In the end I actually tell her that it meant nothing, that it was just sex, that it’s all over now. I had agonised over the wording for days but it emerges like this, in a rush of fumbled clichés. Nic is eerily calm and this sets my nerves askew. I’d braced myself for shouting, swearing from the more colourful end of her repertoire, perhaps a wincing slap across my sorry face. I deserve this and more. I need the penance of it.

     But nada. Nic just sets her fork down and rests her elbows on the table. I imagine the pasta cooling and hardening imperceptibly as the seconds stretch; it’s a place for my mind to go. She says nothing for some time. Her eyes, though? Her eyes have left the building.

     I say sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry so much the words wear out, are finally fraying even as my lips form their shapes. 

     “Say something, please. Shout at me.”

     I repeat variations on this several times. Still she is silent. Eventually I sink the tines of my fork into the pasta bake (cold now, naturally). Some native wisdom from the deepest part of me, dredged up and dripping, prevents me from leaving my chair to heat it in the microwave. For somewhere for the fork to go, for some momentary focal point other than all this, I spear a second piece of pasta. And she says, “What are you doing?” It is now that she leaves. She brings the bottle of Pinot Grigio with her. The bedroom door does not slam. I leave the rest of the food on my plate as a testament of contrition. Tomorrow she will see that I did stop eating. There is a violent wash of something through me and for a crazed moment I imagine stabbing my hand with the fork. Look how I hurt myself. Look. I scrape the fork along the plate. The awful wincing screech of it soundtracks the moment.

     Then I snap the fork in two; it breaks with surprising ease. (I have a tendency for the melodramatic at moments of stress.)

     I text her seven times from work the following day. She does not reply. I consider phoning. There are two compelling reasons not to call her. One: she won’t answer. Two: she might answer.

     “Who?” she says at home that evening. It arrives sudden and steel-tipped, the bullet of that single word.

     “Louise,” I say. “From work.”

     “Louise? That mousy little one? Really?”

     By the tilt of my wife’s face I see that a response is expected from me despite the apparently rhetorical tone of that really?

     “I’m sorry. I fucked up. I don’t –”

     She raises a rigid flat palm like she is the police and I am the traffic. “No,” she says. “You don’t get to do that. Not yet, you don’t. If ever.”

     She is not crying. For the first time ever, I wish she was crying. Why isn’t she crying? What does it mean?

     “How long was it going on?”

     “Four or five weeks.”

     “How many times did you sleep with her?”

     “Just three.”

     “Just?”

     “No, Nic, I didn’t mean it like that. I just - ”

     “Who ended it?” she says.

     “Me. A couple of weeks ago.”

     “Why?”

     “Because it was wrong. Because I didn’t want to do it to you anymore.”

     “Or maybe you just didn’t want to do it to her anymore.”

     “No, Nic. It was tearing me up. The guilt. I couldn’t live with myself.”

     I miss Louise’s breasts. I’m sorry, but I do. A sudden vivid mental image of their ripe fruit bounty. I fight it. This, of course, renders it all the stronger. Now playing on screen one in the multiplex of my mind: Louise’s breasts close-up, in high definition.

     “Have you thought about her? When we’ve done it.”

     This is a curveball. I wonder how much to hold back. All couples have secrets, surely? It’s normal: healthy even. You can’t just lay your whole consciousness on a plate for inspection like some severed head. The random, crazy shit. The dark stuff. Nic doesn’t tell me everything either. How could she? It’s just not feasible.

     Then the pendulum in my brain sets up its swinging slicing motion, having its fun. And I’m thinking that there’s a kind of intimacy in full and frank confession. It’s a sort of bridge I could build back to her. Rickety, sure, its wood maybe even diseased. But something. A way back, slowly, slowly.

     Nic is looking at me. I’ve never felt so looked at in my life. Plain stupid panic pushes the lie from my mouth.

     “No,” I say.

     “I don’t believe you.”

     “Yes,” I say, and it’s me who begins to cry. A salty dampness on my cheeks and lips and soon in my mouth. My wife leaves the room.

