FIG TREE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
FIG TREE
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,
Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,
Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published 2008
1
Copyright © Andrew Clover, 2008
Illustrations copyright © Andrew Clover, 2008
Extract on page 279 from The House at Pooh Corner, text by
A. A. Milne, © The Trustees of the Pooh Properties. Published by
Egmont UK Ltd London and used with permission
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book
978-0-14-191775-7
It’s a Saturday. I’m standing in Foyles bookshop, and I find three walls of parenting manuals. There’s one – two hundred pages long! – called Everything You Need To Know (in the first months of a child’s life). I’m thinking: Is there that much I should have known? I have, twice, lived through a child’s first months. I could boil my experience down to three sentences of advice:
1. Don’t be reading two-hundred-page books. Try to sleep.
2. Don’t let them suck too long, or mum’s nips will really hurt.
3. Get out the way when they puke.
I find several glossy volumes, which originated on TV, so they do what TV does best: concentrate on the freaks. I open the first book. It plunges me into a world of chaos and fear. I’m smelling the sick stuck to the seatbelt. The next one features photos of Supernanny, who’s clearly been styled by a whole team of Style Experts, so she looks strict but sexy – like a frisky Mary Poppins, who’d wipe your surfaces, then give you a spanking. I want to push Supernanny in a big muddy puddle. The childcare guides are making me feel depressed, and angry, and inadequate. I leave.
I head homewards, and find Liv in the park with the girls. She goes straight off to make lunch. People say kids bring parents together. They do, for about sixty seconds – the length of the average handover. At the playground, all the parents seem to have been reading the same books I have. The mums are mainly looking furious. Their body language is screaming: ‘If ANYONE else asks me to do something, I will start screaming, and I won’t stop.’ The dads are worse. They are trying to make phone calls, and are getting tetchy because they’re losing the connection. Or they’re following their kids saying ‘Careful, Molly!’ with that silly, soppy expression on their faces, like they want to play, but they are embarrassed.
I feel really depressed. I’m thinking: What’s the point of life? What’s the point of kids? They shout at night, they drain all your money and then they leave and blame you for everything that goes wrong with their lives.
At this point Cassady arrives. My second daughter. She’s three and a half. She’s wearing blue pants on her head. She’s pulling the rope of this brilliant go-kart we’ve got. My humming granddad made it fifty years ago out of wooden orange crates and two pram wheels. Cassady says: ‘Daddy, we need to get to our castle. You are a magic horse and you are called Barry the Magic Horse and you’ve got BIG BLACK HAIRY HOOVES!’ My daughter is very forceful. It’s like dealing with Paul McKenna, disguised as a small girl.
I immediately start to feel quite horsey. The other daughter arrives. Grace. The lanky one. She’s five. She steps gingerly into the go-kart. They both shout, ‘Giddy-up, Daddy! Giddy-up!’
I grab that go-kart, and I canter off at some speed. As I leave the playground, I do a neiiiigggggghhh of pleasure. They cheer. I gallop off down the woodland path. I’m seized by a moment of horsey pleasure. I leap over a tree trunk, for the sheer joy of it.
Then I realize I’m out of breath. I walk. I think: How did those little witches get me to pull them home? I turn and look at them. They’re doing clip-clop noises and singing that mad song they learned at school, the one where they chant: ‘Brush your teeth with bubblegum! Belly flop in a pizza!’ They are happy. Children complain that ketchup is touching their peas; they never complain that life is pointless. It occurs to me: life never had any meaning, because it’s not a maths puzzle that can be solved. The secret of life is to play.
The problem with parenting manuals, I reckon, is that they tell you about the rules you impose on your children: Share, Wash Your Hands, Do Not Post Toast In The DVD Player. This is useful, but it doesn’t make you eager about hanging out with your offspring. Which is bad, because kids copy their parents’ moods, and their outlook on life. So it doesn’t really matter what you feed them, or how early you start teaching them French. What matters is that you’re actually happy yourself. My parents taught me a lot about how to read; they taught very little about how to be happy. I had to learn it, from my daughters.
