Look Back in Hunger by Jo Brand

Author:Jo Brand
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Autobiography
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

10

Bed-Sit Betrayal

I did not just turn on my heel and walk out, because in the second or so that it took me to register the scene, a list of everything I had lost because of this man-boy flashed through my head. It was short but enormously consequential:

1. My home.

2. My relationship with my family.

3. My security.

4. My academic future.

5. My mind.

Yes, my mind had been slightly disturbed during those few months, and now I had lost it altogether. Had I had a knife to hand, I suspect it would have been difficult not to use it. Thankfully I didn’t, and I scanned the room for a weapon. The nearest thing to hand was a full soda siphon which was standing on the bar screaming to be used. I approached the guilty couple and before they had a chance to move or even react, I squirted them both full in the face with its contents. I have absolutely no idea what the resulting immediate fall-out was from my squirtiness because I exited stage left and made for home as fast as I could. When I got there, I got drunk and sat up all night playing cards with the Korean chefs and crying. They didn’t seem to mind and were quite happy for me to get on with alternately sobbing and putting cards on the table.

Once this betrayal had occurred, much as I wanted to be forgiving, I just could not manage it, and I would constantly find myself ruminating on a way to physically or emotionally damage my erring partner. I eventually let him into my messy bed-sit with the very shiny walls and he prostrated himself and begged for forgiveness, insisting that the scenario which I had witnessed was purely a goodbye kiss and he was finished with the woman for ever.

In some ways, I suppose it was justice because a previous girlfriend of his had been less than happy about my appearance in his life and had made her feelings plain on a number of quite scary occasions.

We rumbled on for a bit, but it dawned on me that the scene with the woman in the smoky bar had probably not been a one-off. But I was seventeen years old and I knew that my attempts to resist his charm, for charming he was, were just not going to work if I was always on tap, as it were.

You have to bear in mind that I thought he was charming because I was mad about him. I mean, some women manage to fall in love with murderers, so it is not the personality, necessarily, of the individual – it’s your attitude towards him. To me, at the time, Dave was the perfect man: elfin, funny, bright, sparky, unpredictable, entertaining and enormously attractive. When it came to what he had done, he had just the right mix of regret and a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. And, of course, I fell for it, in a hook, line and sinker kind of way.

So I made a radical decision.

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