Forever Is Over

by Wade, Calvin

  “I’ve told him once the kids leave home, we might even get back up to once a week!”

  “Only another twenty years, eh?”

  “It’ll soon go though, Amy. Mark my words, it’ll soon go. Richie will be backing out then because of his arthritic hips and his dodgy back!”

  “I won’t be doing it when I’m old! I shall retire from sexual activity at forty five!”

  “I thought you already had retired!”

  “This is just a sabbatical! A long one!”

  “Poor Jim! He’s going to be starching those sheets like a teenager for the rest of his life!”

  I left Amy in fear of her sheets and guarding Jamie’s pushchair as I took Melissa in to the toilet.

  “Wait until you’re Mummy’s age!” I said to her. “Life gets very complicated.”

  Richie

  “SHE BUYS YOUR PORN! You’re pulling my leg, Dogger!”

  “I swear on little Jake’s life that I’m not! My porn collection has not cost me a penny! If Sandra goes to the supermarket, she’ll say ‘Do you want me to pick up some porn whilst I’m out’?”

  I gave Dogger a quizzical stare.

  “Is that not a little bit odd? Is Sandra into seeing other women naked?”

  “I don’t think so. She just knows what effect it has on me. If I’m tired and not really in the mood, she knows it’ll give me that little bit of zest, you know, turn David Bruce Banner into the ‘Incredible Bulk’!”

  “Great! I am now picturing your green penis!”

  “Surprisingly, it is not really green!”

  “Sorry but I am always going to imagine you have a green penis now! How old is Jake now then?”

  “One in August.”

  We were outside at the courtyard in the Buck. Dogger, myself and a pushchair containing his little son, Jake who was fast asleep. We were using the quiet time to sup a couple of quick pints of Guinness and catch up. Sandra and Jemma had gone shopping. I took a big swig of my drink and continued my questioning wearing a creamy moustache.

  “And Sandra is just as sexually charged now as she was before Jake was born?”

  “She’s worse.”

  “In what way ‘worse’, Dogger?”

  “She used to want it three or four times a week, it’s pretty much every night now.”

  I almost choked on my Guinness.

  “And you call that ‘worse’?”

  “It’s hard work when you’re knackered, Richie!”

  “POOR YOU!” I said in both a sarcastic and mildly aggressive way.

  It was pent up anger caused by a lack of what Dogger was getting far too much of!

  “Sandra just went like that after she recovered from the birth. She worried that with her breasts sagging and her stretch marks, that I might not be attracted to her any more. It’s insecurity really.”

  “I wish Jemma was insecure. When the girls come back from shopping, I’m going to tell Jemma she’s bloody ugly and I find her repulsively unattractive!”

  “Don’t think it’ll work, mate! Different kettles of fish, Jemma and Sandra.”

  “Maybe it’s not them. Maybe it’s us,” I replied, “maybe if I had a green knob too, Jemma might want it more often!”

  “It’s not that! Jemma’s self-confident and self-assured, you should have married a needy bird!”

  I reflected on his point briefly.

  “I’m happy with my marriage, Dogger, it’s just the sex rations that are hard to take.”

  It was Dogger’s turn to take a long, reflective drink of his pint. He put it down and his face looked more intense and less amused.

  “You see, Richie, that’s where we differ. I would not consider myself to be overly happily married.”

  This was a complete shock to me. Sandra was not the world’s most attractive woman, but then Dogger was hardly Mel Gibson either. He was punching above his weight with Sandra and with the fringe benefits, I thought he had a cheek to complain.

  “Dogger, your glass isn’t half empty here, mate! You are having sex every night! Your glass is so full, its contents are spilling over the sides!”

  Dogger shook his head.

  “You’re wrong, mate. The sex is just there to make up for our other deficiencies. We have very little in common. We barely talk to each other. To be honest, I find her a little bit thick! Then there’s the problem that she is the most possessive woman in the world, if I even slightly turn my head when we walk down the road, Sandra’s nostrils flare and she’s like,

  “What are you looking at her for? Do you know her?”

