William Walkers First Year of Marriage (13 page)

‘It’s shotgun, not gunshot, and I am not itchy. I haven’t done anything.’

‘You don’t have to do anything. It sounds like this girl can do it for you. You can be a perfectly innocent bystander and along comes some harlot, some wanton woman, and before you can say, “Back off, bitch, I’m a happily married man,” she’ll lure you.’

‘I won’t be lured.’

‘She’ll lure you.’

‘I won’t be lured.’

‘Okay, fine, but take my advice. Whatever you do, don’t scratch the itch. It’s okay to have an itch but you must not scratch it. Not even a little bit. If you scratch it, it will only itch more. Before you know it, that itch will have you back to bedsits and pizzas and sad, lonely, pathetic, meaningless late-night masturbation, my friend.’

Andy is equally helpful. ‘Wow, it’s pretty karmic, don’t you think? Saskia could have moved anywhere in the world, anywhere at all. China, Luxembourg, French Guiana. But she moves into the flat below yours in Finsbury Park, London, England. Perhaps it’s a sign. Perhaps you’re meant for each other. I mean, you and Isabel are meant for each other, but maybe more than one girl was meant for you. Like in Mormon culture. Like you have two kindred spirits.’

‘I thought you were supposed to be moving to Geneva with your latest kindred spirit?’

‘It didn’t work out. Couldn’t get a transfer. But wait until you meet Alessandra.’

To Andy’s with Isabel to assess Alessandra, an Italian-Mauritanian who only speaks Italian and Hassaniyya Arabic, neither of which Andy speaks (though he can say, ‘I think your country is beautiful,’ in Swahili). Unfortunately, the assessment process was interrupted by my spending a night in a cell in Brixton Police Station.

‘Help, help, help.’ That was how it started, right in the middle of a game of stuttering, desperate, only-way-to-get-through-the-evening, multinational Monopoly, someone getting mugged in the street outside. ‘My Filofax, my lipstick. Help.’ Or words to that effect.

Before I had time to think, ‘It’s raining, put your shoes on,’ I was out on the street. Andy must have been doing double knots because he arrived ages later. By that time I was already in pursuit.

‘Look after the girl, I’m going after them,’ I shouted, before wishing I hadn’t because no matter how heroic you’re being, you really don’t need to sound like you’re in
Baywatch
.

Still, this was it. This was my chance. With each step I took, I felt the chains of emasculation fall away. As I gained on the muggers, I was proving that I was a man, not a big girly girl. I was alive at last.

And I really was gaining on them. Quite quickly. They were a hundred yards ahead, then ninety, then eighty, then…then they stopped running.

My shoeless pursuit was so quiet that they hadn’t even noticed they were being pursued.

‘Now I have them, the fools,’ I thought. ‘Those foolish muggers. Those two stocky, hooded, foolish muggers who might well be carrying concealed weapons or other sharp objects. Being caught by me, not stocky, with no concealed weapons or other sharp objects. I’ve got a napkin and a silver dog but that’s about it.’

So I stopped running as well because there’s being brave and being so stupidly brave you get cut up into lots of little pieces on the mean streets of Stockwell.

I was left with the cowardly option: to follow them at a discreet distance. So I followed and followed and followed all the way back to their lair in Brixton, wishing with every wet puddle that I’d put my shoes on. I could have tried a citizen’s arrest. That might have worked. The muggers might well be the sort of muggers who would accept my right to use reasonable force to prevent crime or arrest offenders or persons unlawfully at large under the Criminal Law Act 1967.

They might well not be.

And so, having memorised their address, Jessica Fletcher-style, I started running back to Stockwell to get help, but halfway there, a police car, sirens wailing, screeched to an incredibly dramatic halt beside me.

‘Been chasing muggers, have we, sir?’

Isabel had called in my description.

It’s my first time in a police car and it’s pretty damn exciting going through red lights and stuff. The sergeant kills the siren as we arrive at the flats. Back-up arrives from the other direction in case things turn nasty. Descriptions I’ve given are walkie-talkied back and forth, and then it’s time for the bust. We all exit our vehicles at the same time and cross the road like Dempsey and Makepeace and Cagney and Lacey and the Professionals and the Avengers and Steve McQueen in
Bullitt
. Unfortunately, I’ve only got the theme
tune from
The Bill
in my head, but I’m also thinking, woo-hoo, I’m going to be in a bust.

