Six Months to Get a Life

by Ben Adams

  On reflection, I feel the need to restate and slightly refine my goals:

  Be a good dad;

  Be proud of myself; and

  Get a job

  On the subject of goal three, I have spent most of today revising my CV. Did you know I once did voluntary work for the World Wildlife Fund saving tigers in India? Oh, and I ran my own health and safety business too. Katie would be proud of me.

  Thursday 7th August

  Getting a job has to be a real priority. The more I think about money, the more I am starting to worry. My flat might not be something I am proud of but the thought of having to move back in to my parents’ fills me with dread. I have filled in five application forms over the course of the last few days. At least one of them, for a ‘performance manager’ job for my local council, sounds right up my street. Literally. It is based at the end of Martin Way, about a five minute walk from my flat.

  Amy and Lucy arrived back from San Diego this morning. Amy’s ex managed to get his arse in gear this time and picked them up from the airport. I haven’t been able to get Amy out of my head since our weekend in the Lakes. Spending some quality time alone with her is even higher up my priority list than getting a job, so I was pleased when Amy phoned me when she got home and invited me to dinner at her place tomorrow night. Our kids were both supposed to be with their other parent but when Lucy and Jack got their heads together, they pleaded with us to be invited to dinner too. So now a romantic twosome has turned in to a slightly awkward foursome. I did invite Sean as well. He politely declined saying he didn’t want to sit there all night and watch his brother behaving like a sissy.

  Saturday 9th August

  I am not sure if a rule book has been written for joint dates between fathers and sons and mothers and daughters, but in the taxi on the way over to Amy’s, Jack and I agreed to adhere to a number of rules. Jack undertook not to mention Julia under any circumstances. I agreed to buy Jack a new games console for Christmas. Jack also made me agree:

  Not to mention him wetting the bed when he was six or putting his mother’s bikini on when he was seven

  Not to get my phone out and show Lucy the video of him singing ‘If I Only Had a Brain’ in his primary school’s production of the Wizard of Oz

  Not to make him eat all his vegetables at dinner, especially if it’s spinach

  Not to boast about his academic abilities again

  Not to kiss Amy in front of him

  Not to laugh, comment or even look if he kisses Lucy

  Not to pretend I am cooler than I actually am

  As the taxi pulled up outside Amy’s, the driver muttered, ‘Bloody hell, they must be minted.’ Indeed they must be. The massive iron gates were open, revealing a house adorned with stone pillars and huge windows. Secluded lighting in the gardens that lined the drive lit up a positive zoo of ornately carved animals. And unlike the gravel out the back of my flat, Amy’s gravel wasn’t threadbare and littered with cat shit. It looked like it had been carefully raked by a gardener just before our arrival.

  On seeing the double-fronted mock something-or-other house, I half expected the butler to come rushing out to take our coats. Or is that the doorman’s job? If there is a butler or a doorman, Amy must have given them the night off because she and Lucy both came to greet us. Amy and I had an awkward moment where we didn’t know whether or not to kiss in front of our children and instead stuck to smiling at each other. Lucy on the other hand had no such qualms and wrapped her arms around Jack so tightly that she nearly suffocated the poor boy. I quite envied their uninhibited embrace.

  Amy led us all in to her palace. I nudged Jack to get him to take his shoes off at the door but Amy laughed and told me not to be so stupid. I bet the hall carpet cost more than all the floor surfaces in my flat put together. It was about the same size too. I caught myself wondering whether it was a shag pile. We walked through to a wood-panelled dining room. The whole room was clad in dark wood. To my untrained eye it all looked a bit imposing and austere but I am sure it oozed class. The table was laid for four but big enough to host double that comfortably.

  Overall the evening went well. Amy is a top cook. We had home-made spinach and ricotta calzone. Jack didn’t seem to notice the spinach. After dinner, the kids adjourned to somewhere else in the house (probably the drawing room) whilst Amy and I stayed seated at the table and shared most of a bottle of claret between us.

