I LOVE YOU, WE SAID
Chapter 3: The New Mrs Human
A serialised novel
In the end we forgot all about the CD and had a nice little ceremony followed by a picnic in Virginia Woolf ’s Richmond Park, attended by my buddy James from back home, my other South African buddy Shirley — more recently from Brighton, as well as Jessica’s cousins from Wimbledon and a friend of hers, Jay Baby (about whom I’ll tell you in a bit).
Jessica had bought Orlando: A Biography in preparation for my arrival in London, where I was to spend six months trying to make a start on my writing career — her treat.
‘What did you think?’ she asked, on the way to the park. She meant the book. ‘Just wondering,’ she said, modestly.
‘It — you know — it’s good,’ I said, unhappily. Her eyes clouded over. Something behind them shut down, some button I had pressed.
What did it matter what I thought? I didn’t know how to tell her. I’d decided to make a go of writing and was struggling mightily (and vainly) to write “to the limits of my ability”. It was a task I’d stupidly set myself, being of uncertain ability and at any rate so directionless that I couldn’t possibly do whatever talent I possessed justice. What could I say? I hoped to improve with practice. It was a drag. Maddening and confusing and a massive hill to climb. Meanwhile, I had no right to say anything about any published author.
I should have just said so.
Under a twisted tree in the park James gave a comically inexpert best man’s speech that somehow, classically, covered all the bases and hit all the wrong notes — unpredictability, patent falsehood, tactlessness and touching affection. Nobody had ever made a speech for me before, so if my sins absolutely had to be dressed up and trotted out for all to see, I’d rather it was him doing it.
Embellishing extravagantly, he implied a wicked but non-specific drug habit at some uncertain point in my shadowy past, as well as a certain fondness for “the ladies”, eclipsed only by a wanton abuse of alcohol and general lack of polish. Standard best man fodder, you’d have to say, and mostly true for the latter part.
Well, Jessica was displeased in the extreme, but she didn’t say anything. She may just have been ignoring it for all I knew, but something in the set of her mouth should have made my blood run cold. James, whom I’d known for fifteen years to her one, was about to have his arse frozen out of my life and I didn’t see it coming. Far too busy, I imagine, taking an enormous amount of pride in what a glorious shit I’d been in years gone by.
My payback was swift, and at once so masterful and petty as to render any objection equally small-minded.
Under the creeping stealth of sunset the new Mrs Human announced an end to proceedings, so suddenly and almost entirely in passing that everyone was already packing up before I knew what was happening.
Airily saying we’d all see one another again (untrue, as it turned out), her shocking matter-of-factness intimated there’d be no discussion and no dissent. People from the old country, up specifically for the wedding, looked speechless on being dismissed by their friend’s wife of one day. The woman had some cold wrath at her beck and call, their blank, disbelieving stares and silence acknowledged. Well, good luck to his balls in her tiny little purse.
From one moment to the next, completely undetected and uncontested, the day had changed from the glorious unselfconscious now to the sorrow of time lost.
Shocked and awed at her fearsome powers, I sneaked a look at her as she issued instructions to pack up. When she finally permitted herself a glance at me, none of the conspiratoriality I so liked played out on the precast façade that had taken the place of her face.
Weren’t there going to be drinks at the beautiful Tudor pub we’d passed earlier? Surely we needed to get off our faces now? How often did one get married? Was she not one-eighth Scottish?
Evidently so, but in the wrong way.
Unfortunately, I laughed a little then.
My world had tilted. I saw the lie of the land. I had the battle of Sisyphus ahead of me with this woman of far more redoubtable reserves than I had given her credit for, and I was friendless and on a short leash in a city I didn’t particularly like or understand.
I felt betrayed but infuriated by my own inexperience in the politics of love, as well as my unguarded arrogance. I needed to watch my wicket with this one, but that was for another inning. Right now I was out for a diamond fucking duck on my very first outing with an infinitely better half.
Oh, it was stumps for me and my shenanigans and my ragtag bunch of hippy friends, shaming her in front of her family on what should have been the best day of her life on that glorious summer’s day in TW10 — and never again would I ever have it that easy again ever. I’d had my bit of fun and my precious misspent youth and my joke of a literary dream, and she was to wear the big girl’s pants and run affairs from here on out.
If there was to be any love-making that evening— and it was by no means certain — it would be a sober, pragmatic affair. No laughs, no hot, breathless nuzzling, just hard-won sex with a very practical woman who was as tight as a tampon and didn’t make any exceptions and might at most permit herself a look of Machiavellian bliss as she ground out a victorious and admittedly stately climax atop my traitorous cock.
In hindsight, I don’t think she carried the control issues around specifically. It was merely part of her programming, something a girl got by with in her family, which their menfolk assented to and guarded against and attack-dogged in observance to.
We were destined to be pitted against each other forever — she, hyper-stubborn and prescriptive in the mould of her parents before her and her grandparents before them, and I, poor idiot, pitifully alone in the world and dead set against being prescribed to and out of my depth in this woefully small arena of adulterior shit, to coin a phrase.
But let’s take a moment to recognise the important thing here — my beautiful girlfriend was now my beautiful wife. A stone-cold fact that I took inordinate pride in. Enough to keep me docile for a bit, though not, probably, for long.
You see, there’s something very wrong with me.
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