by Bishop, John
It was a wedding, and I was knocking out my Frog and Bucket ‘Give me a cheer if you’ve got kids …’ kind of stuff, including material about how marriage was basically rubbish. ‘I was married till I realised I could be happy without being nagged every day …’ I gradually lost everyone in the room except ‘the lads’. By ‘the lads’, I mean the large group of mates who were attending. They loved it. Because it was so bad, for them it was even funnier despite their wives and girlfriends sitting as stony-faced as the relatives of the two people whose day it was meant to be. One of Mike’s uncles even tried to chip in with a word of encouragement, which I took to be a heckle, so I attacked him with heckle put-downs from the clubs.
‘Go on, son, that’s funny, that.’
‘Funny? I tell you what’s funny – wearing that suit and not doing it for a bet. And that wig’s not working for you either, unless of course you’ve just brought your ferret to the wedding.’ It was terrible.
As people clapped, as they are obliged to do, Mike leaned towards me and, with the kind of bluntness I would expect from my mates, said in my ear, ‘Tit, you just ruined my wedding.’
And I thought I was on for an encore! They got divorced in the end, and part of me still blames myself for it.
In essence, my new world and my old world did not cross paths, apart from the material I used on stage. I was enjoying the gigs, I was being booked frequently across the North West and I had joined Off the Kerb, one of the largest comedy agencies with acts such as Jack Dee, Jo Brand, Jonathan Ross and Lee Evans.
These people seemed in another stratosphere to me. They had been successful for years and, as far as I knew, had been involved in TV and comedy all their working lives. What was certain was that none of them had tried to crack the circuit in their late thirties.
Age and the fact that I had a decent day job made me believe that comedy would only ever be a second income for me. But I could see no reason why I shouldn’t try and push that second income as much as I could, because it was like being paid for going out and having a laugh … which basically was what it was.
In fact, the extra money from the comedy allowed me to move to a house where the box room actually was a room, and I had a proper master bedroom, although it looked slightly too big when I placed my single wardrobe in it.
• • •
At the start of 2002, I was in as good a place as I could wish for. I was managing my job and the comedy, and I was seeing the boys during our precious weekends together. I was also getting on well with Melanie.
She had found out I was doing comedy in a way I would not have wished, but which probably helped soften the blow. I was on stage one night performing some material about splitting up with my wife. This is something many comedians do: they tell an audience that they have just suffered a relationship breakdown, as this is often a gateway to material, and is also a great way to let any interested members of the crowd know that you are single – despite there never being a repeat of the ‘hen party from Warrington’ incident, I was forever optimistic.
I stood on the stage and went into my routine.
‘I’ve just split up with my wife.’
(Pause for audience to say ‘Aaah.’)
‘No, it’s not sad like that. We’re not divorced or anything. I’ve just killed her!’
(Pause for audience to laugh.)
‘But I knew I would miss her, so I kept her head in the fridge for three months.’
(Another audience reaction – some laughing, with some ‘oooohhs’ thrown in.)
‘And it’s surprising how handy that becomes after a while.’
(Another pause and sometimes a cheeky wink to the audience.)
I would not suggest that is the best piece of material I have ever come up with, but it certainly was effective at that stage in my career. What I had never expected was to say that line and to find the head that was supposed to be in the fridge sitting at a table right in front of the stage (still attached to the rest of the body, I hasten to add).
During my act, I tried not to look in the direction of her table, so at the end I had no idea if she had found anything funny, apart from the fact that no bottles had been thrown.
Melanie had come to the Frog and Bucket with some friends who I didn’t know. She had no idea that I was going to be on stage, and I had no idea that she was going to be in the audience. Why would I? We were moving along the lines of divorce, and apart from the occasional childcare situation we had to deal with together, our lives were now firmly moving in opposite directions.
When I came off stage, I couldn’t believe that the face I had seen actually belonged to Melanie: as far as I was aware, she had never gone to a comedy club before, certainly not during the 13 years I had known her. I was hoping it was just someone who looked similar, although I knew this was not the case. You do not have three children with someone and not know what they look like, even if the expression I saw from the stage when I first walked on displayed a greater level of shock and discomfort than when her waters broke prior to the birth of one of the boys.
The divorce had been hurtful for all concerned. My way of dealing with the pain was to use it to make people laugh, and I wasn’t expecting that to be seen as a positive thing from her point of view. I may not have been pelted on stage, but I was at least expecting a letter from her solicitor the following day demanding a greater settlement due to the humiliation and distress caused by my suggestion of decapitation as a way of resolving our marital disputes.
Instead, when I nervously went out to the bar after the show, I was greeted by a smile – a smile I hardly recognised as it had been so long since I had seen it. Thankfully, Melanie had seen the joke in what I had said. She had been able to laugh with me and the audience about the situation. She had seen the funny side of me cutting her head off and keeping it in the fridge. I would suggest that, within the rawness of a failed marriage, to be able to laugh at the idea of being decapitated by your soon-to-be-ex-husband, you have to have a fair sense of humour.
