David and Deirdre

David’s day started naturally enough.
Being a Saturday, he took the eight-minute bath as opposed to the usual four-minute power-shower.
Today, David would wet-shave his spotless face in the exact time it took for the bath to fill to the precise measure, which would rise just above the overflow upon his insertion. He retained a small amount of pleasure in knowing that, on Saturdays, he could watch the bath’s water-level lower sufficiently not to overflow once eight minutes were up.
Though he tried to relax, the extra four-minute allocation would always be spent wondering what he was doing in the bath for an additional two hundred and forty seconds.
Like a little boy, he’d wait for the water to become silent in the overflow-system, then jump out and drip all the way to the gym in one of the numerous extra bedrooms, where a rigorous sixteen-minute fitness-session would take place.
Usually, he’d be in the gym for thirty-two minutes but, being a Saturday, a day in which he would physically exert himself with chores in an attempt to feel tired enough to enjoy a quiet night in with the wife, he would go easy on himself.
This worked in theory, although in practise the lack of exercise found him wanting. He’d go twice as hard for the sixteen minutes, then wonder why he wasn’t still in there for the next sixteen minutes, spent in the shower (four), the kitchen to make filtered coffee (four), and then back to the marital bed with the wife (eight).
Looking out of the huge, silk sprinkled bay-window, out to the wall of trees, he’d watch a squirrel scurry around at the peak of the oak tree in a flurry for food (two), then notice the presence of a magpie who would play a game with the squirrel to try and put him off collecting a nice nut, chasing him from branch to branch but not too close, for a squirrel can rip the throat of a magpie out in one second (two). With the intervention of a second magpie, David feels the need to be joyful, but misses by a mile, whilst another magpie discourages her partner from teasing the violent squirrel and leaves with him (two).
In the next two minutes, David sighs twice and his wife wakes up.
‘Morning, darling,’ he says. ‘Coffee’s just next to you.’
‘Mmm,’ she murmurs. ‘Thanks,’ and then she goes back to sleep.
David gets up again.
In the next eight minutes, Deirdre’s coffee goes cold and David’s face grows bitter.
He wonders how she can sleep in on Saturdays like everyone else. Then he wonders why he can’t (two). Looking out the window and up into the sky, the weather is fine: only a few fluffy white clouds at low level racing innocently across a blue mass of sky (one).
David goes back to bed. He tries to guess the time.
He’s one minute out, so he waits to find out precisely how far out he was, and adds the seconds of his error until the digit changes. Thirty-one seconds. Not bad. David goes back to bed. Maybe she’s in one of those hungover but horny moods, he thinks, scratching an ear without realising.
No reason why I can’t have a good day today, he thinks, sitting up to read the Times.
Careful not to make jolts or wriggles that might wake the missus, the Fantasy League looks highly inviting. The bed cost a fortune just so the wife could sleep whilst he perused the papers on a Saturday without detection. He’d always resented paying extra for that comfort.
Perhaps I’ll be Manager Of The Year this season, he says to himself. The features around his mouth contort to bloom into the pursed lips of a prudent football manager awaiting interview with the media.
‘When I put the team together, I’ve got four things in mind; a goalkeeper of quality, Arsenal’s back-four, Man United’s midfield and Liverpool up front.’
It was 1999.
‘A fabulous idea,’ says the imaginary interviewer. ‘My thoughts entirely!’
‘Thank you,’ says David, this time out loud.
‘Huh?’ his wife shuffles and murmurs. Poor David realises all too late what a twerp he is talking to himself about being Manager Of The Year with John Motson.
‘Oh nothing, darling,’ says David tenderly, falsely.
‘Thanks for nothing?’ replies Dierdre drearily, snootily.
Now that confuses David, you see. Anyone other than his wife and he’s never confused.
‘No, dear. I meant thanks for…,’
What did he mean? He could lie through his teeth to clients but he couldn’t lie to Deirdre. That’d be wrong, not that he’d detected her sweet, airy farts from the gardener’s incessant penetration yesterday afternoon.
