The years stuttered by in a surprising, unpredictable manner.
Apparently Einstein said that time isn’t linear, and I can totally relate to that. Because some of those years had to be dragged like a cart with no wheels, while others slipped and slid and vanished before anyone even noticed.
Different events within a single year could feel both blindingly fast and painfully slow, so that Dawn’s uncomfortable second pregnancy lasted, I’m pretty sure, at least three years, while at the same time Lucy went from ‘Mmm’ to verbal diarrhoea in what I remember as three or four days. That process of her learning to speak was so funny, so cute, so utterly adorable, I remember wishing it would last forever.
I truly doted on Lucy once she started speaking. I just couldn’t get enough of her.
‘You have to say ‘no’ sometimes,’ Dawn would instruct me. ‘You’re making yourself into her slave.’
But I couldn’t say ‘no’ to Lucy any more than I could say ‘no’ to Dawn.
‘Daddy, can we go to the sweetshop?’ Lucy would ask.
‘No more sweets!’ Dawn would say. ‘We haven’t had tea yet!’
I’d wink at Dawn and pull my coat on. ‘We promise not to eat them until after tea, don’t we Lucy?’ I’d say, sweeping her onto my shoulders.
‘Promsis promsis cross pants die,’ she replied one time, making us all crack up laughing. She’d mixed upLiar liar, pants on fire,which she’d recently learned, withCross your heart, hope to die.
Promsis promsis cross pants diebecame, for a while, my favourite catchphrase, a treasured gift from my daughter.
There were proud first days at nursery school that were over way too fast, and sleepless nights when Lucy stayed over at her new friends’ houses for the first time. But gradually we got used to Lucy being an actual person with her own free will and at some point worrying about Lucy morphed into worrying how I was going to pay my taxes instead. Becoming a dad had made me take my eye off the ball and suddenly business wasn’t so good.
* * *
In ’94, just a week before Lou was born, I met a guy who imported cheap copper cables from Turkey, and by the time little Lou was running after his sister – something that also happened in the blink of an eye – two long, angst-ridden years had groaned past, during which I’d rented, then bought a warehouse, set up a business, and morphed from electrician to boss.
By ’97, when Blair was elected, Lucy was already at primary. Dawn had learned to help with my accounts and we’d become rich enough for proper holidays. I was importing VCRs, CD players and phones.
But the sex, unexpectedly, had stopped, and I think we were both too embarrassed to discuss why.
Things had never really been the same after Lou was born, but though Dawn had claimed for a while that ‘it hurt’ I’m not sure I ever believed her that was the only thing going on.
My insecurities about sexual technique meant that I’d always suspected she forced herself to sleep with me. So when she began rolling away and murmuring that she was sleepy, I naturally assumed that she’d had enough of having to pretend.
But like I said before, I’m a glass half full kind of guy, and even that I managed to take as a compliment, albeit a back-handed one. Because if Dawn no longer felt she needed to pretend to want sex with me then didn’t it mean everything else was fine? Didn’t it mean that our marriage was now so rock solid that we didn’t need the ‘glue’ of sex holding us together? It was true, after all: everything else reallywashunky-dory.
Over the seven years together, we’d negotiated every aspect of our lives so that they overlapped perfectly, without any raggedy edges at all.
We preferred Bowie and the Stone Roses to my Duran Duran or Dawn’s Sonic Youth – CDs that were banished to the Dusty Drawer of Oblivion. We liked Coldplay but not Oasis, preferred Indian to Chinese, and favoured Channel4 News over the Beeb. We both voted for Blair (at least I think we did), and we definitely shared a bottle of champagne when he won. We liked Greece more than Spain, preferred Andy’s ex to his stuck-up current, and raisin and biscuit Yorkie bars better than the plain ones.
We were parents who didn’t slap their kids,ever, but not the awful friendless kind of parent who’d make a fuss when others slapped theirs. And like many, many other couples (according to theGuardian, which we both now read) we’d agreed not only to never have sex, but to never talk about the fact we weren’t having sex, either.
So yes, we were pretty much in tune about everything.
SIX
CHOOSING HAPPINESS (BY DAWN)
I should probably have felt happier.
I don’t mean that I feltun-happy – I wouldn’t want to give the wrong impression… It’s just that there were so many reasons to feel happy that I think I should have been happier. I should probably have been ecstatic.
Lucy was just… I can’t even think of words to describe how amazing she was. She was cute and funny and smart and pretty… For a while she was my world.
On top of that – on top of being absolutely smitten with my daughter – everything else was good too. The house was lovely to live in and Rob was, as Mum liked to say,the best husband any woman never had. Living so close to the seafront and, in summer, to the beach, was brilliant. So yeah, all the ingredients were there, and I hated myself for the fact that Ididn’tfeel ecstatically happy.
I suppose, if I’m honest, I felt cheated. It seemed as if I’d somehow been conned into a life that wasn’t my own: a very, very nice life, and a very lucky one too, when you consider all the misery there is on this planet. It’s just that it wasn’t my life and I couldn’t quite let myself relax into it.
