‘No, they’re up both our streets. We’re on the same street. So thanks, I like the lamps. Very…tactile.’
‘Oh, okay. Well, that’s good.’
Even longer stony silence.
‘And I’m glad to hear your marital difficulties are over.’
‘What marital difficulties?’
‘You know.’
‘Look, mate, it’s none of your business, but for your information there is no marital difficulty…’
‘Yes, but Isabel’s my friend and I’m just saying I’m glad everything is back on track.’
‘Hang on a—’
‘And that all is well in the you-know-what department.’
‘No, I don’t know what. What are you talking about?’
‘Nothing. Hey, do you fancy going paint-balling sometime? I’ve never done it but it’s supposed to be great.’
‘Not really, no.’
‘Oh, okay.’ And with that, he climbed a stile and went running off after his number one fan, Mrs B.
Did you tell Alex I didn’t like the lamps? No.
Did you tell Alex we were having marital difficulties? No.
Did you tell Alex I was buying your parents a set of shitty cheese knives? No.
Did you tell Alex we were having sexual difficulties? No.
Well, how did he know all that then?
I don’t know what to think and I don’t think I care any more. Like Diana, I’m in a crowded marriage. Except I don’t think Diana’s threesome involved actual spying.
Because the options I’ve narrowed it down to over the last two festive days are these: either Isabel is lying and she is telling Alex all about our private affairs and they’re having a good laugh behind my back; or she isn’t lying and Alex is somehow listening in on all our conversations. Neither is great.
To clear my head, I decide to go for an early morning ride on the bike Isabel bought me the last time we were being driven apart. It is dark when I leave but the blood-red orb of the sun soon breaks over the horizon and I am out of the village, racing along the lanes on a crisp winter’s day. It’s good to do some exercise every now and again, I think to myself. Not in a stinking gym with some Lycra-clad sadist driving you on. Out in nature, sweeping through the glorious British countryside, alone in the elements, fresh air pumping through your lungs.
‘Morning,’ I call cheerily to a tweedy man walking his dogs. He looks vaguely familiar.
‘What do you think this is?’ he shouts back, pointing to a locked gate we’ve both reached at the same time.
‘It’s a gate,’ I reply, too puzzled to understand.
‘You can’t get a bloody horse through that, can you?’ He’s still shouting, although we’re now no more than three feet apart.
‘Probably not.’ I still can’t work out what he’s getting at. Neither of us has a horse so it’s not an enormous problem. You couldn’t get a wheelchair through it either, but again, it’s simply not an issue.
‘It’s not a bloody bridle path, so you’re not allowed to cycle here,’ he shouts.
‘Oh, I must have taken a wrong turn. I’ve got an OS map here.’
‘You think I can’t read an OS map. You think I’m some sort of bloody idiot. I can read an OS map. I live here. I live on this estate. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone.’ His whole head has swollen into a red, veiny balloon. He must be seconds away from having a stroke, and that is probably a good thing.
‘I’m sure you can read an OS map. Would you mind telling me where the bridle path goes, then?’
‘WE’VE ALL GOT KEYS. EVERYONE IN THE VILLAGE HAS GOT BLOODY KEYS. SO DO YOU THINK I’M BLOODY LYING?’
It’s quite a flabbergasting onslaught.
‘No, I just want you to show me where the bridle path goes.’
‘YOU DON’T BELIEVE ME? YOU DON’T BLOODY BELIEVE ME? WHERE ARE YOU FROM? WHERE ARE YOU BLOODY FROM? YOU’RE NOT FROM THE VILLAGE.’
I tell him that I am from the village and that I’d be grateful if he could just stop shouting long enough to tell me where the bridle path goes.
‘OVER THERE!’ He’s pointing at a path covering the same ground but coming out at a stile ten yards further along. I have trespassed off it for about ten seconds. I tell him this and he goes an even redder shade of scarlet.
‘I DON’T CARE. I COULDN’T GIVE A TOSS. IT’S THE GAMEKEEPER YOU WANT TO WATCH OUT FOR. HE’S NOT NEARLY SO UNDERSTANDING.’
