Jasmin Bradley

It was that time of week again. Tatiana shivered and her back arched slightly as it met the damp, stone cold bench she had occupied alone every Sunday afternoon for the past twenty one years. The distant padding sound of the players’ studs against soggy ground and the smell of wet mud lingered familiarly in the air, as well as a thick, sad cloud of grey fog. Tatiana’s bench stood away from the rest of the scarf-ridden, red nosed, mostly male crowd watching the game at Dartmouth Rugby Club. To the left of the main crowd, huddled together and dressed immaculately wearing varying shades of pastel coloured overcoats, were the usual posse of  ‘stepford wives.’ Tatiana didn’t stand with them, and she didn’t want to thank you very much, even though her husband attended the rugby every Sunday just like theirs. No, Tatiana wasn’t part of that group, she had messy hair and wore big jumpers and didn’t do her makeup anymore. She was tatty Tatiana, just like her husband always told her.

But anyway, Tatiana didn’t care if she didn’t stand with the stepford wives, as long as he was at the rugby every Sunday. Her eyes switched from the tightly clustered group of women gossiping in hushed voices and turned instead to the pitch, where her eyes rested in contempt for a long moment on a pair of glorious, muscle clad thighs shining with sweat and spattered with mud. She sighed out loud – no danger of anyone hearing her over here – and switched her gaze to that magnificent face. She watched as the hot breath emitting from a perfect chest and out through a perfect mouth warmed the winter air for just a second before it vanished and the next beautiful spurt came. The mouth she watched so intently turned to face her and beamed a wide, flawlessly crooked smile. The face upon which this lovely smile sat was framed by messy, blonde hair, and a pair of brilliant pale green eyes shone out at her mischievously from underneath it. She blushed and looked down at her faded navy jeans. And for a dream-like moment she couldn’t hear the thuds of the rugby boots, nor the occasional grunts from the players as their body smashed into the hard wall of another, not even the shrieking and giggling of the ten or so children (four of which were her own) playing together nearby. But best of all, she couldn’t hear that awful man whose booming voice emanated across the pitch, through the air and then through her body every other minute. The voice, that brassy, loud voice, shouting insults at players on the opposing team, like “Cauliflower ears!”, was usually followed by the harsh bark of an order directed at the pitch, or a crude yell of disapproval when a player missed a pass. God she hated that voice.

And then, after only a brief blissful indulgence in her own thoughts and him, she heard it again.

“OI, GINGER! IF YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE PACE, THEN GO BACK HOME TO MUMMY!”

The group of men crowded around that vile voice laughed adoringly with it. And that was her husband, Ronnie White, and his jeering group of overweight, balding cronies that attended the rugby every Sunday to laugh with him and drink with him and worship his every ignorant, vulgar, bolshie word.

Tatiana Scott became Mrs Tatiana White at the age of twenty one. Ronnie was tall and charming and the best at rugby in the county, and Tatiana was slim and pretty and young. Now Ronnie was fat and red and horrible. He’d never made it playing rugby and he had blamed Tatiana every single day of their miserable, dull married life. She’d never told him the real reason he didn’t make it was because he drank too much, in fact she never told him anything he didn’t want to hear, because Ronnie White was always right. Tatiana was forty two now and she hid herself and her unhappiness under dowdy clothes and inside her house. The trip to the rugby she was dragged to every Sunday to provide snacks and drinks for her husband and his crowd of men had become the only regular time she spent away from her home. She had dreamed of becoming an artist, the closest thing she’d done to anything artistic in the past twenty one years was sewing sequins onto various outfits to be worn by her four children at their nativity plays every Christmas. She loved those plays. She loved the feeling of pride that consumed her when her lovely children, the only good thing to come of her marriage, waved at her bashfully from the stage. That was her favourite feeling in the world, that, and those secret smiles on Sundays.

“Tatty?!” She barely flinched when that voice echoed across the pitch and smacked her in the face like a cold wind. “Tatty Tatiana! Bring over some sandwiches!”

Her eyes observed her husband’s protruding gut that hug over his waist belt and jiggled grotesquely when he laughed. As she walked around the pitch she felt those pale green eyes watching her and caught the flash of those wonderful teeth smiling wildly at her, she blushed into her box of sandwiches.

The truth is that Tatiana had another reason to come to the rugby on Sundays besides providing refreshments for Ronnie and his pink faced followers, and that reason was Tom Flint. Tom Flint was in love Tatiana White and he’d told her so three years ago, and he’d told her every Sunday, ever since. And every time Tom Flint smiled that crooked smile at her she loved him too.

Tatty Tatiana wanted to tell Tom Flint she loved him back, no, she wanted to scream it across the pitch every Sunday when he smiled her that perfect, crooked smile. But all she could do was flush and look at her feet because she was fat and useless and good for nothing, Ronnie told her so.

Tatiana watched as her husband grabbed at a sandwich in the tin with his short stubby fingers and shoved it into his open mouth. She watched as his yellow teeth chewed and his tongue rolled around the food, and she listened to his throat swallow lazily with a grim, squelching sound. And then she listened again to that loud voice, and this time she really listened.

“Not got any cheese ones then? Eh?” She stared back at him blankly. And then he glanced to his adoring gang with a smug look on his ugly face and spat through his peg-like teeth, “Well then, you’re about as useful to me as a one legged man in an arse kicking contest, aren’t you!”

The stepford wives tutted and the cronies laughed, their stomachs shaking grossly, and Tatty Tatiana dropped the tin of sandwiches right there at her husband’s feet, turned away from him and his fat friends and met that beautiful green eyed face with her own. And she smiled the biggest smile right back at Tom Flint.