Give Me a Reason Pt. 04

The immediate results were dramatic the first time she put her new glasses on. She just blinked and then sat straight up and said, "I can see your face now." I felt guilty but I had a lump in my throat. However, Rodney still complained because he had to pay for the glasses as well. He added that to the crime of not noticing she was struggling to see. It was the first sign that things weren't right in our 'perfect' home and even Annabelle had words to say on the matter.

"Does he think this is the first time it's happened? It happens a lot more than you think and why is he complaining about paying for fucking glasses anyway?"

I agreed with that but back then I was still trying to keep the ship on an even keel and I was focused more on Anna anyway. She made immediate improvements at kindergarten, according to Annabelle and gradually the tension between Rodney and I began to dissipate somewhat, but six months later I was offered a part time job at Robyn's old workplace, a real estate agency in Croydon. It was two days a week with the option of a half day on Saturday and I was in school two days a week. Rodney hit the roof because he'd been working Saturdays for the last few years and didn't I see that he was trying to keep a roof over our heads?

It was an easy enough job. I just had to prepare the final contract for customers and when it came to babysitting on Saturday I had four sisters and a mother as well as my mother in law. In the end I took the job because I desperately needed contact with other adults in a work environment. I wasn't set to finish my course until 2018 but it certainly saw a deterioration in the marriage. I wouldn't say it was on the rocks then but there were rocks in the distance. At some point I'd graduate and be able to get a job working full time.

I really liked that job because it gave me a chance to put what I was learning at school into practice at work. Sadly, it only lasted until the end of 2016 but in March 2017, as part of my course, I took a position as an intern with the Citizens Advice Bureau as a financial counsellor. That internship was only six months long but after it ended officially, I stayed on as a volunteer for two days a week and kept going with my studies.

Anna started Primary school in February of 2018, I walked her to the school gate and felt the usual emotional tug of war. My little girl had started school, there was a part of me that wanted another and sensing that, Rodney raised the prospect of having a child some months later. However by then I was looking forward to graduating and hopefully getting a job where I could put my new skills to some use, it seemed counter-intuitive to spend years doing an MBA course part time and then waste the next year or so raising a baby. I said no and a few months later he tried again, using the tried and true tactic of my biological clock.

As luck would have it though my tenure at the Citizens Advice Bureau had paid off. They offered me a full time position, dependent on my pass mark in six weeks time and that spurred me on for the next few weeks. I literally lived and breathed my course materials and passed my final exam in November. I got an A with Distinctions. The Bureau put me on full time as a financial counsellor and that put the final nail in the childbearing coffin, so to speak. It also widened the gulf between us because for the first time I was earning more money than my husband.

Nevertheless, 2019 was what I refer to as my swansong year, I was in my late twenties, with a six-year-old daughter, a husband, a home and a career. I felt as if I was on top of the world but there were signs that things were falling apart. Rodney and I weren't seeing eye to eye on a lot of things and he spent more time with his friends than at home with us and our sex life had virtually died but that was a minor thing for me.

I had my own friends like Josie and Annabelle, I'd been an unofficial auntie to their daughters for years and when they had a double wedding in late October, Anna was one of flower girls. Dad was furious that I'd corrupted his granddaughter with all that gay, woke nonsense but I was old enough to ignore it and just move on. He'd become quite entranced with the rise of Trump but none of us shared his enthusiasm for the orange monster. Dad thought Trump would bring about the end of days and the Second Coming. We just thought he was an egotistical maniac, we still do.

Trump's success in the presidential race of 2016 had been predicted by the Brexit vote in Britain when the no campaign won by a narrow margin, disregarding the advice of experts who predicted the decision would decimate the British economy. In that prediction they were proved right and as Trump excoriated the American public with his inaugural speech, warning of the chaos to come we all thought that it would come from America. After all, hadn't the U.S.A been involved in numerous wars since the end of the Second World War?

What none of us could predict however was that the chaos when it came would come not from a great military power but from that most basic of life forms, a virus.

