The hatchet-faced woman who shouted at me pulled out her lipstick and sat reapplying it during the meeting. The pretty young girl next to her took out a nail file and sat filing her nails, as people shared. She was wearing see-through, skin-tight, skin-coloured leggings and a pair of six-inch wedged boots.
I sat opposite them in the church hall and brooded. This used to be a support group but after 20 years of going it no longer feels like I am getting support. Lately, I feel worse when I come out.
The woman with the stern face screeched at me at another meeting recently when I tried to speak up for my friend, the bricklayer, who had been texted and told not to come again. When I asked why, she and the other women in the room shouted me down, and I had to leave.
He was turned away because of his criminal convictions, I was later informed. I looked at these two women now who had both been in the room that day, one putting on her lipstick and the other filing her nails as they listened to people’s stories, and the word that came into my head was ‘Tricoteuses’. The female gang who have formed a #MeToo movement to cleanse meetings of men they consider ‘unsafe’ are sitting by the guillotine doing their knitting while low bottom drunks are flung out to dry.
My friend has two previous non-violent convictions relating to break-ups with ex-girlfriends.
He has been banned from 20 meetings now and many of them he has never been to. He gets emails from the ‘safeguarding officer’ telling him he has been the subject of a vote, usually described rather gleefully as ‘unanimous’.
I send lots of emails to head office complaining, and mostly they ignore me.
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