The Best a Man Can Get

by John O'Farrell

  My finger was a portable pacifier that had worked for both children. Unsurprisingly, they seemed to find Catherine’s long, sharp fingernails rather less comforting, and so my little finger was the only oral comfort they were permitted. Early on I had tentatively suggested that we buy them plastic dummies, but Catherine put up the objections that dummies were unhygienic and that they impaired speech development and that we would only be creating a rod for our own backs and it would be impossible to wean them off them and several other second-hand objections. She never mentioned the real one, which was that she secretly thought dummies looked common and no baby of hers was going to look common. I couldn’t offer an argument against a conviction I dared not accuse her of, and so the only pacifier that our children ever had was my upturned little finger. The dummy was me.

  To keep little Alfie asleep I knew I had to keep gently rocking the pram, so inch by inch I manoeuvred it to a position beside the bed. Now, at least, I could lie down. I was probably only making it worse for myself. Like an alcoholic going to the pub for a glass of water, I was taunting myself with my proximity to the thing I craved most. But I was just too tired to sit upright, so I lay on the edge of the bed and, with the blood draining from my outstretched arm, I slowly pushed the pram back and forth. As long as this motion was maintained at an enthusiastic enough rate, Alfie would grudgingly lie there in silence and I could pretend to myself that he was going to sleep. But he was made of stronger stuff than I was. The rocking would become increasingly half-hearted; growing slower and weaker until the moment my exhausted arm finally flopped down by the side of the bed. This was his signal to resume crying and then, independently of the rest of my comatose body, my arm would take hold of the pram handle and start pushing it back and forth once again. This pattern was repeated over and over again; for the next hour we took turns to almost drift off. Then eventually I stopped. Silence. Could it be that at last he was finally going to let me doze off and let my weary, demoralized body finally have some rest? All I could think about was sleep.

  Oh sleep, I just need to sleep, I would give anything just to have eight hours’ solid, uninterrupted sleep. Not this violent bungee jumping in and out of half-consciousness, but real, deep, deep, proper sleep. That’s the only drug I need: sleep. Tune in, turn on and drop off. If only I could find a dealer and score some snore; I’d pay good money for it, I wouldn’t care if it was illegal or who it had been stolen from; I’d rob my mother’s purse to pay for it, I’ve just got to get a fix of sleep; I’d snort it, smoke it, take a big tab of it, inject it – I’d share a needle if that was all the sleep I could get hold of, and then I’d mainline a massive dose of pure unrefined sleep and just lie back as the hit washed over me, feeling my brain go numb and my body relax, and then I’d just close my eyes and I’d be gone, zonked out, out of this world; there’s no drug like it and I’ve just got to have some sleep or I’m going to die; maybe if I kill myself that’ll feel like sleep; please, please, please, I’ve got to have some sleep; I’ll steal the sleep from Catherine; yeah, she doesn’t need it; that’s it, I’ll have her sleep; in the morning I’m going back over the river and I’ll tell her I’ve got to work and I’ll get into my room and turn my mobile off, I’ll take off all my clothes and I’ll fluff up the feather pillows and I’ll pull the duvet over my head and I’ll feel the heaviness of my limbs on the soft mattress and I’ll just feel myself going, going, slipping away, and then I’ll have such a massive shot, when I’ve had that fix I’ll feel so great, like an athlete, like the heavyweight champion of the world, like I could run a marathon, but I’m falling asleep now and it feels so good; it’s all I want; please let me sleep, baby, let me sleep; I need it now, I can’t wait; I’ve got to sleep now and I’m going, I’m going . . .

  Was I dreaming or did I hear a tiny moan from the pram? I held my breath lest even my breathing should disturb him. Sure enough, there followed another barely perceptible half moan and my heart sank. The pattern was always the same. The moans would be weak at first – intermittent, unimpressive attempts to stir, like somebody failing to start a car with a flat battery. But as I closed my eyes and tried to ignore them, eventually the moans would develop into bleats, and then a bleat would break into a coughed-out cry, and then the cries would become more punctuated and insistent, until the engine finally started and roared and revved as the baby screamed with a strength that belied its tiny size.

