by Matt Rudd
And with that, she walks off into a different carriage. ‘It was only a cat,’ I mutter. Because it was only a cat.
At Cat World, Janice asks if I saw the news story about the cat that was brutally murdered. I say I didn’t, but would she like a peppermint. She loves peppermints. It’s her catnip. I always have some to hand if I need to take her mind off something.
Saturday 5 October
Geoff and Alex have popped round for lunch and to play tonsil hockey with each other in front of my nine-month-old child. I don’t know if this is acceptable or not. I worry, briefly, that I’m homophobic but then realise I’m not: any tonsil hockey in front of a nine-month-old is unacceptable. Isabel seems to think everything up to early-stage foreplay, including affectionate spanking, is acceptable. This is partly because she’s read a book about how, in Germany and other northern European countries, they teach sex education to toddlers.
‘It means they don’t stigmatise sex. It’s simply another part of human life. Perfectly natural. Nothing to be secretive or weird or ignorant about,’ she says.
‘To toddlers, though?’
‘We’re very happy to teach our kids about where meat comes from.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Sex is just another part of life. Why shouldn’t our children know about it? Isn’t it better that they grow up with a matter-of-fact attitude to it rather than thinking it’s something dirty and grubby? The Germans don’t have that behind-the-bike-shed mentality. Nor do the Danish.’
I don’t know where to begin. All I can think of is that the one time I went to Copenhagen, all the girls were beautiful and half of them were pregnant. And that whenever Johnson sends me a gratuitous hardcore porn picture – usually a fat woman in a Viking hat doing something unspeakable to a barnyard animal – it’s German. And that I’d be very happy for Jacob to know absolutely nothing about any of this until long after his twenty-first birthday. And that teenage years are supposed to include a succession of embarrassing behind-bike-shed encounters, otherwise how else are English people supposed to develop their lovable sexual hang-ups?
And now Alex is licking a bit of mascarpone off Geoff’s cheek, and Jacob is wide-eyed and Isabel is giving me a don’t-be-weird-it’s-fine look, so I abandon my pudding (I don’t like mascarpone, anyway, I’ve said this a million times) and escape to do the washing up.
‘Thanks,’ whispers Alex conspiratorially, breaking my leave-me-alone-when-I’m-doing-the-washing-up rule. ‘Thanks again.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘But, my God, this treat ’em mean strategy of yours, it’s driving him crazy.’
‘I haven’t noticed any particular meanness. All I saw was you licking mascarpone off him.’
‘Oh no, don’t you worry. That’s all part of my game. Later, I’m going to say I’ve got work to do – and I’m going to go back to my place. Alone. It will drive him wild.’
I have created a monster.
Sunday 6 October
Andy arrives for our first attempt at a mini-triathlon. He’s still not really talking to me. At first, I assume this is because we are swimming and it’s hard to talk underwater. Then I assume it’s because we’re cycling and you’re supposed to pedal in each other’s slipstreams. Then we’re running and I think I’m going to puke, so I don’t care if we’re not talking. Except I do care. Andy never gets upset about anything.
‘Look…I’m…sorry…I…called…her…a tart,’ I say, using the energy I really could have used for not puking.
‘I don’t want talk about it,’ replies Andy, less breathlessly. He doesn’t have Ninja Daddy Power, but then he doesn’t have kids. So he still feels young and well-slept. And he’s obviously fit from all his female-with-a-penis sex marathons.
‘This…is…silly…I’m…pleased…for…you.’
‘No, you’re not.’ Andy has stopped running, thank Christ. ‘Ever since I got together with Saskia, you’ve been rude about her.’
‘I’ve always been rude about her, ever since she went out of her way to ruin my marriage. Don’t take it personally. You know what she tried to do to me.’
‘Get over yourself. That was ages ago. She’s moved on. Why can’t you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you go on and on and on about what a nightmare Saskia was, how she tried to ruin your marriage, how she was obsessed with you for years and you never knew. I think you quite liked it.’
‘What?’
‘I think, now that you’re married and you’ve got a kid and you live out here in the sticks, you quite like the idea of the beautiful woman who was so, so, so in love with you. It lends a little frisson to your otherwise tedious existence.’
‘What?’
‘I think you need to get over Saskia. I love her. She loves me. We’re getting married on New Year’s Eve. If you can’t accept that, so be it. I don’t want you there. And, by the way, you’re too slow.’
And off he ran, my best friend, the bastard, leaving me to hobble home, speechless, wronged and demotivated.
Monday 7 October
The morning after you’ve been dressed down by your best friend is a bleak one. I had stopped being defensive and started to wonder if he had a point. Not about me needing Saskia and all her associated excitement to cheer up my suburban existence. Not that. Just about whether I was being completely unfair. But then I reminded myself that, even last week, she’d thrust her boobs in my face. Surely she was the unfair one, not me.
Tuesday 8 October
Of course she was one of those people who thrust their boobs in everybody’s faces. She was probably given sex education as a toddler. She may even have a Danish mother. I don’t know. Maybe I was creating too much of a fuss. Maybe I was trying to make my own boring life more exciting. People always exaggerate the past to make themselves sound more crazy and fun. Maybe I’ve started to do that myself. Maybe I can no longer separate the truth from my own exaggerations.
