Gosford Bloody Tanner's Fault

"What were you thinking, then, when he took you to that bedroom?" I had to ask.

"We were just walking around exploring that huge place like everyone else had at some time during the afternoon and I got to thinking I had to get myself ready for you," a sob escaped her as she continued, "I was expecting you to arrive early evening, while it was still light and Tanner said it was time to get ready to meet you in bed. He had been going on about it as if it was a secret plan by us for me to seduce you and that he was just helping me as a very good friend. Our children were away with my parents, we were at a party and I was looking forward to seeing you and holding you and loving you. I've loved you since I was a little girl, I've always loved you, my childhood sweetheart. And then I lay down on the bed and thought we were cuddling and kissing and making love. I thought it was beautiful and dreamy and just so right. I thought I was lost in your arms."

Mandy looked at me for comment but I didn't have anything to say. She continued.

"Then the next minute you are pulling me half undressed through the house party and driving me home and I really didn't know for certain what was happening. I fell asleep at home in our bedroom until I woke up alone and looked around for you. I searched the house and found your sports bag and some clothes and all your underwear missing and that you'd clearly moved out."

"I couldn't cope with what happened," I said miserably, "You were my whole life at the beginning but we had been drifting apart for years. You kept on sniping at me, belittling my job and the amount of income I should have been able to earn. I was never quite good enough for you or your mother. Then I finally lost you and it suddenly dawned on me that, in losing you I had lost myself."

"You never lost me, I was just ... misplaced and only for just a few minutes," she sniffed, "I didn't ever think you had the impression that we were drifting apart, I thought we were settling comfortably onto family life. Every couple moan about money when there's not a lot of it about. I didn't think we were any different to anyone else, I certainly wasn't looking to end our marriage."

"When the children came along, I was second, then third, finally fourth in the loving queue, we hardly ever made love the last couple of years, especially after you restarted work. I had to virtually beg for some affection. When we did go to bed together I felt you were just going through the motions as if I didn't do it for you any more and I was more trouble than I was worth. I reckon with Kelly and Kaytie I must rung the conception bell about once in five."

She pulled some tissues out of her bag and sat quietly dabbing her eyes.

I lay back quietly too, remembering the past. That's all I could do now, and even that took its toll on me.

I recalled virtually dragging Mandy home from that party. All her work colleagues and their spouses, were looking on at the pair of us, all of them knowing what had happened, no doubt discussing us between them. Perhaps some of them were feeling sorry for us but they hardly even knew me from Adam. Mandy had been ashamed of me and kept me hidden from her school friends most of the time, particularly while we were having the children. Mandy was full of apologies in the car, crying fit to further splinter my already broken heart, saying it was the drink and I had been ignoring her all day.

"I was at work all day you silly bitch!" was all I could scream at her, I remembered while I drove home in the gathering gloom. I kept telling myself, she's the schoolteacher, she's supposed to be the bright one in the family, I just bang metal and join tubes together for a living. I'm the stupid one that has been left out in the cold.

I paid the baby sitter and gave her a lift home, then I packed a bag with a few essentials and left Mandy's home for good. I got a hotel room for Saturday and Sunday nights and when I got into work on the Monday morning I found out where there were vacancies elsewhere in the group, we were part of a national chain.

There were a whole bunch of vacancies around the country but the one that appealed to me most was over two hundred miles away in Lincolnshire. I rang them up to express my interest; then their manager spoke to my manager and the deal was done same day, as simple as that. I started at my new place of work the following Monday. I rescheduled my planned fortnight's leave for our family holiday to start effectively so I had the rest of the week off and drove up to Grantham later that day to stay in a hotel on Monday night and sought out digs to tide me over.

Mandy did ring the office a number of times on Monday before I left but as a rule we wouldn't leave the workshop while on a job in order to answer the phone, so the front deskman took messages for me to ring her urgently on my next break. I ignored every message, screwed them up and tossed them in the bin. I left my mobile phone switched off. By lunchtime I was finished there and on the road heading north.