  I lay there awake, listening to the angry crying, unable to summon the enthusiasm to pull my heavy frame upright again. Catherine would normally have leaped up long before now because she didn’t want Millie to be woken up by the baby, but I was never particularly convinced of the likelihood of this. It was one of those fussy overprotective worries that Catherine was always coming up with. There was the creak of a floorboard in the doorway.

  ‘Alfie waked me up,’ said Millie weepily, standing in the half light, clutching a chewed blanket.

  ‘Oh no.’ I sighed. I picked up the baby to stop the crying, prompting Millie to hold her arms out for me to lift her up as well, which I did. And then I just stood there in the lonely nadir of the night-time, balancing two small crying children in my arms, my tired body nearly buckling under the weight, wondering what on earth to do next.

  I thought about how there was only one thing worse than children that refused to sleep and that was the self-satisfied parents of babies who did. They believed it was down to them. Whenever Catherine and I were at our most exasperated we would be forced to listen to her stupid hippie sister Judith smugly explaining to us what we were doing wrong. I wanted to pick her up and scream at her, ‘It’s because you were lucky, that’s all. Because you happen to have had a baby that sleeps. It’s not because you had a water birth or fed him organic babyfood or feng shui-ed the fucking nursery. It’s just the luck of the draw.’

  Catherine and I had tried everything with Millie and Alfie, and now I was reduced to empty threats. ‘Just wait till you’re teenagers,’ I told them, ‘then I’ll get my revenge. I’m going to pick you up from your friends’ in a purple flowery shirt and I’ll do the twist at the school disco and when you bring home your first dates, I’m going to produce those photos of you as babies wriggling in the nude on the carpet.’ But my threats meant nothing and now the stakes were raised. I hadn’t wanted Catherine to be roused because she desperately needed to sleep. With both her children awake she was more likely to stir, and when she did and saw that I had allowed Alfie to disturb Millie, too, there would be an argument and I wouldn’t hear the end of it until Catherine had her head in the toilet bowl the following morning. Millie being awake was a disaster on every front. Apart from anything else the process of feeding and changing a baby in the small hours of the morning was a precise and precarious operation. Generally speaking, having an irritable two-and-a-half-year-old at one’s side was a hindrance rather than a help.

  ‘I want to watch Barney video,’ said Millie.

  We were not particularly severe parents, but one regulation that we did agree on was that Millie could not get us up in the middle of the night to watch children’s videos. This was fine as an abstract regulation, but it didn’t take into account the fact that Millie had the personality of Margaret Thatcher. She was not someone you could negotiate with, meet halfway, bribe or persuade. She would take up a position and you could see in her demonic eyes that she was completely persuaded by the total and absolute rightness of her cause, and at this moment nothing would shift her from her unwavering belief that she was going to watch the Barney video.

  One of our child-rearing books had said that the clever thing to do is not to confront a toddler head on, but to outwit her by changing the subject or distracting her with the unexpected. Imaginative distraction techniques are for when you are not feeling tired and irritable. I presume that this feeling comes back when the toddlers have grown up and gone to school.

  ‘No! You’re not watching the Barney video, Millie,’ I snapped. On hearing my firm refusal Millie threw hersel
f to the ground with all the agony of a bereaved parent. She repeated her demand one hundred and forty-seven times while I proceeded to try and change Alfie’s nappy, but I opted to ignore it. It was fine, I was in control, I was just going to ignore her and not let her get to me.

  ‘FOR GOD’S SAKE SHUT UP, MILLIE!’ I yelled. Deep down I knew that one way or another she would get to watch the Barney video before morning. I was still fighting to put a clean nappy on Alfie, but he wouldn’t keep still. The lotion I’d been trying to smear on his red bottom had landed on the front of the nappy, where the sticky tape goes, so the nappy wouldn’t hold together. I cast it aside and decided to start again, looking around to see where I had put the pack. It was now that Alfie chose to urinate. A great arc of wee shot up over his head, as if someone had suddenly turned on the garden sprinkler. I attempted to catch the last few drops with the old nappy, but it was a pointless exercise as he had already sprayed most of it in all directions and now his vest and babygro were both soaked.

