Different marriages work in different ways. Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun got married, spent one day in a bomb shelter and then committed suicide together. Fine; if that’s what they found worked best for them, who are we to pass judgement? Every couple have their own way of doing things – bizarre rituals, idiosyncratic little routines that keep them together. Often these evolve and grow until they completely disappear off the scale of rational behaviour. Catherine’s parents, for example, go out into the garden together each evening and find woodlice, which are then ritually crushed in a pestle and mortar before the remains are sprinkled on the roses. They think this is perfectly normal. ‘I’ve got another one, Kenneth.’ ‘Hang on, dear, you’ve got a centipede in there as well, we don’t want to crush you now, do we, little fellah.’
Once Catherine and I went on holiday with another couple, and on the last night we heard them nonchalantly chatting about us through the wall. They were saying they could never be married to anyone as peculiar as Catherine or I. They thought that our relationship was completely weird. Then we heard her muffled voice saying, ‘Are you coming to bed or what, because this clingfilm’s making my tits sweat.’ And then we think he said, ‘All right. Hang on, the zip’s stuck on my wetsuit.’ Every marriage is bizarre if you look under the surface.
There are, of course, plenty of relationships that do not develop tailored survival strategies and these are the ones that don’t last. My parents split up when I was five and I remember thinking, Can’t you just pretend to be married? Having experienced the grim and twisted diplomacy of Mum and Dad’s divorce, I was determined that my children’s parents would stay together. It was because I thought our marriage was so important that I kept resting it. The strain that small children brought into our lives suddenly seemed to create such tension and petty hostility between us that I was terrified of the damage becoming irreparable. Admittedly, I had developed a personal solution to a joint problem without ever talking it through with Catherine. But I didn’t feel I could confess to wanting time away from my children. It’s not something that men who are running for president boast about in their election broadcasts. ‘You know, sometimes I like to walk alone on the beach because it reminds me of the wonder of God’s work and how little time we have in this world to make it a better place. But most of all, it gives me the chance to get away from my bloody kids for a while.’ I loved Catherine and I loved Millie and Alfie, but sometimes I felt as if they were driving me mad. Wasn’t it better to get away rather than let the pressure just build and build until the whole marriage exploded and the kids had no dad for seven days of the week like I’d had?
So I didn’t feel guilty about it. I’m sure I still would have run her a big foamy bath, even if I’d genuinely been working as hard as she imagined I did. I took her the wine bottle and a copy of Hello!, which I worried that she was no longer reading ironically. I poured us both a glass and she pulled me down for a loving kiss on the lips, which I engaged in a little awkwardly.
‘What are the kids doing?’
‘Millie’s watching the Postman Pat video; the one in which he goes on a shooting spree through Greendale. And Alfie is strapped in his chair watching Millie.’
‘Oh well, as long as the telly’s on. We wouldn’t want to leave them unsupervised.’
‘You’ll never guess what I saw today: Hugo Harrison disappearing into a prostitute’s doorway.’
‘Really? Where were you?’
‘Well I was just coming down the stairs obviously, doing up my trousers.’
‘He’s married, isn’t he? Remember we met his wife? I wonder if he’s going to tell her?’
‘Of course he’s not going to tell her! “Did you have a nice day at the office, dear?” “Very nice, thank you. I popped out to visit a whore in the afternoon.” “That’s nice, dear. Supper’s nearly ready.”’
‘Poor woman. Imagine if she found out.’
‘I was a bit irritated to be honest. I wanted to know what he thought of the bit of music I’d brought for him and he’d disappeared to have it off with a prostitute.’
‘So did you find out if he liked it?’
‘Well, you don’t like to ask, do you.’
‘Your bit of music.’
‘Oh yeah, he called me on the mobile. He said it was great.’
‘I don’t know how you do it. Was it another four o’clock in the morning job?’
‘No, not as late as that.’