I didn't really settle in Grantham at first. The work was exactly the same but I was used to warm wet Atlantic Westerlies. The weather that first winter away from home consisted of freezing cold Easterlies off the North Sea and I struggled to get used to it. The bay doors were always open, the locals were hardened to it. After six months I changed jobs and worked for a ducting company, making steel boxes for air-conditioning or for sucking production offcuts out to waste compactors. It was mostly factory-based manufacturing the ducting, with about a quarter of the time spent installing them in factories and offices in the Humberside, Lincolnshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire areas. That was OK for a couple of years, but then the company started laying people off due to the recession and I found myself out on my ear.

I applied to become a fire fighter and passed all the tests. I was pretty fit, lean, strong and agile, wiry compared to some of the beefier guys. So, after basic training I was appointed a newly-qualified fire fighter at the Cleethorpes fire station.

When I was an exhaust fitter I was paid weekly. Although I had left my family behind, I couldn't possibly ignore them completely. So each week I went into one of the nearby bank branches and transferred about half my net wages into our old joint account, to help with the upkeep of my kids. I decided early on that my kids would be better off having a stable home with Tanner and Mandy as Dad and Mum and not confuse them with having me and the unwanted party hovering in the background. That was one of the reasons for moving away, for my family, by keeping well away from them.

I sent the kids money and cards on their birthdays as well as Christmas but didn't sign any of the cards. I let Mandy worry about who to say they were from. I used banks and post offices in various places in Humberside and Lincolnshire so they wouldn't easily be able to track me down to the town I lived. When I moved to the ducting company I was forced onto monthly pay and didn't have enough savings to fall back on to make the usual weekly payments, so I also had to switch my payments to monthly. I sent Mandy a letter that first week explaining the situation, that I got a Continent-bound driver going to Great Yarmouth to post for me when he got there. I hoped Mandy and Tanner would cope with the schedule change and not deprive my kids of their little treats.

I didn't have a place of my own, I couldn't afford one with what I was left to live on, so I stayed in a succession of digs, lodgings, most recently with a family that had a new baby. They needed the extra income with only one wage coming in and I paid them cash-in-hand, which was convenient all round. I had been there two years or so and Mrs Murray had broached the subject fairly recently that they were trying for another baby as brother or sister to Darren and so my room would be needed as a nursery at some point in the near future. The rent I paid was just for the room and bed linen, no meals, but they let me keep some of my food in their fridge so I could make myself something when I was not working. Mrs Murray had the washing machine going virtually every day anyway, so she offered to do my washing for me for a few pennies extra which saved me a lot of wasted time and money in the local launderette.

They had a good kitchen at the fire station and we took turns in cooking a main meal for the whole of each shift, which I quite enjoyed doing. We didn't always manage to eat at the time we were supposed to, if any emergency came up, but it worked out well more often than not.

When Mrs Murray mentioned that I might have to move soon, I had looked into the possibility of buying a mobile home. I had no means to buy a traditional house or flat. I had saved a little bit of money and thought I might have enough for a minimum deposit for something really cheap. Then I would be paying out a lot more each month than I was now, taking ground rent, services and repayment instalments into account. I looked at a few of the mobile homes available and some of them were already fitted with furniture, while others were shells. I had planned that I would forgo a holiday this year and build up my savings for the imminent change, my accident scuppered those plans.

Chapter 3 - Family values

I was tired and miserable and in agony, inside and out, lying in my hospital bed. I wondered what it would be like, going back to Mandy's house for my recovery. I couldn't bring myself to think of it as our home any more, it was definitely hers. Possibly, despite what she said, theirs, irrespective of whoever "they" were.

