Lara Williams - Supper Club

Lina was the first. We met her in a caf with cloudy gray furnishings and a needless accumulation of potted plants. The tables were piled with magazines that had titles like Wheatsheaf and Gardenia, their covers featuring tanned girls with ribbony limbs, all pigtails and peasant dresses. One by one, Stevie turned them upside down. Lina messaged us from outside, and we watched her do it, crinkling her nose at the beginnings of rain.

Im outside.

Shall I come inside?

I mean, shall I meet you inside?

Where are you sat?

Sorry, I just hate not knowing where to sit.

Are you near the back window? I think I can see you.

Okay, I can see you. Im heading in now.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Lina had blond hair knotted over her shoulder. She wore a navy cord suit and a white silk shirt. Her bulky trainers were incongruous to her outfit. She explained she wears them to and from work but in the office is required to wear heels.

She worked as an office manager at an expensive hotel. It was reasonably paid; shed get a discounted Caesar salad in the hotel bistro for lunch, plus use of the steam room and sauna. But she worked a fifty-hour week and once got docked pay for having chipped her nail varnish on the tram. And watching all the rooms being used for affairs and, worse, for ordering sex workers, had made her paranoid about her husbands fidelity.

At first it was the middle-aged couples leering over the counter. Drunk and conspicuous, like we couldnt believe their audacity.

She wore a thin gold bracelet, which she rolled between her fingers. Spinning it in circles against her skin until it left a faint red mark.

Then it was the younger ones. Women asking which lift would take them to Room Thirty-three. Their eyes never really leaving the floor. Walking out of the hotel still adjusting their clothes.

Stevie and I made notes: me scribbling into a notepad, Stevie tapping at her phone. We didnt know what we were collating at that point, but the data felt urgent and indispensable. Linas round face turning pink.

But it was the sex workers who got to me. And the men who use them. These completely ordinary-looking men.

Linas obsession began with the women: eyeing the sizes of their waists, scrutinizing their faceswondering whether he might find them attractive. Shed think about the way they dressed, whether her husband might want her to dress like that. The women, of course, mostly werent sex workers, but to her they might as well all have been. These other women, with their lipstick and their lacquered hair. All offering something else, something new, something she never couldbeing in possession of just the one human bodyand trying to make a penny off it, too. She wondered whether she hated these women or if she was afraid of them. Whether there was a difference.

She became fixated on the idea that her husband must be having an affair or using sex workersor that he eventually would. Shed follow him home from work, leaving her own work early, making up doctors appointments or dentist checkups, taking Ubers across town. Shed sit on the other side of the square outside the recruitment agency where he worked, having already taken note of the colors he was wearing that morning in order to better spot him. Shed follow him on the opposite side of the street, a few feet behind, her gaze fixed on him diagonally across the road. Shed trail him into shops on the way home from work, ducking behind the bread counter in Tesco. Once she held an especially large watermelon out in front of her head so she could walk past him undetected and check the contents of his basket (Jazz apples, cooked ham, Ritz crackers). She would trace him all the way to the train station, where he would sometimes stop for a drink at the station pub, not telling her, saying he had to work late; and if he was lying about this, then what else was he lying about? Dishonesty, she felt, was a spectrum; you might be on the less dangerous end, but you were still on it, prone to slip up, slide further along, depending on the circumstances.

She wouldnt stop until she had followed him all the way to their door, and then she would crouch down, sometimes crawl on her hands and knees, hiding behind the brick wall that fronted their home. She would wait there for thirty minutes, sometimes an hour, until she was sure, until she was absolutely certain, he wasnt going back out.

Once he had gone to bed, she would stay up late to devour his Internet activity: scrolling through his history after hed fallen asleep. She installed a keystroke logger on their downstairs desktop, finding out all his passwords and accounts. When her husband used the bathroom or showered in the morning, or popped out to buy a pint of milk, she would check his phone, reading his texts, looking at his photos, reviewing his outgoing calls. She learned what kind of pornography he liked and that sometimes he looked up his old girlfriends on Facebook. But no sex workers. Never sex workers. She began feeling almost resentful at his inactivity, thinking about all the well-dressed businessmen who ordered champagne and chateaubriand who wouldnt patch through their wives telephone callsdid he really think he was better than them?