  Millie was now emphasizing her repeated proposal that she watch the Barney video by hitting me on the arm every time she said it. I was unaware that in her other hand she was clutching a bright-red wooden building block, and at that moment her other arm swung round and she hit me full in the face with it. The sharp corner caught me just above the eye. The pain shot through me, and in a flash of temper I picked her up and threw her too roughly onto the bed and she banged the back of her head on the wooden headboard. Now she was really screaming. Frightened by the volume of his sister’s cries, or maybe just out of a sense of sibling solidarity, Alfie started screaming at full pitch as well. Almost panicking, I tried covering his mouth with my hand to shut him up, but unsurprisingly this didn’t make him more relaxed and he spluttered and wriggled his head and I backed off. And then I felt fear and shame that the boiling sense of anger and frustration within me could have been capable of covering the baby’s mouth completely and holding it there until he was completely silent and still.

  I left them both to scream and turned and punched my pillow as hard as I could, and then I punched it again and again, and I shouted, ‘WHY DON’T YOU FUCKING SHUT UP! WHY DON’T YOU JUST LET ME GO TO FUCKING SLEEP!’ And I looked up and saw that Catherine was standing in the doorway surveying the scene.

  She had that look on her face that suggested I wasn’t coping very well. She picked up Millie and told her that she was taking her straight back to bed, and because of some special code that she must have used, Millie accepted this state of affairs.

  ‘I was just going to do that,’ I said unconvincingly. ‘Why can’t you just let me deal with things my way?’ She didn’t reply. ‘You’re supposed to be getting some sleep,’ I shouted after her as a defiant afterthought, as if she had got up and wandered into a perfectly normal situation.

  ‘Did Alfie’s crying wake Millie up?’ she asked me directly when she came back in.

  ‘Yeah. I mean, I got straight up and everything, but he was just inconsolable.’

  ‘Oh great, she’ll be really ratty tomorrow.’ She gave an irritated sigh, and then I noticed that she’d come in with a warmed bottle of milk for the baby. ‘Why hasn’t Alfie had his bottle?’

  ‘It wasn’t time.’

  ‘It’s three o’clock.’

  ‘Yes, it’s time now, but it wasn’t time when he started crying. You said not to feed him before it was time. I was only doing what you said.’

  Catherine picked up Alfie from where I had changed him and popped the plastic teat of the bottle into his mouth.

  ‘I’ll feed him,’ I protested. ‘I said I’d do it tonight. You go to bed and go to sleep.’ She handed me the baby and the bottle and, instead of returning to the sofa bed downstairs, climbed into our double bed, where she could spend her break from feeding Alfie in the middle of the night watching me feed Alfie in the middle of the night.

  ‘Don’t hold it right up like that or he won’t take it,’ she heckled from the sidelines. Because of the tone in which she told me this information I felt compelled to ignore her and sure enough the baby wriggled and started to cry.

  ‘What are you doing? Why do you deliberately do it wrong?’

  ‘I wasn’t doing it deliberately.’

  ‘Give him to me,’ and she got out of bed and took the baby and I sulkily climbed under the covers and sat there, angry and indignant, as she gave the bottle to Alfie. The baby sucked rhythmically and happily, comfortable and relaxed in his mother’s arms, and when the sucking began to slow as Alfie fell into a stupefied sleep, Catherine would gently tap the soles of his feet to stir him. It was as if those tiny podgy feet had a little secret button that only Catherine knew about which made the head end start feeding properly. And even though I was lying there feeling injured and resentful, there was a little part of me that thought it was marvellous that she knew how to do that.

  She eventually resumed her place in bed beside me and I decided against pressing the point that I could cope perfectly well on my own.

  ‘I’ve only had an hour and a half’s sleep,’ I moaned, in the hope of some sympathy.

  ‘That’s more than I’ve had recently,’ she parried.

