Jerry started speaking while I was still standing, my back against the door. Anger shot the words out of his mouth.

  ‘I’ve read every single message between the two of you and I’ve looked at every single photo. I’ve sent myself screenshots so that I don’t forget what you’ve done, that you don’t talk my head in and convince me nothing happened, that it wasn’t so bad. You shag him in that storeroom? Or did you only try to?’ he asked me, his face twisted into ugly. ‘Hey? Hey, Shelley? … I won’t be surprised – you shagged me in a toilet, after all, and we only just met each other. That too long ago for you? You need some excitement and a fresher model to get your rocks off?’ His voice broke. ‘The other night not good enough for you? Or were you thinking of him?’ The anger in his voice was momentarily cracked by hurt. I was glad he didn’t know how close he was to the truth. ‘We’ve got kids, Shelley, two of them. You’re my wife. You are a mother. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? How could you do this to our family?’

  ‘I never …’ I tried to say something. That Wayde and I hadn’t had sex. That it wasn’t like that. It was me being stupid. It had nothing to do with being a wife or a mother, or maybe it did, but not in the way he thought. No matter how much I loved them, being their mother, being his wife, some days I missed feeling young. Could a man understand it? I thought many could – many cheat, after all – but maybe they wouldn’t accept a man’s excuse as being good enough for a woman.

  Jerry interrupted. It was not going to be his night to listen.

  ‘If you want us to work through this, you are going to fire him. You are going to fire him, right damn now, on that phone of yours. I’m going to watch you do it. No bullshit, no excuses, no tantrums, Shelley.’ Jerry spoke quietly, not shouting, as was our fight modus operandi. He didn’t want to wake the kids. This afternoon at the beach must have scared him too. ‘If you want me to even try to listen to you, you will never see him again. Not at the shop, no chat on your phone, no fucking surf lessons for the kids. Who even takes three-year-olds for surf lessons? They just learned to walk the other day. Or was that whole thing a cover to fool your idiot husband?’ he said, not waiting for me to reply. ‘I want no contact. Nothing. Nowhere. Never. From this day on I will look at your phone and your messages whenever I want, I will stop by at the shop whenever I want.’

  Quiet.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jerry. I didn’t mean for it to happen. I promise you the lessons for the kids were real.’ I went to sit next to him on the other end of the ottoman, a half-metre and my phone between us. I was dry-eyed, in shock. ‘It was just chaffing that got out of hand … I’ll tell you everything. We didn’t have sex.’ I didn’t say it was because Wayde stopped it from happening. Jerry seemed to know that because he didn’t react with any relief.

  ‘Unless you want to be with him, you are going to fire him right now. I don’t trust you, Shelley.’ Jerry looked at me in mirrored cupboard doors across from us. ‘And until I do – if I ever do – this is how it’s going to be. We all know … my mother knows, my brothers know, my friends know … Shelley always gets what Shelley wants. But here’s how it is: if you want me, if I mean anything to you, you will fucking fire that guy right now.’

  He handed me my phone.

  There was no choice.

  I did it.

  Me: Hi, I think things are not going to work out with you at the shop. I’m going to have to let you go. You don’t have to come tomorrow or any other time. I’ll talk to Di and get her to organise whatever money is owing to you. My kids are also not going to do surf lessons any more. Sorry.

  Jerry watched as I typed the message.

  I pressed the arrow to send.

  He took my phone from my hand, stood up, switched it off and stuffed it into his jeans pocket.

  ‘I’m going to keep this,’ he said, ‘make sure there aren’t any more messages between you and your candy crush tonight. For right now, I can’t stand seeing your face. I’m going to stay at Mervyn’s. I told him I have an eight o’clock meeting in town in the morning and I don’t want to sit in traffic. You can tell the kids the same thing. I’ll be home by the time Theresa gets them from school. Tomorrow night you’re going to tell me every damn thing I want to know.’ He pumped out the words, didn’t wait for me to agree, for me to say anything at all, just turned and left the room.

  I didn’t follow.

