The Time Of My Life

About a year after my separation from my first ex-wife, by chance I met a very attractive woman from Spain. She had a very pretty face, a great figure, and a friendly manner. In a very short time, I fell madly in love with the woman and set out upon building an exciting new life with her. Not for one moment could I have ever imagined what this woman had in store for me.

One of the things about crazy is that it can be extremely difficult to detect at the beginning of a new relationship. Unhinged people do not go around with a pair of Janet Reger knickers on their head with 'I Am Batshit Crazy' writ large across the crotch. Of course, crazy people do know they are crazy and do their level best to conceal the condition, very much to the cost of their new victim.

In my case there were early signs of an unbalanced mind with my second ex, I just chose to ignore them. My attention was too fixed on the unbridled sex on offer. The very first sign was when one day she came round to my house to live with me. She was putting some of her things in some drawers in the living room and found a framed professional photograph of me with my first ex and three children. I had taken it down off a wall so as not to make her feel uncomfortable.

"What's this?" She demanded. I explained the photograph's presence in the drawer. "Liar." she snarled. "That's just waiting for you to put it up on the wall." This soon escalated to the point that I lost my temper to my everlasting shame and regret and smashed the frame and tore the photo up. "Happy now baby?" Somehow we got over it.

In time, little by little, her contrary way of thinking and outright nastiness reared its ugly head. One night we went to bed early as I had to get up early the next morning to go to work. The peaceful slumbers did not last long.

At about three o'clock in the morning, I woke up on the hardwood bedroom floor crippled with pain. I had been launched out of bed. "What the fuck!!!

What did you want to do that for?" I managed to scream out in pain.

"I want to talk."

"What about?"

"Well if you don't know I'm not telling you."

"Shit, I'm not a bloody mind reader. I have to sleep."

At that, she shot out of bed and started to beat the crap out of me. I backed into the en-suite toilet and as I did so she landed a ferocious kick on my left knee. My leg buckled and I ended up with a limp which lasted for days after.

I managed to get past her and went to the second bedroom where I had two bunk beds for when my children visited. She pushed past me and stripped the beds, throwing all the bed linen on the floor. "Oh to hell with this," I muttered as I slipped past her to go downstairs.

She reached out and managed to grab my pajama top ripping it in the process and then pushed me down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs, I got up off the floor and quickly grabbed my car keys, and managed to get out of the house. It was winter and there had been a heavy snowfall. I didn't care, I had to get to the safety of the car even if it meant treading across a pavement covered with three feet of snow. She followed me, but just in the nick of time, I managed to get in the car and lock the doors. As she started to bang her fists on the car door and window I drove off. I took myself to my best friend's house and found myself standing in his front garden in bare feet and ruined pajamas throwing small stones at his bedroom window. Thankfully Andrew let me in and got me sorted out with bedding so I could sleep on his sofa.

Looking back, that was the point I really should have ended the relationship. However, I was too besotted with the best sex I had ever had in my entire life.

During this time there were other worrying signs. One evening I went to visit her and her sister at their flat and saw a very dangerous, disagreeable fallout over something incredibly trivial. Suddenly she grabbed a hot iron and held it two centimetres from her sister's face angrily threatening to burn her face. That was pretty scary I can tell you.

In time we got married, had a baby son, and started to move to Spain. She went three months before me until the sale of my house was completed. A few days before having to leave the house she returned. By that time I had managed to pack about ninety boxes all on my own after a lot of hard days at work. And of course, I packed some of her things too. That was a bad move, apparently.

"Why were you rooting through my things?" she snarled.

"Because they needed to be packed and I wasn't sure you were going to get back in time to do it yourself."

"Liar. You were looking for something."

This unpleasantness lasted for the rest of her stay. Eventually, the day for leaving the house arrived. It was a very busy Saturday morning with quite a lot of packing still to do before the removal truck turned up. Also, I still had quite a lot of stuff some house clearance guy was going to collect, but he failed to come. So a last-minute panic ensued trying to find another house clearance guy. Fortunately, I found one. However, due to it all being last minute, he offered me a fraction of what it was worth. I had no option but to accept. Then I had to sell my BMW 525 in just two hours. Again, I got very little for it, but the deal was done with a big sigh of relief. In all about two thousand pounds worth of goods went for 6oo pounds.

At the airport, I bought my ex-wife a very expensive bottle of Channel perfume for an arm and a leg. Did I get any thanks for that little detail? Nope. All she did was refuse to believe that I had got so little for the house things and my BMW. She accused me of lying, of holding out on her to keep the money to myself. Two years later she was still moaning about that with "You still haven't told me the truth about what you got for the house things and your car." I later learned where she got that from. Her mother was constantly accusing her father of doing things I knew for a fact he was totally innocent of because I was with him at the time.

In those early days of our new life, I was stupid enough to think that back in her own country with 100,000 euros in the bank she would flourish. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

One day we went into town so she could have her hair dyed blond. As it was going to take about two hours I left her there and went for a walk around town. At some point, I committed the heinous crime of treating myself to a coffee. When I went back I paid ninety euros for her hair and we went outside. She asked me what I had been up to. I told her I had had a coffee. You would have thought I had murdered somebody.

"You did what? Do you think we are made of money boy? How dare you do that without asking me first."

