Forty and Fat
Chapter 1
By the time I'd gotten her into the car
and we were on our way the pains were coming every two minutes.
I tried to drive fast but not so fast we bumped around too
much. The subtlety was lost on her.
“Fuck's sake!” she
screamed. “Hurry! Ooh, Jesus, fuuccckkkk!!”
I put my foot down and moved us over
to the fast lane. It was after midnight and the traffic on the
A34 wasn't too bad. With luck, we'd be at the hospital in
Oxford in twenty minutes. All she had to do was hang on in
there. I wondered if some music might help then glanced across
at her scrunched-up face and decided not.
“I can feel the head!”
she screamed, grasping between her legs.
“What?”
“I can feel the fucking
head!”
Jesus Christ. It wasn't meant to
happen like this, was it? What karmic law had we broken to make
it happen like this? I eased the pedal closer to the floor and
watched the dial climb up to ninety. If the cops stopped us,
well, what better excuse? We might even get a police escort, I
thought idly between screams.
My mobile rang. I looked at it
astonished. Who the fuck? But its green face displayed no
numbers, just the word 'private'.
“It must be your
parents,” I said, trying not to sound concerned. They
were back at the house looking after daughter for us. Was
something wrong?
I picked up.
“Hello?”
“Mick? It's
Ross…”
Ross? What was Ross doing calling me
in the middle of the night? What was anybody doing calling
right now, at this most fraught and fantastic of moments, as we
hurtled through the darkness together, my wife and I, in
mounting agony?
“I thought you'd be up,”
he said. “Whatcha doing? Still trying to finish the
Zeppelin thing?”
I was struck dumb for a moment as
the two worlds collided. Zeppelin thing? What baby's head? All
I could think of were the cats' eyes streaming past the
windshield.
“Ross,” I said,
searching for the shortest words, “I'm in the car on the
way to the hospital. We're having the baby.”
“Oh, shit,” he said.
“Sorry. Is that what that noise is? I thought it was the
telly.”
“Ross, I'm gonna have to call
you back.”
“Okay, just quickly then --
did you get the Zep thing done yet? You know they're screaming
for it.”
I should have hung up there and then
but that was just Ross; he was a zealot, the original Mr 24/7,
working on LA time in London and New York time in LA. There was
nothing to forgive, just a lot to forget.
“Ross…”
“I know,” he said,
“You're under pressure right now. But gimme a call
tomorrow, okay, after you've had the whassname, the kid. We can
discuss it then, okay? It's just that Jimmy was asking about it
again today and I just wanted you to know he's on the
warpath.”
“Ross…”
“Cos you know the words are
the only thing they're waiting for now.”
“Ross, it's done, okay? I sent
it tonight. Now goodbye.”
“You did? Oh, that's great!
I'll tell Jimmy. How did it turn out in the end? Are you
pleased with it?”
“Ross!”
“Yeah, okay. Good news,
though. Gimme a call tomorrow anyway. And good luck with the,
er, the kid, you know?”
As I hung up I noticed the
speedometer was now touching a hundred.
“Who was that?” gasped
wife.
“The devil,” I sighed.
Right on cue, she let go another
one. A real goody this time. One that reached right into your
skull and squeezed the jelly between its fingers.
“I'm sorry,” she sobbed,
when the pain subsided again.
“It's okay,” I said,
“just let it out. We'll be there soon.”
I hoped so anyway…
Chapter 2
If so much of life can be broken down into
safe, petty banalities like love and money, or love and no
money, or no money and no love, or whatever the shortest straw
happens to be that day, there are certain times when the
universe appears to break all the rules and begin tilting
towards you at a quite frighteningly familiar angle. When you
find your space invaded by so much light it leaves you feeling
sickened and depressed, even suicidal. First love, perhaps. Or
first flush of success. Times when the pendulum appears to have
swung so far in your favour you simply become overwhelmed by
it; events take on a giddy momentum of their own and life
becomes a series of unnatural highs. Punctuated, as any drug
guru will tell you, by long, desperate lows -- characterised,
in my case, by a daisy chain of plum assignments, interspersed
with endless days and nights spent stabbing at the keyboard,
trying to summon forth the requisite gutter wit to enliven
whatever overcooked piece of rock hagiography I happened to be
working on. Fighting off the lip-curling tedium of trying to do
too many things adequately rather than concentrating on doing
one thing really well; and along with it, the nagging suspicion
that I had taken a wrong turn somewhere far back down the road.
