My Fence is Electric: and other stories by Mark Newman

Author:Mark Newman [Newman, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Odyssey Books

Jason thought often of telling his friends, sharing the story over a third pint of lager, but the shame of it held him back, so that when they were all gathered together and he told a joke among them his mistake kept him from enjoying the ensuing laughter.

He knew that something was starting to loosen in his mind, that this was not at all healthy. It was one night. A mistake. Gaudia had tried to move on; he had to do the same.

Yet, it was the shame of it that did him in most of all. He knew he had friends who had done similar things, had caught tail ends of fights with their partners, heard the accusatory sniping, but his friends had smoothed things over or broken apart and started new relationships. They did not refer to these mistakes again, and so he seemed unable to bring it up and kept it to himself. He didn’t think that Gaudia had told her family (was sure they would have said something to him if she had) and he certainly was not going to tell his. Gaudia was the only one he could talk to about it, but they had talked through it endlessly when it happened and she had asked that they not speak of it again.

But how were they to avoid it when it came with them everywhere, as much a part of them as the extra weight they carried, the blemishes on the skin that had gathered over the years.

Jason and Gaudia went to the theatre; they took pictures on their phone of the safety curtain and tried to guess how much such an expanse of material had cost and how often it needed to be cleaned, but, when the curtain lifted, their mistake was there on the stage. There was a bed to stage right, and the actors were writhing around on it in a most unseemly fashion (completely inappropriate to the content of the play) so that Jason didn’t know where to look. By the time they had finished the sheets were crumpled and strewn at the foot of the bed in complete disarray and Jason could feel the blush in his cheeks. Gaudia sat, stony faced, next to him and at the interval she asked to leave.

‘I can’t sit under a heavy floodlight, it is making me nervous’—the excuse a nod at his own propensity for glancing above him in theatres and cinemas to see if there were anything that might drop on his head. ‘You can stay if you want,’ she said, but it was clear that she didn’t mean it.

‘I’ll come with you,’ Jason said, ‘but let’s at least get an ice cream.’

Gaudia walked off then, teeth clenched to hold her words inside, and he skipped, like a scolded boy, to catch up with her. He thought how he had annoyed her and he thought how he had missed out on an ice cream, and both these things aggrieved him equally, which he supposed was part of the problem.

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