‘What’s he going to do, shoot me?’
The tweedy man’s face becomes inscrutable and without another word he climbs over the stile and walks off.
I shout Merry Christmas after him and walk my bike the eight yards to the correct stile, swearing to attend the next Countryside Alliance march just to throw rotten eggs at all these silly wax-jacket-wearing idiots.
I get home more stressed than when I left. I shower, I change, I jog down to the station to get the train to work. Standing next to me on the platform, as he is every morning, is the tweedy man, now de-tweeded and wearing standard-issue business suit. I knew I had seen him somewhere before.
He bids me good morning, as he always does, not recognising me without my law-breaking mountain bike.
I bid him good morning back, then spend the rest of the journey into London wishing I’d bid him fuck off instead. But by the time we come into Charing Cross, I have a plan. I walk over to his seat, hand him a leaflet from my anger-management class and suggest he joins us.
The look on his face as he puts two and two together is still not enough to cheer up a day that began with a stroke of Alex’s horrible lamp.
Firstly, let me say, dear diary, that this will be my last day of drinking for a month. I can feel both my kidneys protesting at the cruel treatment they’ve been subjected to over the last month/year/ decade, despite my brief lapse into rural bliss. And my liver seems to have left the building altogether. Andy is also suffering acute organ failure. Johnson has been told by his wife that his pot-belly is getting a pot-belly of its own. She loved the original pot-belly, but not the new one. We are all abstaining for a month.
Which partly explains what happened later.
Because I worked all week and Isabel’s more enlightened office closed for the festive period, she was left to arrange the fancy dress. Hers was therefore brilliant—Marilyn Monroe in
that
dress, complete with convincing wig and portable up-skirt wind machine. Mine wasn’t so good. I would be Clark Kent until midnight, then phone-booth myself into Superman to welcome in the New Year. I didn’t think it sounded like a good idea, particularly given that Isabel had been unable to find a proper Superman costume.
Still, she told me I looked sexy with my Clark Kent glasses so I went along with it. All evening, her annoying friends (why couldn’t we have gone to one of my friends’ parties?) asked why I’d come to a fancy-dress party in a suit. All evening I said, wait and see.
As the hour of both revealing my superpowers and abandoning drink for a month approached, I became increasingly inebriated. Isabel was wowing everyone with her billowing skirt and I was de-wowing them with my suit and speccy four-eyes.
Bong. Bong. Bong. My big opportunity.
I stepped onto the dance floor and began to strip. Empowered by vodka, I really gave it everything, flinging my blazer across the
room, nearly garrotting myself as I whipped off my tie. Then shirt, then trousers. It wasn’t quite Christopher Reeve, but as I stood there in my Superman T-shirt, frilly red knickers and blue tights, I expected a round of applause at the very least.
No one noticed.
Everyone was too drunk and too busy singing Old bloody Lang bloody Syne.
Except for Isabel. She’d watched the whole debacle from the kitchen doorway. After suppressing a cruel giggle, she came over and whispered, ‘Let’s go home, Superman, before your cover is blown.’
That wasn’t even the embarrassing bit. I can’t remember the Tube or the train. I can remember getting back to the village and Isabel still Monroe-ing her knickers at me. And getting into the house and her singing ‘Happy Birthday’ all provocatively, and me pretending to fly and hurting my knees quite badly. And then us, rather spontaneously I thought for married people, tearing each other’s clothes off. Literally tearing them, so that we’d have trouble returning them to the fancy-dress shop next week—not that I was thinking about that at the time. Well, I was a bit.
And then starting to have sex.
And it all going to plan.
And then the image of her naked, postcoital mother and father, winking provocatively from the album on Alex’s lap.
And then retreat. Like a snail someone just threw salt over.
And the words, ‘Don’t worry, we can try again tomorrow,’ coming from Isabel’s lips like a bullet between the eyes of a malfunctioning prize bull.
I am sexually incapable. Happy New Year.
