by Matt Rudd
Isabel is still the rock of the family, but only just. Her mother is wearing her down. I get home from work and everyone is rolling their eyes.
‘Hi, darlink. Your wife thinks her mother doesn’t know anything about raising children.’ Eye roll.
‘Hi, darling. She’s been telling me that I should establish a routine.’ Eye roll.
‘It will make all your lives easier, don’t you think, William?’ Eye roll.
‘Three-month-old babies are too young to have a routine forced on them.’ Eye roll. I’m starting to wonder which one of them will be the first to sprain an eye. Or if that’s even possible.
‘Well, we managed it with you and you turned out all right,’ continues her mother.
‘Yes, now I’ve recovered from the deep psychological trauma of being abandoned in my cot like a Romanian orphan,’ says Isabel, folding her arms.
‘Bit of tough love never killed anyone,’ says her father, always the master at timing an entrance. I haven’t even put my bag down and said hello and all three of them are eye-rolling at me.
‘Evening, everyone. Jacob all right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes.’
‘Playing up a bit.’
Saturday 6 April
More of the same, but I’m not at work to avoid it.
Sunday 7 April
More of the same combined with the horror of my middle-of-the-night pee coinciding with Isabel’s dad’s middle-of-the-night pee and release of wind. And he is naked. And I am wearing Isabel’s nightdress because I was cold and no one has got round to dealing with my flood-damaged wardrobe. We both give each other funny looks, then the next morning pretend nothing has happened.
Monday 8 April
Thank God for work. Sort of. I am tempted to dodge kick boxing again on the grounds of my continuing domestic crisis, but if I don’t go now, I’ll never go. And Ingrid forced me to pay for all ten classes upfront. I’m guessing she’d have a high drop-out rate if she didn’t.
‘Hi, Brenda. I knew I knew you. You get the same train as me.’
‘Right. You’re the one who always tuts at everyone.’
‘Right. You’re the one who always tries to take up two seats.’
‘You should get on earlier if you want a seat.’
‘What? Like further down the line?’
‘That’s what I do.’
‘But I don’t live further down the line.’
I’ve realised that Brenda is irritating not just because she’s very smug for a short person but also because she speaks entirely through her nose. This makes her sound alarmingly like Miss Porritt, my vindictive geography teacher who would bore the class to sleep with long nasal monologues on oxbow lakes and then punish us for not paying attention.
After the Spice Girls routine, we begin with a warm-up. A few gentle hits, says Ingrid. So I give Brenda a couple of nudges, nothing more, and she punches me really hard, straight in the face, when I wasn’t ready. Bloody hell. I know what’s happening here. I’m taking the frustration of a woman who refuses to accept she is clinically short. She won’t go to short-people bars and nightclubs to meet other short people. She tries to make her way in the normal-heighted world, finds nothing but prejudice, rejection and cans of beans that are out of reach. She has only two choices: retrain as a vindictive geography teacher or get paired off with a tall person in kick-boxing class and then cheat.
Well, I won’t let her win. I shall take the punches and I’ll give them back, even though it feels weird to hit a woman. Even though she moves too bloody quickly to hit properly.
‘Sorry about the eye,’ she sneers at the end of the class. ‘Don’t know my own strength.’
‘No need to apologise,’ I say. ‘It looks worse than it is.’
This is the opposite of the truth. Isabel says she can hardly see a mark, but I feel like I’ve been hit by a bus, whatever that feels like.
Tuesday 9 April
Hurts more now. Pretty sure my nose is broken, but the internet reveals it might not be. If it were, it would feel crunchy and my eyes would be bruised, apparently. But we all know how wildly inaccurate the internet is.
Maybe it’s a little bit broken or maybe part of it has splintered off and is now gouging a hole in my frontal lobe. That would teach Isabel to tease me. And Johnson, who has helpfully e-mailed me a picture of Johnny Owen, a skinny, jug-eared boxer from Merthyr Tydfil who was known as the Bionic Bantum and died after a knockout in Los Angeles in 1980. ‘That’s you, that is,’ read the accompanying note. ‘Except, of course, Johnny wasn’t fighting a girl.’
