by Hatch, Ben
‘You all right?’
‘Yes,’ she says, laughing at herself.
I squeeze her hand. She pulls it away. It shoots back up to her eye to catch another tear.
‘What’s up?’
‘It’s just remembering,’ she says. She half laughs. ‘How happy we were.’
The waiter tops up our glasses.
‘It was the little things I fell in love with,’ I tell her later. ‘Your hot red thighs when you came back from the gym.’
She laughs. ‘My big fat thighs you mean.’
‘No. I liked them. I still like them. The way you’d cook a saucepan of chilli, leave it out and live off it for a week sometimes. Heating the congealed slop up each night and eating a new square of it without ever contracting food poisoning. Your iron stomach, I suppose!’
She laughs.
I remember how Dinah began to treat me like a small boy within a few weeks of living under the same roof. ‘You are not wearing those boxer shorts again. Give them here!’ The habit she developed of sniffing me to see if I needed a bath. ‘Get in there now, smelly boy.’ The way she stared at my hands after a chicken fajita to check there was nothing on them I could wipe down the sofa arm. Her habit of placing kitchen mess – a dirty knife or an unwashed plate – under my nose like she was litter-training a pup: ‘And I found it on the sideboard!’ The delight on her face when she saw me in the bath. The pleasure it gave her to wash my hair. Her passion for buying scatter cushions, chunky candles and wooden tea trays. The love she showed for a perfume when she screwed the lid back on the bottle. The VAT-free children’s T-shirts from Mothercare she squeezed into, which were, ‘Good on one hand – they’re cheap. But also bad, as many do actually have Care Bears on the front.’ The way her green eyes turned a paler grape colour when she cried. Her stomp of a walk when cross. The quizzes we gave each other: ‘My ex-boyfriend, who crushed the can of baked beans into his forehead in frustration at where our lives were going?’
‘Pete.’
‘No, Jeremy!’
‘OK. Why did I resign from Copenhagen Reinsurance? I’ve told you twice.’
‘Because you worked out the wrong insurance cover for a supertanker and got worried it would sink. My turn. OK, my mum’s sister – what is the strange thing about her and margarine?’
Then there was the way we read the customer comments book in our local Tesco, those wonderful outpourings of bilious frustration we loved so much: ‘Andrex £1.09 for four. They’re 85p in Kwik Save. Rip off!!’… ‘I do wish you’d remember to restock haricot beans!’… ‘I’m not satisfied! Where is your ham roll?’
Dinah wipes away another tear.
‘The waiters will think I’m being a bastard. Stop it.’
I stretch my arm out across the table, put my hand up her sleeve and grip her wrist.
‘It also reminds me how old and grumpy we’ve got,’ she says.
‘You’re not grumpy.’
‘I am, and I’m fat.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘I am. It’s thinking of Phoebe too,’ she says. ‘I don’t know why, I have this image of her in my head, of driving to Little Dippers when she was a few months old, her face in the car seat next to me. That’s the face I think about when she says something serious now.’
‘I remember her birth,’ I say. ‘The way she plopped out. That birthmark on her back.’
‘Those first six months,’ she says, tilting her head. ‘We’d go into her room sometimes just to stare at her.’
‘I know.’
‘I was so happy then,’ says Dinah.
‘Me too. But I’m happy now too. I want to freeze time, though. Stop everything where it is.’
‘I know you do,’ she says. ‘Why are we sad tonight, Ben?’
‘We’re being reflective. It’s the end of our first week.’
‘Shall we go to bed?’
‘I think we’d better.’
But we don’t. We drink more wine and talk. I end up telling Dinah what I’d really like to do is convert our cellar into a laboratory so I could carry out experiments like a Victorian eccentric.
‘Are you a bit drunk now, love?’
‘Yes.’
Dinah laughs.
‘I’d investigate the whole world. Everything. I’d be like Edward Jenner.’
‘Would you, love,’ she says, patting my hand.
‘Yes, I would. I’d observe things like Jenner, carry out experiments. Dissect animals, birds, dead bodies, brains. I bet there are loads of other animals that hibernate or birds that fly places that nobody knows about.’
‘Do you want to find things out about hedgehogs?’
