by David Nobbs
‘Mum’s changed,’ she says.
‘Well, I agree,’ he says. ‘She’s not quite herself at the moment.’
There can only be one explanation. She’s having an affair. That is something he would never have thought possible for her. He is devastated.
Of course the marriage has hit a rocky patch. It’s hardly surprising, given the situation over Get Stuffed. The atmosphere in the house has not been good. Naomi has become convinced that she will never work again, that she is unemployable.
Day after day she has called out, ‘I’m just taking Emily to school,’ and then something like, ‘I might shop for some shoes,’ or ‘I’m going to try to get in and have my feet done,’ and then she would return home with Emily six or seven hours later and say, ‘Sorry. I got held up,’ or ‘She couldn’t fit me in till two thirty,’ or ‘I met Sandra Hardcastle in Boots and she said, “Do you fancy a sandwich?” – and she always ended up, ‘So it wasn’t worth coming home before I picked up Emily.’ Once or twice she has even phoned and said, ‘I’ve got a bit delayed. Can you pick Emily up?’ and he couldn’t say, ‘I do have the scripts to finish, you know,’ because the whole subject of the sitcom was taboo in the house. It had become an unmentionable, invisible wall that kept them apart from each other in their own home. Really Emily was old enough to go to and from school on her own, but this was a stage in her development that they both rather dreaded. She showed no sign of undue naughtiness, but in this world you expected something to erupt at any time and, the longer it didn’t, the more you feared the time when it would.
Colin thought of hiring a private detective to follow Naomi and see where she went, but that seemed very dramatic, very clichéd, not to mention very expensive. He decided to follow her himself. A friend in publishing had told him that his work lacked ‘the salt and pepper of experience’. He was writing too much and living too little. Well, tailing his own wife counted as experience. It might help him to kick-start that novel.
So, every morning, after she has driven off to the school, he gets into his car and drives to a spot from which he can see the school gates. He sees where she parks, and when she sets off after dropping Emily, he follows. He does this for two days, loses her both times, and goes back home to his four cups of coffee and his writer’s block. On the third day he parks in a side street on the other side of the school, and follows her as she passes by the end of the road. He feels quite safe. She isn’t the world’s most careful driver and he’s noticed that she very rarely looks in her mirror. The next two days he sees where she parks, watches her set off on foot, but by the time he’s found a parking space she has disappeared. On both days her walk is taking her in the general direction of West Hampstead tube station, and so on the fifth morning, the Friday of his first week of stalking his own wife, he gambles.
He thinks it likely that she is going to the tube station. He feels that she wouldn’t risk an affair in her own neck of the woods. He decides not to follow her to West Hampstead station. She’s very likely to spot him if they’re standing on the same platform, waiting for the same train. As soon as she is out of sight of Narcissus Road, he will leave the house in the opposite direction, and get on a train bound for the West End at Kilburn station, which is one station further away from Central London than West Hampstead station. Then he will get off at West Hampstead station, and await her, hiding behind his newspaper, like any good spy. She will not be there yet, for she has to drop Emily at school and then park before she catches her train. He is working, of course, on the assumption that Naomi will be getting a train going towards Central London. But he thinks that this is a pretty safe assumption. She’s no snob, but she just isn’t Dollis Hill material. She isn’t a Neasden type of girl.
So, the moment she has gone, he slips out of the house and walks rather fast to Kilburn tube station, only to be told that there’s a twelve-minute wait ‘due to the knock-on effects of an early-morning signal failure in the Baker Street area’. So that’s no good. She will almost certainly catch the same train, and it will be very, very crowded due to the delays. She might get into his carriage and he might find her standing right by him.
So he doesn’t get the train. He goes home, and spends a terrible weekend wondering, imagining her slender body next to some obscenely hairy chest. He has been embarrassed all his life by the smoothness of his chest. There’s nothing wrong in a man having a smooth chest. It suits some men. But he feels that he is a man who should have a hairy chest, and hasn’t.
