There, heartbroken once again, I broke down and lost it, big time.
Later, when we were in the car together and without saying a word, I handed her a piece of paper with the figures written down on it She looked at them blankly. Is it a mask, I asked myself, or did she really not know what they related to?
Evidently not.
‘What is this?’ she asked in all innocence.
‘What do you think it is?’
‘No idea. You tell me. I don’t have time for your games.’ This is Yossy on the attack. A fearsome sight at the best of times.
‘Got a phone call this morning,’ I told her. ‘Those figures there are the amounts you have run up on your credit cards. I didn’t even know you had one card until this morning and now I find you have two and owe more than eight million rupiah!!!!! That’s almost three grand!!!! Not only are we skint, but we owe fucking millions!!!’
‘Neil,’ she started.
‘Fuck off,’ I finished.
Three months of not talking followed. Not much anyway.
To give her some due, she actually had the grace to appear contrite and, dare I say, even ashamed of what had happened.
I, on the other hand, just had no idea what I was supposed to say or do from there on in. I knew from watching films and reading books containing plotlines such as the one I found myself in, I was supposed to be feeling a moral outrage and throwing things while ranting and raving.
I should have been packing my bag, or hers, or at least threatening to do so.
Yet, I didn’t. I couldn’t.
It’s not that I didn’t feel anything at all or that I was numb, it was just that I seemed to have lost the power of speech or movement. Now I can relate to how some people experience something so harrowing or jolting that they go into a kind of shock and, although remaining perfectly mentally stable, are unable able to ever speak or relate to anyone or anything in the same way ever again.
Not that I am comparing what I went through to that experienced by those poor souls, I’m just saying I can understand that kind of catatonic state.
Yoss tried to engage me a few times over the days and weeks that followed but I would always just shake my head and wander away from her. I knew at some stage we would have to sit down and have this out and see whether or not we could sort this one out, or if we even wanted to try to do so, but I just couldn’t face it and so I put it off more and more. I just didn’t know what would happen.
The one thing I knew I wanted was to never feel like that again the rest of my life.
Time is a great healer, so I’m told anyway.
I guess things did start healing in the sense that I eventually started getting used to the idea of having no money, of not being able to afford to go anywhere or do anything, of having no sense that my life was any sort of a success, of knowing the marriage and life I thought I had was nothing more than a bucket of spit.
Through this, though, the real pain, the real kick in the nuts, came from the realisation that Yossy wasn’t, had never been, happy. I thought we had it all, I really did. I really thought we were both so happy and that pain, the pain of knowing that I wasn’t making the person I loved, love, happy is the one that cut me most.
Even now, all these years later, I find myself thinking, wishing, if only I could turn back the clock and make Yossy happy again, make her love me again as she used to. If only I could get her to look at me as she used to do, to be the centre of her world as she was mine. That yearning will never diminish, no matter where I am or what I do in life.
In the misery of the weeks and months that followed all of this, however, I would sit up late at night with my thoughts after Yossy had gone to bed alone. Full of regret and self-pity, I’d think to myself, if only I could go back in time and make sure we’d never met then I would not know this bloody pain.
These were the saddest of thoughts. The crushing of dreams, the realization that things had changed and forever, and that the life I had was gone.
I felt so alone. Living in a foreign country with hardly a friend in the world, or so it seemed, these were once more desperate days. I had never found it particularly easy to make friends when I lived in England, and so now thousands of miles from home I felt truly isolated. Every day was groundhog day: drag myself up, stagger out the door, take public transport to work as we could no longer afford to run a car, race around the city looking for work, take public transport home again fourteen hours later, and stagger into bed. Next day, wake up and do it all again.
And all the time Yossy and I were at best being cordial, at worst ignoring one another.
What was there anymore?
Awwww … this is just not fair, I’d think to myself late at night. This is not what I signed up for and I just don’t think I deserve this. I mean, what did I do wrong, what happened? All I ever did was love her, right?
Come on, I don’t act like a knob head, do I? I don’t go out drinking or chasing other women, or spending all our money. I don’t abuse her or be mean to her in any way or do anything a million other useless husbands do.
So why-oh-bloody-why??????
I guess this sounds
