The Hole

Chapter Two

Sally and Jerry met seven years ago in ninety three. She’d been twenty six, he, twenty one. She was escaping from a disastrous three year marriage and he was living day to day without a care in the world, as only twenty one year old men can. His freshness and vitality had intoxicated Sally after the claustrophobia of marriage and, even though she knew it was no more than candy, she’d gone after him; keen for light relief. 

They met in a pub, The Holly Bush, one of the few remaining in the city centre that had not been ruined by the tasteless make-overs that so many others had fallen victim to. Access to the bar was by a steep, narrow flight of stairs and the place could still boast a decent juke box. The two of them had been standing by the bar; each separated from the group of people they’d arrived with; each of them totally unaware of how their life was about to change. 

Sally hadn’t purposely gone out to trap him, but still, he hadn’t stood a chance: with her long, curly, ash-blonde hair, her height – five eight, and exceptionally good looks, she was all a young man could wish for. She also had a stunning figure: a proper one: full and athletic rather than the desperately hungry, poorly look that was currently the vogue in the fashion world. It was Jerry staring stupidly at her breasts that had sparked their relationship. 

“Are you thinking of buying or just browsing? Sally said. 

Jerry looked up at her, startled. “Eh? … What?” 

“Then I’II have a Brandy.” 

Sally was no vamp, but the few drinks she’d had earlier and the obvious age difference had given her a confidence she was unused to. She’d only been on her own a few weeks and still felt bitter in general towards the male population. She didn’t want to be mean to the young feller, but she didn’t think some good natured teasing would do him any harm; probably give him something to fantasise about when he got home alone later, she thought. 

“You want anything in it?” he said. 

“Sorry?” His question had caught her by surprise. She’d expected him to scuttle away and find a less aggressive part of the bar to drink. 

“Do you want anything in your Brandy – lemonade or orange, maybe?”

“You’re buying me one?” 

“Well, you asked.” 

“I’II have it neat then.” 

“Neat,” he said, though Sally wasn’t sure if it was in confirmation or comment. “BRANDY!” he bawled across the bar at a youth wearing black jeans and a white shirt and chatting to a couple of under-age girls farther along. “When you’re ready,” he added. 

He paid for the drink and then handed Sally the glass. He sipped at his Guinness. 

“You with anyone?” he asked, wiping froth from a less than impressive moustache. 

At first she thought he was talking about relationships and considered telling him how she was separated from her husband, but then realised he was referring to more immediate matters when he followed it with: “Because I fancy a sit down.”

“Oh,” she said. “Er, yes, I’m with that hen party over there. But let’s sit in the corner where it’s quieter.” 

“Okay,” he said, and walked off without waiting. Sally shook her head and followed. She found him mopping up spills with ragged beer mats. “That’s the only thing about town,” he said. “No-one ever cleans the tables. By half eleven it’ll be swimming in here. At least they have mats. endangered species.” 

Sally sat down opposite and gave him a quick once over, being careful not to let him see her doing it. He had shoulder length, curly black hair and wore clothes that were, frankly, twenty years out of date: flared jeans (she didn’t think you could even buy those now), granddad shirt and baseball boots. He was almost pure nineteen seventies. “Who did you come with?” she asked. 

He stopped his cleaning activities and looked at her face. He was handsome, she thought, in an ugly sort of way. It was the darkness of his eyebrows and stubble. 

“I’m with the stag party in the other room. They’ve stopped talking about football and how many girls they’ve shagged and are onto the pouring beer over each others heads now.”

“And you don’t like that?” 

He grinned and looked like a naughty schoolboy. “Not the football or beer spilling.” 

“Shagging’s alright then?” 

She’d gone too far, she knew. He hung his head and she could see the redness of his neck even through the tangle of shiny dark hair. “Sorry,” she said. “Not nice of me.” 

“That’s alright,” he said. “My fault for being shy. I’m working on it.” 

