It shames me (almost) to confess when I first heard the news I was minutely tempted to stop and ponder the child’s paternity for half a millisecond. After all, Yossy didn’t exactly have an unbeaten batting average when it comes to the honesty and truth stakes, but after the aforementioned period of contemplation I realised what I was suggesting and the remoteness of its possibility even after all the problems we had experienced.
There was also the matter of Yossy’s reaction when she found out she was pregnant. Nobody can feign the happiness and delight she displayed then. It’s just not possible. If she’d had anything to hide or anything to feel guilty about then it would have shown then.
Anyway, who cares? I was as delighted as her.
Tessy really brought us back together and gave us happiness and hope again. The dark days of those bleak years or so ago seemed to belong to another lifetime. Little Tess was such a funny, sweet, happy, inquisitive, lovely little girl and gave us so much joy, fun and happiness.
Hark at me, the first man to ever become a father, going on like this. Well, I tell you what, no man has ever loved his kids more, that’s for sure.
Everyday I would take her to her playschool or else try and pick her up and always make sure there was another period of what our American friends would term quality time in the afternoon or evening with her.
We had a full time maid, or pembantu, who helped take care of Tess, but Yoss was a good mother and also liked nothing more than being with Tess. She really was a little ray of sunshine.
Yoss became happy in her work now, too. We opened a small English language school when she was pregnant and that developed and expanded in the first two and a half years or so after Tess was born.
We started by simply renovating the garage in our house and turning that into a single classroom. We soon had so many students sign up that we ended up renovating the whole house into a small school with three or four classrooms and having to rent somewhere else to live.
The school continued to grow and in no time we had two schools and plans for a third. As good as it was, I didn’t really have too much to do with the business side of the school, leaving most of that to Yoss, and I just taught there a couple of hours a day if I could as I was still spending most of my time running (well, driving actually) around Surabaya chasing the big bucks teaching in companies.
We seemed to have finally sorted out our finances and even started the process of buying our own house. We actually started saving quite regularly and were able to afford to finally go to England the year Tess turned two.
It was my first time back since I came out here in ’93 and, obviously, Yoss and Tess’ first ever experience of Blighty. I think they both enjoyed themselves, although they found it rather cold and the food a bit strange.
I must confess that although I also enjoyed the trip, it felt very much like what it was: a holiday. It didn’t feel in any way that I was coming home, as it were, and I actually felt a bit of a stranger in my own country.
Everything just felt a bit different, you see. Things seemed to be cleaner and more well-organised than I remembered when living there; people appeared to be more professional in their jobs but not as happy or friendly; as I just said, the weather was colder than I remembered. Another thing was the TV and entertainment world had moved on so I no longer recognised or knew most of the presenters on TV or many of the programmes or pop stars or other people in the public eye.
Yep, it was a bit of a strange feeling. Rather a case of feeling like a fish out of water, I fear.
Still, all in all it was fun and my family certainly enjoyed meeting Yoss and Tess.
‘So? That’s good, isn’t it?’ I hear you, dear reader, say. ‘Seems you finally had your life sorted out.’
‘Nope,’ reply I. ‘That was just the calm before the storm.’
By the end of the year it had all gone wrong again. Well, I say it had ‘gone’ wrong. It hadn’t, really. In fact, nothing had actually happened as such, things had just drifted into mutual antipathy. Time waits for no man and the year was once more coming to a close. Tess was now a couple of months past her fourth birthday and had become a lovely, well-behaved, well-adjusted little kid. All the more surprising seeing that her parents barely bothered communicating any more.
Oh, I don’t know. I just seemed to give up on Yossy. Yeah, yeah, I know this sounds like ‘poor little me’ again, but I’d just had enough of trying to reason with her, of trying to find out why she was permanently unhappy or angry, of being blamed for the aforementioned anger or unhappiness or anything remotely resulting in the slightest problem or deviation from the day’s norm.
God, I was sick of it.
Yossy seemed to be happy for a while with the onset of motherhood and the opening of our businesses, but I can see now it was just a case of the cracks being papered over and she was still in fact deeply rooted in misery. She was back to her snidey,