On the Monday morning, she takes Emily to school. He walks very swiftly to Kilburn station, gets a train immediately, gets off at West Hampstead station, sits on a seat at the end of the platform furthest from the entrance and exit, hides behind his newspaper as planned, and waits. At West Hampstead underground station the platforms and trains are still actually above ground; the train burrows under London shortly after the station. Somehow, being in the open air makes him feel more secure, more in control, than if he was having to do all this hundreds of feet under the surface.
He considers again his belief that she will be travelling towards Central London. Much as he would like to imagine Hairy Chest as living in Neasden because it’s so convenient for Wembley Stadium, or choosing Dollis Hill because of the views (he presumes that there’s a hill there), he knows it isn’t likely. Hairy Chest’s a city centre slicker, knows his way around. He’ll be modern, trendy, he’s where it’s at, he isn’t some end-of-the-line nerd with glasses. Colin’s heart is pumping. He hates the thought of what he’s going to find, but he hates the uncertainty even more.
There she is! Oh, God! She’s quite a long way down the platform, but he can see her sense of purpose. This is a woman with a mission. She looks hungry. He knows what her mission is – to meet and get laid by a virile young man with a very hairy chest. It stands out a mile.
He hears the train approaching. He walks slowly towards his wife’s part of the platform. This is really risky now. How foolish of him not to rely on a private detective, whom she wouldn’t recognise. He has his story ready, of course, in case she does see him, but still, it will rather abort the whole exercise.
He’s in luck. She gets into the far end of the next carriage, and he slips into the other end of it. The carriage is very crowded. They both have to stand. He hides behind his newspaper. He feels self-conscious, but then he realises that nobody is looking at him. People survive the torments of the rush hour on the underground by incarcerating themselves in their own world. They don’t ever meet anyone else’s eyes.
At each station he peers down the carriage. At the first one she doesn’t get off. At the second he isn’t quite sure. But no, at the third, he sees her.
She gets off at Oxford Street station, but he has difficulty getting out of his crowded doorway, and he loses her.
He goes home to his writer’s block in a foul mood. This following your wife, this stalking business, isn’t nearly as exciting as he’d hoped. He’s not getting any material for his book. And it’s far more difficult than you would suppose from all the books and films he’s seen, in which the stalkee never turns round and the stalker never expects the stalkee to turn round. And as he wrestles with his writer’s block he realises suddenly that he’s come to hate his two fictional taxidermists. They are two albatrosses round his creative neck. He’d like to kill them off, stuff them – no, model them and paint them silver and leave them by the Thames near the London Eye, so that the hordes of tourists would think they were real live people standing stock-still and would put money into the caps on the ground in front of them, which he would empty at the end of the day.
The next day he takes another risk. He gambles that she’s not changing trains at Oxford Street, but getting out. So he takes his train from Kilburn straight through West Hampstead, and gets off at Oxford Street. He goes up the escalator and stands near its top, hiding behind his paper, heart thudding.
There she is. He notes again her eager, hungry look, and suddenly he understands. It isn
’t just for the sex that she visits Hairy Chest. He takes her to the Ivy, the flash bastard. It’s her revenge on him for not taking her there as promised, when the fourth series was commissioned. But how could he, how could they celebrate the commissioning of the fourth series, dwarfed as it was by the fact of her being written out of it?
He slips into the human stream behind her, follows her up the steps, sees her go eastwards along Oxford Street. She’ll probably turn down Poland Street, Hairy Chest probably lives on the fringes of Soho, he’s a musician, they’ll smoke dope together, not too much, just enough to give an additional excitement to that lunch at the Ivy.
She enters a doorway, a vile, sinister doorway, a doorway to filth. Colin is shocked to see her enter this doorway. Suddenly thoughts of the Ivy fade. He’s got it all wrong. Hairy Chest inhabits the sordid underbelly of the city, lives on the grotty end of Oxford Street and – oh, God – probably has several sexually transmitted diseases.