So that’s what this book is about. I tell you the parenting rules that I’ve learned by telling you the stories of how I learned them. I hope you’ll pick up a few tips. Example: If you’re really tired, take your top off, and invite your children to paint your back. You’ll feel like you’re being massaged by fairies. I’ll tell you how we’ve coped with the big issues: sibling rivalry, choosing a school, getting them to eat something that’s not a fish finger. I’ll also tell you how I’ve coped with the big fears: Will I ever see my friends? Will I turn into my dad? Will we ever have sex again? So I hope you’ll find that, in its own mad way, this book is curiously complete: it covers almost everything a modern parent might think about.
But, most of all, I hope the book does justice to the two small girls who inspired it. I hope that, like them, it’s short, playful and shockingly intimate. I hope it makes you laugh. I hope it makes you cry. I hope it sprinkles glittery fairy dust on your life.
Me and Liv on the muddy beach, the day before the incident I mention
July 1999. We’re on West Wittering beach. Kites are flying. Dogs are chasing balls. Liv squeezes my hand. ‘Andrew,’ she says, ‘would you like to have children?’ I know instantly this is a huge, historic moment. I know I must respond like a man. So I ignore her. Suddenly the wind is blasting sand against my legs. It’s overcast. I walk off towards the car. She follows after me, saying: ‘You can’t ignore the subject forever, you know.’ She’s wrong about that. I reckon I can ignore it for two more years at least. The trouble is she keeps bringing it up…
January 2000. It’s a Saturday morning. I’m in heaven. The sun is streaming through the window. It’s catching in the steam of my freshly brewed coffee. I’m sitting at the table, working on my Fantasy League Football team. I need a new midfielder, and I’ve still got 5.8 million quid. I could buy Darren Anderton for that; he’s a bargain at 5.4. I’d practically be making money on Darren.
I hear a whimpering sound from upstairs. Liv is calling me. I hate it when she does that. If she needs to talk to me, why can’t she visit me? I’m not a butler. I go upstairs, and find her sitting on the bed, staring tragically at the A4 box file that I’ve left on the desk.
‘What’s the matter?’ I say. I’m instantly ready to help. I’ll listen to her woes, I’ll soothe her brow, I’ll attack her enemies.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ she says.
‘NO! No! It does matter. Tell me.’
‘It’s… just…’ She sniffs tragically. She stares at my dying bonsai tree.
‘I just… I’d like to have a baby, and…’
At this point her voice goes squeaky. This is bad. She’s raised the very worst subject she could raise, and she’s raised it in the very worst way: she’s actually crying. My every instinct is telling me to get the hell out of that room. I know I can’t. I compromise by staring out of the window, at the small park we overlook.
A Staffordshire bull terrier is brazenly sniffing the arse of a red spaniel. Suddenly the terrier clambers on and starts thrusting. He looks cheerful. His tongue is hanging out like he’s a grinning cockney scaffolder. He seems to be saying: ‘Lovely-jubbley… you just stay where you are… I’ll sort you right out.’ Meanwhile the spaniel is pretending nothing is happening. She sniffs the air carefully, as if she’s a critic whose job is assessing delicious smells. ‘Oh yes…’ she seems to be saying. ‘There’s a little bit of early dahlia… that’s very fresh… and I can smell that those foxes have been at the bins… that’s a bit more urban.’
‘What are you looking at?’ says Liv.
‘Two dogs who’re… having sex. Well… I think that’s what they’re doing. It’s possible the one in front is blind. And the one behind is trying to push her round the park.’
Now Livy’s blotchy tearful eyes are staring right at me. I just know something awful is going to happen.
‘But aren’t you going to SAY something?’ says Liv.
‘About what?’
‘Having kids.’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Tell me the truth,’ she says. Now that’s never a good idea. ‘Tell me what you think about having kids?’
I disappear into the most secret vault inside my head. I’m thinking: Well I definitely don’t want kids. I don’t think any men actually want kids. I’ve never met a broody man. I’ve got one friend, Dom, who had kids early, but Dom was adopted and spent his early drunken youth searching desperately for a family. Men never want kids now, because they know they can have them when they’re ninety. They’ll just have to be rich, or lucky, or good at golf. I’ve always assumed I’ll be all of these things, as long as some woman doesn’t stop me.