  Amy told me about her and Lucy’s San Diego holiday. It wasn’t as hot as they were expecting but unlike our trip to Turkey, they had no dramas to report. Lucy brought Jack back a cuddly panda as a present. If I had given Jack a panda, he would have given it to Albus and told me he wasn’t a baby anymore. But apparently it is OK to receive a cuddly panda from your girlfriend.

  The kids are off to Antigua tomorrow. Jack told me on the way home from Amy’s that he didn’t want to go. Secretly that made me feel good but I was ever the professional divorced dad and told him he would have a great time with his mum and his brother, and his mum’s new bloke. ‘Mark’s a dork, and Sean’s a cripple at the moment so I don’t see how it is going to be fun,’ replied Jack. The fact that Jack thinks that Mr comb-over is a dork pleased me, but I suspect the real reason that Jack didn’t want to go is because he will miss Lucy.

  The extent of Jack’s interest in Lucy is beginning to worry me. He is living life and that is great. Being in love is exciting, exhilarating. I am not worried about them having sex or anything like that either. They are still embarrassed about getting to first base.

  What worries me is how Jack will be when, and in my mind it is when and not if, he and Lucy break up. He has never had his heart broken before. I know it is something he will have to deal with at some point. I certainly did when I was a teenager – Andrea Hollingwood, I still haven’t forgiven you. But as his dad I want to protect him for as long as possible. I guess I just have to accept that some things are out of my control. Jack has to live his life, heartbreak and all.

  Monday 11th August

  I went to my ex’s this morning to see the boys off. I haven’t seen Sean since he left the hospital with my ex. When I arrived he was sitting on the sofa with his foot up. He was totally grumpy and wasn’t looking forward to the holiday either. I can’t say I blame him. He will struggle to walk on the sand. He can’t get his cast wet so I don’t quite know what he will do for three weeks in Antigua. I gave him a new hand-held gaming thingy that I picked up cheaply on eBay. It was the least I could do.

  I am not going to see the boys for the next three weeks. I haven’t gone that long without seeing them since they were born. I bet some people don’t go three weeks without seeing their kids for the whole of their lives.

  I am feeling pretty flat this evening and yes, I am blaming myself for ruining Sean’s Antigua trip.

  My evening gloom was interrupted by a phone call. Now, before I start on this one, in my defence I should point out that the phone reception on my mobile is dodgy in the new flat and I can’t read the phone screen without my glasses. I answered the phone.

  ‘Hello gorgeous, I have missed you,’ said Amy.

  ‘I am missing you too, sexy,’ I replied.

  ‘Ah, that’s good to hear. I need you. It has been a while since we made love,’ Amy said.

  Hang on a minute, Amy and I haven’t quite made love yet. Yet. Panic.

  ‘Er, who is this?’

  ‘Who do you bloody think it is?’ replied a cross Julia.

  I tried to recover the situation by telling her I was only joking but I don’t think I got away with it.

  ‘Are you seeing someone else?’ she asked.

  ‘No, of course not.’ I tried to sound outraged.

  Letting women down gently is something else I don’t have much experience of. In my youth it used to be them letting me down gently. Or sometimes not so gently – Andrea Hollingwood, you have a lot to answer for. I was trying to let Julia down gently and thought it would be kinder to her to say I just wanted to be fri
ends rather than telling her I had someone else, but I couldn’t seem to find the right words.

  ‘That’s all right then,’ she said. ‘I have really missed you over the last few weeks. Don’t you think it is great having someone special in your life again?’ This was getting worse.

  ‘Oh, Julia, you are special to me but…’

  ‘What are you doing tomorrow night?’

  ‘Nothing, but…’

  ‘Good, come round to mine. See you at 7.30.’

  ‘OK, see you then,’ I mumbled.

  I’m a numpty. A doofus. I tried composing a text but decided I wouldn’t have been very proud of myself if I had sent it. It read, ‘Sorry Julia, I just can’t do this anymore. Goodbye. Graham’. It sounded more like a suicide note than an end of relationship text in any case.