Wednesday 10 April
Still no word from the insurance company about the builders’ quote.
One of my virtual Facebook friends is full of sympathy. Not for my sore nose. For the flood. Her husband once left the freezer door open. Nearly lost a steak box, she explains. I’m going to block her.
Saskia, whom I have now accepted as a Facebook friend even though she is a real-life nightmare, is ranting on about how sexy Stockholm is but breaks away long enough to say she hopes I’m okay. I don’t want her to hope I’m okay.
The work experience, who is now not a work experience, wants me to be her Facebook friend even though I hate her. No wonder she has nine thousand other Facebook buddies if she’s that indiscriminate.
I accept. One can’t be too dismissive of the youth of today.
‘OMG. You really do only have twenty-one friends,’ she posts on my Facebook wall, whatever that is. ‘Sweet.’
Bloody youth of today.
Thursday 11 April
Nose not broken and pain going away. No one realises how serious that was. I notice from previous updates on the workie’s Facebook account that she thinks I am well old and well uptight. I tell her, face to face – not virtually, since we work in the same office – that I am not uptight. She says she was only kidding and that I should lighten up. I say, ‘Are you serious?’ and she says, ‘What?’ because she’s not paying attention, she’s texting. I say, ‘Can’t you stop texting for a second while I talk to you?’ And she says, ‘I’m not texting. I’m IMing.’
Isabel is uninterested in the frustrations of work. She wants me to get the insurance people to fix the bathroom NOW. I phone, press 4, then 2, then 7, then give my details, my mother’s maiden name and accept that the call might be being recorded for training purposes, before establishing that there’s nothing that can be done because builders don’t work during the Easter holidays.
Sunday 14 April
Easter. Isabel, Jacob, me. Spring flowers in the park. Lambs bleating playfully. The distant prospect of summer. Our first summer with a baby. We will lie in meadows while our child learns to crawl a lot earlier than you would expect a child to learn to crawl. We will eat fruit and chat like we used to in the old days. And return each night to the tent we will no doubt be living in because the bastard builders won’t have got round to patching up our house and Isabel won’t be able to live in the same house as her parents any more.
Monday 15 April
Thank God for bank holidays. No girly kick boxing. No violent midgets. Only a father-in-law explaining to Jacob, our not-even-four-month-old, that he is too old to be crying so much. Far too old. And Isabel saying are we doing anything for her birthday and that she’s only asking because her pre-baby friends, the ones still in London, still going out to parties, still without a care in the world, want to treat her to a night out. And me saying, ‘Yes, we’re definitely doing something.’ And her saying, ‘Really, that’s exciting. Is it okay if I go out the following Saturday, then? I won’t go for long and I’m sure Jacob can manage one evening without me.’ And me, still panicking about what I’m going to do for her birthday, saying, ‘Sure, of course.’
Wednesday 17 April
‘Darling, it’s fine. No one will see it. It’s daytime television,’ says Isabel like she’s been practising what to say all day.
Didn’t I say, right from the start, that this whole idea
of getting Alex to do our bathroom was a bad, bad idea? Didn’t I say that? Yes, I did. So not only do we end up with a bathroom that is completely inappropriate for our lovely house, not only is it a bathroom shaped like a uterus, which makes my brave attempt to recover from the psychological damage of witnessing childbirth far harder, not only does this, in turn, mean that the only time Isabel and I have had proper sex in the last nearly four months, I do it humming the theme tune to the Antiques Roadshow, not only does the bathroom end up destroying the whole house but – and I think this is quite a large but – I also get humiliated on national television by the bastard.
‘You saw it,’ I reply, furious. ‘You saw it and recorded it and now I’ve seen it. Your mum has seen it. Your dad has seen it.’
‘The baby-group mums have seen it. They thought it was good.’
‘What? How did the baby group see it?’
