The Best a Man Can Get

by John O'Farrell

  After a while I approached a group of visitors and persuaded them to convey a message to Room 8 on the labour ward. I handed them a note that I had scribbled on the back of a piece of card I’d found in a telephone box. They were so full of goodwill to the world that it was easy to ask them a favour, although they seemed less sure about helping me when they turned the card over and saw a photo of a large-breasted topless prostitute with the message ‘Dominatrix! Let her punish you!’ It had been the only bit of card I could find. ‘It’s a private joke,’ I stammered. ‘She likes to get her own way at home.’ The message told Catherine that I would not be far away and would appreciate a phone call when the baby was born. Catherine would not recognize the number as it was for a telephone box by Westminster Bridge. I then spent the day sitting on a bench beside my chosen public telephone. Occasionally people would move towards it, but then they’d notice a large ‘out of order’ sticker on the door, and they’d look at me and we’d share a what-is-this-country-coming-to tut.

  Every quarter of an hour Big Ben would strike to remind me how slowly the day was going by. Somehow I had contrived to watch the minutes pass by sitting opposite the largest clock in the world. The London Eye inched slowly round and the tide rose and then started to ebb again. I tucked into my lunch. Before I’d sat down I had approached a shell-shocked couple emerging into the hospital car park with a new baby.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you,’ they both replied, looking proud and bewildered as mother and baby were helped into the back seat.

  ‘Erm, can I ask? Did she eat the sandwiches?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The sandwiches you made her when she went into labour.’

  ‘No. It’s funny you should say that because she didn’t touch them.’

  ‘Well, would you mind if I took them for the homeless round here. It’s part of a scheme we’re running.’

  ‘Of course. What a splendid idea.’ And he gave me the sandwiches and fizzy drinks and even a bar of chocolate. And even though she had just given birth and was apparently focusing totally on her newborn baby, a firm voice came from the back seat of the car: ‘Not the chocolate.’

  My long vigil beside the phone box went through several stages. At first I was pleased with myself for my powers of organization in the face of such apparent adversity. I had a seat with a view over the Thames. My lunch was in a bag on my left. My private public phone was on my right. It was just a question of waiting. But as hour followed hour and the cold gnawed away at my morale, I began to worry. First I worried that Catherine wasn’t going to ring, that she would have just torn up the note and I’d still be sitting there long after she had left the hospital. Then I began to worry that the telephone really was out of order, that I had stuck a sign on it without first making sure the notice was definitely lying. I went into the telephone box and dialled 150.

  ‘Hello, BT customer services, Janice speaking, how may I help you?’

  ‘Thank you, that’s all I wanted to know.’

  Then I became anxious that the ten seconds it had taken me to make that call had been when Catherine had tried to ring, and she would have got the engaged signal and wouldn’t try again. Should I try and scrounge 10p from a passer-by so I could ring the labour ward to find out? But then that might turn out to be the exact moment she chose to ring me. These anxieties span around and around until I had worn them out and then was left with only genuine, serious worries to fret over. What on earth did I think she should want to ring me for? And anyway, what would I do then? Go back to my bench on Clapham Common? Go and sleep in Mrs Conroy’s garage? The homeless unemployed have more problems than most people, but worst of all they have hours and hours with nothing to do but dwell on them. At least when General Custer had lots of problems he was busy.

  Dusk began to fall. The thousands of people who had walked past me in one direction that morning now walked back the other way. The lights on the riverboats disappeared under Westminster Bridge and the headlights on the bridge slowed to a halt. And with the darkness it grew colder and the need to urinate, which I had hoped might go away if I ignored it, now became my over-riding and all-consuming concern. I walked up and down in front of my bench, I crossed my legs, I jumped up and down, but it became unbearable. I had to remain within earshot of the telephone box, but I desperately needed to go to the toilet. So that’s why telephone boxes always smelled of urine. Eventually I had an idea. I furtively took a discarded empty lager can into the telephone box and decided the deed would be done in there. It seemed like a civilized solution at the time, but I had never measured the capacity of my full bladder before. It never occurred to me that it was about four times the volume of an empty 50cl lager tin. The can filled up in about two seconds, by which time the torrent seemed unstoppable. I couldn’t bear the idea that I had been reduced to urinating in a public telephone box, and so I squeezed the end of my penis and painfully turned off the tap. Then I awkwardly nudged the door of the box open with my leg and contorted my body so that I could tip the can out onto the muddy patch of grass outside, while with my other hand I continued to grip my poor aching penis, which was swollen to bursting, like a blocked fire hose in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. It was then that the telephone rang.

