GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2025/26

KINNESON LALOR

‘Clean Sheet’

I WANT TO CHANGE THE BEDSHEETS. I wanted to change them yesterday, when I got home, but there was only so much time before he was due to arrive, and I chose tidying the clutter from the hall, preparing the dinner, then going for a swim, over changing the bedsheets. Later, sitting on the edge of the bed, waiting for me to shower, he said: you have no clutter. I hadn’t showered after the swim, he was already at the door, already letting himself into the house because I’d told him to, had left the key in the gate, so he could store his bike, and the front door open. We’d been messaging for weeks so he’d already been there, in my house, taking up space with his words in light grey rectangles. I put a shirt over my wet swimming top and, all through dinner and then later as we sat on the sofas, drinking tea, it looked like I was lactating. He didn’t drink tea. He had the elderflower cordial I foraged last year, almost green in its fermented sourness, but sweet enough that it will never go off. I gestured to my chest saying: that’s why it looks like I’m lactating. I was illustrating my carelessness, a feature of my personality I did not actually have. Then later, on the edge of my bed, in the dark, a storm in the distance then flashing across the field behind the garden, he said: you don’t have clutter. You have objects, but it’s not cluttered. He said: I have an eye for objects.

What was he looking at? The abacus I wanted to know how to use, but never learned how? The Amnesty International boat candles my husband gave me as a stocking stuffer three Christmases ago? That was what my husband understood about me: I wanted to support charitable things. I’ve never used them. How would they even burn? I imagine the wick burning a quick hole right through to the bottom of the boat, hot wax staining the second-hand furniture I nursed back to life with polish I made from linseed oil and my own beeswax. I buy second hand furniture. I make my own furniture polish. I keep bees. These things are who I think I am, but what did he see? On the shelf is a Victorian barometer that I’ve never seen working. It was my husband’s grandfather’s. My husband has asked for his grandfather’s piano in the divorce. I have not mentioned the barometer. I’m hoping that, like the Le Creuset pans, he has forgotten it. There is something about the truncated, faded violet ink on the paper cylinder that makes me think the barometer is just waiting for a meteorological event big enough to move it again. I want to see it working, even just once.

Despite the storm, it was hot, so I left the windows open, the blinds too. I almost served him salad. I didn’t want to have the oven going, but I did. Before he arrived, I put the food in the oven and set a timer and went into the pool. Then he was in the hallway, and I walked past him in my bathrobe and told him to come upstairs. He seemed unsure. It’s an upside down house, I explained, but I don’t think he heard me. He followed me upstairs. I went into my bedroom and changed. I closed the door. He sat on the sofa in the living room, waiting. What was he thinking at that point? Did he know then how the evening would unfold? What was he looking at? He is a writer. Experiences, he once wrote, will no longer be what people collect. Objects are making a comeback. At one point, during the night, or perhaps it was the next morning, he was on my side of the bed and saw the camera on the lowest shelf. That’s some camera, he said. I have an eye for objects, he reminded me. I said it wasn’t a particularly special camera, it was the lens that was impressive. Yes, he agreed, the lens. He is a writer. I am a teacher. What was he doing on my side of the bed? The lasting impression I have from that morning was his back turned to me. I curled around it, more than once, but he did not respond. Was he asleep or was he telling me that spooning was not part of the contract? In the end I settled for doing to him what I wanted him to do to me. I ran my fingers along his back, his arms, his neck, his chest. It’s unbelievable, he said, how good that feels. He turned onto his back after a long while, so long I started to wonder if it really did feel all that good, if I should stop. Are you propositioning me again, he asked. I said: you’re in my bed and I have no clothes on, it’s a given. He reminded me that it wasn’t. Consent has to be received, he said, constantly. It was a line I taught to boys and girls. It was not a line I lived. The realisation was a fissure. I like hearing you say yes, he said. Who was this person who took up the other half of the bed and moaned when I said yes? He took off his underwear and told me he liked it when I stroked him the night before and so I stroked him again. Is this what you wanted? he asked, and I said yes, but it was not what I wanted. What I wanted was him to touch me the way I was touching him. Can I sit on top of you, he asked. Yes. Do you want me to come inside you or on you, he asked. Yes.

