Diary of an Unsmug Married (13 page)

He goes off in a huff – to get the early edition of the local paper, or so he says. That’s usually code for a ‘restorative’ drink.

While he’s gone, I email Johnny the best of the photos I finally managed to take last night – by waiting until everyone else had gone to bed, then locking myself in the bathroom again.

I had to keep flushing the loo and groaning so Max would think I had a stomach upset, while twisting around like a lunatic to make sure that my arse was actually in the frame. The whole thing took ages, and it was after 4:00am when I finally got to bed.
How
have I come to this?

Of course, as soon as I hit
send
, I change my mind. Then I spend the rest of the afternoon panicking, especially when I get an out-of-office reply from Johnny. I bet his PA is showing my arse to everyone at the Global Oil Company water cooler right this minute.

I’m still trying to work out how to get an email back when there’s another call from Josh’s school. For God’s sake. Josh has apparently ‘failed to control’ his skateboard, which has flown up into the air and smashed the window of the Deputy Head’s office.

Mr Thumb says that he
had
intended to confiscate the skateboard for a week, but has now changed his mind.

‘Why?’ I ask.

I’d have confiscated it for ever, given half a chance. Josh’s teeth looked perfectly normal until he took up skateboarding, and I’m sure he was more reasonable before all the blows to the head.

‘Because of the championship,’ says Mr Thumb.

‘Pardon?’ I say. I have no idea what he’s talking about.

‘Well, Josh was saying that he’s in the National Skateboarding Championships this weekend, so I felt it would be only fair to delay his punishment until next week.’

Josh can’t stay upright on that damned thing for more than twenty seconds without having an accident. No way is he capable of participating in a National Championship, unless it’s the
Unintentional Comedy on a Skateboard Championship
– which I don’t think exists, though it certainly
should
.

‘Don’t you agree?’ says Mr Thumb.

I’m barely capable of speech, so just mumble a pathetic ‘Thank you’, and then hang up.

How the hell did Max and I raise a compulsive liar? And why didn’t I expose Josh’s dishonesty, to teach him a lesson? This abdication of parental responsibility and discipline is probably how serial killers are made – as well as gang lords.

At least Connie’s unlikely to become either of those things, as she’s got the call centre job, which sounds fairly harmless. She’s very excited about it – particularly at the thought of flexi-time – though I forget to ask her why, as just then Max arrives home, looking thoroughly fed up.

He feigns enthusiasm for Connie’s achievement pretty well, but later tells me that
his
boss warned of further branch closures this morning. I try to reassure him, but God knows how we’d manage on my pathetic salary alone. We’d probably have to separate to survive. According to Mrs H, that’s what all married people should be doing, anyway …

SATURDAY, 3 JULY

Josh does not take well to Max and I taking the piss about the National Skateboarding Championships. In fact, he goes so far as to say that it is our failure to encourage his talents which has made him the way he is. Then he storms off into town with Robbie.

Max laughs, while I fall into a guilt-ridden slough of despond, which isn’t helped by the fact that I won’t get a reply from Johnny until Monday at the earliest.

God knows how many copies of my photo his PA will have disseminated around the typing pool by then. I will be his staff’s equivalent of Mr Beales – my buttocks might even adorn their dartboard, as Andrew’s face does ours.

This thought is so horrendous that even Max notices that I’m looking a bit stressed-out, and suggests we go and have a coffee somewhere – so we plod down to Caffè Nero, where I ingest so much caffeine that I give myself a bout of palpitations.

Max wants to know if I think The Boss will give me a pay-rise now that I can
prove
that I’m so badly paid in comparison to the employees of most other MPs. I say I rate my chances of that at zero, to which Max says he has now developed palpitations as well. The way our working lives are going, we’ll have to rely on Connie to keep us soon – and
she’s
only back at home for the summer!

Anyway, if Max’s job’s in such jeopardy, we can’t afford to buy anything other than a coffee, so we decide we may as well go home again – and I feel even more guilty about the twenty quid I spent on underwear than I already did. It’s not as if you can take
that
back for a refund, unlike your wife.

