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I was online, buying myself a fortieth birthday present from my husband, when I discovered he was leaving me for a Latvian lap-dancer less than half my age.
Now, I like to think I’m an open-minded woman, but that definitely wasn’t on my wish list.
One minute I was sipping coffee, listening to the radio and trying to choose between a new Dyson and a course of Botox, and the next it all came apart at the seams. The rug was tugged from beneath my feet, and I was left lying on my almost middle-aged backside, wondering where I’d gone wrong. All while I was listening to a band called The Afterbirth, in an attempt to understand my Goth daughter’s tortured psyche.
The Internet wasn’t helping my mood either. I knew the Dyson was the sensible choice, but the Botox ad kept springing into evil cyber-life whenever my cursor brushed against it. Maybe it was God’s way of telling me I was an ugly old hag who desperately needed surgical intervention.
The fact that I was having to do it at all was depressing enough. As he’d left for work that morning, Simon had casually suggested I ‘just stick something on the credit card’. He might as well have added ‘because I really can’t be arsed…’
He may be my husband of seventeen years, but he is a truly lazy git sometimes. We’re not just talking the usual male traits – like putting empty milk cartons back in the fridge, or squashing seven metric tons of household waste into the kitchen bin to avoid emptying it – but real, hurtful laziness. Like, anniversary-forgetting, birthday-avoiding levels of hurtful.
Of course, it hadn’t always been like that. Once, it had been wonderful – flawed, but wonderful. Over the last few years, though, we’d been sliding more and more out of the wonderful column, and so far into flawed that it almost qualified as ‘fucked-up’.
It had happened so slowly, I’d barely noticed – a gradual widening of the cracks in the plasterwork of our marriage: different interests, different priorities. A failure on both our parts, perhaps, to see the fact that the other was changing.
With hindsight, he’d been especially switched off in recent months: spending more time at work, missing our son’s sports day, and not blowing even half a gasket when Lucy dyed her blond hair a deathly shade of black. I’d put it down to the male menopause and moved on. I was far too busy pairing lost socks to give his moods too much attention anyway. Tragic but true – I’d taken things for granted as much as he had.
As I flicked between Curry’s and Botox clinics, an e-mail landed. It was Simon – probably, I thought as I opened it, reminding me to iron five fresh work shirts for him. I don’t know why he bothers – it’s part of my raison d’être. If he opened that wardrobe on a Monday morning and five fresh work shirts weren’t hanging there, perfectly ironed, I think we’d both spontaneously combust.
‘Dear Sally,’ it started, ‘this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but I need to take a break. I have some issues I need to sort out and I can’t do that at home. I won’t be coming back this weekend, but I’ll contact you soon so we can talk. Please don’t hate me – try to understand it’s not about you or anything you’ve done wrong, it’s about me making the time to find myself. I’d really appreciate it if you could pack me a bag – you know what I’ll need. And if you could explain to the children for me it would probably be for the best – you’re so much better at that kind of thing. With love, Simon. PS – please don’t forget to pack my work shirts.’
And at the bottom of the e-mail, rolling across the page in all its before-and-after glory, was an advert. For bloody Botox. I stared at it and gave some serious consideration to smashing the laptop to pieces with a sledgehammer.
Instead, I remained calm and in control of my senses. At least calm enough to not wreck the computer.
The only problem was what to do next. When you get news like that, especially in the deeply personal format of an e-mail, it renders you too stupefied to feel much at all. I think my brain shut down to protect itself from overload, and I did the logical thing – started making lunch. Lucy would be back from a trip to Oxford city centre soon with her friends Lucifer and Beelzebub. Well, that was my name for them. I think it was actually Tasha and Sophie, but they’d changed a lot since Reception, and I wasn’t sure if they were even human any more.
They’d left earlier that morning on some sort of adventure to mark the end of the school term. They were probably sticking it to the Man by shoplifting black nail varnish from Superdrug.
My son, Ollie, was out at Warhammer club at the local library, where he took a frightening amount of pleasure in painting small figures of trolls and demons various shades of silver. He still looked like a normal fourteen-year-old, at least – apart from the iPod devices that had now permanently replaced his ears. I’d got used to raising my voice slightly when talking to him, a bit like you do with an elderly aunt at a family do, and playing ad hoc games of charades to let him know dinner was ready or it was time for school.
They’d both be coming home soon, even if Simon wasn’t, and they’d be hungry, thirsty, possibly lazy, grumpy, and a variety of other dwarfs as well.
On autopilot, I opened the fridge door and pulled out some ham, mayonnaise and half a leftover chocolate log, starting to assemble a sumptuous feast. Well, maybe not that sumptuous, but pretty good for a woman who’d just been cyber-dumped.
Simon was leaving me, I thought as I chopped and spread. Leaving us. My handsome husband: orthopaedic surgeon to the stars. Or at least a few C-listers who’d knackered their knees skiing, and one overweight comedian who snapped his wrist in a celebrity break-dancing contest.
It didn’t seem real. I couldn’t let it be real. Our marriage had survived way too much for it to fall to pieces now. Me getting pregnant when we were both student doctors working twenty-hour days. Lucy arriving, Ollie soon after; struggling to cope on one wage as Simon carried on with his residency. The miscarriage I’d had a few years ago, which devastated us both, even though we hadn’t planned any more…seventeen years of love and passion and anger and boredom and resentment couldn’t end with an e-mail, surely?
Except I knew marriages did end, all the time. At the school where I work as a teaching assistant, the deputy head’s husband had recently run off with a woman he met through an online betting website. Apparently they bonded over a game of Texas Hold ’Em and next thing she knew, he’d buggered off to Barrow-in-Furness to start a new life. And my sister-in-law Cheryl divorced