He isn’t quite sure what to do now. To tell the truth, he’s a little frightened. Nothing good can happen behind doorways like that.
He decides to wait until she has had time to get into bed with Hairy Chest. He needs to catch her in flagrante delicto.
He crosses the road, so that if she should look out of the window – unlikely, she’s gasping for it, but possible – she won’t see him.
One more minute. He’s pretty frightened now. He’s not a man of action, he’s a wordsmith. Hairy Chest could be violent. Those forearms are pretty muscular. Maybe he should just go home and ask her in the evening what she’s been doing.
No. Be brave. Enter.
Just as he is about to enter, she comes out, along with five other people, three men and two women, all somewhat younger than her.
He can’t believe his eyes. They’re all carrying sandwich boards and large, heavy bags.
They set off westwards towards Oxford Circus.
He follows in their wake.
On one side of each of the six sandwich boards are the words, ‘There is no God’ in large letters. On the other side, in even larger letters, the message reads, ‘And it doesn’t matter
’. The six sandwich-board people each get a pile of pamphlets from their bag and start offering them to passers-by, smiling and saying, very politely, ‘Please take one of these.’ Some people smile and shake their heads. Others walk on without meeting their eyes. A few people do take pamphlets, which they examine briefly. Some of these people dump them in the nearest litter bin, others drop them onto the pavement, a few stuff them into their pockets, one or two even open briefcases and put them in with their other papers.
Colin follows Naomi for about a quarter of an hour, fascinated yet repelled. At first he feels relieved. She isn’t having an affair with Hairy Chest. But then a wave of dismay sweeps away the relief. This nutter is his wife.
At last he feels that he has seen all he needs to.
He approaches Naomi, his heart pounding. He is hating this.
He taps her on the shoulder.
She turns, sees him. The blood drains from her face. She smiles – a little desperately, he feels.
‘Naomi, Naomi, please stop this,’ he implores.
She smiles rather sadly, tells him to meet her in Starbucks in half an hour, and hurries on to catch up with her five colleagues.
He walks the streets for what he hopes is half an hour – he doesn’t wear a watch – but he still gets to Starbucks five minutes early. It’s his first experience of this new chain, and it isn’t his kind of place. It’s so full that he has to sit downstairs, in unattractive gloom. His medium coffee is so large that he feels full before he even starts on it. He wishes he was an eighteenth-century writer in the coffee houses of Vienna. Oh, to be in Vienna in its heyday. Oh, to be anywhere in its heyday. Oh, to be anywhere but here.
Ten minutes pass. She isn’t coming.
And then there she is, coming down the stairs, smiling and so pretty. She has an even larger coffee.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ she says. ‘Chrissy, she’s the very tall one, I don’t know if you noticed her, but she’s very pretty, she’s really nice, she’s half Danish though you wouldn’t know it, she was trying to persuade me not to come. She thinks you’ll persuade me not to go back.’
‘Who are they?’
‘They call themselves Atheists of Acton.’
He notes that she doesn’t say, ‘We call ourselves…’ It gives him hope. He needs to play this very cool, very straight. Any mockery could be disastrous. He resists the temptation to smile at the mention of Atheists of Acton.
‘“Atheists of Acton?”’
‘Yeah. Jamie’s actually the only one from Acton, he’s the balding one, he’s really nice, but he started it and it sounds snappy with the alliteration.’
This from a woman who has played the immortal words of Shakespeare, not to mention Colin Coppinger, thinks Colin.
‘How did you find them?’
‘On the internet.’
‘You really…’ He lowers his voice. A man who’s just come in may be a BBC producer and if word of this gets around, Naomi will never work again ‘…want to go out on a limb with this anti-God business, don’t you?’
‘I don’t want to. I have to. Mickey—’
‘Matey lot, aren’t you?’
Careful, Colin.
‘Well, yes.’
‘Is he really nice too?’
No. Don’t.
‘I suppose you’re bound to mock.’
‘Sorry. Listen…darling…’ Damn. The endearment hasn’t worked. It sounded like an afterthought.
