‘Saskia. What a surprise.’
[Keep calm. Keep calm. Keep calm. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Don’t panic.]
‘Good heavens. How wonderful to see you.’
[Good heavens? Who says good heavens? And stop being so friendly. Keep calm.]
‘If it isn’t the man who molested me on Hyde Park Corner and then sent me off to America in disgrace.’
‘Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Aren’t you supposed to be in New York?’
[Don’t go red. Don’t go red. Don’t go red.]
‘New York’s over. The men are wimps. So I’m back. Want to show me the sights of London again? Or are you jetting off after snake-eating orchids again?’
‘Yes, no, marvellous. I’m married now.’
[Well done. Very cool.]
‘Yes, you said that. To Elizabeth?’
‘No, to Isabel. As it happens, today’s our five-month anniversary.’
‘Ahhh, how sweet. I’d like to meet her.’
[That won’t work. That will never work. It might have done if I hadn’t bragged like a big fat idiot about the Hyde Park thing to Isabel when I was trying to impress her with my wild and thrilling past. Or lied about East Timor. Or never mentioned any email contact. Idiot.]
‘Okay, I’ll give you a call.’
[That’s better. Take the number, buy the partridge, get the hell out.]
‘Here’s my card, it’s got my mobile on it. I’m having a flat-warming tomorrow. You should come over. Bring Isabel if you like.’
‘Can’t, I’m afraid. I’m doing partridge.’ I hold up the partridge as proof.
‘Oh well. Give me a call. Or I’ll start to think you’re avoiding me. Which would be silly, wouldn’t it? We’re both grown-ups.’
‘Yes, of course. Bye then.’
[Well done. Walk away. Keep smiling. Walk away. Bye-bye, Relationship Destroyer.]
Back at the flat, I’m calmer. No one needs to know anything. Everything is fine. I haven’t done anything wrong.
‘Is that lipstick on your lips?’ asks Isabel, peering at the lipstick Saskia obviously sneaked onto my lips because she’s one of those people that thinks kissing on lips is a perfectly acceptable way to greet friends.
‘No, I just bit my lip,’ I reply brilliantly.
No one needs to know anything. Everything is fine.
While I’m preparing the partridge, the doorbell goes. ‘Come and meet our new neighbour, darling,’ calls Isabel.
‘Sorry, can’t. Partridge is almost ready.’ I don’t want to meet the new head-banging neighbours and Isabel knows it.
‘Come on, darling, don’t be antisocial.’ There’s an edge to her voice so I trudge up the stairs, bracing myself for the skinhead death-thrash metal rock band that’s bound to be standing at the door.
‘I thought you were doing partridge tomorrow night, you naughty man,’ rasps the pneumatic blonde in the inch-long skirt.
Saskia. The Destroyer of Relationships. My new neighbour.
‘The deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurlyburly
of the chaise longue.’M
RS
P
ATRICK
C
AMPBELL
on marriage (1865-1940)
Last night, on my five-month wedding anniversary, I slept under the same roof as two women I have copulated with. Of all the flats in all the world, why did she have to move into the one below ours? What are the chances? I’ve slept with eight people properly in my entire life, five if I’m being honest. Four if I’m being really honest. There are six billion people on the planet. So that’s one in more than a billion. Why couldn’t something else improbable like winning the lottery have happened instead?
On the plus side, she’s only there for a couple of months, house-sitting for some friend of a friend of a friend who’s bought the place as an investment. On the minus side, she’s there for a couple of months, with her legs and her lips and her massively inappropriate innuendos.
Isabel has reacted quite frighteningly, in that she has hardly reacted at all. ‘She looks like a bit of a tart. Can’t believe I married someone with such trashy taste in women.’ That’s all she has said, although there will inevitably be more.
After running out of every excuse but the obvious one (’Sorry, we can’t come because we only know each other because we used to have illicit sex together and I’m now happily married thank you very much and my wife knows about Hyde Park and the burnt duvet and doesn’t want us to have anything to do with you and good riddance’), we drop into Saskia’s flat-warming. Half an hour later, we drop out again because everyone is five years younger than us, they’re all snogging each other and, while Isabel is being chatted up by a Frenchman wearing a mesh T-shirt, Saskia asks if I remember every detail of our first night together because she does.
She appears to have forgotten about my time in East Timor.
It is a beautiful autumn day so I suggest we drive down to Kent and have another snoop at the house in Isabel’s mum’s village. Isabel asks if this is because I’m trying to get on her good side because I slept with the trollop downstairs who is now in the process of turning our address into a notorious brothel. I say it isn’t, which is a lie: I don’t care if we end up living in the same bedroom as Isabel’s mum, I have to get away from Saskia.
We snoop. I say I love it. Isabel looks at me suspiciously. I say no really. I want to grow vegetables and eat locally farmed sheep and
get a train to work and go sailing and mountain-biking and orienteering at the weekend and she says great, we’ll put an offer in on Monday if it’s still available. Then we walk the six yards or so to her parents’ for a cup of tea, during which the following conversation takes place:
‘We’ve decided to make an offer on the house,’ says Isabel.
‘But I thought William wasn’t sure he wanted to live here,’ says her mum.