‘I can’t see why you don’t just work normal hours and tell them they’ll have to wait a bit longer.’
‘Because they’d get someone else to do it and then we’d have no money and I’d have to look after the children while you worked as a prostitute for the likes of Hugo Harrison.’
‘It doesn’t bear thinking about – you looking after the children.’
We laughed and I kissed her again. I loved it when she hadn’t seen me for a couple of days; those were our most perfect times together.
Catherine had smooth pale skin, a pointy little nose and big brown eyes with which I was struggling to keep eye contact as she shifted her body in the steaming bath. She would always contradict me if I told her she was beautiful because she had this ridiculous notion that her fingers were too short. Sometimes I would catch her with her jumper sleeves right over the ends of her hands, and I knew she was doing this because she thought everyone was looking at her and thinking, Look at that woman; she’d look lovely if she didn’t have such awful short fingers. Her hair was long and dark, and though it wasn’t particularly elaborately styled, for some reason she would travel fifteen miles for a haircut because the man who had always done it had moved shops and she didn’t want to risk letting anyone else have a go. I was just glad he hadn’t emigrated to Paraguay because we would have struggled to raise the air fare every eight weeks.
What I wanted to do right now was jump into the bath with her and attempt foamy, clumsy sex, but I didn’t suggest it because I didn’t want to spoil the moment by precipitating rejection. More importantly, I knew there were no condoms in the house and there was no way I was risking a third baby. It wasn’t as if I was the perfect father to the first two.
The first time we had ever made love we followed it by sharing a foamy tub like this one. On our first date she said she knew a lovely place for a drink and drove me all the way to a luxurious hotel she had booked in Brighton. On the way down a policeman pulled her over for speeding. She wound down her window as he slowly strode across and then he said to her, ‘Are you aware that you were doing fifty-three miles an hour in a forty-mile-an-hour zone?’ And with a superior sneer he waited to see how she was going to try and explain herself.
‘Pardonnez-moi; je ne parle pas l’anglais donc je ne comprends pas ce que vous dîtes . . .’
He looked completely thrown. And considering she’d failed French A level, she almost convinced me. The policeman then decided that the English language might be more comprehensible if it was spoken more loudly and with a number of glaring grammatical errors.
‘You break speed limit. You too fast. Driving licence?’
But she just responded with a confused Gallic shrug, saying, ‘Pardonnez-moi, mais je ne comprends rien, monsieur.’
The bewildered officer looked at me and said, ‘Do you speak English?’ and I felt forced to say, ‘Er – non!’ in an appalling French accent. I lacked the chutzpah to chat away to the policeman like Catherine; my French was far more limited than hers and I didn’t think he would be particularly impressed by my observation that ‘on the bridge at Avignon, they dance there, they dance there’. She jumped in before I risked giving myself away, but this time she found a few words of English. ‘Mais Gary Lineker – eez very good!’
The officer visibly softened, and with a little bit of patriotic pride restored he felt able to send us on our way with an overenunciated warning to ‘Drive – more – slowly’.
‘D’accord,’ she said, and he didn’t even notice anything unusual when she added ‘Auf Wieders
ehen’ as she drove away. We had to pull into a side road a hundred yards later because we were both laughing so much she was in danger of crashing the car.
We had first met when she appeared in an advert for which I had arranged the music. She had just graduated with a drama degree from Manchester University and this commercial was her first professional acting part. She was cast as one of five dancing yoghurt pots. She played fruits of the forest flavour and she was easily the best. It still galls me that orange and passion fruit flavour went on to star in EastEnders. After that Catherine got a few walk-on parts in minor soaps and appeared in a health and safety video in which she informed viewers that they should not walk into glass doors but should open them first. I got very excited when she told me she had landed the part of Sarah Mclsaac in a major TV drama called The Strange Case of Sarah Mclsaac. She showed me the script. Page one went like this: a woman is sitting at her desk, working late in a London office. A man walks in and says, ‘Are you Sarah Mclsaac?’ She says, ‘Yes,’ and then he takes out a gun and shoots her dead. Still, it was the title role and that was definitely a step up.
