CAUGHT ON THE HOP
By
Suzanne Readsmith
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
PUBLISHED BY:
Suzanne Readsmith on Smashwords
Copyright © 2012 Suzanne Readsmith
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This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
Determinedly she took the stairs two at a time. No point in sneaking up quietly – she knew they were in her bedroom and there was no escape for her prey in this confrontation. She could hear them scrambling about. If she were to derive any compensation for the pain she was feeling, it would be when she flung open the door to catch them in a ridiculous naked pose.
There was no compensation. In confirming for herself what someone else had told her about, she found the true vision more painful than her imagination. She wished now, as the woman scrambled past her, clothes bundled under her arms that she had waited downstairs. It would have been a much more civilised approach, but in a frenzy of anger, disbelief and hurt she had been forced into the bedroom. The expression on his face sickened her. She flew across the bedroom, heading straight for him and when she reached him she grabbed hold of what was left of his hair and jerked his head violently from side to side. Leaving hold of his head she clawed at his face, kicked him and punched him. But he didn’t retaliate at all. She pulled away. Looking directly at him, she saw humiliation in his eyes and knew that he was sorry she had witnessed what he had always denied could ever happen. His face was bleeding. There seemed no point in conversation and she left the room, glancing towards the bathroom on her way downstairs.
Her immediate reaction was to leave the house straightaway to flee to her mother’s. In downright anger she thought of the young, beautiful, slim, large breasted woman upstairs in her bathroom. It was ridiculous to remember how she had cleaned the bath with lemon cleanser and poured new, scented bleach down the lavatory only that morning. After putting out fresh towels she had returned to the bathroom and made up their king-size bed and had actually felt proud of her new William Morris design duvet cover with the matching pillow-cases and valance that adorned it. They had made love last night and he had taken another woman to lie on the very same sheets, his wife’s scent mixed in with his own and then hers. How many times had he done this before, then opened the windows and pulled back the duvet to air the bed afterwards? Any why had she never detected it?
In a fresh burst of anger she returned to the bottom of the stairs; she herself was certainly not going anywhere but she knew someone who was. Like a fishwife she shouted, “Get down these stairs! Get out of my house! Get out of my house do you hear? Right now! Get out of my house you bloody whore!” She carried on repeating this chant until the woman suddenly and ungraciously appeared on the landing, her face holding an expression of absolute terror. She stopped shouting and waited for the woman to come down. The woman did not move or speak David appeared, stepping in front of the woman to guide her protectively down and past his wife. The three looked ridiculous standing on the staircase glaring at each other.
David spoke quietly. “Come on Beth, there’s no need for this.”
She wanted to hit the woman. But suddenly she decided she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of degrading herself any more. She moved back into the lounge with its stupid bay window. The room seemed small, dirty and dingy. Only yesterday her thoughts had centred on redecorating this room and whether or not to buy some new summer curtains. Now all she wanted to do was to smash the window. She looked at the copper figurines standing by the Adam-style fireplace. She picked up one, threw it straight towards the large central window pane and, without even waiting to see the impact, her eyes turned back to David, who had only managed to don a pair of jeans which were unzipped. The woman, dressed now or at least more covered, was hiding behind him in the corner of the room. The woman made towards the kitchen door but wasn’t quick enough. Beth ran before her, blocking her escape route. “How long? Just tell me how long? How many times have you been in my house?” When the woman spoke, the sound of her voice surprised and hurt Beth as much as the large breasts had done. It was well spoken, refined and sexy even. Beth immediately regretted her shrill, coarse shouting earlier.
“I would like to leave please. This is nothing to do with me. It’s between you and David.”
Beth started to tremble, her bottom lip was quivering and she knew she looked pathetic. A look of pity entered the woman’s eyes and Beth moved aside to let her pass. The back door slammed quickly shut. David looked at the jagged pieces of glass left in the window-frame. “You’re bloody insane. Mad. There was no need for that. To break the bloody window, no need at all.”
