The Benito Mungaro phase lasted almost three years, and it was pretty damn irritating to live through. Amy spent most of that time with a weird half-smile on her lips, as if she knew some big secret that I didn’t, which is almost certainly what she believed.
She went vegan, which was fine. She’s a great cook, and I had no problem eating the Thai tofu curries and colourful Buddha bowls she came up with. Officially, we were all vegan, but when I was out and about with Ben, I’d feed him fish and eggs and dairy. I’d read up a bit on how to balance a vegan diet properly for growing children, and it seemed easier to me just to cheat.
Amy stopped drinking coffee, then tea and then alcohol. These were apparently destructive to her ‘spirit soul’. That’s what the guru had told her, anyway.
She found other adepts to hang out with as well. Whether she’d converted them or just bumped into them – implying they were perhaps less elusive than I’d imagined – I couldn’t tell, but I would come home to find five or six people sitting at the kitchen table drinking juiced kale. They’d all smile at me at once, revealing matching sets of juice-green teeth, and I’d make my excuses and head through to the lounge. Sometimes I’d put on a really noisy action movie with lots of shooting just to piss them all off, but I never saw any sign they cared.
If Amy had ever tried to convert me, I think that our marriage might have been in trouble, but she never did. So perhaps, deep down, she knew that was the choice facing her: live with the heathen, or live alone.
On the few occasions when she did try to share her wisdom with me, I knocked her back with a heavy dose of sarcasm, at which she’d smile serenely and walk away. I think she managed to frame it so that my incapacity to understand actually made her feel better about herself. Her secret knowledge giving her the edge, as she saw it.
As you probably remember from the news, Mungaro’s empire crashed and burned at the end of 2013. First he was arrested for tax evasion, and then within days he’d been accused of rape as well.
‘It’s all fake news,’ Amy told me, when the first reports appeared on TV. ‘They’re going to crucify him exactly like they did Jesus.’
But then the horror stories became more specific. Women, more girls actually, with sad eyes and real tears, began appearing and describing in detail how they’d been abused. The Italian authorities were seizing Mungaro’s millions and exploring his links with the Cosa Nostra mafia. There were even rumours of drug running.
‘How else could he have managed to make seventy million?’ I asked Amy. ‘Unless his followers were actually giving him money?’
‘I don’t know,’ Amy said, looking uncomfortable.
‘They weren’t, were they?’ I asked. ‘You didn’t give him money, did you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course not. Not at all.’
‘Not at all,’ I repeated. There was something wrong about her choice of words.
‘OK, hardly any,’ Amy said. ‘I mean, I bought the books, obviously. I paid for the tutorials. There was, like, a membership fee, you know? For access. To all the courses.’
‘Was that expensive?’ I asked.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘And I don’t regret a penny of it.’
But it was over, that was the main thing. The meetings had dried up. The books had moved to the bookcase, where they were sandwiched between The Power of Now and The Secret. Later on, I noticed they’d completely vanished. I think having been a fan of Mungaro became something to be ashamed of once everyone knew he was in jail.
The stupid smile had faded as well, to be replaced once again by the complex facial expressions of the woman I loved.
Ben started school the following year, and so Amy went back to working as close to full-time as she could manage. She ran yoga classes from our conservatory, taught jazz dance back in Canterbury, and ran senior stretching sessions in Herne Bay. Desperate to get rid of the last traces of her baby bump, she started bodybuilding, too. As her body became ever more ripped, I couldn’t help but notice how much she was starting to look like Madonna.
She began spending money again, too, her dissatisfaction with life gradually returning and expressing itself through a need to constantly change our surroundings.
So we knocked out the wall between the kitchen and the dining room, replaced the bathtub with an Italian wet room and added an en suite to our bedroom.
The constant upheaval was exhausting and, of course, because of my job, I frequently got roped in to help with whatever transformation was in progress. But I still preferred it to the Mungaro years. Materialism was an enemy that at least I felt equipped to understand – and fight.
Little Ben floated through all of this effortlessly.
In fact, if there was a spiritual lesson to be learned, it was our Ben we needed to pay attention to, not Benito. Because everything seemed to make little Ben happy.
A pile of rubble in the kitchen? Happy. A new shower to stand under? Very happy. An old bathtub full of rainwater in the back garden? Ecstatic!
I’m guessing this is how most parents feel, but I honestly felt that he was the happiest child who’d ever lived. He’d come through his mum’s various phases unscathed. Perhaps her fake spiritual contentment had even contributed to making him so easy-going, who knows?
My business was going from strength to strength and I’d even had to take on a second employee. Having learned his trade in Romania – where flat-pack was considered a luxury – fifty-year-old Marius was a master craftsman in the true sense of the word. He could make stunning kitchen cabinets from scratch and in not much more time than it took me to go to Ikea, bring them back and screw them
