William Walkers First Year of Marriage (9 page)

I email Isabel, wanting everything to be all right again. No answer. I call her on her mobile. No answer. I get home and my cheery greeting goes unanswered. She’s cooking angrily. I feel sorry for the shitake mushrooms which are being diced to smithereens.

The situation is grave. I have expressly forbidden her to talk to her best friend who at least one of my two best friends thinks is a really nice guy. I have also struck up an online relationship with the floozy from New York who never wears knickers, and always insists on telling me that.

I must regain control of things before some irreparable damage is done. I have no option but to employ the fake injury trick.

Origin: Tibet. Twelfth century. A closely guarded secret passed down through the ages to those chosen few ready for the knowledge. The process is simple: pretend to injure yourself, lie there in agony and wait for the angry woman to abandon the stony silence and come to your rescue. But it only works if used sparingly and performed convincingly. If you are not a good actor, it may be safer to do yourself real harm. Injuries, fake or otherwise, must be eye-watering. E.g. bad toe-stubbing, banging of head on a kitchen cupboard corner, standing barefoot on a drawing pin, falling down stairs (then, if argument is serious enough, lying motionless).

I fall down the stairs between the living room and the kitchen. Isabel stops castrating the courgettes and runs to my aid, helps me to the sofa, makes me a cup of tea and, as soon as I’m focused
enough to speak again, listens to my pained, gasping apology. I trust her, I say. She’s the most special person in the world, I say. I know Alex is just a good friend, I say. And I hope his Moroccan ex-girlfriend sets her Moroccan older brothers on him, I think.

I am forgiven. More than that, Isabel apologises back. She knows I don’t like Alex but he’s been a friend of hers for years. Still, she probably overreacted.

Have actually injured myself. Very sore neck. Possible break?

Ignore another email from Saskia even though the cocktail bar Alex took Isabel to has come top in the
Evening Standard
’s poll of London’s sexiest bars. ‘Want to guarantee your hot date becomes a hot night of passion?’ says the review. ‘Then go to Alto with its seductive sofas, its smoochy lighting and its naughty, naughty cocktails. It’ll be “coming in for a coffee?” guaranteed.’ Won’t mention to Isabel but can’t believe she can’t see what Mr Super-Transparent Slime-bag Shithead is up to.

Neck is not getting better. Think it would have been better to still be in Isabel’s bad books.

Called into managing editor’s office: pay rise is being revoked due to budget cuts and the recent poor staff relations. I tell the managing editor to stick his job and stick his pay rise and stick his staff relations. But only in my head. Can’t believe how rubbish work is at the moment. At least on
Cat World
we didn’t have people dropping dead and other people blaming me.

Not only that, I’m a month shy of thirty and I’m an old man with a twisted neck. I have a small pot-belly, like an anaconda that’s
just swallowed a quail. My hair, famously thick throughout my twenties, is starting to thin a little, I’m sure of it, around my temples. I still don’t have hair on my back but it can only be a matter of time.

Not only that, Saskia has sent another email and I stupidly respond.

‘Great to hear from you. Life after
Cat World
is great. I’m married. I’m very, very happy. I’m moving to the country to grow vegetables and maybe keep a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig.’

She replies immediately. ‘That doesn’t sound like the naughty William I knew. Sounds like I need to come back and get the party started again. Before suburban married life destroys you.’

‘Hahahahahaha,’ I reply. ‘Unfortunately, I’m away that week.’

‘Where?’

‘On assignment.’

‘Where?’

‘East Timor.’

‘Why?’

‘Orchids.’

‘What?’

‘They’ve found some orchids that eat snakes in the jungles of East Timor. I’m going to investigate them.’

‘How marvellous. Can’t wait to read all about it.’

My editor says I can’t go to East Timor to make up a story about snake-eating orchids. Why did I ever reply in the first place? Idiot.

Neck worse, if that’s possible. The pain has spread down my spine so I can no longer bend at all. Getting dressed is agony, can hardly brush teeth, and Isabel leaves before I put my shoes on so I have to force my feet in without undoing the shoelaces so the backs are all
rucked and uncomfortable all the way to work. No one stands up to give me their seat on the Tube.

Thoroughly regret throwing myself down the stairs. It’s all Alex’s fault, and I don’t care what Isabel says. Everything is shit.

On the advice of Johnson, I have been lying on various frozen vegetables all night. We have everything except peas. I’m eating Nurofen by the pound and I’ve applied so much Deep Heat that I glow in the dark.

