by David Jester
“But you sent me here.”
“And why do you think we did that?” she asked.
“I—I—” I honestly had no idea, but the absurdity of the situation was robbing me of all coherent thought.
“Exactly,” she said with a firm nod.
I turned to my dad and he also gave me a firm nod, although he wasn’t able to hide his smile.
“You’re crazy,” I told them both.
“Now, now,” my dad chimed in. “I don’t want to have to tell you the story about the pot and the kettle.”
“Shut up!” I barked before flopping into the passenger’s seat, folding my arms, and plastering a discontented pout on my face.
“There’s plenty more fish in the sea.”
“That’s what they all say.”
“But it’s true. And if you don’t live by the sea, well, that’s what escorts are for.”
“Good point. What was your wife’s number again?”
The look Matthew gave me suggested that I had gone too far. The barrier that would have stopped me from saying such things in the past had broken down. I no longer cared.
“Mate, that was below the belt.”
That was rich coming from Matthew, a man for whom there was no belt. Everything and everyone was fair game in his universe, but that was the sort of person he was and always had been. It was different for me, because I wasn’t a careless bastard.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it.”
I expected him to tell me that it was okay and that he didn’t take offense, but in expecting such things, I was forgetting who I was dealing with.
“But if you do want her number, I’m happy to give it to you. I think she could teach you a thing or two.”
“You’re joking, right?”
He shrugged. “I’m just saying, it’s not about sex, remember, it’s strictly no contact. It’s all about dominance. Maybe she could help you get over Lizzie.”
I merely stared at him, waiting for him to find my reply himself.
“Fine, if that’s the way you’re going to be … just don’t say I didn’t try to help you.”
“I won’t. You have my word.”
Even if I did want to take Matthew up on his offer to let his wife spank me and call me names, I doubted she would agree to it. She had taken Lizzie’s side. It wasn’t that they were great friends, or that they had taken a vow of solidarity on account of them both being mature women married to immature children, but rather that my version of events was hard to believe. The only one to believe me was Matthew, who was so used to my reckless fuckery that he didn’t need to question it to believe it.
Sharon had been at my house when I tried to pack some clothes and reason with my wife while she was in an unreasonable state. Sharon sat on the sofa listening to our conversation, nodding and agreeing with Lizzie, and heckling me like a one-woman talk show audience.
For most of the visit, Lizzie wasn’t interested in what I had to say. She didn’t want to hear my side of the story. When I eventually ground her down, she stood in the middle of the room with her hands on her hips and a stern look on her face. It suggested that whatever I had to say wasn’t going to be believed or well received, and that even if I dropped my pants and began to defecate rainbows, she still wouldn’t be impressed.
“Well then,” she had hissed. “What is it, what is your side of the story? What excuse could you possibly have?”
I contemplated whether I should lie. It had been a week since the incident. A week that I had spent trying to get hold of her and a week she had spent avoiding me. She had changed the locks, turned off the phone, and emailed all of our mutual friends to tell them that I was scum and was not to be trusted. After all that, and after finally getting my foot in the door, I knew I needed to lie, but nothing came to me.
Instead I told her the truth and then, when I had finished, I waited to be embraced. I waited for the nightmare to be over, or for her to slap me and kick me out. What I didn’t expect was for them both to laugh, which is exactly what happened.
“That’s the best you can come up with?” Sharon said, offering her two cents where it wasn’t welcome. “You’ve had all this time and that’s all you have?”
“In my defense it was a week, and stop laughing. I’m not one of your clients, I don’t enjoy being humiliated.”
Sharon’s mouth fell open and I felt a little rush of delight. I liked her and I certainly didn’t have an issue with what she did. In fact, my only issue was that I couldn’t do it myself. But she had annoyed me, so that felt good.
“Pack your suitcase, Kieran.” Lizzie’s laughter didn’t seem genuine. It was tired, maniacal, and in that moment, I saw what I had done to her, and I realized that as much as she hated me for what had happened, I hated myself even more. She still had Ben and Eddie to look after—our child, our dog, our family. I had made her life, and by association theirs, much more difficult.
“I’m so sorry,” I had told her.
“I don’t believe you.”
Two weeks had passed since that conversation, and I hadn’t spoken a word to her. I had sent many messages and emails, but had only received a handful in return, and most of them told me to give up. It got to the point where that was exactly what I felt like doing, because no matter how hard I tried, nothing seemed to work and Lizzie wasn’t willing to listen. I had no proof, nothing but my word, and even when I had been allowed to express that word, it hadn’t been believed.
“One of my exes is available.”
“Sorry?”
Matthew was still persisting. The compassionate friend in him, which occupied a very small space, was telling him that he needed to help me, that he needed to cheer me up. The rest of him, the smaller parts that held his reasoning, his logic, and his common sense, was what he used to find that help for me.
“You can hook up with them. One of them, Cheryl, or Cherrie, or—” he paused, looking confused for a moment before shaking it off, “her name is not important, but she can definitely help you to forget. Trust me.”
“I don’t want your sloppy seconds.”
