I saw a dead bird today.

It was a dead magpie lying peacefully at the bottom of a tree in the park and my first thought was; I’ll take a photo and send it to James.

He used to be flummoxed by where all the dead birds were. If there were so many millions of birds in the world and their life spans aren’t that long, how come we don’t see piles of dead birds littered on the ground or just dropping dead out the sky?

He would ask our friends for their theories on where the dead birds were at; the best anyone came up with was that cats and wildlife got to them before we had a chance to see them.

Muscle memory still momentarily kicks-in before reality bites.

He has been a part of my life for a quarter of a century now; first as my friend, then as my boyfriend and for 9 years as my husband. We were a couple for 12 years and he left 5 years ago today. I realise this only as I sat down to finally write about him.

He came into my life in 2001.

My first ex-husband and I bought a little house outside Reading in a row of 5 new build townhouses, the next-door house was bought by another newly married couple.

The first time I met her she said; ‘Hi, I’m Sarahjane but you can call me SJ, everyone does.’

I thought, well, we’re not fucking American so there’s no way I’m calling you SJ and I never did.

The first time he and I spoke was over our joint garden fence.

I said; ‘How’s your lawn looking?’ and he said; ‘A bit patchy’ and then he scuttled inside.

We became good friends as two couples with Gareth Gates and Will Young playing an integral role in our budding friendship. In December 2001, Pop Idol, the first of the now multitude of televised talent competitions, was born and we were all faithful Will Young fans, getting together at one or other’s houses to watch the show every week. The night Gareth Gates won we were united in our grief.

We were regulars at our local pub and most weekends we could all be found there; they did a great burger at the time. We were next-door neighbours for two years or so.

They had a tumultuous marriage, she was dramatic and considered herself from a well-to-do family, though granny was born in a council house in Liverpool. He was the son of working-class parents with a father from Tottenham who bought a racehorse when he was 19, and a mother from Dagenham who rolled her own cigarettes. Neither was cut out to cross class lines.

We were there for the final nail in the coffin of their marriage, though it had been troubled from the outset with loud arguments, door slamming and holes being punched in doors. We had sold up and moved to Dublin and then to London and they were staying over at ours after a night out in London.  Everyone had drunk a bit too much and we’d all gone to bed to be awoken by door slamming and shouting. I went downstairs to see what was going on and it transpired he had called her an ‘ungrateful cunt’. She wasn’t having a bar of it and spent the night on an armchair.

Whilst our marriage was shitty, it wasn’t door slamming and abuse yelling and frankly we were relieved we weren’t that angry with each other.

So, I knew him.

I knew he got angry, over-excited, could be ridiculous, could be depressive and anti-social, drank too much and had had a serious cocaine habit. I knew he contracted Hepatitis B on a holiday to Thailand with a mate, a holiday that was intended to be his first honeymoon but she had decided not to come back from her hen’s party in Bournemouth 10 days prior to the wedding. I knew he could be mean and vicious with his words.

I thought Sarahjane was a bad fit for him, she was hard work, and if he was with the right woman, I thought he had the potential to be calm and kind all of the time, not just in bursts. I didn’t think that I was that right woman at the time.

But before my marriage had come to an end, he was already in full pursuit mode, because he was single, taking opportunities to tell me I was beautiful and to touch me, call me and message me. And, had I not been sad and vulnerable and starved of affection without any comprehension of what the signs of an abusive relationship were, things might have turned out quite differently. I was an easy target and he saw that and he went all in.  

I was so sad at that time and it felt so good to be wanted so passionately.

He showered me with gifts and I thought he truly adored me. Our first holiday together was a boutique hotel in Sorrento with stunning views of the Amalfi Coast and it was heavenly. He would take me to Selfridges on a Sunday and tell me I looked beautiful and would buy me the beautiful things I tried on. He would send flowers to my work, buy me jewellery, take me to Michelin Star restaurants and I thought I had discovered what love really is.

He promised me there would always be Laurent Perrier Rose in our fridge and said he never thought he could ever be with a girl like me.

There were times of joy and laughter and deep affection. But now I can’t help but question how real those feelings were for him, was it pure or was it just a different expression of his mental illness. It’s hard now to see his behaviour as a whole as anything but disingenuous.

Deep in my gut though, I knew something wasn’t right, we always do.

Once, very early on, I didn’t pick up his call, I was busy with something else, and when we did speak, he was so angry at me that I had ignored his call I hung up on him. The following call he spat out at me ‘Don’t you ever fucking hang up on me ever again!’

