William Walkers First Year of Marriage (11 page)

I spend the rest of the afternoon throwing security guards through windows and down stairs and off viaducts in my mind, while the work experience gets on with my job.

The sweaty fat bloke is sweating less and his fat is looking less fatty. I think he may be getting muscles. I tell Denise I can’t do much today because I broke my little toe.

‘We can focus on our upper body, don’t we think?’ she replies. ‘If we think we’re up to it.’

Day six of ten and Anastasia is now having meetings with important people around the office. It’s only a matter of time before she starts telling me to do the photocopying.

Back home before Isabel and, for the second time this week, the phone rang, only for the caller to ring off again when I answered it. Tried 1471-ing it but the caller had withheld their number.

My toe hurts.

I saw Alex today, I’m sure I did, standing motionless outside my office, then disappearing into the crowd when he saw me. Just staring, a cold, cruel look in his eyes.

I break the Alex embargo and tell Isabel when she gets home and she just sighs, shakes her head sadly and goes into the kitchen. She doesn’t believe me. He’s so clever, dividing and ruling. Driving us apart so he can strike. I’m about to follow her into the kitchen when the phone rings, then goes dead when I answer it.

When the phone rings again, I answer by screaming, ‘STOP BOTHERING US, YOU SICK MANIAC, AND LET US GET ON WITH OUR MARRIAGE IN PEACE,’ to which Isabel’s mother replies, ‘That’s no way to talk to your mother-in-law. Please put Isabel on, darlink.’

Johnson suggests we go around to Alex’s maisonette-cum-psycho-control-centre and mess him up a bit.

Andy suggests I move to Papua New Guinea. Take Isabel with me. Spend the rest of our days on a Robinson Crusoe island, just the two of us, far away from the tedium and misery of modern Western culture. Like Gauguin without the paedophilia.

I go with option C, to skip last orders, go home and continue brooding.

Woken in the middle of the night by a scraping sound, then a banging sound in the street below. In my half-sleep, I imagine it is Alex, finally flipped, here to take Isabel by force. But as I reach the window I see right below us, under the full glare of the streetlamp,
a tattooed hoodie mounting a frenzied attack on our car, bending back the bent door and banging his fists in fury against the window. He is clearly drug-crazed, clearly has a knife and clearly would stop at nothing to get into our car. Like lightning, I make an assessment that it is too dangerous to get involved. Life on the mean streets of London is cheap and, while we had a lot to lose—a wonderful marriage, a perfectly decent though strangely unsellable flat, more crockery than any normal person could ever make use of—this chap had nothing. All he cared about was where his next shot of crystal meth was coming from. So I sprinted into the kitchen, quickly dialled 999 and, without hesitation, asked to be put through to the police.

While I was put on hold, a low roar erupted from the bedroom, growing suddenly and terrifyingly into a shriek of jaw-dropping, foul-mouthed profanity. It was Isabel.

‘What are you doing?’ I shout, running back to the bedroom just in time to see the drug-crazed maniac shake his fist up at us threateningly before leaping over a fence and disappearing.

‘I’m stopping that idiot from pulling our car to pieces. What were you doing?’

‘Calling the police.’

‘How’s that going to help? Why didn’t you run down there and stop him?’

I explain about my lightning assessment and the mean streets of London.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Hardly a day goes by when you don’t see the headline “City Worker Killed After Battling Drug-Crazed Robber”.’

‘He was about twelve.’

‘He was not. And now, thanks to your screaming fit, he knows where we live and how posh we are.’

‘What do you mean, posh?’

‘You sound posh when you swear.’

The policeman who arrived to take down our particulars didn’t help.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said in the most patronising, disapproving, accusing tone he could muster. ‘You did the right thing. Just do nothing—that’s the spirit. This child—’

‘Youth…’

‘Sorry, yes, youth. This youth could have had a weapon. A gun, a machete, a peashooter, anything.’

‘Did you say peashooter?’

‘No, I said machete. Don’t you worry now. I’ll check your premises are all nice and secure and safe and tucked up, look at the vehicle and give you a big girly number.’

