Fake: A startling true story of love in a world of liars, cheats, narcissists, fantasists and phonies

2019·0.69 MB·english

by  Stephanie Wood

About the Book
Women the world over are brought up to hope, even expect,
to find the man of their dreams and live happily ever after.
When Stephanie Wood meets a former architect turned
farmer they embark on an exhilarating romance. He seems
compassionate, loving, truthful. They talk about the future.
She falls in love. She also becomes increasingly beset by
anxiety at his frequent cancellations, no-shows and bizarre
excuses. She starts to wonder, who is this man?
When she ends the relationship Stephanie reboots her
journalism skills and embarks on a romantic investigation.
She discovers a story of mind-boggling duplicity and
manipulation. She learns that the man she thought she was
in love with doesn’t exist. She also finds she is not alone;
that the world is full of smart women and men who have
suffered at the hands of liars, cheats, narcissists, fantasists
and phonies, people enormously skilled in the art of
deception.

CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: Looking for a Man
1.    An Introduction to Romance
2.    The Other Woman
3.    We Made Love
4.    A Mansion in the Country
5.    Two Weddings and a Funeral
6.    A Cabinet of Curiosities
7.    Disordered
8.    Who the Hell Are You?
9.    All the Similar Stories
10.  How Could That Have Happened to Me?
11.  The Getting of Wisdom
Epilogue: Dive
Notes
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Imprint
Read more at Penguin Books Australia
In memory of my father
Ourself, behind ourself concealed,
Should startle most;
Assassin, hid in our apartment,
Be horror’s least.
From ‘One need not be a chamber to be haunted’,
Complete Poems, Emily Dickinson, 1891
PROLOGUE
LOOKING FOR A MAN
I’m on the highway a few miles out of town when the noise
starts: a scraping, grinding din that jackhammers my heart
into my stomach. Behind me, semi-trailers menace and the
road shoulder is narrow, but I brake, pull over, and when
there’s a pause in the traffic, scramble from the driver’s
seat to investigate what I’m sure must be a mechanical
catastrophe. I crouch in the dust beside the front of the car
and peer underneath. The damage is obvious. Some form of
panel has dropped from the undercarriage and is dragging
on the asphalt. The semi-trailers roar past and I decide my
only option is to get back on the road and into town.
I wanted to arrive unnoticed. I’m looking for a man, or
traces of him, but I don’t want to see him. I’d even
considered wearing a wig. But my car’s discordant chorus is
such that I might as well have hired a brass band to trumpet
me into this country town on the New South Wales Southern
Tablelands. In a dry paddock dotted with rusted farm
equipment sheep lift their heads; a boy on a bike in the
main street pauses his aimless circling to stare; a bloke in a
beanie stands in the driveway of the service station and
watches as I scrape and grind to a stop.
He takes a couple of steps towards me and I wind down
my window. ‘You’ve got a problem there,’ he says. His mud-
splattered truck is parked at a petrol bowser. A kelpie stands
alert on the back, tied to the truck’s bars. I’m flustered: the
last noisy miles into town have shaken me and now I’m
here, 100 metres from the motel I’m afraid of returning to,
and there’s no running away from the decision I’ve made to
come back.
‘I know, I know,’ I say. ‘It started on the highway …
scared the life out of me.’ I get out of the car. The wind is
icy.
‘I’ll take a look,’ he says. The bloke is young, well built,
fetching in his roughness. A hint of flannelette shirt at the
collar of his sweater. Open, unlined face and square,
stubbled jaw. I can’t stop looking at his hands. Powerful,
leathery, the dirt running through crevices of heart, head,
life and fate lines, a map of honest exertion.
‘Oh, would you?’ I thank the man and he asks me to
drive over to a patch of grass at the service station’s edge.
There, he lies on his back and thrusts his head under the
front of the car.
‘Nothing major,’ he says, showing his face again. ‘Just a
splash-guard panel … can hold it up with a cable tie …
always carry some.’ He swings himself upright and goes
back to his truck, rummages in tool boxes. The kelpie whirls
in excitement, its lead jerks it back. The man ignores it,
returns with ties and a knife, and in a minute my
undercarriage is stitched up.
‘Good to go.’ I gush thanks. ‘No worries,’ he says,
seemingly uninterested in small talk. I try to make some, as
a way of leading into a bigger question. I introduce myself,
extract his name. It’s Des. He has a farm in this district.
Sheep. Merinos. Loves the work. It’s Sunday, nearly lunch,
and he’s heading out to bring some sheep in.
I tell him I’m a journalist and that I’ve come to town to
look for a man. It’s a strange, awkward thing to explain, but
Des seems to get it. I tell him about the man – that he said
he too had a sheep farm here, a few hundred acres. Said he
fattened dorpers for the Chinese market on land out this
way.
‘Dorpers, eh,’ Des says. ‘Not many of them round here.’ I
don’t tell him that the man scoffed at merinos and said that