Authors: Paul Southern
Counsellors are all the same. I’m not sure what gene they’re missing, or whether counsellor school turns them all out that way, but to me they seem to be largely missing the point. I don’t want them to listen; I want them to counsel. Hence, the name, right? All they ever seem to do is take notes and read them back.
‘Let me see if I’ve got this right.’
Of course you have. I’ve just spent the last hour telling you.
My ex-wife and I - I’ve got to think of another name for her - were sat on a small sofa staring at her. Or what we could see of her. When I arrived five minutes before, I had completely missed her.
‘Take a seat.’
‘Hello?’
‘Here.’
I’ve never been very good at disguising my feelings. I’ve always been more Othello than Iago. When she hopped off the seat and walked towards me, all I could think about were the other genes she must be missing. She wasn’t exactly straight from the pantomime, but she could have passed as a hobbit without much makeup. She smiled rather grotesquely at me, with her too bright red lipstick, and took my hand in her hoof. I wondered what the officer had meant - she’s very good. At what? Not smiling.
I suppose she must have got that reaction a lot. It’s always worse for women, I know. I know because they tell me. Nearly every woman I’ve ever been with has told me this. I’ve gone beyond the age where I care what they think, if they think I’m sexist or a racist or a paedophile. Some of them have quite liked that, others have stared at me and wondered what genes
I
was missing. Women need to be beautiful. Or they need to be seen to be beautiful. Without it, they wither. They need the constant bolstering and ego inflation to compensate for the lack of collagen and silicone. Somehow, this is all men’s fault. Our expectations greatly exceed the supply. There simply aren’t that many pretty girls. There are a lot of reasonable looking girls - I’d go as far to say that most girls fall into this category - the ones who could, with a little bit of effort and expense and careful application of makeup, aspire to being beautiful, but they seem alternately disappointed and unhappy making the effort. Of course, with time, that effort only increases. I have seen middle-aged women, and even, heaven forbid, old women, sitting in front of mirrors with pins in their eyebrows and stitches in their cheeks, trying to hold back the years. They look exhausted. In the end, they have no choice. Nature takes its course and they re-join their ugly sisters. You can only play at being Cinderella for so long.
There aren’t that many ugly girls, although there are more of them than there are pretty girls. For them, there is a very steep learning curve. They know they’re going to get overlooked so find their compensation elsewhere, usually in something tragic like nursing or social services. Checkouts usually have their fair share of them, particularly the lower end stores like Aldi and Kwik Save, though it never strikes me that these girls are bothered in quite the same way. They have, I think, come to realise the great consolation for all women looking for a man - and just a quick scan of the shelf stackers and managers in their shops bears me out on this - that no matter how ugly a woman is, or thinks she is, there are far more ugly men in the world whose desperation is greater, who would bite their toes off for a sight of a real, ugly, flesh and blood girl in their bed, or in the store room. I know because I count myself among their number. Not that I understand why they would want a man in the first place - we are such apes - or why you’re seen as sad if you don’t have someone, but there you go.
I often wondered what my little girl would turn into when she was older. She’d already shown signs of simpering vanity and started picking up red lipsticks in shops. She’d got that from her mother, along with the fascination for big earrings. I didn’t really know what to say. It made her look like a tart. I told her it looked silly and she told me she thought it looked nice and that she was going to wear it all the time when she was older. I didn’t want her to do that but I think I was fighting a losing battle. I didn’t know what I wanted her to be - other than happy. I wanted to tell her none of the stuff she was going to worry about would matter, but that wouldn’t do any good, either. I guess she was going to be one of the reasonable girls - so far as I could tell, she looked more like her mother than me, which was only a good thing, and would spend her day poring over teen magazines with eighteen-year-old boys in them; she’d probably already started wishing she was that age. I suppose all fathers say this but, to me, she was the most beautiful thing in the world. Even if it wasn’t true, it wouldn’t have stopped me believing it.
I watched a programme once about a father who managed his daughter’s modelling career. He attended shoots, nude or not, and accompanied her everywhere. He said he’d never trust another man to look after her, and neither would she. I thought he was sick watching her, staring at her photographs. He just couldn’t let go. Now, I have some sympathy. I look at nineteen-year-old girls who could well be my daughter and have no trouble at all staring at their photographs. I wank over them all the time - the pictures, that is; I had trouble getting a nineteen-year-old when I
was
nineteen - and am well aware that it’s someone’s daughter, someone like me, someone with an ex-wife and kid of their own. I try not to pass judgement at all. Of course, such talk for me is hypothetical. My daughter is no longer with me. I can’t let go, either.
