I LOVE YOU, WE SAID
Chapter 10: Jay Baby
A serialised novel
I wanted to tell you about Jay Baby.
Jessica’s phone had the number of a friend she’d worked with in her previous life in London. He was listed as “Jay Baby aka The Stud”.
And since I’d found his number on her phone and was being a jealous arsehole about it, she wanted me to meet him, she said, further clarifying that his girlfriend was a lesbian, and that was why her (the girlfriend’s) friends called him “The Stud”.
So to recap, my wife had the number of a guy who was such a stud muffin that he could turn lesbians, and her special name for him was “Jay Baby, aka The Stud”. Also, he made her laugh. Which is how we got into our second of five bullshit battles to end all others in our married life, around four months in.
‘He’d put himself there under that name,’ she said.
‘No,’ I answered. ‘Not helping.’
‘As a joke,’ she said.
‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Nope.’
‘Wait till you see him,’ she said-sighed. ‘You’ll understand.’
‘Ohhhh…’ I said. ‘OK then. Remind me to have a pet name for the first female friend I make in this town of wonders. How does Sweet-Ass Josie sound? ’Fact, let’s go find her now. Oh, does that threaten you? I don’t see why it should though, when you think about it.’
‘You’re an idiot,’ she said.
I knew I was. I was right, in a way that was all wrong. It didn’t feel fair, exactly. I wanted to call her out for being wrong and stupidly insensible to it, except, of course, we both were.
I looked at her. I saw a girl who was used to getting away with murder and understood it to be a basic right of human females.
She saw a man who was on about whatever the fuck he was on about — it didn’t matter since she had done nothing wrong. And never the twain, etc.
You can begin to see how, ideally, one should try being in a relationship for longer than six months before you marry.
But it reminded me of something I’d wanted to bitch about for a while. She still wore the wedding band from her first marriage.
Also, our very first house-hunt together. It reminded me of that too. At our knock, a man opened and made a grand welcoming exit onto the porch in his robe, curly blond chest hairs spilling from its loosely gathered front. ‘Oooh,’ Jessica had said. And being of brittle ego, as one is often told in these deals, it niggled with one, and presently one brought it up again.
‘Oh you know, you’re such a prick,’ she said. ‘Were you seriously threatened by that? A guy we’d met for the first time?’
It seemed foolish, certainly. And if I’d been foolish about him, I was probably being foolish about Jay Baby too. Like I’d been foolish about whatsisface Dean in Cape Town before both of them. (About whom I will tell you shortly as well.)
As a first-time batsman in the great game of love — so akin to cricket — I was new to the dark art of sledging. Being shown the error of my ways so easily wasn’t exactly helping, but then it wasn’t supposed to, because that isn’t the way the game is played. It’s not decided by the quaint rule book or unwritten courtesies of the gentleman’s game, but won and lost by throwing the other guy (that’d be me) off his game — and the first to cry foul loses. That’s the game. Nobody tells you this, so I’m telling you now. Better not be a bloody cry baby. Better watch the old wicket, son.
I was a cry baby, though. I didn’t like losing. But what burned my ass the most was that love, the way Jessica saw it, could be a game — a very stupid one at that. One in which the sole object is to lure or misdirect your beloved into battle and toy with their emotions.
Also called Plausible Deniability, aka Sometimes Love is Not Enough, and in the unwritten rule book it says you can and therefore must spend your waking life causing shit just so that you can dream up more shit in refutation of the shit you’ve already caused, to keep putting one over the other player and keep one step ahead of play. Must be fun if you’re so smart that the clean way of playing bores you — there’s that, I’ll give her that. But then I’ve always found gaming the rule book to be infinitely more boring than just playing the game.
But the funny thing about childish games is that no one’s above them — all I could think of while this conversation was going on was how upset I was at having thrown out a former girlfriend’s panties months before, since Jessica wasn’t too ecstatic about them being in my drawer. Her name was Dorian, a big buxom girl who was wearing actual big girl’s pants, whom I had loved and who had cancer of all the bad breaks — and yet I’d chucked out her delicates as soon as someone who had taught and beaten me at Plausible Deniability had demanded it.
At the time, I’d filled up with the validation of Jessica’s jealousy. That’s how naïve I was. Now, all I could think was that I could have, should have, kept those big girl’s panties. How I missed those white cotton pants, enveloping that ass, that immoderate ass, and how happy they’d made me… Right now I’d have worn them out of spite and remembrance of lust, but that ship had sailed.
But then, thank Jesus, as at the wedding, I was assailed once more by noble, weaselly, manly instincts, and my mood mutated from helpless anger and misery to merciless disdain. I would have my revenge. I would do something. I didn’t know what, but it would be good.
It came to me. ‘It made me uncomfortable,’ I said. (To clarify, I figured I’d dig up the story about the dick in the dressing gown.) My face heated up in advance as I anticipated being laughed out the house.
‘I’m sorry if it made you uncomfortable,’ she said.
If! Expressing doubt that I was as good as my word! You had to hand it to her. Even on the back foot she was knocking out those imperious cover drives, every sweet cherry being dispatched with nary a wallop of the sweet tawny willow.
But enough of the cricket metaphors; my Sensitive New Age Guy cover had temporarily put her on the defensive. You couldn’t hit a SNAG; that’d be insensitive. I felt foolishly vindicated. I didn’t know then that sorry in the normal cut-and-thrust of a married squabble wasn’t a real sorry, or that you could only use your feelings so many times as a man before being treated like the pussy you were. I didn’t know a lot of things. My advice is to know things. Get your nose bloodied if you like the game so much.
‘OK,’ I said. And, ‘thanks.’ What a prat.
