Meet Jerry

There followed three very strange months for Werner. He somehow had a sixth sense about what Cream Puff was up to. Being friends with everyone at the university, he got the security staff to warn him when his car left the premises. He also went to look at their camera footage and saw there, that she was leaving (in the middle of the morning) with a man in the car.


It did not take him too long to figure out who the Prof was.

Now...Meet Jerry. The stories about Jerry are funny – but actually show a very desperate attempt on Werner’s part – to stop his life from falling apart. Jerry: a totally fictitious PI, made up by Werner.

How did that work? Well, we roll around with laughter when he pulls Jerry out of his hat of trick. Werner is an actor of note (he missed his calling in life!). Out comes the cell phone, as he gives us a practical demonstration. Using the house phone he rang his cell phone, then hung up the house phone and “answered” the cell. In a very serious voice he demonstrates “Jerry”.

“O hi, yes Jerry. Mmm – good and you. “ Strategic silence. “No no, don’t worry – I wipe the phone logs clean – no one will trace you. “ More silence.
“Ok – what did you find out.” Then he would walk away – pretending a private conversation. Some oooeees and aaaahs coming from his side, some silences while Jerry supposedly “fills” Werner in on what Cream Puff and the Prof had been up to. Our sides ache with laughter as he demonstrates his fictitious conversations. We can only imagine how someone “listening in” would feel – especially if they start suspecting that they might be the topic of that conversation!

With his keen sense of observation, some excellent guessing and a goodly dose of reality – Werner took some “shots in the dark”, and managed to hit bull’s eye.

He would return from his conversation with Jerry, and ask Cream Puff things like: O did you enjoy your visit to Cresta today?

Cream Puff was completely freaked out. Apparently the Prof was too. “Stop following us around”, she told him.

Then on other occasions, Werner would take his cell phone, wipe the surface clean and carefully put it down on his bed side table. When he returned from from his shower, his cell had been moved, and was full of her finger prints. Was she looking for Jerry in there?

Appointments with counselors

Werner made an appointment with a counselor for Cream Puff, and asked her to go.


On return of her “counseling session”, he casually asked her how the session had gone.

“Oh fine,” she trilled (she is a very surface, fake type of person – in my unbiased opinion of course) . “It was just an introductory session really.”

Something sounded off.

Since they worked at the same place, they drove in to work together. Cream Puff had the habit of resetting the trip meter on the car (so Werner would not know where she had been?), but she had forgotten about a second trip meter function on the car.


Werner checked the car and discovered she had gone a mere 19km in total. Somehow that wasn’t right. The next day he drove out himself and when he had not even reached the counselor’s premises after 19 km, he turned back, knowing she had lied to him.

Again he confronted her, and she just shrugged her shoulders. He made another appointment, this time for marriage counseling, with a new person, with the intention that they would go together.

That counselor wanted to speak to them separately. Cream Puff went in first. By the time she had finished – the counselor too must have been of the opinion that Werner was murderous and violent. She did not "hear" what he had to say, and so ended the attempts for counseling to save the marriage.

Sad pictures

Werner’s dream must have been in about February 2007.

For you to understand what was happening in his life, I need to paint the picture of what his life looked like at that time.

When they were first married, Werner and Cream Puff stayed in a flat. They decided to buy a house. The one they eventually bought was in bad shape and needed a lot of fixing up. I often get the idea, that this house would not have been Werner's first choice - since it needed such a lot of repair work.

Werner started the 4 – 5 year stint of fixing up the house. He took out carpets, redid bathrooms and started making a sound room for himself. In the mean time he began fixing up the garden, and managed all that work himself – without any help.

Cream Puff’s mother had a farm in Witbank, and they regularly went to visit the family on the farm. With the advent of the house, it became too much for Werner to be away for whole weekends at a time, plus keeping the garden going and fixing up the house. Cream Puff began going to the farm alone, taking the children with her.

Cream Puff’s mother fell seriously ill. She had a type of muscular dystrophy – it was degenerative and fatal. With this, Cream Puff increased her visits to the farm, now going every weekend. This meant that Werner was alone, every weekend, no children and no wife. He did the garden and house, Cream Puff went to the farm. I wonder how he managed to survive this time. He is such a chatty, sociable person. For me, it paints the picture of a very sad and lonely way of life.

