Sticks and Stones 2

Because she gives one hundred percent to the children, she expects me to do the same.
Perhaps it’s because two of the three children are hers and not mine that I feel robbed on eighty percent, but there surely has to be time set aside from the kids, even for a martyr like Suzie. Cloaking herself in a shroud of housework will never help, but she has refused to get to know the other women in our little French village since we arrived in August 2003, and there has been little outside contact with other families from the children’s school.
Neither of us seems to have grown from the experience and I feel like I’ve aged a good ten years since our first real blow-out session. It’s obvious that we’re sticking together for the children’s sake, which is a plus considering I’ve only done things for myself in the past and that never really worked out.
But there’s always that niggling feeling in the back of my head that, the more we fight, the more we do damage to the children as a result. That’s what rests like a stone in my stomach.
I know that if my own father, or even a stepfather, if I’d had one, was around when I was a kid (and kind to me just a few times a week) I’d be a much more centred person, a more complete person, rather than the colourful fragments I display at given moments.
Suzie’s parents have stayed together and look what good that did. Zilch! Her mother has remained head honcho to this day and her father has slowly receded into a ball of resentment in his leather chair, constantly looking back in pacific anger at how he never stood his ground with her.
Suzie’s very similar to her Mum in that sense; it’s her way or highway, and whatever I say to change her mind when she’s forking out sixty-five euros for a pair of shoes for one of the children that I know will only be worn for ten months because she only buys the exact size and not the one up like most hard-up parents, she always gets last say in the matter. The kids’ shoe-bill alone is well over six hundred euros a year and it strangles me when I think about the Caribbean holidays we could have had, because the list of six hundreds goes on and on.
There are Maddy’s clarinet lessons (the clarinet alone set me back five hundred euros but I had to do it because her father had bought her a second-hand Chinese one that the French teacher refused her to use), the dance classes, the sports gear, the PS2 games, the vet bills, the Chinese remedies, her contact lenses, two cars to run, insurance policies at every level, school shit, you name it.
Top this little lot with the fact that everything, even shampoo, has to be top-of-the-range, and you get the picture.
You could be in the same shit as me for all I know.
The children have to have the best of everything for Suzie to sleep at night, while I rack my brains trying to conjure up the necessary readies for a new week (and then get on the phone to my mother to ask for another loan).
It wasn’t like this when we met, at her front door, back in late 1999.
I’d had a call from Steve, my painting partner, to do a quote in Guildford.
The moment she answered the door, I knew she was the one, whatever that means.
She was a gem, pretty as an English Rose and with a quiet, husky voice.
She accepted my quote to paint her bay windows, which were in a terrible state, and I started immediately. We flirted, she gave me a bottle of red once I’d done the work and so I started taking her out on lunch outings to country pubs with her three-year old son, Griff, where there were tentative kisses. I went to Ibiza with an old friend from Paris and she started to get clingy on the phone, asking if I intended to sleep with anyone. When I came back sexually intact, the relationship developed and she asked me to stay when I couldn’t seem to find a room in a flat at that time. I was on a student loan doing a course in music production and picking up work as a painter.
Having inherited a ready-made family from an adulterous father, I was given free rein over my life with Suzie.
She never once told me off for pubbing it or smoking dope. How could she? I was a lodger that gave her orgasms and taught her how to smoke again. I had my PC, Korg X5D and Cubase in the little room she gave me and I was beginning to feel happy again, having gone back on the sauce after nine months of treatment and a total of fifteen months’ sobriety from alcohol, drugs and gambling; The Big Three.
I relished Clara’s birth when Suzie announced she was pregnant. Assuming that she’d allow me to do as I wished, within good reason, I assured her that I’d change my ways once Clara was born, and that Suzie wouldn’t have to lift a finger. But I was on a downward spiral, as is always the case when one returns to the sauce.
We were living near Guildford when Clara popped out.
The little angel had been forecast to sprinkle her beauty into the world on April Fool’s Day, the same day as I had been expected to arrive, but she obviously liked it in her mummy’s tummy and stayed put till the Fifth.
The night before the big day, I had gone out for too much to drink and returned home late and drunk. Suzie was less than happy.
The next day, the day she would be induced and my life would seem worthwhile, I stayed in bed and asked my mother to take her in to hospital, fearing that I’d throw up if I didn’t nurse my hangover with due care and attention.
The midwife had assured me the day before that it would be some time after her induction for birth to take place, and I think I remembered this while I was drinking that night.
‘She’ll be born at kick-off time,’ I’d told my drinking buddy.
I arrived at two in the afternoon as if I was going through the motions of attending a match, giving myself enough time for a pint, programme, pie and a pee.
It took me twenty minutes to park and find the ward, at which time I took my seat, leaned forward and across, kissed Suzie hello and squeezed her hand.
‘I brought the travel scrabble!’ I announced, just as Suzie began to look uncomfortable. The midwife laughed at my inability to adapt to the situation.
This reminded me of the time I had gone halves on an abortion with an ex. Just as the poor angel emerged from killing our baby, I chose to ignore the situation by chatting to the doctor about the finer qualities of laughing gas. I even asked if it was available on the open market as I had a big party coming up and needed new tricks for friends and fiends to remember the night by.
Jo never forgave me for that, just as Suzie has always hated me for not ‘being there’ for her that warm, bright and breezy April morning.
Clara was a dream to give birth to, Suzie admitted with pride. I must say it did seem very quick and easy. I felt like I was an actor doing a TV hospital drama rehearsal.
She arrived at three on the dot.
I held her in my arms and looked at her wondrous face.
‘She’ll be an Arsenal fan,’ I said longingly.
She hardly cried at all, and it seemed from the word go that she’d been here before.
We left that evening and I can remember feeling cheated that I hadn’t changed immediately.
Steve, my painting friend, had told me how awe-inspiring the birth of his children had been for him and how it had changed him forever the moment they were born.
For me, these natural feelings of wellbeing had escaped me, so I began considering treatment for my boozing, although consideration was as far as it went.
I wrote some good stories while we were in Woking. There were extra splashes of irony and my chosen scenarios centred around dishevelled young families trying to make ends meet under unusual circumstances. The hellbent losers on blackouts that I usually wrote about seemed to have evaporated, for a while, and I remembered feeling considerably better when I realised I was a father at last.
Being on the dole, my boozing and gambling escalated in the sort of way every partner dreads; out at lunchtime and back once I’d picked the children up from school. At home, I’d hurry around looking for something important to do with pursed lips, wondering why I wasn’t in the pub reading the paper or talking to small-time crooks to reinvent stories from. With Stella’s full force, I’d pick up my keys and tell Suzie I had a job to quote somewhere quite far away with Steve, which was rarely true.