She ignores it.
‘Mickey, he articulated exactly what I’ve been thinking. “The world is living through a pivotal period. Science has given us the chance to create a truly secular society. We can all live together in secular unity, or the world can dissolve into hatred, persecution and terrorism.”’
‘Bit of an extreme choice, touch of simplification just possibly, but I do have…um…a certain sympathy with those views. But you can’t achieve anything going round with Atheists of Acton, Agnostics of Aldershot or even Sceptics of Swindon.’
Careful, Colin. She’s bridling.
‘No, darling, but seriously, if you want to get that sort of message across, forget sandwich boards. They’re all about sad men standing in the cold with dewdrops on the ends of their noses advertising Indian restaurants, and religious maniacs who fear that Staines and Guildford will turn into Sodom and Gomorrah announcing that “The End of the World is Nigh”.’
‘Funny you should mention that. Carrie, sorry, but that’s what she’s called, and she’s really nice too, sorry, but she is, she said maybe we ought to have a board that said, “The End of the World isn’t Actually all that Nigh at all”, but then Jamie said that would make it sound as if we didn’t believe in global warming, so Mickey said we ought to have a board that said, “The End of the World is Nigh, but not for the Reasons that People Thought it was Nigh Before”, and we had a bit of a laugh, so you see we don’t take ourselves too seriously.’
‘I never said you did.’
‘No, but you thought it. So we settled for simplicity.’
‘I’m really not making fun, and I’m sure they are very nice,’ says Colin, ‘but you are my wife and I am being rather neglected and I don’t want you to do it and neither does Emily, and I think she feels rather neglected too, and you’ve done such a wonderful job with her so far, it would be a pity, well, a tragedy actually, to spoil it now. You’re a sitcom star and if the press get hold of it they’ll make fun of you. “Get Them Off.” You’ll never work again and it’ll get Emily mocked at school. Honestly, darling.’
This ‘darling’ is a success, it attaches itself nicely to his preceding word. Colin longs to tell her that the publicity wouldn’t do him much good either, but it would be a big mistake to mention this.
‘I do love you,’ he says. He isn’t absolutely sure that he means it entirely, but he means it enough for it
not to be classified as a lie.
‘I love you too,’ she says. He no longer has any idea whether she means it.
They hold hands. They make a pretty picture.
‘I just wish you’d use other methods, darling,’ he says. ‘Better methods. That’s all.’
Naomi squeezes his hand.
‘All right,’ she says. ‘I will.’
Colin thinks that something has been achieved. He really does.
‘Would you like some more coffee?’ she asks.
‘Possibly, in a fortnight,’ he replies.
The sight of all the chairs and settees depresses him. He knows that they are necessary, because there will be times when large numbers of people need to sit down all at once, but they speak so loudly of the fact that this is not anyone’s home, but a home. They are bulky, so that the residents of the home can be comfortable in them, and there is no way that so many chairs and settees can be arranged with elegance in so large a room.
‘Now then, sole product of my under-used loins, how goes it at number ninety-six?’
Only some seven or eight people are in the room this somnolent afternoon, but Timothy is deeply embarrassed by Roly’s rotund language, spoken, it seems to him, more loudly than is necessary, as if the Cadogan is a home for the deaf, not the blind.
‘Not bad, Dad.’
Now he is embarrassed because his language seems so shrivelled by comparison. He tells himself not to be embarrassed. No one in the room knows who he is. No one in the room can see him. Surely the fact of their blindness can protect him from the need to feel embarrassed?
Come on, boy. Don’t be feeble, he tells himself, before his father can.
‘But how are you, Dad?’
‘I’m happy in this place, Timothy. It’s right that I should be here. Nobody wants a gooseberry in their marital home, especially a blind gooseberry.’
‘I wanted you to stay, Dad.’ This in a much stronger voice. He has to accept the fact that this very personal conversation is being overheard by seven blind strangers – eight now, another has tip-tapped his way to one of the chairs.