Sometimes this was ‘social’ drinking down the pub with Marius or Joe, but mainly it consisted of a lonely stream of beers from the fridge, consumed with lacklustre ready meals from the freezer. When I took the recycling out and saw the sheer number of empties, it scared me.
The alcohol wasn’t helping, either. Sure, it made the evenings slip by in a blur, and that was preferable to minutes that felt like hours and hours that dragged by like weeks. And it certainly made the telly more entertaining, or, at the very least, less dull. But it did terrible things to my sleep patterns, and I started waking up to pee at three in the morning and not being able to get back to sleep. This lack of sleep, plus the inevitable hangovers, left me feeling tired and irritable by day, and ruined my concentration at work. Worst of all, as the weeks went by, the drinking left me feeling even more depressed than before.
My roll-with-it personality was gone, and I caught myself ranting about politics or Brexit or Boris Johnson – ‘going off on one’, as my dad would say, about pretty much anything. By mid-November, Joe and Marius had begun declining the invitations to my fun-filled evenings down the pub as well. Life had just got even lonelier.
I needed to get a grip on myself – this much I knew. It’s just that I had no idea where to start.
Eleven
Heather
I felt happy and I felt surprised. In fact, feeling happy was the surprise. After all, you’re not supposed to feel great about being dumped for a neighbour, are you?
But I did – in fact, sometimes I felt ecstatic. I’d wake up in a good mood, and snuggle against whichever of the girls had crawled into my bed. Downstairs in the kitchen, as I made breakfast, I’d notice that my body was tingling with joy, and occasionally I’d even dance around to whatever song was on the radio. It felt a bit like being in love, only it wasn’t that. It was simply no longer being in hate.
I felt guilty, too, about feeling happy, so it was a complex set of emotions. I tried to temper my joy, preparing myself for an inevitable rebound, for the wave of misery and sadness that would submerge me once I came to my senses. It’s just the rebound never came.
Or course, I had plenty of concerns about my situation. I was living in the house Ant had bought, and he was still paying for everything. I was only too aware how dependent I was on my ex, and so I started looking for work. But finding any kind of nursing job that fitted around the girls’ out-of-school hours and the local bus schedule seemed to be impossible. If I was going to work full-time again, we’d have to move as well, and that was, by a long shot, more upheaval than I felt ready to face.
Ant surprised me with his generosity. He took his responsibilities as a father seriously, it transpired. Perhaps he felt he was paying off a debt incurred by his infidelity, or perhaps he thought he owed his daughters some stability because he’d broken up our family. Maybe the idea of our dependence on him soothed his fragile ego. Actually, it was probably all of those.
Whatever the reason, he made staying on in the house easy.
But as time went by, I couldn’t help but suspect this was his way of continuing to control me. As long as I was entirely dependent upon him, I remained exactly that – dependent on him.
So when a postcard advert popped up asking for part-time help at the local farm shop, I jumped at the opportunity. The pay was only minimum wage, but the hours – 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. – fitted in perfectly with the girls’ schooling, and the owner, who I already knew from having been a customer, was a ruddy-faced man who laughed a lot. He gave me the job straight away.
Now that Ben was living with Ant and Amy during the week, I crossed paths with Joe far less than before. I think he worked late most nights and certainly there was never any sign of him when I walked past the house with the girls. During the autumn term I only bumped into him twice, once at the school one Monday morning as he dropped Ben off, and once at the farm shop as I was arriving for work. But two momentary sightings were enough to see that he wasn’t happy. With dry skin and bloodshot eyes, he looked so shocking that on both occasions I asked if he was OK – and he insisted that he was. I asked him if he was eating properly and even invited him round to dinner, but he declined both times. He was busy, he said. He was fine.
Working made me feel so much better about myself, it shocked me. I found myself chatting and joking with Peter, the farmer, and whistling as I washed and packed the veg. What I was doing was hardly earth-shattering, but it was indisputably useful and being useful felt good. People were happy when I handed them their boxes of veg, and Peter even more so when he emptied the till at the end of the shift. My days felt shorter and less pointless, and I found myself feeling saner, physically stronger, and more the way I’d always imagined ‘normal’ adults might feel. I even had to open my own bank account to receive my wages, and it was only when I received my debit card – with my own name on it, rather than Ant’s – that I realised just how much of my identity had been erased over the