‘Sir, wait in the back of the vehicle, will you?’

I’m not going to be in a bust.

At Brixton Police Station everyone is calling me either Zola because I am not wearing any shoes or The Guv’nor because I instigated a successful arrest. None of this changes the fact that Brixton Police Station is such a dangerous place at one in the morning that the safest place to keep me while I wait to give my witness statement is in a cell. It takes three hours for them to get to me—I am released an hour after the muggers, which is enough to make me vow never to half chase anyone half heroically ever again.

Back in Stockwell, Isabel, Andy, his Italian-Mauritanian wife-to-be and the mugging victim have all stayed up waiting for me, which is nice, but are all so drunk that they sing ‘I need a hero’ when I walk in, which isn’t.

After two hours’ sleep, I had to go to Penge, of all places, for the anger-management course. Everyone else on the course has a look of sinister calm, like they might explode at the slightest provocation. I wonder why they’re here. They all look like completely normal, respectable businessmen. Scratch the surface and I bet you’ll find wife-beaters, bullies, sadomasochists and the middle-class ringleaders of football hooliganism. These are the sorts of people that pulled the wings off flies when they were children. All I did was throw a (cold) cup of tea over a work experience.

We begin with a sort of anger amnesty. The organiser asks each of us to introduce ourselves and reveal what makes us angry. In response, she gets a barrage of irritations: switching broadband provider;
the Microsoft Office Assistant staple; the French; people without any noticeable disability using the special parking areas at Tesco, and so forth. One guy goes puce describing his hatred of cyclists who fail to observe the rules of the road. The next guy, already puce, proclaims himself a cyclist who loves failing to observe the rules of the road but hates inconsiderate drivers. Then they both add each other to their angry lists and have to be physically restrained.

When it gets to my turn, I decide to be perfectly honest and list anger-management courses I don’t need to go on because all I did was throw a (cold) cup of tea at an obnoxious work experience. I am told that I am not being constructive so I say that’s not surprising because I spent last night locked up in a cell in Brixton for a crime the people I was chasing committed. In response, the organiser, a dowdy woman with a neat bob and thick-rimmed glasses, writes something down in her file. I ask what she has just written and she shows me.

‘Has denial issues,’ it says.

Astounded at the injustice of it all, I tell her I also get angry when people make sweeping judgements about people they have only just met. For instance, I say, I have a good idea that she’s a dowdy woman with a spurious career who should have been a librarian because she bloody well looks like one. However, I continue, it would be unfair to draw such sweeping conclusions because we have only just met.

Well done, William. I now have to attend a course of six more anger-management sessions. I hold Ryanair responsible, and Alex and Saskia. I haven’t slept properly for days. It’s not denial, it’s the truth.

Because of Ryanair and the three hours in a police cell with wet socks, I now have the ‘flu. Still struggle into work just to check I haven’t been sacked for upsetting the anger-management librarian. Although I almost certainly have a temperature, no one at work is remotely sympathetic. I am too ill to work so I surf the Net for information about sneezing. Then I go home, taking care to sneeze on all the bastards on the Tube who have their iPods on too loud.

1. The material spread by sneezing can travel up to three metres at one hundred miles per hour.
   
2. There is some debate over who holds the world record for the loudest sneeze. It is either Yi Yang of the People’s Republic of China at 176 decibels or Bill Page of South Australia at 186 decibels. For perspective, Maria Sharapova grunts at 101.2 decibels, scoring a home goal in a football stadium generates 115 decibels and a jet takes off at 140. Anything above 80 decibels can damage hearing, another good reason to sneeze all over Tube iPod-ers.
   
3. As reported in the
   Lexington Leader
   , serving the people of Lee County, Texas, Bobby Ruthven of McDade suffered severe injuries in a one-car automobile accident last Thursday at approximately 3 p.m. He was travelling westbound driving a beige 1988 Ford Mustang convertible when he suffered a
   sneezing attack and veered off the road. Emergency personnel had to use the Jaws of Life to remove him from the wreckage.
   
