Coming Clean (2 page)

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A
s a young Fleet Street journalist, Greg could spend weeks on the road working on a story. It wasn’t unusual for him to fly home from one trip, shower and change, only to head straight back to the airport. In a few years, he rose from reporter to political editor.

Meanwhile I was made senior producer on
Coffee Break
, a daily radio show aimed at women. Going back to work after Amy and Ben were born wasn’t easy, but we had a huge London mortgage and we needed my salary. Plus full-time motherhood wasn’t for me. Much as I adored my children, I needed the stimulation my job provided. That’s not to say I waltzed out of the house every morning without a thought for what I was doing. When I went back to work after having Amy, the guilt was overwhelming. What sort of mother abandons her precious six-month-old baby? Greg was quick to remind me that I wasn’t abandoning her—any more than he was—and that we were leaving her in the care of a kind, loving, highly trained, highly vetted middle-aged nanny with children of her own who, by the way, was costing a fortune.

We were lucky. Amy adored Joyce and so did Ben. She held them, soothed them and sang to them and loved them as if they were her own. She ended up staying with us until both children started school. We all cried when she left—even Greg. The kids and I made her a going-away cake, which Amy and Ben covered in sprinkles and wobbly pink icing. Joyce still sends the kids birthday cards and a couple of times a year they go and stay with her at her bungalow on the coast. I’ve lost count of the times that Greg and I have lain in bed in a self-congratulatory mood, telling each other what excellent judges of character we are and how we got it spot-on with Joyce. That may be true, but I’m never quite sure how I feel when Amy and Ben tell me now that, when they were little, it felt like they had two mummies.

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W
orking on a daily live show isn’t without its stresses. I’m in at eight each morning; the junior producers arrive an hour earlier. The program goes out at eleven and lasts an hour. Afterwards there’s always a postmortem in the editor’s office. It’s not until that’s over that we start to come down from the adrenaline and caffeine.

Strictly speaking, the buck stops with the program editor, but in reality I’m responsible for program content, commissioning prerecorded features and making sure they run strictly to time. If a guest is going to be late for an interview because they’re stuck in traffic or, worst of all, they’ve dropped out for some reason, it’s down to me to rejig the program. This has been known to happen minutes before we’re due on air.

As a political editor on a daily newspaper, Greg also has some hefty responsibilities. Not only is he expected to beat his rivals to the best political stories, it’s up to him to ensure that the
Vanguard
’s political pages are filled with intelligent, thought-provoking analysis. He’s also in the prediction game. His job involves sniffing the parliamentary wind, having a sense of how a Commons vote will go, knowing how the government is going to tackle an issue before even it knows. He knows that his job isn’t guaranteed, that there is always some young, thrusting Oxbridge graduate, with a brain the size of a small continent and an even larger contacts book, ready to usurp him.

We didn’t pay too much attention when frazzled and exhausted married friends who were trying to run careers, homes and babies told us how hard it was. We told ourselves we would be more organized, that parents who had babies who refused to sleep at night were clearly getting something wrong. Not only were we naive and romantic (remember it was Greg and I who wanted to schlep our babies around India and Nepal), we were also supremely arrogant.

When the strain got too much and our marriage started to suffer, we should have got professional help. Instead we spent years being permanently irritable with each other.

We still compete about who’s had the worst day. My thirty seconds of dead air is nothing compared to the flak Greg has just taken from the justice minister because one of his reporters ever so slightly misquoted him. If I have two reporters off sick, he has four.

When I developed thrush, which the doctor said was probably stress induced, I knew that Greg couldn’t compete. Gotcha. What was he going to say? That he had an entire flock of the things nesting inside his vagina? But compete he did. He managed to catch mumps from the kids. His balls swelled to the size of oranges, and for a week he had a fever of a hundred and two. Whereas I had been suffering from a mild yeast infection, he was close to death—although maybe he could force down some pre-termination eggs (lightly boiled), a slice of toast (whole wheat, buttered) and a cup of jasmine tea (the posh loose stuff, not the bags that came free with the Chinese takeout).

