The Marriage Diaries Read online

  When my wife, Celeste, the second of the two imperious deities ruling my universe, finally gets home, she “takes over.” Harry, of course, is a joy for that hour before bed. The plan, it seems, is to make me look like a whining, chiding, grumbling ne'er-do-well—a grudger and a shirk. Who, after all, could complain about this angel, happily toddling about, naked from the waist down to encourage, futilely, the use of the potty, smiling and chatting to his yellow plastic bulldozer and the toy soldiers I really shouldn't have bought him? Here, with those blue eyes and the long blond hair, he looks like a child invented by a Victorian propagandist for the virtues of home and family.

  So, you see, the lunchtime hour—two if I'm lucky—when Harry sleeps is a special time. It's not long enough to write an article or do anything useful, so I'm at liberty to vegetate or even to indulge in a little mulling over all the things in my life that haven't gone quite to plan. I begin, still in the elevator, to relax into the moment, mentally already in the armchair, mentally, in fact, already shifting uncomfortably in that armchair trying to avoid the broken spring that presents such a regular challenge to my anal integrity.

  And then, just as the elevator door begins to rattle open, I catch the glint.

  He's looking at me. Not straight at me, but bouncing his malevolence off the mirror that takes up most of the back wall of the elevator. And he has to work hard at getting his message through: after all, his gaze has to squeeze between the pressing mass of chin and cheeks and pudgy nose below his eyes and the tugged-down peak of his baseball cap above.

  That baseball cap, by the way, was my masterstroke, the Pearl Harbor in the warfare Celeste and I fought over Harry. For this to make sense, I'm going to have to tell you something about Celeste.

  Celeste works in fashion. There, I've said it. She's tried to explain to me what exactly it is that she does, but it won't seem to compute. Wait, let's try:

  She works for a big French designer that even I've heard of. They have shops in which the clothes they make are sold as well as “concessions” in other shops. And then there are yet other shops in which there is not a special concession but that also sell these clothes. With me so far? Well, Celeste is something called The Buyer (I don't know if she really gets initial caps for that, but in my head, she does), which means that she buys clothes from the designer's collections (see, I know some of the words) on behalf of the label's shops and concessions. So she decides which bits of the current collection work best in the various locations.

  Actually, I think I might have cracked it. So that's what she does.

  The clothes in which she deals don't seem, on the whole, to be the birdcage-on-the-head kind. They don't incorporate or otherwise use in their designs chain mail, the dung of ungulates, spent nuclear fuel rods, objets trouvés, or live lizards. You're never going to get laughed at behind your back for wearing one of Celeste's suits or dresses. Well, when I say you, I mean you if you're a woman. I'd get laughed at. But then I get laughed at whatever I wear, black tie at a funeral, trunks in the sauna. But it's still the sort of stuff that would have my mum, back in Leeds, shaking her head in disbelief.

  And being in fashion, it's part of Celeste's job to look fabulous. She looks beautiful professionally the way bartenders looked pissed professionally. When she enters a room, you can feel the tension. Most of the men instantly dislike her because they know they'll never get her; and you can almost hear the shriveling, mean contraction in the souls of the women.

  Ugliness comes to us in a million different forms—limping, hunched, ill-knit, diseased, mutilated, poor. Ugliness is democratic: most of us partake of it in some aspect of our being, and this chiming with something in ourselves makes for the most human of responses—our hatred and our pity.

  Beauty comes in fewer guises: as yielding feminine comeliness; in fatal, dark-eyed elegance; in stretched and sinewy Giacometti forms. Celeste's beauty is of another kind. It has a cold, flawless, crystalline perfection about it, like an electron micrograph of a mosquito's compound eye. It is the beauty of a stiletto, of a panther, of an impossible equation, of the silence at the end of everything.

