She was no longer prepared to put up with his strange behaviour.
It was not a case of her being unaware of his weirdness, she’d known about that from the day she moved in with him. It was the weird practice of what he called ‘water gathering’ that she just couldn’t stand any longer. It seemed to be some sort of eighteenth-century ritual that he felt compelled to carry out on a regular basis. She could never see the point of it. After all, every tap in the unit had hot and cold running water: the shower worked just fine and the toilet flushed. It just seemed so much trouble to go to. Climbing up all that way to the town’s water reservoir just to get what was such a relatively small volume of water.
For her, the big wakeup call came when they both lost their footing coming down. Then, there was the bizarre business of him wrapping paper, soaked in something that smelt horrible around his head; some quaint old remedy, apparently. At the same time, she had been just about covered with bruises. It was at this point that she fully realised that he was a complete nutter.
Her bags were packed and she’d be long gone by the time he got home.
She sat, scribbling a note that she’d leave under a fridge magnet.
It read, ‘Sorry, couldn’t put up with it any longer. Goodbye and thanks for nothing. By the way, I put a big hole in your bucket!
Jill.’