We both spent a lot of time ruminating about work issues, but I don’t think I retreated into myself the way Greg did. To his credit, he usually managed to pull it out of the bag for the kids, but when we were alone in the evenings his mind was always on work. We would sit in the same room and I’d kid myself that we were “together,” but we weren’t. I would try to make conversation, but he would either ignore me or grunt. Then one evening he sent me an e-mail that was meant for a female colleague. There was nothing remotely flirty or sexual about it—and when I pointed out what he’d done, he didn’t give off anything that suggested embarrassment or guilt—but the e-mail was witty and funny, and I realized that he was more intimate with his workmates than he was with me.

Greg’s slobbish tendencies increased in direct correlation to his workload. To that end he would leave little “presents” lying about the house. Picture it. After my own hectic, adrenaline-filled day at work, the kids are finally in bed and I’m relaxing in the bathtub. I’ve added oils that promise to soothe the soul. I’ve lit a Jo Malone lime, basil and mandarin candle. Eyes closed, I reach out for the soap. But instead of happening upon the satiny, subtly scented handcrafted bar, my fingers discover a pile of Greg’s toenail clippings, which have been left on the side of the bath. Other gifts—often left on my dressing table—could be anything from a sticky, booger-filled handkerchief to a couple of Q-tips covered in orange ear gunk.

His best and most frequent gift was, and still is, a blocked toilet. Having produced a turd of gargantuan proportions, he avails himself of half a toilet roll. The waste pipe can’t cope and he comes running to me. “Soph, the toilet’s blocked again.” Note the lack of personal responsibility.

“So get the plunger and unblock it.”

“But the smell of shit makes me gag.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

Over time, the irritation I’ve always felt about his slovenliness turned to real resentment and I started yelling at him. Greg is much better than me at controlling his temper in front of the kids, so he rarely yells back. As far as the kids are concerned, it’s Mummy who’s the baddy.

It goes without saying that it wasn’t long before our sex life was on the skids. Most nights we would turn our backs on each other. Or we would engage in a whispered (so as not to wake the kids) fight. Our fights were always identical. Greg would accuse me of being self-centered. “You’re not remotely interested in any of my worries or struggles.”

“Er, hello—since when did you acknowledge mine? On top of that, you think you have the right to treat me like some skivvy.”

By the time Tanky rolled in, our sex life was already severely wounded. Tanky merely delivered the fatal shell.

The thing that hurts most about Greg’s slovenliness is that he claims to be a feminist. Gender equality, free child care, a woman’s right not to shave—he’s into it all. I’ve often asked him how he reconciles this with behaving like an idle git at home. His defense is two-pronged. First he insists that he does his best and that any lapses are down to his being exhausted and preoccupied with work. Then he accuses me of being hung up and obsessed about untidiness and hygiene. According to Greg, my so-called neurosis is typically petit bourgeois and born out of the need of the middle classes to ape the grand, well-ordered homes of the aristocracy. Whenever he comes out with this, I tell him he’s talking arrogant claptrap and make the point that his background was just as petit bourgeois as mine. He refutes this on the grounds that his mother was—and is still—prone to dropping her cigarette ash into the Bolognese sauce and keeps a grease-spattered notice on the kitchen wall asking people not to feed the dust bunnies.

Being tarred with the neurotic woman epithet really pisses me off. For a start—as I keep telling my husband the feminist—it’s male chauvinist piggery at its worst. Second, it makes me sound like I’ve turned into some kind of mad, pacing Lady Macbeth constantly fretting about the spots she can’t seem to get out of her granite countertops.

Let me be clear. I do not want to raise our kids in one of those perfectly coordinated, sterile homes you find in interiors magazines, where the mum is the type who uses vaginal deodorant, irons the family’s underpants and adds talcum powder to the kitty litter to make it smell more fragrant. Nor do I want to be like my grandma Yetta, who was rarely to be seen without a sponge in her hand. “You have to use the toilet now?” she would moan to my granddad. “When I’ve just cleaned it?” To which he would reply, “No problem. I’ll tie a knot in my penis and wait until you tell me I can go.”

All I want is to live in a house that doesn’t look like we just had burglars in. I’m fed up with our domestic chaos: the whole of the downstairs is strewn with books, comics, game and puzzle parts. Even the breadboard isn’t fit for its purpose, since it’s covered in screws, pliers, a couple of iPod Shuffles that haven’t worked for months, not to mention a pickled cucumber jar full of sea monkeys.

