Something Happened (Unfinished)

Something happened two years ago. I don’t know if we’re supposed to have an in-built shelf-life of tolerance, a sort of time limited shite survival capacity which on, let’s say Wednesday morning, seems quite healthy and absorbent, but by Thursday afternoon has become mysteriously used up. Anyway, that’s how it happened for me. One minute, I was a contented, downtrodden and ritually abused housewife; the next I just knew I wasn’t going home to him anymore. Not even for one night. So I rang him from work and arranged to meet him somewhere other than our beautiful home. Suddenly the original Victorian floor tiles and solid oak bannister began to look less like Home and Garden and more menacingly like Accident and Emergency.

I saw him from a distance away and I couldn’t imagine how I was going to find the courage to tell him I was leaving. I never even disagreed with him, because if I did I would have to watch his face twist and sputter like a five year-old on bath night. Somehow, though, as we came face to face, the words just came out of mouth, all by themselves. And his face didn’t change. There wasn’t any shouting or crying, no recriminations or pleading.

“Ok”, he said, and then he walked away. So I did, too.

I’d packed a bag and a spare duvet and I’d given the boys to my mother for safe-keeping. I’d even had the foresight to make a pretend contingency plan which, in reality, everyone involved knew to be a dead certainty. So I drove from there to Isabelle’s apartment with a bag of squirming eels in my stomach. Good job they were there, too, since as it turned out I didn’t eat for about a week, despite Isabelle’s best efforts.

It’s a funny thing about girlfriends. I mean, they say that men, when they go to war together, share a special bond, a willingness to die rather than let each other down. The whole blood brothers mentality is a thing that women can’t understand, never mind join in. Well, I genuinely don’t know anything about that. I mean, don’t get me wrong – I like men. You know where you stand. If they don’t want to shag you or look at your tits, they don’t bother speaking to you. Men have a marvellous commitment to expediency that kind of precludes bitchy gossip as a time-wasting piece of girlie nonsense which, at its worst, can interfere with the football commentary. But girls – wow. We are just so much more complex. I have to admit, we can be manipulative and indulge in mind games in a way that leaves our male buddies scratching their heads and wondering just where and how they got left behind. And sometimes we do it just for fun. But once we make a real connection, our loyalty extends way beyond loaning out our season tickets.

That night, when all I wanted was to become very drunk, very quickly, make disgusting snivelling noises and lie in a hot, bubbly bath with eastern aromas clearing my passages, Isabelle calmly arranged it all.
I don’t know what he did that night, all alone in that big empty house. I was awake, sitting on the bed with the curtains open and a vast blackness stretching out across town to where we had lived. But I know I wasn’t thinking about him. My thoughts were all about tomorrow and starting again.

So in the morning I took a long hard look at my life. I could see there were obvious areas where improvements could be made. For instance, the joint account was horribly overdrawn, no clear decisions had been made about where I was going to live, or where he was going to live, and the bulk of my makeup was still in the en-suite bathroom. And I’m sorry to say, the make-up was my main priority at that moment. It was clear I couldn’t possibly go to work, or even leave the apartment with no slap. So I decided to be positive, proactive and productive. I stayed in bed and made a list. Isabelle phoned work and told the boss I wouldn’t be in.

Life changes are very scary. It wasn’t a case of wondering had I made the right decision. Staying in my marriage wasn’t an option. I’m no expert, but  had a gut feeling that most happy husbands and wives didn’t spend their evenings dodging each other and listening for movement in the other room, timing visits to the kitchen or the loo so that they didn’t accidentally meet up in the hallway. We shared a bedroom right up until that day, but I made sure that that I went up early, so that I would be either genuinely or at least plausibly asleep by the time Ian climbed into bed. Most nights, though, it seemed that he was so monumentally self-absorbed that, even though the bedroom light was off and I was apparently in a peaceful sleep – feigned or otherwise – the door would burst open and he’d clatter in, go straight through to the en-suite, leaving both lights on and the door open, and empty his bladder with the vigour and nonchalance of a shire horse on the parade ground.

Then, when he finally slid into bed next to me, he never seemed to notice that that I lay frozen on the very edge, so I could feel the piping of the mattress through the sheet. My arms were folded against my breasts, my legs clamped together and my face turned resolutely away. I had to lie on my back in order to protect my rear flanks, so to speak. It’s not a complex assessment, is it? Body language was never his strong point. Actually, neither was the English language. It’s possible that Ian could have misinterpreted the sleepy demurs and I may have been accused of the occasional mixed message. Still, by the time our pillow talk had been reduced to fairly simple, clear directives such as, “No, I still don’t want sex.” And “Step away from my ass or I’ll scream”, I was a little disappointed in his apparent lack of understanding.

