Read Online On Top of Everything by Sarah-Kate Lynch - Free Book Online
Authors: Sarah-Kate Lynch
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dead?
The look on her face when it did sink in broke my heart. That beautiful face. Those big brown eyes. That thick, dark hair that drives her mad because there’s so bloody much of it but has strangers turning to watch it swing across her shoulders as she walks down the street.
What kind of a man can walk away from this, I asked myself, as I watched those eyes widen, a light come on, then go out in them. She seemed to sag to half her normal size. It crushed her. What kind of a man does that?
I suppose I had not known myself what kind of a man I really was until I met Charles. Even then I denied it as long as I could possibly manage. I’d always known I had more than a passing interest in that sort of thing but I thought this was probably on the acceptable side of normal. Besides, I was madly in love with my wife. I had been ever since she noticed me at the bus stop I’d been staking out for weeks, after first noticing her buying crisps at the corner shop. We were little more than children, really, now that I look back on it. When Monty was fourteen I used to spy on him watching cartoons on TV and think, I met the woman I married when I was his age. What did I know then?
Well, I knew I loved her and nothing will ever change that. But meeting Charles was different and nothing could change that either. Meeting Charles just made the rest of my life feel wrong. No, worse than that, it made it feel like a lie. And I may be many things but I have tried, especially where Florence has been concerned, especially at home, never to be a liar.
To be honest, the blow to the side of the head with the bananas felt good and I don’t even like bananas. But I deserved them. I deserved worse, much worse, but I also deserved better, and so did Florence.
CHAPTER FIVE
How does one get over something like that? The husband being gay thing, I mean, not the deadly assault with bananas.
And by ‘get over’ I’m not talking in a long term ‘how does one survive in a world without one’s previously heterosexual other half’ sense. I’m talking in a ‘how does one live through the very immediate seconds, minutes, hours, that keep ticking by after the world has been turned upside down’ sense.
How do you survive those? How do you get over that?
Well, the answer is simple. You don’t. Not exactly. There is the aforementioned bit of you that dies, then there’s a bit that wishes the rest would follow or that it had never been born in the first place, then there is whatever’s left over. This bit, rather astonishingly, can have quite a lot of pep. This is the bit that attacks your husband with rotting bananas, that tries to pull at his clothes, that tears at your hair and beats at your breast. The dead and the wanting-to-be-dead or never-born bits areunbearably sad but the banana bit is angry.
Although it wasn’t Harry’s being gay that made me furious. It’s true. In the immediate aftermath of his bombshell, I believed I loved him too much for a tiny little thing like sexual persuasion to get in the way. In the fullness of time, I saw this to be completely untrue but for a few minutes there, after the bananas but before the lamp stand, I believed we could somehow work around it. But when I told Harry this he did not smile and look relieved as I imagined he might, he got that same miserable look on his face and I realised that there was more, that there was something else I was not getting. That’s when it occurred to me that being gay and meeting Charles from the Whittington combined with all that repetitive talk of being so sorry and endlessly begging my forgiveness was just a lead up to the real bombshell: Harry was leaving me.
Yes, leaving me. He was moving into a bedsit in Lancaster Gate, he told me, until he had ‘sorted out’ his position with Charles. He’d already signed the lease.
I couldn’t have felt more ambushed if he’d jumped out from behind a tree wearing a chamois leather loincloth (not out of the
The look on her face when it did sink in broke my heart. That beautiful face. Those big brown eyes. That thick, dark hair that drives her mad because there’s so bloody much of it but has strangers turning to watch it swing across her shoulders as she walks down the street.
What kind of a man can walk away from this, I asked myself, as I watched those eyes widen, a light come on, then go out in them. She seemed to sag to half her normal size. It crushed her. What kind of a man does that?
I suppose I had not known myself what kind of a man I really was until I met Charles. Even then I denied it as long as I could possibly manage. I’d always known I had more than a passing interest in that sort of thing but I thought this was probably on the acceptable side of normal. Besides, I was madly in love with my wife. I had been ever since she noticed me at the bus stop I’d been staking out for weeks, after first noticing her buying crisps at the corner shop. We were little more than children, really, now that I look back on it. When Monty was fourteen I used to spy on him watching cartoons on TV and think, I met the woman I married when I was his age. What did I know then?
Well, I knew I loved her and nothing will ever change that. But meeting Charles was different and nothing could change that either. Meeting Charles just made the rest of my life feel wrong. No, worse than that, it made it feel like a lie. And I may be many things but I have tried, especially where Florence has been concerned, especially at home, never to be a liar.
To be honest, the blow to the side of the head with the bananas felt good and I don’t even like bananas. But I deserved them. I deserved worse, much worse, but I also deserved better, and so did Florence.
CHAPTER FIVE
How does one get over something like that? The husband being gay thing, I mean, not the deadly assault with bananas.
And by ‘get over’ I’m not talking in a long term ‘how does one survive in a world without one’s previously heterosexual other half’ sense. I’m talking in a ‘how does one live through the very immediate seconds, minutes, hours, that keep ticking by after the world has been turned upside down’ sense.
How do you survive those? How do you get over that?
Well, the answer is simple. You don’t. Not exactly. There is the aforementioned bit of you that dies, then there’s a bit that wishes the rest would follow or that it had never been born in the first place, then there is whatever’s left over. This bit, rather astonishingly, can have quite a lot of pep. This is the bit that attacks your husband with rotting bananas, that tries to pull at his clothes, that tears at your hair and beats at your breast. The dead and the wanting-to-be-dead or never-born bits areunbearably sad but the banana bit is angry.
Although it wasn’t Harry’s being gay that made me furious. It’s true. In the immediate aftermath of his bombshell, I believed I loved him too much for a tiny little thing like sexual persuasion to get in the way. In the fullness of time, I saw this to be completely untrue but for a few minutes there, after the bananas but before the lamp stand, I believed we could somehow work around it. But when I told Harry this he did not smile and look relieved as I imagined he might, he got that same miserable look on his face and I realised that there was more, that there was something else I was not getting. That’s when it occurred to me that being gay and meeting Charles from the Whittington combined with all that repetitive talk of being so sorry and endlessly begging my forgiveness was just a lead up to the real bombshell: Harry was leaving me.
Yes, leaving me. He was moving into a bedsit in Lancaster Gate, he told me, until he had ‘sorted out’ his position with Charles. He’d already signed the lease.
I couldn’t have felt more ambushed if he’d jumped out from behind a tree wearing a chamois leather loincloth (not out of the
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