That made her laugh. He looked offended at first, then puzzled. Eventually he started to laugh as well. Before long they had a good old infectious double act going; as soon as one stopped they would look at each other and then start all over again. Others in the pub began to stare. 

When they eventually managed to stop they heard a huge roar from across the room. They both looked over, towards the three tables that Sally’s hen-party occupied. A heavy-set girl was standing on the centre table, wobbling dangerously, with her blouse pulled high over her head to reveal an industrial-looking, cream-coloured bra doing its best to support a bosom of Herculean proportions, even though Hercules did not own a bosom. For all the lasciviousness and overt sexuality, it was, nevertheless, an aggressive stance and the look on her face suggested that she was inviting a challenge. 

“They look like quite a handful,” Jerry said. 

Sally snapped him a questioning glance. 

“Your friends, I mean,” he said, turning a deep red for the second time. 

Sally laughed. She liked him. “They are,” she said. “They’re all talking about clothes and sex. I don’t think they’ll get around to pouring drinks over each others heads but they will start throwing the vitriolic acid around soon.”

“Sounds nasty.” 

“Oh, it will be. They’ve known each other years, some of them; grew 

up together. There’s that much envy, jealousy and resentment bubbling just under the surface that when it inevitably erupts it won’t be safe to be in the same pub.” 

“So where shall we go then?” said Jerry. 

Sally was taken aback by how natural it sounded.

“We can go to my flat if you like.” She’d said it without thinking. It seemed totally the right thing to say. 

ii

Three hours later they were sitting up, side by side, in Sally’s single bed. Jerry’s retro clothing was lying crumpled in the doorway, Sally’s dress was at the foot of the bed, her underwear almost within reach. 

“Well, that was nice,” said Jerry. “Bit of a surprise.” 

“Not as much as it was to me,” said Sally. “I thought I’d finished with men.” 

“Oh, you’re not going to talk about women together to try and get me going again are you? Cause even though I’m not that old, I need a drink and a snooze first.” 

Sally reached under the covers. “Liar,” she said.

“To be any good,” he added . 

“I’ll get a drink then,” Sally said, and slipped out of bed. 

She imagined him watching her bare behind as she tip-toed into the living area and rummaged in a cheap, veneered cabinet that held books and glasses. The top supported a small hi-fi. She then stretched up to put a CD into the unit and then she was walking back towards him, a bottle of wine in one hand and two wine glasses in the other. She felt a deep thrill at the way he was looking at her. She wasn’t at all worried that he would now know that the ash-blonde should have been a shade or two nearer red. 

“God! You look terrific,” he said, as she sat crosslegged in front of him. “I might not need that drink after all!” 

Sally handed him a glass and peeled the foil from the bottle. “Make the most of it. Passion is pretty short lived, believe me. Things soon get ordinary. A few weeks like this and my bare arse would hold less interest to you than a slice of mouldy cheese.”

“I  wouldn’t mind finding…” He was interrupted by a deep, sonorous heartbeat booming from the tiny speakers. “Hey! Dark Side of the Moon.” 

“I thought you’d like it.” 

“How did you…? Oh, the clothes.” Jerry smiled. “I’ve a big brother. Ten years older. I suppose it must just rub off.” 

“Big brother, eh? Much bigger?”

“Oh, yeah. Married, three kids, life’s over.”

“Tell me about it,” said Sally.

“So how come you’re…?”

“What?” 

“Well, you don’t need me to tell you you’re pretty. I wondered why you were living in this little flat. I’d have thought…” 

“Married?” she said, plunging the thread into the cork. “I am.” 

A look of horror filled Jerry’s face. 

“Don’t worry. I’ve left him. I live here alone.” 

His sense of relief was almost palpable. “Didn’t get along then?” he managed, though Sally guessed how shaken he’d been for a second.

“Three years of hell,” she said. “Not something I talk about.” She pulled hard and the cork slid slowly out with a satisfying plop. She saw his eyes shift quickly to her breasts as they reacted to the sudden movement. “Hold your glass steady, I’ll pour you some wine.”

