“I wouldn’t be surprised as he is one of these blokes who’s
annoyingly natural when it comes to women. You should see him at closing time,
they’re practically hanging off of him, I tell you.” Two hundred? Jesus, that
was fifty times the women I’d had and one of my total would’ve been subject to
a steward’s enquiry.
“I expect this Martin would think I’m the luckiest bloke in
the world too,” I said.
“I doubt it. He’s married an’all,” Tom reckoned.
“So when’s he had time to shag all these girls then?” I
asked.
“What are you talking about, he’s still shagging them! Bit
bad to be honest. I mean not phoning some bird after you’ve chucked her pants
out of the window, or bullshitting that you’re an airline pilot in order to
chuck her pants out of the window is one thing, but shagging another hundred
and eighty birds after you’ve walked Miss Number Twenty Five down the aisle is
a bit above and beyond if you know what I mean,” Tom frowned.
“How the hell’s he get away with it?” That’s what I wanted
to know.
“Fuck knows. Maybe his wife don’t mind. Maybe she turns a
blind eye. I mean, he might be banging every old boiler in Camberley but she’s
the one he comes home to every night, or at least most nights, that sort of
madness,” Tom figured. “And besides, they’ve got a kiddy too and women always
go off sex after they have kids.”
“Do they?”
“Oh yeah, that’s well known that is. They’ve done studies on
it and everything,” he said, presumably to show me he was now talking facts
here – not just pub bollocks.
I thought about this when I went to the toilet and concluded
it was a load of codswallop. I mean, women not wanting sex after they’d had
kids? Dirty birds on every street corner? A twenty girl national average? And
Martin from the Duke of York up to his nuts in sluts?
How could any of this be true?
I definitely wasn’t sure about the twenty-girl average. In
order for that to make mathematical sense girls had to have a twenty bloke
average too then, unless of course it was all down to a handful of old boilers
with incalculable totals and broken beds?
Sally hadn’t had twenty blokes and none of her friends had
either. I knew this as we’d discussed it a few months before our wedding.
Sally had slept with only five guys in total, annoyingly two
more than me. I’d only slept with three (girls not guys – and this
included Sally herself) though I’d once enjoyed a spot of foreplay with a
French girl on a campsite and had quickly drafted her into my total when Sally
told me she’d had five.
So Sally was well below the national average too.
At least, she was if she’d told me the truth and I can only
assume she’d told me the truth as she’d never lied to me about this sort of
thing before, but it was possible, I suppose. Everything was possible.
Maybe she’d had more than five men. Maybe she’d even had
ten. Or twenty. Or thirty.
If she had’ve done, it probably wouldn’t have been the sort
of thing she would’ve shared with her eager young husband-to-be, especially
when that poor near-virgin still had two fingers and a whole other hand free
after totting up his total.
Maybe she was still at it. Maybe she was like Martin from
the Duke of York and had been getting pummelled senseless by two hundred guys
while I’d been at work.
I doubted it, because Sally wasn’t the type, but then again
who was? You read about these sorts of thing in the Sunday papers all the time
and I’m sure these women’s husbands didn’t think they were the type either, but
it goes on.
Hmm.
Elenor?
Now she most definitely the type.
I wondered how many guys she’d slept with and concluded it
was more likely to be nearer Martin’s total than mine. I thought about her for
a while and inadvertently ended up picturing her buffeting and bashing, moaning
and thrashing, sweaty, crying, yelping, sighing, stroking, coaxing and sucking
her way through an army of hairy-backed gorillas.
Loving it she was. Absolutely loving it.
When the last of them was done, she lay there puffing and
panting and doodling her fingers all over her sweat-streaked skin before
suddenly noticing me.
“Enjoy the show?” she asked, making no attempt to cover
herself up.
I looked down before zipping myself up and realised I had
– a little too much if I’m honest.
It’s New Year’s Eve, out with the
old and in with the new. I’m going to make a real conscious effort to stop
bickering with Andrew and just get on with him. I don’t think it’s me a lot of
the time, but it takes two to argue, just as it takes two to do most things in
life, so I’m going to redouble my efforts and hope this inspires Andrew to
redouble his. To be honest we’re not at each other’s throats the whole time.