Last night, Astrid, Isabel’s yoga teacher, recommended an osteopath. Apparently, they are better than physiotherapists because they’ve been to a proper osteopathy school for four years. And Astrid’s one is part-osteopath, part-faith healer. Astrid has told Isabel to tell me to pay attention to his hands—they will become incredibly hot when he’s treating me. Oh good.

I book an emergency appointment. His name is Serge and he speaks so softly I can hardly hear anything he’s saying.

After noting down my history (‘I sit in front of a computer for nine hours a day and I don’t go to the gym’), sage-like nods and tuts throughout, he whispers: ‘Can you take your shirt and trousers off?’ Before I know it, I’m standing in my underpants being held from behind by a man called Serge. Serge is still whispering in my ear: ‘Turn your neck to the right, move forward from the waist, touch your toes, gyrate your hips. Does it hurt when I do this?’ I wish he would stop whispering.

After a long hold of my hips, he tells me to lie down on his bed. I lie down and he just holds me for what seems like ages because it is ages, his hands around my back, rocking me back and forth gently, whispering sweet nothings in my ear. His hands are very warm. I feel as if I should be wearing a nappy.

The prognosis isn’t good: according to Serge, falling down the stairs was my body’s way of telling me that my head is too large for my weakened neck muscles. Serge says I have to go to the gym and do lots of neck-strengthening exercises or by the time I’m forty, my head will just flap around like a throttled chicken’s. Before I go to the gym, though, I have to see Serge a couple more times. He needs to do some more semi-naked holding. I hand over my £40, borrow a neck brace and waddle away.

‘How was Serge?’ asks Isabel when she gets back from yoga. ‘Did his hands get warm?’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I reply. Some things are best kept bottled up.

No one at work can understand why I had to take my trousers off for Serge. At least I seem to have been forgiven for the whole Sandra debacle.

Lunch at the in-laws’ so Isabel and I can have another sneak look at the house we might buy. I like her parents, I really do, but the stiff-upper-lipped-English-medical-Polish combo makes lunches a minefield.

‘How’s married life, dear boy? Busy working on getting me some grandchildren?’

‘Now, darlink, don’t pressure them. Isabel is still recovering from her swollen labium majus. How is everything down there, darlink?’

‘Stuff and nonsense, dear. There are just two reasons people get married these days: first, to get a nice new set of saucepans, and second, to have kids. It’s not so they can have sex and move in
together. They’re already doing all that long before they get married. Jumping into bed before they’ve even been properly introduced. Isn’t that true, William?’

This incredibly inappropriate and largely unanswerable line of questioning stretches across the equally unpalatable main course: cabbage stuffed with cabbage on a bed of cabbage. To not clean your plate is not an option (‘My boy, we wouldn’t have won the war if we were a nation of fussy eaters, would we?’), and to not have seconds is downright heretical (‘My darlink, you are skin and bones with a big head and no neck muscles. You must have more, my darlink, so you have strength like a good Polish farmer’).

But it is only when the strudel arrives that things really take a turn for the worse.

‘So Alex is alone again, my darlink. Such a lovely boy. So polite. And with such a good appetite. Of all your friends, he was the best eater.’

‘Yes, good chap, Alex. Doing very well, isn’t he? Architecture, now that’s a proper, respectable job. He’s just done Sting’s Moroccan garden, you know? Big job that. And he knows how to shake your hand and look you in the eye.’

‘And he adored you, didn’t he, my darlink? One little kiss and he was around here with flowers and chocolates every day for a week.’

I look at Isabel. Isabel looks at me.

This is something of a revelation.

Pretty Woman
. Julia Roberts won’t kiss Richard Gere. She’ll have sex with him repeatedly but she won’t kiss him. Why? Because kissing is more intimate. Now it’s hardly sensible to take a view based on a slushy Hollywood movie, but what does one little kiss mean exactly? Isabel might have explained it as one little kiss to her parents, but that probably means you have to add on a couple of bases to get to the murky truth.

Did they use tongues?

Did he squeeze her bottom?

Did he touch her breasts?

How could she have let him touch her breasts?

How could I have married someone who let him touch her breasts?

Why didn’t she tell me?

Why hadn’t I guessed?

How much longer do I have to sit here looking through my father-in-law’s Japanese theatre programme collection before I can get some answers?

On the way home, Isabel answers my questions without me having to ask them. ‘It was during a summer vacation. We snogged. He was keen to make something of it. I was going out with Chris. And that was it. I didn’t tell you because you already behave like a child whenever he’s around and this was so long ago, it’s irrelevant.’