I knew I didn’t want to be spoken to like that or treated this way, it was irrational as I hadn’t done anything wrong and, in the moment, I was scared by it. But that feeling of fear from the words and tone a man used towards me weren’t new, my dad has spoken to me meanly and unfairly for years, that tension in my stomach, that fear; it wasn’t new to me.

So, I assumed I could handle this; I had done so before. I didn’t want to upset him, I thought he might leave me and I didn’t know if I could be on my own yet, I had never been on my own, so I buried it and told myself it would get better, he would get better by being with me.

Because I am a good woman and good women support their men; they prop them up, they paper over their failings, they put on a brave face, they aren’t demanding and they sacrifice. 

This must be the price women pay for having a man that adores them so much. He is only angry because he was so worried about me because he loves me so much. This is surely a small sacrifice to make to thank him for his love and adoration and I will bear it because it’s my duty in exchange for his love and adoration to make this man into the best version of himself he can be.

Later he of course apologised and bought me flowers but for the rest of our relationship I thought twice before ever hanging up on him again.

And this was the pattern that persisted for years but with the apologies becoming fewer and further between.

I hated Fridays.

Every Friday night, he would get hammered and I would come home from work and he would be bouncing off the walls in his excitement for the weekend and I hated it.

I hated it when he was drunk because he was a horrible drunk. Every weekday, he arranged his working day to get home by 3pm so he could start drinking, but on Friday’s he would get home even earlier so he could drink even more.

Every Friday ended with a fight. I was working my way up in my job and diligently doing long hours and I would come home to him talking rubbish at triple speed at me until I couldn’t stand it anymore and told him to be quiet and then he would start having a go at me about prioritising work over him and how I really was a dreadful wife and that I didn’t really care about him and his needs and then he would become enraged and that was Fridays.

Saturday’s he would be depressed and blue and on Sunday’s he would be apologetic and loving and take me shopping.

He proposed several times and I turned him down each time but, the pressure to marry him was building from all sides until one day I flippantly said to my family, if you all fly over to London I will marry him; and they only all went and booked tickets.

My family thought he was great, quirky but great. They wanted me to marry him, it was the right thing to do and they would all be a lot more comfortable with our ‘situation’ if I did.

My family’s desire for me to marry him had nothing to do with what the right thing was for me; what could the upside have possibly been for me in marrying him?  It was entirely about their comfortability with my relationship status.  It was about their position in their community and their religious beliefs and removing the shame they felt having a divorced daughter now living with her new boyfriend, the optics weren’t good for them.

For me; I didn’t share their religious beliefs and I didn’t live in their community, I was on the other side of the world where no one could see me. I did not want to get married again and I was not at all certain that I wanted to marry him; I was already becoming exhausted and I didn’t want to be someone’s wife again, I wanted to be unburdened, I certainly didn’t want to marry again because it was the right thing to do.

My family have always been confused by me. Why won’t she stop trying to be different and just marry him? No one really asked me why I didn’t want to marry him and in fairness, I likely wouldn’t have been open about it at that point anyway. I was too ashamed to admit I might have got it wrong a second time around and if I had they wouldn’t have understood the seriousness of it. Likely I would have been told to be stoic and work on my relationship, like they had said last time.

They were never going to understand why a woman wouldn’t want to be married, it would have been quite foreign to them. I’m certain they were thinking how could you possibly not marry this man who clearly adores you and showers you with gifts and spoils you and is fun and charming? What’s wrong with you? Why are you being so mean to him by turning him down?

He used his charm indiscriminately and he manipulated them too. Knowing they already regarded me as difficult, he positioned himself as a saviour and such a great guy for putting up with me.  He excelled at painting me as challenging and himself as really sacrificing in our relationship, I mean I didn’t even cook and then I was at work all the time focussed on my career. He quickly worked out all the touch-points that would really hit home with my evangelical, traditional Christian family.

I should surely be grateful to have someone want to marry me so badly, someone that loves me this much, who takes such good care of me and puts up with all my failings as a woman.

So, I married him to adhere, to be like the rest of the family, to make them happy and make them comfortable, to be less confusing to them, to be normal.

We had a wonderful honeymoon in Sorrento in a beautiful villa with my whole family, bar two nieces and a brother-in-law. It was the best family holiday we ever had and I’ll be thankful for that. But I felt sick the day following the wedding, I sat on the plane early the following morning to Naples and I felt uncomfortable in my insides, I knew I’d done the wrong thing and again I was trapped.