I consider what part of that I can actually say. I say nothing.
‘Would you like to have kids?’ she asks.
Oh God, how can I possibly know that? First I’d have to decide if I’m staying with Livy. Don’t get me wrong. I do love her, but there’s only one time when a man knows, for absolute certain, that he wants to stay with his woman for ever: when she’s just chucked him. The rest of the time, he’s not sure. I don’t say that either.
‘What is your problem?’ she says. ‘Why can’t you talk about your feelings?’
I hate it when she says that. Loathe it. ‘Oh… OK. Right,’ I say. ‘Well… my feelings are… erm… Terror.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m struggling to have a career as it is. I don’t have any time to look after children.’
‘But I’d do that.’
‘Well… would you? And I’m also quite scared of becoming a dad. Because I’m scared of turning into My Dad.’
‘But your dad had five children!’ she says.
‘But he spent all his time avoiding them.’
‘Oh, come on. Your dad’s not so bad!’
I picture my dad. Big Dad, we call him. OK. He isn’t so bad. He’s funny. He gives a good hug. He can speak ten languages. If you want to know the Ancient Greek word for harp, he’s your man. But he spent my entire childhood scowling at us from behind a pile of books about military history. If he did talk, he’d keep going for two hours. He’d give potted biographies of people he knew from the Bank of England. He’d speculate about careers he might have had if he hadn’t made the mistake of having children. The implication was always clear: it was because of us that Dad’s dreams were smashed. Liv’s right. Big Dad isn’t so bad, but he’s the living embodiment of the man I’m trying not to be.
I don’t say any of this. I just stare at the wall.
‘Andrew,’ says Liv. ‘Forget your dad –’
‘I’m trying to.’
‘You don’t think there are any dads who want to be dads?’
‘No, I don’t. That’s why they have sheds. That’s why they go out on pointless errands in the car. That’s why they fish. Do you really think people like fishing? It involves staring at a pond for hours and hours, with the odd break where you get to torture a small creature.’
Livy starts weeping again. I realize, belatedly, that the jokes aren’t working. When you’re trying to comfort someone, you shouldn’t use the words ‘torture a small creature’.
‘Sorry,’ I say. Sorry is always a good start, I reckon. It’s the equivalent of getting out the kitchen roll. You’re preparing to start wiping up.
I put my hand on her shoulder. She shrugs it off, and her knuckles knock against my face. Suddenly I’m thinking: Oh God, she’s actually hitting me now! I knew I shouldn’t have talked about my feelings. Women never want you to talk about your feelings. They’ve got far too many of their own.
‘Get out!’ she says. ‘GET OUT!!!’
‘That’s fine,’ I say. And I mean it too. If it would get me out of that room, I would happily sign up for the French Foreign Legion.
Liv says she’s going to see her sister. She goes out. Result. This means I can get on with some writing. I go upstairs and switch on. I’m working on a film script called Sex with Strangers. It’s a political romantic comedy in the style of Charlie Kaufman. This is the story…
Meg Ryan plays a presidential nominee, who finds her husband shagging a maid over the table. She can’t stop and argue. She’s on the way to a live presidential debate.
At the debate, the interviewer asks her: ‘What are you going to do to preserve the family?’
And she loses it: ‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘People have been going on for years about the family, but no one can do anything about it. Why? It’s not like the Middle Ages, where you’d fall in love with the only person in the village who didn’t have warts, and you’d love them till the day you died. Which was usually a week later. Now people live for years, and they fall in love, they have kids, but they want more, they fall in love again, have more kids, and eventually the kids grow up abandoned and angry and they beat the crap out of everyone before breeding themselves. Lust rules. The family is finished.’
‘So… what?’ says the interviewer. ‘Are you banning sex?’
‘No. You can do it, but you shouldn’t pretend it’s about love. You should do it with someone new each time. In fact, it’ll be illegal to sleep with someone twice. And the kids should be raised by the only people they can trust: the state.’
Her opponent looks at her: ‘That’s your policy? You’re giving people endless sex. You’ve seriously underestimated the intelligence of the American people!’
Cut to:
Meg Ryan sweeping to a landslide election victory.
