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Synopsis

How to turn a personal crisis into an opportunity. Narrative memoirs of A British Expat dumped remotely by his wife after thirty-two years of ‘happy marriage’ while he is on a visit to his mother at her home near London.. Heavily in debt and without a home he is expected by his wife to live with his mother in UK while she sorts out her financial affairs in UAE, citing the fact that she needs ‘time and space’ to achieve this. She is not able to travel because her visa would not be issued until she has the funds to clear the debt on her old business and close it down. The catalyst is an American ‘shaman’ who comes into their life less than a month before he leaves and takes over the writer’s life like a cuckoo.

 

Meanwhile the writer had been in a yearlong rut waiting for a production project to start with his ex-employer, the region’s largest broadcaster, and had been living in a comfortable numb state in their villa while she worked three jobs to support them. The stand off with his wife escalates when his mother gets involved and he becomes stuck in the middle of a ‘battle-royale’ between his wife and his mother.

 

The story follows the narrator’s three months in UK during which he painfully turns his upside-down life back up  before his return to Dubai. The crisis causes him to re-invent himself and ironically to regain his confidence.

 

The story is told in a relatable, intimate and humorous style and there is an original conceit which runs throughout the book as the narrator refers to real-time instagram posts which he makes along the way @maskalleli

SAMPLE

 

October 20, Stave Hill, Instagram Video Post

 

It’s five o’clock in the morning. I’m in Canada Water, inside the famous bend of the River Thames, up on Stave Hill. That’s Canary Wharf you can see there…. And I’ll take you round, round the bend of the river. That’s the City of London you can see there. That’s the Shard and on the left of it is the London Eye. So you know where we are.

 

I’m literally going round the bend.

 

1. October 20, Joe’s House: Bombshell

 

Dear Clare,

 

You nearly blew it thirty-five years ago, and how many times did we retell that story and make fun of it. Please don’t blow it again.

 

No that needs softening…

 

My wife dropped a bombshell yesterday. I was on my way out of Mum’s cottage in Essex when she called from our home in Dubai

 

- Andrew, I need time and space

 

It took me completely by surprise. I held on to the phone, no words came for some time.

 

- Clare, I can’t talk now

 

Writing my story down is cathartic. It’s so round the bend that I could write a book on it. Yes that’s exactly what I’m going to do.  But I need to finish this letter first.

 

Surely she can’t turn the love switch off and on. Mind you she has previous.

 

It was 1986, thirty-six years ago, the year of the Great Storm in England; Clare was just 20 and I was 23, I had broken through the friend-zone and we were falling in love. Right from the start I knew she was ‘the one’ but she was wary of commitment; she was very cool in those days. I can see her coming towards me with her long black hair over her long grey coat. I was waiting patiently outside Charing Cross Station. It was a bitterly cold night and she was late as usual. But she was starting to thaw. We had six happy months behind us and I was spending more and more time in the flat she shared with her friends off Tottenham Court Road. We were having a blast but after a few months she got the wind up. I can’t remember what instigated it but she broke up with me just like that.

 

After a month of little communication I called to invite her to a show in the West End. I had tickets to see the great comedian, Dave Allen, famous for sending up religious traits back in his home country of Ireland, and for sitting on a barstool with a glass of whisky on the table at his side and a cigarette in his hand which was missing half a finger. We never found out how it happened.

 

• “Am I the Irish comedian with half a finger? No, I’m the Irish comedian with nine and a half fingers.”

 

Clare was at work when I called, she was a stylist then at a top salon in the West End working long hours. She sounded pleased to hear my voice and I could hear her boss in the background egging her on, God love him.

 

• I’m calling to say that I have got two tickets for Dave Allen, would you like to come with me?

 

There was a brief pause and then she said four short words that changed my life.

 

• Oh, go on then!

 

And she laughed, that lovely warm laugh of hers. She had melted.

 

What a lovely night it was. There were no reservations between us anymore, she had removed any barriers.

 

When I say she melted I mean she gave herself fully to me. She turned the love switch on and it stayed on for 36 years. We joked about the time she ‘nearly blew it’; it was one of our stories which we loved to tell each other over again over the years.

 

So when I told my son Joe last night that she had switched the love light off he suggested that I write her a letter; he is an old soul. But is it a love letter or a bargaining letter?