With my first ex-husband I used to daydream about ways I could get out of the marriage without divorce. I certainly didn’t consider murder but I definitely considered him dying of a dreadful accident and the feeling of freedom I got from those daydreams was fabulous. It wasn’t long before I started having the same thoughts with my new husband but this time it did seem slightly more realistic to think of him getting into in a terrible self-inflicted accident, the chances were certainly higher.

After about 5 years’ together, a couple of years after we married, he went on a spectacular bender on a Friday night and was so blue on the Saturday morning that he got out of bed, rummaged about for his laptop and his phone and got in his car and drove away. There’s no doubt he was still drunk. I gave it an hour or two but he didn’t come back, I started calling around but no one had heard from him. After a few more hours of me being worried sick he’d had a car accident or worse, he calls, crying down the phone to tell me he’s down at Battersea Park, not more than 5 minutes’ drive from home, and had been contemplating ending his life in the lake there. I drove down to get him and bring him home. I have often wondered why he needed his laptop and wallet to end his life and exactly how he thought he would achieve that in the Battersea Park lake where people hire peddle-o’s and feed the ducks, it just wasn’t nearly deep enough, even at the time I thought it was an absurd plan. 

But, come the Monday, he agreed to go to the doctor and from that point he quit drinking. He saw a therapist consistently, I think, and he stopped drinking immediately and altogether, I think. He was of course diagnosed an alcoholic.

And thus followed maybe 5 good years.

He sold his business and we bought a great flat and then he talked me into moving to Australia. I didn’t want to live in Australia, I hadn’t ever been comfortable there and I loved living in London, but I sacrificed and agreed to move to Sydney if I got a transfer with my company. And I did.

It didn’t take long in Australia before the wheels starting falling off again. My work got busier and his didn’t. Of course, he couldn’t be an employee, he had never been an employee, so he tried to start his own business again. I don’t know the truth about how well or otherwise that business tracked but I supported him, financially and emotionally wanting him to succeed.

It was at the launch party of a big project I had been working on since arriving in Sydney, that I realised I had lost him. It was a very important night in my career with 150 guests, a celebrity emcee, my clients, VIP’s and of course he was there, I wanted him there to support me and see what I had been doing, I wanted him to be proud of me. 

I look across the room to find him mid-way through the evening, I’m talking guests through the project, and I see him standing with a handful of other friends I had invited and in his hand is a tumbler and I know he is drinking spirits. There’s a splash of Coke in it, but it's not a lot. And he looks at me and he doesn’t care, he knows what he’s doing, he refills his glass with vodka.

I am angry and disappointed and I’m panicked. I tell my friends to get him out of there because I can’t have him lose his shit at this event, it’s too important to me. I can see by his eyes he’s already on the turn. They take him home. But he successfully ruined my night and he did it deliberately because he needed to have my full attention and what better way than to sabotage my event by pouring himself a drink.

He never drank spirits, he only drank beer, and on this most important of nights for me, after having not drunk for 5 years, I think, he pours himself a vodka. It wasn’t a cry for help, it was a fuck you. 

I don’t know if he’d been drinking before that night but he certainly kept drinking after it. I also don’t know if he was using cocaine again but I think there’s a decent chance.

The next 2 years were hell. He lied about his drinking, he refused to even sit with me in the lounge to watch television of an evening. Each night he would sit in the kitchen with his beer listening to music on his own and I would sit in the lounge. He was punishing me, pushing me, making me feel like shit.

He made my life hell. He would call me when I was on work trips and accuse me over the phone of having an affair or he would call and tell me that he was having suicidal thoughts and was looking for a place to hang himself.

He downloaded all of the texts from my phone, he didn’t find any evidence of an affair but he reserved the right to continue his accusations.  He installed Find My Friend on my phone without me knowing.

One night I came home from a work event and he looked me in the eye and accused me of using coke because he could obviously tell, he could see it in my eyeballs, it was so obvious to him that I was using, he went on and on at me staring into my eyes accusing me over and over. I have never used coke but I do now assume by this point he was.

He told my PT that I came home so drunk I fell on the stairs. It never happened. He called my brother and told him I was having an affair. It never happened. I found beer hidden in his wardrobe. I looked in the recycling bin down the side of the house, it was three quarters full of beer bottles and when confronted he said the old man round the back was an alcoholic and was using our bin. The bin that was behind a locked gate and beside a 6-foot fence.

