Wanda turned up the following Sunday and, while I nursed the baby downstairs, she lay next to Amy and chatted quietly. They were together all afternoon.
‘It’s her sister,’ Wanda told me, as she was leaving.
I was flummoxed. Amy had never once mentioned the existence of a sister.
‘She died when they were kids,’ Wanda continued. ‘And Ben’s birth has dredged up painful memories.’
‘Shit,’ I said. ‘So what do we need to do to help her get better? I’m assuming she needs some kind of thera—’
‘It’s all agreed,’ Wanda said, laying one hand on my shoulder to interrupt me. ‘She’s going to start counselling this week.’
The problem – and I do blame myself for this – was that Wanda was the wrong person to have called. And the therapist Wanda advised – a devotee of an online guru called Benito Mungaro – was the worst possible kind of therapist for Amy to consult.
She became less unhappy almost instantly – that much, even I would admit. And she got up and started doing stuff again to prove it: joining me for yoga, cooking, cleaning, running . . . within three months, she was back teaching Pilates.
She was, as Dad would say, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed; she was enthusiastic and optimistic about everything. And that’s precisely what made it so hard to name the problem. For how can you tell your previously miserable partner that she’s too happy? How can you explain that being optimistic, nay, having utter faith that all life’s situations are going to work out for the best isn’t natural? That a smidgin of misery is part of being sane?
She saw Melissa, her ‘Pure Being’ therapist, twice a week, and on ‘off’ days she’d spend at least an hour watching Mungaro.
I took a peek at one of his videos while she was out, one time. He was Italian and younger and better-looking than I’d imagined. He gave off a vibe of enlightenment that was indisputable, but I found his mock-revelation delivery of what I knew were age-old platitudes more irritating than inspiring. At least now I knew where all the tripe Amy was spouting – her moments of ‘pure God-like being’ or the need to ‘cease thinking in order to exist’ – was coming from.
To check I wasn’t overreacting, I chatted to Dad about it at length on the phone. But even he agreed that this Mungaro guy sounded dodgy. ‘There are plenty of ancient philosophies around if she needs more sense in her life,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure why anyone would want to pay money to listen to some youngster winging it.’
‘Do you think you could give your Mungaro guy a break for a bit?’ I asked her that evening. ‘I’m not sure putting all your eggs in his spiritual basket is . . . well . . . healthy, really . . .’
‘I’m thinking of giving up eggs, actually,’ she said, smiling at me beatifically. ‘I think we need to go properly vegan.’
‘Um, OK,’ I said. ‘Maybe. But all this Benito Mussolini stuff. It’s not healthy. What d’you say we give it a break?’
‘What do I say?’
‘Yeah. What do you say?’
‘I say you’re suffering from the classic jealousy of an unenlightened heathen!’ Amy exclaimed. ‘That’s what I say, honey.’ And then she stood and, more floating than walking, left the room.
The Benito Mungaro phase lasted almost three years, and it was pretty damn irritating to live through. Amy spent most of that time with a weird half-smile on her lips, as if she knew some big secret that I didn’t, which is almost certainly what she believed.
She went vegan, which was fine. She’s a great cook, and I had no problem eating the Thai tofu curries and colourful Buddha bowls she came up with. Officially, we were all vegan, but when I was out and about with Ben, I’d feed him fish and eggs and dairy. I’d read up a bit on how to balance a vegan diet properly for growing children, and it seemed easier to me just to cheat.
Amy stopped drinking coffee, then tea and then alcohol. These were apparently destructive to her ‘spirit soul’. That’s what the guru had told her, anyway.
She found other adepts to hang out with as well. Whether she’d converted them or just bumped into them – implying they were perhaps less elusive than I’d imagined – I couldn’t tell, but I would come home to find five or six people sitting at the kitchen table drinking juiced kale. They’d all smile at me at once, revealing matching sets of juice-green teeth, and I’d make my excuses and head through to the lounge. Sometimes I’d put on a really noisy action movie with lots of shooting just to piss them all off, but I never saw any sign they cared.
