2 :

The front door was locked, which was odd. Maybe she was out. Maybe she’d just gone to the supermarket to get some milk and some bread.

In my bleary state this morning I’d fumbled with the idea of making sandwiches, but had quickly given up when I realised that the bread had turned mouldy. I might call her when I get in and let her know that we need something for dinner. I really fancied a pizza. Anything that didn’t really require any effort on my part because I was tired and it had been a fucking shitty day.

The type of day we hate. Delayed trains. Cramped offices. Junk food. Phones that buzz like flies. Emails that replicate like a virus. The endless chatter of people. People crowded round entrances and exits, unthinking clutter in the detriris of life. Standing like an Auschwitz Jew on a bullet train just to get home. An ugly day.

Cursing without thinking, I fumbled with my keys, pulled out a small bundle and fiddled through them to find the right one, placing it in the lock and turning and pushing at the same time. The door moved, but only a millimetre before falling back on the deadbolt. She must have double-locked the door.

I didn’t need this. I’d had a hard day anyway and all I wanted to do was put my feet up, and tell my girl about my awful day at work. Maybe we could curl into each other and watch some bad television later. I could check my email, maybe drink a beer from the fridge, have an ice cream. I was seriously fucked off. The kind of slow-burning fury that only a genetically mutated cartoon character could match. I didn’t need any more bullshit.

More and more reports. More and more frantic phone calls. More snide comments, suspicious glances across the office, surreptitious phone calls and emails I wasn’t copied in on. I really didn’t have the tolerance for even one more ounce of bullshit. This world is a prison. And I want to escape.

Fumbling with the keys again, I removed one ear from my headphones, where a tinny sound was telling someone to stop crying your heart out. I placed the big key in the top lock, felt the satisfying clunk of metal on metal, then put the other key in the bottom lock, turned. The symphony of sychronicity. As parts moved together.

"Darling, I’m home." Jack Torrance said.

Before you entered the main living room there was a small entrance hall with a Perspex full-length window. I dropped my bag in there, removed the other earphone from my CD walkman, and pocketed my keys in my jacket pocket, careful to switch the walkman off. I looked up.

Something wasn’t right.

The room looked different. Wrong somehow. The walls had the wrong shadows. The light was wrong. Something wasn’t right but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

I don’t know quite what was wrong, but something was.

I hung up my jacket, started to unravel my tie, and entered the living room.

But it wasn’t the living room anymore.

There was a hole where the television used to be. A hole where my DVD’s used to be. A hole where my life used to be. The computer desk and her PC gone. As if she was never there. As if she had never lived. Gone.

Burgled from the inside.

There are some moments that one can point to, and know that from that moment on, life will never be the same. That history had changed direction I had just entered one of those moments. I didn’t feel very historic. We, that is she and I, were history. There was no other explanation I could reasonably reach. When you rule out what is impossible, what is possible must be true.

My life had just been derailed and gone sharp left. Fucking fuck. After everything else, this?

My body suddenly uncoiled. A weight left me, replaced instantly by a different, other weight. This one was not the weight of time, but the weight of crisis. A relationship is, after all, nothing but a different set of problems.

My life would be different forever now. My life cut in half. My future stolen. Our children, unborn. Only what could have been, not what would ever be. The fucking cow ripped me off and left me whilst I was out earning money to feed us. I felt amputated. I had been chained to a trap, and I had been set free. But still you miss the limb. Still you feel where it once was.

We weren’t happy anymore. We weren’t unhappy anymore. We just troughed through the days, and thought this was what life was.

I turned to look at the rest of the room. The sofa was still there, tired holes and stains. Not even worth stealing. And on my computer monitor there was a scrawled, yellow Post-It note. I didn’t need to read it to know what it said. Life is too short.

I tossed the note that announced the death of my marriage into the bin unread. I tossed my tie over to somewhere in the room, undoing the buttons on my shirt as I did so.

I wanted to wash the smell of her off my skin. I wanted to change my face, my clothes, my life. As if she were never alive. As if she were a mistake I had never made. A lesson I had played truant from. The bigger the mistake, the more you learn.

