William Walkers First Year of Marriage (6 page)

Assuming I can get to the flower shop, what with the dead leg that won’t go away. Apparently, I was asleep for a whole two hours in the metal chair by Isabel’s bed. Couldn’t feel my leg at all when I woke up. Actually thought I might have permanently paralysed
myself, it took so long to recover. Is that possible? Will check on Wikipedia.

Isabel was very worried. ‘Poor you,’ she said when I woke. ‘You look so tired.’

She’s amazing. Not even Florence Nightingale would have been worrying about my dead leg if her private parts looked like a monkey’s arse.

‘The chains of marriage are so heavy that it takes two to
bear them, and sometimes three.’

A
LEXANDRE
D
UMAS

She’s alive! Operation was a success. Important stuff intact. Not counting the dead-leg chair-nap, I haven’t slept a wink. Went home for a couple of hours to change pants and so forth. Tried to rest but had nightmares about being attacked by a gang of inflamed orangutans. Whoever said all men’s dreams were about sex was lying.

Isabel releases herself mid-afternoon (like in soaps when the patient ill-advisedly tears out her own tubes and storms out of the ward), and we get home just in time for one of the idiots upstairs to start practising his new set of drums.

I am in no mood for drums.

As I ring the upstairs doorbell, I am a creature of crimson terror, a brooding, fearsome primeval ape-man from the dawn of time: hideous, malevolent, aggressive, coiled. I am the Incredible Hulk in shirt-splitting mid-transition. I am King Kong with hunger anger.

The door is opened by one of the idiots.

‘My wife has just had a major operation on her labia,’ I roar-whisper, the way an unpredictable serial killer would. ‘She has just spent a whole night being operated on and then a whole day in an NHS ward full of moaning grannies and superbugs. She could well have MBNA. She has survived an ordeal and I. Am. Her. HUSBAND.’

Pause for effect. I exude boiling, molten rage.

‘Do you mean MRSA?’

The idiot shifts his cool, slouchy weight from one foot to the other.

‘It doesn’t matter what I mean. What are you going to do about it?’

More boiling moltenness but he doesn’t look as threatened or apologetic as I had hoped. He looks a little sleepy.

‘Do about what?’

‘THE DRUMS. THE BLOODY DRUMS. Would you mind not playing your drums today?’

Another pause. More boiling.

‘Or for the rest of the week?…Or, in fact, for-fucking-ever?’

He looks at me nonchalantly. I look at him as if I’m a stick of dynamite.

‘I don’t have any drums,’ he says with a cool, calm shrug. ‘That’s why you can still hear drumming even though I’m here talking to you. It’s the flat next door.’

For the rest of the day, I’m in full hand-and-foot waiting mode.

Initially, this is an immense pleasure. My poor recovering wife needs me. I have a role. I am a man with a role. I am protecting the womenfolk. I will silence drummers and top up hot-water bottles. It is the north London equivalent of forming a defensive ring of prairie wagons, then fending off Red Indians with Smith & Wessons.

‘Can I have some Marmite toast?’ Of course, darling, coming right up.

‘Oh, can you cut it into soldiers?’ No problem, sweetie.

‘Can I have another cup of tea?’ That’s fine, sugar.

‘Oh, you’ve just sat down but I need another cushion from the bedroom. Are you sure you don’t mind?’ Your wish is my command, buttercup.

Gradually, the novelty of being needed wears off. Yes, I’ll get your magazine, your book, your bed socks, your smelly candle. But do you really want chicken soup, dearest? We’ve got vegetable soup. Nice organic vegetable soup. It’s your favourite. No? Okay, I’ll go back to the shops where I’ve just been to buy your Purdey’s and get some chicken soup.

By eight, it is clear that I am being exploited.

‘Darling, I’m sorry. Can you get my face cream, my lip balm, my hair band and some Shreddies with double cream?’ For someone who is allegedly unwell, she rattles off the list with surprising sprightliness. And she’s got a lot more colour in her cheeks. I sigh like an overworked, underpaid NHS nurse at the end of another grinding shift and go about my duties.

Then, the TV premiere of
The Bourne Identity
clashes with a two-hour documentary about Rudolf Nureyev.

‘Aren’t you tired, darling?’ I ask hopefully.

No.

‘The doctor did say you should rest as much as possible in the first forty-eight hours.’

No.

