Whenever my husband latched onto some daft new fad, I really just had to strap myself in and sit under that dark storm cloud until his interest finally waned.
For example, on Monday, Glen might have returned home from the supermarket with six bottles of olive oil that he’d guzzle by the spoonful, because it ‘helped stabilize blood sugar’. Then, by Thursday, he’d have moved on to lathering manuka honey over everything for the ‘antibacterial properties’, never mind the fact it cost £85 a fucking jar…
His latest fad started with a tennis ball, of all things. While out walking our pet Beagle, Toto, Glen bet I couldn’t clear the fence some 50 yards away. I made it soar clean past that point.
But then Toto took off after the projectile, burrowed his way beneath the closest post, and disappeared.
“Great fucking job Pete,” Glen snapped, his angry forehead wrinkle making itself known.
As I jogged away backwards, I threw my hubby a shit-eating grin. “Enjoy cleaning those dishes, bitch.”
I got halfway over the post before deciding it was too slippery, but climbing back down, my finger snagged. There was a sharp tug with zero pain, and when I looked down, my first thought was: oh great, Glen’s gonna make a scene…
“Don’t freak out,” I said, once he finally caught up, breathless, “but I need you to call an ambulance.”
My ring finger had become completely degloved; only the tendon remained attached to the knuckle. To my surprise, Glen didn’t hyperventilate at the sight of all the juicy blood—he just stared fixedly at the lonesome digit slowly rotating in front of my waist, a bungee jumper hanging from a cord.
A passing nurse bandaged me up while we waited for the paramedics, who doped me up with some seriously good shit. At the hospital, a doctor drove a needle into my mangled finger base. Even with all those painkillers, it stung like a pissed-off hornet.
Three days later I got discharged and sent home, one digit lighter.
Toto got found by a cute couple with an adorable eight-year-old daughter who cried when she learned her new best friend already had owners. As the father handed him over to me on their front porch, he said, “Damn kids heartbroken. Her and Toto played with a stupid rope toy for three hours straight last night.”
The doctors warned me I might need therapy to cope with the amputation, but honestly, the trauma of losing a finger wasn’t nearly so bad as the inconvenience of having a spouse who endlessly talked about losing a finger…
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said one evening, as we sat down to a dinner of smoked salmon and manuka honey, “but can we please go ten minutes without mentioning phantom pains or tissue death?”
“Fine.”
Except it wasn’t actually fine. Glen could be louder than a blender without uttering a single word, and from the pursed lips and narrow eyes, you could tell he was desperate to discuss some obscure study about limb detachment by some fringe scientist in Denmark.
Why’s it always the Danes?
“Go on then,” I sighed.
He leaned forward, elbows on the table, telling me about amputation—about how increased blood flow accelerates the healing of wounds. From there, he pivoted to Olympic athletes and how they extract and re-inject their blood to boost ‘red-cell concentration’.
You see what I was up against…
The next morning, as I shuffled into the bathroom, my eye happened across this big purple plumb wrapped around Glen’s toothbrush.
When pressed, Glen held his hand behind his back and tried to distract me by insisting I should read the five-hundred-page study he WhatsApped me.
Using my height/weight advantage—let’s just say the kids in my English class didn’t call me ‘Grizzly Adams’ for nothing—I wrestled Glen’s hand out of hiding.
A string was tied around the base of his forefinger, so tight the digit had inflated to triple its regular size. It quickly deflated once I pulled the thread loose.
“Why can’t you sign up for a gym membership like a regular person?” I asked.
Of course, the love of my life had his comeback ready: because running and weightlifting are terrible for your body. Didn’t you know pro-athletes all wind up with artificial knees by their early forties? If they’re not already dead, that is…
I blamed his father for the whole horrible mess. All those weight jokes had burrowed deep inside Glen’s psyche, embedding themselves like a tick. This was simply the manifestation.
For the next few weeks, every time he opened his mouth, it was a fountain of pure arse gravy; a tidal wave of diarrhoea more pungent than the bathroom during that week when he ate nothing except sardines and rhubarb.
He told me our bodies had a concentration of minerals and that scientists in California had figured out how to ‘focus’ them. Neanderthals understood this stuff, back when mankind truly engaged with nature. And anytime I said, “Why not come with me to weight watchers?” he’d sob and bring up the time an attendant at Disney World told him he was too heavy to ride Space Mountain, and he had to watch as his entire family got on without him.
He was 27 that day.
