The Time Of My Life

One day her boss telephoned whilst she was away from home at our holiday home, a caravan on the coast. He had left a message on my answering machine whilst I was out shopping.”Hey Mel, do you fancy making hay this weekend? Call me.”

Thinking about it, I realized that the message was not for her, it was for me. The bastard wanted to torment me. He knew for sure she was away from home on holiday as she would have told him in advance AND they no doubt had contact whilst she was on the coast anyway via his mobile and a camp public telephone booth. I got that confirmed later by the holiday camp caretaker.

As far as the holiday was concerned she had gone with the children for the first week whilst I stayed at home to do some important writing and I would follow on at the end of the first week. However, even leaving for the trip she was up to no good. An hour after she set off she was back, again with her lost bag trick.

“Hi, I lost my bag again, I think I left it at home, I’ll just have a look.” Then she swanned very quickly around the whole house looking into every room. She came back downstairs and said “Oh hang on a minute, I think I know where it is, I think I had it in the car after all…. Yes, it’s here look.” she called from the car before setting off once again.

So what was she looking for back at home? Another woman. Here was our old friend ‘Guilt Projection’, wanting to accuse me of the very thing she was up to. What she wanted was to appear to family and friends as blameless. She wanted them to say “Oh well, she had just cause if he was at it first.”

I spent my week alone well after she left a second time to go to the coast. I realized that whatever was going on, a lot of it was going on via the telephone, and if I was going to get anywhere I had to find a way to listen in to her calls. Of course, I knew it was illegal to bug a phone, but what if my life was at risk? Or what if worse still, my children’s well-being was being compromised? I realized I had no other option, I just had to somehow listen in to her calls. In the end, I discovered that my children’s young lives were indeed being compromised and my life was most certainly at risk.

In the end, I resorted to perfectly legal means of listening in to my ex’s calls

with a hidden second phone as well as by the simple expedient of eavesdropping from just a few feet away. I think I managed to hear everything, including snippets of conversation that told me that serious harm or worse was indeed intended for me.

Having spent some time setting certain other things in motion that week I finally made my way to the coast. After the 120-mile trip to join up with the family, almost immediately after my arrival, my wife told me that she had to return home that night for a routine dental appointment the next day. My first thought was, this is bullshit. There was no way any mother would abandon her family halfway through a two-week holiday just for an easily re-arranged routine dental appointment. Anyway, she left on the Friday evening and returned on the Sunday evening. What she did not know was that after she left I had called the dentist to confirm her appointment and was informed that she had no such appointment. No, she was going back to make hay with her boss.

I found the second week of what was supposed to be a relaxing family holiday difficult to get through. So many things preyed on my mind, and it was helped by one or two events that just made things worse.

One day my wife asked me to go to her car and get a few water toys for the children. Whilst rummaging through the boot I came across an A4 Manila envelope, which was open. On the front side of the envelope was the intriguing handwritten message “ Mel, read this at your peril!” I put my hand inside the envelope and out came a book titled ‘How to get rid of him.”

Suddenly I saw my wife running towards me and quickly put the book back in the envelope and closed the boot. I never did get the chance to discover what exactly the book was about, murder perhaps?

Another day my wife said she wanted an open relationship whereby we could both have lovers, mine could visit our house by the back door and hers could enter by the front.

Yet another time she tried to convince me to buy the house next door to her lover. Presumably, this was to make it easier to nip next door for sex any time they felt like it, no doubt whilst I like a good little boy was out doing the garden. I swear the woman was certifiably mad if she ever thought for one moment that I would readily agree to that.

When I got back home I immediately set about examining any evidence I could find on the pretext of doing some important work. First I checked the answering machine, and I heard nothing suspicious. No new messages had been left. I then did a little tour of the house looking to see if anything aroused my photographic memory. An extra wine glass in the wash, any alien-looking hairs on the bed. I even checked the bathroom for any signs of shaving having taken place. All seemed well.