Jerry held his glass out. His hands were shaking. “Any kids?” he said. 

“No, thank God.” 

“Not keen on them?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” She filled his glass and then her own. Took a sip from hers. “I think I might like to have them one day. I just think myself lucky that I was able to escape the marriage without the complication of children. It must be a nightmare, all that custody and who loves mummy and who loves daddy stuff.”

“It’s not so bad.” 

Sally looked at him. Surely he hasn’t been through it; not at his age. He noticed her puzzled look. 

“My mum and dad,” he said. “When I was seven. They tell me that I was devastated; that I cried for days; even started wetting the bed again. To be honest, all I remember is being excited about the new place where dad was going to live. And I liked Trish, the woman he was moving in with. I think kids are more resilient than they’re given credit for.” 

“Drink your wine,” said Sally. 

“I’ve never had red wine before,” he said, almost apologetically, and then sipped it, grimaced, then downed the lot. “I suppose I could get used to it.” 

“Not if you drink it like that you won’t,” she said, filling it up again. She sipped at her own and then slipped beneath the covers.

“Hey!’ Jerry shouted, attempting to hold his glass still. “What’re you doing?” 

Sally never did get the stains out of the sheets. They lived together in that flat for a year and then bought the house on the hill. They never married, didn’t see a need to, and were perfectly happy for six more years – right up until the day they found the hole in the vegetable patch. 

iii

Sally moved forward into the darkness cautiously. The torch beam refused to penetrate more than a few feet. Served only to confuse what she was looking at; like headlights in fog. She called out: 

JERRY! JERRY! WHERE ARE YOU?” 

She stopped after taking a few steps and listened. There was nothing. She turned and looked back at the candle in the jam-jar. Despite the fact that she’d moved less than twenty feet, it was little more than a dim glow. Everything felt wrong. She retraced her steps as quickly as possible.

“Scaredy cat Sally,” she said to no-one in particular, breathing heavily as though she’d run. She looked up the shaft at the sky. It was a dull grey instead of the bright, spring blue that she knew it was outside. Also, there were no sounds. When she’d been ransacking the shed she’d heard electric mowers and hedge trimmers, and the kids from over the back were having some sort of army game which involved lots of screaming and impersonations of machine guns. Now, she could hear absolutely nothing. 

What to do? Climb back out and get help? Go back into the tunnel and look for Jerry? One part of her insisted that she needed help; that it would be foolish to follow alone. But another part, the part that she trusted, the part that reacted to gut feelings and emotion, reminded her that Jerry might be lying almost within reach. It had only been a matter of seconds between his moving away from the shaft and the moment when he no longer answered her. Whatever had happened to him had happened in that short time. He might only be a few yards away, maybe even trapped, hurting. She knew what she was going to do: she was going to master her fears and follow. After all, what could go wrong in an old tunnel? She was a grown up; she knew there was no such thing as monsters and that creepy crawlies could never hurt you; not in England at any rate. 

She turned away from the depressing daylight above, shone the torch back into the tunnel and gave herself a metaphorical shake up and down. 

“Come on, girl,” she said. “Break a leg.” Then she got moving. The darkness didn’t seem as bad now that she actually had some resolve. Sure, it was gloomy, she thought, but she could still see a yard or two in front. It smelled okay, too. Sort of fresh, in a stale kind of way. She smiled at her own ridiculous thoughts. She counted her steps and didn’t stop until she reached thirty. Then she turned again. Her stomach did a little flip when she saw that the tunnel behind her was completely black. There was no sign of the candle flame or the light from the shaft and yet she was certain that she’d been walking in a straight line. She let the torch beam play across the floor, mainly to check that she wasn’t walking in anything disgusting, and was horrified to see that, only ten or fifteen feet back, she’d narrowly missed plunging down another hole; there was a metal cover half on and half off the opening. She quickly walked back and shone the beam down. It was just about big enough to squeeze into but that’s exactly what it would have been: a squeeze. Jerry had once gone pot-holing and told her when he got home about a hole that he’d watched one of the guides go down . 

