April 2007

After my conversation with Danny on the Monday  I went to Susan’s house. Her sister was there and she worked in a solicitors office; when I told them what Danny had said about not divorcing him Susan’s sister had said I must start divorce proceedings because if I bought Danny out of the house but didn’t divorce him he would still be entitled to half of the value, even though it was just in my name.

I knew she was right, I really didn’t want to divorce Danny, but it made sense. So Susan’s sister arranged for me to go and see someone in her firm because they provided legal aid.

I had no money to pay for a divorce and even with legal aid I needed an initial payment to start proceedings; so I got Danny’s bike back from Della’s house and I took it to the bike shop at the end of the road and sold it for eighty pounds. With the money from this in hand I made the appointment with the solicitor to commence divorce proceedings.

I could remember when Danny had bought that bike: it was as a celebration of his promotion to a supervisory role.  How ironic that Danny had inadvertently funded the start of our divorce proceedings; a divorce he had said he did not want. For the first time in a long while I laughed.

The mortgage was moving at a pace now and I was pulling together the paperwork for all of the loans that we had, because they had to be paid off as part of the buying out process. I was shocked at how much debt we actually had, and I was determined that I wasn’t paying it all off. I sent a text to Danny to advise him that my initial buy-out offer would be less due to the amount of loans outstanding; as a result Danny then rang me.

As soon as I heard his voice I just felt so much anger towards him for what he had done; for what he was putting us all through: how he had turned our life upside down for a woman who had made a play for nearly every other person’s husband that we knew.

So why did it have to be my husband who had fell for it?

I asked Danny if he was still happy with ‘Her’, and he laughed at me and said that yes he was happy with ‘Her’, and that yes he did love ‘Her’. It felt as if someone was stabbing me in the chest, but I did not cry.

I asked him why? Why was he doing this when we had been so happy? He said that he had started to fall out of love me the year before and that it had been coming for a long time. Danny said that I had been too needy, and always wanting him to show how much he loved me, and it had begun to grate on him.

I’d had enough, as he was talking to me he called me Rose and I told him not to call me Rose, that only people who were my friends and those I loved called me Rose and he was not my fucking friend, and was certainly not someone I loved so he was never to call me fucking Rose again.

I was more determined than ever and told him he would get as little as possible out of the house. I reminded him of our wedding speeches, when all his friends who knew him called him ‘Lucky Danny’ implying that really he was just  a loser. I reminded him of how I did not believe he was a loser; that at that time I believed in him. Then I told him that now I believed that they were right; I told him how my sister had said that they were right that he was just that: a “fucking loser” and that he could fuck off! I hung up, my resolve to proceed with the divorce and for him to end up with nothing.Then I started to cry; and wondered to myself how I got to this place in such a short space of time?

When I went to visit some friends later that night the oil light came on in the car and Mandy’s husband David sorted it out for me.

Another kindness.

After I got home Della’s neighbour, the man who had seen me crying in her house, came over. He explained that he had been to France that day and because he knew I had not been eating he had brought me a big bag of fresh prawns from Calais and some French bread and wine.

Another kindness.

The kindness of other people was unbelievable and after he had left I started to cry. I could not eat, everything in my mouth just felt like cardboard. Ethan tried to persuade me to eat some prawns with a jacket potato and I managed one prawn and three forkfuls of jacket spud. I drank the wine though!!

I’ve lost twenty pounds now!!

 
You either stand or you fall
When your will is broken
When it slips from your hand
When there’s no time for joking
There’s a hole in the plan

Oh, you don’t mean nothing at all to me

Say It Right –Nelly Furtado

Written by Nelly Furtado, Nate Hills, Timothy Mosley