A Family Affair

It was a beautiful summer’s morning in the middle of June, a day that is etched in my memory for all the wrong reasons, though it started promisingly enough. For a start, it was my birthday and the sun had his hat on and was coming out to play. My three young children were already up and about, waiting for me to get up and go downstairs to make them some breakfast. My wife was ahead of me in the bathroom, so I made my way downstairs to tend to the kids’ needs for some chow. Already thinking about the day ahead and what it might hold in store for me, I had a spring in my step as I descended the two short flights of stairs.

As soon as I stepped down off the last step I felt grounded in what needed to be done in the next half an hour. First breakfast, cereal with milk for the kids, coffee and toast for me, and leave my lovely wife to sort herself out. I had enough on my plate without having to worry about the family’s new breadwinner, my wife.

After breakfast, it was back upstairs to get the kids washed and dressed into their school uniforms, then throw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt for me and by the time all this was finished, there was just enough time to kiss my wife goodbye as she left for the day.

Ten minutes later I was walking out the door with my three delightful charges for the short walk to school. I always felt a great sense of relief as I ushered the children through the school gates. For the rest of the day, I could make it up as I went along. Usually, it was straight back home for another coffee and washing the dirty dishes by hand. Next, I would turn on the tv to catch the morning news for fifteen minutes before making my way upstairs into my attic office.

At some point in the day, I would need to find time to wash and dry some dirty clothes. I also had to cut the grass, wash my car, and take a trip to the local rubbish tip in the countryside. Then I had to go and do a little shopping for my lunch and our evening meal at the local supermarket in town. However, for now, I needed to get on with some writing for a local newspaper I had promised for today. I knew the work would take about three hours, so by my reckoning I would be finished by lunchtime.

The three hours of writing flew by almost without me noticing. In no time at all the job was done, printed, and faxed to my clients’ Head Office and it was time to go back downstairs for a break and some lunch.

A sandwich and another coffee were soon dispatched and I was about to turn the TV back on for the midday news when I heard the mail being shoved through the letterbox. I got up and went to retrieve the mail and was sorting it out as ambled slowly back into the dining room. It was the usual junk mail mixed in with some household bills, including the telephone bill. Within less than ten minutes my whole world would be rocking on its axis.

I opened the telephone bill and was shocked to see that for whatever reason it was for three hundred and fifty pounds, instead of the usual sixty. I leafed through the nine pages of itemised calls looking for an answer. Back in those days I had an excellent memory and recognized almost every single number called, friends, relatives, clients, the lot. The first few pages were local calls, then regional numbers called, then national followed by international and miscellaneous. The last page seemed to have the answer.

There was a number that began 0898……a prefix I did not recognize. Now at that time, a new service had begun not too long before, sex lines. These were numbers sad lonely old men could call for some easy titillation at five pounds a minute. And the thought crossed my mind that just maybe one of the kids had been ringing one of those numbers. So I decided to give the number a try to see what it was all about. That was probably the best and worst decision I ever made in my entire life.

The number rang but was suddenly cut off after just three beeps. So I called it again, and again it was cut. I gave it one last try and bingo, somebody answered. “Hello…” I said as politely as possible “….Who am I speaking to please?”

A very rough, snarly bass voice growled back at me “How dare you call me out of the blue when I’m busy and demand to know who I am, who are you?” I agreed, unpleasant sounding as he was, he had a point. “I’m sorry, you’re right. My name is Joseph James, and you?” The voice started an evil-sounding belly laugh and after a few seconds snarled “Why don’t you ask your wife? You’re so pathetic and stupid.” Then he hung up the call, and I went into a seismic shock so strong I almost fell into the dining room chair. And although I didn’t realize it at the time, the extra-marital affair the snarling voice seemed to be suggesting was the least of it.

After a few minutes of staring vacantly through the window, I called my best friend and told him what had just happened and asked him what I should do about it. Mike said I shouldn’t jump to conclusions and I should as calmly as I could do what the guy told me to do, ask my wife. After all, it could all just be some sort of misunderstanding or a prank. I said okay and put the phone back down.

