storybook

I was the weird kid who liked books. I came to school already knowing how to read, and I read everything. Everything we were assigned, anything I was given, anything I might have found myself next to in a quiet moment. When I was about seven years old, I spent many an instructive hour lying on my nan’s bed reading her Bible, having exhausted all the kids’ books in her house.

[several years later]
Mum: We all thought you were finding religion.
Me: What? Have you read that thing? Everyone is horrible to everyone and everyone dies. And God is an arsehole.
Mum: Why did you read the whole book, then?
Me: It was a book.

I knew exactly how stories worked. The structures, patterns and flow became second nature to me, and I started to think in stories, silently narrating mundane things that happened to me and wondering at what point in the book this particular mundane thing would occur if my life were a story that others might read. I understood adventure and mystery and romance, at least as they related to storytelling. I didn’t really understand romance. Boys were weird and they picked on me. As I hit my teens and started reading a few contemporary romance novels, I concluded that romance was a slightly unpleasant thing that existed between an annoying woman and an arrogant man who didn’t like each other very much. But it was still something I wanted, because it seemed as though I ought to want it, such was the importance given to it by everyone and everything around me.

When I was seventeen, my storybook came along. I met a boy at my Saturday job in the supermarket, and after a few months of talking bollocks and very definitely not flirting, we were a couple. We went from ‘friends’ to ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’ almost immediately. It wasn’t long before he bought me a ring and we planned to get married.

It didn’t work out, and the reasons for it not working out are the kind that make it very difficult to tell this story from the perspective I’m about to tell it. It’s difficult to tell this story from any perspective other than “Here is a list of six years’ worth of horrible things”. I’ve written that story before, and thousands of other people have written it too. It’s a common, unpalatable and necessary story. But I haven’t seen much of the story I’m about to tell: our relationship was a storybook, even though it didn’t follow the patterns and flow that I knew from what I’d read, because he seemed to be genuinely convinced that that’s what it was. The story of him, playing Man, and me, playing Woman, Falling in Love and living Happily Ever After.

When we fought, which was a lot, he would reach for the script of Man and Woman Fall in Love and flip to “Fight Scene”. Man would cast his eyes downward mournfully (Man did a lot of things mournfully). Man would speak slowly, evenly, in a voice suffused by grief that he and Woman were fighting. Man would respond to tearful complaints with “I know”, and launch into a grave, melodramatic speech about how Woman’s love was everything to him, and of course if she wanted to leave that was up to her, and he would simply live out the rest of his life as a lonely, shattered man, wouldn’t he? He would never find anyone else, just grieve for their love for ever and ever.

I want to be clear here: he said every last one of these things to me on a regular basis. There were times when pretty much this exact Fight Scene would happen multiple times a week. I don’t think we ever went longer than a month without it. Sometimes he would recite it even when we weren’t fighting. “Hey, Jen. Here’s what I’d be doing now if you left me.” There was manipulative intent, I’m sure, but I also think part of him really believed it, that he really thought this was what you were supposed to do. He would sometimes comment on what passers-by would think his income was based on his being with me, always viewing us from the outside and not the inside.

He came to realise that I didn’t really know the characters of Man and Woman, and would quite often attempt to educate me. The characters of Man and Woman are constant, and played by everyone. All men are Man, and all women are Woman. Their traits do not change. He would tell me stories about Man’s slavery to his own uselessness, his inherent inferiority to the emotionally strong Woman and his gratitude that she would put up with the terrible Man-behaviour that he knew was carved into his soul.

My favourite of these was during my second year of university, when he announced to me that my then-flatmate and sole good male friend (Woman does not have male friends) was in love with me.

“What are you basing that on?”
“Just trust me.”
“No.”
“Alright.” He sighed the sigh of a reluctant martyr. “There’s an unwritten code among men. When you’re introduced to another man and he’s with his girlfriend, you have to nod to him and take a step back. That shows you respect his territory, you’re not going to try and make a move on his girl.”
“Um.”
“When we met your friend from school that time, that’s what I did to her boyfriend, nodded and stepped back. It’s a sign of respect.”
“It’s – huh.”
“And when you introduced me to your flatmate, he didn’t do that. He folded his arms. He looked at me with folded arms. And that’s a challenge. That’s how I know he’s in love with you.”
“Because he folded his arms?”
“All men know this code. It’s just how it works. He didn’t show me that respect.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever said.”
“This is why I didn’t want to tell you. Women just don’t understand men.”

This conversation happened nine years ago, and sometimes I’m still compelled to turn to men I know and say, “Hey, so when you meet another guy, do you take a deliberate step back from his girlfriend to show that you respect his ownership?” I have many male friends these days and I know that men are not Man, that Man was just that one specific weird guy, but I keep asking. Just in case.

As we got closer to the endgame of Happily Ever After, when I’d graduated and we could be openly engaged instead of hiding it from my mother (who had Views on people being engaged before they’d finished educating themselves), when he could see marriage and mortgage and babies within touching distance, when my reticence on the last two points didn’t make a dent in him, he began to see me as Woman rather than me more and more often. He was confused as to why I wasn’t playing it correctly, why I didn’t say or do or want the right things, and that’s where I stop being able to tell the story this way.

We broke up over the phone one day in mid-August, after previous attempts to break up in person had led to him listing the overwhelming amount of work I’d have to do to extricate myself from the relationship. I told him I couldn’t do it anymore, and tried to explain, again, what was wrong with us. He cut me off.

“It doesn’t matter. Nope, nope, no need to discuss it, you’ve made your decision. I’ll go now and you’ll never hear from me again. Goodbye.”

At that point we were almost breaking up every week. We almost broke up every time we spoke to each other. I was ill at the time, so ill that I barely left the house, and sometimes I pretended I was too ill to take any of his five daily phone calls (Every. Single. Day. For nearly six goddamn years) so that I didn’t have to almost break up with him again. Every time he made a speech like this, and every time he was expecting what normally happened, which was for me to phone back five minutes later yelling about how he never listened to me, to which he could whisper, “I know,” and with that out of my system we could get on with the happy business of having completely opposing life goals.

But this time, it was the last thing I ever heard him say. That low, whispered, dramatic “Goodbye” that he didn’t mean and I knew even at the time he didn’t mean. It was an empty threat, a babysitter closing the book with his finger on the right page, telling his misbehaving charge that if she was going to cry and say she didn’t like the story anymore, then he was just going to put the book away for good and then she’d never find out what happens, would she? I never found out what would have happened, though I can probably guess.

I expected this story to look different when I wrote it down. From the inside it looked like light absurdity, funny things that happened in a situation that wasn’t so funny, with the situation mostly excised. I was expecting it to read like the time I wrote about my wine-diluting landlord. But it doesn’t. Written down it’s still absurd, but sad and harsh. I’ve written elsewhere about the more destructive dynamics between my ex and me, and it’s not a fun read, but it at least makes some kind of sense. Anger is a motivator we’re all familiar with, even if we don’t experience it, so while it felt transgressive at the time to write publicly about scary experiences I’d had, that story – where I emerged triumphant from adversity – is a much more comfortable narrative than this one, which reads like two people having a relationship with nothing (and that’s not a reading I could reasonably dispute). But my storybook is long closed, and I don’t need to follow those conventions anymore. This is a story about a story, one that consumed everything while not ever really existing at all. It’s a sad, weird story that I needed to tell, despite its lack of Happily Ever After. There was an ending, and that’s enough.