“I beg your pardon. I never promised you a bloody rose garden. . .”
Genevieve always liked to laugh at my love of country music, just as she made fun of my short stature, my stoop, my premature baldness and my stutter.
“Shut up, you bitch!” I was biting my lip, trying not to cry. “Why do you always have to twist the knife?”
“Truth hurts, doesn’t it, James? Listen to me, lover boy! You knew I was married and it was you who ran after me. Face facts: I live in a big detached house, drive a big fuck-off Mercedes and have pots of money without having to work. Yet you want me to leave Gary and move into your pokey flat and be on the bloody breadline for the rest of my life!”
“You said you were in love with me.”
“Don’t be so naïve, James! Christ on a bike, sometimes I think you’re just a boy, not a bloody man at all.”
She said ‘bloody’ all the time with an affected pseudo-posh accent. She laughed at me constantly, loved making me squirm. She was cruel, vicious, nasty, insensitive and constantly cruel.
And I was passionately, hopelessly, devotedly, in love with her and knew that I always would be. The way her smile started at the edge of her right upper lip. The way she pushed a tendril of hair behind her ear before she laughed. Every one of her thousand mannerisms were my life and death and my everything.
Someone much cleverer than me once said that sex made you happy and love made you miserable.
It was certainly true in my case. For since I had fallen in love with Genevieve, I had never been more utterly desperately sad and lonely in my life before. I had chucked my lovely girlfriend without a thought, no longer found time for my friends, and I was on the verge of losing my job because my constant ‘illness’ excuses for absences were wearing thin.
I had met Genevieve at the cosmetic counter of our local department store. Ironically enough, I was buying perfume for my girlfriend, Jackie. Genevieve had been at the Chanel counter (of course) and when she dropped her phone I picked it up. As I handed it to her, our eyes met and I was lost forever. She said something I can’t even remember, and my heart was beating so fast I could hardly talk. I felt as if my mind was melting into hers, as if I was in a kind of living trance. We went to the top floor café. She drank tea and I had five cups of coffee, and we talked nonstop for three hours. My rushed lunch hour was a distant memory, my job was forgotten for the afternoon as I gazed into the beautiful face that was going to be my forever. Nothing mattered to me but being with Genevieve. Nothing looked better than her gorgeous face and her beautiful sexy mouth and her eyes that I wanted to drown in.
Of course, my situation was completely impossible, but I just couldn’t face the truth. Even if Genevieve had not been married to a rich man and had agreed to live with me, it was more than obvious we were completely incompatible: she was a money-grabbing social climber who adored the finer things in life, whereas being dirt poor has always been in my DNA. But love doesn’t care. Love is everything and nothing.
Love can take control of your life, chew you up, spit you out and trample you in the dirt.
“Even if I did divorce him,” she went on as we sat together in the café at the far side of town, where no one was likely to recognise us, “he made me sign a prenuptial agreement, which means I’d only get a nominal settlement. And I’m damned if I’m going to give up everything I’ve worked hard for, just to live in bloody poverty with a. . .”
“Go on say it. With a loser like me.”
“You’re not a loser, darling, You’re just, just James. You’re my lovely little James and you always will be. . .”
“Sometimes I wonder if you ever loved me,” I muttered miserably.
“Don’t be boring darling,” Once again her callous disregard for my feelings supercharged the ice in her words. “Why are you always talking about love? Just enjoy bloody life. Just enjoy what we’ve bloody well got.”
“And what have we got? Snatched afternoons? Phone calls? Texts?”
“Don’t forget the phone sex, darling.” She grinned wickedly.
“Shit, sometimes I wonder—”
“What?”
“Nothing. Fuck off.”
“Fuck off. Fuck off. Is that what they call a Freudian slip, darling? Because I feel really hot for you right now. Shall we find a hotel?”
And so another afternoon ended in seedy frantic sex that always left me feeling suicidal because we had to part afterwards.