If Amy had ever tried to convert me, I think that our marriage might have been in trouble, but she never did. So perhaps, deep down, she knew that was the choice facing her: live with the heathen, or live alone.
On the few occasions when she did try to share her wisdom with me, I knocked her back with a heavy dose of sarcasm, at which she’d smile serenely and walk away. I think she managed to frame it so that my incapacity to understand actually made her feel better about herself. Her secret knowledge giving her the edge, as she saw it.
As you probably remember from the news, Mungaro’s empire crashed and burned at the end of 2013. First he was arrested for tax evasion, and then within days he’d been accused of rape as well.
‘It’s all fake news,’ Amy told me, when the first reports appeared on TV. ‘They’re going to crucify him exactly like they did Jesus.’
But then the horror stories became more specific. Women, more girls actually, with sad eyes and real tears, began appearing and describing in detail how they’d been abused. The Italian authorities were seizing Mungaro’s millions and exploring his links with the Cosa Nostra mafia. There were even rumours of drug running.
‘How else could he have managed to make seventy million?’ I asked Amy. ‘Unless his followers were actually giving him money?’
‘I don’t know,’ Amy said, looking uncomfortable.
‘They weren’t, were they?’ I asked. ‘You didn’t give him money, did you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Of course not. Not at all.’
‘Not at all,’ I repeated. There was something wrong about her choice of words.
‘OK, hardly any,’ Amy said. ‘I mean, I bought the books, obviously. I paid for the tutorials. There was, like, a membership fee, you know? For access. To all the courses.’
‘Was that expensive?’ I asked.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘And I don’t regret a penny of it.’
But it was over, that was the main thing. The meetings had dried up. The books had moved to the bookcase, where they were sandwiched between The Power of Now and The Secret. Later on, I noticed they’d completely vanished. I think having been a fan of Mungaro became something to be ashamed of once everyone knew he was in jail.
The stupid smile had faded as well, to be replaced once again by the complex facial expressions of the woman I loved.
Ben started school the following year, and so Amy went back to working as close to full-time as she could manage. She ran yoga classes from our conservatory, taught jazz dance back in Canterbury, and ran senior stretching sessions in Herne Bay. Desperate to get rid of the last traces of her baby bump, she started bodybuilding, too. As her body became ever more ripped, I couldn’t help but notice how much she was starting to look like Madonna.
She began spending money again, too, her dissatisfaction with life gradually returning and expressing itself through a need to constantly change our surroundings.
So we knocked out the wall between the kitchen and the dining room, replaced the bathtub with an Italian wet room and added an en suite to our bedroom.
The constant upheaval was exhausting and, of course, because of my job, I frequently got roped in to help with whatever transformation was in progress. But I still preferred it to the Mungaro years. Materialism was an enemy that at least I felt equipped to understand – and fight.
Little Ben floated through all of this effortlessly.
In fact, if there was a spiritual lesson to be learned, it was our Ben we needed to pay
attention to, not Benito. Because everything seemed to make little Ben happy.
A pile of rubble in the kitchen? Happy. A new shower to stand under? Very happy. An old bathtub full of rainwater in the back garden? Ecstatic!
I’m guessing this is how most parents feel, but I honestly felt that he was the happiest child who’d ever lived. He’d come through his mum’s various phases unscathed. Perhaps her fake spiritual contentment had even contributed to making him so easy-going, who knows?
My business was going from strength to strength and I’d even had to take on a second employee. Having learned his trade in Romania – where flat-pack was considered a luxury – fifty-year-old Marius was a master craftsman in the true sense of the word. He could make stunning kitchen cabinets from scratch and in not much more time than it took me to go to Ikea, bring them back and screw them together. So we started offering made-to-measure kitchens, built from solid oak. Our prices, and my turnover, went through the roof.
With Amy earning as well, we were on almost a hundred thousand a year, and even though we had no rent or mortgage to pay, she still managed to spend it all.