‘Wouldn’t you rather watch something less taxing than a documentary?
The Bourne Identity
, for example, is on at exactly the same time as
Nureyev: the Man, the Ballerina
, and it’s supposed to be great fun. Very light.’

No.

He was born on a train going to Vladivostok, where his father served in the army.

At ballet school, he was incredibly stroppy, perhaps because of an internal conflict over his sexuality.

He didn’t like non-celebrities.

He might have slept with Anthony Perkins.

Alex came around early and unannounced, gushing concern like he would gush blood out of a deep arterial wound if I took an axe to him: ‘I didn’t know, I hadn’t heard, oh my God, babes, are you okay? You poor, poor thing.’

Despite his allegedly broken arm, he has carted a bunch of flowers the size of a small tree with him, which he picked and arranged himself. And some organic chicken soup.

‘I know how you love chicken soup when you’re under the weather, babes. We’ll have you right as rain in no time.’

After an interminable chat about how wonderful last night’s Nureyev documentary was, he leaves, wincing a bit to remind us of his injury as he goes. He has bought last-minute tickets to the matinee at Sadler’s Wells, a surprise for his Moroccan girlfriend, who also loved the Nureyev documentary. What a guy.

Quite relieved to get out of the flat. I offered to stay at home and continue being Florence Nightingale, but Isabel is almost back to normal now. Or else she’s quite keen to get me out of the flat.

The usual frustrations of the day seem harder to deal with today, possibly because I am suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome by proxy. No one ever looks after the carer.

It’s the start of the week and I still appear to be no closer to ever escaping Finsbury Park. I manage to get a seat on the Tube. A fellow citizen of my ‘hood, a gangsta rappa with headphones the size of grapefruit, manages to get the seat next to me. The music is so loud I can hear the vocals:
‘I don’t know what you heard about me; But a bitch can’t get a dollar out of me; No Cadillac, no perms, you can’t see; That I’m a motherfucking P-I-M-P.’
I ask him to turn it down. He says: ‘Interrupt my train of thought again, bitch, and I’ll cut you.’ Then the Tube stops mid-tunnel: someone in another train in another tunnel has pulled the emergency cord. I have to spend the next thirty-five stationary minutes sitting with a man who just threatened to knife me.

A woman with a loud voice has just got a job in the book department of
Life & Times
, which involves her sitting two desks away from me. After an alarmingly short I’m-in-a-new-job-so-must-be-on-best-behaviour honeymoon period (five days), she has settled in and revealed her true colours: she is a phoner of friends and a sorter-outer of home administration at work. This is dreadful news.

Last week (her first in the office), she booked a holiday to the Maldives (‘I just need to get away from it all for a while’), arranged for a quote on a garden spa bath (‘how much more are those underwater speakers? It wouldn’t be proper without a bit of Courtney Pine bubbling away,’ snort, guffaw, snort) and had a two-hour argument with her daughter about the pros and cons of Gordon Brown.

This morning, I arrive late because of my one-to-one face time with the knife-man and she’s already mid-conversation with an unspecified friend.

Johnson is making slit-throat mimes but I don’t know why he’s complaining—he sits seven desks away and, because he likes rock and roll, he can’t hear properly anyway.

‘My BUPA insurance has always reimbursed me. Mmm, mmm, mmm, so why’s she taken him off the diet if the stools are only grey? Mmm, mmm. I suppose all I would say is that there is probably a psychological aspect to it, in that she’s a bit of a hypochondriac. Mmm, mmm, mmm. But if they were green…mmm, mmm.’

My appetite for a morning croissant is ruined.

When I call Isabel, mid-afternoon, Alex is there. He has taken the afternoon off work because his arm is too painful and he thought they could convalesce together. Isn’t that sweet?

‘Barry? Barry?
Barry
?’

I haven’t even switched my computer on yet.

‘This is a bad line, Barry. Can you hear me, Barry? I wondered whether you were free on Sunday?…
Free
…On
Sunday
! No,
Sunday
…I’ve bought a lamb…Not a lamp.

‘A
lamb
. From the nice place in Wales where we went last summer…No, a lamb. It’s cut up and in the fridge…No, I’m fine, Barry. I said the lamb’s cut up and in the fridge. I’m going to do the shoulder on Sunday. Wondered whether you’d like to come? No, a lamb. I’ll call you back.

‘Not a lamp. It’s Sandra. No, I’ll call you back.
I’ll call you back
.’

This conversation is repeated throughout the day. The woman is organising a Sunday roast with a group of deaf or stupid people.