On Monday morning I returned to work. Ian had gone to stay with his sister and I had brought the boys home. I still hadn’t eaten or slept and I was constantly on the phone to Isabelle, who appeared to have an infinitesimal capacity to absorb weeping angst. Actually, I had a suspicion that at certain points she had simply left the phone on a convenient flat surface while she made a cup of coffee, fed the cat, possibly even had a nap, and generally tended to her own needs. But it didn’t matter – I never once felt that she wasn’t there for me and that was what counted. At about two in the morning, after what must have been the most exhausting weekend of her life, Isabelle managed to persuade me to put the phone down.
“You’re putting way too much pressure on yourself, honey” she told me. “I’ll be there whenever you need me, but you’ve been through such a lot over the last few days. You really need to rest. Don’t go to work, I’ll phone in for you.”
I think she really needed to rest.

But in the morning I took the boys to school as usual, kissed their wan faces as they got out of the car and drove away with tears in my eyes and cigarette smoke billowing from the open window. Then something struck me as I glanced in the rear view mirror which, by the way has a dual purpose in my car. Hair, lipstick and nothing else.

“oh my God,” I thought in wondering tones, “I look like the wreck of the Hesperus.” Actually the make-up was halfway decent, but my hair looked untouched. Not, I might add, in the careless, winsome ways of natural-faced, lithesome beauties who model teenage cosmetics and shampoos, but more in the style of hurricane or earthquake survivors.

So, with scant thought to the horrible overdraft, I swung by the hairdressers. If I was facing a brave new world, I wasn’t going to face it with bad hair. When I finally arrived at work, three hours late, my boss, Stella, called me into the office.
“Where were you this morning, Jen? We had a meeting, you missed it and no-one seemed to know why.” She looked sternly over her glasses at me. I briefly contemplated going through the whole cataclysmic leaving of husband scenario but couldn’t face it.
“Sorry, Stella, I went to get my hair cut.”
Stella scowled. “And you thought you’d get it cut in the firm’s time?”
Something snapped. “Well it grew in the firm’s time!”
“Not all of it.” Said Stella
“No,” I conceded, “and I didn’t have all of it cut off!”
It was quick and it was witty and I think I might have felt quite pleased with myself if I hadn’t then immediately burst into tears.

Stella softened and supplied the tissues while I poured out the recent story behind my marriage and its demise. When I had finished, she told me that when her first marriage had ended she had gone for a walk to the top of a Welsh mountain and had sat for a full day reading Men are From Mars and Women are from Venus.
“If anybody had walked past me, they would have been calling for assistance,” she said. “It just spoke so clearly to me. All day, I’d keeping looking up and shouting “Fucking Hell” into the wind. Keep strong, Jen. And by the way, keep coming to work!”

That night Ian phoned. My heart sank when I heard his voice. I suppose once my heart would have fluttered when I heard his voice, but now the only fluttering was in my bowels.
“Jen?” he said, “Have you sorted yourself out yet?”
“I don’t think I can talk to you yet, if that’s what you mean. Look Ian, this is just as hard for me as it is for you, but I think it’s really over. I just can’t do it anymore.”
“Do what exactly? Jen, we have the perfect marriage – we never even argue. But I suppose your so-called friend has been feeding all sorts of crap about being fulfilled and finding yourself, hasn’t she?  Well get real, Jen. You are a wife and a mother. And that’s all there is. That’s the point of your life, bearing my children and bringing them up. Why do you think you need anything else?”

He wasn’t saying anything new. He really had no idea why I had left. He was angry and it was clear that he expected me to crumple in the face of his anger. I felt a familiar uncertainty beginning to build, a gnawing doubt forming in my mind. I don’t know why I was still afraid. He could only shout now – I knew he couldn’t hurt me from the other end of telephone line. I sat and listened, with tears pouring down my face and a knot of anxiety forming in the pit of my stomach. I could visualise his expression and knew that so often in the past he had controlled my decisions in just this way. Old habits die harder than Bruce Willis. I couldn’t speak; couldn’t say, “Ian you are wrong. I have made my first independent decision in fifteen years and I’m going to follow my heart, even though I know it’s going to be difficult.”
Instead, I just held the phone away from my ear for a few seconds and then carefully replaced it onto the stand. Ian’s voice was still.

