Best Behaviour

The Flat was trashed after The First Fight. I was, too. I’d called in sick for work the next day, but my boss had a weird inkling that something wasn’t right. She turned up around an hour after my call, gasping at the state of the front door and essentially letting herself in. Let’s call her Barbara.

“What on earth happened here?” Barbara said, a hint of disbelief in her tone.

“We… we had a fight,” I cried. I’d been curled up in the corner of the sofa since Whisky left the night before, only moving for two drink and three toilet breaks. I hadn’t even slept. I didn’t bother getting up to let my boss in.

“A fight?” She eyed me up. “Show me your arms.”

I didn’t move. We both knew what I’d done to myself. I was a self-harmer. I mean, I hadn’t been for a while up until that point, but I was no longer in recovery. Whisky had bought out the very worst of me, even that early on in our relationship; but, of course, I didn’t realise that. It would take many more years for that to dawn on me.

Barbara strode over, lifted one of my arms, and pulled down the arm of my cardigan that I was desperately trying to keep in place.

“Oh, NotSo,” she said, seeing them. Tears welled in her eyes.

It was one of the worst and lowest moments of my life.

Over the next hour or so Barbara cleaned me up, tended my wounds, and even cleared some of the mess away. She made cups of tea, opened a packet of biscuits, and chit-chatted about work stuff even though I didn’t reply. It was almost normality, and I think I needed that. Whatever it was, it snapped me back to life. By the time she left, I had laughed, cried, and promised to call her before doing “anything silly” again.

She didn’t talk about Whisky. Neither of us mentioned him, or the fight, or the reason why she had been in my home at all. She’d never been there before, and she wouldn’t ever go there again. In fact, that was the only time that Barbara had even checked on me like that. I’d called in sick before, but something about that time was “different,” according to her. I was grateful for it, whatever the reason. But we never spoke about it. Not once. Not then or ever after.

Bestie, of course, was a different matter entirely.

He was furious, and rightfully so. Whisky had trashed, broken, destroyed many, many of his possessions, so I fully expected him to be angry about it. His anger was an entirely different level, though… and that was before he essentially bullied more information out of me.

“Did he hurt you?”

“Did he hurt you?”

“DID HE FUCKING HURT YOU?”

Eventually, I answered. “Yes!”

I didn’t mean to. I wholeheartedly wanted to, and planned to keep what Whisky had done, a secret. I knew that information would blow up our home lives, and that was the last thing I wanted. If I had my way, not a single soul would’ve learned about that damn fight.

Bestie’s face went a shade of red that I’d never seen before. “So, you’re just going to let another man punch you in the face?”

“He didn’t punch me in the face,” I protested, but it was futile.

I hated Bestie for the harsh interrogation at the time, but now, all these years later, I wish I could tell him just how right he’d been, so often, all those years ago. I wish I could tell him to ask more questions, dive deeper, don’t settle for the excuses that came out of my mouth. Because that’s what I did: I excused Whisky’s behaviour. I took responsibility for it all. It was my fault that the argument started, escalated, then ended up with our destroyed flat. I was barely out of my teens, for fuck’s sake; how was I meant to know any better? I thought it had all been my fault. It wouldn’t have been the first time that my drunken behaviour blew up my whole life.  

Bestie tried to ban Whisky from our home, which I should’ve listened to; instead, I reminded my best friend just how much of our joint rent I’d paid by myself. What a horrible little cunt, I was.

So, Whisky came ‘home,’ armed with a bunch of red roses and one million apologies. He was, probably predictably, on his best behaviour.

I, also probably predictably, lapped up every apology.

I thought it was a one-off, an accident of sorts. You know? I know better now, obviously, but I didn’t then. I thought that I had gone too far, pushed the issue, interrogated him. I threw a phone – and it had hit him! Why wouldn’t it be my fault? Whisky said it was my fault. If I didn’t push and interrogate like that again, he wouldn’t hurt me again. Plus, he’d promised: it would never happen again.

“I’ll make damn sure of it,” he said, and he sounded so certain.

He held to his word, too.

Well, for a while.

The next blog post in the dating timeline is this one: Perfectly Lovely Saturday.