Then she got a good-size part in a West End play – in the west end of Essex that is – and I drove out to watch her in the glamorous setting of the Kenneth More Theatre, Ilford, every night. At first she said it was very supportive of me, but after a while I think she found it a little distracting to have me sitting in the front row, mouthing all her words as she said them. She was on the stage on her own for quite a lot of the play and was completely mesmerizing, though I didn’t like the way all the other men in the audience just stared at her all the time.
But she saved her best performances for when she was winding people up. She could burst into tears if the bus conductor wouldn’t let her on the bus without the right change and she was prepared to faint into a chair if the doctor’s receptionist tried to prevent her from seeing the doctor. Once, when the bloke in the video shop wouldn’t let us take out two films on the one card, she suddenly seemed to recognize him.
‘Oh my God, you’re Darren Freeman, aren’t you?’
‘Er, yeah?’ he said, looking amazed.
‘Do you remember me from school?’
‘Er, oh erm, vaguely?’
‘God, you were always interested in films and stuff; it’s funny that you’re working here. Blimey, Darren Freeman. Do you remember that stupid geography teacher? What was he called?’
And then they chatted nostalgically for ten minutes and it turned out that Darren had married Julie Hails, who Catherine said she’d always liked, and he gave us two films on one ticket and, as he handed them over, I noticed he was wearing a badge that said, ‘My name is Darren Freeman, how may I help you?’
We shared a casual attitude towards deception. When she asked me to marry her I gave her a cautionary sideways look to see if she was just having me on. I had this vision of myself as a ninety-year-old man at my wife’s funeral, with her suddenly sitting up in the coffin going, ‘Ha! Ha! Had you fooled!’ So to an outsider my double life might seem like some sort of shocking betrayal, but I liked to think it was just part of the fun we had with one another; another round in our on-going game of one-upmanship. Her deceptions always made me laugh. The only trouble with the scam I was pulling was that I wasn’t sure what the punchline was going to be.
*
My double life had started to evolve soon after Millie had been born. For years our relationship had been perfect and happy and I never would have imagined that anything could have made me want to run away. But then she fell in love with someone else. Perhaps that was what I had been afraid of. Maybe that was why I had tried to put her off having kids for so long.
I never said I didn’t want them, I just said I didn’t want them yet. Of course I was going to have children eventually, just like I was going to die eventually, but I didn’t spend a great deal of time planning that, either. Catherine, however, always talked about our future children as if they were imminent. She didn’t want a two-door car because it would be such a struggle getting the baby seat in and out of the back. What bloody baby seat is this? I’d felt like asking. Baby clothes would be pointed out in shop windows, and she would insist on calling our spare room ‘the nursery’. ‘You mean my recording studio,’ I would assert every time. Some of her hints were even less subtle. ‘It would be nice to have a summer baby, wouldn’t it?’ she said exactly nine months before the summer. Friends with small babies would be invited round on a Sunday and I would have to pretend to be interested as the mother and father casually chatted about Baby’s bowel movements.
I don’t know why parents think this is an acceptable way to carry on; it is not a subject we stray onto when we politely enquire about the health of fellow adults.
‘Hello, Michael, how are you?’
‘I’m fine, thanks. I did quite a big poo this morning, but soon after I did another smaller one that wasn’t quite so firm, which is unlike me because I normally only have one poo a day.’
