XI

STRENGTH

HARRY - BEFORE

Drowning described it best. Every time I got my head just even slightly above the water, I was dragged back to the brink of bankruptcy by something else. Our offer on the house had been accepted, and we had a few weeks until completion day. I was almost back in the same position as I started, and the Broadhead bag grew emptier by the day. It was meant to be a one-time thing with Becky, but every few days, I’d receive a text asking for more. The amounts were insignificant at first, but it was starting to mount up. I still hadn’t met Joshua, and I started to question if he even existed. It got to the point where she didn’t even want me to come into the house anymore; she would instruct me to post it through the letterbox.

I endured the constant barrage in survival mode, putting out financial fires where I found them, and continued to conceal the whole thing from Amelia. The weight on my shoulders was massive. I was desperate to tell her what was going on just to get it off my chest, but I knew it would only make matters worse. The first Broadhead repayment was due soon, and I’d be paying it back with the money I loaned from them in the first place. I was so anxious and nervous all the time that I even toyed with the idea of taking a few of Amelia’s pills to take the edge off.

We’d completed the first round of IVF, and Amelia was excited that this would be the time we would finally become parents. I should have been excited, too, but I wasn’t. I was in a state of perpetual terror. Scared stiff by every knock at the door or incoming phone call. Each time Amelia had a notification on her phone, I found myself checking it, just in case Becky had decided to come clean to her. Everything was just hanging in the balance, and I waited for the day that it would all come crashing down. I could tell that Amelia knew something was wrong, too. The way she started looking at me whenever my phone made a noise, or if I took it into the bathroom with me. She’d always been so paranoid that I might be cheating on her, but I wasn’t sure the truth would be any less upsetting. I did the only thing I thought I could, and I carried on lying about everything in a drastic attempt to keep the peace. I dreamt of threading the needle and somehow making everything right before I was exposed, but it was starting to seem impossible.

I was still working as a financial adviser, albeit over the phone from Manchester. Geoff, the owner, was really understanding about it all and continued to let me work remotely. The clients didn’t mind either; I’d actually built up a really good relationship with some of them, and I’m sure they would actually miss me when I left.

I’d given up stashing the Broadhead money at my mother’s house, and it sat in the compartment underneath the boot mat in my car. The fortune seemed to dwindle by the day. I stopped planning for the future. I could barely plan twenty-four hours in advance. I just dealt with each day as it came, waiting for the inevitable landslide. I should have felt hopeless, but I actually didn’t. I was so wrapped up in frantically trying to hold everything together with my bare hands that I didn’t stop to process just how dire my situation was.

Thud. Another five hundred pounds was posted through Becky’s letterbox. I didn’t even know how much I’d given her at this point or what she was spending it on. Every text request came with its own excuse, each more fantastical than the last. I’d be more content with just a pounds and pence figure from now on; I started to feel ridiculous that she thought I believed her lies. I had only seen Becky a few times since I’d first met her, and at first, I thought I was almost doing a good thing, but it quickly became evident I was being taken advantage of. During the previous few deliveries, I could tell from outside that Becky couldn’t even be bothered to get up off the sofa. I dutifully continued the cash drops without hesitation because I would have done anything to keep Amelia from knowing about it.

I got back in the car and started to drive back home. Just as Becky’s excuses were becoming implausible, so were mine to Amelia. I kept saying I needed to nip into the office of my new job to complete some paperwork or meet someone. But the reasons I was giving were becoming increasingly thin. It was probably my paranoia talking, but I was convinced she knew exactly what I was doing, and she was just waiting for me to admit it.

When I returned home, Amelia was crashing around in the kitchen. She had been getting increasingly agitated with the time it was taking for the house to complete, but I was grateful for every day it got delayed. Every day was another day to try and magic up some funds. I had no idea where to get the rest of the money from; I was just hoping there would be some kind of miracle, and the whole thing fell through.

“Amelia?” I shouted whilst kicking off my shoes.

She responded, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying from the kitchen. I came in and found she had emptied every cupboard and set of drawers onto the floor. The kitchen looked like it had been looted by a pack of monkeys. Amelia was violently swaying from side to side, and she was clearly drunk. I was standing there open-mouthed, waiting for some kind of explanation.

“We are dry!” she slurred, shaking an empty glass in her hand.

“Dry?” I asked.

“No more booze left, duh!” she responded.

“Amelia, you said you were going to stop drinking. It makes it harder to conceive, remember?” I explained.

“Oh, calm down, killjoy. I did a test, negative, again.”

“I’m sorry, Amelia. But you shouldn’t get like this regardless.”

“Well, what else am I supposed to do whilst you are out, doing god knows what?”

“I had to nip out to the office. I can’t help that,” I said.

Amelia came over to me, aggressively pulled my face closer to hers with my cheeks, and smiled.

“The office, right,” she slurred.

I pulled away. “It’s the truth, Ames,” I argued dishonestly.

Amelia seemed to be satisfied by my response for a few seconds and started almost dancing around the kitchen, smiling. But all of a sudden, the smile slipped from her face sinisterly, and she gave me this really maddened look. She stopped dancing and ran into me, gripping me by my throat and pinning me ferociously against the fridge. It rocked violently, knocking over all the contents inside when I impacted it. I could barely breathe under her grasp; her grip increased the pressure as her disturbing smile widened.

“Bullshit,” she laughed, her grip still strengthening, “who is she, Harry?”