Melanie had always possessed one, but it had been drowned out by nappies and my indifference, and now it was there again in her eyes. She introduced me to some people at the table who hardly registered in my mind. I couldn’t stop looking at her. ‘There you are,’ I thought. ‘I can see you again after all these years. That angry line on your forehead has changed to a dimple in your cheek. There you are, right where I left you before we both became lost in the fog of our marriage.’
There was a brief conversation, and then I said I needed to go. There was a look, a little longer than was necessary, and I knew something had changed in her, too – I just didn’t know what. ‘Perhaps this is what it is like when you stop hating each other,’ I thought. When your life falls apart and you start to hate someone, it doesn’t mean automatically you stop loving them. In a marriage, both emotions can coexist with the balance swinging between the two; in a divorce, you never expect the pendulum to swing back from hate.
That night, I realised that sometimes it does. Just before I left Melanie said, ‘You were great. You were like how you were when I met you all that time ago. What happened to you?’
‘I married you!’
As Melanie now knew about the comedy, she was happy to help if I struggled for a babysitter during a weekend and, in return, I would occasionally babysit for her during the week. It seems a ridiculous thing to write, ‘I was babysitting my own children,’ but the English language has yet to keep up with the ever-changing world we live in and as far as I know it does not yet have a more appropriate word than ‘babysitter’ to describe a person looking after their own children in the house of their former partner. So the description that best suits a 16-year-old girl will have to do.
Although we were getting on well together, the divorce was still proceeding, and things may not have changed substantially had we not messed up the school holidays when, during the Easter half term of 2002, we both booked the same week off work.
I had alr
eady booked to take the boys to a hotel in Portugal, and Melanie was considering either taking them to see her mum in France or going to Abersoch, both destinations that had been our holiday outlets during the years of our marriage.
When the mistake was realised, neither of us was able to alter our dates with work. So it meant the choice between one of us taking the boys on holiday whilst the other one went somewhere alone, or we both took them. We decided that we were getting on well enough to go to Portugal together, but not well enough for me to go to France or Abersoch. To me, revisiting holiday destinations that you went to when married seemed a step too far. Consequently, we spent a week together with the boys in a hotel with other English holidaymakers.
The boys loved it. They were seven, five and three, and while the complications of adult relationships perhaps never registered with them, what did was the fact that they had two parents there for them at once.
When you’re a child and one parent is not available to you as they are dealing with a sibling or the million other things that adults do, to be able to turn and find another pair of willing hands to help put your arm bands on, tie your shoes, kick the ball or find your favourite toy all just helps to let you know you are loved.
However, the strange situation in which we found ourselves did not make talking to other parents on the holiday straightforward.
‘So, how long have you two been married?’
‘We’re not married, we’re getting divorced and it should all be final in a few months,’ tended to curtail conversation.
At the end of the week, it was strange to say goodbye to Melanie and the boys and return to my own home. Although we had gone on the trip purely out of necessity and not because we thought our relationship had reached a new level, it made the home that I had only ever lived in as a single man seem empty when I turned the key and stepped inside.
We never spoke about the effect of having that holiday together, but perhaps it was that week which changed Melanie’s attitude. Having been the one who had wanted the divorce, she now began stalling on signing the final documents. We were literally weeks away from the divorce being complete, but my solicitor informed me that the process had halted at her end.
Having resisted the divorce from the beginning, I was now keen to get it done and dusted. Of course, it was preferable to be able to have a relationship where you may be able to go on holiday together, but I had certainly never anticipated anything more than that. Now I just wanted to finalise things.
My solicitor suggested that I talk to Melanie about the delay, as communicating between our solicitors was just racking up bills, which I was not in the best position to pay. After having no joy with Melanie, I decided the best way forward was some form of arbitration. So I arranged for us to go to Relate, and Melanie, much to my surprise – as she can be the most stubborn person in the world – agreed to attend.
Going to Relate is like dogging; there are more couples doing it than would like to admit. I found it a brilliant process because the confusion that often arises when two people live together for years and speak the same language but cannot understand each other’s words is changed by the fact that you have to listen. You have to listen because there is a counsellor (or, as I would prefer to call them, a referee) who makes you stop talking.
What may surprise many people who have not been through the process or are not trained counsellors is that when you don’t speak you have to listen, and when you listen, what you hear is not always what you might have expected.
Our counsellor was called Susan, and was not the type of person I would expect to be a counsellor, primarily because she didn’t have a flowery dress, sandals or a beard. She had auburn hair, a gentle demeanour and a forceful way of saying ‘Ssshh!’ should you talk when it was not your turn. Slowly, I began to realise my failings in the relationship and to understand some of Melanie’s.