Cut to:
Four years later, the country is going well. The kids are all locked up. Old ladies feel safer. Everyone’s healthier. And the economy is healthier too. Everyone’s buying more. Shagging more. Working longer hours. The president is even more committed to her policy. As a routine courtesy, she always has sex with Olympic Gold athletes and any visiting dignitaries. The sex is broadcast on television. The voting public don’t like it when she goes down on people. In the Second Act climax, Meg Ryan agrees to have sex with the president of China. While being skewered like a kebab, she secures a new trade agreement with China. Her approval ratings go through the roof.
Now that is only the beginning of the story. It’s a romantic comedy, so obviously Meg Ryan does meet someone, a naïve monk played by Tobey Maguire, and she falls in love. So now she wants to sleep with him twice, and she sees that the whole policy is corrupt and evil. The story builds up to the ultimate feel-good ending, which I express with five words that I tell Livy confidently will earn me a one million pound script fee: They fuck. The world celebrates.
I bring up Sex with Strangers for three reasons.
1. I’m writing a script where adults have lives of boundless sex; kids are raised by the state: I have issues on the subject of kids. Fears.
2. You’re probably thinking, Sex with Strangers starring Meg Ryan… Hmm… I don’t recall ever seeing that film. And you’d be quite right. The film is never made. A producer called Robert Steapleton does eventually give me fourteen grand for the script, but that doesn’t cover the two years I spend writing it. Translation: Liv is dealing with a man who earns fourteen grand for a two-year project, which has a deranged premise that only a mentalist would think up. This is not the man women dream of having babies with. And in my heart of hearts, I know the film won’t work. The idea is not Swiftian – it’s impractical. If it was funnier, someone would have given me more money for it. I’m not the dad I dreamed of being.
3. Robert Steapleton is one of my closest friends, and as I finish Draft Nine, he gets his girlfriend pregnant. She’s a successful architect. She’s kind, pretty, successful. She has lovely large breasts. When their baby is three months old, he walks out on her. At the same time as he walks out on my script. This is the world that Livy wants to bring children into.
I need to interrupt the story. I need to tell you where I meet Liv, and how.
I’m twenty. I’m at college. One evening, I’m watching a student fashion show. I become fascinated by one of the models. She looks shy and mysterious. She has shoulder-length brown hair, good cheekbones and one of those mouths that don’t quite close so it looks like she’s eternally ready for kissing. As she comes out, the room seems to go silent. I whisper, ‘Who’s that?’ and someone says, ‘That’s Livy Lankester,’ and just the name seems beautiful and enchanting. Two months later, I spend two minutes talking to her at a party, and it makes me feel confused and lightheaded, and I have to go and sit down. Admittedly someone’s just given me a blowback. I don’t talk to her again before I leave college. I go home, and spend the summer at home. I spend the days painting our house with my brother. I spend the night dreaming I’m still at college, and I’m back with the beautiful girl that I only talked to once.
Three years later, I meet her in Russell Square in central London, and we stare into each other’s eyes and we both forget what we were about to say. She tells me she’s at the Tropical Disease Centre. ‘Really?’ I say. ‘I’m often at the Tropical Disease Centre!’ I did once have a friend who took me for lunch in the canteen. At this point I’d be willing to make another one. I write a letter there, suggesting we meet. I get no response, but it doesn’t put me off; I just know she’s the right woman for me. So then whenever I’m in town I visit Russell Square for lunch. (There’s a fine line between being very romantic, and being a stalker.) I eat a lot of sandwiches in the café. I see a lot of joggers going round and round. I don’t see Livy. So instead I just look for her everywhere. I look for her in Russell Square; I look for her in Camden. One day I’m on a train that stops at Woking Station, and I can’t stop myself: I get off and check if she’s on the platform. She isn’t.
Five more years pass, and life isn’t going well. I’m an actor. I’ve got one of those CVs that sounds OK if you say it quickly enough, but the truth is I’ve been in movies that weren’t distributed, and TV shows broadcast when there was something better on the other side. I usually arrive in programmes once they reach their last series. If you see me in a TV show, you know the show is doomed. As an actor, I’ve gone from hot to lukewarm. In terms of hotness, my career is like one of those tepid baths that bring you no pleasure, but you’re too demoralized to get out, so you lie there vainly hoping the boiler will heat up.