  And what is a woman like that, a woman for whom the world is all reflective surface, the eye's delight the only delight, going to do with a baby? I don't want to suggest that Celeste saw the child as a fashion accessory. She never fluffed his hair and draped him around her neck like one of those removable fur collars that were all the rage a year or so ago. She hasn't had him skinned, tanned, and turned into a handbag or even taken the Gucci branding iron to him. But nor was she going to dress him in any old rag, the stuff from Next or Woollies or the Gap, the stuff that I bought him or my mom bought him or my friends bought him. No, for Celeste, it had to be some unfathomable knickerbocker-like thing with a matching top part and some complex system of cantilevers joining the two, purchased from a shop with, to the untrained eye, nothing in it at all in Paris or New York or Tokyo, from a designer with quite possibly pedophiliac tendencies, and at the very least an unhealthy disregard for the practicalities of diaper changing and bum wiping. Don't expect me to remember the names. Remembering names is not one of the things that I do. But the prices I remember (“You spent £205 for that? What, even with the yen as weak as it is?”) and the chilling fact that, in the first year, Harry's wardrobe cost more than I've spent on clothes in my entire life.

  I'd get Harry dressed in the morning, in, you know, just normal stuff: a pair of baggy pants and a sweatshirt. Like mine, but smaller, and usually with more dribble down the front. And, okay, I'm not saying that the top and the pants always loved each other, and the chances of his little socks being the same color or size were fleeting, but what the hell did he care? Well, Celeste cared, and if she had time before going off to her studio, she'd raise an eyebrow, take Harry firmly by the hand, and lead him back to his room for a makeover, from whence he'd emerge like something the catwalk dragged in.

  Which was why the hat was so inspired. I'd seen it in Woolworths, where we went to ride the Thomas the Tank Engine machine. Thomas ate pound coins but was otherwise ideal: he moved in monotonous gyrations like a three-toed sloth with Parkinson's disease, giving just enough of a thrill to Harry to keep him interested but providing me with a fear-free five minutes in which I could sit on a step and watch the thirteen-year-old girls in micro-skirts busily shoplifting, while I contemplated what I should do about Uma Thursday and her unexpected proposition. It was there that I saw the hat, perched proudly on its very own floor-mounted, revolving display.

  Even a fashion refusenik like me could see that it was truly hideous. The bits that weren't Pooh Bear-colored were a gruesome, labial pink, like an embarrassed flamingo caught interfering with himself in a public park. And it had ears. Two yellow Pooh ears, standing proud on the dome. Magisterial. Best of all, as a special, Woolworths was throwing in a pair of matching sunglasses (normal price ninety-nine pence) for the four ninety-nine you had to stump up for the hat. Now that was a lot of hat-and-sunglasses action you were picking up for under a fiver.

  Harry, of course, loved it. How could he not when it had ears and looked like a flamingo's fanny? That evening, Celeste, after staring at me and it as if we were something that Harry had vomited, expectorated, or shat, hurried him away, but the operation to remove the growth was entirely unsuccessful. Celeste came to know the wrath of Harry, and he did smite her, and the hat remaineth.

  It took her a long time to get over the hat. The usual sanctions— withdrawal of affection, restriction of access to her side of the marital bed—were already in place, backed up, where she deemed necessary, by the forceful and often innovative use of hairbrushes and nail scissors. I think she may have briefly contemplated killing me, but the problems with disposing of my body, and the hassle of having to find another childminder for Harry, put her off. In the end, she settled for simply using the hat as a mobile and permanent demonstration of my mental cruelty, garnering what sympathy she could.

  So that was the hat. And now he, my l
ittle baby boy, was looking up at me in the elevator mirror from beneath the pink brim. And below the eyes, that exquisite mouth of his was smiling: not his usual “Ah, here come the chocolates” smile, or the “Ha, I hit Daddy on the head with the potty” smile, but a smile that said, “Yes, I know exactly what you wanted me to do—you wanted me to go to sleep so you could loosen your trousers and sit in your chair and drink your tea—but I'm not going to, am I? Instead, you're going to spend the next hour singing me songs and telling me stories about monsters and giving me chocolates in the vain hope that I eventually drop off. Isn't that so, eh? Eh?”