For the rest of the afternoon, I was in a haze and just couldn’t take my mind off what had happened. What plagued me most was who the hell was this guy. I kept looking at the page of the bill where the calls to that number were listed. The first thing I noticed was that they were expensive calls, especially for the relatively short duration of each call.

Then I checked the dates of the calls against a calendar and noticed that they were quite often at the weekend. I also noticed that they were more often than not late at night. So the next thing I did was check the calls against my diary, somewhere I even kept notes of when I was out visiting a male friend. Sure enough, the calls were being made when I was out of the house. It all seemed to point to an affair, but I so wanted it to not be true I decided to try to keep my nerve and see what my wife had to say about it all. One thing was for sure, she had a lot of answering to do.

The next thing I discovered was that the number was for a mobile phone. That in itself explained a lot, such as the cost of the calls, as well as my not being able to geographically locate where the snarly voice was situated. Apart from all that, for the moment I could do no more, I would just have to wait for my wife to get home.

Over the course of the afternoon, I sat and tried to think if had there been any other signs I might have missed. My wife worked five days a week and left home at exactly the same time every day. And apart from the few times she went for a swim at the local leisure center, she never went out anywhere on her own. I suppose the trip to the swimming pool could have been an excuse to be with somebody else, but she always came back with her hair still a little wet.

Suddenly one other curious thing occurred to me. Sometimes during the evening when we were both at home, the telephone would ring. If I picked up the phone the line went dead. That never happened if my wife picked up the phone. I mentioned this and jokingly said the only ones who might ring a number in the hours of darkness and then cut the call were burglars and lovers. The first one wants to know if anybody is at home and the second wants to know if somebody is at home. My wife said, “Well I guess somebody is out to get you huh.” She shrugged her shoulders as if to signal that that was the end of that conversation and the subject was dropped. It was however something which was to come back and haunt me further down the line.

The afternoon passed surprisingly quickly, including picking up the children from school and getting them into a change of clothes, homework done and fed and watered, and in no time at all it seemed, my wife arrived home. Even as she walked into the house I was watching her intently for any signs of anything untoward. One thing which had occurred to me was that if that man was a lover, he had totally dropped her well and truly in the shit and, if he really cared anything about her, he would surely forwarn her of an impending earthquake in the kitchen at home. However, I saw no sign of any distress, not even the slightest sign of nervousness.

We went into the kitchen and asked each other had we had a good day and we both responded in the affirmative. Then I picked up the telephone bill and told her how much it was. “That’s you, I’ve told you before how you spend too much time on the phone,” she said accusingly. “Ah yes….” I replied “…..but you see I’ve had an in-depth look at it and the vast majority of the cost is connected to this number here.” I pointed at the 0898 number and asked her “Who does that number belong to?” There was a discernable look of nervousness on her face. “Oh that, errrrr….that’s my boss at work.”

We were seconds away from this whole thing blowing up. Suddenly everything started to make sense and I was going in for the kill. Of course, she wasn’t seeing him at night or the weekend, or so I thought, she could see him at work any time if it was for work-related matters. But if that was true, then why the need to call him so much out of normal working hours and why when I was out?

“And what sort of a person is your boss?” I asked.

“Very nice, a very nice person.”

“Then can you please tell me why he wasn’t very nice to me when I called him this afternoon?” I said. Her face went white as a ghost.

“Whaaaaaat! You didn’t call him, oh my god, you are going to cost me my job. What did he say?”

I told her how my cozy little chat on the phone went with Mr. Snarly boss and immediately she called me a liar. So I told her to call him and ask him to explain himself. “I’m going to, right now.” she snapped and then turned to go into the living room where the phone was. I tried to follow her, but she stopped me saying she would not call him in front of me. So I said ok, go.