‘Thanks to God,’ he said.
A white lie. Every religious follower takes pride from telling little porkies. David’s no exception. He’s not above a whitey. Everyone did it. Confession’s been fashionable for centuries. Coppers must get a lot of leads from pastors.
But it hadn’t washed with Deirdre.
‘Oh my God,’ she says dismissively, hoping that he might just take her irony badly enough to skulk off somewhere else. Anything to get him out of her head. Deirdre’s hung over. She’s rolling her eyes.
With a childish huff and a mini-wiggle of his bottom, David returns to the Times. The financial section is where he belongs, not comatose in bed on this beautiful day like his beautifully flawed and resolutely frigid wife.
‘Compaq’s down again.’
‘Really?’
You can see where this is going, can’t you?
A sneer develops on David’s face. He can’t believe he’s sneering at thirty-seven on a beautiful Saturday morning.
David rustles the folded paper without effect as Deirdre turns over to temper herself. She needs to concentrate on sleep.
The bed was £19,000 and the covers were an extra grand. A good investment overall, he thought.
Musing over current property speculation, he does a quick mental calculation of his estimated worth and multipies it by four. This will then determine his wealth at the time of his death, which he estimates should, by all rights, take place around the seventy-four mark.
At thirty-seven, David has plenty of time. In fact, he has a whole life again to come, in which he will endeavour to grow spiritually and mentally, emotionally and, obviously, financially. Maybe he’ll grow old as a worldly philanthropist in the rain forest, if there’s any left.
Children have never figured in David and Deirdre’s plans, but David has become increasingly confused by the change in his own attitude towards children, and especially babies.
Only yesterday, he’d stunned himself by his own reaction to the sight and sound of a crying baby on the tube. Normally, he’d dream of smothering it.
As his heart filled with a love so foreign, his mind drifted off to the most beautiful place, right there on the stinking hot tube. As the baby screamed and screamed, his soul announced that it was time for David to change, time to accept life in all its forms, time to encourage and nurture new life; time to impregnate the wife.
With that single moment, David began to feel what it might be like to experience life with a whole new set of ethics. He’d tired of constantly striving to have the latest big boy’s toy. He wanted a toy for a little boy now. He was certain of it.
On that day, he put his newfound feelings down to God and, realising the enormity of His power, resigned himself by honouring the call as best he could.
In the cab that night, up the endless Finchley Road and past Golders Green on the way home in the evening, he kept on noticing children. He couldn’t help it. They seemed to be the only type of being in his field of vision. Adults didn’t count. Only children interested him at any level at all.
It was on this journey that David saw the sign.
It said ‘Jews For Jesus’, big letters in a shop window recruiting for the young. Of course, David got it wrong and read it backwards, as he does in times of inverted religious bigotry.
‘Jesus For Jews?’ he said to his driver. ‘What on earth does that mean? That Jesus is only available to Jews? I mean, really!’
His driver, a short, unassuming man with a permanent grin on a pimple-riddled face, put him right. ‘It says Jews For Jesus, mate. Can’t you read? A man of your standing?’
David looked back to the sign. ‘Gosh! So it does!’ he exclaimed.
The driver, seeing David for the arsehole he is, decided to change tack. ‘D’you hear about that golliwog being banned worldwide the other day?’
‘No,’ replied David in a sort of grunt. ‘Who? What? Are you by any chance referring to that man of Islam, Farraquhan?’ But he was thinking too hard.
‘No,’ said the driver in bemused fashion. ‘The Robertson’s golliwog, the one on the marmalade adverts. You wanna watch that religion stuff, mate. It can do ya’ right in.’
David piped down hard on his nostrils and returned his gaze to the financial section of The Times. Thank God for The Times. Being outwitted by a cab driver; whatever next?
Anyway, back, or forward again, to Saturday.
Compaq was down a point, the third time that week, but Psion, the palmtop-maker, had all but died in value, limping around the 60p mark having been 330p only six months before. That was when Deirdre had insisted on Psion shares.
