Free Swimming Upstream by Ruth Mancini

thing. Martin sat up and
shook his head.
    “It’s none of your business,” he said, quietly.
    Then he left the room.
    It was still early, and there was no sound from upstairs. I
found some paper in my handbag and scribbled a note to Catherine. I left it on
the kitchen table and slipped out of the front door. The street was empty apart
from a few cats and a paperboy doing his rounds. I limped to the end of the
road and stood on the corner, and looked in both directions. I could see a
newsagent and a grocer’s shop at the bottom of the road that I recognised. I
realised that I knew where I was, at the top of Cherry Hinton High Street and
Fulbourn Road. I spotted a phone box on the corner and started towards it,
pulling my purse out of my bag to check if I had change.
    Suddenly, I heard a whistle, looked up and saw my
father walking down the street towards me. I stopped in my tracks and stared at
him but he didn't seem to notice me. He opened a gate further up the street and
disappeared up the pathway. I continued to stand there, rooted to the pavement,
holding my breath while time stood still. The gate opened and the postman came
back out. It was the postman. It wasn’t my father. Of course it wasn’t my
father. How could it be?
    “Morning, love,” said the postman, cheerfully, as
he passed.
    “Morning,” I replied, in a whisper.
    When I got home the house was cold. I switched the
heating on but the boiler had gone out in the kitchen.After a couple of
indifferent flicks at the pilot light, I gave up on it. I made myself a cup of
tea and sat in the living room by the window with my jumper over my knees,
watching a couple of pigeons pecking away hungrily at the cracks in the
pavement outside. My stomach churned, demanding food, but I couldn't think of
anything I wanted to eat. I couldn't think of anything at all, except that I
wanted Larsen back. I couldn't remember what could have been so bad, bad enough
for me to give him up. I thought of all our arguments and longed for even that.
Anything had to be better than this. As Sinead O’Connor had so pertinently
reminded me, nothing compared to him. It was that simple. He was Larsen. Nothing
- no-one - compared to him.
    I sat curled up in the chair until my toes and my
nose were numb, then climbed wearily up the stairs and into the bedroom. I
pulled the curtains to shut out the light, pulled off my jeans and crawled
under the heavy feathery folds of the duvet.

5
    Larsen had been gone for nearly three months when Marion
and Doug threw a party at their new flat on Chesterton Road.
    “You’ve got to come,” Doug had insisted on the
telephone. “We never see you these days.”
    On the evening of the party I took a taxi to the
address he’d given me. I knocked on the door and took a deep breath. Doug
answered. He put his arms around me and squeezed me tight.
    “How are you?” asked Marion, as I entered the
kitchen.
    It was hard to judge whether this was an
invitation to tell her how I was coping without Larsen, or just the standard
British pleasantry, to which the response “Fine. And you?” would prompt another
“Fine,” and allow her to get her drink and go back into the living room.
    “Oh, fine,” I said, watching her. Something about
Marion’s face told me that she had rather hoped I wasn’t fine at all. She was
the sort of person who would slow right down to look at a car crash.
    “Drink?” she said. She tipped a three litre wine
box onto its side and squelched the remains out of the silver paper and into
two glasses.
    “So,” she said, finally, “How's things between you
and Larsen?”
    “Well, we've split up,” I said. I knew that she
knew that. I was just hoping that if I started from the very beginning, someone
might come into the kitchen and interrupt us before I had to say anything very
much else.
    “I know that.” Marion looked confused. “I was just
wondering if, you know…” she trailed off.
    “No.” I shook my head. “If