by David Jester
“Thanks, Dad.”
“Poor bastard.”
He sniggered to himself and then sat down. He later told us that the baby actually looked like Lizzie, which was a huge compliment, as my dad adored Lizzie. He never had a bad word to say about her, saving all of them for me.
When Ben drifted off again, my mother carefully placed him in his carrier, spending several minutes standing over him and grinning before eventually turning to me and wiping that smile off her face. “I hope you’re going home after this,” she warned. “The boy needs some rest. He’s had a long day.”
I nodded. “Of course.”
We’d all had a long day, but these days anything longer than several hours felt like a long day. In fact, every morning, as I woke to the sound of screaming, still half in a dream state, my legs barely able to carry me, the day already felt twenty hours long.
We left Ben to sleep, and as soon as we got back we tried to get some sleep as well, but that didn’t last. We arranged to take it in turns, which meant we could see to him throughout the night and in the morning, but that rarely panned out. If Ben wasn’t the one to wake up the parent who was off duty, then the parent who was on duty was.
The following morning, we opened the house to Lizzie’s friends, a bundle of excitable women who, judging by the sounds they were making, had never seen a baby before. I did my best to stay out of the way; a penis in that company was only acceptable if it was attached to a small baby.
My own friends came over to see him later in the day, with Max at the head of the line. Max was my oldest friend, but far from the best. He wasn’t very bright and had somehow dulled with age. “He’s so much of an idiot that he makes you look intelligent” was how my dad often described him.
Max’s family had money. He was given some big opportunities at an early age and, to everyone’s surprise, he didn’t mess them up. He was now rich beyond belief, his idiocy now irrelevant and completely hidden behind his designer clothes, his designer haircuts, and his designer girlfriends. He had offered me a job on several occasions, but I couldn’t bring myself to work with, under, or anywhere near Max. He was a nice guy, but there was nothing but wax and air between his ears.
He showed up with a dazzling brunette on his arm. I didn’t even bother to ask her name; I knew I wouldn’t need to remember it. Max wasn’t a womanizer, certainly not as much as Matthew had been. Many of his girlfriends were with him for his money, and when those relationships inevitably broke down, there were always several more waiting to take their place. I still wasn’t convinced that Max knew what went where in the bedroom. Matthew had once put such a question to him and, following his answer, it took us several minutes to realize he was talking about home improvement.
“Who do you think the baby looks like then?” Lizzie had asked Max.
Max studied Ben for a while. His girlfriend was sitting on the sofa trying to look elegant and nonchalant and failing horribly in both cases. I’d already caught her pulling her knickers out of her ass and grimacing when Lizzie mentioned the labors of pregnancy. Obviously, I tried my best not to be drawn in by Max’s girlfriends, but I was still amazed that the little idiot who had sat next to me at school, failing at every subject and at life in general, could be such a babe magnet.
“Matt Damon,” Max said eventually.
Lizzie rolled her eyes. She usually had a lot of patience for Max, but since the birth, she seemed to be always one syllable away from murdering someone. “Me or Kieran, I meant.”
“Oh,” he nodded slowly and looked like he understood, but I knew Max better than that.
“No, he definitely looks like Matt Damon.”
I always felt strange having Max in my house. This was a man who had more money than he knew what to do with, a man who made more in a day than I made in a year. But despite that, he never acted like he was too good for me and was always just as polite and as friendly as he had always been. That was one of the reasons I still counted him as a close friend.
He didn’t talk about money or about work, and he didn’t brag. He was an all-round great guy, and one who life and karma had treated very well.
“Has Matthew seen him yet?” he asked.
Matthew was my closest friend, but they didn’t get along. Matthew had issues, bags of them, and he took a lot of his anger out on Max. Most of them stemmed from the fact that Max had everything that Matthew had ever wanted and had used only a quarter of the brain power to get there. Max was a better man than Matthew in that respect. He was not as petty, but he wasn’t as much fun to be around either.
“He’s coming soon.”
“I should go.”
“You don’t have to go just because he’s coming.”
Max waved a dismissive hand. “Trust me, I’m not. I like watching him squirm. I just have work to do.”
He shook my hand and gave me a hug, which felt a little awkward. “You did good, Kieran. The baby is adorable.”
“Thanks.”
He walked past me and I froze when it was his girlfriend’s turn. She held out her hand as if she expected me to kiss it, perhaps mistaking me for someone who gave a shit and mistaking herself for royalty. I turned her hand around and shook it, reveling in the appalled expression on her face.
Matthew arrived after Max had left. He wasn’t a big fan of children, something he made a point of mentioning as soon as he walked through the door.
“So, what brings us here? I hope you got a new pool table or an Xbox, because if this has anything to do with the baby, then I’m going home.”
His wife, Sharon, shoved him and hissed at him. She was the one who kept him on the straight and narrow, the one who had reeled him in and stopped his playboy ways, but keeping him on a short leash was a full-time job. The only reason they didn’t have a kid themselves was because Sharon couldn’t see herself looking after two children who only wanted to whine and suck her nipples.
