In a marriage, no news is bad news. I therefore determined to talk to my husband on Saturday morning, over breakfast.
‘Rory, I don’t seem to remember that my wedding vows were “To Love, Hoover and Obey”.’
‘What exactly are those Japanese researching on whales?’ was his answer. He was scrutinizing an Animal Welfare report.
‘Rory, are you listening to me?’
He munched on some cereal, sending milk splattering. ‘I mean, they’ve killed so many and yet made no announcements. Are they suddenly going to reveal that whales can tap dance? Yodel? Do calculus?’
‘Great! You can’t even hear me asking if you’re listening^ (Note to self Never attempt conversation with man if newspaper, sports programme or work folder is within one-mile radius.)
‘Huh?’ Rory was so unused to me shouting at him that he looked up in wounded bewilderment. But for once I was not going
to do the traditional Anglo-Saxon thing of bottling it all inside and then finally psychologically imploding one afternoon by the cheese counter of Sainsbury’s.
‘YOU NEVER HELP ME AROUND THE HOUSE ANY
more;
‘HuhP A schoolboy head of floppy hair fell into his eyes. ‘That’s not true, puss.’
‘Rory, your only contribution to anything domestic of late was when your brother and his new bride were coming to stay and I asked you to get the bedroom in the surgery flat ready and you put the baby monitor under the bed so you could hear them having sex. I mean, how old are you exactly^
Grinning cheekily, he answered my query with a melodious belch.
‘I had hoped one day that you might grow up and perhaps discover that a burp is not an after-dinner speech,’ I sighed, stacking newspapers into the recycling bin. ‘All I ask of life is a hygienic toilet environment. Peeing on the loo seat, leaving your underwear all over the floor . . . you’re like an animal marking its territory.’
‘But we have a cleaner.’
‘So? You still have to clean for the cleaner. Besides, she only comes once a week which is not enough to clean up all the mess you make.’
‘Where?’ Rory smiled lazily. ‘I can’t see all this mess I’ve allegedly made.’
‘My point exactly. Why is it that you can see a naked boob a hundred miles away, but you can’t see a dirty sock in the middle of the floor?’ I snapped, clearing away his breakfast plates. ‘And then there’s the childcare . . .’
‘Hey, that’s not fair. I help with the kids. What about Jenny’s
last birthday? I brought that retired sheep dog in from the surgery and it had all the kids rounded up into a holding position in the garden for the entire party.’
‘Exactly. You do all the fun stuff, making me the ogre who has to bully them into eating vegetables and brushing teeth and—’
‘I make them balanced meals!’
‘Yeah, you give them dark and white chocolate! Not to mention the nagging over homework.’
‘That Lego I bought them was very educational.’
‘Yes. You spent six hours building a space craft with rotors and working moon modules while I took the kids to the park. And that was five years ago.’
‘But you’re such a great mum, Cass. Of course a dad should have a say in his children’s upbringing and welfare, but what he should say is “Your mother is right”.’
My anxieties had grown too big for me to laugh. They were sumo anxieties by now. ‘I’m also always the one who has to take a day off when the kids are sick.’ I hated the shrewish tone to my voice, but I couldn’t stop my complaints from piling up on top of each other, like a Chinese acrobatic group. ‘Why am I the only one who can find a lost library book or football boot?’ It was as if someone else had written the words and I was merely miming — a marital karaoke with the banality of a pop song.
‘I do things . . .’
‘Rore, I’ve been waiting two months for you to put together that new Ikea bed we bought for Jamie.’
‘I’ll do it, okay? I’m a man — I love rising to vacuous challenges.’
I looked at my husband. This was as meaningless as Republicans saying that they were going to do something about global warming.
‘But whenl Why don’t you do it today? And you could wash up while you’re at it. Plates don’t levitate, clean, into cupboards of their own accord, you know.’
‘Boy, it’s so nice to see you so positive this morning.’
‘Hey, I like to start out right.’ Once, Rory’s flaws had made me feel more tender towards him, a little ache of attraction and affection. Now these same endearing foibles had my skin crawling with irritation.
My husband got up from the table and wrapped his muscular arms around me. ‘Of course I’ll help, chicken. You go off and have a nice time.’
I had been about to forgive him, but these words froze me in my tracks. 'Nice timet I won’t be having a “nice time”. I’ll be doing the food shopping.’ This was my ‘day off’ so of course I was taking the kids for hair cuts, dropping one off at dance class and the other at tennis, stopping by the dry cleaners, renting videos, buying garden fertilizer, filling up the car with petrol, selecting Rory’s brother’s birthday present, renewing my pill prescription and then depositing the kids at various parties. Ten Pin Bowling and Rock Climbing, and at absolute opposite ends of the city. The thing that drives a mother mad, is driving her offspring everywhere. ‘And I expect you to clean up while I’m away too, okay? I was going to say this house is a pigsty, but no self-respecting pig would set a trotter in here!’
Judging by the peculiar odour emanating from under the couch, herds of wildebeest had obviously gone there to die. Or maybe it was just the smell of our relationship rotting. But then my husband said a surprising thing. ‘Of course, angel.’ And blew me a kiss goodbye.
The cockles of my heart, not to mention other parts of my anatomy, warmed. I couldn’t wait to tell Jasmine how wrong she was. Rory wasn’t autistic or emotionally inarticulate. I had
complained, he had listened, compromised and changed. He was sensitive and caring and my darling and there was absolutely no need to put this marriage to the sword.
Three and a half hours later I was back, laden down with bags of groceries. I could hear the music blaring from two blocks away. As I struggled into the house, the throb of the amplifier rattled my bone marrow. Td dropped the bags in the hall and burst into the sitting room to see Rory gyrating manically. My husband is the Jimi Hendrix of air-guitardom. He knows all the various stances. He can play on his back, behind his head. The man can play with his teeth. He once sold an air guitar on ebay for £50.
