William Walkers First Year of Marriage (15 page)

The Destroyer of Relationships is mercifully away for the weekend but kindly left a note under the door for either of us to find.

Dear William,

It’s been fun sharing the same house with you but not as much fun as it could have been. Enjoy your tweedy life in the countryside and call me if it gets too boring.

Saskia xxxxxx

What is wrong with the woman? Thank God I got back before Isabel did.

‘We don’t need any removal men. We’ll hire a van and do it ourselves.’ That’s now top of my list of Words That Will Come Back to Haunt Me, marginally ahead of ‘I’ll never get pickpocketed,
darling. I’m too alert,’ and, ‘We don’t need waterproofs, the forecast is sunny and, besides, a bit of light rain on an alpine trek won’t kill us, now will it?’

Andy was the first to be injured, falling harder than he would have done if he hadn’t been determined not to smash the vase he was holding on the way down. He really is a loyal friend again. A loyal friend with a nasty gash on his arm.

Then I lifted with my arms not my knees and people three streets away heard my back snap. It was agony until Isabel dropped her end of a chest of drawers early, causing a second snap. After that, it didn’t hurt any more and I can now turn my head right around, like an owl.

I don’t know how we got the sofa up the stairs but we sure as hell couldn’t get it down again. So we decided to take the bay window out and lower it onto the street—only the sheer terror of lowering a sofa out of a first-floor window caused us all to become momentarily hysterical. It fell the last two metres and we now have two armchairs instead of one sofa.

Other casualties included three of the twelve wedding plates, one of the four whisky glasses, all of the champagne flutes and, when no one was looking, accidentally on purpose, a horrible crystal sculpture of a unicorn sent by one of Isabel’s distant Polish relatives.

During the whole exhausting, arm-stretching, unending nightmare, Isabel managed to say ‘I told you so’ only fourteen times and, by one in the morning, a mere nine hours behind schedule, the flat was empty, all our wordly goods were in a battered old van and we were off to Kent like a couple of hobos.

Ahh, a fresh start. A new dawn. A proper marital home at last. I can’t remember much about yesterday except that I had arms like Mr Tickle, that there are no traffic wardens patrolling our new road and that Isabel was actually squealing with delight because we had a spare room and our own private, non-communal stairs and a garden rather than a park full of used condoms and syringes. Oh, and that Isabel’s mum came around twice for no reason whatsoever.

Today was great. After a first night in the new house we weren’t woken by dance music, screaming or Saskia’s high heels clicking away down the street. We were woken by birds tweeting, trees rustling and the sound of trickling water. The boiler, described in our survey as ‘possibly all right, possibly not, can’t tell ‘cos it wasn’t a Friday when we did the inspection’, had sprung a fairly significant leak and water was trickling, like a romantic rural stream, down our bathroom wall.

We soon staunched the flow and embraced each other happily like we were doing a remake of
The Good Life
. After all, we were in the country now: a few teething problems were inevitable. We had breakfast on the patio because we’d never had a patio before, then went in for a hot bath together because it was a crisp November morning and our alfresco breakfast had given us hypothermia. Even Isabel will have a hot bath sometimes.

The commute was fine; no, really it was. Door to door, it only took an hour or so. Well, an hour and a half. But that’s because I had to buy a ticket and I just missed the 08.24 and the next one wasn’t until 08.47 and that was running late. I reckon I can get it down to under an hour. But even an hour and a half is fine because it gives me a chance to read. Really getting into the
Magna Carta
book now.

And I should normally get a seat. I hadn’t understood why all the regular commuters were standing in small bunches on the platform. Turns out it’s because the train doors always open in the same place. If I’d been in a bunch rather than in between two bunches, I would have stood a chance of a seat. So it’ll be fine. I’m sure of it.

