Chapter 15

Breaking The Mould

     It’s been quite a day. It started first thing with unprecedented discussions in the office regarding the state of the office, the state of the paperwork ergo the state of the business. Organizationally speaking, things have slipped (obviously) and I am to be allowed free reign to try and put them right. Kev is tired and scared and doubts his capacity to put a good many things right. Handing over is the only logical way forward. So the office is to be loosened up for use. I can re-structure, systematize, file, bind and re-organize to my own requirements and, crucially, I can even keep a scented candle on the windowsill. The guitar has moved up to the bedroom which means I’ll have to listen to Kev’s rhythm-free strumming each night before I sleep. This won’t make much difference at the moment because I can’t sleep anyway, but the purchase of a CD of top-notch Spanish guitar playing will be necessary at the first available opportunity to give Kev something to aim for - also to encourage him to listen rather than play before bed. Not that playing the guitar, in however limited a fashion is a bad thing. Let’s face it, it beats some of his more recent choices of diversion.

 I feel a small thrill of excitement at being allowed to re-organize the office. This has a ‘moving on’ vibe about it. Kev, being rubbish at paperwork and sulky as hell when he has to do some, can now go from being minimally involved to not being involved at all. Quite frankly, I’d rather he kept a million miles away from any changes I want to make or any work I have to do. His urge to control things is always way too close to the surface and, strangely enough, I now have a quite serious aversion to allowing Kev Gates control over, well, anything that affects me. Still, I realize I must do whatever I can to keep spirits high and feelings positive. Any upsurge in sulking and belligerence could tip our fragile relationship over the edge and cause the business to career, helter-skelter, in a relentlessly downhill direction. We are teetering.

    You know, work really is the best kind of distraction when domestic upheaval strikes. This being said, I find I still have reservations about giving of my valuable time in continuing support of my wholly untrustworthy partner. Would I choose to go into a business partnership with him now, knowing what I know? Is striving to make a success of something which benefits him as much, if not more, than it benefits me really the right path in the wake of his taking the piss out of his ten-year relationship with me? It is possible that it’s not. So, in a newfound spirit of furthering my own interests, as encouraged by Eldest, I have decided to also seek work beyond home, Kev and self-employment. So far, I have seen four jobs in The Inverness Courier which I will apply for.

1)      Receptionist at the Courier

2)      Receptionist at Scotland-North Printers

3)      Co-ordinator for Victim Support Highland

4)      Operator of Estate Agency franchise

The reception work will be easy but probably poorly paid and not the best use of my time. Also I’ll be tied to working hours and a desk. But the art of written communication has always fascinated me and I know I would love just to be around people who write. The estate agency thing would be similar to what I do now – plenty of interaction with the public plus I have sales experience. Logs / tree demolition/houses. It all comes down to the same thing in the end, doesn’t it? Still, the one that interests me most is the job with Victim Support.

Kev (rather rudely I think) suggests I am only interested in such work because my recent life experiences have made me feel like a victim. Breaking off with his floozy hasn’t yet made a decent partner of him then - it’s going to take time. No. I don’t feel like a victim – I feel self-aware, wiser than I’ve ever been and, periodically, angry enough to generate lightning bolts from my eyes. What interests me is the opportunity I see to utilize my newly-discovered capacity to keep a self-created sanctuary somewhere inside, a place immune from turbulation which, even as my emotions screech off the scale, turning out-of-water sommersaults like over-revved dolphins, allows me to attack a problem with my rational mind. I now know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I won’t get drawn in to other people’s difficult circumstances and therefore, I think, I may have something very useful to offer. The job is part-time, three days a week, so I’ll be able to do what I do for the business on my free days. A re-alignment of priorities here. I have my own life to think about. Training’s offered and, if I don’t get the job, I can still become involved as a volunteer. Sounds nicely open-ended. Who knows where it might lead?

     I would be in the kitchen right now roughing out some applications if it weren’t for the fact that Kev’s in there and, having spent the entire day with him, I’m quite enjoying his absence.

    Round about lunchtime we were in the Eastgate Centre looking at tents and outdoor clothing because the emotional bruising he’ d taken lately had led him to retreat into thoughts of good times he’d had in his youth and camping had come to the forefront of his mind.

I hate camping. I first camped with the school when I was eleven and had to make a distressed phone call to my parents before the end of the week to organize a rescue. Then I camped with Kev at his auntie’s in southern France and sobbed all night at the revolting condensation on the inside of the tent, at the strange man walking his dog at four in the morning, at the gross discomfort occasioned by the thin mat I was supposed to sleep on and at the intense feeling of insecurity I endured trying to sleep with just the thinnest layer of slippery synthetic fabric between me and the elements. Finally, I tried once more, with Kev and Eldest near Tongue. Just the one night, but a similar story. Dark when we put up the tent so we didn’t discover till morning that we were situated next to the rotting carcass of a dead sheep. I told Kev this afternoon then, as we hovered (sleep deprived and fragile) in Nevisport, that camping was a great idea. Cheap adventuring. How wonderful. Anything to completely break the mould of our relationship.