  Crunch

  •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

  35

  Monday, 12 March

  ‘What happened to you?’ Di’s first words to me as she opened one of the glass doors to the shop to let me in. I’d rushed the kids to school early, and it was only eight-thirty, but I knew she’d be there, getting everything perfect for opening at nine. I had a half-hour alone with her before Beauty arrived. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt anywhere. Not even at home. And your hair …’ She started to joke but stopped halfway. It might have been because I started crying. Just a trickle out my left eye, not a full-on meltdown. I didn’t mean to. I have never cried in front of anyone in ABS, except that one New Year’s Eve with Kari when I was drunk. I didn’t want to cry today because it’s not like I deserve any sympathy for what had happened. I got myself into it.

  ‘Don’t feel sorry for me … It’s my fault,’ I said, but Di put her arms around me anyhow, and she led me to sit on the floor behind the counter so that no-one could see us from outside the shop. It reminded me of how Wayde and I had sat on the storeroom floor. That made it harder to control the trickle out my eyes. I wiped the tears away.

  ‘What happened?’ Di asked again, this time her voice softer, her eyes questioning.

  ‘Oh God, Di, you’re going to hate me when I tell you what I’ve done. It’s such a big mess.’

  ‘Stop being so dramatic and tell me,’ said Di, her experience of dealing with pre-teen daughters showing. Kari and Lily always said that Di was the one you wanted to be with if things were falling down. She never got flustered.

  ‘It was innocent at first, but I let things get out of hand with Wayde.’ I saw Di raise her eyebrows. ‘It was nothing …’ I knew I was trying to convince myself. ‘Some WhatsApps, couple of chaffing messages – just nonsense, you know.’ I shook my head. Sometimes telling your story makes you understand how it happened. ‘It was exciting, but I wasn’t planning to do anything.’ I so wanted Di to believe me; I wanted to believe me. ‘One day he came into the storeroom and I stepped on my dress by accident and my boobs were out and he saw me. Nothing happened but it changed things, you know – we chatted more and it was like we had a secret.’ The whole thing sounded ridiculous, but I pushed on. I had to tell Di everything. ‘Then I sent him a couple of photos of myself.’ I hung my head, the embarrassment of telling Di catching me. ‘They were genuine mistakes – the first one I thought I was sending to ABS and the others I thought I was sending to Jerry.’

  ‘Ag no, Shelley, was your face in them?’

  ‘What?’ I was thrown for a minute. I hadn’t expected Di to focus on that kind of detail. She’d clearly had some experiences that I knew nothing about, too. ‘Yes, my face was in them.’

  ‘Shit, has he sent them around?’

  ‘God, I don’t know.’ Another trickle to wipe away, I hadn’t considered that possibility. ‘It’s worse than photos. Saturday afternoon after we were in Muizenberg, he brought a bottle of whisky and some dagga brownies to the shop. No, wait, he didn’t bring it for us,’ I said when I saw her about to launch into something. ‘He just had it in his bag. It was his for after work. But I said something about sharing, and at the end of the day he poured a shot into my cappuccino and I grabbed two brownies. I drank more of the whisky than I should’ve. I think he had maybe one shot, if anything.’ I’d only just realised it as I was telling Di – I was the only one who had been trashed; Wayde had been perfectly sober. I rushed the last part of the story. ‘I came on to him in the storeroom. Like proper, Di. I threw myself at him. Full on. I can’t believe it myself.’

  ‘What? You’re kidding. Why can’t you just get paranoid on pot like everyone else?’ Di let go of my hand, ran her fingers through her short hair, held her face in her hands for a second. She looked up at me. ‘No, Shelley, are you serious? That much pot that you couldn’t wait until you got home to jump Jerry? Wayde is a kid! His mother is younger than you; his brother goes to the same school as your kids.’

  ‘What?’ My turn to feel shock. ‘How’d you know that?’

  ‘Kari told me. Thought you knew already. Did you sleep with him?’ Di asked. I knew it was the trigger that would remind her of when Alan had cheated on her. She would judge me hard. I was relieved with the answer I was able to give.

  ‘No, he had the sense to push me off.’

  Relief in her face. It lasted a moment until I told the last bits.

  ‘Yesterday Jerry saw everything on my phone – all the chats, all the photos. He made me fire Wayde. Jerry took my phone, so I haven’t heard anything from Wayde.’

  Di blew a long breath out between her lips, stared at me. ‘Well, that’s a bloody stuff-up.’

