28th August 2008.
Things aren’t easy for us. Although I’m glad to have Marty back home it’s made things very difficult. Russ made no secret of the fact that he didn’t want him back and had to be told quite bluntly that if it was a choice between the two of them that I’d give him visiting rights to visit the animals on a Sunday. For his part Marty wants his backside kicking. It is as it was, he lies in bed all day and eats, and other than that he’s pretty much a waste of space. He did work four nights last week in the take-away but I didn’t see any of the money. One of the conditions of him coming home was that he’d be given a reasonable amount of ‘grace’ to sort himself out with a proper job before I charged him any board. Apparently he went to the job centre every day last week. Well unless they pay house calls to lay-abouts in bed as a government incentive to get people into work, then he’s a lying little toe-rag.
I’m furious about that bloody contract phone. Why the hell did I ever cave in and allow myself to be talked into letting him have it when I knew at the time it was going to be trouble? I have no house phone as it is on incoming calls only. I took the contract away from him because there was no way that he was ever going to pay for it as per our agreement. The first time that I wanted to make a call, and believe me you need an advanced degree with honours just to do that, an automated voice told me that my phone had been locked and I couldn’t use it. I rang the company to find that Marty had used all of his seven hundred allotted minutes and had then continued using the phone until he’d reached his credit limit of a further ninety pounds. I now have to pay a hundred and twenty eight pounds (I still have to make the agreed forty pounds payment on top of his usage) before I can have the use of a phone.
Last night I got home from work to find a mountain of pots in the sink and on the worktops. He’d obviously had friends in the house and had decided to feed half of Btown judging by the size of the stack that I had to get stuck into. He wasn’t in when I got home so I couldn’t make him do them. I got in from work last night to find the front door unlocked, once again anybody could have walked into my house. Part of me wishes that he’d never come home but then I remember how desperate I was to get him back and I try to find something to be glad about.
I know he’s back home because of the bath mat. I have a large fluffy bath mat to step onto when I get out of the bath or shower. Marty does this ‘thing’. He has a talent for bath mat origami. He must get bored when he’s sitting on the toilet because he’s been doing this for over twelve months. For a long time I thought it was Russ. Yesterday I went into the bathroom to find that the mat had morphed into an orchid, today it was a pyramid. Now correct me if I’m wrong (no please, do correct me. write to me or email but don’t bother ringing because my phone’s been locked and you can’t get through) but I thought the whole purpose of a bathmat was to have something soft and dry to step onto. My mat is usually so intricately origamied that it is the size of a fifty pence piece.
Things are far from good with Russ. He’s drifting away from me and living life more and more as a single man. For the last few weeks he’s taken to going out on his own. I can’t afford to go and I’m thoroughly sick of the tedium of his karaoke obsession. Every spare second that he has he sits on the sofa with his laptop on his knee listening to songs and ‘practising’. When he finds one that he wants to do he writes it in his karaoke log and waits to tick it off when he’s performed it. What used to be fun and something that we were interested in together has become like a job. I’m tired and fed up and I really don’t want to go out and make a fool of myself singing everything from ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ to ‘Bat out of Hell’. The man is a karaoke anorak and although that in itself is annoying I can live with it and realise that it’s just one of his obsessional little quirks. What I can’t live with is the lying and possible cheating that accompanies this new Russ.
I always remember either being told or hearing on a radio programme that your instincts are rarely wrong. We pick up messages subliminally that we may not notice but the brain does, it logs them, stores them and holds them as evidence. Russ’ recent antics haven’t even been subtle. Recently I have had three horribly vivid dreams about Russ being unfaithful to me. He’s going out at night and coming in at all hours. He’s a good-looking man and needn’t be stuck for company.