     That night in the spare room I snatch jagged scraps of sleep. Leading the cymbal-crashing, baton-twirling marching band of my waking night-thoughts –oh, it’s quite a parade - is my memory of the time when I was nine and my father began sleeping in the spare room. How I wanted to ask why but was afraid. How the horrible hum of it was just below the silent surface of every dinnertime or evening in front of the TV. How after some time he moved back into the right bedroom with my mother. How the hum was silenced. How we all went out for a posh meal to celebrate, even if nobody said it was a celebration. How my father moved out the following summer and never came back.

     Men. Jesus Christ. I hate being the cheating type, the lumpen male predictability of it.

     The evenings and weekends pass at a viscous crawl. It’s there behind everything, trapped in the nerves of the air. We have short, but normal conversations – what’s needed from the supermarket, is this the week the recycling bins are collected? - that are entirely abnormal in what they exclude. I buy her flowers, expensive flowers - not the discount supermarket ones anymore. I cook her favourite dish, the Thai green curry she ate on our first time together in a restaurant. I cook it again.

     She says she is processing what has happened. What I have done. She asks me to stop calling her ‘Nic’, to call her ‘Nicola’. I ask why, but she won’t answer, and of course I know why anyway. I wonder why I felt the need to ask.

     Once she screams at me because as usual I’ve left some small hairs in the bathroom sink after shaving. “Four fucking hairs!” I scream back, knowing that the hairs are a proxy only but that the real fight is too huge, too hard.

     “Do you not think we should talk about it some more?” I say over the second Thai green curry.

     “About what?”

     I feel the superfluity of the question. I know why she needs to ask it.

     “About what I did.”

     “How you cheated on me, you mean? With that little fucking mouse?”

     I lower my head. “Look, it’s not like I particularly want to talk about it either,” I say to the tablemat. “But don’t you think we should? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Communicate? I mean, I don’t know how you feel. Well, I think I do. But you don’t say anything.”

     “Oh, you want to know how I feel? I feel hurt. Incredibly hurt. I feel angry. I feel like something is broken. I feel like I don’t know you anymore. I wonder if I ever did, actually. And I feel like you think that cooking me nice meals changes something, and that’s childish beyond belief. I feel like absolute shit. How’s that?”

     “A-one!” I say, and the joke shrivels and dies like a time-lapse flower in reverse.

     “Sorry,” I say but the word is so very, very blunted from use now, old pencil lead.

     She shakes her head and says, “Well, that went well.”

     I think it politic not to smile wryly.

I decide that a holiday is the thing. Somewhere warm and pretty where we can shuck off the everyday, where we can … What? Escape the glacial battleground of home, jags of ice hanging from everything. We get a last-minute deal. Granada in July. She loves the heat; I don’t. This will be part of the gesture. I will foot every bill.

     On our first day we find a place that does North African food in a lively plaza. We shelter from the sun’s harsh brightness under an awning, sweating and slugging cold lagers. I catch her eye as she looks up from the menu. I’ve been mentally working up to it. I feel the drumroll pounding of my heart.

     “What are you thinking? I mean, what do you think, you know?”

     “Hmm,” she says, her head back in the menu. “Maybe the lamb. Or the veggie couscous.”

     I’m fairly sure she has wilfully misunderstood me. I’m about to say that I’m talking about the other thing.

     There’s a boy of six or seven in the plaza chasing enormous bubbles released from an oversized wand. They form and take off wobbling and float and burst, iridescent for a few seconds. As each one dies the child turns around, awaiting another. Nic notices the kid too. We smile at each other unthinkingly for a second. I jealously grasp the moment, hold it close to my breast. I swig some beer, decide to say nothing.

     In a bar later that evening after a lull in the conversation, she says, “Sometimes I think we might be okay.” I smile, lay my hand on her knee. She lifts the hand, holds it aloft as if weighing it. “And sometimes I want to cut your fucking balls off.”

     The following morning we are in the queue for the Alhambra when a voice from behind asks, “Sorry, is this the line for people who haven’t pre-booked?”

     “Yeah, it is,” I say.  “You Irish?”

     “I am, yeah. Neil.”

     “Paul,” I say, extending a hand. “And this is my wife, Nicola.”

     “Nic,” she says smiling at Neil. I receive these little daggers almost gratefully, in the hope that each one brings me a little closer to their ending.

