The Seven Year Itch

by Emlyn Rees

  But Amy appears completely oblivious to any discomfort I might be going through. Ignoring me, she marches back past me and noisily upends the first of the shopping bags on to the table.

  She stares down at its disgorged contents in the same way I imagine a panicked rookie army surgeon might when presented with their first critical battlefield casualty.

  Why me? her expression seems to be saying. Why now? I never wanted to be a surgeon. I never wanted to go to war.

  The Sainsbury’s bag’s entrails consist of the following: an assorted pack of Discos crisps, six bright blue jellies in pots, a party pack of pink flumps, eight bags of Chewits, a pink and yellow chequered Battenberg cake, and a discounted tin of Christmas biscuits with some badly painted shop-brand generic cartoon characters on the lid.

  Amy’s diagnosis is: ‘There’s enough saturated fat in there to sink an aircraft carrier.’

  But I’m ready for this. I tip out the contents of the second bag and point out the two carrots and the apple which I considerately bought.

  ‘I thought we could make sticks out of them,’ I helpfully suggest. ‘You know, batons . . .’

  Amy seizes on the family-sized bag of salted mixed nuts, and holds it up before her like Poirot might a loaded gun.

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ I ask.

  ‘You can’t serve nuts at a kids’ party, Jack. Haven’t you heard of anaphylactic shock?’

  ‘The punk band?’ I hazard.

  She groans and grabs the Smartie cake, which suddenly doesn’t look quite as big, or as smart, as it did on the supermarket shelf. She starts to tear the brown icing-smudged wrapper off, but then she just stops. Her shoulders sag. She stares forlornly down.

  ‘I’m not Jesus, Jack,’ she groans. ‘How do you expect me to feed them all with this?’

  ‘Well, if you’d told me the truth about how many people were coming –’

  ‘You’d just have got angry,’ she yells, gripping the edge of the table like she’s on a ship in a storm. ‘Just like you are now.’

  Me angry? She’s the one who looks like she’s auditioning for The Exorcism of Emily Rose. I check her ears for signs of blood, or steam, but then her face crumples in anguish and I start to feel sorry for her.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she wails, ‘my mother’s going to think I’m such a failure . . .’

  My sense of pity evaporates like a droplet of water on the surface of the sun. It’s my turn for am-dram antics now.

  ‘Whoah,’ I say, holding up my hand like a copper stopping the traffic. ‘Your mother? Your mother’s coming here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘No, Jack, next bloody millennium.’

  ‘Hah. More like that’s when she’s planning to leave.’

  ‘She’s only coming over for an hour.’

  ‘An hour,’ Ben mindlessly agrees.

  ‘Right, and the last time she said that she was still here three days later,’ I remind her.

  OK, time out. I know. The Mother-in-Law of Doom (MILOD). It is, of course, a bit of a cliché, but there’s no smoke without a fire. And MILODs really do exist. I know. I have one myself. She inveigled her way into my life, shortly after I inveigled my way into her daughter’s knickers. And she hasn’t left since.

  ‘This isn’t about you, Jack,’ Amy complains. ‘This isn’t your party. This is about Ben.’

  ‘Ben,’ says Ben, as if to emphasise this point.

  But I’m not in the mood for being ganged up on, and I’ve had enough of being vilified too. I’ve been up since seven. I’ve done the shopping. I’ve agreed to do the barbecue. I’m here, aren’t I? I’m doing my bit, goddammit.

  ‘No,’ I say, suddenly feeling more snappy than a piranha with a period, ‘this is about you. About you showing off to your friends and your mother . . . It’s about you saying, “Look at me. Aren’t I a great mum?” ’

  Ben starts to cry.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Amy and I bark in unison, before lunging at our son in an effort to claim the parenting moral high ground.

  Annoyingly, Amy gets there first. She snatches Ben up triumphantly and kisses him rapidly and repeatedly on the face, before holding him tightly and melodramatically to her chest, like she’s sweet little Nancy trying to protect Oliver Twist from the murderous claws of nasty Bill Sikes.

  ‘Horrid Daddy,’ she tells Ben, ‘making you cry like that.’

