“What did he say about her?”
Ludo was famous for being honest, and I knew that he wouldn't lie.
“Nothing much. He said she was a bit flirty, that's all. Made a joke about her being after him. Said she was mad.”
“I have to get going,” I said. Ludo winced. He was completely incapable of hiding his feelings. “But I had such a nice time tonight, we must do it again.” It was all that I meant to say, but somehow I couldn't help adding “You could always try to think of something else, ah, cultural for us to do.”
He looked startled. His features really were actors, playing out his thoughts to the gallery.
“Yes. You mean just the two … yeah, that'd be … good. I'll try to think of something. I'll call you.”
So I enjoyed the taxi ride home—the first part, at least, feeling warm and excited and nervous. I didn't want to think about what might happen. And nothing would, probably. Just a harmless flirtation. Like Sean's with his Uma Thursday. But then thinking of him, of her, the pleasure of the evening leaked out of me, and by the time I reached home, I wanted nothing but bed and oblivion.
SEANJOURNALNINE.DOC
DADDY ON THE RADIO
“How would you like to chat about being a single parent on Woman's Hour?”
“What?”
There was a lot of screeching and clattering, low moans, a hideous twanging noise. A passerby might think a rehearsal for a Greek tragedy, put on by The West Hampstead Amateur Theatrical Society (or TWATS, as they would be called, if they existed), had reached its crisis point, with Oedipus about to put out his eyes, or Clytemnestra on the verge of stabbing someone, to the accompaniment of authentic ancient Greek flutes, drums, and lyres.
“I said,” she shouted, “would you like to talk on Woman's Hour about being a single parent?”
Susan was a friend of Edwina. Edwina was a friend of Celeste. Edwina allowed her house to be used for “music” sessions on Thursday mornings. Celeste talked me into going, despite the two buses it took me to get there. Edwina herself was wise enough to shun the events, leaving the shepherding of her two sons to the nanny, while she had her talons clipped at a nail bar.
Ten children sat around a large woman wearing a guitar and a smock and a crazed smile. Parents formed an outer hull, restraining and encouraging, as best we could. The children banged arhythmically on a range of percussion instruments, including Nepalese temple gongs, African talking drums, Peruvian llama-skull tympana, and one another. The ones who were banged cried loudly. The ones who did the banging, principally Harry, also cried. After ten minutes of clanging, most of the children had wandered off to find things to break, leaving the parents and the music lady more or less alone, like the ribs of a picked carcass. For no very good reason, I found myself scraping at a serrated stick with another stick, not serrated.
“But I'm not a single parent,” I said, unsure whether to be annoyed. Perhaps it was flattering to be thought capable of doing the whole job on my own. Or maybe I looked like the kind of sad bastard who just couldn't hold on to a “life” partner, probably because of erectile dysfunction (should stress here that I haven't, oh no, not at all, not me, not ever) or obsessive interest in spanking. Susan looked disappointed.
“Oh, I was led to believe … But you are the main carer, aren't you?”
“Yeah, I suppose so.”
“And you are a man, aren't you?”
“Last time I looked.”
I wished I hadn't said that. It was the sort of embarrassing banter that got you the reputation for being a boob.
“Well that's something. You see, we like to have new angles on Woman's Hour. It's one of the things I was brought in for. Making up new angles.”
In the flurry of accusations, I'd failed to properly absorb what she was talking about. Woman's Hour. Radio show. About women's stuff. Occasional piece designed to appeal to humans in general. I used to listen to it in bed when I was a student, when it had the twelve-till-one slot, just before the news. Then it switched to 10:00 a.m., and several years passed before I caught it again. As a virtual woman, I did sometimes listen in, while pottering, until I'd be driven insane with boredom by someone complaining about how their Chronic Fatigue Syndrome made it difficult to get the soufflé to rise, or mildly enraged when the program reached the part (as it always did, usually about two-thirds of the way in) at which the panel laughed about how generally useless men are, as opposed to women, who were generally clever and nice. If I wanted to be patronized by harpies, I'd grumble to myself, not infrequently aloud, I have a wife quite prepared to do the job in-house.
