Infidelity for Beginners

by Danny King

  Andrew is currently looking into wigs. He says he read in one of his leaflets that wigs can be important psychological crutches. That maybe so, but they’re also pretty expensive. The good ones, that is. Spend anything less than three or four hundred pounds and I might as well walk around with the mop on my head. I know I can get free wigs on the NHS but I think I might dodge the whole wig issue altogether in favour of a hat.

  With this in mind, I am leafing through several catalogues in search of a suitable bonnet. I believe they’re coming back in fashion. They must be, they seem all the rage in the out-patients’ clinic.

  Chapter 18. Ominous Signs

  I stayed in the car for Sally’s first support group meeting. Not because I couldn’t bear the thought of having to spend an afternoon surrounded by a load of people with cancer, but because Sally didn’t want me to come in with her. She was apprehensive about what lay in store but nevertheless she was determined to brave it alone. She likened it to those sissy first year pupils who cried on the first day of school and who wouldn’t let their mothers leave so that every autumn Sally would have to spend a day teaching half a dozen house wives what the letter A looked like. Mind you, she reckoned one or two of them probably needed it.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind?” she asked when I pulled up into the car park.

  “Of course,” I reassured her, feeling half-snubbed and half-relieved.

  “Okay, I’ll see you out here at four. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Go to the pub and get slaughtered, I suppose,” I replied. Sally said she wished she could come with me, then gave me a kiss and climbed out of the car. “Play nice with the other sickies,” I called at her through the wound-down window, then instantly regretted it when one such sicky with no eyebrows and a similar hat to Sally’s walked past a split-second later.

  They disappeared through the door and into their meeting, so I climbed out from underneath the dashboard and wondered what I should do with myself. I decided not to spend the entire hour staring at the door and set about searching for ways to distract my brain, having not thought to buy a paper and reluctant to go wandering off looking for a newsagents in case Sally needed a quick getaway.

  I spent ten minutes playing with the stereo, trying to remember how to store stations on the preset buttons and lost Radio 2 altogether before giving up and looking for something else to occupy my thoughts.

  My dashboard was pretty dusty so I found a packet of tissues in the glove box and gave it a wipe, then turned my attention to my wing-mirrors and gave them a spit and polish too until I could virtually see the car behind in them – very unusual for my mirrors. Then I took out all the mats and gave them a bit of a shake. Then I neatly ordered everything in my boot. Then I cleared all the old car park tickets and sweet wrappers out of the compartments down the side of both doors and found a rubbish bin. Then I played with my radio again.

  Then I saw how far my seat could recline.

  Then I looked at my watch and the door again.

  I was just wondering if I should start the car and do a couple of circuits of the car park in order to find a better – nay the best – parking spot when my mobile rang. No number came up to indicate who was calling but I answered it anyway, thankful for the distraction.

  “Hello?”

  “Andrew, it’s Godfrey,” a morose voice moaned somewhere off in telephone land.

  “Oh, hello Godfrey, where are you?” I asked, checking my watch to see that I only had another fifteen minutes to fill before Sally was finished.

  “Well I’m at work ain’t I? Where else am I going to be on a Tuesday afternoon?” he pointed out, though his pointing seemed to point more at me than it did in him. See, while Norman had given me a week’s compassionate leave to be with Sally when she’d gone in for her surgery, he’d instantly doubled it when the doctors had found more than we’d bargained for and allowed me to throw in my entire year’s holiday allocation so that I hadn’t actually been anywhere near the office in over six weeks. I was still doing a few bits and bobs on the magazine that either Norman or Godfrey posted or emailed me, including all of my regular columns and features, but the majority of the day-to-day running was being shouldered by Norman, which is remarkable when you think about it. How many other bosses would’ve done the same? Not many. And even though the workload wasn’t exactly breaking rocks for eights hours a day it still spoke volumes about Norman.

  “When are you coming back?” Godfrey forced himself to ask, a reticence in his voice a vestige of our recent run-ins.

