Six Months to Get a Life

by Ben Adams

  ‘I wouldn’t read too much into Lucy and Jack’s relationship. Lucy’s boyfriends tend to come and go pretty quickly.’

  The kids re-joined us at that point so I didn’t get the chance to ask Amy whether the same could be said of her boyfriends.

  Tuesday 1st July

  I think I now know why my ex was being nice to me last week. Today when she was picking up the kids she dropped the bombshell that she was taking them off to Antigua for three weeks a few days after I get back from Turkey with them in August. Three weeks in Antigua. And in their own private villa too. Well, that has well and truly trumped my Turkey trip. I should be pleased for the kids that they will be getting a great holiday, but I must admit that my most prominent emotions when the ex told me about the holiday were envy and self-pity. Envy soon evolved into anger when I thought of how much a holiday like that would cost.

  ‘I bet you are paying for that trip out of my maintenance payments, aren’t you?’ I asked.

  ‘No, actually Mark’s parents own the villa so we only have to pay for the flights,’ she replied.

  Mr comb-over. Not only is she whisking my kids off to Antigua for three weeks, but they are going with her new man.

  I really and truly don’t care that my ex has got a new bloke, but I can’t get the thought out of my head that this new bloke is going to be spending longer with Jack and Sean this summer than I am. He will be making memories with my kids that I should be making.

  I wanted to say something that would be a show-stopper. Something that would make her realise that she can’t take Jack and Sean away for half the summer without me and with some strange bloke.

  ‘Don’t you need injections to go to Antigua?’ I rather lamely asked.

  ‘Mark says you don’t need anything that they haven’t had already, and in any case the kids aren’t frightened of a nurse’s needle like you are,’ my ex took pleasure in telling me.

  I need a beer. Fortunately so does Dave, so we are off to the Morden Brook to watch the football.

  Wednesday 2nd July

  Last night’s drink turned into a real session. Dave and I found it impossible to refuse the Brook’s World Cup special-four pints for a tenner. It turns out that we also had something to celebrate. I asked Dave about the birdie he picked up on the golf course the last time I saw him.

  ‘Oh, that cow,’ he replied, ‘she’s old news. I am back with Lou now.’

  I nearly choked on my lager. By Lou he means Louise, his ex-wife. The one who ran off with the librarian about five years ago. Well that is a turn-up for the books, no pun intended. Dave went on to tell me that Lou wants her old rock and roll lifestyle back. I just hope the librarian gets fined for taking five years to return her.

  ‘Any chance of you getting back with your ex?’ Dave asked me after a few more drinks.

  ‘There’s more chance of England being given a wild card in to the World Cup final and winning it,’ I assured him. They have already flown home.

  Dave’s situation is very different from mine. He hasn’t quite admitted as much to us but Ray, Andy and I have often speculated that Dave has never stopped loving Louise. I don’t hold such intense feelings for my ex. I certainly can’t see myself wanting to have her back five years from now. If I do, then something will have gone wrong in my life.

  I do envy Dave though. He has got a real spring in his step. If even a fraction of the stories he told last night about his reconciliation with Lou are true, I especially envy him the amount of sex he is getting. God, Amy and I need to move our relationship on to the next level. I long to feel the thrill of being intimate with a woman again. The awkwardness of the first time. The feeling of closeness afterwards. I long to hold Amy in my arms as we drift off to sleep.

  Enough already.

  As hangovers go, this morning’s was bad. I stumbled out of bed and just about managed to make the bathroom despite the world spinning around me. Copious amounts of coffee, Coke (the drink), water and any pills I could get my hands on didn’t seem to help.

  I eventually managed to muster up enough co-ordination to do my shirt buttons up and struggle into work. I now wish I hadn’t bothered. Short skirt Sarah was shrieking and dancing in the corridors as I got to my desk. Oh, my head. Sarah’s antics could only mean one thing. Daniel took great delight in telling me that I didn’t get my job. It took all my effort not to throw up on the desk as he was giving me the news.

  My boss did say that there were a couple of junior admin jobs in the organisation that I could do if I was committed to staying with the company. I told him where he could stick those jobs and the precious company. I may live to regret that decision but things would have to get pretty bad for me to mourn walking out on that shower.

  Officially they have to give me a month’s notice before they make me redundant. I am supposed to work up until that point, but I can’t see myself going in to the office much over the coming month.

  Looking on the bright side, I can stay up and watch the remaining World Cup games without having to get up first thing in the morning and trek off to work. And losing my job must put me slightly closer to achieving my goal of getting a more interesting job. But with less than three months to go until my 43rd birthday, I am still way off getting a new life. I have taken some positive steps over the past few months but there is every chance that, come my birthday, I will be unemployed, in rent arrears and feeling sorry for myself as my kids jet off to exotic places with Mr comb-over or whatever new fancy man’s name is.

  Thursday 3rd July

  Last night I turned my alarm off. Bollocks to going into work. Half an hour later I changed my mind and set the alarm for 6am. This morning, by the time I stopped for breakfast I had completed one job application and started another. Remember, shit happens to those that let shit happen. Maybe I should write my own self-help book?