  Last week, we were walking past the Sixth Form block at the Grammar just as they were all coming out at half three and I swear I didn’t even look, but Sandra was like,

  “Put your tongue back in, she’s a child, Andy!”

  I thought how much I would have hated that. One thing I definitely wasn’t, was a hen pecked husband.

  “We went down to Kent the other week to visit some of Sandra’s family,” continued Dogger, he was getting it all off his chest now, “so they could see Jake. It must have taken about six hours to get there and the whole way down was either silences or trivial chit-chat about Jake. We just don’t have anything to say to each other any more that does not revolve around the baby.”

  “Bet you got a shag when you went to bed that night though!”

  I was trying to lighten the mood. This was supposed to be a rare opportunity for an enjoyable pint with a mate and it had all gone pear shaped. It was my fault, I started it. Dogger preferred to continue with the sombre stuff.

  “That’s not the point, Richie! My sex life is great but I would swop in a heartbeat to have a relationship like you’ve got with Jemma. I see how you two are together, you make each other laugh, you have lots to talk about or even argue about. I would love a relationship like that. A relationship were you are passionate about each other. Any passion Sandra and I have is solely reserved for the bedroom. It’s great that Sandra likes sex, but that and Jake are our only bonds. There needs to be more in a relationship than just an active sex life and a shared love for a child. It feels like Sandra and I don’t love each other, we just need each other.”

  This felt like Dogger had opened up a wound and we were just sat there as all the blood and guts spilt out. He was an emotional haemophiliac.

  “Dogger, I understand where you are coming from, mate. I just don’t understand why we can’t have both the good things from your relationship and the good things from mine. A brilliant relationship both mentally and physically.”

  Dogger blew out.

  “It’s the kids, mate, they’re hard work. At least your sex life will return to normality as Melissa and Jamie get older. I just think Sandra and I have more to worry about.”

  “I hope these things sort themselves out for both of us, Dogger. I just want everything to be right.”

  Having seemingly calmed down a little, my statement fired Dogger up all over again.

  “Do you know what your problem is, Richie? If something is 99% right, you dwell on that 1%. Stop doing that! Stop thinking about all the things that aren’t right and start thinking about all the things that are. Jemma’s fantastic, Richie! You have two lovely children. Be grateful for everything you have. There are a lot of miserable, lonely, single people out there who would swop with you in the blink of an eye!”

  Dogger was cross with me, but I still thought he had no right to be.

  “So says the man who has sex every night! Pot, kettle, black, Dogger mate! Pot, kettle, black!”

  Kelly

  Sometimes clarity does not exist in a relationship. Your perspective is clouded by a desire for the relationship to succeed. It is only once you analyse the relationship from a safe distance of time away, that you can accurately judge whether it was a good one or a complete disaster. With hindsight, my relationship with Brad Hughes, should not have lasted beyond a few crazy days in Cairns. The problem I had at that stage in my life was that I was incredibly lonely. Tou
ring around the world sounds wonderful to the ‘stay-at-homes’, but it can be a lonely existence. There is a general consensus that in life you should not just “settle”. Don’t just make do with something or someone mediocre, you owe it to yourself to look for something better. This isn’t always true. People chase dreams when sometimes they need a reality check. If you are ugly as sin with the intelligence and conversational skills of a gnat, no matter how hard you try, at some stage you are going to have to accept that Tom Cruise is not going to be the man for you! In Australia, subconsciously, I must have done my reality check. Brad was no Prince Charming, but he was company and I was lonely. Richie used to call this his “Black Jack Theory”. On that basis, I would have scored Brad a sixteen. A safe option but not a great one. The fear of loneliness dragged that relationship along for seven months in Australia and a further three in New Zealand.

