Sticks and Stones 9

This is part of what I wrote;

‘How many times have I bought one of these little kiddy notebooks and sat alone in a bar trying to evaluate a new predicament with words, beers and cigarettes?

How many life-changing chances have I squandered, preferring to justify my pain by writing it down and celebrating loss?

A woman may cry into a puffed-up pillow, just as a man smokes into a half-empty glass; the feelings of loss are the same. One looks to the self to recover and the other cares for company. One mends while the other bends.

Betrayal is the hardest thing for me to come up against. With betrayal comes a morose lapse of self, coiled in the spiralling truth that another has drunk from my cup.
I can’t get it out of my head that Alan has crossed lines that have erased my relationship with my family. He has dislocated my sense of being one with my loved ones, and he has knowingly set me apart from Suzie, Griff and Maddy.

He has played his role well. He is alone, emaciated, almost anorexic, yet still he finds time to keep contact with Suzie whilst he slates me in England, probably with her help.
Suzie has betrayed me in a crude, intelligent way, where she may find satisfaction in denying my justification of betrayal.
She has allowed the one person I would never again allow to stay at the house, kept me away from my daughter, while he drinks my wine to my demise, with my (ex) girlfriend giggling with him at my stupidity.
She has betrayed me by portraying me as a hard-drinking, loveless, dishonest, violent, money-taking liar who has no feeling for her children, all the while filling up Alan’s glass for him.
How good he is with the children. How he plays with them and seems to enjoy himself at the same time. How he was surprised to hear of what I had against him! And how Suzie sprang to his defence.

How could I suggest he had said terrible things about me to my old friends in Woking?
In Suzie’s eyes, Jon was to blame for telling me what he’d said about me at Christian’s fortieth birthday party.
According to Jon, Alan had effectively uninvited me months before when Christian, Jon and Alan were deciding who to invite.

‘He was a mess, Jim,’ Jon had told me. ‘But he said the most disgusting things about you, man. He was slurring his words and his eyes were on fire. Everyone thought he was a complete idiot.’

‘Alan can’t remember saying anything about you,’ Suzie had tried to assure me. ‘Although he did say he could have said something when he was drunk.’

‘Exactly!’ I replied down the phone. ‘The little shit’s a raving alcoholic madman, Suze! He’s slagged me off to old mates and then you allow him to stay with the family, my family, when I’m not there!’

I again asked Suzie whether he had drunk from the wine I brought back from Andorra.
On the Monday evening, she said she had drunk it all, and that Alan had drunk from another bottle as an easy alternative for him to digest, knowing why.

Then, on Tuesday afternoon, she told me she had only drunk part of it, but when I asked who else drank from the bottle I expressly asked her not to drink until I returned, she had no answer.
Betrayal does that; it suffocates a moment, freezing the perpetrator into confusion and giddiness. She froze on the phone, unable to speak the truth, that she had openly betrayed me in a very unromantic way. It was almost as bad as him fucking her.
She accepted the jacket I bought her, but she will take it back and she will rid herself of it and exchange it for something more expensive to extract the truth from where the garment really came.

She will grow the children up in fear of me; how I left only to return worse a hundred times, how I ruined their education, their joie de vivre, their energy.

She will live alone with the children and come to terms with the fact that she has poisoned them for years, but only after the damage is well set for the children’s demise, which she will relentlessly blame on me until the day she dies, will she see the wrong in her ways, sad and lost. The children will pity her, unable to hate her for the lies she had manufactured to be true.
A woman scorned is a woman lost forever.

Betrayal; in the coming days, Alan will call, right on time, and he will know that I don’t live there any more. He will offer his support and congratulate her on taking the only route left to her.
She will further confide in him and he will grin from ear to ear when she tells him that I felt that he and she had fun with my wine on Saturday night. She will tell him I’m crazy and he will relay the fears he has had about me for years. He will crush her allegiance to me for his own ends.
She will quiver when she sees the wolf dressed as a dog that he is, but he will only show himself after passing his apprenticeship as a Family Man.
But why has he never kept a girlfriend for longer than a few months? And why do they laugh behind his back when he is down? Why? Because he is a loveless, deluded little boy still wriggling out from his mother’s grasp.’

It goes on and on and gets much more twisted and painful, so I’ll return to reality.

On Wednesday, I called Suzie at nineish but there was no reply. I called twice again at lunchtime, but still no answer. I read the newspaper and saw that an accident had taken place on the D631 in Giroussens (where they live) at four o’clock yesterday afternoon. I squirmed in my seat. When had I last talked to Suzie on the phone? I couldn’t remember.

Then, I spotted an article in the newspaper I was reading at the bar, entitled ‘Recherchant Romy’.

It was about a divorced man who hadn’t seen his now grown up kids for over ten years. He had heard through his own family over Christmas that his daughter had given birth to a daughter called Romy. He had written to ask permission to see his grand-daughter, but his ex-wife had ignored his plea. He ended his letter by saying that he would go through the courts to see her. I shuddered when I woke up to the potential costs of my actions.

Unable to think about finding a flat, I waited on a bench outside the dance school where Clara goes, hoping that she would turn up for her class. I waited till a quarter past two and then skulked off to ‘Les Americains’, a new Irish pub that sells draught Guinness, albeit at five euros a pint.

Once there, halfway through a pint, I called Suzie and found her to be there. They’d gone to Toulouse the night before and stayed in a hotel in fear that I’d come over drunk. I felt like an emotional cripple. Perhaps I am.
I asked why Clara hadn’t gone to her dance class and she told me that she’d fallen asleep in the car on the way back from Toulouse and wouldn’t have enjoyed it had she been woken.
Suzie invited me over, for what reason I couldn’t tell because I was still being nasty and unyielding on the phone.

‘Would you like to have dinner with Clara?’ she’d said huskily.
I’d just met a musician called Philippe and won a little on the horses, but I stupidly agreed, and went off in the car. I knew I wasn’t right in the head for this meeting, unless, by coincidence, everything went to plan.

I got there and dinner was on the table in minutes. Clara came to sit with me and then Suzie asked if I’d like some juice.

‘No wine, then?’ I asked, with too much irony for it to go by the by.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘I haven’t had time to get any in.’

‘After the weekend you drank the house dry,’ I wanted to say.

I said nothing, but stewed my anger with every bite of overcooked pork and lamb. I was now in no fit state to be there.
Griff entered and went to see the kittens, which, in turn, distracted Clara from her meal. She slid off her chair and went to join him in the downstairs bathroom that had been turned into a kitten nursery.

‘Griff?’ I called to him, but he was too busy to answer. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Oh, Jim, leave him alone,’ Suzie sighed.

‘Leave him alone?’ I barked. ‘I wish he’d leave Clara alone to eat her food at the table without being distracted.’

‘Enough!’ Suzie shouted. ‘Right, get out. Go on!’ she screamed, pointing me towards the door.
And that was that.

Maddy came downstairs as white as a sheet, having heard her mother’s crackled, defiant voice. Griff joined her on the stairs and I told them to ‘fuck off upstairs and leave me alone’.
I couldn’t believe I’d said it and hated myself instantly.

Clara came to hold my leg tentatively, knowing my time was up, that I had to leave to stop the insanity.

I almost cried at this point, but that’s like getting blood out of a stone, so I just crouched down to her and repeated to her, ‘I love you so much’.

I was shivering with emotions that I was sure I had killed off years ago.

Suzie comforted her and led her off to the sitting room for some milk as I reached for the door latch shaking like a leaf.