Love You Madly. Alex George
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pair of tights, a plastic toothpick, a chewed biro top. This bland innocuity whips me up into ever increasing spirals of anxiety, so I’ve also started to conduct jittery forays into Anna’s handbag while she’s in the bath. Her contented splashes almost make my heart stop as I delve into the bag’s scented darkness, clumsily scattering peppermints and tampons in my quest for clues.
The lack of meaningful results from my surreptitious prying made me realise with an unpleasant jolt how little I know about what Anna actually does all day. Vast swathes of her life are hidden from view behind the grey façade of her office near Moorgate. Consequently I spent last Friday hovering on the street near where she works, waiting to see what would happen. Nothing did, of course. Anna didn’t even leave the office for lunch. She eventually emerged, looking tired and drawn, at seven o’clock in the evening, and went straight home.
It was the frustration of that unenlightening experiment that prompted me to follow Anna on her purported shopping expedition on Saturday afternoon. Out in public, I reasoned, I would be able to observe her without interruption. There was nothing sinister about it, nothing untoward. I’m no deranged obsessive. (Anyway, I doubt whether it’s technically possible to stalk your own wife.) I just wanted to observe Anna with her guard down. I wanted to see how she behaved without me around. That was all.
Of course, I wish I hadn’t done it now. All of my worries have been compounded by Anna’s purposeful stride towards the matinée showing of Citizen Kane, and her cool, deliberate lies.
Why did I not stay at home?
I am trapped, helplessly pinioned on the skewers of my own distrust. Worse, I don’t even know what it is I should be worrying about: my emotional radar isn’t sufficiently well-equipped to interpret all these alien signals. There’s a little green dot flashing angrily on my screen, telling me that there’s something out there, but I can’t tell what it is.
Sometimes I wonder whether I want to know.
On Monday morning, when I wake up, I am alone in the bed.
I roll over and look at the alarm clock. It is just after nine o’clock. I stare at the ceiling for a few moments, then reluctantly pull back the duvet and stagger into the kitchen. On the table is a note.
Have a good Monday,darling. Hope the writing goes well. Please will you get some (lavender!) loo roll when you go shopping today? We’re nearly out.
A
On weekdays Anna is always long gone by the time I wake up. Instead of a goodbye kiss every morning I receive one of these notes, which contain the occasional unsolicited endearment and (more regularly) gentle reminders of the chores that I, the doyen of house-husbandry, am expected to do each day.
Also on the kitchen table is an envelope with a lurid Australian stamp. It is a card from my parents – late as always – wishing me luck for the launch party. My mother has written a brief message inside the card, Sorry we can’t be with you on your special day. I snort at this. They’re not sorry in the slightest.
My parents had been living a quietly middle-aged life in the shallows of Hertfordshire until one Saturday evening four years ago, when their lives changed forever. My mother called me as soon as she had recovered her power of speech after she had watched her numbers roll out of the National Lottery machine. Six balls nestling alongside each other in a narrow Perspex tube: their passport away from Home Counties drudgery. They had to share their jackpot with four other winners, but still pocketed well over one and a half million quid. There was much celebration, not least by me. Two of the numbers that my mother always picked were based on my birthday, so I felt that I had a legitimate claim to some of the proceeds. Anyway, all parents would distribute at least a share of such a huge windfall to their nearest and dearest, wouldn’t they?
Apparently not.
Within a week, my mother and father had put their house in Potters Bar on the market and had decided to move to Australia. I wasn’t given a penny of their new-found fortune. It was explained to me that nowadays one and a half million pounds wasn’t really that much, and that they couldn’t afford to start giving handouts to all and sundry. I pointed out that, as their only child, it was arguably disingenuous to describe me as ‘all and sundry’, but my complaints fell on determinedly deaf ears.
My parents’ new ambition is to annexe the world through their camera lens. They spend more time travelling than they do in their brand-new, architect-designed beach house just outside Perth. The only place they refuse to visit is England – too boring, apparently, my continued presence here notwithstanding. Whatever happened to growing old gracefully? They really shouldn’t be having so much fun at their age, especially not as they’re whittling away my inheritance in the process.
At least Mum and Dad have acknowledged that my novel has been published, which is more than can be said for my parents-in-law. There is nothing that Anna’s father likes to do more than enumerate, at length, my many failings – particularly when I am within earshot. My greatest transgression is that I do not have a Proper Job. A Proper Job, in this context, is one that commands a basic annual salary in the middling six-figure range (that’s excluding twice-yearly bonuses large enough to buy a Porsche or two) and requires a wardrobe full of pinstripe suits. My father-in-law thinks I’m little more than a parasite, greedily feeding off the fruits of his daughter’s industry. He obviously has no idea how much effort goes into writing a novel. I had rather hoped that the publication of Licked would allay his misgivings, but both he and Anna’s obnoxious mother have ignored it completely. There have been no polite enquiries, no words of congratulations, nothing but the icy silence of sour indifference.
Sometimes, I have to admit, I share Anna’s parents’ loathing of my job. There are occasions when I wish I had become an accountant instead, but my fate was writ large in the constellations, indelibly inscribed in the heavens by a celestial hand greater than my own. Ultimately, I was powerless to resist the sweet song of my Muse. I was put on this earth to write; and so write I must.
I began making up stories as a child. I would slave over these heavily derivative tales (one was called, ‘The Tiger, the Wizard, and the Chest of Drawers’) and would then solemnly recite them in front of my parents, who always applauded kindly (and doubtless with relief) when I finished. And this was the key: I loved being the centre of attention. That clapping was for me. The hubristic lure of approbation was what got me in the end. I was powerless to resist my all-consuming egotism.
But it’s not all my fault. I also blame Ernest Hemingway. It was reading A Moveable Feast, his account of his life in Paris during the twenties, that made me think that being a writer would be an enjoyable way to earn a living. Hemingway, the lying bastard, made the writer’s existence sound too alluring to resist. He cavorted around Paris with his glamorous chums, knocking out literary masterpieces in between drinking binges in the glittering bars of the Left Bank. I was captivated by his stories of ordering oysters and a bottle of white wine to celebrate the completion of a story. I wanted a slice of that carefree, bohemian existence.
(I did get a job, once. It was after my third unpublished effort, Peeling the Grape, had been met with the by then familiar chorus of indifference and hostility from thirty-five of the country’s largest publishers. Crushed, I decided to give my self-esteem a break and resolved to abandon fiction completely. I had done my best; it was time to submit to the inevitable. Literature’s loss was to be the advertising industry’s gain. I sent my rather sparse CV – embellished with one or two half-truths and three or four outright whoppers – to a few advertising agencies. To my surprise, I managed to blag my way into a copywriting job in a small agency in Fitzrovia. It wasn’t nearly as glamorous as I had anticipated; there was none of the coke-snorting excess amongst the creatives that I had always imagined. Instead people nervously sat at their desks, desperately trying to think of ways to persuade people to buy things that they didn’t want. The atmosphere of paranoid terror quickly seeped into me by some sort of awful corporate osmosis. I began to lie awake at night, terrified that my creative juices would abandon me. In fact, released from the demanding, unforgiving shackles of writing fiction, my creativity blossomed. It was just