Dinner for Two (5 page)

When I eventually get to see Izzy she doesn’t look any different. She’s still wearing the clothes I saw her put on this morning. This morning when everything was so different from how it is now. It makes me think – if only for a second – that this is a bad dream. That somehow everything will still be all right.

‘I love you,’ I say, holding her tightly. ‘We’ll be all right.’

‘I didn’t love him enough,’ says Izzy, as tears stream down her face. ‘That’s why he’s gone.’

‘No.’ I wonder why she’s made up her mind that the baby would’ve been a boy. ‘You’re wrong. You did love him. You loved him more than enough for the two of us. And, if it was possible for him to know anything, he knew that. It wasn’t anybody’s fault, Izzy. It’s just one of those things.’

When the news emerges everyone is incredibly supportive: Trevor and Jenny say they’re available to help whenever help is needed, and Stella and Lee call constantly for updates. They’re all really good friends to Izzy and me.

Several days after Izzy is discharged from hospital we decide to spend some time away from London and head for Izzy’s mum’s holiday cottage in Wales. I think we assume that somehow we’ll be able to leave our problems behind if we aren’t at home. All we want is to stop feeling what we’re feeling but we can’t manage that. Neither of us has the strength even to bring up the subject of the miscarriage. Neither of us wants to remind the other of the terrible thing that has happened. This is ridiculous, of course, because those key hours in hospital are our constant companions: we review them separately, time and again, wishing that the past hadn’t happened.

When something terrible happens and you’re in the middle of it you really do feel like you’re never going to be the same again. You feel like every day of your life from now will have about it the same dull greyness. Sometimes you feel like you’ll never smile again. Then, of course, the day arrives when the anger and bitterness are not as intense as they were the day before, and eventually the catastrophe seems like a distant memory from some other lifetime. You begin to feel . . . okay. Not great, not good, but not bad either. You can laugh without feeling guilty. You can smile without wanting to cry.

As things get better Izzy and I treat ourselves a million times better than we ever have before. We buy a new car – a 1964 white Mercedes 280 SL convertible that’s in relatively good condition. The first weekend we have it, we drive to Brighton with the hood down. It makes us feel free. It makes us feel young again. The miscarriage made us feel like fully-fledged adults, which we both resent. The car gives us back our youth and returns to us our right to be carefree.

It’s a couple of weeks later and we’re in the car driving to a restaurant in Ladbroke Grove to meet up with Trevor and Jenny. It’s raining and one of the windscreen wipers is making a terrible screeching noise. The guy who we bought the car from had installed a CD player in it and we’re listening to Rod Stewart’s
Never a Dull Moment
because I think it’s good driving music. Izzy and I are both singing along quietly to ‘You Wear It Well,’ which we both consider one of the best songs ever written. Just as it comes to the chorus for the second time Izzy turns down the volume. I’m about to ask her what she’s doing but something makes me stop.

‘Dave,’ she says quietly, ‘I’ve been thinking about kids. And I know that what has happened should make me want to have them more than ever – but it hasn’t. And I have to be honest . . .’ she begins to cry but manages to control herself enough to continue ‘. . . I’m not sure I could go through all this again. I really don’t think I could. I’m sorry if that makes me a coward. I really am. But . . . at least for the foreseeable future, I’d like us to forget about it. I don’t . . . I can’t even think about it if it’s going to fail every time. And before you say it, I know it won’t necessarily happen every time. But even one more time is one time too many.’

I pull the car over to the side of the road and tell her I understand. I tell her that I, too, am not sure. I tell her I think it would be best for us to forget about having kids for a while.

This decision turns out to be a defining moment for Izzy. It’s the moment she lets go of the past and decides to live in the future. It’s the moment she moves on from being just okay to being her old self. Soon everything is back to normal.

Apart from me.