He ducked as the second copper figurine whizzed past his head and shot through the left-hand windowpane. He had never been a man of violence but as he walked towards her now she felt a little frightened. He slapped her hard across the face. She didn’t feel it. She slapped him back, harder she hoped, enjoying the sickening sound. Then she looked past David to see Norma, her next-door neighbour, surveying the damage to the window, obviously wondering what, if anything, she should do. It had been Norma who, only this morning, had alerted her to this nightmare. She returned her gaze to David.
“Why?”
David said nothing, just turned around and made his way upstairs to dress and pack. He knew they were finished. Suddenly there was a meek tap at the back door. It was the woman. “My car is in your garage. Your car … it’s blocking me in.”
Beth threw her hands into the air dramatically, mockingly. “Goodness, how thoughtless of me. I’d better move it then hadn’t I?” She picked up her car keys and followed the woman back outside. The woman entered the garage through the side door and, after seeing her settled into her car seat, Beth locked the side door and then ran around to lock the front garage doors. She went back inside and looked into the pot on the mantelpiece. True to habit, his keys were there. She took them and hid them, along with her own. Then she picked up the telephone and called her mother.
“Mum. Hi. Yes. Okay really. You okay? Yes. Well I’d like you to come over. Now if you could. Yes, for tea if you’d like. Salad, yes. You can meet David’s girlfriend. She’s here in the garage.” She replaced the receiver. While she had been talking she had focused on David’s precious iPad and iPhone. She could hear the sound of slamming drawers. David was obviously packing. She tore his PC from the electrical socket, leaving a mass of cable connectors behind. After carrying it out into the back garden Beth placed it into the centre of the lawn and returned to fetch his gadgets. She returned once again and spotted his jacket thrown casually over the chair. She felt inside the interior pocket. Yes, his wallet was there. She carried that out into the garden as well.
Before she put a match to the firelighters and paper around her bonfire. She thought of how much it had cost her to pay for this very PC. Nine monthly instalments by direct debit from her bank account. She cast her eyes around the garden for a stick with which to prod the fire, then looked towards the garage. The woman was looking at her through the small window. She was angry but too proud to shout or call out to Beth. Beth waved and smiled at her and wondered if the woman knew how tight David was with his money.
Norma’s head appeared over the fence just as David appeared at the back door carrying two suitcases in his hands, and her mother was heading down the driveway into the back garden. Her mother looked first at David, then at the woman’s face, framed nicely by the window frame, then at her daughter, and finally at the two suitcases placed on the step by David’s feet. Beth poked at the fire, guiding a half-melted disc, which had fallen away from the flames back into the heart of the fire. “Ah Mum.” She threw down her stick and walked towards her mother. “I’m glad you were able to come at such short notice.” It was a stupid statement because Beth’s mother only lived two streets away. “I’m sure David is also glad – he can introduce you to his new girlfriend.”
They all looked at the woman trapped in the garage, her face now wearing a menacing expression. Beth peered at her as one might at a monkey in a cage. The woman backed away. “Doesn’t look as pretty as I first thought David, although she’s young, I’ll give you that. There again young girls are much more impressionable. She may not mind your receding hairline now, in the flush and excitement of your affair, you know, doing it in another woman’s bed and all that, but she might later. Don’t you agree Mother?”
David pulled hard on each of the garage door handles, knowing they’d be locked, just as he knew that all the keys would be hidden. He looked at the mound of plastic smouldering in the centre of the lawn he had tended to Bowling Green standard. He looked at his mother-in-law who appeared helpless and confused. “Tell her to tell me where the bloody keys are! Now! Do you hear, now! Your daughter is off her rocker! Mental! Stark staring mad!” He might have gained a little leeway from Edna had he not called her daughter ‘mental’, and therefore insulted the whole family. As it was, she stepped over the suitcases into the kitchen.
“ Is she really David?” She said. “I’d better put the kettle on then while I wait for the green van.” She busied herself making tea while her daughter paced the kitchen, and wondered whether to call for Beth’s brother Jack.
“In my bed, Mother! In my bed! Can you believe he would do that? He brought her into my house, into my ….”
