Was it like this for all fathers? Is this why, for thousands of years, men had made themselves scarce: to be spared the humiliation of being second best at something? Before long, my absence became routine. I would tend to be held up at meetings; I was no longer in a rush to get home in time to be told off for putting plastic teaspoons in the dishwasher. If I was working out of town, I would always seem to end up on the later train back to London, and wouldn’t get home until after Catherine was fast asleep.
One day I came home late and crept into the room that I had persisted in clinging to as my recording studio. Then I saw it. A whole wall had been covered with Wind in the Willows wallpaper. Where there had previously been a Clash poster of Joe Strummer smashing a guitar, now there were little nursery drawings of Ratty and Mole in tweeds and plus fours. That was my parenting Kristallnacht, the moment I knew I was being driven out.
We had always agreed that when the baby went into ‘the nursery’ I would have to rent a room away from home for my work, but the move was one of those far-off problems that I preferred to put out of my head. Just because I agreed I would move my stuff out didn’t mean that I was actually planning to do anything about it. I pointed out that finding somewhere suitable would be a long and complicated business.
‘There’s a free room going in Heather’s brother’s house in Balham; you can rent that in the short term.’ Catherine was way ahead of me. The following weekend we packed up all the things that I would need in my new recording studio, and a little bit more. By the end of the morning the hallway was blocked with a large pile of boxes containing my entire youth. CDs, tapes, music magazines, my autographed Elvis Costello baseball cap and all the ironically naff mugs that I had bought before we moved in together. Two birthdays ago I had given her a chrome CD rack in the shape of an electric guitar; that appeared on the pile by the front door as well. I got the feeling there was a side to me that Catherine was looking forward to expunging from the family home.
‘Oh, you’ve got to have your Beatles mirror in your studio. It’ll look great there and it doesn’t really go in our bedroom,’ she said, taking it down off the wall with a little too much relish.
And so I started commuting to a little room in South London. It was only half an hour down the Northern Line, but it felt like a whole world away. If Catherine needed to speak to me she could ring my mobile, except when I was really up against it, when the mobile was switched off. It seems I was often really up against it. Nothing improved our marriage like being apart. The more time I spent at the studio, the more we liked each other. I had always worked unconventional hours and, with a sofa bed that folded out between the amps and keyboards, I continued to do so. As far as Catherine was concerned, the longer I was in my studio, the harder I must have been working, and she was proud to have a husband who could work such long hours and yet still come home and put so much effort into his family.
‘Where do you get your energy from?’ she asked as she lay on the bed after her bath and watched me swinging Millie round by her arms. ‘Well, a change is as good as a rest,’ I said modestly, thinking to myself that a change and a rest was even better. I gave the kids a quick bath in their mum’s perfumed bathwater while she lay on the bed and finished the bottle of wine. She assured me that she wasn’t too drunk to tell Millie her bedtime story and proceeded to read perfectly, only ripping two of the tabs on the Pocahontas pop-up book. Soon Millie and Alfie were asleep and the house was at peace. Catherine lay on our bed, wrapped in a giant towel, soft and talcum-powdered and still glowing warm from her hour-long soak. She gazed up at me.
‘If we’re going to have more children, it would be good to have them close together, wouldn’t it?’
This particular come-on was somehow left out of the Erotic Guide to Sexual Seduction. She looked irresistible, but two children was enough for me.
‘Well, Alfie’s only nine months; there’s no need to hurry,’ I said, avoiding a confrontation. But Catherine had always known she was going to have four kids and she had a very persuasive argument in favour of trying for another one right now, namely that she was lying naked on a warm soft bed. We hadn’t made love for three weeks and four days, and here she was pressing herself against me and kissing me wet kisses on my lips. I won’t pretend that I wasn’t very tempted, but I knew I had to be strong. Without any contraception it would simply be too much of a gamble. For a few minutes’ pleasure I was not prepared to risk yet more years of sleepless nights and all the marital tension and continued deception on my part that another baby would bring. Any way that you looked at it, it just wasn’t worth it. I was not going to have five minutes of ecstatic sexual intercourse with my beautiful wife.
As it turned out, this last bit was true – it was only a minute and a half. I cursed my weakness as I held her close and climaxed. Lots of men apparently shout obscenities at that moment, but I moaned, ‘Oh fuck!’ Not as in, ‘Wow! That was amazing!’ But more in the sense of, ‘Oh fuck! What have I just done!’ Sex was the crime and I’d just blown my parole. I had let this double life develop, thinking it would just be a temporary measure, that soon the kids would reach the age when we could emerge from the war zone of babies and then I could start being a normal husband and father. Fortunately, the chances of Catherine conceiving so quickly were slim. She was still breastfeeding once a day and so I reckoned it was safe.
Two weeks later, Catherine told me she was pregnant.
chapter three
have a break
When Catherine had been expecting our first child, one of the books I had read suggested that, in order to appreciate what my wife was going through, I should fill a balloon up with water and wear it strapped to my stomach for a day. To demonstrate how supportive I was, I actually attempted this exercise. I followed the diagrams and tied the squishy balloon around my waist and then walked around the kitchen with one hand on the base of my back, trying to look radiant. Afterwards, I felt I could look my wife in the eye and say that now, at last, I finally understood how it felt to have a balloon filled with water stuffed under your jumper. I only did it for an hour. My waters burst suddenly while I was pruning the roses.