 

I found a space at the dining room table in the house Joe shares with three old friends. My laptop open, saved LovelettertoClare, and was doing my best to get on with it. The central heating had been off for hours, winter had well and truly arrived, and it was hard to get my fingers moving. My mum’s dog Izzie was accompanying me, she was asleep with Joe. Joe’s housemates all had one thing in common by the way; they grew up in Dubai. Expat kids tend to stick together.

 

Last night I told them how I’d been on the outside lane of the escalator at Surrey Quays Underground station with Izzie in my arms.  I was in a state of shock, unable to process Clare’s bombshell, when I was jolted back to the real world by an extremely angry commuter who shouted ‘Oi!’ in my ear at the top of his voice. You are not supposed to stand still on the outside lane you see but I thought that was a bit harsh.

 

Darling Clare,

 

You are the most beautiful person that I have ever met. Every day I count my lucky stars that you didn't blow it 36 years ago. Thank you Dave Allen!

 

But here we are again. I've been reflecting since you dropped the bombshell and I think I’m getting some clarity. This morning at 5am I was walking along the River Thames in the rain, thinking how to put together this letter for you, the love of my life…

 

Clare’s bombshell was dropped completely out of the blue. The morning I left for England, just ten days before she dropped it, we had made love tenderly and looked forward to my return. BB was Before Bombshell, and AB is After Bombshell. My world was turned upside down.

 

As I composed my letter a word from a sonnet by Shakespeare popped into my mind through the years, so I googled it up.

 

Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

 

It was that word ‘remover’ that came to me. Clare had decided to remove me and dump me on my Mum. O no! I say to myself, I will fix this.

 

Who was the remover in the poem?  Critics usually focused on the grim reaper coming towards us with his bened sickle but I saw the remover as one of the lovers in the poem and that was just as dreadful to me. Being removed is a type of grief which begins with denial.

 

I turned back to the start of the poem:

 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments.

 

It reminded me of the most dramatic moment in a marriage ceremony when the minister asked the congregation if they have any objections

 

"Should anyone present know of any reason that this couple should not be joined in holy matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace."

 

Shakespeare admitted no impediment to a marriage based on trust and understanding. This love cannot be removed.

 

I truly believed that our marriage was unbreakable. Not because I was religious, though brought up a Catholic I was agnostic at best, but because I was romantic to my core.  Quite why I was so fixed on this idea I cannot tell. My parents had a difficult divorce and I had seen the damage it does, that might have had something to do with it, but it was a positive conviction which I just felt.

 

Clare was my ever-fixed mark, my anchor in our fragile and insecure life in Dubai. We were middle aged, owned no home, and we were in debt but we had raised two wonderful and well-balanced kids, both now at the start of their careers in London, and I never doubted that our love would see us through. I was a romantic fool holed up in the world’s least romantic place in denial of our money problems.

 

Clare had unresolved financial issues on her previous business in Dubai. She did not close Blue Skies LLC when she opened SunKiss LLC and she owed VAT, visa fines which had built up and there was a case against her by an ex employee; I had no idea how much it amounted to because we could not talk about money (I’ll tell you more about our communication breakdown later). Her visa had been held by the government in Dubai and her bank account, or her access to our joint bank account, had been frozen. Meanwhile I was waiting for one of my pitches to the biggest Television group in the region to get green-lit, and they were taking their time about it. Corporate time moved much slower than small business time. Meanwhile I was busy burying my head in the sand.

 

Throughout this period, and our married life, Clare always had a good news story to share when she came home at the end of the working day, about a deal she had just done or was just about to do. That was good enough for me, enough to keep my head firmly stuck in the sand.

 

In the circumstances Clare was an incredibly positive person. Tall, wide-open face, blue eyes, but her crowning glory is her long dark hair (naturally, compatibly I thought, I have none). Her super-power was to connect very quickly with people she meets.  Rich or poor, old or young, business or personal: no matter their reservations they thought of her as an old friend within an hour of meeting her. It was not calculated, until our split she had not taken advantage of her connections; I think she just liked being loved and she trusted her friends, occasionally to her cost.

 

- How do I picture our relationship?