  ‘Nasty Mummy,’ I retort, ‘shouting all the time.’

  ‘Prick,’ Amy hisses.

  I open my mouth to swear back (I was considering either a shithead, an arsehole, or a twat), but then I close it again, because the route back on to the moral high ground has opened up wide before me. I don’t need to resort to petty profanities. I can rise above all that.

  ‘Don’t swear at me like that in front of him,’ I say. ‘Apologise. Now.’

  But my valiant defence of civility and good old-fashioned family values appears entirely wasted on Amy.

  ‘Piss off,’ she shouts, before bolshing out of the kitchen and up the corridor like a hormonal teenager.

  ‘Oh, fine,’ I call after her. ‘Walk away. That’ll solve everything.’

  ‘No, Jack, it won’t,’ she flares, ‘but going to the corner shop will. And getting everything you should have already got.’

  But just as Amy reaches out to open the flat’s front door, the doorbell rings and I watch her freeze.

  ‘Who’s that?’ she demands, suddenly looking back at me. ‘No one’s meant to be here for another hour.’

  I fold my arms across my chest and smile. ‘Gosh, I wonder . . .’

  Amy’s eyes glint with feral menace. ‘You don’t know it’s her.’

  Oh, but I do. As surely as Harry Potter can sense the approach of a Dementor coming to suck his very life force away . . .

  I walk up behind Amy as she opens our flat’s front door. As we peer across the small, tiled communal hallway, we both see that I’m right.

  A large-barnetted woman is clearly silhouetted there on the other side of the building’s stained-glass front door. It’s instantly apparent that there are only five possibilities as to who this is: Marge Simpson, Dusty Springfield, one of the two chicks out of the B52s or . . . Amy’s Mum.

  Step Aside, Sperm Provider

  ‘Shit,’ Amy says. ‘Stall her, will you, Jack? The cake wrapper. She’ll see it. She’ll know I didn’t make it myself.’

  So now she wants a friend . . .

  As paranoid as she might sound, Amy’s panic is actually well founded. Her mother, Jan, is something of a pre-feminist, 1950s throwback, who genuinely believes that any woman worthy of the name should be capable of knitting a shawl, ironing a shirt, milking a cow, and, most importantly of all, baking and icing a moist Victoria sponge cake.

  Any woman failing to live up to these highfalutin standards is liable to incur Jan’s tut-tutting disapproval, no matter what other great achievements might have peppered her life.

  I once heard Jan comment, after reading an article on Andrea Dworkin, ‘With an attitude and dress sense like that, it’s no wonder she’s still single.’

  Panicked, Amy puts Ben down and tries to squeeze in between me and the Blue Gingham Buggy from Hell, so that she can get to the kitchen.

  But I am Prometheus. I don’t budge an inch.

  ‘Move,’ she tells me.

  ‘What’s the magic word?’ I reply.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘You heard.’

  ‘Please,’ she hisses, pressing herself up against me and trying and failing to force her way past.

  Again the doorbell rings, but again I stand my ground.

  ‘I mean the other magic word,’ I say. ‘The one you use when you want to apologise to someone for calling them a prick in front of their son.’

  In answer to my not unreasonable request, Amy mumbles something that even a bat with an ear trumpet would have difficulty hearing.

  ‘I didn’t quite catch that,’ I
say.

  ‘I said I’m sormomr . . .’ Amy growls through gritted teeth.

  ‘Sormomr?’ I query, turning my attention to Ben, who’s standing behind her with his thumb in his mouth. ‘I’m not sure that I know what sormomr means. I’m not even sure if sormomr’s a real word. Are you, Ben? Have you ever heard that funny little word before?’

  ‘Who door, Daddy?’ Ben asks, as the doorbell rings for a third time.

  Amy finally looks up at me. ‘Sorry,’ she spits.

  I smile benignly. ‘There. That wasn’t so difficult, was it?’

  She’s almost too furious to reply as I finally step aside to let her past.

  Almost, but not quite. Because she does manage one word.

  And that word is: ‘Cunt.’