“What would you want me to do?”
“Well,” said Susan, keeping one eye on her little boy, who was trying to escape from Harry, who wanted to use him as a cymbal (and I do mean cymbal, as in gong, and not symbol, as in a symbol for all that's wrong in modern society), “I'm putting together a feature on … I'm not exactly sure yet, but it's on something. An aspect of something. Parenthood or life, one of those. And you could talk about it. From your perspective. As a man.”
“And just remind me, what do you do again?”
“I'm the producer.”
“Wheels on the bus!” screeched the music lady, in a final, desperate attempt to wrest the attention of the kids away from Edwina's knickknacks.
“Go round and round.”
“And you're a journalist, is it? Or something to do with the Web? I can't remember what Edwina told me.”
“Round and round.”
“Sort of. I used to be a … yeah, journalist.”
“Round and round.”
It was very nearly true. I'll have to rewind a month. Harry is two. He's started nursery school, which will need a chapter to itself. Only three afternoons a week, to begin with. And I still have the mornings to cope with. Nursery just gives me a four-hour breathing space to get my head together. But to Celeste, it suddenly means that I'm not fully employed: a situation she endeavors to rectify with instructions, commands, suggestions, and notes. She seems to think that I've suddenly become a handyman and can do things like fix the light in the bathroom or put away the box of bits that have fallen off my bicycle, a box that has remained bravely at its post in the middle of the hallway since we moved into the new apartment. I don't want to move it because that means I'll never get round to putting the bits back, and for all I know, some of them (odd toothed, coglike things; a small section of chain; a piece of wire inside a rubber insulating sheath) might be important. I needed the box there as a reminder. And, I've tried arguing, it had, in its metallic, oily randomness, certain aesthetic qualities, on the same plane as Duchamp's urinal.
Anyway, Celeste was furious that I had some “free” time and seemed determined to ruin it for me. It was Carol, my old landlady, who came to the rescue. She phoned up one evening with a proposal. She'd just taken over the editing of a website. The previous team had been lured away entire by a rival, and she was desperate.
“You can write, can't you?”
“Physically, yes.”
“Good. Well, you can be the content person.”
“But I've only really done civil service stuff. Speeches for ministers, where I get them to say wank or bum without realizing it.”
“Nonsense. What about all your poetry and odes and things? You used to leave them in the toilet, for emergencies.”
“They weren't for emergencies. I just left them there by mistake. It was a good place to contemplate. What do you mean emergencies?”
“You know, when we ran out—”
“Carol, you're not telling me that you … with one of my odes…”
But I said yes, in the end.
I admit that starting a job was a pretty desperate way of avoiding being given jobs, but these were desperate times. And it had the advantage of being hugely flexible. I was based in a high-tech, swanky office in Camden Town, but the regime was fairly slack, which meant that I could spend some mornings working from home, have relaxed lunch hours, and genera
lly piss around, as long as I churned out ten thousand more or less relevant words each week. The contract was for three months, initially. After which … ? Well, who could say what bright vistas might have opened up? The child care did take some finessing. Celeste's dad, Magnus, strode manfully into the breach, ably assisted by Natasha, who'd been helping me for a few months. It was a big wrench. Harry had been as close to me as a tumor for almost two years. He'd been the thing that was always there, like Mt. Fuji in Japanese prints—the presence that made everything else small and unimportant. Now suddenly I had to start thinking about other things, other people, again.
I wasn't at all sure that I could do that. Babies are great things to talk about when you can't think of anything to talk about. And I was good at baby small talk. I'd hardly ever offended anyone by pointing out how much her baby looked like a gibbon or what a shame it was that she'd never managed to get her figure back after the birth. I never failed to praise the delicacy of the girls or the robustness of the boys, except when the mother clearly signaled her abhorrence of gender stereotyping, in which case I smoothly slipped into the groove, pointing out how caring the boy seemed to be and what an excellent male nurse he'd make, or how feisty the little girl and how suitable for space exploration, coal mining, or football hooliganism.