  And he was right, that's what I'd be doing. But I didn't mind. I didn't mind because Harry had shown that he wasn't just an eating, belching, shitting machine but a little man, a mini-me, with a brain and a will as well as a mouth and a bum. And most of all, I didn't mind because of the voice, born somewhere deep in our genes or our culture, that said, Go on, love him, love him, even if he's ruined your life and stopped you from doing all the things you like to do and made you do loads of other things you don't like doing at all.

  You've got no choice; love him, love him.

  PRADAPRADAPRADAPRADAGUCCI 2

  Well, where to begin? Uma Thursday, I think. She seems the obvious

  place.

  Oh yes, I know I'm supposed to rise to the bait of this mysterious Thursday woman and her unexpected proposition. A likely name I don't think. The Uma bit is obviously there to make me think of Uma Thurman, but if she exists at all, she probably looks like a gnu and lives in a council apartment in Kilburn with the five kids by four different fathers and has a septic hole in her navel where she botched a DIY piercing.

  Or maybe I'm supposed to think of Robinson Crusoe and his Man Friday. The companion come to save the hero from a life of terrible loneliness. The poor lamb.

  No, darling, you'll have to do better than Uma Thursday if you want to make me jealous.

  Jealous or not, when I first read it, I huffed off to the spare bedroom, but it was cold and damp and had things in it that shouldn't have been there, like bits of bicycle and old shoes that Sean wouldn't throw away and inexplicable lengths of wire. So I went back in beside Sean and pulled the duvet off him round myself so that he couldn't get anywhere near me, knowing that he'd wake up cold in the morning, which was just what I wanted.

  It was as I was lying in bed that the rest of it began to irritate me. For all his droning on about being a dead-tough, hard-as-nails, call-a-spade-a-spade man of the people, he's just a huge—and I mean colossal—ponce.

  The huge-ponce thing comes out with all his drama-queening it, the way everything takes on an epic scale, every little problem becoming a tragedy. You'd hardly guess from his oh-so-moving description of the life of the practically single-parent family that he claims to lead, that we have in place, at the moment, three cleaning ladies, two additional childminders, a whole kindergarten, and my father, who does much of the collecting, driving, and depositing, as dear, dear Sean hasn't got a car and couldn't drive it even if he had and wouldn't drive it even if he could on account of the weight his conscience would have to bear for destroying the planet.

  And on the subject of Sean's hidden seam of campness, I suppose that one does have to remember that he once bought a Kylie Minogue CD.

  “It's from her rock period,” he claimed lamely, when I found it, hidden in between Radiohead and Neil Young.

  “She hasn't got a rock period. It's gay music, and that's all there is to it. She's a friend of Milo, you know.”

  “It's not gay music. Well, not this album. She worked with some proper musicians. There are guitars. It's really hard to dance to. It flopped.”

  “Stop making excuses. It's gay and you know it. There's nothing wrong with it, just stop wriggling.”

  “I don't want to listen to it while a man in tight trousers puts his arm up to the elbow in my ass. I just want to f— I mean, I fancy her, that's all. That can't be gay, can it?”

  “And that's supposed to be better, is it? You bought it because you fancy her?”

  “Not like a real person. I didn't know Milo knew Kylie. He couldn't … ? Only kidding.”

  As for being a “lardass,” that's another example of his self-dramatizing. And probably a subtle attack on me. True, he's a bit doughy around the middle, but as long as he keeps his clothes on and minds how he sits, you'd hardly notice. And you see, by making himself seem ridiculous, he makes me ridiculous as well—he is, after all, my choice.

  The boy's a genius at black propaganda. Take the beauty bit. Looks, at first glance, like a compliment, doesn't it? And then comes that creepy compound eye and the stuff about everybody's hating me. It's a verbal version of his most evil invention, the deafening kiss. Exquisite in its way. Up he'll sidle, in full view of the dinner guests or the party crowd, put an arm around my shoulders, and kiss me on the ear. Looks like the sweetest gesture, but what he's really doing is making a horrid vacuum, accompanied by a great loud smacking noise. It actually physically hurts, as well as being a bit of a shock. And so, of course, I reel away, usually crying out something like “Stop it” or “Fuck off” or “Drop dead,” and so the whole world thinks that I've responded to a gentle endearment or soft nuzzle with a piece of naked aggression. It's all designed to make me look like a bitch and him the poor lost innocent.

