William Walker’s First Year of Marriage: A Horror Story. Matt Rudd

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      Monday 27 June

      Start of another day already ruined by half eight in the morning when Arthur Arsehole calls. A lot of interest in the flat. Sixteen hits on the website alone. But it’s a bad time for the market. Tells me to keep my pecker up, Willy. I tell him I’ll smash his face in if he ever calls me Willy ever again ever or makes any reference to my pecker whatsoever. But only after he’s hung up.

      Tuesday 28 June

      Andy has been around to Alex’s again to help make him dinner. ‘What’s the point in arguing? Alex is a nice guy,’ he tells me. ‘You’re a ridiculous hippy,’ I reply. Of course, he always has been a ridiculous hippy. The first time we met, in Freshers’ Week at university, his hair was down to his shoulders, his trousers were stripy and he smelt. Since then, he has learned to wash, bought new clothes and cut his hair, but the hippy still lurks within.

      And you can never rely on a hippy to understand that an evil maniac is trying to ruin your marriage.

      Wednesday 29 June

      The only reason I went back to Astrid’s sweaty room in Holborn is because of the whole Alex buggy-crash debacle. I suspect Alex, with his broken arm, is winning the charm offensive. I need to be seen in Lycra again, just so Isabel will stop giving me that look every time anyone mentions the race.

      It is just as sweaty as last week but I make sure we get there early and that I bagsy a place right at the front. This means I get told off by Astrid for yawning but sweaty Lycra guy has to spend the whole lesson staring at my clenched buttocks and not vice versa.

      I think he likes it.

      Thursday 30 June

      Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. Isabel sent straight from doctor’s appointment to hospital. Something gynaecological. Something about an operation…

      She called me from the hospital, sounded very shaky. Couldn’t talk because mobiles are banned and she’d run out of coins. Just starting to explain what was wrong when the beeps started. Cut off saying, ‘Hopefully the doctor will…’ beep, beep, beep.

      Took ages to get from work to the hospital because of the sodding Northern Line. Absolutely the worst hour of my life. I love her so much. Realised by King’s Cross that if I lost her I would never recover. Wouldn’t want to. Realised by Camden Town that I even loved her for her goat’s milk and her ridiculous yoga. Promised by Archway I would never argue with her again.

      Three a.m. now. She has a Bartholin’s cyst, which means her bits, or more specifically one bit, has swollen like an orang-utan’s bottom. They wheeled her away an hour ago just like they do in Casualty, which was dreadful. Wanted to follow her through the flappy doors but the big, scary nurse-bitch wouldn’t let me. Nice little nurse has let me stay in the ward with the groaning old ladies. One is on morphine, in and out of consciousness, muttering wildly.

      Will buy Isabel an enormous bunch of flowers tomorrow.

      Assuming I can get to the flower shop, what with the dead leg that won’t go away. Apparently, I was asleep for a whole two hours in the metal chair by Isabel’s bed. Couldn’t feel my leg at all when I woke up. Actually thought I might have permanently paralysed myself, it took so long to recover. Is that possible? Will check on Wikipedia.

      Isabel was very worried. ‘Poor you,’ she said when I woke. ‘You look so tired.’

      She’s amazing. Not even Florence Nightingale would have been worrying about my dead leg if her private parts looked like a monkey’s arse.

       JULY

       ‘The chains of marriage are so heavy that it takes two tobear them, and sometimes three.’

      ALEXANDRE DUMAS

      Friday 1 July

      She’s alive! Operation was a success. Important stuff intact. Not counting the dead-leg chair-nap, I haven’t slept a wink. Went home for a couple of hours to change pants and so forth. Tried to rest but had nightmares about being attacked by a gang of inflamed orangutans. Whoever said all men’s dreams were about sex was lying.

      Isabel releases herself mid-afternoon (like in soaps when the patient ill-advisedly tears out her own tubes and storms out of the ward), and we get home just in time for one of the idiots upstairs to start practising his new set of drums.

      I am in no mood for drums.

      As I ring the upstairs doorbell, I am a creature of crimson terror, a brooding, fearsome primeval ape-man from the dawn of time: hideous, malevolent, aggressive, coiled. I am the Incredible Hulk in shirt-splitting mid-transition. I am King Kong with hunger anger.

      The door is opened by one of the idiots.

      ‘My wife has just had a major operation on her labia,’ I roar-whisper, the way an unpredictable serial killer would. ‘She has just spent a whole night being operated on and then a whole day in an NHS ward full of moaning grannies and superbugs. She could well have MBNA. She has survived an ordeal and I. Am. Her. HUSBAND.’

      Pause for effect. I exude boiling, molten rage.

      ‘Do you mean MRSA?’

      The idiot shifts his cool, slouchy weight from one foot to the other.

      ‘It doesn’t matter what I mean. What are you going to do about it?’

      More boiling moltenness but he doesn’t look as threatened or apologetic as I had hoped. He looks a little sleepy.

      ‘Do about what?’

      ‘THE DRUMS. THE BLOODY DRUMS. Would you mind not playing your drums today?’

      Another pause. More boiling.

      ‘Or for the rest of the week?…Or, in fact, for-fucking-ever?’

      He looks at me nonchalantly. I look at him as if I’m a stick of dynamite.

      ‘I don’t have any drums,’ he says with a cool, calm shrug. ‘That’s why you can still hear drumming even though I’m here talking to you. It’s the flat next door.’

      For the rest of the day, I’m in full hand-and-foot waiting mode.

      Initially, this is an immense pleasure. My poor recovering wife needs me. I have a role. I am a man with a role. I am protecting the womenfolk. I will silence drummers and top up hot-water bottles. It is the north London equivalent of forming a defensive ring of prairie wagons, then fending off Red Indians with Smith & Wessons.

      ‘Can I have some Marmite toast?’ Of course, darling, coming right up.

      ‘Oh, СКАЧАТЬ