Page 48 of The Day Shelley Woodhouse Woke Up
‘Well, I don’t know what’s going on in the country, or the world. I don’t know about the latest celebrity scandals, which pop star is sleeping with which actor. I don’t know what I don’t know, because I don’t know what there is to know.’
‘Got it,’ he says. ‘I guess that must feel quite disorientating.’
That’s exactly right. I feel like I’m locked out of a secret, like everyone’s in on something except me. I always hated that feeling.
‘Can I help?’ he asks. ‘I could answer questions. Or just tell you things?’
‘Is Theresa May still the prime minister?’
‘No. You’ve missed three prime ministers, actually. Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and now Rishi Sunak.’
‘Boris Johnson? God.’
‘Yeah. Also, there’s been a pandemic.’
A pandemic? ‘Like the Spanish flu or something?’
‘Kind of. It’s called Covid-19. Thousands of people died. Hundreds of thousands.’
That term, Covid-19. It doesn’t feel completely alien. It feels like something I’ve heard before.
What am I doing? The thing I really want to know is what I did with the years between David’s attack and this one. Whether I got out. But Matt won’t know the answer to that, will he?
‘I need to know whether I’m still married to the man who tried to kill me seven years ago. I woke up so sure that I would end things, but now I find out that I’m seven years too late, and I don’t know what I did or didn’t do.’
‘Shelley, your ex-husband is in prison,’ he says.
I am very still, very quiet. Ex-husband.
‘I feel like everyone has been lying to me. Letting me think he was still out there, that he might come here at any moment. The doctors, nurses, Dee. Even you.’
He stands, and his chair makes an awful squeaking sound as it pushes back across the floor. ‘I’m sorry, Shelley,’ he says. ‘We all thought it was for the best, because you were so upset when we tried to tell you it was 2024.’
I try to reach for that. For them telling me, for me getting upset. But there’s nothing there.
‘I can see I’ve upset you,’ he goes on. ‘So I’ll go now. I’ll come back tomorrow, and you can let me know whether you want to see me or not.’
He doesn’t wait for an answer, starts walking away. I watch his back. There’s something about his gait. Resignation. Why does he care? Could it be that he’s developed feelings for me, the way I have for him? And if David is in prison, and my marriage is over, has been over for years, possibly, I don’t need to feel guilty about those feelings, do I? I am a free woman. I say it again, inside my head. A free woman. It’s like a pair of jeans I’m trying on, checking the fit. And it’s good. It’s sweet. So perhaps there are some things to be grateful for, among all this mess.
26
THEN
I’m getting ready to open up, Dee at my side. Something’s shifted a bit between us, in the months since I admitted to the violence in my marriage. I feel like she’s always watching me but, at the same time, she’s keeping me at arm’s length. We haven’t talked about it again. She’s tried, but I’ve always walked away or changed the subject. Sometimes I worry that we’ll never recapture our friendship, the way it was. But tonight, I’m not thinking about any of that. Things feel easy. She’s telling me about a date she went on last night, on her night off, with one of our regular customers, Liam.
‘I was looking forward to it. I mean, he’s a good laugh, isn’t he?’
I nod my agreement.
‘But he was so boring, Shell. I don’t know what happened.’
‘Boring how?’
‘Like, every single thing that came out of his mouth was about his job or an article he’d read about climate change or something.’
‘What is his job?’ I’m surprised to realise I don’t know.
‘He’s an IT consultant. God, I almost wish I’d been at work. At least I would have got paid for it,’ she says.