I wish a piano would crash through the ceiling and kill either her or me, I no longer care which.

When I tell Isabel I wish a piano would crush either me or Sandra, she says I should be more tolerant.

‘…and I walked in and he was just lying there, in the hallway…’

This sounds better than the lamb.

‘…I thought he might have just been resting, but when I touched him, he was cold. His body was stiff. He was gone. Gone
forever. I should have done something. I should have noticed his suffering sooner. He didn’t deserve to go out like this. I should have put an end to it all. But I let him go on. I let him fight on bravely. To suffer. All for my own selfish motives. And now this.
Now this
…
Dying alone
…
Alone
…
On the floor
…
In the hall
.’

Hacking, racking, sloppy sobs. I’m guessing a husband. A lucky husband who’s taken the easy option: slow, painful death in a hallway rather than slow, painful life with Sandra.

‘I picked him up, wrapped him in kitchen towel and flushed him down the loo. He meant so much to me.’

A goldfish? A bloody goldfish? I have to listen to all that for a bloody flipping goldfish. Surprised it wasn’t her husband. I’d have killed myself long ago if I’d been married to this. Or just killed her.

The managing editor ushered me into his office later in the day and pointed out that since Sandra had been recently widowed, it was somewhat tactless to go on about it. I said I had no idea about the widowing and that I hadn’t been going on about it. He said I had. I said I hadn’t. He said I’d been overheard ranting about how I’d have killed myself if I’d been married to Sandra. Or at the very least killed her. I said I’d only thought that, I hadn’t actually said it. He said I had. I said I hadn’t. Unless of course I had been thinking out loud, which sometimes happens. This didn’t seem to make him any happier. He said he’d have to put it in my record. I said fine but that Sandra was really annoying.

Isabel’s magical dissolving stitches aren’t dissolving. By the time I get home, Isabel is lying spread-eagled on the kitchen table, clutching a pair of sterilised eyebrow pluckers.

‘Darling, we must get them out now. They’re itching.’

‘But shouldn’t we go to hospital?’

‘No, Mummy said it was easy. It’s not worth the schlep back there.’

‘What about the GP?’

‘It can’t wait.’

‘Okay.’

‘Now call Mummy.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Call her. She’s going to instruct you.’

‘Your mother is going to instruct me to remove your stitches?…From your—’

‘Come on. I’m getting cold.’

Clutching the pluckers, I call her.

‘Right, William. Are the pluckers sterilised? Good. Are your hands washed? Good. Are Isabel’s legs open? William? William? No time to be squeamish now, William. None of us was born yesterday. Now, you see the labia majora?’

Oh God.

Isabel is staying with her parents for the weekend to recuperate further. I don’t have to stay with her parents for the weekend because Arthur Arsehole has lined up some ‘very keen’ prospective buyers. I am charged with being present but not present. I must vacuum. I must plump cushions. I must keep the flat spotless, keep our drummer/party animal neighbours silen-t/-ced, and have the bread machine wafting suitable aromas at prescient moments. But whenever Arsehole opens the door, I must be gone.

This is the first time I have been alone since we got married. Isabel says this is probably a good thing: what with wishing a poor widow at work dead, I could do with some time on my own to relax and recuperate from what is clearly a stressful time of my life.

Hahaha, I say.

The overwhelming sense of freedom is intoxicating, as is the whisky I down naughtily the moment I get in from work. I don’t know why I was so excited…I’m very happy being married. I love Isabel. Isabel loves me. Sure, the honeymoon is over (the honeymoon that dare not speak its name, complete with its constant diarrhoea and its inescapable taxi drivers and its long-haul economy class syndrome, and I thought honeymoons were supposed to be relaxing and, yes, it’s still too raw to talk about). But even in this post-honeymoon phase, where it’s all got a bit trouble and strife and ball and chain, I don’t know what I’d do without her.

Well, actually I do.

Step one:
find note from Isabel. ‘Will miss you, darling. Vegetables in fridge need to be used. And there’s still some quiche left. Love you. Call later.’

Step two:
feel quite tired. Can’t face cooking or eating of vegetables. Have a Scotch and dry. And another. Decide to have a curry. Fortunately, the curry house number is still on speed-dial seven, right between the video shop and the laundrette. I am asked if I’ve been on holiday when I give my name and ask for the usual. ‘No, no, just married,’ I reply. ‘Ahh,’ comes the reply. ‘Extra poppadums for you, sir.’