Who Are You? Read Online Free Page A

sort him out. On the good days she can convince herself that Alex really is the same man she married, and she can try and forget about all the bad stuff and be the glass half-full person and believe him when he says it will all be OK. But sometimes something will blow up – something not even of her doing – that will push his buttons and leave her feeling nothing but fear and despair. Those are the bad days, the dark days, and she doesn’t like to dwell on those because what’s the point? For Ben’s sake they’ve got to make it work. She wants him to have a secure home; a proper upbringing with both a mother and a father in his life. She owes it to Ben.
    When Alex is loving he can be wonderful: kind and really gentle. And she has this hope that knowing what he was like before means that he can be like that again if he’ll only agree to get some help. Christ, if only. When he came back from Afghanistan the second time, when she realized there was something very wrong, that a new Alex had returned, she pleaded with him to talk to her about what had happened to him, but it was as though he’d locked his emotions into a lead-lined vault and no one – especially her – would ever get anywhere near them. It all seemed so bloody unfair. She’d always believed there was an unbreakable tie between them, based on a deep understanding of each other’s insecurities and what had caused them. She’d persuaded herself that one of the major strengths of their relationship had been this recognition of their similarities. It meant that when the bad things happened they could work things through. She’d tried to convince herself that it was the major crises in their marriage that brought them closer together, as though somehow battling through the traumas and crawling out the other side – scarred, maybe, but still together – made their marriage stronger. Sometimes she wanted to scream at him, ‘For fuck’s sake, Alex, just think of what we’ve been through, what I’ve put up with … and OK, what you’ve put up with … but we’re still bloody here. So if you can’t sort yourself out now, what the hell has it all been for?’ When she’d felt brave enough she’d tried to raise the possibility of his talking to somebody else, perhaps a professional, but he’d told her to lay off, to fuck off, to drop it or else … Christ, he’d even said he’d kill her if she raised it again. Sure, he was only saying that, like people do, but it was the way he said it, which convinced her he really meant it.
    Juliet is finding lots of things hard at the moment, but she finds it particularly cruel when Alex accuses her of being the one who’s at fault. He has the bloody nerve to tell her she has mood swings. She tells him that they’re not mood swings, they’re just normal reactions to his behaviour. That anyone ‘normal’ would react in the same way as she does. He tries to make out that she’s bipolar or something, like a manic depressive, but she knows she isn’t. It’s his way of justifying his own behaviour. It’s just the effect that he has on her. God, that’s the basic script of so many of their rows.
    She’s like an apple in a bowl of water, quite happily bobbing around on the surface, and then Alex comes along and gets his teeth into her to try and drown her. But he can’t. She just bobs up again. She thinks it annoys him the way she bounces back, because it shows that he can’t really control her fully.
    ‘Why can’t you just do as I say?’ he’ll ask her. ‘If only you could just do what I want then we wouldn’t have all these bloody awful rows.’
    And what if she did? He wouldn’t respect her for it, would he? He’d just get worse until there was nothing left of her own will. It’s exhausting living with Alex but she has ways of coping, and she tries to show him that if he does treat her badly she’ll give just as good as she gets. Alex used to say that had always been their attraction to each