The next day my wife went to work and I took the children to school. When I got back home I checked with a kindly neighbour who I’d asked to keep an eye on the house whilst we were away. He told me that all seemed well, that he’d seen my wife arrive on a Friday evening. Then on Saturday, he saw some guy arrive, tall and bald with a big chin He’d chatted with my wife who had told him that the man was her brother. That of course was impossible since her brother lived on the other side of the world. So bingo, I was right all along. The man described was a dead ringer for her boss. However, so as not to alert her that she was being watched I kept all that I discovered to myself, for the time being at least.

Over the following days and weeks, I learned so much by chance as well as by dint of my own surveillance. For example one day I telephoned my wife at work only to be told by an office junior that my wife only worked three days a week. So for the past year, she had been living a double life behind my back. All that time I thought she was hard at it when in fact she was having the time of her life with her bit on the side. And this far too trusting muppet was busting a gut back at base, blithely unaware of what was going on right under his own nose.

For the rest of that first week back at home from the holiday I got busy listening in to telephone calls on a second phone I had installed up in my attic office. I have to say, what I overheard sent shivers down my spine. First of all, I heard myself being called fit to burn to all and sundry. Family and friends were being told the most atrocious lies about me and unfortunately, they were all falling for them.

Now I understood why people had been so cold with me for quite some time. I was being labeled as lazy good for nothing who wasn’t worth the time of day. I was being called a wife-beater when in fact I had never in all of the twenty years I had known her, laid a hand on her not once……

About three times in our almost twenty-year marriage she had attacked me when she was pregnant. All I did was put my arms up to ward off the punches being thrown at my face.

One time I was about to go out to see my best friend for a beer or two and a chat about music and cars. She passed me in the kitchen then spun around and started to attack me.

She landed two or three punches in the kidneys, which hurt like hell. Then she grabbed my neck. I instinctively half-turned to push her off me and she fell on the floor and hurt herself.

I was called a serial cheat, and yet I had never once strayed from my promise to be faithful. What a hatchet job by a pathological liar. It was all to justify her own infidelity.

A lot of people hated me for being the swine I had been untruthfully been described as. My wife’s best friend’s husband wanted to give me a big fat punch on the nose. My father-in-law wanted to kill me and almost did.

One day whilst I was over at my mum’s house my wife called me and told me not to bother going to collect the children, her parents would collect them and take them home until she arrived. She advised me to stay away from our home to avoid any unpleasantness with her parents. When I told my mum about that advice she said “Son, it’s your house, nobody would keep me away from my own home. If you do not go back now, you are not my son.” And so I went, not knowing quite what to expect.

Once home I walked through the hall to the kitchen and my five-year-old daughter ran to me and grabbed my hand joyfully screaming “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” Suddenly my father in law, quickly grabbed a big kitchen knife, took me by the throat and snarled as he waved the knife in my face

“Right you bastard, from where we’re standing, you have not been pulling your weight. Well, I’m here to put you right you freeking rat. Our daughter is getting everything, the house, the contents, the car, the children….and you mister get nothing, you are going to hell.”

During the whole rant, he continued to wave the big knife in my face as my poor daughter held on to me for dear life. I really thought the arrogant fool was going to do me right there and then.

Fortunately, he relaxed his grip on me enough for me to slip away from him and I quickly put some distance between us. I went out to the back garden with my daughter and tried to distract her from what had happened by playing with a ball. However, my father-in-law wasn’t quite finished. He followed me into the garden and snarled….

“Our daughter did say that if we chanced to bump into you to be nice to you, but I have to tell you, we’re not that kind of people.” That was about the only true thing he had ever said to me.

Ha, “From where we are standing…..” Where he and his ridiculous wife, a nasty simpleton, and insufferable working-class snob, were standing all year was in a mountain-top villa on the Mediterranean fifteen hundred miles away. All of his opinions were based on the malicious lies he had been told by my lovely wife over the telephone.

Later when she got home I told her about the attack and asked her what she had been telling them and, of course, she replied as calmly as you like “Nothing. It’s just that they know we haven’t been getting on.”

I didn’t believe that for one second. What I had on my hands was what is called a Perverse Narcissist. A narcissist just wants everything for themselves. A Perverse Narcissist wants that and their victim dead. It had been a close call, and I did not believe that it would stop until I was actually dead.