‘I do. I’d have loads of test tubes and conical flasks and Bunsen burners down there. Can you imagine it?’
‘I can imagine smells wafting up into the kitchen from the cellar.’
‘And there’d be explosions.’
She laughs.
‘You wandering back upstairs looking a bit dazed.’
‘My hair singed. My clothes in tattered rags.’ I put on a German accent. ‘Just a little less potassium pomegranate!’
She laughs. ‘Come round here and give me a cuddle, you fool.’
I do what she says. I walk round the table and drape myself over her shoulders like a scarf.
‘We’re all right, aren’t we?’ I ask.
‘Of course we are.’
We hold hands in the lift. In the room, just like at home, I fill two glasses with water. I leave one by her side of the bed and another by my own. I double check the door’s locked.
‘Head of Security,’ she says, from under the covers.
‘What I’d also like to do down in the cellar…’ I start to say.
‘Bedtime now, Mr Jenner,’ she says.
CHAPTER 6
In the evenings Dad, home late, changed into the kaftan he preferred to pyjamas. He’d come downstairs, pour himself a drink and eat the dinner Mum cooked him on a little pine table in front of the telly sat on the floor, his legs threaded through the table legs. ‘He, he, he,’ he’d say, rubbing his hands together if it was yellow fish. His meals ended with a peanut butter and Marmite sandwich that he’d fold into his mouth in one go like he was stuffing a hanky in a breast pocket. Afterwards he’d haul himself back into his armchair where he’d watch telly until he eventually fell asleep and snored like a foghorn, his head tipped back like a lid.
Saturday morning was family time. We’d fly kites on Winchmore Hill, visit Whipsnade Zoo. Or we’d frequent garden centres and gift shops in Wendover and Weston Turville, tutting at the windmill memorabilia Dad was into. Because we lived in one, he couldn’t get enough of things shaped like windmills or with windmills on them. Windmill tea towels, windmill plates, mugs, thimbles, a brass windmill bell, a miniature wooden windmill for the garden. Sometimes we’d visit other windmills, where Dad introduced himself as ‘David Hatch, Cholesbury Windmill’ as if it was some select club he belonged to that allowed us to have biscuits in any home shaped like ours.
‘Come on, Dinah!’ I shout at the closed door. I’m sitting on the giant green suitcase trying to close the zip. Dinah’s on the dreaded tour with the hotel manager being led around their conference facilities, informed of their occupancy rates and other details we’ll have no room for in our review. Meanwhile, Charlie, cleverly taking advantage of my preoccupation with packing, is quietly ripping up the A Guide to Guest Services handbook. At the same time Phoebe’s putting her hand into a tub of her aqueous eczema cream and is smearing it all over the bedcovers. On the overhead telly Survival with Ray Mears is playing extraordinarily loudly because Charlie sat on the volume button of the remote. I finally close the case and then chase Charlie into the bathroom and yank the remains of the handbook from him like he’s some kind of gun dog giving up a dead partridge.
‘Please, guys, behave for Daddy.’
He throws his head back in a rage, bumping it on the toilet seat just as Phoebe knocks over an open bottle
of shampoo on the bath rim that spills onto the tiled floor that Charlie then slips over in. Phoebe joins him and they writhe about in the V05, laughing as the last of their clean clothes bite the dust, before Charlie scuttles away to indulge his new love – rifling through and tugging at potentially hazardous wires, this time on the internet set-up box behind the writing desk. Unsure where to begin clearing up after them, I stare at Ray Mears. Ray’s thirsty in the outback, and has rigged up a transpiration bag to obtain water from the leaves of a eucalyptus tree. He’s hungry and hot because he has no shelter. And I want to shout, ‘Oi, Ray. Never mind your transpiration bag, bollocks to your lean-to shelter. Survive driving round England with two under-fours, staying at a different hotel each night and visiting four or five attractions a day. Sleep all in the same room then wake up at seven in the morning and do it all again the next day with the prospect of another one hundred and forty nights of the same – then come and tell me about survival in your khaki fucking shorts.’