My shoes hurt. They always did after a day at work. These new shoes, their pinching soles and walls. I kicked them off, not even looking where they landed, because by now, I really didn’t give a fuck at all.

I walked over to the phone and fumbled with my wallet, taking out the bank card so that I may ring the right number. It was on the back in small print next to the legal stuff about how your house is at risk if you do not keep up with mortgage repayments.

I waited. A dial tone. I was now in a queue. The first voice I heard when my wife left me was a recording. Not even a real human being. They appreciated my call and one of their operators would deal with me as soon as they became available, as my call was important to them. Glad I was important to someone.

The first voice I heard in my life was a digitised imitation. A lie.

I am Simon’s raging impotence.

In the meantime, Simply Red were singing about the Stars that fall from your eyes. How callous love can be when one is without. I took off my shirt, contorting against the phone, slipping arms out as I cradled a receiver against a stubbled neck, listening for the sound of real people, sighed. Shit shit shit. There were so many questions that would never be answered. So many things to do. So many mistakes to put right.

“Good morning/afternoon/evening. My name is (insert name here). May I have your name and account details please?” it said on a monitor-prompt someone was reading out to me somewhere in Wales. Or in Middlesborough. Or India.

I didn’t want anyone to ask me anything. I didn’t want to answer anything. I didn’t want to be making this call. But not knowing was worse than knowing.

Two security questions later and I was in. Stuff anyone would know. Mothers maiden name, birthdate. How could she help me? I wondered. Well, she couldn’t bring my wife back. But I didn’t want her, not after this. In five minutes I had gone from loving to loathing. How fickle love can be.

“I’d like to freeze the joint account please. My wife has left me and I would like to prevent the joint account being misused please.”

Of course I wouldn’t like to report that. But I had no choice. I looked at the clock. 5.40. Just after branch closing time. Fuck. Maybe I couldn’t get the account frozen. Maybe she could empty it with her cashcard sometime in the next seventeen hours and twenty minutes. Maybe she already had. Maybe my whole life is fucked. Ruined. Maybe I was the bank being robbed.

“I’m not sure that’s possible. Let me have a quick look into it please.”

There was still time to go out, walk to the nearest Atm, and rob my own bank to prevent someone else doing so. I am merely buried treasure, waiting to be plundered.

At the end of the phone there was a click and an “er” and she asked a supervisor about something. At times like this you can’t think in any term longer than the next thirty seconds. My forward planning had become a goldfish. Left. Right. Clunk. Window.

“I know it’s an unusual request but these are very unusual circumstances. Is it possible?” I almost said into the hold music. For some reason, I was getting pissed off. But nothing pleases a cubemonkey more than having an excuse to terminate the call or pass you on, if you’re being troublesome. And calls are monitored for our own safety and protection.

Because we need protecting from ourselves. Look at the state of the human race, driving headlong into the wall of extinction.

I still had keys. But so did she. I could go out and walk to the bank, withdraw all the money myself if I fucking had to. It was a race against time. There was just enough money to pay the rent and all my wages had just gone in. Maybe –

“Yes, I can do that, I’ll need to take you through some security checks.”

More security checks. More hoops to jump through. Watch me, I am a seal. Reward me with cold fish when I have done well. I would be safe. I hope.

The account was frozen.

“Can I have the balance please?” I asked the girl.

“Certainly. The current balance is £497.51 overdrawn.”

Fuck. I hadn’t paid the rent yet and I had one hundred and two pounds forty nine pence to do it with. It’s not enough.

The fucking cow. She must’ve taken the maximum daily allowance out of the account at some point between my tired steps to the train and my tired steps home.

No money. No rent money. I am fucked.

“Can you give me a verbal statement please?”

I looked around. No kettle. No toaster.

“Certainly. Direct debits from NG Power, HJ Gas, British Telecom, and the County Council have all been paid today. As well as a cash withdrawl of £300.”

I knew it. I fucking knew it. Sometimes, I hated being right. Sometimes I wish I was wrong. So very, inexhaustibly, dreadfully wrong. I wish I was wrong now. But I wasn’t. For once, I was right, and I didn’t want to be.

