The more Richie becomes a distant feature of my day-to-day life, the more I am astounded at what I believed, what I allowed myself to be convinced of, and what lengths I would go to to assist his lie of a life. When Diego was very young and Richie was long-term unemployed, he somehow convinced me that he needed time to be able to apply for jobs and go to interviews, and that this wouldn’t be possible if he were looking after our son at the same time. He was also keen not to let his parents think that he didn’t have regular work. They would be disappointed with him and he didn’t want them to think that he wasn’t pulling his weight with regard to his family. Rather than spend time with his son, he would drive me to work in the morning - he insisted on this and insisted on picking me up as soon as work was over so that I could be back with the kids and he could go out and unwind after his desperately difficult day - but first he’d  drop Diego off with his parents, who agreed to look after him, while he then went to “work”. He’d concocted a story that he was working for a construction company, but had negotiated reduced hours in order to be able to look after Diego from mid-afternoon each day. We would drop the little man there in the morning, with me having to go and hand him over to the grandmother, burning with shame as I did so, while Richie stayed in the car. The deal was that he would then pick Diego up at around 3.45pm once he had collected Stephanie from school and look after them both until it was time to collect me from work at 5pm.

 

It’s probably worth just going over that again. Rather than look after his very young son, he pretended to have a job (and had me complicit in the lie) so that he could drop his son off with his parents for the whole day while he… well, let’s think…

 

Was it to work on his CV? Clearly not - there was nothing more to add, well, nothing much to include in the first place and it was by and large a piece of fiction anyway. Was it to write cover letters for prospective employment? Was it fuck! I occasionally checked the laptop to see when that particular document had last been opened or updated. Alterations to that masterpiece were very rare, despite him once telling me that he'd sent out over 700 applications to a variety of different employers. And from time to time, when I presented him with job adverts from the local paper or passed on news of vacancies directly from helpful friends, his response would be to reject the suggestion. Who would pick the kids up for a start! 

 

I later found out - years later, from people we both knew and with whom he has fallen out or become estranged from - that during those times he was actually spending much of his day driving around the local cafes, explaining to the regulars he met in each one that he was a stay-at-home dad! Each cafe would get the same story: he’d just dropped his toddler son off with his parents for an hour to get a bit of time to himself, and also to keep them happy for they were forever insisting that he bring Diego over so that they could spend a bit of time with him. How could he refuse the grandparents that joy? And though it pained him to leave the little one even for one minute, he knew it was good for him, necessary even, to take a breather and recharge his own batteries. As his mother - a woman from whom he had clearly inherited these narcissistic characteristics - told me one time, in reference to Richie’s daily struggle, it was a long day for poor dad, ferrying the family around, working flat out, then rushing back to pick up his little boy. No wonder he used the weekends to catch up on much-needed sleep!

 

Hats-off to those men who do stay at home and wear the stay-at-home-title with pride, the authentic ones who understand about silly little things like responsibility, mutual respect, equality. I wouldn’t for a moment dream of belittling them. But here was Richie, an insult to these good men, taking the credit for everything, doing absolutely nothing.

 

And I endured this nonsense. I allowed his parents to believe what they wanted to believe and for him to be showered with praise for his selflessness, his duty to the cause. His mother would tell me sometimes, in hushed tones, that she was worried about Richie, the poor soul, working all the hours that God sent to try and carve a positive future for his young family. But strange though this may seem, I was kind of convinced by it all too. I even told our friends the same lie about him working. I wanted to protect the family from shame, or so I thought. Little did I understand the subtleties of his coercive ways.

 

Many years later, when things began to unravel properly with our relationship, I learned more about what else he was doing during those days and then, in the evenings, when he would leave me with the kids and head out. He told me he had been teaching evening classes at a college in Balham - teaching “functional skills” English to non-native speakers, adults who had recently arrived in the UK who were trying to learn English to improve their chances of  employment. How he loved the idea of this, him being the model of what they were trying to achieve. A shining example of what they might aspire to. And how he loved to tell friends about the transformation he was having on these people’s lives. 

 

I am still minded to believe that there is a tiny bit of truth in this, that at least he was taking some classes, but I don’t for a minute believe that that was where he was every night or that he then took on extra classes with a couple at their home after normal classes had finished. Where was the money, for a start?

 

And when I finally got him out of the house - and I’ll come to that story later - he stayed for a long time with a family friend (who, inevitably, no longer speaks to him), moving out without warning just as a flood of bailiff letters began to arrive for him there, and then moved in for a short while with a woman who had kindly given him shelter in his hour of need when everyone else had abandoned him, the only person he could turn to, so he told me. 

 

This woman? Only the person I’d suspected him of having an affair with on and off for the last ten years, the seeds of suspicion sown when, many years before, while looking for screwdriver in his toolbox so that I could assemble some furniture that he had been promising to sort for weeks, I found passport booth photos of Richie wearing a sailor’s cap and a woman with a floral garland round her neck, her arms wrapped around him, kissing his cheek and, with it, a signed card, complete with the message “to my naughty Spanish sailor, I can’t wait to fuck you”. 

 

And where did she live, this woman? His saviour, his rock? Oh, you’ve guessed it: Balham.