By now I had spent a couple of weeks living on my own in a child-orientated home. The mobile still span lazily in the breeze and the blue bird pendulum still swung maniacally back and forth under the rainbow clock, but the little isolated pockets of movement only served to emphasize how lifeless and eerily quiet the children’s room seemed without them. I didn’t want to change anything; it was all ready for them whenever they wanted to come back. I still had to push open the baby gate to get down the stairs, I still had to negotiate the child locks to open the cupboards. The only slight change I had made was to scramble the colourful magnet letters on the side of the fridge where Catherine had spelled out ‘wanker’ at eye level. I wondered how long she had searched for the letter ‘w’ before making do with a number 3 turned on its side? I was the lonely caretaker for a family show home – furnished accommodation all ready for my wife and children to move into any day they fancied. It had everything they needed, every safety precaution you could buy to prevent any possible damage being done to our precious little ones, except for the one minor mishap of their parents splitting up, of course. To think that we had dragged our kids round all those shops, buying plug guards, video covers, child locks, baby gates and a barrier to stop Millie rolling out of her bed, but we never saw anything in Mothercare to prevent the divorce for which we were heading. OK, so the kids grow up without a father, and Mum will become lonely, poor and bitter, but at least the little ones never fell down those three steps by the kitchen, and that’s the main thing.
I wanted them back. I wanted them back so much I felt hollow and numb and sick. I had been round to her parents’ house and pleaded with Catherine to come home, but she’d said she wasn’t prepared to talk to me because I was a selfish shitbag, because I had betrayed her trust and because it was half-past three in the morning. So the only punctuation in my long and lonely weeks were my meetings with the children, which Catherine icily granted me. We met once a week at the windy swings in Hyde Park as the last few leaves were blown from the trees. We stood in silence, watching the children play, and because the silence was so oppressive I would occasionally shout things like, ‘No! Not on the big slide, Millie,’ and Catherine would say, ‘It’s all right, Millie, you can go on the big slide if you want,’ and though she was looking at Millie, she was really talking to me. These few hours a week were supposed to be my quality time with the children, but I never quite managed to see where any quality came into it. I’d have a tense, self-conscious hour with them and then I knew I had to go back to the house on my own again.
And lo and behold, here was my double life all over again. Long days spent on my own, free to do whatever I wanted, and then short periods spent with my wife and family. Catherine was smart enough to say as much. ‘This is just what you wanted, isn’t it? To see us occasionally and have your own space the rest of the time. You still get to see them and play with them, but you don’t have to do any of the boring hard work. All that’s different is now you’ve got a bigger bed to lie in all day.’
‘That’s not fair,’ I said, and then struggled to come up with a reason why it wasn’t. From the outside it might have seemed a similar existence, but whereas before I’d believed I had organized myself the perfect life and had revelled in the best of both worlds, now I was utterly miserable. Because now none of it was in my control, now my hours as a father were begrudgingly meted out to me rather than being generously granted by my good self. Catherine had the power. My secret outpost of resistance to the dictatorship of babies had been betrayed by an informer. Now I’d been exiled to parental Siberia, condemned to solitary confinement with two hours’ visiting time a week.
Although Catherine initiated these meetings, she was so angry with me that she could hardly bear to make eye contact. On the first occasion I attempted to greet her with a kiss on the cheek, which turned out to be a gross misreading of terms. As I leaned forward she recoiled and turned away; my kiss landed on her ear and I had to carry on as if that were a perfectly normal place to kiss somebody. I had tried to defend myself by claiming it wasn’t as bad as having an affair with another woman, but to my disappointment Catherine said she would have preferred that; at least she could have put that down to some insatiable male craving.
