William Walkers First Year of Marriage

by Rudd, Matt

  ‘Hi, my name is William.’

  ‘Right, William. I’ll be straight with you. I’ve been mucked about by men far too much and I’m sick of you lying bastards. Yes, I’m blonde and yes, I have very large breasts but that doesn’t mean I’m a tart. I want to know, right now, before we go a single second further, if you’re seriously looking for love, if you want to have a relationship. You know, with actual dating and cinemas and walks in the country. I’m not interested in wasting any more time with no-hopers. Capiche?’

  ‘Good evening, I’m William.’

  ‘William. Charlotte. Do you ride? Horses, that is. Hahahahaha. I love riding. I’m still talking about horses. Hahahahahahahaha-haha-snort. I ride three. Still horses, William, you filthy-minded man. Hahahahaha. Another glass of ssshampypampy? Oh go on. Oops. Spilt it. Bit squiffy, which is odd because I’ve only had two glasses. We should go riding sometime. Not talking about horses any more, William, hahahahahaha.’

  JUNE

  ‘Marriage is a wonderful invention;

  But, then again, so is a bicycle repair kit.’

  BILLY CONNOLLY

  Wednesday 1 June

  REASONS TO BE HAPPY

  Married for a month, only one proper argument and that was under immense airport-related stress. Don’t know what Johnson was worried about. If anything, life with a wife is even more exciting than life with a fiancée. Apart from the John Lewis thing, the Honeymoon That Dare Not Speak Its Name and the new, tougher line in bathroom politics, my first thirty-one days hitched have been nothing short of blissful. Everything is the same but everything is different. In a good way.

  And I like my job. It doesn’t matter that I am never going to get a half-mill bonus to blow on a gin palace called That’s My Buoy.Or that I will never be able to splash ten grand on a corked bottle of wine in a snooty restaurant. Or that I won’t have a penthouse serviced by an elevator that has a retractable floor which, if required, drops enemies into a shark-infested swimming pool. Well, it matters a bit but the main thing is I no longer work for Cat World. I have a great boss. I get paid enough to enjoy the simple things in married life: the occasional dinner out, the odd weekend away, a subscription to Money Can’t Buy Happiness Monthly.

  REASONS TO BE UNHAPPY

  None.

  Thursday 2 June

  REASONS TO BE UNHAPPY (REVISED)

  One.

  A new marital rule has been snuck in before I’m even properly awake. It was Isabel’s turn to make the tea, which she did and brought back to bed, looking like butter wouldn’t melt. But the tea tasted bitter and strange. Gave her a ‘this-tea-tastes-strange’ look; she pretended not to notice, went on reading her magazine. Had another taste, looked at her again.

  ‘Darling, there’s something wrong with the tea.’

  THE THREE DIFFERENT USES OF ‘DARLING’

  Darling. Traditional term of endearment between two partners. As in ‘I love you, darling’ or ‘I’m home, darling.’

  Darling. Irritating term of endearment between two posh friends. As in, ‘Darling, you look simply super.’ ‘Thank you, darling. And you look simply radiant.’ Very irritating but not as irritating as ‘babes’, which Alex calls Isabel at every opportunity. ‘Hi babes, bye babes, love you, babes.’

  Darling. Traditional start to an argument between two married persons. As in ‘Darling, there’s something wrong with the tea.’

  ‘It’s got goat’s milk in it. You can’t taste the difference.’

  ‘I can taste the difference.’

  ‘You can’t. It tastes exactly the same.’

  ‘If it tastes exactly the same, why would we be having this conversation?’

  ‘We’re not having cow’s milk any more. It’s hard to digest.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cow’s milk is designed for calves.’

  ‘We’re not goats either.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’re not goats. We’re humans.’

  ‘Look, goat’s milk is much better for you.’

  ‘But goat’s milk tastes like cat spray.’

  ‘You should try drinking tea without sugar as well. It’s bad for you.’

  ‘What?’

