The Best a Man Can Get

by John O'Farrell

  ‘Yes,’ she snapped, irritated at being patronized.

  ‘I know it’s hard,’ I went on in my most consoling and understanding voice, ‘but soon you’ll be glad I made you do it.’

  She said nothing, so I drove the point home. ‘Try and be strong; it’s for baby’s good as well in the long run.’

  Then a grossly unfair thing happened. She agreed with me. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘You’re right; we’ve got to win this.’

  ‘What?’ I said, in consternation.

  ‘We can’t go on like this every night; the baby making me an exhausted wreck. We have to take control.’

  This wasn’t what I was expecting at all. I had thought she was about to leap out of bed and run to the baby and say, ‘I’m sorry, Michael, I’m just not as strong as you. I can’t help it; I’m sorry.’

  I tried to cling on to my superior status as tough paternal supervisor. ‘I don’t mind, if you really feel you have to go to him.’

  ‘No!’ she said insistently. ‘We’ve got to be strong.’

  ‘You’re very brave, Catherine, but I know you want to go and pick him up.’

  ‘No, I’m not going to. We’re going to win this.’

  ‘Do you want me to pick him up for you?’

  ‘Don’t you dare! Leave him to cry.’

  And I just lay there listening to the baby wailing, and with my last scrap of pride and status taken from me, I felt like joining in.

  Alfie did learn to send himself off to sleep, and we felt a sense of triumph and achievement, as if a milestone had been reached. An hour later it seemed that he had forgotten the lesson completely and needed to learn it all over again. We took turns to push the pram up and down the bedroom, we diagnosed colic and wind and every other ailment we’d read about on the tatty noticeboard at the health centre. Then we suddenly panicked that he might be crying so much because he had meningitis, and I ran downstairs and got the torch. If the baby shows an aversion to bright light, that’s a definite symptom of meningitis, and sure enough, to our utter dismay, this baby that had been lying in a darkened room all night recoiled from having a 200-watt torch shone in his face. Meningitis is a killer; it’s infectious. What if Millie had it as well? We ran into her bedroom and shook her awake in order to shine my super-powered spotlight into her eyes. She recoiled as well. And drowsiness, that’s another symptom. Both our children had meningitis! A disorientated Millie was placed in front of the telly while we quickly looked up the other symptoms in the book – headache, temperature, stiffness of the neck. Neither of them seemed to be suffering any of these. And then we realized that if Millie was happy to stare at the light coming out of a television screen then she couldn’t have meningitis.

  ‘Come on, Millie. Off to bed.’

  ‘But I’m watching Barney.’

  ‘You know you’re not allowed to watch television at night time.’

  Her bottom lip stuck out and she started to cry, and we couldn’t help but be aware that there was perhaps a slight injustice to shaking a child awake at five o’clock in the morning and putting her in front of the television, only to tell her she wasn’t allowed to watch television. So I spent the hour before dawn sitting up with Millie, watching a giant cuddly green and purple dinosaur being hugged by a lot of sickly American children.

  Breakfast was tense. It didn’t require Catherine’s morning sickness to make it tense, but the sound of her throwing up didn’t particularly lighten the mood. By this stage we were both so irritably irrational that I was convinced she was just affecting the vomiting to try and demonstrate that she felt worse than I did. These were the times when we needed some space apart, when I needed to go and hide out in my cave. Catherine’s father had converted the shed at the bottom of the garden into a little office, which was his private refuge, where he could sit in quiet, peaceful meditation, planning the next massacre of the woodlice. But I had the whole of South London to myself. Having been born and brought up in North London, Catherine would be no more inclined to travel to the depths of Balham than she would consider trekking to Kazakhstan. She had a vague idea of where both of them probably were, but she could not begin to contemplate what sort of visas, maps and local guides you would need to get to such places.

  It would have been better if I’d headed across the river there and then; Catherine would be a lot happier once I was out of the way. But there were a few practicalities that had to be sorted out first: I wanted to at least mix the babymilk, then I had to find my phone charger, gather a few things together in my holdall and then we had to have a full-blown marital row. It was approaching with all the depressing inevitability of a Cliff Richard Christmas single.

