Sad but true

SAD BUT TRUE

The first thing to say is that this isn’t fiction. This is all true. I really have come into 20k and I really didn’t expect it. It really happened to me. I got the money a few weeks ago and then, Kaboom - this competition appeared! It was meant to be. And here’s how it happened. Let’s go back, back into the mists of early lockdown. Early May, 2020.

2020 and May is glorious in the Midlands, in England. This gives me an excuse to spend time in the garden, something I have only occasionally done before, despite having lived here for seventeen years. Before I was always busy or working or going somewhere. But now: lockdown. I can only go out for a walk, at night. I am ‘high risk’ and my husband, recently bereaved, mother lost after a long cancer battle, says he cannot bear the thought of losing me too and so I must stay in and be safe. You see? He really cares.

He does not come into the garden with me but instead, sits at a screen in a room that is permanently dark. Curtains are never opened. The Badger Hole, my eldest labelled it. Where the badger lives. Badgers bite. He once shouted at me for wiping the dust from a broken alarm clock, reasoning that doing any dusting merely disturbed the previously unrevealed levels of dust present and made it look dirty. He is spending most of his time exploring his family tree. Actual documented information on this ran dry long ago, as it does for the plebs, so now he is clinging to DNA probability. Through a method of ignoring dull, local, likely connections and exploring more exciting ones, he has convinced himself that his grandmother is related to possible-future-president, Joe Biden. Through the Robinettes. This is only possible if his great grandfather impregnated a young girl, who likely had learning difficulties, and then deserted her. Only a bastard connection. Perhaps. But this lends grandeur to his story of himself. He spends the rest of his time contacting old school friends and old flames. But I don’t know that’s what he’s doing. I am in the garden, spending hours, ages, with Thomas Cromwell, in the present tense. Then seems more real than the unreality of now, when I am in the garden, in the green, in the shadow of the old oak tree.

Hanging over our marriage is an event that happened several months earlier, synchronously, with his mother’s death. My eldest daughter, his step-daughter, was forced out of our home because he was unforgivably violent to her. It was a final event, the worst, in an upbringing of bullying and control that I had missed or tolerated or explained away for the past eighteen years. I wasn’t there but had a sobbing, breathless account from her, over the phone as I left work. He was, at first, taciturn and then insistent that he had apologised and had not held her by her neck against the wall, had not smashed her MacBook shut onto her fingers and then smashed it repeatedly until it was broken and she was bruised. Me, having seen the photographs of her dented fingers, told him that I was ashamed of myself for bringing him into her life. Right then - at that very moment of an ending - the phone rang, from the hospice, and Mother was giving up. So that was the end of that conversation. My daughter gone, his mother gone, he quickly, systematically, removed all traces of daughter from the house, while the ashes of his mother took pride of place in the front room, mausoleum-like, amongst her pricey but unfashionable furniture.

A horrible, silent truce ensued and still exists, as I muster up the courage, wait for the moment to speak to him about his intolerable violence. Vile violence. He begins to rewrite the past, to better fit his version of himself. He is kind and reasonable. He is gentle and there were reasons. Christmas and more drama ensues to delay the day of reckoning, forestalling the moment that we know we face. Then: a fucking pandemic. Time together, Time has come. Time has told me…but no, I hide in the garden. The oak tree hangs over me. I look up and towards the house. I cannot face another Robinette connection tale or a silent dinner watching cunts be terrible cunts to other cunts on ‘Billions’.

He starts to go out on his bicycle. He is overweight, shaven-headed, bloated, yellow-eyed from too much whiskey and, frankly, needs the fresh air and exercise. I am glad that he won’t wear a helmet and hope that he does not come back, imagining the rap at the door and the regretful face of the young PC. I am thankful to be lost in The Sweat, flying with falcons and watching the severed heads roll.

I look up into the oak tree. It looks down to me.

“What ever shall I do, tree?” I ask.

“Kill him,” says the tree.