‘Did you say big girly?’

‘No, I said crime report number.’

I’ve thrown a cup of tea over the work experience. Thank goodness it was a cold one. I don’t know what happened. I just snapped. She was banging on about how she’d met the European editor of
Newsweek
at a cocktail bloody party last night and he was into base-jumping too. Then she asked me if I’d get
her
a tea. So I just stood up and threw a cup over her and shouted, ‘Here, have mine.’ Apparently, I ranted at her for about ten minutes as well, using phrases like ‘in my day’ and ‘no respect’ and ‘think you can just waltz in here’. I have a meeting with the managing editor on Monday to discuss my behaviour. Unless he’s forgotten about the whole Sandra affair, I will inevitably be sacked.

The weirdos downstairs are moving out today with their smug little faces and crappy little furniture. They say they don’t know who’s moving in. It was all done through some sort of offshore trust fund. Which probably means it’s going to be a buy-to-let. Probably going to get some more party animal cretins like the ones upstairs. We will be trapped in a residential nightclub. Until, of course, we get repossessed because I can’t afford the mortgage because I got sacked because I threw (cold) tea over a work experience.

Arthur Arsehole finally returned my ninth call. He says the market is really down at the moment. He says he can’t understand how the flat below us shifted so quickly. He says he thinks it will pick up when everyone gets back from their summer holiday. I point out that that happened three weeks ago. He says October will be a strong month. I say we will have to reconsider our position, and hang up.

I am not sacked! The managing editor started the meeting by asking if everything was okay. It was just a cursory question requiring a ‘Yes, fine thanks’ answer but I chose to let it all come out. This was my Oprah moment. With tears in my eyes, I told him all about the horror of turning thirty, the ruined birthday weekend, Alex the stalker, the botched attempt to jump off a viaduct, the failure to defend my wife against security guards and seven-year-old car thieves. I told him I was becoming emasculated, that I was ruining my life with my own neuroses. I even told him about the trend that had been just a blip. It was more than he’d bargained for but it
meant I kept my job. He told me not to throw tea over workies again, that I should take the rest of the week off and that I would be required to spend a day next month on an anger-management course.

With my time at home, I shall build some shelves in the living room. The reason the flat isn’t shifting is that my two structurally unsound, bright-blue, bought-when-I-was-living-in-a-bedsit bookcases teeter towards each other from their respective alcoves. It makes the whole room look as though we have subsidence. Some nice white built-in shelves will change the whole mood of the place.

Progress is slower than I’d hoped. It takes all day to do the measuring, partly because the walls aren’t straight either and partly because I get sucked into the vortex that is daytime TV. By the time Isabel gets home, I have seen a pregnant fourteen-year-old mother-of-three from Derby tell her fifteen-year-old boyfriend that he probably isn’t the father of any of them, it’s his thirteen-year-old brother; a housewife from Baltimore explain to her husband, a cable-TV evangelist, that for the last eight years she’s been working as a stripper, stage name Flaming Lily; and a Minnesotan transsexual tell his/her partner of five years that she/he used to have a penis, only for the partner to reveal that he’s running off with a trucker called Leonard.

I have watched four rip-offs of
Tomorrow’s World
,back to back.

I am also convinced of the essential benefits of a walk-in bath, the need to make provisions for my funeral so as not to burden loved ones when I die, and that I am entitled to compensation for breaking my little toe in a workplace, at home or anywhere else.

Much better progress today after unplugging television. Have had MDF cut, have painted two coats, have done sawing and sanding and prepping. If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. Alex is meeting Isabel for a drink tonight but I don’t care because if there’s one thing that women hate, it’s paranoia, jealousy and lack of trust. Three things, then.

Well, she had dinner with him, which is slightly more annoying than I’d bargained for. The swanky bastard knew the chef at this new place in Shoreditch. Sure, it was candlelit and romantic and totally inappropriate for two friends who were supposed to be having a quick drink, but he wanted to drop in to lend his support to the chef. It just happened to coincide with the night he was meeting Isabel for a drink.

