The Black Spot – On the Miseries of Being an 'And Spouse'

When I was a child, my favourite book was the Ladybird version of Treasure Island. I would read the story in bed every night without fail and, now, nearly – gulp – forty years later can still picture how the illustrator rendered Blind Pew, Billy Bones, Jim Hawkins, and Long John Silver, the dank interior of the Admiral Benbow Inn, the red bandanas and thick gold earrings of the pirates, the turquoise sea that lapped the island where the treasure was stashed. An island that one could walk to in low tide near to our home in Ireland was called Gunn’s Island and I would spend hours daydreaming how the place just must have been named for castaway Ben Gunn. Seven- or eight- year-old Gordon was sure that such would be a place where a Captain Flint would have buried his treasure, most probably the side of the island that couldn’t be seen from shore, the one that looked out towards the Isle of Man. My dad, sister and I went there once but we discovered nothing more remarkable than thousands of bullet-hard balls of sheep droppings.

Even though I knew the book practically by heart, there was one bit of Treasure Island I never understood and that was the ‘black spot’, the circular piece of card that, when placed in anyone’s hand, would generate a dejection so virulent and a horror so deep that it would drive the recipient firstly mad and, more often than not, dead. Billy Bones had a constitution that could with- stand decades of rum flagons but, as soon as wizened old Blind Pew thrust the spot into Bones’s right hand, the old seadog was a goner. Throughout the book, rough, tough, mean and gruff pirates would live in fear of falling asunder to this outwardly innocuous piece of card. Only Long John Silver had the fortitude to with- stand its anathematising effects, a feat he accomplished essentially by laughing it away.

I could never understand the fuss about the ‘black spot’. After all it was just a piece of card. How could a piece of flimsy card generate so much terror amongst such seemingly unappeasable men? It seemed hardly in the same terror-inducing league as a cutlass, a cannon ball or an invitation to walk the plank. But then I became a trailing spouse, and, finally, I understood just what a piece of card could do.

The term ‘trailing spouse’ was first coined by Mary Bralove in the Wall Street Journal in 1981 and refers to people whose partners have mobile careers. The partners of diplomats, military officers, academics, businessmen and businesswomen all fit into the category of ‘the trailing spouse’. The term itself is freighted with no small amount of cheerlessness and, as I was to find out, rightfully so.

Meeting the woman who is now my wife in Dili, Timor-Leste felt like winning the ultimate tombola. I’m sure one of the reasons why I love Timor-Leste so much is that it brought us together. We had a great three years together in Dili and spent a similar amount of time in Canberra, where our two amazing sons were born. When she rang to tell me she’d been asked to go overseas for her job, I said ‘let’s do it’ and I thought it’d be a great, fun adventure. I’d spent the last decade or so pigeonholing myself as a consultant working on niche subjects of international development and was excited by the prospect of going somewhere entirely different. This would be the opportunity to write that second book that had itched away at me for a few years. And with a second book, I would feel I actually could call myself ‘a writer’ without feeling that teensy bit fraudulent. ‘There’ll be so much material’, friends told me at my departure party. ‘A book will practically write itself.’ On our final week in Canberra, I’d won the ACT Book of the Year and thought the world full of possibilities.

Before we left, I dipped into some memoirs of trailing spouses, all in the chatty innocent-abroad-type genre, and almost unfailingly written by women. At first blush, the authors made it sound all very exotic: uproarious stories of inadvertent culture clashes at dinner parties, tales of getting lost in the desert/jungle/mountain steppe and the butler mixing up the gin and tonics with the toilet cleaning fluid. It sounded like a right lark. Our arrival was the sort of well-turned anecdote tailor-made for the spousal memoir. Our youngest son vomited non-stop on the first flight and pulled a different party trick on the second, waiting until we landed before discharging three loud bursts of runny poo all over me. Not wanting to be upstaged, our other boy abseiled over a high-backed couch, base-jumped down the other side, got up, and then sprinted the full length of the terminal before throwing himself on the floor of the bookshop and refusing to get up. As we got into the car that picked us up, everyone was kind enough not to remark upon the coagulating browny-yellow additions to my previously blue shirt.

So far, so dinner-party hilarious but, once my wife left for work on our first Monday, melancholy and dread filled me by the time the door had shut. Just exactly how was I going to fill my days? By Wednesday, the boys and I had checked out every shish jungle gym and deathtrap outdoor playground on offer. Our house was full of people hired to attend to our every need, meaning that there was nothing to do. I looked at the calendar. Only 1092 days to go.

