The Backpacking Housewife. Janice Horton
lives in Australia on the Gold Coast. Joanie lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Both their husbands, they tell me, are in banking.
‘Boring men who’d rather stay at home than travel!’ they chorus gleefully.
‘Sounds like my husband,’ I agree, wondering why I’d even mentioned him.
‘So, we meet up in a different place every year and tick something else off our bucket list,’ Joanie tells me. ‘Last year, we met up in Hong Kong.’
Marcie roars with laughter. ‘Oh, yeah, we had a ball in Hong Kong!’
When we part, the ladies go off laughing and chatting and I go back up to my room.
I sit on my bed and plug my phone into its charger, thinking about my own bucket list.
I do have one. I’ve had one for a long time. Only, until now, it’s been more of a wish list.
My phone suddenly comes back to life and I see I have two new messages.
One is from Sally, the traitorous whore, and one is from my lying husband.
I can hardly believe their nerve in texting me.
Especially as it’s so obviously coordinated.
I open Sally’s first. In it, she says she’s sorry for the way I’d found out about her and Charles, but apparently, she’s not sorry about their affair (which she calls a ‘relationship’) that has been going on for over a year. I want you to know Charles and I are in love and that he was planning to leave you. I feel like her hand has just come right through the phone and slapped my face.
My anger flares up again. Tears of betrayal fill my eyes and pour down my cheeks.
How can this be true? For over a year? How could I not have known about this?
Have there been any tell-tale clues, that I’ve missed?
Receipts for things I hadn’t known about? Meals, hotels, gifts?
Has Charles’ behaviour over the past year been an indication?
He’d been a little distant. Uncaring on occasions. Indifferent, certainly.
Should I have been going through his pockets and secretly checking his phone records?
We hadn’t been having sex. Was that a factor?
I’d just assumed we were typical of all couples who’d been married a long time.
Charles works long hours for seven days a week, running our business. He often complained of being tired. I understood when he fell asleep in front of the TV at the end of the day. But what kind of wife doesn’t have a clue that her husband is fucking another woman?
A busy one? A preoccupied one? A trusting one?
An incredibly stupid one?
I open Charles’s message next. It’s written in short, sharp sentences, exactly the way he speaks in real life. Lorraine, I’m divorcing you. We haven’t been happy in a long time. Let’s keep things amicable. Best of luck. Charles.
Divorce! Amicable? Luck?!
His reason for having an affair is that we haven’t been happy in a long time?
On the contrary, it sounds to me like Charles has been very happy indeed.
Going balls deep in Sally behind my back while planning to leave me!
But he’s right about one thing. I haven’t been happy. I’m not happy.
I’ve been bloody miserable for as long as I can remember!
It seems clear to me now that I’ve spent my whole life waiting to be happy on his terms.
Charles is eight years older than me. I was only twenty-two when we met and started dating. We both worked at a travel agency office in town back then. He was the branch manager and I was on the sales desk. It was my dream job and he was my dream boyfriend. He seemed so worldly. Charles and I fell in love over our passionate plans to explore the world together.
During our working day, our job was to plan detailed travel itineraries for our adventurous clients. But in the evenings, sitting in our local pub over two half pints of beer, we would talk endlessly about all the faraway countries that we wanted to visit one day, the interesting places we wanted to see and the incredible experiences we wanted to have when we got there.
We’d plan routes across India, taking in the Golden Triangle of Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur. We’d look at flights to exotic destinations like South East Asia, Japan, Korea and China. We’d investigate travelling by train all the way from Beijing to Hong Kong. We’d even fully researched and planned a three-thousand-mile road trip all the way from the Canadian Rockies to the Mexican Border. Charles used to say to me: ‘Don’t call it a dream, call it a plan.’
And it seemed that the whole world was ours for the living and for the travelling.
He filled me with wanderlust and inspiration and excitement.
I thought we were soul mates and kindred roaming spirits.
Every summer, on a limited budget, we used up all our holiday leave and money travelling.
We mostly backpacked around Europe: France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Greek islands… Charles and I were always talking about and planning and saving up for our next trip. At work, we were surrounded by glossy travel brochures and the spirit of travel and the promise of exotic adventures in lands far away.
Then, a few years later, everything changed. We got married.
Charles and I moved into a flat in town above a shop where we’d decided to set up our very own travel agency. Those were the days before the internet made independent travel possible. Back then, everyone expected to book their holidays through a high street travel shop. We were good at selling the idea of travel and our business boomed. It was the early Nineties and people at that time were starting to look further afield for their holidays. It was a time when those who usually went to Malta and Gibraltar were choosing to go to Turkey and Cyprus instead. Families who would usually opt for the Costas in Spain were starting to consider Florida, for a change.
Then the recession hit, interest rates went through the roof and for the next few years, instead of travelling, holidaymakers stayed at home and we ploughed all our time and money into our now struggling business. Instead of all those inspiring travel quotes, Charles’s mantras soon became ‘success is a journey, not a destination’.
Well, that’s what happens, isn’t it? When you get married, your life and priorities change.
Free and single becomes, well, something else, and life gets in the way.
Then our kids came along and the business picked up and life was steady again. I loved being a mother and family life was blissfully happy. But, of course, it was all-consuming when it came to my time and energy. Soon, we needed to move ‘up in the world’ by selling our little rented flat over the shop to buy a detached townhouse with a garden for our two rambunctious little boys.
We certainly needed the space, even if it was going to be a struggle to afford the mortgage.
When our boys were a little older, we decided to invest in their future and put them both through a very good private school. This was a good decision, which paid dividends in the long run, with both our boys going on to achieve straight As and places at top universities. Everyone said we had it all. And, indeed, it seemed that we did.
A lovely home. A successful business. Two wonderful clever sons who made us proud.
Charles went on to expand the business by investing in the new technology of the time.
Money was tight, so again, we forfeited any holidays or weekends away.
But soon, we not only had the shop in town, we also had an effective and profitable travel website too. I didn’t have to work anymore. I was a homemaker. A housewife.
I