Some people seem to take their luck
for granted, as though always being dealt the winning hand was
just the way the game was meant to be played. They take success
and swallow it whole, washing it down each morning like a happy
pill. God, how I have always envied those people. If only I
could have been born one of those. The chosen ones.
Instead, presented with a gift horse
I have always found it impossible not to stare intently at its
mouth -- searching for clues, waiting for the catch. Always
wanting to know what the bad news was first. And so it was now,
as work and babies and all the etcs clashed and exploded in my
mind like noisy fireworks. The brief spray of colours may have
looked impressive from afar but it was the big, ugly explosions
that stayed with you longest. That really shook you up.
Don't get me wrong, you only have to
look at the lines that railroad my face, notice the tombstone
teeth, the lost hair and the fading, once blue eyes to know
that I have experienced enough bad runs not to complain too
loudly when an unexpected lucky streak breaks out. But hard
times are something you can rail against. You might never win
the battle but at least you know what you're fighting for; who
the enemy is. The good times, when they finally come, are
harder to know what to do with. Work piles up, commitments
rise, precious time left alone in which to do sweet nothing is
ritually sacrificed before the altar of so-called opportunity.
In short, you start to lose control. Days topple over into
nights and things that should have been done yesterday are now
consigned to an unspecified, but much better, you promise,
tomorrow. Things like family and friends. Babies and love. Or
just being around to help put up the new curtains. Important
things…
Luck, of one kind or another, is
something none of us ever quite runs out of, and surely I had
waited long enough for a little bit of the good stuff to come
sluicing my way. Now it was here though, I was falling over in
it, messed up by it. Being broke has almost nothing going for
it except the chance to sit and stare into space occasionally
knowing the phone is definitely not going to ring. Now I didn't
have time to zip up my fly let alone sit and think. Nothing was
simple or easy anymore. Bogged down in contracts, pension
plans, mortgages, loans, insurance and the rest of the
blithering, idiot-proof paraphernalia that comes with being a
responsible, 21st century dad, I had no option but to keep
working. Money goes to money, they say, and I believed that,
and so I had set the wheels in motion. Now they were spinning
out of control. Meanwhile, I kept waiting for someone to knock
on the door and tell me it was all an elaborate hoax, a cheap
laugh for the gods to enjoy, and that now they had had their
fill they were here to take it all back again -- new car, new
house, the works, maybe even the new wife and babies, too. It
was an insane idea but I felt surrounded by insane ideas, and
it would not have been the first time I'd thrown it all away
just as the going got good. I had a history of turning my back
on good fortune. Not because of any cheap principle, but
because I was too pig thick to know what to do with it once it
started banging on the door. Go away, I always told it, I'm not
in. And away it would go, looking for some other sucker to nail
to the cross.
Now it was all coming to a head
again -- figuratively, metaphorically, financially, you name it
-- and like wife screaming in the car, all I could do was hang
on. My pains weren't coming in bursts but in waves; a constant
ebb and flow. Like a tightrope walker poised halfway across the
wire, trembling on one leg with an umbrella in his hand, the
pressure was now building from without and within. There was
the baby that was coming and the baby that was already there.
There was the book I was hurrying to finish and the other two
books I now worried I'd never finish. Then there was the new
house we had just moved into, the new job I was about to start,
the radio and TV stuff, and of course the Zeppelin thing --
some glossy notes to be included with their glossy new DVD.
It was all very big deal in its own
context and what middle-aged fart doesn't want to kid himself
he's throwing away all his best hours on something fractionally
more exciting than simply paying the bills, chalking up the
work days like notches on a prison wall? This forty-something
desperado was no different. Now, though, I'd reached overload.
I really did want it all to stop. Or rather, not to stop, but
to hit the pause button for a moment. Just while I caught my
breath, scratched my arse. Just long enough to try and remember
why it was I put myself and my family through all this crap in
the first place.
But of course there is no pause to such
moments, because ultimately that's all they are: moments of
exceptional, un-pausing madness; vividly lived holiday romances
with a built-in burn-out factor. Making them stop meant taking
the plane home early and I was still too eager for the action,
too hot for the clinch, to consider anything as drastic as
that. Despite the spiraling costs to my personal life, I still
hungered for the morsel of prestige it threw my way; the minute
recognition that my life might just be worth something more
than the shambles it had too often resembled over the years.
When the offers came, I took 'em. I was the Michael Caine of
rock punditry, never willingly saying no to anything -- unless
of course it didn't pay. Then I had no interest at all. In that
sense I was a true child of the eighties, only really fired up
to finish something once I'd gotten the glint of gold. Hence
the stalled novel, the lost poems, the never to be requited
loves. continue reading
