Looking Over The Edge

It was scary being with him. Every time I kissed him, he smelled like vanilla, but during our swift and short relationship I learned a few things that made me think he was a man of strictly slippery origins.

Firstly, his French passport was once taken at the airport when he lent it to one of his friends to cross the French border while his friend’s ID card wasn’t accepted there. My man had dual nationality, French and African, so I guess it was a favour any of his friends could ask for. So, in this simple way he was stripped of his French passport, which made his stay in Europe with his exclusively African identity very complicated. He needed a visa and additional documents to prove his status after this unfortunate incident.

Secondly, the other day he mentioned that his hero was Osama bin Laden. This unpredictable, unproductive slip of the tongue made me think of him as a criminal, and my view was now more ingrained after an illegally confiscated passport. And then by chance, while helping him with payslips and bank statements, I found out that none of the transactions he made came from actual stores, but from and to specific people. One person’s name showed up several times, which made me think again that he was paying his boss a gangster charge or something in a similar style. It was a man’s name and his landlord was a woman, so it couldn’t be the rent he was paying that person. He explained that this was his Monzo Bank internet account used for international payments free of charge [sic].

One day he happened to leave his email inbox open without logging out (it was stupid enough, right?) on my laptop from which I discovered that he had recently paid for a round trip with hotel accommodation included in the package to Portugal for a few days spending four hundred in local currency. That was apparently his friend again, although his name as guest was in the hotel register. He regularly paid for his mother, who he claimed had never worked in her life, so he always paid for her travels everywhere, including this one to Amsterdam during the holiday season. Suffice it to mention, I haven’t been home for Christmas in eight years, so what the hell was going on?!

I did my own quiet digging and inquiry as he kept asking me for money as if I was a bank or loan company. I mean, why start a relationship from material things? What was wrong with him? Was he broke and desperate? He worked with me at the same place that paid well, although he clarified that:

a) he commutes to work from a distant place;

b) works only part-time;

c) receives benefits (that last thing I figured out by myself).

Aha! Then he was at the mercy of a woman who:

a) works her butt off, full-time;

b) who walks to work every day for almost an hour (twice, both ways) to save some money, instead of using the sweaty and smelly commuter bus for all the famous blue-collar workers of the town;

c) who pities him: a strong, healthy, still young man!

How silly, you would probably say, as I told myself, putting all the pieces of the puzzle together one day. And for what reason? Just not to be lonely. As one of the female protagonists of Pedro Almodóvar’s film “All About My Mother” says: “Women will do everything to avoid being alone.” When he once grabbed my throat during our intercourse, I felt fear for the first time. Why then and not before? Because for the first time I felt a threat of physical violence? As if the morality he possessed hadn’t scared me away enough from him. He pronounced all the nasty things he had done and thought these were normal things that every human on Earth does every day. Why? Because for him, these were the things he did and thought about every single day. Cheat, lie, scrounge for money, and after have fun with thousands of his friends around the world. Let’s add, dangerous fun.

One day he called me after we officially broke up saying he had recently been to France. And it was during the pandemic that he announced it in an unexpectedly joyful voice. He still owes me money, not much, yet that money would do wonders for me, while my situation is not stable. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get them out of him, although I tried with some help, I failed. It all adds up to a very poor romance in a lavish scenery. I remember him mentioning that he wanted a golden tooth (as he had seen in another guy’s mouth sometime), to straighten his teeth (and it was a black guy whose teeth were perfect from a white man’s point of view), and… he has been buying clothes recently in Turkey. When I asked him about it, he stated that clothes were cheap there, and after a while I watched pictures of him wearing Balmain’s pants. He said he sold them. Whatever version of the truth was true, the fact is, all of these things are damn expensive, extra, and shouldn’t interest a person at his income level. Unless he wasn’t the person, I thought him to be. And I am firmly convinced that the second version was closer to the truth. However, nothing has been officially confirmed.

Then he used my address to forward letters from his debt. Not much, only a penalty for an unpaid train ticket. A few coins in local currency unpaid for a man who paid for a trip and a hotel of his friend in Portugal, who paid his mother for a trip to Amsterdam, who recently was in Turkey buying Balmain clothes costing thousands… It was just outrageous! It was like skating on the thin ice of a freshly frozen lake when the ice wasn’t as thick as it should have been because winter wasn’t as hard as anticipated. Everything seemed wrong in this relationship where feelings of love were totally replaced with a sense of danger surrounding me like a spider’s web. He also added a driving licence taken for drink and drive to this parade of legal offenses. This is a true picture of the criminal in full.

That is the message. A message to other women, especially young people who are just starting their adult life. Don’t get trapped by his words. Don’t always believe he loves you. Whatever he says, it may be a cold calculation of his actions and your job is to find out what his schemes are. I was lucky, but you may not be like me. I’m not saying that every man has his dirty intrigues to perform on a woman, but it happened to me twice because I allowed it (in the second case, all the money I lent I took back into my pocket, even though I was left with empty feelings). Trusting myself that this won’t detract me again from normal life is no great relief, yet at least I can put my words on paper, hoping to alert some women to the dangers of this world. They can happen anytime, anywhere, even in the workplace, in the meantime closed during lunch hours. And then word to word you are in his trap, lending him money, taking care of his kids and ex-girlfriends (thankfully I didn’t get that far). Don’t confuse it with love. It’s just not worth it.

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