The appointment

Fiction, about two adults over 18 who had never met. She packed a bag, told her friend where she was going, and went to find out whether the thing in her head had ever been real.

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

A story by the editor.

I packed on the Thursday night, and the packing was the strangest part of the whole thing.

You cannot pack for it. There is no list. I stood in front of my own wardrobe at forty-six years old, a woman who has chaired a parish council meeting and buried a parent, holding a cardigan and thinking: what does one wear to be caned by a stranger in Manchester.

In the end I took the cardigan, because it was soft, and I had read somewhere that you go cold afterwards.

Hazel knew. Hazel has known for two years, since a bottle and a half of white wine in her kitchen when I told her the thing I had never told anybody, and she put her glass down and said, "Is that it? I thought you were going to say you were leaving Simon."

She had the address, his real name, his phone number, and instructions that if she had not heard from me by ten she was to ring and then ring again. She sent me a message at Stockport that said: You are allowed to get back on the train. Even from the doorstep. Especially from the doorstep.

I looked at that for a long time somewhere outside Manchester Piccadilly, with the backs of terraces going past, and thought about the fact that I was nineteen when this started and that it had taken me twenty-seven years to buy the ticket.

We had coffee first. He had insisted on that, before I had a chance to.

I want to record how comic it was, because nobody ever tells you that part. A chain coffee place near the station, a chipped table, a man in his fifties in a proper coat, and the two of us going through a list.

Marks, and where they could show. What was completely off the table. What he was allowed to say and what would land badly. The word I would use to stop everything, and the second word for slow down, and what he would do if I stopped using words at all.

At one point a woman at the next table was talking loudly about her sister's kitchen extension, and he was saying, "And if you need it to stop, you say red and everything stops, immediately, and there is no conversation about it," and I thought: this is the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me, and it is happening next to a display of blueberry muffins.

He asked me why I wanted it. I gave him the honest answer, which took some doing, and which was: I do not know, and I have stopped needing to know, and I would just like to find out whether it is anything like the thing I have been carrying about for most of my adult life.

He said that was a better answer than most.

His flat was ordinary. I do not know what I had built in my head over the months of writing to him, but it was not a bookcase full of paperbacks and a dining table with a folded towel laid over one end of it and a glass of water already poured, sitting on a coaster, waiting for me.

The glass of water nearly finished me. A man had thought, in advance, about afterwards.

I had asked for formality, in writing, weeks before, and he had taken me at my word. He called me Mrs Ellis. He did not touch me at all except when the scene required it. He told me where to stand and what would happen and in what order, and then he asked me to say back to him what the word was, and I said it, and he said, "Good. Whenever you like. It costs nothing."

And then the room went quiet in a way I have never experienced anywhere else, and I stood there in a stranger's dining room with my hands flat on a towel, and I was so frightened that my legs were going, and I have never wanted anything more in my life.

There is no stroke-by-stroke account here. I have read those, and they read like somebody reciting a shopping list of adjectives, and they miss everything.

What I will say is this.

The first one was appalling. Not the pain, though it was worse than I had allowed for. Appalling because in that instant every version of me arrived at once: me at nineteen, the woman who had chaired the parish council, my mother, the whole committee. Absolutely everybody had an opinion. I nearly said the word after the second, not because I could not bear it, but because I could not bear how much I had wanted it.

Then, somewhere around the fifth, the committee went home.

That is the only way I can put it. Everybody who lives in my head and comments on everything I do simply left, and for about eleven minutes there was nobody in there but me. No inventory of things I ought to be doing. No performance of coping. Just the room, and the count, and the pause between one and the next, which is where the whole thing actually lives.

I understand now why people are so bad at explaining it. It is not that the pain becomes pleasure, which is what the magazines say and is nonsense. It is that the pain becomes the only thing, and the only thing is a considerable relief when you have spent twenty-five years running six of them at once.

There was one, near the end, where I heard myself make a noise I did not recognise, and he stopped and put his hand flat between my shoulder blades and said, "Still with me?" and I said, "Yes." And I meant it in a way I have not meant a yes in years.

Afterwards he put a blanket round me, which was ridiculous and necessary, because I was shaking like a wet dog. He gave me the water. He sat on the other side of the room, not near me, because I had said in the cafe that I did not want to be held by somebody I had known for four hours, and he had written it down.

I laughed for about a minute and a half. I could not have told you at what.

We looked at the marks together in a mirror in his hallway, which is a sentence I could not have imagined writing, and he pointed out what would be gone by Sunday and what would still be there on Wednesday, and I stood there in a borrowed blanket looking at the evidence of the thing I had been thinking about since I was nineteen, and what I felt was not shame.

It was closer to how you feel standing in a house you have finally bought.

On the train home I sat with my back not quite touching the seat and watched the dark go past and did not read my book. I sent Hazel a message that said: I am on the train. I am completely fine. I will tell you on Sunday and you are not allowed to make a face.

She wrote back: I never make a face. Which is untrue.

Tuesday was bad. I had been warned it might be, and it was, and knowing did not stop it. I sat in the car park at Waitrose at four in the afternoon and cried for no reason I could name and felt about two inches tall, and thought: you are forty-six, what have you done.

His message arrived at six, and I had not asked for it, and it said only: A few days on is usually the worst of it. Nothing is wrong with you. Eat something and go to bed early.

I read it three times in the car park. Then I went in and bought something for dinner and went home.

That was in March. I have been back twice.

What I would say, if I could say it to the woman who stood in front of her wardrobe holding a cardigan, is that almost none of it was what she expected.

It was not dark, or shameful, or dangerous, and it did not turn out to be a door into a different life. It was a dining table in Manchester, a glass of water on a coaster, and a man who wrote down what I said in a coffee shop and then did exactly that and nothing else.

And eleven minutes when there was nobody in my head but me.