Riptide

The shock of sudden change

RIPTIDE.

 

I’d listened to her in silence. I was too stunned to respond verbally. My responses were physical but not so much that she’d have noticed them. She used clichés, of course, which might have irritated me had I not been rendered dumb by the enormity of her message.

We need to talk...

I took it all in from a dizzy perspective. I didn’t comprehend immediately, I think. Shock plays tricks on the mind.

I’ve met someone...

My happy family had been an illusion. Change is swift and cold. It shatters the illusion. Our hopes and dreams become so much flotsam and jetsam on the high water mark. And we, when it happens, are useless, empty shells beside them, scoured clean and discarded by an indifferent sea.

I love you but I’m not in love with you...

Nausea and panic collided and I broke into a cold sweat. She didn’t notice. She was immersed completely in her carefully prepared monologue.

It’s not you, it’s me...

The whole day had been an illusion. We had made love when we awoke that morning. We’d risen, taken the children to lunch in Exeter and gone shopping. We had laughed, told jokes, bought the children some new clothes and some new toys. We had bought her some new clothes too. I was engulfed by a wave of nausea as I remembered this.

I can’t help the way I feel...

She’d linked arms with me and smiled coquettishly as she steered me into the Anne Summers shop. The lingerie she chose was expensive. Not all expense is monetary. I realise that now. The lingerie hadn’t been chosen for me. That smile, I wonder about that now. At the time it was a smile from one lover to another. It had been a secret between us, a promise of further intimacy.

I think of you now as a brother...

I thought I knew all her smiles. She had one that was false when she didn’t understand the joke. She had one that was real when she did. She had the one that was ours that promised love. Perhaps I’d confused that one with another I hadn’t known. The one that mocks. The one that Brutus wore.

I know we’ll always be friends...

We’d returned from Exeter, had a light supper and I had put the children to bed while she had a bath before her kickboxing class. Who bathes before exercise? Her class should have finished at nine but she returned at one. She’d gone for drinks with some of the other girls in the class afterwards. They’d had mojitos and danced, they were a great crowd. She went upstairs and had another bath and came down in some of the new lingerie. We made love in front of the fire. It had always been good but never so intense. It was the last time, you see. Only she had known that. Ignorance, bliss, it’s all true.

The children will live with you...I need my space...we’ll figure out a routine so I can see them often...

We build our lives and with them our illusions. The two are connected as if by a marriage vow. A hollow vow has the same substance. I met her kickboxing coach in the village a few days later. He’d been surprised that she’d missed so many classes, she hadn’t been for weeks.

I never meant to hurt you...

I am not yet alcoholic. I am dipsomaniac. I drink on a full moon when I’m lighter. I drink enough to exist. There is no past and no future when I drink. I drink until I am numb and feel nothing. The alcohol is novocaine for my soul. I choose a night when the children are with their mother.

To have and to hold...

I become an inconsequential part of my surroundings. My brain ceases to function properly. The clock stops. I breathe in and out and my heart pumps the blood around but only because it can. If I’m hungry and I remember, I eat.

For better for worse...

When I awake I am calm and hung-over but the pain has gone and with it my anxiety. The children return and I bury myself in the routine of being a single Dad. I believe in the love between us. They are too young and too pure to have learnt how to fake that.

For richer for poorer...

We have become a family of three. They screamed when I told them mummy had moved out. That image haunts me. They are young to have to suffer such a disappointment. They are also resilient and I am proud of them. I was a sailor and my children understand the moon and the tide. I have taught them that if ever they are caught in a riptide, they must swim across it and never against it.

In sickness and in health...

They are both swimming strongly now. I observe this with relief whilst treading water myself. I am tired and the current is dragging me further and further out to sea. I’d be alright if only I had a little sloop to tack back to shore with.

To love and to cherish...

It’s no accident that boats have female names. They require a captain and a crew who must work together like a family. But the boat itself is the centre of that particular universe. The boat is the matriarch. The boat comes first, the crew second and lastly the captain. Look after the boat and she’ll look after you. It is the end if you forget this basic rule.

‘Til death do us part...

There is not one molecule within us that cannot be found in the sea. We will all become part of it eventually.