The Time Of My Life

It was a beautiful summer’s morning in the middle of June, a day that is etched in my memory for all the wrong reasons, though it started promisingly enough. For a start, it was my birthday and the sun had his hat on and was coming out to play. My three young children were already up and about, waiting for me to get up and go downstairs to make them some breakfast. My wife was ahead of me in the bathroom, so I made my way downstairs to tend to the kids’ needs for some chow. Already thinking about the day ahead and what it might hold in store for me, I had a spring in my step as I descended the two short flights of stairs.

As soon as I stepped down off the last step I felt grounded in what needed to be done in the next half an hour. First breakfast, cereal with milk for the kids, coffee and toast for me, and leave my lovely wife to sort herself out. I had enough on my plate without having to worry about the family’s new breadwinner, my wife.

After breakfast, it was back upstairs to get the kids washed and dressed into their school uniforms, then throw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt for me, and by the time all this was finished, there was just enough time to kiss my wife goodbye as she left for the day.

Ten minutes later I was walking out the door with my three delightful charges for the short walk to school. I always felt a great sense of relief as I ushered the children through the school gates. For the rest of the day, I could make it up as I went along. Usually, it was straight back home for another coffee and washing the dirty dishes by hand. Next, I would turn on the tv to catch the morning news for fifteen minutes before making my way upstairs into my attic office.

At some point in the day, I would need to find time to wash and dry some dirty clothes. I also had to cut the grass, wash my car and take a trip to the local rubbish tip in the countryside. Then I had to go and do a little shopping for my lunch and our evening meal at the local supermarket in town. However, for now, I needed to get on with some writing for a local newspaper I had promised for today. I knew the work would take about three hours, so by my reckoning I would be finished by lunchtime.

The three hours of writing flew by almost without me noticing. In no time at all the job was done, printed, and faxed to my clients’ Head Office and it was time to go back downstairs for a break and some lunch.

A sandwich and another coffee were soon dispatched and I was about to turn the tv back on for the midday news when I heard the mail being shoved through the letterbox. I got up and went to retrieve the mail and was sorting it out as ambled slowly back into the dining room. It was the usual junk mail mixed in with some household bills, including the telephone bill. Within less than ten minutes my whole world would be rocking on its axis.

I opened the telephone bill and was shocked to see that for whatever reason it was for three hundred and fifty pounds, instead of the usual sixty. I leafed through the nine pages of itemized calls looking for an answer. Back in those days I had an excellent memory and recognized almost every single number called, friends, relatives, clients, the lot. The first few pages were local calls, then regional numbers called, then national followed by international and miscellaneous. The last page seemed to have the answer.

There was a number that began 0898……a prefix I did not recognize. Now at that time, a new service had begun not too long before, sex lines. These were numbers sad lonely old men could call for some easy titillation at five pounds a minute. And the thought crossed my mind that just maybe one of the kids had been ringing one of those numbers. So I decided to give the number a try to see what it was all about. That was probably the best and worst ever decision I ever made in my entire life.

The number rang but was suddenly cut off after just three beeps. So I called it again, and again it was cut. I gave it one last try and bingo, somebody answered. “Hello…” I said as politely as possible “….who am I speaking to please?”

A very rough, snarly bass voice growled back at me “How dare you call me out of the blue when I’m busy and demand to know who I am, who are you?” I agreed, unpleasant sounding as he was, he had a point. “I’m sorry, you’re right. My name is Joseph James, and you?” The voice started an evil-sounding belly laugh and after a few seconds snarled “Why don’t you ask your wife? You’re so pathetic and stupid.” Then he hung up the call, and I went into a seismic shock so strong I almost fell into the dining room chair. And although I didn’t realize it at the time, the extra-marital affair the snarling voice seemed to be suggesting was the least of it.

After a few minutes of staring vacantly through the window, I called my best friend and told him what had just happened and asked him what I should do about it. Mike said I shouldn’t jump to conclusions and I should as calmly as I could do what the guy told me to do, ask my wife. After all, it could all just be some sort of misunderstanding or a prank. I said ok and put the phone back down.

For the rest of the afternoon, I was in a haze and just couldn’t take my mind off what had happened. What plagued me most was who the hell was this guy. I kept looking at the page of the bill where the calls to that number were listed. The first thing I noticed was that they were expensive calls, especially for the relatively short duration of each call.

Then I checked the dates of the calls against a calendar and noticed that they were quite often at the weekend. I also noticed that they were more often than not late at night. So the next thing I did was check the calls against my diary, somewhere I even kept notes of when I was out visiting a male friend. Sure enough, the calls were being made when I was out of the house. It all seemed to point to an affair, but I so wanted it to not be true I decided to try to keep my nerve and see what my wife had to say about it all. One thing was for sure, she had a lot of answering to do.

