25-ish (Ages of David, Part 5 of 8)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘I want to have a baby,’ she declares one Tuesday night, sat at the kitchen table with an Ikea catalogue open in front of her at the kid’s bedroom page.  I’m doing the washing up.

‘Er,’ I reply, continuing to towel a plate in as nonchalant fashion as possible wondering where to start.

‘It’d be so cute.’

‘I think working with so many babies everyday is clouding your judgement.’

‘I’m not broody,’ she says, mock offended.  She looks away and smiles slightly.  ‘Maybe a little.  It’d be amazing.’

‘I guess.’

‘You don’t sound super convinced?’

And she’s right, I don’t.  Because I’m not.  Twenty-four hours previously we were embroiled in an almost violent argument, verbally not physically, about who knows what.  Something so fleeting that it should barely have been worth commenting upon.  It is nine o’clock on a Tuesday and tomorrow morning I have to get up at half four and drive to Bolton for a meeting.  I should be going to bed, not having this conversation.   I should be doing anything other than having this conversation.

‘So when are we going to have a baby?’

‘Are we having a baby?’  We have been together, sort of, for eight years, or there-abouts, depending on exactly when this conversation is taking place, and we haven’t discussed this before.  I know my girlfriend wants kids.  She works part-time with children, she loves children, it’s obvious.  The thing is, I’ve never asked myself whether I do, or not.

‘It’s what people are programmed to do.  We breed.  It’s genetics.’

‘Sure, but things have changed from other generations.  It’s not like we’ll be social outcasts if we don’t.’

And why should I have thought about whether I want children or not?  I can barely cope with thinking about what’s going to happen from one day to the next.

I mean, we’re still young, right?  There’s plenty of time to be taking these sorts of decisions.

‘Some of your friends have kids already.’

‘Yeah, but they live in a village.  In Wales.’

‘That’s not really an argument.’

‘No, I guess it isn’t.’

The thing is, I haven’t been very good at taking decisions of any sort.  I loved living in Sheffield, but moved to South East London to be with her, because that’s where she was and she couldn’t countenance living anywhere else.  Only in London, she’d said, could she be an artist.  I didn’t really know what that meant for me and so, unoriginally and like millions of others, I took the first decently paying job I could find.  In a moment, I went from having dreams of creativity to being a media sales rep. 

Against all expectations I was rather good at it.  A booming economy works in my favour for certain, but at the same time barely two years earlier I would regularly find my fingers shake when dialling a phone number knowing I’d have to speak to whoever answered.  I was painfully shy, preferring the silence of comfortable friendships to actually having to venture an opinion.  These are characteristics rather at odds with someone adept at sales. 

So, I made up someone else to do it for me.  I created a facade of myself to do the patter, the sales pitch, the charming smile.  It’s all possible if I pretend that it’s someone else doing it.  I can be more decisive, more endearing, more articulate if it’s not me.  Because if it’s all made up, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s right or wrong. 

Fakery got me promoted several times until I am national sales director, selling floor space at exhibitions for the construction industry.  The national bit means I spend my weeks traipsing around the country, locked in place behind the car’s steering wheel, and my weekends trying to recoup sleep.  While my peers are out enjoying the delights of London, I go to bed early.  And those dreams of writing because less and less tangible, as another month goes by and the short story I have been trying to will into existence, which in some ways sits perfectly formed inside my head, doesn’t grow beyond the first paragraph.

As the woman who will become my wife will tell me several years hence, I have the job of someone in their mid-forties twenty years too early. 

But I don’t know that yet.

It is only just occurring to me quite how much of my life I am faking.

‘No we don’t have to,’ she says, ‘but what if I want to?’

And somehow I don’t say that if I had the opportunity to do the one thing I wanted to, then it would involve a bottle of whisky and be as far from a baby as possible.  I don’t remind her that I already pay the vast majority of rent and bills and that if I listen hard to the tiny voice inside me, it tells me how crushed by life’s tedious reality it is.  I manage to not say any of those things.  Or maybe I do, because before I can stop the slide we’re arguing again and I’m wondering whether the glass on the table is going to be directed at me again.  We’re bitter spiteful arguerers, throwing out often untrue words that can never be taken back.

A few years later I will tell myself that it’d be okay, that we could have a baby.  I have refound myself, given up the sales job to write, but the arguments have increased.  I don’t admit it to myself, but my change of heart is to try and prevent the inevitable.  I never voice my idea, because instead she tells me it’s over.

And with hindsight, maybe, there’s more than a smudge of relief.