One of my first year tutors, fifteen something years ago, couldn’t get an erection unless I told him he could come on my face. This was before everyone knew that tutors shouldn’t date their students. Earlier that night I had told a version of this episode to him, of the physicists I’d slept with who only knew how to have sex from porn. Then he was asking me: do you want me to come inside you or on you? I suppose at least he asked. What do you want, I asked him. I want to come on you, he said. They all want to come on me. My body is a shallow vessel for receiving ejaculate. It is not what I wanted, but I said yes. Yes. They want consent now so I say yes.

I strip the bed. I smell the sheet where he slept, the pillow. They do not smell of him. He has not left his scent upon them. I liked the way he smelled, some strong soap I’ve memorised since that trip to New Caledonia when I was fifteen and the French Air Force pilot who scoured the beach for drunk teenagers kissed me for the first time. Then there was the girl in my Physics classes at uni, the only other girl, who must have used the same soap. Every time she solved a problem on the board I thought of the French Air Force pilot and felt a familiar void I could not measure the shape of. My husband did not fill this shape, nor the tutor. The girl was meeker and prettier than me and somehow also better at the maths.

I leave the bed unmade. I open the blinds and windows so that sunlight and air can kill whatever bacteria breeds under the sheets. I did not sleep, frightened that the low, heavy feeling in my abdomen was the beginning of a UTI. I got up to pee in the middle of the night, our night of actual sleeping time, which was actually past the middle of the night, and only he slept, his back turned to me. He didn’t snore. His breath was feminine in its quietness. I wanted him to turn to me. I wanted him to hold me. I remembered my husband, the warmth of him around my back, that we would wake, when we used to sleep together, and he would drag me back to sleep by curving around me, pinning me with his heavy arms against him, against the mattress. When I was awake, it made me want to burst from him, to run. But now and then it would draw me back under. Sleeping in. I never sleep in now. I wake with purpose. I wake with energy. I do not sleep in. Not even with this consent-seeking stranger in my bed. We know each other, a friend of a friend, but he is a stranger. Foreign. His mouth is another planet. I did not understand the terrain, how to breathe. The staccato kissing, the staccato tongue. Teasing, I suppose, lips held centimetres from me. I kept expecting him to be my husband. I did not like the way my husband kissed, but I knew it well. I knew how to navigate it. I did not know this stranger, his smell, the half centimetre hairs on his chin and upper lip. I had never kissed anyone with facial hair. I touched his face and it was thin and long. Who was this stranger on my couch, kissing me, asking me if I wanted him to kiss me. Yes, I said. But I didn’t, not yet. I wanted to know him first, but that was not what was on offer. I read a whole Javier Marìas book about how it was not on offer. Pages upon pages of how you should not tell anyone anything. Loose lips sink ships. I read the book because he is a writer and recommended it. I thought he was saying: how wise we are to know the narrator is fooling himself. How wise we are to know that what he’s really looking for is connection. What I understand about connection comes from baring one’s soul to the point of extinction. When I asked him what he liked about the book he said: you should not tell anyone anything. Is this what you wanted? he kept asking. Yes.

What I actually wanted was someone to take his hands, press them to my sternum, tear back the skin, break through the breastbone with the side of his palm, crack open the ribcage. I wanted someone to know what I wanted, so that I would know.

At some point during the night, kept awake by the silence of his quiet breathing and the receding flashes across the fields, I craved the coolness of my husband’s room below us, the sheets cold with his year-long absence. My husband and I slept apart because he snored, but I still heard the slow drumbeat of it through the floor and then, later, that low, heavy sound of his talking to someone else on the phone. Could you please be quieter, I would text from the room above. Sorry, he would say, just chatting to the lads. Then he would add some anecdote like Jason’s troops were invading Owen’s territories but he and Owen had made a pact and they were on the counterattack. It is the specificities that are the lie. If he had just said sorry perhaps it would have all been OK. Perhaps it would have been us in bed last night and not this foreign body who is already someone else’s, with her being someone else’s too. Would you ever consider an open marriage? my husband asked me, and I said I didn’t know, and then, later, crying, the shock worn down to foil-thin eggshell, why? Why was I not good enough? Now this. A fundamental understanding that no one person is good enough. Polyamory. I understand it in theory only. He is already someone else’s, she is already someone else’s, I am no one’s. I am undefined. In practice, it numbs the back of my throat. The back of my throat, I think, is where my sorrow lives, tears coming from the same place I form words. Contained in the blue speech bubble I could say what I wanted. Let yourself in. I will make dinner. Out loud, when nothing holds the words, I cannot form them. My phone was a vessel, a translator. Not between us, but between the woman I am and the woman I wanted to be. My phone charges overnight on the kitchen bench and I do not look at it unless I have already eaten breakfast and meditated. These calm, nourishing tasks are the new me. This woman, naked to the storm, breathing quickly at his tongue on her, dizzy with the shortness of her breath, she is not me. She is the skin I am wearing for a night. She is a creature I have created from sorrow, but she is a creature I have created from habit too. Is this what you wanted? he asked. Yes.