We had a pool installed in the garden. We had a sofa made to measure in Italy and new windows and an attic conversion and solar panels. We got new cars – an MX-5 for Amy and a massive Toyota pickup for me. We had a dressing room added to the bedroom, which Amy filled with expensive clothes for her and Hugo Boss suits for me. Other than for a very occasional trip to a posh restaurant, I could never work out when to wear the damn things.
By the time Ben was six, Amy started running out of projects, and I could see that her unhappiness was starting, once again, to leak out.
‘Can’t you just sit back and enjoy it all?’ I suggested. ‘Isn’t that supposed to be the point?’
Amy sighed and shook her head. ‘How would you feel about moving?’ she asked.
We went to Whitby for the bank-holiday weekend, and while I took Ben for long windy walks along the seafront, I hoped that Dad would manage to talk some sense into Amy. He had, I suspected, the kind of philosophical vocabulary that could reach her.
But though he tried his best, it didn’t seem to make any difference. Amy was already looking at houses on her iPhone during the drive back home.
Having spent massive amounts of blood, sweat and money turning our house into her personal version of paradise, I was loath to even enter into a conversation about starting from scratch somewhere else.
Amy started buying jewellery, including actual diamonds. She bought so many shoes I had to build her a shoe cupboard. For my birthday she gave me a Philippe Patek watch that was worth so much money (yes, I googled it) that I never dared take it out of the house. I took a sneaky look at her bank account shortly afterwards, and she was starting to go seriously overdrawn.
Her forty-fifth birthday came around and suddenly everything changed once again – one book was all it took. It seemed innocent enough, as gifts go, and Dad was so sure of his choice that he winked at me as he handed her the package. It was called ‘Money as the root of well-being’.
‘Don’t worry,’ he reassured me in the kitchen. ‘I’ve read it and it’s all perfectly sound. My Buddhist friend Emma swears by it.’
A week later we were on a beach in Faro, Portugal, and while I made sandcastles at the water’s edge with Ben, Amy read the book.
‘How’s it going?’ I asked her, not without apprehension.
‘Oh, it’s good,’ she said, smiling up at me. ‘It’s really clever, actually.’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘What do you want to do for food tonight?’
‘I thought we could buy some veg and cook it back at the flat,’ she said. ‘I’m getting bored, I think, with restaurants.’
‘Good,’ I said, disguising my surprise. ‘That would be nice.’
‘You seem relaxed,’ I told her towards the end of the flight home. What I meant was that she hadn’t purchased anything from the TAP SkyShop. ‘Was it that book you read? Was it useful?’
‘Yeah,’ Amy said, nodding thoughtfully. ‘Yeah, I realised a lot of stuff, actually.’
‘Such as?’ I prompted.
‘Oh, pretty basic stuff,’ she said. ‘Stuff that everyone else already knows, no doubt. You’d hate it.’
‘Try me,’ I said.
‘I think I’ve been trying to buy happiness,’ Amy said. ‘And it hasn’t really been working for me.’
‘You think?’ I said.
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s cool,’ I told her, managing to sound low-key even though within the privacy of my head I was screaming, Hallelujah!
So began The Year of Spending Nowt.
For a while, my wife’s inner turmoil remained visible, so as she did her best to adjust to these new self-imposed rules, she’d pipe up, ‘I was wondering if maybe we could . . .’
I’d look up from whatever I was doing and prompt her to continue, but she’d say, ‘Forget it. I’ve changed my mind,’ and I’d be left wondering what she’d wanted to spend money on and whether it was something that I would have enjoyed.
Within a few weeks she’d adjusted, though, and other than food she bought virtually nothing for a year. Our break from constant consumerism felt restful. It felt good.
Halfway through the year, she started selling things as well, putting spare furniture we’d had in the garage on eBay, selling old books on Amazon, and even getting rid of some of the flashier suits I’d never worn. But then my favourite armchair vanished. It was the one I sat in every evening to read. ‘I liked that chair,’ I protested. ‘It’s my reading chair.’
‘You can sit somewhere else, can’t you?’ she asked, looking confused. ‘I’m only trying to reduce all the clutter, honey. And I have to buy stuff for Ben – he’s growing so fast. It seems healthier to finance that by getting rid of shit we don’t want any more, you know?’
