The Seven Year Itch

by Emlyn Rees

  I try to remind myself of all Jack’s good points, picturing myself and how happy I look in the framed photo in H’s flat. I watch Ben sleeping in his cot and see how much he’s the best blend of Jack and me. I look around our bedroom. There’s a framed nude of me above our bed that Jack did just after we were married and a teddy bear that he gave me when I first got pregnant. Everywhere I look are reminders of our entwined life. So why isn’t he here in bed entwined with me?

  It’s light by the time Jack rolls in. I hear him lurch into the bedroom and trip over. I freeze and pretend to be asleep.

  He comes up the bed from the bottom of the duvet. Even with my head out of the top, I’m engulfed by cigarette and booze and fast-food fumes. It makes me want to retch.

  His fingers walk up my thigh. I know what that means.

  I don’t believe it. He expects me to have sex with him.

  Now?

  And despite all my earlier fears, my hackles rise.

  He’s horny. And he’s horny because he’s been dancing the night away with sexy, barely clad clubby types who’ve probably made lewd advances at him all night and made it perfectly clear they’d do it in the toilet. I’m no fool.

  How DARE he.

  I coil up and roll on to my side away from him.

  Jack grunts and sighs heavily. He thuds on to his side of the bed and wrenches the duvet over him, pulling it off me.

  I pull it back.

  He pulls it back.

  I yank it back with as much force as I can muster.

  ‘Stop it,’ I hiss.

  ‘So you are awake, then,’ he says.

  I’m so relieved he’s home, but now that he is, my fury has returned. I’m not going to answer him. I’m not going to give him the satisfaction. Besides, I know that ignoring him will get to him more than anything else.

  ‘So, you’re not going to talk to me?’ he says.

  No, I’m fucking-well not. Not until he apologises for being such a thoughtless shit.

  ‘Well just for the record, Amy . . .’ he says, leaning over. His breath honks. ‘I did try and make it up to you. You’re the one that’s being childish here. Not me.’

  With that, he yanks the duvet completely off me and, holding it in a vice-like grip across his body, promptly passes out.

  8

  Jack

  The Battered Corpse Of Last Night’s Contretemps

  I’m up near the summit of Primrose Hill. Kites slice across the sky, and kids yell, snapping frisbees back and forth. There are so many people lying around on the grass, that I’m wondering to myself, Haven’t these people got pubs to go to?

  A moped snarls past and a frenetic bass line thumps out of a nearby SUV. The screeches of caged apes rise up from London Zoo – and, boy, do I know how they feel.

  It’s lunchtime and I’m lying side-by-side with Amy on a moth-eaten tartan rug, as incommunicative and stiff as a couple of recently embalmed corpses, with Ben curled up asleep in between us.

  I am Jack Rossiter, The Amazing Melting Man. The sun is beating down and, what with my hangover leaving my brain feeling like a sponge in the Sahara, I’m so hot I wish I could take off my skin.

  Doghouse, Jack . . .

  Jack, doghouse . . .

  It’s not hard to spot the link.

  Which is why I asked Amy to meet me here during my lunch hour, and then presented her with a surprise picnic from the posh deli over on Primrose Hill Road, near where I’ve been working for Greensleeves on the communal gardens of a block of swish Regency apartments.

  The picnic was meant as an apology, for being such a drunken oaf last night – a self-assessment which I reached at the breakfast table this morning, as a Stolichnaya-induced Russian marching band rattled through their raucous repertoire inside my skull, and Amy glared at me over the Special K box like a Siege of Stalingrad sniper who’d just zoomed in on her latest prey.

  I glance warily across at her now, as she flicks an ant off her wrist and shifts position. She settles back with her hands clasped behind her head, and stares up through the leafy branches of an oak tree at the constantly evolving cloud patterns above.

  I look up too and search the sky like a soothsayer for omens that might augur well, but as the clouds continue their slow migration across the city from Wembley to Canary Wharf, instead of discerning smiling faces or fluffy bunny rabbits amongst the cumuli, all I can see are jack-hammers, warships and guns.

