by Rudd, Matt
‘Harmless?’
‘It was only a cake slice.’
After a fitful night, we are woken at seven by an insistent ice-cream-van melody. Scribbling out yet another mental Post-it note to change the doorbell ring of the previous occupants, I arm myself with the most dangerous thing I can find in the wardrobe (a rollerblade, though I’d have preferred an ice skate), and answer the door with an aggressive swoosh. It is not Primrose, here to finish what she inexplicably started. It is a delivery man clutching a large cardboard box.
‘Easy, mate,’ he says, handing me the box and backing away nervously.
The mind boggled. Was it a horse’s head? A fishbowl full of flies? A black spot?
Worse, Alex has sent us a house-warming present: two horrible stained-glass bedside lamps which emit various levels of brightness depending on how many times you stroke them. Inevitably, Isabel loves them. Says she always wanted them, which is ridiculous because no one would have something so awful and twee on a wish list. It’s like always having wanted a large porcelain cat or an ashtray made out of that purple kryptonite stuff.
I suggest they might look nice in the garage.
She suggests that, given that she was kidnapped by our neighbour last night, the least I could do this morning is be supportive.
I suggest that the lamps and the kidnapping are entirely unrelated and she gives me a look which suggests I have learnt nothing from seven months of married life.
Five minutes later, the bedside lamps are ruining our nice new bedroom and I have to accept that, from now on, the last thing I will see at night, not to mention the first thing in the morning, will be a tacky reminder of Alex. And Isabel stroking it.
Dinner: turnip surprise. The surprise being there really is nothing but turnip. No meat. No other vegetables. Just some sort of turnip-based sauce.
Friday 2 December
The doorbell goes at 9.30 p.m. It’s Primrose, just when I’d put the rollerblade away again. This time, though, she is wielding a cake rather than a cake slice. She has made it by way of apology for the kidnapping she told the police never happened. She says she’s sorry, it’s just that the parked cars make her panic and do silly things. Isabel says it’s fine, I say yes, absolutely no problem, and we usher her out of the door with a communion of smiles.
Isabel and I then argue for about an hour over whether she should have said something or whether I should have said something along the lines of don’t ever come round here again, you maniac.
The doorbell goes again at 10.30 p.m. It’s Primrose with another cake she has made by way of apology. She appears to have no recollection of the first cake. Again, Isabel says thank you and I say no problem, always good to meet the neighbours, and we usher her out the door. Again, there is heated argument about who should have said what to the lunatic bringing cakes round at God knows what hour.
I throw both cakes in the bin because they’re probably made with cat food and bleach and toenail clippings and eye of newt, and we go to bed. It’s hours before either of us can sleep for fear of more apologetic cakes.
Dinner, by the way: turnip soufflé. The cakes, regardless of ingredients, would have been nicer.
Sunday 4 December
Isabel strikes up a conversation with the neighbour on the other side who can’t understand why we’ve got a problem with Primrose. Apparently, she’s always been perfectly decent with them. A real pillar of the community. Never complained about the parking, never kidnapped anyone, however briefly, and certainly never been seen marching naked up and down her garden, knitting, at 4 a.m. (like she was last night). But, said the neighbour, she’s not our neighbour. She’s yours, so maybe you see more than we do. Or maybe you did something to upset her.
Isabel’s mum says it will probably blow over, although she once had a neighbour in Poland who started acting crazy, and everyone said it would blow over, and one day the person killed nine people with a hammer, but that was Communism for you so it’s bound not to happen here.
Dinner: you’d have thought we would have cleared the turnip backlog, but there is still some work to be done, so it was turnip soup followed by turnips with chicken followed by what, if we’d had pudding, would no doubt have been turnip sorbet.
Monday 5 December
I have a quick look at houses for sale in north London before (a) realising what I’m doing and (b) concluding that the only area we can afford is Finsbury Park and, thanks to the huge chunk of cash Arthur the Thieving Arsehole took, we can now only afford a studio flat. Even given Primrose, moving back to a smaller flat (without fitted shelves) in the place we’ve just escaped from would be ridiculous.
At least it’s the start of the party season. Anything, frankly, to get us out of the house and not eating turnip. I start gently because this is the first Christmas I’ve had to cope with since becoming middle-aged: a night in my old local with Johnson and Andy. Having wasted most of the day trying to compose a text to Saskia explaining why she wasn’t invited to the house-warming party in as inoffensive yet final yet uninvolved yet undismissive a way as possible, I ask them to help. Several pints in, they conclude, as I already had done, that it just isn’t possible with only 149 characters. It’s just like trying to dump someone nicely, which is impossible.
THE ONLY TWO STRATEGIES FOR DUMPING GIRLFRIENDS, NEITHER OF WHICH IS PREFERABLE
By email/letter (not hand-delivered, too risky)
Pros: you aren’t there during tears and vase-throwing, and you can say what you really mean, not what will make the tears and vase-throwing go away (e.g. it’s not me, it’s you; I’ve met someone who is much less annoying; I want to have a takeaway when I feel like it, not when you say I can; it’s over, goodbye).
