The Best a Man Can Get

by John O'Farrell

  ‘I can’t hold on much longer,’ she said. ‘The moment he presses that thing against my bladder I’m going to wet my knickers, I know it.’

  ‘Go for a wee now, then.’

  ‘No, I want the first picture of the baby to be a good one.’

  ‘Well try not to think about it. Do your pelvic-floor exercises or something.’

  ‘I’m already doing them.’

  I knew she wouldn’t wet herself, of course, unless the doctor suddenly announced that he could see twins. It happened to Nick and Debbie, a couple who live near us. They went for the scan and were suddenly told they were expecting two babies. And they thought it was good news, bless them. Last time I went past their house I thought I saw the grandparents coming out of the door, but when I looked again I realized that it was Nick and Debbie themselves – six months after the twins were born.

  Eventually our turn came and the doctor asked Catherine to lie down. To show that he had every confidence in my wife’s personal hygiene, he tore off a huge strip of paper which he placed along the length of the bed before she came into contact with his leatherette mattress. For some reason I wasn’t suspected of having any major skin diseases and so was permitted to sit on a chair as I was. He then wheeled across this huge expensive-looking piece of wizardry which he pretended was the ultrasound machine. Of course, foetal scans are all a massive con trick. They don’t show you your baby at all. When all the cutbacks were being made in the health service, one of the accountants suddenly realized what a complete waste of money ultrasounds really were. All babies in the womb look completely identical, so what they do these days is just play you a video of a foetus that the consultant made back in the Sixties. That’s why it’s in black and white. We’ve all been told to look at the monitor where we’ve been shown exactly the same footage of the same foetus, and we’ve all clasped our partner’s hand and bitten our lips at the miraculous beauty of our little unborn baby, when really all we are looking at is the gynaecological equivalent of that little girl playing noughts and crosses on the test card. The foetus we are actually looking at was born years ago. He’s grown up now; he’s a chartered surveyor who lives in Droitwich. He still gets the repeat fees.

  Obviously, for appearance’s sake, they still have to smear ice-cold Swarfega on your wife’s bump, rub a shower attachment around a bit and point to a grey splurge on the screen and say, ‘There, that’s the head, see?’ when it all looks like the bubbles on a bad animated Sixties underground film. But still you go away satisfied with a flimsy little photo which you believe is of your next baby, and no-one is any the wiser when friends say, ‘I’ve got one of Jocasta almost identical to that.’

  I approached the scan like a cynical old hand, exuding the blasé air of someone who already had two ultrasound images framed and artistically placed amid the gallery of black-and-white photos of my kids on the wall up the stairs at home. The doctor turned on the screen and I said, ‘They’re showing the snooker on the other channel,’ and Catherine told me I had made the same joke when we’d come in for Millie’s and Alfie’s scans. So I shut up and squinted at the monitor as the deep-sea probe searched the murky depths for any sign of life. But then, when I saw the shape of our third child suddenly emerge, all my scepticism and facetiousness instantly melted away. It was a miracle. There really was a baby in there. It is simply beyond the bounds of ordinary human comprehension as to how such a thing can possibly have happened. How could our two bodies have combined to create a completely new and separate person? How could Catherine’s body know how to grow an umbilical cord and a foetal sac and a placenta and create a little human being exactly the right shape and size? How is it possible that such complex biological information can all be innately programmed somewhere inside her while the conscious Catherine still couldn’t understand how to set the bloody video? How could one of my sperm transmit so many million messages when I couldn’t even remember to tell Catherine that her mother had rung? Millions and millions of years of evolution to get to this point. Species dying out and others emerging all so that this perfect little baby could be born. It was only one baby, thank God. Not like the guilty secrets I could feel kicking inside me; they were quins, sextuplets, octuplets. Thank God there was no machine that could see inside me. Now that would be something. A machine that showed us what was really going on inside. Come to think of it, I would have quite liked to have known. The doctor could have pointed to the various blobs on the screen and said, ‘Oh look, there’s your anxiety – that’s growing worryingly large. Does your family have a history of anxiety problems?’ Or, ‘Hmm, your ego looks like it may have been damaged there. We’ll have to get the nurse to massage that for you.’

  I looked at Catherine lying there on the bed and thought the two of us couldn’t have been more different. Me sitting there quietly, the buttoned-up man with all my secrets inside me, and Catherine, the effusive open-hearted woman with her T-shirt pulled up and her trousers unzipped and the scanner squirming around on her exposed midriff so that even the inside of her body was broadcast on the telly for us all to gawp at.

  We watched carefully as the doctor plotted the crown-to-rump length and eventually extrapolated from this measurement that Catherine was twelve weeks pregnant. This seemed a fairly uncontroversial diagnosis considering we had come in for her twelve-week scan. Then he chatted at great length about the stage the pregnancy was at and what Catherine should expect to feel in the coming months, and she listened and nodded as politely as she could, considering that she’d done it twice before and all she wanted to do now the scan was over was run to the toilet and have a wee.

  Soon we were driving back home and Catherine sat in the seat beside me just staring at the photo of the three-month-old foetus.

  ‘I think it might be safer if I drove,’ I said nervously.

