One Split Second

by Gillian Crook

  Actually, Pete may ask her to do all those things, that I didn’t do, by the way, but no doubt he will also show her love because, after all, in all seriousness, she’s the mother of his child and he will treat her well and get her nice things when he can. Why is it, that men like Pete, have their lovely gentle, kind, thoughtful side as well. You know, I really don’t care that much about what they are doing in their little sham of a marriage, but I must say people intrigue me, and I am ‘intrigued’ at the mentality of some people, and now I’m just glad that I’m a single, independent woman and intend to stay like that—even though the independence bit is not so easy as I thought, (at the moment).

  Monday 8th December

  Had a funny nights sleep, funny peculiar… . I had a dream that I was actually dancing, and I have no idea who with, but we were having such a good time, and when I said to him to LOOK I CAN DANCE, MY LEGS ARE MOVING, he just said, Oh that’s good, as if it were entirely natural. Sometimes you would think that having these types of dreams would be upsetting, but I actually love them. I remember the film Demolition Man, and it was based in the future, and certain things in life could be experienced using ‘virtual reality’, and I just thought that it would be so nice if I could just put on some kind of headgear and transport myself to say, perhaps a bowling alley, to have a game of bowls and then WALK into a cinema, and then after that onto somewhere that I could go dancing, and then perhaps finish a lovely day with a virtual Colin Farrell!! Oh, dream on… . ok, maybe that’s asking just a little bit too much. But in the film Sandra Bullock, puts on her ‘headgear’ to have virtual sex, and then Sylvester Stallone shows her the real thing!!! . . . . Yeah, maybe on the grand scheme of things, there are just no substitutes for the REAL thing, if you no what I mean, ha ha!

  Anyway, it’s a posse day today and the main man, Mr Templar came round and explained that my wound was looking really clean, and that the last swab they had taken had come back ‘negative’. Yes! Excellent! Now they would only have to wait for one more swab to come back negative, and hey presto, we are in the clear and living on borrowed time till the Op!

  Gillian, who is a very serious nurse, is in today, and she is actually one of these really good nurses that just seem to make everything look effortless without making a fuss. She oozes confidence and reminds me of a skinny version of the ‘big’ nurse down in Derry, and I can’t remember her flipping name! I took my pleats out today and I have one thin side and one thicker side, because of the butchered hairdo I got in Derry hospital. I don’t suppose they were too concerned about the fashion police when they were trying to sew my scalp together!! Do you know, its really strange, but I’m dying to find out what else Petes’ been up to?

  After lunch, ward 5 was getting the ‘once over’ with the old bleach, because lets face it, we really don’t want to end up with MRSA, I had the shitty little S, and that was bad enough! So Hose is on the trolley and I am just going to be put on the rack, and get some stretching exercises done by Rhona. Actually, she explained to me how to effectively do stretching exercises from the bed, and I’m really quite flexible, I never knew it before, but I can put my head right in between my legs, arms outstretched, and it’s quite a feat! Poor Duncan, is in real pain with his spasms… his whole face just crinkles up and his hands tightly clasp his chair, when he is trying to ride them through… . they’re bloody awful things, your whole body just gets massive cramps. The only way I can describe them are, if you could imagine getting cramps in your legs that ripple up through your body until they reach the top of your spine, and contract so so tightly you can sometimes go ‘rigid’, or you legs start bouncing up and down in a frantic fashion, so badly, that I even saw one of the young lads ‘spasm’ out of his chair and a grown woman ‘whimper’ in pain, just because someone touched her and set them off?

  My writing is really jumbled up today… my head is everywhere and I keep thinking about the kids because they never phoned last night, and now I just ‘expect’ them to phone me! I hope they’re ok? My God, I received some texts from Pete today, and I am really struggling to answer because I don’t want to open up a MASSIVE CAN OF WORMS! (if I haven’t already)!

