Julie

Normal couples go out. They have fun together. Especially couples who have no children, no ties. When my drinking was at its peak, Harry and I avoided going out together at all costs.

But in the summer of 2007 my husband asked me to go to an event that the bank was hosting in aid of a suicide prevention charity. It was ironic, really. I’d slipped into a dark depression after I’d miscarried, not helped by the alcohol. I spent a lot of time those days thinking about killing myself. I mean, really thinking about it. Not just toying with the idea or seeing it as some sort of cry for help.

Sometimes it felt like just one more thing – it didn’t even have to be a big thing – could tip me over the edge and I’d down a vial of prescription tablets. Quietly, when I was alone in the house, when Harry was away and I knew he wouldn’t be back in time. I’d researched which ones were the best to take. I’d heard horror stories of people overdosing on pills that took a while to kill, then changing their minds. But I didn’t think I had it in me to slash open a vein or hang myself. It had to be something I could do while drunk and, let’s face it, after years of living with Harry, I really was very good at swallowing shite.

‘I’d like you to come to this thing at the weekend, and for the love of God, Julie, stay sober at it, can you?’ Harry said. ‘I need some moral support. There will be people there … they’re going to be making decisions about the bank in the coming months. I need them to think that I don’t have much to do with the business end any more and that I’m spending time at home. Can you just back me up? Please?’

‘What people?’ I said, curiosity getting the better of me.

‘Just politicians and that. I need you beside me, Julie.’

There was always something between the lines with Harry. Always some devious strategy, some plan I wasn’t aware of.

Harry did need the politicians at the benefit that night to think that he was a small player at the bank over that 2007 period. He needed them to think that because he knew that the crash was coming and the bank would be investigated.

He could make them think it in one of two ways. Either by having me on his arm telling everybody how much time he spent with me those days, or by bringing me to an event he knew I’d get hammered at, with all those people to bear witness and assume that he was practically a full-time carer for his alcoholic wife.

Sure, they would say, how could he have known what was going on in HM Capital when he was dealing with her?

Which performance do you think I put on that night?

Even though it was win-win for my husband, he must have decided at some point in the evening that the drunk option was preferable to me being on my best behaviour, sober but dour. He needed authenticity, and I’m not that good an actress. I tried to laugh and say things like, ‘Oh, Harry, I can’t get rid of him these days!’, but it was so forced, even I found it painful.

I wasn’t privy to his change of tack. And before you get all judgemental, please know two things. One, you’ve never met anybody better at mind games than Harry. When he started flirting outrageously with the other women on our table, right in front of me, looking over to make sure I was watching, I met his eye and coolly reached out for an empty wine glass. He knew what buttons to push. I filled the glass to the brim and drank from it like I had a starring role in Ice Cold in Alex.

And two, Richard Hendricks, though having the sense not to sit at our table, was at the event. At least Harry had the good grace to be embarrassed about that when we arrived. Apparently, Richard was meant to be away that weekend but had cancelled at the last minute and turned up. I could see him from where I was sitting – his fat, ugly back straining his jacket seams, his meaty paw resting on his wife’s shoulder. I couldn’t look at his fingers, those things he’d stuck inside my body, without wanting to vomit.

‘I wouldn’t have asked you to come if I’d known he was here,’ Harry whispered urgently in my ear when I spotted him.

‘Wouldn’t you?’ I said, my shoulders sagging. ‘You seem to expect me to endure plenty when it comes to him. I’ll try to make sure I don’t wander out to the toilet on my own in case he thinks it’s an invite to rape me. I just hope he’s not looking for another promotion.’

I turned my back on Harry and his flirting and chatted to the other table guests. I drank glass after glass, mixing white wine with red, picking up other people’s dregs when my glass wasn’t filled quickly enough.

I was the first person on the dance floor as soon as the interminable after-dinner speeches concluded, dragging up some poor unfortunate who happened to be sitting nearest and sending him and me into a heap during the first song.

That wasn’t bad enough. After helping me back to the table, with apologies to my unwilling partner and the tables nearest the dance floor, Harry upped his game. He turned to the woman on his left, his hand resting so high up her thigh he could have been her gynaecologist, and began to whisper sweet nothings in her ear.

‘Is the baby crowning yet?’ I said, leaning over Harry and belching alcohol fumes into the other woman’s face. ‘You look about nine months now. What do you think, Harry? How many inches is she dilated there?’

‘For crying out loud, Julie.’ He grimaced, and she flushed a new shade of mortified.

Normally, I’d collapse after more than two bottles of wine, but that night I managed to make it to the toilet, throw up with only a little bit landing on my dress and return to the table for a repeat. Harry was dancing at that stage, twirling some girl half his age in the centre of the floor as she giggled and fluttered her false eye-lashes for him. She held the attention of most of the men there, her blonde hair almost down to her bum, shimmying in a backless dress that stopped just high enough to protect her modesty while accentuating all her curves.

I don’t know what it was about her that upset me so much. Perhaps it was because I suspected that the women Harry cheated with were normally skinny brown-haired girls, so very different. Like that was okay. But there he was, dirty dancing with what could only be described as a prettier version of me.

I stumbled on to the dance floor and got in between the two of them, pulled Harry’s arms around me and began probing his lips with my tongue. He responded for a second, the habit strong, then pulled back.

‘Jesus, Julie. You taste of vomit. Sit down, will you?’

She was still close enough to have heard, and I bristled.

‘Well, at least I don’t taste of shit, which is what comes out of your mouth most of the time, my darling husband,’ I said, loudly and for her benefit.

‘Right, I think it’s time to take you home,’ he said, the voice of reason.

‘So soon?’ I cried. ‘After bringing me here and forcing me to have all this fun? I know, how about instead of running out, why don’t we do what I imagine you normally do at these things? Why don’t you take me to a room upstairs and fuck me senseless like I’m one of the slappers at the bank, huh? Isn’t that how you usually end a night like this?’

I’d roared all this, completely oblivious to the band finishing the song they’d been performing and the crowd’s polite clapping. The sound dribbled to a halt as they all turned to stare at the mad drunk woman.

Game, set and match to Harry.

‘Outside!’ he hissed.

He grabbed me by the arm and dragged me out of the ballroom. Everybody who was anybody – all of those he’d wanted to witness the little scene – got the full benefit of my husband’s purple face and his most put-upon expression.

By the time we reached the reception area, the light bulb had gone on over my head.

‘Oh my God,’ I slurred, as the air conditioning and the bright lights of the lobby hit me. ‘You wanted that to happen.’

‘Sure,’ he said, looking over my head, not meeting my eyes. ‘I wanted you to embarrass yourself and me. Please, will you just shut up and come on.’

I stayed where I was, propping myself against a marble pillar for support.

‘You did. You absolute fucking bastard. You wanted them to see what you have to cope with, have them think you’re home trying to save me from myself day and night. You …’

I sobbed, unable to believe how low my husband would stoop, a man who would throw his wife’s reputation to the lions for his own benefit.

Harry paled and stared at the floor.

I had caught him out.

‘I’m not staying in this hotel,’ I said. ‘Give me the keys.’

‘What?’ he said.

‘Give me the keys. I’m going home.’

‘Julie, you can barely stand. You can’t drive. You’ll kill yourself.’

‘I don’t care! Give me the keys.’

It was the 7th of June. A night I’d like to say I would never forget but, to be honest, I was drunk and forgetting was my survival mode.