He had looked understandably dubious. Sad, washed out and dubious. But he’d bought a tent, doing his best to stay up-beat, and then it had occurred to me. Sod tents. He was in that place all middle-aged men end up. The land of mid-life crisis fall-out. He’d already experimented with what a lot of them do to chase the demons of mortality awareness and age-related depression away. It hadn’t worked. Perhaps now it was time for plan B? By the time we’d spent an hour in the BMW garage in the company of Martin (smooth-talking super salesman with streaked hair and pinstripes) the scene was set for a  mind-expanding blast up Drumossie Brae on the back of a very big bike and the subsequent purchase of a 1200 cc, two-wheeled item from the top of the range.

     Back in the car with flat hair, a raw face, throbbing thighs and still no feeling in my toes, “I got more text messages from her,” he’d said. “You want to see them?”

     I had still been torn. Should I look at them? “No. No. Definitely no.” It had been the voice of Sindy with the pink shoes, my alter ego, my role model since childhood when perfect plastic, nipple-free Sindy with the glossy bob had, for several formative years, been my constant companion. “You should keep yourself apart from this, maintain your dignity at a distance. It’s for him to make this go away and come to you, a new man, enlightened as to the destructive power of temptation, no longer in thrall to some scheming Barbie with pinker shoes.” I had found myself engaging in an argument with Sindy. “Sindy, I have to tell you that, although we were close once upon a time and I can’t deny I’ve always assumed you were an influential role model for me during my most formative years, I have recently undergone an experience which has convinced me I am, in reality, nothing like you at all. You would never drink under age and singe your knickers heavy petting in the embers of a bonfire. You don’t play yourself loud rock music, shave your pussy on a misguided whim or carry on having sex with a man who’s wronged you because you enjoy it. Listen - if I keep my distance from this, where’s the on-going incentive for him to level with me? He’s just going to disappear once more into the alternative universe he occupied in order to involve himself with another woman in the first place! And I will suffer justifiable upsurges of mistrust bound eventually to bring about total relationship breakdown. Yes I will, Sindy, you know I will. And now you really need to shut up.”

I had taken the phone. There were several puzzling messages, some two or three lines long, others lengthy tirades against my attempts to ‘control’ Kev’s mind. One purported to be a Chinese proverb. Perhaps something has been lost in translation but I couldn’t grasp either its meaning or its relevance. Another snippet ended ‘Your personal and wilful guru.’

     I’d looked up at him, sitting with his head tipped back against the headrest, stubble on his chin turning grey, creases and folds appearing round his closed eyes. Maybe he was worried I’d be hurt by what she had to say, maybe he was just embarrassed. Maybe he didn’t want to see how hard I was having to work to stop my lips curling up and a snort of laughter escaping from my nose.

     We had driven home making diversionary small talk. Him a bit elated, I think, about the bike and where we might go on it, me fighting the nagging suspicion that Juliet Sanders wasn’t going to go quickly or quietly but pretending to be elated about the bike and where we might go on it. Maybe he was fighting that nagging suspicion too, just not showing it. Maybe he had been pretending too. If he had a mind worth controlling he should’ve been. Because it was there, the next salvo, waiting for us, when we got home.

Back at Home -“Youngest’s not back yet – Audrey MaCallum rang to say they were taking him to the pictures. Oh and this came, in the post, after you left this morning…”

    Eldest had held out a middle-sized Jiffy bag as he’d said the words. Kev had hesitated, then taken it from him. We’d all stood in uncomfortable silence for a few seconds before I’d found a cloth and some Dettox with which to strenuously clean the work surfaces and Eldest had decided to sort through his school bag for no particular reason.

     Paper-tearing, deep sighs and Kev filling the kettle. “I lent her my French tapes,” he’d said flatly as I’d squeezed my J Cloth out under the tap. “She’s sent them back.” And he’d begun to read the first page of what looked like a three, or even four, page letter. I had smartly instructed Eldest to go look for his chemistry past papers in his room. He’d correctly inferred that this meant something seriously adult might be about to go down, and so had departed silently, if a little hurriedly, for his boudoir. Kev had his fingers to his lips as he read and something of a slight smirk on his face. The smirk was not pleasant. Trying to ignore him, I’d taken the Dettox and attacked a clod of pasta sauce stuck on the outside of the oven door. Said clod had been there for some time, edges dried, almost curly, and I could tell by the way it had gone brown in the middle that I’d tried to soak it off with surface cleaner before. Must’ve failed and not noticed. Would the ‘Astonish’ hob and oven cleaner be a better bet? It contains something like bicarbonate of soda, an abrasive powder with which to scrape burned on foodstuffs from ceramic surfaces. My mum used to use something called ‘ vim’ which I think was similar (though maybe harsher, as I remember her complaining of scratches). I could pick the edges off using my nails but…”

     “Uh?” I’d jumped so far out of my skin that a sliver of dried pasta sauce had inserted itself behind my nail. “I er… I don’t…”

     He’d put it down beside the bread board and gone off in the direction of the downstairs toilet. It was that bad then. Laxative bad.