  “Erm… I don’t really know. Soon I hope. Another week or two. Why, is everything okay?” Godfrey exhaled deeply into the phone and I had visions of him on the other end of the line screwing up his face and snapping pens in half.

  “Fucking Norman…!” he finally grumbled.

  “Got you working has he?” I sympathised.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with him, he can’t leave anything alone. Anything,” he complained bitterly.

  “Why, what’s he doing?” I asked, happier than ever to be out of the firing line.

  “It’s not what he’s doing, it’s what he’s got me doing,” he corrected me.

  “Okay, what’s he got you doing?” I chuckled.

  “You know Caravan Fact File? He wants to make it twice as big. Twice as fucking big! Does he know how much work that’s going to entail? For fuck’s sake.”

  Caravan Fact File was four pages of listings in the back of the magazine which listed all the major manufacturers of caravans, caravan parts and caravan accessories and what they produced. To be perfectly honest, Caravan Fact File hadn’t changed in almost two years and was in dire need of updating. But they were Godfrey’s pages and Godfrey always just used to send the previous issue’s off on the first day of the month so that he could cross four pages off the flatplan before the working month had even started. And usually before I’d even finished drawing it up.

  “And you know what else he wants? He wants RRP prices next to all the listings. And he wants them updated every month. Every single month! I can’t do that. How the hell am I going to do all that?” he hyperventilated.

  “Well, I guess once you’ve got the first lot of prices in place it’s just a case of faxing or emailing them to the manufacturers each month for any updates and staying on top of it,” I reasoned.

  “He’s even talking about making the whole thing a little A5 pull-out booklet in the centre of the mag, printed on cheap paper, so that people can pull it out and carry it around when they’re out and about buying stuff. He doesn’t seem to understand that if we do that, we’ll then not only have all that extra work to do every month, but we’ll then also have to find something to replace Caravan Fact File in the back with. He keeps saying that it’s an opportunity to try out new features, but it’s not, it’s a nightmare, it’s a fucking nightmare!” Godfrey bawled.

  That was probably putting it a bit strong, but try to see it from Godfrey’s point of view. Up until Norman had taken an interest in the magazine, Godfrey had been in the enviable position where through routine, forward thinking and the copy and paste keys he’d been able to whittle his regular workload down to about four and a half full days a month – that’s spread out across the entire month remember – leaving him free to spend great swathes of his working week surfing the internet, playing on-line computer games, downloading music and movies and disappearing from the office in convenient half hour chunks to have secret pints he thought I didn’t know about.

  So when you’ve been used to this sort of cushy existence, extra work and increased responsibilities are always that much harder to come to terms with.

  “Please, you’ve got to come back before he has any more fantastic ideas,” Godfrey pleaded.

  As much as it amused me to hear about Godfrey’s ballooning duties, I wasn’t sure I shared Norman’s enthusiasm for doubling our workloads. See, new and exciting opportunities are great – in principle, and many’s the t
ime I’ve thought about trying out a new feature, but this can set a dangerous precedent because once you’ve done it in one issue, you’ve got to do it in the next. And in the next one after that and the next one after that until suddenly you realise the only way out of this enormous monthly head-ache is to turn your rotten ever-changing pages into a regular monthly feature and before you know it you’re copying and pasting Tow Bar Inventory every month and crossing off flatplan pages in the pub with Godfrey.

  “Look Godfrey, Norman likes to shake things up occasionally, as every publisher does. You never know, it might actually be interesting doing something new for a change, something that’s actually a bit taxing rather than just sitting there rotting in your rut and going through the motions,” I speculated, though I could’ve easily added, “all the same, rather you than me mate”.

  “Oh spare me will you, you sound just like Norman,” he objected.

  “Well look, it’s only for a few weeks, not the rest of your life, so you’ll just have to make the best of it. He’s not messing with any of my stuff is he?”