  Mum called today and was telling me that my Aunt Helen isn’t too good, her health seems to be deteriorating, and she is a good age, 90 I think? But even I’m worried, because I love Aunt Helen so much; she was really good to me and Barry, and has always been there for everyone in the family! She’s a wonderful, lovely special woman. Anyway, mum seems determined that she is coming down twice before Christmas. I love mum soo much, and always feel so bad when I am short with her, but sometimes things get really bad, and mum is always there to take the earache, bless her! She really has so much to deal with and she tries to please everyone, and that’s hard work, because there are so many in our flippin family. I’m going to make sure that she gets to see the kids somehow when they come up. I just can’t wait to see them, I love them so much, and it’s them that keep me going. Between them and mum, they give my life meaning and a purpose and without them I probably would have lost the will to live by now.

  Actually, there is one young guy Dan, who is only about 17, who came of his motocross bike and broke his spine, and he has real temper tantrums and swears like crazy at the nurses, and another young guy, Grant, who was on honeymoon, and dived in at the shallow end, and cracked his head and broke his spine. Grant is only about 20, and his wife is wonderful, and tries to cheer him up, but he hardly ever cracks a smile and just sits at his bed playing computer games all the time and shuts everyone out. I think they had to give him a single room for a while, because he couldn’t cope being in a ward with other people with the same type of injury, its fucking sad!

  So, time has come and gone today and Pete phoned and was talking a lot of verbal diarrhoea and I really couldn’t be bothered. We are NEVER going to be together again—he’s deluded… . he beat the crap out of me for a start, so I don’t think I should encourage any type of relationship, and he’s in a bloody fake marriage and has taken on a completely phoney persona in life! But, never guess who phoned? . . . . the incorrigible Mr Mackenzie and he has just left a message at the desk for the nurses to give to me, and it would seem that he has been trying to get hold of me for 2 weeks. Duncan has been getting his own back with hogging the phone a lot. He goes on for absolutely ages to Ruby, and I can understand it because they are such a close close lovely couple, but come on??? I will speak to him tomorrow about it and see if we can come to some agreement over the phone (you may have noticed that only we tend to hog the phone). Actually, Pete tried to phone as well and I missed his call, but that’s no great loss. I just know that the children would have been trying to get through. No doubt they are in bed now and will probably try and phone tomorrow. I love them so much and look forward to their calls, but they are kids, and they want to be doing their own thing at night. Then my mobile phone went and I picked it up and hid, well, well, it was Pete and he was gibbering on about different things, and I can only say that the guy is completely and entirely round the friggin bend and NUTS! I wasn’t going to say too much on the Pete story, but maybe I will write just a little bit because it’s on my mind. I’m gonna ask for a last cup of tea and a biscuit and get back to the book tonight, as I’m not tired at the moment… . Read on… .

  Monday 8th December

  Just to continue the saga.

  I had lost touch with Pete ages ago—well, way back in February in fact, when I told him to get lost when he tried to get my best friend into bed, AND when our last bitter-sweet constant arguments over the phone were becoming more and more tedious, AND when he came down to pester me in Plymund, by very conveniently getting a transfer to Exeter with his work—SCUMBAG! That’s why I am concerned that this contact had opened a large can of very wriggly worms… In fact, I wanted away from him so much, that the social worker couldn’t get me out of our council flat (nice one as well, but dodgy area) quick enough when she saw the hole
s in the walls and shockingly realised that those holes could have been my head, and with that, didn’t waste time in getting me out of there and away from him—fortunately for me, she had the misfortune of meeting the man in question, and was evidently not impressed, and I think that probably sealed the deal for my exit. I left three quarters of my clothes there, most of my personal belongings and all the house furniture that was mine because Barry had suggested I leave enough to make it look as if I was going to be back… I just wanted away from him, away from that disgusting lifestyle, having to get down four flights of stairs every day with cans and cigarette butts liberally just discarded, stepping over the sick in the stairwell, smelling the urine where despicable people had to relieve themselves and didn’t care where, thrown out prams and ovens and furniture—anything that the tenants on that particular estate wanted rid of—I don’t think they had heard of a skip or rubbish tip—OH NO, these tenants were just happy to live in one! Actually, one of those abandoned ovens had conveniently helped in my quest to find a hiding place for my bottles, so that I could sneak out the front door and run to the oven and bring anything back at the earliest opportunity without him seeing me (most probably when he was taking his usual hour long shit for the day!)Yuk! Talk about living life on the disgusting edge and walking on rotten eggshells… . that was me… . In fact, he and that shithole were a horrendously ugly part of my life at that stage.