I dipped back into the spousal memoirs for succour but this had the opposite of its intended effect, serving only to heighten my unease. Read back in Canberra, these books were big-smile amusing but read in a big empty house in a country in which I knew not a soul their bleaker tinges became obvious. Two sets of messages emerged. The first was about long, empty, pointless days peeking out from almost every page and I knew all about that already. The second set of messaging seemed even more horrifying and that was the total relevance-deprivation syndrome of spousedom. People simply didn’t care about spouses was the message. Brigid Keenan is the doyenne of the ‘trailing spouse’ genre and a gifted, light-touch writer. She writes candidly about how no one took her seriously and/or cared the remotest whit as to who she was or what she did, even though she was an accomplished journalist and writer in her own right. I started to get shiver-down-the-spine alarmed. And that’s when my wife came home with the first of many cards bearing the mark of the ‘black spot’, only my black spot wasn’t a circle but two words that adorned nearly every card, two words that taunted, mocked, and wormed their way into me like a confidence-depleting virus.

My parents gave me three names: Gordon for my grand- father, Patrick for my father and James for the saint on whose feast day I was born. I like my names very much. After forty-three years, I’m very attached to them. They are the names on my wedding certificate, my passport and our sons’ birth certificates.

But yet, once I became a trailing spouse, these given names would disappear and change magically to a new appellation, one totally new to me and one I didn’t care for at all. My new name, it seemed, was ‘and spouse’. My new moniker appeared most days, usually on little invites written on thin cardboard. Some of the invites would be adorned with fancy-schmancy raised emboss- ment while others had the smudged look of having being sent at late notice to a cheapo print shop. But no matter what the print quality, almost always the form of words on them would be similar. Written in arch 19th-century ‘we have the honour to request the pleasure of the com- pany’-style prose, my wife’s name would be accurately rendered but yet I invariably was called ‘and spouse’. Dinners, national days, openings, receptions: the desig- nation would always be the same.

Who was this ‘And Spouse’ person? I guess it must be me? But why did so many people think that I had that name? And what was ‘And’ short for? Andre? Andrew? Andreas? Andean? Andorran? Androcentric? And what sort of surname was ‘Spouse’? I don’t think I have a super-huge ego but why had no one even bothered to know me by name? At first this new name just niggled me but pretty soon it plain flat out infuriated the shit out of me.

I had forgotten largely all about the heroes and thieves of the good ship Hispaniola and the secrets of Treasure Island but now I had an epiphany. The thing I could never understand about the book suddenly made total sense. For ‘and spouse’ was the modern-day equivalent of the ‘black spot’: a verdict of withering judgment from which it is hard to escape, a subtle but firm communication of one’s basement dwelling place in the pecking order of the weird, surreal and cheerless world of the trailing spouse. ‘And spouse’ is a curse that can afflict the strongest of women and men. It can rob self-esteem, snip at self-confidence, induce blubbering, occasion listlessness and lassitude, and guarantee that they’re going to get occasionally condescended to by total and utter clowns. I don’t think anyone put ‘and spouse’ on a card to get a deliberate rise out of me. It’s simply that I wasn’t important enough for anyone to care to find out my name.

There can be no greater test of one’s mental resilience, and, for a man, it is probably the best way to experience the everyday sexism I knew women suffer but had never previously felt.

I hadn’t realised the debilitating powers of the ‘and spouse’ curse before it was visited upon me. But come to think of it, I remember lots of forlorn partners in Dili, busying themselves with busy make-work, being jangly through too many coffees sipped slowly in order to pass the time, pressing the ‘like’ button at inordinate speed, or quickening their voice in punishing self-justification when asked how they spent their days. Probably either totally unused or thoroughly inured to being so idle, many took to drink. In the ‘Ports’ (Moresby and Vila) of the Pacific I’d visited often for work, it didn’t take too much sleuthing to find the trailing spouses, legs a bit wobbly and faces nice and ruddy through getting a few drinks head-start before happy hour officially began. I had a new sense of sympathy for these people, and especially those who had for decades followed their partners here, there and everywhere. The palpable unhappiness of so many of them then was my radiating loneliness and glumness now. Now I was the one getting over-caffeinated; the waiters in the coffee shops would produce my coffee order before I even ordered it. Ordinarily, I’d find such attention to customer needs endearing but here I found it revealing of just how much time I was punching out in coffee shops. I’d change locations once every few weeks but knowledgeable waiter syndrome trailed me like a black dog.

I went back to the Pacific for work a few months in and saw members of my new tribe all the more acutely. In a coffee shop – where else? – I bumped into a guy I’d met four months before he was about to head off with his partner on her overseas assignment. When I met him the first time, he was wearing a nice suit, a Tony Abbott-style power tie and carried with him sheens of can-do confidence. Four months later, he was unshaven, looking ground-down and clenched. ‘Only two years and eight months to go’, he intoned mirthlessly. I felt like I was looking at myself in the mirror.

Ah, but what about the second book? I’d really enjoyed writing my first one and, filliped with the prize, my vague plan was that I could find an easy outlet in writing a second. But a large part of the reason why I was able to write Beloved Land was that it emerged from years of being joyfully in amongst it in Timor-Leste. What was I going to write about here? Lattes I’d loved and lost? I was stumped. I had vague ideas before we left: a travelogue about colonial ghosts, a hidden history of the Irish in off-the-map parts of the world, but nothing was firming up, nothing was sticking.