  It made me jump and panic all at the same time. ‘Hello?’ I said into the receiver as urine sprayed like a burst dam all over my trousers. ‘Oh no!’ Then I realized that I had dropped the can as well and it was glugging out all over my shoes. ‘Oh fuck, shit, bollocks!’

  ‘It’s me,’ said Catherine. ‘I thought you wanted me to ring.’

  ‘No, I did. Sorry, it’s just you made me drop my can of piss.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lager, pissy lager.’

  I attempted to affect a casual air of normality as urine sprayed uncontrollably down my trousers.

  ‘So, um, what have you been up to?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Having a baby,’ she replied, matter-of-factly.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, that’s right.’

  A man was walking past the telephone box and glanced at me through the glass as I struggled to conceal the fact that I was effectively using it as a public toilet.

  ‘So, um, what have you been up to?’

  ‘You just asked me that.’

  ‘Oh yes, sorry. And you said you’d been having a baby. So you see I was listening.’

  The steaming Niagara Falls inside the telephone box had finally come to a halt and, still clinging onto the phone, I buttoned up my flies with my other hand.

  ‘Well, I’ve had it,’ she finally said. She sounded strange. Tired, obviously, but cold and remote, which scared me slightly.

  ‘And the baby’s OK?’ I asked nervously. ‘I mean, it’s healthy and everything?’

  ‘Yes, completely healthy and beautiful. Seven pounds, three ounces. Born at half-past one this afternoon. It’s a boy, by the way, in case you were thinking of asking.’

  ‘A boy! Fantastic! And you’re OK, are you?’

  ‘Yes. He came out really easily.’

  ‘Well, that’s the wonder of whale song,’ I joked, but Catherine wasn’t tempted to laugh.

  ‘Look, you’d better come and see us. I have to talk to you. I’ve persuaded them to let you in now. They’ve put me in Helen Ward, sixth floor.’

  ‘Great, thanks. I’ll be there as quick as I can,’ I said and hung up. I could have added, ‘I’ve just got to rinse all this urine out of my trousers’, but it didn’t seem like quite the right moment. I picked up the half-full lager can and threw it in a nearby litter bin. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a dosser watch the liquid slosh out of the can as I threw it away, and as I rushed towards the hospital he lumbered up to the litter bin, excitedly anticipating his first taste.

  ‘Good evening,’ I said brightly to the porter who came into the hospital toilets. I had decided that if I behaved as if it was perfectly normal to stand there in my underpants, holdi
ng my rinsed-out trousers under the electric hand dryer, then he might be temporarily convinced. He wasn’t. ‘I spilled some coffee on my trousers, so I’ve just washed it out,’ I said, giving him the opportunity to smile and understand. He didn’t take it.

  Before long I was dressed again. I washed my stubbly face and did my best to flatten down my thinning hair. I looked like an old man, but had the nervous air of a boy on his first date. As I went to pull open the door I noticed my hand was shaking. The elation I felt at the birth of our baby took my private anxiety up another level. One new life had already started today, it was now up to Catherine whether another one could begin for me. It felt like my last chance. I had told her that I would be different, that I’d change. If she didn’t feel that we should be together when she had just had our third baby then she never would. I pressed the button for the lift as if I were being summoned to hear the outcome of my appeal. I should have felt excited but instead I felt nervous. She said she loved me, I kept telling myself, but she punched me in the face. These seemed to be conflicting signals. And if she was going to take me back, why had she sounded so cool and loveless on the phone?

