Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (9 page)

To what, Raymond Ash? Say it.

To a ticket the fuck out of your life.

That, after all, was why he was at the airport right then, wasn’t it? To be tantalised, to contemplate the possibilities in a place where possibilities proliferated, as opposed to home or work, where they shrank, withered and died. Or was he really going to swallow that shite he was telling himself about going there to buy his PC magazine because the airport was on the way home and the parking was about the same price as New Street? He’d bought the magazine half an hour ago, and the parking was in twenty‐
minute increments, so why wasn’t he on his way?

Ray was sitting on a bench in the upstairs concourse, watching the screens, the destinations, the possibilities. Watching the passengers, wishing he was one of them, knowing that such a transformation was one credit‐
card transaction away. Make it that I’m getting on that flight to New York. Make it that I’m getting on that flight to Toronto. Make it that I’m not a rookie English teacher anchored to his unpromising new career by a wife and three‐
month‐
old baby. Make it that I don’t have to go home to them tonight, to see her in desperate tears and to hear him screaming because the pain won’t stop. Make it that I don’t have to humiliate myself in the face of another shower of psychopaths tomorrow.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Ray still didn’t know. He was thirty‐
three and he still didn’t know. Father? Teacher? They’d both sounded good for a while, but then so had astronaut and pilot. Astronauts risk their lives. Pilots, it turned out, also needed a little more vocational commitment than he had anticipated: viz, being prepared to fly to foreign destinations without going on holiday for a fortnight once they got there. He hadn’t foreseen all the drawbacks to his latest pursuit either, but had proceeded through faith in the dual, contradictory self‐
assurances that: a) he would be able to surmount any obstacles through the drive to provide for his family; and b) if he didn’t like it, he could always do something else.

Also known as denial. Denial, however, was peace of mind on tick, and sooner or later, the bill always arrives, plus interest.

So now here he was, a father and a teacher. He didn’t like either and he couldn’t do something else, not any more. That was why he was at the airport, wasn’t it?

Possibilities.

No, not sure, but thinking about it very carefully. The game in progress wasn’t looking good. Health was low, energy was lower, morale was flashing red and the battle just kept getting harder. He had been badly misled about the skill level.

After sex, there could be no facet of human existence that people lied about more than parenthood. It was a mammoth, worldwide, multicultural, ecumenical, cross‐
generational conspiracy of porkies that would shame the Warren Commission, but without which, presumably, the species might well have died out. People didn’t just fib about it to your face, either; the shelves of every bookshop and library were teeming with volume upon volume of whoppers, theoretical and purportedly anecdotal information, guidance and advice that bore no resemblance to reality as he and Kate were experiencing it – on average twenty hours a day.

For three months, their lives had passed in an excruciatingly slow, trance‐
like haze, never fully asleep, never fully awake, as they struggled to cope with a tiny creature who didn’t seem particularly pleased to have been called into existence. It had been a planned pregnancy, but within a couple of weeks they had learned that while they might have wanted a child, they definitely hadn’t wanted a baby; and definitely not one like this poor wee scone.

Misery, thy name is colic.

It began in the afternoons, around three, sometimes earlier, and ended around three in the morning, sometimes later. Within about ten minutes of each breastfeed concluding, Martin would draw his wee legs up to his stomach, arch his back, open his mouth and howl, tears on his temples, pain and confusion on his face. Ray had very quickly appreciated what the word ‘inconsolable’ truly meant. There was nothing he could do to alleviate his son’s suffering, save wearing a path in the carpet as he walked up and down holding him, stroking him, singing to him, patting him, all of it utterly, utterly futile.

The evenings, in particular, were a blast. They each took it in turns to fail to console the junior Munch model while the other grabbed a quick bite to eat through in the coveted oasis of peace that the kitchen had become. It was surely a sign of sensory deprivation that he often found himself wishing a Tesco microwaveable cannelloni could last forever, because as soon as it was finished, it was back to face the enemy.