Later one night, the fire alarm started screeching. I reached over and flicked on the porcelain lamp Glen’s aunt left us; the one with the French aristocrat figurine whose eyes tracked you across the room.
Quickly we pulled on our robes and scrambled to rescue Toto. Fortunately, after a few minutes of complete terror, we realized the alarm was caused by faulty wiring and settled back down.
And to think, we’d already had that bastard electrician out six times…
As I climbed back into bed grumbling about a refund, it hit me how, during the mad panic, Glen only wrestled one arm through the sleeve of his robe.
When I ripped the blanket away, I saw a limp, blue appendage sprawled across my husband’s torso. A rope was tied around his arm, just beneath the deltoid. Fuck knows how he managed the knot by himself.
The two of us argued around the house, his arm flopping about like an out-of-control firehouse. After finally giving in and loosening the knot, he shivered his fingertips a half inch or so. “See? You’re getting worked up over nothing.”
He threw me a cheery smile like the argument was finished. No need for these ‘over-the-top’ theatrics, darling.
That felt a little condescending from the guy who sobbed loud enough to get us kicked out of ‘Marley and Me’…
Over the next month, I’d ask him to fetch a tin opener from the middle drawer, then he’d awkwardly paw at the handle, his hands pale and useless because he’d been sitting on them for hours. And occasionally he’d limp out of the bathtub with a red ring beneath his kneecap, then I’d discover twine clogging up the drain.
Once it became clear this nonsense wasn’t simply another flash-in-the-pan craze, I gave him an ultimatum: me, or the bullshit.
What did he do? He crammed his belongings into a suitcase and marched straight out the door.
From then on, I could only keep tabs on him through the scale readings and selfies posted on Instagram, each post accompanied by a mountain of hashtags. #weightloss #weightlossjourney #healthylifestyle #motivation
Note the words ‘fitness’ and ‘diet’ don’t appear anywhere on that list.
As he went from 127kg to 115, to 105, his following grew.
You can do it.
So proud of you.
You’ve inspired me with my journey.
I texted him ferociously, begging him to come up to for air, but he never responded.
Little by little, oddities crept into the selfies. They started as full-body mirror pics, soon switching to extreme angles where you couldn’t see below the chest, then only showed him from the neck up, and soon, not even that.
Meanwhile, those figures continued to plunge: 94, 83. You couldn’t lose that much weight if you cosied up to a damn tapeworm.
I completely lost the plot and messaged him to come home immediately, otherwise, we were through. I didn’t want the police on my doorstep saying they found a rotted bag of skin and bones that I was once married to.
After that exchange, his Instagram page got deleted, and my calls went unanswered.
Two weeks later, in the middle of the night, a door shivered open downstairs, so I pulled on a robe and shouted ‘Glen?’ into the darkened hall.
No answer. I exited the room, feeling along the wall for the light switch that did nothing.
Damn electrician…
Dread crept into the pit of my stomach as a voice called out from the lounge. It sounded like Glen, only more…guttural. The kind of sounds you make in a dentist’s chair.
I called out to him, receiving only a muffled, “Pete,” in reply.
In the lounge, a trapezoid of moonlight was thrown across the floor by the bay window. In the direct center sat a figure perched on a wooden stool, it’s back to me.
From the blonde hair, I could tell it was Glen. Only…thinner. I let out a sigh of relief, crossed the room, and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Okay, what the hells going—”
As my husband spun around, the words caught inside my throat.
There was a gaping hole in the middle of his face, through which you could see the beginnings of a nasal passage. Beneath it, the lips were gone, as though they had succumbed to a flesh-eating bacteria. I retched.
Before I could react, a hand shot out and plunged a needle into my neck. My gut churned uneasily as the room and all the furniture sloshed from side to side, and then I hit the floor, hard.
Glen rose. A plucked chicken wing poked through his left sleeve, capped by a rounded elbow infested with maggots, and the hand which had been holding the needle moments earlier only had two fingers and a thumb.
The last thing I can remember was staring at a bare foot that ended in a perfectly straight line, as though somebody had sliced the rest off with a guillotine.
I woke up staring at the bedroom ceiling, my arms raised and splayed out, wrists secured to the bedpost by a length of rope that bit down on the spongy flesh. The slack gave me about six inches of movement.
I couldn’t feel my toes. Oh fuck, did that maniac cut off my legs? What else had he cut off?