On Friday night he went out with his mate Adam. Adam is married and kept on a reasonably tight rein. I wasn’t bothered. Despite having to be up for work the following morning I expected Russ in soon after midnight and decided to wait up for him. At three o’clock I nodded off on the setee and was woken by my phone ringing at four thirty. I didn’t realise at the time that I can’t receive calls and every time I tried to answer the bloody thing it buzzed at me twice and cut off. I was so frustrated that I couldn’t even work out how to answer a damned phone. It took me some time to access the memory to search the number of the caller. I expected it to be Russ ringing with some lame excuse to explain his not being home even though dawn was breaking. It wasn’t his number and I instantly panicked. My first thought was that it might be the hospital. What if he’d been beaten up? My common sense was asleep and didn’t kick in to tell me that the hospital wouldn’t ring me using a mobile phone. Russ isn’t very street savvy on his own and I was worried sick about him.
The worry remained for the rest of the night but it was soon overtaken by suspicion. Where the bloody hell was he at five in the morning? There was no way on earth that Adam would still be out, his missus would kill him. Jealousy came a-tap-tap-tapping at my shoulder and fury was holding her hand. I woke Marty and said that I’d put ten pounds worth of credit on my old phone for the use of it. I couldn’t put money on my own because the minimum they’d accept was a hundred and twenty eight pounds.
I topped up the credit on Marty’s phone and rang Russ. It went straight to answer phone. Like me, Russ has some OCD tendencies. He never, ever has his phone switched off in case Tia tries to get in touch with him. In two years of being with him I’ve never known it to not be switched on. On this occasion it wasn’t. Later he told me that he’d sat on it and it had accidentally switched off in his pocket.
I fired off half a dozen rapid texts each one more verbally abusive than the last. By now I was convinced that he was with some slapper that he’d picked up in a club for the night.
This is something that always plays on my mind because of the night we met. I’d been out with my great niece Nicky and she’d dragged me onto the boat, a floating nightclub and last chance saloon for the unbedded desperate. Russ was there alone and when he asked me to dance he made little secret of the fact that he was there only to cop off. It was getting late, all the pretty women had been taken and only the sad and the old dross were left. He only had an hour or so left to make his move and I suppose I was the best of the bunch. I was in a furious mood because my bed had been calling for about five hours and I just wanted to go home but Nicki was still having fun. I towered above Russ while we danced and felt ridiculous. When we left he walked us off the boat. What has always stuck in my mind was the look of shock on his face that night. He fully expected to take me home to have sex with me. This wasn’t an outside possibility, it was the rules of the game and he was so shocked when I knocked him back.
We’ve talked about it since and he told me that after his divorce and one other real relationship, he went through a stage of promiscuity. Now it was my turn to be shocked. Despite being hit on on a regular basis, Russ has never struck me as the type to bed a string of different women night after night but he did. He’s a good lover, I expect he had to learn that somewhere and they say that practise makes perfect.
On Friday, the night we met played over and over in my mind, particularly his absolute certainty that we’d be having meaningless sex at his house that night. I convinced myself that history was repeating. I’m really ashamed to admit this, but at quarter to six I was pulling up outside his house to check up on him.
As I walked up the path I didn’t think that he was going to be there. For the first time in over an hour I returned to the, ‘lying on life support on a hospital bed’ scenario. I was surprised to find his front door standing open and knew that he was there. His door was ajar but I knocked anyway. When there was no answer I went in. Russ was asleep on the setee fully clothed and the room stank of stale alcohol.
We had a one grunt and eleven-word conversation before I stormed out slamming the door behind me to drive the six miles home.
“Why didn’t you come home?”
“Gugh,” he was sitting up now and looked as rough as toast, “Because I came here instead.”
“Fine.”
And that was it; I was out of there. I felt much better; at least I hadn’t found him romping naked with some little slut half my age. He’d obviously had a heavy night and had gone home to crash on his sofa. In hindsight I suspect that he might have made himself ill and knew better than to come home if he was going to vomit. He does tend to hit it hard when he goes out with his mate and invariably Sandra doesn’t speak to Adam for days after one of their jaunts. This explanation does make perfect sense.