In a move that had shocked everyone, including his parents, Matthew had married before me. To this day, his parents still thought the marriage was some sort of elaborate joke, unable to believe that Matthew would settle down and that Sharon would allow him to settle down with her. They were opposites in every way. She was smart, well-read, and well-educated; he finished school at the bottom of his class and had never read anything that wasn’t large print and illustrated. She was polite, generous, forgiving; Matthew once stopped speaking to me for three weeks because I borrowed money to pay for a pack of gum and forgot to pay it back. I’d never imagined that opposites could ever attract, but somehow they did. Max had once speculated that Sharon made up for Matthew’s downsides and he made up for hers, like they were two incomplete jigsaws that provided the parts needed to complete each other, and that marriage was the box that brought them both together—of course, this was Max talking, so I’m paraphrasing. But while I could see Sharon’s jigsaw completing Matthew’s, I couldn’t seem him contributing to hers.
It wasn’t like I thought my friend had no good points, but rather that I had known him long enough to know that he had no good points. In fact, between all the obscenities, the crudeness, the name calling, and the fact that he was constantly trying to make me look like an idiot, I had no idea why I was friends with him. But somehow I knew that all those reasons were exactly why I was friends with him.
Their marriage had been facing difficulties, with Sharon depriving Matthew of sex. But with his sexual appetite, I couldn’t blame her. She probably needed a rest.
Once the pleasantries were over, we took them to see Ben, who had fallen asleep in his crib. Sharon was ecstatic; Matthew was a little less impressed.
“You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all,” he stated.
“And when was the last time you saw a baby?” Sharon asked.
Matthew shrugged. “Does television count?”
I laughed it off, but Sharon didn’t seem to find it as funny. She glared at him momentarily and then turned away, the smile only returning to her face when her
husband was no longer in view.
“So how is the sex life?” Matthew asked as soon as we all sat down.
“Really?” Sharon was ready to take another shot at her husband. “That’s the first thing you ask?”
Lizzie and I both felt the tension, and we both tried to laugh it off, but it didn’t work. I also tried to change the subject, but Sharon cut me short, her attention fully on her husband, her tone even more annoyed than before.
“What else am I going to ask?” Matthew wondered. “How fun the diaper changes have been? How many sleepless nights they’ve had? If anything, sex talk lightens the mood.”
“It’s always sex, sex, bloody sex with you, isn’t it?” Sharon said.
“Not in our house it’s not.”
I heard a sharp intake of breath from Lizzie. “So …” She stood quickly, slapping her thighs and making sure everyone was paying attention to her. “Can I get you guys another cup of coffee?”
They both looked down at the cups they had just placed on the coffee table, both brimming with scolding hot coffee.
“No,” they said simultaneously, giving her a worried look.
“Tea?” she asked, her voice loud, her tone high.
“No, no,” Matthew said, eyeing her, most likely wondering what she had taken and if she would give him any. “We’re good, thanks.”
“I’ll get you some cookies then.”
Matthew rolled his eyes. “Sure.”
Lizzie waited, still standing. Then, happy with the silence that followed, she ducked into the kitchen. As soon as she was gone, the bickering couple turned back to each other, but before either of them could utter a word, Lizzie popped her face around the door.
“Chocolate Chip or Sugar?”
Lizzie’s bizarre behavior did its job. After spending some time wondering what had gotten into her, and dealing with all her requests, they had completely forgotten what they had been arguing about. Once the cookies, the cake, and the sandwiches came, a friendly atmosphere returned.
When they were ready to leave, before they kissed and hugged their goodbyes, and while Sharon was upstairs with Lizzie saying a silent goodnight to Ben, I felt Matthew’s hand grip my arm.
“I need your help.”
There was a pleading, desperate look in his eyes. “Sorry?”
He released me from his grasp, paused to check on the noises coming from upstairs, and then ran a hand through his hair. He looked like a man in distress, and for a moment, he had me worried, but as was always the case with Matthew, whether he was happy, sad, angry, or ecstatic, there was always one prevailing cause. “I’m horny as hell,” he whispered.
I took a step back. “I can’t help you there.”
“Trust me, mate, even if I was that way inclined, you wouldn’t be my first choice.”
I was a little hurt by that. “What do you mean?”
“You’re not my type.”
I understood. “You’d prefer them more feminine.”
He looked like he was struggling to suppress a laugh. “Yeah, sure. I like them more feminine.” He paused to look up the stairs again, content when he heard the two women gossiping, seemingly stuck in an argument about how adorable the sleeping baby was. He grabbed my arm again and dragged me away, into the hallway and out of earshot.
“It’s been three weeks now.” His voice broke toward the end of the sentence, as if hearing it aloud was painful for him. “I don’t know what to do with myself.”
“Well … there are a few things.”
“Ah, believe me, I’ve been wanking so much that I’m worried it’s going to fall off. I have friction burns down there. At least, I hope they’re friction burns.”
“Let’s not get into that, please.”
“I need you to help me get laid.”
“With Sharon?”
He shrugged. “At this point, I don’t care. Anyone will do. Whatever you can get; whatever it takes.”
