Nobody believes us

Fiction, about two adults over 18. There is nothing wrong between the two of them and there never has been. The trouble is entirely with everybody else.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

Alison paid for the coffees, which I should have noticed at the time.

We do the garden centre on the last Friday of the month, the one off the bypass with the glass roof, because it is four minutes from where our mother is. It is a good arrangement. She buys something she has nowhere to put, and we sit there for an hour and a half.

She had a clematis in a plastic tray on the chair beside her. She waited until the plates had been cleared, which I have turned over since, because it means she had decided in advance where in the afternoon to put it.

She said, "How long has it been going on?"

I said, "How long has what been going on."

She gave me the look she gives people at bus stops. "Moira."

She had the second Sunday. Six years of it, near enough, because Alison rings on a Sunday and I have never once picked up on that one, and I ring her back at nine in the evening sounding, apparently, like a woman who has been for a swim. She had the hour and ten minutes in the car each way. She had the fact that I have never said where.

Then she put her hand flat on the table next to mine, not on it, and told me she was not judging me.

What came after that was about four minutes of the kindest speech I have ever been on the wrong end of. She had known for a while.

She had gone back and forth all spring about whether to say anything and had settled on saying it out loud once and then never again, so that I would know she knew and could stop managing her. She said Colin was a good man and that she was fond of him, and that being fond of somebody does not stop you seeing what living with him might be like from the inside.

Then she said she was glad I had somebody.

She meant it. That is what you have to understand about Alison. She had carried it around for months and got herself all the way to the far side, to the place where her sister is having an affair and she is going to be on her sister's side about it, and she had driven to a garden centre to tell me so before the coffee went cold.

And I sat there and could not find a single sentence.

I have gone back over it in the car and at four in the morning, and I still cannot find one. Every true thing I could have said would have made it worse.

I could have said it is not an affair. Women say that sentence constantly and it is nearly always the opening line of a longer story, so she would have heard the word and not the meaning.

I could have said nothing sexual has ever happened. Nobody believes us. I have watched people fail to believe it while trying their hardest.

I could have said: he canes me, on the second Sunday, in his dining room, and afterwards we have tea. Out loud. To my sister. Across a table with a plastic tomato in the middle of it.

And I could have said the true one, which is that a man I have never wanted to touch and never will is one of about four people I would be genuinely lost without. There is no arrangement of those words that does not sound like a lie or like something much worse being tidied up.

Colin knows where I go. He has known since the start, has never asked for the details, and once called it my Sunday club, which is wrong and is still closer than anything I have managed. That is a second thing I could not begin to explain in a garden centre.

So I said, "It's not what you think," which is precisely what a guilty woman says. Alison put her hand over mine at last and said, "All right."

And I let her have it.

I have never lied to my sister about anything that mattered, and I did not lie that day either, technically, which is the sort of distinction you make in a car park with the engine off. What I did was watch her walk out to the trolleys carrying a version of me that is worse than the real one, because the real one would have taken an hour and would not have landed at the end of it.

It cost me something, and I am still paying it off in small amounts. She rings on Wednesdays now as well.

The second Sunday of this month was the ninth.

Gordon lives in a semi on an estate built about 1974, with a garage he cannot get the car into and a doorbell that stopped working in the first lockdown. He is sixty-six. He was a quantity surveyor, and he has a brother in Perth, and he is unreasonable about his lawn. He opens the door with a tea towel over his shoulder every single time, and I have never established what he is drying.

The first thing he says is always something about the drive. The second thing, since March, is how is the knee.

My knee is not good. I went over on a kerb outside the Co-op in February like a woman of eighty, and I am on a list, and the list is eleven months long. He asks because he wants to know and because he needs to know, since a position we used for six years is now off the table and neither of us made anything of dropping it. He asked in March and every month since, and he will ask again in September.

Then tea, and the tin.

The tin has malted milks in it, which Gordon does not eat. I have never said a word about them and neither has he, and I think if either of us did, something in that house would move that we would not be able to put back. Six years. Seventy-odd Sundays. Neither of us has ever remarked on a biscuit.

We talk for twenty minutes or so. My mother, and the man opposite who has done something unforgivable to a hedge.

Then he puts his cup down and says, "Right then."

Two words, in exactly the same voice he has used for six years, and everything after them is different from everything before them. I have never had to ask what it means. He has never had to explain it.

The dining table gets pushed against the wall and put back afterwards. I bend over it. He is good at this and it hurts a great deal, which is the point, and it is not a thing either of us has ever felt the need to discuss afterwards.

Eighteen this month. He counts out loud and I do not. There is a gap of about four seconds between them and a longer stop somewhere in the middle where he puts his hand flat on my back and says nothing at all, which he has done since the second time and which I have never asked him about.

Eleven minutes, start to finish. Then he says "Good," once, and goes to fill the kettle while I sort myself out, which is a piece of tact he worked out on his own.

The forty minutes afterwards is the part nobody would believe either.

We sit in the front room with more tea and talk about nothing whatsoever. His brother's kitchen extension. Whether I should get the knee done privately, which he thinks I should and I cannot afford. Last month he told me the plot of a television programme for nine solid minutes and I let him, because it was better than most of what happened to me that week.

I am forty-eight. I have a husband, a sister, two friends I have had since my twenties and a mother who no longer reliably knows me. That forty minutes in Gordon's front room is in the top handful of hours of my month, and there is nowhere I can put that sentence.

Then I get my coat, and he stands in the doorway with one hand on the frame.

"Text me when you get home."

The same six words since the very first time. I always do it. He always sends back a single full stop, which I believe is his phone doing something he has never looked into.

Alison rang that evening at nine, as she does.

She asked after our mother and after the knee. Then, near the end, in a slightly different voice, she asked whether I was all right. She has asked me that every Sunday since the garden centre. She will go on asking, kindly, for as long as it takes, and I will go on saying yes, and she will go on hearing something else underneath it.

There is no word for what Gordon is. I have looked properly. Friend is wrong. Everything else is either filthy or belongs to somebody twenty years younger, and the best I have got after six years is the man I see on the second Sunday, which is as far as the language goes. That is the only part of it I would change.

Next month it is the thirteenth. I have moved a dentist appointment for it.