No,no, no,no, no,no, no,no.

Back to Serge for a special Sunday appointment. He dims the lights seductively as I step into his office. ‘I’ve missed you. It’s been so long. Take off your clothes off and hop into bed.’

After another £40 and another thirty minutes being held semi-naked by a man called Serge, it emerges that my neck is on the mend but I now have new stress in my shoulders. That’ll be because the woman I love has kissed the man I hate. I don’t bloody care how bloody long a-bloody-go it bloody was.

Isabel can’t understand why an osteopath would have a dimmer switch in his surgery or why he’d see one patient specially on a Sunday. I haven’t mentioned Alex since yesterday’s revelation and nor has she. At the pub, Andy suggests calm, caution and perspective. Johnson suggests a campaign of violence and intimidation. ‘Let’s warn him off. If he doesn’t get the message, we’ll kneecap him.’

‘Husbands ought to love their wives as their own
bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no
one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for
it…For this reason a man will leave his father and
mother and be united to his wife, and the two will
become one flesh.’

The Holy Bible, New International Version,
Epistle to the Ephesians 5:25-33

I’ve been married for three months. What I’ve lost in hot baths and tea with sugar, I’ve gained in Isabel being a permanent part of my life. I have someone living in the same flat as me who cares about everything I do.

A girl who finds my jokes funny is now sitting where the sadly deceased Sandra sat.

Assaults on traffic wardens in London have risen by 17 per cent in the last year. According to council statistics, every traffic warden can expect to be attacked an average of 2.2 times per twelve-month period.

I have a pot-belly and I’m not even thirty.

Either I’ve become a jealous and overprotective husband with an irrational suspicion of my wife’s male friends, or I’ve been right all along and one of her male friends—who snogged her—is trying to steal her off me.

And he still hasn’t forgotten about the game of bloody squash.

And Saskia, the Destroyer of Relationships, is going to be in London for a whole week because, even when she’s naked, New York is too hot for her. There are only ten million people in London to hide behind when she arrives because I told her I’m in East Timor.

Serge says we’re going to have to see each other more regularly.

Arthur the Total Arsehole calls Isabel (he doesn’t call me any more—I have succeeded in the impossible; I have pissed off an estate agent) to explain that August is a particularly slow month for selling flats, even if the flats have cooker hoods. We may grow old or die trying in Finsbury Park.

Pinch, punch, join a gym. Only by building up my neck muscles can I end my relationship with Serge. Only by becoming fit can I beat Alex at squash, since he is a squash player and I am a tennis player. Except I’m not even a tennis player, that’s just what non-squash players tell squash players to make themselves feel better.

The gym nearest us is called Iron Man and was the scene of a drive-by shooting in January, so I jog to the next nearest which is
called Avocado but is almost two miles away. I arrive exhausted and consider turning around and going home again. Then I think of Serge and step inside. There is a fruit basket in reception, TV screens in front of the treadmills and a woman called Denise dressed head to toe in Lycra. Her arms are crossed, her back is rigid, her legs are apart: if she was wearing a tiara, she would be Wonder Woman. I haven’t even got fully through the door and she is explaining her determination to revolutionise the way my body works for me.

As she measures my vitals, she asks a few lifestyle questions. Despite being about nineteen, she is, with the annoying use of first-person plural, patronising in a way only people who work in gyms can be.

‘Now, Will. How much do we drink?’

‘Not as much as we used to. Say, a couple of glasses of wine a night, more at the weekend.’

‘…Mmm, right…we’re a heavy drinker. Let’s bend forward and breathe into this, there’s a good boy. And what about our diet, William? Do we eat a lot of dairy?’

‘Well, I have goat’s milk in my tea.’

‘Hardly going to keep our arteries unblocked now, is it, Will? But it’s a start, I suppose. Hold out our right arm. Good. What about exercise?’

‘Well, I’m joining a gym, aren’t I?’

While she fills in my induction form, she mutters and shakes her head gravely. While she makes me run for ten minutes on the treadmill, she looks off into the mid-distance as if pondering the recent expected but nonetheless tragic death of a close relative. While she takes my final pulse readings, she adopts the resigned expression of someone who knows they are fighting for the greater good, but that the fight is futile in a world full of people who just don’t know what is best for them.