They usually had the TV on, both to provide distraction and to give some sense of time, but unless Martin was clamped to the nipple, they were reliant on their new favourite number – 888 – for Teletext subtitles. This had its limitations for the genre they were in most need of (the phrase ‘comic timing’ clearly meant little to whoever programmed the computer to present the feedline and punchline one atop the other on the same screen), but did have an unintentionally reciprocal effect on live news and current affairs shows. The poor sod frantically pummelling on the phonetic translator could seldom keep up, particularly during interviews, so you were often treated to the closing arguments of one item when the talking head or cutaway footage was already up for the next. The sight of Carol Vorderman being inadvertently captioned as ‘a cancerous blight on our society that we seem powerless to stop’ had been an invaluable chink of light in an otherwise very bleak few hours, matched on another occasion by Baroness Young appearing to tell David Frost that she deeply regretted posing topless for FHM.

Adding to the siege effect was the fact that unlike most new fathers, Ray hadn’t had the escape of a job to go to by day, the start date for his post being ten weeks after the birth. It was an interval that had once seemed cosily serendipitous, leaving him free for a natural nesting period during which the three of them could rest, recover, bond and contemplate their Mothercare‐
catalogue blissful future.

Ray used to wonder how torturers could carry out their atrocities, as their victims’ screams of pain would be unbearable to anyone with the merest vestige of humanity. He now reckoned that the first qualification would be parenthood, as there could be nothing that inured you to the sound of screaming better than hearing it for hours on end, every day of every week.

There were far darker thoughts than that, though, thoughts that you weren’t supposed to admit to, that you couldn’t unburden to anyone, and that there was definitely no page in the parenting manuals offering advice on. This was, of course, because he was the first new father ever to think them, just like Kate was the first new mother to intersperse worries that her newborn might die in its sleep with wondering whether she’d feel bereaved or relieved.

This was the gigantic lie, masking truths that nobody talked about, nobody acknowledged. You were supposed to be all smiles and chunky jumpers now, posing in photos, smiling down at your beatific bundle, whose very presence just filled your heart with warmth and your head with pride. Parenthood was hard work, sure, but bountifully rewarding, and it cast a sparkling spell of love, joy and fulfilment about every minute of your soft‐
focus existence.

Didn’t it?

When he looked down at Martin, the main thing Ray felt was tired, and instead of gazing towards the bright, beckoning adventure of their lives ahead, what most frequently filled his mind was the question of how he could get back the life he had. He had many times contemplated the same desperate scenario as Kate, knowing as she did that it was merely a symptom of distress. That was why as soon as the baby did fall silent for any length of time during the night, his first response was to get up and check that this wasn’t because the bugger had spontaneously snuffed it. In fact, he remembered breaking down in helpless floods of tears on the living‐
room floor one afternoon while Kate was asleep upstairs, the emotional collapse precipitated by the idea of another possible way out: what if they gave him up for adoption? They were clearly not cut out for raising him, you only had to look at the state of the pair of them to see that. Surely someone else could do a better job, could ease his pain, stop the crying. Wouldn’t that be better for all of them? Then he had looked at Martin, at that moment awake and uncharacteristically calm. He saw him two, maybe three years older, standing in a room with other children, other adults, looking a little nervous, a little confused, not knowing the man who was kneeling down to say hello to him. That was when Ray lost it. He ended up walking around the living room, holding Martin to his shoulder as ever, but with Ash pere taking on the crying role for a change.

Despite this, the question refused to go away, whether or not he had a satisfactory answer for it. He wanted his old life back, and who wouldn’t. This wasn’t life; this was barely subsistence. And yeah, he knew – they both knew – of all the ways it could be worse, the things they ought to be grateful for. Martin was, colic aside, a fit and healthy baby, with none of the defects every expectant parent can’t help worrying about; not even ginger hair. Wonderful, magic, spiffing. Can I go to bed now please? Can I have some time to myself? And could somebody remind me who I used to be?