The summer of 2019/2020 however was big enough as massive bushfires swept across the country. Eventually the smoke drifted all the way across the Pacific to Peru but our government refused to attribute the national disaster to climate change because they were in hock to big energy, it wasn't the first time an Australian government had been caught with its head in the sand. It was however the first time the public and press condemned them for their inaction.

But enough of that for now. Anna has just come back from Puffing Billy and I'm tired of writing so I'll shut the laptop down and come back to this later.

***

It's after dinner and Anna is playing with Jorani's daughter, Toni. As I mentioned earlier, they both got married in 2019. She married Danielle, and her sister Sokha married to Shannon. Jorani was lucky enough to fall pregnant via IVF before she walked down the aisle. She gave birth to Hope in lockdown and I became a godmother! Sokha and Shannon had to wait, it's only recently that Shannon got pregnant, she's due in late May, 2023. Jorani and Danielle were planning on another IVF baby but over dinner tonight they said that they now want to adopt. The war in Ukraine is hotting up and both of them have a desire to follow their mothers example and adopt a child and I support them too. There are far too many orphans out there and not enough foster parents but back to the story.

When the coronavirus hit it was like a runaway train in slow motion heading for a broken down bridge. It went from China to Italy in a matter of weeks and the bodies pile up, it was like watching a pandemic movie. Initially we were somewhat insulated, many visitors had stayed away because half the country was literally ablaze and our so-called Prime Minister, 'Scotty from Marketing' went on holiday to Hawaii and came back to an enraged electorate.

Ultimately however even the Morrison government was forced to enact restrictions but even they were somewhat blunted because the state governments were left to make their own rules, which is the way it's been since Federation. The federal government only intervenes when there's no other option and that has more to do with penny pinching than respect for state rights.

Eventually though, both the national and state borders were closed and we were all subjected to lockdowns that bordered on inhumane in view of the haphazard, slipshod help doled out to families in desperate need of financial relief. It was an era of rolling restrictions that were frequently rolled back and then put back into place when the death toll started rising. Sometimes I could take Anna to school but then she'd go back to online learning and I worked from home.

Another major issue revolved around Australians stranded overseas because no government could agree on who was paying for repatriation flights. It beggars belief that our leaders would argue over something as simple as bringing people back home but there you have it, a big beautiful country run by extremely small-minded people. Many Aussies were overstaying their visas and trying to make ends meet in foreign countries on a limited budget whilst our leaders in Canberra bickered over who was going to meet the cost.

We had changes at home, Anna's school was closed and we went into online learning and because I couldn't see Josie and Annabelle anymore I finally rejoined Penny's Women Who Talk meeting and that meeting became my salvation. It moved from a monthly format to once a week. Every Friday I would cook two separate meals, one for Rodney and Anna, and the second for me. I'd sit down at the laptop in the office with my meal, a glass of wine and share my frustrations, hopes and triumphs with the other women on screen. The meetings actually meant more to me in lockdown than they ever could have been on a face to face level.

About six weeks into that I hosted it from my house, which felt a little weird but I just had to choose a subject and kick off the conversation with my own thoughts on the subject. Within a month or so we were calling each other during the week for a chat, after all we were all locked down and slowly but surely I began to move forward but Rodney on the other hand was suffering.

Rodney was finally sent home and it was in lockdown when I worked from home and he had to look after Anna that things really fell apart. About a month afterwards his boss died from Covid and his widow shuttered the business, meaning he had to go onto unemployment benefits and for a guy who'd worked for years it was hard to take. I was sympathetic at the time and helped him fill out the forms but the simmering tension soon broke out into arguments.

They started over minor things, like clothes left on the floor and escalated to money. Rodney didn't think I should spend eight hours a day talking to people on the phone. We were all taking calls at home by then so I had to sit in my office and just take calls and my scheduled breaks. He accused me of being an absent mother but by then I'd found a lot more self respect thanks to my friends in Women Who Talk. I no longer felt the need to justify myself to him. I was dealing with people every day who had serious financial problems, organising budgets, repayment plans and referrals to another agency. I grew up during the pandemic but Rodney was a ball of pent up energy, he was often out punching a punching bag but then his drinking got worse. In the end I left him to it and focussed on Anna, my job and keeping the house in some kind of order. Now that Rodney was on benefits I was the sole breadwinner and it crushed him. He was the babysitter during the day and that certainly curtailed his drinking severely but after 4:30 he'd start drinking and wouldn't stop until midnight.