  Amy’s got mirror shades on, so I can’t tell what she’s thinking.

  Which is just as well, I consider glumly, because what she’s probably thinking is, ‘Why did I marry such a complete spanner?’

  And, if this is indeed what’s on her mind, I have to concede that she has a point. Or rather three points: I did get knee-tremblingly drunk; I did selfishly sod off out on the tiles and leave her holding the baby; and, yes, she probably does deserve much better than me . . .

  Not that she’s actually said any of this. She doesn’t need to, when she knows full well that her silence cuts me deepest of all.

  She’s hardly uttered a syllable since she arrived half an hour ago. Nor has she touched the food (all of her favourites), which I painstakingly picked out and lovingly arranged on a specially purchased paper plate.

  I feel dejected, rejected, deep-down black and blue, and I’m beginning to fear that my gesture of reconciliation could well have been doomed from the start.

  Then Amy stabs a finger at the sky. ‘There,’ she says. ‘That one over there looks just like a fat milkmaid bending over.’

  I can’t see Amy’s cloudy bucolic figure myself, but I’m sure as hell not about to let the lines of communication be severed once more. ‘And that one right behind it looks just like a randy farmer who’s about to –’

  ‘Stop it, Jack,’ she tells me, twisting round to acknowledge my presence at last. ‘Ben’s got a filthy enough vocabulary as it is, without you –’

  She pushes back her shades and, unexpectedly, grins. It’s like watching the sun burst out from behind a cloud and I feel my heart instantly soar.

  ‘I still can’t believe he actually said that to Mum,’ she says.

  She’s referring, of course, to the Curious Incident of the C*** in the Daytime on Ben’s birthday, the occasion, no less, of our last barney.

  It’s an unpleasant memory, perhaps, but one that I’m delighted to see is currently being eclipsed by Amy’s smile.

  A smile which, I’m even more delighted to see, is currently being directed at me.

  Because this means that Amy has, against the odds, decided to forgive me for going out with Kate & Co last night.

  It also means, presumably, that Amy’s forgiven me for making a mumbling, fumbling pass at her on my return, before promptly passing out . . .

  ‘Do you want to –’ I start to say.

  But Amy’s shades drop back down faster than the visor of a knight who’s just been challenged to a joust.

  ‘No, I really don’t want to talk about it, Jack. Not this time. Not about something so black and white.’

  I was actually going to ask her if she wanted to try some taramasalata, but I’m guessing from her tone of voice that perhaps now is not the best time to point out her mistake.

  She sighs deeply. ‘I’m here, OK? And you asked me here. And bought all this,’ she says, gesturing towards the picnic. ‘And that’s enough,’ she adds magnanimously. ‘All I want now is for both of us to put what happened last night behind us and move on.’

  I don’t need telling twice.

  ‘Deal,’ I declare.

  It feels like someone’s just removed a backpack full of lead weights from my shoulders.

  It’s all I can manage not to grin, but I do resist. The last thing I need is to reignite our row by looking smug.

  Bygones appear to be bygones.

  And thank God for that.

  Amy crawls around Ben, and then sets about rearranging me against the trunk of the tree, plumping me up like an old pillow, before fina
lly leaning back against me, with her face towards the sun.

  I link my arms around her waist and smile.

  It comes as a great relief, of course, her deciding not to dig up the battered corpse of last night’s contretemps, since I’m really not sure what, if any, positive purpose would be served by getting into that whole ‘Why Jack Shouldn’t Go Out Clubbing Without Amy’ debate.

  For one thing, it would only lead us back to the topic of She Who Must Not Be Named (somewhat pointlessly, as well, seeing as Sally McCullen didn’t even put in an appearance at Urban Wall last night).

  And for another thing, I don’t actually believe there is any justification, aside from my extreme inebriation and predilection towards stubbornness, for going out without my wife the way I did.

  Not that I’d ever admit this to Amy, of course – on the grounds that I’m a grown-up and should therefore be allowed to go where I want, when I want.

  But still, I do already realise that I was wrong.