  ‘Level it off with a knife,’ she said as I measured out the milk powder.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re supposed to level the spoonfuls off with a knife, so you get exactly the right amount.’

  ‘Catherine, what is the worst that could happen if the babymilk is fractionally stronger or weaker? Will Alfie get food poisoning? Will he die of starvation?’

  ‘You only have to follow the instructions,’ she said, prickling.

  ‘You mean I only have to follow your instructions. Why can’t you just trust me to measure out a few poxy spoons of babymilk without watching me like a bloody hawk?’

  And then we were off. The fight was nobody’s fault, it was just the unavoidable collision of an exhausted couple cooped up together in a poky little house, like battery hens locked up for too long in the same tiny cage. But before long all our anger and frustration was being clumsily knocked back and forth. I hurled obscenities at her and she threw a large paperback at me. It was a book called The Caring Parent and it flew straight past me and hit Millie on her leg. Millie looked rather bemused and carried on playing, but I made such a meal of my sympathy for her that she decided perhaps she ought to cry after all, and then I was able to give Catherine a hateful glare and say, ‘Look what you’ve done.’ Then, to emphasize who was the caring parent in this marriage, I comforted our distraught toddler by sitting her down to read her a Beatrix Potter book.

  ‘You naughty kittens, you have lost your mittens,’ said Mrs Tabitha Twitchet. Then the cuddly pussy cat apparently added, ‘You’re always so fucking moody, aren’t you? You’re the only woman who ever managed to be pre-menstrual twenty-eight days a fucking month.’ Millie looked as if she didn’t remember this bit from the book, but then looked reassured when I continued, ‘Just then, three puddle-ducks marched by . . .’

  The argument followed its usual symphonic narrative, each movement building on the last. Catherine said that I never told her anything, that I never talked to her about my work or what I was up to. I told her that whatever I did with the children it was always wrong, that she would never permit me the dignity of just doing things my own way. I was shaking now. I couldn’t look at her, so I angrily busied myself by washing up some plastic plates, focusing my pent-up anger on domestic work. I suddenly realized that Catherine had already washed them, but I carried on anyway, hoping she wouldn’t notice.

  ‘I’ve already washed those plates,’ she said.

  Eventually she told me to fuck off back to work, and I made an unconvincing job of saying I’d been planning to hang around a bit longer to help her.

  ‘What’s the point?’ she said as I put my jacket on. ‘I’ve got to go out anyway, walk to the shops, buy some more babymilk, take Millie to playgroup, blah, blah, blah. It’s all so bloody boring,’ she said.

  ‘But it doesn’t have to be boring. I got you that Sony Walkman so that you can listen to Radio 4 when you take the kids to the swings, and you hardly ever use it.’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that, Michael. You can’t just provide instant answers to my problems like they’re a bloody trivia question. I don’t want you to try and stop me being bored. I just wish sometimes you could be bored with me.’

  This was such a strange concept to me that I was completely lost for words. She wanted me to be bored with her. The
woman who had the greatest sense of fun of anyone I had ever met. The woman who had told a Dutch hitch-hiker that I was completely deaf and then spent the next hour trying to make me laugh by telling him how useless I was in bed. I wanted that Catherine back; I wanted to rescue her from the body-snatchers and go back to the days when all we had wanted was to spend every second of the day together. Now we were like a couple of magnets, one side drew us together and the other side forced us apart. Alternately attracting and repelling, adoring and then resenting.

  It was just as I went to leave that she hit me with another body blow. ‘Michael, I don’t mind the fact that you’re never here, but I do mind the fact that you don’t want to be here.’

  How did she have the time to lie awake and think of lines like that?

  Attack was my only possible form of defence. ‘That is so unfair,’ I snapped, raising my voice to give the impression that now she had really overstepped the mark. ‘You think I choose to be away from the kids this much? You think I don’t rush home to see them as soon as I can? You think I don’t go to bed feeling miserable at three in the morning because I’m not going to see them wake up? I can’t see them as much as you do because I have to go out to work. I have to work all day and night to pay for a wife and two children and a mortgage we can barely afford. And when you want a dishwasher, the money is magically there, or new clothes or a holiday or a stupid bidet that cost four hundred pounds but is only used as a receptacle for storing plastic bath toys. The money is always there, and it’s there because I work so hard for it.’