‘He is now that an ex-girlfriend—sorry, a girl he was seeing when he was going out with Elizabeth—has moved into the flat downstairs.’
‘That’s not the reason, darl—’ I interject.
‘The one he met on Hyde Park Corner,’ she interjects.
‘Hyde Park Corner? But that’s a roundabout,’ her mum interjects.
‘Anyway, I really like this vill—’ I interject.
‘What’s this about Hyde Park Corner?’ Her father has come in from the potting shed, mid-re-itemisation of his Japanese theatre programme collection.
‘Nothing,’ I say.
‘Bloody treacherous, if you ask me,’ he offers.
‘It is if your boyfriend goes there with a trollop called Saskia.’
I step outside for some fresh air, marvelling at the timing. Why couldn’t we have had the inevitable argument on our own? Why do it in front of the parents? Isabel’s grandfather, a fit but almost entirely deaf ninety-year-old, is sitting on a bench minding his own business. He beckons me over and we sit watching the small part of the world we can see go by. I know he’s ninety and not long for this world, but at least he doesn’t have much to worry about any more. As if to exemplify this, he reaches out for his afternoon cucumber sandwich, upon which an enormous grasshopper is perched.
‘Mr Jeffreys, there’s an enormous grasshopper perched on your cucumber sandwich,’ I say.
‘Ey, duck?’ he enquires, crunching through the doomed critter.
‘Nothing,’ I reply, because he’s already swallowed it and, as with a lot of things in life, what you don’t know won’t hurt you. Then I spend the whole drive home wondering whether grasshoppers are poisonous.
Good news: haven’t seen Saskia since Saturday—she appears to be keeping herself to herself (although it may be because I have been creeping in and out of our flat like a burglar). And our offer on the house near Isabel’s mum’s house has been accepted, after we assured the seller that we would be in a position to move quickly because flats in Finsbury Park were selling like hot cakes. I phone Arsehole, who is now so overfamiliar with me that he calls me ‘Big W’. I tell him we want to drop the price for a quick sale. Then, Isabel and I go out to celebrate with Andy and Johnson and…Alex. Her idea. But the mere fact that I’m still married and that there’s a light at the end of Saskia’s tunnel, so to speak, means I don’t care.
‘How’s it going, babes?’
He is still a cock, though.
‘Fine, looks like we’ve found somewhere to move away from William’s floozy.’
Oh no, not again.
‘What floozy?’ He looks, for the briefest moment, like all his Christmases have come stacked high on top of each other in an enormous pyramid of festive joy. But he hides it before Isabel notices and then, having revelled in the telling of the whole unfortunate coincidence, takes his usual Machiavellian tack.
‘Come on, babes. It’s not William’s fault that a girl he was unfaithful with has moved into your house. You should be more trusting. He’s hardly going to be unfaithful again, is he? Are you, William? Of course you aren’t. Once bitten and all that. Now, drinkies, anyone? It sounds like we have something to celebrate. The imminent move to the country, I mean. Not this terrible situation with the floozy. Hahahahahahaha.’
I hit him so hard in the face that his body flies clean across the room, crumpling over a rather angular chair in the corner. Then, as he staggers to his feet, I knee him four or five times in the crotch before round-housing him over the bar and into the display of drinks beyond. Then he asks what drink I want, I stop fantasising and ask for a double Scotch on the rocks.
In the toilet, even though we both know men aren’t supposed to chat there, Andy says that he’s sorry he ever thought Alex was a good bloke. He can see now that he’s a cock. I am relieved, in more ways than one. In fact, if we hadn’t been at the urinal, Andy’s prodigal return to my team could have been worthy of a man-hug.
Used correctly and sparingly, a man-hug can seal a powerful, emotional bond between close male friends. Under no circumstance should a man-hug become a standard form of greeting among men who see each other regularly in work and/or social situations. That’s what hand-shaking is for.
Situations which may warrant a man-hug include: the return of a best friend from a stay overseas of not less than eight months (two weeks on a Greek island is not sufficient); life-changing good news (e.g. engagement/impregnation of wife/arrival of first-born son, but not pay rise/house purchase/successful completion of kitchen conversion); life-changing bad news (e.g. divorce/family
bereavement/limb amputation, but not marital dispute over new type of wallpaper/failure to win lottery); significant national sporting victories (e.g. England winning the Rugby World Cup) but only if in a pub, not if in a living room; and the meeting of minds after a long-running disagreement (e.g. Andy thinking Alex was an acceptable human being).
Man-hugs should be brief.
Hands should only be used to back-pat; not, under any circumstances, to rub or squeeze.
Chests should touch but nothing else.
Denise has completely lost interest in me and I miss her sadistic taunts. Furthermore, I now have to move the weight key thing at least ten notches up rather than down after no-longer-sweaty-or-fat guy has been there. It’s utterly demoralising so I tell Denise I don’t think it’s working out. She half-heartedly suggests ‘we’ join a class. How about aerobics? It’s for girls. Or boxercise? It’s for lesbians. Or spinning? I think I’ll just leave actually. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Sign here.’ Don’t care. Thursday is the new Friday. Off to Stockholm tomorrow after Isabel spotted Ryanair flights for 99p.
