The expensive necklace: “Just felt like treating myself, you don’t mind do you?” How stupid did she think I was? So why not admit it? I thought she’d get over it. Come running back with her tail between her legs. Only she didn’t come back. And it wasn’t a tail between her legs — it was George.
“Hold tight, Dad!” Samantha’s shout of alarm jerked him back to the present. He grabbed the dashboard with both hands and stabbed at an imaginary brake as his daughter swerved around an unlit parked truck with inches to spare.
“Stupid place to park,” he shouted, as if anyone could hear, then turned to Samantha. “Do you want me to drive?”
“You’re kidding — you lose your own car and now you want to wreck mine?”
“I didn’t lose it,” he protested but, conceding she had a point, relaxed and let his mind drift back to thoughts of Sarah.
Deep down she had wanted to be caught, he’d realized. Tempting him with obvious little clues, little Freudian slips which grew bigger and bigger as her guilt egged her on to make mistakes. And then there was the farce with the underpants — George’s semen-stained underpants, left in her car following one of their most intimate moments, either by accident or, as Bliss later began to suspect, by design. She had tenderly washed, dried, and folded them, then placed them in his underwear drawer. By accident or by design?
He hadn’t noticed. He’d even worn them — the other man’s underwear. He’d even laughed later, much later, when she taunted him with it. “You didn’t even notice you were wearing his bloody underpants did you?”
Talk about walking a mile in the other man’s shoes — he’d driven to Bristol and back in the other man’s Y-fronts. The memory still brought a wry smile to his lips.
And when, finally and inevitably, he’d actually caught them together he still wouldn’t acknowledge the fact. It was a hurried lunchtime rendezvous. Sarah — his Sarah, the mother of his daughter — enjoying a romantic moment with George over a greasy pork pie, a shared packet of crisps, and a couple of lagers in a sleazy bar.
He was at work, following a suspect. But how serendipitous deception so often turns out to be. He would never know what hand of fate, ill or otherwise, persuaded his target to enter the same obscure back-street bar as his wife and George that day.
He’d discovered them inflagrante, but had remained oblivious for some moments, his attention entirely devoted to watching his target, a beak-nosed anorexic sixteen-year-old who was trying to fence a pocketful of hot watches that one of his mates had liberated at gunpoint from a jeweller’s safe. Sarah half rose from a dimly lit nook, flustered into motion like a pheasant put up by a beater. He might never have noticed if she had remained seated and kept quiet. But her conscience was pulling the strings.
“Hello David,” she said, catching his eye.
That greeting alone should have alerted him. Not, “Hello Love,” or, “Hello Dear.” “Hello David.” So formal. Businesslike almost. Twenty-odd years of using the same toilet and sleeping in the same bed and she said, “Hello David,” with as much familiarity as she may have used to address the butcher.
“This is George,” she continued, with a nervous hand gesture, as if she expected him to know who George was.
Bliss looked puzzled, but his right hand automatically stretched toward the stranger expecting a shake. The stranger shrank back, anticipating a punch, and Bliss sought an answer in his wife’s face.
“George is…” she started at last, but her face said: Surely you recognise him. You’re wearing his bloody underpants.
“Yes, Dear,” said Bliss, urging her to finish the statement. But he knew — of course he knew. Who was he kidding? But his pride wouldn’t let him make it easy.
The silence between them may have lasted eternally had not George summoned courage from somewhere. Pushing his chair back with a teeth-clenching screech, he stood. “David, I think it’s time you knew that Sarah and I have decided to move in together.”
“That’s nice for you, George,” Bliss said stupidly.
Sarah clearly thought it was stupid as well. “Is that all you can say?”
What did she want him to say? What’s expected of a man in a situation like this? Did she expect him to fly into a jealous rage? Was he supposed to invite George outside and bop him?
“You can do what you want,” was all he could think of saying as he stalked away, beginning to feel the itch of the George’s underpants. The young villain had pocketted the hot watches and scarpered, so Bliss headed for another bar.
It sank in about an hour later as he sat drowning his sorrows. I should have smashed his face to a pulp, he decided. That’s what she wanted. That’s what a real man would have done. Then I should have dragged her home and given her a right seeing to.
He swallowed his drink in a single gulp and, holding the empty glass in the air, spoke to the barman as if he were aware of the entire situation. “She was waiting for me to prove I still wanted her enough to fight for her.”
“They all do mate,” he replied knowingly, refilling the glass. “They all do.”
Sarah had gone when he eventually got home. Just one hurriedly packed suitcase, replaced with a scrawled note: “Sorry David. I’ve told Samantha.”
The ground opened beneath him and he started to plummet. She had walked away with twenty-five years of his life — the best twenty-five years. Twenty-five years of accumulated memories. More importantly, she had stolen his hopes and dreams for the next twenty-five. Their hopes and dreams, he had thought: the ivy covered cottage near the sea, long walks on the beach in the sunset, reliving simple childhood pleasures with the grandchildren. Their grandchildren. Not step-grandchildren. Not confused grandchildren enquiring, “Are you my real Grandpa?” Their grandchildren playing in their garden; their grandchildren opening Christmas presents in front of their fire. Gone. His dreams — their dreams —snatched away by George and his hairy nostrils.
Why? Why? Why? His head was going to explode. All the hurt, anger, loneliness, and love swirling around in his brain was too much. Too many thoughts. Too many synapses firing simultaneously and sending out contradictory signals.
Some form of telepathy between father and daughter alerted Samantha to his distress.
“Are you all right, Dad?”
Her question snapped him back to the present. “Yeah,” he replied, but his voice was shaky.
“You said on the phone you wanted some advice.”
He took a few seconds to push Sarah and George to one side, then said, “I want to know how a man could kill his own daughter.”
“I hope you’re not thinking of practicing on me.”
“Oh, Sam!”
Her face shone in the gleam of oncoming headlights. She was joking.
“Maybe,” he said with a serious tone, joking back
She laughed, “You don’t need a lawyer. You need a psychiatrist.”
You could be right, he thought to himself, but said, “You don’t understand. It’s serious. I let a murderer go free twenty years ago and he killed again.”
Her voice took on a critical, lawyer-like tone. “Did you have sufficient evidence to prosecute?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t look for any evidence. I broke the cardinal rule. I assumed it was an accident instead of assuming it was murder.”
“And now you believe it was murder?”
“I’d bet my pension on it.”
The trattoria, a favourite lunchtime haunt of Samantha and her legalist friends, was brash, noisy, and big. Big tables for big families, big