David remembered the awful conversation they’d had on the matter.
‘They’re absolutely indispensable for us ladies,’ she’d said, waving her dinky little Psion 5mx in front of her tits.
He watched, hoping it’d fly out of its leather wallet and smash into pieces on the floor. ‘They’re at their peak, angel,’ he’d tried to tell her. But, no. She had to have shares in Psion.
‘They’ll go higher. I’m telling you, dear.’ He secretly hated it when she called him ‘dear’, but how could he tell her? She might take it the wrong way. Surely he’d learnt his lesson. ‘Every self-respecting girl in town uses a Psion. I want shares in them.’
The game was up. If he hadn’t relented then, she’d have gone on one of her week-long hate-campaigns, quietly wrecking his life with every phone call to work, making him suffer with every dress she ‘just had to buy’, every new magazine subscription, and every cold meal at the day’s end.
David thought that five thousand would do the trick, but she wanted more. She wanted enough to make her lunch friends sit up and think.
‘No, David. Ten thousand. I want ten thousand Psion shares. No less.’ When Deirdre repeated herself, David’s face fell. Repetition had a nasty knack of hitting him hard whatever he decided.
The poor man tried to lift his face to talk back but the thought of how his last stand fared muffled his speech. Instead, he totted up the sum he needed to pay to keep her happy. £33,000.
At the time, it seemed a small price to pay for her happiness, even if her happiness depended more on pomp and circumstance than serenity and love. Deirdre did serenity in her sleep and, well, love was for the birds for all she cared. At times of self-loathing (when a haircut went wrong, when a man she liked refused to acknowledge her at a dinner party, when a friend ‘betrayed’ her), David’s complete demoralisation would be her only way of feeling better. Once she’d taken him apart, she could tolerate life again.
To hell with Saturday, he thought to himself, and scampered off to watch The Morning Line on telly downstairs. She’ll never have kids, he pondered. No, he’d have to broach the subject. But not today. It’s a Saturday. He knew not to bother her on a Saturday.
The weekend passed without incident.
David’s travelling back home in a cab again. It’s Monday evening and the taxi creeps along the busy main road. Finally, David decides to let the Psion fiasco taper off.
He’d only lost £27,000, which was, coincidentally, the sum he saved when he bought the new Lexus by charging it against his taxable income.
How David paid less tax than most honest, hardworking people was no mystery to his associates. They were all it, even the so-called nice people in the firm.
The system cried out for them to do it. It was the done thing. You did it, and you subscribed to The Big Issue, went to the charity galas, sponsored a chimp in Malaysia. It didn’t matter so long as it cancelled out the guilt.
By engaging a shameless accountant at an annual cost of £4,000 in cash, his £250,000 salary was broken up into intricate little slithers and justified by the law, in the main, as non-taxable income. As a self-employed director of a multi-national consortium, the taxman has been unable to touch him for more than £3,000 a year for over a decade.
Like all swindlers, he stood by his actions. His justification was simple; ‘I earn a lot and I spend a lot. Each time I purchase something, I pay tax one way or another. Why should I pay any more than that?’
Inner guilt had manifested itself in the usual ways. He took out Five Star premium health insurance plans, installed the latest CCTV security at his home, insured all possessions at the most expensive brokerage, dabbled on the stock exchange (losses of which were also tax-deductable), got fit and took sumptuous holidays in the world’s most exclusive hotels and tax-havens to comfort the spirits.
David and Deirdre have everything a modern couple could wish for, everything, that is, apart from the one thing that truly makes a marriage worthwhile; children.
As the cab enters his leafy street in Hampstead Garden Suburb, the sight of three Jewish children playing in a garden struck David with fear.
‘What if I never have children?’ he wonders. ‘What if Deirdre won’t allow it? Maybe I’m sterile. Oh, God,’ he prays, just as the driver stops and puts on the handbrake.
Something was the matter, because he could see his father’s car parked in the drive. He never came unannounced.
