I have the good seat on the bus, my favourite one in the back, right up against the glass partition, where I can rest my knees and lie back and watch the city go by. These bus journeys are my solace, my reprieve. My time to plug into my music and travel to wherever I want as the bus judders its way through the traffic, south to north and north to south and home again. My time to think, but I didn’t think about this. I didn’t know I was going to do it.
The phone is in my hand. I type:
‘You and I are not done yet. There’s a time for us. Not now, but one day.’
The number I haven’t used for five years comes up on the screen. I don’t remember how it got there. A new phone, a number he’s never called me on. I haven’t called him for five years. I don’t remember putting it in, but I must have done. Typed the number in from memory, saved it. Written his name. Four letters, four taps on the keyboard. His name is on my screen.
I press send.
I kill the screen immediately and stare ahead. I don’t want to watch it go. Wash my hands of it, but my fingers are tight around the phone. And the thing I’ve just done is travelling, unstoppable now, strange scrambled data bouncing off satellites to reconfigure itself into words on another screen. I don’t want to imagine it, how he’ll lift up his phone and read. I squeeze my eyes shut; my other hand is a fist. I can see it, how he lifts up the phone and reads the words. He doesn’t know my number. It’s only words, uncredited. He won’t reply.
The phone shudders in my hand. My hand is shaking. I swipe and the screen lights up: ‘I know.’
‘Fuck.’ I say it out loud. I slam the phone into my knee, many times, repeatedly, dull thuds. ‘Fuck fuck fuck.’ A few passengers look over, roll their eyes, mutter to themselves. They do that here: they look. This isn’t London. This is as far away from London as I could get.
Not far enough. He knows. The words have reached him, and he knows. And just like that, I’m back exactly where I started, in the palm of his hand like the words I just sent.
We’ve always liked to play with words. But betrayal is not a word you play with. Betrayal, even if you tell yourself there are reasons. Good reasons, and survival is the best. Survival means killing anything that stands in your way. Except this thing also survives: it wasn’t killed. It isn’t dead. He knows, and I’m back where I never left.
Betrayal. Not now. A long time ago. And, also, every day.
This is the opening of my much-neglected novel you can’t name an unfinished thing. It’a available, as all my books, on Amazon, in paperback and on Kindle.
