Chapters Three & Four

18+ | Explicit content

Links to Chapter One and Chapter Two

—

Chapter 3

I’m in my Dad’s car – a metallic blue Golf VR6 – and we are flying. The overpass loops and climbs and my dad has floored the pedal. My head thumps back against the seat and my stomach churns and for a long moment I don’t breathe, giddy with thrill and fear. The awkward silence is broken without a need for speech. Usually I daydream as I sit beside him, or pick a wrecked fly on the windscreen and move my head to navigate it around objects outside. But the speed – for a breathless moment – breaks the spell.

That year, the music was always Springsteen. 57 channels and nuthin’ on. My dad would sing along to it in his baritone. Eventually, the narrator of the song shoots out the TV.

This was fitting, because we’re driving to the gun club. It’s in an industrial estate in Dewsbury, a shitty suburb of Leeds. The club consists of two separate spaces, divided by an alleyway. One is the range – dim, quiet outside of the constant gunshots. Lined by breezeblocks and sound-damping egg cartons, divided into lanes with simple booths for shooters – plastic-wool covered surface and sides. There’s a red light that comes on when you’re allowed to fire. Voices are hushed. Targets can be brought forward and back via electric switches and pulleys. This is where I learn life or death safety practices, discipline. One of the few things in life you can’t fuck around with.

The other space is the clubhouse: scratchy nylon carpets, coffee-stains, strip lighting. A long counter with a lot of guns on racks behind it. Couches, a TV that sometimes shows the Playboy Channel. Once, it showed semi-naked women in a pirate scenario, climbing the mast and swabbing the decks, cutlasses dangling from their sides. I told my mum about it when I got home and she questioned my father about its appropriateness. There are always men standing at the counter chatting. In the toilets there’s a condom machine I stare at when I have chance – ribbed, featherlight, flavoured.

Near the outer door is a little vestibule with a sit-in arcade machine I sometimes play on.

Here on this day is a girl. She’s about my age, 10. Tall and slim, with curly blonde hair. We smile awkwardly at first, then as the slow hours go by, we begin talking. We end up in the sit-in arcade machine, and I kiss her. Her lips are soft and pink and her hair frizzy under my fingers. When my dad tells me we’re leaving, I say goodbye to her and we smile at each other again.

—

Next weekend I go to a kid’s birthday party at a cinema. My girlfriend is there. She has dark-red hair, pale skin and a few freckles. She’s feline and dominant and has an acid tongue, and we often fall out. In the darkness I put my hand down her pants. There’s hair there, rough and crinkled and wiry. She pulls my hand away when I try to move it lower.

When I get home, my dad is back from the gunclub. He tells me that the blonde girl was back, she asked where I was.

‘What did you tell him?’ I ask.

‘That you were out with your girlfriend.’

—

4.

This was supposed to be a different book to the one you’re reading. I’d pitched it to my agent: It would be a Jon Ronson style look at infidelity. It would tell my own story, cleverly broken up – with irresistible cliffhangers – and the stories of other cheats of every background. I’d interview therapists and psychologists, the people who claimed to be able to help. Given that I lived in LA, I imagined that some of these would be whacky, and thus comic. I pictured myself driving out to a paradisical facility in Malibu and being broken down and healed again by an older woman with plastic surgery, who might even be strangely attractive.

Ultimately though, this would be a sincere effort to get fixed, to banish the demons and end my haunting by the woman I’d loved and lost. This would give the book its quest, and along with the sordid drama of my story, provide it with a propulsive engine.

The people I told about the book - a close friend, my sister - thought it was a great idea. At first, so did my agent. But then when my previous book didn’t sell as well as we’d hoped, falling into the trap of strong reviews/ weak sales that I knew so well from the music industry, he seemed to cool on the idea.

By that stage, it came as a relief. I’d struggled to find a way into the book. Everything I wrote felt wrong. Even though this seemed one of the most important parts of my life - the thing that had defined it, in some ways - I couldn’t find the tone.

I interviewed a couple of other cheats. I’d imagined this would be the hard part of the book, because surely people would be reluctant to talk about this most private and painful of subjects. I’d naively expected that speaking to therapists would be the easy bit: they, surely, would want to sell their wares.

In the end, it was the other way round. Perhaps like me, the people who’d cheated wanted to relive the excitement, replay the explicit images, sights and smells and secrecy; to pick at the trauma that resulted.

I found my first cheat on Mumsnet. She was a large, new world expat living in an east Anglian village, and we spoke by Zoom. She told me that she ‘had more degrees than was probably useful,’ and was the outwardly respectable type who ‘used to wear a lot of Boden clothes.’

In my mind, I’d imagined these stories would capture the dark thrill of infidelity. I’d even written a short fictional example for my pitch, which my agent had loved; a youngish woman in London, heading out into foul weather to go and meet her lover, her husband’s eyes cold as she made her excuses and left the flat.

The reality didn’t live up to the fiction. My real-life interviewee told me a story rooted in websites and social media. She’d met her lovers in hotel rooms during invented conferences, but she’d discovered them all on ‘married dating’ sites, and by flirting on Twitter. The picture she painted was of a woman spending more hours in front of a computer than actually having affairs.

I interviewed a close friend of my wife, who had an affair with a colleague. We’d attended her wedding in Tuscany. This took place just after my own life reached its lowest point, in what I only later recognised as a form of nervous breakdown. I remember being embarrassed to go to the swimming pool because, a month or so earlier, I’d cut my upper arm so deeply with a knife that two large scars remained.

I think we all knew that something wasn’t right in this woman’s relationship, that she had talked herself into settling with this man. When they got married, the couple already had a child together.

A year after the wedding, my wife told me that her friend was having an affair.

When I interviewed her, she spoke quickly and without inhibition. During Covid, her husband’s worst aspects had begun to dominate his personality. He sat around smoking weed all day, playing violent video games or watching conspiracy videos on YouTube. He tried to prevent his wife from being vaccinated.

She had grown closer to a man at work. They’d often been the only two in the office. They’d begun to speak to each other with a total, radical honesty that neither of them had ever experienced before. Perhaps predictably, it hadn’t taken long for this psychic intimacy to turn into a physical one.

When everything began to collapse and come out, she’d behaved with dignity.

‘It seems it all worked out now,’ I’d suggested, and she said that on the surface it had, but that she had so much guilt to live with. She’d taken her son’s father away from him, she said.

The man she’d cheated with had left his wife and children, something that clashed with everything he believed. I could see the trauma in her as she spoke. They weren’t living together yet, but they were officially a couple.

I wondered what kind of sex she’d had with this colleague of hers, in the office and the hotels they’d met in. I wasn’t getting what I wanted from these interviews. I didn’t really want to know about the stress, the tedious details common to all affairs. I wanted to know about what made it exciting.

This friend of my wife’s was an experienced city girl, she told me, and she’d taken a man from the country who’d married young as her lover. Had she shown him things, pushed at the boundaries, experimented with orifices and bodily fluids as I had?

But perhaps it’s just me. When I had my own terminal affair, the woman I cheated with told me: ‘It’s hard to find boys as filthy as you.’

When I was ten, I went on a school trip to Llandudno by bus. I sat beside my best friend on the journey home; a quiet, diligent British Chinese boy. I was carrying out an ongoing flirtation with a girl called Francesca at the time. I told my friend that I wanted to put my tongue in her vagina. He screwed up his face in disgust, utterly revolted.

‘Why would you want to do that?’ he said.

—