Cheap Lives

By Jane Goodhew

If you are reading this then you have either purchased or picked up a copy of the magazine which contains the sort of stories that you would expect to find in an X rated movie or cheap novel but never to have been written by yourself.

Yet, this is my story; it may sound familiar to some of you who are reading this in the hope of finding inspiration and I do not mean to write for a group that you are in but the motivation to move out of the situation.  The one that so far you have not had the power to leave or anywhere to go that you will not be found and returned to the hell you were living in and continue to live and will do until you decide enough is enough.

There will be others of you who have such boring, mundane lives that this is how you get your cheap adrenaline rush, reading other people’s sordid, sad lives of sex, depravity, violence or even murder. You may think that this could never happen to your or any member of your family, but it can and does even to those who you think are in a happy and stable relationship they too can have their secrets.

Those who have high-powered and highly paid jobs, they are not exempt they can just disguise it more by sending you to a health spa until you have recovered or if really serious to a plastic surgeon to fix that broken nose or displaced jaw or to remove the scars from your wrists where you tried to kill yourself or just to replace one pain with another.

I can almost feel you cringe and blush as you realise, I am talking about you, and you wonder how many more are sitting at home thinking ‘Oh my god that is me! Yet you do not like to see yourself as a pathetic victim, so you allow such demeaning, despicable behaviour to continue and you continue to make excuse after excuse.

So, what do you intend to do? Continue reading in the hope I will save you from this hell by giving you permission or the method to leave. There is no magic answer, no fairy wand to wave away your misery, no wishing will make it happen, it must come from you. You could stop now and go upstairs and pack a bag, get your passport and any small treasured items you can carry and just leave but no you continue to sit there and imagine it will all go away so make more excuses such as it is coming up for Christmas and you don’t have relatives to take you in, you are not yet at the stage of desperation where a doorstep is preferable to being in your comfortable home so you continue to sit and sip your tea and read on until it is time to pick the children up from school. 

For others of you the children are all grown and moved on and have jobs and family of their own. They no longer bother to visit very often as their lives are too busy and anyway, Australia, the USA and any other far flung country is about as far from you and your situation that they could go as they knew no matter what they said you would not leave.   You had dedicated your life to being a martyr as you believed in the sanctimony of marriage and the vows you had taken. Harsh you may think, who is this person to say such things. But are your vows the real reason you stay?

Well, I cannot share my sordid pathetic life with you so pick up the phone and ask for help, find that refuge, I don’t say women’s because there are many men out there who are physically and mentally abused by the woman in their lives but are too ashamed to admit it.  They consider it a failure, that it would not be manly to admit that a woman hit them, or ridiculed them until they lacked self-esteem and believed that no one else would want them or love them as she did when she was not tormenting or goading or proving he was not a man as he cowered in the doorway as she moved towards him with that smile that meant she was about to strike.

The night before I had been prepared to leave, he came home struck for the final time. The police are here now and are about to take his body away. I had just the strength to type this concluding chapter and press send to wish you all a Merry Christmas and may your New Year be without fear, filled with love, health, and happiness even if it means alone. I am going to be at peace for the first time in years, for an eternity because they will find a second body and it is mine.

Copyright Jane Goodhew