She looked tired; apparently she hadn’t been able to sleep very well so close to the kids. I was tired, too; I hadn’t been able to sleep so far away from them. Her bulge was now comically large. She was either very, very pregnant or she’d already had the baby and was now hiding a space hopper under her jumper. I would have liked to have touched the bump, to feel it and talk to it, but that particular child was even more out of bounds. I wanted to ask about arrangements for the big day, but was too frightened to ask her where she would like me during the birth. She’d probably say Canada. During the previous eight months, while it had grown into a little person and developed eyes and ears and a heart and lungs and blood vessels and nerve endings and all the other incredible things that just happen by themselves, its parents’ love had seemingly withered and died. If only babies could burst forth at the moment of passion in which they are conceived and not nine months later when it’s all turned to dust.
‘Well? Are you going to go and play with them?’ she said, since that was what I was there for.
‘Right, yes,’ and I went off and tried to be as spontaneous and fun a dad as it’s possible to be when you are being intensively monitored by their mother who is contemplating divorcing you. Millie was on the climbing frame.
‘Shall I chase you round the climbing frame, Millie?’
‘No.’
‘Would you like me to push you on the swings, then?’
‘No.’
‘I’ve got you!’ I said as I playfully grabbed her off the frame. My edginess had made me too rough and I grabbed her too hard or made her jump or something because she suddenly started crying.
‘What are you doing?’ said Catherine angrily, and she came across, took Millie from me and held her daughter close and looked at me with hatred in her eyes. Maybe I would have more success with Alfie, I hoped. He had taken his first steps a few weeks before – an event that I had not been there to witness – and now he was confidently tottering around, only occasionally falling on his nappy-padded bottom. He took up position beside the metal frame of the swing and banged a little pebble against it. I could feel Catherine watching me, and so I squatted down beside him and, with my own stone, banged the metal frame as well. He liked the noise of the stone hitting the metal bar. He didn’t get bored of the noise of the stone hitting the metal bar. When after five minutes I wanted to stop, he became distressed, so I continued to bang the little stone against the metal bar. I looked round and did a mock long-suffering smile to Catherine, but she didn’t smile back. I was cold to my bones and my squatting position became increasingly uncomfortable, but the spongy playground surface was too wet for me to kneel, so I teetered there as I was, feeling the blood draining from my legs, going tap tap tap with my bit of gravel on the echoey cold steel bar. I’d always wished I could have known which bits of childcare were bonding and which bits were just completely wasting time.
Eventually I sat down beside Catherine on a bench and attempted to find a way to talk about what had happened. She was living with her mad parents, who were even more overbearing than usual as it was no longer the woodlice-crushing season.
‘I imagine it must be quite hard, isn’t it? Living with your mum and dad, you know, with the kids and everything.’
‘Yes.’
‘So have you any idea how long you might stay there?’
‘No.’
‘You could come home, you know.’
‘And where would you move to?’
I sensed I wasn’t charming her out of her shell.
‘Well I’d be there to help with the kids. I’ve given up the flat.’
‘Yeah, you don’t need it now, do you? Now you’ve got us out of the way there’s no need for the flat, is there?’
As passi
vely and apologetically as I could, I tried to float the idea that maybe I hadn’t been quite ready for fatherhood and was only now adjusting to it. At this point her emotional dam just burst.
‘You don’t think it was hard for me to adjust?’ she said in a furious, spitting whisper. ‘Giving up work, giving birth and then suddenly being stuck in a house on my own all day with a crying baby? You don’t think that was a big shock for me to suddenly be ugly, fat, tired and bursting into tears; trying to breastfeed a screaming baby with blood coming out of my cracked nipples and no-one there to tell me it was OK, and that I was doing all right, even when the baby wouldn’t feed or sleep or do anything but scream for days on end? I’m sorry it was so fucking hard for you to adjust, Michael.’ She was crying now, angry with me and for letting herself break down in front of me. ‘But I never fucking adjusted, because it’s impossible. I was in a lose-lose situation. I felt guilty when I thought about going back to work and guilty for giving up work, but there’s no-one you can talk to about it because the only other women with children at the swings are all eighteen years old and only speak fucking Croatian. So I’m really sorry you found it so hard to be in the same house as your wife when she was going through hell, but it’s OK, because you could just leave, you could just fuck off whenever you felt like it and lie around with your mates, having parties and watching videos and leaving your mobile turned off just in case your wife wanted to cry down the phone to you.’