“No bigger than a dinner plate,” he’d said, in disbelief. “There was no way I was following him in there. He couldn’t even move properly; had to put his arms in first and then scrabble along like a snake. I saw his wet-suit ruckling up as it rubbed against the rock. They must be out of their minds.” 

And I’d have to be out of mine to try and go down there, she thought, especially in my condition. 

But she didn’t know for sure what “her condition” really was, did she? She told herself that the feeling of guilt she had for risking more than her own life was unfounded – as yet. 

She heaved the metal cover back over the tiny shaft where it fell into place with a dull clang and then she continued back along the tunnel. 

Periodically she called his name, though this only added to the suppressed fear that something was dreadfully wrong. She told herself that she didn’t have to shout, that she would bump into him any second now – any second. And when she did, boy, would he get a bollocking. 

“You’re in the shit, Jez,” she said. “If you’ve any sense you’ll come out right now and get this over with.” 

The lightheartedness of her tone didn’t fool her. Jerry sometimes did stupid things, insensitive things; after all, he was a man, that’s what they’re best at, but this was more than stupid. He knew he shouldn’t have gone wandering away without at least discussing it with her. Even shouting up: 

“Hey! I’m just gonna take a look up here. It’s not worth you coming down.” 

Even that would have been more acceptable. To just wander off, and to ignore her calls when she knew he must have still been able to hear her; that was completely unlike him. He sent her crazy half the time with his habit of late, late, late nights, his almost psychotic hypochondria and his obsession with seventies music, but in all the seven years they’d been together he had never once hurt her or caused her distress on purpose. Walking away the way he had was just not like him. 

And he’d been ill, she thought. He said he had a hangover but maybe it wasn’t that; maybe his hypochondria finally let him down and there was really something wrong with him. His behaviour certainly hadn’t been normal. 

Sally stopped walking. She’d forgotten to start counting again, but she knew that she’d walked a good distance: at least to the end of their road. Plus the darkness was changing. It was becoming blacker, and therefore, paradoxically, clearer where the torch beam fell. 

She could make out the arched brick wall and the slightly concave floor. It was certainly like a sewer but up here? Their house was at least a hundred feet above the level of the city, maybe even two hundred. Why would there be sewers like this beneath where they lived? It just didn’t make sense. 

“Jerry, stop pissing about. I’m getting angry now.” 

That was when she heard him scream. 

iv

At first she thought it came from in front of her, that’s why she started running forwards, but then there was a sort of echo effect and she felt that it might have been from behind. She stopped and listened to the absolute silence and had to accept that she hadn’t a clue which way to go. 

“JERRY!” she yelled, rising in pitch at the end of his name, but there was no reply, no other sound at all. She tried to comfort herself that the scream hadn’t been the blood-curdling, terror-stricken kind that came from the old Hammer films or even the new, slicker but lesser, slasher films. It wasn’t a word but more a sort of cry of surprise; as though he’d fallen or bashed his knee or head. The sound created images of bruised bones and egos rather than steaming entrails and empty eye-sockets. Still, she thought, it had been a scream, and it had been Jerry. 

The short run had left her breathless but also, the rush of adrenalin had sharpened her senses and she could see better than before. Either that or there was some residual light down there. As her breathing steadied she decided to try an experiment. First she checked that the lighters and candles were within easy reach and then she closed her eyes. She waited for a few seconds, seconds in which she could imagine that she was standing in their bedroom and that everything was fine; or that she was back in the flat, revelling in the ecstasy of sexual abandon. But really she was just waiting for her pupils to dilate beneath her lids. She bit her lip and turned off the torch. She kept her eyes closed for a few seconds more and then opened them. 

She was right. There was light. And with it she sensed that same smell that Jerry had spoken of. “Not unpleasant”, he’d said. That was as near as she could get too. Slightly sweet perhaps, almost as though the air was being purified and delicately scented but not with anything like those appalling air fresheners that came in aerosol cans. “The only thing in the world that can make shit smell worse than it already does”, Jerry had once said in the supermarket, loud enough to make Sally blush more than she’d laughed. Her smile at the memory slid off her face as she suddenly, desperately, wanted him back to make her laugh now. 