‘That’s twenty-three-thirty, please, guvnor,’ said the driver.
‘Thanks. Receipt, please,’ replied David, scrutinising the implications of his father being there. He absolutely never came unannounced.
Walking up to the door, he feels a cold wind blow through his body.
The door’s ajar.
Placing his case just inside, David feels an uneasy sense of fear as he moves through the hallway towards the living-room. He can’t understand why he’s tip-toeing in his own house but it becomes clearer when he starts to hear discreet voicewaves coming from the ajar living-room door.
Rather than entering, as one might naturally do, David stays behind the door and takes position to listen in to his wife and father. Between the door’s frame and the door itself, a sliver of light allows him to view them. His nose pokes through the crack of light very slightly.
They’re sitting either side of the empty fireplace, legs crossed and arched necks forward towards each other. There’s a fire burning between them.
Their tone and manner of speaking is downbeat. It seems that his father had just told his wife something of great importance and David gets the distinctly unerring feeling that it has something to do with him.
This is confirmed only moments later, moments he will never forget.
As his father reaches out for his whisky glass, David distinctly hears him say, ‘I should have told him years ago,’ to which his wife replies, ‘Don’t beat yourself up, Jonathan. You did what you thought was right for David and that’s all that matters.’
‘Told me what?’ David asks himself. ‘That I’m not his son? That I’m an orphan? Was I adopted ? Am I gay?’ He’d always wondered about that.
His father looks towards the door as David stands still with his eye poked through the gap at the door frame.
If he moved, his father would see and probably hear movement, so he stands still with eyes closed.
‘Thought I heard something then,’ his father says nervously, picking away at a small crack in his glass’ rim with a finger-nail.
‘Probably nothing,’ Deirdre assures him. ‘Would you like me to have a look?’
David freezes. Again, his father looks up towards the door, but only briefly.
‘No, probably nothing,’ he replies.
Rather than move back quietly towards the front door, make a loud re-entrance and stomp across the hallway to the living room, as one might, David decides to stay put. If he moves away now, he may never get to the bottom of this. He can’t rely on them to tell him the truth.
His father looks gaunt. Truth has finally caught up with him after a lengthy bout of obstinate and calculated denial. The early signs of ageing in him are now understood by Deirdre.
‘How did you come to be involved in all this?’ asks his wife,
‘Well, it was the Sixties and there were a lot of new ideas being given research funds,’ he replied. ‘You know that I’m all for scientific discovery and, well, when we heard that David had a tumour on the heart, there were no alternatives. If we hadn’t done it, David wouldn’t be here now.’ Deirdre hides her angry, wondering who she would have married had he died. ‘A well known surgeon from Cambridge offered us the operation so we decided to go ahead with it. A pig’s heart sounded awful at the time but it was better than his own.’
‘So that’s what the scar’s from. I’m so sorry, Jonathan,’ she replies.
His father tries to make light of the situation. ‘We always told him he’d just had a little operation to remove a small blood vessel that was in the way.’ His father looks into space. ‘He never once questioned us about it, so we just let it lie.’
‘You did the right thing, honestly you did,’ says Deirdre, but David can take no more.
He walks in and stands above his father. His father tries to stand up, as if to defend himself, but David pushes him back down.
‘All this time and you couldn’t even tell a fully grown man that he has a pig’s heart?’ David has never once shown anger to his father.
‘We didn’t know what else to do, David,’ retorts his father. ‘What would you have done? Ask yourself that, please. We did it for you, David. For you.’ His father’s breathing becomes weak. He seems to be losing touch with consciousness. Something’s happening, but David’s rage is overwhelming.
‘David,’ says Deirdre, but David has hit her and she falls back on to the floor. Her head hits the marble-topped table with a thud on the way.
Blood pumps out from her temple onto the white carpet as she lies unconscious.
His father tries to get up but he’s having a heart attack now.
Suddenly David realises what’s happening and runs into the hallway to phone for an ambulance, but it’s too late.