     I’d picked up the letter with Dettox-wet fingers. “My Dearest Kevin,” it had begun, though so much was written, squeezed in all over the page, above and below the opening line that this took a little while to work out. It took only a couple of sentences however, before I realized the letter was not what it seemed. It purported to be a for-your-eyes-only-goodbye-love-letter but despite the name after ‘Dearest’, it was clearly, directly and determinedly, aimed at me.

     Kev (it appeared) had told her that their ‘thing’ was about lust rather than love – “the ‘lust’ was fantastic!” she claimed– and at the top of the page, in small letters, as an after-barb “Our sexual life was fantastic!”. Further in, half way down page 2, we were talking about having been ‘unleashed’. An interesting word to have used, I felt. A word associated with, let’s see, the hounds of hell and Armageddon? By the time I’d waded through a sea of barely decipherable scrawl relating to how selfish I was, we’d reached page three where she seemed to want to draw a contrast between Kev’s sheepish voice on the phone to her when he told her I’d put my foot down and forbidden him to see her anymore, and the bright, joyous smiles he had been giving her every time he turned up for free sex. A piece of sharp, dried pasta sauce, embedded in sensitive, under-nail skin, had been irritating me severely. Well Juliet, I found myself telling her under my breath, I know my Kev, and they may have started out as smiles, when he thought he could keep this under wraps and use you like a blow-up doll, guilt-free, for a while -  after all, you did offer - but as it gradually began to dawn on him that he was in really deep, stinky shit, because what you wanted from him was no different to what I wanted and somebody was going to get torn to bits over this, I would guess those smiles turned very quickly to fakes, stretched across his face to mask the jellifying of his ego caused by having to continually strut his stuff even as the sure and certain realization that he’d probably ruined his life asserted itself. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t hear me. I wasn’t allowed to answer back.

The writing was jagged, lots of taut verticality and emphatic downward strokes. I could feel the anger (intense but well leashed) radiating from every page. This was a strategically planned missile attack. Cowardly, like hiding behind a hedge and throwing bottles.

    Kev had re-emerged unsteadily from the toilet just then, and I’d been unsure whether he was rubbing his buttock to alleviate his sciatica or the unfortunate burning effects on the sphincter of adrenalin-induced diahorrea.     

     “Em, Kev, you’re not going to let her do this to me, are you?” I’d asked him.

     “I thought the letter was to me – I just let you read it because…”

    “Of course it’s not to you! She’s been contacting you on your phone, in secret, for months now, hasn’t she? Why would she send a letter if it wasn’t a way to reach me?”

     He had sighed and rested his arms on the side of the sink. The cuff of his sleeve was sunk in a small pool of Dettox. He would have a white patch in the morning – unfortunate and permanent.

     “Look, she’s just hitting out. What else is she gonna do? She can’t get at me, she’s got nothing to get at me with - she started it all off! So she’s trying to get at whatever she thinks matters to me. She’ll stop. She just has to get it off her chest.”

     Of course, he couldn’t win. He was making sense and he hoped that what he had to say would reassure me but he couldn’t help coming awfully close to standing up for her. I had to bite my lip big time and sit on a sudden upsurge. What of, I wasn’t quite sure, all I knew was that it burned.

     “Kev, I can’t handle this,” I’d told him. “I’m doing my best to be strong. It’s very hard. Please tell her to stop.”

     “It’s best if I don’t tell her anything Lizzie. Like I said, I’m just not replying. That’s the best way believe me. It’s the only way.”

     It had been impossible to argue. Instead, I’d grabbed the letter, marched resolutely to the woodburner and watched her poison flare briefly before disintegrating into something dead, black and insubstantial.  

     “Didn’t you want to keep that for evidence?” Kev had asked.

    “I mean, just in case. You know, evidence..?”

    Still kneeling beside the hearth I’d raised my eyebrows at him. What did he mean? Glenn Close boiled the family pet didn’t she? Was that what he meant? Could he really be afraid the Wilful Guru would cut up that rough? Was Byron the Maine Coon in danger of winding up trussed and stuck in the microwave set to defrost?

It had taken the rest of the afternoon and all the early evening to calm us down. I’d read through all the correspondence I’d kept during college days from young, supportive, completely wacky friends, some of whom had addressed me as ‘babe’ and sighed (on paper) over the impossibility of engaging my affections romantically. Kev had worked out the cost per annum over five years of running a 1200 cc GS and jumped out of his skin every time the phone rang. Then Youngest had returned home full of popcorn and Fanta and smelling of fusty cinema seat.

Can 'free love' be the answer to the painful scourge of infidelity? Will Lizzie's Druid friend be able to settle this question? Is the Gates' perspective the only workable one after all? And is Byron the Maine Coon really out-of-the-woods yet? These and more crucial issues hosed down and investigated in Chapter 16, coming soon...