  She pulled over at a bus stop and showed the photo to me again. She loved the baby already. I gave her a tentative kiss. I felt so very proud of her, she was so positive and full of optimism. I undid my seat belt so I could lean across and kiss her properly, and then I found myself hugging and kissing her like a rescued child. I had so nearly let myself slip my moorings and I was so glad to be back with her that I just kept on giving her grateful, silent guilty kisses and hugging her slightly too much.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m so happy this new baby is coming.’

  And she was so relieved to hear me say that that she kissed me back passionately. There were no children tugging at our legs or crying in the background; it was just Catherine and me and all the people queuing for the number 31 bus.

  Right now we were at the very zenith of our passion cycle. This was the routine emotional loop of our relationship, which came round with all the biological regularity of a menstrual cycle or a biorhythm. It took us from bitter argument to loving, mutual adoration every seven days or so. It fooled me every time. Every week, as we were staring devotedly into each other’s eyes, I thought we had finally sorted out all our problems for ever. But then a day or two later Catherine would seem inexplicably irritated with me and I’d become defensive and silent, which in turn made her prickly and oversensitive. The tension would build until we reached the nadir of the cycle, when we would explode into argument, saying hateful, hurtful, stupid things to each other, briefly despising one another as passionately as we had adored each other only days before. Then I would disappear for a while. I was still in orbit around her, still in her gravitational pull, but this was the most distant point between us. Then I would re-emerge, shining brightly in her life for a while, and everything seemed like it was perfect between us again for ever.

  If I was ever unsure about what stage we were at in the loop I just had to check the height of the pile of ironing. The crumpled clothes would just be a few items at first and then, during the week, more would be placed on top, until the tower was in danger of toppling over when we finally had a fight and Catherine angrily threw herself into the ironing, smashing
the hissing metal onto Barbie and Ken’s faces as they smiled up at her from the front of Millie’s T-shirts.

  We drove the rest of the way home in a blissful haze and Catherine miraculously agreed that we should go out that evening if her mother didn’t mind staying on and babysitting the children. Her mum eagerly agreed; she never missed an opportunity to put the kids to bed so that she could send them off to sleep with another thrilling instalment from the neglected copy of Bible Stories for Children, which she had given Millie for Christmas.

  Catherine’s mother was a Church of England fundamentalist, fighting her own holy jihad against anyone who would not take Jesus into their life, or indeed anyone who wouldn’t help her with the St Botolph’s Christmas fayre and jumble sale.

  There was a particular shirt I wanted to wear, but discovered that it needed ironing. It occurred to me that I could, of course, precipitate a row so that I wouldn’t have to wait a couple of days, but on balance I decided it was probably unfair and against the natural order of things to try to force an argument before it was organically due, and so I painstakingly ironed the shirt myself. Catherine was amazed and delighted to see me doing the ironing, and then she realized that I was only doing my own shirt and not ironing anything of hers or the children’s and a huge row blew up. Before long she was ironing everything, including the very shirt that I had originally made such a hash of myself.

  ‘Jesus, you’re a selfish bastard sometimes, Michael,’ said Catherine.

  ‘Please do not use the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in that way, dear,’ said her mother.

  I think that was the only time the passion cycle took a couple of hours instead of the full seven days. We never had that evening out together, instead I found myself heading down the Northern Line to Balham. ‘Mind the gap,’ said the announcement at Embankment. A few hours later I was back at my flat again, and after I knew she would be asleep I left a brusque message on the answerphone saying that something had come up and I probably wouldn’t be able to leave the studio for a couple of days. Lies are like cigarettes – your first one makes you feel sick, but soon you’re addicted to them, unaware you are even doing it.

  The next day was the hottest day of the summer. The weatherman had predicted that the temperature would be in the mid-eighties, though in London this was probably bumped up another couple of degrees by all the electrical equipment in my studio. It can only have been around half an hour after I had sat down to work that Jim popped his head round the door and asked me if I wanted to come to a barbecue on Clapham Common. The little devil by my right ear said, ‘Go on, it’s a lovely day, have some fun. All this work can wait.’ And the little angel by my left ear said, ‘Oh, fuck it, what’s the point in even trying?’

  The barbecue was already well under way in the semi-wooded hilly area by the Latin American football pitches. There must have been over twenty people at our picnic, all of them about my age – meaning that I was probably seven or eight years older than any of them. Girls with pierced navels laid their heads on the laps of boyfriends in combat trousers, music floated across the grass, a couple of disposable barbecues smoked away and the smell of charcoal mingled with the occasional wafts of cannabis. They were so free they didn’t know it. Part of me was nervous about gate-crashing their twenty-something party, as if one of them might suddenly sit up, point at me and say, ‘Just a minute, you’re not young!’ Lots of the blokes had little beards, so small they hardly seemed worth the trouble. Not me, though – I was far too old for a beard. I hid behind my sunglasses and sat down in a space amongst the stretched-out legs, some of them sporting flared trousers like the ones I remembered wearing first time round. If anyone asked, I couldn’t remember when Elvis died. Elvis who? The Falklands? What was that? Typewriters? Never heard of them. Microsoft Windows ’95– oooh, yes, I think I just about remember that.

