Dinner for Two (2 page)

It’s just coming up to midday and I’m at work when the phone rings.

‘Dave Harding,’ I say into the receiver. ‘
Louder
magazine.’

‘It’s me.’

My wife Izzy’s at the other end of the line, calling from her office.

‘Hey, you. How’s your day?’

‘Fine. What are you doing right now?’

‘Nothing that couldn’t do with an interruption.’

‘Oh.’

‘What’s up?’

Silence.

‘Are you okay?’

Silence.

‘What’s wrong?’

The silence ends. ‘I think I might be pregnant,’ she says, and bursts into tears.

‘You’re pregnant?’ I repeat.

‘I think so.’

‘You think so?’

‘I haven’t done the test . . . I wanted you to be there. But I’m late. Very late. In fact, late enough for it to be a foregone conclusion.’

Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I was kind of hoping it wouldn’t be true,’ she says quietly.

‘I love you,’ I say.

‘This is so terrible,’ she says.

‘I love you,’ I say.

‘This is the end of everything,’ she says.

‘I love you,’ I say.

‘But what are we going to do?’ she says.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘But I love you.’

Some people conceive their firstborn on a sun-kissed beach in the Caribbean, others on a stormy night in the Lake District, or in their own bedroom, by candlelight with a Barry White CD playing in the background. What do Izzy and I get? A slightly grumpy midnight coupling on a rainy north London Tuesday last June. Izzy and I try to work out when it might have happened and we can’t help but laugh when we do – Izzy had spent part of that day editing an article on the decline of sexual activity among thirty something couples and had initiated our encounter as a token protest.

Like her, I make my living from writing for magazines and I know well enough that you should never believe anything you read in a magazine because it’s all written by people like us – jobbing journalists who, at the end of the day, are as clueless and lacking direction as the rest of the world, the only difference being that we’d never admit it. Still, none of this changes the fact that
we
are pregnant and we hadn’t planned to be so.

Am I annoyed with the magazine?

No.

Am I annoyed with Izzy?

No.

Am I even angry with myself?

No.

I am – to use a cliché – over the moon.

Ecstatic.

Overjoyed.

This is
the
best thing that has ever happened to me.

Izzy is crying on the phone because she doesn’t want to have kids . . . yet. It’s not as if Izzy doesn’t like kids – we know loads of people who have them and she’s forever cooing over them, making trips with their mothers to baby-Gap and pinning photographs of them on the cork board in the kitchen. The thing is, she wants them later rather than sooner.

‘Maybe in a couple of years,’ she’d said, at twenty-eight, when the first people we knew became pregnant.

‘I just don’t feel ready,’ she’d said, at twenty-nine, when a whole herd of workmates, friends, cousins and neighbours produced infants.

‘I’m not even sure I want them,’ she’d said, at thirty, when she heard that her childhood best friend was expecting her fourth child.

To be fair to Izzy, her anti-baby stance is both publicly and privately supported by me. ‘We’re not a very child-friendly household,’ I’d say, whenever the subject came up among friends. ‘Me with a kid? You must be joking.’ And then Izzy and I would laugh and joke about how bad we’d be at child-rearing. We even have a little routine to go with it:

Her:
We can’t have kids. We’d make terrible parents.

Me:
We’d end up feeding the baby Budweiser instead of milk.

Her:
Or leaving it on buses.

Me:
Or in supermarkets.

Her:
They’d be the unluckiest kids in the world with our gene pool to cope with.

Me:
They’d inherit your huge ears.

Her:
And your weird monkey toes.

Me:
Imagine that – a big-eared, monkey-toed child clutching its bottle of milk without using its hands.

Her:
And don’t forget we’re both short-sighted! So that’s a short-sighted, big-eared, monkey-toed child.

Me:
And you were asthmatic as a child and I’m allergic to just about everything: pollen, penicillin, shellfish . . .

Her:
(Takes deep breath) An asthmatic, allergic to just about everything including pollen, penicillin, shellfish, short-sighted, big-eared, monkey-toed child. Incredible!