She clicked on the torch and started to walk again, trying to ignore the nagging feeling that she was going the wrong way. 

“There is only one way,” she said. “So this is where he must have gone.” But even her spoken words couldn’t brush away the certainty inside her that insisted she was not following Jerry but walking away from him. It was an irrational feeling but it persisted. 

She played the torch beam around the walls and floor and ceiling constantly, searching for some clue as to what the place was. For the most part it was just old bricks, like a Victorian train tunnel or, she suspected, exactly like the sewers that Jerry went down occasionally at work. The reminder that this would be familiar to him made her feel a little easier (though it did nothing to dispel the feeling of wrongness). It was as she was thinking about Jerry’s job and the sort of places he must see that the texture of the walls changed. At first the bricks began to look less well cared for – odd ones missing and occasionally, patches of cement filling a larger space. Suddenly the whole structure became concrete. Solid, smooth concrete. Sally put her left hand out and dragged it across the surface. It was so flat, so even, that she suspected it was one of those huge pipes that are buried deep into the ground. Massive, engineered structures. But there were no joins. It was as though someone had come down and plastered the entire surface with cement. It was her attention to the walls and ceiling that nearly caused her to fall down another hole. This time a huge one. Afterwards, as she stood shaking, looking into its fathomless depth, she couldn’t think of one good reason for her having stopped when she did. If she hadn’t stopped, then she would have been straight in. And there would have been no getting out again. 

But the hole was more than that: it was a chasm before her. The entire floor and part of the wall simply disappeared. The gap stretched for what she estimated to be around fifteen feet in front of her. There was no way past. It would take half a dozen men with ropes and climbing tackle to even attempt the breach as there were no foot or hand-holds anywhere to be seen. Just a smooth, vertical drop, the bottom of which her torch could not illuminate. 

There was no way that Jerry had come past here, she thought. If he’d been this way then she would have met him on the way back by now. The possibility that he had fallen had not escaped her, she simply refused to acknowledge it, despite the cry that she’d heard. 

“That was not a falling down a hole in the ground scream,” she tried to assure herself. Even so, as she turned and started to retrace her steps, tears dripped from the end of her nose and fell silently onto the hard, unyielding floor of the tunnel. Sally had never felt so alone since the morning that she’d decided to finally leave John. 

v

It had been the 15th July. A Friday. They first met in December when she’d been twenty one and John was twenty three. Jerry would have been sitting his GCSE levels that year; he would have been sixteen. 

Sally and John were engaged for two years and he seemed a good catch, despite both their parents’ warnings that they were too young. “Too young at twenty five,” John had scoffed. “We’re very nearly past it.” 

He had gone on to prove in the next three years that he was anything but “past it.” For the two year engagement everything had been wonderful. No more than half a dozen rows and those mainly over what film to watch, which pub to go in or who was going to get up first and turn the heating on and make a cup of tea (both sets of parents had made it abundantly clear that they disapproved of cohabitation which, of course, made it so much more enjoyable). It was only after the wedding, still the same day, but after the church, that Sally began to see John as he really was. Whether he had finally relaxed his guard or not she never decided for sure, but she had found him in the beer tent with Gloria Simmonds, her maid of honour. Gloria had her arms draped around his neck and her dress was unzipped almost to her bum in a most dishonourable manner. 

“Get this drunken bitch off me,” John had snapped. And Sally would have fallen for it if they hadn’t both started giggling. She’d stormed off and, half an hour later, the combined efforts of every married woman there convinced her that “all men were bastards” and that she could either “put up with it” or “dump the piece of shit right now” . 

John had been more successful. He’d turned on the charm and, with the help of a great deal of Champagne and the desire for the day to end well, she’d agreed to forget it. 