While I understand her apprehension about trying for another baby, and while I’m far from sure that I have what it takes to face that kind of disappointment again, the truth is that we’ve come to different conclusions about our future. Right now I want us to have a baby more than anything in the world. I want to be a father. I want it more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. And while I’m accomplished at hiding this knowledge from the world at large, it makes me feel a greater sadness and emptiness than I’ve ever known. But I don’t tell Izzy. I don’t tell anyone. It’s going to have to be my secret.

It’s Monday morning, a little before ten o’clock when I settle down at my desk and turn on my computer, listening to its gentle harmonica wheeze of a ‘good morning’. Like all good office workers I have no intention of using it for a good half-hour and have started it up merely to state my intentions to the world that I will be working soon(ish). It’s taken for granted at
Louder
that we work late, so the boss doesn’t worry too much if we’re not in by ten a.m. – nine times out of ten we’re sleeping off the previous night’s activities (gigs, after-show parties, band showcases) endured in the name of work. I haven’t been on such nocturnal outings for a long while, though. I just haven’t wanted to.

My usual itinerary for the first half-hour at work is to have breakfast at my desk – a toasted bagel and coffee – then flick through the day’s newspapers, but today the new issue of
Louder
is in the office so I read that instead – I like to double-check the sections I’ve edited. To my left Bill Reed,
Louder
’s features editor, is sitting with his feet up on his desk, listening to an advanced promotional tape of the new Busta Rhymes album on the office hi-fi; to the right of me Jon Cassidy,
Louder
’s staff writer, is going through his morning post; and at the desk opposite Mark Attwood,
Louder
’s assistant editor, is on the phone arguing with his girlfriend. All of the art department are at their computers at the back of the office; the three members of the production department are at their desks in the middle of the office; and the rest of editorial, Col Campbell, the news editor, and Liam Burke, the junior writer, are deep in conversation by the printer. The only person missing is Nick Randall, Louder’s editor.

I’m about to begin working my way through the new issue when Chrissy hands me an old-fashioned office memo. I receive dozens every day by e-mail, all of which I tend to ignore because they’re usually about tedious stuff like stationery. The memo in my hand is a sign of bad news though. It’s a memo that says, ‘Don’t ignore me.’ And as I make my way to the boardroom along with the rest of the team, as instructed by the memo, my stomach tightens. As I’ve got a pretty good guess what kind of bad news I’m heading for.

Louder
’s new circulation figures are in and the news is bad. The magazine has suffered the steepest drop in readership not only among music titles but for the whole BDP group. Statistics like this, we’re told by the deputy MD, can only mean one thing:
Louder
will fold immediately. Izzy has been telling me to jump ship for the last year because of our falling circulation, and I’d always assured her that it was happening right across the music industry. If major artists aren’t releasing the kind of high-profile albums that people want to read about, it’s no wonder that we’ve struggled to keep our circulation up. Despite this I’d been convinced that
Louder
could ride out the lull.

A magazine folding is no big surprise in this trade, and it had affected me more times than I cared to remember. Back in the summer of 1992 I’d got my first job as a music journalist freelancing for
Start
, a monthly magazine that had folded after eight issues. Then, determined not to do anything other than write about music I’d eked out a living doing occasional live reviews for the weekly music newspaper
Sound Clash
, before I swallowed my pride and freelanced for a number of titles that
never ever
made it on to my CV:
TV, Cable and Satellite Plus
and
Careers Choice
. Eventually I landed my first staff job as a junior writer on a new music magazine called
Compact
– which folded after two issues. Six months later I became a staff writer on
Up
, a music-and-lifestyle magazine aimed at the eighteen-to-twenty-five male market, which lasted two years. Then I did freelance stints in the offices of
Below Zero
, a unisex lifestyle title, which collapsed after a year. By this time, however, my reputation as a writer was strong enough to clinch me the senior writer’s post on
Louder
. I’d been at the magazine five years, longer than I’d ever been in any other job, and now it was all over.