‘The majority of husbands remind me of an orang-utan
trying to play the violin.’H
ONORÉ
DE
B
ALZAC
No one, not her, not me, says anything about my lack of performance, which means it must be a serious problem. Really need a drink but mustn’t fail at that too.
Still no one’s said anything about Mr Floppy. Soon it will be time to have sex again, with this unresolved. Can’t believe this is clashing with the alcohol ban.
We’re on the sofa watching Bond and a
Gardener’s World
winter special (I get fifteen minutes, she gets fifteen minutes. How’s that, by the way, for marital harmony?) when I decide the sooner, the better on the sex front. After all, it’s exactly the same as getting straight back in the saddle after a fall. Assuming, of course, that neither you nor the horse has broken a neck.
I wait until it’s Bond (no point making a move when they’re digging up parsnips). Then I put my hand, which is schoolboy clammy, on her knee like we’re on a grubby first date at the cinema. Unlike most of my first dates, she seems unperturbed, so I go in for a kiss. Our teeth bang, which hasn’t happened in years. I retreat.
I stretch my arms up, then down, and snare her with one of them—another textbook adolescent manoeuvre. I pull her towards me, start nibbling her ear, she moves to swat me away and I go in for another kiss. Better this time. I resist the urge to ice-cream-cone her mouth out with my untrained tongue because I am not actually a teenager. We kiss gently, then more vigorously, and just as I’m going to go for second base, BANG, Isabel’s naked, writhing parents pop into my head again.
I stop kissing Isabel and look back at the television to find Sean Connery just millimetres from laser-gun castration.
Andy is in love in Guiana and can’t make himself available for an emergency pint until next Wednesday. Not that we can have a pint anyway.
Johnson is the next best bet so we meet for lime sodas in a wine bar. He has his own problems. The pot-belly’s pot-belly has grown
half a centimetre since he stopped drinking four days ago. He’s thinking of starting to drink again.
My problem, he thinks, is that I’m thinking too much. It’s better to keep it simple: every time I start overanalysing during sex, I must simply chase the thought away. It’s the same principle as counting sheep.
If that doesn’t work, then I must use the Sex Gears.
‘Tell me about the Sex Gears, oh Grand Master,’ I say, nursing my fruitless pint of fruit cordial.
‘Okay, it’s like what Sting does, only simpler and without the need for a Moroccan yoga tent. If you want to go faster, think of a beautiful woman you are in no way related to. If you want to go slower, think of your mother-in-law. Since we have already established that the latter has quite an extreme effect, this should be considered reverse. And you
never
put a car into reverse when you’re driving.’
‘You’re quite pleased with this, aren’t you?’
‘Mine are as follows: first, Maureen Lipman; second (or neutral), the wife; third, Michelle Pfeiffer in
Lethal Weapon IV
; fourth, Pamela Anderson; I don’t need a fifth.’
‘You really are a disgusting human being.’
‘My reverse is Ann Widdecombe.’
I have spent the last two days not thinking about anything. Every time the idea of sex comes into my head (which, as has been well documented, is every thirty-four seconds), I count sheep. Which is taking Johnson’s first theory far too literally but it seems to work.
Isabel has still said nothing about the New Year debacle followed by the billowing sex-free tundra that has followed. I can only assume it is not a problem. Or that she is confiding in Alex.
When Isabel and I both get back from work early, I decide to give sex another chance. Even as I suggest it—as matter-of-factly as possible—I can feel those disturbing images trying to push themselves into view. I count sheep but the sheep start having a Polish accent and saying ‘darlink’ at the end of every sentence.
I have no choice but to try the gears. Starting in third (Isabel, because there’s no way she’s second), I reach for fourth (Cameron Diaz in
Mask
) and all is well so I drop it back into third, and it’s just like the old days, but then I slip the clutch and find myself grinding into reverse. Panic sets in, I go back to Cameron, still struggling, but I haven’t got a fifth. Didn’t think I’d need one. And suddenly, there it is: fifth. Saskia. The Destroyer of Relationships.
In the postcoital aftermath, Isabel says simply, ‘Is everything all right? You seemed…distracted.’ And I say simply, ‘Yes, everything is all right.’
