by Rudd, Matt
As the terrifying bloke raises his knife, which is now a very efficient giant pink razor, above his head, I am cornered with nothing but the hole punch. Like a fluffy blur, Fluffy is there, flying through the air like Lassie. Except Lassie wouldn’t have been razored clean in two. The last thing I see is a look of total astonishment on Fluffy’s fluffy little face. Then I wake up clutching one end of a pillow.
Thursday 9 June
Three estate agents come round to do flat valuation. Needed a shower afterwards. However much I scrubbed, I still felt dirty.
‘Mr Walker. Hi, Arthur Arthurs from Arthurs’ Arseholes.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Arthur Arthurs from Arthurs & Sons. For the valuation. Pleasure. May I? Lovely, lovely hallway. Mmm, yes, oh, lovely carpets. Neutral. Perfect.’
‘This is the only bedroom.’
‘Oh gorgeous, the space, the light, the scope, the movement.’ He’s a stamp collector who’s discovered a penny black, an art collector who’s tripped over a Rembrandt in the attic, the first archaeologist at Sutton bloody Hoo.
‘Look at this kitchen, will you? Just look at it. Look at this well-appointed, well-equipped, well-planned little minx of a kitchen.’
It’s a tiny kitchen in a tiny flat on the wrong side of Finsbury Park that he may have to sell at the height of a property-market crash but he’s excited.
‘Oh yes, the walls. Oh yes, the marble surfaces. Oh yes, the hood, the hood, the hood. Mmmm, lovely. The toilet! Aarrrrhhhh. Ooooooh. Bidet. Smooth. Simple. Soft. You cheeky bidet. You halogen lighting. You naughty, naughty power shower.’
He was the least repellent of the three. And suggested the highest selling price.
Saturday 11 June
This was always going to be a difficult day: both sets of parents coming up for an afternoon stroll, then wedding photos, then dinner. Seemed so simple—we have nice, non-problematic, hang-up-free parents. No messy divorces, no excessive corporal punishment, no strange method-parenting guaranteed to instil some deeply hidden psychological bomb set to go off any time in early adulthood. But then you have to consider the conflicting requirements: it’s like doing the catering at an allergy-sufferers’ convention.
My mum: South African interior designer, impatient; loves short walks, dogs, home improvements; hates cats, overcooked vegetables, old art-house movies from Japan.
Her mum: Polish doctor, impatient; likes cats, home improvements, cleanliness; hates dogs, undercooked vegetables and walking anywhere that isn’t strictly necessary. ‘I escaped through the Iron Curtain, my darlinks, with only forty zloty, some silver spoons and my university certificate hidden in my tights. I walked through Europe to be here. I have done enough walking.’
My dad: English; traditional; slowing down a bit. Likes not saying very much, except when he tells a story, which can take hours. Leaves rest of liking and hating of cats, dogs, vegetables and home improvements to Mum.
Her dad: ditto, but more so; doesn’t suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. In fact doesn’t really suffer anyone or anything. Especially short walks. Short walks are stuff and nonsense. In his day, he walked 100 miles just to buy the milk.
Even before the lunch began, I knew it would be difficult. Isabel in big mood because her razor is blunt and her legs, consequently, look like streaky bacon. I obviously know nothing, which only makes her more grumpy. Then, the family arrives.
The walk
‘I will stay here. I don’t want to go for a walk,’ says her mum.
‘A short walk never killed anyone. It is a short walk, isn’t it?’ says mine.
‘Come on, let’s get on with it,’ say the dads in unison.
We all leave the flat, and set a course for Hampstead Heath.
‘Are these plantains?’ Three hundred yards in, my dad, like a moth to an ultraviolet insect zapper, has been drawn to a Caribbean vegetable store on the Holloway Road.
‘I think so, Dad. Leave them.’
‘Excuse me, young man, how long does one cook plantains?’
We wait outside a wig shop for ten minutes while Dad gets the lowdown on plantains from the Rastafarian vegetable stallholder. During the delay, her mum keeps breaking for the flat, mine looks at the wigs. Her dad tuts at people with shirts hanging out. Sheepdogs have an easier job.