     As the queue snakes forward, we talk the usual shite. What do you do? Where you from? Do you know _____? Ah, Jesus, that’s gas, you know her.

     At the entrance after we have all bought tickets, he says, “Well, it was lovely to meet you. Might see you around the town again.”

     Nic says, “Sure, come around with us. If you like.”

     Neil’s eyes slide towards mine.

     “Yeah, yeah, do,” I say, nodding like an idiot. Buffer is the word that springs forth in my mind. Buffer.

     “Ah, I don’t want to be a third wheel.”

     “Believe me, you won’t be,” says Nic, all teeth. It’s the fourth or fifth red carpet smile she’s blasted at him. I nod again, like a fucking simpleton. As if I have a say in the matter.

     “Grand, so. If you don’t mind.”

     We walk through Moorish courtyards, past lazily pattering fountains and long glassy pools – beauty reflecting more beauty. There are new wonders around every corner and it’s exhausting. It’s like being repeatedly punched in the face by beauty. In the Court of the Sultana’s Cypress Tree, I chance an arm round Nic’s waist while she consults the guidebook next to the titular cypress. She doesn’t move away. I notice Neil making himself scarce, taking photos on the other side of the courtyard. When he returns, Nic reads from the book. “Listen to this. According to the legend, the Sultan Boabdil's wife used to meet a knight of the Abencerrajes family under this tree. This triggered the death of the people of this noble tribe, whose throats were slit by Boabdil’s assassins.” Nic nods. “Proper order too.” Neil begins to laugh and, seeing this, I join in. Nic plucks my hand from her waist and moves off.

     I try to judge whether Neil is handsome. He’s no movie star. But he doesn’t look like the back of a bus either.  He’s somewhere in between. Like most people. Like me. He’s a few years younger than me, though – early thirties, maybe – and his arms and chest are better defined than mine. One of those gym fuckers. In the next courtyard I watch Nic throw her head back with laughter at something he says.

     Later, as the three of us are parting ways for our respective hotels I ask for Neil’s number, so Nic can’t do it first.

     “Oh, text it to me too,” she says. “We should meet for a drink later.”

     “Ah, look, thanks, but you’re here as a couple. I don’t want to be - ”

     “Don’t be ridiculous. We’d love to meet up. Wouldn’t we, Paul?”

     “Yeah, yeah,” I say, making myself comfortable in the hole I’ve dug.

     “Right, so,” he says. “I’ll text you.”

     Later in the hotel, Nic says, “Neil texted. He suggested a tapas place for later.”

     “I know,” I say. “I got the text too.”

     “Oh,” she says. “Right.”

     Nic turns away then so I can’t see her expression. When she emerges from the bathroom she’s wearing her glossiest going-out face.

     Spanish bar staff pour gin at a glugging angle. Things are getting swimmy. The conversation is taking a slide for the confessional, lubricated by all the Bombay Sapphire and beer. I am helpless against the current of it, swept along by Neil and Nic. I have moved onto lager, looking for some kind of toehold.  

     “I was actually meant to come here with my girlfriend,” he says. “But we split up last month. I decided to come anyway. Everything was booked. Fuck it.”

     Here we fucking go, I think.

     “Aw, that sucks,” Nic says. “But it’s great that you came yourself. Screw her! You don’t need her.”

     Neil laughs and they clink glasses.

     “Yeah,” he says. “She was cheating on me actually.”

     “Oh, that’s so horrible,” Nic says. “Then you’re definitely better off without her.” As she speaks she rests her hand on Neil’s knee for one, two, three, four, five seconds - oh, I’m fucking counting all right - before withdrawing it.

     “Right, Paul?” she says.

     “Bitch,” I say. “Total bitch.”

     “A toast to the bitch!” says Nic. “Good riddance!”

     The three of us clink glasses and booze slops over the rims, leaving a mess on the table between us.

     When Nic is up ordering a new round, I nod at Neil’s bottle of Estrella beer.

     “You always drink the little bottles, yeah?” I sip from my large glass.

     “Sometimes. I don’t know, it depends.”

     He rolls his eyes off to the side and back and says, “Why?”