“Just a bit pissed,” John said. “Made a cheeky comment about being able to see half her tits and the mad cow tried to strip off. She’ll be throwing her guts up now in replace of the drunken shag she thought she was going to get off me.” 

They’d even laughed about it in bed that night in a damp hotel room in France. John slept soundly, happy that everything was smoothed over – Sally had lain awake most of the night, watching the stars, listening to the couple in the next room making love as though the end of their world had just been announced and trying to convince herself that hers hadn’t. 

Of course, her world wasn’t coming to an end, but she had made the wrong decision at the wedding. His behaviour became more and more intolerable. It was less than a week after they’d returned from the honeymoon that she smelled perfume on his shirt when he came in from work and before their first wedding anniversary he’d started to ring and say that a meeting was scheduled to go through the night and that he’d see her sometime the following day. By their second anniversary he wasn’t even trying to deny his affairs and had started demanding that she give him “the freedom that all red-bloodied males should rightfully be allowed”, because she “didn’t want to think she was married to a queer”, did she? It wasn’t long after that that he started to hit her; not hard, not hard enough to mark, physically, but hard enough to hurt. Sally had never spoken to anyone about those three years. She had no intention of speaking about them. She was ashamed of the mess that she considered was of her own making. She came out of the marriage feeling foolish and used and swore that she would never suffer the same again. She wasn’t sure even that she was interested in men anymore. She couldn’t detect anything inside her that suggested she might be attracted to women, though she would have gone with it had it been the case, and a couple of girls at work were actively encouraging her; but she also felt nothing when she was with men, even attractive men. 

vi

The Friday on which she decided to end that miserable marriage had been warm, very warm. There hadn’t been any prelude to her decision (unless the previous three years counted as that) but it was a Friday and John loved his Fridays. He would be in from work early, around four thirty, and he would expect his tea to be ready (despite the fact that Sally worked nine ‘til three thirty every day at the library). When he’d finished he would often try it on with her before he got ready to go out. At first she’d been happy to oblige, afternoon sex being almost as good as dinner time drinking in her opinion, but she soon realised that it was always before he had a shower. And, as she often suspected that he’d been with someone else when he eventually rolled into bed anywhere between two and six thirty Saturday morning, he made her feel as though she was something he had to wash off before he went putting it about on the town. It was her unwillingness to engage in this habit that had caused the hitting to accelerate. 

“I don’t know why you bother,” she’d said bitterly. “For how much attention you pay me you might as well toss yourself off in the shower.” 

“I don’t do that,” he’d bawled. I don’t HAVE to do that.” 

“Well that’s the only option available right this moment,” she’d said and stormed out. 

He’d had his shower and got changed. She listened to him bouncing about in a temper while she sat in the armchair downstairs with a Stephen King book, a cup of coffee and a bar of Bournville chocolate. Eventually the bouncing became less dramatic until she heard only the occasional squeak of floorboard. When she heard his steps on the stairs she glanced at the clock on the shelf. Six thirty. He’d be going up to the Rainmakers for an early start. Good, she’d thought. Get the bastard out as soon as possible. She was surprised when he came into the room and strode towards her. He only ever shouted “Bye” from the front door and he’d never apologised in all the time she’d been married to him. She put the book down and looked up just in time to register the pink blur of his hand before it slapped hard across her face. 

“Just something for you to think about before you make filthy suggestions like that again,” he said, and walked out. 

Sally had cried, even though it hadn’t hurt that much. And then she’d been furious because her tears had fallen on the book and fattened the pages. She’d thrown it across the room and never tried to finish it. The sentence she had been reading she would always associate with that first, totally unprovoked hit. 

It had gone from bad to worse after that and Friday became her most hated day. Where everyone else went around saying things like: “Thank God it’s Friday. Another day and I’d have topped meself.” Sally dreaded the day arriving. Conversely, her mood was always light and cheerful on Sunday evening at the prospect of getting back to work the following day and having a relatively trouble-free five days to look forward to.