  In our wedding vows, we had both promised to honour, love and obey each other. At the time, it seemed like a good idea. We’re a modern couple. We were both up for a bit of obeying. Rather sexist if it was only Isabel who said it. The vicar, in one of his compulsory marriage classes, had explained that obeying in a marital context didn’t mean doing what someone said anyway. Oh no, no, no, no. It followed its original Latin meaning, ‘to listen’, as in ‘to empathise’, as in ‘to be lovely to each other all the time’. Which seemed to have slipped Isabel’s mind this morning.

  ‘But I like sugar in my tea.’

  ‘You’ll get used to it without. It’s only because I love you, and care about your health, darling.’

  And with a gentle pat of the bed linen, she signified that this discussion was over. Henceforth, tea shall be taken with goat’s milk but without sugar. So speaketh the wife.

  Feeling quite put upon, I ordered a double espresso at Moor-gate. Then drank sugary cow’s-milky tea all morning. Then ate a whole packet of nuts to reduce sugar-and caffeine-poisoning effects before lunch. Then had no appetite for lunch and had to eat a sandwich at 5 p.m. so then had no appetite for dinner.

  NOTE TO SELF: now that you are married, you must capitulate more often. Resistance is inadvisable. At best, it will throw a day’s eating patterns out of kilter. At worst, it will make you wonder what on earth you let yourself in for when you said ‘I do.’ And it’s far too soon to start thinking like that.

  Friday 3 June

  Not only am I not working on Cat World any more; not only have I joined a reputable magazine that does proper grown-up stuff about proper grown-up things like politics and economics and how to look good in a cheap suit, but I am getting a pay rise. Thank you, editor, for recognising my hard work and dedication over the last twelve months.

  REASONS TO BE UNHAPPY (RE-REVISED)

  None.

  ‘Congratulations. I’m really pleased for you,’ says Johnson on our way to the Tube. ‘Obviously, bum-licking is seen as a more useful skill on this magazine than the ability to string a sentence together.’

  ‘You mean bum-licking is a more useful skill than hosting and winning the World Throw the Paper Aeroplane Out the Window and See if You Can Hit a Traffic Warden Championships?’

  ‘Teacher’s gerbil.’

  ‘Low-income earner.’

  ‘Bottom-dweller.’

  ‘Tramp.’

  I know Johnson is secretly pleased for me—even if he is a miserable old bastard. He’s always been my mentor—it was him who saved me from Cat World. If he hadn’t lied about how good I was, I wouldn’t have got tea-maker on Life & Times. I’d still be tasting new Whiskas flavours every month in my famous ‘Good enough for your dinner plate?’ cat-food column.

  Isabel is much more excited. She’s popped the champagne before I’ve stepped through the door, even before I can point out that the champagne almost certainly cost more than my pay rise is worth.

  ‘Do you want to go out and celebrate?’ she says.

  ‘No, let’s have a night in. Just the two of us.’

  ‘Why, I’d love to, Grandpa.’

  This is another great thing about being hitched. We can have a quiet Friday night in. We can even watch Gardener’s World.And Have I Got News For You. And the news. With a cup of hot cocoa. Because we’re incredibly old and incredibly boring and we don’t have the willpower to go out at the weekends and stand in loud bars communicating by sign language any more.

  Bliss.

  Except upstairs is having a party. I know this because two hours after the DJ starts, one of them (the actor, claims to have been in EastEnders, has a nose ring) comes down to warn us they’re having a party.

  Until that point, I’d been planning his and his two flatmates’ execution intricat
ely. It would involve a pitchfork, a corkscrew, two bicycle pumps, a pair of size-eleven ice skates and one of those old-fashioned elevators with the iron concertina sliding doors. Isabel tells me to stop being so aggressive, they’re only young, they’re allowed to have a party. Then the doorbell goes, the guy who says he’s from EastEnders says he’s having a party and, instead of ripping his head off or even saying something dry like ‘no kidding’, I say, ‘Oh right, a party. Good-o,’ and gyrate my hips a bit. ‘No problem at all, thanks awfully for letting me know.’