Me:
It wouldn’t bode well for a kid at all. (Pause.) So it’s just you and me, then?

Her:
Yeah, it’s just you and me.

Even when the peer pressure was turned up to the max and all the babied-up couples kept pressuring us with their ‘Oh, you
must
have a baby, it’s so fulfilling,’ mantra, I continued to back Izzy because I loved her. And she loved me. And I wanted her to be happy, whatever we chose to do in life.

But the truth was, I’d wanted kids from the word go. I didn’t want to wait. If I could’ve had them the moment I met Izzy and kept on having them until we were old and grey I couldn’t have been happier. But I kept it in. I didn’t want to pressurise her. One day, I told myself, she’d change her mind and until then I’d have to be patient. So I was patient while we did the couple thing: installed kitchens, ripped out walls, holidayed in exotic locales far off the beaten track. We were poster children for the twin-income no-kids generation. We had it all and we had it now. But I would’ve swapped the lot for a pile of stinking nappies and the child that had filled them.

‘Which one shall we get?’ I ask.

It’s now a quarter to seven and Izzy and I are standing in the large Boots store on Oxford Street staring at a long row of pregnancy-testing kits – about which I know nothing. This is all new to me and I hadn’t even been sure where they’d be located in the store. In Feminine Hygiene? Next to Haircare? Between Shapers sandwiches and refrigerated soft drinks? It turns out that they’re in the same aisle as contraception, which I find amusing, on a shelf called, ironically, ‘Family Planning’.

‘We did a consumer test feature on them a few months ago,’ says Izzy as we carefully study the row of tests. ‘This one,’ she points to a dark blue box, ‘and this one,’ a pastel green box at the opposite end of the row, ‘came out on top.’

I pick one up and look at the price. I’m horrified. ‘Is this a mistake?’

She peers at it. ‘No, babe. That’s how much they cost.’

‘Because?’

‘Because that’s how much they cost.’

‘Everywhere?’

‘Everywhere.’

‘You could buy a half-decent CD for the price of one of these,’ I say, frowning.

‘And
you
probably would,’ says Izzy, smiling. She has a wonderful smile, my wife. The kind that makes you glad to be alive. ‘Which CD would you get?’ she asks.

‘Tindersticks,
Simple Pleasures
. Cracking album.’

‘But haven’t you already got it?’

‘Yeah,’ I reply. ‘But it’s so good I’d like to own it twice.’

On the journey home to our flat, 24b Cresswell Gardens, Muswell Hill, we talk about everything and nothing: how things have gone at work, what to eat when we get in, what to do at the weekend, real couple stuff. However, as soon as we reach the flat – the second-floor of a three-storey Edwardian conversion – we stop kidding ourselves that this isn’t the biggest thing to happen in our relationship since the day we met.

Suddenly we’re on a mission and only one thing counts. Even though our cat, a three-year-old egocentric grey Persian called Arthur, is mewing like a maniac and writhing on the floor for attention, we ignore him and head to the bathroom. I watch as she opens the kit and brandishes the test stick in my direction. I’m mesmerised. It’s hard to believe that this piece of plastic can determine what kind of
rest of my entire life
I’m going to have.

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘This is it.’

She looks at me and I look back at her. After a few moments of quiet, while we collect our thoughts, I give her the nod. ‘Go for it,’ I say.

She doesn’t move.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I can’t pee with you in the room. You’ll have to wait outside.’

‘Why not?’ I’m not joking either. I think it’s a ridiculous thing to say. ‘Why do I have to miss out on all the good bits?’

‘You’re not going to miss out on anything,’ she snaps.

I leave the room and she closes the door behind me. I stand directly outside, place my ear to the door and strain to make out the sound of my wife peeing on to the plastic stick. The cat joins me. He doesn’t listen at the door, though: he weaves in and out of my legs purring loudly. I kneel down and scratch the back of his neck and he looks up at me, with his huge grey eyes. We have a Moment, my cat and I, but he doesn’t know I’m not really there with him – I’m in the bathroom with Izzy.

