Behind Her Eyes
: Part 1: Chapter 10

I had forgotten what happiness feels like. For so long everything has been about David’s happiness – how to stop his dark moods, how to stop him drinking, how to make him love me – that somewhere in all that my own happiness dulled. Even having David has not been making me happy. And that is something I never thought was possible.

But now there are fireworks inside me. Bursts of colourful joy. Now I have Louise. A new secret. She’s funny and sharp. A breath of fresh air after the arid winds of endless doctors’ wives limited company. She’s prettier than she thinks, and for the sake of half a stone she’d have a wonderful figure. Not lean and boyish like me, but curvy and feminine. She’s tough too, laughing at events in her life that other people would want sympathy or pity for. She really is quite wonderful.

I only half look at the daubs of paint bar-coding the bedroom wall – various shades of green with suitably expensive names. Pale Eau de Nil, Vert de Terre, Tunsgate Green, Olive Smoke. None whose colour you could ever guess from the name alone. I like them all. Together in a line they could be leaves from trees in a wood. I can’t choose a winner though, my brain is too busy buzzing with all the things that Louise and I can do together to focus on decor.

Louise only works three days a week. That leaves plenty of time for girl things. The gym perhaps. Definitely. I can help her lose that little bit of extra flesh and tone up. Maybe get her to give up smoking. That would be good, and I can’t afford my hair and clothes to smell of cigarette smoke. That would betray us. David would know I had a new friend, and he wouldn’t like that.

We can drink wine in the garden together, or perhaps outside one of the little bistros on the Broadway, and talk and laugh like we did today. I want to know everything about her. I’m already fascinated by her. I’m lost in the imagined fun we’re going to have together.

I leave my tiny tins of paint and go and make a pot of peppermint tea. I push one of David’s pills down the kitchen sink plughole and run the tap to make sure it washes entirely away.

I take my tea out into the garden and the sunshine. It’s not long past lunchtime. I have some time before David’s next call and I want to enjoy having nothing to do but savour this wonderful feeling, and think and plan. I know Louise won’t tell David about our meeting. She isn’t like that. And she knows it wouldn’t do either of us any good.

It was so easy to meet her, thanks to the map David brought home from work, clearly marked up with her help and local knowledge. I navigated while we drove around the area on Sunday afternoon, visiting each of the locations marked down, seeing how the boutique shops petered out into pound shops and boarded-up fronts within the turn of a few streets. The underpasses that no one in their right mind but junkies would walk through. The cluster of tatty estate blocks only a mile or two away from our wonderful house. I also saw the primary school with the brightly coloured flowers painted on the walls. I read David’s scrawled note alongside the location.

After that, it was simple.

Two strangers colliding.

She didn’t suspect a thing.