Serious Sweet by A.L. Kennedy

can … No, not that … Yes, bye.’
    Jon turned at the brewery corner – sucking in the malty air – and started to lope for the Underground. Val’s had never been that handy for public transport. All this nonsense meant he was late and the Tube wouldn’t cut it, time-wise, and the rush hour was going to cripple any cab’s progress – if he could even find one. She’d made him have to deal with the rush hour. That was bad of her.
    Peter will naturally mention my trousers and Chiswick to others, to the denizens around him, which will make for an inflammatory combination.
    Once the sticky type of word got round, it stayed round and rumours of a sexual nature were the tastiest for onlookers and the most adhesive.
    No, not that
.
    His current predicament had nothing to do with women, or a woman, in the erotic sense.
    No, not that.
    But everyone would assume. They thought he had women, that he had some ludicrous stable of complacent partners and rushed from one bed to another dispensing sex.
    No, not that.
    If you trace things to their sources …
    During his marriage he’d been taken as neuter, treated like an invalid – patronised by some and softly avoided by others who didn’t want his assumed deficiencies to infect them. And those men who knew his wife in the sporting sense … some were brashwith him, some guilty, some gentle. Being married to an adulteress taught you a lot about human nature.
    After the divorce very little had changed, although he’d seemed to be accepted as less contagious. And he’d been able, for a few translucent weeks, to identify even the most covert of the colleagues she had encountered, come across, had … Each of the men had displayed an underlying tension he could only assume was caused by fears that Valerie might now intend to marry and then betray them.
    Although I must not exaggerate. It wasn’t so many men. Not that many. It was only enough. I suppose one could frame it in those terms. It was enough to satisfy her needs, which I was not.
    Beyond that stage, there were pats on the shoulder, rueful and complicit looks, invitations involving pubs, or coming round for dinner to get a change of air, meet the wife and kids.
    Jon had sidestepped each offer of hospitality and been punctual, reliable in his working life – which was to say the whole of his life, pretty much – and had given no indications of internal crisis.
    What I feel …
    Well, if I don’t know at present it doesn’t matter … Except it does feel … I do feel … as if I have misplaced something of importance and forgotten what … And Christ knows, I haven’t and can’t and mustn’t forget anything today …
    It’s as if I am ill … as if my skin were someone else’s … There’s a strain … the obvious strain … which I hope is not obvious …
    And then, it had been on a Thursday morning – he’d never taken to Thursdays, they weren’t as generous as Fridays should be –
today is an exception but could rally –
they weren’t as workman-like and peaceable as Wednesdays, Thursdays were bitter … On a Thursday, he’d discovered he’d been turned into this whole new figure of fun.
    The word had been put round. A number of words, to be accurate: Lucy, Sophia … words such as those words. And I was declared a divorcé now off his leash. One and all have since assumed that I am, in some manner, taking up where Valerie left off.
    Not that she has left off. Not that I am presently left on.
    Jon was far from the river by now, had passed – surely and inevitably had passed – the usual priggishly well-trimmed Chiswick hedges and lopped trees at a pressing but sustainable speed. Which was to say, he did have to assume he must have done that. He was no