The friend who knew

Fiction, about adults over 18. No scene, no partner, nothing happens. One woman tells another woman something in a kitchen in Nottingham, and that is the entire event.

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

A story by the editor.

I told Bev on a Wednesday in February, in her kitchen, while she was doing the washing up, because I am apparently incapable of saying anything important to a person who is facing me.

We have known each other since 2010. We shared a flat in Lenton with black mould in the bathroom and an oven that only worked on one setting. She is a nurse now, and she has a husband who does long-distance cycling, and she is the least easily shocked person I have ever met, which I knew, and which turned out not to help at all in advance.

Because the thing about being frightened of a reaction is that it is not really about the person. I could have told you, that afternoon, with complete conviction, that Bev would be fine. I have watched Bev be fine about things that would flatten most people. And it made no difference whatsoever to what my body was doing on her doorstep.

I had been building up to it for about six weeks, which meant six weeks of evenings where I did not say it.

Once I got as far as "there's something I've been meaning to" and then finished the sentence with "ask you about that dentist you use", which is not what I had been meaning to say and which cost me an unnecessary trip to a dentist in West Bridgford.

I had a version prepared. I had several. There was a light one, where I made it into a funny anecdote about something I had read, and left an escape route so that if her face did anything I could say it was not really me. There was a serious one, where I explained the difference between this and abuse, with reference to consent, at some length, in the manner of a woman defending a thesis.

Fifteen years I had been carrying it by then. Since I was about twenty. And in all that time, in my head, the reaction had always been the same. A pause. A small physical withdrawal, an inch, nothing you could point to. And then kindness, which would be the worst part, because it would be the kindness you extend to someone who has just revealed something you now have to manage.

I had imagined that inch so many times that it had the quality of a memory.

What actually happened is that she had her hands in the bowl and her back to me and she said, "Right, go on then, you've been odd since you got here."

And I said it. Not the light version and not the thesis. I said, "I want someone to spank me. Not as a joke. It's been years and I don't know what to do about it."

The tap was running. She turned it off.

That two seconds of running water going quiet is, I think, the longest interval of my adult life.

She dried her hands on the tea towel, turned round, leaned against the sink and said, "I thought you were going to tell me you were ill."

Then she said, "You've gone a horrible colour. Sit down."

And then, while I was sitting down: "So what are you going to do about it, then?"

What is the word for what that does to you.

Not acceptance, which is too grand and has a whiff of the confessional about it. She was not accepting me. Accepting implies there was something to get past and she went and got past it, generously, on my behalf.

She just took the information. That is the closest I can get. She took it the way you take somebody telling you they have applied for a job in Leeds. A development. A fact about a person she already knew everything else about. And then she moved directly to the practical question, because that is what she is like, and because for her there was nothing else in the sentence that needed dealing with first.

I sat at her kitchen table with a hot face and understood that I had spent fifteen years bracing for an inch of withdrawal that was never coming, and that the bracing had cost me a great deal more than the telling did.

She asked good questions for about an hour and a half.

Whether I wanted it to be a partner or not. Whether I had told anyone else, ever, in any form, and I said no, and she went quiet for a second and said, "Right," in a completely different voice, and moved on, which I was grateful for.

Whether I meant a stranger, and then, immediately, with the nurse coming out in her, how I would know a stranger was not going to do something unsafe. That turned into forty minutes and two more glasses of wine and her getting her phone out and reading things aloud in a voice of increasing indignation.

"This one says you should always meet in public first. Well, obviously. That's just dating."

"Vetting. References. Right, so you'd actually contact them, would you? Like a landlord."

Then, after a long silence during which she was clearly looking at something: "Not the cane. I'm sorry, love, I'm not being funny, but that looks like it absolutely kills."

I laughed so hard I had to put my glass down. Fifteen years of secrecy and it ended with my oldest friend giving an unsolicited review of the implements page with her reading glasses on.

At about eleven she said the thing that undid me.

We had moved on. She had been telling me about a woman she had looked after that week and about her husband's new bike, and there was a gap, and she said, not looking at me:

"You've had that on your own since Lenton, then."

I said something like, "Pretty much."

And she said, "Well. You haven't now."

That was all. She got up and put the kettle on and asked whether I had ever got the man out about the boiler.

I walked to the bus stop about midnight in the sort of cold that gets into your teeth, and I felt physically different. Lighter is the obvious word and it is not quite right. What I actually felt was that I had been holding a suitcase in one hand for so long that I had stopped noticing, and somebody had taken it off me, and now that arm did not know what to do with itself.

Nothing had happened. That is what I keep coming back to. No partner, no scene, nobody had touched me, nothing about my life had changed by a single practical inch. One other human being on earth simply knew a true thing about me and had not moved away.

The next morning she sent me a message. It said:

Feeling rough. Your fault. Also: don't do anything daft. Meet him in a busy pub and tell me where you are. And read the safe word thing before you do anything at all, I read it after you went and it's sensible.

Then, twenty minutes later, on its own:

Proud of you for saying it out loud x

I have not deleted either of them. I have deleted a great many things off that phone. Not those.