Free The Promise by Tony Birch

the street. We downed a few beers and threw small talk around before he earnestly rested a hand on my shoulder, like some old mate.
    â€˜You look like shit. I’ve seen this before, you know. The smoking and pacing around and the crash diet. Getting on the speed will fuck you up for life, my friend. Pretty soon your teeth will fall out and you won’t be able to shit.’
    â€˜Speed? I don’t know what you’re on about. I’ve never had a go at the hard gear. Got nothing to do with drugs.’
    â€˜Oh.’ He threw his head back, suddenly onto me. ‘It’s a girl. You’ve been fucked over by your woman.’
    He slowly shook his head from side to side.
    I downed a half a pot of beer, wiped my mouth and told him about how I’d woken in the morning, two weeks earlier, to Rachel’s goodbye note. He nodded knowingly as I spoke, patted me on the knee and said he understood what I was going through. He also claimed he knew a little more.
    â€˜I’ve been through this shit. She wants her space, she wrote? Yeah?’
    â€˜That’s all she wrote.’
    â€˜You know that’s a code word, don’t you?’
    â€˜Code for what?’

    â€˜Rooting. I’d bet my last pipe she’s been fucking another bloke.’

    The thought of Rachel sleeping with another man shocked me.
    â€˜No. It’s not like that,’ I answered, a little surprised that I was so quick to defend her. ‘She just needs some time to herself.’
    â€˜Whatever,’ he said, chuckling to himself. The drink was getting to both of us. ‘I’m telling you, a few months down the track you’ll run into her on the street, or in a café somewhere, and she’ll be with some fella, smooching like a honeymooner. It’ll be a bloke you already know. Or the face to go with the name of the fella she couldn’t stop talking about when she was having a feed with you, the lovely bloke always helping her out with stuff.You’ll front her and she’ll turn all red and bullshit to you that this thing between them has only just started.’
    Swooper looked into the bottom of his glass through one eye and spied a tall dark-haired woman who had just walked into the bar with the other.
    â€˜Don’t fall for her crap. Nothing worse than a woman making a fool of you.’
    He seemed to be talking from experience.
    â€˜You got a girlfriend of your own?’
    â€˜No, mate. I’m between women at the moment. Too busy playing the field.’
    We had a few more beers before I left him mumbling to one of the barmaids. I walked to the train station through the rain. I got off at my stop and it was still pouring. I was wet through and felt miserable knowing that I had nothing to look forward to but an empty house.
    Rachel had come back the weekend after she’d left me. She’d called the night before she came and ordered me to stay away from the house until the removal van she’d organised had loaded her stuff and driven away.
    â€˜You can trust me, Stephen. I’ll only take what’s mine.’
    Which happened to be almost everything we possessed between us.
    I hid behind a tree across from the house and watched as the van was loaded, until Rachel spotted me and marched across the road.
    â€˜I asked that you not be here, Stephen. This is harassment.’
    I sulked away, embarrassed, and didn’t stop walking the streets until I suddenly realised that I’d managed to get myself lost. When I eventually found my way home and put the key in the door I could actually hear the loneliness of the house. As I walked across the bare boards of the hallway – she’d rolled up the fake Persian and taken it with her – my footsteps echoed through the rooms.
    There were just a few sticks of furniture left in the house. Although I shouldn’t have been, I was shocked. I’d turned up at Rachel’s place two years earlier