The Best a Man Can Get

by John O'Farrell

  ‘Stop it, Catherine, it’s not funny. Millie, stop wriggling, will you.’

  ‘I’m not joking.’

  ‘You do cope with the children. You cope brilliantly. Millie, lie still.’

  Catherine shrugged and said nothing. I looked up at her from where I was kneeling on the floor, hunched over the changing mat.

  ‘OK, sometimes maybe you feel as if you can’t cope with them, but I’m sure that’s normal. Generally speaking you like being with the kids on your own.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Well maybe occasionally they feel a bit overwhelming. But, generally speaking, you like having me out of the way.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Look stop it, you naughty girl.’

  ‘Are you talking to me or Millie?’

  Millie was wriggling and making it impossible for me to put the nappy on straight.

  ‘Why do you have to make things Woody difficult?’ And then I added, ‘Millie!’ just to be clear.

  ‘I want Mummy to do it.’

  ‘No, Mummy can’t do everything.’

  ‘Yes she can,’ said Catherine. ‘Clever Mummy can do everything and keep smiling happy smiles all day long, tra-la-la.’

  ‘Catherine, you’re pissed.’

  ‘… off. I’m pissed off.’

  ‘Look, I understand that you’ve had a lousy day and that the kids can be wearing, but you have always said how much you love being at home with them.’

  ‘That was for your sake,’ she said. ‘I thought if you were under all that pressure at work then the last thing you needed was to have me moaning about being at home.’

  ‘You’re just saying that.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘It’s not.’

  ‘It is; it’s miserable being on my own half the week. Sometimes I feel like I’ve already done a day’s work, and then I look at the kitchen clock and it’s only ten in the morning and I think, Only nine hours till they’re in bed.’

  ‘You’re just saying that because you feel miserable at the moment. I know you cope really well when I’m not there.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘I’m telling you you do. I know you do.’

  ‘How do you know? How do you know better than me how I cope when you’re not there?’

  ‘Well, er, because I know you, that’s how. You’re a very good mother.’

  ‘You used to say I was a very good actress.’

  ‘You still are a very good actress.’

  ‘I must be if you believe all that happy-families stuff I turn on when you walk through the front door.’

  I didn’t have an answer to that, and then Millie tried to wriggle free again and I lost patience with her.

  ‘JUST STOP IT, MILLIE, FOR GOD’S SAKE. YOU’RE A VERY NAUGHTY GIRL! YOU’RE VERY, VERY NAUGHTY AND I’VE HAD ENOUGH OF IT NOW!’

  Eventually Catherine decided it was time to go home and she said that I had better get back to my studio to carry on with my work. But this time I didn’t take her up on her offer. Something had penetrated my rhino-hide skin and I sensed that she wanted me to change my plans and come home. She needed me to just be there. She needed me to be supportive. And she needed me to drive the car home because she was pissed out of her head.

  We headed back over the river, and I told Millie that Albert Bridge was made out of pink icing sugar, and in the late May sunshine it looked as if it might well have been. As we entered Chelsea the people on the street were suddenly very different to those a hundred yards away on the other side of the river. With their Moschino handbags and Ralph Lauren shirts, they were so expensively dressed that they had to wear their labels on the outside. We would have to drive all the way through the richest parts of London before we came out on the other side and were back among the more impoverished middle classes once again.

  Forty minutes later we were back in our bijou shoebox in Kentish Town. I put some tea in front of Millie, which after three packets of crisps she quite rightly ignored. Why I didn’t cook it and then put it straight in the bin to save time, I don’t know. Then I sat down beside her and, with Alfie on my lap, we watched The Lion King again, right up to the bit where Simba disappears off on his own to grow up and then finally bumps into his long-lost Nala in the forest. Catherine got herself another drink; I was glad that she was no longer breastfeeding because if she had been Alfie would probably have passed out from alcohol poisoning. We didn’t talk any more about what she’d said, although I did notice myself making exaggerated aren’t-they-sweet? noises every time the kids did anything as much as throw a lump of food on the floor.