The next thing I discovered was that the number was for a mobile phone. That in itself explained a lot, such as the cost of the calls, as well as my not being able to geographically locate where the snarly voice was situated. Apart from all that, for the moment I could do no more, I would just have to wait for my wife to get home.

Over the course of the afternoon, I sat and tried to think if there had there been any other signs I might have missed. My wife worked five days a week and left and home at exactly the same time every day. And apart from the few times she went for a swim at the local leisure center, she never went out anywhere on her own. I suppose the trip to the swimming pool could have been an excuse to be with somebody else, but she always came back with her hair still a little wet.

Suddenly one other curious thing occurred to me. Sometimes during the evening when we were both at home, the telephone would ring. If I picked up the phone the line went dead. That never happened if my wife picked up the phone. I mentioned this and jokingly said the only ones who might ring a number in the hours of darkness and then cut the call were burglars and lovers. The first one wants to know if anybody is at home and the second wants to know if somebody is at home. My wife said, “Well I guess somebody is out to get you huh.” She shrugged her shoulders as if to signal that that was the end of that conversation and the subject was dropped. It was however something which was to come back and haunt me further down the line.

The afternoon passed surprisingly quickly, including picking up the children from school and getting them into a change of clothes, homework done and fed and watered, and in no time at all it seemed, my wife arrived home. Even as she walked into the house I was watching her intently for any signs of anything untoward. One thing which had occurred to me was that if that man was a lover, he had totally dropped her well and truly in the shit and, if he really cared anything about her, he would surely forwarn her of an impending earthquake in the kitchen at home. However, I saw no sign of any distress, not even the slightest sign of nervousness.

We went into the kitchen and asked each other had we had a good day and we both responded in the affirmative. Then I picked up the telephone bill and told her how much it was. “That’s you, I’ve told you before how you spend too much time on the phone,” she said accusingly. “Ah yes….” I replied “…..but you see I’ve had an in-depth look at it and the vast majority of the cost is connected to this number here.” I pointed at the 0898 number and asked her “Who does that number belong to?” There was a discernable look of nervousness on her face. “Oh that, err….that’s my boss at work.”

We were seconds away from this whole thing blowing up. Suddenly everything started to make sense and I was going in for the kill. Of course, she wasn’t seeing him at night or the weekend, or so I thought, she could see him at work any time if it was for work-related matters. But if that was true, then why the need to call him so much out of normal working hours and why when I was out?

“And what sort of a person is your boss?” I asked.

“Very nice, a very nice person.”

“Then can you please tell me why he wasn’t very nice to me when I called him this afternoon?” I said. Her face went white as a ghost.

“Whaaaaaat! You didn’t call him, oh my god, you are going to cost me my job. What did he say?”

I told her how my cozy little chat on the phone went with Mr. Snarly boss and immediately she called me a liar. So I told her to call him and ask him to explain himself. “I’m going to, right now.” she snapped and then turned to go into the living room where the phone was. I tried to follow her, but she stopped me saying she would not call him in front of me. So I said ok, go.

I stayed in the kitchen and in less than ten seconds she came back in saying she had called him but he wouldn’t pick up and that she would try again later. For now, she said we should concentrate on getting the children ready for bed. Then suddenly she said “Oh, I seem to have left my bag at a shop when I went shopping on the way home, can you go and look for it for me. I went to the butchers, the bakers……I’ll get the food on for the kids.”

I made a leisurely trip around the shops she’d mentioned before making my way back home. As I walked into the house she said: “Oh, good news, I found my bag and I managed to get hold of my boss whilst you were out and he said that you’d misunderstood him, that he had not said what you said he said in the way that you said it.” For the moment I had to go along with this. In truth, I still wanted to believe that it was all a big mistake as I couldn’t deal with the prospect of her having an affair being true.

At the end of the evening, we both went to bed, me shortly after her. She was sitting up in bed reading a magazine, except it was upside down. As I climbed into bed I started.

“So, can you please tell me why you would need to call your boss at work at midnight on a Friday on a mobile phone number? Surely he can’t be at work?”

“He’s a farmer “ she replied.

“A farmer? Even farmers aren’t out in the field at that time of night.” I said.

“Well, he’s got lots of different jobs.”

“Hang on a minute, I thought he was a full-time teacher?”

“I don’t know everything he does. So…..” she said nonchalantly “……what are you going to do about it?”

I am not happy with your answers, but mark my words, I will get to the bottom of it.”

She suddenly exploded jumping out of bed, stark naked and screaming at me “Right that’s it, I’m leaving and I’m taking the kids with me, you bastard.” And as she screamed she started to wildly empty drawers of clothing. This was not good, certainly not for the three innocent children sleeping in the next two bedrooms. I had to back down and lie to her.

“Ok, calm down, I won’t get to the bottom of it, it’s really not that important. We have three lovely kids and they don’t need this, so calm down and get back in bed and go to sleep.” Thankfully that worked and the madness stopped as suddenly as it had begun. How little did I know that this was just the beginning.