  I was genuinely fired up now, and Catherine seemed at a loss for words.

  ‘It’s not easy, you know, going to my studio exhausted, then working thirty-six hours at a stretch to get compositions ready by their deadlines, writing one piece while pitching for another, working non-stop on my own in a cramped studio on the other side of town, crashing out on a lonely bed so that I can get up and carry straight on with it. But I have to do it so that we can afford to have a decent standard of living, so that we can feed and clothe our children, so that we can afford to all keep on living in this house. I have to work this hard because it’s the only way we can stay afloat.’

  I picked up my holdall and strode angrily towards the front door for a triumphant exit. Lying on the doormat was an envelope the shape and size of which I had come to recognize. I snatched it up and stuffed it in my bag. I didn’t need to open it to know what it said. It was another warning letter from our bank. They wanted to know why the mortgage had not been paid for four months.

  chapter four

  because I’m worth it

  One way or another I was always going to be woken up by children. My radio alarm said 3:31 and for a moment I wasn’t sure if it was morning or afternoon, but the noise of kids being picked up from over the road convinced me it must be p.m. Your kids would have to be pretty hyperactive for you to leave them at school till half-past three in the morning. Although I had once again broken my own record for sleeping in, I still felt like I needed another twelve hours. When you’ve been deprived of any proper shut-eye for days, a massive shot of sleep only makes you crave it all the more. All that rest had drained me, now I was tired and groggy, as if emerging from a general anaesthetic. How Sleeping Beauty managed to sit up with such a twinkly smile after a hundred years was a mystery to me. I pulled the duvet over my head and tried to drift off again.

  Hedgehogs; they had the right idea, I thought. When they felt the time was right to have a massive kip they just found themselves a huge pile of sticks and leaves and crawled inside. Obviously it was a shame that this generally happened to be around 5 November, but the basic principle was a sound one. Why couldn’t humans hibernate, I wondered. We could turn in at the end of October, sleep right through Christmas and the New Year, and finally get up, having set the radio alarm for some time in mid-March. If it was still raining we could press the snooze button and lie in for another couple of weeks, just getting up to catch the end of the football season. Right, I thought, I’m going to try and do that right now. Nope, no good, I was wide awake. I sat up and clicked on the kettle.

  I remembered all that spare sleep I’d had when I was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. I’d spent it so recklessly. If only I could have put it in a sleep bank, saved up for a sleep pension later in life. ‘Michael! Get out of bed,’ my mother used to shout up the stairs at me. We spend the first few years trying to get our children to stay in bed and then, before we know it, we’re trying to get them out again. It’s hard to think of a period when we actually get our sleep right. Small children wake up too early, teenagers don’t wake up at all, new parents don’t get any sleep because of the noise their children make, and then a few years later they can’t get to sleep because now there’s no noise of their children returning home at night. Then, when we get old, we start waking up as early as we did when we were toddlers, until finally we fall asleep for ever. Sounds quite attractive sometimes, except they’ll probably bury me next to some nursery school and I’ll be woken from the dead by kids screaming and crying and jumping on top of me at all hours.

  I made myself a cup of tea and switched on the television, flicking around, trying to find some commercials to watch. As always there were far too many programmes between the adverts. First up was an inspired interpretation of George Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ – a Paul Robeson soundalike sang, ‘Somerfield . . . and the shopping is easy. Lots of parking, and the prices ain’t high.’ The next ad was for a shampoo, in which a French footballer told us why he used L’Oréal. ‘Because I’m worth it,’ he said. That’s why I’m still in bed at half-past three in the afternoon, I thought, because I’m worth it. Because I can, and because there’s no harm in it. Then there was an advert for a building society which said, ‘Remember your home is at risk if you do not keep up repayments’ and I quickly switched channels. I’d pay off my overdue mortgage payments soon enough. It would mean a few months of working as hard as Catherine thought I did all the time, but I estimated that I could clear the backlog before the baby was born.