I think you only really realise how bad a time you’re having when you tell someone else about it. And sometimes your crap time can only get better once you’ve truly acknowledged it. We’re in the gigantic Coventry Transport Museum. It’s the largest museum of its kind in the world and I’m on my way back to the Maudsley Tea Rooms with Charlie’s baby food, which I’ve returned to the car for, when I stumble accidentally into the Spirit of Speed Gallery. Thrust2, the former holder of the land speed record is here, along with ThrustSSC, the current holder, and there’s also a ThrustSSC simulator. My simulated experience of Andy Green’s 763-mile-per-hour record-breaking drive is made, if anything, marginally more exhilarating by Dinah texting every few seconds ‘What are you doing?’ then ‘Hurry up, he’s starving’ and finally, ‘If you’re in that bloody simulator…’
We finally leave the museum after Phoebe almost falls off a nineteenth-century hay-fork tricycle in the Cyclopedia exhibition and Charlie throws a Jelly Tot at the Humber staff car driven continuously by Montgomery from the D-Day landings to the German surrender in 1945. Afterwards we’re supposed to be visiting the Northampton shoe museum (or the Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, as it’s officially known), but coming hot on the heels of my supersonic pelt across Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, it doesn’t seem quite right to charge around the M45 and back down the M1 just to stare at some East Midlands footwear, so instead I reinstate the Santa Pod Raceway Summer Nationals near Wellingborough onto our itinerary. Dinah previously vetoed the dragster event because, ‘Oily men talking about Castrol GTX! Is that going to be fun for the kids?’ On the way, Dinah first tries to re-interest me in the shoe museum (‘I think there’s a model of Emma Bunton in high heels’) and, when this fails, infers the simulator and the prospect of seeing dragsters is making me drive too fast through the village of Podington.
‘Slow down, Andy Green.’
‘What?’
‘You’re veering all over the road. What’s the matter with you?’
‘I want to get there.’
‘So do I. In one piece.’
And finally she sulks. ‘Why are you railroading me? This is going to be awful. I thought we were going to make today fun.’
Whenever friends cautioned against this trip we countered smugly that in later years, when Phoebe and Charlie were broad-minded, implausibly well-rounded adults, they’d end up thanking us. This sense of a higher purpose ended a couple of days ago when Phoebe wet herself on a walking tour of Ledbury and the same day I lost the key to the roof box containing Charlie’s nappy stuff – meaning we were forced to change him on a bench outside the Knight’s Maze of Eastnor Castle using nothing but three tiny KFC lemon fresh wipes Dinah found at the bottom of her handbag. Tucked up in bed at 7 p.m. that night as the hotel had no listening service and the Bébétel baby monitor didn’t work, the honeymoon period of this trip well and truly over, we’d held hands across the mattress, telling each other we just needed a routine. We got one. Phoebe wet herself the next day too, at the Elgar Birthplace Museum in Worcester, and, meanwhile, Charlie’s new debilitating dread of wax mannequins meant he fixed himself to my leg like a shin pad the whole way through the Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum (‘Daddy, I want a cuddle.’). Crossing the Welsh border, we hit a new low when we realised after it rained in Cardiff that not only had Dinah forgotten to pack my trainers, she’d also forgotten to pack all our coats.
From not arguing, suddenly we were at each other’s throats. At the Kington Small Breeds Farm Park Dinah and I even managed to have a dispute about which type of owl was best – tawny or barn (‘Fuck off, you’re just saying the opposite to annoy me – the tawny owl has much better directional hearing’) – which led to Dinah storming off and calling me childish.
Dinah seems to have forgotten how to map read, too. Tired from Charlie’s dawn feeds, she keeps failing to notice tiny things such as road numbers changing, keeps refusing to accept that bypassing cities is quicker than going through their centres (‘It looked small, Swansea, on the map’) and can’t remember she’s map reading at all if she’s, say, reading an article about Gwyneth Paltrow’s children in OK! magazine.
Our clothes, too. We can’t afford to wash them in hotels, there’s no time for a launderette and we’ve yet to stay in a serviced apartment. It’s something Dinah’s been blaming for her bad mood. ‘I’m sorry, Ben. I struggle to enjoy myself when I actually smell.’
At the Santa Pod Raceway we stop at a booth to pick up our press passes. Each pass includes a passport-sized photo of one of us set against a chequered flag style background. Hung around our necks on lanyards they make us look like we maybe work for the McLaren team. And it’s all looking up slightly, until I open the driver’s door a few hundred yards from the track. The noise is incredible. It’s so loud it’s like a dozen jet engines all taking off at once.