  I had another row with my ex on the phone this evening. The summer months are the time of year when hurricanes can hit the Caribbean.

  ‘Don’t you think you are being irresponsible taking our kids to Antigua in the hurricane season?’ I asked her.

  ‘Mark says the villa is very well built and would survive a hurricane,’ she replied. Oh, Mark says, does he? Well, that’s alright then.

  ‘I don’t give a shit whether the villa survives,’ I told her, ‘it’s my children I am worried about.’

  I don’t know what I was hoping to achieve through this conversation but inevitably I didn’t achieve it. They are still going to Antigua.

  Friday 4th July

  I couldn’t be bothered to go to work today either. This was a conscious, proactive decision, not a wallowing-in-self-pity one. Honestly. Despite me not going in, there were still some developments on the work front. Michelle, head of HR, phoned and asked me to come in on Monday for a chat. I don’t think she was just ringing to bollock me for not showing up at work since I was told I didn’t get my job. I need to hand my work phone back and pick some personal stuff up anyway so I agreed to go in.

  In other developments, I got a letter from the estate agent ‘reminding’ me that I am not allowed to keep pets in my flat. Great. I must admit I didn’t actually read the tenancy agreement before signing it. What can I say? I am not giving Albus away. After thinking long and hard about the situation I did the sensible thing and gave the letter to Albus to chew up.

  I am struggling to stay positive at the moment. I must remember that shit happens to those that let shit happen to them.

  Sunday 6th July

  Yesterday night I went to a dinner party hosted by Julia, aka Miss Putney. This was the follow-up to the dinner I went to in April at Katie and Bryan Green’s house. I had totally forgotten about it until about lunchtime yesterday when Julia phoned me to check I was going. ‘Of course, I’ll be there,’ I replied. I had nothing better to do as the kids were otherwise occupied and Amy was away in Saffron Walden with friends. The invitation gave me something to do on a Saturday night.

  The same six people were the
re again. Katie and Bryan who the boys and I are going away with in a few weeks, John and Tracey, and Julia and myself. I arrived at the door of Julia’s modern house just off the back of Putney High Street with some apprehension. After the week I have had I could do with a good night out, but I did wonder what I was doing there without Amy. At the first dinner party at Katie and Bryan’s in Southfields, the hosts had unashamedly invited Julia and me as their two single friends. If their intention was to matchmake, it didn’t quite work. I am now with Amy so things are different. Or at least they should have been.

  It turned out to be a memorable evening. The company, the wine and the food were all top notch although I must admit I am getting a bit bored with spag bol now, even when someone else cooks it better than me. Julia had gone to great lengths to doll herself and her house up. There were flowers or candles on every surface, and some surfaces had both. Neither did my asthma any good.

  Unfortunately for me, we spent half the evening talking about my employment situation. Bryan is a lawyer and Katie a recruitment consultant. Bryan wanted to sue the bastards for constructive dismissal whereas Katie took pleasure in telling me straight that I was not very appointable and nothing about me stood out to potential new employers except maybe for my big nose. I am apparently ‘practically unappointable’ at the moment because I have been with one company for ten years and in a niche job with few transferrable skills. That made me feel better.

  To solve this problem, Katie recommended that I ‘reinvent’ myself.

  ‘How do I do that?’ I asked.

  ‘Easy. You lie more imaginatively on your CV.’ Her ideas for ‘making me more marketable’ included inventing some interesting voluntary work, thinking of some rewarding things you could do on a self-employed basis and claiming you have done them, and bribing a few people in professional-sounding jobs to act as your referees on job applications.

  Even John and Tracey joined in. Tracey is a hairdresser and told me she hadn’t seen my hairstyle since she cut Peter Beardsley’s hair twenty years ago. John is a local politician and thinks I have the right experience to go into politics. I don’t know how he knew I had been fiddling my expenses for years. I suspect that Katie and Bryan will take great delight in continuing this conversation in Turkey.

  Having had dinner at Katie and Bryan’s and now at Julia’s, it was agreed that it was my turn to host next. A date of 3rd September was entered into various smartphones at the end of the evening. I am not sure everyone will fit into my Morden flat but I didn’t protest because I like the idea of hosting a dinner party. I haven’t done it for a while.

  Anyway, I wish I could say that the evening ended on a convivial note with us all going off in our respective directions and that’s that. Unfortunately we didn’t all go off home. I feel crap about what actually happened but in my defence I was feeling low. Losing my job was a real kick to my self-esteem. The dissection of my future career prospects hadn’t helped my feel-good factor either. By the end of the dinner party I was feeling pretty depressed and a little bit drunk.

  So when Julia put her hand on my knee under the table as we were finishing off the cheese and biscuits, I was a bit slow to react.

  Until tonight I had thought that Julia and I were only ever going to be friends. She wasn’t my Amy. Even before I knew Amy, I didn’t lie in bed imagining what it would be like to be with Julia. Well, not much anyway. Until last night I would have guessed that Julia felt the same level of interest, bordering on indifference, about me. But as has been noted before, I am a bit out of practice at reading the signals. I have never been in practice really. Julia had been attentive to my every need all evening but I had just put that down to her being a good hostess.

