Like I said, Mhari was a learning experience for me. Do you really want to hear about our doomed on-again/off-again car-crash relationship? The immediate nature of the teachable moment for little old twenty-something me was, as a drunken friend of mine questionably phrased it sometime later, “Do not stick your dick in the bad crazy.” It took a lot longer, and a whole lot more perspective (not to mention being married for several years to someone who most certainly was not the “bad crazy”) for me to work out what was actually going on in our dysfunctional relationship, which alternated between bouts of hot primal monkey sex and screaming pan-throwing arguments. What I think was happening was that the “me” that Mhari was alternately fucking and throwing things at was not me, but some sort of demented, revenge-rebound placeholder for a previous boyfriend of many years and some commitment. She’d split up with him acrimoniously less than six months before we first so much as snogged, and he’d done a beautiful gaslight number on her in the process. (Either that or she was bipolar with a topping of psycho special sauce: but resentful rebound relationships are a hell of a lot commoner, and I’ll go with Occam’s razor this time.) The net result was that she was a walking bomb, primed to take out all her existential resentment on whatever man she next took up with, because Bill (I think he was a Bill) had convinced her that all men were fundamentally untrustworthy bastards who would lie to her at the drop of a hat. And I, having recently emerged blinking into the light from a quasi-monastic existence, was simply a convenient cuddly punchbag.

Basically our relationship was doomed to be toxic from the get-go, if only I had possessed the experience to recognize it. Luckily . . . well, I got lucky: I met Mo, and then had a decade-long healing and maturation process because Mo was both older and smarter than me, and patient enough to wait for me to get my head out of my arse. As for Mhari, her instability got back to HR, who politely offered her an out-placement—sworn to secrecy on a permanent sabbatical, file marked DO NOT REACTIVATE EXCEPT IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, and discreet help in building a new life that didn’t press all her broken buttons on a daily basis by rubbing her nose in the transience and irrationality of human life and the underlying horror of the things waiting for us at the bottom of the world.

So picture my joy at walking into that boardroom and being smiled at by my toxic ex from hell, in blonde highlights and a black suit with sharp shoulder pads, a pile of HR forms on hand for me to countersign, and the assurance that once again I’d be working with her.

No, time does not heal all wounds . . .

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