Cons: everyone thinks you are a bastard because you didn’t even have the guts to do it in person.
In person
Pros: everyone thinks that, although you’re a bastard for dumping your girlfriend, at least you did it the right way.
Cons: you are there for the tears and the vase-throwing, so you have to say what you don’t really mean (e.g. it’s not you, it’s me; no, I just want some time on my own; please, stop crying, I’m not dumping you, I just think we could both do with a break; sure, we can go for a drink to discuss it).
Johnson says the only way to do it is by getting them to dump you. Pick your nose at dinner, spray the toilet seat then leave it up, don’t just ogle other women, stop in the street and say Wow!, forget all anniversaries, talk only about sport. It takes about a week and you’re home free.
Andy says he wishes he could get to the stage of being dumped more often—rather than having immigration officials do it for him.
Johnson says the only reason he’s married is because Ali doesn’t mind that he talks only about sport.
Tuesday 6 December
Another angry text from Saskia. Am thinking silence is perhaps the best option.
A boring work-related party coincides with Isabel’s boring work-related party, so we agree to meet on the last fast train home, which I miss by three seconds because it left one minute, four seconds early. I remonstrate with the platform assistant who points at a sign explaining that trains are prone to leave a minute early and I’m about to point out that it left even earlier than that when I realise there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to be gained.
My phone rings and it’s Isabel saying where am I because she’s got me a coffee and a seat so I explain how the train left early and she says there’s a sign saying it leaves early.
I retreat Zen-like into myself and wait for the last-not-fast-really-really-slow train.
Fifty minutes later, the Zen thing has worn off. The train is late and I am surrounded by a carnival of late-night out-of-towner horrors.
A benchload of teenagers are trying to eat each other’s faces off like extras from a zombie movie.
A girl in a trouser suit is actually howling like a wolf because her boyfriend/husband has, quite understandably given the state of her inebriation
and her mascara, abandoned her at Charing Cross.
A couple with myriad facial piercings are punching each other really hard in the facial piercings while police try pointlessly to prise them apart.
A football enthusiast sets off a klaxon—as if a distraction is necessary—while his mates try to steal the station clock.
And three women are dragging an unconscious man across the concourse, perhaps to a basement cell to be used as a sex slave, perhaps just to bed and a terrible hangover in the morning.
It’s like Custer’s Last Stand, and then the train finally arrives and all these people board it with me.
I crawl into bed at 2.15 a.m., nearly two hours after I would have done if the train hadn’t left four seconds earlier than a minute earlier than it bloody should have bloody done bloody bloody.
Wednesday 7 December
Seven a.m. doorbell. Primrose. Why have we thrown her cakes in the bin?
How does she know we’ve thrown them in the bin?
Because she’s been through our rubbish.
Too tired to deal with this, so I explained we have a gluten allergy.
‘What, both of you?’ she said, putting her foot firmly in the closing door.
‘Yes, Isabel caught it off me.’ The reply took her by just enough surprise to allow me to say goodbye and shut the door before becoming further embroiled.
It was going to be a good day.
Until I missed the train home again, this time because it went from a different platform. I actually cried a bit in frustration. Then sat through another two hours of exactly the same people doing exactly the same things: face-eating, fighting, passing out, vomiting. It’s all so festive.
Thursday 8 December
Work party. Horrible. Already exhausted by previous three nights out and missing of trains. Isabel annoyed that I can barely speak to her due to fatigue which is all my own fault because I ‘keep partying’ even though it isn’t because it’s the train’s fault.
To compound everything, Anastasia the Work Experience I Threw (Cold) Tea Over has been invited. She jetted back from New York especially for our little party. (Who jets? You don’t jet, you fly.) Anyway, how sweet of her to show such disregard for the size of her bulging carbon footprint by jetting over especially. How simply marvellous. And what, pray, is she doing in New York? Currently, feature writing at the New Yorker but soon to be launch editor of a top-secret new section of the New York Times as of 3 January. She can’t tell us any more or she’d have to kill us, except to say that it has been a lightning year and it’s all thanks to us; well, most of us (cue withering look in my direction), and now she must be leaving because she can’t, simply can’t, miss the redeye back to the Big Apple. Mwa mwa. Adios.Spew.
Despite arriving half an hour early and listening bat-like for any platform changes, I miss my own redeye because it simply doesn’t arrive. My friend the platform assistant, in a brief and uncharacteristic display of humanity, says, ‘Sorry, mate, they don’t tell me the whys and wherefores, but it isn’t good enough, is it?’
Despite the usual cacophony of screaming, swearing, fighting and sucking, I fall into a near-coma and wake up one stop beyond home. The doors were open and if I’d made a dash for it, I could have got off in time and got a £10 taxi home. But I was damned if I was going to have a big been-asleep, missed-my-stop panic and amuse everyone still left on the train. So I just yawned and stretched as nonchalantly as possible and had to wait twenty minutes for the next station. And got a £45 taxi home.