Three hundred pounds is the maximum daily cash withdrawal you could make on our account. She never fucked me until she left. Then she fucked me as hard as she could.

“Thank you.” I said. My heart was beating faster than a Boeing. In it’s place a black hole of fear. What the fuck had happened? How? How could someone fall to think that leaving someone like this was in any way acceptable? Desirable? In any way anything even near the right way to behave?

Sometimes I think that I can’t relate to people, and when I think that people act like she did, I think that not being able to relate to people is a good thing.

The silence was longer than death and shorter than a heartbeat, as I thought for something to say.

I’d missed her by hours. If only I’d been here, been different, been able to stop this, but the biggest if only was… if only she wasn’t such a fucking bitch.

I fumbled with my mobile. I debated ringing her. Trying to find out what was going on. But it was really fucking obvious. I wanted to know his name. The man who had helped load all my stolen things into a hired van.

I wanted to know who was fucking my wife. I wanted a name.

But more importantly than that I wanted to know what was going on with my life.

I wanted to know where my life was going now. What I was meant to do with my life, Whatever it was, I was going to do it. I had no choice. Life was a speeding jet plane, and I was tied by my wrist to the turbine engines.

She wouldn’t’ve answered the phone anyway. She would’ve turned it off. Or seen my name and cancelled the call. It figures, if she didn’t have the decency to be honest about leaving me, she wouldn’t, couldn’t be honest about anything else.

“Thank you.” I said again. I am a robot. In emotional narcolepsy, I shut down, go on autopilot. Just carry on as if nothing was wrong. A robot, performing tasks that must be performed, because I need to survive now.

“I’ll need to go into my branch office tomorrow and make an appointment regarding the change in circumstances. Can you inform me please what time your branches open please?”

Tomorrow was a Tuesday. Late opening for staff training I bet you.

“Hang on I’ll just check.”

This girl sounded nice. I bet someone looked at her and thought the things I used to think about my wife. Heard her voice and experienced the slightest of tremors in their heart at the thought of her walking towards them.

At some point in my life I would have to – if I was lucky – meet someone new, fall in love again, make love again. But I was still in love with the person who’d just fucked me over and ripped me off. Twenty minutes ago things were different. But I couldn’t see beyond surviving today. I just had to survive. My victory was just staying alive. Living through this.

“Branches open at 9.30 tomorrow, sir. Can I be of any more help?”

Helpful as always. Still, I bet that’s what she was paid for. I bet I was the type of call they hated receiving, and yet always did. They go on training courses to deal with people like me on days like today. I bet this is one of those nightmare calls, the ones they train you to take but you dread, the anguished, ripped off, the desperate.

“No thank you. Can you just confirm that the account has now been frozen and that can be no further withdrawals from the account please?”

Unfortunately, I wasn’t really feeling up to making a joke of anything, but normally I would at least try.

“Yes sir, I can confirm the account has been frozen and there can be no further withdrawals without your permission.”

I breathed a sigh of relief, the kind that exists when you know you’ve only been majorly wounded and not killed. I married a fucking thief.

Tomorrow I would have to go forward and plead an extension to an overdraft, a new direct debit to be set up, a new everything. Just so I could pay the fucking rent. I don’t know how I would do it, I just knew that I would have to.

“Can I help with anything else?” She asked. Fuck it. I had to look in the freezer as well. She wouldn’t have stolen all the food as well would she?

Anything’s possible.

“Yes, can I have your name please?”

“Er….” Maybe she was thrown by the request. Maybe I was trying to breach company policy. “My name’s Natasha.” She had told me earlier, I had forgotten, when she was reading off that on screen prompt.

“Thank you very much, Natasha, you’ve been very helpful.”

Before she could thank me and bid me goodbye I hung up. I really didn’t feel like talking to anyone right now. I just wanted to get the fuck away from me, her, everyfuckingthing.

I sat on the sofa, wearing nothing but socks and my work trousers, ten minutes after my wife left me, scared for the future, ashamed of the past, and in the middle of the worst day of my life. And that is how my life changed.