But now I was going to be in a place where none of that would wash. I was going to have to find some new material. I thought back to the time before Harry, the time when I talked about other things. What were they? TV, of course. But two years ago, people were still saying that there was never anything good on, apart from the nature docs. Was that still the same? Had the conversation moved on? Perhaps now the thing was to say that TV was wonderful, a glorious cornucopia, a box of delights. Except, of course, for the nature programs, which now were rubbish. Or perhaps people didn't have TVs anymore and to mention them was as grotesque as belching loudly on a crowded train. Perhaps now people went on rambles in the countryside or fished for eels or practiced archery on the village common.
What else apart from TV? Two years ago, the new lad was all the rage. Boys were allowed to get pissed and play video games and be interested in football as long as they were also reasonably correct about sexism and racism. So should I burst into my new office on a skateboard wearing an Arsenal soccer kit, my eyes dilated from hours of slaying the bad guys in Unreal Tournament? But no, that surely had all passed. Perhaps we were caring again, or maybe militarism was in. Or Maoism. Or bestiality. There was just no way of knowing.
My friends—Leo, Andrew, and Ludo—were no use. The stuff we talked about was, well, marginal, to say the least. We were like a club the rules of which were so long and complex that only the four of us could ever get in. It was a miracle we ever found one another. No, when it came to the world, I was on my own.
What about preparing a few conversational gambits? “So, the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo—if Princip's bullet had missed …” “Oh yes, it's interesting that the origins of the unicorn myth should have come up, because, you see, my theory is that the Arabian oryx, a small, goatlike antelope, with remarkably long, straight horns, when viewed in profile …” “No, you're quite wrong there: the reason why pop music was better in the sixties is because almost every band then had a designated rhythm guitarist, and his job was to add melodic complexity, within the otherwise simple …”
Of course, I never needed them. The place was full of geeks and gimps, and what we talked about was ISDN lines and what a bunch of cunts the bosses were.
The website was called livelifetothefull.com and was all about illness, death, and dying. I spent three weeks writing articles about terminal cancer, how to help a colleague cope with bereavement (“Alcohol can be a great friend in a period of personal crisis”), woodland burials (very environmentally friendly), cremation (nastily polluting, it turns out), and other suchlike topics, hastily researched or completely made up, as whim dictated. The work was easy and amazingly well paid. Then the money ran out, and we closed down after receiving fourteen hits, only one of which generated any income by clicking through to the site of our major partner, the Crickelwood Funeral Parlor.
I was mildly annoyed when the stupid thing went belly-up. The job made it look like I was making an effort. It also meant that I could claim to be a journalist or working for a dot-com or in the high-technology sector or in the death industry, as circumstances dictated—the circumstances being: talking to pretty studenty girl at party (journalist); pretty girl in black-rimmed square glasses (dotcom); pretty girl with shoulder pads (high-tech); pretty girl with pale skin, long black hair, blood-red lips, and fangs … You get the picture.
“So,” continued Susan (sorry, better explain that we're back in the music class now, and the Woman's Hour producer is talking at me), a slight smile playing across her face as she saw a child not her own gouge a groove in the parquet flooring (also not her own) with the surprisingly sharp toe of an action figure, “if you're a journalist, you'll know all about it.”
“About what?” I tried again. But the dogs of war had been unleashed. Two kids were fighting over a bongo drum; the maracas were being hurled backward and forward like those German stick hand grenades; and one child was lying motionless on the floor as his mother ululated in grief. Death by triangle? No, he's up and laughing; mother looks like she's going to do the job properly later on.
“I'll call you,” said Susan, as I made for the door, pushing Harry before me like a lawn mower.
So that's how I came to find myself talking to a presenter over the phone, my words being recorded for use in that day's program.
