THE LIES WE TELL

John Beattie had spent thirty years fantasising about what might have been, in the safe and certain knowledge that it was just that: a daydream that would never become a reality. An affair with a woman that boosted his ego and made him - by his own account - walk inches taller and instilled within him the confidence to accomplish anything.
To take on the world if he had to.
‘You were unbearable then,’ Annie had told him years later, unaware of his duplicity and deception.
But his cosy world of imaginings became a possibility the night the stranger rang his door bell. ‘So, you did know my mother in the 70’s,’ the intense, and sinister visitor asked.
‘Yes, I knew your mother,’ he replied, looking at his visitor – looking for something of her; looking for something of himself.
He remembered never forgotten conversations a life-time old. ‘You only have to say the word,’ she had told him, ‘and I’ll leave him.’
He couldn’t do it to Annie, could he?
To a wife he loved and adored, to betray her because… and his daughters, Carole and Lauren. What would become of them? ‘If I leave her,’ he told her, ‘I’d lose my kids, and I won’t be to a father to yours.’
Her reply startled him. ‘I don’t expect you to. I’ll leave them as well. He loves his children; to take them from him, would be too cruel.’
Would she do that, for him? It didn’t sit right with him. How could she do that – to her own children? ‘Because I love you John, and I’d do anything for you.’
‘How do you reconcile what we are doing with your church-going-upbringing?’ She had once asked, post coital and naked in her matrimonial bed.
‘I don’t, I can’t.’
‘Don’t you have to bare all? Don’t you have to confess?’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I have a conscience.’
‘You’ll never leave her, will you?’ she said realising, this was as good as it was ever going to get.
And now, thirty years later, was it all about to start again, and if it did, did he have the energy? He had mellowed and a double-life needed a sharp mind and a quick wit; he no longer had either. He couldn’t do it, but then he knew that he would.