A good father-to-be is supposed to empathize. In fact, I read that occasionally the most sensitive of men genuinely experience some of the actual physical symptoms of their partner’s pregnancies, although having an eight-pound baby pop out of their vaginas was obviously not one of them. ‘Couvade syndrome’, as it’s called, happened to me with Catherine’s first pregnancy. In the first six weeks or so, as Catherine started to put on weight, through some deep spiritual sensibility I began to gain weight as well. Amazingly, since we had stopped playing squash together and stayed in ordering takeaway pizzas and tubs of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, my waistline had started to expand at approximately the same rate as hers. Truly, nature is a wonderful thing.
All these concepts and suggestions left me feeling that I was supposed to try and make myself more maternal. That’s what they wanted me to be: a back-up mother. I ought to be feeling what she felt; I ought to have the instincts that she had. I almost felt guilty for not blubbing when my milk seemed a bit slow to come in. No wonder I felt that I was no good at it, because it was an aspiration that was impossible to achieve. My wife was always going to be a better woman than I was.
I suppose we were quite a conventional couple in the way we slotted into our gender stereotypes. Catherine had decided she wanted to put her acting career on hold while the children were small. She didn’t feel she was getting any-where, despite the fact that after Millie was born she was no longer being cast as ‘passer-by’ but had progressed to ‘passer-by holding baby’. So she resolved to become a full-time mother. ‘Ah well, that is the toughest role of all,’ said her annoying father a hundred and twelve times. What Catherine found disorientating was how guilty she was made to feel for not being a promotion-hungry career woman. When she told people that she’d given up work, they froze into embarrassed silence. She said she didn’t want to
go to any more drinks parties unless she could ring a handbell and wear a placard round her neck saying, ‘Uninteresting’. Being with the baby was what she wanted and so I was happy to support her decision, even though I had always enjoyed her occasional appearances on television, not to mention the occasional appearance of the cheques that had landed on the doormat.
We had always liked to think of ourselves as artistic and Bohemian, me the musician and her the actress, but in reality we were no different from any of the accountants and insurance brokers who lived in our road. We lived in a small two-bedroom house in Kentish Town which the estate agents had described as a ‘cottage’. This meant that you could just about fit the pushchair through the front door, but then getting past it yourself was such a physical impossibility that you had to sleep in the front garden. I can vouch for the fact that there wasn’t room to swing a cat in our house because I once caught Millie trying.
Because we aspired to live in a neighbourhood which was quite close to a postal code which was next door to a borough which was quite near a desirable part of London, we had no choice but to live in a tiny house. I remember climbing inside the kiddies’ playhouse at Toys “Я” Us and thinking, Blimey, this is roomy! How we were going to fit another baby into our home was quite beyond me, but if the old lady who lived in the shoe had managed, then I suppose we would have to try our best. I never really understood that nursery rhyme until I moved to London. If that had been today, some developer would have bought the old lady’s shoe and converted it into flats.
The third baby was not due for another eight months and was no more than half an inch long, but it was still able to make its mother nauseous, tired and tearful. I suppose that’s an early warning that there’s no relationship between the size of a baby and the scale of disruption it can cause. Of course an embryo disrupts your life in a different way to a small baby, and a small baby disrupts your life in a different way to a toddler. But now we had all three of them wreaking havoc simultaneously. Few of us have any memories of our own lives before we were three years old. This is an evolutionary necessity – if we could recall what bastards we were to our parents we’d never have any children of our own. Millie was two and a half, Alfie was ten months, the embryo was four weeks and I felt about a hundred and five. Nothing could have prepared me for how tired I felt, let alone Catherine. Sleep deprivation is a popular torture device used by the Indonesian secret police and small babies. I suppose at least Alfie couldn’t kick me in the testicles every time I eventually dropped off. He left that to his big sister, who generally climbed into our bed at around three in the morning. Even when I slept on my own I still found myself lying there with my hands over my groin in the footballer-in-defensive-wall position.
Catherine was always most exhausted at the beginning of her pregnancies, when they were still secret from everyone else. I had to pretend to friends that she kept fainting and bursting into tears because we’d stayed up very late watching old James Stewart movies, but she always insisted that she was coping all right. ‘Tired? No, I’m not tired,’ she said as I cleared the dinner plates away, although my suspicions were increased when I came back with the pudding to find her fast asleep with her head on the kitchen table.
Although we had been together five years, I’d not yet learned how to translate the things she said to me. Before her last birthday she had remarked, ‘Don’t get me anything special this year,’ and I had foolishly taken this to mean, ‘Don’t get me anything special this year.’ I had failed to decipher the subtle intonation in her voice, I had listened to the lyrics rather than the notes. In the same way she had a dozen different ways of saying, ‘I’m not tired.’ Some of them meant exactly that, while others meant, ‘I am very tired, please insist that I go to bed right away.’
