Yet another story about my psychotic ex
When I moved to Holland a couple of years ago I had problems getting broadband sorted out, so I was stuck with dial-up for the first few weeks. I told my Dutch ex that we were paying by the minute, so not to stay connected for hours on end during the day while I was out at work.

When the first phone bill arrived it was for 850 euros (for a sodding land line), almost all of it for dial-up Internet and calls to her mother's mobile during peak hours, so I was a tad pissed off; especially as she didn't have any money to pay me any of it back because she claimed she was unable to work. Anyway, I managed to arrange with the phone company to pay it off in two installments.

A few weeks later I'd taken the day off work to take her and her mother to see her 14-year-old sister, who was locked up in a kind of Dutch young offenders' centre in a place called Breda. Can't remember exactly what she'd done to be in there, but there was a visiting day coming up and her mother couldn't afford to get there and these visiting days were pretty few and far between, so I had offered to hire a car for the day to drive them both there to see her.

I still had to pay the second installment of the phone bill, so I told my ex that I was just nipping to the post office round the corner to pay it and then we could go and pick her mother up. Went to the cash point, queued up in the post office (still feeling quite pissed off when I started thinking what I could have bought with the 450 euros I had in my hand), paid the bill and then just as I was rounding the corner in front of the flat again I saw her storming up and down the street in a fury, her face glowing crimson with rage.

She started screaming at me that I'd been gone over an hour (according to my watch it was 12 minutes since she'd last seen me), and suggested that I'd been "fucking the girls" in a place further up the street that she thought was a brothel because she once saw girls standing outside in short skirts (I believe it was actually a youth hostel or something, I doubt that there are many brothels called Mount Zion). That was the only reason why she was angry, because she thought I'd been getting up to no good with these imaginary whores. Said she'd looked in the post office and I wasn't there. Apparently the receipt with the time and date on it wasn't proof enough that I was.

The screaming continued back inside the flat, where she smashed some of the Ikea dining chairs that I had just bought with the money my Nan left me in her will, and then grabbed a carving knife and pressed the point against my chest! In front of her other sister, who was 10 and started going hysterical. I was shitting bricks.

So I paid her mammoth phone bill, took a day off and hired a car to take them all to Breda as a favour, and there she was threatening to stab me in the heart. A simple "thank you" would have sufficed.
(trashbat, Fri 25 May 2007, 22:53, Reply)