‘Well, I might have mentioned—’
‘Oh, thanks a million.’
‘It’s not that bad. I thought it was quite funny.’
It wasn’t funny. The programme-makers have gone beyond their remit as makers of a yet another annoying daytime DIY show. They have attempted to make it comical. They have given me a superhero name, ‘Captain Impractical’. They keep playing a little jingle every time I’m mentioned. There’s Isabel explaining how she’s wanted the bathroom decorated for years (exaggeration), but how I’m not very focused (more exaggeration) when it comes to house stuff. She then recounts a shelving saga very hyperbolically. And a run-in with an IKEA cupboard. And a fence. All the time, Alex and Geoff are hamming up the horror. And it is all interspersed with clips of me sitting on the sofa doing nothing. Then reading the paper. Then sleeping.
‘They’re just having some fun to make it more interesting,’ says Isabel.
‘At my expense. Where’s the bit at the end where I said this is the most ridiculous bathroom I have ever seen?’
That’s what bugs me the most. The nation needs to know that Alex and Geoff are rubbish. That, only a few months ago, Alex wasn’t an interior designer at all. That he wasn’t even gay. All they’ve shown is the third take, with Isabel banging on enthusiastically about how wonderful the bathroom is. She even cries a bit, as requested by the producer, when Alex tells her it’s the sort of bathroom a young, beautiful family should have. And instead of me telling Alex and Geoff they’ve ruined our house, which they had, it shows me appearing to smile approvingly, even though I’m in a different room and not smiling about the bathroom at all.
‘Hmm, yes, funny they decided not to go with the ranting, swearing disgruntled husband for their first show. Now, stop being silly, darling. It’s all over now. It’s not a big deal.’
Except that it isn’t quite over.
It finishes with some more of the Captain Impractical jingle. Then Alex and Geoff promising to come to the rescue of all the poor women married to DIY slobs. And then a slow-motion clip of me sitting down on the sofa again, over which the narrator explains that, a few days after they left, I destroyed the bathroom by leaving the tap on.
‘Captain Impractical strikes again, ladies and gentlemen. If you see this man, do not approach him. He is dangerous.’
‘It’s really not a big deal,’ reiterates Isabel.
Thursday 18 April
It is a big deal.
I arrive late at work due to the late running of an earlier train (I mean, do the bloody railway people not understand that blaming the late running of a train on the late running of an earlier train is not a sufficient explanation?) and already there’s a hammer on my desk with a note reading, ‘Lesson one: this is a hammer’. Everyone is pretending to work, but sniggering. They’ve seen it. They’ve seen the daytime DIY programme Isabel said no one watches. How is that possible?
I have the no-longer-a-workie to thank. She’s posted an even more cruelly edited version of Alex & Geoff to the Rescue on YouTube. Everyone at work has seen it. So have 6,427 other people, some of them in Brazil. People in Brazil are writing ‘What a loser’ in the comments box below the video.
Emergency lunchtime drinking session with Johnson, my only friend in the world. At least he’s real, not like all the no-longer-a-workie’s Facebook friends. And he only spends the first half of the lunch hour laughing his head off. Even though we are back in the office by 2.10 p.m., Anastasia has the temerity to reprimand us for treating work like one big social event. She then gets the Managing Editor to send round an e-mail stating that long boozy lunches are not conducive to efficient magazine production and will, henceforth, be banned.
She then leaves the office because she’s having a (boozy) dinner with George Clooney. In Italy.
I phone Isabel and tell her I’m going to have a quick drink with Johnson. Johnson’s a good friend. He understands.
‘I mean, it’s completely ridiculous. Alex is still ruining my life.’
‘A leopard can’t change its spots.’
‘I mean, how is it that I’m the one appearing useless and unreasonable when Alex is the one that put dildos on our bath instead of taps?’
‘It’s just not fair.’
‘It’s not.’
‘I mean, it could happen to anyone.’
‘What could?’
‘Leaving a tap on and destroying your house. I mean, you know, we live in a hectic, perplexing world. Things are complicated. How are we supposed to keep tabs on things like taps?’