Fucking hell. Have ruined the flat. Stupid bloody fucking drill recommended by spotty DIY teenager…on the hammer setting, it just rips out a hole the size of a football in half a second. On the normal setting, it doesn’t do anything. Unless of course I hit a soft bit in the brickwork, in which case it goes in so deep, so fast and at such an uncontrollable angle, I’ve drilled a bloody ‘W’ shape before I can switch the damn thing off.

I manage to get three holes for the first shelf in perfect alignment, but the fourth one slips down a bit and the wall plug gets jammed so I have to leave it and drill a new hole. It’s too high but I carry on anyway so the shelf is crooked. The next shelf I had to abandon altogether and the third wobbles thanks to some strange cavity in the wall whose existence I could in no way have predicted.
I call Dad for advice and he puts Mum on who suggests matchsticks to try to fill the cavity but we don’t have any matches in the flat—that would be far too easy—so the excess hole for the fourth shelf is now plugged by three toothpicks and a shard of picnic fork.

By lunchtime, I have created a home-made Beirut. I have reduced the value of the flat by several thousand pounds, got red brick dust all over the carpet because, as Isabel will say, I never cover the floors properly when I’m working, and ruined my new pair of jeans because, as Isabel will also say, I always wear my best clothes for DIY. Disconsolate, sweaty and apprehensive, I decide to take a break, plug in the PlayStation and shoot some zombies. Before I know it, it’s 8 p.m., I haven’t got dinner ready as I’d promised and Isabel is saying all the stuff I knew she would.

I have agreed with Isabel to get rid of the PlayStation because I am thirty and I am pathetic and I spent the whole of my last day of enforced leave playing Speed Rally IV. I have given up on the shelf plan…we now have one alcove of partially built-in shelves at random heights and one still with the old blue monstrosity. I think it looks fine and even quite artful now we’ve filled most of the surplus holes.

Miraculously, Arthur Arsehole brought two couples around to the flat today. I’m pretty sure the first were just two other estate agents from his office pretending to be prospective buyers. The second were a knock-through couple. They spent the whole viewing tapping walls knowingly and saying to each other, ‘We could knock this through’ and, ‘We could knock that through.’ I don’t know why
they don’t just buy a barn or a field and live in that. As he left, Arsehole said he would add the built-in shelves to the property details. I can’t work out whether he was being sarcastic or not…so hard to tell with estate agents.

Everyone at work thinks it’s funny to cower when I walk past. Even Johnson keeps shouting, ‘Don’t hit me, don’t hit me,’ every time I wander over. At least Anastasia has left, probably to run for president of UNICEF or to become the first work experience in space.

Having followed IT geek at work’s advice and put the Play-Station on eBay with no reserve to attract attention, it has sold for £12.17. The buyer wants to know if they can collect in person to save the postage. I will now have to kill the IT geek.

First time to the gym in a week. Not only is sweaty fat guy looking thin and muscle-bound, he seems to have brought his glands under control. He leaves the machines dry. He is also, rather brilliantly, occupying most of Denise’s attention. I am left to my own devices and spend most of the session sitting on the rowing machine reading a year-old copy of
Hello.

Surprise, surprise: the last two couples have declined to make an offer on the flat. At least it means I can get Isabel to agree to wait a bit before making an offer on the house three seconds from her mum’s house.

Great news: my built-in shelves are now part of the selling details for our flat. It says ‘Spacious living room with bay window, fitted curtains, original features and designer shelving.’

Our five-month anniversary today. Breakfast in bed for Isabel, then conclusive proof that it was just a blip and not a trend. Twice in two days and not just because I felt I had to keep the numbers up.

To mark our anniversary, I decide to cook a splendid five-course feast for my beautiful wife. Got home then went all the way to Waitrose especially and was minding my own business in the partridge aisle when I heard that voice.

‘William, you naughty boy. Fancy seeing you here.’

And there she was. Saskia. Eighteen feet tall, seventeen of them legs, a trademark six inches covered by skirt. Bottle-blonde hair, hypnotic blue eyes, come-hither lashes, life-raft lips and a smile that makes men tremble and women spit with rage. Saskia: the Destroyer of Relationships.