  Now the baby was fed, changed and warm. Now, surely he would sleep. We lay together, stiffly and silently, both knowing that the other was listening for the first grating moan to come from the pram. Like patients reclining on a dentist’s chair, it was impossible to relax because we were waiting for that moment when the drill hits the tooth – the first fretful cry that told us the baby’s pitiful precipitation was beginning again. When it came I said nothing, but I felt Catherine flinch beside me. It was nobody’s turn to get up and so, as the moans grew more regular and insistent, neither of us moved from our hopelessly optimistic sleeping positions, like a couple trying to sunbathe in the pouring rain.

  ‘Let’s just try leaving him,’ I said as the cry broke into fullblown wailing.

  ‘I can’t do that when you’re working and I’m here on my own.’

  ‘Well, I’m here tonight, so this can be the night that he learns we won’t always go running to him.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Just till the clock says three fifty.’

  I said that at 3:42. I got up to close the door so that Millie would not be woken up again. Catherine said nothing, but lay there facing the glowing digital display on the radio alarm as the baby bawled its tightly wound, breathless cries.

  After what seemed an age – 3:43 – Catherine angrily put the pillow over her head. I think it must have been intended to demonstrate something to me because I noticed her lift it slightly above her ear so that she could still listen to Alfie crying. I had thought the baby’s volume needle was already on the red line, that his little lungs and tinny voice box could not produce any more power, but at 3:44 the screaming suddenly went into quadraphonic hypersound, doubling in power, anger and volume. If it had been a son et lumière this would have been the moment when the fireworks went off and the chorus all stood up. How could he suddenly find such energy? Where did he get the stamina and strength of purpose from at that time of the night when we, his parents, with twenty times his weight and strength, had been ready to throw in the towel hours ago? Now I understood why mothers used to worry that the big metal nappy pin must have come unclasped and was piercing the flesh of the baby’s thigh, because that was the extreme level of pain Alfie was expressing. Even I was worried that he must have a safety pin sticking right through his skin, and we used disposable nappies.

  The furious bawling continued throughout 3:45, still at full pitch, but there was a gear change that produced shorter, more erratic noises. They were taut, painful, bewildered cries that screamed, ‘Mother, Mother, why hast thou forsaken me?’ And though her back was turned to me, I guessed that by now Catherine was probably crying, too. I had tried to make her leave the baby to cry in the first few months when she had still been breastfeeding. As the baby wailed, Catherine had sat up in bed with tears pouring down her cheeks and P
avlovian milk spraying out from her bosoms. At that point I had suggested she go and get the baby. I was worried that one way or another she might dehydrate completely.

  If she was crying now I’d feel as if I had caused it. Now I was the torturer; I had brought this poor mother to a darkened room in the middle of the night and forced her to listen to her own baby screaming and writhing in apparent agony. Though the cries maddened and infuriated me, they didn’t break my heart as I sensed they did hers. It was clear how much it hurt her to listen to it, but I couldn’t feel what she was feeling. I was able to step back from it, to close off the side of my brain that was aware that our baby was unhappy, and now I was forcing Catherine to try and do the same. I was trying to make her be more like a man. Perhaps this was my subconscious revenge. In the daytime she made me feel that I should be more like a woman, that I should instinctively understand all the moods and needs of the baby in the way that she did. The daylight hours were definitely hers. But now, at night, it was my turn. I had made her read the bits of the books that agreed with me; I had shown her written proof of what I kept saying to her: that she shouldn’t rush straight to the baby every time it cried, that she had to try and steel herself, to lash herself to the mast and endure her baby’s sobbing while it learned to fall asleep on its own. But though she was prepared to entertain the abstract theory of this idea, it was something she could never implement in practice.

  Here at last was an aspect of parenting that I was better at than her. Here was something that I could do and she could not. I suppose there’s an irony that my particular area of expertise involved leaving the baby to cry in its pram, but I needed something to feel good about and this was it. I was better at lying there and doing nothing than she was. This reversal of power was a subtle one and might even have gone unnoticed if it hadn’t been highlighted, so at 3:46 I gently and sympathetically asked her if she was coping all right.