  I cooked the kids’ tea and cleared up, I cooked our dinner and cleared up, I bathed the kids and put them to bed, I tidied away the toys and even put a load of washing on, but it seemed that nothing could extricate any grateful noises of approval from Catherine, who just lay on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. To her credit, she had known when to stop drinking, which was when the wine bottle was empty. Eventually she announced she was going to bed early and she gave me a hug. ‘It’s not you; it’s me,’ she said meaningfully, and then she squeezed me so tightly she nearly cracked a couple of ribs.

  I stayed downstairs for a while and listened to a few of my favourite bits of music on my own. I listened to ‘For No One’ by the Beatles three times, which felt like having someone unlock an impossible sequence of secret doors inside my head. When I couldn’t think of any more reasons to stay up I got ready to follow Catherine to bed. I mixed Alfie’s bottle of babymilk for the night feed, stood it by the microwave and then checked on the kids. Millie had already vacated her bed and taken my place beside Catherine, so I went into the nursery, climbed into her bed and pulled the Barbie duvet up over my head. I kicked a couple of soft toys out of the bottom of the bed and lay there listening to Alfie snuffling in the cot beside me.

  An hour passed and I was still awake. I fluffed up the pillow and pulled up the duvet, but it wasn’t the bedding that was making me uncomfortable. The picture of her sitting on the ground crying just kept coming back to me. It was so at odds with the image of Catherine that I had kept in my head when we were apart. Unaware that I was watching her, she had just given up and surrendered. And now that her cover was blown she wasn’t pretending any more.

  ‘There’s something missing that I just can’t put my finger on,’ she had said. I tried to tell myself it was just some hormonal depression related to the pregnancy, but I knew if it was that simple I wouldn’t be lying awake at two o’clock in the morning. An hour later, I listened as Alfie began to stir. Now that he was nearly a year old he generally only woke once in the night, and although the chances of Catherine being stirred from her wine-induced coma were frankly quite slim, I went downstairs and warmed up his babymilk before he started to cry. I took a swig to check the temperature and then spat the disgusting chalky pond water out into the sink, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. The trick now was to give Alfie a good feed without stimulating him so much that he became wide awake. But as we sat together in the half light of the nursery and he sucked eagerly on the bottle, he suddenly opened his eyes as if he had just realized something very important. He stared at me as he fed and I risked a gentle, ‘Hello, Alfie Adams,’ and he just carried on drinking and staring. He seemed so completely trusting and innocent, so completely dependent on my care that I felt like I had somehow let him down. As I looked into his big blue eyes I imagined for a moment that he knew everything about me, that he understood why his mother felt isolated and abandoned and he was just staring sternly at me as if to say, ‘What on earth do you think you are doing, Dad?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Alfie,’ I said. ‘I’m really sorry.’ And I was.

  chapter seven

  the mark of a man

 
‘It is not possible to maintain your dignity in a ball pit. Once you are lying on your back in the krazy quicksand of brightly coloured plastic balls you must resign yourself to looking like a lumbering, graceless buffoon, a sweaty injured walrus of a grown-up who, just by dint of being there, invites being bombarded by a hail of primary-coloured plastic cannon balls. There is a special fun smile you must wear, even when the little boy with the bullet haircut who you don’t know has just got you right in the face with a ball he has squashed to make it hurt more when he throws it. This is just one aspect of the general loss of dignity that is part of the modern paternal contract. You cannot appear aloof and indifferent when your two-year-old is vomiting his chocolate ice cream all over the floor of a designer menswear shop. There is no sophisticated, tasteful way to wipe the shit off your baby’s bottom. Don’t ever believe those adverts that tell you having kids will make you look cool, because it won’t. There is no Action Man double buggy with pull-out baby-changing mat. The mark of a man is no longer splashing on Old Spice and surfing to the chorus of the Carmina Burana; it is swallowing your pride and grubbing about on the floor and rolling around in ball pits. It’s humiliating, but it’s part of the deal.’

  The crowd of fathers-to-be listened to me in shocked silence. Despite this pregnancy being Catherine’s third, I found myself being dragged back to antenatal classes and, on this particular evening, all the men had been sent into a separate room to discuss the ways in which we expected our lives to change after our babies were born.