I tried to pull away from her, but the more I flailed, the more her hold around my neck tightened. I started to struggle even more, and I accidentally stood on a discarded wine glass on the floor. It smashed, slicing into the bottom of my foot. The noise distracted Amelia enough for her to temporarily lose her grip, and I managed to escape, dropping to my knees and breathing desperately.

“What the fuck, Amelia?” I gasped.

She looked alarmed at what she had done at first. The blood had already soaked through my sock and began pooling on the kitchen floor. I saw the expression on her face change as if she’d decided I deserved what had just happened to me. She casually threw a tea towel by my feet for me to soak up the blood. I obediently picked it up and wrapped it around my bleeding sole. The wound wasn’t nearly as bad as the amount of blood suggested, but the pain was staggering.

“There isn’t anybody else, okay? I honestly just nipped into the office,” I protested.

“So, it’s some slut from the office then?” She asked.

“No. I just had to drop off some more paperwork.”

“No. You are lying,” Amelia accused, nodding knowingly.

“Believe what you want. I’m done trying to convince you,” I said, hobbling out of the kitchen and through the front door.

I intended to leave immediately, but in my haste to escape Amelia, I’d forgotten to put my shoes back on. I walked a few feet away from our flat door, and the blood from my foot was producing a grim smear across the usually white floor tiles. I sat on the cold floor, and I could still hear Amelia smashing up things in the flat whilst I was in the safety of the corridor.

I had no idea what the statistics were in regard to how common this is within a relationship, but I definitely felt like I was in the minority. Don’t get me wrong, she didn’t get like this often, but it was becoming more frequent. Drink was almost always involved. Amelia wasn’t an alcoholic, and I’m not sure there was a word invented for what she was. She didn’t need to drink, but when she did, it just changed her into a different person. I tried to ease her off the drink by telling her it hurt the chances of conceiving, which was true, but as a matter of fact I just wanted her to be sober for my own sake. The booze didn’t agree with her at all. In my head, I had this idea that having a child would fix everything in our marriage, and I was just hanging on until it finally happened. I tried giving her everything that she ever wanted, but it seemed to only make matters worse.

It started off small, wanting to know every last detail whenever I’d been away from home. Later came the accusations. Before I knew it, I found myself not going out with my friends anymore. It just wasn’t worth the resulting inquisition. Everything had to be prearranged, with notice, and approved by her. Every time Poppy called, and Amelia got to my phone first, she would cancel the call or answer it herself. It took me a while to notice what was going on, and by the time I did, I felt like I was already too isolated to see a way out.

Then she started putting me down in public. I was known for constantly making jokes by everyone who knew me. Instead of laughing at them, she would give me a disgusted look, like I had no right to speak. Every time it happened, I felt myself receding further into myself, and the jokes became less and less frequent. She would often talk to a complete stranger and then tell them intimate details about my life, which seemed insignificant at first, but as time went on, the stories became even more inappropriate.

The time that stuck in my head the most was when she begged me to drive her to the supermarket to get more drinks. She got chatting with the woman serving us, making the odd joke about me being boring or a wet blanket. That’s what she did to people; she used to start small, gauge their reaction, and, if it was positive, say something even more tactless. Within a few minutes, Amelia was laughing her head off, telling this poor woman how terrible I was in bed and how I’d never managed to give her an orgasm. At first, I used to defend myself, but I quickly found out that it only made matters worse. So I kept silent as Amelia cackled with the awkward-looking retail assistant, who gave me the occasional look of pity.

Instead of backing away from her and potentially ending the relationship, I started blaming myself and doing everything I could to fix it. I was desperate for our marriage not to be like my parents’ marriage. I felt myself transforming into my father, silently taking it all and not saying a single thing in response. I didn’t feel like a man anymore. It made me feel pathetic and weak. She’d covertly chipped away at my dignity until there was almost nothing left but debris and dust. Just when I thought I was at my lowest moment, she stepped it up.

She started getting physical.

That started small, too, a harder than playful tap on the back of the head or an overly efforted shove when I said something she didn’t like. It was always in private and in the house, but if I said something she didn’t like in public, it would come to haunt me later. She did this thing where she would grab my hand and dig her fingernails into it, and I knew I’d be on the receiving end of worse after it. Some days, I’d have marks or even bruises from it for days. It got to the point that every time she had a drink, I’d receive a slap from her for something. Or, more often than not, for nothing. I didn’t know what her rules were, and it seemed to be random most of the time. Once she started closing her fist, that’s when I noticed the intensification.

The choking was new, and every time there was an escalation, it still caught me off guard. I loved her so much, and I thought she loved me back. I just didn’t understand why she was doing it to me. The day after an altercation, we wouldn’t even talk about it. I didn’t dare bring it up for fear of it happening again. We just continued like nothing had happened. It was as if as soon as a drop of alcohol touched her lips, she transformed into this monster that was lurking inside her.

The worst part of it all was that no one knew.

I hadn’t told a soul what she was doing to me. I think it was due to a mixture of shame and disbelief. I felt like telling someone would be self-emasculating, like I couldn’t handle myself. I just kept imagining me telling Steve he would have laughed me out of the house. I just bottled it up, let her continue destroying everything good about me, and hoped one day she would see who she was becoming and go and get help.

That day was different, though, because it was the first step I’d actually taken to regain my independence back and fix the mess I had slipped into. I didn’t realise I had a line, but she had unquestionably crossed it. I could still feel Amelia’s grip around my throat when I made the call, and she was still screaming as if she was being tortured in our flat.

“Hi! Harry!” Poppy answered.

“Hi, Poppy,” I croaked.

“Are you okay, Harry? You sound weird.”