William Walker’s First Year of Marriage: A Horror Story. Matt Rudd
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I’m really pleased for you,’ says Johnson on our way to the Tube. ‘Obviously, bum-licking is seen as a more useful skill on this magazine than the ability to string a sentence together.’
‘You mean bum-licking is a more useful skill than hosting and winning the World Throw the Paper Aeroplane Out the Window and See if You Can Hit a Traffic Warden Championships?’
‘Teacher’s gerbil.’
‘Low-income earner.’
‘Bottom-dweller.’
‘Tramp.’
I know Johnson is secretly pleased for me—even if he is a miserable old bastard. He’s always been my mentor—it was him who saved me from Cat World. If he hadn’t lied about how good I was, I wouldn’t have got tea-maker on Life & Times. I’d still be tasting new Whiskas flavours every month in my famous ‘Good enough for your dinner plate?’ cat-food column.
Isabel is much more excited. She’s popped the champagne before I’ve stepped through the door, even before I can point out that the champagne almost certainly cost more than my pay rise is worth.
‘Do you want to go out and celebrate?’ she says.
‘No, let’s have a night in. Just the two of us.’
‘Why, I’d love to, Grandpa.’
This is another great thing about being hitched. We can have a quiet Friday night in. We can even watch Gardener’s World.And Have I Got News For You. And the news. With a cup of hot cocoa. Because we’re incredibly old and incredibly boring and we don’t have the willpower to go out at the weekends and stand in loud bars communicating by sign language any more.
Bliss.
Except upstairs is having a party. I know this because two hours after the DJ starts, one of them (the actor, claims to have been in EastEnders, has a nose ring) comes down to warn us they’re having a party.
Until that point, I’d been planning his and his two flatmates’ execution intricately. It would involve a pitchfork, a corkscrew, two bicycle pumps, a pair of size-eleven ice skates and one of those old-fashioned elevators with the iron concertina sliding doors. Isabel tells me to stop being so aggressive, they’re only young, they’re allowed to have a party. Then the doorbell goes, the guy who says he’s from EastEnders says he’s having a party and, instead of ripping his head off or even saying something dry like ‘no kidding’, I say, ‘Oh right, a party. Good-o,’ and gyrate my hips a bit. ‘No problem at all, thanks awfully for letting me know.’
Now it’s 3 a.m.
Would forgo ice skates and corkscrew for simple but effective baseball bat. Isabel ear-plugged and valerianed, dead to the world. Really thought she was actually, prodded her to check, got a tut. How can she sleep through this?
And why, at the age of twenty-nine and almost a year, am I still living in a middle-floor flat, trapped like a noise-sensitive piece of ham in a sandwich of irritation? A sandwich on a platter of other rundown sandwiches full of people who spend all day mugging each other. So tired.
Now it’s 4 a.m.
Scratch previous comments on being happy with lack of half-million bonus/yacht/shark-lift. Am putting the flat up for sale tomorrow morning. I don’t care how far the housing market has crashed. And when I sell, I’m moving to the Isle of Skye.
Saturday 4 June
Surprise, surprise, Isabel’s not sure about the Isle of Skye idea. She says she likes living in Finsbury Park. It’s colourful and multicultural and vibrant and alive. She likes our flat, she likes being near her friends. She’s hardly going to commute to work from Skye, is she?
‘Two months ago, you wanted us to move to a flat around the corner from your favourite bar in Quito. The Isle of Skye is a lot closer than Quito.’
‘Two months ago, I was stressed about the wedding. Now, I’m blissfully married and very happy here, thank you very much.’
But I play my trump card…
‘Think of the space, the trees, the nature, the organic farm we could start. With yaks and llamas and our own biltong shop.’
She really loves biltong, enough to hesitate for a split second.
But only a split second.
‘We can move to the outer reaches of civilisation when we’re in our thirties.’
When I suggest I am in my thirties, practically speaking, she says we’re married now and that it’s not ‘I’ but ‘we’, ‘I’ might be practically middle-aged, but ‘we’ are still almost two years off.
By the time I have had my morning coffee (I am allowed cow’s milk and sugar because I’m grumpy), I am recovered. I like living in Finsbury Park too. I like being near my friends. I like our first marital home.
Things continue to improve.
Although I was dreading today’s chore—getting the wedding ring I thought I’d managed to dodge—it couldn’t have been easier: turned up, put my finger through a spaghetti measure, gave the man with the monocle £300 and it was all done. Easy. Unlike the first ring I ever bought.
The engagement ring
Unless he’s a surfer or a scoundrel who tries to stall for time with a ‘friendship’ ring, the engagement ring is the first ring a man buys.
Two months’ salary is the rule: it’s fun watching flashy bankers with a penchant for ordering champagne in pubs work that one out. They go pale.
I am obviously not a banker but I didn’t have two months’ salary tucked under the mattress either the day I decided I would marry Isabel. I ransacked everything, from my Post Office account to my piggy bank, scrabbled for coins in the sofa, my old suit trousers and the hard-to-reach bit around the handbrake of my car. I had a princely £1,426.32.
‘How much would you like to spend?’ asked the man with the monocle.
‘Oh, two thousand. Maybe two thousand five hundred,’ I replied without hesitation. I think it was because I’d had to ring a doorbell to get into the shop. And then been shown in by a security guard. It intimidated me into making wildly inaccurate summations of wealth. The man with the monocle still looked unimpressed, scrabbled around in the dusty bit of the display and found some itty-bitty diamond rings.
There is a cruel diamond ratio you only learn when you have to buy one. A small high-quality one costs the same as a large low-quality one. Girls know the difference, which means you must ignore the size-is-everything rule, and go for quality. That was Johnson’s advice. (Andy suggested I write a poem and engrave it on the side of a silver tankard instead.)
So I brushed away the big sparkler that would have impressed my ignorant mates and went for the near-perfect, near-invisible solitaire.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she had lied when I’d got down on my knee, done my speech and opened the velvet box. Still, she’d already burst into tears and said yes by that point, which is what she was supposed to do.
Sunday 5 June
Lunch at Alex’s to meet his new girlfriend (who he seems to have rustled up despite his alleged grief at being dumped by Watszerface) and to go through wedding photos (which, apparently, he can’t wait to see). Consider knifing myself to get out of going but it is made clear that this is not an option. I must stop behaving like a child. It’s very unattractive. Alex, bless him, has made a Moroccan tagine to go with his new Moroccan-themed terrace and his new conveniently Moroccan girlfriend. Don’t know what’s wrong with roast chicken. It is a Sunday lunch after all. He says Sunday lunch is the new Saturday night and threatens to make this the first