  ‘Another thing they don’t warn you about,’ I continued, like an irate caller on a late-night radio phone-in, ‘is what it does to your marriage. Suddenly you niggle at each other and score points and try to make out you’ve had a much worse time than your partner. Catherine will say to me, “Have you sterilized the bottles,” when she can see the dirty bottles piled up in the sink. She knows the answer to the question, but by asking it knows she will force me into a guilty admission of failure. But all that does is make me exaggerate how difficult Alfie was while she was out. No, not exaggerate, lie! I will claim that I haven’t had a minute spare, and then Catherine will be forced to pretend she had a far worse time with Millie at the supermarket. It’s martyr’s poker – I’ll see your tantrum-at-the-checkout story and raise it with my account of diarrhoea in mid nappy-change.’

  They were as eager to hear about my experiences as I was to recount them. No other man in the room had yet become a parent and they looked to me as the war-scarred veteran, back from battle, full of horrific tales from the front line of fatherhood.

  ‘But the thing that really disappears overnight is your youth. Suddenly your youth is over. I tried to artificially recreate mine,’ I said enigmatically, ‘but it hasn’t really worked. As soon as you become responsible for someone very, very young, it suddenly makes you feel very, very old. For one thing you are exhausted, both physically and emotionally, and if you have any time to still do any of the things you did as a young man, you will find yourself struggling to tackle them with the weary foreboding of an overwhelmed pensioner. By the time the children start to be less physically demanding you’ve aged ten years in the space of two or three, so it’s too late to get it back anyway. You will look in the mirror at the greying hair and sagging face and you will think, Where the bloody hell did he come from? But you don’t just look old and feel old in your bones, you think old. You fuss and you worry about your children, but you don’t realize or care that you’re walking down the street with odd socks and your hair sticking up. You become fretful and sensible and organized, and if you ever do anything carefree and spontaneous together it’s because two weeks ago you set aside an hour to do something carefree and spontaneous together. The day that baby comes out it’s over. Your independence, your youth, your pride – everything that made you what you were. You have to start again from scratch.’

  The cheery teacher came into the room and clapped her hands together in enthusiastic anticipation.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘how are we all getting on in here?’

  And none of the open-mouthed men even looked up from where they were staring silently at the floor.

  I found these antenatal classes embarrassing, to tell the truth. It was like I was some backward child being made to do a year at school all over again. At one point our partners had to get on all fours and we had to kneel beside them and rub them on the small of the back, and then the teacher came round to see if we were rubbing our partners correctly. We have classes to help us with the birth of the child; I suppose we should just be grateful we don’t have some prim little woman guiding us through the best way to conceive them as well. ‘Right, now if the women would all like to lie on the floor, perhaps the men could practise stimulating the clitoris. No, Michael, you’re miles out there . . .’

  And why are there no classes to help us once the children have come out? That’s the bit that the adults get wrong, that’s the bit where we need real help. ‘Well done, you gave birth, here’s your baby. Now the rest is up to you.’ I allowed myself a private chuckle at all the naive enthusiasm of the first-time parents. One of the men even asked what sort of filling he should put in the sandwiches, bless him. They were all completely consumed by their child before it had even been born. I wanted to say to them, don’t keep coming to these parenting classes, go to the cinema together instead, go out for dinner, just do things for yourselves while you still can. But they compared bumps and bootees and asked us whether it was best to put the baby straight into a cot or whether they should let it come into the parents’ bed, and Catherine shrugged and said she still didn’t know.

  Catherine and I didn’t discuss the things she had said sitting outside the Windmill Inn, but it was clear that she had abandoned the pretence that everything in her life was as perfect as I had always presumed. Her frustration was allayed by redecorating the house; she had come out of the tired stage of pregnancy and flipped over into the manic nesting phase. I tried to assuage my guilt by suggesting that she should be resting and that she should leave it all to me, but she really wanted to do something for this new baby, and so she heroically climbed up and down the stepladder, lovingly painting the nursery walls as the paint splattered down onto her growing bump. Obviously there were some things she couldn’t do herself, things that needed the strength and technical expertise of a handyman, which was when she would turn to me and say, ‘Michael, pop round to Mrs Conroy’s and see if Klaus and Hans can give us a hand.’ I could usually just about manage that.