He wasn't the only one to fall into that trap of course, I was dealing with people like him all day but I didn't want to take work home with me, so to speak, and fix my husband too. I just made dinner and spent time with Anna, and then kept myself busy until about eleven, often chatting to friends and family. Rodney set himself up in the third bedroom and sometimes I'd come through in the early hours of the morning to find him asleep on the couch. His personal hygiene deteriorated and there were times I had to tell him to have a shower.

All around us, people were dying from Covid and other complications and one of them was dad. He was one of those who saw it as God's punishment on a sinful world. In his eyes it was one of the signs of the end times when God and his holy angels would return to make war on the beast and all his followers. He was the only member of our family who refused the vaccine and so when he got Covid it floored him. Mum isolated herself from him and I took ready-made meals around to the house for her.

On the fourth day though he got really bad and so we called the ambulance and he was taken into an ICU ward. We couldn't get near him but the nurses had set up his iPad so we could see each other but he went down steadily. He lasted two more weeks with occasional good days when he was lucid and capable of holding a conversation but it wasn't to last. He died on September 1st and we had to have a small, socially-distanced funeral with a limit of ten people, just immediate family, a minister and two guys to roll the coffin to the hearse. Our partners and their kids watched on Zoom and the wake was cancelled because it was just too problematic.

I have mixed feelings when I think about the funeral. Dad had lived a life in the spotlight, preaching from the church pulpit or his own private pulpit. Despite the fact he'd been forced to retire from the church pastoral team, he'd been an honorary member ever since, so now and then he'd be called on to preach the occasional sermon. He'd had a following though of like-minded people who thought the sun rose and set on his words.

None of them were present at the funeral though, most watched online as the preacher spoke about his dedication to the Lord, his faith and his love for his family. That last part felt odd because it was bullshit, he'd distanced himself from us in the last few years of his life, we'd all pulled away from the church by then. I used to look at my friends' fathers and wonder why dad couldn't be more like them and with Josie's and Shobi's dads I actually looked on them as being more fatherly than my own dad. I know that my sisters thought the same about their fathers in law too.

A week after dad's funeral mum left the church and announced to all of us that she was agnostic, it wasn't a surprise though, we'd all seen the increasing rift between them. The only reason she didn't leave him earlier was down to pride and she half admitted that at Christmas. Six months later she'd move in with a guy she knew from her tennis club and the church formally pronounced her persona non grata but I'm getting ahead of myself, again!

December 23, 2020 is a day that goes down in history in my mind. It was a Wednesday and we were having an online office Christmas party. We were still observing social distancing rules at that point but our manager announced at the party that we would be returning to blended working in January. It cheered us all up because by then we were getting sick of the isolation and Zoom meetings but towards the end Rodney's phone rang. It surprised me because he took that phone everywhere, even to the toilet. He'd gone out shopping with Anna to pick up my Christmas present and he had agreed to take Anna to see the lights out at Eastland Shopping Centre.

I picked up the phone and answered it. There was a click and then I heard a woman's voice.

"Hi, honey. Just wondering how you're doing."

"Hello?" I replied, "who's this?"

There was an intake of breath.

"Shit, shit, sorry, wrong number, is this Darren?"

"No this phone belongs to my husband, Rodney."

"Sorry, wrong number," and then she hung up.

I don't know what possessed me to look at his call history, I'd had a few wines so I was a bit tipsy but I sobered up very quickly when I matched the most recent number to dozens of others from the same number. So, the mystery woman hadn't called a wrong number but who was she? I sat down at my computer and stared at the faces on the screen, one of my colleagues, Johanna asked if I was okay and I hesitated before replying.