  36

  She sent me home when Beauty arrived, knocking on the glass doors to be let into the shop.

  ‘Go home, have a shower, get dressed, do your face. Then come back to the shop. It would’ve been your and Wayde’s shift this afternoon, but it’s no use your hanging around at home in this state, so come early,’ she looked at her watch, ‘say by ten-thirty. We’ll figure out how to deal with this. I’ll stay in Wayde’s place this afternoon and I’ll see if Beauty’s daughter can help out with any of the other shifts.’ She didn’t say, Everything will be okay, as people sometimes do when your world is falling down and they don’t know what else to say. She hugged me, though, and from Di that felt like nearly the same thing.

  I got there at ten-thirty, prompt for once, and Di set me to work. ‘Fix those shelves’; ‘check the stock of that’; ‘check the sales sheets’. I helped a customer or two. There were always a few women first thing on a Monday morning. I knew they wouldn’t buy anything, but I was always nice to them as they wandered about the shop, decompressing after a weekend with their kids. Stay-at-home moms don’t actually want to just stay at home.

  Di spent her time coaching Beauty through the coffee machine. From the looks of it, she was doing well and her official barista course was only scheduled for the end of the month. Why had I pushed for Wayde when we had another barista ready to go right under our noses?

  Then they came.

  Kari and Lily arrived at twelve, waiting at the escalators just outside the door of the shop. Kari smiled and blew me a kiss when I spotted them.

  ‘We’ll be half an hour,’ Di said to Beauty when she saw them, breaking her own rule of always having more than one person in the shop. ‘If it suddenly gets busy, then call me.’ It was wishful thinking. Mondays were just for browsers. ‘Let’s go. Quick coffee at the Woolies café,’ she said to me, picking up her bag, answering my unspoken question. ‘I called them because you need them.’

  And they came? I wanted to ask, but I didn’t.

  I don’t remember everything they said to me at the Woolies café, where we sat at a table one aisle from the dairy products, and where I cried properly and ruined my make-up while the women at the table next to us stared at me. I do remember Kari and Lily’s very first words at the escalators outside Coffee & Cream.

  Kari, her voice and eyes soft, said, ‘It’s okay, Shelley, it’s bad. But it’s not like someone died or anything.’ She put her arm around my waist and squeezed. ‘We’ll help you figure it out.’

  Lily, when I must’ve scrunched my face too severely trying not to cry: ‘No need to make my job that much harder, Shell – Botox can only do so much. This will pass; it’s just a midlife crisis.’ She didn’t touch me and her words might’ve been sharp, but she wasn’t. It made me laugh a snot bubble.

  At the Woolworths café, no-one held back.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us about what was going on with Wayde? We would’ve talked some sense into you,’ said Kari, she who usually only told Lily anything. Still, at least she told.

  ‘It’s going to take Jerry a while to get over this. It won’t be personal – it’s a man thing. Every guy I ever cheated on couldn’t cope when they found out, but when they cheated on me? Huh,’ Lily snorted, ‘they thought I should just move on from it. Like it was their damn birthright to cheat. We forgive them, but they can’t forgive us. Truth, babe,’ she said, tapping the tips of her nails on the laminated table for emphasis, her sunglasses perched on the top of her head. Kari and Di stilled. One had forgiven a cheating husband and the other hadn’t. I loved Lily in that minute; someone else besides me who suffered foot-in-mouth. None of us was perfect. ‘I’ll get you the name of a couple’s therapist. Not the same as ours – that would be too weird – but someone good.’ She paused. ‘Or maybe someone just for you? This kind of thing happens when you’re not happy with yourself or your life. Laughing and forcing jokes about everything all the time doesn’t make you happy.’ That struck me. Stated just so, it was real. I didn’t know that others could see it.

  ‘Fine with the caring and sharing, ladies. You’ve got a couple’s therapist? For real?’ Di asked, looking at Lily, surprised. Childish, but I was glad I wasn’t the only one in ABS who didn’t know everything. ‘We do have a bigger problem. I asked Andile about it because he has some experience with labour law from when he had his own business. It’s not like TV – in South Africa you can’t just fire someone. There are processes you must follow. I don’t know all of it, but a WhatsApp sure as hell won’t cut it. Shelley, you are one of Wayde’s bosses and, after what happened between you, Andile thinks Wayde could make a claim of sexual harassment. He could take us to the CCMA for unfair dismissal and sexual harassment.’

