The honeymoon is over!

We quickly settled into a routine.  We’d walk to Nundah train station together then from the city station walk to City Hall in the morning.  Working in sections only separated by a waist-high divider we would often have lunch together.  The reverse journey every afternoon was the same except that the moment we walked in our front door, P would sit down and turn the TV on then ask “What’s for dinner?”.  I taught myself how to cook pretty quickly because P ‘acted’ as though he was completely useless in the kitchen.  He only knew two temperature settings on the stove, either off or full blast, so he burned everything he ‘attempted’ to cook.  He claimed to be a “meat and potatoes” man and also demanded a roast meal every Sunday for lunch.  I had grown up with Mum’s international cooking so I loved Chinese, Italian and Greek cuisine to supplement everyday Aussie food, so I found his bland tastes very constricting.

Being Winter, the football season was in full swing so he was kept busy with training sessions on Tuesday and Thursday nights and if the team’s prospects were good toward the end of the season, training would also take up part of Sunday.  He played Australian Rules Football in the major competition in Brisbane and the games were played on Saturday.  I didn’t mind him playing, in fact I was very proud of him but it was all the boozing afterwards with his mates that caused all the problems.  He came home drunk from every training session and I had to watch him get drunk after every Saturday game.  Once he started drinking, he wouldn’t or couldn’t stop until he was very drunk.

As soon as he got home in this condition, my own personal nightmare would start.  One minute he would be affectionate and loving, then something would set him off and he would become violently aggressive.  For example, one of his friends had just come back from his tour of duty in Vietnam.  Poor GS came back to find his world had changed while he had been away.  None of his mates, including P, had been conscripted into service so they had all moved on with their lives without him.  He came back to find himself at a loose end and frequently dropped in to visit us at our flat.  Apparently P suspected he was dropping in to see me, but didn’t mention anything to him.  Instead he took it out on me during his first drunken attack in our flat.  P wanted me to have sex with him and when I said “No” he went berserk.  I saw his pupils dilate until there was almost no colour left in his eyes.  He accused me of having sex with GS and my denials fell on deaf ears as he started to hit me.  I ran into the bedroom and slammed the door shut but he put his foot through the door and broke into the bedroom.  He proceeded to hit me until I couldn’t get up, then he passed out.

One of my mother’s favourite expressions came back to haunt me, “You’ve made your bed, now you have to lie in it”.  I couldn’t go home, I was too ashamed to tell anyone … not my best friend or my twin sister.  The next morning he claimed he couldn’t remember any of it, but after he saw the huge bruises on my body he promised that it would never happen again and went out to buy me flowers.  The next time he came home drunk, I thought I could avoid the violent consequences by saying “Yes” when he wanted sex.  You can’t imagine how disgusting it is to have sex:

1. When you don’t want to
2. With a completely drunk man

It was like making love to a jellyfish and apparently I couldn’t fake that it was the best thing in the world, because he went berserk anyway beating me while he demanded to know who my lover was!

This became the routine in our marriage for the next 16 years.  Summer was better as he didn’t meet up with his mates quite as often, except on special occasions such as Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and his birthday in February.