With the prospect of a relatively hefty redundancy package and the expectation that it wouldn’t be
that
hard to find another job, I’m fine with my new-found unemployed status. Perhaps this is the push I need to do something new. The usual way out for the thirtysomething music hack is to move to more adult music titles, which to my mind is the equivalent of one of those horrible Eighties revival concerts where the balding remnants of a once great band parade around on stage unaware of the self-parody they’ve become. The other option is to join a national newspaper as one of those rock critics who have their picture next to their byline. Several music journalists I admired in my youth have done this and while it’s an okay compromise I can’t help but think that it’s like admitting defeat. What’s the point of writing about music for people who don’t like it enough to buy a dedicated music publication? Why bother reviewing music when all your readership wants to know is what CD they should buy to accompany their next dinner party? If I’m going to continue to write about music I want to write about it for an audience who appreciate it the way it’s meant to be appreciated: when it’s in your heart, in your head and means more to you than life
and
death.

It’s now nine o’clock in the evening and I’m sitting on a stool in the kitchen drinking a bottle of Becks while Izzy makes dinner. I’ve spent the majority of my day of freedom with my former colleagues in the Eagle, on Charing Cross Road, drowning our collective sorrows. Izzy had called me on my mobile when the news had filtered through to her that
Louder
had closed. She’d been annoyed because I hadn’t phoned to tell her straight away. We talked over our various options and soon realised things weren’t too bad. Yes, there were mortgage, credit-card and bank-loan payments to be met but, thanks to the money Izzy had inherited from her dad, we had enough stacked up in savings plans and in various high-interest accounts not to panic immediately. I’d bounced back from this kind of thing before and, she assured me, I’d bounce back again. I’d just have to get myself some freelance work in the meantime and it was with this in mind that Izzy makes herself the first person to offer me work.

‘Why don’t you do some work for
Femme
?’ says Izzy, who is washing her hands under the tap. ‘You’d be good at it,’ she continues. ‘You could write one of those touchy-feely “what men are really thinking” pieces. You should see the guys we get to write those things: I doubt that any of them has had a girlfriend in a very long time, so who cares what they think? You’re a listening-to-serious-music-on-your-serious-hi-fi-on-your-serious-headphones-because-your-partner-won’t-let-you-play-it-loud-because-she’s-watching-
EastEnders
type of bloke. There must be millions like you and I’m pretty sure that ninety per cent of
Femme
readers have got one.’ She laughs. ‘You’d be good at it, Dave. Women would love to know what’s going on in your mind. What am I saying? I’d like to know what’s going on in it.’

While I have the greatest respect for what Izzy does for a living, in my heart of hearts I only let her get away with it because she’s a girl. I really can’t stand any of that women’s magazine nonsense. I hate the horoscopes and the health columns. I hate the fashion spreads and the makeup tips. I especially hate the sex advice of the ‘how to have multiple orgasms’ type, and the endless features about making relationships ‘work’. To me, writing about music is writing about the really important things of life, while writing about relationships is a great way to persuade fashion houses, cosmetics developers and calorie-controlled frozen-meal manufacturers to part with millions of pounds in advertising.

‘Thanks,’ I reply, ‘but no thanks. I’m a
music
journalist, Izzy. That’s what I do. I can’t write about emotions. I can’t write about relationships. All that stuff’s just too . . .’ I don’t bother finishing the sentence.

Izzy laughs, clearly amused at the distress the thought of writing for
Femme
has caused me. ‘You’re right, I suppose,’ she agrees. ‘It was a terrible idea. I couldn’t imagine you writing a piece for us in a million years. You haven’t got the right mindset. I’d ask you for a piece about what men are thinking and you’d write one word: “Nothing”.’

‘It’s true,’ I say. ‘Other than the odd thought about naked ladies there’s absolutely nothing going on up here.’ I point to my temple. ‘Men are visual creatures. If we’re thinking about something, nine times out of ten it’s something that’s right in front of us. Like that,’ I say, gesturing at the yucca on the kitchen TV. ‘I can’t begin to count the times when I’ve turned off the TV and thought about that plant – what it would think about if plants could think, whether it would die if it didn’t have a pot to live in; how the word “yucca” came into existence and whether it sounds stupid or not; then finally I think about naked women and go to bed.’