It’ll get easier, people kept telling him. He wanted to believe that, and rationally knew he ought to, but it was a hard thing to have faith in when the evidence to hand didn’t appear to support it. They’d struggled through weeks, months of this, and the only thing that had alleviated was the pain when Kate breast fed, a development she attributed to having lost all feeling in that area. Ray worried that he’d suffer the same effect emotionally, so worn‐
down and hollowed‐
out did he feel. These days, he barely felt like an individual, never mind the specific individual he’d been a few months ago. Instead, he was an enslaved appendage, existing only to serve the unknowingly tyrannical infant. He could plausibly envisage parenthood turning the pair of them into these miserable, embittered cyphers, bearing no resemblance to the two people who had opted to become parents in the first place. It’ll get better. Yeah, and what if it does but I don’t?

That was the true fear, wasn’t it? Not that he’d never get his old life back, but that he’d never get his old self back. His ‘old life’ was far too nebulous a concept to know exactly what part or period to feel nostalgic about. For much of Kate’s pregnancy, he’d been a glorified student, for God’s sake, in his bloody thirties. Not exactly heady days, he’d have to say, but they had been days of genuine optimism, and a certain belated sense of maturity. Baby on the way, responsibility close at hand, time to ‘put away childish things’ to quote St Paul, from Ray’s shortlist of least favourite expressions, irritatingly appropriate given that he had been making a living from computer games before opting to train as a teacher. He hadn’t looked back then, but admittedly if there was one thing Ray was truly cut out for in life, it was packing in whatever he was doing and starting over elsewhere.

No.

Since graduating from university, a wince‐
inducingly long time ago now, his CV had become a testament to his versatility and constant thirst for fresh challenges, to quote the job‐
interview spin. Another way of looking at it was that he had the attention span of a hyperactive budgie and the applied perseverance of a butterfly. The truth was probably a combination of the two, and he left it to individual interpretation what one made of a previous employment list that included, in no memorable order: bartender, waiter, video‐
shop clerk, local radio researcher, occasional local radio contributor (unpaid, usually in reparation for screwing up the researcher part and leaving a hole in the schedule where a missing guest should have been), local council desk‐
jockey, call‐
centre drone, computer assembly‐
line operative, computer relocation technician (and no, that wasn’t a euphemism for thief), archery instructor, minicab driver, typesetter, PC gaming entrepreneur, cartoonist and rock star.

This last didn’t actually appear on his CV, though it was true, kind of in the same way as playing for East Stirlingshire meant you could describe yourself as a professional footballer. Simply ‘drummer’ would be more accurate, which was probably why he had opted to excise it altogether from the official version. You were obliged to admit to your criminal record, but fortunately there were some stigmas the law couldn’t force you to reveal.

In a working life spent flitting hither and yon, the hardest change should have been the most recent one: selling up The Dark Zone and training to be a teacher; giving up a project he had invested time, money, energies and hopes in, for a career offering more stability but demanding vocational commitment (ooh, scary). At the time, though, it had felt right; more right, more defining than any decision he had ever made. The business was only that – a business, another project he could (and inevitably would) walk away from. What had always really mattered was him and Kate. They had begun to talk seriously about having a baby, and though she had never spelled it out, he knew that it wasn’t something she’d embark upon while he was still living out his extended adolescence. Even when the business was making money, he’d never have kidded himself that it was viable in the long term. Maybe he’d have got a few more years out of it (and maybe the bank would have closed it in another month), but what he and Kate were planning put the timescale into perspective. Making the decision even more straightforward was the fact that The Dark Zone was listing into the red when the council’s offer came in to buy him out, so he recognised fate’s beckoning finger and did the grown‐
up thing.

Mistake.

One week in the job and he could still see fate’s hand, but it was showing him a different finger.