Human Remains

too bright, poor thing. Still, I sat with her for a while and chatted to her. I’m intrigued by her house, which is beautiful, along with everything in it – there must be about six bedrooms upstairs; no idea why she needs that many since she’s been on her own for a good couple of years. I don’t think I disturbed her too much, although she was looking very tired. I told her I’d go back and see how she was doing at the weekend, and left her to it.
    I got home and cleaned the kitchen and bathroom, put on a load of laundry and ironed my work shirts whilst watching the news.
    I’ll have to plan my weekend carefully, with so much to fit in. Vaughn’s dinner party, diverting as it sounds, is the least of my priorities at the moment.
     

Briarstone Chronicle
     
    September
Briarstone Man Found Dead in Flat
     
    The badly decomposed body of a man in his 50s was found by council workers at a block of flats in Briarstone yesterday.
    The housing officers called at the flat in North Lane after several official letters and phone calls had gone unanswered, it was revealed. ‘The body was discovered sitting upright in the living area and the television was still on,’ a council spokesperson said.
    The man is believed to be Robin Downley, unemployed. Neighbours had not seen Mr Downley for some time. One woman who did not wish to be named told us: ‘I kept calling the council about the smell. I must have rung up 30 times and they never came round.’
     

Robin
     
    My wife left me, and that was the beginning of the end of my life.
    I remember I was at home with the kids on a Sunday afternoon, washing up, when the doorbell rang. It was Elaine, my wife’s best friend. She had tears in her eyes. I invited her in and faffed about making a cup of tea while she sat in the living room and sobbed unselfconsciously, making a hideous racket. Fortunately the kids were upstairs also making a hideous racket so they were none the wiser.
    ‘Where’s Beverley?’ Elaine said to me when at last she could speak. I assumed she just wanted her best friend’s shoulder to cry on, not mine.
    ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘She went out.’ We weren’t the sort of couple who spent every minute together. We had our own lives, our own hobbies, our own friends. It made the time we did spend together more exciting, more precious. Or so I thought.
    The doorbell went again just then, and I remember feeling terrible, as if the world had suddenly shifted on its axis and I hadn’t realised, as if something was wrong in the most fundamental way possible and I was the last one to know. On the doorstep was Beverley, with Mike, Elaine’s husband.
    They were holding hands.
    I stood aside to let them in and they went through to the living room where Elaine was sitting, presumably already somehow aware of the bombshell they were about to drop into all of our lives. They were surprisingly calm, rational and emotionless as they delivered the news. They had been carrying on the affair for the past five months, and they were no longer prepared to continue to lie to everyone. Beverley told me she didn’t love me any more, she loved Mike, and she wanted us to get a divorce so that they could get married.
    At the time I took it all so well. I think if it had just been Bev and me having the discussion I might have ranted, thrown something, certainly raised my voice a little. But here we were, the four of us, having this civil discussion downstairs while upstairs our children played some game that involved a lot of banging and crashing and pounding of feet on the landing between the bedrooms.
    They got their way, of course. There was nothing I could do to stop it, and, besides, after the initial hysteria Elaine seemed to get used to the idea and then she was fine with it. How could I kick up a fuss when she was being so reasonable?
    In the days and weeks that followed, though, I found myself at the start of a downward spiral. I moved out into a rented flat, leaving Bev and the kids in the house while it was sold. But it was the wrong time to try and sell a four-bedroomed house, and it stayed on the market for month after month, while I paid the mortgage and the rent on the flat and money to Bev for child support.
    Alone in my miserable little one-bedroomed flat, trying to make sense of what I’d done wrong, why it was me being punished when I wasn’t the one who’d had the affair, who’d demanded a divorce, I started drinking every night and then