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Act 1.

It begins with a family.

There is a mother, father and a son. The son is eight years old, precocious, independent beyond his years. The relationship between the parents is fractious: love affairs, secrets and lies. The household has the veneer of respectability, but beneath it all - inside the belly of the beast, behind the curtains - there is a simmering rage. It is a detached house with detached individuals floating around.

Act 2.

The conflict arises one day when the mother reads the father’s messages. A flirtatious message from a workmate. He had forgotten to sign out of his email account on her laptop - the kind of error that she would never make.

Who the fuck is this, she thinks.

Then she thinks of her own duplicity.

She thinks of scrolling through other emails that he has sent and received. The thing is too tempting. She walks away and leaves the laptop on the kitchen counter and makes herself a drink, occupies herself with washing bowls and drying them, using the bathroom. But suddenly it’s 11 o’clock in the morning and she has nothing else to do and the laptop is standing open, mute but screaming for her attention. Her own infidelities raise the probability, she admits, that he too has had his share of infidelities. Yet things unknown and not known can always be discounted and pushed aside.

She clicks and starts to look through email thread and discovers words and phrases from her husband that sound like they come from another person altogether. She can hear his voice saying the words, but she can’t imagine him ever saying them. Image attachments load and disappear as she continues to scroll. It is filthy beyond imagination and the more she sees, the more she is floored by an overwhelming sense of self-hate. She wants to search for her name in the thread, to see if she has ever come up in conversation. It’s a bad idea - she knows it’s a terrible idea.

She pauses to reflect: if I search and find nothing, I’ll feel emptier than before. If I search and find something, the odds are that it will be degrading and I’ll feel even emptier.

The son comes back from school and plays video games in his room, dropped off by a friend. He barely even says hello as he walks through the door, through her and away to his den. Her eyes follow him up the stairs, his back to her.

The father works late and comes home later: unemotional and tired. The mother spends the day restless, wandering about the home with nothing much to do.

He says something - or maybe it was something he did? - that triggers her to confront him. She can’t remember it anymore that well. It’s become a blurred image, overexposed.

Act 3.

The resolution comes as the boy walks in on his raging parents. It’s an embarrassing scene, seeing his mother and father screaming at each other; but worse still, his mother is half-naked and his father is still in his work suit.

His father shouts incomprehensible things at his mother who is crying and sobbing and the son doesn’t know quite what to do. His urge is to comfort his mother, but he also feels a strong desire to run away and pretend that nothing is happening. There is also a rising sense within him that he needs to protect his mother from this angry man.

The parents don’t realise he’s there until they realise he’s there. It’s too late, though, and they both know it. But they still try, for a moment, to maintain the pretence of a happy marriage. It’s as if the curtains have been pulled aside and the characters are naked on stage, and that there is an audience to their charade. Silence dominates until the mother reassures her son that everything is ok - but her voice does little to suggest that everything is truly ok.

The boy has never seen anyone cry like the way his mother is crying, but he knows it’t not a good thing.

The man walks past the son without looking and announces to no one that he’s leaving.

The boy can smell his father’s aftershave lingering in the air long after he’s slammed the front door. He can hear the car starting, the gears crunching, the wheels against the driveway’s tarmac. And then there’s more silence, punctuated by the mother’s sporadic sniffing. He can still see the hideous moment when the car’s headlamps are flicked on and the darkness of the bedroom slackens and giant shadows are cast all over. But then the car is gone and the shadows dissipate.

The boy looks at his mother and doesn’t know what to feel. She is crying, wearing underpants and her body is shaking. He’s not sure what to do.

The father is gone now but in that instance neither know for how long. Neither realise that he will never come back. The boy can’t remember if his father pushed him over when he left, or whether he just fell in shock at the sight of seeing such distress.

She recalls waking up in the morning and watching him say goodbye, and realises that, all of what has since been revealed was, back then, as yet unknown.