  Now it’s 3 a.m.

  Would forgo ice skates and corkscrew for simple but effective baseball bat. Isabel ear-plugged and valerianed, dead to the world. Really thought she was actually, prodded her to check, got a tut. How can she sleep through this?

  And why, at the age of twenty-nine and almost a year, am I still living in a middle-floor flat, trapped like a noise-sensitive piece of ham in a sandwich of irritation? A sandwich on a platter of other rundown sandwiches full of people who spend all day mugging each other. So tired.

  Now it’s 4 a.m.

  Scratch previous comments on being happy with lack of half-million bonus/yacht/shark-lift. Am putting the flat up for sale tomorrow morning. I don’t care how far the housing market has crashed. And when I sell, I’m moving to the Isle of Skye.

  Saturday 4 June

  Surprise, surprise, Isabel’s not sure about the Isle of Skye idea. She says she likes living in Finsbury Park. It’s colourful and multicultural and vibrant and alive. She likes our flat, she likes being near her friends. She’s hardly going to commute to work from Skye, is she?

  ‘Two months ago, you wanted us to move to a flat around the corner from your favourite bar in Quito. The Isle of Skye is a lot closer than Quito.’

  ‘Two months ago, I was stressed about the wedding. Now, I’m blissfully married and very happy here, thank you very much.’

  But I play my trump card…

  ‘Think of the space, the trees, the nature, the organic farm we could start. With yaks and llamas and our own biltong shop.’

  She really loves biltong, enough to hesitate for a split second.

  But only a split second.

  ‘We can move to the outer reaches of civilisation when we’re in our thirties.’

  When I suggest I am in my thirties, practically speaking, she says we’re married now and that it’s not ‘I’ but ‘we’, ‘I’ might be practically middle-aged, but ‘we’ are still almost two years off.

  By the time I have had my morning coffee (I am allowed cow’s milk and sugar because I’m grumpy), I am recovered. I like living in Finsbury Park too. I like being near my friends. I like our first marital home.

  Things continue to improve.

  Although I was dreading today’s chore—getting the wedding ring I thought I’d managed to dodge—it couldn’t have been easier: turned up, put my finger through a spaghetti measure, gave the man with the monocle £300 and it was all done. Easy. Unlike the first ring I ever bought.

  The engagement ring

  Unless he’s a surfer or a scoundrel who tries to stall for time with a ‘friendship’ ring, the engagement ring is the first ring a man buys.

  Two months’ salary is the rule: it’s fun watching flashy bankers with a penchant for ordering champagne in pubs work that one out. They go pale.

  I am obviously not a banker but I didn’t have two months’ salary tucked under the mattress either the day I decided I would marry Isabel. I ransacked everything, from my Post Office account to my piggy bank, scrabbled for coins in the sofa, my old suit trousers and the hard-to-reach bit around the handbrake of my car. I had a princely £1,426.32.

  ‘How much would you like to spend?’ asked the man with the monocle.

  ‘Oh, two thousand. Maybe two thousand five hundred,’ I replied without hesitation. I think it was because I’d had to ring a doorbell to get into the shop. And then been shown in by a security guard. It intimidated me into making wildly inaccurate summations of wealth. The man with the monocle still looked unimpressed, scrabbled around in the dusty bit of the display and found some itty-bitty diamond rings.

  There is a cruel diamond ratio you only learn when you have to buy one. A small high-quality one costs the same as a large low-quality one. Girls know the difference, which means you must ignore the size-is-everything rule, and go for quality. That was Johnson’s advice. (Andy suggested I write a poem and engrave it on the side of a silver tankard instead.)

  So I brushed away the big sparkler that would have impressed my ignorant mates and went for the near-perfect, near-invisible solitaire.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she had lied when I’d got down on my knee, done my speech and opened the velvet box. Still, she’d already burst into tears and said yes by that point, which is what she was supposed to do.