  My thoughts had strayed back to our unborn baby as I watched an Open University programme on BBC2. It was about some nutty institute in California where pregnant women went to have algebraic formulae and quotes from Shakespeare shouted down a tube pressed against their bumps. Apparently the foetus spends much of its time in the womb asleep, but they’re even trying to stop that now. ‘It’s never too early to start learning things,’ said the teacher. Like the fact that your parents are completely mad.

  But that must be the soundest sleep of all, I thought, tucked up tight inside that dark, heated waterbed, with the muffled heartbeat hypnotically pattering away, before all the worries of the outside world start to churn over in your subconscious. Everything provided; no need to leave the comfort and security of your fleshy nest. Was that what this was all about? Was my secret refuge in deepest South London an attempt to return to the comforting simplicity I’d enjoyed in the nine months before I was born? I lay down again and curled my naked body into the foetal position, and realized that was how I naturally preferred to fall asleep. My dark, cosy little hideaway had everything my first sleeping place had had. Not literally, obviously; my mother’s uterus hadn’t had a large poster of the Ramones stuck up with Blu-tack, but practically and spiritually speaking, this little den was an artificial womb of my own. An umbilical cord of tangled electrical leads hung down beside the bed – the electric blanket that brought me warmth, the kettle lead that provided my fluids, the fridge cord for nutrition. The drumbeat from Jim’s stereo pulsated rhythmically through the wall and the daylight that seeped through the red-patterned curtains gave a veiny pink effect to my window on the outside world. The only way to escape from the tyranny of babies had been to regress into a prenatal state myself.

  I told myself I shouldn’t feel guilty that I sometimes found my family so oppressive. I reassured myself that what I was doing was no worse than the behaviour of the rest of the men of my gener
ation. Some fathers stayed at work far longer than they really needed to. Some fathers worked all week and then played golf all weekend. Some fathers came home and went straight to their computers for the rest of the evening. These men were not there for their wives and families any more than I was, but at least I wasn’t deceiving myself about it. The simple fact was that, for the time being, everyone was better off if I wasn’t at home all the time. The problem was that the less I was there, the worse I was at it, and the less I seemed to want to be there.

  In all the adverts that I’d arranged the music for, the families always had such fun; they always looked so comfortable with each other. Even though I worked in the industry I still hadn’t seen through the lies. Obviously I knew that Lite ’n’ lo wasn’t really a delicious alternative to butter, but it hadn’t occurred to me that they were also lying about the happy smiling kids and parents laughing round the breakfast table together. If that had been my childhood, then the mum would have picked up the butter knife and threatened to stab the dad with it.

  The adverts told us we could have it all, we could be great dads and still go off snowboarding and earn lots of money and pop out of the business meeting to tell our children a bedtime story on the mobile phone. But it can’t be done. Work, family and self; it’s an impossible Rubik’s Cube. You can’t be a hands-on, sensitive father and a tough, high-earning businessman and a pillar of your local community and a handy do-it-yourself Mr Fixit and a romantic, attentive husband – something has to give. In my case, everything.

  But on top of all this, I had another reason for not wanting to spend hours and hours with my children just yet. It was something that no mother or father was brave enough to admit, a guilty secret that I suspected we all shared but dared not mention for fear of being thought bad parents:

  Small children are boring.

  We all pretend that we find every little nuance of our off-spring wonderful and fascinating, but we’re all lying to ourselves. Small children are boring; it’s the tedium that dare not speak its name. I want to come out of the closet and stand on top of the tallest climbing frame in the country and proclaim to the world, ‘Small children are boring.’ All the other parents would look shocked and offended as they pushed their toddler up and down on the seesaw for the one hundredth time, but secretly they would feel a huge sense of relief that they weren’t alone. And all the guilt they had felt because they secretly hated spending the entire mind-numbing day with their little two-year-olds would suddenly be lifted when they realized they weren’t bad, unloving parents; there was nothing wrong with them, it was their children. Their children were boring.