  Klaus and Hans were two German students that lodged next door whom Catherine got round on a regular basis to make me feel useless. On this occasion I had failed to assemble a chest of drawers. The instructions were printed in English, German, Italian, Spanish, French and Arabic. It was thoughtful of the manufacturers to print them in English, but it didn’t really make any difference; they made the same amount of sense to me in any language. When I read a sentence like ‘Attach tab “c” to retaining toggle “g” without releasing pivot joint “f”,’ a blanket of mist descends on my brain and I am no longer reading instructions, I am just looking at a lot of words. Klaus and Hans put the unit together with the speed and efficiency of a Grand Prix pit-stop team.

  ‘You have a set of Allen keys, Michael, yes?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘Yes you have. In your toolbox.’

  ‘Allen keys? Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. They are in the little compartment with the spokeshave.’

  ‘Spokeshave? What’s a spokeshave?’

  Klaus knew the English for spokeshave. I still don’t know what a spokeshave is or how I came to be the owner of one. Klaus and Hans often popped round to borrow my tools, which meant ripping open the packaging in which they’d remained hidden since some long-ago Christmas.

  ‘Is Michael using his power drill at the moment?’ Klaus would ask Catherine at the front door. And then I could hear him say, ‘I don’t understand. What is funny?’

  But
however charming and helpful Klaus and Hans were, I couldn’t help but feel vaguely emasculated by the way Catherine came to depend on them. They mended the lawn-mower, they unblocked the sink, they stopped the radio alarm I had rewired from giving you an electric shock every time you pressed the snooze button. If I ever came home to find one of them putting a new washer on the tap or whatever I’d step in and say, ‘Thanks, Klaus, I can take over now.’ And then an hour later I’d knock on his door and say, ‘So how do I get the tap back on, exactly?’

  Catherine always wanted to change things in our house. It was a kind of permanent revolution; as soon as the campaign to have a new carpet in the bedroom was successful, the next campaign to have new kitchen units would begin. I optimistically suggested to her that the nursery wallpaper would be fine for another year or so, but she asserted that it wouldn’t be fair if we didn’t make it as nice for the next two kids as it had been for our first two.

  ‘The next two kids?’

  ‘Yeah, although sooner or later we’re going to have to move to a bigger house, aren’t we?’

  ‘A BIGGER HOUSE!’ and then I realized that my reaction sounded too much like blind panic and so I repeated the phrase with the air of reasoned contemplation. ‘A bigger house. Hmm, interesting . . .’

  It didn’t allay suspicions.

  ‘Why? We’re not overdrawn or anything, are we?’ asked Catherine, rolling an expensive brand of paint across the ceiling.

  I responded with an assertive, ‘No!’ in the overemphatic, look-straight-ahead-and-broach-no-debate way that I normally reserved for squeegee merchants offering to clean my windscreen at traffic lights. Catherine generally took little interest in the balance of our financial affairs. She did once attempt to pay off an overdraft by writing out a cheque from the same account, but generally her only financial worry was that when the sun was shining you couldn’t read the screen on the cash dispenser.

  I wanted to tell her about the double life I had been leading and explain how I had got into so much debt, but now she had revealed she wasn’t happy I didn’t have the heart to make things any worse. She said I seemed very quiet, and with an affectionate smile she asked me if I was all right. I said I was fine, which was the word I always used to deflect any embarrassing emotional probing. I could have said I was OK, but that’s two syllables and I didn’t want to start gushing on about my feelings and getting all Californian about it. Somehow it never felt like the perfect moment to announce, ‘Actually, darling, this decorating we’re doing is a complete waste of time because, guess what? I haven’t been paying the mortgage!’ They say that honesty is the best policy. Well, that’s fine when the truth is all nice and lovely, then it’s easy to be honest. What if you’re the mystery second gunman in the Kennedy assassination? In that case honesty is clearly not the best policy.