by Rudd, Matt
Gym quite tiring. Couldn’t stop yawning on the rowing machine. Denise says it’s our body’s way of getting extra oxygen but we think it’s because we’re knackered from all the rampant sex. Hoorah.
Tuesday 9 August
A date has been set for my squash match with Alex. On the plus side, Isabel is delighted that we’re ‘getting on’. On the minus side, we aren’t. This is just another one of his schemes to make me look stupid.
Johnson says I have to beat him—my reputation as a man depends on it. Andy says I should take a chill pill. This is the perfect chance to let bygones be bygones.
Wednesday 10 August
Serge says that although my neck doesn’t hurt any more, I should keep seeing him just a couple more times to ensure that everything has settled down. The subtle movements Isabel says Astrid says he’ll be making to realign my spine have become so subtle, I’m not sure there are any. He may just be holding me now.
Had a terrible nightmare. Serge isn’t an osteopath at all. He went to osteopathy school but was thrown out after a late-night experiment pushing the boundaries of osteopathy to the limit went very wrong. In the intervening years, his grudge against the world of osteopathy has developed into full-blown hatred. He has become a serial killer who only kills men whose spines are perfectly aligned. The plastic skeleton in his office that he uses to show new ‘patients’ how vertebrae work is not plastic at all. It’s the skeleton of his last victim, replaced each time he kills again. In my nightmare, I work all this out while he’s holding me—that this isn’t a surgery, it’s a cellar, that the skeleton in the corner has hair, that the diploma on the wall has another man’s name crossed out with the word Serge scrawled angrily above it in blood. I try to get up and escape, but my legs don’t work. So I try to grapple him off, but he just presses something in my neck and my arms fall useless to my sides. Whispering calm osteopathic clichés—‘keep your back straight, don’t arch it’, ‘there’s no quick fix when it comes to bones’, ‘breathe in, and hold, and breathe out’—he produces a surgeon’s scalpel and starts his serial killer’s work at my feet.
Saturday 13 August
That’s it. It’s all over. It’s definitely a trend. This morning, I passed up a perfectly decent opportunity to have sex. I hopped out of bed at an ungodly 8 a.m., said something terribly middle-aged like, ‘Come on, darling, it’s the best part of the day’, and bounced off to the kitchen to do the washing up. Last night, I couldn’t be bothered to do it—sex, that is, not the washing up, although that as well—because it was too hot. Eight days until I’m thirty and I’m now regularly passing up opportunities to have sex. And I’m the man. Men are supposed to want it all the time. The average red-blooded heterosexual male thinks about sex every two or three milliseconds. Isabel hasn’t started coming up with excuses.
It’s me.
Maybe I’m not red-blooded? Maybe I’m yellow-belly-blooded? My libido is in free fall.
When I confess to Isabel, she doesn’t bat an eyelid. She says it’s a cliché that men always want sex and women never do. It’s just something people write in sitcoms.
‘But we used to have sex every day.’
‘Only for about a week.’
‘Well, we used to have sex every other day then.’
‘It’s probably only a blip.’
‘I think it’s a trend.’
In her experience, men never want sex as much as women, particularly when they get older. This is, on the one hand, disgusting because I don’t want to have to think about Isabel’s experience with other men ever, particularly older ones. On the other hand, it is reassuring. Why else would they have invented Viagra? The older we get, the more support we need.
Monday 15 August
Saskia’s flight landed this morning. I’m in Finsbury Park, not East Timor. Knowing my luck, I will bump into her, so when Isabel and I walk to the Tube, I suggest we take an alternative route through the park. Just because I fancy a nice stroll with her.
I refuse to have lunch outside the office.
I refuse to go to the pub with Johnson, even though he’s having an argument with Ali about which day they should have fish and chips, and which day they should have curry.
I sneak home via the park again. Tomorrow, definitely wearing sunglasses and a beanie.