I stayed in the kitchen and in less than ten seconds she came back in saying she had called him but he wouldn’t pick up and that she would try again later. For now, she said we should concentrate on getting the children ready for bed. Then suddenly she said “Oh, I seem to have left my bag at a shop when I went shopping on the way home, can you go and look for it for me. I went to the butchers, the bakers……I’ll get the food on for the kids.”

I made a leisurely trip around the shops she’d mentioned before making my way back home. As I walked into the house she said: “Oh, good news, I found my bag and I managed to get hold of my boss whilst you were out and he said that you’d misunderstood him, that he had not said what you said he said in the way that you said it.” For the moment I had to go along with this. In truth, I still wanted to believe that it was all a big mistake as I couldn’t deal with the prospect of her having an affair being true.

At the end of the evening, we both went to bed, me shortly after her. She was sitting up in bed reading a magazine, except it was upside down. As I climbed into bed I started.

“So, can you please tell me why you would need to call your boss at work at midnight on a Friday on a mobile phone number? Surely he can’t be at work?”

“He’s a farmer “ she replied.

“A farmer? Even farmers aren’t out in the field at that time of night.” I said.

“Well, he’s got lots of different jobs.”

“Hang on a minute, I thought he was a full-time teacher?”

“I don’t know everything he does. So…..” she said nonchalantly “……what are you going to do about it?”

I am not happy with your answers, but mark my words, I will get to the bottom of it.”

She suddenly exploded jumping out of bed, stark naked, and screaming at me “Right that’s it, I’m leaving and I’m taking the kids with me, you bastard.” And as she screamed she started to wildly empty drawers of clothing. This was not good, certainly not for the three innocent children sleeping in the next two bedrooms. I had to back down and lie to her.

“Okay, calm down, I won’t get to the bottom of it, it’s really not that important. We have three lovely kids and they don’t need this, so calm down and get back in bed and go to sleep.” Thankfully that worked and the madness stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

One day her boss telephoned whilst she was away from home at our holiday home, a caravan on the coast. He had left a message on my answering machine whilst I was out shopping.”Hey Mel, do you fancy making hay this weekend? Call me.”

Thinking about it, I realized that the message was not for her, it was for me. The bastard wanted to torment me. He knew for sure she was away from home on holiday as she would have told him in advance AND they no doubt had contact whilst she was on the coast anyway via his mobile and a camp public telephone booth. I got that confirmed later by the holiday camp caretaker.

As far as the holiday was concerned she had gone with the children for the first week whilst I stayed at home to do some important writing and I would follow on at the end of the first week. However, even leaving for the trip she was up to no good. An hour after she set off she was back, again with her lost bag trick.

“Hi, I lost my bag again, I think I left it at home, I’ll just have a look.” Then she swanned very quickly around the whole house looking into every room. She came back downstairs and said “Oh hang on a minute, I think I know where it is, I think I had it in the car after all…. Yes, it’s here look.” she called from the car before setting off once again.

So what was she looking for back at home? Another woman. Here was our old friend ‘Guilt Projection’, wanting to accuse me of the very thing she was up to. What she wanted was to appear to family and friends as blameless. She wanted them to say “Oh well, she had just cause if he was at it first.”

I spent my week alone well after she left a second time to go to the coast. I realized that whatever was going on, a lot of it was going on via the telephone, and if I was going to get anywhere I had to find a way to listen in to her calls. Of course, I knew it was illegal to bug a phone, but what if my life was at risk? Or what if worse still, my children’s well-being was being compromised? I realized I had no other option, I just had to somehow listen in to her calls. In the end, I discovered that my children’s young lives were indeed being compromised and my life was most certainly at risk.

In the end, I resorted to perfectly legal means of listening in to my ex's calls

with a hidden second phone as well as by the simple expedient of eavesdropping from just a few feet away. I think I managed to hear everything, including snippets of conversation that told me that serious harm or worse was indeed intended for me.