Nobody gets married hoping for divorce – they just find themselves on a path that seems impossible to get off. And because you become numb to your partner, everything they say or do simply confirms the need to split up. It’s not until you actually hear what is really going through their minds that you realise, ‘Bloody hell, some of this is my fault!’
The process was not quick and not always easy, but gradually we began to rediscover the part of our relationship that was not defined by being ‘married with kids’. There had been a time when I was a cocky lad in a tracksuit with a twinkle in his eye, and she had been a vibrant young woman who lit up the room with a smile that took my breath away. We had excited each other and had overflowed with potential, which we had then unconsciously set aside for the practicalities of the path we chose to follow into domesticity.
Through a process like Relate, you begin to remember why you loved someone in the first place, even if you can also see why that love had not been enough. I had gone into the process with a view that this was the most expedient way to move the divorce forward, having long accepted that reconciliation was not on the cards. Yet, during the sessions, it became apparent that what we had lost in the relationship was time with each other, and this had led to us drifting apart. This is not a unique situation, and the same thing can be said of a million relationships. But nor had we spent time building a foundation of memories that can sustain a relationship through the tough times: the holiday photographs, party memories or simply a back catalogue of time together which was not in some way tainted by the same pressures, perceived or real, that forced our split.
We decided to spend some time together, but not tell anyone. I certainly wasn’t going to tell my mates I was going to counselling. I had the Northern working-class man mindset that telling your friends you were seeing a counsellor would be like telling them you had fallen in love with musical theatre. It’s something that some people do, but nobody from my world. My view on this has obviously changed now, and I would encourage anyone who feels that they have problems to talk to someone. The only thing I would say is that it helps if that person is involved in the counselling profession – speaking to people you sit next to on the bus about your feelings generally results in someone feeling slightly uncomfortable.
It is a strange thing to date your own wife. We took it slowly, and a babysitter would be arranged depending on whose turn it was to have the boys. We then would meet and go somewhere we knew we wouldn’t bump into people we might know, which made it clandestine and exciting – it was almost like we were having an affair, sneaking around behind the backs of our real lives as separated single parents. We knew it could easily go wrong and didn’t want to rush into anything. We both knew the stakes were high: an on-off relationship is OK when there is just you two involved, but it is potentially very destructive when there are children. We were also both protective of our own feelings, and though it was clear we were rekindling lost emotions, neither of us was ready to accept that there could be more to this than two lonely people keeping each other company.
The turning point was when Melanie accompanied me to a gig at Alexander’s, a comedy club in Chester. It was a small club with around 80 people in, and I was headlining on the Saturday. I had dropped the decapitation material at this point, which I thought was for the best – I don’t know if there is a handbook of advice for people on the path to reconciliation, but I am certain if there is it will say that joking about murdering your partner and then using their body parts for sex will not facilitate a successful reunion.
After the gig, we spent our first night together in years in a hotel in Chester.
For me, that night turned the question from ‘If we would get back together …’ into ‘How shall we get back together?’ We had two houses, the children were used to this arrangement, and everyone involved in our lives, including friends and family, had moved on and now just saw us as a divorced couple. I also didn’t know how to broach the subject with Melanie. What if she felt differently? What if I had read it wrong?
Rather than ask her straight out, I bought a wardrobe. I know t
hat doesn’t sound like the most romantic gesture in the world; there are not advertising campaigns suggesting you should ‘say it with a wardrobe’, or companies claiming that they can deliver a wardrobe to anywhere in the world with a romantic message attached in the same way Interflora do. But I couldn’t think of a simpler way to express my intentions.
In my new house, my bedroom dwarfed the single wardrobe I had, so there was plenty of space to put another one beside it. I bought a pine wardrobe, and one afternoon, when I was ‘working from home’, the boys were in school and Melanie had finished work, I asked her to come around for a coffee.
When she did, I led her upstairs to the bedroom. It was not a place she had not been to before – we were dating at this point, so an afternoon roll around was not entirely a new experience. When she walked into the room, she immediately saw the wardrobe.
‘It’s about time you bought yourself something better than that tiny thing,’ she said.
‘It’s not for me. It’s for you. I want you to put your clothes in it and never take them out again.’
She melted in my arms and with tears in her eyes said she had wanted nothing else more, almost from the moment we split up. By this I mean she had wanted nothing more than to get back together, not just get a new wardrobe. (If it was possible to mend all relationships with the purchase of a wardrobe, Relate would be sponsored by Ikea.)
I felt joy and relief. Relief because I wasn’t going to end up with a massive wardrobe I was never going to fill, and joy at the fact the door was now open for both of us to make a go of things. When relationships begin to fall part, arguing is often the only form of communication that exists, and it’s often impossible to find a response to each other that doesn’t perpetuate the row. Only when the arguing ends is there any chance that you may find something about the other person that does not make you angry. Our shouting had stopped, and now we were standing, embracing, looking at an empty wardrobe and the prospect of being a family again.