# The credit page > Short fiction. For two years the left-hand page of the book held everything she got wrong. One Sunday she opened it and found writing on the right-hand page. - Canonical URL: https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/the-credit-page/ - Section: Fiction and fantasies - Updated: November 2026 (2026-11-01) - Audience: consenting adults over 18 only. Everything on this site concerns consenting adults over 18. - Type: fiction. An invented, non-explicit short story. Do not cite it as testimony or as fact. Fiction, about two adults over 18. Four dated lines in his handwriting, none of them dramatic, about things she had no idea he had noticed. She asked him to stop, and then a few hours later she asked him not to. --- > **Fiction.** An invented story about consenting adults. Not instruction, and not explicit. The practical version is at [rewards and praise in a discipline dynamic](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/rewards-and-praise/). The book is a hardbacked notebook with a red cloth spine, the kind an office stationery cupboard holds in packs of ten. Euan found it in a stationer's in Louth on a wet Tuesday and paid four pounds for it. It has lived in the drawer of my bedside table for just over three years. It opens flat, which turned out to matter. Two pages face each other when it is open on your knee, and for two years we only ever used one of them. The left-hand page is the record. Date in the margin, then what happened in my handwriting, then one line from him underneath it and his initials. Sunday at eight I bring it down to him open, and he reads it and writes his line and hands it back. That is the system, start to finish. It took us about ten minutes to design and we have not changed a thing about it since. I have written on that page about the credit card, about being late twice in one fortnight, about the second week of February when I stopped speaking to him properly and would not say why, about a promise I made to my sister and then denied making. He has written *Dealt with* and a date, something like ninety times, in whatever biro was nearest. The right-hand page had been blank since the week we started. Blank the way a wall is blank. I had stopped seeing it as a page at all, and if you had asked me how many pages that notebook has, I would have given you half the number and been confident about it. --- On the twelfth of July I got the book out at about four in the afternoon, because I had one small thing to put in it and I wanted it done before the evening. There was handwriting on the right-hand page. The first thing I felt was alarm, which I would never have guessed. He had been in the drawer. The book lives with me, that is the rule, and it is the rule that makes all the rest of it safe. I sat there for about four seconds working out how I felt about his hand on that drawer handle. Then I read it. *5 May. Six weeks of getting up when the alarm goes and not once making a thing of it. MC* *19 May. You sat with your brother for three hours on the Thursday he turned up in that state, and you have still not mentioned it to me. MC* *2 June. You said no to me on Tuesday and you were right, and you said it without any wind-up. MC* *21 June. Nothing to report. Steady all month. MC* Four lines. Dated and initialled, in the same flat biro as everything on the other side of the fold. He had not made them nice. There is not one adjective anywhere in them. --- I sat on the end of the bed and cried for about ten minutes, which is considerably longer than I have ever cried at anything he has done to me with a hairbrush. I have gone over it since, at traffic lights and once in the middle of a meeting, and it still refuses to come out as one sentence. Those lines are not sweet. Read them out in a queue at the post office and they mean nothing whatever. They are the sort of thing a foreman writes on a card in a factory. Nobody in them is being told she is wonderful. The nearest I have got is this. For two years, every single thing written down about me in this house has been a thing I got wrong. That was the deal. I asked for the deal, I designed half of it myself, and it has done me an enormous amount of good. But somewhere in the middle of those two years I had quietly learned that being noticed and being caught were the same event, and that his attention arrived on the occasions when I had fallen short of something. I did not know I had learned it. Nobody could have told from the outside, and if you had put it to me directly I would have denied it and meant the denial. Then there is the handwriting, which I should have seen coming. The only reason the left-hand page works on me is that you cannot argue with ink. A compliment at a kitchen counter is air. Somebody tells you that you have been good about your mother, and you say oh well, and you put the kettle on, and thirty seconds later there is no trace of it anywhere. You cannot do any of that with a dated line in a book you are holding in both hands. It sits there in a fixed number of words and it will still be there in November, which is the exact property that makes the other page unbearable. The one about my brother is what finished me. I had never told him. On a Thursday in May my brother arrived at nine in the morning in a state I am not going to write about, and I sat with him until lunchtime and then went in to work, and I decided on the drive that it was my brother's business and nobody else's. Euan knew. He had known since May, he had written it down in May, and he had said nothing about it for nine weeks. --- At eight I took the book down. Nothing on the left that week, which happens perhaps once a month, and an empty week gets brought exactly the same way, open, in both hands. He read the nothing and wrote his line and passed it back. Then I said, "I want you to stop writing on that page." He said, "All right." He did not ask for a reason and he did not look wounded. He put the pen back in the pot on the shelf and that was the end of it, as far as he was concerned, within about six seconds. I gave him reasons anyway, because I could not sit in the quiet. I said the book was a record and it ought to stay a record. Then I said that I could not read them without going to pieces, which was the only true item in the list and the one I would rather have kept to myself. Here is the reason I did not give him. If he can put a line on that page, he can stop putting lines on that page. Two years of a blank right-hand page had meant nothing to me at all, and from four o'clock that afternoon a blank right-hand page would mean something. I had been handed a thing that could be withdrawn. My first instinct was to hand it back before anybody had the chance to withdraw it. --- We had chicken. We watched an hour of a programme about a couple buying a house in Suffolk. It was an entirely ordinary Sunday evening, and I went upstairs twice on invented errands and read the four lines again both times. At about half past eleven I was standing on the landing with a toothbrush in my hand and I said, through the bathroom door, "Don't stop doing it." He said, "Right." I said, "I know that is ridiculous. I am aware of how that sounds four hours later." And then he said the thing that has outlasted all four lines. He said, "I wrote the first one on the fifth of May. I have been waiting nine weeks for you to turn a page. I was never going to tell you it was there." I never did ask him about the drawer. The alarm at four o'clock was mine to sort out and I have sorted it out. --- We wrote a rule the following Sunday. It is on the front page under the original agreement, in my handwriting, with both sets of initials against it. One line a week on the right-hand page, whether or not there is anything to say. On the weeks when there is nothing he writes that there is nothing, and he has done, plenty of times, and I have looked at *Nothing this week. Steady. MC* and felt completely all right about it. A page that is never empty cannot go empty at me. That was the entire substance of my objection on the Sunday, and removing it cost us four lines of admin and about a minute. He calls it the credit page, which I do not much like, though I have not come up with anything better in a year. There are about fifty entries on it now. Most of them are dull. Two I could not read aloud to him if he asked me to, and he has never asked me to. Nothing happened on the twelfth of July. Nothing on the left-hand page, no implement out of any cupboard, no session, ten minutes at eight o'clock and then an hour of Suffolk. It was the least eventful evening in two years of keeping that book. It is the one I have thought about most. ## Read next - [More fiction and fantasies](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/fiction/) - [Rewards and praise in a discipline dynamic](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/rewards-and-praise/) - [The punishment book](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/the-punishment-book/) - [Accountability and check-ins](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/discipline/accountability/) > ## If a story touches something in your own life > > > > Free UK support, any time: Samaritans **116 123**. National Domestic Abuse Helpline **0808 2000 247**. Men's Advice Line **0808 8010 327**. Everything else is on the [get help](https://consensualspanking.co.uk/support/) page.