The Halfways by Nilopar Uddin

Author:Nilopar Uddin [Uddin, Nilopar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The rest of the day dripped away slowly. The memory of Richard’s relaxed smile directed at another woman tore at her. How he had gazed at her once. All it took, she remembered reading somewhere – all it took to fall in love was a gaze. That gaze.

That evening, Richard came home in a loud, obnoxious mood. Barging in with his bundle of papers, which he refused to use a briefcase for, jiggling his phone in his hand. He dropped kisses on Elias’s head and looked over and caught Nasrin’s eye and smiled.

She laid the table, waiting for him to remark on her silence, to ask what the matter was, but he did not.

They ate bland poached salmon and stringy, soggy asparagus, and as he washed it down with yesterday’s Sauvignon, she stuck to water, and still he noticed nothing. Her eyes wandered to Richard’s fingers, to the band of ugly platinum digging into his flesh. She looked away and stood to clear the plates.

Richard picked up his papers from the hallway table, and with the bottle of wine tucked under his arm and his chipped Best Dad mug dangling from his finger, made his way up the stairs.

She watched him from the kitchen, thinking about the raspberry-sized foetus performing somersaults in her uterus during the ultrasound.

She looked at the plates left on the tabletop, at the crumbs beneath the stool, at the smudges of butter on the counter and the sprays of cooking oil on the splashback. She looked through the kitchen window with its smeared pane that needed cleaning from the outside, at the potted orchids that were resilient to her neglect. She looked at the rug on the white ceramic floor, once far too pretty to be in front of a hob, but now so stained that it would be useless anywhere else. As she took in all the details of her home, her prison, something in her howled to be released.

What had her life become? Was this what it was to be married? To have a child? Was this it? The half-baked attentions of a man she had once loved, and the half-formed affections of an over-coddled child.

And then that woman. That woman.

She leapt up the stairs two, three at a time.

She had a first in Engineering from Imperial. She’d flown at the helm of a Boeing 747. And that history translated to something. It did. It translated to more than being the mother of his child, the mistress of his house, a janitor and nurse and secretary revolving around him and facilitating his life. All while he was doing what? What was he doing with that woman?

She stood outside his study, her breaths tumbling out, one on top of the other.

She could hear him inside listening to Miles Davis. In his own space, sipping his wine, perusing those damn papers and oblivious to her.

She opened the door.

‘Oh fuck! Nasrin, what the fuck!’

She closed it again. It was a measured response; a dignified response to the undignified posture of her husband, hunched over the lewd images on his screen.

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