Escape.

When I first began writing my tongue-in-cheek account of the perils of dating ‘evil’ men, I had a set plan about what I wanted to put down, but now it seems to be warping into a creature of its own. I don’t have much of an idea as to what I’m going to write until I do. It’s both exciting and disconcerting.

In the summer of 2003, I went into self-imposed exile. The fallout from the Pantera experience was enormous, though it was only obvious to myself, and hardly noticeable from the outside.

I wasn’t odd or strange, just quietly rearranged
Sometimes the biggest change stays out of sight
                                                                       
‘The Dreaming Road’, Mary Chapin Carpenter

It was my dream to go island-hopping in the Caribbean, and so I did, covering ten islands in a month. Most of my memories are dim: I vaguely recall attending a Carnival on St Vincent and walking out halfway through because I got bored of the bumping and grinding; following Lonely Planet’s advice to the letter, taking aimless bus rides along breakneck coastal roads in St Kitts, St Lucia; hiking to the Boiling Lake on Dominica; eating my dinner alone amidst honeymooning couples; taking part in the semblance of a fling in Barbados – dancing to oldie love songs, taking a stroll on a moonlit beach, taking half-hearted part in an ill-advised one-night stand, which would come back to haunt me because the man in question emailed me for months afterwards, claiming to be in love with me. My heart wasn’t in any of it, and while I appreciate that it’s not my heart that was required for the last bit, it wasn’t really fair on the other party, because he didn’t even qualify as a rebound: I was too…elsewhere…to even be properly distracted by him. I did manage to feel guilty about the whole thing and beat myself up over it afterwards, taking responsibility for a complete stranger’s feelings, until Xerxes* quite sensibly pointed out that the guy clearly didn’t know the meaning of love, and that in any case, how he felt about the one-night stand was not my problem.

I felt as if I was going through the motions: hike up to that fort ruin; tick. Take a catamaran out to the Tobago Cays and go snorkelling; tick. Eat; tick. Sleep; tick. Never before or since had travel seemed so lacklustre. On Carriacou, I didn’t even leave my room.

Travel had always had an element of escape for me, but never to that extent. When I spent my university summers backpacking around the States and Canada, it was partly in search of adventure and excitement, and partly as means of breaking free of the intense claustrophobia I felt each time I came home at the end of term. When I first came to Warwick, for the first time in a decade I found myself in an entirely peaceful environment: no more unpredictability, no more public rows, no more lying awake, dreading the slam of the door that indicated that my father was home. There was other turmoil at university, of course, but that was mostly generated by my suspect choice of men. The unpleasantness at home continued, but I was no longer around to witness them.

When I was a teenager - I must’ve been around thirteen or fourteen at the time - I used to physically escape by plugging into my Walkman and wandering the streets at night. One night I remember trespassing on my school’s property and lying on my back on the Lower School field, looking at the stars. Another time I had this idea of taking a round bin to the top of the only hill in Cambridge, getting inside it and rolling down the hill – kind of like ‘zorbing’, but without the cushioning effect - but in the end I was either too lazy or too sensible to do it. One night I left the house by climbing out of the first floor window, dangling by my fingertips from the windowsill and dropping down into the bushes below. Another time I shimmied down the drainpipe from the bathroom window. Why I couldn’t have left by the front door, I couldn’t tell you.

Why my school? I suppose because to me it represented peace and stability – the opposite of my anarchic home. After school, I’d linger at my friends’ or pester my long-suffering teachers. I defied my father’s wishes to have me go to another Sixth Form, because I knew instinctively that deprived of my source of stability, I would implode, go off the rails completely, and become just another teenage statistic. I got a job at a nearby hospital laundry for two nights a week, which is where I met the incomparable Apollonia* and began to question my sexuality. When we moved across town, I took to pacing new streets. Then I went to university, and simultaneously, instead of escaping out of the house, I took to escaping abroad.

