Read Online On Top of Everything by Sarah-Kate Lynch - Free Book Online Page A

question in the new circumstances) and pointing a bow and arrow at me.
    It was unfair enough that this was happening in the first place but it was worse that I’d had no warning. This is the thing no one prepares you for where disasters are concerned. There is no ominous black cloud, no spooky chill, no neon sign that flashes: Stop! Please! Go back to bed! There’s something really, really dreadful waiting to happen around the corner! I beg of you, do not continue!
    If only. Instead I’d kissed my husband goodbye just two days before as he’d headed for Aldeburgh and carried on innocently as usual. But now I had this, this,
this
being dumped on mefrom a great height. Bloody Harry had spent I don’t know how long thrashing out his plans, coming to his conclusions, making all his decisions, but I was totally new to the lot of it and the shock had me in pieces.
    As we sat there at the kitchen table, or I chased him around it, or I collapsed on the floor against the creaky dishwasher, I kept forgetting what was going on. My mind would race ahead to being a lonely old maid and I’d see myself sitting in a wheelchair (for some reason) dressed in black with lipstick à la
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
smeared all over my face and my mind would get stuck in this desolate future while Harry stood on the other side of the room, burbling on about being true to himself and doing what’s best for everyone.
    Then I’d switch back to the moment, to him, only to lose myself instantly to the past. I had been with Harry for twenty-five years. Was it all bollocks? Had our sex life been abnormal? I didn’t know. I’d only ever slept with him. And it’s not like he’d ever tried to take me from behind or insisted on a Swedish strap-on or whatever the hell they’re called so I don’t know how I was supposed to fathom that he was bloody well gay.
    He was loving, he was affectionate, he was engaged in me, in us, in our life. How had this happened? Where had it happened?
    ‘At the gym,’ he told me. ‘I met him at the gym.’
    You know, it’s not until you absolutely lose your dignity that you realise just how much you need it in the first place. I cringe when I think of what happened that day, for many reasons, but mostly because Harry and I had never been ones to row. We had the odd grumpy silence, made the odd snarky comment, but we just weren’t shouters or screamers. But I shouted and screamed at him then with a venom I had not known I was capable of. I told him his mother was an alcoholic and hisfather a bully (almost true but never previously mentioned); I told him he was a turgid writer without a glimmer of talent (same); I told him he hitched his trousers up too high and shouldn’t wear thick white socks with his sneakers (I had mentioned the socks before). I went on.
    I know now that Harry could not help who he was and how difficult it must have been for him to confront the truth and therefore me. He loved me, I know he did, and still does, and he truly did not want to hurt me. Ultimately he cared about that less than he cared about being true to himself, though, which is fine. Really. I mean for him, especially, but eventually even for me, fine. Who wants to live a lie? Who wants to make someone else live one?
    Not me. Although that afternoon I could see none of this. All I could see was the life I thought I was so happily living whooshing away from me like those filthy, brown tsunami floodwaters. And as I was caught up in this hateful torrent and dragged downwards, the survival mechanism that kicked in was not one of grace and serenity and understanding but one of ferocious anger and bitterness and over-ripe fruit.
    Worse, as Harry escaped the house, his ear caked with squashed banana, so many things still unsaid, I knew that I was right about the rotten things, that I was two really big ones down but still had one to go and it was bound to be a pearler. The universe had at least one more crappy treat in store for me