As I was driving home I realised that he might have had some floosie asleep in his bed upstairs. I hadn’t checked to see if there were any used mugs or glasses in the lounge. Although he’s off the hook for now my brain has logged it, filed it and kept it under armed guard to be brought out and re-examined later.
On Saturday we were barely speaking. I didn’t see him because he was going to an R.E.M concert in Manchester. He had the gaul to ring me up to say that he hadn’t been able to book into a hotel with it being Gay Pride weekend and could I go through to Manchester at midnight to pick him up. It’s a six hour round trip.
Like hell.
All right that’s just wishful thinking, I didn’t tell him to sod off, my doormat hat is still my favourite piece of attire. I said that I’d really rather not but that if he was absolutely stuck I’d grudgingly do it.
In the end he decided to come out of the gig and just hit some bars and clubs until the first train back at five in the morning.
When he got home he said that he’d met a couple and that they’d invited him back to their house until his train went. Making conversation, i.e. grilling him like a jealous fishwife, I asked him pleasantly what their names were.
“Er, um, er, Russ… another Russ, and er, Sam.”
I don’t know why I instantly thought of Sam as a man’s name these days it’s just as likely to be a woman’s, “Oh, so they were a gay couple?”
“Er, um, er….” He was stumbling again. He’s been accused of being gay more than once. I think he was trying to work out which answer would get him into less trouble but it was blatantly, bloody obvious that he was lying and trying to come up with a plausible story. “Er, yes.”
I know that he was lying and trying to hide something but I have no idea what happened that night. Is he picking people up for casual sex? Are they men? Women? Both? I have no idea what’s going on… if anything, but I do know that he’s been lying to me and I don’t like it one little bit.
He refused me sex that night. He told me that his penis was sore and that he’d had to cream himself up. Well of course I was all over that one like a rabid terrier. “What do you mean your Willie is sore?” He said that it was from the last time we’d had sex. It’s true the last time we made love we did hammer it a bit harder than usual … but that was Thursday!
I confronted him and told him that I’m having some major trust issues. He admits that he did go onto the boat on Friday night but swears to me that nothing wrong happened. He maintains that he’s never been unfaithful to me in any way and that I’m jealous and possessive.
I am and I don’t like it.
I’m not a nice person at the moment. I’m being sneaky and underhand. The boat has cameras and I happen to be good friends with the head doorman. He’s going to check the footage and if there’s anything untoward he’ll burn me a copy.
In all honesty do I think my boyfriend is having an affair?
No, though his last new ‘friendship’ was with a woman he met at Furness Fest, that’s when our problems began
Is he having sex with random people?
If I had to lay money on it I’d say no, but it’d be touch and go which side I’d bet on. I don’t think he’s had penetrative sex with anybody else while we’ve been together, but I could well be wrong.
What about Saturday night? He did go back to somebody’s house that night, I believe that. It was Gay Pride weekend, Manchester would be teaming with gays and it’d be a case of ‘spot the straight bloke’. He couldn’t make up his mind whether the people/person that he stayed with was male or female and put on the spot he dithered like a schoolboy. If he is gay curious that would be the ideal opportunity to experiment, nobody knows him, little chance of repercussion. Why would a couple, gay or straight pick up a random bloke, take pity on him and take him back to their house, especially in the inner city of Manchester where crime is rife. And more importantly, if he was in any way unfaithful to me what does it mater who he had sex with? Diseases can be past with either gender of pairing and that kind of break in trust would be unrefundable. If I ever found out that he’d done the dirty on me we would be finished.
Do I think that he’s ‘getting off’ with people while he’s out? Do I think that he’s flirting, dancing, kissing, and behaving inappropriately and in a way that would be unacceptable to me as his girlfriend?
Oh yes.
How can you have a relationship without trust?
You can’t.
I’m in a bad place at the moment.