Suddenly Beth jumped up. She could hear David talking to Norma and she knew what he would be asking for. She darted out just in time to hear the last of their conversation. It was just as she had guessed; David’s tools were locked in the garage and he was now asking Norma to lend him a hammer. “Don’t you dare, Norma, don’t lend him a thing.” Norma hid behind her back the hammer she was holding.
“I wasn’t going to …” Norma retreated back inside.
David was cursing himself now in complete despair. Then he decided to go for the softly, softly approach. “Look, Beth, let’s have a cup of tea and try to sort this out. If you could just calm down a little.” Beth pretended to go along with him. They sat facing each other at the kitchen table while Edna poured the tea. “Just tell me where the keys are”, said David. “Let her go and then we can talk. There’s no need for all this.”
“So you keep saying, David.”
At this moment their only child Mark sauntered into the kitchen. At the age of sixteen he was six foot tall. His face held an expression of mild interest. “Hi, Mum, Dad. Gran. What gives with the windows and the neighbours?” Beth did not give David a chance to answer his son.
“Go and look in the garage. Your Dad has brought a young lady home for tea. From the office I think, although I could be wrong. But I didn’t like her arriving uninvited, so I locked her in the garage.”
Mark went outside to see. His father placed his head into his hands. He lifted his head slowly and looked at Beth, his eyes full of tears and anger. “God I hate you Beth.” It hurt her to hear him say that. She knew now that she had really lost him. She didn’t care, she’d already lost him when he had first been unfaithful. Even before that, when he’d first contemplated it. This was the climax, but she was still thinking of the beginning, asking herself when it had all started going wrong and why. All this was irrelevant, it didn’t matter, and she wasn’t feeling anything, just acting out a part. Mark returned.
“Wow! Mega trouble, Dad.”
Beth didn’t like his flippant attitude and neither did his grandmother who said to him. “Go to one of your friend’s houses Mark. “Get yourself out of the way.” David piped up, his voice weak and shaky.
“Go and get me a hammer, Mark.”
“Where from?”
“Anywhere – just get one.”
Beth spoke now calmly. “Don’t Mark.” Mark was upset now, torn between his two parents. He appealed to his mother.
“Let her out, Mum, think of the neighbours.”
Beth got up wearily, went into the front room, put her hands down the side of the settee and pulled out two bunches of keys. She gave her own bunch to her mother and threw David’s bunch at him. David jumped up. Beth spoke sharply to him. “I’d rather my mother let her out, David. If you don’t mind, I’d like a word.” He sat back down and Edna went to move her daughter’s car and to free the woman. Beth’s anger was spent now – hurt and bewilderment were setting in. “I wouldn’t have locked her in the garage, David, but it was the way she knocked on the door and asked me to move my car. It was the way I had cleaned the bathroom and made up what I had always regarded as our bed. It was the way a neighbour, one I don’t particularly like or bother with, called me at work and told me what was going on. It was the way her car was hidden in the garage while yours was casually parked in the road as though you’d popped home for something you’d forgotten. You have humiliated me. I feel like a fool and I hate your guts for making me feel this way.” David jumped up.
“All right, you’ve had your say. All right.” His face crumpled and his voice trailed away to nothing and he repeated himself again. “All right.” As he walked out, he didn’t look at his son or his mother-in-law, and he didn’t look at his wife. Mark said.
“Will he come back do you think, Mum?”
Beth cried then. Now that he’d gone she could allow herself to cry properly. Already the flashbacks that would probably occur time and time again were beginning as she remembered the way he had pranced around the bedroom hiding his nakedness from her, his wife of twenty years. And now he was gone ….”
End.
Did you enjoy reading this story? You can read more …
‘Letting Him Stay’
The angst of a woman who learns about the precarious state of her marriage.
‘The Girl with No Name’
Is it all fair in love and war?
‘Wistful Thinking’
A marriage is at threat and a couple tread very carefully.
Writers like to know what their reader is thinking! By now you will know that I am very interested and intrigued about the twists and turns of life. Contact me at Twitter or directly review my work at the site you have chosen to download from. Alternatively via my email address at: suzanne.readsmith@virginmedia.com