  A chance meeting at ‘Franz Josef Glacier’, on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island changed everything. It opened my eyes to the fact that Brad and I had no future. Using Richie’s analogy again, I suddenly became aware that the cards that I held were two eights rather than an Ace and a King! Our trip to the glacier resulted in the death of our relationship and although we managed to tolerate each other long enough to get the “Ute” we had been travelling in, up to Picton, for the ferry crossing to Wellington, once we arrived in the North Island, I bade Brad farewell and he travelled on in the “Ute”, whilst I stayed in a hostel for a few days before heading off to the fragrant smells of Rotorua.

  I am sure as I grew older, I also grew less tolerant! I was definitely more laid back as a child and young adult. Mum was a complete fruitcake, the winner of “World’s Looniest Lady” for twelve years running, but her erratic, drunken, aggressive behaviour did not seem to irritate me as much as it irritated Jemma. Jemma herself had more than her fair share of ‘hissy fits’ and ‘teenage tantrums’, but I seemed to tolerate her too. I just kept everything bottled it up until that one life changing night. If Mum had not made the transition from verbal abuse to physical abuse, I would have probably headed off to University and married Richie. We would have settled somewhere in English suburbia, a stone’s throw from a country pub, with our four children and two cocker spaniels. Mum kept pushing Jemma though until that night when I quite literally pushed back.

  By the time I was with Brad, I was no longer tolerant. When I met him in Cairns, I liked his confident charm and cheeky smile. I also liked the fact that he was Australian, as all my previous boyfriends had been European, so I figured variety was the spice of life. Seven million Aussie blokes to choose from though and I went for Brad! An error on my part but he wasn’t all bad, he was an adrenalin junkie, which I loved as my natural state had gone from risky to cautious and I found with Brad, I’d push the boundaries back out. The problem I had with Brad though, was that early in our relationship, even after the first few weeks, I started to find his traits and mannerisms irritating. In fact, some qualities I liked at the outset, were the ones I found most irritating as time passed. When our relationship started I liked the fact that Brad was tactile. He would think nothing of seeking out a full blown kiss on the middle of Cairns Esplanade. I remember finding it cute that he thought so much of me that he wanted the world to know. When he tried to do the same thing in Brisbane, a couple of months later, I remember asking him, firmly, to keep his wandering hands off me!

  Brad’s snore was another thing I bizarrely found cute initially. If we were in a hostel, often in a mixed dormitory, it felt like he was comforting me, even when he was asleep. That was what I thought for the first few weeks. Several months later, when we had worked our way down to Sydney, it became so irritating I felt like smothering him with a pillow! I managed to talk myself out of murdering him, I already had one death on my conscience, a second and I was well on my way to being a mass murderer!

  On the long list of “Irritating Habits of Mr. Brad Hughes”, sexual noises would also rank very highly! As well as the sexual mutterings which made him feel more like my coach than my lover, he also came out with sexual babble of the cheesiest order. He said things like, “I’m going to be your dentist and give you a good filling!” and “The Snake Is In The Grass!”, it was the biggest turn off ever! To add further insult to injury, at climax, he would make a bizarre noise like a mouse! It seemed like he was trying to stem a grunt, but what came out his mouth, whilst his fluids were departing, was pretty much a high pitched, mouse like, “Eek”!

  As we had spent the majority of our nights in hostels, we were normally booked in to a dormitory, which meant that sex was off limits, even tactile Brad drew the line there, but in Coffs Harbour, Brad had pre-arranged for us to stay with an old University friend, Shane, and it was in Shane’s spare room that the mouse first appeared. At that point, admittedly, I found it endearing, despite several of his other habits driving me crazy by then, as I just thought that Brad was being discreet, not wanting to disturb his friend with an ejaculatory yell, but in Churchtown and Queenstown in New Zealand, we stayed in hostels that had double rooms available and I was less sympathetic when “Jerry”, as that cry became known, re-appeared.

  I know I’m horrible, but it was not just the physical and nocturnal habits I found irritating. Brad drank more than than any other human being I had met since Mum died and at a speed that would even have impressed Mum, if she had remained amongst the living. He also ate junk food like he believed rationing was imminent and farted like he believed the smell of his gases could be bottled and sold as an aphrodisiac. How he wasn’t fat, I really do not know, but somehow he managed to stay in shape.

