of me having sex with my ex-girlfriend, Saskia (the Destroyer of Relationships). Worst of all, he found out I was getting Isabel’s parents some cheese knives for Christmas and he got them better ones. How could anyone be so devious?
I had assumed the answer was simple enough: he loved her, she didn’t love him, he turned into a nutter. But after the dust had settled, after Isabel and I had repaired the damage he had done, after he had cried a lot and begged for forgiveness, it became clear that it wasn’t quite so simple after all.
‘Isabel. William. I have something else to tell you.’
You’re moving to Indonesia? You’re becoming a Trappist monk? You’re—
‘I’m gay and I’m in love with an interior designer called Geoff.’
I don’t know why we were even still talking to him at all, let alone talking to him about this exciting new revelation, a revelation which, frankly, if he’d revealed it to himself a bit earlier, could have saved us all an awful lot of hassle.
‘Wow,’ exclaimed Isabel charitably.
‘Couldn’t you have worked that out a bit earlier?’ I asked as patiently as possible.
‘I know. I’m so sorry. I always knew deep down. You just do, don’t you? But I was too frightened to admit it to myself, let alone to anyone else. I think that’s why I spent all my time chasing a woman I knew I could never be with.’
‘And hiding a camera in her bedside lamp.’
‘Yes, well, I was in denial. And denial led to confusion. And obsession. And…’
‘And psychotic behaviour?’ I was only trying to help him finish his train of thought, but Isabel gave me a look. Despite everything, Alex was still her friend and she would still support him, a fact which I found intensely annoying. Given the lengths to which he had gone to spoil our wedded bliss, announcing he was gay was about the only way he could insinuate himself back into Isabel’s affections. Which is exactly what happened. He went from, ‘Sorry for nearly ruining your lives’ to ‘I can’t wait for you to meet Geoff, you’re going to love him’ in the space of five minutes.
A week after that, contrary to Alex’s prediction, I found that I didn’t love Geoff. Geoff loved the sound of his own voice too much for there to be room for any other love. ‘William. Hi. Heard a lot about—Blimey, I hope that rug was a present, or are you being ironic? Maybe the latter, I’ve heard you’re quite dry and, my God, what a bold statement you’re making putting that picture against that wallpaper. Bravo. Anyway, sorry, where was I? So good to meet you. I was thinking on the way here that—’
The only time anyone else could speak was when he had food in his mouth. The rest of the time, he monopolised the conversation with long, fanciful stories about how brilliant he was and how awful everyone else’s taste in home furnishings was. I don’t know why he thinks he’s so brilliant. He’s only an interior designer who was on daytime television once.
‘You know, he used to be on television?’ whispered Alex when Geoff gave us all a break by going to the toilet. ‘And he wants me to work with him. He loves my style. He thinks I could be an interior designer, too. Isn’t that exciting?’
‘Yes.’
No.
So now Alex is back in our lives. He has chucked in his old pretentious job and got a new pretentious job. He is now an interior designer. And we have to have dinner with them at their annoyingly designed flat. And they have to come to dinner and make annoying comments about our normally designed house.
And, clearly, he still can’t help upstaging me on the present front. First cheese knives. Now flowers. His bunch would embarrass the head gardener at Kew.
‘Isabel, I thought you disapproved of out-of-season flowers. Because of the food miles, or whatever it is.’
‘Yes, but aren’t they beautiful?’
Friday 4 January
The baby seat. My God, the baby seat. Even when I’d read the instructions (birthing pool: lesson learned), in four languages, I still couldn’t work it out. You have to feed the seat belt through several different holes, loops and clips, all at the pace of a snail to prevent the very touchy seat belt from locking up. If there are any slight twists or kinks in the seat belt, YOUR BABY WILL DIE. You have to get a floaty orange thing lined up with another floaty orange thing, or YOUR BABY WILL DIE. Even though the orange thing is a sort of spirit level and it only lines up when our car is on the road, not the drive. You must then clip one clip into another clip, even though the clips don’t reach one another, or YOUR BABY WILL DIE. If the air bags go off, YOUR BABY WILL DIE. If you have the headrest angled wrong, YOUR BABY WILL DIE. If you don’t follow points 1 to 97 of the health and safety section of the policy document of the car seat, you will be a child killer.
Before leaving for the hospital, I managed to get the seat into the car in a relatively non-lethal way. It took twenty-five minutes and an awful lot of swearing, but I did it. As long as I put it in when the car was on the road, not the drive, it was safe. But when I got to the hospital, they wouldn’t let us carry Jacob out in our arms – against health and safety regulations. So I had to unravel the seat, bring it into the hospital, put Jacob in it, take it and him back to the car and then tell the hardcore hospital traffic warden to back off because, even though I was in a ten-minute loading bay, I was dealing with baby seats as well as a baby and would be more than ten minutes. The traffic warden backed off.
Putting a baby-filled baby seat into a car is much harder than putting an empty seat in. Eventually, I gave up. I told Isabel, sitting in considerable pain in the front seat, that all was well, smiled at Jacob, cursed the fact that Alex’s flowers had to be brought down to the car in two separate journeys, then drove all the way home at no more than four miles per hour so that OUR BABY WOULD NOT DIE.
Ahhh, home. Start of the babymoon. We are all alive. We are all at home. None of us appear to have contracted a hospital superbug. Although I can no longer get away with watching DVDs or drinking beer, I am feeling very, very happy – as happy as someone who thought everyone was going to die and then found out they weren’t. As long as I don’t make Isabel laugh at all in the next two weeks (her stitches forbid it) and as long as we never want to drive anywhere ever again with Jacob, we will be fine.
Saturday 5 January
Well, that was interesting. I think I slept about nine minutes in total. In one-minute bursts. Jacob was in a crib next to the bed. He didn’t like that, so Isabel brought him into the bed. Co-sleeping, they call it. By the time I came to bed (very late, after trying to recover from eight hours of constant waitering), Isabel was fast asleep and Jacob was in the middle of the bed stretched out in a star shape.
He looked very, very small. Easily squashable. Isabel says that a parent, so long as he or she is sober, is perfectly in tune with his or her baby and wouldn’t squash it in a million years. She’s read that in a book. But in the small hours, with Jacob snuffling away next to me, a half-remembered horror story about a giant panda squashing its offspring creeps into my head. I think it was a panda, but it could have been a Glaswegian. No, it was definitely a giant panda.
So I lay there trying to work out if giant pandas aren’t comparable because they are animals, not half as intelligent as humans, and they