Now I’m not talking to Johnson, either.
Friday 19 April
Horrible, horrible, horrible start to the day. Got back late enough to be in the doghouse, mainly because I’d promised I would be back soon enough to distract Isabel’s mum from offering any more parenting advice.
‘You said you were only going for one for the road,’ said Isabel, in the sort of furious whisper you do when you’re rowing at your parents’ house.
‘I needed a drink.’
‘Well, I needed a bloody drink, too.’ The last time she swore at me, she was six centimetres dilated.
‘Look, I had a bad day.’
‘We’ve all had a bad day.’
‘Yes, but you haven’t become a YouTube hit, have you?’
‘Oh God, will you just get over yourself. This family needs you to grow up.’
I am well and truly in the doghouse. In pre-parent days this would have meant sleeping on the sofa, but at Isabel’s parents’ house, we have to confine our marital disputes to the one spare bedroom all three of us are attempting to occupy. So I am forced to sleep on the floor. As it happens, this is where I’ve been sleeping anyway because Isabel and Jacob sleep in the tiny double bed – all huddled up and cosy. I sleep on a lilo. So perhaps the best thing that could be said of last night is that there was no difference in sleeping arrangements despite the doghousing.
On the less positive side, Jacob woke up at 4.30 a.m., precisely three hours after I finally got to sleep because I felt so pathetic about having a family but not growing up. He didn’t cry or scream or do a terrifyingly realistic impression of a baby choking to death like usual. He just lay there gurgling in a way that was almost but not quite possible to ignore.
‘He needs a change. You deal with him, I’m still asleep,’ said Isabel from under a pillow. So I got up, took him downstairs, changed his nappy, tried and failed four times to do up all the buttons on his babygro in the correct order and then sang him ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’.
He smiled the whole way through, so I started singing it again. More smiling. Then I got to the end and he stopped smiling and started crying. So I started again. And I decided I wouldn’t stop until he’d had enough. Because I might be a crap husband and a useless DIY man and a laughing stock, but I can make my son happy.
And then it was 7 a.m. and time to start a whole new day. I am never going to drink four pints again.
‘Hello, this is William Walker. The one with the bath in his living room. Look, it’s been three weeks since—’
‘Claim number, pleas
e, sir?’
‘467XP4 – 76565. V3423.128765. 98AAF.’
‘I’m sorry. Was that a hyphen or a dash?’
‘What?’
‘After the first six digits?’
‘Do you not think it might be sensible to have shorter claim numbers?’
‘I’m sorry, sir?’
‘I mean, I’ve called every day this week and each time I call I have to read out this whole number. With all these letters and you lot—’
‘Was it an “F” at the end or an “S”, sir?’
‘I mean, you’d have to have several trillion claims on the go to warrant such a long—’
‘Yes, sir, well we are quite busy at the moment. Now, your surname?’
‘Walker. Like I said.’
‘And can you spell that, sir?’
They reckon the builders will come on Monday. Almost certainly. Which means I have achieved something. On four hours of broken sleep, I have achieved something with my terrible Friday. Anastasia has been to Italy and achieved an exclusive interview and photoshoot with George Clooney. In the same time, I have been to the pub, drunk four whole pints, got through another night as a parent and got an almost definite time frame off the insurance company. There is no question who deserves the greater credit.
(Me.)
Saturday 20 April
Five days until Isabel’s birthday, and it’s a big one. I never really got her anything very special for the whole giving-birth thing, a fact which looks all the bleaker when you consider that Caroline’s husband managed to attend the birth without fainting and to hand her some ‘beautiful, absolutely beautiful’ diamond earrings before she had even regained feeling in her legs.
The problem is that I’ve already left it too late to order anything on Amazon. And Amazon isn’t really going to cut it, anyway. And earrings just seem like copying now. And Isabel has told me not to be extravagant because we’re a one-income family now – and a homeless one at that. The time for extravagant gestures has passed.