  I had met him in Invernevis when I was up there for a while (another book), and I was on a bus coming home from my sisters and he was route training and he chatted me up, and I never really fancied him, but he chased and chased and after a while I was worn down and agreed to go out with him. What the hell kept us together? He worked and grafted, but was a womanizer, slob, ill-mannered, rude, hurtful, abusive, angry, conceited, shameful, liar, chauvinistic and boring bastard, and I was a drunken slob, liar, hurtful, shameful, lazy, mad, conceited bitch. Of course, if it was our negative sides and ‘flaws’ that attracted us to each other then that is understandable, we were made for each other; we were both horrible, but on the positive side, and oh yes, there is one… according to him, he was happy and positive when I was, and because I could be kind, caring, loving, giving, honest (apart from drink), intelligent, funny and an amiable person… . he could be the same!!

  Maybe, it was ‘flaws’ that attracted us to each other at first.

  Of course, I was always the one to blame for his bad behaviour, or pushing him (mentally)! After I had been speaking to my psychologist whom I was supposed to speak to regularly but only managed on a few occasions—I learnt from her that the description of what me and Pete had was a co-dependency-dependency relationship, whereby, when I was unable to function he would have to look after me, so then, I became dependent on him having to look after me, and then he became dependent on having to look after me; so in a nutshell, when I didn’t need looking after, he would have to find a way of making me dependent on him, and if that meant resulting in him having to deliberately harm me to keep me dependent on him HE would!! . . .

  It was a complete disaster area and potentially a very serious and dangerous situation. So, anyway, I had made contact and no self-analysis of me or Pete was going to change that. Curiosity got the better of me when I made that phone call to his mum. When we had spoken he had said ‘why didn’t you tell me and why had I left it so long’?, he then went on to tell me that things between him and Li had happened when he was on the rebound and that he had never stopped loving me—oh please, give me a sick bucket. My personal space is a man-free, sympathy free zone! He was telling me that he had told Li that we had been Lovers aah, and he still had feeling for me (jerk)! And that we were all going to be good friends, yippee! He wanted to come into visit me because he was going up to his dads for new year (poor Li) and he would be in on the 28h of December, spend the day with me, and then the next day take Li and the baby into see me. Oh, he was drooling over the fact that it was only going to be 20 days before we saw each other and he didn’t know if he could wait that long… . Blah blah. Eventually I stopped answering his texts and he was constantly leaving messages on the landline. I’m sorry, but I lost interest in this carry on, and he became tedious, and I’m sure his already oversized ego was being massively dented! I really am not interested in this crazy, friggin psycho. He had even taken to start texting messages from goofy to Minnie!! My god, that’s mental… . That had been our ridiculous ‘pet names’ when we first met (many moons ago now), and he was still calling me ‘Minnie’! . . . . So as to not confused you poor folks, the reason behind these names were because I told him a joke the first time we actually went out, and he laughed and the names stuck… . I will tell you the joke and then you may understand:—

  Minnie Mouse to Lawyer—

  “I want to divorce Mickey cause he’s fuckin Goofy?”

  Lawyer to Minnie Mouse—

  “I can’t give you a divorce on the grounds that Mickey has buck teeth!”

