Finally, a silence down the phone.
‘How long has it been going on?’
Another silence. I could hear Azra breathing.
‘Five years,’ she said.
Do you know? She was too cowardly to come and face me. My bold, fearless friend. Ex-friend. The woman who slashed tyres and chased Islamophobes down the street. She sent me an email—how pitiful is that?
‘I’m so sorry,’ said my friend Linda—my ex-friend Linda—this totally unknowable person.
Actually it’s a relief. I’ve felt so guilty because I love you too, it made me sick to my stomach to lie to you. I know you’ll think it’s a betrayal but what Gregory and I have is bigger than all of us.
She’d laid it out neatly in paragraphs. No spelling mistakes either, and she was borderline dyslexic. Care had been taken.
What I’ve realised is that life is short and if we are lucky enough to find love we must follow our hearts. I truly apologise for my behaviour, but for a while I was in a state of denial. In fact I was hoping it was just a fling and would soon blow over. You know me! Nobody would be the wiser and Gregory and I would have got it out of our systems. But as time passed we realised we’d both met the love of our lives.
We kept meaning to tell you, but kept putting it off. Unforgivable, I know, but there you are. It’s terrible to cause pain and, as they say, ignorance is bliss. But when you saw us, that’s exactly what we’d decided to do. Gregory came up from Dorset to discuss it with me. We were then going to phone you up and come round to the house to tell you.
You would have known soon enough. I’ve got a tenant for my flat and I’m moving out, in a couple of weeks, and going to live with him in Mortimer’s Creek. It may not work—who knows?—but to be honest I’ve never been happier, and I’m just sorry it has been on the back of your pain. I’ve always loved your part of Dorset and it will be a new life for both of us.
I was astounded. She’d practically asked me to wish her luck. I’d always known Azra was thick-skinned but the brutality of this was jaw-dropping.
And no question of asking my permission to live in what had been my cottage, with my husband. She was obviously deranged by sex.
I couldn’t shake off the images. Azra’s long, dry, olive-skinned legs wrapped around Greg’s pallid, spongey midriff. She had the most beautiful legs. When she came down to Dorset we’d sit on the beach, side by side. She’d give me a squirt of her tea-tree moisturiser. Rubbing it in, I’d gaze with envy at her neat, chiselled knees and slender feet. Next to hers, my legs looked unappetisingly pale and mottled with bruises which, as I grew older, stubbornly remained, blooming under the skin.
I imagined her big, hungry lips clamped around Greg’s cock.