So now I’ve got stress hiccups, and Max and I are heading home, less than an hour after we left the house. We walk along in silence most of the way – me holding my breath and trying not to think what he’d say about the underwear if he found out about it, while he could be thinking about Ellen, for all I know – until we reach the underpass.

We’ve just passed through one of its steepish, sloping arms when we’re stopped in our tracks by a sudden loud, rumbling noise, which startles me so much that my hiccups stop. As we stand still in the central circle, a skateboarder suddenly shoots out of another of the arms, waves, spins a few times, then roars gracefully past – out into the other arm that leads in the direction of our house.

We just manage to spot that it’s Robbie, but honestly,
blink
, and you’d have missed him: it was all over in seconds, even though he was going uphill on the way out.

The rumbling doesn’t diminish as much as it should, though, seeing as Robbie should be a fair distance away by now, given the speed he was going. Instead, it’s intensifying, though it isn’t half as rhythmic as the earlier sound.

Unnerved, Max and I continue to stand still in the central area, in case we’re about to get taken out by a runaway trolley or something.

We seem to wait for ever until, eventually, another skateboarder appears. He’s veering all over the place, and wobbling like a maniac.

It’s Josh – and watching him is
agonising
.

Max and I look at each other, both close to hysteria, then back at Josh, who doesn’t acknowledge us at all. He’s too busy concentrating on wobbling his way slowly –
very
slowly – out of the underpass.

Just before he’s out of earshot, it all becomes too much. Max lets out an explosive volley of laughter, and I sink against the wall, shaking. I may need an incontinence pad.

‘Our son, the skateboard champion,’ says Max.

I just nod. Honestly, we are
terrible
parents.

SUNDAY, 4 JULY

Josh doesn’t speak to Max or I all day, but he does leave the skateboard behind when he goes round to Holly’s. Connie’s also out, with her new boyfriend, so it’s very quiet, even for a Sunday.

Max and I are sitting in the kitchen, in a fairly companionable silence, while he tightens the wheels on Josh’s skateboard to improve the steering and I read the Sunday papers – which for once don’t include a single quote from The Boss. We’re having quite a nice time, until Annoying Ellen turns up, to borrow the corkscrew yet again.

After another of her overly vocal performances late last night, I ask her whether she’s aware of how sound travels between our houses. Honestly, I’m
so
stupid sometimes.

She doesn’t even look me in the eye, but does a silly little giggle, then simpers – right at Max – and says, ‘Oh, sorry – it’s just that I do
so
love sex.’

I say nothing, while I envisage beating her to death with a blunt object. I doubt Max is picturing the same thing, though he doesn’t look any more amused than me.

‘I didn’t hear anything last night,’ he says, looking up at Ellen, and cutting his finger on the chisel he’s using to straighten Josh’s wheels.

‘Don’t worry, Max,’ she says. ‘You didn’t miss anything. Only me and some batteries.’ Then she winks at him.

Max blushes, gets up to fetch the corkscrew, then presses it into her hand – just a little more slowly than necessary, though he claims that’s because his finger’s bleeding.

I’d have drilled the damn thing right through her palm, if I’d had the chance. Then they’d both need medical attention, not just Max.

He still looks a bit flustered when Ellen leaves, though that may be due to it being rather tricky to put a plaster on your right hand with your left, when your wife says she’s too busy to help you do it.

I’m not sure if he realises ‘busy’ is a euphemism for ‘annoyed’, but things are tense for the rest of the day and I’m relieved when the phone rings, for once in my life.

It’s Mum, who says that Dad has phoned her again, and she thinks that he is flirting with her now: too horrible a thought to contemplate. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong,
wrong
. Divorced parents should know that you don’t suddenly start flirting with each other when you’re in your seventies, and when your offspring have only just come to terms with being from a broken home.

Now I suppose I’m going to have to do something about it, and God knows what Dinah will say. Or
would
say, as
I’m
not going to tell her. I’m not that stupid. I just hope Dad’s not chatting her mother up too, otherwise chaos could ensue.

What happened to women over thirty being ‘too wrinkly’? That man’s a hazard to the whole of the opposite sex, bendy willy or not. He’s basically the Annoying Ellen of Dorset – with the addition of a foreshortened penis.

