Married Life

Now the dust has settled on my unhappy marriage and subsequent brush with white slavery, perhaps I should enlighten you further on my extended absence from these pages.

Do you recall my mentioning a cleaning lady from Moldavia, who claimed to be a former dentist and seemed genuinely concerned for my well-being following my back-breaking episode?

Reader, I married her. Should have had my head tested first, but alas I was still feeling the afterglow of that glorious morphine addiction – a permanent light-headed optimism, manifesting less as happiness, more like naive stupidity. This woman, I can’t bear to speak her name, let’s call her Olga, went through my flat like a dose of salts, first cleaning it, then, following our unholy matrimony, redistributing its contents to her brats in Bratislava or wherever they were - somewhere in the lap of luxury, certainly. She actually told me she was: “Decluttering your life,” when spotted tiptoeing out the door with a holdall of swag, and as long as she came back with the odd bag of groceries, supposedly purchased with the proceeds of an unwanted vase, or something, I was none the wiser and indeed encouraging of her efforts to rid my life of burdensome chattel. She was of course, also fencing the good silverware and the Clarice Clift tea-service, emptying my drawers of any saved cash and maxing my credit cards, once I’d foolishly revealed my PIN number so she could buy a bottle of vodka to “celebrate” my birthday.

I celebrated much harder than was strictly prudent and awoke in a state of some confusion. I didn’t recognise my own bedroom. Largely because Olga had sold off the furniture while I was asleep. With her “medical background”, she persuaded me that I was having a nervous breakdown and needed to see a specialist.

I was duly dispatched to some East European quack who recommended an extended stay at a sanatorium in Budapest. The brochure included an eye-watering price list for their services: electro-convulsive irrigation, nipposuction, hydro-electric damnation, deep-wallet massage and other dubious practices, conducted in a wood-panelled retreat in a pine-forest, breakfast a Michelin-starred bowl of yogurt and a lightly poached zinc tablet.

Olga took care of the booking, by scaring the shit out of my Visa card, and told me a car would come to take me to the airport. On the day, I was expecting something slightly more commodious than the pummelled Transit van which idled outside my block, five other bemused passengers strapped into bench seats in the back. Rather than the quick, comfy hop across Europe in a 737 I’d anticipated, we undertook a murderous three day drive, punctuated by a ferry crossing which tossed us around – still in the back of the van – for what felt like 18 years. Parted from my luggage and sick as a poisoner’s dog, I started to feel delirious, so when we pitched out onto a featureless concrete dockland, I thought the passing camel was an hallucination. Sadly not. It was a local, doubtless picking up something illegal from our ship. I was just trying to figure out what sort of useless travel company goes to Hungary via Egypt when someone hit me on the back of the head.

Long story short, I spend three days in a darkened room before being led into some kind of nightclub where I am persuaded in very poor, foul-mouthed English to perform an obscene act with another bewildered gentleman and a pit-bull terrier. I am just weighing up the consequences of not taking part in this sexual horror show, getting the measure of the puffer-jacketed hooligan carrying a tazer and a full set of butt-plugs, when the doors burst open to announce a visit from the local constabulary. I’m still not sure which country we were in, suffice to say that their police are the most thorough practitioners of police brutality it has ever been my pleasure to witness. Puffer-jacket and his chums are soon bloody-face down in the meat wagon and getting friendly with a fresh crop of truncheons, and I am being escorted to a hot bath, a fluffy robe and thence to the airport.

When I arrive home emotionally scarred but pleased to be British, Olga seems surprised to see me, but instantly recovers and cries “At last, at last!” She claims there was some terrible mix-up, my taxi had been outside all along but happened to arrive at the same time as a mini bus apparently taking illegal immigrants back to hell. When she realised I had missed my flight she says she alerted Interpol who tracked me to the casbah of bad dreams and airlifted me to safety. Her expression of concern doesn’t fully explain why my flat has a For Sale sign outside, nor its new super-minimalist décor. I decide not to believe a word of her story and am soon filing annulment papers and calling a locksmith.

Once the restraining order had kicked in and the nightmares had started to recede, I was able to take some pleasure in my new, pared-to-the-bone living arrangements. Decluttered life suits me surprisingly well. A shame that the life savings have disappeared into a greedy hole in the Caucasus, but an entreaty to the criminal compensation board garnered enough readies to buy the essentials and, in time, get back on line. As that awful pervert, Sir Garold Glitter once said: “It’s good to be back…”