‘What is that man doing? He’s almost naked.’ We have inadvertently wandered into the heath’s nudge-nudge, wink-wink meeting place for lonely hearts. Her dad has stopped and is pointing at a man in a red G-string reading the Guardian.
‘He’s reading the Guardian, Dad. Don’t worry about it.’
‘There’s another one. Reading the Guardian,’ says my dad.
‘Lot of Guardian-readers round here,’ says her dad. He’s a Times man.
‘Why are they all sitting in this field, separately?’ says mine. ‘It’s suspicious to say the least.’
‘In knickers.’
‘G-strings, I believe they’re called.’
‘Please, let’s go,’ Isabel and I say together.
‘Are these men after a bit of nookie, with strangers?’ asks her dad, loudly. Just because he’s hard of hearing, he thinks everyone else is.
‘Like that MP, you mean?’ asks mine.
‘Yes, it’s what they call dogging, isn’t it?’ says hers.
‘No, I think dogging is when you watch other people having sex in cars,’ says mine.
‘Kinky stuff they’re into these days, don’t you think? Mind you, we weren’t much better back in the Sixties, were we, darling?’
‘Now is not the time to talk about our era of free love, darlink. I have a blister,’ says her mum.
Isabel is looking like you’d expect her to look after finding out her parents really swung in the Swinging Sixties.
‘This is turning into a long walk,’ says my mum.
The wedding photos
‘You look wonderful. I look dreadful,’ says her mum to my mum.
‘You look wonderful. I look dreadful,’ says my mum to her mum.
‘Not put them in an album yet, William?’ enquires her dad. ‘Just going to have them out in any order like that, are you?’
‘That Alex made for a rather dashing horseman, wouldn’t you say?’ says my mum. ‘Look at him looking splendid in his tails.’
‘Yes, tailored especially on Savile Row,’ says her mum. ‘And hasn’t he got a lovely voice? That song he sang for you both was so beautiful.’
The lunch
‘Red snapper? Not in our day. Sounds like a fancy fish. Cod, hake, John Dory—whatever happened to them?’
‘Yes, good honest fish, they were.’
‘Halibut.’
‘Tuna.’
Then her mum changes the subject to sphincters. Her colleague had a patient in the other day with a bleeding bottom. His wife had attempted to pleasure him with her Prada stiletto but the point had been worn down into something too sharp for the sphincter wall to tolerate.
Why does she tell us these things? Why is it always when we’re eating? What is it with doctors, anal adventures and clinical storytelling?
My dad changes the subject.
‘Are you still working for that charity?’
‘Yes, she is. And they’re still not paying her properly,’ says her dad, because children are never allowed to answer for themselves. ‘I keep telling her, just because they’re saving the whole of Africa doesn’t mean they can’t pay you a living wage.’
Isabel regresses into a teenager: short-tempered, impatient, tutting, crossing arms aggressively. I do the same when they move on to my time at Cat World, even though it’s in the past and I shouldn’t care.
Minutes before they are all strangled, they all head off together, making jokes about getting stabbed on the way to the Tube and going off to the fish ‘n’ chip shop for a nice bit of marlin.
‘I’ve changed my mind. We should move,’ says Isabel as we stand exhausted in the doorway. ‘The rent boys and plantain-sellers of north London shouldn�
��t have to put up with our parents.’
Monday 13 June
Alex has delivered a handmade wedding album he claims to have been working on night and day for the last six weeks. The accompanying note said he was sorry I had slightly spoilt the surprise while ‘looking for the toilet in my study’ but that he hoped this handcrafted work would be a lasting memento of what he was sure would prove to be a long and happy marriage.
‘Ahhh,’ goes Isabel, thumbing through the infinitely detailed photo montages. Yes, he’s made mosaics of our faces, thousands of intricate combinations of heads and hands and more heads, all touching and overlapping and linking up.
‘It’s incredible. Like a beautiful stained-glass window,’ opines Isabel.