He went to therapy and laughed about psyching the psych. He was diagnosed with bi-polar and given lithium which he gave up on a few weeks later because he felt funny. He changed therapists and was diagnosed with a borderline personality disorder. I tried to get him into residential treatment but there were no beds. My doctor, who also treated him, said later, had she known how it was going to turn out she would have tried harder to get him sectioned and she apologised. But it wouldn’t have helped, his demise was inevitable.

Life was miserable. Row after row, accusation after accusation, hours of erratic, irrational conversation going nowhere, cruelty and withholding no matter what I tried.

But I stuck it out because he was diagnosed mentally ill and I needed to stick by him and care for him and I couldn’t possibly have two divorces and I was so stressed out with work; I just didn’t have the stamina to deal with him.

And then came Krystal. I can’t be angry with Krystal, though I do refer to her as Krystal Meth, for she was as crazy as he was. But according to him, after only a 4-week relationship, she really, truly understood him in a way I could never understand him. He wanted ‘Disney’ and she gave it to him.

I offered him a break, time to reconsider what he was wanting to do but Krystal Meth’s pull was as strong as the drug itself it seems and, after a weekend away with my sisters, where he was supposed to take time to really consider his next move, I came home to him with a bag packed. I told him if he left, he would be leaving forever and that would mean he wouldn’t have any money from me anymore and he told me that he wasn’t interested in material things.  

He kissed me on the forehead and walked out the door.

I knew he was having an affair and I don’t believe for a moment it was a 4-week relationship. I worked out who it was, he wasn’t smart enough to take his text and email connected desktop computer with him and I recalled her name from conversations months earlier. I recalled he had called her crazy and I knew it was her.

I didn’t have the bandwidth to confront him with it over all those months so I buried it. I pretended it wasn’t happening but of course it was, I had a proper job now and other responsibilities and he needed someone who believed his bullshit and bought into his charm and his ‘poor me’ stories which had worn thin with me. He wasn’t the only thing in my life anymore and he couldn’t live that way, he had tried to keep himself at the centre through his abuse but I think he just got bored of me and needed a new play thing.

His lies and the mess he left me with unravelled as quickly as his Disney-esq life with Krystal Meth did.

There was debt, about $120,000 of debt on credit cards and loans I didn’t know I had and because he lied to me, I had to call around banks and find accounts that I might have. I was left with a car and a hefty car loan that had been purchased in my name. The finances were a mess and he refused to assist me and give me any clarity around what he’d done with them.

He was supposed to pop into the house every day and walk our dogs but soon enough I came home to dog shit on the floor because he didn’t care even for them anymore. He had moved on and was not inclined to take any responsibility for what he had left behind. He got a completely fresh start; debt free, wife free and dog free.

And I just wanted him out of my life so I went into admin mode and took control of the finances, arranged a dog walker and gave notice to our leasing agent. I had to get out of that house and I needed to be free of him.

Not once did I text him angry abuse, not even when he texted me for his crockery and favourite frying pan. Not once did I have too many wines and call him, not once did I ask him to come back, I cut him off and I think that partly spurred on his next move, that and his obvious rethink on his requirement for material things.

The night he told me he’d found someone new, someone better, I walked out the house and called my mum. She was upset, but this time, both my parents were upset for me. My mum immediately told me to come home and she jumped online and booked me a ticket to fly out at 9am the next morning, which I did.

After a few days at home, I went back Sydney and a few days after he left the house for good, my parents arrived to stay with me. They didn’t call him; they didn’t try and convince me of anything other than to protect my safety and get my affairs in order. They house hunted with me and we found a place for me to move to together.

When my parents left, my brother arrived. Together we cleaned the house and packed boxes and sorted the movers and unpacked and he put my bed back together in the new house and helped me settle in. James was nowhere to be seen, he didn’t even make the effort to collect his own things, I had to arrange a courier. My poor brother was incensed by his callous self-centredness, it hurt him to see the man he thought of as a brother behave this way. We were cleaning up his mess, my brother with 3 young boys at home and a busy life, cleaning his mess from our house whilst he was off chasing Krystal Meth and his new found freedom.

Several months later as I’m settling into my new life, getting my affairs in order, trying to heal, I receive a letter from lawyers listing a timeline of lies about our relationship and demanding information from me to finalise a financial settlement. He came after me for money. Regardless of the debt and the mess he coldly left me with, he felt entitled to my future income.