I started wondering then about the kids and how much their appearances must've changed in the last five years. Would I recognise them? Would they even recognise me? I was in conflict, did I really want to see them? I had cut them out of my life with just token one-way gifts at Christmas and birthdays. It was all too emotional for me to cope with and I started crying again. Me, a big grown fire fighter who feared nothing physical, crying quietly, tears streaming down my cheeks. It wasn't just that I had missed five years of my kids, it was the thought that I'd tried to exist since I left them without any hope in my life. This was why I was never able to commit to Sally, I wasn't able to take my life forward onto the next step until I faced up to where we had got to and what I had left behind.

Mandy reached across and held my big rough left hand in both her hands. Her tiny hands were warm and comforting but my mind was so full of contradictory thoughts. I looked her in the eyes and, although I tried to smile, I pulled my hand away from hers, saying gently,

"Sorry Mandy I can't do this ... yet." For yet, my mind was saying, never ever, but I didn't have the strength to say as much.

Tears started in her eyes and she got up and went out of the ward. I was upset too, in agony, both physically and mentally, before finally relaxing into my pillows and closing my eyes. I think I must have dozed off until just before lunch came around, when the nurse woke me for my more-than-welcome medication.

Mandy was back by then and sitting in the chair reading a newspaper. She must have returned while I slept on undisturbed. Saturday was the first day the consultant hadn't come round to see me and poke my injuries, I supposed they have to have the weekends off. I guessed that was fair enough. Maybe if I had earned enough money to have proper weekends to spend and rebuild my relationship with Mandy after Josh arrived, we wouldn't be in the mess we had gotten ourselves into. My lunch followed and Mandy helped by cutting up my food so I could let my right wrist get the rest it needed.

The afternoon visiting time was interesting. The nurses seemed to regard Mandy as an auxiliary fixture so they let me have more than one additional visitor at a time. Firstly, a couple of mates from the garage turned up, although they seemed to spend more time chatting up Mandy than they did conversing with boring old me. They brought me an envelope containing some wages owed to me from the previous week, which was a nice surprise.

Then Station Officer Stafford turned up with my car keys, which he handed straight over to Mandy, with not a single reference to me. He was accompanied by my old mucker Brendan, who had fallen through the warehouse floor with me. He had been completely unhurt, other than shaken up, landing on a pile of pallets, all the beams and floorboards apparently went my way! Anyhow, the Service had given him a week off work to recover from the shock. We had a good chinwag and Brendan took the opportunity to take a lot of photos with his mobile phone. He took snaps of me alone, with the boss, with Mandy and the boss, with Mandy and me and then Mandy took one of us three firefighters together. We flicked through them on the screen, the one with the three of us together looked great, Mandy was a natural-born photographer, clearly.

Before they left, SO Stafford handed me a cheque, which the lads had collected from a whip-round among the lads. I had tears in my eyes at their generosity. Although I was on sick pay, which covered me on full pay for the first six months and half-pay for a further six, that didn't anywhere near cover what I would lose from my usual Service overtime plus the cash-in-hand income I got from my second job. The collection went some way towards making up some of that loss over the next few weeks, though, so I was pretty grateful for their generosity.

While Mandy took her leave to drive my car over to the Murrays to pack and collect my stuff - there wasn't much of value there to worry about, just my underwear drawer might be embarrassing - I checked the contents of the envelope from the garage. There was more than enough cash in there to cover what I would have paid into Mandy's account for the month, so I could at least settle up with her without having to go to the bank. There was sufficient surplus to fill up my car's fuel tank on her drive home on Sunday. The cheque from the fire crews would have to wait until I was mobile again and could get to a branch of my bank and pay it in.

I think I must've dozed off during the afternoon because when I awoke my afternoon cup of tea was stone cold to the touch. Mandy had virtually bounced into the room, arousing me from a deep slumber where I had dreamed of the peace and quiet of a shaded glade with the sound of droning bumble bees and a sighing breeze.

I spluttered on an injudicious mouthful of cold tea. Then she forced my ribs and shoulder to complain as I was encouraged to lean forward while she cheerfully plumped up my pillows for me. I blinked around the room where little appeared to have changed, although Mandy looked positively cheerful.

