My husband and I do not get on, it’s my fault I fear, our whole married life has been built on a lie. See him sneer at me, he loathes me, detests me but he can't understand why. How did this happen he wonders, how is it possible? What went wrong?

I decided to come clean, after all we are both imprisoned in this hell of togetherness, perhaps now I can provide a key.
"We're not compatible, never were." I say, thrusting my face into his, our mutual hatred locking horns in a frozen moment of fury.
He shakes his head, still unbelieving.

"No," he whines, that pathetic nasal voice unleashing in me years of bitterness kept curdling in a deep pit of time.

He insists, "We are meant to be together, we proved that, we're a unit, we just have to try harder."

I laugh, throw my head back and let out the most unlady like guffaw.

"You bloody fool!" I scream.

He looks hurt, pained, so confused.

"It was a trick."

"What?" he folds his arms across his body, gently pressing against his belly, in a futile gesture so reminiscent of someone searching for their umbilical chord, which of course he is.

"I heard you and your bloody mother talking, I hid in the next room, I knew the plan!' I shout, exalted at speaking the truth at last.

"What?" is all he can manage again.

"You heard, I never felt the fucking pea."

“Oh dear,” he mutters as I hurl my crown across the room and it smashes against the door.