When she put it like that, she did sort of have a point. When I’d been on my own I had spent hours preparing carefully crafted arguments, like North American Indians fashioning beautifully decorated arrows before battle. And now she came along like the US Army, fired her great big cannon and blew me away. I offered up my puny self-justification all the same. I put it to her that the only difference between what I had done and what other fathers did was that I had been aware I was doing it.
‘What? And you think it does you credit that you were consciously deceiving me? Those men are still part of a team,’ she went on. ‘They are still operating as a unit with their wives, one at home, one at work. They’re still in it together.’
‘They’re at their place of work, sure, just like I was. But those men don’t really have to go on all those trips or have all those meals out in the evening or play golf with clients at the weekend; they do those things because they don’t think it’s less important than being with their families.’
Everything I said just made her angrier. ‘So, let me get this straight, you thought all this through and, instead of resolving not to be that kind of father, you went and behaved ten times worse by being absent deliberately as part of a plan.’
‘I thought it would help our marriage.’
I could feel most of my excuses dying in my mouth as I said them.
‘Well, that worked well, didn’t it.’
And then she got up and said she was going back to her mum’s, and for some pathetic, desperate reason I said, ‘You’re lucky to have a mum,’ and she looked back at me with contempt. I hated myself for saying it almost as much as she appeared to hate me for saying it. And then as she walked away I thought, Oh well, if we both feel the same way about what a pathetic worm I have become, then that’s something we have in common; maybe we could build on that?
After they had gone I sat there in the playground on my own for a while. A young mother with a couple of kids came in and looked at me as if I were some escaped child molester, and when I heard her tell her children not to go near me I stood up and went home.
There was another familiar-shaped envelope on the doormat, though this one had been delivered by hand. I put it, unopened, on the side with all the others. They piled up on the hall table like accumulating evidence against me. Obviously I knew the bank wanted money, but I thought I’d never be able to earn any if I read the threats I feared were contained inside. As long as I was trying to work, then I believed I was doing something about it, and so I just buried my head deeper and deeper into my music. One of the letters came registered post, which seemed a bit of a waste of money. I was quite happy to sign for it; it didn’t mean I had any intention of opening or reading it. Sometimes they tried ringing, and when I saw their number flash up on the little screen on our telephone, I’d quickly switch on the answer-phone and then fast forward through their messages. The cross-sounding man wasn’t as scary when you speeded him up. He sounded like Donald Duck after inhaling helium.
On some days I would sit at my keyboard for thirteen or fourteen hours but I’d often achieve less than I used to in half a morning. Once upon a time I’d been able to lose myself in music, but that was before I’d been so desperate to do so. It was another couple of months before I was due to put together Classic Commercials and so between now and then I had a chance to create my own seminal compositions, which today happened to be a thirteen-second jingle that had to accommodate the line, ‘Butterness! Butterness! It tastes like butter but the fat is less!’
Hmm, I thought, I think they’re going for a sort of butter theme here. It was a shame the advert would be legally required to feature a large caption that flashed ‘NOT BUTTER’ along the bottom of the screen, but that wasn’t my problem. The woman at the agency had said they wanted it to be just like the Ken Dodd song ‘Happiness’ without breaching copyright. So it would either sound wrong or be illegal. It had to be completed by six o’clock. I fired up my keyboard.