Babies’ bodily functions are discussed at length because that’s all there is to them. They feed, they puke, they crap, they sleep, they cry and it starts again. And though there is nothing more you can say about the activities of a newborn, their parents still talk about nothing else. If by some miracle our visitors from the Planet Baby did happen to wander from the fascinating topic of the infant digestive system, the conversation only switched to the equally unsavoury subject of the mother’s bodily functions. At this point, some of the fathers at least had the good grace to look embarrassed and awkward, while Catherine and the new mum chatted at great length about breast pumps and episiotomies. Those dads were not beyond saving. The fathers I really couldn’t tolerate were those who had clearly been turned into gibbering idiots by the trauma of it all. These self-deluding infants’ entertainers would maniacally roll around on my carpet, blowing raspberries at their babies and shouting made-up words in the forlorn attempt to engender the slightest response from their new offspring. ‘Ooooooohhh-bla-bla-bla-bla-bla bum-bum,’ they’d squeal. ‘Oh, she loves this,’ the mother would say with an approving smile, and you could tell the baby loved it because it blinked – possibly – just the once.
After a while the mother would punish me for my obvious indifference by saying, ‘Would you like to hold the baby, Michael?’
‘Oh, that would be lovely,’ I’d dutifully reply and I would take hold of the baby with all the relaxed composure of the Minister for Northern Ireland being handed a mystery parcel during a walkabout of West Belfast. All the while, both mother and father hovered right next to me, keeping their hands under his head, back and legs, just to show how much confidence they had in my ability not to drop an eight-pound baby for the twelve seconds that I held it.
These new parents reminded me of born-again Christians. They had a smugness and a superior air that suggested my life was somehow incomplete because I hadn’t heard the Good News about babies. I would only be a whole person once I had joined their throng of happy clappy parents who went to the church hall every week to sing ‘Three Little Men in a Flying Saucer’. They all thought I’d be converted sooner or later. Eventually my soul would be saved and I would take babies into my life. This was Catherine’s plan, hence the newborn charm offensive. If she was trying to persuade me that I might like to have a baby then you would have thought that exposing me to a lot of babies was the worst possible tack. But in the end she wore me down. What could I do; the thing that would bring the greatest happiness to the woman I loved was in my gift and I couldn’t keep denying her for ever.
I finally agreed that we should start trying for children on one of those let’s-be-really-in-love days. These are times of total intimacy and mutual adoration, when all you want to do is agree with everything your partner says. To actually cut across and contradict her by saying, ‘No, actually I think “Hotel California” is a dreadful song,’ would completely ruin the atmosphere, so you nod and smile and say, ‘Mmmm, yeah, that’s one of my favourites, too.’
It was in one of these moments that I acceded to the idea of being a parent. I agreed to a lifetime of fatherhood so as not to spoil a nice afternoon.
I could never understand those men who complained that it took them and their partners years to conceive. Month after month of constant eager sex! Catherine got pregnant in the first month we started trying. ‘You’re so clever,’ she said to me with a hug, and I was supposed to be proud that we had managed it so quickly. But inside I was thinking, Damn! Is that it, then? Can’t we keep doing it every night anyway, just to be sure. She wee’d onto a little stick and we watched it change colour. The instructions said that if it went light pink she was not pregnant, but if it went dark pink she was pregnant. It went pink. Sort of halfway between light and dark pink, a sort of pinky-pink with just a hint of pink. She went to the doctor’s, because that’s the only way to be really sure you are pregnant, and the best start an expectant mother can get is to sit for an hour and a half in a hot, stuffy waiting room, inhaling the germs of as many infectious diseases as possible.
Before the baby arrived I was actually more consumed by it all than she was. I read every pregnancy manual I could lay my hands on, researched the best car seats and monitored Catherine’s weight gain, which I logged on a wall chart in the kitchen. I was rather hurt when she took it down before a dinner party; I thought it showed just how supportive and interested I was being. This birth was my new project, my new enterprise, an exam that could be passed if I did enough revision. I learned the expectant parents’ script off by heart.
‘What are you hoping for, a boy or a girl?’
‘I don’t mind, as long as it’s healthy.’
Correct answer.
‘What sort of birth are you going for?’
The Best a Man Can Get Page 3