Loose Thread

She loved his thick jumpers, with the aroma of his tobacco soaked into the old threads. She loved his lop-sided beard, his missing canine, craggy brow, crooked nose, and his eyes — those smoke-filled caverns that knew her well.

But the goodness in him, though tightly wound, could be unravelled by his temper. And when it did, it smothered her, like one of his thick-spun jumpers, shrunk in the wash, tight around her chest and neck.

His storm would pass, and her tears would dry. But if this was going to be their life, she thought, it was not good enough.

He should have seen it coming, and she should had done it sooner. Potato clumps clung to the shards of wet china as they smashed against the cottage’s stone walls. She scraped around for things she liked that were not his. It did not take long. She slung her carpet bag into the back of her car and slipped behind the wheel. His palms slapped and rattled the window as she turned the key. He raised his voice over the spluttering diesel engine, over the rising dust cloud, only giving up as she reached the end of the lane.

She knew not where she would go. Everywhere she knew, he knew too. Nothing, not even the road, was her own. She cursed herself, then him, and herself again for promising there to be no secrets. She longed for one now, an inky black cloak she could wrap around her shoulders. She noticed the encroaching dark sky. The wipers parried the rain to the edges of the screen, the same whipping motion again and again as she drove west, with no destination in mind.

She had to stop for fuel. Half-way across the forecourt, she stopped again. In the plastic window, cut off at the waist by red tops and coal bags, a woman was staring back at her, with the same grey hair and dark eyes, clutching her debit card, the quivering hand protruding from the deep sleeve of an oversized sweater.

She left it to soak, at the roadside, like their last supper’s dishes.