We had an alcohol fuelled love affair during the Edinburgh Festival. I learned she was agoraphobic and obsessive and batty. After 3 weeks I fled, literally, she chased me down the street. I felt so relieved.
Back in Australia she wrote to me, a lot. I must have given her my address. I feel devotion to anyone who is interested in me…
One of the 18 page letters had blood on it – she was a cutter. But it was so loving and inviting, and I was unemployed, lonely and drunk.
A year later I was 100% sober. A cask of wine was in my bedroom and every day I threw the dice and in more than a year I never threw two sixes.
My lesbian friend (and not yet lover) went to the UK to be with her two loves, both women I had been intimate with, She implored me to come and join them, essentially a lesbian quadrangle was on the cards. I committed credit card fraud to get there, and, well, a guy in the equation didn’t work out. Makes sense in retrospect.
I had a plan B – the crazy girl, now in Norwich.
We met in a park, and her chaperone was a guy called Steve who was her boyfriend in a mental facility. He later killed himself.
We stayed a few weeks with friends of hers who she knew from the facility. The guy had seasonal effective disorder, but in retrospect was clearly autistic. He (had) worked in electronics, high up, like security clearance. She was simply crazy and tried to kill herself during our stay. Ambulances came, but it was attention seeking, I reckon.
We got our own place, and she milked the social security system like a rockstar. Faked being unable to walk to the bathroom. Out income was more than workers got (I would’ve loved to work but I was overstaying, after 3 years in Edinburgh)
She was a cutter. Blood was common. One night, memorably, when I asked her about the knife under her pillow, she said it was in case she wanted to stab me while I slept.
Short of a year, I fled. I had been secretly communicating with the lesbian, spy-level shit, and she told me I needed rescuing. I was in a such a fog that, absent of her initiative and love, I’d still be there now, or dead.
Three days later I was hitch-hiking in Scotland, alone, and after getting very high at a stone circle for the solstice, I accepted a ride from some very bad young men.
The lad who held a broken bottle to my throat, during the trial, his brother beat a (wrongly) alleged pedophile to death with a baseball bat. I got through the experience purely down to the empty threats of my wife. I stared through him.