The weekend after Werner had discovered the cell phone with the messages – Cream Puff again went to the farm with the children. At this stage, he did not fully know what to make of the messages, but told Cream Puff to break off this “friendship”.

For some reason he can’t remember, Werner began looking for the children’s bible which he knew was somewhere in the house, during that weekend. While looking for this, he found more than he bargained for... inside a drawer, Cream Puff had hidden away draft divorce papers.

Now for the first time he realized – here is a BIG problem.

Dreaming

You must have asked yourself by now, as I did then – how did Werner find out about the Prof and the Cream Puff (and manage not to do any of them bodily harm?)

He told me on one of our coffee dates.

Werner does a lot of video recording work. It is his hobby, work and passion.

One night he had a strange dream. He dreamt that Cream Puff was recording on his video camera. In his dream she would not let him see the footage she had captured. He went after her and managed to get the camera from her. When he looked at the footage it was of her and another man.

He woke from that dream with a start.

It was the middle of the night, but he went in search of her cell phone. He had never looked at her cell phone before, but the dream had been disturbing enough, to make him look. What he found there shocked him to his very core. There was the evidence of what he had been dreaming. Endless messages from an unknown man – put on her phone as ALP (or something to that effect. I know the Prof used the initials of a very old detective series which used to be on television: Arsen Luper ). It was a game he played – sort of an “undercover” identity.

Some of those messages were so bad, that Werner refuses to tell me what was in them. Better that way.


He then went to wake Cream Puff, confronting her with the cell phone. She could not do much to deny it. I think she also tried to make out that this was a friend and the messages were just "jokes". But Werner saw through that.

His world fell apart, the same as mine had that Christmas eve. Unlike the Prof, Cream Puff just had not been as forthright with Werner. I have often wondered what made him dream such a dream. Did his sub-conscious perceive something which his conscious world would not acknowledge?

The Start of a new life - with good grace

I had long since decided I would celebrate the divorce. Well, not the DIVORCE itself, but the new start in life which it represented.

So - the day after the divorce, I went to work with a bottle of champagne. We have no champagne glasses in the office - so we poured it into coffee mugs. Ha - it reminded me of my wine in the juice glasses!

At first - the people at work looked at me so strangely. What kind of crazy stunt was this?

"I am celebrating the start of a new life, with good grace", I explained. I am sure my boss thinks (right until today) - that THAT was the cause of all the stuff which was to follow. Ha!

I did the same with the Divorce Care group - took a bottle of champagne with to the next meeting.

A day or so after the divorce went through, a dear and close friend, told me that the Prof had asked her husband how I was doing - on the day of the divorce. He told his friend that he had made the biggest mistake of his life, had now lost everything, except the children. Sweet revenge? Well not really - it is a very sad admission. It was also the ONLY indication I have ever had, that he might have regretted his decisions. But... by the time the divorce went through, I had long since reached my point of no-return. I had learnt to be happy, and I was discovering a new Yvonne.

As opposed to what the Prof might have been thinking, I was starting to feel like the Prof had done me a huge favour.

The Divorce

At last the day of the divorce arrived. Behind the scenes the negotiations had been back and forth about the settlement. It had me emotionally exhausted, but in the end, it was all agreed upon. The Prof today is still complaining about it - and saying that I "forced him", "manipulated him", etc. His 2nd biggest pain in life is the maintenance money he pays . (His BIGGEST pain is Werner. )

The date was 27th July 2007. By now, I actually couldn’t wait for it to be over. I was the one who had to appear in court. When there are children involved, at least one parent has to appear in the High Court and it is usual for the person who is suing for divorce, to be the one to appear.

My dear friend Kay was visiting from Australia, and she had come with me to give me support. Thank you dear friend - your company and support were invaluable.

We drove into town with my lawyer. An advocate had been appointed by the lawyer - because only advocates appear in the High Court. Our advocate had been chosen by my lawyer according to something she called - "seniority". Sometimes the Judge asks the advocates appear in order of seniority. I had no idea what this meant. Did it mean the most experienced advocates go first?

Soon, I found out that seniority meant – oldest. Well, I don’t know where my lawyer scratched out this gem! She was old as the mountains, had a dicey leg, and was a nervous chain smoker. Another lady, who was also getting divorced, had driven in with us, and our lawyer met up with a 3rd customer, a man. The advocate pushed and hustled the 3 of us into a tiny room – to rehearse – she said.


