The Bingo Coin

My name is Joshua, I'm thirty-five, and I've been married eleven years to a woman who shagged a bloke from her office two years ago.

She thinks I don't know. Or she thinks I've forgiven her, which would be worse. Truth is Carla sat me down at the kitchen table, said "Josh, I need to tell you something," and then told me the whole sorry business like she was reading a shopping list. She'd been seeing a man named Dean from her accounts department. Six months it went on. She cried, I didn't. She asked if I wanted a divorce, and I said no, because I'm a coward and the house was nearly paid for and I liked my routines.

So now we live like flatmates who share a bed out of habit. She goes to her book club. I sand skirting boards. Once a month she gets a look on her face I pretend not to recognise, and I pretend so hard I sometimes believe it myself.

Last Tuesday I was sanding skirting boards in a rental on the east side, thinking about absolutely nothing, when my phone buzzed and I saw the little notification for the old dating app I never deleted. Deleted the account, never the app, if that makes sense. And there in the matches was a face I'd forgotten I remembered.

Sammi. Thirty-two now. Fishmonger. Last online four years ago.

We'd talked proper back when I was twenty-eight and she was twenty-five. Long chats, half the night, the kind where you say things you'd never say in a pub. We never met. She lived in Ashwick, two hours up the canal, and I kept saying I'd come and I never came. Then Carla happened, or Carla had already happened, and I let it die.

I typed: "Still selling fish?"

Sent it before I could be sensible about it.

Three minutes later: "Still fixing houses? I never deleted you either, funny enough."

And that was that. I was sunk by Thursday.

* * *

Saturday I drove up to Ashwick. Nice little town, all university students and canal water. She works part-time at the bingo hall on weekends, but her fish stall is at the market square, open Saturdays.

I stood outside the bingo hall like a man waiting for a bus that never comes, and then she came out the side door with two paper cups and I nearly walked into the lamppost.

"Joshua," she said.

"Sammi."

"You look exactly like your photos, which is annoying, because I spent four hours on mine."

She had dark hair cut short and paint on her trainers and she handed me a coffee before I'd said a word. Thirty-two, she told me again, like she was checking I'd kept up.

"Come on, there's a bench by the square. It's the only decent place to sit in this whole town."

We sat. The fountain in the middle of the square was doing its thing, splashing away at nobody.

"So," she said. "Two hours' drive. You must really hate your weekends."

"I needed the air."

"Course you did." She looked at me over her cup. "You went quiet on me four years ago. I used to lie awake wondering what I'd said wrong, and then I decided you were married and felt stupid for wondering."

"Half right," I said. "I was married already, when we chatted. I just hadn't admitted it to myself. Then I did, and I felt rotten, so I stopped talking to you instead of the person I should have."

"That's a very carpenter way of apologising. Lots of joints, no glue."

I laughed. She always could make me laugh, that was the entire trouble with her.

We talked for an hour. About her stall, about the bingo hall, about nothing. Then she dug in her pocket and came out with a ten pence piece.

"Watch this," she said, and stood up.

She walked to the fountain, held the coin up like a judge, and threw it in.

"You've got to make a wish," I said. "That's the rules."

"I made it."

"What was it?"

"Can't tell you or it won't come true." She sat back down, grinning. "But I'll tell you the one I made here when I was twenty-nine, since that one failed. I wished I'd met you years earlier, before I ever got my heart set on you."

That landed somewhere in my chest and stayed there.

"Sammi."

"Don't do your serious face. It doesn't suit you." She finished her coffee. "Right. I've got to be back at the stall by one. Market square, corner spot, all the mackerel you can shake a stick at. Come or don't."

"I'll come."

* * *

Her stall smells of the sea in a good way, and she's got a paper apron on and she's bossing a lad of twenty-two about when I walk up.

"This is Joshua," she tells the lad. "He's a friend from the internet, which sounds much worse than it is."

"Cheers," the lad says, and goes back to his ice.

Sammi slaps a mackerel down on the block and looks at me over it. "So. What do you want, Joshua? Fish, or conversation?"

"Bit of both."

"Good answer." She guts the fish while we talk, fast and clean, and I tell her about my work and she tells me about a customer who returns every week to complain the haddock is too fishy.

"I mean it," she says, chopping. "Every week. Mrs Prescott. The haddock is too fishy. I said, it's a fish, love, what did you expect, a chicken?"

I'm laughing like a fool at a fish stall in Ashwick and I realise I haven't laughed like that in years. Not at home, anyway. Carla and I laugh at telly, that's different, that's laughing at the same thing. This is laughing at each other.

"You know what I keep thinking about," she says, quieter now, wrapping a piece of cod. "That night we stayed up till four. Do you remember?"

"I remember."

"The canoe."

I go warm all over, remembering. Because that night, four in the morning, stupid with tiredness, we'd written each other this daft plan. A canoe trip down the river, camping, just the two of us and a tent. And the things we said we'd do in that tent, well. We said them. Then we both went quiet and pretended we'd been joking, and neither of us ever quite said so.

"You remember it too," she says, watching my face.

"Every word."

"I've got a friend with a canoe. Jonas. He runs trips on the River Ash. Big soft northern lad, thirty-eight, known him five years through bingo." She ties the paper. "He'd lend us the boat."

"Sammi." I look at the cod, at her, at the cod. "You know my situation."

"I know your situation. I also know you drove two hours on a Saturday. And I know you didn't message me by accident, because nobody's thumb works that hard."

The lad coughs somewhere out of sight, which I think is his way of saying take it round the corner.

"Next Saturday," she says. "Jonas drops the canoe at the bottom lock, nine sharp. You come back up, and we do the thing we were too chicken to do four years ago. Properly this time. And Joshua, listen. If you say no, that's fine, genuinely, no hard feelings, you can still have the cod."

I stand there with fish smell and river wind and my heart pounding like a drum kit, and I think of Carla's face at the kitchen table, calm as milk, telling me about Dean.

"Yes," I say. "Saturday. I'll be there."

"Good." She hands me the cod. "That's on the house. Bring a tent."

"I've got a tent."

"Good man." She grins. "Now get out of my stall, you're bad for business, standing there grinning like a lunatic."

I walk back to the car park with a free cod under my arm and no idea what I'm doing, or every idea, depending how you count it. Two years of resentment, one ten pence piece at the bottom of a fountain, and a river two hours north of my front door.

I'll deal with the cod tonight. The rest is for Saturday.

I drive home with the cod on the passenger seat like it's a witness. Carla's car is in the drive when I pull in, which is a shame, because I'd planned to put the cod in the fridge and think about my life without commentary.

"You're back late," she says from the kitchen. Book club was last night, so today she's been doing whatever it is she does on Saturdays, which lately is nothing with me in it.

"Went to Ashwick," I say. Because lying about a fish stall seems daft when the bigger thing is coming anyway.

"Ashwick. What's in Ashwick?"

"A friend."

She looks at me over her tea. Eleven years of marriage and I know every version of that look, and this one is the one that says she's deciding whether it's worth an argument. She decides it isn't. "Well. Dinner's in the oven."

That's it. That's the entire conversation. We eat dinner as two people in a waiting room, and afterwards I go to the shed and sand skirting boards until my arms ache, and I think about the kitchen table two years ago, Carla calm as milk, telling me about Dean from accounts, six months, she said it as a weather report. We stayed married because starting over seemed like more effort than staying. That's the honest size of it. We share a bed out of habit and a life out of inertia and I have been furious in a quiet, tidy way for two years.

So when I message Sammi that night, I don't dress it up.

"Can I tell you why I actually came up?"

Her reply is quick. "Go on then."

"My wife had an affair. Two years ago. A bloke from her office, six months. She told me at the kitchen table like she was reading me a shopping list. And we stayed. And I've been walking round my own house ever since like a man checking for draft."

Three dots, then nothing, then dots again. Then: "Joshua."

"I'm not telling you to make you feel sorry for me. I'm telling you because I came to Ashwick to see you, and it wasn't only for the mackerel. I wanted something that was mine. That's a rotten reason to turn up on your Saturday."

Another pause. Then: "It's not rotten. It's honest, which is more than most blokes manage. Can I say my bit?"

"Go on."

"I know you're married. I've known it since I was twenty-five and you were twenty-eight and I liked you anyway. I thought I'd got over it, four years of quiet and all that. Then you turned up at my fountain throwing ten pence about, and it turns out I hadn't got over it at all. So. There it is."

I read it four times.

"So where does that leave us?" I type.

"On a river, next Saturday, in a canoe. If you