  Tuesday 12th August

  I am still missing the boys but I feel better now because I have sorted the Julia situation out. I manned up and phoned her this morning. I told her everything. Literally everything. She started off upset but by the time I got to the ‘Father and son, mother and daughter’ bit of the story, she was less frosty.

  ‘Why didn’t you just tell me all this in the first place?’ she asked.

  ‘I thought you’d be upset,’

  ‘I am a bit disappointed that I won’t be getting any more nookie for a while, but it isn’t as if I had fallen in love with you or anything, and come to think of it, the sex wasn’t the best I have ever had,’ she said. Bloody cheek. In the circumstances though, I probably deserved that dig so I let it go.

  Julia went on to tell me she has been talking to Katie. Apparently Katie and Bryan’s relationship has been on the rocks for a while now. Bryan has moved out and is living with his parents. That sounds familiar.

  This weekend is a no-kids weekend. It is also a no-football weekend. I am not quite sure what I am going to do with my time as Amy is visiting friends in Cheshire. Why is it that when I visit friends, I go to places like Morden? Amy goes to Alderley Edge or Saffron Walden.

  Wednesday 13th August

  This is the furthest I have ever been away from my children. And I don’t like it. On the day they flew to the Caribbean I kept looking at Twitter to check for plane crashes. I never normally give that sort of thing a thought when I am flying with the boys. At least I know they arrived safely. Jack texted me and told me ‘we are here’. That is about as descriptive as I would expect Jack to get via text. They have been there two days now and I haven’t heard any more.

  The boys are probably sitting on a luxury yacht being skippered around some idyllic island or other by Mr comb-over whilst my ex is sunbathing naked on the poop deck. I suspect this makes me a bad father but I hope they aren’t having too good a time. I am not wishing them an awful holiday. Just one that isn’t better than anything I can give them. I made the mistake of confessing my feelings to my parents when I went round for a coffee this afternoon. The coffee turned in to a few cans of London Pride. My mum reminded me that being a parent isn’t all about me. I should be putting Jack and Sean’s interests first. Apparently being a good parent is about being there when they need me, not them being there when I need them. Trust me to have social workers for parents. For once in their lives, why can’t they be on my side?

  I ended up having a few beers with Bryan last night. He tells me that Katie is an alcoholic. Tell me something I don’t know. Bryan’s contention is that it is no wonder he is having an affair with Tracey the hairdresser.

  ‘Which came first though, the chicken or the egg?’ I asked him. He didn’t seem to get my meaning and I confess I wasn’t interested enough in the answer to bother pursuing it.

  We spent most of the night talking about the pros and cons of living with your parents. But it must be said that over the last double whiskey we talked nonstop about what Tracey was like in bed. Very noisy apparently.

  Friday 15th August

  I have got another job interview. It is for that performance management job at Merton Council. Merton is famous for Paul, the comedian, who named himself after the council. Honestly, at least according to what I read when I started researching Merton.

  The interview is next week so I will do some prep over the next few days. But for now I am off to Amy’s. Generally, I hate my kids not being around but occasionally it has its advantages. Lucy is at her dad’s tonight too. Is tonight the night? I shaved and put my nearly new briefs on just in case.

  Sunday 17th August

  There was a spring in my step when Amy dropped me back home this afternoon. If I could whistle I would have been whistling. I have had a good few days. And nights.

  I have only had sex with one divorced woman so my study of what it is like to have sex with divorced women isn’t statistically significant. But having sex with a divorced woman is different from the passionate but clumsy fumblings that characterised my experiences of sex in my youth. In my youth I would always be worrying that someone’s mother would come in and interrupt us, that my condom would split or that the person I was having sex with would change her mind at any moment. Foreplay was therefore pretty absent in those days.

  Sex with a divorced woman is also different from the going-through-the-routine type sex I had with my wife. Even in our early days, our marital sex was little more than functional, the aim being either to produce a baby or to shut me up.