This evening, the neighbour popped around to introduce herself and tell us that our car was parked pointing in the wrong direction. She was hopping from one foot to the other, said her name was Primrose and that she got very twitchy when cars were pointing the wrong way even though she knew it was irrational. I said my name was William and that she was right to describe it as irrational because this was a quiet residential street and we could park the car whichever way we wanted. She said she wasn’t trying to be difficult, it was simply that she needed the cars to be all lined up. I suggested that, perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, she was overreacting. So she put her hands over her ears and started hopping more urgently. I tried to explain some more but she just hopped faster and started humming, then umming, then screaming, ‘
It’s the wrong way. It’s the wrong way, it’s the wrong way!!!!!
’

Isabel ran to the door with a paper bag, which Primrose proceeded to blow into, then tear up, then eat while we both tried to calm her. I agreed to turn the car around and her mood immediately brightened. Still chewing the paper bag, she repeated her welcome to the neighbourhood, told us to watch out for the people at number 24 and then walked off down the drive, taking care to only stand on cracks.

One hour twelve minutes but still didn’t get a seat. A woman with a scarf on her head beat me to it. Isabel did the commute in fifty-six minutes, but that’s because she’s leaving an hour later when the rest of the world has already travelled.

Isabel does her commute in two minutes this morning on account of the fact that she has wangled Wednesdays and Fridays as ‘working from home’ days. I, on the other hand, am back to an hour and a half. ‘We apologise for the late running of this service. This is due to the late running of an earlier service.’ I want an apology and reason for the late running of the earlier service then, but none is forthcoming.

I am beaten to the last seat by the woman with the scarf again, so I take more notice of her. She is at least sixty. She has the look of someone who has spent her life being mean and self-serving. She is incredibly particular about how she folds her paper and how she lines up her glasses case on the flip-table. Her wispy, thinning hair forms a perfect, gravity-defying orb several inches around her head, protected from gusts of wind by the paisley scarf. At home, her tidy pink bathroom with shell motifs will be overflowing with big gold hairspray cans. We owe at least a third of the hole in the ozone layer to this woman.

An hour and five. Scarf woman got the bloody seat again. I think I’ve worked her out: she’s a barger. Everyone else dashes for a seat in a very polite, commuterish way, including me. But she barges. She also yelps if anyone touches her, which gives her an element of surprise. When a man put his briefcase on her shoe, she yelped as if it was a ten-pin bowling ball. He stepped back in shock; she nipped onto the train before him. I could try a different carriage altogether but that would be what she wanted. And who’s to say there isn’t a bescarfed monster on every carriage to London? Tomorrow, I will try a new strategy.

Late-night Ikea visit because Ikea on a Saturday is even worse than a shopping centre on a Bank Holiday Monday. It is still a Swedish vision of hell, with meatballs on the side. Stupidly, I hadn’t eaten beforehand so I get hunger-anger before we even get through beds, and become unbearable. Isabel sends me off to the hotdog area early.

The 50p hotdog is always my Ikea highlight. It is something to look forward to, to focus on, to keep me strong as I battle the urge to fall to my knees in the middle of the Ingenious Foldaway Space-Saving Shelf Section and beg for a quick and painless death. Because it is a delicious hotdog and it only costs 50p. By having the hotdog prematurely, I am left with nothing to look forward to except more time in Ikea.

Trudging back, I cause worried looks and mutterings from other shoppers—‘Look, Dad, he’s going the wrong way! He’s not following the arrows. What will happen to him, Dad?’—and it is like being in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. Except in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, the Thought Police didn’t wear yellow.

Isabel has found a shelf system called something ridiculous and we spend maybe seven or eight hours debating whether it would
look less Ikea-ish in birch, beech or just white. We go for beech and trek down into the bowels of the not-at-all-super-store to try to find the flat-pack version. Isabel is convinced it will fit in the Corsa. I am not.

Then we pick out some plastic things, some glass things and some balsawood things, all of which we will regret buying as soon as we get home. We buy a wacky coloured rug after convincing ourselves it looks as if it’s from the Conran Shop, which it doesn’t.

They don’t let you out of the loading bay area with your trolley. Oh no, that could cause a revolution. So I go and get the car. It’s all becoming too much now—even Isabel is getting irritable. And the flat-pack doesn’t fit. I knew it wouldn’t and so, while people honk their horns and fight for spaces in a swirling Ikea maelstrom all around, I adopt the I-told-you-so position (arms crossed, motionless, slow shaking of head).

