Grandparents

Whisky and I had been in Deutschland for maybe three months when my grandparents started asking about coming to visit.

“Invite them over,” he said, weirdly enthusiastic about it. “We can give them our bed if you want? Get an airbed, or something?”

It was a nice gesture, but since my grandparents had been divorced for the best part of forty years at that point (although very much still in a love-hate relationship with each other, I should add,) it was best that they had their own spaces to sleep in. My Nan would have the spare bedroom. My Gramps would have the double-sized airbed on the living room floor. Whisky and I repeatedly offered them both our bed, but neither of them would take it. Grandparents be grandparenting.

He was at work on the day that they were due to fly in, so I organised transport with a lad on camp… and then accidentally guided him to Düsseldorf Airport instead of Dortmund Airport, which is quite the fuck up, let me tell you. Just to give you some idea of how big: Düsseldorf Airport was three hours in the wrong direction, and the correct one (Dortmund Airport) was two hours away from home in the opposite direction. My bad. It cost me three bottles of port, but the lad from camp eventually forgave me… I think?

Eventually, after much mocking, me and my grandparents were safely back at the apartment, where Whisky was anxiously waiting.

“Where were you?” he cried. “I was so worried!”

I left my Gramps to tell him my funny little tale, taking Nan with me to the kitchen. It was her favourite room in the house, after all. We busied ourselves making steak for dinner as Whisky and Gramps talked all things whisky and Scotland in the living room. I was setting the table, just a few minutes away from dishing dinner up for everyone, when there was a knock on the front door.

“That was The Neighbour’s Husband,” Whisky explained. “I’m just heading out with him for ten minutes, but I’ll be right back.”

I carried on serving dinner, but Whisky never came back. We all ate, cleared the table, ate dessert, cleared the table again, and even got through two Irish coffees each by the time he finally returned, three hours later.

“Where have you been?” I hissed at him, guiding his now drunk self into the bedroom so we wouldn’t row in front of my family.

“Oh, fuck off,” he slurred, pushing me to the side and grabbing a shirt. “I’m going out.”

And with that, he left again.

I stood in the hallway for a minute or two, trying to process what had just happened. He was fine when he left, right before dinner… so what could possibly have happened in the last three hours to have made his mood turn so sour?

My grandparents pried in that way, grandparents do. It took everything I had not to burst into tears in front of them.

“Just a work thing,” I said, brushing it off and desperately blinking the tears from my eyes. “He’s just really stressed out with the War Zone coming up, you know?”

They knew, and they sympathised as they helped me wrap my husband’s plate of food in cling film and stash it in the fridge. We had moved to Deutschland to prepare for his trip to the War Zone, which, thankfully, was a few years in the future yet. It was coming, though. Whisky had never lied about it, or tried to hide it. “Just the way military life is,” he’d shrugged, and I’d nodded along. What did I care? I’d have followed him to the ends of the earth, and I was always sniffing out my next adventure. So far, I was enjoying his adventure, bar those deep, dark moments that I was trying really hard to forget. My first couple of months there had been nerve-wracking and lonely at times, but I was slowly making friends and getting accustomed to a new country, a new language, and a new life. More than that: I was enjoying it. Loving it. Ich liebe es.

Whisky didn’t come home that night, not until gone five in the morning, anyway. He passed out in bed as I tried to ask him where he’d been, because of course he’d woken all of us up on his noisy return to the apartment.

My grandparents never brought it up in the morning, or ever. Not to me, anyway. I could tell that they knew, though. They knew that something was wrong in my new fairytale life. They brought me up as child; how could they not have known? I lied to them, though. I excused and protested and defended my husband’s actions. The War Zone made it so, so much easier to do.

I didn’t find out where he’d gone that night, or what had happened, until about three months later. That’s another story for another day, though.

To end this story: that day was the first time in Deutschland that I considered leaving. Just three days later, right after my grandparents flew home, Whisky and I had a drunken fight in the street about it that resulted in me lobbing my wedding ring at him, losing it forever.

We had only been married for three and a half months!

The next blog post in the dating timeline is this one: