Forty and Fat (continued)
Chapter 2 (continued)
But you can only keep up the happy-face
for so long, no matter how much money is on the table, and by
the time wife and I were on our way to the hospital the mask
had now fallen away completely. I had felt its edges slowly
peeling from my skin for some time now but it had not been
until a few nights before, as I sat slumped at my makeshift
desk in our new home, trying to stay awake, that I realised it
was now coming away in big, unsightly chunks, like bits of an
old scab…
Chapter 3
It was late and I could feel myself going.
My head felt like it was about to roll off my shoulders like a
football. I looked blearily at the clock on the laptop. It said:
3.04. “Fuck it,” I said out loud. The screen just
sat there blinking at me reproachfully. I didn't care. At that
hour, you've gone past the middle of the night, you're now into
the middle of nowhere. I saved the stuff on the floppy and
turned the damn thing off. It took a few moments to die then --
one last blink -- and it was gone. I breathed out. Silence.
Momentary peace. Then that was gone too as I struggled to my
feet and looked about me.
Since moving in a few weeks before,
we'd hardly unpacked a thing. Just the essentials. As ever my
'office' was the smallest bedroom, the box room -- quite
literally, in this case. I was surrounded by boxes and boxes of
crap. And then more crap. And more boxes. Even my makeshift
desk was now an unopened box of crap, on which sat my laptop,
another box of crap. Getting from the desk to the door was like
trying to cross a minefield. I sized-up my best escape route:
crawling under the couch (propped up on its side against the
wall) then squeezing past the big stack of boxes in the corner
marked 'Heavy'; or down the other side, struggling between the
empty shelves of the bookcase, then feet-first over the filing
cabinet behind it, landing on the small river of CDs,
magazines, newspapers and old MacDonald's containers that
smothered the floor beyond.
I chose the couch. Crawling comes
easy at the end of another long night spent huddled over the
machine like a mad scientist at his microscope. It was just
getting past those big bastard boxes at the end. The removals
guys had been very efficient and stacked them so tight a thin
person would have had difficulty circumnavigating them. I was
no longer a thin person and each shuffling, sideways step I
took threatened to bring the whole caboodle down on my head
with an almighty crash. Which would wake wife, then maybe
daughter and then the whole madhouse really would come tumbling
down around me.
By the time I got to the door I'd
built up a sweat. Nothing unusual there. These days, I built up
a sweat just climbing off the couch. I walked stooping through
the darkness to the bathroom. I felt crushed and short of
breath, ill and freaked out. Fuck this, I thought, this is
killing me. I really did feel deep down inside as though I were
dying. Or that a part of me -- the good part -- was already far
gone. Gone but not forgotten; not quite.
It was pitiful. How had I allowed
things to get this way? When did it happen? I was no longer
young, that was true. But when did I become so fucking old? I
turned the light on in the bathroom and looked in the mirror.
The same, maybe worse. I felt for the lump between my
breastbones and, yep, there it was. Wife said it was my
imagination. “It's probably your ulcer again.” But
no, the ulcer was what caused the intermittent stomach pain;
the piles were what gave me most grief in the mornings; and the
dizzy spells and RSI were self-inflicted. The lump was
something else. I knew.
There wasn't much I could do about
it now, though, except add it to the list of Things To Do Once
I Get My Life Back. I wondered about that. Right then, that
idea seemed further away to me than Christmas to an impatient
child. My fingers were so numb from the hours spent at the
keyboard I could barely hold the toothbrush steady in my hand.
Man, I was tired. Tired and fucked and ill and weak. An idiot
that needed to be kept indoors, away from decent
people…
I finished up, threw some water on
my face and toweled off. Then I turned off the light and crept
back down the hall to the bedroom to check on wife and
daughter. Daughter's cot was empty and they were both asleep in
the double bed together. That meant I was on the couch again.
Oh, well. At least I'd have the telly.
The dog, a big German Shepherd named
Annie, was lying at the foot of the bed. She lifted her big
head and looked at me inquisitively as I entered, as if trying
to place me. “Do you want a widdle-widdle?” I
whispered. Her ears pricked up and she got to her feet, shook
noisily, and padded past me out the door. I stood there like a
statue, holding its breath. But neither of them stirred, thank
god, and so I leaned over and gently tucked them in, my angels,
and gave them both a little kiss on their foreheads. I could
smell their hair, it was the same; the warm, soft smell of
babies and mummy love. I was almost overcome by it and felt
like weeping, but I couldn't allow myself to go there. I didn't
want to disturb them. I did enough of that when they were
awake.
Wife was lying on her back, snoring.
Her belly was so big now it looked like she had someone lying
on top of her under the duvet. Then I thought about it and
realised she did. She had started to 'show' a few nights before
and we'd said, okay, this is it! I rang the hospital and told
them we were on our way while she rang her mother to come over
and look after daughter. We knew it would be any day now and so
we were prepared. We had all the bags packed and arrangements
made, right down to setting aside enough quid coins to feed the
meter in the hospital car park.
What we weren't prepared for was
being told, after we'd been there several hours, that it was a
false alarm. We sat there shell-shocked as the nurse explained
that it was “just one of those things.” But that
now she had given wife a thorough examination and
“massaged the cervix” -- a phrase guaranteed to
make any man wither -- the baby would probably arrive within
the next forty-eight hours. As it was also wife's second baby,
she added cheerily, “I expect it will come really quickly
once it begins.” The nurse looked at me and smiled.
“You probably won't even have time to get here. You'll
probably end up delivering it at home on the floor!”
I smiled back. “Great,”
I said. Because of course that's exactly what I wanted to hear
right then. Not only was I trying to finish a book, sort out
the new house, deal with my job, do something about the lump,
the ulcer, the everything, I could now add to that list the
possibility of delivering a baby. At home. On the floor. Any
minute now. I mean, how astoundingly fucking great is that?
Wife cried all the way home in the car. We both did.
Since then we had been on permanent
red alert, every twinge monitored like a ticking bomb. I prayed
to god that whatever happened next I wouldn't have to deliver
any babies this night and tiptoed down the stairs, where the
dog was waiting for me. I opened the backdoor into the garden
and let her out. She went and did her widdle and I went to the
kitchen and made myself a sandwich and a pot of tea. Then I
grabbed a four-pack of Crunchie bars from the cupboard and
carried it all into the lounge.
This was now a close-of-play ritual
for me. I collapsed on the couch and turned on the TV. Thank
god for satellite TV. Most people dragged out the old
cliché about there being two hundred channels and
nothing on any of them but that was bullshit. There was always
something to get stuck into on satellite TV. Films,
documentaries, sports, music, news, shopping, cartoons,
wildlife, art, even half-a-dozen excellent porn channels. And
if that still didn't work, from about four in the morning you
could watch back-to-back episodes of Magic Roundabout for hours
on end. I mean, come on, if you don't like satellite TV, then
you simply ain't got one yet, awright?
Maybe. It helps, I suppose, if you
tend to spend your 'social' hours sitting on your own at some
godforsaken time of the night. I shivered as I bit into my
sandwich and began flipping through the channels. It was
raining outside and I sat there for a moment listening to it
lash against the windows. There was a time when I didn't even
own a TV and I became absolutely brilliant at backgammon
instead. Backgammon and getting drunk. The only reason I bought
one in the end was because I was actually appearing on it by
then and my curiosity simply got the better of me.
There was another, much longer time
after that when I owned a TV but rarely watched it. I was a
radio man by then. I still am but now I only hear it in the
car. Then I used to have it on around the house all day, even
when I was writing. Especially when I was writing. Sitting
there alone in the same old room, doing the same old thing,
hour after hour, you soon exhaust your own record collection.
The radio erased the need to think about what 'background' I
might have on, beyond a general desire to hear some classical
maybe, or some jazz, or rap, or in the evening the Peel show,
perhaps -- anything but rock. The only real rocking I did
nowadays was on the page.
Since getting married, though, and
having our first child, having the radio on at home had become
a thing of the past. Apart from the satellite TV -- which had
almost as many radio stations on it as TV channels -- I didn't
even own a radio anymore. As far as I could tell, unless it
came as part of her Walkman or her car, Wife had never owned
one. But then she came from the next generation down from me;
as long as she had her MTV and her mobile, she was sweet.
I flipped it to 250 -- the E Channel. I
loved their kiss-and-tell documentaries on US celebrities I'd
never heard of. Like the girl who starred in Three Of A Kind --
the American version of Man About The House -- but got fired
for demanding too much money. Or the dark-haired guy who got
all the fan mail and the chicks but was hated by the
blonde-haired guy in CHiPs. Or -- my favourite -- the beautiful
blonde twins who became Playboy cover stars but had an eating
disorder which sent them loopy. Tonight's story was about the
English guy who became famous in America in the sixties as the
Galloping Gourmet, one of the first celebrity TV chefs. Turns
out, it was his rich cream-and-butter cooking that nearly
killed his wife, so now he has a white beard and cooks only
healthy meals. Absolutely top-drawer whack… continue
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