  “Not for the moment, but you should be warned that he’s talking to the repro house about making Tom’s mag 148 pages, 120 of them editorial. You might want to tell Tom to hurry up and learn to walk again before he finds himself editing a fucking catalogue.”

  Jesus, Godfrey was right, this was getting out of hand. I had to get back there.

  “Okay, I’ll try and get into the office some time before the end of this week and maybe speak to Norman and see if he’ll let me take the mag back over on a part-time basis. In the meantime try and look as busy as you can for eight hours a day so that he doesn’t saddle us with any more improvements.”

  “Will do,” Godfrey agreed, before catching me by surprise and wishing Sally all the best.

  “Thanks,” I told him, happy that the worst seemed to be over between us, albeit only in the face of a common enemy.

  I now heard muffled murmurs his end and asked the palm of Godfrey’s hand if everything was okay before Godfrey came back on the line with a fresh case of grumbles and told me that somebody else wanted to speak to me. I braced myself to hear Norman launch into one about how he’d decided that we should deliver the magazines on BMXs ourselves but it wasn’t Norman who tickled a “hello” into my ear.

  It was Elenor.

  “Oh, hello,” I replied, a little unsure about which way this one was going to go.

  The last time I’d seen Elenor was in the office some six weeks ago. And an ice-cold blank page of herself she’d been too. She’d talked to me, of course, when she’d needed to, but I suspected that this was only because ignoring me would’ve been too telling. So, all her counters had been reset to 0000 and we’d spent a few minimalistic weeks of economic interaction, which, when all was said and done, had been something of a blessing as it drew a very thick line under… all that silliness.

  All that silliness?

  Okay, I’ll admit it: all my silliness.

  For a few weeks I’d walked around with my head up my arse and I still shake my head and wonder how I could’ve let myself get so carried away. I can’t explain it. I really can’t. I guess I’d just enjoyed the fantasy while it had lasted, but wasn’t quite so keen on it when it almost became a reality.

  But I can’t do anything about that now. All I can do is learn from my mistakes – or near-mistakes, as my old friend from Frimley Park Hospital would say – move on and spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to Sally. Perhaps without letting on too specifically what I was trying to make up for.

  I just hoped Elenor felt the same way.

  “We’re all missing you Andrew. I’m missing you in particular,” she told me just a trifle less huskily than that dog who used to say “sausages” on That’s Life.

  I see.

  “Well, yes, thank you. I hope to be back as soon as I can. I just need to be with Sally, my wife, for the moment and do all I can for her, but I’ll pass on your best wishes and I’m sure I’ll see you all soon,” I told her, without Elenor having given me any wishes to pass on.

  Naturally, this gave her the wrong idea entirely.

  “Oh, I understand. Is she there with you then?”

  “No, not at all. I’m in the car waiting for her to come out of her first support group meeting,” I told her, then instantly regretted this and wished I’d lied.

  “Oh well, don’t worry, no one’s listening this end. Godfrey’s gone off in a sulk and Norman’s back in his office for the moment,” she reassured me, then asked if I’d be coming up for Emmeline’s leaving do on Friday. “Everyone’s going to be there,” she promised, prompting visions of me standing around in some God-awful Croydon boozer, laughing and joking with Elenor, Rosemary, Norman, Godfrey, my miserable designer Adam, the Xtremers and the sandwich man while my wife made a super-human effort to crawl to the bathroom back home to vomit blood into the toilet.

  “Tempting,” I told her. “But I don’t think so. My wife needs me and…” I took a deep breath, “I think I’m probably going to give work parties a miss from now on, if you know what I mean.”

  Elenor didn’t and told me not to be so boring.

  “Actually, I think I’m going to be very boring from now on. Very, very boring,” I promised her, to which Elenor pointed out that this was boring. “Yes, I know, but I like boring. And my wife likes boring, so I think I’m going to be the most boring man in the office from now on.”