Wednesday 9 October
First encounter with member of opposite sex: Sarah ‘The Donkey’ Philips
How I remember it, officially: I was fourteen. She was blonde and large-breasted. We kissed in the park. She let me feel her breasts. She gave me her number, but I never called.
How I really remember it, honestly: I was fifteen. She was mousy-brown and kept rats. We kissed in the park. She didn’t really have breasts. I gave her my number, but she never called, largely because she was renowned for snogging a different bloke every weekend.
First girlfriend: Vanessa Hughes
How I remember it, officially: I was sixteen. She was blonde and large-breasted. Very, very beautiful. She was a year older than me. We dated for six months and then things fizzled out, probably because of all the snogging we did.
How I remember it, honestly: I was eighteen. She was mousy-brown and small-breasted. Quite pretty. Two days older than me. We dated for two months and then she dumped me because Lance Baker had a tattoo and a car with a sunroof.
First and only proper two-timing steamy affair: Saskia
How I remember it, officially: she was blonde, large-breasted and never wore pants, we had alfresco sex two hours after meeting. She was crazy and exciting. Then mad. Then a nightmare.
How I remember it, honestly: blonde, breasts, no pants, alfresco. Crazy and exciting. Mad. Nightmare. Then not a nightmare any more.
Thursday 10 October
So it’s definitely all me. She’s just a vivacious, spirited woman who’s enjoying life and love. And I’m an overanalytical, self-centred arse who’s trying to ruin his best friend’s relationship by making his own life feel more interesting.
This is what I’m thinking as I walk to the station. But then I reach the station and notice the local newspaper headline screaming out of the billboard: ‘Cat murderer strikes again.’
I buy the paper.
Checking that Brenda is not on the train, I open the paper to the page-three splash. Brenda and Bob are staring out at me. She is hol
ding an unoccupied flea collar. He is looking stony-faced. In the background, a croquet mallet is propped up against the hedge. The picture quality is too poor to spot any discernible stains.
The article is written as if this is the biggest story the paper has had in years which, if it hadn’t been for the man two villages down from us who chopped up his wife and fed her to his Staffordshire bull terrier last Christmas, it would have been. Brenda and Bob got another cat to replace Smudgie. They called it Smidgie. It refused to go into the garden. ‘“We thought Smidgie sensed the pain and suffering of Smudgie,” said the tearful city worker,’ the article read. And then, yesterday, they found it in the pub kitchen, brutally slain. Just like last time. They think the killer crawled in through the dog flap. A local officer (guess who) described the case as the most horrific he’d seen in his entire career. ‘“A serial killer is at large,” the policeman explained. “And he needs to be stopped before more innocent pets get hurt.”’
At work, I am halfway through trying to establish how long the effects of Lion Poo last when a delivery arrives. Three huge boxes of aloe vera. Even though I still have two and a half boxes left from my stupid original order.
I phone the aloe-vera area sales manager.
‘You signed a contract and a direct-debit form,’ he says, unsympathetically.
‘Did I?’
‘Yes. You agreed to take £400 of stock a month for six months. You can’t go back on that now. We’d be stuck with a lot of aloe vera if you suddenly decided you weren’t going to take it off us. It’s all shipped here from America, you know. It doesn’t grow on trees.’
I need to make up with Andy, and he needs to do a lot more shagging. It is my only hope of not being killed by (a) a falling tower of aloe vera or (b) a wife who discovers that not only did I rack up an £8,000 debt from internet gambling but I also then racked up a further £2,400 on aloe vera in an attempt to offset it.
Friday 11 October
‘Did you hear a second cat has been murdered?’ Isabel is chewing some toast methodically. Jacob is chewing a pen absent-mindedly.
‘Yes, except you can’t murder a cat. Is he all right chewing that pen?’
‘Yes, he’s teething.’ She always says this. He’s been teething for six months. Every time he cries, it’s because he’s teething.
‘What if he fell while he was chewing the pen? He could kill himself instantly.’
‘He won’t fall.’ She has been reading more books which say we must constantly expose our child to danger. It is the only way he will learn. ‘He’ll only fall if you make him think he might fall.’
I decide to change the subject.
‘You know that whole aloe-vera thing? Well, a girl at work’s trying to flog it. Just wondered if any of the mums might be in the market for some?’
‘I’ll ask. Or you can ask tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Yes, we’re going camping, remember? With the baby group?’
Saturday 12 October
I definitely don’t remember us ever having a conversation about a baby-group camping trip. Not one in October. Not with Teresa and Annabel and their difficult children. I certainly don’t remember agreeing to it. Why would I ever agree to a whole weekend of mixing their difficult children with our wonderful but also difficult child? And yet here we are in a field near Brighton, in the rain, trying to set up a tent we last used when we were young and stupid and content to spend a whole crappy weekend in a crappy little tent at a crappy little music festival with drunk people knocking out our pegs and not shutting up until 4 a.m.
