Episode # 14

Ava, her father and the cowboy – The Father:

Sometimes, the thought of living alone for the rest of my life, however fucking long that was going to be, was nearly appealing. First of all, I can do whatever I want, even if I do sweet fuck all most of the time. Ava’s hardly ever around and when she is, she’s in her room with the door closed. I hate closed doors.

Most of the time I was with Yvonne I was bored. I’d been bored since the day I was born, if you want to know the truth. My Mum reckons I didn’t cry when I came out of her, I just yawned. There’s not much that excites me. Nothing changed much when I married Yvonne. The wedding was so fucking boring. On that night, her brother, who’s a right royal pisshead was drinking as much free beer as he could without spewing and he can hardly stand and he’s telling me I’d better look after his “baby sister” or he’d come and get me. Yeah, right.

The guy was a dwarf. Did he not have a mirror? Did he not know that I was about ten times bigger than him? So the marriage is about five minutes old and I’m getting grief from a dwarf who wants to shit on me. Then, on our wedding anniversary, like the first one, it’s a pretty big deal so I bought Yvonne flowers and chocolates and told her we’d go to the pub for a counter meal.

Turns out that wasn’t good enough and then I got a whole lot of tripe about not being interested in her shit. But that wasn’t true, I wasn’t interested in my shit either. Most of the time in our marriage, I just wanted to do nothing. Then when she runs off with that gay, fancy talking dickhead I just thought, yeah, that’d be right.

So now I could scratch my arse and fart and stuff and watch whatever I wanted. Nothing mattered. Then out of nowhere, along comes Gail. It made me uncomfortable, you know, a woman paying me attention.

She’d just stand there and start talking and she’d always end with a question, like you know, I had to say something back. I knew how to play that game, I thought so I’d only give short answers. Like really short. Like one or two words. But she’d go, “Oh, okay”, like she was really interested or like I’d just told her how to split the atom or something.

Truth is, I didn’t want Gail to find out about my wife leaving me for another man. I was so fucking shop soiled it’s like I had the word “loser” stamped on my forehead. What woman would ever want to be seen with a guy that’s been dumped? So, how was I as a man? I don’t know, I never worked out shit like that. But I tell you what, I’d sure taken a hit when Yvonne left.

But when Gail found out, it’s like it didn’t matter. She didn’t appear to give two hoots about much from the past. She told me at our age we have to live in the now and that people change and marriages fuck up all the time.

She’s pretty smart in some ways, I’ll give her that. So we’d been out and I’d had her around here and we’d kissed and now I was starting to worry about what would come next. The big trouble was that she made me feel good and I’d never felt good in my life. All of a sudden I didn’t feel like a useless piece of shit.