Tuesday afternoon

Fiction, about adults over 18. Nothing happens in this story. That is rather the point, because the thing that frightened her arrived three days after everything had already finished.

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

A story by the editor.

Half past two on a Tuesday, and I was looking at a spreadsheet about pallet logistics.

That is the detail I keep. Not the crying. Pallets. Column F would not sum properly because somebody in Warrington had typed a number as text, and I sat there with my hand on the mouse and something went out of me, the way the sound goes out of a room when a fridge stops.

I want to be clear that nothing had happened. Nobody had said anything to me. It was an ordinary February Tuesday in an office with bad lighting, and I was fine at eleven, and I was fine at one, and at some point in the twenty minutes after half past two I stopped being fine and could not tell you why.

Saturday had been good.

I want to be clear about that too, because when I went back over it looking for the fault, and I did go back over it, there was no fault. It was the fourth time with Owain and it was the best of the four. He stopped before I wanted him to. He put a jumper round me afterwards and we ate toast at midnight and I laughed so much at something on his phone that I got hiccups.

Sunday I floated about the flat feeling like I had been rinsed out. Monday was ordinary. Monday I went to the gym.

So there was no reason. That is what I need you to understand about it, because the absence of a reason is the whole of the horror. If somebody had been unkind to me I would have had somewhere to put it.

What it was actually like: flat, first. Grey. Like the colour had come down two notches on everything, including things I like.

Then a sort of low shame that had no object. Not shame about Saturday. Just shame, running underneath, the way a tap runs in another room. I found myself thinking about a thing I said at a wedding in 2019 and going hot about it.

Then the certainty. And the certainty is the part I would most like to warn people about, because it does not feel like a mood. It feels like information. It feels like something has been quietly explained to you at last.

What was explained to me, at my desk, between the pallets and the four o'clock call, was this. That there is something wrong with me. That a normal woman of thirty-four does not need what I apparently need. That Owain was being kind on Saturday and would think about it properly this week and be repelled. That I had let somebody see the actual inside of me and the bill had now arrived.

All of that presented itself as fact. I did not experience it as a feeling at all. I sat in a meeting at three and nodded about pallets while a voice with excellent manners went through the evidence.

The body did its own separate thing alongside. Cold hands, all afternoon, in a warm office. No appetite at lunch and then a raging want for something sweet at four. And a low ache across the shoulders, which is where I put things.

The worst of it was a contradiction I could not get out of. I wanted Owain. I wanted to be in a room with him with my head somewhere on him, quite badly, with the specific urgency of wanting to go home when you are ill at work.

And at the same moment I could not bear the idea of him looking at me, or texting me, or existing anywhere near me, because he was the person who had seen the whole thing and I did not want to be seen by anybody at all.

Wanting somebody and wanting them not to be able to see you is an unusual position to hold at your desk on an ordinary afternoon, and it does not dispose you to reaching out.

Here is the annoying part. I had been told.

Owain had told me. Not vaguely either. He had said, in the kitchen, with a tea towel over his shoulder: sometimes it hits people a couple of days later, so if Tuesday is odd, that is a thing, and you can text me.

I remember nodding. I remember thinking that was thoughtful of him and slightly unnecessary, in the way you think a fire drill is unnecessary.

Being told about a thing and recognising the thing are two entirely different events, and nobody warns you about the gap between them. Because it does not arrive labelled. It does not arrive at all, in fact. There is no arrival. You simply notice at some point that you have been sitting in it, and the whole time it has been presenting itself as the truth about your character.

I typed it into my phone under the desk at about ten past four. I am not going to write out what I typed because it was three separate attempts and all of them were the sort of thing you would delete.

What came back was a page, written by a stranger, that used the word delayed and the phrase twenty-four to seventy-two hours, and described the flatness and the shame and the certainty in the order I had experienced them.

In the order I had experienced them.

I went to the toilets on the second floor, which nobody uses because the door sticks, and I cried for about ninety seconds. Not from misery. From the specific relief of finding out you are ordinary, which I had not known was one of the good feelings until that afternoon.

I texted him at five. Tuesday is odd.

He rang me before I had put the phone down. He did not say very much and none of what he said was clever. He asked whether I had eaten, which I had not. He said it usually lifts by Thursday and to be careful about making any large decisions about myself before then, which struck me as the single most useful sentence anybody had said to me in a year.

Then he said: it is not a verdict. It is a chemical.

That is not quite right and I know it is not quite right, and I have since read enough to know the mechanism is not that tidy. It did not matter. What I needed at ten past five on a Tuesday was permission to stop treating the voice as an expert witness.

By Thursday it had gone. Not lifted gradually. Gone, the way a headache goes while you are doing something else, and I noticed it in the queue at Boots and felt faintly embarrassed about the whole thing.

It has happened four times since. Twice badly.

Knowing does not stop it. I want to be honest about that, because I read a great deal that Tuesday which implied that understanding a thing dismantles it, and understanding this one does nothing of the sort. It still arrives. It still presents its evidence in the same reasonable voice.

What knowing changes is what I do with it. I no longer make a decision about my own character on a Tuesday. I eat something. I tell him, in three words, and three words is all it takes now. And I have stopped mistaking the flatness for the truth about myself, which turns out to be the entire difference between a bad afternoon and a bad month.