“I was with her years ago. She’s probably been with dozens of guys since. You’d be lucky if it was just seconds.”
“You disgust me.”
“I’m trying to help you.”
It also hurt me that I hadn’t seen Ben in over three weeks. I could have gone through the courts, taken the legal route, but I didn’t want to cause Lizzie any more stress. Hope was quickly fading, but I still believed that we could get back together and I felt that taking legal action would make the split official.
After our conversation at the house, I got very drunk and phoned her. The house phone had been cut off and eventually she turned off her cell, so I phoned her parents instead. I was too drunk and too upset to care, and even though they hated me, and even though Lizzie wasn’t with them, I saw them as a link to her and demanded that they listened to me as I explained myself. It didn’t go as well as I had hoped.
“Just please, listen to me. No one will, no one gives me a chance,” I had begged, beginning as I intended to go on by sounding like a depressed teenager.
“Kieran, you cheated on my daughter. I have nothing to say to you.”
“Then put your wife on.”
There was a groan as the phone changed hands. Lizzie’s mother was stuck up, but she was also reserved and much too polite to hang up on me. She was the sort of woman who would give up her morning to talk to someone selling door-to-door vacuum cleaners or salvation. It wasn’t because she was a people person or because she loved to talk, far from it—she was just worried that the image of the polite and upper-class woman that she had worked so hard to achieve would crumble if she told someone to fuck off.
“Please, listen to me,” I said as soon as I heard her breathe, one that turned into a sigh. “You have to let me explain myself.”
“I don’t have to do anything.”
She had a point, but I wasn’t
prepared to back away. “That night didn’t happen the way you think it did. I went to Lizzie’s room to get away from the noise and—”
“The noise?” she said. “What do you mean, the noise?”
“That’s not important.”
“I think it is. I think you just described my family as, and I quote, ‘the noise.’”
I had done just that. But it could have been worse. In fact, of all the things I could have said about her family, that was the least offensive.
“It was noisy, that’s all,” I said, keen to push on. “Anyway, Laura spoke to me, she was friendly, but I think she got the wrong idea and thought I was coming onto her.”
“From what we saw, it very much looked like a mutual decision.”
“No, no, it’s not like that, listen to me …” I paused. There was a gap where her name should have gone, but—
“You don’t know my name, do you?”
“I—I …” I finished with a grumble. I was sure it had come up before, but it hadn’t stuck.
“You don’t know your own mother-in-law’s name?” I sensed the anger in her voice. The veil was shifting and her emotions were finally showing through. I hoped she wasn’t as needlessly aggressive and violent as her husband was. I had been innocent when he beat me up, and now that I was guilty, I dreaded to think what would happen to me.
“In my defense …” My mother had once told me that whenever I used those words to begin a sentence, I very rarely actually had a justifiable defense, and although she was right, I was too drunk to realize it. “It’s not like Lizzie calls you by your first name or anything. She calls you mum, mother, or she-devil.”
Again, I attributed the last bit to the alcohol, and although I regretted it as soon as I said it, I also enjoyed it.
“How dare you speak to me like that?”
“How dare I?” I spat back, feeling my own anger increase. “How dare you treat me like you’ve always treated me. How dare you drag my name through the mud. How dare you think less of me or my family just because we weren’t raised on a diet of caviar, Queen’s English, and fucking incest?”
She gasped. “You can’t speak to me like that!” She was annoyed, surprised, but she didn’t hang up, and I wasn’t finished.
“How dare you stand there and treat your son-in-law like a rotten vegetable, something to be pushed away, discarded, and grimaced at if it ever gets too close; how dare you look down your nose at my family, at a mother who has been nothing but polite and accommodating to you, a mother who has shown her child and grandchild nothing but love, and a mother who is respectful of everyone that her child dates because she is a human fucking being. And that goes for my father as well, a man who—who—” I felt my argument drying up. “—how dare you?”
“You can’t speak to me like that.”
“Yes I can. But if you don’t want to hear any more then put your husband back on. That is, if he isn’t drowning his misery in a bottle of whiskey, or drowning some poor sucker who did nothing but try to befriend him in his own piss.”
She gasped again. “You can’t speak to me like that!”
“Oh, get a fucking thesaurus. And quit the posh bullshit while you’re at it. I know you’re from Hull.”
That was when I hung up on her. I had sobered up by then, the anger and the adrenaline seemingly boiling the alcohol out of my blood, but after suffering through that conversation, I needed another drink.
I sighed heavily and slumped back on my bed. I felt a horrible nagging migraine creep up on me as I remembered the phone call with Lizzie’s mother. I had enjoyed it, but I still regretted it. Lizzie didn’t like the way her mother treated me and was often on my side when I bitched about her, but this was different. This time I had done it to her face, and I had done it during a tense time, a time when I should have been trying to make peace.
I rested back on my hands, staring at the ceiling and the poster of Kate Moss in her prime. My father had bought it for me when I was sixteen. He thought it would make me see him as the cool father, when it fact it made me think he was kinda creepy. I wasn’t even a big fan of Kate Moss, but I didn’t want to disappoint him so I had agreed to let him put it in my room. The fact that he put it above my bed and then winked when he told me reminded me—as if I needed reminding—just how disturbed he was.