  The ‘Why Jack Shouldn’t Go Out Clubbing Without Amy’ Debate

  I mean, sure, I like to get wasted and throw a few shapes on the dance floor every once in a while. What red-blooded male doesn’t? But without Amy? Just me, bobbing away in a sea of sweaty strangers? Isn’t wanting to do that solo rather like just coming out and saying, ‘I want to do the dirty with someone who’s not my wife’?

  Because that is the point of nightclubs, isn’t it? To screw around. To get laid by a stranger. OK, sure, we pretend it’s about other things. It’s about the music. About the exercise. It’s about getting drunk and off your head. But all of these things can be done in isolation, so why not save yourself the cab fare and do them at home? It’s about meeting new people. Yeah, meeting them and fucking them, more like.

  Because with the music turned up that loud, you certainly haven’t gone there to discuss philosophy . . .

  And if clubs really are all about flirtation and sex, then what’s the point of someone like me – someone who’s not looking for any sextra-curricular activity – going there on my own?

  It’s like reserving a table at a steakhouse when you’re a vegetarian.

  Or visiting a car showroom when you don’t have a driving licence. You’re not planning on going out for a ride. So why are you there? Just to look at the gleaming chassis and wonder what if?

  Because all that’s going to do is leave you feeling frustrated and wound up. Like a spring that needs to be sprung.

  Which is precisely how I ended up feeling as I stumbled out of Urban Wall last night, in search of some KFC, prior to some TLC back home . . .

  As I chowed down on the Colonel’s finest wingery at the taxi rank, visions of the fit, available girls I’d seen in the club continued to dance inside my drunken mind.

  Fantastical scenarios played out. I felt like I’d travelled back in time, back to my debauched bachelor years, when I’d gone to clubs just like that with only one thing on my mind: to head home with a stranger and put her to bed . . .

  It was this very mental regression which led me to my ungainly attempt at sex with Amy after I got back to the flat, because, you see, the truth is: it wasn’t Amy I wanted to have sex with at all. Not really. It was the girls I’d been dancing with in the club. Those images of them had stuck with me. It was like I’d been remotely fluffed.

  Here in the cold light of day, this is not something I’m proud of.

  In fact, it makes me feel ashamed.

  But it doesn’t make it any less true.

  It also makes me no better than the City-boy braggers I know, like Rory, who spend their evenings in lap-dance joints, before going home to their naïve, deceived trophy wives and getting them to finish them off.

  Subconscious as it may have been on Amy’s behalf, there was justice, then, in her instinctive rejection of me last night.

  It was exactly what I deserved.

  Although I concede that it’s also possible that there may have been some sort of sensory issue involved – on the grounds that I probably stank like a cigarette butt that had been soaked in a vodka still and deep-fried in breadcrumbs and oil . . .

  Something Like A Phenomenon

  But the past, as they say, is the past.

  And new days, I think, as I continue to stare up through the branches of the oak tree at the sky above Primrose Hill, are all about turning over new leaves. And the possibility of change. And the possibility – and hope – that even I might one day end up every bit as perfect as I think Amy deserves.

  Now, seeing as any further discussion of my nocturnal misadventures has gratefully, wondrously, marvellously, now been deemed strictly taboo, it seems only fair that we talk about Amy’s night out instead.

  ‘So how was H?’ I venture.

  ‘All of a fluster.’

  I dip my head and breathe in the sweet shampoo scent of Amy’s hair. ‘What about?’

  ‘Boys.’

  ‘Ah . . .’

  H’s intermittent singleness, much like Matt’s, is a constant source of fascination to wedded folk such as Amy and myself. Hearing their trials and tribulations never fails to excite in us a mixture of relief and nostalgia, drawing us in like a couple of ex-combatants pouring over dispatches sent back from the front line.

  ‘Who’s she seeing now?’ I ask.

  ‘No one.’

  ‘No one?’ Concerning a woman who Matt once described as being ‘hungry like the wolf’ in the sack, I find this hard to believe.

