The hour I paid for

Fiction, about adults over 18. She has wanted this since her early twenties and has told nobody in thirty years. The strangest part of the afternoon turned out to be the envelope.

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

A story by the editor.

I am fifty-four. I have wanted this since I was about twenty-two. Nothing prompted it and nobody had ever laid a hand on me.

What I had was a story I ran in my head on the bus to work, and in the story there was somebody completely unbothered, and a punishment I had earned and could not talk my way out of. I had no word for any of it. I knew only that it was mine and that I could not mention it to a living soul.

The years made it quieter and more particular. By thirty it had settled into a permanent feature of my inside life, like the shape of my own handwriting.

I have never told anybody. My husband and I have been married twenty-six years and he knows things about me I would rather he did not. My sister knows my bank balance and both of my passwords.

In thirty-odd years the sentence has never once left my mouth, and I could not have got it out, because the second I imagined beginning it I could see the face at the other end, and then I would have had to live alongside whatever was on that face for the rest of my life.

That is the bit people underestimate about telling someone. It does not finish when you have told them. Afterwards you have to look after what you have done to them, and go on looking after it, indefinitely.

So I paid a stranger.

I found her online, on a site that looked like a plumber's website from about 2011, with a photograph of a wingback chair and no photograph of her. Fifteen years of reading things I never acted on had taught me what a careful person sounds like in writing. She read careful. There was a page about what she would not do that ran twice as long as the page about what she would.

I made a new email address with a name that meant nothing. I wrote the first message seven times over four evenings, sent it at twenty to midnight, and then lay in the dark next to my husband being quietly sick with it.

She replied at ten past eight the following morning, which nearly finished me off. I had budgeted for days of waiting and got about eight hours.

She asked for my age, whether I had done anything like this before, what medication I was on, anything wrong with my back or my joints, and whether one other person in the world would know where I was that afternoon. Then, at the bottom, what I actually wanted from an hour.

I typed an answer to that last one and deleted it four times. What I sent in the end was: "I do not know. I have never said any of this to anybody, so I have no idea what I want, only that I have wanted it for thirty years." She wrote back that this was the most common answer she got, and that we would work it out at the table before anything started.

A Thursday, two o'clock, a first-floor flat over a shop that sold blinds. She sent the postcode, the bell to press, and a line telling me which bell not to press. I parked four streets away for no reason I could defend to anybody.

The envelope had been in my handbag since Tuesday. She had said cash, in an envelope, and that I should put it on the side table by the window when I came in rather than hand it over. I counted the twenties out of the tin on top of the fridge the night before and felt like I was arranging something criminal.

None of it is criminal. Buying a bottle of wine on the way home involves more law than that hour did. But there is no card machine for this and there should not be, and counting the notes out on my own worktop made it real in a way that nine weeks of emails had not.

She was roughly my age, in a jumper, and the first thing she asked me was whether I had found somewhere to park.

We sat at her kitchen table for twenty minutes with a notebook between us. She asked what I did not want and wrote all of it down. She read the list back to me. She asked about my back twice, once at the start and once after I mentioned a physio appointment in passing, which I had not expected her to catch.

She asked what I wanted to be called and I said my own name. She said good, most people say that.

Then she asked me to put my phone on silent, and we began, and the part you would assume is the story took perhaps fifteen minutes of the hour. I am not going to set it down. The other forty-five are the ones I think about.

She was kind to me the way a good dentist is kind. There was nothing personal in it. She had done this a few thousand times and she was extremely good at it, and the kindness was part of doing the job properly. I had not earned it by being likeable or by being worth anybody's trouble.

I cannot easily explain how restful that was. I have spent my entire adult life being kind at people and having it come back at me, and the whole arrangement is exhausting, and here was somebody delivering the same thing to a professional standard and charging me for it, and the charging was precisely what made it safe.

Halfway through she told me to go and stand in the corner, and I stood facing the wall of a stranger's spare room for what she later said was four minutes. I cried with no noise at all. She did not come over and she did not say anything soothing. When the four minutes were up she said, "Right. Come and sit down," in the voice you would use to a colleague at the end of a meeting, and I did.

At ten past three she gave me a glass of water and asked what I was doing with the rest of my day. I said Sainsbury's. She laughed and said that was what everybody did.

The envelope was where I had put it. She had not looked at it once in seventy minutes, and I had been watching for it. She said goodbye at the top of the stairs and did not come down with me, which I was grateful for without understanding why until later.

I sat in the car for eleven minutes and worked out what the feeling was.

It was privacy. Nobody had to be told. There was not one person alive who now held a piece of information about me that they would be carrying around at Christmas, or bringing up gently, once, in a year's time, to check I was all right. No one's feelings had been rearranged by anything I had done. I had wanted a thing, arranged it, paid for it and had it, and the whole transaction was over the moment I shut the car door.

Then I did the shopping. I got home before my husband, put the radio on and made a chicken and rice thing that takes forty minutes, and I stood at the hob with a tea towel over my shoulder and felt completely ordinary. He came in at half six and talked about the boiler. There is a part for it that has to come from Germany.

It is the evening I keep going back to, more than the afternoon. He was entirely fine. So was I. Both of those were true at once and neither was purchased at the other's expense, and I had spent roughly thirty years assuming that combination was not available to me.

I have not been back. It is fourteen months now.

People who hear a story like this want the ending to be a conversion or a regret, and I have neither to offer. I went to find out whether the thing in my head had any existence outside my head. It has. I know that now the way you know a place you have stood in, which is a different sort of knowing from years of reading about it at one in the morning.

Possibly I will go again. If I do it will be for a reason I have not had yet, and I would want the same woman, and I would still park four streets away.

What I have is one Thursday afternoon in a flat above a shop that sold blinds. Nobody will ever ask me about it. There is no photograph of it and nothing about it in the joint account. I paid for an hour in twenties out of a tin, I got exactly the hour, and then I drove home and made the dinner. It did not fix anything. It was never sold to me as a repair and I did not buy it as one.