I knew she was not her usual self that evening when some Jehovah’s Witnesses had come to the door. That’s strange behaviour, I had thought, she didn’t want to talk to them. Normally she would have invited them in, given them a cup of tea and then asked them if they had thought about taking Satan into their lives. She nearly recruited one of them once when she earnestly described the uplifting spiritual catharsis of naked bouncy-castle night.
But tonight tiredness reduced her to a robotic drone; she had carried out the duties required to get the kids into bed, with no energy or enthusiasm remaining for anything else. Alfie had just given us three terrible nights in a row and we were both completely exhausted and demoralized. I can’t say that we had been sleeping badly because I don’t actually think we slept at all. The wakeful night-times were totally disorientating and we had lost any sense of time; how Catherine’s body clock remembered to make her throw up in the morning was completely beyond me.
When she finally lifted her creased face off the kitchen table, I tried to persuade her to sleep downstairs on the sofa with the door closed, where she would be out of earshot of the baby. I wanted her to delegate some of the sleeplessness to me before I went off to work the next morning. But she found this hard to agree to. She was greedy; she wanted all the misery to herself. But I kept on and on at her, and eventually she didn’t have the energy to resist my arguments. So I set her up on the sofa with a duvet and pillows before kissing her good night and heading upstairs to face the nighttime on my own.
It was like an approaching storm which I entered into with nervous trepidation. Batten down the hatches; we’re going into the night. In the days before children came along I often deliberately chose to stay up until morning. It was a fun and crazy thing to do. We’d climb over the railings of Hyde Park and play on the swings. I went to an all-night sci-fi festival at an independent cinema. I went to parties and took speed or coke and sat at the top of Hampstead Heath watching the sun rise over London. Often, when I had a big piece of work in, I liked to spend an evening with Catherine and then, as she went to bed, I would disappear into the studio, put on the headphones and work at my keyboard until dawn. I would have breakfast with Catherine before she went off to her audition or whatever, and then I’d go to bed until she came back again. I loved working at night when it was all quiet and still and you could really lose yourself in your thoughts. A melody would come into my head and I’d think, Where is this coming from? Somebody else has taken over my body and is giving me this tune for free. Sometimes, if I got stuck, I would go for a walk in the dead of the night and just feel the stillness of the city asleep. The nights were my time to myself. Mr Moonlight she called me. That was Catherine’s pet name for her boyfriend who loved to stay up all night. In moments of intimacy and affection she still called me Mr Moonlight, though now that I was secretly moonlighting on our family life, it was no longer a nickname with which I felt particularly comfortable.
I tiptoed into Millie’s room and checked that she was asleep. She looked so sweet and trusting and secure. Carefully avoiding the creaky floorboard, I picked up a couple of soft toys that had fallen on the floor and silently placed them behind her pillow. As quietly and gently as I could, I slowly pulled her blanket back over her. With the care and precision of a microsurgeon, I moved the plastic doll from where it was pressing into her face and laid it on the side of the bed. Then, as I straightened up, my head crashed into the stained-glass mobile above her bed, which set it jangling and clinking, and she opened her eyes and looked at me in surprised disbelief.
‘Why are you here?’ she said in a dreamy voice. It wasn’t an easy question to answer on any level. I told her to go back to sleep again, and amazingly she did.
Alfie was asleep in the pram which, for reasons that had once seemed sensible but now eluded me, we carried up to our bedroom every night. He was sleeping soundly, getting his rest in now so that he would have as much energy as possible for the long night ahead. Silently, and on my own, I prepared for bed, wondering how the next few hours might unfold, like a soldier on the eve of battle. The knowledge that I would soon be disturbed made me desperate to get to sleep as quickly as possible, so that I lay down in panicky concentration, thinking
, Got to get to sleep. Got to get to sleep, which kept me awake for far longer than usual. Then finally I was gone.
In the first hour or so my mind would race downhill into its deepest, deepest sleep, but it was during this dreamy descent that I was always violently pulled up, jerked awake by the sudden angry scream of the baby. Tonight Alfie was bang on cue, and though I was suddenly conscious of being awake, for a couple of scary seconds I lay there frozen, paralysed while my body struggled to catch up and become operative as well. Then, like some bleary automaton, I threw back the duvet, staggered over to the pram and stuck my little finger in his mouth. The crying stopped as he sucked and sucked, and I sat down on the end of the bed, still only half conscious. Rubbing my aching head I glanced in the mirror and saw the hunched, greying figure of an exhausted man, a ghost of my former self, my thinning hair sticking up and my face creased and lined. When he had been born, one of the cards we had been sent featured a black-and-white photo of a muscular man clutching a naked baby to his rippling chest. That was not how fatherhood felt right now. The clock told me that I had only slept for an hour and forty minutes and that it was far too early to give Alfie a feed. After a while the sucking became less frantic; he slowly calmed down as I gently rocked the pram back and forth for good measure. When I deftly removed the digit, he barely reacted.
The Best a Man Can Get Page 5