 

We had a regular walk together with our two dogs, Bonzy and Babadus, in the streets around our villa. We called it ‘the circuit’. In the summer in Dubai it was too hot to walk the dogs during the day so we would usually walk as the sun was going down, in the dusk. The circuit had six defined points. The Oval, so called because the Indian labourers play cricket – really good cricket - on a dusty waste-land close to the primary school where the kids went. Watching over the Oval was the Palace, a huge pile protected by a high wall and lines of tall trees where we watched a murder of noisy crows go to roost before sunset. Round the side of the Palace was the ‘Practice Run,’ a dogleg of manicured grass where we let the dogs off the leads inside the railings. Dubai did not approve of dogs off the lead but it was irresistible. We watched them stop the railing posts and wall corners  and called it the ‘Smellyverse’ because we thought there was a story for the dogs in every one of those marking points. Occasionally they would chase a stray cat up a tree and we called this ‘cat-coursing’.

 

After the Practice run, down the street and around the corner, was the ‘Gallop.’ This ran alongside an even bigger palace with a longer and wider strip of well-watered grass. Here the dogs really opened-up. Babadus headed straight for the bowl of water in the distance, filled daily and generously by the gardeners, where he jumped in to cool his tummy. At this point we usually took a video to share with the kids on our WhatsApp group called the Official 4. Finally, before heading home for a glass of wine, we walked across ‘Watership Down’, so called because this sandy waste land had patches of scrubby plants and dune-lets, and because we thought we saw a rabbit there once. It could have been a cat, it was dark. This is where the dogs usually took a dump and we took it in turns to scoop and bag it up.

 

Why did I think the circuit defined our relationship? Because it’s a pattern we followed, it was familiar and comforting. We had many other patterns. Stories about the kids we liked to repeat, funny songs I had written for them when they were very young, multiple nick names we created for each other, our ‘jazz breakfasts’ every Friday, and the ‘you nearly blew it’ story were among them. Look reader, we had our own language.

 

We loved to party. To be honest we had increased our drinking together after the kids left home and it had made her feel less comfortable in her body. She had been getting heavier in middle age but when I went on business trips or to stay with my mum she lived a much healthier lifestyle and it showed. On my last return at the beginning of the year I was bowled over by how great she looked and with her renewed confidence in her body. She felt sexy. Our love life was the best it had been since Lydia was born. Neither of us had been unfaithful but I had come to think of this as less important than telling each other the truth, bodies were less important than minds for a lasting marriage. We had never lied to one another, lying was like theft.

 

 

But the beast was waiting in the shadows, ready to tear us apart.

 

She was removing me from her life to focus on making money. Of course, she had a point. Our need for money was urgent but I felt I had the right to talk it through with her face to face, and truthfully, and I did not feel that she had the right to dump me at my mum’s house without any notice.

 

I decide to share the sonnet with Clare, I hope for the right reasons, and I included it in my love letter. Then I continued in my own spirit:       

 

We are like two trees which have grown together, individual but firmly entwined, supporting each other in all weathers, and a good prune will make us stronger than ever

 

It was a bit flowery I grant you but I was feeling emotional. I was bargaining with her you see and a tug on the heartstrings might open her up for negotiation.

 

… I love you with all my heart darling. We have great times ahead growing old together and grandchildren to look forward to and share with our children.

 

I was so busy bargaining that it stopped me from seeing the wood for the trees.

 

2. October 24, Troy

 

Clare had posted a video on  the Official 4. It was our best means of communication at that time and I was grateful for it. The video showed our living room after she and Troy had moved it around. It was barely recognizable.  The television and the room dividing shelf had been removed and the living room was opened feng shui style. Yoga mats like tiny life rafts were spread around our new opened-up living space on the floor ready for the breath work session they were planning that day with ‘industry titans’.  Clare said that they were going to get ‘a bit of a scene going’, presumably in the fashion that Troy had created in Hawaii.

 

It was three o’clock in the morning and I was reviewing the video. It seemed very cruel of Clare to post it but I’m sure she was just showing us how she was coping. She had stopped seeing things from my point of view. I heard my Mum getting out of bed in the next room, the floorboards were creaking. I think she wanted me to hear her.

 

- Mum, do you want me to let the dog out?

- Yes please, that’s sweet of you.