Reading back through my diary you might think we are, but actually most of the
time we’re perfectly happy. Well, maybe happy’s putting it a bit strong. We’re
together and we’re content. To be happy would probably require something else,
so I’ll start with content and see where I can take it.
Other resolutions: to cut out the chocolate for the whole of
January, and to stop watching so much nonsense on the television.
Naturally Andrews talking up the gym again but for once I’ve
decided not to fall for it. Sure it would be lovely to go to the gym three
times a week, take a couple of years off my butt and fit into my old jeans again
(I still have them somewhere for motivational purposes) but I think it’s time
we stopped kidding ourselves. This isn’t going to happen. For either of us.
Why? Okay, I’ll admit it even if Andrew won’t. The gym is soooooooo boring. I
can’t even begin to describe it. I’ve come to dread January because every
January means another two or three weeks of huffing and puffing on a tread mill
or a bike or a step machine before we’re ready to admit defeat and put
ourselves through the ritual humiliation of cancelling our membership again.
Well I’ve had it. I’m going to finally throw my old jeans
away and accept once and for all that this is the shape God intends me to be.
Hey, you know what, I think I’ve just taken that first step
towards that happiness I was talking about.
The crowd was on its feet. They
could scarcely believe what they were seeing. This unknown, unseeded, last
minute qualifier had made it all the way through to the final and he was
matching the undefeated six-times world champion application for application.
“Quiet please, ladies and gentlemen. Quiet!” the umpire
insisted and an expectant hush descended upon the hundred-thousand-strong crowd
that had literally (or do I mean metaphorically?) shoehorned itself into the
new Wembley Stadium for this showpiece final.
“Mr Nolan, you may proceed.”
I took a few deep breaths to calm my nerves, wiped some of
the sweat from my fingertips and gripped the mouse. On screen the cursor
hovered over StuffIt Expander and I moved it micrometers to the left and right
before finding the exact perfect spot.
“Go for it,” I told myself, said a little prayer and
double-clicked.
The computer blinked a couple of times then the cursor
turned into a tiny clock. The second hand of the clock spun around and around
and the crowd rippled with apprehension.
“Quiet please ladies and gentlemen. Quiet!” the umpire urged
them again, but it was no use, the tension was just too great.
All at once the menu bar of my Mac went white and StuffIt
Expander appeared. I could scarcely believe it but my machine continued to
click, whirl and crunch and eventually StuffIt Expander moved across to the
right hand corner of the menu bar and offered me a choice of File, iSupport and
Help.
The crowd went mental.
The cheering and screaming was almost ear-splitting and it
took a good couple of minutes for the umpire to get on top of them again, and
when he did, he totted up the number of applications I had opened and found I
held the new world record.
Thirty-three applications.
Unbelievable.
The application menu bar almost stretched all the way down
the screen and I held it open to admire my accomplishment, as the judges
declared me the new Application Opening World Champion.
QuarkExpress, Word, QuickTime, PictureViewer, Outlook,
Internet Explorer, iTunes, Adobe, Acrobat, Netscape, RealPlayer, FlashPlayer
and so on and so on thirty-three times. They were all open and active. What an
accomplishment! Of course, a number of the applications were admittedly pretty
small; Stickies and Mac Solitaire, for example, were only around about 100k
each, but then that was what made Application Opening such a tactical sport.
“Morning Andrew, I wondered if you had a moment?” Norman
said behind me, shitting the life out of me.
I knocked several stacks of papers flying as I tried to
click the applications menu closed again but the cursor just turned into a
little clock and froze halfway round.
“What’s the matter, crashed again? Hmm, yeah, looks like
you’ve probably got too many applications open,” he pointed out.
“Er yeah, yeah, I reckon,” I agreed, quickly reaching behind
my computer and pressing the restart button.
“I know it’s the first day back after Christmas and everything
so I don’t want to rock your boat, but I just wondered if you’d had a chance to
do that report,” he asked, draining me to my very soul.