I own a one-bedroom flat in Harlesden, a place which is the geographical equivalent of a lukewarm scummy bath floating with pubic hairs. I’m so poor that, when I’m walking to the shop for my milk, I scour the gutters for extra 2p pieces. I hardly even remember what Livy looks like any more, but know it’s a tiny bit like Kate Beckinsale. Once a week, my friend David Walliams takes me to the theatre, and I always say: ‘I’ll get the drinks.’ I put my card in the wall, it says: ‘Your request has been denied.’ David always says: ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get the drinks.’ And I feel touched by his tenderness, but stiff with a sense of failure. I don’t believe in anything. David’s got a partnership with this guy called Matt, who’s really sweet, but they’ve just had yet another sitcom rejected by the BBC. I don’t think their work together is gelling. I advise them both to split up.
One day, David invites me to his birthday party, to which he’s wearing a full-length sequin dress. He introduces me to Kate Beckinsale. She says: ‘You’re getting lovely reviews at the moment.’ Now it’s been two years since I was in anything, and I’ve never had lovely reviews. I acted in the first Royal Court production of Shopping and Fucking. Critics raved about the text; they applauded the furniture; not one of them mentioned my performance. My problem is: I don’t know who I am. I figure that Kate Beckinsale is offering me an opportunity to find out. If I know who I’m like, that could help. I say: ‘Kate, who do you think that I am?’
She immediately walks off.
I think what’s the point of this? And I leave the party, and bump into Eleanor, who I know to be Livy’s friend. I get her address. I write Liv a letter, via Eleanor, in which I declare my feelings in the grand Victorian manner. I begin: ‘You’ve got to put a name to the face you’re looking for in a crowd, and for me it’s always been yours.’
I get no reply.
Five months later, I am in my flat. I’ve just cycled through a rainstorm, and I’m wringing my wet socks into the kitchen sink. The phone rings. I run to the living room. ‘Hi,’ says a voice, which sounds pure and beautiful like fresh mountain water. ‘It’s Livy. I got your letter.’
I pull the phone out of the wall. Trembling, I get the plug back in. She’s still talking. She’s saying she once sent me a Valentine card, when we were at college, but sent it to the wrong Andrew. She says she never went to the Tropical Disease Centre, she just thought it sounded interesting and romantic. (Who the hell is turned on by malaria?) She’s just come back from the Ukraine. She’s been living in Karkov, helping people set up new businesses. She says she’s having a party the next day.
The next day, I go to Livy’s party. I walk in. I see Livy. She doesn’t look like Kate Beckinsale. She looks skinnier than I remember. She’s no longer a luscious student; she’s a professional woman. I notice everyone is looking at me and whispering. I realize that almost everyone has read my letter. I feel uneasy. I go home before the end of the party, leaving Livy with an annoying banker who seems intent on shagging her.
She calls a couple of days later. She didn’t shag the banker. She suggests a date. A week later, we’re sitting on the bottom stair of the World’s End Pub in Camden Town, and we’re holding hands.
Three months later, she asks me to rent out my Harlesden flat. I lend it to my friend, Nick Rowe, who’s just left his girlfriend because she wanted to get serious. I move in with Liv.
You see why I have to say all that. It isn’t just anyone who is proposing having kids with me. It is my Fantasy Woman. This is the person who is watching me being dragged towards parenthood, like a stubborn dog being dragged towards his bath.
Admittedly, Livy does things that no woman would ever do in a fantasy. In the morning she eats cereal in bed, so she wakes me with the chink of spoon on bowl, and the sound of a bolus of food being swallowed. She uses my razors on her underarms. She says: ‘Let’s talk about money.’ But she also does things that are endearing and surprising. She’s just got a new job at the Cabinet Office, and she comes home with hilarious stories about drunk civil servants, and vain cabinet ministers. I don’t know what her work is exactly. I like to picture her as a sort of post-feminist Miss Money-penny, all pert and sexy and full of strange plans.