This petty mean streak soon developed into quite a habitual thing. One day out shopping in a supermarket I committed the grave offence of buying myself a cheap pair of shoes to replace the hole-ridden shoes I was wearing. She went apeshit. She ran to her mother in the clothes detergent section and screamed "Have you seen what he has done mother? He's only gone and bought himself a new pair of shoes without my permission!

Another time we went to a poolside bar on the coast to eat. She ordered a very small tapa of ensalada de gambas (a very small prawn salad) about half the size of a saucer. I pronged a small prawn with the small fork and she seized my arm mid-air as the bloody prawn was heading towards my mouth.

"What are you doing? Who said you could eat?" she said. I put the fork down and told her to fuck off, got up, and left to go somewhere else to eat on my own.

One day after taking a shower in her mother's house I hung up the towel on the towel rail. However, the towel had fallen on the floor after I left the bathroom.

"What's this?" she screamed at me.

I tried to explain that I had in fact hung the towel up but she just wouldn't listen. The next time Had a shower she gave me a fifty-year old grey, threadbare, rag full of holes. "Until you learn how to look after things this is what you get to get dry." A few days after this we went to Ikea and I bought myself a new towel just for me. Again she went apeshit. "We've got lots of towels at home, what do you think you are doing?"

"I'm buying myself a towel with my own fucking money that I don't need to ask you if I can use, that is what I'm doing." She didn't speak to me for three days after that.

Looking back, even still as I write, I do wonder what in the lord's name I was doing putting up with so much of this crap. Of course, she wasn't like that just with me. Woe betides any member of the family who innocently pissed her off.

One day at her father's farm, before I bought a car, we were waiting for her younger sister to come home with their father's car so we could go into town. The sister was late. Oh boy!

"Where the hell have you been? We've been waiting. It's now too late for us to go out."

The sister was imprudent enough to reply "Not my problem." And with that comment, all hell let loose.

My ex ran into the kitchen to grab a very big, sharp kitchen knife and attacked her sister. My father-in-law was in bed dying of cancer, but he had to quickly get up and go to the kitchen to save his younger daughter's life. The terrified girl made a run for it and didn't dare return for three whole days! Mind you, she wasn't much better. I think the whole bloody family was batshit crazy.

The sister had a boyfriend who had come over to live, a truly lovely young lad. He bought a car for her sister and was exploring getting a job. However, one day Jack got a call from the UK saying his father had sadly passed away. He told her sister he had to go back for the funeral. Her reply?

"Well, I hope this doesn't mean that every time a member of your family gets a cold you are going to go running back Jack." Jack did what I should have done a lot sooner, he left and never came back. Best of all on the way home he met a lovely young girl and got laid waiting for a plane. I know, one-track mind, but I think it was fitting.

As for myself, there was a whole lot more yet to come. Her father passed away, which made me sad as he was a decent guy and treated me like a son. In part that was because I helped him on the farm when he was dying. Out in the midday heat digging and planting crops, collecting a harvest of green peppers, digging a grave for his deceased dog, etc, etc. His two sons, big strapping lads, did not want to know.

After he passed away we moved in with her mother to help her. However, even before we left our apartment, the problems continued. One evening after work I was in the apartment kitchen helping her to wash up and placed a clean cup on the counterpane. "That does not go there." she snapped unpleasantly.

"Does it matter that much to warrant being so unpleasant?" I said.

"Does this matter?" she screamed at me as she pulled a boiling pan of water off the stove and threw it all over me." I got burned all down my left arm.

I ran out of the house and went rushing to the hospital where I spent the night in casualty. Finally, after treatment, no lasting harm thank god, I went home. However, as it was five in the morning I decided to park the car and sleep there.

Daylight arrived and I tentatively went upstairs to be met with "Where did you go last night?"

"I went to the hospital thank you for burning my arm. Then I slept in the car downstairs outside."

"You fucking liar, you spent the night with another woman, who is she?"

I showed her the hospital papers and arm dressing all to no avail. Again, I found myself still waiting for an improvement, it wasn't coming. It was a living hell and it was only going to get worse.

What really put me on edge was the constant false accusations of infidelity. If we were out driving into town and I stopped the car at traffic lights or a zebra crossing, she would see some woman, a total stranger, walking along the pavement and accuse me of having an affair with her.

"Who's that woman?"

"What woman?"

"Oh come on, you know who I mean, the woman who has just disappeared around that corner. What have you got going with her? I saw her looking at you, which means there's something going on with you two."

How on God's earth can one deal with that level of madness and twisted thinking? At one point she even accused me of having an affair with her six-year-old niece! This woman was dangerous. After that, her sister forbade me to go anywhere near her daughter.

There were so many times this woman behaved in a manner that can only be called monstrous. Like the time she poured a two-liter bottle of water over me as I was driving in heavy traffic. I got absolutely drenched and had to pull over. And the time she started to drive at 90 kilometers an hour in the city threatening to drive the car into a wall and kill us all, herself, me, and our one-year-old son.

There were many other physical attacks at home in front of our son when all I could do was try to grab her by the wrists to restrain her. Then she started to kick and bite me like a bloody wild animal. And what on earth possessed me to agree to move in with her mother after all of that violent nonsense? I still do not have an answer for that I'm afraid.