  I don’t have time to dwell on the fact that this is the first time either of us has ever addressed the other this way. Nor do I have time to throw an insult back (though quite how you trump a cunt, I don’t know. I’m guessing that it would take a motherfucker at the very least).

  The doorbell starts ringing again, and keeps ringing, like whoever’s outside has died from boredom and slumped inert against the bell button.

  But as I open the front door, I see that my mother-in-law is perfectly well, and smelling mildly of Dettol and chomping vigorously on her customary antacid tablet, in the same way that Clint Eastwood might once have sucked on a cheroot.

  ‘Hi, Jan,’ I say. ‘How nice to see you.’

  Of course, I could just as easily have said, ‘Hey, Jan, show us your growler!’ for all the reaction I get.

  Because there is no reaction. Because Jan’s not listening. Or not to me anyway. Because, to her, I am Mr Cellophane.

  I smile awkwardly, as she looks straight past me like I’m a particularly uninteresting piece of furniture. As with her failure to greet me, this is an incidental form of insult to which I’ve grown accustomed, ever since Jan first barged me aside like a professional wrestler as I greeted her at the maternity ward doorway.

  Her continued attitude towards me since the arrival of her only grandchild can be summarised thus:

  Step aside, sperm provider. Your work here is done. We have your DNA, and no further use for you. For now . . .

  Jan, in other words, is not here to see me. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure that Jan can actually see me any more, so insignificant have I become in her scheme of things.

  This could even be a medical condition, I consider. Perhaps a bad dose of witchus myopus discourteoso.

  Her eyes scan the area around me like the missile-targeting system of an Apache helicopter, before locking on to Ben.

  Like Gollum, Jan only has eyes for The Precious, aka my son, and it’s only now as she spots him that she smiles.

  ‘There’s my gorgeous boy,’ she coos, shoving past me and crouching down to Ben’s level, as her expression sets into that screwed-up come-hither-child-and-kiss-my-moustachioed-lips look that grannies do so well.

  Grandparenting College

  I sometimes wonder if there’s a college grandparents enrol at the moment they discover that their offspring are having offspring of their own.

  Modular learning units to be practised in the months leading up to the grandchild’s birth might include:

  COURSE UNIT ONE: Turd sniffing. A popular distrust method employed by grandparents to reinforce their own status as authority figures, by undermining their own children’s parenting ability. The novice grandparent would learn a variety of methods for detecting soiled nappies, from the simple but effective nose twitch, to the infinitely more dramatic nappy snort and retch, to the extremist dip ’n’ sniff.

  COURSE UNIT TWO: Traipsing. A horse and cart method, whereby grandparents never let their grandchild out of their sight, whilst simultaneously providing frequent criticism and advice, but never any actual form of practical help.

  COURSE UNIT THREE: Repeating long-since discredited parenting advice from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, such as, ‘What that child needs is fattening up’, or ‘A good glug of whisky in your formula always used to get you off to sleep’, or ‘We used to spank you black and blue and it never did you any harm’.

  COURSE UNIT FOUR: Indulging in genetic one-upmanship, whereby any attractive biological traits displayed by the child (such as beautiful eyes, or a well-proportioned nose) are immediately attributed to the superiority of one’s own gene pool. Conversely, any less attractive character traits or physical qualities (triple nipples, etc) should be immediately palmed off on the murky genetic waters of the good-for-nothing spouse.

  One thing I do know is that, were there such a thing as Grandparenting College, then Jan would get a first-class degree, no sweat.

  The Curious Incident Of The C*** In The Daytime

  Still, it’s not all bad. As Jan scrabbles around my groin, in an attempt to get hold of Ben, who’s suddenly gone all shy on her and is making a doomed attempt at evading her Cruella de Vil clutches by clinging on to my leg like a randy dog, I notice with relief the absence of an overnight bag, or indeed an estate agent’s prospectus for the property next door (my ultimate fear).

  ‘Come to Granny,’ Jan warbles, puckering up now, closing in for the kill.

  But Ben’s not having any of it. He’s been tickled by that little mustachio before.