Using my pot-plants as the other band members, a lampstand for a mike, and the mirror as an adoring audience, he was belting out the lyrics to ‘Smoke on the Water’ whilst giving himself a bad case of thrash.
Needless to say, the house did not look like the model home I’d envisaged. It looked more like an SAS training ground. The dirty plates were still underneath the couch and the Ikea bed remained in its flat-pack at his feet. Rory wasn’t even embarrassed when he saw me standing in the door, but just strummed his invisible guitar even more enthusiastically, dropping to his knees at one point for a particularly harrowing solo.
I felt it might be time to share with him a wife’s most handy household hint: that a husband’s bloodstains can be effectively removed from carpet using a mixture of starch and water.
Surprise, surprise, a fight ensued. There was quite a lot of incredulity on my part i.e.
‘What have you been doing all this time?’
‘Well, I have cleaned up a bit.’
‘Cleaned . . d Why is it that there can be rutting rats romping across a coffee table, creating a bacteria colony capable of devouring a small child . . . and a man thinks that’s clean? Hmmm?’
There was also quite a bit of sarcasm i.e.
‘What about a Power-Point presentation on whether empty orange-juice cartons belong in the fridge or the bin? Would that help you?’
Quite a lot of open hostility i.e.
‘Any husband’s ass left here on the couch watching sport on the telly for over four hours will be towed away and impounded at the owner’s expense. Am I making myself clear?’
And quite a lot of martyrdom i.e.
‘I suppose ril have to do it, just like I do Everything Else.’
Graduating to full martyr mode, I then ripped the plastic off the wooden slats of Jamie’s Ikea bed and scrutinized the instruction pamphlet. Take a Phillips-head screwdriver. I slammed open the toolbox and surveyed the bewildering contents. Who the hell was Phillip'^. And why was he such a sadist?
‘Oh, all right then.’ Rory begrudgingly turned the music off and cancelled the rest of his imaginary rock concert. ‘If you help me, it shouldn’t take too long.’
Three hours later it began to dawn on me that Mr Ikea and his Allen key are responsible for more marriage break-ups than infidelity. They should be renamed ‘The Divorce Bookshelves’ — only they weren’t supposed to be bookshelves, they were supposed to be Jamie’s new bed, but that’s not how they turned out. Six tantrums later I finally found a good use for the Phillips-
head screwdriver. It’s a very handy implement for spouses to use when stabbing each other to death.
Rory hit the whisky bottle. I was so depressed I thought I might need something stronger — a swig of paint-stripper, perhaps.
‘Look,’ I relented, ‘why don’t we book a babysitter tonight and just go out and talk.’
‘Out? Where? Going out pisses me off. Restaurants always have those menus where it takes sixty words to describe something which then arrives at your table on a lettuce leaf, looking like a diseased frog with a sprig of basil sticking out of its backside. No, thanks, Cassie. Besides, what is there to talk about?’
‘Gee, I dunno. Our impending divorce?!’
The next day, 2 March, was my birthday. A mother’s birthday takes second place to the guinea pig’s, of course — we women know that. But I would have thought a cup of tea and a bit of burned toast in bed might have been in the offing. Even from the kids.
When it’s Rory’s birthday, I buy and wrap presents from the children, plan a birthday dinner, complete with heart-shaped cake and generally make him feel like a Sultan. By Sunday lunchtime when there had still been no mention of What Special Day It Was, I spoke up.
‘Look, I wasn’t expecting a light aircraft sky-writing I Love You, Cassie in the clouds. Or a neon sign lit up with a love message at Piccadilly Gircus, but, you know, a flower or two for my birthday might have been nice. Did you at least remind the kids?’
When Rory told me that he’d forgotten and hadn’t bought me any presents, I knew he was just trying to put me off the scent.
Obviously he had a surprise party planned! By 9 p.m., I felt a twinge of doubt. An even bigger twinge at 10. A panic at 11. Followed by a manic declaration of‘now or never’ at 11.45.
‘But I told you I hadn’t bought you anything,’ he replied, perplexed.
‘But I thought you were joking! Flow can you spend twelve months researching five hundred Internet sites and remembering every comparative price before buying an electrical appliance, but you can’t remember your own wife’s birthday?’
‘It’s not my fault I forgot. I mean, it’s not like you dropped any hints. Did you stay in bed all morning shouting, “Where’s my birthday breakfast?” at intervals? No. Did you send yourself flowers from a mystery admirer? No. Did you circle the date on the kids’ kitchen calendar? No. Besides, how could I remember it’s your birthday when you never look a day older?’ he concluded sycophantically.
Good try. But I was beginning to think that Rory and I just didn’t match any more. If life were linen, suddenly he was a king- size top sheet and I was a single fitted bottom. God! Even my analogies had deteriorated into the domestic. What the hell had happened to me?
There was only one course of action left. Sulking. I decided not to talk to him. For the next five days I served his meals in silence. I turned my back on him in bed. By the end of the week, I was a nervous wreck, as were both children. We’d been walking around on eggshells. The strain and tension in the air was palpable. The cat had taken to looking at me in a superior way as if to say, ‘You’re new at this, aren’t you?’
By Friday night I could take it no more. ‘Oh Rory. Rory darling,’ I sobbed with relief
‘Huh?’ he replied, giving me his full peripheral attention.
How To Kill Your Husband
‘Let’s make up, Rore. I just can’t stand it any more. I’ve been crying myself to sleep at night. I mean, the tension, the angst, the atmosphere!’
He just looked at me and said, ‘What?’
HE HADN’T NOTICED.
PA RT T wo