Johnson is shaking his head gravely by the water cooler.
He says he blames himself. He should have warned me that imagining other women while in bed with one’s own wife is a big step, and not one to be taken lightly. And it is crucial, absolutely crucial, not to have any gears that are real people. Pamela Anderson is not a real person. Saskia is.
What was I thinking? Well, I wasn’t thinking, that was the whole bloody point. And now I’ve imagined my terrifying ex at exactly the wrong moment and does this mean I find Saskia more attractive than my own beautiful wife?
Johnson says it’s just a rogue gear. He slipped into Ann Widdecombe at exactly the wrong moment once: it took him weeks to recover from the terrible ecstasy.
I spend the rest of the day with a migraine that I can only assume is some sort of guilty reaction to the fact that I committed mental adultery.
Still have a headache. Deserve it.
Another text from Saskia. Delete.
Apparently, it’s the toxins washing themselves out of my system. Andy has a headache in Guiana and Johnson is out of action in Islington. His beer belly is expanding at the rate of one centimetre every four days despite the total lack of beer. It seems sensible, for our health and sanity, to give up giving up alcohol. I explain all this to Isabel, who is entirely unsupportive. She tells me that a week from now, I will feel out of this world, like a million dollars, smashing.
Then she says she’s going for a drink with Alex so she might be home a bit late.
After the joys of December, the miseries of January. We aren’t arguing like we did when we were newly married. Then, we’d have a good burst of unreasonableness followed by honeymoon-ish resolution. Now, it’s low-level bickering, caused entirely, I think, by the continuing problem of Alex.
‘Where’s the ibuprofen, darling?’
‘I don’t know. Where did you last have it?’
‘If I knew that, I wouldn’t be asking, would I?’
‘You should put things back when you’ve used them.’
‘I do.’
‘You don’t.’
‘I do.’
‘So why can’t you find the ibuprofen, then?’
‘So how was the drink?’
‘Don’t start.’
‘I wasn’t. I was simply asking how the drink with the guy who touched your breasts was. You know, the one who’s glad we’re through our marital difficulties.’
‘He said he never said that. He said he just asked how married life was treating us.’
‘He didn’t.’
‘He said he did.’
‘He didn’t.’
‘Lentils are pretty tasteless, aren’t they?’
‘You just have rubbish taste buds. You can’t appreciate subtle flavours.’
‘I can.’
‘Why do you add salt to everything, then?’
‘Because I am slowly poisoning myself to death so I don’t have to eat lentils.’
‘Good.’
‘Good.’
‘Good.’
The tweedy heart-attack man and the scarfed hairspray woman sit next to each other on the train and it’s like watching a World Championship elbowing contest. From my own bitter experience, I know that neither are the giving-in sort and by London Bridge it has erupted into full-scale childishness. The woman knocks the man’s umbrella into the aisle. He retaliates by shredding her
Woman’s Own
. She punches a hole straight through his
Telegraph.
He pulls off her scarf. She punches him.
The rest of the carriage refuse to get involved—we are united in our sense of pleasure—and I am in a good mood all the way to my anger-management class.
‘Have you any further thoughts on our discussion last month?’ I ask before the woman with the neat bob can set her own agenda.
‘Which discussion would that be, Mr Walker?’
‘The one about whether or not anger is justified as a response to our broken-down society. And please feel free to call me William.’
‘We’re not here to find reasons to justify anger, Mr Walker. We’re here because you have a problem managing it.’
‘Yes, but he has a point though, doesn’t he?’ suggests the cyclist, who seems to be back after escaping the last two classes. ‘I mean, if everything is so much more irritating than it used to be, surely the rational response is to become irritated by it?’
‘No, Mr Schofield,’ interjects the woman, her bob twitching ever so slightly. ‘Irritation is simply an emotional response. It is subjec
tive, not objective. It is therefore not a question of it being rational or not.’
‘But, Ms Prestwick,’ I say. ‘Or may I call you Harriet? I don’t understand what you mean. If a train leaves earlier than it’s supposed to, if a man in the countryside shouts at you for no reason, if a neighbour kidnaps your wife and a thirteen-year-old achieves more in six months than you have done in your whole career, surely you are entitled to be angry? If only to release tension?’