However, nervous as I was about what might come next, I knew now was not the time to lose my nerve or my head. I decided to remain as calm as I could and see how far this bloody sick woman was prepared to go. I just had to be patient, and extremely vigilant. It wasn’t too long before I finally heard a telephone call between her and her boss which was all I needed to be sure of her true intent.

In the meantime, I sent a conciliatory letter to her parents trying to explain that they had been very misinformed and that the problem was their daughter was having an affair. Of course, I never heard back from them. But maybe it was enough to make them think twice about attacking me again.

One day my mother came to visit us and whilst I was in the kitchen making mum a cup of tea my lovely wife was in the living room telling her I had lost my mind and was falsely accusing her of being unfaithful. She was in floods of tears telling this sorry little tale to my mum. I only found out when it was time to take Mum back home. We hadn’t gone one hundred yards when my mother blurted out that she wanted me to see a psychiatrist because I was delusional imagining all sorts of untrue wrongdoings. Mum fell for it, so sincere was my wife’s apparent concern for me.

Over the following days, I listened to yet more telephone calls upstairs in my attic office, as well as downstairs on the ground floor through a slightly ajar door. Not long after our return from our holiday my wife’s best friend called her wanting an update on the affair.

I was busy in the kitchen making a meal for us. From a few feet away I overheard my wife brazenly talking in a low voice about her sex life with her lover. I walked into the room and immediately my wife changed the subject…

“Oh well you know, I also like horse riding and windsurfing.” Her friend knew that was a sign that I had walked in and I presume quickly followed the change of subject. These two were as thick as thieves. On yet another call I heard my wife and her friend discussing how they could cover for each other in the pursuit of their affairs.

The last call I could bear to listen to was more than enough to tell me that my life was indeed very much in danger. It was a brief call to her lover in which I heard her say “Do you think he’ll do something? Do you think we should do it for him?” Do what exactly, kill myself, and if not they could do it for me? I have to say that short conversation chilled me to the bone.

Finally, the night arrived when my wife and her friends decided to up the ante. And it was a night when I, at last, decided that I had to get out and stay out.

Downstairs I was washing some dishes when my wife told me that she was going for a swim at the local leisure center. I went to the bathroom upstairs for a pee and as I made my way back down I suddenly noticed that the telephone had been disconnected underneath the hall radiator. I said nothing for the moment. I went into our back lounge and sat pretending to watch tv. My wife came in and went directly to the patio doors to the back garden, doors I had locked earlier. I was watching her like a hawk.

Suddenly I heard the lock being very quietly slipped open. Then off she went for her swim. I quickly re-connected the telephone and re-locked the patio doors. It looked to me like I was going to be paid a visit. I was genuinely worried as I had three very young children upstairs. How I kept my nerve I do not know.

I turned off the tv and all the lights and then sat back and waited. About an hour later there was an almighty bang on the front door which almost took the door off its hinges. It sounded like somebody was trying to smash their way into the house.

I jumped up in the dark and ran to the front room. Through the window, I could see a car at the bottom of the drive with three people in it. I could just make out what appeared to be my wife’s silhouette in the back seat. The driver started to rev the engine very highly then took off at high speed with the tires loudly screeching.

Only two minutes later my wife returned home, her hair still a little wet from swimming. I told her what had happened and amazingly she seemed undisturbed by it. My suspicions were more than sufficiently aroused, so I told her I was going out to get some milk and bread. However, after buying the goods in the late shop, I quickly drove over to the local swimming pool.

As I suspected the pool was closed and had been all day. I went to the next nearest pool and that too was closed. Clearly, my wife had set the whole thing up. And I have absolutely no doubt her best friend, a famous personality, was in on the whole thing. For sure my wife had wet her hair at her best friend’s house. It was a pity for my wife that she forgot to also wet her swimming costume and towel, which I checked when I got back home.