Having spent some time setting certain other things in motion that week I finally made my way to the coast. After the 120-mile trip to join up with the family, almost immediately after my arrival, my wife told me that she had to return home that night for a routine dental appointment the next day. My first thought was, this is bullshit. There was no way any mother would abandon her family halfway through a two-week holiday just for an easily re-arranged routine dental appointment. Anyway, she left on a Friday evening and returned on a Sunday evening. What she did not know was that after she left I had called the dentist to confirm her appointment and was informed that she had no such appointment. No, she was going back to make hay with her boss.

I found the second week of what was supposed to be a relaxing family holiday difficult to get through. So many things preyed on my mind, and it was helped by one or two events which just made things worse.

One day my wife asked me to go to her car and get a few water toys for the children. Whilst rummaging through the boot I came across an A4 Manila envelope, which was open. On the front side of the envelope was the intriguing handwritten message " Mel, read this at your peril!" I put my hand inside the envelope and out came a book titled 'How to get rid of him."

Suddenly I saw my wife running towards me and quickly put the book back in the envelope and closed the boot. I never did get the chance to discover what exactly the book was about, murder perhaps?

Another day my wife said she wanted an open relationship whereby we could both have lovers, mine could visit our house by the back door and hers could enter by the front.

Yet another time she tried to convince me to buy the house next door to her lover. Presumably, this was to make it easier to nip next door for sex any time they felt like it, no doubt whilst I like a good little boy was out doing the garden. I swear the woman was certifiably mad if she ever thought for one moment that I would readily agree to that.

When I got back home I immediately set about examining any evidence I could find on the pretext of doing some important work. First I checked the answering machine, and I heard nothing suspicious. No new messages had been left. I then did a little tour of the house looking to see if anything aroused my photographic memory. An extra wine glass in the wash, any alien-looking hairs on the bed. I even checked the bathroom for any signs of shaving having taken place. All seemed well.

The next day my wife went to work and I took the children to school. When I got back home I checked with a kindly neighbour who I’d asked to keep an eye on the house whilst we were away. He told me that all seemed well, that he’d seen my wife arrive on a Friday evening. Then on Saturday, he saw some guy arrive, tall and bald with a big chin He’d chatted with my wife who had told him that the man was her brother. That of course was impossible since her brother lived on the other side of the world. So bingo, I was right all along. The man described was a dead ringer for her boss. However, so as not to alert her that she was being watched I kept all that I discovered to myself, for the time being at least.

Over the following days and weeks, I learned so much by chance as well as by dint of my own surveillance. For example one day I telephoned my wife at work only to be told by an office junior that my wife only worked three days a week. So for the past year, she had been living a double life behind my back. All that time I thought she was hard at it when in fact she was having the time of her life with her bit on the side. And this far too trusting muppet was busting a gut back at base, blithely unaware of what was going on right under his own nose.

For the rest of that first week back at home from the holiday I got busy listening in to telephone calls on a second phone I had installed up in my attic office. I have to say, what I overheard sent shivers down my spine. First of all, I heard myself being called fit to burn to all and sundry. Family and friends were being told the most atrocious lies about me and unfortunately, they were all falling for them.

Now I understood why people had been so cold with me for quite some time. I was being labeled as lazy good for nothing who wasn’t worth the time of day. I was being called a wife-beater when in fact I had never in all of the twenty years I had known her, laid a hand on her not once......

About three times in our almost twenty-year marriage she had attacked me when she was pregnant. All I did was put my arms up to ward off the punches being thrown at my face.

One time I was about to go out to see my best friend for a beer or two and a chat about music and cars. She passed me in the kitchen then spun around and started to attack me.

She landed two or three punches in the kidneys, which hurt like hell. Then she grabbed my neck. I instinctively half-turned to push her off me and she fell on the floor and hurt herself.

I was called a serial cheat, and yet I had never once strayed from my promise to be faithful. What a hatchet job by a pathological liar. It was all to justify her own infidelity.

A lot of people hated me for being the swine I had been untruthfully described as. My wife’s best friend’s husband wanted to give me a big fat punch on the nose. My father-in-law wanted to kill me and almost did.