  Minnie Mouse to Lawyer—

  “I didn’t say Mickey had BUCK TEETH, I said, HE’S FUCKING GOOFY!

  Funny, eh? Well, he laughed and that’s how the names stuck.

  Anyway, wasn’t, Goofy, the same manic, aggressive, unpredictable bastard that pinned me against the kitchen units, then kicked me onto the floor in our caravan and beat the shit out of me!! Pig, shit, bastard, creepy warped ex-soldier, who used Bosnia as an excuse for losing it and blacking out in his defence!! Truth is, the possessive bastard thought my mate’s boyfriend who dropped me off in his car, was someone I had been with… . In his stupid jealous rage he didn’t stop to think that if it had been someone I had been with, would I have seriously got him to drop me off at the front of the caravan!! Eer, Duh!!

  Anyway, this hadn’t been the first time it had happened, but by fuck, it was the worst… . he wasn’t clever enough this time, he had gone too far; this time I looked like I had had a collision with a fork-lift truck. I didn’t look into the mirror until the morning, because after he had dragged me into the kitchen from the bedroom area by the hair and beaten me up, he put me straight to bed, and then had to set about cleaning up the blood. The next day I was unrecognizable. Jesus, that wasn’t me in the mirror, it was some disfigured son-of-a-bitch, who was walking like Quasimodo, clutching my stomach and limping. I probably looked like someone that you would have seen on the frontline and left for dead… .; if your reading this in my book and can relate to the above, then I am dedicating this chapter to all those other poor guys and dolls that have been at the receiving end of some evil evil bastards punching fists and slaps and kicking evil legs… . My heart goes out to you ALL!

  I couldn’t walk properly, felt sick, sore, in pain, violated ugly, dirty, shameful and pathetic—how could this happen to me? Well, he had made sure that no-one would find me remotely attractive now and for a very long time—sick fuck! Apologies came fast and furious the next day and he promised me everything and offered to buy me what I wanted… he had to go to work, so the caravan was locked behind him and he took the key so I couldn’t get out… . I wouldn’t have been able to walk anywhere anyway… . I could only whimper in my bed like some poor beaten animal. I even had a headache, and I never got headaches, even with my worst hangovers, but where he had pulled my hair, and kicked me down, I’m surprised he didn’t pull my hair out at the scalp! Thank fuck I wasn’t Bosnian, or I would have been dead! Why the hell do they train these guys up to be killing machines, and then let them loose on `civvy street`? The MOD should be shot, scuse the pun. I am actually, getting quite upset just writing this, and I am getting angry, and in fact, I can’t believe I made contact. The human psyche is a complex thing. Do you know, I couldn’t even look in the mirror after he left because he had taken the only mirror we had in the shower room down before he went to work and he must have put it in his car… what a vindictive arse. I remember looking for a compact which I had in my bag, wondering if that had survived the kicking that my
bag had got… my compact was there, but oh, my mobile phone hadn’t survived… . just another casualty that had been repeatedly stamped on… . That must have made that about mobile number 6 that had met a sticky end at the wrath of that bastard. I wanted a drink, and that could have been anything, it didn’t have to be alcoholic, but an alcoholic drink would have worked if only for medicinal purposes.

  I couldn’t believe it, before he went out he said he would try and get finished early and bring something home for dinner. Well, there was really no point with food, because I wouldn’t be able to open my mouth wide enough to eat. When he did return he had bought some fish and chips home with irn bru and 2 large bottles of red and white wine… . the sick pig, would rather sit in with me looking the way I did and let me drink wine, than me going out anywhere… in his own macabre way I honestly think he was quite happy, now that I had NO CHOICE but to stay in the caravan, and because I was so injured he HAD, to look after me!! I could go on but I’m tired, but it does beg the question—WHY did I want to see him? Love/hate are very strong powerful emotions that are separated by a very fine line, but one things for sure, they both take a lot of fucking hard work and both can be LETHAL!