Tuesday 16 August
I’ve told Serge it’s all over, this has to stop, we can’t go on like this. It’s not him, it’s me. We’re just not right for each other. We both need to move on. And besides, £40 half-hours really start to add up. He takes it well. I am allowed to leave his cellar without being skinned alive and turned into an osteopath’s dummy.
Can’t be bothered to go to the gym. My neck feels fine, I need to keep my energy up for sex and tomorrow’s squash match and I’m depressed anyway because of the sixteen people invited to my birthday dinner party on Saturday, only four can come. And the more I’m out on the streets, the more I risk running into the Destroyer of Relationships. And I am, to all intents and purposes, thirty. I am unpopular, I live in an unsellable flat, I have a low sex drive.
Wednesday 17 August
Phone rings. Unlisted phone number. Don’t answer it. Isabel asks why I’m ignoring my phone. I say it’s a work thing. I’m lying to my wife about another woman calling me.
It wasn’t Saskia, it was Denise from the gym. ‘Is William being a naughty boy?’
She is as annoying as Saskia.
‘Six days, William, six days. We’ve got off to such a good start. We need to keep it up, William. Self-loathing might be winning the battle, but let’s not let it win the war.’
I obviously forgot to tick the box on my joining form to say I didn’t want to be contacted by carefully selected associate companies or patronising fitness instructors.
Alex is already on the court when I arrive. He gives me one of his nine racquets and we start rallying. He’s all chatty and matey, but also quite I’ve-hardly-played-at-all-this-year-what-with-the-broken-arm, and I’m all I-haven’t-played-for-three-years, so he’s all yes-but-my-arm-still-really-hurts.
The stupid ball doesn’t bounce and it’s really hot so he wins the first game to love. Except, as he points out patronisingly, you don’t say love in squash.
He wins the next game to love as well, despite complaining about his stupid arm. Then he suggests we rally a bit. I feel like I’m going to be sick, mainly because my tall, gangly physique is clearly not suited to this squitty little game. So I agree.
We rally.
Then he says, can I offer you a few suggestions?
And I say no, piss off, in my head, but yes, that would be great, I am a tennis player, to his face.
He says I need to take the racquet up and back much earlier, I need to face the side not the front, I must never step in that triangle or that triangle and I must watch him as well as the ball.
After that, I can’t even rally any more. He laughs encouragingly so I suggest we play one more game. While I’m trying to remember all the patronising things he has told me in his pretence of being friendly, I lose the first six points quite quickly. Then he sniggers. Then I take a mad, exhausted swipe at another horrible ball from him, lose control of the racquet and hit him square on the jaw.
He yelps, falls to the floor and spits out half a tooth.
‘Sorry about that.’
It takes the rest of the evening to convince Isabel that it was an accident.
Thursday 18 August
Wearing a mac and a trilby hat, I take the circuitous route to the gym. Denise gives another stirring speech to her troop. Come on now, we really must put the time in, mustn’t we? A little effort now will save a lot of pain later. It’s the posh London gym equivalent of the sergeant major’s, ‘Right, you horrible little piece of filth on the bottom of my boot. Drop and give me twenty.’
More yawning on the rowing machine and on the treadmill. When Denise isn’t looking, I hop onto the edges and let the bloody thing run itself. I’m grateful and everything but I don’
t see why she has to bully ‘us’ and only ‘us’. Why can’t she bully the fat bloke, the horrible sweaty fat bloke who is always one machine ahead of me on the circuit? The fat bloke who doesn’t wipe away his sweat properly because there’s so much of it. He’s hardly trying at all and I can hardly grip anything he’s been on because it’s all moist.
Friday 19 August
Isabel meets me at work unexpectedly and behaves quite erratically. She wants to take me out for a pre-birthday drink. I say we have to go home and clean the flat, ready for the four people who were bothering to turn up to the world’s least-attended thirtieth. She says to hell with it, we’re going for a drink.
We have to go to a bar in Soho. One where we used to go when we couldn’t stop snogging each other. One where Saskia and I used to go because it had a hidden downstairs bit. It is the last place I want to be. Saskia is bound to strut in any minute. I contemplate coming clean to Isabel, given the fact that I haven’t actually done anything wrong, but she’s in such a good mood, and she’s obviously more excited about my wretched birthday than I am. So I don’t. I continue to live the lie.