I took my place on the sofa and the counsellor returned to her seat. She’d done her best to counter my look of shock, and started sifting through papers on her desk to make us both feel better. I wondered whether I’d need to bite any toes off to have a chance with her. Not that I’d want to; short people fascinate me in a circus freak show kind of way, not carnally. But I wonder what it must be like. Many years ago, I had a Mexican friend who spent his time hanging round a troupe of female, Mexican dwarves. He said he was a film director and wanted to make a film about them. He said he had the lot of them, singly and collectively, and it was the best sex of his life. I asked him how come and he said it made him feel big, like he was one of those guys in porn films. Maybe I should have tried it.
When my ex-wife came in, it was quite some relief. She hadn’t slept, I think. I recognised the look in her face. She flashed me a look that said everything. She wanted to know where her baby was. The counsellor gave her a sympathetic look and my ex-wife reciprocated. It was neatly done. I’ve said before that my ex-wife was better than me at most things and faking it was one of them. She just seems to get into part immediately. She should have been an actress, although having another one in the house would have been unbearable. My ex-wife has given command performances the like of which I’ve never seen, most recently in front of the judge when she took everything I had, and in bed, when she put Delilah and Dido and Cleopatra to shame. Later, she told me with great relish that she’d faked every orgasm I thought she’d had. I believed her. It seemed scarcely plausible that I came anywhere near Caesar’s greatness. I think it annoys her, though, that I’ve seen her naked and been with her. She can’t take that away from me. Or maybe that, too, was an act, and the seven years, or however many it was, were a dream.
Despite her tiredness, my wife looked pretty that morning. She was wearing a summer dress that fell to her calves, all tidied in the middle with a red belt. When we were together, I know a lot of men fancied her. I know this because she told me. They would chat her up at parties we threw and wink improprieties across the dinner table. She didn’t like lying to me and holding it back. I appreciated this a lot. I knew they must be doing something because I was doing it with their wives. My wife wouldn’t have appreciated that, but maybe she knew that, too. Maybe she was doing it; she was just more discrete. When you’re young, all that stuff seems perfectly acceptable. It’s what you’re meant to do. When you’re middle-aged, it just seems seedy - or worse, sad. Now we’re separated, they all have the chance, of course, but I know they won’t take it. The magic has gone. A single mother with a child is a whole different balls game.
‘I know this is really traumatic for you. I’ve dealt with many cases like this and I want you to know that there is no right or wrong way to feel. You just have to focus on what you can do. I’m here for you. We’re all here for you. The vast majority of the time, these things resolve quickly and end well.’
The hobbit was doing well, too; far more pro-active than I’d expected.
‘You think she’ll be okay?’
My wife was reaching across to her, clutching at anything.
The hobbit paused, measuring her words out carefully. ‘I hope so.’
My wife looked at me. ‘Have they heard anything?’
I shook my head.
‘I can’t bear this, you know. I think I’m dying.’
The hobbit asked us if she wanted her to go; she could come back in a bit. My wife nodded. She didn’t want an audience.
I never understood that about her, how she could function so well without one. There has been nothing in my life without public approval, without the slow handclap of strangers. Ambition has been an albatross round my neck, and fame and wealth my white whale. Only my little girl lifted them from me. She gave me joy, and only that, I know, because she put me back in the spotlight. Even now I can feel its glare and I hate myself for what I’ve done.
When the hobbit had gone, my wife put her head in her hands and sobbed. I knew I should have done something - put my arms round her, comforted her - but I couldn’t bring myself to move. I was thinking of all the command performances she’d given in her time, and my little girl, and how I couldn’t fake it at all.
It’s time to come clean. I hate my ex-wife. I hate what she did to me. I know people will say it’s all my fault and I deserve it after all the things I’ve done, but they don’t see the things she did to me. Especially her women friends. They huddle together and gossip about me; or at least they did when it all happened. Now, I’m just part of the past, one of those mistakes you learn from. Their disapproving looks have become indifferent ones. I don’t mind that; most people have been indifferent to me. I have never stood out. Whenever I tried, my anxiety levels got the better of me and I made a fool of myself. Some people would rather have that, I know, but for me, it was death. That’s why I went into acting. I wanted the attention but I didn’t want the fallout. If I fell flat on my face, it wasn’t me. Unfortunately, everyone has seen through that now.
Once, I was seen as quite a catch. Yes, I know that’s hard to believe, but it’s true. I overheard one of my wife’s coven say it.
‘You’ve got a good one there. I’d keep good hold of him.’
I never liked her friend, save in that casual fancying way a man has for all his wife’s friends, but she grew in my estimation after that. I spent hours deliberating what
a good one
was, and how I fitted the bill. Whenever she came round, I did my best to live up to it. I would smile and demonstrate great and selfless acts of husbandry, hoping she’d make further comments, but she never said anything. She might have seen through me, of course. Or just gone off me. Worse than that, maybe she wasn’t even talking about me. That thought has occurred to me many times since.