In the stands, surrounded by men in Santa Pod caps and prodrag hoodies eating chip cobs, it’s even more deafening. Here it’s like actually being inside a jet engine.
‘We’ll get used to it,’ I shout across to Dinah, as she holds her hands over Charlie’s ears and I do the same with Phoebe’s.
We watch a series of races, which each last about eight seconds, and are categorised meaninglessly (for us) as things like: Super
Modified, Street Eliminator, Pro Stock Cars. After the VWs-with-modified-engines class race I risk a joke.
‘Shame there isn’t one for Vauxhall Astra diesels. I could buy some nitrous fuel and enter us.’
Dinah doesn’t laugh. ‘Do you see any other under-fours here, Ben? I’m going to buy some ear muffs. They’ll get tinnitus.’
After buying the kids ear muffs at the Motor Shack, which they both refuse to wear, Dinah leaves to find the kids’ caravan while I grimly stay on for Super Twin Top Fuel and the Outlawed Flat Four. The trouble is I don’t know the drivers, or what the Summer Nationals even are exactly. I listen to overalled racers rueing earlier mistakes on the track (‘I shouldn’t have lent it so far over, John’) as ‘Ace of Spades’ blares out of giant-sized speakers and begin to realise Dinah’s right. The children’s area, when I find it, is a static caravan, containing two other bored children colouring in pictures of super-bikes. Dinah’s furious. ‘Can we go now, please?’
In a last-ditch show of defiance on the way out I buy a chip cob and a ‘Throttle in a Bottle’ T-shirt for Charlie. And, to compensate Phoebe for maybe never again being able to hear properly in the presence of background noise, I treat her to the pod-racer dodgems next to the car park, where, after I’m told off for going the wrong way round the track, Dinah refuses to let me drive back through Podington again.
Inside Birmingham’s National Sea Life Centre, our next attraction, Dinah won’t talk to me even when I pass on an interesting fact about the shore crab having its nose under its armpit. She’s up to some old tricks. She slows down her walk so if I continue at my normal pace it looks like I’ve stormed off. Her voice is quieter too, so whatever I say seems somehow louder, enabli
ng her to accuse me of ‘shouting’ as well. An aquarium, however, is a dangerous place to fall out with your husband if you have chelonaphobia.
My wife, I must tell you, is scared – not just scared, terrified more like – of all tortoises and all creatures that look like tortoises including turtles. When she was seven and living in South Africa, so the story goes, she was confronted at a bunny park in Benoni by a giant tortoise she describes as being ‘the size of a Fiat Uno’. Her dad had asked her to come and look ‘round this corner, Dine’ at something he’d found. After bursting into tears at the sight of the giant tortoise, and wetting herself, the fear was born. At home, if I show her a tortoise picture Dinah will irrationally attack me with whatever is in her hand. We cannot watch One Foot in the Grave because of the tortoise in the title sequence. Freelancing on travel technology stories in the study, her chelonaphobia isn’t an inconvenience, but seeing as though virtually every day on this trip we’re at some wildlife park, it’s become one. Normally I rove ahead at risky attractions – aquaria, zoos (butterfly farms are particularly dangerous) – guiding Dinah through them by the hand like she’s some geriatric pensioner with a shattered hip, as she holds up a brochure to her face on whichever side I’ve deemed ‘the tortoisey one’. But there have been accidents, screams, a little bit of hyperventilation, and a few accusations (the Kington Small Breeds Farm: ‘You bastard. You said they were hibernating.’).
Today she has lost me. Today she’s on her own. I sit on a bench outside the Atlantic Mirror Maze and guiltily watch her walk obliviously into the turtle sanctuary. I count to ten and sure enough, I hear a muffled scream and a few seconds later Dinah, red-faced and furious, scurries out. Ahead of the kids.
‘You arsehole!’
I try to look shocked.
‘What?’
‘Why didn’t you say something?’
‘About what?’
‘You know what.’
‘What?’
‘You must have seen those red-bellied turtles in there?’
‘I didn’t see anything.’