So off to Jay we still went, to get back to the object of our fourth-biggest disagreement ever.
Jessica’s deal sweetener for visiting Jay Baby was that he had a fondness for absinthe, like my precious idol Hemingway.
This was a good move and guaranteed to get me to warm to him. You forget that this girl was hell’s own shakes at gaming the game. At her nicest she was at her most dangerous or whatever, but absinthe made the heart grow blonder.
This is the true mind of the adult white male: Jay was now my brother, and that was how I was going to treat him. And it started off pretty well.
He was a jolly little chap of mixed lineage, and like me, ever so fucking lost. I didn’t ask what his problem was, exactly, but he talked the hind leg off an ass and smiled maniacally more or less throughout his non-stop delivery — which was cool, because if there was one thing I couldn’t stand (among all the various and diverse things I couldn’t bear), it was one of those nerdy guys whose face brightened and darkened as he held forth, flecks of spittle flying, taking himself way the fuck too seriously and getting lost along the way and bellowing intermittently and being cleverer than thou. Jessica said Jay was “incredibly” clever, but I was there strictly for the absinthe. I mean, clever is as clever does.
Anyhow, it seemed to me the night had only just started when Jessie Baby again called a halt to proceedings, way early. She must’ve read up on the absinthe. Evidently, Jay Baby was not a true absinthe drinker — a thing I knew without question I was — before I’d had my first drop. A true absinthe drinker would merely drink it, if possible with a brother, and not let on about it to a partner for as long as possible. Jay let on, and after my second cup and one for my brother it was overs, bruh.
It — her second party spoiler — was beyond forgivable. But when you were high on absinthe and it was over you didn’t bother with arguments, so I followed her home, pliant and dumb and docile, with oceans of writing very much not sloshing about inside of me.
She ranted more or less the entire way to the tube station, where I could see little reason to continue with any of it. ‘I’m a die,’ I said. I wasn’t sad or angry.
‘What!?’ she cried.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Pbbbttt.’
‘What the fuck,’ she said. ‘What did you say about dying? Fucking twat.’ A train came up and it drew me in, just drew me in.
‘Ben!’ she screamed. I smiled at her as she grabbed my collar. My jacket came halfway off and I tried to walk out of it, to help her. She was bawling now, her face twisted and red, and couldn’t get another word out. ‘It’s all right Jess,’ I said. ‘Come on now, leggo.’
A man came running out of the station office. It was the station master. He was speaking into a two-way radio or something. ‘Hey man,’ I wanted to say, but couldn’t.
‘Stay right there,’ he said. I began to say something, but he raised his finger and took a step subtly too close and said ‘be very quiet’ under his breath. For Jessica’s benefit he said, ‘wait right there, sir.’
A colleague then came sideways through the turnstiles and dragged his immense corpus up with ponderous inevitability. Not unhurried, but only as fast as his murderous weight allowed.
Finally, he stood breathing before me.
‘Were you approaching the rolling stock, sir?’ he asked in a flavour of Cockney I didn’t quite understand.
‘Uh!’ I said. I looked at Jessica.
‘No, he wasn’t,’ said Jessica. ‘He stumbled.’
‘I’ll thank you kindly to allow me to discharge my duties, madam,’ he said. She blinked. I saw into my future, and it involved punching him a little.
‘What were you finking, doing vat, sir?’ he asked.
‘Please, he didn’t mean anything by it. He wasn’t thinking,’ said Jessica. He looked at her with mild distraction on his face and tried again. ‘Do you realise I can charge you wiv intent to damage state property?’
I didn’t answer him. It seemed unnecessary. Jessica looked stricken. A third man came out. Now the fat man came into his stride. He’d stopped panting and his belligerence was in full effect.
‘You, sir, weren’t finking. You were stupid, sir. You’re a stupid man.’ Shocking, really.
‘Hey now,’ I said. But Jessica back-handed me in the stomach. ‘Shut up!’ she hissed in my ear. It was nice.
A fourth man came out. A small crowd of people were standing by, self-consciously unobtrusive. He took out a handheld device with a stylus. ‘I’m going to have to take down your details, sir.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Yeah yeah. Come on.’ I gave him my details as he kept losing the screen of whatever station master program he was operating. Something about him not apologising cleared my head. I didn’t say anything more.
They took a copy of my ID and let us go.
I carried the experience with me for days until I’d built up such a head of shame, I had to talk to someone and contrived to put in a call to James. After a day or so he emailed back.
He was doing his best to hide his scorn, but the restraint and tone of distance ran over my scalp like scalding water.
Amazingly, I’d written to bare my soul, to tell of my embarrassment and fucking depression over it, depending on him to make me feel OK about it. Thinking I’d somehow been wronged. But his glib responses made it clear once more. The truth was simple — I’d let myself down. It was amazing (and yes, depressing) how banal my life was, and how I’d mastered none of it.
Rules mattered. When you broke them you were a twat. Thinking you’re above them made you a twat. Moments before it had still seemed hilarious or important or at least literary, what had happened to me, but I saw how small my actions were. I was a child, scampering, playing to the wind.
But even that was misguided. Sure, everything was fucked, but it was fucked for everyone and much worse for many, and there I was, getting off on little me and mine.
I should have diagnosed and ripped the behaviour out at the root, forever stopping it. Instead I said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, it’s not that serious. So I’m an idiot, so what?”
And, thankfully, no more was said about it.
This novel serialisation is exclusive to The Pro Files on Medium.
To be notified of new chapters, subscribe on my profile page. To read all my stories, join Medium using my referral link. I will get a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Or, if you’d like to own a copy, buy my book here! Thanks for reading.