It appears that if I don’t radically alter the way I’m going with my life, I will be dead within the year, obese in two and impotent before I hit thirty-five. I sign up for a month—‘No, I don’t want to waive the joining fee by signing up for a year. I don’t expect to be here in a year.’ ‘Oh, it’s not quite that bad, William.’ ‘No, I mean here in Finsbury Park’—and start the long jog home.

Denise wants ‘us’ back on Thursday to begin to take action to stop the rot to turn ‘our’ clock back to a new beginning.

I’m not sure we’re having enough sex. Think it might be a blip—my sore back hasn’t helped. Nor has the stupid arguing about Alex. But this is all the stuff of blips rather than trends. But what if it’s a trend rather than a blip?

It’s just a blip. I’m sure it’s a blip.

Gym. I could feel my muscles actually doing some work. On Denise’s advice, I only did a low-impact workout. We need to build a foundation, she says. We need to reset our body, undo the damage, then launch into a hyperbolic curve of fitness and win the battle against self-loathing. Which sounds positive.

Shall go to the gym at least three times a week.

It’s not a blip. It’s a trend. Oh God. We have definitely gone down a notch. It’s not a big notch but it’s a notch. We have gone from having sex once every two days to having it twice every week and once during the weekend, which means we’ve dropped from a 50
per cent probability of copulation each night to 42.86 per cent. If the weekend sex is skipped, as it was last weekend, then the percentage drops to just 28.57 per cent.

When we started going out, the probability was in the high nineties. On one particular night, it was 200 per cent, if you count the next morning. Two hundred per cent to 28.57 per cent in a few short months. If this is a trend and not a blip, then we will be sleeping in separate beds before the year is out.

Will go to the gym tomorrow.

It’s a blip.

Gym quite tiring. Couldn’t stop yawning on the rowing machine. Denise says it’s our body’s way of getting extra oxygen but we think it’s because we’re knackered from all the rampant sex. Hoorah.

A date has been set for my squash match with Alex. On the plus side, Isabel is delighted that we’re ‘getting on’. On the minus side, we aren’t. This is just another one of his schemes to make me look stupid.

Johnson says I have to beat him—my reputation as a man depends on it. Andy says I should take a chill pill. This is the perfect chance to let bygones be bygones.

Serge says that although my neck doesn’t hurt any more, I should keep seeing him just a couple more times to ensure that everything
has settled down. The subtle movements Isabel says Astrid says he’ll be making to realign my spine have become so subtle, I’m not sure there are any. He may just be holding me now.

Had a terrible nightmare. Serge isn’t an osteopath at all. He went to osteopathy school but was thrown out after a late-night experiment pushing the boundaries of osteopathy to the limit went very wrong. In the intervening years, his grudge against the world of osteopathy has developed into full-blown hatred. He has become a serial killer who only kills men whose spines are perfectly aligned. The plastic skeleton in his office that he uses to show new ‘patients’ how vertebrae work is not plastic at all. It’s the skeleton of his last victim, replaced each time he kills again. In my nightmare, I work all this out while he’s holding me—that this isn’t a surgery, it’s a cellar, that the skeleton in the corner has hair, that the diploma on the wall has another man’s name crossed out with the word Serge scrawled angrily above it in blood. I try to get up and escape, but my legs don’t work. So I try to grapple him off, but he just presses something in my neck and my arms fall useless to my sides. Whispering calm osteopathic clichés—‘keep your back straight, don’t arch it’, ‘there’s no quick fix when it comes to bones’, ‘breathe in, and hold, and breathe out’—he produces a surgeon’s scalpel and starts his serial killer’s work at my feet.

That’s it. It’s all over. It’s definitely a trend. This morning, I passed up a perfectly decent opportunity to have sex. I hopped out of bed at an ungodly 8 a.m., said something terribly middle-aged like, ‘Come on, darling, it’s the best part of the day’, and bounced off to the kitchen to do the washing up. Last night, I couldn’t be bothered to do it—sex, that is, not the washing up, although that as well—because it was too hot. Eight days until I’m thirty and I’m now
regularly passing up opportunities to have sex. And I’m the man. Men are supposed to want it all the time. The average red-blooded heterosexual male thinks about sex every two or three milliseconds. Isabel hasn’t started coming up with excuses.

It’s me.

Maybe I’m not red-blooded? Maybe I’m yellow-belly-blooded? My libido is in free fall.

When I confess to Isabel, she doesn’t bat an eyelid. She says it’s a cliché that men always want sex and women never do. It’s just something people write in sitcoms.