Teresa has a tent that can only be described as a house. It has a main living space, a vestibule and four bedrooms. I ask if it has a billiard room and she doesn’t laugh.
Annabel has a yurt, handmade in Mongolia.
We have a tent with a hole in it which smells of wet dog.
‘It got a bit wet in the flood,’ says Isabel, by way of warning me not to complain too much since the flood – and therefore everything related to the flood – is my fault for evermore.
The plan, if you can call it that, had been to cook sausages (brought by Teresa, who knows the best butcher in the whole of Europe) and burgers (brought by Annabel, who made them by hand because everything’s always best when it’s homemade) on the open fire, but the horizontal rain confined us to Teresa’s tent hall instead. All we could do was sit there eating cold cheese sandwiches and wait for it to get dark enough to call it a day.
Obviously, Teresa’s perfect child was asleep by 7.30 p.m. on the dot. ‘Routine,’ said Teresa instructively, while the two remaining feral children, wide awake as usual and with no apparent intention of going to sleep ever again, made yet another break for the great outdoors. It was too dark to see, but I swear I heard Isabel’s eyes rolling as Teresa then expanded on her theories of infant discipline.
Eventually, we all turned in, and that’s when the crying started. First Teresa’s (no doubt part of a routine), then Annabel’s, then ours. One child after another having its nightly moan. Next time I go camping with other people’s children – which will be never – I will pitch our tent in a separate field.
Sunday 13 October
How do you get trench foot? Can you still get it these days or was it something that died out in the 1970s? The field in which we are camping is fairly trench-like. My shoes have been soaked since three minutes after we arrived yesterday. It’s still raining horizontally and I’m pretty sure that I have water on the lung as well. Is that also something you can still get? Or is it water on the brain? I’ve definitely got something on the lung, though, because there’s a clicking noise every time I breathe. Sitting in a wet field during a cold October weekend with people whose parenting methods differ wildly from our own is not my idea of heaven. Even when Teresa hands me a fresh coffee made from the finest Jamaican coffee beans money can buy.
But Isabel is loving it. She wants to stay another night.
‘Please can we stay another night? Please, please, please, please, please? The others are going home. It will be just us. It will be so romantic. Pleeeeeease.’
‘We won’t have the use of Teresa’s show tent. And it’s still raining.’
‘Pleeeeeease.’
Jacob’s big eyes are also begging. He’s obviously very happy in that puddle eating that mud.
‘Okay,’ I say, because it’s impossible not to with all those pleases and, besides, there is nothing at home but Andy not talking to me, Alex telling me the intimate rewards of his new-found hard-ball-playing and a spate of cat murders for which I am, ridiculously, chief suspect.
In the evening, alone in our field, Jacob knocked out early by the gallons of fresh air his little lungs have sucked in, Isabel and I made love in our damp, cold tent. And, for the first time in a very, very long time, it was proper, loving, caring and unrushed. Afterwards, the skies had cleared. It took a while but I got a fire going and we sat beside it chatting. This is what married life used to be like. Time. Sex. Chatting.
‘I think I’m going to arrange an engagement party for Andy and Saskia,’ I said after we’d finished wittering on about how wonderful everything was. (You have to cover a lot of ground in these rare moments of child-free peace and togetherness.)
‘I think that’s a good idea.’
‘You do?’
‘Yes.’
‘But I thought you hated Saskia.’
‘She’s not my favourite person in the world, but she makes Andy happy. And if you don’t accept that, you’re going to lose him.’
‘I know.’
‘And by the way, I put a note in playgroup about the aloe vera. You can tell the girl at work we need fifteen bottles.’
‘Great. And you know that triathlon practice we did last week?’
‘Yes.’
‘Personal best by twenty minutes.’
‘Well done. We need a new tent.’
‘Yes. I’ll get one in the sales. Have you sent the form back for the Child Tr
ust Fund thingy?’
‘No. A man’s coming round to replace the shelves in the living room.’
‘Sure I shouldn’t do it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay.’
‘I love you.’
‘I love you, too.’
‘Shall we go camping in France next spr—’
And that was it. Jacob had woken up. Global politics, the crack in the car windscreen and the prospects of a general election would have to wait until the next time we had a chance for a proper conversation.
Monday 14 October
Worst Monday ever, including the Monday when I was seven that I broke my arm on a rockery, the Monday when I was nine that I found out there was no afterlife and the Monday when I was twenty-six that somebody told me it was perfectly safe to reheat hot dogs.
REASONS IT WAS THE WORST MONDAY EVER
First, the weekend was over. And even though it was a wet weekend and our tent had a hole in it, it was the best weekend of the year.
Second, we had to get up at 5 a.m., pack up in the rain and race home, and the traffic was so bad I had to leave for work without having a shower.
Third, I was still only five minutes late, but Janice nonetheless complained.
Fourth, she then said, ‘Did you hear that a second cat was murdered? Maybe we should look into it for our news pages,’ before announcing that she was off to a cat show and wouldn’t have time to write her column. Would I mind?