  The tragic thing was that while I could remember everything from when I was young, I couldn’t actually remember anything from the last few years. This lot would all know what song was number one. When was the last time I knew or cared? I could still list all the Christmas chart-toppers of the Seventies and Eighties – I could tell you every track of every album I bought back then – but ask my brain to store any more new information now and it would refuse. Disk full. It ought to be possible to delete some files to make space. For example, thanks to three hours spent racking my brain after having breakfast with Simon, I knew that St John’s Wood was the only underground station that doesn’t include a letter from the word ‘mackerel’. I’d be more than happy to wipe that piece of knowledge from my mind so that I could make room to remember my dad’s birthday. But every year I forgot to send him a card, and every time the tube train pulled into St John’s Wood I would now think of mackerel.

  I accepted a little bottle of French lager, lay back, closed my eyes and let the sun and alcohol carry me away. A few revellers struggled to their feet and youthfully threw a frisbee back and forth. Others busied themselves rolling joints or putting overcooked sausages into bread for everyone. Cannabis was passed one way and hot dogs were passed the other; there’s probably some modern youth etiquette to it. There was an efficiency to this picnic that made me realize these kids weren’t really the lazy no-hopers they affected to be; their bumming about was far too well organized. Anyone at the advertising agencies would be able to tell me the name of this particular tribe. The pierced navels? The clubbers? The Ibiza posse? I think they were expected to drink Pepsi Max and buy snowboards, or care about the planet, but in the most hedonistic way possible. The girls brushed their shiny long hair away from their faces with the backs of their wrists and they all had the healthy glow of well-bred families. Like Jim, they were hippie posh; they’d dropped out, but had return tickets for when they were older. Their parents would have spent the summer doing Ascot, Henley and Wimbledon, and these kids would have had their own summer season, going to the Fleadh, Reading Festival or Glastonbury.

  So if I wasn’t one of them, which advertising tribe would I be filed under? When Hugo had asked me to write the musical sting for ‘The saloon car that thinks it’s a sports car’, he had told me they were aiming at the ‘Lad Dad’. A shudder had run down my spine as I’d felt instantly categorized in two short syllables. ‘Oh, I know the sort,’ I had said to him scornfully, simultaneously throwing a glossy men’s magazine into the waste-paper bin.

  The midday sun felt powerful and I moved into the shade to prevent my tender forehead from burning. It would be hard to explain how I’d become sunburned from sitting at my keyboard all day. Suddenly, from my bag I could hear my mobile phone ringing. I expected to get groans from all the pierced alternative environmentalists, but they all reached for their pockets and bags as well.

  ‘Hi. It’s me,’ said Catherine.

  Her tone was suitably cool considering that we had had a row, but at least she’d made the first contact.

  ‘Are you in your studio?’

  I thought I could just about answer that one without lying unnecessarily.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where are you, then?’

  I sensed that she might be angling for me to come home for bathtime. I looked around and decided that it wouldn’t be a very good idea to say that I was lying on the grass on Clapham Common. Near by a little boy was wearing a Manchester United top.

  ‘I’m in … Manchester.’

  Some of the people sitting near by seemed curious, so I smiled at them and mimed a long-suffering tut that the person I was speaking to couldn’t grasp this obvious and simple fact.

  ‘Manchester? Really? Whereabouts?’

  ‘Oh. United.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean, um, Piccadilly.’ It had been a bad choice. Manchester was where Catherine had been to college.

  ‘Why did you say united?’

  ‘Sorry, I just associate Manchester with United. As opposed to Manchester City, who wear sky-blue shirts, of course.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ />
  ‘Sorry. They’ve just told me to hurry up because this edit suite is costing them five hundred pounds an hour.’

  ‘Oh. So you won’t see the kids before bed, then?’

  ‘’Fraid not. It’s bloody murder up here. I’m having to rewrite something on the spot. Talk about pressure.’

  ‘Oh.’ She sounded disappointed. ‘Well, we’re just off to see Susan and Piers’s new house. I’ll speak to you tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, well don’t get chatting to Piers about the Astra; you’ll never get away.’

  She was still too cool towards me to laugh, so I asked her to give the kids a kiss from me and we said our goodbyes and hung up. Neither of us said sorry for the horrible things we had shouted at each other the day before, but the ice had been broken and we would speak more warmly again the next day. It was so much better this way; we wouldn’t spend two days slamming doors and ruining each other’s weekend. I cracked open another stubby lager bottle and passed an hour lazily trying to make things out of the shapes of clouds. They looked cloud-shaped to me every time.

  The mobile rang again and this time it was Hugo Harrison. When I had completed my last job for him I had put the track on the tape three times in a row, knowing that he would need to listen to it over and over again and so saving him the trouble of having to repeatedly cue up the same piece of music.

  ‘Hi, Michael, it’s Hugo here. I’ve had a listen to your tracks.’

  ‘Tracks?’ I said, confused that he was using the plural.

  ‘Yeah, now I like the beginning of the first mix, the pace of the second one and the best ending of the three is definitely on the last version.’