‘It looks like a Hieronymus Bosch version of Hell. Hasn’t the guy got anything better to do?’ opine I.
Isabel looks genuinely upset. She says I really should stop being so difficult about Alex. He clearly wants us to be happy. He’s gone out of his way to make our wedding special. It’s important that I don’t stop her having friends. I have to promise to behave like a grown-up. So I do, with my fingers crossed behind my back.
Wednesday 15 June
Alex is not a psycho. Alex is not a psycho. Alex is not a psycho. If I say it enough times, I might believe it.
Isabel, home late and glowing, has found a new yoga class in Holborn. Says she received new energy from the ground or something. Astrid, the yoga teacher, uses crystals to help centre her pupils. Argument ensues when I look sceptical.
Thursday 16 June
A banker and his girlfriend came to look at the flat today. We hid up the road, behind the Man and His Dog Were Knifed incident board. Someone has graffitied ‘A cat person?’ underneath the can-you-help? bit. Arthur Arsehole calls afterwards to say they loved it, loved the space, the light, the angles, the dynamic, the touch. But they wanted a garden.
Friday 17 June
It’s been a long week. I get home late from work, am grumpy, am hot and bothered, am looking forward to a nice bath.
‘Don’t have a bath, have a shower.’
Here we go again.
It is only because Isabel is hugging me when she says this that there is no immediate bloodshed.
I consider a bath with a whisky after a long week at work to be one of man’s inalienable rights—a period of quiet reflection, contemplation and the making of amusing bubble-bath hats. But I considered sugar in goat’s-milk-free tea with a similar reverence until only a few days ago and look what happened to that.
‘Why not?’
‘It’s a waste of water.’
‘I want a bath though.’
‘One bath is the same as four showers.’
‘I’m having a bath.’
But as I sat in the bath, trying to enjoy my inalienable right, I knew its days were numbered. From the speed-date to the wedding, Isabel had never attempted to change me: it’s one of the reasons I love her. But now we’re married, we both sense a change. She is my wife, she has the power, she just doesn’t know quite how much power yet. Like a young Jedi knight, she will learn.
Saturday 18 June
What a brilliant day: went to what may be the worst wedding ever. Jess, horrible property developer, marrying poor Tony—creative, sensitive, artistic, in-touch-with-his-feminine-side Tony. In short, he’s gay, she knows it, but she wants kids and he’s the best she can find. And he just needs a wife so he can pretend he’s straight forever. It was the wedding you always dream about, one that unravels before your very eyes.
The service
They had written their own vows. Tony said, ‘With my arms, I will cradle you.’ Jess said, ‘With my arms, I will encircle you.’
For what has to be a virtually sexless marriage, they really were laying it on a bit thick.
Best man composed and performed an electric piano piece for their exit. Almost entirely atonal, it was quite upsetting and made three babies cry. Brilliant. 3/10.
The meal
Some sort of mutton offcut, cooked for 10,000 years in the hellish furnaces of Gomorrah. Served on a bed of what might have been risotto but was in actual fact mashed potato. Isabel has Banker Man on her right, all pink shirt and big hair. I have Acronym Man on my left. He’s in IT, setting up his own ISP, depending on the FAP of the NRT in QPE, or something. 1/10.
The speeches
Father-of-the-bride walked out on mother-of-the-bride six months ago for glamorous and youthful secretary. Mother mutters and scoffs through all fatherly marital advice. Father finishes with ‘…and in short, Tony, I would advise you to ignore all my advice. I married her, after all, which shows how little I know. So please, can you all be upstanding…?’ Chaos and stormings-out from then on. Brilliant. 1/10.
The first dance
They just clung to each other, revolving slowly like chickens on a supermarket rotisserie to the tune of bloody ‘Angels’ by bloody Robbie Williams. Nasty. 4/10. TOTAL 9/40. A new last place, but for all the right reasons.