"I um, I just got a call from some mystery woman on my husband's phone."

"Oh, okay? And?"

I related the conversation and then told her, and everyone else, about the dozens of calls to and from that some number.

"Who is she?" I finally finished.

"One way to find out," Johanna replied, "give me the number and I'll call it."

I gave her the number and waited whilst she called it and put it on loudspeaker.

"Hello," she smiled, "this is Gina from Vodafone, is that Ruth?"

"Ruth? No, you have the wrong number but I am with Vodafone."

"Oh, I have a Ruth Reynolds registered as the owner of this number, to whom am I speaking?"

"Alison Coker, what's this all about?"

"It's just an overdue bill, can you give me your number again, please?"

Alison repeated her number and Johanna exhaled.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I mixed up the six and the nine, my mistake but it happens sometimes, I'm so sorry to bother you, merry Christmas," she hung up and stared at the screen.

"Did you get that name?"

"I did," I took my glasses off, "thank you."

"Hey, it's no problem, trust me but at least you have a name now."

She was right there. The party continued but Johanna and another colleague, Saoirse got me into a private breakout room that our boss opened up for us and we talked about what had happened. I let my drawbridge down and blurted out my frustrations at the marriage and him. He'd been going for long runs and answering calls outside sometimes, I should've seen the signs but they both assured me that most people ignored it until it was too late. They left me with two options.

"Either confront him and have it out or ignore it and make your own arrangements."

"Such as?"

"An agreement to separate for a trial period, it's not as dramatic as just screaming at him."

Ultimately though the first option was the one I took but I waited until after Christmas, I wanted to have one last Christmas together before I let rip. In all honesty it was the hardest four days I'd ever known. I finally took Anna to Hannah's place and arranged for her to stay the night but didn't tell her the reason. Rodney was out when I got back but I called him and asked him to come back home.

"We need to talk about something."

"Can't we talk over the phone?"

"It's not that kind of talk," I replied.

I hung up, packed his clothes into a suitcase and sat down to wait. He arrived about twenty minutes later and as soon as he saw the suitcase he turned a whiter shade of pale.

"What's with the suitcase?"

"Huh?" I nudged my glasses, "oh, that?" I looked at it and then opened it up and flipped the lid back to show the contents, "it's full of your clothes," I rose from the couch.

"As soon as you give me a good reason for calling Alison Coker I'll put your clothes back but make it a good one, I don't want some half baked bullshit excuse."

Rodney sank down into a sofa chair and let his breath out suddenly.

"How much do you know?"

"I know her name and I have her phone number. It shouldn't be too hard to track her down."

"Shit," he closed his eyes, "shit, shit, shit."

"Shit is right. So, who is she?"

He didn't reply at first but then he opened his eyes.

"How long have you known?"

"A while," I replied, "since before Christmas but I didn't want to spoil it for Anna. Who is she?"

"She's just a friend I met during lockdown."

"A friend? The kind of friend who calls you honey?"

Rodney bit his lip and then leaned forward and stared at the suitcase.

"I wasn't going to have this conversation now."

"So, when were you going to have it? After my birthday? After Anna's birthday? After Easter?"

"I don't know," he threw his hands in the air, "things have been fucked for awhile."

"You're right there," I closed the suitcase and then stepped back.

"I'm going to Hannah's for the night, I want you gone by the time I get back tomorrow."

"What the fuck? Why?"

"Why? Do you remember our wedding day? Do you remember the vow you took? I certainly do and I've been faithful ever since," I shouted back at him, "this is over. Get out and stay out, don't worry about leaving the key, I'll arrange for a locksmith tomorrow."

I took another step back and he stood up suddenly.

"Please, let me try again."

"Try what? Try to be a husband? You've failed that test completely," I took another step back.

"It's over," I turned on my heel and walking into our bedroom, I grabbed my overnight bag and a handbag. When I came back out he was standing in front of me and for a moment I thought he was going to hit me, it was in his eyes but then he looked away and stepped back.