"Guess what I've got for you," she beamed, then paused for effect, waiting for me to respond with a guess, for her amusement.

I groaned inwardly. What was she playing at now? We married each getting on for 15 years ago and for the last third of the time since we have been entirely estranged. Happily separated on my part if you regard being resigned to the situation as a synonym for reasonable contentment. I don't think we had been all that happy when we were together, other than perhaps the first few years. Once she started working at the school with Gosford bloody Tanner we were finished as a couple and I'd had plenty of time to get used to that state of existence. It was something I had coped with well and had no problem with continuing.

Beautiful as she was, I would be happy if I never saw Mandy ever again, yet she was acting around me like we were still a loving couple.

"I don't want to play happy families, Amanda," I said firmly, "We are no longer friends, we are barely acquaintances any more, we have nothing going on between us except for the kids and that is not a strong enough reason for us to be anything other than civil during brief handovers between your time and mine with them. And that's only if we ever manage to agree on sharing the kids at some future date. There is no 'we' only me on my own and you on whatever you want to be, anything except us. On that basis I have no intention of ever playing games with you."

"You are a miserable spoilsport, honey, no wonder nobody wants to go out with you," she retorted, with her self-satisfied smile still on her lips, "Annabel and I had a long talk about you over a pot of tea, when I was over there. So I know you've never mentioned having a girlfriend in the two years since you've been living there. You spend all your time at work or at your second job and mope around the place on your lonesome the rest of the time. So I know that there is no woman in your life."

"Don't get your hopes up, honey," I snarled back, "I may have come to distrust women so much that I've gone completely the other way ... I may just not be ready to come out of the closet yet."

I hoped that might take the smug smile off her face but I should have remembered it was never a fair contest arguing with Amanda Collins nee Wilson, that's why she had stayed and I was the one that went. I gave up and left after the adultery with Gosford Tanner because I knew if I remained there, even if we'd had a spare room which we hadn't, of course, she'd talk me into accepting my position and I knew I could never forget, I could never trust her ever again. I may not be a very happy person on my own but away from her I felt I would be a lot less miserable somehow.

"OK," she folded her arms, maintaining her provocative smirk. I couldn't see or hear her foot tapping under the bed but I could well imagine it. "Who's the lucky buddy lover then?"

"If I am not ready to come out, then maybe my 'special friend' or even friends might not want to be known either."

Hee hee, I thought, she may have a good service and return game but I can dink a few stop volleys over the net when I have to. I make that deuce. Mrs Collins-Wilson-bloody-Tanner-Wannabe to serve.

"I did notice Brendan hug you last night for a moment longer than social etiquette called for, honey." she grinned, "And I also noticed that, compared to your physical condition, he's a fine figure of a man."

"He is," I agreed, winking at her, "Very fine, I can vouch for that."

"And he is so proud of his four children," she grinned, "He showed me the pictures, his youngest is keeping him awake at night this week teething."

Damn, I had no return shot in the locker. Advantage Mrs Collins-Wilson-bloody-Tanner. She looked at me beaming, her cheating face beautiful, instantly reminding me of her look of ecstasy while being served by Gosford bloody Tanner. I could still hear her words of encouragement to her lover back then echoing in my brain, words I had previously thought of exclusively as mine only. Out of it she said she was, but no, she knew exactly what she was doing, then and now.

Now I come to think of it, when we used to make love she was always quiet, so I never knew if what I was doing was agreeable to her or not. Clearly I wasn't. I always assumed as we moved from childhood friends to courtship and marriage that like me we had always been exclusive. I know she was my only lover, I have never actually asked her if I was also her only lover up to that point. I guess I had always been fumbling around in the dark, with little encouragement other than a general impression of get on with it for goodness sake! I do remember very clearly though that under Gosford Tanner's skilful attention she was screaming the bloody house down so everybody giggling to each other at that party knew what was going on and why I found their bedroom so easily. My eyes watered, she noticed.

"Are you in pain, honey?"