  ‘Well, no one specific,’ Amy says, ‘but lots of people . . . potentially . . .’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘She’s trying out this new thing. Internet dating.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ I say, ‘I haf heard of zis pheeenomenon. I believe eet eeze powered by vot ve call zee electricitee in combination vid ze com-poo-tor.’ I drop the cod accent. ‘It’s hardly new, darling. It’s been around for years.’

  ‘Well, it’s new to me.’

  ‘You make it sound like you’re trying it too,’ I tease. ‘Don’t tell me you’re lining up an undercover lover to seduce you on the side?’

  ‘No. I just mean it’s dating, Jim,’ she says in her best Star Trek voice, ‘but not as we know it. They do it differently now.’

  ‘I bet they do. In isolation. Hardwired into their laptops. With electrodes up their bums.’

  Amy digs me in the ribs. ‘Stop being such a Luddite. All I’m saying is they get to know each other virtually first, before they actually meet in the flesh.’

  ‘It still sounds weird to me.’

  ‘Well, it’s not. It’s a perfectly normal way for people to get together.’

  ‘Yeah, people who like sticking electrodes up their bums.’

  Again, the elbow. ‘I’m serious. H said it was the way forward.’

  ‘And was her bum vibrating when she said this?’

  Amy sighs. ‘She’s just looking for happiness, Jack, the same as everyone else . . .’

  ‘Yeah, well, she’s not going to find it online. It’ll be a disaster.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, for starters, it’s like everything online: you don’t really know what you’re letting yourself in for. Until it’s too late. I mean, there’s no quality control, is there?’

  ‘Quality control? I’m talking about people here, Jack, not factory parts.’

  ‘Quality control is even more important with people. You’ve got to be able to differentiate. That’s the first thing you learn when you start dating in the real world: to pick the good from the bad . . . the funny from the boring . . .’

  ‘Or in your case, the big tits from the small . . .’

  ‘Maybe. But so what? What’s so wrong with the old-fashioned way of doing it, with a bloke walking into a bar and spotting a bird he fancies, and going up to her and seeing if she wants to get it on?’

  ‘Well thank you, Fred Flintstone, for your considered and enlightened opinion. Remind me to catch the first prehistoric bus out of town, the next time I see your Cro
-Magnon face coming my way in a bar.’

  ‘It’s way too late for that,’ I remind her. ‘You let me drag you back to my cave a long time ago.’

  ‘I seem to remember it was me who did the dragging . . .’

  ‘Good point, Wilma, but you mark my words, I bet you that all these people H has been chatting up online are real losers . . .’

  ‘Actually, some of them are pretty good-looking.’

  ‘How would you know?’ There’s a telltale pause. ‘You mean you’ve actually looked?’ I ask.

  ‘At their photos? Yes. H showed me. She wanted my opinion.’

  I laugh. ‘You’ve been choosing boys with her.’

  ‘For her. There’s a big difference.’

  ‘But you still thought some of them were hot?’

  ‘I suppose, but . . .’

  ‘But?’ My heart skips a beat.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s just that whole single mentality . . . fancying strangers . . . going out on hot dates . . .’

  ‘Having great sex . . .’

  ‘Sometimes several times a night . . .’

  It’s my turn to nudge her in the ribs. ‘Hey,’ I say, ‘I was joking . . .’

  ‘And so was I. But, really, all that stuff’s so irrelevant to my life now. It’s so long ago that I can barely remember it. It might as well have happened to another person, on another planet . . .’

  ‘Yeah.’ I sigh. ‘I know exactly what you mean.’

  ‘There’s no need to sound so wistful about it,’ she chides.

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘Er, I think sighing does count as wistful, Jack.’

  ‘I sighed?’

  ‘Like the wind.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘It’s all right. There’s no law against sighing . . . or being wistful, for that matter . . .’ There’s a pause. Then she takes off her shades and turns round and peers up at me. ‘So what do you miss about it?’ she asks. ‘About being single . . .’

  I can’t tell if she’s just being provocative, or mischievous, or what, and then I begin to worry that the ‘Why Jack Shouldn’t Go Out Clubbing Without Amy’ debate might not be nearly as dead as it seems.