  Elenor turned this over in her mind and told me that it didn’t bother her one way or the other what I did with my life, it was mine to lead and I could do what I wanted with it.

  “I could never be boring though,” she told me, rather boringly. “I’ve just got to go for it.”

  “Well then you go for it and have fun on Friday. Oh and please pass on my apologies to Emmeline,” whoever the fuck she was. At that moment, women in hats started emerging from the building and I looked at my watch. It was just gone four.

  “Anyway, I’ve got to go as Sally’s meeting has just finished. Tell Godfrey to give me a call if he has any more problems and I’ll see you some time next week probably. Okay then,” I quickly told her, then hung up just as she was in mid-tantalise.

  “I’m looking forw…”

  Sally emerged from the hall looking a lot happier than she’d done when we’d first arrived. She was in deep conversation with another eyebrowless woman, but took a moment out to wave enthusiastically in my direction.

  I waved back and almost choked on the love I felt for her, such was the contrast in feelings I had for her and the girl I’d just spoken to. My God, she was great. Just looking at her chatting and smiling with that other cancer lady. My wife was absolutely fantastic. Absolutely.

  And wasn’t I a big dummy? Christ!

  The smile slipped a little from my face but I tried not to dwell on my own shortcomings and put a positive spin on my conversation with Elenor.

  If nothing else, I’d at least proved to myself that her spell was well and truly lifted and that I knew I’d be able to work opposite her from now on and feel nothing but deep disappointment with myself for the way I’d behaved.

  No matter how boring that was of me.

  Elenor probably wouldn’t believe me at first and I could envisage a set of circumstances where she might even try to reinitiate my interests. Not because I was so utterly desirable you understand, but because I wouldn’t rise to her flirting from now on. But I was confident I could cope with anything Elenor threw at me. I felt vaccinated. Inoculated against her feminine charms. And it was then that I finally realised that my old friend from the hospital had been one hundred per cent right about everything.

  It really was better to be tempted and to pass temptation than to never be tempted at all. At least, I reckon it had been in my case. Because it finally made me realise what I had. And just how lucky I was.

  “Hello you,” Sally said, climbing into the car and giving me a welcoming kiss.

  “Hello you,”
I replied, returning her kiss. “Let’s go home.”

  Sally’s Diary: May 3rd

  I must say, I’m somewhat relieved to have attended my first meeting and lived to tell the tale. I don’t know what I was expecting, something like a cross between Alcoholics Anonymous and a sinking lifeboat I suppose, where one-by-one we all stood up and admitted we were dying, but we were not afraid, in exchange for a round of applause and a cup of tea. But it wasn’t like that at all. Once I got over my initial jitters, I found I really… well, not exactly enjoyed it, but I took a lot from it. We played the inevitable game of top trumps with our CA125 counts, which I’m glad to say I didn’t win, but for the most part we just chatted about our experiences and shared what we’d learnt along the way. Forewarned is forearmed as they say. A lot of the other women were further into their treatments than I so I was happy to sit and listen for most of the meeting, although by the end I’d found my voice.

  You know the sad thing that never occurred to me up until this point is that it’s not only women with partners who get cancer. Single women get it too. A number of those I talked to this afternoon, Joan in her fifties and Sarah in her mid-forties, are having to go through this whole process alone. Well, not quite alone, as Joan has two children of university age, and Sarah has friends and family close by, but neither has a regular partner to speak of. Sarah was divorced four years ago and hasn’t even told her ex-husband about her illness, which I find bonkers, though perhaps it wasn’t the most amicable of separations. And Joan is widowed, though I don’t know for how long. I didn’t like to pry. Either way though, it just goes to show that the expression is right; there really is always someone worse off than yourself.

  Which is why I guess these support groups are so important. And not just for single women like Sarah and Joan, but for all of us. Because we’re drawing strength from each other. Andrew’s been like a rock and I don’t think I could’ve coped without him, but it feels good to be part of something which is helping others too.