In a World Gone Mad: Wednesday 29 April 2020

Wednesday 29 April 2020

Max

Over three years this entry would have been drip-fed over time, but I don’t have time because it’s already been, used and gone.

Max has had an interesting life and it’s worth telling.

He's a musician but started his career as an outdoor pursuits, teacher.  He met a Chinese girl at college called Shyan and they married within a year. Max went to college late and was in his late twenties, it made him a leader amongst his teenage peers.  He was twenty-eight when they met. Shyan was sixteen and exceptionally beautiful. He had his first daughter and called her Kila. One of our common bonds is that we both have Chinese, mixed-race children—the other is that we gave up everything to start again.

Shyan didn’t take to motherhood. She was homesick for her family in Hong Kong. When Kila was a year-old, Max came home to find the baby alone in the house. There was a note on the table saying that Shyan had gone away for a week and would be back the following weekend. She never came back.  Max got his credit card statement and found that two thousand pounds had been taken on a week’s lavish hotel living, theatre and shopping in London. In 1975 two grand was a lot of money and took all of their savings.

 Her parents had visited from China. Shyan insisted on meeting them in London and paid for their week’s holiday, including shopping trips in Harrods. The incredible thing about this story is that Shyla never told her strict parents about Max or Kila, they didn’t know she was married—or a mother. It was as though Max and their had daughter never existed.

Kila never saw her mother again.

Because Max’s mother did what she did—and his father did what he did, which will be told in the cause of time, Max had to take in his mentally disabled sister shortly after Kila left them.  He brought up his daughter and his teenage sister alone.

He had a couple of relationships over the next decade, but nothing that lasted more than a couple of years.

He met his second wife and they had Belle, Andy and Krystal. He found Annie on a bus: she was seventeen—he was thirty-nine.  They married within a year and her family came around after initial resistance and attended the wedding. Given the age difference, this should never have worked, Belle was born the next year and they were incredibly happy. They were in love and the marriage was danmed near perfect for a long time, for fifteen of their twenty-five years, until tragedy struck.Fate changed everything in ten seconds.

Krystal was their last surviving child. Though Annie was pregnant again during the year that they split up, she didn’t know if this pregnancy was to Max, or the man she threw him out for. Max pretty much forced her to have a termination against her will.

There are two versions of the lead up to the accident. Max was a businessman during his marriage and went from owning a taxi company to owning a travel agency where he and his wife worked.  When Krystal was a year and a half and toddling, Max tells that he’d worked a night shift on the taxis and had come home and gone to bed.  Andy and Belle tell it that Max was lazy and slept until mid-afternoon every day, he hadn’t been working the night before, he was just lazy. I don’t know which version is true.

His wife was upstairs vacuuming the kid’s bedrooms while Krystal amused herself in the upstairs hall. Annie hadn’t secured the baby gate at the top or bottom of the stairs as she was up and down.

The noise when Krystal fell down the stairs is the noise you would expect from a baby doing back flips the length of a staircase.  She listened for that micro-second of shocked silence to change to screaming as she charged down the stairs. The scream never came.  In a bizarre, million-to-one chance accident, Krystal had landed on the upright post of the baby gate. It went through her left eye, skimmed her brain and impalled her to the rod.

A fire crew had to saw through the gate support while she was attached to it. The post was buried in the soft tissue of her cranial cavity through her eye socket

Krystal is monocular.

In hospital, infection took her eye and there was irreparable damage to the socket wall leaving her unable to wear a prosthetic. Every time they look at her, Annie and Max are faced with their guilt.

They each blame the other.  

Show me one mother who hasn't run upstairs and forgotten to shut the gate. There is no blame, it was a horrible, horrible accident.

It killed their marriage. Annie lapsed into a ten-year depression and liked red wine. She stopped working, became slovenly and rarely left the house.