  ‘Shit. How do you make that go away?’ asked Lily.

  ‘Depends what he wants. He could want his job back,’ said Di.

  ‘Maybe he won’t know about the CCMA thing?’ I was clutching. Jerry. Oh my God – how would Jerry deal with Wayde being back at the shop?

  ‘Can we take the chance?’ Di was grim. ‘I don’t mean to freak you out, Shelley, but it could be more than CCMA. This would be a juicy story for the local Tabletalk if it got out: ‘You’re fired,’ says mall lady boss to young surfer who says NO, with WhatsApps and photos as proof? There is plenty of damage he could do to you and to the business if he is pissed off and the thing goes public.’

  ‘Erm … and his mother works for Old Mutual HR. I talked to her last week at school drop and she told me. He’s going to know about the CCMA once he talks to her,’ said Kari, making a face. She was right; I remembered him telling me about his mother’s job.

  ‘I’m going to look for a labour law guy for us, but, Shelley, we might have to offer him his job back in the meantime. I’m sorry, I can’t see another way right now.’

  ‘Talk to the labour guy first, Di,’ said Lily.

  ‘Or Dirk, at least. He will know something,’ said Kari.

  I was in a nightmare.

  But as Lily, Kari and Di sat looking at me, I knew.

  It had come to the crunch, and I wasn’t alone. ABS were going to help me.

  37

  Wednesday, 14 March

  I am up, alone in our kitchen. It is light at six and the day is fresh, the warmth just creeping in at the edges. A promise of the heat that will come later. I don’t feel fresh. I feel stale. My head like the inside of that peanut butter jar of old cigarette stubs my mother kept to sniff and gag on when she felt the craving to smoke. Sometimes it stopped her; other times she lit up anyway. That is how my thoughts have gone over the past few days. Sometimes the horror of it makes me shut down and not think. Other times I take a big, long drag, fill my brain with the poison of what I’ve done.

  Three long days, three long nights since everything changed. Jerry swings from calm to crazy to catatonic. He wants to know everything. He interrogates, berates me on every WhatsApp, every word, every smile, every flame and every thumbs-up that went between me and Wayde. Every photo that was sent is zoomed into, examined, questioned. He compares himself to the Wayde in my WhatsApps. He wants to know every story, every back story, every feeling I had behind every message. What did it mean; where was I when I replied; what was I thinking? What happened that’s not in the WhatsApps? Where was he – Jerry – when all this was going on? I feel like Jerry has had a look at what I’ve been hiding under my skin. I don’t know if it helps, but we talk more than we have in years. It is exhausting, this scrutiny. I don’t have answers to all the questions he asks. Kari and Di say to tell him the truth about everything; answer everything he asks. ‘Whatever you don’t answer, he will decide for himself,’ Di warns.

  Jerry questions me until we fall asleep exhausted, each on our own side of the bed in the early hours. The early-rising husband finally transformed into the night owl. I wake early but I haven’t become a morning person.

  The story is simple, and complicated, and I tell it to Jerry in a hundred different ways to try and make him understand.

  A month ago I met a boy in a surf shop. He stared at my boobs and I stared at his youth. We talked and smiled and winked, and I fantasised myself into a storeroom disaster that should never have happened. It’s my fault, all of it. Whatever part Wayde played, he owes it to the ignorance and impulsiveness of his youth. Me? I had, have, the terror of the passage of time – that side dish of ageing, compliments of the chef – to credit. It has to be credit, right? Because when a woman ages, when you’re supposedly finally comfortable in your body and have allegedly acquired the knowledge everyone says you will, you’re presumed to be wise. You can no longer blame anything or anyone but yourself. You must be sage; you cannot be ignorant or impulsive or do things without care for consequence. Yet that is the essence of youth, is it not? Yes, it’s me, Shelley. I’m saying these things, having these thoughts. What? Because I love clothes and I change my body and I joke and have a laugh like a hadedah and everyone thinks I am foolish, I cannot have these thoughts? I’ve had time to think. I’ve always had time to think. Where there is light, there is dark, a sugar packet would’ve said. Others only see the light, but I know the darkness that’s under my skin.