I never forgot what she told me that night as we sat together in the bed. She gave me one of her long stares, blinking her eyelashes, putting up a well-manicured fingernailed hand to sweep aside her curtain of silky black hair from her eyes. She leaned forwards. “Don’t give up hope, darling. Gary had a heart attack last year, he’s got some kind of heart condition, he has this special spray stuff to squirt under his tongue if he has an attack, and he’s used it several times, always keeps it close by. Thing is, that if he dies, then I get everything. I’ll be rich and I’ll be totally free.” She kissed me on the lips. “And we can be together forever.”
“For God’s sake, how can you talk like that?” I was genuinely aghast.
“I was only joking, you didn’t think I meant it did you? Of course I didn’t mean it! What kind of woman do you take me for? Honestly, James. . .”
Her laugh was liquid cruelty.
But I put it all to the back of my mind, persuading myself she wasn’t serious. Because? You’ve guessed it. Because I loved her.
So I went on with my nightmare life.
On the day I was sacked from my job, I actually risked going round to her house and we made love in the afternoon in her huge bed.
Madness?
Maybe it was. But my God, it was worth it. Because making love with Genevieve was the only time I could feel sure of her, feel that she was all mine, when her frantic orgasmic breathing joined with mine, and I could forget that we could never be together, I could make-believe that there would be a happy-ever-after for us.
And do you know what happened?
The cliché. The nightmare. The shock horror in every TV soap opera, just before the adverts come on!
Her husband Gary came home unexpectedly and caught us in bed together.
He didn’t do anything dramatic.
Just opened the door, looked at us, then closed the door. And opened it again.
Hw was just an ordinary looking middle-aged man with thinning silver hair, a pot belly and a serious lined face.
I sprang out of bed.
“You treacherous little shit.”
He was looking at Genevieve, not at me. She cringed backwards against the headboard, covering her nakedness with the sheet.
He walked closer.
Then he clutched his chest, his face screwed up in agony and he fell to his knees, clearly choking, struggling to breathe. He was trying to crawl along the floor to the bedside table, clawing his hands out in front of him.
Which was when Genevieve darted out of bed, still naked, and rushed to the table and picked up a small metal tube. She grabbed it and ran away into the corner of the room. And I’ll never forget the nasty little smile on her lips.
I suddenly remembered her words “He has this spray, glyceryl trinitrate, that he can spray under his tongue, and it stops the heart attack. Keeps it with him all the time, just in case.”
And I knew it was the tube that she had in her hands, as we were watching Gary fall to the floor while his face was getting redder and redder and he was reaching out with clawing fingers, trying in a vain attempt to get to the metal tube.
My next actions were instinctive. I ran naked across the room to the corner where Genevieve was standing. And punched her full in the face. As her head clacked against the wall, I grabbed the metal tube from her hands and raced back to Gary, knelt down beside him, ripped off the tube’s lid and managed to open his mouth, prize up his tongue with a finger and squirt the stuff into his mouth.
Nothing happened at first, he was still struggling and gasping for air. But after a second burst of spray, his breathing became slightly improved, though he was still struggling badly, poor bugger.
I managed to reach out and get my phone from my trouser pocket, dialled 999 and told them what had happened, while Genevieve put on her dressing gown.
I don’t remember much of what happened next. But soon the paramedics arrived and they took over.
While they were working on him, and Genevieve was standing and simpering, looking tragic and acting the sympathetic and supportive wife, I dressed as quickly as I could and slipped out of the house. It was a long long walk to the bus stop at the edge of town.
Numb and shaking, I put in my ear buds and listened to music as I walked. The first song I heard was that wonderful old Sheryl Crow number about hopeless love.
And somehow I couldn’t forget Genevieve’s self-satisfied little smirk as she hugged the metal tube to her chest.
And with a jolt of seismic amazement, I realised that in the moment of seeing that smirk something had changed deep inside me. My feelings swam around me like a vivid kaleidoscope, a swirling welter of emotions.
I was suddenly out of love.
I never contacted her again, even though she phoned and texted me in the first few days.
Finally.
I was free. . .
Sheryl’s voice went on in my ears:
If it makes you happy, it can’t be that ba-a-a-ad,
If it makes you happy, then why hell are you so sad?