  Don't, by the way, fall into the trap of imagining that the vanity in our relationship is distributed purely on the female side. True, it's my job to care how I look, but Sean is as much the mirror's slave as I am. More so. I go to the mirror for help. It's a tool. Five minutes max of hair and makeup, and we part, without a backward glance, job done, mission accomplished.

  But Sean.

  Picture the scene. He's standing in front of the big hall mirror, groaning.

  “Oh, good God in heaven,” he moans. “What the fuck do I look like?”

  “You look fine,” I say, not really thinking or caring, but just, you know, being nice.

  “I look like something shat out by a vulture.”

  “You don't look like you've had anything to do with a vulture. You just look like you always do, normal.”

  “Look at these clothes. Why don't I have any nice clothes? I look like the tramp the other tramps hit with sticks and throw bricks at. I look like—”

  “Well, go and buy yourself some new things, then.”

  “What's the point? I'd look just as bad. Like a tramp in a new suit. And anyway, nothing ever fits, and you know how shopping always makes me sweat and stammer and the store detectives follow me like dogs after a bitch in heat.”

  And by that stage, you can forgive me for losing it.

  “Well, perhaps it'd help if you washed your clothes occasionally. Look, you've got stains all over your trousers. And you keep taking things out of the washing basket and wearing them again.”

  “That's because you keep putting things in there that aren't dirty.”

  “The stains,” I say, pointing.

  “Yes, but in between the stains, these trousers are completely clean.”

  And then back to the mirror for more groaning.

  So, you see, if anyone's vain, it's him. It's just that he has negative vanity, and it brings him only suffering.

  I never quite twigged that the grotesque baseball cap was part of his deviousness. I had simply, and understandably, assumed bad taste. Perhaps I've underestimated him. I did try weaning Harry off it by being less affectionate to the child whenever he wore it, but either the hat meant more to him than my love or he still hasn't got the mental facility to make the connection. He'll learn.

  Oddly prescient, by the way, that thing about killing him. One does sometimes, in idle moments (not that I have any), speculate on … things. I remember sixth-form debates about whether it would have been okay to kill Hitler before he came to power. And Tolstoy drones on about it at tedious length in War and Peace or Anna Karenina or somewhere, doesn't he? (Ha! See, I can do it, too!)

  But I suppose
it would be pretty tough to make a case for killing your husband on the grounds that he's frequently annoying. Must have a look in Sean's philosophy books (there are, dismayingly, shelves of them), just in case someone has tried.

  Now that would be pleasingly ironic, wouldn't it?

  Leaving aside the issue of killing people (and I was kidding, by the way), there are a couple of other moral dilemmas in the air, one being the whole thing about reading other people's intimate thoughts without their knowing about it. I considered telling Sean that I'd found his journal, just to see him squirm. But then he'd either have stopped writing it or done a better job of hiding it. And the truth is, I want to carry on reading what he has to say. I don't suppose there will be any revelations about affairs with Uma Thursday or whomever—I do actually trust him. And anyway, none of my friends has ever suggested that he might be affair material—you know, the kind of man who gives out the aura, who has the look, the smell … He has something else altogether, a kind of innocence. It's one of the reasons I fell in love with him. That and the smile and the eyes and the gush of words. So it's not that I want to trick him into betraying himself; it's more that, well, I really want to see what he says about things. And yes, by things, I include me. And Harry, of course.

  Although discovering Sean's journal was due to simple good fortune, continued access relies on a little more cunning. Sean has two computers—the “big” one, on which he does all his “work,” and a cute baby laptop, which seems mainly to be decorative. He devised some cunning way of making them talk to each other without any obvious external connection and proudly announced that he had made a “wireless network,” without explaining why this was good or necessary. His next mistake was to let me use the laptop when I needed to work at home. It took very little clicking to find that the wireless network thingy gave me access to the hard disk on his main machine. It asked me for a password. “Celeste”? No, the swine! “Harry”? Bingo. How like children men are.