  But when her hand began stroking my leg, I began to realise that she had other intentions altogether.

  When my brain caught up with events, my first thought was of Amy. Amy is the one I want to be with. So why didn’t I just remove Julia’s hand from my leg straight away? Maybe it was the alcohol that made me slow to react. If I am being honest with myself though, there was definitely some small part of my brain telling me that after my shitty week, I wanted to be needed. Or more to the point, I needed to be wanted. I needed some physical contact.

  As my internal battle with myself was raging, Julia’s hand had moved from my knee to somewhere further up my leg and it was becoming increasingly hard to think straight. It was becoming increasingly hard.

  There is only so much I want to say in this diary. I need to confess that my willpower deserted me totally last night. When the others went home, the metaphorical fireworks went off, accompanied by a rousing crescendo of music. The crescendo was more of recorders and triangles than trombones and bass drums, but that’s about as descriptive as I am prepared to get on paper.

  I came home this morning.

  Reflecting on the events of last night, on the plus side there endeth the longest drought of my adult life. Julia and I were more than compatible in bed. The sex was better than anything I remember having with my ex. Even in the early stages of our relationship, I had often felt that my ex simply did what was expected of her in the bedroom. Julia, on the other hand, genuinely seemed to enjoy our nakedness and got me to do things to her that I hadn’t ever done for my ex.

  But I fear that the negatives of my actions outweigh the positives. My love life, or should I say my sex life, has not been particularly noteworthy up until now. I have never two-timed anyone and haven’t even remotely been considered a love rat. So you should believe me when I say I am wrestling with my emotions today. I feel like a complete shit. I have cheated on Amy even before anything serious has happened between us.

  Monday 7th July

  I met Michelle from HR this morning.

  To cut to the chase, it turns out that short skirt Sarah is pregnant with Daniel boss-man’s child. The darling little sprog is due around Christmas time. That means they need to find someone to replace Sarah to do the job I had been doing for years. Michelle told me this over a coffee. ‘What do you think about staying with us to cover Sarah’s maternity leave?’ she asked.

  Now, the sensible answer might have been ‘OK, why not.’ But I have mentally moved on from my current job since being told I was going to be made redundant a couple of weeks ago. In fact I don’t think I have mentally been there for years. For my own self-esteem as much as anything, I need to start something new.

  I not only told Michelle where she could stick her kind offer, but I also went a step further and recited some of Bryan’s arguments from Saturday night, calling into question the fairness of the original interviews.

  ‘How can it be fair that I was interviewed by someone who was shagging the other candidate for the job?’ I asked. Like I ever had a chance of getting that job. I didn’t quite threaten legal action or whatever formal process I would have to go down to embarrass work and get compensation, but I think Michelle got the message. She told me that if my mind was made up about leaving, she would see what she could do to get me ‘an enhanced redundancy package’ in view of the circumstances.

  Not a bad result, but with rent and maintenance payments to pay, I may live to regret putting my pride ahead of my wallet and not taking the offer of continuing in my job for another year or so.

  I am still living to regret my actions of Saturday night. Amy texted me today suggesting we meet up for a drink one night this week. I haven’t been able to bring myself to reply. I couldn’t look her in the eye without her noticing a big chunk of guilt in my expression.

  Wednesday 9th July

  I have spent the last couple of days filling in application forms and feeling sorry for myself. Dave provided a welcome distraction last night when he invited me out for a beer.

  Over the first few pints we concentrated on Dave’s problems. It turns out that Louise only wanted rock and roll for a fortnight whilst her librarian went to study some ancient Peruvian temples. As soon as he landed back at Heathrow, Lou was there waiting for him with open arms �
�� and open legs too according to Dave. You have to give it to her, she has got some chutzpah. Dave has now been ditched twice for a librarian. It was quite refreshing to be able to laugh at someone else’s life for a change rather than him taking the piss out of mine.

  We then went on to my issues. I told Dave first about Amy. He was impressed that I had found myself someone that sounded so classy. I then told him about Julia and the episode the other night.

  ‘Bloody hell mate, I didn’t think you had it in you,’ was Dave’s considered comment on the subject.

  When I asked him what I should do about my situation, he asked me whether there was likely to be a repeat of Saturday night with Julia. ‘No way,’ I told him; it’s Amy I want to be with, not Julia.

  ‘Then just don’t tell Amy and you’ll be fine,’ he advised.

  I wish it were that simple. I have never really understood the term ‘wrestle with your conscience’ before. I do now. My conscience is beating the living daylights out of me every time I think of Saturday night.

  ‘Chill out Graham, no one’s died,’ was Dave’s final word on the subject as we stumbled out of the Brook at chucking out time.

  The two of us were so wrapped up in our women problems that we managed to totally miss one of the most amazing football matches ever. Germany’s seven-goal thrashing of Brazil totally passed us by.