I wriggled my nose, puckered my lips, did a few kegels, and then let out the deepest sigh of relief imaginable, almost forgetting my dire situation.
I squirmed from side to side, alternating between trying to shimmy and brute force my way out. I screamed even though I knew it wouldn’t help since our closest neighbour was that partially-deaf old lady who threatened to have Toto put down for pissing on her rose bushes.
To my left, the door swung open, and then Glen leaned into my window of vision, his exposed teeth chattering away as he promised things would be okay. The words came out all garbled because of those missing lips.
“You sick fuck,” I screamed. “You cut off my legs.”
“Not yet,” he replied, eyes gliding across my naked body. I craned my neck far enough to see past my waist.
Two hose clamps were fastened around my thighs, tighter than a python. There was a two-inch recess where they plunged into the flesh. Past them, my toes had turned impossibly blue.
Glen promised things would be over soon. Every time he spoke it took a little contemplation to deduce the words. “You’ll feel so much better this way.”
“Why are you doing this?” I screamed, between bouts of hysteria.
He launched into another tirade, excitedly raving about some fringe researcher who believed amputation makes you healthier because the blood has less distance to travel. Cut off an arm, the good bacteria in your gut produce extra iron. Lop off some fingers, and hey presto, lung capacity just increased by 14%.
“You’ll kill us both,” I cried.
“Don’t be so dramatic. Look at me.” He straightened up and struck a pose. “This treatment worked wonders.”
“Glen, you’re killing yourself. Look at your arm. There’s maggots everywhere.”
“Shows what you know. Maggots only eat the dead skin. It’s like a little exfoliation treatment.”
Glen grabbed a pencil and stabbed it into my ankle. Only after a few seconds did I realize he was testing whether I had any feeling left.
I faked a grimace. “Ooohhh.”
Teeth rattling away, he smiled and said, “Almost ready.” And with that, he disappeared into the hall.
I thought Glen’s horrible, garbled voice was the most bone-chilling sound I’d ever heard, until a few minutes later when a metal whine rang out from the garage.
He was testing the circular saw…
With every available ounce of strength, I squeezed, pulled, and twisted, but before I could work myself loose, the door creaked open once again.
A giant pool of sweat gathered beneath my bare ass. Here we go. Goodbye leftie, goodbye rightie. You were always my favourite…
A little ball of fur jumped up onto the bed and licked along my face. “Toto,” I cried out, relieved. “Here boy, bite this rope.”
He stared blankly, tongue hanging from the corner of his mouth, until I said, “Get me out of here then we’ll go for a walk.”
The magic ‘W’ word sent him into overdrive.
Soon the knot around my left hand loosed enough for me to reach as far as the ugly lamp on the bedside table, but before I’d worked the other free, unsteady footsteps travelled along the stairs.
My time had just run out…
Left with no other option, I shooed Toto off the bed, lay flat, and held both arms against the headboard as though still pinned in place.
Glen stepped into the room, the circular saw pinched between the crook of his pencil-eraser elbow and two-fingered hand. “Toto, who let you out?”
While he shooed my furry saviour into the hall and closed the door with his foot, I forced myself to remain perfectly still, arms quaking.
Glen marched across the room and stood beside the bed, ready to carve me up like a Christmas turkey. The saw made a brutal hissing sound as it spun round and round.
He handled it pretty well for someone with only three digits, honestly.
As he squatted into position, my hand shot out and seized his aunt’s lamp, then I sat up as far as my restraints would allow, swung the ugly figurine in a fierce arc, and smashed the heavy base across the top of my husband’s skull.
What happened next was a PSA on why you should never play with power tools. Glen collapsed forward, the saw chewing through both the mattress and his neck, mere inches from the side of my exposed midriff.
With his top half sprawled across the bed, Glen’s eyes rotated towards me, a ring of blades threaded through his jaw, the entire lower half of his face a torn rag with diagonal, metal spokes shining through.
Several minutes later, after a little negotiation, I worked my arms free, then I rolled over onto the floor and crawled around the bed on my elbows, past the heap of amputated meat that hadn’t quite died yet, and out into the hall, where Toto licked my face, eager to get on with that walk.
At the hospital, the doctors and investigators insisted I didn’t have a choice, and even Glen’s dad agreed. “That boy was fucking wild,” he said, staring out the window. “I just don’t understand why he couldn’t have just signed up for a gym membership?”
“Who knows,” I replied, then wriggled my big toes. “Who fucking knows.”