I shared a cubicle at work with two women, who also lived together. The elder one regularly complained about her flatmate’s noisy bedtime antics.
One day maintenance staff boxed in all the cubicles with black aquaboard. This was apparently ‘for safety reasons’, but it made it very difficult to enter and exit our place of work. Fortunately I had the strength to climb up the cubicle walls and out into the main office complex. My talents were put to good use whenever I wanted to visit other colleagues in their cubicles.
At the end of the week, I was reunited with TPR. We each drove our own BMWs – his red, mine silver – to our regular meeting spot. From the car park, I expected that we would return home in convoy in the usual way. However, TPR had other plans.
He grabbed my car keys, then locked my car. It was now impossible for me to access my possessions. Then he bundled me up and threw me onto the back seat of his car, took the front passenger seat for himself, and instructed an unfamiliar driver to take us north.
I needed to confess to someone the perilous state of my marriage. It now seemed that we had moved on from coercive control to kidnapping. I slid my phone out of my pocket and attempted to compose a WhatsApp message to send to my sisters. No matter how hard I tried to type the words, the autocorrect function mangled them into nonsense. Meanwhile, from the front of the car, TPR told me that he had cancelled our Sunday lunch guests.
Our final destination was a remote hotel. It might have been a romantic hideaway had I not been brought here by force – and housekeeping had cleaned the room properly. The head receptionist almost fired the chain smoking chamber maid on the spot when I asked if we might be offered alternative accommodation.
While a new bedroom was sought for us, I struggled to understand why my husband was so angry with me. After all, he was the one who had admitted to a string of affairs. (He had absolutely no knowledge of my single indiscretion of many moons ago.)
Dreamaticus 