Friday 9 December
To Penge at the crack of dawn for the anger-management course where I initiate a long discussion about whether it is our anger that requires management at all. What if, I argue, our anger was perfectly justified and it was society’s consistent ineptitude that needed the managing? The same woman as before twitched slightly at this perfectly valid argument, but rather than respond with a sensible/erudite/enlightening answer, she just made more notes.
I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of becoming angry this time. I could beat her at her own game.
Got the third-from-last fast train home, with a wink from the platform assistant. In bed by 9.15 p.m.
Saturday 10 December
A momentous decision. I am not going out ever again in London. I don’t care what anyone says, I refuse to socialise in the capital. I am too old. I am too tired. I don’t like drinking, I don’t like staying up late, I don’t like hangovers or trains or hassle. Consider all engagements cancelled.
Isabel accepts this 8 a.m. pronouncement with enthusiasm. Anything, she says, to stop the whingeing. And she happily agrees to cancel everything too. We shall spend the next two weeks in out-of-town bliss, apart from, of course, having to commute in every day for work but that’s fine because I know how to beat that scarfed woman to my seat.
Monday 12 December
This is much better.
A lovely weekend of pubs and winter walks and fruit crumbles and mulled wine and lie-ins and sex and backgammon. Even the turnip mountain has been conquered.
Tonight, I picked my way through the early evening office-worker revelry, happy in the knowledge that I shall be tucked up in bed fast asleep in my village and that all these idiots will be missing trains and slipping on vomit and sleeping with strangers who will appear far less attractive in the morning.
Wednesday 14 December
Even a missed call from Saskia cannot dent my spirit. I just can’t understand why people who are already in relationships bother going out and getting drunk and chatting. There’s nothing in it. Just pointless conversation, unnecessary outgoings and a hangover.
Staying at home is the new going out. Home has all the advantages of a bar (alcohol, seating) with none of the disadvantages (other people, loud music). Plus you can still have sex.
We appear to have upped our average to just under once a day, which is a relief given the latest shock survey in the papers this morning. The French say they do it nine times a week compared to the Germans who only do it four times. The English, more importantly, given that one must always judge oneself against one’s peers, do it just eleven times a month, so I’m ahead. By 0.12 intercourses per day.
I am in the upper quartile.
Saturday 17 December
Isabel and I had a long conversation last night about how good marriage is, how lucky we are to have found each other, how the first few months were bound to be difficult because our lives were in a state of flux.
If I’m honest, which I wasn’t at the time, it was quite a boring conversation; one of the ones you have to have from time to time when you’re sitting on a sofa with your wife and it’s pesto pasta night and there’s nothing good on TV. My refusal to attend Christmas social events has been met with scorn at work—I cannot walk into a room without someone humming the theme from Terry and June—but I refuse to give up my comfortable, suburban, pedestrian, enjoyable existence.
Sunday 18 December
Whole day in bed. No Primrose. No texts. No violent carol singers. Only the strokeable bedside lamps intrude on an otherwise perfect day. Isabel calls me a stud and this time she wasn’t even being ironic. I don’t think. You can never be sure.
Monday 19 December
It would appear that my thirty-day, money-back-guaranteed Viagra trial has begun. I know this because a box of little blue pills has arrived in the post addressed for ‘M. Walker’, which Isabel has opened. The company, based in Florida, has my credit-card details, which they have already used to withdraw an initial down-payment of US$240.
Isabel is speechless.
Well, she’s speechless for about twelve seconds before she asks why I think I need Viagra and whether it would have been sensible and appropriate to discuss this sort of thing with her, or perhaps a doctor, before signing up to some dodgy American therapy programme. And spending a large proportion of our marital budget on sex pills.
I had only been expecting a cup of tea (which, by the way, is now standard-issue
goat’s milk sans sugar, which I have, as an adaptable husband, grown to quite like). Now I’m getting the Viagra Monologues.
Only when Isabel pauses for breath can I focus enough to point out that I know nothing about it.
Only after forty-five minutes of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik do I find someone at my credit-card company willing to believe that I do not need Viagra.
‘So, Mr Walker, you definitely didn’t give your details on any adult website?’
‘No.’
‘And there’s no way anyone using your computer in your house could have accessed an adult website, typed in all your personal details and signed up to some sort of eighteen-plus sex site?’
‘No.’
‘Because lots of people, when they get found out by their wives or girlfriends or cohabiting partners, claim this sort of thing is fraud rather than admit they have been on adult-content websites.’
‘Yes, okay.’
‘Yes, okay, as in, Yes, okay, you have been on adult-content websites?’
‘No, yes, okay as in, “Yes, okay, I understand but can we get on with this…I know nothing about this, I have not signed up for a Viagra trial and I don’t need a lecture. I just want you to find out what happened and get my money back.”’
‘Yes, okay.’
I am going to write a letter of complaint to my credit-card company.
Tuesday 20 December
Isabel apologetic today about Viagra misunderstanding. I forgive her quickly because we are blissfully, rurally in love until I realise why she’s being nice. Bloody Alex is coming to bloody Christmas bloody lunch at her bloody parents’ house.