‘It will be like a second honeymoon,’ said Isabel.
‘But darling, we’re unlikely to get diarrhoea, jet lag, altitude sickness and heatstroke in Scandinavia. At least, not all at the same time. How can it possibly be as good as our first honeymoon?’
A bad start to our spontaneous second mini-honeymoon. Because our flight leaves Stansted at 6.05 bloody a.m., we have to
get to Stansted at 4.05 a.m. which is before the Tube starts so we have to get a taxi which costs £46 or more than twenty-three times as much as it’s costing us to fly to Stockholm. It also means we had to wake up at half two, which is effectively the night before, which is just horrible.
At the airport, whole families of aggressive holidaymaking yobs, all dressed head to toe in England football kit, are already drinking pints of lager and fighting with each other, even though they would normally be tucked up in their beds at this hour. Then they all get on our flight before us through a mixture of threats, elbowing and well-timed sprints, so Isabel and I fail to find two seats next to each other. I pay about forty quid for a soggy sandwich and try to improve on the two-and-a-quarter hours’ sleep I’ve had while the hyperactive child behind me uses my headrest, then my head, as a punchbag.
Obviously, we didn’t fly to Stockholm at all. We flew to Stockholm-Skavsta, which really means we flew to Skavsta-Stock-holm, which really means we flew to
bloody Skavsta
. Stockholm is fifty-five miles away by coach, the first of which we just miss because the flight was late in and all the hyperactive families elbow their way off the plane before us and we were half asleep and bloody hell…So we wait for the midday coach and an hour and twenty minutes later we’re in Stockholm. By the time we reach the hotel, it’s nearly three. It feels as if we’ve been travelling for twelve hours, mainly because we have. So we decide to have a quick siesta. I wake up nine hours later thinking I’m in a small cell block in southern Turkey. Isabel is equally disorientated when I shake her awake.
We’re both starving and our hotel doesn’t do room service after 11 p.m., so we walk out into the Scandinavian night to forage for something to eat. It’s one in the morning and our part of Stockholm has shut. Our only option is to drink vodka on the streets with bored Swedish teenagers or buy a donkey-lip kebab from the
only food-seller who forgot to go home. Like starving Andean plane-crash survivors who decide to start eating one another, we opt, in desperation, for the kebab.
Have spent the rest of the weekend trying and failing to recover from peculiar Ryanair short-haul jet lag. Up at 5 a.m., bright-eyed and bloody bushy-tailed, roaming the streets in an attempt to find anything that’s open before eight; then, flagging, can hardly stay awake past 7 p.m.
Cruelly, our flight back from Skavsta-Skavsta didn’t leave until 10 p.m., hours after our Ryanair bedtime. At least, with the help of an axe and two hand grenades with the clips off, I managed to get us two seats next to each other. But then we landed at Stansted four or five seconds after the last train left. Tried to get a coach but they were on strike so took another cab, this time with an hour-long wait and a special airport premium. Sixty quid later (‘Take it or fackin’ leave it, guvna, there’s a whole fackin’ queue a people going a lot fackin’ furver than Finsbury facking Park who’ll take it’), our no-frills adventure is over. I feel as if I’ve been to Peru and back in a weekend, which probably would have been quicker and less stressful.
At least Alex didn’t pop out coincidentally from behind the plastic tree in our hotel foyer with a: ‘Hi, babes, fancy seeing you here. I’m still missing my Moroccan girlfriend, babes, so I thought I’d have a weekend in Stockholm to cheer my poor little self up, babes, babes, babes.’
‘Thanks for the note. You’re very naughty.’
Saskia is standing in the hall in her pants and nothing else, trapping me in full stealth-burglar mode between the letter boxes and the front door. I am speechless long enough for her to say, ‘And don’t worry, I understand.’ Then long enough again for her to walk right up to me, open her letter box, take out her letters, turn around and walk back into her flat.
Isabel is making toast upstairs. She is also only in her pants and nothing else.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing’s wrong. Why would anything be wrong? How could anything be wrong? Who would anything be wrong?’
So now she knew something was wrong.
‘I just like it when you make toast in your pants.’
I am now lying to my wife. Or at least concealing the truth. I do like it when she makes toast in her pants, especially when she follows the Marmite recipe properly. But I didn’t tell her about Saskia being in her pants. So that’s lying by omission. Which is tantamount to adultery. And what note? What bloody blinking note? I didn’t send Saskia a note. Why would anyone who’s been married to the girl of his dreams for five blissful months and eleven quite fraught days send a ‘naughty’ note to the girl of his nightmares?
Emergency pub meeting. Johnson says it’s the six-month itch when I tell him what happened this morning. I re-explain what happened this morning, emphasising that I did nothing, but he sticks to his theory. ‘It’s the six-month itch come early,’ he expounds. ‘You’ve heard of the seven-year itch? Well, that’s
outdated in the computer age. Everything happens much faster these days: speed-dating, speed-shagging, gunshot weddings, quickie divorces. There’s no time for a seven-year itch. That’s why there’s a six-month one.’