  And besides, he’s a boy. And Amy’s mum, an embittered divorcee of fifteen years, has forgotten how us boys operate. The more affection you give us, the less we’re likely to give in return.

  Ben blows a king-size raspberry at her and Jan glares up at me, as if his current rejection of her is in some way my fault.

  ‘Look who it is,’ I tell him in that fake rhetorical sing-song voice that parents seem to reserve exclusively for addressing their kids in front of their in-laws. ‘That’s right, it’s Granny. Now what do we say to Granny?’

  Ben grins at me. ‘Cunt,’ he says.

  Time slows. Tumbleweed blows past. Somewhere in the distance, a lone wolf howls at the moon.

  So here we have it. The daddy of all swear words. Possibly the last remaining word in the English language guaranteed to cause offence. But particularly when spoken by a two-year-old child. On his birthday. To his dear Grand-Mama.

  ‘Can’t. Can’t. Can’t. Can’t,’ I half-say, half-sing, smiling inanely down at Jan, as if there’s absolutely nothing wrong.

  But my plan to distract Ben drastically backfires, as he sings straight back at me: ‘Cunty-cunty-cunty-cunt . . .’

  I stare down at my son in horror. He can’t even pronounce his own name clearly, but he’s somehow managing to enunciate this choice piece of Anglo-Saxon with all the authority and precision of a BBC newsreader.

  Jan’s eyes fix on mine. And there it is again. That look – the only look I ever get from her these days – the look that says, Well, it’s not hard to see where he gets that from.

  It’s right then, as my cheeks are burning bright with shame, that I notice Amy standing, listening just outside the kitchen door, and both of us start to laugh, and just can’t stop.

  This last bit, of course, is all in my mind.

  Amy and I don’t start to laugh, and just can’t stop. This is what I wish was happening. Just like I wish that Amy and I would continue our display of solidarity in the face of her mother’s damning judgementalism, by telling Jan to chill out and back off. Just like I wish the phone would ring right now and it would be Bill Gates telling me that he’s plain sick of being the richest man in the universe, and that he’s picked my name at random off a worldwide phone directory, and wants to swap places – and, crucially, bank account details – with me, for today, and forever more.

  But like I say, this is all in my mind.

  In reality, what happens is that Jan tells me, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ before snatching Ben up from the floor and cradling him protectively in her arms, in exactly the same way Amy did in the kitchen less than two minutes ago.

  I glare after her, as she follows Amy into the kitchen.
>
  And what I think to myself, as I stand here, an outcast in my own hallway, is:

  Yeah, and it’s not hard to see where Amy gets it from either . . .

  The Slow And Sensual Orgasm Of Sharon Stone

  I don’t know when it happened, this renewed expansion of the gender gap. I don’t know what prompted this San-Andreas-style seismic shift that drove us men and women back apart.

  It was there in primary school, of course, a gaping chasm which I refused to cross, so that I only made friends with other boys, and eschewed the company of girls on account of the fact that they were sissy and gossipy and couldn’t throw properly.

  But then I hit puberty and came to see women in an altogether more attractive light. So much so that I spent my whole teenagehood and early twenties trying to butter them up, by proving that us boys weren’t so different after all. I worked on my listening skills. And my sensitivity and charm. I became a shoulder to cry on. And a hand to hold.

  I even bought into it myself. I played after-work softball and pretended that the ability to throw straight didn’t really matter at all. I stopped talking about cars and football and all that other tosh that was meant to be the exclusive preserve of men. I started talking about people instead, and what it was that made them tick.

  It was well worth the effort. Because I worked out how girls ticked as well. And I ended up with a lot of them as friends. And, just as important at the time, with a lot of them as girlfriends too.

  Yet here I am at a party, manning the barbecue at the end of the garden, at the centre of a scrummage of men, while all the women are clucking around the kitchen doors with the kids.

  Equal opportunity, it ain’t.

  And this separation, between us Mums and Dads, it’s permanent. We’ve become like water and oil. We no longer mix, because we no longer need to. Just like we don’t flirt any more, because it’s no longer necessary. Because our big decisions about the opposite sex have already been made. Because we’ve already found our mates, and already bred.