Friday was one of Maisie's gym nights, so I wore dark clothing and waited in the bushes at the back of the car park. It wasn't long before I saw Gavin pull up in his flash red BMW with "GAV" as part of the number plate. No wonder Karen knew that it was his car without any mix-up.
Sure enough, just over an hour and ten minutes later, Gavin returned to the car alone, but sat in the car waiting rather than drive off. Two minutes later, my loving wife put in an appearance. She walked over to the car and let herself in the back seat. Gavin got out of the front, looked all round and got into the back with her. Within five minutes the car was bouncing up on its springs like Karen had described.
Now, why was I still crouching there? Any hot blooded male should be storming over there as soon as she got in the car and bashing their bloody heads together, instead of letting them smack the bases of their torsos together. Oh, yes, I was angry, you can be sure of that, but I didn't want to stop them, well not in the short-term, and I definitely didn't want her back.
What I wanted was revenge and I had an idea how I was going to achieve at least part of it.
I crept out of the bushes and up to the car on hands and knees. Using a small screwdriver, I always carried in my work shirt pocket, I slowly let the air out of all four of the tyres. Then I crept away on hands and knees a few car lengths before getting up and looking for Maisie's car. I knew if I let her tyres down in the same way that they would know that it was me, so I just jammed my penknife into the side wall of one of the tyres, so it would look unrelated. Thinking about it, Gavin was getting off bloody lightly, so I crept back to his BMW and this time used my penknife to cut off all four of his tyre valves and chucked them in the undergrowth.
Then I went home and lay on my lounger so I looked asleep when Maisie got home about half eleven. She clipped about, showered and stomped off to bed while I appeared steadfastly asleep throughout. Actually, I fitfully slept in that chair all night.
When I got up on Saturday morning and checked the microwave, her supper was still in there, untouched. I left for work early, as soon as I heard her get up to go to the toilet. I didn't want to be around her in case I lost my temper. Her car was outside, with the spare non-alloy wheel on the rear nearside. I let out about three-quarters of the air and fetched a couple of nails from our garage and hammered them into the tyre. I hoped she would get halfway to the supermarket before the tyre went down and she'd be stuck on the bypass with no spare. I didn't want to make a noise opening her boot, but I am sure that's where the vandalised flat tyre was.
Usually on a Saturday morning, on those weekends when I didn't go down to the coast, I would work overtime from 7am to noon in the garage. Saturday morning was one of our busiest sessions of the week. I had taken this Saturday off. I drove into town and bought several cans of body-building protein powder, a case each of wine and beer and a load of chocolate bars. I guessed that when Maisie got home she'd need a glass or two of wine. The house was empty when I got back. I emptied the protein powder into empty jars of flour and sugar and packed the rest in plain freezer bags which I stored at the top of the cupboards out of normal reach. I started cooking a pasta sauce with loads of olive oil and the protein powder mixed into the sauce. I thought that if Maisie had plenty to drink, she wouldn't notice any taste difference.
I went to look at No 22 Fairfield Walk to see if I could get a glimpse of who the guy was, but the car was missing from the short driveway.
Next, I called Emma, the slimming consultant, to get hold of Gavin's address. I told her I had arranged to pick up some recipes from him but lost the post-it with his address on. She was happy to supply it to me, knowing we often close to him. I drove over to see him, but there was no sign of his bright red car either. However, I rang the bell while I was there and spoke to his wife, an attractive confident-looking woman in her early thirties.
I sat down and introduced myself and told her straight that her husband was having an affair with my wife. She had expected something of the kind as soon as I asked to speak to her privately. She had suspected her husband of other affairs but he always denied them and she had never had concrete proof.
Adrienne had three young children and wanted to keep her marriage. I told her she would need to keep Gavin on a short lease if that was the case, perhaps by hinting to him that friends were keeping a check on him and she was hearing some strong rumours.
I owned up to her about vandalising his car at the sports centre and that I was now going to concentrate on frustrating the pair of them in future. She thought it was very funny and we laughed about it, agreeing that we would keep in touch and let each other know our respective partners' movements. Adrienne and I exchanged mobile and email addresses and then I got up to go.
I had got a missed call from Maisie on my mobile while at Adrienne's. I had an inkling what it was about and called her back on my way out of Adrienne's door. Maisie screamed at me that she was stranded on the bypass with a flat tyre. She blamed it on me for not checking her spare regularly enough.
"Honey," I said, "you didn't even tell me you had already had to use the spare."
She shut up ranting then, probably unwilling to tell me how she managed to change the old tyre.
I said, "I'll pick up a spare BMW wheel from the garage and get to you in thirty minutes and sort you out."
I took my leave of the lovely Adrienne at her door. As I turned to say goodbye, I held both her hands and blurted out that I was so sorry that I had brought such bad news of my wife's infidelity, saying it was probably my fault, and my eyes started to well up.
Adrienne put her arms around me and pulled me into her shoulder and rubbed and patted my back. I returned the comforting pats and rubs in as neutral a place as I could find, between her shoulder blades. Adrienne was cooing and reassuring me that it will be all right, as if I was a child. After thirty or forty seconds, we released each other and pressed a couple of cheek kisses on each other before I left to collect my soon-to-be-ex-wife Maisie.
I thought about my situation on the way, of course I did. I really hadn't thought of anything else since Karen tipped me the wink about my cheating wife. How did I feel about her lovers Gavin and the mystery father of young children from the bank? Well, the common denominator in both these affairs was Maisie. Whose fault it was didn't really matter, she shouldn't be doing what she was doing. It certainly wasn't a one-time mistake due to being drunk or some other excuse, she was having an affair, in fact multiple affairs at the same bloody time, the slut! We had a sworn agreement to be faithful with one another, forsaking all others it said. We weren't just shacked up, we weren't a casual relationship, our commitment was tied, not tenuous, we were married and had a legally binding contract to have and to hold for better or for worse and she should have honoured it.
When we agreed to marry, we did so as equals, OK she was better looking than me at the time (who wasn't?) but I made up for my lacking in the looks department by helping to support her through college and providing us a roof over our heads until she had established her career. Since then she had improved herself out of all proportion, not only career wise, but she looked much foxier than when we originally started out. Meanwhile, I had pretty well stayed still career wise and my looks had gone downhill. I had been overweight and even though I had lost most of the surplus weight, my body had a lot of loose skin and I was not exactly as toned as my tanned upper torso implied.
It seemed to me that we were no longer in the same league. Maisie had been promoted to the Championship and I had until recently dropped down a couple of divisions to Non-league. Due to my efforts I could say I was back in the game in League Two, but I still had some catching up to do. Could I ever catch up though? Was it in me to make myself attractive to my wife again? More to the point, though, did I want her anymore, now I knew how I was being treated?