That report? Jesus, was he still going on about that? It had
hardly been mentioned at all during December so I’d figured I’d got away with
it, but suddenly he wanted it again? This was unbelievable. Of course he didn’t
really want it. He was only asking for it to put me on the spot because I
hadn’t done it when everyone else had.
For fuck’s sake!
This was beyond unbelievable. It was just plain petty and it
immediately ruined what I’d hoped was going be a nice easy day.
“Oh, er, no, I’m afraid not, Norman. I took all the erm…
files home and everything, to take a look at, you know, over Christmas, but,
er…” I clicked, whirled and crunched as my iExcuses application opened up
behind my eyes. “But, the thing was…”
Norman frowned and watched the little clocks spinning in my
eyes as he resigned himself to hearing what the thing was.
Here were my options.
I took the wrong set
of files home?
We got a dog for
Christmas and he ate my report?
I left it on the bus?
A dog ate it, possibly
on the bus?
What report?
I couldn’t be arsed?
Why don’t you just
fuck off?
Sally’s been ill?
Shit, yeah, that was a good one.
“Sally’s been ill,”
“Oh, I’m very sorry to hear that. Nothing serious I hope.”
“No, no,” I reassured him then quickly amended that before
he asked me why I hadn’t done my report then. “Well yeah actually. On and off,
you know. I’ve been run off my feet and pretty worried, to be honest.”
“Oh no, she’s all right isn’t she?” Norman fretted.
“Oh, yeah, fine. She’s okay now. Just pretty ill then,” I
told him, as I tried to express as much unspoken manly concern as I could
without inviting too many awkward and unanswerable questions.
“What was the matter with her?”
Like that one.
“The doctors weren’t sure. They think it was just a virus,
but it pretty much laid her out for the whole of Christmas,” I said,
desperately trying to shake him off the scent. I didn’t want to go into
specifics and start talking about symptoms and rashes and lumps and that sort
of thing as I didn’t feel particularly comfortable steering my excuse through
these sorts of waters but fortunately Norman didn’t press.
“Is she okay now?”
“As a daisy. I think we both just need some exercise. We’re
joining the gym on Friday so that should sort us both out,” I reassured him.
“Well, please pass on my best and tell her to take care.
These things can sometimes reoccur,” he said, handing me repeat rights for this
particular excuse on a silver platter.
*
The rest of the day ticked along
quietly, as work days have a tendency to do, and most people spent it trying to
remember what they’d been doing when they’d tossed their files over their
shoulders twelve care-free days earlier. Godfrey put himself fairly and
squarely in charge of clearing away every last residue of Christmas and even
used a wet paper towel to clean the fake snow off the corners of our windows
that Rosemary had sprayed last year.
“Oh leave it, it looks nice,” Rosemary said when she
wandered around and saw him wiping away her handiwork.
“… mumble mumble fucking Christmas mumble…” was all I could
make out of his reply and to be honest I had to agree. If there was one thing I
couldn’t stand it was a never-ending Christmas. I liked there to be a definite
cut-off point, a “that’s it, all over, unplug the fairy lights and chuck away
the cards,” followed by a nice quiet, drab January to help straighten out the
routine. Consequently, I wasn’t looking forward to next week’s office Christmas
party.
Our MD had decided it would be fun to have it on January
13th to give us a bit of a treat in what was traditionally a rather depressing
month, though cynics might’ve raised an eyebrow and wondered how much Joe
Bananas cost to hire in January compared to December. Either way, no matter how
much tinsel Godfrey ripped down we hadn’t got rid of it yet.
Another constant reminder of Christmas was Elenor’s endless
partying stories. She’d sung her own praises all morning down the telephone to
whomever she could think to call and now it was my turn to get chapter and
verse. They were pretty tedious, naturally, but I found myself hanging on her
every word. It helped that she’d come around and sat in my cubicle, twisting
gently in the swivel chair a mere two feet from mine and pulling down the hem
of her tight lycra skirt every time it threatened to divulge its secrets.