Then, halfway through the drink in the bar I don’t want to be in, Isabel receives a mysterious mobile call, won’t say who it is, then says we have to go home, she’s not feeling well. No, we can’t finish our drink. We have to go now. Right now. Then she takes another call as we’re on the way to the Tube, mutters something to whoever it is, tells me it’s her mum, then says she’s feeling better, let’s go for another drink.
As soon as I’ve battled to the bar of some horribly busy it’s-a-Friday-night pub, established it is Saskia-free, got drinks and settled down, Isabel says she’s feeling unwell again.
Period pain.
Before I can protest, we are on the Tube; then we’re run-walking through Finsbury Park. If I slow down, Isabel says hurry up. When I say I’m not going any faster and that if she’s feeling unwell, shouldn’t we take it a bit easier, she says she’s got diarrhoea, which makes me have Vietnam-style flashbacks to the honeymoon. So now we’re sprinting down our road, making a big scene, and I’m carrying all the bags so Isabel can get the key ready. I don’t know why she couldn’t have gone to the toilet in the pub and I don’t know why I have to run as well. When we reach the flat, Isabel opens the outside door and stops.
‘You go first,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a stone in my shoe.’
‘But I thought you were about to explode,’ I reply, hot and bothered, as I push past her and climb up the stairs. While I fumble for the key to the door of the flat in the pitch darkness of the upstairs landing, Isabel is standing in the hall not looking very unwell at all. I’m weighed down by her ridiculously heavy work bag and she’s just standing by the light switch that quite clearly needs flicking on while I scratch away at the paintwork on the door with a key that I can’t be sure is the right one because it’s so dark. And that’s when I snap.
‘Turn the light on, you stupid cow,’ I shout in a flash of fury brought on by a freak combination of alcohol, exhaustion, Saskiarelated stress and eve-of-thirtieth depression. This is easily the worst thing I’ve ever shouted at Isabel. I’m not the sort of person that calls people stupid cows, not to their faces anyway. And never Isabel, woman of my dreams, etc, etc. It was just a sudden, uncharacteristic verbal splurge, never to be repeated.
So it’s a shame that, in the same second the blasphemy comes out, the key finds the keyhole, the door swings open and I step into a room full of friends standing motionless, clutching party poppers.
‘Happy birthday!’ they all shout, their faces etched with My God We Didn’t Know He Was a Wife-Beater horror. Half-heartedly, someone blows a party whistle. Hoorah, I am popular after all. Or at least I was.
Saturday 20 August
Thirty, thirty, thirty. Sod it.
Mum called, as she does every year, at 7.04 a.m. and tells me her birth story.
‘This time thirty years ago, I was lying prostrate…thirty-eight hours of agony…a student doctor…epidural headache…forceps weren’t big enough for your head…came out sideways…your father thought he had a brain-damaged wife and a mongrel for a son…’
Isabel wakes while I’m on the phone and scrawls on a piece of paper, ‘I want you packed and ready to leave in one hour.’ So I stop Mum mid-sentence and follow Isabel through to the kitchen, the full impact of my ‘stupid cow’ faux pas sinking in only now. But it turns out she’s coming with me…on my surprise weekend away. The ‘stupid cow’ thing is long forgotten, silly me. She is so great.
Two hours later we’re in a traffic jam crawling south but it’s okay because this is all part of the surprise weekend and at least we’re out of London and away from Saskia and I’m determined not to spoil it.
It’s a furnace-hot August day and, now that we’re in the country, the overpopulated stinking metropolis well behind us, even the fact that I am thirty isn’t bothering me. Thirty is nothing. Barely even started. Decades and decades to go.