I talked the talk. I was a strong, independent, modern woman, emerging from the socially constructed slavery of marriage, excitedly embracing my brave new world. The reality was that I couldn’t be sure that I had even survived the old one. I vaguely remembered a younger version of myself, noisier and more confident, with a streak of stubborn rebellion which was fired by a certainty that, beyond all else I knew about myself, I was not like the others. I was special, with the promise of a sparkling future.

And then, one very special and sparkling night, while I was too busy being a wild child to remember about condoms, everything changed.

His father hit the ground running and my father stopped singing. I became a mother, and Jack, in all honesty, became my life. When I met Ian he was six months old and I was never quite certain which one of us he had fallen in love with. I only saw a man who behaved like a father to him and who bought me my first red rose. Before the first rose began to wilt, another would take its place and then another and then another. And so I never saw the rose die. I thought that perseverance would keep it alive and make it grow into something beautiful. I really thought my marriage would make my father sing again. And he did. It wasn’t exciting and my heart never sang, but my father did and it seemed to be enough for Jack and Ian.

Ian bought the last rose on the day before our wedding. On the day after our wedding he told me I couldn’t buy another pair of tights. I had to make them last. I wasn’t special after all. But my husband said he loved me, because of my child-bearing hips and in spite of them. When Donnie was born, four years later, his sense of achievement was complete. He knew his place in the grand scheme of things, and he knew mine. He was determined and confident and always knew the right thing to do. That’s what he told me and I believed him. He was building a career so that he could provide for his family and he set about cultivating an executive image. He insisted on silk ties and a weekly haircut. He was the leader – master of his household. As he thrived, my roses were never replaced and slowly, simply withered.

It takes a long time for the slow but thorough process of grooming, isolation and, eventually, total control to become complete. It happened insidiously, so that I would believe in its normality. The life I led had to be acceptable, and so the alternative that Ian warned of was terrifying. Women who put their own selfish desires before the needs of their families, alienating the men whose financial support and guidance was so crucial to survival, and jeopardising their offspring’s emotional well-being by leaving them to the care of strangers. In the search for material gain, these women risked their children’s sense of morality. Our children were fortunate to have a mother who cared solely for them and who spent her days richly fulfilled in the nurturing of her family. What a crock.
I was brought down.

Oh, I loved watching my boys grow and playing with them, teaching them. But I wanted to be a full time mother, not a servant in my own home. I frequently disappointed Ian in my lack of devotion to the ironing board and the hoover. I had a strange and unnatural aversion to manual labour and grocery shopping that he found hard to understand in a woman. Even worse, I seemed incapable of preventing the children from making loud noises or jumping on the furniture. At the end of each day, my senses sharpened as I heard Ian’s key turn in the lock. My sole objective for the evening was to keep the peace until bedtime so that he didn’t shout or hurt anyone. Sometimes it worked, mostly it didn’t.

The kitchen was a microcosm of our lives. I was a pretty good cook but I just never managed to bake the cakes quite right. Each attempt was a slight improvement on the last, but still not quite making the grade. Ian gave me just enough encouragement to keep me motivated. Day after day I would try again and he would taste the results with the slightest disappointment. Keep trying. Could do better.

So I devoted myself to home and family, the outside world seeing only the things that Ian wanted it to see. No one came in and I went nowhere. It was a very effective strategy. I had no-one to compare notes with and I thought, since even my parents appeared to think my marriage was ok, that it must be the same for everybody. And I thought that sex just became horrible once you got past your twenties. I thought that people stopped kissing. And I believed him when he told me that there was something wrong with me. I must be unreasonable and unadventurous. That must be why my husband had to force me, why I had to hold my breath and bite the pillow to stop from crying out when eventually I realised he was never going to listen.

I did a bad thing to him, too. I gave up saying no. For years my silence gave him permission to call me names, cut my hair, choose my clothes, make all the decisions and whittle away at my self until I became a horribly compliant, malleable, exhausted thing whose over-riding emotion was bone gnawing terror.
When I left, his sense of order fell apart. Bewilderment turned to anger and anger into hate.

It isn’t even very hard to pinpoint the moment that process began. As long as I was alone, Ian felt reasonably comfortable that I would see sense and return to the fold.