  Brad had a collection of annoying habits, but until we reached Franz Josef Glacier, I did not consider them to be significant enough to want to end our relationship. I have mentioned all the negatives, but there were positives too, the main one being, as I said, that he always looking for the next thrill. He even persuaded me to do a bungee jump at Kawaru Bridge in Queenstown, something I never would have dreamed that I would do and I am sure I would not have done, if Brad had not coaxed me into giving it a try. It was the biggest rush I have ever had and when I sat in the boat at the bottom, looking back up at the bridge I had just thrown myself off, I just could not believe that I’d done it. I have always said that my middle name is “Risk”, which reflected that I would take bold options in life, not that I would take life threatening options! This time, “I came, I saw, I bungee jumped!”

  Brad was really excited about visiting the Franz Josef Glacier. It was a glacier that was around eight miles long and sloped down from the Southern Alps to around three hundred metres above sea level Every photo looked spectacular and Brad really wanted to do a day’s hiking on the glacier itself, saying it was a once in a lifetime opportunity and we owed it to ourselves to do it. I may have been persuaded but he said exactly the same to me about bungee jumping and as a result of Kawaru Bridge, I was totally skint! A day’s hiking was going to cost over one hundred New Zealand dollars (about forty five quid) and I had not done more than the odd days bar work since I had met Brad, so I had no choice but to opt out. I told Brad that I would be happy having a wander around Westland National Park, where the glacier was located, but I must admit, when I waved him off early that morning, I was more than a little jealous. His tour was not only taking him onto the glacier, but also into it too, there were photos of previous hikers squeezing in between tight crevasses between two sheets of compact ice.

  As it turned out, I actually had a lovely day on my own, as I meandered around the park. It was a chilly day and I was thankful that I had purchased a lime green sock hat in Queenstown, that clung to my head like a joey to its mother’s pouch. By mid-afternoon, my feet were aching, so I sat myself down on the valley floor, with a book and a flask of coffee, occasionally looking up at the immense glacier that spilled its way down to the valley floor like freezing lava.

  Coach parties came and went, which I did not take too much notice of, as I was immersed in my book, but a
t one point I felt someone peering down. My immediate thought was that it was Christian, my Swiss ex-boyfriend, as we had met in similar circumstances on Hong Kong Island. I looked up to discover that this time it was actually a young woman that was staring intently at me. This was unusual. Men staring down had been commonplace throughout my travels, but not women. For men, an attractive young woman reading was too good an opportunity to miss out on, as they could use the book as an excuse for a glib chat up line, so, over the years I had had to politely respond to the likes of,

  “Any good?”

  “I’ve read that! It’s good isn’t it?” This usually transpired to be a lie, or “I won’t spoil the ending!”

  A woman staring at me was different, there was no hidden romantic agenda. I returned the stare. There was a vague familiarity about this lady. She looked like an athlete, I wondered briefly if she was a famous runner or tennis player. She was in her twenties, was girl next door pretty, with straight black hair and skin littered with brown freckles. She was wearing a long pair of shorts, hiking boots and a thick sweater. It was her bronzed, muscular calves that made me think that she was an athlete.

  “I know you from somewhere!” she announced with a Northern English accent, “are you from Ormskirk?”

  “Yes, I am! Small world! I recognise you too,” I said, “I just can’t think where from though! It’ll come to me in a minute!”

  “Did you go to Cross Hall?” she asked.

  “No, Ormskirk Grammar.”

  “Town Green?” she asked, meaning the Primary school.

  “No! Greetby Hill!”

  She scratched her head.

  “This is going to drive me mad! How old are you?”

  “Twenty three,” I answered.

  “I’m twenty five. Maybe I’ve just seen you around Ormskirk. Stood next to you in a bar?”

  “I doubt it. I moved away quite a while ago now.”

  “This will come back to me!” she insisted, “My name’s Anna, by the way, Anna Eccleston.”