I’d like to stop thinking it’s normal to find a can of tick repellent in the pasta saucepan or screw plugs in the sugar bowl. I’d like to come into the kitchen and find the counters clear of loose change, junk mail, CDs and a giant lattice of drinking straws, Ping-Pong balls and cereal packets, which turns out to be Ben’s latest school science project. I’d like to stop finding shoes in the middle of the living room, coats on the backs of chairs, Greg’s beard shavings in the sink, his tarry turds mixed with loo roll blocking the toilet. But none of this will happen while my husband carries on being a slob and teaching our kids to be slobs.

He says that my mind should be more like his, focused on life’s “big issues” instead of a bit of grease and rank underpants. Just because Greg reads the
Economist
and knows what the Large Hadron Collider is (does it also come in medium and small?), he thinks he exists on a higher intellectual plane than the rest of us and should be excused housework detail.

For Greg, life’s big issues include soccer. Therein lies another of his exit strategies. If I ask him to help with some chore or other—often while he is sprawled on the sofa, scratching his balls and watching soccer on TV—his response is: “OK, give me a couple of minutes. The game’s just gone into extra time.” I’m happy to give him a couple of minutes. It’s when he hasn’t shifted his backside off the sofa after an hour that I get pissed off.

By the time he appears, the task I wanted him to perform has been completed—by me. “Why couldn’t you have waited five minutes?” he protests. “I would have done it. But you can’t resist making a martyr of yourself. You’re not right in the head. You do know that, don’t you?”

When I go upstairs, I discover the toilet is blocked. I shout at him to get the hell up here and deal with it, only to be told he has a sudden work emergency and needs to make a load of calls.

From time to time, I force myself to hold out until he’s done in the loo. Then I hand him the pile of laundry—or whatever—that needs putting away. On these occasions, he starts out looking enthusiastic, but it’s clearly a pose. I know he’s thinking, “How do I sabotage this so that she won’t ask me to do it again?” And sabotage it he does—by running downstairs every five minutes, demanding to know, “Whose sock is this?” or “Is this underwear yours or Amy’s?” Yeah, Greg, like I’m really into briefs with pink ballet shoes appliquéd to the crotch.

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V
irginia Pruitt’s is indeed a “nice” house. It’s a large, imposing Edwardian villa: red brick, original porch and lead pane glass. It’s been freshly painted white. The old wood-paneled front door is an understated subfusc gray.

“They call that color lamp room gray,” I announce to Greg, nodding towards the front door.

“And you know that how?”

“Annie. She’s got it on one of the walls in her living room. The rest is Wimborne white.”

“Riveting.” That’s the reaction I recognize.

We continue up the garden path. It’s early evening, but the sun is warm on my neck and bare arms. I can’t help getting cross as I watch Greg taking in the terra-cotta tubs full of lavender, the sweet peas on their canes, the honeysuckle climbing Virginia Pruitt’s red brick. He’s clearly appreciating the pretty cottage garden, but whenever I suggest we clear ours of the weeds and rocks, the rusting garden furniture, the kids’ ancient toy tricycles and tractors, the red plastic faded from the sun, he says it’s fine as it is. He takes the view that there’s no point tarting up the garden while the kids are young and still using it for soccer, trampolining and camping purposes.

I want Virginia Pruitt to be plump and mothering, with a huge bosom. Most of all, I want her to make it better.

“What I hate about therapists,” Greg says, “is all the psychobabble.” He thinks he’s an expert on shrinks because of the handful of sessions he had with one during his second term at university. He’d been experiencing a listlessness and lassitude, which—by his own later admission—was nothing more than a touch of freshman-year miseries. “I’ll never forget that Tina woman I saw on campus,” he says now. Cue his famous Tina impression. “Greg,” he says, adopting the familiar overly soothing, empathetic voice, “thank you for unpacking your pain and laying it on the table. It seems to me that your depression is a result of your father failing to validate you while you were growing up and that now your inner child is in desperate need of hugs from Daddy.”