Last night at 3am, black coffee brooding time, I put up plaintive messages here and on my Twitter site, meant for a long lost, once beloved friend who had been outed as a cheat. The message said that I missed him and that if he had anything to say, he need only give the word, a time, a place (as long as it was in North London, either tomorrow or across the weekend and he was free for the whole day and not just a one hour slot) and I would go.
The message had only been up for ten minutes before I began to get twitchy. It felt like a piece of teasing gameplay at worst, twee whimsy at best. I couldn't get into all that again. I had waited a year for some kind of karma, rapprochement, reconciliation, but nothing came. I had approached him enough times, unable to believe he was really 'one of the bad guys', only to have it thrown straight back in my face. I had really thought he might apologise and explain. In fact, had he but known it, that was all I wanted.
I realise now that this will never happen and that begging, ignoring, bullying, complaining, writing enraged columns or sending secret messages hidden in public essays will make no difference and prompt no action. I have been duped like all the others and it's just my ego that's sore. In the fantasy he would be sitting chastened in the back corner seat of an old haunt, looking as painfully lovely as ever (I do like that), and we'd still have our old wild friendly chemistry and humour.... as if none of that had ever happened. But, I remind myself, the friendliness was an act, the humour was a lie, the joke was on me.
If I did something bad to a person I wouldn't be able to live with myself until I had apologised, regardless of whether they forgave me or not. But people are very different. Some people are cruel. They are sadists. This is hard to understand: the way a person can enjoy causing pain, the same way I enjoy a walk in the open air or lunch with a favourite relative... or a long day of hanging out with a cherished friend. It was babyish of me to write the note because he is not reading my web site. He is busy cheating and mistreating. But he is, for all that, so generous: he has given a life sentence to me and to all other women who know. For the rest of my life I must be on guard to bump into him or see or hear his name. Whenever I do hear it I feel as though someone has shot me in the heart with a crossbow. A crackling white pain radiates out from this point slowly, until it reaches the surface of my skin. Then it becomes more intense and travels into the roots of my hair and slowly to the ends. Then a vile nausea crawls down my body from my forehead to my soles. Then a wave of faintness goes back up into my brain, until I almost do faint. This experience, which happens about three times a week, leaves me disgusted physically and mentally, crawling to get out of my skin. This is what happens when you see the world applaud and congratulate a famous man whom you know to be an abuser. There has been no karma for him. How can this be? How is it that it will always be?
The moment the note was up I imagined what would happen in reality, away from the dewy tinge of my fantasy. There would be no rapturous meeting in a symbolic venue or slow motion dazzled handclasp. There might be a brief, teasing, withholding, irritating line in the post - the start of another game, no doubt. Or he would invite me somewhere and I would immediately think, how many dates has he stacked up that day? Where did he wake up that morning, who did he text and write to in secret, whose messages would he coyly answer if I went to the bathroom during our so-civilised coffee? How many women is he abusing at this time? And let me say publicly now, if I find out who they are I will contact them and out him. During the meeting he would speak and I would be on guard, wondering what was a lie and what was true, or approximately true. That is why you can never go back - because you are different and the past is different. The past has changed. There is no way of talking afresh to a liar.
My old friend does not live in Purgatory, but I do. I am caught between the memory of a sweet, fun, successful, happy past, which turned out to be a trick, and a disillusioned future in which anything anyone says to me is met with suspicion, hate and mistrust. It is a future in which exactly those 'family men' who go on about being male feminists are the biggest abusers. And, oh, how I wish I could name them.
It is said of the evil that their normality is their cover. This is the meaning of philosopher Hannah Arendt's famous phrase, 'The banality of evil'. Because they can chat to their neighbours, drive a car, maintain a job and do up their own shoelaces, nobody suspects that they have ten heads in their freezer and a secret life as the nocturnal hatchet killer of the county. I wish dearly that the opposite were true: that a person was not as abusive as their actions make them appear. I wish there was a magic explanation or that he had simply made it all up to make himself look cool, a choir boy pretending to be a Casanova. I wish there was a simple key, a justification so small and comical and true, even ridiculous, that the only reason it hasn't come out now is that it would be absurd and he would rather look like a big villain than a little fool.
I waited a year. Now that year is up. My skin no longer ripples in pain as though it's been slashed all over with razors. I can taste food again. I can think straight and make decisions. When I think about my heart I no longer imagine a torn sponge dripping acid. I can read more than a paragraph of a book and sit through an entire film. I am not blind and frantic. I am no longer freaked with pain, shock, fear and misery. I am no longer angry. But I feel sad. I mourn the loss of my friend. I wish he had got in touch.
But in wishing this, as in so much else, I am too innocent.
UPDATED: Thanks, Wikipedia, for a rare moment of accuracy in your Betrayal entry:
Betrayal at any stage of the socio-developmental cycle results in extreme biopsychosocial distress far beyond the event itself. It disrupts the person’s established mental model by which he or she views, understands, and responds to his or her environment and life events, destabilizes the co-occurring psychological contracts by which one trusts, and negates important aspects of viable strategies by which the person copes with life events. Planful problem-solving coping strategies often become non-viable, resulting in activation of primitive biologically based, amygdala-driven coping mechanisms that are often long-term maladaptive.