Now we’re in Sussex, driving up a drive so long and well-weeded, I thank my stars I did go for chinos rather than jeans, even though that’s something someone in their thirties not their twenties would do. Isabel parks us between a Jaguar and a Bentley in the car park of the very beautiful Bailiffscourt, country house hotel, spa and highly suitable venue for the start of my new decade. This is perfect, I think, as a man unloads the boot of our Corsa without the slightest hint of disapproval.
Champagne waiting in the room—nice. Open fireplace—unnecessary but nice. Peacocks outside the window—also unnecessary but nice. Four-poster bed—marvellous. What could possibly spoil the perfect birthday?
‘My God, this is a coincidence.’
And there it was, the only thing worse than Saskia, the only thing that could ruin the perfect birthday. Alex, sitting alone in the corner of the restaurant, about to tuck into his amuse-bouche.
‘What are you doing here?’ spluttered Isabel. Even she was shocked.
Yes, what are you doing here, alone, in a romantic country house hotel on exactly the same night we’re here?
‘I read about the place in the Guardian a few weeks ago. Thought it sounded romantic. Booked it as a treat for Monica, then’—pause for effect—‘everything, as you know, went’—sniff for effect—‘wrong. Seemed a shame to let the weekend go to waste so I came down on my own.’ He looks even more pathetic with his bruised cheek and his missing bit of tooth.
‘Couldn’t you have cancelled and got a refund?’ I asked, and for a moment, I saw a flicker of confusion in his eyes. Like he hadn’t thought through every plot hole in his premeditated tale of woe.
‘I’ve been in such a mess over this whole break-up, I clean forgot to call until Thursday, by which time I could only get a fifty per cent refund.’
Damn he was good. So good he actually gives me a smirking grin while Isabel is stepping out of the way of a waiter.
‘Anyway, why are you here, guys?’ The smirk vanishes as quickly as it appeared.
‘Because it’s William’s birthday. Surely I must have mentioned it?’
Yes, you maniac, because it’s my birthday, as you very well knew. And Isabel is taking me away for a quiet, romantic weekend, which you also very well knew, you evil psycho-stalker.
‘Happy birthday, William. Now look, your table’s ready. Don’t let me get in the way of your evening. You might attack me with my own squash racquet again.’
‘Hahahahahaha. Fine, see you later.’
And it all would have been fine, extremely weird but fine, if we’d left it there. Except, as we make our way across the restaurant, Isabel whispers to me about getting Alex to join us at our table. I whisper no way and she says she knows, she really does, but this has happened, it’s a bad coincidence and now we can’t really sit at tables on opposite sides of a room ignoring each other, can we? Even if it does mean ruining our romantic meal.
[Yes we can yes we can yes we can yes we can yes we can yes we can yes we can yes we can can can
can can can can can.]
‘No, I suppose not.’ And then I have to get up and ask Alex if he’ll join us.
‘Oh, I couldn’t.’
‘You must.’
‘I couldn’t.’
Well, don’t then. Just fuck off back to London.
‘You must.’
‘Oh, all right then. But I’m ordering champagne.’
Two’s company, three is a complete and utter disaster. And guess who coincidentally had the same slot booked in the spa the next morning.
‘I couldn’t.’
‘You must.’
‘I couldn’t.’
Well, you’re bloody going to anyway, aren’t you?
I decide the journey back to the stinking, overpopulated metropolis is the right time to mention what’s been on my mind for the last week.
‘What exactly does “a kiss” mean in relation to Alex?’
‘A kiss,’ she replies after a lot of theatrical eye-rolling.
‘Oh, come on. That’s what you told your mum. No one ever tells their mum the truth.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ she says, stalling. ‘Can we not talk about Alex any more this weekend? I’ve had enough of him.’
‘Believe me, you’re not the only one. But tell me, I won’t mind,’ I say, lying.
‘It was ten years ago. You really don’t need to go on about this,’ she says, still stalling.
‘Look, I want to know what happened. I’m not going to go on about it.’
‘It was a kiss.’
‘With tongues?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘Did he touch your breasts?’
‘The traffic light’s green.’
‘Did he touch your breasts?’
‘I can’t remember. Go, it’s green.’