Rehearse? You “rehearse” your divorce?????

She slammed her papers down on a bench in front of her, and started rustling through them. The more she looked for a piece of paper, the faster she started chain smoking. Then, victoriously, our advocate would hold up a sheet and say – ah – here – which one of you is ….- and then whatever the name was on the piece of paper she had in front of her.

I watched this whole scene with the utmost amusement. Who would think – divorce could be such fun, I thought. Then the serious side of me says– Yvonne, you better hope you get divorced today – this woman is as mixed up as can be. She will never find your papers – you will be here till tonight when they chuck you out of court, while she still tries to find your papers.

The advocate, somehow managed to find our documents and ran through the procedure. "Will you swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth?" (hey I thought that stuff came out of movies), "Then you will place your hand on the bible and say yes."

"You will be asked the reason for your divorce" ( ok – that one is a no brainer in my case), "and when asked about the children – you say it is all handled as per the settlement agreement. " Walla - that was it.

We stepped into the court. The most pressing question on every one's mind is whether the judge would ask for seniority.

She did! Yah! The Advocates looked at each other and made slight bows, to concede age. Our Advocate was not the oldest – merely the 2nd oldest!

Well, this daft lady, with her dicey leg ,was as organized and spot on inside the court, as she had been disorganized, outside the court. Never, judge a book by it’s cover. She was clearly highly respected and professional. Was it just us plebs, who got a sneak preview of something different?

I love people, I love stories – so I could not help, but enjoy myself a little in this new world, playing out before me. This interplay of characters intrigued me no end. But…it does not take away, the sadness of what those courts represent.

So many faces, people with broken lives, who had been married 1 year, 2 years? There was an endless stream of them. 3 Court rooms packed full, every Friday – going through the same routine – that of pronouncing people divorced.

Not long, before it was my turn.

I swore on the bible, held up my hand, gave my name to the court, and answered the questions. How long were you married? 17 years.

Did I imagine the slight pause, and the quick glance up, of a judge who had heard it all? Was there a hint of a something in the audience? I am not sure, but I think it was there… because I was by far, the only one with such a high number of years to record – from what I saw that morning anyway.

It was all done in a matter of minutes. Amazing, that which you spend so much money on – a perfect wedding, the years together, the children, the history… it all gets wiped out by the fall of a gavel, in the space of a few minutes, and by pronouncement of a judge.

But that is not really right. I guess it had all been wiped out so many months before… in the split second where the Prof and Cream Puff chose to cheat....

Arriving Home

Werner and I had not intended for him still to be having coffee at my house, when the Prof arrived there to drop the children off. We were not on a "revenge vendetta", but when the Prof's car pulled up in the drive way...we just shrugged our shoulders and thought - oh well, too bad.

The children came running up the driveway, looking a bit like miniature thunder clouds. How dare someone visit with their mother! They had asked their dad - whose car is THAT. The Prof knew full well whose car it was, and mumbled crossly - that is Werner's car.

The Prof drove off, as soon as the kids had their stuff. They disappeared into the house. Werner did not stay long after they arrived home.

The children cornered me later with: why did you invite him, why was he at our house - I sure got the second degree from them. I told them that we went to Divorce Care together, and that they must remember he was just as much a victim in this story as they were. This was reaching out to someone who was as hurt by the story, as we were.

I did not have long to wait before the Prof's reaction came. It arrived in the form of an email a day or so later:

Did I know what I was getting in to? Hello - did you, I thought.
Did I know what a dangerous man this was etc. etc. (I wish I had kept that email!) It tickled my funny bone - I could throw all those questions back to the Prof. Had he known what HE was getting in to? Did he know the dangers involved in the game he was playing? I was not involved in an affair - I had merely made a new friend. The Prof's email did not warrant an answer - and I hope I did not answer him, but I can't remember if I did or not.

A funny antidote I have to tell, which did not happen on this day, but sometime during those early days. I can't remember the order of events, but it had the same "atmosphere" as this one. Somehow, the armed reaction company still had the Prof on their contact list. There was a day where the Prof picked up the children, and had seen Werner was there. Werner and I had decided to go out, and I accidentally set off the alarm. The alarm company phoned the Prof, and he, in a panic phoned me to find out if I was OK. Did he think I was being beaten up / murdered by his lover's X. Who knows - but it had us giggling for a long time after that.