A Wayward Game by Pandora Witzmann Page A

to be too uncomfortable; if you’re
unlucky, like Neil and me, it’ll choke the life slowly out of
you.
    Perhaps James
Sallow felt something like this while he was watching Diane’s belly
swell, coming home and watching a woman pattering around in his
sterile kitchen and lying down on his bed, a woman who had no
intention of leaving. He always considered himself a case apart, a
member of an elite. It wasn’t for him, the plodding business of
tending to a marriage and raising kids – not when he had the money
to have as much sex, as many women and adventures, as he wanted.
He’d walked blindly into his relationship with Diane, without much
thought for the consequences, and then he saw the prison door
swinging shut on his life. And perhaps that sense of panic and fear
drove him mad, and spurred him to do something he would never
normally have done. If that’s the case, then I can almost – almost – understand him. Because I remember times when I
felt imprisoned too, and how I’d have done almost anything to break
free.
    I wouldn’t have
killed someone, though. I would never have done that.
    By my side,
Neil stirs and sighs, cutting the thread of my thoughts.
    “You don’t know
what it means, to be a parent,” he says. “You don’t know what real
love is, until you have a child. You’d die for that person, without
question, without hesitation. If I had to jump off a tall building
or lie down on a railway line for my daughters, I wouldn’t think
twice about it. But, oh God, if there’s just one thing that does scare me, it’s the prospect of a slow, living
death.”
    “Me too,” I
say. I sit up, and hand him one of the glasses of wine that sit on
the bedside table. Sharing a drink after sex has become one of our
rituals. “What does that mean for you, though?”
    “Hard to say,
in general. In particular, though: marriage to a woman I don’t
love; pretending to be somebody I’m not; letting my life slip away
and trying to pretend that I don’t even care.”
    “You don’t have
to do it.”
    “Perhaps I do.
Perhaps that’s what’s best for my kids.” Neil takes a gulp of wine
– he’s been drinking a lot recently, I suspect – and grimaces. “I
often think, you know, that I’ve been a poor excuse for a father.
Working all the hours that God sends, and then going home to all
those arguments, and now not going home at all. Living in a
different part of the city, and nothing resolved. Not much to feel
proud of, is it?”
    “You’ve done
your best,” I say, and then, when he doesn’t respond, I add: “You
and your wife, then – is there any chance of a reconciliation?”
    He stares out
of the window – the storm is over, and a weak evening sun has
started to leak out from behind the clouds – and for a moment I
think he’s going to tell me to mind my own business. Then he
shrugs. “There’s a chance, I suppose. If that’s what she
wants.”
    “What do you want?”
    “I really don’t
know.” He takes another savage gulp of wine. “I left home so that I
could think things over. What a joke. I’ve been thinking for
months, and I still haven’t reached any conclusions. I don’t know.
I keep hoping she’ll make the decision for me.”
    “You have to
make your own decision.”
    He laughs,
utterly without humour. “You might have noticed that I’m the
passive type.”
    “You can’t
afford to be passive. Not now. Not in this.”
    He gives me a
narrow sideways glance, and for a moment I glimpse a side of him
that I rarely see: the detective, the man who picks at the seams of
human behaviour and human motivations. Suddenly, he is not the
gentle, unresisting man I think I know, but a stranger – a stranger
of great cunning and tremendous insight.
    “Really?” he
says, quietly. “If we were together, you and I – really together – that’s how you’d want me to be, isn’t it?”
    I give him a
long look.
    “No,” I say at
last. “No, it isn’t.”
    A taut silence
stretches