  Amy and I have both got baggage. Actually she would say she has got experience, I have got baggage. We didn’t rush headlong into it. We knew we had all night. We sat on her huge leather sofa and drank wine from each other’s glasses. We cuddled, we kissed, we talked about what we like and what we don’t like in bed, all very reasonable stuff. We drank some more and then I nearly broke my neck carrying her up her winding stately-home-style staircase to her bedroom. It was a bloody long way.

  She freshened up in the bathroom while I lay on her fourposter drinking more wine to stop the feelings of self-consciousness from creeping back in. When she opened the door of her en suite dressed in only her knickers to cover her modesty and climbed on to the bed next to me (not Spurs, not Liverpool but Manchester City. Or even Real Madrid), things just worked. They weren’t rushed. Nature just took its course. It was just, what’s the word, right. There was even an encore.

  The following morning as I was sitting in Amy’s conservatory eating a late breakfast of melon and strawberries (I am more a bacon and egg man but I went with the flow today), Amy asked me what my plans were for the day. Normally I would have spent my Saturday with the boys but they are thousands of miles away. When I told her I didn’t really have any plans, she invited me to stay for a bit longer.

  ‘But isn’t Lucy coming back from her dad’s?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, but we haven’t got anything to hide. She knows we are seeing each other, so why shouldn’t you stay?’

  I have already admitted to being slightly nervous around Lucy. This isn’t because Lucy is a particularly hard character to deal with. It is just that I haven’t spent any time with teenage girls and conversation with them doesn’t seem to come naturally to me. But as Amy was inviting me to stay, I had to get over my awkwardness and make an effort.

  But being a dad myself, I could see how Lucy’s dad might feel if he heard that she was spending time at her house with Amy’s new lover. One of my biggest fears when getting divorced was that my ex would meet someone else and that that man would take over my ‘dad’ role. Everyday dad duties like making the breakfast, asking the kids about their day when they get home from school, beating the crap out of them on the sofa when they are watching some canned laughter sitcom, telling them not to hide their peas under their knife and fork, going to football with them on Saturday mornings and watching the odd over-age film with them when their mother isn’t looking would be taken over by someone other than me. I can’t stand the thought of that so I was very conscious not to muscle in on Lucy’s dad’s role. When I mentioned this to Amy, her response was fairly dismissive.

  ‘Graham, I am on
ly asking you if you want to stay for another day or two. I am not asking you to move in. And besides, Lucy will probably spend the whole day in her room with her stereo on. You won’t even see her.’

  Lucy came home at lunchtime. I stayed right out of the way when her dad dropped her off. When I say right out of the way I mean in the front bedroom peeking through the heavy velvet curtains. He has got a Porsche too. His and hers matching cars. It irked me to see that he was a good looking guy. He reminded me of someone but I couldn’t quite put my finger on who it was. He didn’t get out of the car so I didn’t get a good look at him.

  Amy was right about Lucy. I didn’t see her much all day. From what I did see of her, Lucy is a good kid. Amy tells me that she has got more teenage attitude than Jack but I didn’t see any evidence of it. She didn’t seem to feel awkward having me around. She asked me how Jack was enjoying his holiday. I couldn’t offer anything other than that he had arrived safely. ‘Oh, I know they went on a boat trip yesterday and he got embarrassed when his mum sunbathed naked,’ she told me.

  Over the course of the day I discovered that Lucy won’t want me to take her to the football so there are no worries on that score. I refrained from beating her up on the sofa and she made her own breakfast this morning, so there weren’t actually too many difficult situations for me to worry about. I don’t think I crossed any boundaries but I suspect that if I was her dad I would still be pissed at me for spending the night with his ex and in the same house as his daughter.

  When I eventually made my way home this afternoon, the flat seemed really quiet. I spent a few minutes tidying up. That included chucking the dirty clothes that the boys had left in their two-tone room in to the washing machine. At some point I should invite Amy to visit me but I am a bit conscious of the difference between her Wimbledon Village architectural masterpiece and my Morden ex-council flat. She has seen the outside of the flat but I haven’t invited her in. I reckon it is about time I did.