In our first summer together, she wants to take me to the Ukraine, because she wants to see Yalta, where Chekhov spent his summers. In Yalta, she wants to go to the circus, because she loves clowns. When we reach the circus, we find out it’s closed, since the clown is getting married. Livy says: ‘Let’s tell him we’ve come from England to pay homage to the famous clown. Let’s give him a wedding present. Let’s peek at the big top. Then we’ll go.’ So we go off and find a big wooden spoon, and some flowers, and a shopkeeper who teaches us a little speech for the clown. We return to the circus, and are ushered into the middle of the big top. The clown is wearing his wife’s flowery veil. We make our speech. We bow. We give our gifts. The whole circus cheers. We are embraced like long-lost friends. The flowers are fed to the crocodiles. The wooden spoon is given to the parrots as a new perch. The clown shows Liv a horse, which is, he assures her, ‘worth ten million dollars’.
‘But why?’ says Liv. ‘Why is he worth ten million dollars?’
‘Because he is a dancing horse,’ says the clown. ‘He dances to rock. To disco. He can even dance to opera. Here, you must try.’
I’m standing on a table with a contortionist, feeding a baby monkey from a little bottle. Liv enters the big top, sitting on the dancing horse, which is dancing to, of all things, the ELO’s ‘Last Train to London’, which is pretty much my favourite song. Jeff Lynne is singing: ‘There was magic in the air, it was so right!’ The dancing horse is pirouetting. Liv is waving proudly. ‘Darling!’ she shouts. ‘I think we’re in!’
Soon after returning home, we go to the East End to fetch our friend Kara, who’s an impoverished writer. Kara is renting a room from Roy and Emma Ashford, who, it turns out, have just had a baby – Theo Ashford. As soon as I enter the house, I notice something unpleasantly weird about the atmosphere. We’re shown into the kitchen where there’s a crowd of murmuring people, including Roy who is holding his new baby. He looks like a recently converted Christian. He is grinning like a fool, and he’s whispering. It’s like he’s trying to be extra soft, and I find this a bit annoying, and a bit gay.
I then feel immeasurably distant from Liv as she peers at the baby and exclaims: ‘Oh, he’s beautiful!’ I find it shocking just how ugly little Theo Ashford actually is. He has weird red blotchy skin, which is flaky round the eyes. He looks like a monkey that’s been peeled. I say, ‘He’s lovely,’ and go off to another room. I’m hoping I won’t have to see anyone else before we can leave.
In the living room, I find an Independent, and I read about an upcoming Manchester United European tie. I discover that in the forthcoming match Alex Ferguson thinks the battle will be won in midfield. I find this information reassuring.
But then another man comes in pushing a buggy with a sleeping boy in it. The man doesn’t give his name. He’s grinning too. Everyone is smiling in this house. It’s like being in the headquarters of a cult. He says: ‘This little feller can walk now… I can hardly believe it.’ I want to say: ‘Listen, almost everyone in the world can walk! If you want to impress me, tell me he canfly! Tell me that little monkey got out of his pushchair and soared several hundred metres above Hackney!’
I say nothing.
Soon we are able to escape that horrible house, and I feel liberated. Livy and Kara are in high spirits too. Liv is wearing my trilby hat, and she’s laughing, which I always find very attractive. At one point she takes Kara’s arm, and they skip down the street together. I think: I could have kids with her, but not yet. Definitely not yet. And only if she stops eating cereal in bed.
The only time I ever take crack, I’m living in Bow, in the East End. Our street is where the council houses all the single mums, so the place is filled with mums who are looking for lovers, and kids who are looking for dads. The dads do turn up every now and again, and the mums snap instantly into action: the police are called. In the East End, they always say, ‘Blood’s thicker than water,’ which is true, especially if the blood is congealed on the pavement. They love proverbs in the East End. They love to say: ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,’ as if the only reason they’re unemployed is they haven’t met Richard Branson down the market.
Three months after moving in, I get my first job as an actor. I’m a baddie in The Bill. Actors always scorn The Bill, but cockneys don’t. In the first ad break, the doorbell rings and there’re ten kids crammed into the doorway. They cheer.