“What about that Sally chick?”
I groaned. Matthew was still at it. He’d arrived a few hours ago and had been trying to cheer me up ever since. Most of his methods involved ex-girlfriends, escorts, and even hardcore pornography, and the Sally in question was just as unlikely to cheer me up as all of those things were.
“She’s sixty, Matthew.”
“She’s a cougar.”
“Have you seen her skin? She’s more like an elephant. What could you possibly see in her?”
“She has huge tits.”
“Of course. I should have known.” I sighed, closing my eyes and not for the first time wishing that when I opened them, all this would be over. “She won’t do. No one will.”
“What about Erica?”
I rolled over and wrapped the pillow around my head, hoping it would drown him out. Sharon was out of town, so a small part of me was happy that Matthew had given up masturbation time to come and help me, but I needed silence, peace, time to think things through. I had done very little else over the past couple weeks. Except drinking, that is. I had done a lot of that.
The night after the phone call to Lizzie’s parents, I got drunk again and decided that I would go straight to the source, so that I could make an idiot of myself there, as well. It was late, I didn’t have a key, and I didn’t want to wake Ben, so rather than holding up a stereo that played our favorite song, or singing her a melody myself, I tried to climb in through an open window.
It seemed like a sensible idea at the time, but that’s the problem with alcohol: dumb things begin to make sense. It took me ten minutes and a very sore backside before I scrambled up the drain pipe; ten minutes and five steps before I remembered I was terrified of heights; and ten minutes and thirty seconds before the police van arrived.
One of the neighbors had phoned them. Lizzie didn’t even know I was there until the van pulled up and the two officers stood at her front window, looking up.
It was the same guy who had visited during our tiff with the neighbors, but this time he didn’t have his little sidekick with him. I hoped he wouldn’t remember me, and although he didn’t mention the previous incident and seemed not to recollect it, I had a feeling he knew.
“Can you come down now please, sir?” he had asked in a calm and relaxed voice that didn’t match the situation or the grin on his face.
The window to the spare bedroom was open, but not by much. It was also a very small window and as I stood on the ledge, I began to question my logic for ever climbing up there in the first place.
“I can’t,” I shouted back.
“Yes, you can. You climbed up and now you can climb back down.”
“I really can’t. I’m scared of heights.”
He raised an eyebrow and then looked at his colleague, who did the same.
“I know this might sound crazy, but this is my house.”
“You’re right, sir, that does indeed sound crazy.”
“But you’ve been here before. You recognize me, surely?”
He stared at me for a moment and then shook his head. “I don’t recollect such an event, sir.”
“It’s true, trust me.”
“I make it my business not to trust drunken men on window ledges.”
I groaned in frustration and watched as Lizzie came outside, dressed in a gown and looking shell-shocked. She raised her eyes to look at me before shaking her head in disbelief.
“See,” I barked quickly. “That’s my wife, you can ask her.”
“Is this true, Miss?” the officer asked, still acting like this was a regular occurrence for him. “Is this your husband?”
I did my best to sm
ile at her while pressing myself as tightly to the window as I could, but she didn’t return the smile.
“No, that’s not true.”
The officer turned back to me. I heard him sigh and then saw him take out a notepad and pencil. “Now then, I suggest you tell me what’s really going on here. First, let’s start with your name.”
I looked at Lizzie, pleading, begging, but she merely shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Lizzie, for everything. But please, you need to listen to me. I just need to explain myself.”
“I think you already have explained yourself.”
“Well, yes, but—but.”
“And you also explained yourself to my mother,” she added.
“Oh, she told you that.” I deflated so much I nearly fell off the ledge. I could have sworn there was a glint in the officer’s eye as he saw my foot slip and waited for me to hit the ground and save him the trouble of a negotiation.
Lizzie stared at me for a moment longer and then turned to the police officers. “Can I leave you two to it?” she asked. “I have a baby in there and it is rather chilly out here.”
“Of course, go ahead, we’ll try not to disturb you.”
I watched in open-mouthed disbelief as Lizzie reentered the house, closed the front door, and then locked it. Once she was back inside the warmth, the police officer turned to me, his pen hovering in wait. “So, what did you say your name was?”
I fell asleep listening to Matthew as he offered me every girl he had been with, and every girl he hadn’t. He didn’t stop when I drifted off to sleep, and as a result, I had nightmares about the sort of things that Matthew often dreamed about, and I woke up feeling even worse than when I had gone to sleep.
Matthew had gone, but as I ventured downstairs to drown my sorrows in as much alcohol as I could find, my parents assumed the role of trying to make me feel better. My father was as distant and as vague as he always was, and my mother was full of her usual blend of peppy optimism.
“I don’t think you should worry too much,” she told me. “I have a good feeling that this will turn out okay.”
“I’m glad you think so, but I don’t. There’s nothing I can do to make it better. Everything I try only seems to make things worse.”