  Sunday 5 June

  Lunch at Alex’s to meet his new girlfriend (who he seems to have rustled up despite his alleged grief at being dumped by Watszerface) and to go through wedding photos (which, apparently, he can’t wait to see). Consider knifing myself to get out of going but it is made clear that this is not an option. I must stop behaving like a child. It’s very unattractive. Alex, bless him, has made a Moroccan tagine to go with his new Moroccan-themed terrace and his new conveniently Moroccan girlfriend. Don’t know what’s wrong with roast chicken. It is a Sunday lunch after all. He says Sunday lunch is the new Saturday night and threatens to make this the first of several ‘day dos’ through summer.

  Despite my silent, desperate prayers, it doesn’t rain, the tagine isn’t burnt beyond recognition, he doesn’t suffer anaphylactic shock from the couscous and the afternoon is simply splendid.

  Although I’m left exchanging pleasantries with the Moroccan girlfriend while Alex calls Isabel babes a lot, says all the right things about how wonderful the dress/flowers/father’s speech was, and touches her on the arm repeatedly.

  THREE INTERESTING THINGS I LEARNT ABOUT MOROCCO WHILE SOMEONE HIT ON MY WIFE

  The average temperature in the desert in July is 38°C, which is hot enough to fry an egg in. Not that that’s a priority.

  Most souks close for lunch and on Fridays.

  In the city of Oudja, a large number of deaf men use sign language. It is hard to determine how many women are capable of sign language because they do not speak it in the streets.

  The only other way to kill time is to go to the toilet a lot. Alex’s flat, sorry, maisonette, sorry split-level garden apartment, is so minimalist that you can’t even find the doors without feeling your way around like a blind person. So it wasn’t my fault that on the nth pretend toilet stop, I accidentally found myself in his office/spare room/mirrored gym absent-mindedly wondering how to sabotage the chest-press.

  Or that I accidentally spotted a torn photograph of me poking out from under a sheet in the corner.

  Or that I accidentally lifted the sheet to discover bundles of photos from the wedding, all chopped up.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Alex, all smiles.

  ‘No, just looking for the loo,’ I replied, dropping the sheet. ‘Didn’t know you had copies of the wedding photos.’

  ‘They’re my own. They’re not ready for you to look at yet. The loo is where it’s been all afternoon.’

  Isabel isn’t talking to me on the way home, despite my immense efforts at being nice all day, and despite me revealing the shock news that her ‘best friend’ has a chopped-up pile of photos from our wedding in his spare room.

  Apparently, I was moody and I am ridiculous to even suggest that Alex might have spent the last few weeks chopping up the wedding photos of the girl he loves and the man he despises.

  So unfair.

  Monday 6 June

  Two blocks down from our flat, a new one of those yellow incident boards had been put up. We get a lot of them round our way, but this one was different.

  Incident. Saturday 4 June. A man and his dog were stabbed. Did you see anything? If so, please call.

 
; I can’t believe they stabbed the dog. What had the dog done?

  Tuesday 7 June

  ‘Let’s just get an agent or two around to value the place. We don’t have to move or anything but it would be nice to know what sort of move we could make if we decided we wanted to…move, that is.’

  ‘OKAY, I suppose it would be nice to have a little garden. And if we don’t go too far, I quite like the idea of commuting.’

  ‘Excellent, darling…Hello, I’d like to arrange an evaluation…Tomorrow? That’s rather sudden…No, no, that would be lovely.’

  Good night’s sleep ruined by a horrible nightmare. I was having a drink outside a pub with my childhood pet dog Fluffy, miraculously reincarnated twice as large and twice as fluffy, with the ability to drink beer. Across the road, a woman screams as a terrifying bloke with a baseball cap and face tattoos grapples with her handbag. Fluffy barks, the terrifying bloke stops mugging the woman and turns to confront us. He’s laughing maniacally and being all sarcastic about how fluffy Fluffy is.

  As he advances, a huge knife glinting in his hand, I reach for my pocket penknife. For what seems like ages, I can’t get it open. When I do, it’s only the nail file. He’s getting closer and closer as I find the corkscrew, then the letter-opener, then the tiny little nail scissors.