I concocted a plan. To get out of the coffee shops, I rented a bare room in the top of an estate agency. It was a haven of sorts – no waiters to give me sympathy looks – but no words came out and the bare walls accentuated my loneliness. I opened the six files from then with the words ‘proposal’ in them and found only a few sentences about ideas for books but lots of incomplete killjoy juve- nilia about the miseries of being in a gilded cage, and a few truly dreadful poems. Is it possible for someone in their early forties to write juvenilia? I can assure you it most assuredly is. In a rare bout of proactivity, I wrote to a magazine with an idea for a piece on trailing spouses which I then could do little with but write the same crabby paragraph over and over again. I felt sheepish to have to tell them a month or so later that nothing would be forthcoming.

I’m sure the isolation brought on writers’ block which just deepened a sense of gloom. What affected me most was that many people regarded me as superfluous as cress on a Sunday roast. Of the many low points, here are a few examples to give you the gist: the balding cocktail of ignorance and arrogance who asked me if I’d gone to school in a wheelhouse because, you know, that’s where all us Oirish would have gone to school; the condescend- ing bore of a publisher with a mouth flecked with free sausage roll sneering that my job was essentially to look after the kids. Aren’t publishers meant to be interested in people who write books? The many people who I felt talked to my left earlobe whilst scanning the room for someone more useful to talk to. The endless round of ‘what do you do’ questions and my answers which sounded forced, defensive, false. When I told people I was writing a book, it sounded to me as believable as saying I was convening an expedition to find King Sol- omon’s mines. I’ve been called ‘Murray’ twice, ‘Duncan’ thrice and ‘err, um’ more times than I care to remember. But the lowest point by far was the arrival of the Irish cricket team. I adore cricket and watching the game, whether at a ground or on a television screen, gives me a sense of inner peace. I was looking forward to going to the matches but when an invite turned up for a recep- tion, there were those words ‘and spouse’ again, taunting me, mocking me.

I stewed on the invite for days, really wanting to go but unable to bring myself to RSVP. On the day of the event, I forsook the coffee shop, went to an empty bar, had a gristly burger and two beers for lunch and then =countless more as I whiled the hours away reading a book. At home, I put the boys to bed then had a bottle of wine, then three tumblers of whisky and by the time my wife got back I was a mess, disoriented and inchoately furious at myself. Before I went to bed, I calculated how many days to go. The answer was now 958. Time seemed to be slowing. I went to sleep in a veil of tears.

My golf handicap was lowering dramatically but my ennui and lassitude rates were positively off the charts. But off the fairways and greens my confidence was shot. I was indescribably adrift and fed up. An invite from the Ubud Writers Festival arrived, ordinarily a cause for whooping cheer but, which instead, generated only waves of crashing self-doubt. I didn’t want to go, didn’t feel capable of going and drafted an email with an excuse of ‘cat ate my homework’-thin- ness about why I couldn’t make it. My wife basically forced me onto the plane and we went as a family. I’m so glad she did and the week itself was wonderful. On the way, we stopped over in Singapore where we stayed with a friend of mine who I hadn’t seen for many years, and his family who had come along in the meantime. In Bali, I met writers I’ve always admired and who turned out to be even nicer in person like Drusilla Modjeska, and those I knew only a little bit about like Jono Lineen. All seemed to go through similarly deep bouts of ‘meh’. Parts of Drusilla’s Second Half First are about the pains of writers’ block. Jono was a stay-at-home dad for six years and told me the only person outside of his family he spoke to most weeks was the checkout person at Woolworths. He’s a more inde- fatigable man than me. I met Clementine Ford who told me about the condescension and abuse she puts up with on an hourly basis on social media. It felt good to talk to people as approximate equals.

In the weeks after Ubud, I listened to the audiobook version of Treasure Island in the car on the school run. Long John Silver was a lot less cheery and a lot more murderous in the original text than in the Ladybird version. The peg-legged pirate dealt with the black spot pretty much as I remembered but not quite. Yes, he’d got the letter and laughed it off but, as soon as he could fea- sibly manage it, old Long John jumped ship and headed away into the sunset.

By then, I knew that this too was what I must do. Ubud had been terrific – go if you haven’t been! – but I knew I wasn’t going to have a Clementine, a Drusilla and a Jono on tap to pep me up. I just simply couldn’t survive being a trailing spouse for another two years. I applied for a job that has me away four weeks out of six, which is far from ideal but better than the alterna- tive. I miss my wife and our beautiful children more than words can say but I know that being here more often than there is better for us all. And when I’m back with them, I’m unconditionally happy and dreading leaving rather than counting down the minutes until I can get to the airport, which is how I spent our first year. It’s so nice to be busy, so nice to be valued, so nice to have people know my actual name. I much prefer ‘Gordon’ to ‘Murray’, ‘Duncan’ or ‘And’. It’s wonderful to be able to think in paragraphs again. It’s nice to have the material to think about shaping into another book. And sellable as the genre of spousal memoir may be, I won’t be adding to it more than writing this piece. The origins of these three thousand words were hollowing enough