One day whilst I was over at my mum’s house my wife called me and told me not to bother going to collect the children, her parents would collect them and take them home until she arrived. She advised me to stay away from our home to avoid any unpleasantness with her parents. When I told my mum about that advice she said “Son, it’s your house, nobody would keep me away from my own home. If you do not go back now, you are not my son.” And so I went, not knowing quite what to expect.

Once home I walked through the hall to the kitchen and my five-year-old daughter ran to me and grabbed my hand joyfully screaming “Daddy.” Suddenly my father in law, quickly grabbed a big kitchen knife, took me by the throat, and snarled as he waved the knife in my face

“Right you bastard, from where we’re standing, you have not been pulling your weight. Well, I’m here to put you right you rat. Our daughter is getting everything, the house, the contents, the car, the children….and you mister get nothing, you are going to hell.”

During the whole rant, he continued to wave the big knife in my face as my poor daughter held on to me for dear life. I really thought the arrogant fool was going to do me right there and then.

Fortunately, he relaxed his grip on me enough for me to slip away from him and I quickly put some distance between us. I went out to the back garden with my daughter and tried to distract her from what had happened by playing with a ball. However, my father-in-law wasn’t quite finished. He followed me into the garden and snarled….

“Our daughter did say that if we chanced to bump into you, be nice to you, but I have to tell you, we’re not that kind of people.” That was about the only true thing he had ever said to me.

Ha, “From where we are standing…..” Where he and his ridiculous wife, a nasty simpleton, and insufferable working-class snob, were standing all year was in a mountain-top villa on the Mediterranean fifteen hundred miles away. All of his opinions were based on the malicious lies he had been told by my lovely wife over the telephone.

Later when she got home I told her about the attack and asked her what she had been telling them and, of course, she replied as calmly as you like “Nothing. It’s just that they know we haven’t been getting on.”

I didn’t believe that for one second. What I had on my hands was what is called a Perverse Narcissist. A narcissist just wants everything for themselves. A Perverse Narcissist wants that and their victim dead. It had been a close call, and I did not believe that it would stop until I was actually dead.

However, nervous as I was about what might come next, I knew now was not the time to lose my nerve or my head. I decided to remain as calm as I could and see how far this bloody sick woman was prepared to go. I just had to be patient, and extremely vigilant. It wasn’t too long before I finally heard a telephone call between her and her boss which was all I needed to be sure of her true intent.

In the meantime, I sent a conciliatory letter to her parents trying to explain that they had been very misinformed and that the problem was their daughter was having an affair. Of course, I never heard back from them. But maybe it was enough to make them think twice about attacking me again.

One day my mother came to visit us and whilst I was in the kitchen making mum a cup of tea my lovely wife was in the living room telling her I had lost my mind and was falsely accusing her of being unfaithful. She was in floods of tears telling this sorry little tale to my mum. I only found out when it was time to take Mum back home. We hadn’t gone one hundred yards when my mother blurted out that she wanted me to see a psychiatrist because I was delusional imagining all sorts of untrue wrongdoings. Mum fell for it, so sincere was my wife’s apparent concern for me.

Over the following days, I listened to yet more telephone calls upstairs in my attic office, as well as downstairs on the ground floor through a slightly ajar door. Not long after our return from our holiday my wife’s best friend called her wanting an update on the affair.

I was busy in the kitchen making a meal for us. From a few feet away I overheard my wife brazenly talking in a low voice about her sex life with her lover. I walked into the room and immediately my wife changed the subject...

“Oh well you know, I also like horse riding and windsurfing.” Her friend knew that was a sign that I had walked in and I presume quickly followed the change of subject. These two were as thick as thieves. On yet another call I heard my wife and her friend discussing how they could cover for each other in the pursuit of their affairs.

The last call I could bear to listen to was more than enough to tell me that my life was indeed very much in danger. It was a brief call to her lover in which I heard her say “Do you think he’ll do something? Do you think we should do it for him?” Do what exactly, kill myself, and if not they could do it for me? I have to say that short conversation chilled me to the bone.