Arms Shaking

Hoovering on a Wednesday, she is already a day behind. Slight friction burn from the wire on her forefinger. Lower back aching from standing to watch Patrick’s match last night. Cramps — too early. Sweating from the effort of heaving the hoover around, her bones felt thick and heavy, more so every week.

The last time she had come close to cheating, she’d convinced herself that she decided against it because of her family. There was a narrative: she had been all set to leave that evening, the alibi in place, the underwear chosen, and then she had watched Anwar play with the children in the garden, the spray from the hosepipe catching the sun as they fled from him and jumped on his back, and she saw the fortress they had built together and decided not to let it fall. This was such a good story to tell that, in the telling, it had become real. It had so enraptured her audiences that she made a point of working towards it in conversations with new friends — that time she had almost, but then she had been good. The cake was had and eaten, both.

A lie, though. In truth it had been more the realisation that she did not find the idea of the man from the conference, pot-bellied and needy, all that appealing. And the day with the hosepipe had happened years before.

Hosepipes were banned, now. The grass browned outside. She needed to finish hoovering before the power went out at 2. If she was going out that evening, she needed to make Anwar’s dinner before the outage as well. Her friends often latched onto this — that she cooked him dinner, every night — as Anwar’s ultimate sin, but she was indifferent towards it. She should be angry that he had managed to train her so well, she knew that, but it was the smaller things that ate into her soul. Feeling invisible at his faculty parties, never once introduced. The way his voice changed when he spoke to working-class friends. The arrogance with which he put on a condom.

William was not Anwar. William was a post-doc, originally a legacy admission. Yes, he had been taught by Anwar as an undergraduate. Yes, he was within ten years of her eldest son’s age. She did not kid herself; his age was the point. Since the men in her life had passed 40, she had found herself sporadically repulsed, the disgust crashing into her in sudden waves. Pot bellies, laughter lines, things often gorgeous, suddenly so sickening that she felt the need to wash her hands and wash them again. William had skin so smooth that she sometimes found herself staring at his cheekbones when he spoke, watching it stretch when he laughed and then snap back into place. When she pictured their sex, she saw it in such movements. A joint furling and unfurling; muscles tensed and then untensed; as if nothing had ever happened.

More than anything, it was her certainty that unnerved her. She knew she would sleep with him tonight, in the Belvedere room he had booked, once he had exhausted his overactive brain. Last time she had fretted for two days, feeling guilty every time she walked past a family photograph. In the patrician voice of Gordon Brown on the radio she’d heard her father admonish her. But today, as she kicked the hoover into the corner of the airing cupboard, she just knew.

Why so certain now? Anwar was no worse — in fact, he had mellowed in middle age. The children were no longer children, and perhaps that made a difference. But really it was the weight she carried around, always somehow at the base of her neck. When her mother called her on the phone, crying, because they couldn’t fix her hip, it got heavier. When she heard Andrew Tate’s voice under her son’s door, it got heavier. On the 40-degree days, she thought it might burst. Brown children were dying on the news, and her taxes were helping to kill them, and the certainties that had persisted well into adulthood had crumbled. The arms that held up the world were shaking with the effort.

Lasagne, baked with the radio on, but the tinny voices did not bring her calm like they used to. The power snapped off late today, as she looked at her naked self in the bathroom. Patrick and Simon were home at 5; Anwar was on a work trip; Gabriella was staying at a friend’s. She had deliberately chosen this night, when she knew her daughter wouldn’t be there. It was Gabriella, more than Anwar, whom she felt she was betraying.

The boys ate their dinner with sullen entitlement. They on the sofa, she on the armchair, a Twitch streamer on the TV. Through the meal, her sons looked at her precisely once, in unison, when the streamer used the N-word. She looked at them. They blinked. They looked away. Her neck twinged.

She zipped up her boots in the dark hallway. She said goodbye to her sons, and they said goodbye in return. She turned on the porch light, for when she got back. Night air cool and soft on her skin.

Then, as she went to close the door, a bolt-blue dragonfly landed on her rightmost knuckle. Legs so fine she barely felt it. Wings folded into a triangle, patterned like constellations, and then it was gone.

She had stopped at its touch and now stood frozen in the doorway, not certain if she’d imagined it. A streak of blue in her vision where its tail had caught the light. Her senses, already heightened, felt sharp and taut. When she’d first met Anwar, he had amazed her with his knowledge of animals. And had there not been dragonflies flitting through the garden that evening, years ago, when Anwar had chased the children with the hose?

But no. There hadn’t been. She was just wrapping an impulse in a narrative and calling it fate. She shut the door, locked it, and walked out into the night.