‘Now we’re going to have to walk home, along the hard shoulder of the M25, with a stupid flat-pack I knew wouldn’t fit in the car.’

In a strange role reversal, Isabel becomes the flogger of the dead horse.

‘Try putting the front seats forward a bit more.’ Doesn’t work.

‘Try taking the headrest off.’ Doesn’t work. Breaks the headrest.

‘Try jogging it up and down a bit.’ Doesn’t work. Just makes me sweatier.

‘It’s only an inch out. Try shoving it one more time.’

There is a loud crack as the shelves push into the rear-view mirror which works like the tip of a spear and drives straight through the windscreen. We both stop and look at the finger of cracked glass spreading down towards the wipers.

‘I told you it would fit,’ says Isabel.

The plan worked like a charm. By standing right next to her and adopting a brace position when the train door pulled up in front of us, I was able to repel her barging without actually looking as though I was barging her back. Because I had started off so close to her, she simply couldn’t get any momentum up. And she couldn’t yelp at me because I hadn’t moved. She had nothing to protest about.

Unfortunately, I was so busy blocking that neither of us got a seat so we had to stand facing each other the whole way to London Bridge. Judging by the cold, cruel twinkle in her eye, she now knows she has an adversary.

Our first weekend in the country and the prospect of a lie-in is ruined by the 8 a.m. arrival of Isabel’s mother, a reluctant husband in tow. She has failed to observe the imaginary barrier that must not be crossed by parents before 10 a.m. I shall have to put up a real one, ringing the house with a high-voltage fence, barbed wire and dog patrols.

‘Morning, all. Thought you’d be up by now, goodness, kids these days. I’ve brought some stew and some cake, and some Mr Muscle. We’re going to get this kitch—
Oh my God, what’s that?!
’

She had noticed the new scarecrow in Primrose’s garden.

‘It’s the neighbour’s new scarecrow,’ I say, reaching for the kettle.

‘What does she need a scarecrow for? Her garden’s the size of a postage stamp.’

‘It’s because she has an irrational fear of pigeons. She doesn’t like the way they look at her.’

‘What’s it made of?’

‘Chicken bones.’

By mid-morning, it is clear that I am getting in the way so I escape by mountain bike into the surrounding hills. The minor irritations of life in the country are all worth it for this. Fresh air in the lungs, quiet country lanes, healthy exercise. No Avocado, no Denise, no £70 joining fee. You can’t beat it. We’ve definitely made the right decision.

We definitely haven’t made the right decision. Isabel has gone mad. Today, before I was even properly awake, she announced a new raft of measures designed at countrifying our lives. I thought I had suffered enough with the whole temporary hot-bath clampdown and the goat’s-milk episode. But now, in addition to resolutions 2314 through 2618, three more: we shall be ordering a vegetable box from a local farm each week, we shall no longer be using washing powder, and I am to build a compost box in the garden.

By the time our friends come down for the house-warming, we’ll be living in the woods and eating worms.

Got a seat. Scarf woman furious, which made my day, but then the person sitting next to me started barking down his mobile phone, which didn’t. I’m only on page sixty-two of
Magna Carta
and it’s tough going at the best of times. With the barker barking in my ear it was impossible. I can’t understand how some people have failed to realise that on-train barking is socially unacceptable in civilised society.

‘Ted. S’George. Ya. Ya. What’s the latest? Ya. Ya. Ya. Ya. Ya. No. Ya. Ya. How many did you get? Ya. Ya. Ya. Ya. What are we going to do with them? Na. Na. Na. Na. Yes, I would.’

Then, more annoying still.

‘Sorry, Ted. Bloody tunn—…sorry, Ted. Another bloody tunn—…sorry about this, Ted, lots of bloody tunn—’

Isabel all excited because she spoke to a real, live farmer and ordered real, live vegetables, which will be arriving, milk-float-style, tomorrow. I’m very excited because the broken car windscreen is covered by our insurance.

It’s all sodding turnips. Six of the big, flavourless bastards. And a tiny bit of broccoli, one courgette and some unfathomable beige things—half carrot, half dead man’s fingers.