Whatever my track record was, it’s true to say that I don’t have it now. Or, to be more precise, I do. I have a stained one. I have trumped every trick my wife ever played on me. All the good has come to nought. I have become like every other man, all the chavs and chav nots: the window cleaners, joiners, insurance salesman and university lecturers. We are all the same cheating bastards. I resent that. I resent the way it’s all my fault and the fact my wife has got off scot-free. Does she think I don’t know what she and her friends got up to? There’s something odious about a woman who cheats. I mean, I’m not saying the same isn’t true of a man - we’ve all done it at one time, and even those who haven’t, have thought about it: even the good ones, like I was. We’re all sinners. But a woman is much worse.
One of my wife’s other friends made a habit of it. She cheated before she was married, then cheated after she was married: thirteen weeks after, to be precise. She was having it away with someone at work. I’m told this is quite common, and indeed, de rigueur in some offices. The husband didn’t know that. He thought they were in love. She merrily paraded him in front of them. When my wife told me about this - we were still on good terms then, and used to swap anecdotes about the sad lives of our friends, before realising ours was the saddest of all - I asked her if she was going to say something. She looked at me like I’d lost my mind, which I probably had.
‘Why?’ she said.
‘Because you’re her friend.’
‘It’s not my business.’
‘Wouldn’t you want to know if I was having an affair?’
‘Are you?’
‘No.’
‘Then I wouldn’t need to.’
‘Don’t you think she’s doing wrong?’
‘I suppose.’
‘You suppose?’
‘You know what’s it’s like; it’s the classic case. Should I, shouldn’t I, get involved?’
‘She’s giving blowjobs to a guy behind her husband’s back. Don’t you think, as a friend, you have a duty to say something?’
‘Why are you getting so hot under the collar?’
‘I’m thinking of him.’
‘Maybe you should tell him?’
‘Maybe I will.’
I remember the look she gave. It’s like I’d betrayed
her
. We stopped talking for about a week. I didn’t hear any more about her friend till much later. Her husband was in the papers. There was a picture of him tucked away beneath an advert for a tooth whitening product. He looked pretty much like every other guy I’ve ever met: nothing special, but not awful. He’d got into his car one night and filled it with petrol and pumped it full of fumes. He died of a broken heart. They called it suicide.
Now I’m pretty sure this kind of shit has happened to plenty of women, and heaven knows they have my sympathy, but the shit that guy had, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. He found out, of course - when the scales finally fell from his eyes - he found out the lot. He caught his wife kissing someone after an office do; saw their shadows dancing on the walls. His whole world just collapsed. The truth came out, little by little, of all the tawdry things she’d done to him. She tried to cover it up - what would anyone do? - but the truth doesn’t lie buried for long. It buried them both. It’s not what killed him - though the thought of my wife sinking to her knees and giving another guy a blowjob behind my back gives me variously an erection, it is mainly a feeling of death - it was the humiliation. Every guy in that office knew he was cheated on, every one of his friends. He lost his standing. When a woman is cheated on, you can guarantee her female friends will be there to bolster her ego and trot out the usual list of platitudes: men are to blame; he didn’t deserve you; you’re better off without. When a man is cheated on, the converse is true: he is still to blame; he didn’t do enough to keep you; he is a loser. That’s a tough call. Unless you’re my wife.
‘It’s a tragedy.’
‘It certainly is.’
‘I’m not sure how she’ll get over it.’
‘She has more chance than him.’
‘Don’t you think she feels bad enough?’
‘A bit late, wouldn’t you say?’
‘People do make mistakes.’
‘Yes, they do.’
‘I can’t believe you just said that.’
‘Why?’
‘My best friend’s just lost her husband and you’re blaming the whole thing on me?’
‘I’m blaming the whole thing on her. She should have thought about things a bit more.’
‘She was unhappy.’
‘I’m unhappy.’
‘Are you having an affair?’
‘No. Are you?’
‘What kind of question is that?’
‘It’s the kind of question a man asks himself when he sees the picture of a guy in a newspaper who has just killed himself and wonders if he’ll be next.’
‘That’s a revolting thing to say.’
‘It’s a revolting thing to do.’
‘Then don’t do it.’
‘I wasn’t talking about me. I was talking about her.’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘I want you to tell me.’
‘What? That I’m sorry?’
‘No. I want you to tell me if you’re having an affair.’
She looked at me in that way all women do when they’re on the ropes: affronted. How dare I even think of asking such a question. I must have a sick mind. Was I trying to hide something?
‘What do you think?’
Yes, I thought. You’re trying to hide (a) that you’ve thought about it, (b) that you’ve already done it, or (c) that you’re doing it right now.
‘No.’