I’m so worn out by all these sex-crazed divorced people that I’ve just decided to go to bed for a very early night, when my phone emits a beep. I have a new email – from Johnny! I forgot not everyone’s like The Boss, who turns his phone off whenever he can and who has been known to throw it into the Thames – along with his pager – whenever he starts feeling persecuted by the Whips. Johnny keeps
his
BlackBerry turned on. (I wonder if this is some sort of omen?)

He doesn’t say much, just, ‘Fabulous arse. When can I see it in the flesh? Name the date, and don’t keep me waiting too long.’

Oh, my God. I bet
I’m
the one who’s blushing now.

MONDAY, 5 JULY

I seem to be surrounded by compulsive liars. All male, apart from Miss Chambers. What are the odds Johnny isn’t another?

At work, the new website’s almost finished, and the designer asks for a copy of The Boss’ CV for inclusion. Greg finally finds a dog-eared old copy under a pile of photos of Andrew, all dreadful, even though he still had real hair in some of them.

I give the designer the least horrific, while Greg chooses the worst one for use on the dartboard, then reads the CV aloud. Neither he nor I can ever remember seeing it before.

Buried at the bottom of page two is the news that Andrew used to play cricket semi-professionally. For a fairly well-known team, in his home town. I don’t pay much attention at first, as I am otherwise occupied in re-reading Johnny’s email from last night; anyway, The Boss is a sports fanatic, which is why most of his jollies – sorry,
fact
finding
trips
abroad
– take place at exactly the same time as major sporting fixtures. Greg is just suspicious by nature.

Before I know it, I hear him say, ‘Just wondered if you could confirm the dates that Andrew Sinclair played for the team?’

Now
what the hell is he doing? I leave my office and stand in the doorway to Greg’s, raising my eyebrows in enquiry. Greg waves me away and swivels his chair so that his back is facing me.

‘Are you sure?’ he says. There’s a pause, then he continues, ‘You’re
positive
there’s no mistake?’ He gestures furiously at me to approach his desk.

I wish he’d make his bloody mind up which direction I’m supposed to go in, and am about to say so, when he slams the phone down and punches the air. He looks even more like Patrick Bateman when triumphant.

‘He’s
such
a tosser sometimes,’ he says.

‘Who?’ I say.

‘Our lord and master, the keeper of the socialist flame and all-round good egg. That was the Secretary of the Cricket Club,’ Greg says, as if that makes everything crystal-clear.

It doesn’t. ‘And?’ I say.

‘And they have never –
ever
– heard of Andrew Sinclair!’

‘What?’ And there was me, thinking that all my illusions had already been shattered. ‘You mean—’

‘That’s
exactly
what I mean, Molly. The Boss’ CV is total bullshit. He never played for the team. Probably never did
half
the stuff he’s got on here.’ Greg screws up the CV and lobs it into the bin.

I don’t know what to say, so I return to my desk and delete the email I’d started to draft in reply to Johnny’s. I don’t feel like flirting with him now – not when all I know about him is what he’s told me himself.

‘A drinkypoo at lunchtime?’ says Greg.

I nod. Vigorously.

After lunch (one G&T for me, three for Greg), we pop into WH Smith, at Greg’s insistence, where he buys a large, red box file and some new labels – and pays in cash. When I point out that we already have folders and labels in the stationery cupboard, he says that his purchase is ‘for personal use’.

When we get back to the office, he retrieves the balled-up CV from the bin, smooths it out as best he can, then shoves it into the new folder. He winks as he does so. (I
do
wish people wouldn’t keep doing that.)

The rest of the afternoon’s not too bad, at least from a constituent point of view. Miss Chambers rings, but only once – to complain about a letter she’s received from the local Council, telling her that their staff have been instructed not to take her calls any longer, and to insist that she writes in with her complaints instead. The hearing of Council staff is obviously
much
more important than mine.

Anyway, I’m deafer, but quite calm when I close down my computer and prepare to go home – until I spot Greg, who’s precariously balanced in the depths of the archive cupboard, his feet straddling two of the shelves, half-way up. (There’s a certain amount of wobbling going on, which reminds me of Josh.)