  The lift doors opened and a joyful young couple came out with a newborn infant; obviously their first, judging by the nervousness with which they were taking it home. I’d forgotten how absolutely tiny newborn babies are, how much they look like something out of a nature documentary. ‘He’s gorgeous,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ said the proud mum, trying to stop the huge blue cotton hat slipping down over the baby’s entire face. The event of childbirth is one of the few things that will prompt the British to talk to complete strangers. Newborn babies, puppies and being in major rail disasters.

  The lift arrived at the sixth floor and I buzzed my way into Helen Ward. A polished corridor stretched out in front of me. On my right was the first bay, with six beds containing six very different women. Catherine was not one of them. The mothers were all in dressing gowns or nighties, but were too focused on the little packages in their little perspex cribs to worry about the strange man walking past, looking at each of them in turn. The next bay had another batch of new mums, all so completely unlike Catherine that it just confirmed to me that there was no-one else I could ever be interested in. The last bay was next to the television room and the distorted shouting of actors could be heard through the open door.

  ‘Hello, Michael,’ said Catherine’s voice from behind me. There was a little gap between the tatty green curtains that had been drawn around the first bed and I walked towards it. I stepped through the curtain, where Catherine was sitting up in bed wearing an old Radiohead T-shirt of mine. She didn’t look happy to see me. In fact, if anything she looked a little scared. I bent down to kiss her on the cheek and she didn’t resist.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said.

  She said nothing and looked back blankly.

  ‘Erm, right, well, where’s my little boy, then?’ I stuttered, trying to affect an air of happy-family normality, made all the more surreal by the jaunty signature tune of a sitcom which echoed through from the TV room.

  Then I looked down at the tiny infant asleep in the crib, wrapped in a hospital blanket and with a light-blue plastic name tag around his wrist. He was so perfect and miniature, with every detail lovingly handcrafted, that it made me want to believe in God.

  ‘Oh, he’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘He’s so beautiful.’

  I looked at how the baby’s eyelashes were so expertly curled and placed at tiny but exact intervals, and at how the little circumference of his nostrils formed such perfect circles. And then I heard Catherine’s voice say, ‘He’s not yours, Michael.’

  It didn’t register at first. Then I took in the meaning of what she had just said to me and glanced up at her, struck dumb with total incomprehension. Tears were welling up in her eyes.

  ‘He not yours,’ she repeated, and to answer my puzzled confusion she added, ‘You were never there,’ and then she started to sob uncontrollably. ‘You were never there.’

  I just kept looking at her, searching for some logic.

  ‘But how do you know? I mean, who else did you …’

  ‘Klaus.’

  ‘Klaus?!’

  ‘I was lonely and we shared a bottle of wine and, well, I don’t know.’

  ‘What? One thing led to another, I fucking suppose!’

  ‘Don’t shout.’

  ‘I am not shouting,’ I shouted. ‘But you walked out on me for deceiving you, when all the time you were carrying someone else’s baby.’

  Her sobs were louder now; graceless animal snorts that contorted her face.

  ‘Anyway, how do you know it’s his? We had unprotected sex, remember?’

  ‘I did that because I knew I was pregnant. To cover myself, so you’d never have to know. When I still thought you were a proper father, but it’s too late for that now.’

  ‘But he might still be mine,’ I pleaded hopelessly, glancing into the crib, hoping to spot some distinctive feature that I shared with this baby. There was none. If it was a question of who the baby looked like, then clearly Catherine had had it off with Sir Winston Churchill.

  ‘The dates make it his. I just know. You can do a DNA test if you aren’t convinced, but till then you will just have to take my word for it. This is not your child.’

  She fixed me in her gaze; she looked defiant and almost proud to have been the one to put the final nail into this marriage.

  ‘Does he know? I mean, did you tell him before he went back to Munich?’

  ‘No. This child has no father.’ And then the weeping started up again, and there was part of me that wanted to say, ‘All right, stop crying now; it’s not that bad,’ but of course it was that bad; it was very bad indeed.