The sheets pile up — pillow cases, duvet cover, fitted sheet, flat sheet — as if there is something hidden under there, but it is all just air. They were a gift from my husband. The set I have taken off, the cranes, he bought because I like birds. The ones I will put on, the pomegranates, he bought because I like orange. These are the things my husband knew about me: I like birds and the colour orange.

I have the sudden desire to call him, as if to say thank you.

Hey.

What’s happening?

I thought you might be away…

Nah.

How’s work?

You know. It’s work. How’s teaching?

I don’t know.

And then I add: OK, I guess.

He won’t ask why I’ve called because he thinks he knows and also he has no idea because I never told him anything. Loose lips sink ships. You should not tell anyone anything. I told him I loved the sheets, but what I really loved was that my husband almost knew something about me. I like the colour orange. I pretend the pomegranates on the sheets are oranges because, in the wild, pomegranates are not orange and this mistake upsets me. I wish I had ironed the sheets, their freshness crushed by the way I hung them over the door because they are too heavy to fold neatly onto the clothes pulley when they are wet. We used to fold the sheets together, corners matching corners, fingers touching. You cannot fold a bedsheet alone. The orange pomegranates are not quite the right shape for oranges, but this upsets me less than the colour of the fruit not being right.

On the phone, my husband tells me an anecdote about the impeccably dressed French at work. An intern was told off by someone unreasonable for underdressing in the office and so someone more reasonable asked everyone to dress down in solidarity. This is the drama of the hedge fund husband. My husband wore trainers and a hoodie. The French, he says, wore jeans too, but somehow they were still impeccably dressed. He laughs. I laugh even though the story makes no sense to me. Fucking well-dressed French, he says. In his voice, I hear that same low, deep sound that vibrated through the floor of my bedroom. He likes that he makes me laugh. He’s always disliked the French. My husband’s dislike is rooted in admiration. That is why he loved me, and will hate me if I ever say no. And when you are next in London, he says, as if we were already talking of me being in London, we can grab a coffee or something. I say: yes.

When we meet, it is almost like those days he got home from his work trips and I would run downstairs and press my face into his cheek. He has a round face, too round, really, a moon face the colour of ham, but I liked the feeling of being lost inside it. Back then, he wanted me to kiss him, something sensual, without asking. Eventually, though, he’d slip in the front door without my knowing, going straight into the shower.

I hug him. He says: you’re looking well. This is what my aunts say to me when they think I’ve put on weight. I have not put on weight. The separation has honed my body to muscle and veins. I am wearing a push up bra. My breasts feel like they are floating to my chin. They want to make me a moon face too. He used to press his eyes against them and tell me he could see into the future. Did he see the future where a stranger slept on his side of the bed, asking me if it was OK for him to touch them? Yes. I meant it that time. Yes. I think I meant it each time, wanting this stranger to make my body stranger to me again so that when I would meet my husband, just like I am doing now, I would not remember the things that made me turn from him, and instead remember the stranger’s hands, everywhere, all at once, writing a different story over the one that shouts the other woman’s name louder than the London street. Should we go for a walk, my husband asks, and I cannot say yes because we’ve already done this walk, weeks ago, before I let the stranger into our bed, and my husband asked me if I could forgive him and I said no and my husband walked away.

I have made a spreadsheet of how our assets will be divided. We halve ourselves, and halve and halve and halve. I think of the stranger in my bed, the way his shadow cut open the flashing sky. Then I remember I was on top of him, lit by the storm, and he said: you look so good. And I thought: not well, good.

I am good.

And I said: yes.