The Car

I didn’t realise for a long time (because I’m oblivious like that,) but Whisky didn’t have a car, or a driving license for a long time… because he’d lost it. Drink driving. Nobody was hurt, thankfully, and it was before we’d met. Quite a bit before. I should’ve left him when I found out, but of course I didn’t. Plus, he’d told me that he’d learned his lesson. He would never do it again.

About three or four months after we moved to Deutschland, he came home with a new car.

“You’ve got your license back?” I gasped, slightly devastated as I’d planned to pop it into a card and surprise him with it.

“Nope, but it’ll be back in a month or so,” he said.

“So… how is there a brand-new car outside?”

“They just let me do it. I test-drove it, then signed up there and then,” he said, going on to tell me all about the £25k car, down to £13k because it was tax-free, on finance… or something like that?

“You just bought a car without talking to me about it?”

“Why would it have anything to do with? You’re not paying for it,” he scoffed.

And that, was that.

One month later, his license arrived. I put it in the card as planned, then surprised him with it. He surprised me right back.

“I’m driving back to the UK next week,” Whisky stated. “I can drop you down south before I head up the country if you want?”

It took everything I had to not cry in response. What do you mean, my husband was going on holiday ‘back home’ for a week, but he didn’t want me to come with him? Did he seriously just offer to dump me at home before fucking off and doing… well, whatever he wanted?! It felt so brutal.

Thankfully, when the next week came, he’d offered a compromise: half south, half north – for both of us.

I should’ve been suspicious of his niceties. I wasn’t, but I should’ve been.

The drive from Deutschland to the UK was hell. He took the lack of speed limit on the autobahn as a challenge, scaring the absolute shit out of me as much as possible. The laugh on his face as mine flashed me with terror told me that it was deliberate. I couldn’t work out why, though. I hadn’t been argumentative. I’d not argued with him, or cried, or asked questions, or anything else that normally kickstarted his anger/bad mood/torture. I’d just held on for dear life and tried not to cry, complain, or piss my actual pants.

We managed to get to Britain, up and down it, then back to Deutschland again in one piece, with no crashes, only one flashing speed camera in Belgium (that didn’t ever catch up to us,) and a brand-new way for him to terrorise me. From that point onwards, the car was just another way to make my life miserable.

One day, in snowy winter, he drove around the corner that led to our block so fast that he lost control of the car and we crashed into a hedge, narrowly missing two other cars in the process.

And the time we went to that other base, an hour away, when he threatened to crash the car, going close to 100mph.

He’d let go of the steering wheel, swing across lanes like a maniac, speed terrifyingly fast, lock me in the car, lock me out of the car, threaten to leave me in towns and cities far away from home, and drive drunk. I tried to stop him. I’d refuse to get in the car when he’d had a drink, and tell other people that he wasn’t sober enough to drive. He never cared, though. Nothing deterred him. He has lost his license again at least once since then (possibly twice,) and he was drunk enough to make the news that time.

He bought a £13k car on finance without talking to me first, then used it as a weapon at every possible opportunity, and eventually forced me to pay for the finance and insurance on the fucking thing.

I’ve wanted to smash the windows of every Renault Megane GT I’ve passed on the street ever since.

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