Bed of Lies (ON HOLD)

XXXIV

"I hate you?" Tony's mouth pops open, a door left ajar in a hurry.

I can't tell why, but the shock displayed on his face angers me. Why does he play stupid? Doesn't he know what he's been doing to me since the day I married him? How could he be a stranger to the cold shoulder he's continued to show me time after time? He can't be, right? Yes, there's no chance that could be the case. His silence is merely intended to make me out to be a fool. Unfortunately for him, I'm no moron.

"Do you know one thing that frankly pisses me off, Tony?"

"No." He answers to the point. "What could that be?"

"Pretence; it's when people pretend. And I mean so in general. It might not be apparent to you, but you're really annoying me right now. Why?—you might ask, and my reply is because you're pretending to not know what I'm talking about."

Tony stares at me as if he were an analyst in the process of figuring out if I were an original art piece. His lips refuse to seal, and the thought of kissing him slams into me with a fierce hunger in tow. I tug in a deep breath that sucks my stomach in as I dig my toes into the ground, obstinately not giving in.

"Isi, I am not pretending. Neither am I lying. If we were honest, the truth would be that you are the one keeping a farce. The same farce lies in the mask you've pulled over your face since we married. You are the one who's masqueraded as something you're not, to the extent that I no longer know the woman I married."

I sneer at that, my anger erupting in flames from its former, charring embers. From the ashes rises an emotion I can't entirely put my finger on. It's one so sceptically similar to animus, though I'm not yet clear whom its target is. 

It has to be me. I resent myself for being this helpless, useless, flimsy vessel when Tony is involved. I loathe my heart for only beating for him, no matter how much I try to restrain it. I abhor the fact that I can't imagine a life without him. It's really all so pathetic.

Why do I love him so much?

Disdainfully—having gotten no single answer to my query—I hurl at Tony words that are so close to the truth, but he might find unbelievable as an outsider still cloaked in the curtains of my deceit. "Maybe you never knew the woman you married, Tony."

A reverberant silence spanning eons long becomes the fat elephant in the car. None of us wants to address it, so we let it sit comfortably on a mountain of groundnuts and blare its trumpet-like trunk every now and then. I duck my head down, training my eyes on the rubber mat meant for my feet to avoid the fanning ears of our pet mammal.

"Isi," Tony banishes the presence of the awkward quietude eventually. "Am I crazy?"

"What?" I don't think I heard him well because his question is so out of the blue that I wonder if one of us has lost our senses. Am I the one hearing things wrong? Or is he the one who actually uttered the absurdity I caught?

"Am I crazy?"—he repeats, an awed expression overlaying his face—"Am I crazy for believing that's the case? Am I crazy for entertaining the most unreal thought that perhaps I married another woman other than the one I originally knew?"

I swallow hard. It feels like a needle has been pricked against my lungs. The air weasels out my windpipe. I wrap my hand around the base of my neck as the sensation is likened to being strangled from the inside out.

I can't say anything. I only blink and blink and blink. My heart shrivels then grows, unsure what to do while my pulse soars to the great beyond. It's over if he knows. Everything I've worked for will crumble to dust if he discovers that I have a twin and that we both pulled numerous, unforgivable tricks on him.