“You realize I have a small baby to look after now, right?”
He looked a little confused. “You have a wife for that.”
Sometimes Matthew’s blatant sexism surprised me. Most of the time it made me question just why I kept him so close and how Sharon, Lizzie, or any other woman in his life hadn’t killed him. But I knew him well enough to know that he said those things because they annoyed me, and I kept him around because he amused me. And because I didn’t really have any other friends.
“I can’t expect Lizzie to do everything.”
“How many diapers have you changed? How many times have you woken up in the middle of the night to help? Come on, mate, I know you and I know Lizzie. Everything you do to help is probably supervised by her. You probably get in the way more than you help. She’ll be happy to get rid of you.”
I thought about calling him a liar and defending myself, but he was right. “Okay, I’ll help.”
He clapped his hands. I flinched more than I would have liked. “Remember, anyone will do.”
“Let’s stick with Sharon for now, seeing as you did commit to love, honor, and obey an’ all that.”
“Okay, whatever. Just help me.”
3
Desperate Measures
I spent the next few weeks in a haze. I wasn’t sure if minutes or days had passed, because I wasn’t convinced I was even awake most of the time. I might have been supervised and I might not have done as much as Lizzie, but I heard those screams as much as she did; I helped to clean up the vomit, the poop, and everything else that came out of our little bundle of joy; I was also tasked with running to the shop to get whatever Lizzie wanted or told me that the baby needed (although I have my suspicions that the 11 p.m. Snickers was for her and not him). I avoided the local newsstand, on account of the abuse I got from the owner, and trekked the extra mile to another shop. But in doing so, my tired brain got confused, going back to an old routine. On two separate occasions, I ended up at Starbucks, ordering enough caffeine to power an army and glaring at hipsters.
But even though I had a new baby to look after, an older baby became just as demanding of my time. Matthew had spent that time assuming I was looking for an unfortunate woman to sleep with him, and then getting very angry with me when he realized I was putting the needs of my newborn baby ahead of his.
I had avoided his texts and his Facebook messages, on account of the fact that I couldn’t find my phone and couldn’t look at Facebook without getting angry at people who were sleeping and living normally. A few weeks after the night he had been introduced to Ben, he managed to get me on the phone. He sounded even more desperate and frustrated than he had been when he begged for my help. Once we got the pleasantries out of the way, which consisted of him swearing at me for not responding to his messages, and reminding me that he had known me for years, while Ben had only known me for five weeks, he got straight into his sex life.
“She just refused me again,” he said. “I don’t know what to do. I tried everything. I tried brushing up against her, I tried just going for it, but she just blanks me at every turn.”
“Brushing up against her?”
“In bed,” he clarified. “After all else had failed. I figured I’d just sort of slap her in the ass with my penis.”
I had heard many stories about Matthew’s bedroom antics. The majority of them sickened me, but the thought of a desperate Matthew slapping his cock against a disinterested wife and looking perplexed when she didn’t immediately ravish him amused me. “And that didn’t work?”
“No.”
“Amazing.”
It was equally amazing that Matthew used to be such a hit with the ladies. I didn’t know if it was just because he was younger, because they were younger—and therefore too naive or too horny to commit to any real flirting—or if Matthew had just lost his touch over the course of his marriage.
“I had to resort to masturbation again,” he said, giving me an image that I definitely didn’t find amusing. I had once stumbled upon Matthew while he was masturb
ating. He stopped what he was doing to berate me for catching him, telling me that I shouldn’t be disgusted because it was perfectly normal, that what a man does in the comfort of his own house is no one else’s business, and that, if anything, it was all my fault for following him when it was blatantly obvious what he intended to do. Which is all fair and well, but we were in McDonald’s at the time and I’d only popped into the bathroom to wash Big Mac sauce off my hands.
There was a pause and I suspected that he was contemplating hanging up so he could pleasure himself again. Horny, unsexed men tend to get turned on by the merest mention of sex or naked women. But it didn’t even take that much for Matthew. The thought of himself masturbating was enough to get him excited and make him masturbate again. It’s a continuous cycle that only stops when he runs out of lubricant or his balls retreat back into his body.
“It’s not right,” he said eventually, seemingly rejecting the idea of more alone time with his hand. “Marriage is a commitment between two people who signed a verbal contract that neither one of them should ever need to masturbate again.”
“I don’t think that’s quite what marriage is.”
“If I need to unload, then she should be ready to receive me.”
“Is this what you tell Sharon?” I wondered. “Because I think I may have found your problem.”
“Don’t be stupid. Even if she did listen to me, I wouldn’t tell her that.”
I pitied him. He was breathing heavily now, and there was a tone of what appeared to be worry in his voice. It sounded like he was getting ready to cry, or doing his best to avoid crying. I had never known Matthew to be affected by anything that anyone ever did or said. He was like a robot with a penis.
“I need your help,” he reiterated.
“I don’t know—” I paused; his breathing had changed again and I could hear something else. “Are you okay?” I asked. “You sound a little—what’s that noise?”
“I told you, I had no choice but to come downstairs and beat one out.”