A Life More Ordinary

Things happen for a reason, that’s what I’ve come to believe. A few years back, a long time after I had moved on from previous events, I was at a loose end on a Friday morning. Can’t remember why, but that’s not really the important bit. However, for some reason, I decided to take a trip to Horsham from Burgess Hill. Maybe I had a bit of cash to splash and was looking to fill a couple of non-existent gaps on my already bulging DVD shelves. Even so, it was an unusual decision for me to take but I guess that I made my way there after dropping the children off at school. Once safely ensconced within the walls of Swan Walk, long before they had issues with glass roof panels, I nipped into WH Smith and again, completely out of character, decided to purchase a copy of the West Sussex County Times. Still not that unusual, is it? Hardly the stuff of legend. And neither was the rest of the morning but once I was done I drove home and settled down to lunch with my newspaper spread out on the table before me.
 
Now, as a writer of horror and imaginings of all things dark and foreboding, you might think that what I did next was standard fare. But it really wasn’t. For some reason unbeknownst to me, I turned straight to the obituaries and began to read. And what I saw on the page, in black and white in front of me was the announcement of the passing of Todd Vincent Russell. Louise’s brother.
 
By this point in my life, Louise and I had gone way beyond ever being able to claw back anything resembling even the faintest hope of ever conducting a civil conversation with each other (spoilers!), but I wrote a card to Marti and Clive, her parents, who replied to me a few days later before we had a brief but perfectly pleasant phone conversation where we completely avoided the subject of their daughter. After I ended the call, I suddenly recalled my words to Louise way back in 1998 and a shiver ran down my spine as if someone or something in the depths of time was also acknowledging the coincidence. I wonder if Louise ever experienced a similar moment.
 
Back in 1998, we stumbled through the early months of the year, a mass of confusion and conflicting emotions. I became even more insecure, if that was even possible, while Louise became more distant from me, almost belligerent in her desire to become more outgoing while still not finding whatever it took to end my agony. At this point, I was still blissfully unaware of the situation between her and Paul, blindly clinging to the belief that our marriage meant something to her and that anything I felt was amiss was merely the product of my overactive imagination and a by product of the fragmented childhood that had shaped me to this point in my life. It wasn’t though.

One Spring afternoon, I returned home from an early shift to an empty house, as expected as she was working. What I didn’t expect to find though was a piece of paper left on the lounge table where she had been practicing her signature…of her maiden name. It was like being punched in the guts, another hammer blow to my already fragile self-confidence. Taken on its own in isolation, I could maybe have laughed it off as just a daft way of spending a boring morning. Realistically, given everything that we had been through of late, it was almost the final nail in the coffin. When she arrived home later that evening, I simply passed her the piece of paper and told her that she must have forgotten to throw it away. Her face dropped and as much as she tried to pass it off as nothing I was almost running on empty, emotionally.
 
The last rites were almost upon us and about a month later she took a trip to Japan to compete in a Sports Acro competition. It was about now that I chose to have my most stupid moment in our entire relationship. She would be away for a week and set off on a Friday afternoon, meaning that the gym was short of coaches and in need of a little help. Naturally, I volunteered and turned up at the gym, blissfully ignorant of the fact that they were also missing one other coach. Paul. What I didn’t know at the time was that the looks that were thrown my way by Anne and Sarah Pope and the other coaches present were looks of pity. Everyone but me knew what was going on and I still had no idea.

I sometimes wonder if it was wilful ignorance on my part. I was desperate to try and save my marriage because I think it felt at the time that it would just be one failure too many in a life full of shortcomings. A life where I had fought so hard for what I thought was happiness that I couldn’t let go once I believed that I had found it, even though I was more miserable than I had ever been. To have a taste of something so…I hesitate to use the word amazing, because ultimately it wasn’t and perhaps to Louise it never was. Perhaps fine would be more apposite. There were times when it was fine and it maybe suggested that it could be so much more, but it grew dark and gradually extinguished its own flame to die in the darkness.
 
Ellie came to stay for the weekend and her visit gave me a bit of a lift, including one moment where we were watching Independence Day and one scene in particular caused her to throw her drink up the wall and we laughed until we cried. I had very little contact with Louise while she was away, she found the time to give me one quick, two-minute phone call over the entire week. If she was trying to tell me that my time was up without actually saying it, she was doing a bloody good job. Once Ellie left, I sank into a deep depression and for the first time in my life, I considered suicide.
 
I had reached rock bottom. I had fought so hard for my dream and I was about to lose everything. I sat on the sofa, in a soup of cats (Eddie, Lily and Molly (Mog)) and I cried as I stroked and hugged them, pouring out my feelings in the loneliest place that I had ever been. I’ve never told anyone this before, but in the early hours, fuelled by alcohol, I opened three full packs of paracetamol and lined the tablets up in front of me, fully prepared to work my way through them. I felt numb and broken, empty. I felt like a failure. I didn’t want to hurt anymore and I was ashamed that I was going to lose everything. I loved Louise and in my confused and bewildered state, that should have been enough. But it was painfully clear that it wasn’t. I cried myself to sleep to the sound of purring cats and when I awoke I cleared away the evidence of my accidentally aborted plan.

When Louise returned from Japan the atmosphere in the flat was thick enough to cut with a knife. I think we managed a couple of days before things came to a head and she finally put me out of my misery but still didn’t respect me enough to tell me the whole truth. She said that she couldn’t go on like this anymore and that it was over between us and my heart absolutely and completely broke. We agreed that I would move out to stay with friends for a while once I’d had time to process what was going on. I think we stayed in the flat together for another couple of weeks, but it was horrific. She would come and go as she pleased and I wasn’t allowed to ask any questions. After all, it was none of my business anymore. It was also agreed that she would keep the cats as I wouldn’t be able to take them with me until I had a place of my own. I’d recently started a new job, training as a Deputy Manager for PetsMart, but frankly it was a distraction that I could have done without, even though it turned out to be an entirely necessary one.
 
The night before I moved out, we agreed that we would have one last night together, for the good times, to quote the Bill Nash song from 1968. We shared a non-romantic, romantic meal and drank plenty before heading off to bed together for the last time. In hindsight, it probably did more harm than good, the act of sleeping together ended up feeling perfunctory as she was clearly not emotionally invested as she hadn’t been for some time. In the middle of the night, I crept away into the spare room, unable to bear the pain and anguish any longer.
 
And just like that, I was suddenly single once more. A broken man with no idea how to start again and barely even the will or desire to do so.

Copyright Alec Hepburn, 2026.