‘Sure, but that wasn’t shit,’ I said. ‘It was my favourite chair.’
‘I’ll get it back, then,’ Amy promised. ‘Or if I can’t, if it’s too late, then I’ll get you another one exactly the same.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thank you. And maybe just ask, next time?’
Neither the old chair nor a similar chair ever appeared, but in the end Amy was right after all. I could just sit somewhere else.
After The Year of Spending Nowt came The Year of Helping Others, whereby Amy threw herself into just about any charitable opportunity that presented itself. She joined the parents’ association at Ben’s school, donated yoga lessons to a local old people’s home and did a ‘fun run’ to raise money for Red Nose Day.
For once, this seemed like a sensible strategy for feeling better, so I encouraged her and even, when work constraints allowed, joined in with it all. We had fun together. Our relationship began to feel healthy again.
When March arrived, and the summer-holiday adverts began appearing on TV, I started pining for a proper holiday. We hadn’t been abroad since Faro, and having seen the state of Amy’s bank account and not having wanted to be the one to break the economy drive, I’d managed to restrain myself from mentioning holidays all year.
But winter had been cold and miserable, and spring was looking to be more of the same. I was physically exhausted from a series of huge kitchen renovations I’d been working on and a bit down in the dumps about the sense of pre-apocalyptic Brexit misery in the country – there was a feeling I was struggling to shake that the sun might never shine again. So one night, as a blue-sky-filled advert for Costa Cruises flickered on the TV screen, I asked if we were still allowed to have holidays.
‘What do you mean, allowed?’ Amy asked.
‘I just mean, what with the economy drive and everything, can we still have holidays?’
‘It’s not an economy drive,’ Amy said. ‘Why would you say that?’
‘Um, OK, sorry,’ I said. ‘But you know what I mean.’
‘Stopping throwing money away on pointless consumerism isn’t an economy drive,’ Amy said,
wiggling her fingers to make visual quotes to surround the final two words.
‘No,’ I said. ‘So, let me rephrase that. Are holidays also considered pointless consumerism? Or are experiences, specifically sunny ones, all right?’
‘They’re all right,’ Amy said. ‘They’re totally all right.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Um, good.’
‘Actually, I was thinking it would be nice to take your dad somewhere,’ Amy said, surprising me.
‘Dad?’ I repeated.
Amy shrugged. ‘Why not?’
‘Well, for one, he’s not the world’s greatest traveller,’ I said.
‘Last time we saw him, he was telling me all about Thailand,’ Amy reminded me.
I laughed. ‘That was in, like, 1970 or something. It was before he even met Mum.’
‘Ask him,’ Amy said. ‘I bet you he’d say yes.’
‘Really?’ I asked. Perhaps it was my own lack of imagination, but I was struggling to picture Amy on holiday with my dad.
‘He’s not getting any younger, Joe,’ Amy said seriously. ‘And I just think it might be nice for Ben to have to proper memories of spending time with his grandad, you know?’
‘Oh, OK . . .’ I said. ‘Yeah, maybe.’
‘Ask him,’ Amy said again.
‘OK, I’ll sound him out,’ I agreed. ‘Are we thinking of anywhere particular?’
‘Oh, just local,’ Amy said. ‘Just Europe: France or Italy or something.’
‘OK, I’ll ask him,’ I told her. ‘If you’re sure.’
Amy booked a weird-looking house in the countryside a few hours north-east of Granada. It was owned by a Spanish friend of Wanda’s and comprised a series of seven rooms carved into the rock. It fulfilled Amy’s criteria of being both affordable and quirky, plus it had the added bonus of being, according to Wanda, ‘incredibly centring’ and a great place for ‘getting in contact with the earth mother’. It was two hours from the coast, which was a bummer, but had both a pool and a jacuzzi, which made up for the lack of beach just enough that I gave in. The weather would be furnace-like every day, which I hoped would be great for my back.
From Something Old Page 9
