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Monday Puzzler
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Monday Puzzler: 03/09/2020
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No idea. I don't tend to read cheater stories though so I wouldn't recognise it anyway.
Ooooh. MAKE HIM PAY! Estelle will be left with nothing but a "wanker".
Mod
Saturday, February 16
But it’s not. As it turns out, it’s not fine at all.
It’s because of the stars. That’s how I find out. In the city you don’t often see them shining so brightly, but tonight you can. They are sparkling entrancingly. It’s magical.
It’s around 10 p.m. and I’m standing in our back garden, looking up at them, still gripping the bucket from emptying our recycling into the wheelie bin. Remembering the app that Mr. X installed on his phone, I head back into the house to ask him if I can have a go with it. He was telling me how it can identify constellations when it’s pointed at the sky, and tonight is the perfect night for it.
‘Mr. X!’ I call out from the hallway.
‘In the bath,’ comes his voice from upstairs. ‘What is it?’
‘Oh, nothing …’ I’d forgotten he’d gone up for a soak. Izzy is over at Maeve’s on a sleepover, so it’s just the two of us in tonight. Spencer moved out four years ago, when he was eighteen. He dropped out of university in first year – it just wasn’t for him, he insisted, and there was no arguing with him – and we were thrown into panic about his future, but he got a job pretty quickly for a company that installs sound systems for gigs. He lives in Newcastle now, in a shared flat with two friends and a varied selection of fungi sprouting from the bathroom carpet. Whenever I ask him what his job entails he just laughs and says, ‘Lifting things, Mum,’ and ruffles my hair as if I’m a little kid.
I spot Mr. Xs phone sitting on the hall table, take it out to the garden and tap in his passcode. That’s weird; it’s been his date of birth for as long as I can remember, but now it doesn’t seem to work. He must have changed it. I try tapping in the full year – still no luck. Shrugging off a twinge of unease (why has he changed it?) I try reversing the six digits of his date of birth. Bingo, that was easy! I’m now in the inner sanctum of my husband’s telephonic device.
Having found the app, I hold up the phone, marvelling at the way it names Betelgeuse, Venatici, Perseus; what beautiful decorative names they have. Ooh, there’s Mars! This is brilliant. I must get this app. It’s a lot more fun than my fitness one that reminds me – scathingly – that I have only done 397 steps out of the recommended daily 10,000.
Ping! That’s a text from ‘Estelle’, which I know means something celestial (I find out later that it’s Latin for star) so I assume it’s to do with the app. I open it, expecting it to say something like, Look out for incredible shooting stars tonight!
Darling baby, it reads, missing your sweet kisses so much xxx.
I frown at it. How very weird. Perhaps the app is malfunctioning? Or has someone messaged my husband by mistake?
A moment later, there’s another:
Aching for you sweetheart xxx
Something clenches inside me as I see that it’s one of a string of messages. I scroll up and read the conversation:
Mr X: Soon I hope xxx
Estelle: When can I see you darling? xxx
Mr. X: It really was baby xxx
Estelle: Last time was so special xxx
The fact that I am reading it from the bottom up makes me wonder again – momentarily – if my brain has tipped upside down and I am misinterpreting the situation. Could this be another menopausal symptom? I’m aware that I can be a little oversensitive, even verging on paranoid. I read on: I love you baby (from Mr. X). Is this some kind of joke? Or – I realise I’m clutching at straws here – could someone have hacked into his phone?
Sweetie, reads another of her messages, that was the best ever!!! What was the best? It can only mean sex, can’t it? Which means he’s done it with someone who isn’t me. My heart is pounding hard and I feel dizzy and quite sick. I try, desperately, to think of other things that might be described in that way but can’t come up with anything except, perhaps, ‘cake’. And I don’t think she was referring to cake.
‘Evening, Heronine!’ The voice makes me jump. I swing around to see Tim, our next-door neighbour, beaming at me.
‘Hi, Tim.’ Please go away and let me quietly freak out.
‘Everything okay?’ Tim – a short, tubby quantity surveyor who’s as bald as an egg in his late thirties – gives me a concerned look.
‘Yes, I’m fine, thanks,’ I say, forcing a smile.
He looks up at the sky. ‘Aren’t the stars amazing tonight?’
‘They are, yes.’
‘Erm, look, Heroine, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings …’ My heartbeat accelerates. Does Tim know about Estelle? Does everyone know? ‘… but we have rats in the garden,’ he goes on. ‘Seen them a few times so a council guy’s coming round tomorrow to check things out. Is it okay if he has a poke around your garden too?’
I blink at him. ‘Rats?’
‘Well, yes,’ he says, looking regretful now, as if he feels somehow responsible for their arrival. ‘And if they’re in our garden, they’re probably in yours. I don’t think they respect boundaries …’ I watch our neighbour’s fleshy mouth moving as he carries on talking, but nothing seems to make sense anymore. I think he’s talking about poison, something about rats tending to follow a specific route.
All I can think is: Mr. X says he loves her. He’s sleeping with her. My husband has an entire parallel life with this woman that I’ve known nothing about.
‘Oh, Heroine,’ Tim exclaims, looking aghast now. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. Was it something I—’
‘No, no, you haven’t upset me, Tim. I’m fine …’ I realise I am crying.
‘It’s just rats,’ he adds, brow furrowed in concern as he hurries closer and peers at me over the fence. ‘Not ideal, I know, but they’re everywhere these days. The guy’ll put poison down in little bags, buried in the ground …’
I nod, wordlessly, as tears continue to roll down my cheeks.
‘Honestly, it’s nothing to worry about,’ he goes on, looking quite distraught at the state of me. As parents, he and his wife might be spectacularly ineffective – ‘We don’t believe in saying no,’ Chrissie told me recently – but Tim is a decent, well-meaning man. He’s not a cheating bastard of a husband.
‘Worse things happen,’ he adds as I dab at my face with my sweater sleeve.
‘It’s not the rats, Tim—’
‘Oh …?’
‘It’s something else.’ I glance up at our frosted bathroom window with light coming through it, where Mr. X – ‘Sweetie’ – is currently marinating in bubbles, oblivious to my distress.
‘Is it, um, anything I can help with?’
‘No, I’m sorry, and it’s fine – about the rat man,’ I blurt out, marching towards the house, thinking, He can concrete over our entire garden for all I care.
Inside now, I run upstairs and rap sharply on the bathroom door.
‘Still in the bath,’ Mr. X calls out in a jovial tone.
‘Could you open the door?’
‘Mmm?’ The water sloshes. ‘Won’t be long …’
‘Mr. X,’ I bark.
‘Can’t you use the downstairs bathroom?’
‘No, I can’t.’ Fury is bubbling up in me now. I’m gripping his phone so hard it’s a wonder I don’t crush the screen. I bang harder on the door, at which Mr. X curses under his breath – but still audibly – then there’s more sloshing and ostentatious sighing as he hauls himself out of the water. He opens the bathroom door wearing his dressing gown unbelted and stands there dripping all over our wooden floor.
‘What’s up?’
I thrust his phone at him.
‘What is it?’ He gives me an uncomprehending look.
‘I read your texts. I read them just now. The ones from Estelle.’
My back teeth are jammed together and my heart seems to be battering inside my chest. Mr. X hesitates before taking his phone from me. And I know, as a sense of grim resignation settles over his face, that there’s no innocent explanation for these messages.
The astronomy app didn’t malfunction. No one hacked into his phone. My husband has been seeing this woman, and call ing her ‘Baby’, and our marriage will never be the same again.