William Walker’s First Year of Marriage: A Horror Story. Matt Rudd
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all leave the flat, and set a course for Hampstead Heath.
‘Are these plantains?’ Three hundred yards in, my dad, like a moth to an ultraviolet insect zapper, has been drawn to a Caribbean vegetable store on the Holloway Road.
‘I think so, Dad. Leave them.’
‘Excuse me, young man, how long does one cook plantains?’
We wait outside a wig shop for ten minutes while Dad gets the lowdown on plantains from the Rastafarian vegetable stallholder. During the delay, her mum keeps breaking for the flat, mine looks at the wigs. Her dad tuts at people with shirts hanging out. Sheepdogs have an easier job.
‘What is that man doing? He’s almost naked.’ We have inadvertently wandered into the heath’s nudge-nudge, wink-wink meeting place for lonely hearts. Her dad has stopped and is pointing at a man in a red G-string reading the Guardian.
‘He’s reading the Guardian, Dad. Don’t worry about it.’
‘There’s another one. Reading the Guardian,’ says my dad.
‘Lot of Guardian-readers round here,’ says her dad. He’s a Times man.
‘Why are they all sitting in this field, separately?’ says mine. ‘It’s suspicious to say the least.’
‘In knickers.’
‘G-strings, I believe they’re called.’
‘Please, let’s go,’ Isabel and I say together.
‘Are these men after a bit of nookie, with strangers?’ asks her dad, loudly. Just because he’s hard of hearing, he thinks everyone else is.
‘Like that MP, you mean?’ asks mine.
‘Yes, it’s what they call dogging, isn’t it?’ says hers.
‘No, I think dogging is when you watch other people having sex in cars,’ says mine.
‘Kinky stuff they’re into these days, don’t you think? Mind you, we weren’t much better back in the Sixties, were we, darling?’
‘Now is not the time to talk about our era of free love, darlink. I have a blister,’ says her mum.
Isabel is looking like you’d expect her to look after finding out her parents really swung in the Swinging Sixties.
‘This is turning into a long walk,’ says my mum.
The wedding photos
‘You look wonderful. I look dreadful,’ says her mum to my mum.
‘You look wonderful. I look dreadful,’ says my mum to her mum.
‘Not put them in an album yet, William?’ enquires her dad. ‘Just going to have them out in any order like that, are you?’
‘That Alex made for a rather dashing horseman, wouldn’t you say?’ says my mum. ‘Look at him looking splendid in his tails.’
‘Yes, tailored especially on Savile Row,’ says her mum. ‘And hasn’t he got a lovely voice? That song he sang for you both was so beautiful.’
The lunch
‘Red snapper? Not in our day. Sounds like a fancy fish. Cod, hake, John Dory—whatever happened to them?’
‘Yes, good honest fish, they were.’
‘Halibut.’
‘Tuna.’
Then her mum changes the subject to sphincters. Her colleague had a patient in the other day with a bleeding bottom. His wife had attempted to pleasure him with her Prada stiletto but the point had been worn down into something too sharp for the sphincter wall to tolerate.
Why does she tell us these things? Why is it always when we’re eating? What is it with doctors, anal adventures and clinical storytelling?
My dad changes the subject.
‘Are you still working for that charity?’
‘Yes, she is. And they’re still not paying her properly,’ says her dad, because children are never allowed to answer for themselves. ‘I keep telling her, just because they’re saving the whole of Africa doesn’t mean they can’t pay you a living wage.’
Isabel regresses into a teenager: short-tempered, impatient, tutting, crossing arms aggressively. I do the same when they move on to my time at Cat World, even though it’s in the past and I shouldn’t care.
Minutes before they are all strangled, they all head off together, making jokes about getting stabbed on the way to the Tube and going off to the fish ’n’ chip shop for a nice bit of marlin.
‘I’ve changed my mind. We should move,’ says Isabel as we stand exhausted in the doorway. ‘The rent boys and plantain-sellers of north London shouldn’t have to put up with our parents.’
Monday 13 June
Alex has delivered a handmade wedding album he claims to have been working on night and day for the last six weeks. The accompanying note said he was sorry I had slightly spoilt the surprise while ‘looking for the toilet in my study’ but that he hoped this handcrafted work would be a lasting memento of what he was sure would prove to be a long and happy marriage.
‘Ahhh,’ goes Isabel, thumbing through the infinitely detailed photo montages. Yes, he’s made mosaics of our faces, thousands of intricate combinations of heads and hands and more heads, all touching and overlapping and linking up.
‘It’s incredible. Like a beautiful stained-glass window,’ opines Isabel.
‘It looks like a Hieronymus Bosch version of Hell. Hasn’t the guy got anything better to do?’ opine I.
Isabel looks genuinely upset. She says I really should stop being so difficult about Alex. He clearly wants us to be happy. He’s gone out of his way to make our wedding special. It’s important that I don’t stop her having friends. I have to promise to behave like a grown-up. So I do, with my fingers crossed behind my back.
Wednesday 15 June
Alex is not a psycho. Alex is not a psycho. Alex is not a psycho. If I say it enough times, I might believe it.
Isabel, home late and glowing, has found a new yoga class in Holborn. Says she received new energy from the ground or something. Astrid, the yoga teacher, uses crystals to help centre her pupils. Argument ensues when I look sceptical.
Thursday 16 June
A banker and his girlfriend came to look at the flat today. We hid up the road, behind the Man and His Dog Were Knifed incident board. Someone has graffitied ‘A cat person?’ underneath the can-you-help? bit. Arthur Arsehole calls afterwards to say they loved it, loved the space, the light, the angles, the dynamic, the touch. But they wanted a garden.
Friday 17 June
It’s been a long week. I get home late from work, am grumpy, am hot and bothered, am looking forward to a nice bath.
‘Don’t have a bath, have a shower.’
Here we go again.
It is only because Isabel is hugging me when she says this that there is no immediate bloodshed.
I consider a bath with a whisky after a long week at work to be one of man’s inalienable rights—a period of quiet reflection, contemplation and the making of amusing bubble-bath hats. But I considered sugar in goat’s-milk-free tea with a similar reverence until only a few days ago and look what happened to that.