Free Wishful Thinking by Jemma Harvey Page B

office.
    â€˜D’you really want to know what I think,’ said Georgie, ‘or would you rather I told you polite lies?’
    â€˜Lies,’ I said. ‘Definitely. I’m being paranoid. Please don’t make it worse.’
    â€˜If you really thought that,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t have told us. The duplicate cork is just the clincher. There’s also the circumstantial evidence. You go away for the weekend, he refuses to accompany you, then when you come back he turns up the volume on your romance. Classic compensation behaviour. Motivated by guilt or simply the desire to keep you sweet. He’s got himself a cushy number, living rent-free in your flat. You can bet he doesn’t want to screw it up.’
    â€˜He pays me rent! I mean, he pays towards expenses – I can’t ask him for rent, he’s my boyfriend. That’s – that would be crass . . .’
    â€˜How much?’ Georgie demanded inexorably.
    â€˜As much as he can afford! Look, it varies. He doesn’t earn a lot; idealists never do.’
    â€˜ How much ?’
    â€˜About fifty a week . . .’
    â€˜And how much is your mortgage?’
    â€˜Don’t you criticise my financial management,’ I retorted, rallying. ‘You’re the one with the monster credit-card debt.’
    â€˜It doesn’t matter what he pays you,’ Lin interceded. ‘What matters is whether he’s seeing someone else. I think Georgie’s being awfully cynical, but—’
    â€˜But?’
    â€˜You’re worried,’ Lin said simply. ‘And you’re not paranoid. You need to know whether there’s something worth worrying about.’
    â€˜In other words,’ said Georgie, ‘time to get sneaky.’
    Lin demurred at this. For form’s sake, so did I. I hated the idea of searching his drawers for love-letters (does anyone write them any more?), or stealing a look at his bills (probably uninstructive: he was too broke to be extravagant), or hacking into his PC to check his e-mail. I couldn’t bear the vision of myself prying, and spying, and being jealous and pathetic and sad. At the same time, I was jealous, or at least twitchy, and only the truth would sort it out. If I really wanted the truth. And the phantom of a me who shrank from unpalatable facts and preferred to live in a dreamworld so I could keep my faithless boyfriend was even more pathetic than my paranoia. It was almost a relief to let Georgie, who has never had scruples about anything, ride rough-shod over mine.
    â€˜Get his mobile phone,’ she suggested. ‘Check for text messages. It won’t take a minute.’
    â€˜He doesn’t leave it lying about much.’
    â€˜You don’t need much. Grab it when it’s on recharge.’
    So I turned sneak. He always left it charging up overnight, and I would creep into the living room when he was asleep and check it out. For several nights there was nothing. In desperation, I really did go through his drawers, but I only found the sort of things that you usually find in men’s drawers – solitary socks, crusty underwear – and this, though unpleasant, was hardly incriminating. There wasn’t even a porn mag: he had a soul above such things. I wanted to feel reassured, but I didn’t.
    I started to read hidden meanings into every nuance of Nigel’s manner. If you’ve been there, you’ll know how it feels. You look at the other person, and you tell yourself everything’s all right: he’s just been a bit grouchy lately, he’s under pressure, work problems, he’s too tired or too stressed for lots of sex, are you really going to write off the relationship because of a champagne cork which wasn’t even real champagne? He keeps getting back late, but that doesn’t mean a thing. And then one night it’s very late, and he crashes out without a word, and you