Sunday 19 June
Phoned Johnson about the inalienable rights thing. He says men lose all inalienable rights such as having a hot bath on a Friday the moment they say ‘I do.’ That’s the unwritten law, it’s just that women are too smart to point it out explicitly in case men notice and rebel. So they sneak in all the restrictions over the first year of marriage. Before you know it, you’re a house-trained husband, unable to recall whether the things you do, such as having a cold shower on a Friday, are your own idea or part of the new regime.
I suggest that I quite like having someone caring enough to challenge my inalienable rights. Goat’s milk is, after all, better for you than cow’s milk.
It won’t stop at goat’s milk, warns Johnson.
Went to bed with the papers, a cup of tea (goat’s milk, no sugar) and my wife at 10 p.m. Used to go clubbing on a Sunday. Well, once or twice. Now, I’m only a few notches off slippers at seven. Very happy.
Until I had another nightmare.
Isabel and I have somehow agreed to go to Saskia’s wedding reception (we weren’t invited to the service). Only we’ve been seated on different tables. I’m on the top table, in between Saskia, who is wearing nothing but stockings and suspenders, and her groom. Isabel is crammed onto a small table at the back with seven octogenarians: she’s the only one without an ear trumpet or a Zimmer frame. I try to move her cutlery onto our table, but the food starts to arrive: everywhere I step, I block whole squads of waitresses with their huge platters of lobster and inexplicable jelly towers.
The chaos is unimaginable; they fall over like dominoes and it’s all my fault. I just stand in the middle holding a knife, a fork and Isabel’s place name. The head chef, who is Gordon Ramsay, effs and blinds his way out of the kitchen, and starts bludgeoning me with one of the ruined crustaceans. Isabel is being held down by the octogenarians and only Saskia, standing dominatrix-style over everything, can help.
I wake up to find Isabel looking straight at me, an expression of utter disbelief on her face. Someone is shouting ‘Saskia, Saskia, Saskia’ and it only takes a few bleary seconds to realise that it’s me.
Monday 20 June
In the cold light of day, it wasn’t an easy dream to explain.
‘No, darling, I wasn’t shouting Saskia, Saskia, Saskia in a sexual way. I wanted Saskia to save you, darling, from the octogenarians that were pinning you down.’
Even without mentioning the stockings and suspenders, it sounded like a sex dream, only an incredibly perverted one involving ear trumpets. By the time we both left for work, I think I’d succeeded in convincing Isabel that I wasn’t still obsessed with Saskia; unfortunately, I think I’d made her believe I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown instead.
How Saskia destroyed my last-but-one relationship
The relationship was in terminal decline anyway. It was that last three-year one, the one where you know it’s your final practice run before you meet the woman you’re going to marry. It’s as much
about timing as anything. You’re slightly too young to propose like you have to when you’re in your late twenties, slightly too old to walk away easily like you could when you were younger, so you just carry on going out aimlessly, waiting for something dreadful to happen.
Saskia was the dreadful thing that happened. I was at a party; she was also at the party; Elizabeth wasn’t because she was at another party with other friends doing other things. And it’s not every day that the sexiest girl at a party asks me if I’d like to go somewhere—pause for double meaning to become lip-quiveringly obvious—quieter. I knew the right and honourable answer was no, but Elizabeth and I were in the doldrums. We were sick of each other. And Saskia was beautiful. So I said something cool but contradictory like, ‘Sure, this place is dead anyway,’ and before I could catch my breath we were having sex in Hyde Park.
It was a seedy, torrid affair, and one conducted largely outdoors because we had nowhere indoors to go. My flat was usually out of the question because of Elizabeth. Saskia’s flat was always out of the question because it was owned by a forty-year-old stockbroker she had been having an affair with but who, in an effort to avoid hefty alimony, was now trying to rebuild his marriage. I thought this was all incredibly exciting but entirely unsustainable. Apart from all the obvious reasons why being a philandering, cheating, good-for-nothing two-timer is inadvisable, there’s the sheer stress of it all. Lying and cheating is exhausting. Besides, Saskia and I had nothing in common and we both knew it. A month after we met, I told her we had to stop meeting in public parks like this; she said fine, kissed me goodbye and went to live in New York. But not before she phoned Elizabeth and told her I was a cheating bastard.