“You’re fucking perverse,” he’d spat one Sunday night. “No-one, no-fucking-one likes Sunday. There’s something wrong with you.” 

Yeah, you, she’d thought, but had, by then, learned to keep her thoughts strictly to herself.

So it was that Friday in July that she’d been sitting in the library, tearing the front pages out of library books and stamping “For Sale – 90p” on the inside that she decided enough was enough. 

“Jasmine!” she shouted to the girl she worked with. “I have to pop out for awhile.” 

Jasmine came into the main part of the library, a tall skinny girl with short, black hair and a wicked sense of humour. “Everything alright, Sal? VD clinic again?” 

“No,” she said, forcing a smile. 

“Oh, God, Mrs Serious.” She walked over and leaned against the photocopier. “You’re not pregnant, are you? Because if you are, I’ll never speak to you again. We’ve been trying for ages and getting nowhere – well, when I say nowhere, we have been getting rather good at it, just nothing to show for our efforts; apart from the daft grins of course.” 

Sally just wasn’t able to make the effort required to maintain the humour. “I’m alright,” she said. “There’s just something I have to do and I’m not sure how long I’ll be .This is a one off, promise . I’m not developing any anti-social work habits. She kept her face averted so she didn’t have to look her friend in the eyes . 

Jasmine stooped down so that she could see her. Stared intently at her features. “You’re going to leave him, aren’t you?” she said in a hushed voice. “My God! You’re going to do it.”

    “I – I – I…”

“Good for you, girl, take all next week of if you want, I’ll cover for you. Best news I’ve heard in weeks – months – years.” 

Sally had left the library feeling light-headed and, surprising to her, excited too. 

vii

It had taken three tries with different firms before she found one that knew what she meant when she said she wanted a “nice” single flat. It was part of a huge house towards the south side of the city. It was very tiny but it was exactly what she wanted. Also it was furnished; “Simply” it had said on the blurb. She didn’t want to think too hard about that. 

The place turned out to be better than she expected. A small but well ordered living and cooking area with a tiny, doorless bedroom. A door would have made it unusable but, as she was planning on living there alone, what did it matter? It was better than a bed-sit, and more expensive too, but it was perfect. She moved in that same day and didn’t contact John for over a week. She took Jasmine’s advice and had a week’s sick leave (she didn’t expect the girl to lie for her) and used her boyfriend, Soloman, to drive her to her house in his plumber’s van while John was at work to pick up the few oddments that she really cared about. He never even noticed they went. She took very little. Mainly ornaments, toys from her childhood and photos. She’d accumulated absolutely nothing of sentimental value in the three years that she’d known him. When she did eventually contact him, five days after she’d left, she did it by phone.

“Hi, John, sorry to bother you at work…” 

“Where the FUCK are you?”

“…only I need a copy of the marriage certificate. Be a love and do us a photocopy will you. It’s the solicitor who says I need it.”

“Solicitor…? Marriage certificate…? What’s going on?” 

“Oh, come on, John. I thought I’d made it perfectly clear.”

“You’ve made nothing clear. When are you coming home?” 

Sally was delighted to hear a plaintive note in his tone. “I’m sorry, John? I am home.”

“Right!” he said. “Stay right there. I’m coming right now! We’ll sort this out!” 

“No, no, no, no, you don’t understand. I’m not at my old home. I’m at my new home. You really are a scatter brain, aren’t you. I bet you’ve completely forgotten that I’ve left you, you arrogant, pathetic, abusive piece of shit! Oh,” she added, reverting to her original patronising tone, “don’t forget that marriage certificate, will you?” She put the phone down before he had the chance to reply. They never spoke again. She got a copy of the certificate from the registrar and the next time she saw John was in the magistrate’s court and by then she was with Jerry.

Darling Jerry. He’d been a breath of fresh air. He was the exact opposite of everything that she’d had to endure with John. Jerry was exactly what she wanted from life. And now she’d lost him. She’d lost him in a dark, dirty hole in the vegetable patch of their back garden.