‘You hit the Old Bill!’ shouts a little boy.
‘You called him a wanker!’ shouts a little girl.
‘Quick!’ I say. ‘The adverts are finishing. We’ve got to get back!’
They all run off.
The next day, I’m walking back from the market with Trisha, who’s twenty-four, the same age as me, and she’s sexy in a skinny, missing-half-her-teeth sort of way. She’s my best friend in the area. She’s recently out of prison. She had a smack/crack habit for five years; she had multiple convictions for armed robbery; she had a little girl called Meghan who’s now four. So she’s trying to get clean, and has managed it for six months.
Trish disappears. She comes back with some white rocks. ‘Oh, Trish,’ I say, ‘are you sure about this? I don’t want you to take it.’
‘I’ve got it now, Andrew,’ she says, ‘I’ve got to have it.’
‘Give me half then,’ I say. ‘I don’t want you having too much.’
We go up to her mum’s flat, which smells of bleach. Trish puts foil over a cup, she mixes the crack with some fag ash, and then we inhale it. I’m told you can get instantly addicted to crack. I’m instantly disgusted. It’s like having a line of coke, while sucking on an ash tray.
While doing it, I say: ‘So why did you have Meghan?’
‘I love Meghan,’ she says. ‘I want to get clean for her.’
‘She’s a lovely girl. But why did you have her?’
‘I didn’t think too much,’ she says. ‘But I just… sort of… had had enough of going out and getting wrecked every night.’
After this incident, I never take crack again, but I often ask people the same question: ‘Why did you want to have kids?’ It’s amazing how often I get that answer: ‘I was tired of getting wrecked every night.’ These people don’t want children. They want rehab. They are so determined to avoid hangovers they’re prepared to breed. They are not realizing that, if they do have kids, the sofa will be covered in Lego, the toilet will be covered in pee and the whole world will feel like a hangover. But a small part of me still envies Trish. I think way too much.
Seven years on. Liv and I have gone to a party. Liv loves going to parties. She loves arriving at them, and seeing the set-up – the lights, the people, the food – then she likes to go. She’s too impatient to linger. She’s in the front room, dancing. I’m on the balcony, and I’m chatting to this guy called Graham who’s shagging my friend Vicky. He is a slightly successful DJ, who runs his own voice-over company. He’s wearing a leather jacket, and his breath smells of fags and garlic tablets. He’s fifty-six. Vicky told me. She also told me he’s scared of commitment. Graham doesn’t know who I am. He also doesn’t know I’m Vicky’s spy.
I say to him: ‘Would you like to have children?’
‘One day,’ he says.
‘But when?’ I say.
‘Not yet. I don’t wanna be held down.’
I have a brief desire to hold him down and punch him. Vicky is thirty-six, and wants children. Graham doesn’t realize that, for Vicky, he’s wasting vital months.
‘But why?’ I say.
‘I wanna be free,’ says Graham. ‘I like to be able to take off whenever I want.’
Now I want to see him take off from the balcony. I’d like to see him plunging through the conservatory downstairs. Then Liv arrives and tells me she wants to go. I’m amazed she’s lasted this long. We’ve been at the party ninety minutes at least.
In the car, I tell her about the conversation, then immediately regret it. I know she’s going to say: ‘Do you want to have kids?’ But she doesn’t. She changes the subject. She asks if we could get a lodger. I immediately agree. It’ll draw attention away from the fact I’m earning nothing. Then Liv asks me something unexpected. She says: ‘Do you want to get a dog?’
I see instantly what’s happening: Liv knows that I’m terrified of commitment and responsibility. She’s suggesting a dog, as a sort of warm up. I’m about to say: ‘Not yet,’ but then I realize that’s what Graham said. I also realize I’m going to have to compromise somewhere or she’ll leave me. Besides, I like dogs. If we get a dog, I say, it should be a big one, a lurcher, or a Great Dane. She says it should be a small one that can fit in the car.
A week later, we get a border terrier. She is the size of an adult cat, but with all the yap of a larger animal. She has a bushy moustache and eyebrows so she looks like a World War One general. We discuss names. I hate poney names that I wouldn’t want to shout in the park: ‘Thomasina…