“Do you feel at all emasculated?” There hadn't been much in the way of preliminaries, and so I was a little taken aback.
“No, why, should I?”
“Well, a lot of men would, wouldn't they, in our society, doing what you do.”
Obviously I was supposed to launch into a stout defense of the masculinity of parenting, the hearty outdoorness of it all, the Iron John bonding side, whittling harpoons together, getting in touch with the inner yeti; or, failing that, to shun the gender stereotyping implicit in the underlying assumptions, deconstructing the binary division between male and female, blah blah blah. I could have done either of those. Have done both of those, in other situations. But I didn't feel like it that morning.
“You know, maybe you're right. Maybe I should feel emasculated, and maybe I do, a bit. But what I mainly feel is bored. I push a stroller around the streets for hours on end. Then I sit in Starbucks praying he won't wake up before I finish my muffin. Then I go to the supermarket, and old women coo at my child, while the line in front gets longer rather than shorter. Then I walk round some more. Usually it's raining. I go to the library and watch him fight with other toddlers for half an hour. Most days, I don't talk to anyone apart from the checkout cretin or the shelf stacker with learning difficulties who gets lost in a pattern in the lino when you ask him where the tinfoil is. Do you know how much conversation a two-year-old has? ‘No,’ ‘more,’ ‘chokt candy,’ ‘mine,’ ‘ow ow ow.’ They're boring, they're selfish, they're stupid, and they're not funny. And they smell of poo.” It went on like that for quite a while. I think—what am I saying? I know—I mentioned the look of grimly malevolent humor, the look you might expect from a minor barbarian chieftain watching his favorite fool juggle with the heads of vanquished foes. But I didn't swear, which took some fucking doing, I'll tell you.
My assumption was that they wouldn't use the piece. Susan said as much. They always recorded more than they needed in case things didn't work. She didn't seem to have much confidence in my working.
Nevertheless, I meant to listen, just in case. But Harry swallowed a wolverine and I had to take him to the ER. A wolverine (Latin Gulo gulo), should you be unfamiliar with the quadrupeds of northern Europe, is a large, brown badgerlike animal of famous ferocity, although Harry's was made of plastic in China and was about the size of his thumb. But still, swallowing it was an achieve
ment, doublingly baffling when you considered how reluctant he was to put anything sustaining in that lovely mouth of his. Perhaps it was a message: Lay off the broccoli and spinach. What I want is roast fox, served on a bed of puréed squirrel, and garnished with weasel kidneys.
As it happened, the wolverine was passed with minimal discomfort during the two-hour wait in casualty, and we never even saw the doctor. But at least we avoided another black mark in Harry's medical notes. By the time I'd dropped Harry off at the nursery school, done the shopping, and stood with my head resting against the wall for an indeterminate amount of time, it was late afternoon. I checked the answering machine, which we keep in the Room That Nobody Ever Goes In, for maximum inconvenience. There were six messages, which was quite exiting. There were usually two. One from the morning, with Celeste telling me to do something, and then another one from the afternoon, with Celeste again telling me to do something—sometimes the same thing she told me to do in the morning message and sometimes something else altogether. The first and sixth messages conformed to this arrangement. The middle four were all from Susan.
“We're using your piece. About eleven fifteen. Bye.”
“Just had a couple of calls in. Want to know if you were serious.”
“Switchboard flooded. Love your stuff.”
“Call me.”
I called her.
“We've never had a response like it. Not since our male breast cancer feature.”
I couldn't let that lie.
“Male breast cancer?”
“Yes. Reasonably rare but kills a few dozen men each year.”
Great. A new one to worry about. What next? The male prolapsed womb?
“Oh.”
“People seemed to find it very funny. What you said, I mean, not the cancer.”
“That's nice.”
“Yes, and, well, Jemima and I thought that you might like to do a piece in the studio. A sort of essay.”
Christ.
The Marriage Diaries Page 9