4. There is a disturbingly large group of people in cyberspace who find sneezing sexually exciting. It’s to do with lack of control. Note to self—don’t ever follow any sneeze fetish links again.
   

I’m near death’s door when I get home. Mercifully, Saskia is not there waiting in her pants. Isabel is already home. She isn’t in her pants either but she’s looking tired and needy. This is bad timing. It’s my day for looking tired and needy.

Before I can convey to her how needy I am, she tells me she’s had a bad day.
She’s
had a bad day? She doesn’t know the half of it. And I doubt very much that her day could have been as bad as mine. Except hers was: a whole country has pulled out of an aid programme she’d been organising for months.

Still, that’s a work thing. I’m dying here. So I tell her, because she’s not asking, that I’m ill. That I have flu.

She says it’s not flu, it’s just a cold.

We have been through this before.

‘I have a temperature,’ I say.

‘No, you haven’t,’ she replies, holding my forehead, which is a bad way of judging unless you’re a mum and we haven’t got a thermometer to prove it either way.

‘I have a sore throat, a dry cough, a really, really itchy nose and no appetite, which is flu,’ I say.

‘That’s a cold,’ she repeats. ‘But I’m going to get you some hot lemon and honey, some Marmite toast and a hot-water bottle.’ And now I feel guilty because all I have is a cold and I could, frankly, have been more sympathetic.

Ugh. Actually, I am really ill. My cough is like something from the Crimean War. Possibly laryngitis? Whooping cough? At least Isabel has become Florence Nightingale: even told Arthur Arsehole I was too ill to have anyone see the flat. Shame, I would like to have infected an estate agent.

In the afternoon, an aid parcel of soups and Lemsips is waiting outside our door, with a note reading, ‘Heard you needed cheering up. Get well soon, Nurse Saskia, xxxxx.’

‘I told her you only had a cold.’

‘It’s not a cold, it’s flu. She’s just being nice.’

This was the wrong thing to say. In the fog of illness, I had momentarily forgotten that Saskia was the Destroyer of Relationships. Why would I side with her? I backtracked quickly but days of careful diplomacy have been unravelled with one stupid pro-Saskia comment.

Typical. Just in time for work, I can blow my nose straight through. Not the deeply unsatisfying one-nostril-blocked whinny but a full glug-glug-glug, tissue-filling neigh, leaving both nostrils clear for a marvellous few seconds. Filled three whole tissues on the Tube, causing the person next to me with two ghetto blasters strapped to his ears to tut. Unbelievable cheek.

Spontaneously order a folding bike on the Internet. Looks very cool and costs a quarter of the price of the boring Bromptons that everyone else has. While we are still trapped in Finsbury Park, I will be able to avoid the Tube. When we move to the country, I shall take it on the train. Perfect.

Folding bike already at office when I arrive. Very quick delivery, which is obviously because they’re not inundated with orders. It is smaller and yellower than it looked in the photo. When I pedal, my knees hit the handlebars. It does fold nicely and it was cheap so I decide to cycle home on it. By pointing my knees out, I can pedal unhindered but look like Dick Van Dyke. Even though it’s bright Day-Glo yellow, buses and taxis seem to be targeting me rather than avoiding me. The wheels are tiny. It is very hard not to wobble.

Miraculously, I am still alive by the time I reach the Holloway Road where some hilarious drunk waiting in a bus queue runs up behind me and piggybacks me. I stop and ask him what he thinks he’s doing. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he bellows, for all the bus queue to hear, ‘I thought you were the Number Ninety-seven.’

I walk the bike the rest of the way home, resolving to stick it on eBay at the earliest opportunity.

Dreamt I was in the Tour de France last night and, with just twenty minutes until the start of the most precipitous Alpine section, the team realised they’d forgotten to bring my racer. A frantic call for assistance goes out and eventually some Provençal peasant produces a yellow folding bike. Then we’re off. Everyone just vanishes in the first minute, leaving me and thousands of French people with cowbells. I woke as humiliated as when I went to sleep.

Got the Tube to work because it should be marginally less awful than cycling. Except a girl sitting opposite me breaks the cardinal Tube rule (Thou shalt never talk to another person on the Tube) by saying, ‘Hello, William, how are you?’