I took her in my arms and slowly, through her sobs, the story unfolded. It seems she put the money in her handbag which she left under her chair at some point in the day, and then when she went back to it later … well, I think you are ahead of me here.
There was no other possibility than the fact that one of her colleagues had stolen the money. She was, understandably, devastated to think that one of her so-called friends could do that to her and so was I.
We decided there and then that she couldn’t work there anymore and she quit on the spot. I personally phoned her manager in Jakarta and explained what had happened and why Yoss would be leaving with immediate effect.
Following that, my poor wife spent the next two months staying at home moping. I suggested that we should use the break to visit my family in England, as it had been almost three years since I was last there and they were yet to meet Yoss, but she seemed too despondent to think about anything other than the fact that one of her friends was a thief.
While I continued working all over the city, she spent her days at home consoling herself with phone calls and visits from her friends. She explained to me many times that she felt too heartbroken to trust anyone again for a long time and all she wanted to do was to try and forget the whole experience of Bali Party. Whilst I sympathized with her and the pain she was quite evidently going through, I couldn’t help but feel she would be able to put things behind her a bit quicker and truly move on if she didn’t spend so much time talking to her former colleagues on the phone or meeting up with them for lunch. After all, I reasoned, one of them had stolen her money and as the thief had never been caught, and certainly had never owned up to it, for all she knew she could have been talking to him or her every day.
Throughout this painful time I remained there for her always. I did my best to get home quicker than I had previously, and I made a point of calling her from wherever I happened to be working at least two or three times a day. It helped that I was now mostly teaching English in offices in the business sector of Surabaya as it meant I could avail myself of telephone facilities a bit easier and so call Yoss at set times each day.
Yossy’s spell on the sidelines dragged on for another couple of months and then something happened, or rather, I discovered something that had been happening for months, and I was cut to the very quick. In a blink of an eye the very soul and essence of my existence and being was dragged kicking and screaming out of me, leaving me an incomprehensible mess and a mere shadow of the man I had always considered myself to be.
When I first discovered what had been going on it felt every bit as painful as if she’d been having an affair. The betrayal and hurt was such that at times I truly thought I would die and on many occasions I just couldn’t breathe, I really couldn’t, and I would go into this kind of hyperventilating state of flux doubled over with my hands on my hips and my cheeks puffing out in the manner of an exhausted marathon runner.
It was not so much what had happened that was having this affect on me, more the realisation of what was not happening; namely, my life was not what I thought it was.
The sense of wellness and peaceful existence I was feeling previously was been shown up for what it was in reality all along: self-congratulatory, naive, stupid smugness.
Even now I can’t believe I was so ridiculously, gormlessly, half-wittedly trusting and blind. Well, never again, that’s all I can say. Never again am I going to be taken for a fool in that way. Never again am I just going to believe what she, or anyone else for that matter, says to me.
God, how could I have been so stupid?
There I was doe-eyeingly accepting everything she told me, never once questioning her, never once asking anything or raising any point, just wilfully accepting the fact that she was paying all our money into the bank, had been paying into the bank steadily over the past three years, when all the time she was doing nothing of the sort.
Actually, I have no idea, and no way of knowing now as I am sure she won’t ever tell me now, if she ever put any of our money in the bank in those three years, or if she had originally done so and then simply used it up over the few months she was at Bali Party and the immediate aftermath.
All I know is instead of the supposed 30 million rupiah, or almost ten grand, she told me was in our account we actually had precisely bugger-all.
Not a brass farthing. Nothing. Nix. Nada.
What hurt more than being completely skint, at least what I think hurt more – it’s difficult to tell- was the three years of lies. Where was the truth, the honesty, the trust, and the love I thought we had? Where was the marriage?
All of a sudden I knew why she didn’t want to go to England when I suggested it back then; she knew we had no money to pay for it
All of a sudden I also knew who it was who paid for our nights out with her friends.
How could I have been so stupid???????
I only found out by accident. If I hadn’t found the last month’s phone bill I would still, even now, probably be in the dark and as blissfully ignorant and slow as she obviously had me marked down as.
After becoming unemployed, she