‘But we used to have sex every day.’

‘Only for about a week.’

‘Well, we used to have sex every other day then.’

‘It’s probably only a blip.’

‘I think it’s a trend.’

In her experience, men never want sex as much as women, particularly when they get older. This is, on the one hand, disgusting because I don’t want to have to think about Isabel’s experience with other men ever, particularly older ones. On the other hand, it is reassuring. Why else would they have invented Viagra? The older we get, the more support we need.

Saskia’s flight landed this morning. I’m in Finsbury Park, not East Timor. Knowing my luck, I will bump into her, so when Isabel and I walk to the Tube, I suggest we take an alternative route through the park. Just because I fancy a nice stroll with her.

I refuse to have lunch outside the office.

I refuse to go to the pub with Johnson, even though he’s having an argument with Ali about which day they should have fish and chips, and which day they should have curry.

I sneak home via the park again. Tomorrow, definitely wearing sunglasses and a beanie.

I’ve told Serge it’s all over, this has to stop, we can’t go on like this. It’s not him, it’s me. We’re just not right for each other. We both need to move on. And besides, £40 half-hours really start to add up. He takes it well. I am allowed to leave his cellar without being skinned alive and turned into an osteopath’s dummy.

Can’t be bothered to go to the gym. My neck feels fine, I need to keep my energy up for sex and tomorrow’s squash match and I’m depressed anyway because of the sixteen people invited to my birthday dinner party on Saturday, only four can come. And the more I’m out on the streets, the more I risk running into the Destroyer of Relationships. And I am, to all intents and purposes, thirty. I am unpopular, I live in an unsellable flat, I have a low sex drive.

Phone rings. Unlisted phone number. Don’t answer it. Isabel asks why I’m ignoring my phone. I say it’s a work thing. I’m lying to my wife about another woman calling me.

It wasn’t Saskia, it was Denise from the gym. ‘Is William being a naughty boy?’

She is as annoying as Saskia.

‘Six days, William, six days. We’ve got off to such a good start. We need to keep it up, William. Self-loathing might be winning the battle, but let’s not let it win the war.’

I obviously forgot to tick the box on my joining form to say I didn’t want to be contacted by carefully selected associate companies or patronising fitness instructors.

Alex is already on the court when I arrive. He gives me one of his nine racquets and we start rallying. He’s all chatty and matey, but also quite I’ve-hardly-played-at-all-this-year-what-with-the-broken-arm, and I’m all I-haven’t-played-for-three-years, so he’s all yes-but-my-arm-still-really-hurts.

The stupid ball doesn’t bounce and it’s really hot so he wins the first game to love. Except, as he points out patronisingly, you don’t say love in squash.

He wins the next game to love as well, despite complaining about his stupid arm. Then he suggests we rally a bit. I feel like I’m going to be sick, mainly because my tall, gangly physique is clearly not suited to this squitty little game. So I agree.

We rally.

Then he says, can I offer you a few suggestions?

And I say no, piss off, in my head, but yes, that would be great, I am a tennis player, to his face.

He says I need to take the racquet up and back much earlier, I need to face the side not the front, I must never step in that triangle or that triangle and I must watch him as well as the ball.

After that, I can’t even rally any more. He laughs encouragingly so I suggest we play one more game. While I’m trying to remember all the patronising things he has told me in his pretence of being friendly, I lose the first six points quite quickly. Then he sniggers. Then I take a mad, exhausted swipe at another horrible ball from him, lose control of the racquet and hit him square on the jaw.

He yelps, falls to the floor and spits out half a tooth.

‘Sorry about that.’

It takes the rest of the evening to convince Isabel that it was an accident.

Wearing a mac and a trilby hat, I take the circuitous route to the gym. Denise gives another stirring speech to her troop. Come on now, we really must put the time in, mustn’t we? A little effort now will save a lot of pain later. It’s the posh London gym equivalent of the sergeant major’s, ‘Right, you horrible little piece of filth on the bottom of my boot. Drop and give me twenty.’

More yawning on the rowing machine and on the treadmill. When Denise isn’t looking, I hop onto the edges and let the bloody thing run itself. I’m grateful and everything but I don’t see why she has to bully ‘us’ and only ‘us’. Why can’t she bully the fat bloke, the horrible sweaty fat bloke who is always one machine ahead of me on the circuit? The fat bloke who doesn’t wipe away his sweat properly because there’s so much of it. He’s hardly trying at all and I can hardly grip anything he’s been on because it’s all moist.