I thought very long and hard about what had happened. Was it just to spook me, to convince me that indeed somebody was out to get me? Was it to distract my attention from the real reason for the calls, when the caller hung up, her lover checking to see if I was at home? Was it perhaps a campaign of terror, revenge for when she got hurt after I pushed her off my back that time she attacked me in the kitchen? Or was it an actual attempt by some thugs, or her lover, to break in to hurt me or to kill me even, to get rid of me?

At the end of the evening, I decided that for safety’s sake, I had to treat it as a murder attempt. And then I thought about our lovely innocent children getting caught up in all of that. Maybe that bastard lover of hers would also hurt or kill the children. Melodramatic? Exaggeration? I didn’t honestly know what to make of it all.

All I knew was that if there was the slightest possibility of my worst fear coming to pass, murder, I most certainly did not want my children caught up in it. So, in order to protect my children I had to place myself very far away from them, That way if somebody, a lover boy for example, came round to kill me, it would not be in front of the children I loved more than life itself.

After the attack, I became so fearful for my life that I took to sleeping in my attic office, making sure to pull up the ladder after me. Even then I was so fretful I could hardly sleep at all. And during the daytime whenever I went out I varied my route, constantly checking my rearview mirror. Sometimes if I suspected a car following behind I would make a sudden U-turn and double back on my route. I was completely and utterly paranoid.

One day I told my wife arrived home to tell me she was going to give me my directives. A directive is an official instruction that is given by someone in authority. And it was at times like this that I went into some sort of shock. It was like my loving wife of some nineteen years had had a personality transplant. What I was trying to deal with here was some sort of unfeeling automaton narcissist that wanted me dead. And that wasn’t the only surprise I had to deal with.

I remember one day before things got too bad, we were in the Tate Gallery admiring an Augustus John picture of his sister Gwen. I commented to my wife that she looked like Gwen, to which she replied “Oh she was a lesbian you know. Perhaps I am too.”

Her best friend and evil ally also once said that my wife liked women. And to top off the growing suspicion my youngest daughter told me a story she had been ordered not to tell.

One day I telephoned my ex at some temporary accommodation she was living in and my daughter explained she was next door visiting a female neighbor and that she would go and get her.

When my daughter looked through the window to the neighbor’s house she saw my ex naked, entwined, and writhing on the floor with the other woman. My ex ran out and explained that she was doing what was called ‘Personal Body Exercises’ and not to tell Dad what she had seen or been told. That pretty much nailed that one on the head. Maybe being middle-aged she suddenly had a mid-life crisis and wanted to break free and experiment, who knows?

And yet another piece of information I got from the same daughter was how one day when my ex-wife told me she was going to take the children for a day in the park to let me get on with some serious gardening, she went to her lover boss’s house and asked his wife to babysit our three children. She duped the poor woman telling her I refused to spend time with my own kids and that she and the woman’s partner had some homework to do in private. And so off the happy couple went to have nooky at his small holding hidden somewhere up in the hills.

Anyway, in response to her overbearing bossiness, I told her that I was leaving as I now had more than enough to have her and her lover boss sent to jail for a long, long time. I held up a hefty file and told her, "It is all in here, and there are two copies being held in safe places."

“Who has the copies?” she snarled. “None of your damn business lady, just know that if anything happens to me, they will know where to come,” I said. “You bastard.” She spat as I walked out and never looked back.

What I was walking away from was the all-enveloping, suffocating feeling of being the most hated man in the world for no good reason, for nothing more than some twisted woman’s massive overreaction to something trivial, something which to this day evades me.

And although my ex and her co-conspirators hadn’t succeeded in killing me, they had effected a great deal of harm to me emotionally as well as psychologically, which I will never, ever forget nor forgive. And that is because to this day I have to live with the consequences of their actions. I still have no contact with my children, or at least my two daughters, because of what happened all those years ago. And that is a very painful thing to have to live with.

Well, it was the right time to leave, not just for my and my children’s safety, but I had been living on my nerves and I had lost about fifty pounds in less than a month. I was in fact a wreck. I don’t think I would have lasted much longer had I stayed. It felt good to get away from it all, to go, to try to build myself a new life far from all the crap I had had to deal with.