Human Remains by Elizabeth Haynes Page B

carrying on the affair for the past five months, and they were no longer prepared to continue to lie to everyone. Beverley told me she didn’t love me any more, she loved Mike, and she wanted us to get a divorce so that they could get married.
    At the time I took it all so well. I think if it had just been Bev and me having the discussion I might have ranted, thrown something, certainly raised my voice a little. But here we were, the four of us, having this civil discussion downstairs while upstairs our children played some game that involved a lot of banging and crashing and pounding of feet on the landing between the bedrooms.
    They got their way, of course. There was nothing I could do to stop it, and, besides, after the initial hysteria Elaine seemed to get used to the idea and then she was fine with it. How could I kick up a fuss when she was being so reasonable?
    In the days and weeks that followed, though, I found myself at the start of a downward spiral. I moved out into a rented flat, leaving Bev and the kids in the house while it was sold. But it was the wrong time to try and sell a four-bedroomed house, and it stayed on the market for month after month, while I paid the mortgage and the rent on the flat and money to Bev for child support.
    Alone in my miserable little one-bedroomed flat, trying to make sense of what I’d done wrong, why it was me being punished when I wasn’t the one who’d had the affair, who’d demanded a divorce, I started drinking every night and then eventually in the morning when I woke up, too.
    I lost my job the following November, on the day when I came into work still partly drunk from the day before and even drunker because I’d had to have a bottle of strong cider before I could face the day.
    Bev helped me out a bit. She was a good girl really, kind, one of the reasons why I married her in the first place. I think she felt guilty over the way things had ended. She told me I didn’t have to pay for the kids for a while, until I got things sorted out, and as it turned out I didn’t have to pay for the big mortgage any more since Mike and Elaine had sold their house, and he’d moved in with Bev and the kids.
    I got a bit of money from the social, and that went on the rent for the flat. The little bit that I kept back from that, I tried to spend on food, and bills, and presents for the kids at Christmas and birthdays. But more often than not I’d go to the corner shop and buy a couple of bottles, just to keep me warm.
    This was where I ended up, two years after the moment it all started, with me in blissful ignorance doing the washing-up on a Sunday afternoon while my kids played upstairs and my wife was who knew where doing who knew what.
    You never realise what loneliness is until it creeps up on you – like a disease, it is, something that happens to you gradually. And of course the alcohol doesn’t help: you drink it to forget about how shit it is living like that, and then when you stop drinking everything looks a hell of a lot worse. So you keep drinking to try and blot it all out.
    I always thought if there was someone I could have talked to, someone who’d really listen… Not the doctor, who was always in a hurry to get me out of the surgery because I smelt of booze and worse; not the people at the day centre who heard stories like this all the time, every day. Besides, there are a lot worse tales to tell than mine.
    There was nobody like that, of course. And if there had been, if some random person had come up to me in the street and said ‘How are you?’ and meant it, what would I even have said to them? Where would I have begun?
    Sometimes I used to play a little game when I was outside, just to see if I could catch someone’s eye, to see if I could get them to look at me, even just for a minute. And you know what? Nobody looks you in the eye. And I realised, it had been years and years since anyone made eye contact with me, and the last person was probably Bev.