  I really didn’t know what to do. It seemed like there was no point in me being there at all. I was visiting a woman who had already said she didn’t want to be married to me, and now she’d had a baby by another man. So I stepped out through the curtain, walked back down the corridor and floated out of the ward. A passing nurse gave me a beatific smile, which is the normal way to look at someone in a maternity ward, but I don’t think I managed to return it. I don’t remember walking through the door from the ward, but I must have done.

  All those months that I had watched the bump inside her grow, handing her tissues as she had thrown up in the morning, staring at the little photo of the foetus from the ultrasound machine, going to parenting classes with her, feeling the baby kick inside her, anxiously waiting for news of the birth; all that emotional investment was wiped out in one moment. After she had left me I had dreamed that this baby might be the only thing that could bring us back together. Now it had blown everything completely apart.

  I pressed the button for the lift, unsure as to where I might go after I left the hospital, still punch-drunk from the shock. My head was spinning with a hundred confused, angry thoughts. She thought I had done her such a wrong; she had behaved like such an injured party, such a poor victim of my callous deceit, and yet all the time, inside her had been growing this witness to the most fundamental betrayal possible. In my bitter confusion I couldn’t help resenting the fact that she’d had sex with our next-door neighbour when she had never seemed to want to have sex with me. It wasn’t as if when we’d been together we had made love three times a day and then I’d suddenly disappeared, leaving her insatiable sexual appetite unquenched. Since the children had come along sex had always been something she was too tired for. She told me that when you had the kids pawing at you all day, you didn’t want your husband coming home and pawing at you as well. But she hadn’t been too tired to have sexual intercourse with the muscular young student from next door. No wonder he’d always been so nice to me. He’d unblocked my sink, reset my fuses, released my stopcock; no job was too much trouble. Get your wife pregnant? Hey, no problem, Mikey. I’ll pop round when you’re out.’

  The lift showed no sign of arriving, so I pressed the button over and o
ver again, even though I knew this never made any difference. Had she thought about Millie and Alfie when she’d cheated on her husband? Had she thought about where that would leave them when I found out about their night of passion? Or maybe it wasn’t really just one night, maybe it was lots of nights, maybe this affair had been going on for years. Perhaps he hadn’t really gone back to Germany but had set up home somewhere else in London and Catherine and the kids were going to join him with their new child. Yes, when she had found out about my double life it had given her the excuse she’d been waiting for. I mulled over this theory for a while and then decided it had one minor flaw. I had given Klaus a lift to the airport and he had sent me a postcard from Munich to thank me. It seemed like an unnecessarily elaborate cover-up. Anyway, Catherine had told me what had happened; if the truth had been any worse I don’t think it would have stopped her relating it.

  She’d had sex once with the bloke from next door. Couldn’t I forgive her for that? Was that any worse than the extended deception I’d pursued? Hadn’t I left her on her own night after lonely night? Hadn’t I nearly been sexually unfaithful myself? My resentment was dismantled as quickly as I had built it up. It was as if the lift were deliberately keeping me waiting, forcing me to reflect upon what I was walking away from. I pictured Catherine and me cuddled up with the kids in their pyjamas, watching a video together, and I thought about the trust in Millie and Alfie’s faces when they looked at me, and then I just started to cry. What had the kids done to deserve this mess? How had we come to this? ‘Oh, Millie, Alfie, I’m sorry.’ Everything was in ruins, and my tears gushed forth like a burst water main; all the pressure that had been contained since we split suddenly erupting to the surface. I turned my face to the noticeboard and tried to pull myself together. I looked at the photographs of a reunion of all the babies that had been in intensive care a couple of years beforehand – pictures of tiny premature babies clinging on to life in oxygen tents next to photos of the healthy, thriving toddlers they had now grown into, and that set me off all over again. I was blubbing hopelessly, turning the tap full on, letting it all come out. A couple of lift doors opened and then closed again and, when I’d finally regained my composure, I walked back across and pressed the button once more.