Finally, when he wanted to have children, to bring up kids in a way different to how his life had been, his dream failed to come alive. So he took the next best option. He married Flo, who already had three kids of her own, and tried to step into the father role, but it wasn’t easy. He’d even hit Flo’s daughter Rachel, who seemed to always resent his presence, and Jan became stricter than stepmothers in the wildest fairytales. He knew that parents fucked you up, but what about being a parent, or not being the right parent, that fucked you up twice over.
Switching on his computer he read his e-mail. Two dozen junk mails consisting mainly of advertisements for Viagra and teen porn, an offer of five million dollars if he gave out his bank account details, a dozen from Sally, his mistress in Canada, a couple from doctors in Australia working in a similar area and one from Flo’s youngest son Ethan. The last was a rare occurrence.
“I know what you’re up to with Sally,” is all it said.
Sally was Flo’s antithesis, being thick set and grounded in a larger than life sense.
Game over, thought Jan, but then, he thought again. Perhaps he could get Ethan to keep quiet about his discovery, pay him off or something. Then again, it was the guy’s mother. It had to happen sometime or other. Maybe this was the way out. Jan couldn’t concentrate on his work. He had to give a presentation at ten and then there was a meeting of his team. The presentation was already prepared but he didn’t have a clue about the meeting. Wing it, like usual. Lay the blame elsewhere and let things chug along for the time being until there’s a clear way out. He tried to jot down a few points for the agenda and then decided to ring Ethan.
“Hello Ethan, how are you, busy now?”
“So you’ve finally been sprung bad. I’m not surprised really Jan. You always were a complete bastard weren’t you,” drawled Ethan, punching away at his keyboard as he spoke.
“There’s no need to be like that Ethan. You don’t know the full story do you, so you can’t judge. Don’t rush to conclusions. Your mother and I haven’t been getting along for some time and it really isn’t any of your business now is it?”
“Really. So you don’t think you’ve done anything wrong then. Cheating on someone is not a crime in your books,” Ethan continued, his anger behind feigned nonchalance revealing itself through louder thuds on his keyboard.
“Like I said, you don’t know the full picture. There’s no need for you to come down all high and mighty. How do you know your mother doesn’t know about it and allows it, hey?”
“I don’t know but she will now,” shot Ethan, hanging up.
Jan tried Ethan’s number a dozen times and his mobile and then gave up. As soon as Ethan told Flo she would realise why he had been buying two of all those silly gifts, taking so many trips to Canada, flying first class on her money, never being there. He had to wave the old life bye bye. But, then again he had always taken control in the relationship and could maybe still have a woman on both sides of the Atlantic, keeping his base in London.
Jan flew through the presentation, took a couple of questions from the floor, barking statistics at them to shut them up and then attended the team meeting, during which he highlighted the faults of other members of the team, humiliating and undermining them, taking no responsibility for the overall state of the department. Getting back to his office he had thirty messages from Flo.
These ranged from “why don’t you just eat shit and die” to “can we talk about it my darling Jan?” to ‘I’ll always love you.’ Whatever they worked out between them, he realised he couldn’t take it in England any longer. He’d come here from Australia to advance his career and in the process had dragged Flo and her family across the world. Sally had talked about getting him a job at her hospital in Canada and this seemed to be the only real option.
All he had to do now was to try and play the game a little, be sycophantic to those fuck-wits that didn’t deserve it, turn on the charm. He’d tried for full professorships all over the world, but so far had got nowhere.
That evening Flo took an overdose. Knowing what she’d taken, Jan told the nurses not to worry too much, as he sat in A and E, wishing he was now on a plane. A flu epidemic was on, he could see they were pushed for beds, so he decided to get her out of there before she caught something. They had planned to talk about things but when they got back they smoked some weed, had sloppy sex and then went to bed in each other’s arms. At five in the morning Sally called.
“Jan, I need you here. Christopher’s been in an accident at school. I need you to support me. I think we’re going to offer you an interview for a professorship. It will be a formality of course, you’ve already got the job – you know that.”
As Jan hung up his eyes caught Flo’s hollow face.
“That was her wasn’t it?” and then she was off, screaming and shouting for hours. She went round the house, smashing photographs of the two of them together, tearing them out of the frame, and slicing them up.
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