The Woman He Loved Before (30 page)

So, here I am, back where I started but worse off, I suppose. I have money saved, but I pretend that is not there. I remember Aunt Mavis once told me to always have a running away fund. She said, no matter how much you loved a man, always have a stash of money that would get you as far away from him as possible in an emergency. As it turned out, the first time I had to use that money was to get away from my mother and her ‘boyfriend’. I have managed to put enough aside over the years to top it up again. That’s why I didn’t use that money for my dress. I needed to have enough money to get away if I had to.

Why am I worse off? Because I have much less money I can freely spend – I have to ask Elliot for cash if I don’t get any work, and that makes me uneasy.

But I can’t complain too much because I have someone who loves me. That’s something I couldn’t have fathomed happening when I first came to London and especially when I started dancing.

I like the way I can write that down … I have someone who loves me. That makes me smile.

Love,

Me

11
^th
March 1991

When will I learn? Pride comes before a fall. Always. I took too much pride in the nice life that we had and now, three months later, we’ve fallen.

What has happened? Well, today Elliot, came home from work and told me that he’d been sacked. And it was all my fault. He didn’t say that, obviously, not until I dragged it out of him.

Basically when I came in after the cleaning shift at the local gym he was already sitting on the sofa. The television was off, which is how I knew something was wrong, and he was just staring into space.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked him, not moving too far from the door because I had a feeling I would want to run out the second he told me what had happened.

His glazed-over eyes finally found my face and he looked devastated, as if all the stuffing had been kicked and kicked out of him. He was still in his suit but his tie was undone. ‘I’ve lost my job,’ he eventually said. So much time had ticked away between the moment I asked and his reply that I had been on the verge of asking again.

‘Oh God, how? What’s happened?’

‘They gave me some bullshit, but I can’t believe it’s happened.’ He
sounded distant, as if his faith in the world had been seriously shaken. I remembered how I felt when it happened to me and I hadn’t even been there that long.

I crossed the room to the sofa and sat down beside him, aware that I still had the fug of ammonia and bleach and chlorine around me. I snuggled up to him – put my arms around his middle, rested my head on his chest, pushed my body as close to his as possible. I was trying to take away his pain, to absorb it into my body. His heart was beating so fast in his chest I was scared it was going to stop suddenly. ‘What happened? They can’t just sack you, can they? Aren’t there laws about this sort of thing?’

He slowly stroked his chin and was silent again for a long time.

‘Can you take them to court or something? What’s that thing called – an industrial tribunal? What about that? Won’t they be able to help you?’

He shook his head. ‘No, they can’t help. No one can.’

‘But why? I can’t believe you’re not even going to try. They can’t do this. You’re a great employee. And if you don’t fight it, how are you going to get another job?’

‘Maybe I’ll do something else. There’s no point trying to get another job in accountancy, not once they’ve finished with my reputation. And I was getting bored of it all, anyway.’

‘No, you weren’t! You love your job. And what on Earth are they going to do with your reputation? You’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘Let’s just drop it, Eve. I’m really not in the mood. They’re a bunch of wankers and I’m best off out of it.’

‘But I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Please tell me what’s happening. I won’t be able to sleep for worrying about it.’

He sighed and my heart sank to my ankles. I knew then it was something to do with me.

‘Phil called me into his office. Asked if I was seeing you. I said yes and that we lived together, were even talking about getting married someday.’ My heart skipped a beat because we hadn’t talked about marriage but it was obviously in his head. ‘And he said did I know that you were a lap dancer.’

My heart, which had been so lifted a minute ago, started to sink again, falling down to my stomach, then began freefalling towards my toes.

‘I said that you used to be, but you weren’t any more. And he said did I know that you also did extras in the back rooms? And I said you didn’t and he said you did. He said you’d once given him … he said you’d gone down on him. I said you wouldn’t do that. And things got out of hand and one thing led to another and I punched him out.’

‘Oh my GOD, Elliot!’

I sat up and looked at him, horrified. The fact this man Phil lied about me was nothing compared to the fact that Elliot had fought him to defend my honour, as tainted as it was.

‘Don’t, don’t. I feel awful enough as it is. But at least I got him to admit you didn’t go down on him.’

‘They sacked you.’

‘Said I was lucky I wasn’t being charged with assault. But I’ll be paid until the end of the month, so that’s something.’

‘Oh God, Elliot, I’m so sorry.’

‘It’s not your fault.’

‘But I feel responsible. It’s not true, though, you know that, don’t you? I never did any of that. Other girls might have done, but I didn’t.’

‘I know, Eve, I know. That’s why I got so mad at him. Bastard. He’s lucky they dragged me off him when they did.’

‘What a mess,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he replied.

We both sighed desolately and sat in silence for about an hour. I don’t know what he was thinking about, I was too scared to ask in case he was thinking that he should have known better than to get involved with someone like me. I was going from thinking about what had happened to wanting to hug him because he was thinking about marriage. Then I would start to worry about money. I had given up my job because he could support us. But if we didn’t have that …

I’m not sure what we’re going to do, to be honest. After our hour of silence on the sofa, neither of us felt much like eating so he had a couple of smokes (won’t let him near my bed with cigarettes, let alone
weed – which I’ve noticed he’s doing a lot more of) and I smoked a couple of cigarettes and we both went to bed.

He eventually fell asleep and I’ve been sitting here, writing in this, hoping the answer to our impending money problems will present themselves. None have occurred to me so far. I don’t know, I feel sick when I think about our situation. I’m not sure I can go back to lap dancing. Although I miss Connie and some of the girls, and although I miss the freedom the money from it gave me, it was still – at the end of the day – being ogled and groped by strange men night after night.