“Good God, tree,” I laugh, that’s a bit extreme.”

The tree says nothing. Maybe that is a hint.

Day and a day and a day and another day. Each day goes on. You remember then. Thankfully, a trilogy keeps me busy.

His bike rides get longer until, one day at the end of May, he does not come home. Our youngest daughter is worried and is asking where he is. She sleeps with me in our bed. Still young enough to want to do that. I lie awake and check my phone and feel excitedly guilty and afraid. I feel sure that the earnest young PC will come, the phone will ring. I call. I call his phone. He does not answer his phone. He must be dead. Not until almost midday, the next day, does he return. He has been with ‘friends’ – incredible coincidences! Synchronicity. In the woods, up the hills, bumping into dear, dear, old friends, from school, before my time. Not friends I know or need to know. Friends who have all night garden parties that let him stay over, outdoors. In lockdown. I am high risk. Not allowed out.

Henceforth, he has checked out.

He makes no apologies and just…does it again. Still, I say nothing, much. I am carrying rage and grief for my daughter. I am killing him. Through indifference and silence, I kill him in me.

A week passes and he tells me he is leaving. It’s not me, it’s him, so he thinks. He tells me there’s no one else. But I know not to trust him because he’s done this before.

Ten years earlier. I found his confession in a black notebook. Yes really, it was a small black, suedette notebook. I bought it for him. This is all true. I found it then, rooting around, trying to answer my stomach’s irrational questions. It was all documented: another, a younger woman, contempt for me, utter indifference for promises and vows. But even though I read it all, repeatedly, and threw it at him, physically and quoted it back to him, even then, though I knew this was void, because the book told me the truth, even after all of that, I stayed.

He said, afterwards, and says even now, that he wanted me to find the book back then. He says it wasn’t true, what I read. His truth swings in the wind like wind chimes. Signifying nothing. His truth is a rainbow: it can only be seen from certain angles; it’s beautiful, it must be meaningful, surely; you really want it to be real but ultimately, it is fugging fugacious.

He’s sorry but he’s never wrong.

I still have it, that black book, hidden in the loft space in a bag of doodles and notes on differentiation. I find it while he is out again and reread it. It’s like punching myself in the face with words. It’s all there in his self-consciously pretty hand: total rejection, indifference and complete disrespect. Now I read those words and realise that I’d read them all before. Still stayed. Some sense of duty, some duty to stay and make things work. Some self-desiccating tendency of mine. It hasn’t been right for ten years. It hasn’t been right. How are you supposed to tell when it’s time to stop?

He’s so sorry. He says he is sorry. He says he is so sorry.

I let him talk. I let him take the blame. I let him go this time. I show sufficient regret that he feels guilt. I’m like an expert angler: he has to think it is all his idea and that I still want him, really. But I can’t tug too hard because I really do need him to go. He can’t change his mind. It’s a delicate game. I play it well and I don’t mention me and the tree.

I do say ‘thanks be’ to the tree when he’s gone. The tree nods gracefully. Don’t mention it, it says. I didn’t, I say, wink.

That life of locks, of violence, of threatened mental dissolution, of self-harm, of lies, of control, of lies has gone.

My daughter comes home.

We, me and my children, emerge blinking into the summer. We open the curtains. We dust and clean. We eat, laugh. I sell the house and later we will move to a new house, further out and cheaper and calmer and better. We heal. Are healing. No wait: that’s not all true. There’s guilt and damage lingering and he still appears occasionally, now thin and excited about his future. That’s the Larkin guarantee for you. And there is money to spare, even after he’s had his share. Shameful really, a handout from the housing bubble that excludes so many but still… I have exactly twenty thousand going spare – no, really - and this more money than I’ve ever had. After years of living hand to mouth, I have 20k in the bank.

It’s mundane my tale, I know, but it’s true, true as I stand here, with my ginger curly hair, I swear. I swear on my little black book. True story.