Ghosts in the Morning - By Will Thurmann Page 0,39

could go for a little walk.’

I cut into my roast beef and shuddered. It was cooked rare in the middle, there blood oozing from the flesh. I tugged at the muscle fibres with the knife, trying to cut around the bloody section. I was a good cook, I knew that this was the way it should be cooked, I knew meat should never be overdone, but I was no purist when it came to actually eating it. I liked my meat to be well done, I didn’t like to see a hint of blood.

A piece of sinew was twisted in the tines of the fork and I thought of the rugby player’s face. It had looked like raw beef, T-bone steak, I remembered the gristle and bone protruding through the sticky red mass. I closed my eyes. ‘You fucking fat cow’, that’s what he’d said, he’d thrown the words out like confetti, seemingly unaware that words aren’t confetti, sometimes words can be grenades, sometimes they can produce an explosion...

‘Andrea, are you alright?’ Graham said.

‘Er, yes, yes, I’m fine.’

The rugby player must have been doing the Movember thing too, I remembered he had the beginnings of a moustache, I had seen the downy hair mixed with blood and snot and bone...

‘You don’t look fine, Andrea, are you sure you’re feeling okay?’

‘I’m just a bit tired after my night out with Anita, that’s all, not used to a late night, I guess. Excuse me a moment, I just need to go for a quick pee,’ I said.

I dashed to the toilet, locked the door of the cubicle and threw up.

Chapter 10

The mobile phone stared up at me from the table, willing me to pick it up. It wasn’t mine, it was Graham’s, I really shouldn’t, spying wasn’t a good thing, but still...

Graham really must be out of sorts. Firstly, his change at the weekend, what with Sunday lunch and a walk on the beach, and this behaviour had continued for several days now, he had been far nicer, more attentive, than he had been in a long while. And now this; it was unheard of for him to forget to take his phone with him to work, I couldn’t remember one single occasion when this had happened before, he usually checked he had his phone before he worried about his keys.

There had to be a reason why Graham was acting like this, a reason why he was acting like he actually cared about me, about us as a family. I knew I was guilty of a high degree of cynicism but that didn’t mean it was misplaced. I knew that his head was normally full of Nikki, so why the sudden change?

I picked up the phone and saw that it needed a pass code to unlock it. I typed in the digits of Graham’s birthday backwards – I knew it would be the same as the Sky PIN number, Graham didn’t have the imagination to use anything else. It would be the same number for all of his bank cards too.

Hey, presto. I thumbed to the text messages and scrolled down. There were a few texts from Piers and from Harry, one of the guys that Graham played badminton with. There were also a few messages from ‘Work’. I shook my head and said ‘he must think I’m bloody stupid’ – his important work colleagues, the ones who would ring him, were in his phone by their own names, not some generic ‘Work’ caption. It had to be Nikki.

I clicked on the most recent ‘Work’ message.

Yes, Graham, I am seeing some1 else, so pls dont call again

I sighed. Things were beginning to make sense. I clicked on the previous ‘Work’ message.

I think we shld cool it a bit, U R married remembr!

So that was it. He must have phoned her after the “cool it” text and she had felt forced to confirm that she was seeing someone else. I could imagine how it had panned out; Nikki had started to pull away from Graham - maybe she’d had her fun, maybe he’d spent some money on her - but now the cold, harsh reality of the situation had sunken in. She had seen that she was wasting her time with an older, married man and she had decided to break it off. Perhaps Graham had started to get needy, I could sense the threat in her last text, or maybe she had genuinely met someone else.

But one thing was sure- it explained