Is This It – Chapter 1 - A man coming to terms with his marriage
My name is Chris Mathieson. I'm married to Debbie and we have three children, Erin aged 12, Liz age 10 and Bobby aged 6.
We live in a small seaside town in Scotland in a house left to Debbie by her Grandmother. It's a nice house and since we moved in ten years ago, we have spent a lot of time remodelling it to Debbie's taste. I say Debbie's taste as I provide the labour and she, the interior design skills.
This arrangement works pretty well, Debbie is the clever one and an interior designer by profession. I on the other hand, well I am a plasterer by trade, a manual worker who until recently was employed as a jobbing plasterer around construction sites locally.
Due to the slump in new housing builds, I decided to branch out two years ago and now have a specialist plasterwork business. Period houses in this part of the world have a lot of moulded plasterwork on their ceilings and I found I have knack of finding the right way to take mouldings of the existing, often damaged work sites and reproduce new mouldings that match the existing. In two year's I have gone from being the hands on fixer, undertaking all the work required to a situation where I now employ three of my mates to do the manual elements freeing me to concentrate on the sales, estimating and customer management. I'm the boss and it feels great work-wise.
So everything in the house is rosy! Not a bit of it. To find the reasons for my current situation, one has to go back almost twenty years. Twenty years ago I was a skinny schoolboy who hated everything to do with education. I was never going to be an academic and did barely enough to get a few basic qualifications. I left school at the earliest opportunity when I was sixteen, but I am getting slightly ahead of myself.
At school, I was bullied relentlessly. Principally this was by a fellow student, Terry Roberts. Terry was in the same year as me but he was bigger and clever enough not to start anything unless he was accompanied by his group of cronies. High School was not an enjoyable experience until I started to fill out during my last year. I took a sudden sprout and went from five foot four to nearly six feet in just over a year and put the muscle on to go with this new height. During my final year I also gained the confidence to take Roberts or Big T, as everyone called him on whether his mates were there or not. I ended up with detention on quite a few occasions following complaints from angry parents. What the hell, I was leaving anyway, what were they going to do, expel me!
Big T had a girl friend and I really did fancy her, but she would not give me the time of day. She was destined for University and or Art School, I never really knew at the time which. Her name was Deborah or Debbie McEwan and she was every boy's idea of a wet dream. She was to become my wife and how that came about sowed the seeds of my present predicament.
As I mentioned I left school at sixteen and started a trade apprenticeship. Learning how to make tea was my most arduous task during the first few weeks but because of my size and strength I soon moved on to learn the skills that were to be the basis of my present success.
I had a few girlfriends and soon learned how with a bit of boyish charm and flannel, how to sweep them off their feet and into bed. My first success was with a local girl and we were soon at it like rabbits. It had to stop when she started making noises about getting engaged. After that, I found I liked the local licensed beverages and it was in bars that I found a better outlet for my randy instincts, married women! From my selfish standpoint, there were many advantages. They knew what the score was and if they were willing to put it about, I was happy to receive it.
Looking back, I'm not proud of that period of my life as I fucked my way through the available talent locally until one night I received my comeuppance. Three or four husbands with lumps of two by two timber laid into one evening as I left a local hostelry and put me in hospital for two weeks. The single thing I remember from the beating was the angry face shoved in mine and an angry snarling voice saying. "Yew dinna fuck married wimmen in yer ane midden!" (back yard)
A lesson I learned well and after that I was careful to satisfy my sexual needs as far away from my home town as possible. I still concentrated on married women and it was a rare event for me to be lonely at the weekend. By the end of my final year as an apprentice, I had my own place, nothing much to speak of, but it was mine. It was a one bedroom flat in a tenement building and it was a great place for me to bring back my conquests for a quick shag. The only fly in the ointment was having to get up to take them home at a reasonable hour. Then I found a steady date, a married woman with her own car. I didn't even need to wine or dine her, all she wanted was sex and boy she wanted as much as I could provide. She would phone me when she had the chance for shag and if I was available, she would come over and we would fuck. She even had her own key as it saved her hanging around if I was later getting back.
This arrangement suited both of us, no emotional entanglements and sex on tap. Well it was until the day she turned up without calling ahead first and found me in bed with her daughter. That did proved the end of that arrangement, but it was time to move on in any case.
Events overtook that part of my life in the shape of a party held in the local rugby club where I captained the second team. The social side of rugby in those days was great and if the piss taking sometimes went too far, it never held any malice
I used to get the piss taken out of me regularly by my mates at the rugby club about never having a steady girlfriend and would just grin and say. "I'm waiting for the right lassie." They new I was screwing a married woman, but I was discreet enough not the let them see me with her. One of my friends from school who also played for the seconds and who knew about my admiration for Debbie, used to keep me advised of what she was up to. It seems that she did indeed attend Art School in Glasgow and was nearly finished her degree course. He also informed me that she was still attached to Big T and they looked likely to get married in the summer.
It was at a post match session at the Club that I got reacquainted with Debbie and Big T. It was fairly late on in the evening and we all had had a few beers in celebration of our win. The bar was decked out with Xmas decorations, complete with Tree and Trimmings, when in strolled Big T with Debbie in tow. Two other couples accompanied big T and Debbie and all were well oiled.