Max tried for the first few years to bring her round, but he still blamed her for Krystal’s accident. Along with working all hours to keep him away from home, he had pool on a Wednesday, football training Tuesday and Thursday, pub quiz on Monday and he gigged, Friday Saturday and Sunday. Don’t bother counting them—I’ll tell you: it amounts to seven nights a week away from the home. He provided well in monetary terms for his family, but he lost interest in his children and they throw at him that he was always either working, in bed, watching countdown, or out.

I don’t blame Annie, for falling in love with somebody else—what I do blame her for his not ending her marriage first. Max has told me that the children’s version of what life was like with a disinterested father, is for the most part, true. I have enormous sympathy for Annie during those ten years. Their life sounds like hell.

Max persuaded her to go on holiday to Turkey. She met and slept with a Turkish waiter.  They fell in love and continued their affair when she got home. Max was happy to let her go again with her sister a few months later because she’d changed. He could see the young Annie; she quit her ten-year addiction to anti-depressants and was happy and vibrant. She lost weight and was beautiful to him again—but it was too late for them.

Carrie, her sister, met a Turkish man as well and without a messy divorce to go through, she married him and brought him home to England. Annie was trapped in a loveless marriage.

And this is where I’ll be accused of making things up for the sake of a good story again, but I swear, every word is true.

Christmas came and Annie had been fending off Max’s advances for months.  They went out on Christmas Eve and she got wasted. She made a show of herself in the pub and threw up on the carpet. Max and Krystal, who was twelve at the time, had to carry her home because the taxis wouldn’t take her.

Christmas Day, the family were gathered at the table, including all the children, Annie’s parents and Carrie and her husband. Max had his suspicions for months; he knew something was going on. Annie couldn’t get up and see the kids open their presents. She was in no state to cook, so Max had prepared a feast.

During the meal, Annie’s phone kept pinging and she and Carrie shared secretive smiles. Max blew. He grabbed her phone from her hand, scattering tureens and smashing glassware.  In the middle of Christmas Dinner, he dropped the phone on the table in shock. The whole family saw his wife’s, lover’s cock, turgid and ejaculating on video between the platter of turkey and the Brussels sprouts.

The kids all knew. While Max was out every night, she was in her room on the computer wailing like a wounded cow. Belle told me that neither of her parents are quiet lovers and the kids suffered their love life for years. She found out first. Max had an electric toothbrush that he used daily. Belle walking into the living room and saw her mum, using it as a vibrator while her lover did similar allbeit minus toothbrush on video. Andy and Krystal lived at home and Andy would take his sister into his room and turn a movie up loud while Annie and had loud, nightly cybersex.

At three o’clock on Christmas Day, amid the Queen’s Speech, Annie threw Max out and his marriage was over—we don’t watch the Queen.

Max moved in with his eldest daughter and her husband, Scott and from there he lived at his mate’s hotel until after we’d met.

Every time Belle has one of her meltdowns, which is often, she screams at Max that he was an absent father. I can’t comment on those years, I can only relay what I’ve been told—but from the day that man met me, he has done everything he can to make it up to them. They are spoiled, privileged brats who speak to their father like dirt. They get anything they ask for and he is spineless against them on the premise that he has a lot to make up for. Just once, I wish he’d stand up to them and say, no. The past is the past, it’s gone, He doesn’t have to keep paying penance for it. The children blame him for moving in with me, though three of them have come round and I get on well with them. One of them lives with us, and Belle 26, with her daughter who is five, wants to live with us. If he’s such a terrible father, why do they want to live here? There is equal fault on both parties for the marriage breaking down, but Max is the one shouldering all the blame and the guilt, it makes him easy pickings. He wasn’t the one who had an affair and Annie can be so bloody self-righteous when she’s on the phone begging for more money and telling Max what a terrible husband and father he was. She bleeds us.  Krystal has her mother dripping poison and has little to do with him, she’ll come round in time.  Every day, for three years, Max has been the best father that he can be, and his children have wanted for nothing—including his time.