What was I meant to say? Can you imagine the fireworks after that display? The fact she was or wasn’t having an affair was irrelevant. It was the way she dealt with it. I call it odious but self-righteous is perhaps nearer the mark. The standards she set herself were higher; the standards all women set themselves are higher – they put them there. It differentiates them from men. We’re losers and cheats. We’re expected to fall the small distance from the gutter into the drain. They have the whole expanse of heaven to fall from.
She gave a command performance that day and I’ve never forgotten.
My ex-wife has made me a pariah. She has got the house and money and her friends and I have nothing. Nothing except my daughter; and even that, I fear, won’t last long. I can feel my daughter going cold turkey with me already. It’s not that she doesn’t enjoy her visits - how can she not with me as a dad? - it’s just she misses her mum and her friends more. I can understand that. Girls gravitate towards their mothers the older they get; daddy’s girl becomes mummy’s best friend. But my little girl is five. I should have many more years left. I want to be her everything before I am her nothing. I rely on her more than anything in the world.
There’s something else that’s pulling her away. My ex-wife is poisoning her. It’s not the obvious way, when children act as emissaries of hate, delivering Armalite insults through the no-man’s land of their parents’ war-torn separation; it’s more insidious. We are talking my ex-wife here. She denounces me by subtraction. If you do this, your father will take it away from you; if you do that, he’ll take you away. I have become the bogeyman. My ex-wife knows I’m a stickler for rules, and milks it to death. When my daughter asks why she has to do something, the answer is always: ‘Because your father says so.’ It gets her off the hook. I don’t blame her for this - I wish I could use her in the same way - but I resent it, and what it’s doing to my daughter. She is starting to see me less as a fun thing, and more of a chore. All the boring bits like homework and reading, and the granite insistence on table manners and cleanliness, which I imagine in ideal relationships - if they exist - are shared, are left to me. The less I see of her, the more I see she is not brushing her teeth every night, or reading a page of her book, the more I feel the burden. You worry twice as much when you’re separated. You worry about the life they have with you, and the life they have without you. My ex-wife exploits that. She knows what I’m like.
Then there’s her boyfriend. She says he’s not, but he is. He has that look about him: I’m shagging your ex-wife. Well, good luck, mate. I met him outside the house last year. He had a big, blue car and a bigger handshake. He did it deliberately, I know; squeezed the life out of me. He was sizing me up, wondering what the hell she ever saw in me. I was wondering the same thing. There’s something compelling about finding out who your ex is dating. Will they go for the same type, or the complete opposite?
‘I won’t go for a loser again.’
Quite. So there I was face to face with the winner. I wondered if she made love to him the same way, if she did things differently, if he was better or, heaven forbid, worse. You think I wouldn’t care, wouldn’t you? But I did. I wondered if he thought the same about me, and whether he was hung up that I’d been inside my wife - we were married, after all - and I’d visited all the places he was going. Was there something a bit deflating about that? Judging by his handshake, the answer was no. It was masculine and self-assured. But handshakes, like looks, can lie. Who knows what he’d be like when he hit the sack? Maybe he’d be a nervous wreck like I was.
I know he takes them on picnics and to the cinema and family stiff like that. I know he’s quite kind. My daughter tells me that. It’s the only thing that really bothers me. I don’t want him having an avuncular or fatherly relationship with her; I don’t want anyone having that with her; I’m her father. My wife’s lovers make me insecure and I hate that feeling. I want to be in control. When I realise how out of control I am, I feel like I could do anything.
Anything
.
‘How about she comes to live with me?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I’ll miss her.’
‘You’ll see her at the weekends.’
‘That’s five days without her.’
‘You’re lucky it’s not more.’
‘How about alternate weeks?’
‘Do you want her to grow up normal? She needs stability.’
‘So do I.’
‘You had it.’
I remember the way she was in front of the judge. Her solicitor had her wearing a décolleté black dress, which I presumed was an indication of her state of mourning, but was more risqué than any funeral affair I’d ever seen. I wondered if she’d tried it on in front of him. It’s odd; I never used to bother too much about her when we were married; now, we aren’t, I’m bothered a lot. I wonder sometimes if I still love her. It’s a horrible thought. I looked at my solicitor, with his Bart Simpson tie and floppy hair, and knew he’d misjudged the mood. The judge threw us glances à la Pilate before the Jews. His hands were tied. The tears she shed that day would have done justice to the crucifixion. I stood there with Bart and wondered where it had all gone wrong.
My little girl was going to be absent from my life for 261 days a year for the next eleven years. For each of those days, I was ordered to pay my ex-wife maintenance. On top of that, I lost the house. The thorns are still pressing into my skull. She gave another command performance that day and I’m still counting the cost. It’s no wonder things turned out the way they did. Eat my shorts, bitch.