Elliot wasn’t that keen on me working in bars but, now that he’ll be at home during the day for a little while until he gets a job, he might not mind not seeing me in the evenings. Well, even if he does, there’s no way around it, is there? We need the money.

What a mess.

Me

14
^th
October 1991

I would laugh if it wasn’t all so … something.

I can’t quite find the words to describe what is happening sometimes. It often feels like I am living someone else’s life and that the real me is off somewhere at university, watching comedy shows, getting drunk in the college bar and becoming all political. The me that I get to live with, the one with the boyfriend who has been out of work for six months, wakes up to find the electricity has been cut off and then a few minutes later there are bailiffs on her doorstep because the electricity bill she thought was all paid up wasn’t and they need the money in cash right then or they’re coming in to seize stuff. By stuff they of course mean the furniture that belongs to the landlord, my rubbish TV that works when it feels like it, my stereo that is clearly of the same mind as my TV, and my collection of clothes that are mostly fit to be binned, apart from my beautiful dress. I gave them all the cash I had after they explained I would have been sent
letter after letter after letter about this, and that I would have had phone calls too.

And then, working on instinct, I picked up the phone to discover it had been cut off, too. So I got dressed and went to the phonebox down the road and I called the gas people to find out if they’d been ‘keen to make contact’ and of course they had. The same with the Poll Tax people, the phone people, and – oh yes – the Waterboard. The only person who wasn’t chasing me for money was the landlord but that’s because I pay him myself. Everything else is ‘sorted out’ by Elliot.

So, this me that isn’t living it up as a student decides to draw out almost all of her savings to pay off all these people and, when her boyfriend returns from wherever he’s gone, she will tell him he has to find a job, even if it is one he thinks is beneath him – such as working behind a bar – because they have nothing left and they can’t afford to support his quest for the perfect career any longer.

Then I have to actually go into the bank after the machine eats my card and I find that I am overdrawn by one hundred pounds. Obviously that can’t be the case because I had nigh on two thousand pounds in there the last time I checked. I had saved that from dancing in Habbie’s, and saved some from the cleaning and admin work. How could it all be gone and then some?

‘Could your card have been stolen?’ the nice cashier behind the counter asks, obviously seeing my distress.

‘No,’ I tell her, ‘there’s only one card to my account and it’s just been eaten by the machine.’

‘Could someone have been using your card without your knowledge?’ she asks, almost as concerned as I am.

Why it took this nice lady’s concern to have it dawn on me, I have no idea. I thanked her for her time, took my printed out statement and walked out of the bank. I walked the streets until I arrived at a park and I sat on the bench and I stared into space and I wondered how my life, which at one point seemed so settled and lovely, was now down the toilet?

When it was dark, and no answer arrived, I headed home and I
found him reclining on the sofa, his mouth full of crisps, the TV on, the lights off and not a care in the world upon his head. The electricity people were surprisingly good at turning the service back on after I cried on top of paying them their cash. I sat down beside him and I waited and waited until an advert came on because it would be rude to interrupt, wouldn’t it? And this is what happened:

Him: You all right?

Me: No, not really.

Him: Why?

Me: The bailiffs showed up today to take away our stuff because we hadn’t paid the electricity bill.

Him (Switching off the TV
)
: What? The bastards! I’ll be on the phone to them tomorrow and kick seven types of hell out of them. They’ve made a mistake, I’ve paid it.

Me: Oh, right. Well, you’re going to be very busy tomorrow because the gas people, the council, the phone and the Waterboard have all made exactly the same mistake. Strange, isn’t it?

Him (Sitting up): Eve, I can explain.

Me: No, don’t worry about it, I’ll sort it. I’ve got a bit of money saved for emergencies, I’ll go get it tomorrow and pay everything off.

And he just sat there and stared at me. Then he nodded, as if that was a good idea, as if it was even possible.

Me: Oh, wait, I can’t do that, can I? Because you’ve already emptied that account and left it a hundred quid overdrawn.

He stared at me, his eyes growing smaller and darker with every passing second. ‘I had just as much right to that money as you did,’ he said angrily. What he had to be angry about, I didn’t know.

‘Really, how did you work that one out?’ I replied, calm to his anger.

‘Who’s been supporting us for the past year? While I was out at work and you got to sit at home on your arse all day, who was
bringing in the money? And all along you had this secret stash in an account I knew nothing about.’

‘I haven’t stopped working since you made me give up dancing,’ I said, just as calmly. ‘And I always made enough to pay the rent, or didn’t you notice?’

‘Well, I paid for everything else. Do you know how hard that is? Do you have any idea the pressure I felt under?’

‘What, you mean the pressure I’ve felt under for the last seven months? Or the pressure I’m going to feel under because I’ve got to find a way to pay all these bills and don’t even have the fall back of using my savings to cover them?’

‘How do you think I managed to pay the bills all this time I’ve been out of work?’

‘But you haven’t paid them. They haven’t been paid for the last two quarters. And you must have been hiding all the bills, the red letters, the final demands, the court letters, my statements. Everything. So, the only thing I can ask is, where’s my money?’

‘It wasn’t just your money.’

I ignored that because I had never dreamed of asking for access to his accounts, or asking him how much he had in the bank, and it would never occur to me to take it without asking. ‘Where is it?’ I asked again. I was strangely calm considering we were facing financial ruin.