William’s Progress. Matt Rudd
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That is all…
Wednesday 2 January
‘I can’t believe you left us for a whole day. I’m still wearing the same nightdress I came to the hospital in. I’ve had to borrow some sanitary towels from the nurse.’
‘I’m so, so, so, so, so, so, so sorry. I got home. I had a quick lie-down. The phone was still unplugged from when you told me to unplug that (“fucking”) phone. Then it was 11 p.m. I called the hospital. They said you were asleep. I called your mobile. It was off. I’m here now. I’m so sorry. Look, I bought a cranberry, yumberry and blackcurrant smoothie. It’s very high in vitamin C.’
‘Thanks. Now, go and change Jacob’s nappy.’
‘Jacob?’
‘Yes, he’s called Jacob. I had to call him something because the midwives were about to call social services and report us for neglect. You had gone AWOL. So I decided on Jacob. We can always change it later.’
Ahh, the old we-can-always-change-it-later trick. Isabel has been using this all year. We can’t agree on a colour to paint the baby’s room. I want a good, honest, sensible yellow. She wants a pinky-white, which is ridiculous if it’s a boy, but she says, on the contrary, it’s perfect because she intends for our child to have a non-gender-specific upbringing. Halfway through the standoff, she paints it pink while I’m at work. I come home and look angry. She says, ‘We can always change it later.’ Kapow!
Also while I’m at work, she pays a proper handyman to come round and hang pictures where I don’t want them on the grounds that we’ve been in this house for over a year and she’s tired of looking at bare walls. The same happens with the placing of plant pots, the reorganisation of the kitchen and the moving of all my clothes to the bottom drawer of the small cupboard in the spare room (to make room for all the cloth nappies). But it’s okay, we can always change it later…
We will never change it later. We could barely be bothered to change it in the first place.
This is fine when it comes to the feng shui-ing of a living room or the buying of a girly tree for the front garden, but not so fine for the naming of a first-born.
Jacob.
I’m not sure. I knew someone at university called Jacob. Did philosophy. Smoked drugs. Now lives on a beach in Bali. How much of that is because his parents called him Jacob?
It does have a ring to it, though. Jacob Walker. You probably wouldn’t get an astronaut called Jacob Walker, but equally, you wouldn’t get a shoplifter. It didn’t sound prime ministerial, but there was a certain gravitas. Broadsheet newspaper editor, perhaps. Barrister. Surgeon. Discoverer of (a) the cure for old age, (b) life in another solar system or (c) the ark of the covenant. If they haven’t discovered that already. I can’t remem—
‘William! The nappy.’
THE DADDY NAPPY
Well, I missed that one. We had given over ten minutes of the prenatal classes to the treacly first nappy. Turns out I could have skipped that bit on account of having rather tactically skipped the whole of day one. I got day-two nappy instead and, frankly, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. It went absolutely fine until Jacob (see, I’m already calling him that) decided to have a wee the second, the very second, I’d finished cleaning him up. No drama. I changed him again – and that was less fine because he was screaming. And the screaming is very hard to cope with when you’re trying to work out which way around the nappy stickers go and how you wipe the poo off without getting it on the (pink, why is it pink?) babygro. Still, the smell was bearable, the trauma minimal. All trauma will appear minimal now that I have witnessed the miracle of childbirth.
Thursday 3 January
One more night in hospital on account of the whole dissection thing. This has worked out very well. Now that I have slept – and we have put the whole missing-the-first-day-with-Jacob debacle behind us – I am finding the routine of being a new dad quite acceptable. Wake up, drive to hospital, fuss over amazing mother of my child for a few hours, marvel pathetically every time child moves (‘Look, look, look, he moved his hand, ahhhhhh’), go home, watch DVDs, drink beer, watch more DVDs, go to bed.
Today, we introduced Jacob to both sets of grandparents. We had to prise him from the claws of both mums, but other than that – and a slightly disgusting moment when Jacob tried to suckle Isabel’s mum and Isabel’s dad said, ‘Hang on now, old chap, there’s only one of us allowed to sup at that particular cup these days’ – everything went smoothly.
Until the flowers arrived from Alex, Isabel’s best friend.
WHY ALEX IS STILL ISABEL’S BEST FRIEND
Alex very nearly ruined my marriage. He spent the first year of it spying on us and trying to break us up. He gate-crashed our romantic weekend away. He faked photographs of me having sex with my ex-girlfriend, Saskia (the Destroyer of Relationships). Worst of all, he found out I was getting Isabel’s parents some cheese knives for Christmas and he got them better ones. How could anyone be so devious?
I had assumed the answer was simple enough: he loved her, she didn’t love him, he turned into a nutter. But after the dust had settled, after Isabel and I had repaired the damage he had done, after he had cried a lot and begged for forgiveness, it became clear that it wasn’t quite so simple after all.
‘Isabel. William. I have something else to tell you.’
You’re moving to Indonesia? You’re becoming a Trappist monk? You’re—
‘I’m gay and I’m in love with an interior designer called Geoff.’
I don’t know why we were even still talking to him at all, let alone talking to him about this exciting new revelation, a revelation which, frankly, if he’d revealed it to himself a bit earlier, could have saved us all an awful lot of hassle.
‘Wow,’ exclaimed Isabel charitably.
‘Couldn’t you have worked that out a bit earlier?’ I asked as patiently as possible.
‘I know. I’m so sorry. I always knew deep down. You just do, don’t you? But I was too frightened to admit it to myself, let alone to anyone else. I think that’s why I spent all my time chasing a woman I knew I could never be with.’
‘And hiding a camera in her bedside lamp.’
‘Yes, well, I was in denial. And denial led to confusion. And obsession. And…’
‘And psychotic behaviour?’ I was only trying to help him finish his train of thought, but Isabel gave me a look. Despite everything, Alex was still her friend and she would still support him, a fact which I found intensely annoying. Given the lengths to which he had gone to spoil our wedded bliss, announcing he was gay was about the only way he could insinuate himself back into Isabel’s affections. Which is exactly what happened. He went from, ‘Sorry for nearly ruining your lives’ to ‘I can’t wait for you to meet Geoff, you’re going to love him’ in the space of five minutes.
A week after that, contrary to Alex’s prediction, I found that I didn’t love Geoff. Geoff loved the sound of his own voice too much for there to be room for any other love. ‘William. Hi. Heard a lot about—Blimey, I hope that rug was a present, or are you being ironic? Maybe the latter, I’ve heard you’re quite dry and, my God, what a bold statement you’re making putting that picture against that wallpaper. Bravo. Anyway, sorry, where was I? So good to meet you. I was thinking on the way here that—’
The only time anyone else could speak was when he had food in his mouth. The rest of the time, he monopolised the conversation with long, fanciful stories about how brilliant he was and how awful everyone else’s taste in home furnishings was. I don’t know why he thinks he’s so brilliant. He’s only an interior