‘No, please call me Ms Prestwick and yes, I see your point, but anger is a negative response.’
‘Well, Harriet,’ says the cyclist.
‘Ms Prestwick,’ corrects Harriet.
‘Well, Ms Prestwick, I threw my bicycle through the windscreen of a car that had cut me up on a roundabout and I felt a lot better afterwards.’
‘Yes, but that was illegal.’
‘So was cutting me up on the roundabout.’
‘Yes, but two wrongs don’t make a right.’
‘But two negatives do make a positive, Harriet,’ I conclude.
‘STOP CALLING ME HARRIET.’
I have won the battle, but with three more months of meetings to go, the war still hangs in the balance.
Literally no energy. Can hardly be bothered to get out of bed. Isabel and I have yet another fight about pairing socks. Even though she told me she’d bought the days-of-the-week ones in order for me to mis-pair to my heart’s content, that relaxation of rules did not extend to putting them in the sock drawer unpaired. I explain that if I spend just ten minutes a week pairing or mis-pairing socks,
that’s 520 minutes a year, which is two weeks of my next forty years of married bliss. They are my socks, it is my sock drawer, leave me alone.
She says they keep getting muddled with her socks.
I say I’m tired.
She says, ‘Just have a bloody drink then.’
So I call Johnson to see if he’s cracked yet. He hasn’t but says his wife is about to leave him so it’s not all bad.
Texts from Saskia still haven’t stopped. She now seems to have got through her angry phase and is entering an everything’s-perfectly-all-right one.
Yesterday’s text: ‘drnks, mine, tonite, W. Wld b gr8 2 ctch up x.’
Today’s text: ‘soz u missed drnks. dinner?’
Tomorrow’s text: ‘soz u missed dinner. Rabbit boiled to perfection. Brkfst?’
I risk the first text for weeks. No complicated explanation for silence, just: ‘Can’t meet. Super-biz. All best.’
No response. At last, she’s got the picture.
She hasn’t got the picture. ‘Thnks for txt. Sounds good. Look frwrd to it.’
Twenty pairs of black socks arrive at my office with a note from Saskia: ‘A solution to your marital problems. Xxx’
‘Saskia, it’s William. Who told you?’
‘Hello, William. Who told me what, darling?’
‘About the socks?’
‘Oh, that. Did you like them?’
‘Um, well, yes, that’s not the point. Have you been speaking to Johnson?’
‘No.’
‘Or Andy?’
‘No.’
‘Well, how did you know?’
‘Know what?’
‘About the socks?’
‘Oh, I can’t reveal my sources, darling. Now, about dinner.’
‘I told you I’m busy.’
And I hang up, wishing it was an old slammable phone, not an unsatisfying press-the-red-button mobile, then throw all the socks in the bin.
‘Throwing them away?’ asks the IT geek who is walking past clutching a bag of microchips.
‘Take them,’ I reply, and he does.
I decide not to mention Saskia’s socks to Isabel even though the leak almost certainly came from her side.
Isabel’s Christmas present (or part thereof ): theatre plus champagne dinner. A whole bottle, as it turns out, but of course I can’t drink so Isabel quaffs the lot, preparing her well for a three-hour Ibsen shocker at the Almeida. My legs don’t fit in the seat so while I weigh up the cons of deep-vein thrombosis with the pros of hanging my feet over the shoulders of the tetchy person in the row below me, Isabel has a refreshing nap. We both refocus on the play in the last twenty minutes, thanks to a couple of unexpected
gunshots. Several characters I have previously been annoyed by proceed to commit suicide and a woman in a heavy skirt says something lengthy and repetitious about a seagull.
We retire to our village, me feeling like a philistine for not getting the seagull analogy, Isabel babbling on about how Ibsen is overrated anyway.
Waiting for us on our doorstep is what can only be described as a crucifix made of chicken bones with a sort of Jesus-figure fashioned from dried chicken skin. Primrose has struck again.