When I told an old friend of this, while showing him my photos of past adventures one time, he was surprised: “I thought that your travels were a wholly positive experience.” They were, but the ‘escape’ aspect contributed to their allure, whether I was consciously aware of it at the time or not.

There’s two lanes running down this road
Whichever side you’re on
Accounts for where you want to go
Or what you’re running from

“The Moon and St Christopher”, Mary Chapin Carpenter

Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.

Nor could I stay in one place for more than a few days; one of the thing I loved the most about those summers was the constant feeling of motion. Spending hours or even days on a bus is not my friends’ idea of a good time, but I was content. Besides, my Greyhound journeys gave me a real sense of comradeship with the weird, the poor and the crazy who rode those buses, and I’ve had some memorable chance meetings and conversations. Even now, on the rare occasions when I’m on holiday, as opposed to working, I feel the need to be doing something and find it difficult to be still. To me, relaxation is often synonymous with frenzy of activity.

The most vivid thing about the Caribbean was the insomnia. I’d wake up around 4am and toss and turn, unable to sleep for hours. I’m a bit slow on the uptake, you see, and I was finally reacting to everything unpleasant that transpired with Pantera months before. I’d lie there, fuming, thinking “I let him say what to me?! I let him do what?!” On and on it went, on a loop, my twenty-one year old brain unable to glean anything positive out of all that ruminating. I wallowed in anger, in shame, in disgust, perversely content to beat myself up over it all endlessly. After all, there’s only so long that you can blame a man for being a complete bastard, but you can blame yourself endless for putting up with bastardly behaviour.

In that time I acquired a new understanding of my mother’s situation, which was far more difficult than mine, and with which I'd previously had little patience - getting angry at her for putting up with poor behaviour from my father, defending him, following him whenever he walked out, declaring dramatically: "I'm leaving forever!" only to be back days later when the dirty laundry needed doing.  I got involved with Pantera knowing full well that I had a trapdoor that I could escape through: my imminent departure for the UK. If I were living and studying in Puerto Rico indefinitely, it wouldn’t have happened. I can’t exactly compare getting involved with the neighbourhood ‘bad boy’ with being married to an abusive man, moving abroad with him with two small children, and having no one to turn to for support due to not having a job and all my friends left behind in a different country. I’m sure that had we stayed in the Soviet Union, my mother would’ve divorced my father. But then, my life would also have been different – and worse- in ways that I cannot even imagine. I don’t have my mother’s patience (or resilience, or resignation…) and because my instinct of fight-or-flight is far better developed, there’s no way I would’ve put up with daily browbeating and being ground down for months or years; I suspect that I would’ve snapped and turned to extreme violence, or simply left. Luckily, I’ll never have to find out.

I began to appreciate how easy it had been not just to find myself in an unpleasant situation, but to actually put up with the pattern of psychological violence as a fact of daily life. Unlike my mother, however, I never believed that I deserved any of it. There was none of this ‘maybe I haven’t been a good enough wife, maybe I haven’t been understanding enough, supportive enough’ rationalisation: I knew that it wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair, and though I was letting things slide, I hadn’t accepted it as my lot in life. I don't buy into the ‘he’s only mean to me because he loves me’ way of thinking; I have no idea how Pantera really felt about me. Pawel* told me years later that Pantera still wistfully reminisced about me, but that’s not saying much. Neither do I believe in karmic debt - suffering in order to pay off some obscure past sins – beyond rationalising that if you treat people well, you’re likely to get similar treatment from them, or if you treat them badly, you’re likely to get your comeuppance, which is why much of my time with Pantera was spent vacillating between feeling cross and bewildered. I’m a decent human being who treated him well, so where was all this crap coming from and why?

So why did I not do anything earlier? During the second half of my relationship with Pantera, I believed that the main reason I was holding on was because I loaned Pantera all my spare cash, and had to put up with him in order to get my money back. That’s not a good enough reason; if need be, my friends would have fronted me enough money to get home. There’s more to it than that...