Free With or Without You by Helen Warner Page A

stairs.
    ‘Jesus, babe,’ he came into the bathroom to find Martha hunched over the toilet bowl. ‘What’s brought this on?’
    Martha continued retching. Finally, she finished and reached up feebly to flush, panting with exhaustion and gulping furiously.
    ‘I brought you some nice cold water,’ Jamie held the glass out towards her.
    Before he knew what was happening, Martha had swung around and punched the glass out of his hand, causing it to smash into dozens of pieces against the wall and the water to explode like a bomb
all over the bathroom. ‘Take your fucking water and fuck off out of here!’ she screamed at him, her eyes blazing with fury.
    Jamie recoiled in horror. He had rarely seen Martha lose her temper. ‘Martha!’ he yelled back. ‘What the hell’s wrong with you?’
    In response, a long, low wail emitted from somewhere deep inside her and she slumped down onto the slate floor, either unaware or unconcerned by the shards of glass that were everywhere. Jamie
went cold inside as fear gripped him. Was she having some kind of breakdown?
    ‘Why . . .’ she began in a quiet yet malevolent voice, ‘. . . don’t you go and take a look at your filthy fucking computer screen?’
    ‘Oh my God.’ Jamie knew immediately what he would find as he ran into the study. There on the screen of his laptop was a colour photo of him having sex with Debra. ‘It’s
not what you think,’ he started to say to no-one in particular as he reached for the delete button.
    ‘I’ve seen them all,’ said Martha in a strange, detached voice, coming into the study behind him. ‘So it’s no use deleting them.’
    Jamie closed his eyes to try to block out what was on the screen and continued to press the delete button furiously. How the hell had those photos stayed on the computer? He was sure he had got
rid of them as soon as they were downloaded. He thought for a minute he might be sick himself. ‘Oh God, oh God,’ he muttered, his whole body shaking with shock. ‘Martha, baby,
please believe me, it’s not what you think . . .’
    ‘Fuck off, Jamie.’ Martha sat down at her own desk with her back to him.
    ‘Martha! Listen . . .’
    ‘No,’ she said, in that eerily calm voice that was scaring the hell out of him far more than if she had ranted and railed. ‘I won’t listen to anything you have to say any
more. Let’s get the children off to school. And say a proper goodbye to them because you won’t be here when they get home this afternoon.’
    ‘No!’ Jamie cried in an agonised voice, dropping to his knees in front of Martha. ‘Oh God, please don’t let this be happening. Please, Martha, please listen to me. It was
nothing. It meant nothing . . . I don’t know, it just . . .’ he clasped his hands together in a pleading gesture. ‘Please, baby, listen, I . . .’
    ‘You’re a cheating bastard,’ she said coolly, finally turning around to face him and looking at him with eyes that said she despised him. ‘You used the camera I bought
you for Christmas to photograph yourself screwing your whore while I went out to work to support you and the children. Christ, your mother would be so proud,’ she added, causing him to flinch
more than if she had actually stabbed him. His mother had died the previous year and Jamie had been utterly devastated by her loss. Her death had been sudden and unexpected and the shock had left
him reeling for months.
    ‘Oh my God!’ he whimpered, as the tears began to course down his cheeks. ‘Martha, please, please believe me. I love you so very much . . . I love you and the children . .
.’
    ‘Yeah, course you do,’ she snarled, still fixing him with a look that chilled him to the core. ‘Devoted husbands and fathers always photograph themselves screwing other women
while their wives are at work and their kids are at school, don’t they? You love us
so
much that you were quite happy to put our happiness, our security at risk for the sake of a
fuck with