It was a stressful 15-months until it was all over. Letter after letter asking me for more and more information. But, one day, having missed a deadline, his lawyer called my lawyer and wanted to negotiate a payout and for some unknown reason, after months of stress and likely $20,000 each on legal fees, he agreed to a $7,000 settlement; barely enough for him to take Krystal Meth and her kids on a family holiday to Queensland. My lawyer said he’d never known anything like it and we still don’t know exactly what happened but I’d say he ran out of money, had immediate cash requirements, got bored and took what he could get his hands on. 

He is a manipulative narcissist but he’s also lazy and not exactly a long-term planner.

I have only spoken to him once properly since he left. It was before he put lawyers onto me, it was Australia Day 2020, 6 months later. He called and I’d been expecting it. He was crying down the phone saying how he was an idiot and how sorry he was. I agreed to meet him at his work to talk, his work place was very close to our old house together and he had moved there after he walked out. I called my brother to let him know where I was going just in case.

For an hour he fed me a dreadful sob story about his tumultuous relationship with Krystal Meth and how they have moved in together with her kids and there were rows and she punched him in the face and he had the nerve to tell me through his tears that he was in an abusive relationship. I listened and I felt repulsed by his drug fuelled, intoxicated life of drama and crisis and that two small children were involved in this dreadful state of affairs that he’d created. The exercise for him was entirely to check-in to see if he still had his hooks in me and if there would be any chance of me taking him back if Krystal Meth booted him, after all, he couldn’t not have a woman ready to go if the previous one saw through his bullshit.

I obviously demonstrated clearly enough that this was never going to happen because after I dropped him home, to his joint house with Krystal Meth and her children, though at this stage she had left him and returned to her family in the northern beaches, he never contacted me directly again. He was drunk so I didn’t want him driving himself and when we got to his house, he invited me in which I declined. He got the message and obviously called a lawyer, if I wasn’t going to be his back-up plan, he could at least try and get some cash out of me.

Occasionally an old neighbour would run into him at the local pub and I’d get updates. He married Krystal Meth about a year ago with a ring from Tiffany, just like mine. He went into business with a lovely man that he could manipulate and rip off, which he inevitably did. And then he and Krystal Meth got a divorce and he decided to move into an apartment just a street or two away from my home.

A few months ago, I drove past him carrying takeout home down the main road from which clearly both our streets run and then I saw him at the bus stop. I assumed he’d lost his licence through drink-driving or he can’t afford a car.

And then it happens, we are walking towards each other on the street. I brace but I feel no fear. Not even the slightest tension in my gut. He slows down as if we will chat. He says hi and I say hi, and he says how are you? and I say fine, but I didn’t even break stride as I walk past.

I think he wanted to chat. I think he honestly thought we would stop in the street and catch up. On what? Shall we mull over old times when you were such an arsehole? That hilarious episode when you walked out and left me with all that debt? How you were so icy cold…yeah that was so funny… Shall we compare notes on how much we spent on legal fees whilst you tried to rob me? Should I politely ask you how things are going with your new wife, the one you walked out on me for, and her children? Oh, sorry, that’s right, I heard you’re getting a divorce – again!

It boggles the mind.

And then, just a couple of weeks ago, I get a call from his poor, long-suffering, now ex-business partner who has finally managed to extract himself from their business partnership. He is elated, it only cost him $30,000 in the end.

He tells me that James is in Bali, he’s been stuck in Bali for 3 months now because he went there on an Easter weekend away with his new 23-year-old Colombian girlfriend but he’d never renewed his leave to remain visa paperwork for Australia and they wouldn’t let him back in the country.

And I say; ‘he’s going to end up in prison, he hates Bali, he’ll need money and he’ll likely end up selling or trafficking drugs in south east Asia’.

5 days later I get another call. He’s been arrested in Bali and it’s all over social media and he’s looking at anywhere between 5 and 9 years in prison according to the news reports.

I didn’t think it would happen that quickly.

I will probably never see him again. Krystal Meth has a 2-year AVO against him, he will now have a criminal record and when he finally gets out prison, they will deport him back to the UK; the chances of him ever getting an Australian visa are slim to nothing.

And despite it all, I’m sad about it, I’m sad that he’ll be 50 in a couple of months and his life is such a mess of wasted opportunities and chewing up and spitting people out and now there is no one left in his corner.

He’s a dead bird; he’s dropped out the sky and no one cares enough to notice.