‘Butter. What does that put one in mind of?’ I tried out different sounds on the Roland. The oboe setting, the harpsichord setting, the bassoon setting; none of them reminded me remotely of butter, but then I don’t suppose new Butterness would have done, either. I listened to the Ken Dodd track and broke it down into its constituent parts. Apparently the jingle was going to be sung by a chorus line of pantomime cows, so I had to try and concentrate on that image as I wrote the music. I had never pretended that my job was of vital importance to the future of mankind, but sitting on my swivelling piano stool, trying not to think about the state of my marriage and attempting to concentrate instead on a load of pantomime cows singing about new Butterness, well, it didn’t radically improve my feeling of self-worth. It just didn’t get the adrenalin going like really important work. The midwife who would deliver our third child, for example, she’d have no choice but to put all her problems out of her head and focus on getting the baby out safely. Damn! There it was; in one short step I was thinking about our next baby and not concentrating on the jingle for a new low-fat margarine containing dairy solids.
‘Ah yes, Butterness. Right, concentrate, Michael, concentrate. Butter. I sang the guide track to myself a few times. Had the agency deliberately engineered it so that I would be forced to sing ‘Happiness!’ over and over to myself when I was feeling at my most miserable? I tried to parody the tune, but I couldn’t get the original out of my brain. Concentrate, concentrate. Sometimes, when I had things on my mind, when there was a lot of fluff on the stylus, I could barely hear the tunes inside my head. Today there was so much fluff in there that the needle simply slid right across the vinyl.
It was hard to forget about the children with them all smiling at me from frames on the mantelpiece, so I got up and turned all the frames face down. I went and sat down and decided they looked awful like that, as if I was rejecting their existence or something, so I got up and put all the photos back as they were again.
Hmm. Butter? I thought, Butter. Does Catherine have the legal right to take the kids off like that? I mean, I am their father. How would she have liked it if I’d just whisked the kids away, suddenly announced I wasn’t happy with the marriage and left her all alone? I continued to mull this over, and then I looked at the clock and it was quarter past twelve and I hadn’t thought about butter or new Butterness for hours, and even if I came up with a suitably similar tune I still had to lay it down and master it, and getting it finished by six o’clock suddenly looked like a very close call. So come on. Butter, butter. Butterness. ‘Butterness! Butterness! It tas
tes like butter but the fat is less!’ I said this out loud to myself three times. I tried it again, putting the emphasis on different words. And then I went and made a cup of tea.
The house felt different with only me rattling around in it. I saw it in a different way. This was not unrelated to the fact that I sometimes spent hours just lying on my back on the hall carpet or sitting on the floor underneath the kitchen table. You can do these things when you’re on your own. I wandered from room to room with my tea and finally decided to drink it sitting at the top of the stairs.
The cat deigned to vacate its favourite spot amongst Alfie’s soft toys and came to lie next to me on the landing carpet. When we had first got the cat, we had told Millie she would be allowed to choose her name. We then spent the rest of the day trying to dissuade Millie from her immediate and unhesitating choice, but she would not be budged, so we just had to accept it. Cat the cat and I had formed quite a close relationship during my weeks on my own in the family home. I’d buy her treats from the shops and then stand at the front gate shouting, ‘Cat! Cat!’ as passers-by avoided eye contact and quickened their pace. She would sit on my lap in the evenings and I’d stroke her under the chin and she’d purr ridiculously loudly. I tied a little ball on a piece of string and played with her, and when she wouldn’t eat her food I’d give her some fresh fish and she’d always eat that and it was all very comforting. Until Red Collar Day. Cat didn’t have a collar. Until Red Collar Day. She walked in through the cat flap, having been out for a few hours, wearing a bright-red new collar. She sniffed her food bowl, didn’t fancy it and went out again. I was devastated. All the time I had imagined she was out there keeping other cats out of my garden or trying to catch the odd sparrow to proudly present to her master when really she had been curled up in front of someone else’s electric fire, eating someone else’s fresh fish, lying in someone else’s lap. The collar had a name tag on it which said ‘Cleo’. That was her name when she was at her secret other home. Cat had a double life. I felt double-crossed, jilted, rejected. Worst of all, I had been satirized by a bloody cat.
The Best a Man Can Get Page 20