‘Are you done yet?’ I call.

‘Will you give me one
bloody
second, Dave?’ yells Izzy. ‘I’ve only just got going.’

There’s a long silence, then the sound of intermittent peeing, the loo roll rattling, then a flush, and Izzy emerges with the test. ‘Only a man could have invented that,’ she says. ‘Only a man would think it was a great idea to pee on something that requires the target skills of a sharpshooter.’

I laugh – that was a very Izzy thing for her to say. She spends all day helping to create a magazine that speaks directly to hundreds of thousands of women and one of the easiest ways to create a united sisterhood is to have a common enemy in ‘useless men’ in a ‘Can’t live with them, can’t live without them’ way. The truth is, though, that Izzy doesn’t believe in sexual stereotypes. She believes in people.

‘How long do we have to wait?’ I ask.

She looks at the back of the box to check, even though she knows that I know that she knows. ‘Three minutes.’

‘Well, it’s been at least thirty seconds since you flushed the loo and started talking to me so it’s two and a half minutes to go.’ Before Izzy can object I take the stick from her, put it carefully on the floor, grab her hand, drag her into our bedroom and close the door behind us. Here we stand, with our arms wrapped around each other and our eyes stuck to our watches for precisely two and a half minutes. Then Izzy makes a break for the door. Although I’m not far behind her she gets to the test before me and by the time I catch up with her it’s in her hand.

The tension is so excruciating that I can barely speak. ‘What does it say?’

‘I’m pregnant,’ she says quietly. Tears are already rolling down her face. ‘You’re going to be a dad.’

I put my arms round her and hold her close. ‘Don’t cry. Everything’s going to be all right.’

‘I’m not crying because I’m sad,’ she says. ‘I’m crying because right now I feel like this is the best news I’ve ever had.’

It’s the following day and I’m at my place of work – the fourteenth floor of the Hanson building in Holborn, which is home to BDP Publishing, the small magazine empire that produces seventeen magazine titles covering pretty much everything people like reading about:

Interiors:
Your Kitchen, Bathroom and Bedroom
and
Metrohome

Women’s fashion and lifestyle:
Femme
,
It Girl
and
Fashionista

Babies:
Your Baby and You
and
Mothers Now

Computing:
Computer Gaming Now
,
Download
and
Internet Express

Sport:
Football Focus
and
Tee Off

Cooking:
Now Eat That
and
Food Review

Music:
Louder

I work at
Louder
, ‘the magazine for people who live music’.
Louder
’s tag line always makes me laugh because it’s just so accurate. Our readers don’t
love
music they
live
it – eat it, breathe it. Just as I do. Or, perhaps, that should be ‘did’. Though I love my job I’m also well aware that music journalism, like its more glamorous counterpart ‘being a rock star’, is by its very nature a young person’s occupation. Of course, plenty of musicians churn out albums well into their thirties, forties and even fifties, but I have no desire to become the journalistic equivalent of any of them. Like my musical heroes, Buckley, Hendrix, Cobain, Curtis, Shakur, something appeals to me about the idea – metaphorically speaking – of dying young and leaving a good-looking back catalogue. As it is, I’m not only past the thirty mark but have reached the stage where I’m beginning not to ‘get’ a few of the new musical hybrids that the constantly evolving beast that is rock ‘n’ roll churns out. I hide my ignorance behind outrage at the bastardisation of music’s purest forms, but the truth is, with a lot of music, I feel I’ve heard it all before. And I hate myself for feeling that.

For instance, one particular record that’s been in the charts recently samples the theme tune to a well-known TV drama. Every time I hear it I want to smash my car radio. I’ve never felt like this before and it’s unnerved me so much that I daren’t tell anyone else at
Louder
– even though I can see that some of the other writers feel it too. Maybe that was why, over recent months,
Louder
’s circulation figures had been falling. Maybe none of us has realised how out of touch we are with our target audience –fifteen to twenty-six-year-old males with ridiculously large record collections who regularly go to see live music.