     I shrug. “Nah, no reason.”

     He’s wearing a t-shirt that’s too tight for him. Deliberately, of course. I can see his bicep flex each time he raises the bottle to his mouth, the fucker.

     Later on we have the Non-European Travel Pissing Contest.

     “Guatemala was all right,” Neil says. “But I preferred Belize, if I’m honest. Unbelievable diving there. Either of you dive?”

     “I did a little years ago. Paul didn’t want to do it,” says Nic.

     “It can be a bit scary at first,” he says, looking at me. “It’s not for everyone.”

     I retort with India, where I spent a whole year. India is my silver bullet in the Non-European Travel Pissing Contest.

     “Been to the subcontinent?”

     “I’ve been to Sri Lanka,” he says.

     “Ah.” I give two little nods. “The Beginners’ India.”

     “How so?”

     “Well, it’s like India watered down. In a nice neat little package for tourists. It’s like India’s kid brother.”

     “It’s a different country,” he says, brow creasing.

     “Don’t mind The Incredible Sulk here,” Nic says, not looking at me, but at Neil. “He’s drunk too much again. I had to peel him out of the taxi and put him to bed with his clothes on last night.”

     Suddenly I feel weary. Of the night, of everything.

     The following morning, someone keeps emptying full cutlery drawers onto a tiled floor inside my head. The argument happens between my second and third trips to the bathroom to vomit.

     “Do you think you could try to be a bit more polite when we’re in company?” she says.

     “Company? You mean Neil.”

     “Well, obviously.”

     “Oh, right. Like you were being polite to him. Very polite.”

     Even as the thought is becoming these words, zinging from neuron to neuron along synapses and onto my tongue and then out into the cool, conditioned air of the room, I know how foolhardy I’m being. But some mulish momentum propels me. I’m Pandora, poised over the box, wondering what could possibly go wrong.

     “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

     I’m committed now, so I just say it. “You know damn well what it means.”

     “Oh, I see.” Her voice is thick with sarcasm, dripping great gobs of it.  “So, you get to fuck that mousey little bitch, but I can’t – what? – get on well with another man? How dare – “

     But then I’m diving headlong for the toilet bowl. I catch a few words between retches. “…in no position…” is definitely in there.

     And this is how we agree to each do our own thing for the afternoon: “I’m going out,” she says. “Fine,” I say, waiting ten minutes before leaving the room myself.

     Out in the streets of Granada, the sun is brutal, remorseless. I wonder if the heat is some kind of celestial practical joke. A piss-stench rises around every corner. The guilt hits me again along with a hopelessness I haven’t felt since the first days after I told her. I enter a baroque church, hoping for respite, but the building is a furnace. There’s so much fussy detail everywhere I look; it’s a gilded headache. I begin to text Nic to apologise for the argument earlier then stop, realising it is futile.

     Mass is being said. I sit at the back. The mass-goers fan themselves while the priest speaks. The women only, though. The men do not. The men just stand there. They stare ahead, pumping manly sweat, suffering, stoic, stupid. I wonder why the men don’t just fan themselves, why they have allowed themselves to be backed into this sweltering corner by notions of masculinity. Why they choose to take no action.

     Sitting in the pew, the thought comes to me. It gathers momentum in my mind, building and building to a take-off roar.

     I am waiting for Nic when she arrives back at the hotel room. We each grunt grudging hellos, hers from behind sunglasses. Taking a seat, I tuck my hands under my legs to hide their shaking.

     “Look,” I say. “About…all this.”

     Nic gives a gale force sigh but remains standing before me.

     “Look, I’m not going to apologise anymore because I just don’t see the point. And anyway,” I continue, leaning again in my anxiety on the crutch of cliché, “actions speak louder than words.”

     “And?” she says.

     I know I will never say it unless I say it now. So, I push the words like they’re jumpers from the lip of a cliff, eyes shut and screaming.

     “I don’t mind if you want to.”

     “Want to what?”

     “With Neil. I mean, if he wants to. Fair’s fair.”

     “What?”

     “I just thought …” I say. “It’d kind of be a clean slate. After, like.”

     She looks at me in a way that is something other than angry now.

     And this, finally, is what does it.