood of the floor. She sighs as he collapses into his chair and drains a third of the glass. No words are spoken for a while, which gives her time to think. If she wanted to, she could leave him. There’s nothing to stop her – he’s not given to acts of violence or anything. The truth is she’s just tired of him. She’s fed up of his drinking, their lack of any kind of communication or sex. She’s had enough, but she loves him too much to leave him. Once he gets another job, she’s sure everything will return to the way it was before, when they were young and reckless. She misses those days.

He tells her about the affair after breaking into the third bottle for his sixth glass of wine. He laughs in her face and giggles to himself as he sips from the glass, taking unstable steps backward to register her reaction. A certain injustice strikes her then. Wasn’t it she who was going to leave him? Wasn’t it she who realised that she loved him too much to break his heart like that? And now he tells her this. She’s in her twenties, apparently, and they’ve been seeing each other for four months. He tells his wife that the reason he stopped having sex with her was for fear of calling out the wrong name in bed – this young girl is just so much better than her.

As he giggles again and turns away from her, she slowly and silently picks up the three-quarters-full wine bottle from the coffee table. He’s admiring himself in the full-length mirror, smirking and sipping his wine. She holds the bottle by the neck, says his name and swings in the direction of his head. By the time he registers what she is doing, the glass of the bottle connects with his head and he goes down hard on his knees. The bottle smashes and she drops the part of it that she is holding. His blood leaks from the wound she made with the bottle, as if his head were a dripping tap. Her eyes flash dangerously in the mirror in front of her as she smoothes out her dress; tidies her hair slightly. She knows she should phone for an ambulance, but instead she picks up her own glass of wine and takes a sip, smiling.

The truth hurts.