Kitabı oku: «William’s Progress»

JANUARY

‘Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.’

SAM LEVENSON

Tuesday 1 January

I am a father.

I have a son.

My son is alive.

My wife is alive.

My son and my wife are both alive.

I am alive.

We are all alive. Happy new year.

I am a father. Right now. As of forty-three minutes ago. For forty-three minutes, I have been a father.

It must have been the cold air hitting me when I stepped out of the maternity ward. Not just the cold air, of course. I am perfectly capable, under normal circumstances, of not fainting in the face of cold air. There were other contributing factors, too. Lack of food, for instance. I hadn’t eaten for forty-six hours. You lose your appetite when your wife is groaning at you and the midwives are barking at you and no one’s dilating quickly enough and everything’s going wrong. For forty-six hours.

The only sustenance I’d had during the whole debacle was a gulped whisky during the small hours of the first night of the two-night labour when it was only me and Isabel (and the bump). The whisky was purely medicinal. We’d been ‘in labour’ for a good eighteen hours by then and I needed something to stiffen my resolve and prevent me from running, screaming, from the house. What a huge mistake that was. Running, screaming, from the house would have been a far more sensible course of action than staying for the full Reservoir Dogs experience. Isabel and the bump would have managed fine without me.

Lack of sleep: that’s another of the extenuating circumstances leading to my fainting in a bush next to the ambulance bay. I have never stayed up for forty-six hours in my life. Hardened SAS men give up sensitive military secrets if they are kept awake for that long. But I’m not a hardened SAS man, and I wasn’t allowed to sleep. Or I might have been allowed, but I never dared ask: one doesn’t want to appear unsupportive during these (many) hours of need.

As it turns out, the first eighteen of the forty-six hours, the ones in the run-up to the whisky, weren’t actual labour. They were only pre-labour, a sort of softening-up phase God threw in so that everyone would be completely exhausted gibbering wrecks by the time the proper labour began.

I didn’t enjoy the pre-labour. I’m pretty sure Isabel didn’t, either. She was having are-you-sure-this-isn’t-the-actual-labour contractions every fifteen minutes or so. And when I say contractions, I mean proper on-all-fours, groaning and screeching and spitting like the possessed girl in The Exorcist. With me, frantic, helpless, stroking her lower back like they encouraged in the prenatal classes. And her saying, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ and me saying, ‘It’s okay, darling. Swearing is a good release. They said that in the NCT class.’ And her saying, ‘Okay, well stop fucking tickling my back or I’ll fucking kill you,’ and me saying, ‘Yes, darling’. And then her head spinning around 360 degrees.

That was the pre-labour. Eighteen hours, punctuated only by a midwife coming round and saying, ‘Well done, dear,’ before leaving again. And me, about halfway through, saying, ‘Are you sure you want to stick with the whole home-birth plan, because we could go to hospital like everyone else? They have nice monitors and tubes and drugs there and stuff.’

And then the whisky. Thank God for the whisky. For a minute, a beautifully precious minute, peace and quiet. Nerves settling. The clock saying 1.30 a.m. and me wondering whether I could sneak in forty winks since we all seemed to be relaxing into this whole giving-birth thing.

No. Oh no. The moment of tranquillity evaporated as soon as Isabel gave out a real, proper, blood-curdling scream. It was a new noise altogether, a noise that, if you heard it in the distance while you were sitting in a safari truck halfway through a night drive in the Okavango Delta, would prompt you to immediately ask the ranger to drive you back to the camp. It was a noise that would chill a man to the very core, make him drop to his knees and pray, even though he doesn’t believe in God, to make this all stop happening.

MY PRAYER

Dear Lord,

If you can get us through this thing, this terrifying thing, I promise never, ever to have unprotected sex with my wife or anyone else ever again. I promise to give my life to you and spend my days wandering the world preaching your gospel. Without shoes on and everything. Make the next few hours pass as quickly and painlessly as possible, oh, Mighty One, and I shall never, ever be a twat again, I really, really promise. And I’ll bring up the bump in the Christian faith, rather than encouraging him down a more logical humanist path. I promise.

Amen

…and that was it: the start – only the start – of the ‘real labour’. All systems go. ‘This is Houston, you are cleared for liftoff,’ I said to Isabel in an attempt to sound excited and positive.

‘If you say anything else that makes me feel like a space shuttle, I will kill you,’ she replied. ‘Now call the midwife back and tell her to get round.’

The midwife arrived. Four centimetres dilated, she said. Only four? Six whole centimetres to go. Six! Jesus. I mean, blimey. Sorry, God. I started another prayer, but the midwife interrupted, telling me to make myself useful by pumping up the birthing pool. Yes, of course, the birthing pool. Must pump up the birthing pool.

BIRTHING POOL: INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE

1. Important: make sure you unpack the birthing pool and inflate it prior to use to ensure that you are familiar with the equipment and there are no faults. Aquasqueeze Ltd will not offer a refund if any pool malfunctions are only discovered during the birthing procedure.

(Frankly, it was a miracle I even read the instructions on the day, let alone prior to use. I mean, seriously, as if it’s necessary to have a trial run of a glorified paddling pool.)

2. Plug in pump.

3. Pump.

Why didn’t I do a trial run for the paddling pool? It’s childbirth, for goodness’ sake. You don’t muck about with childbirth. But it was one of several things I hadn’t done. I hadn’t read any of the baby books Isabel had asked me to read. I hadn’t got in an awful lot of lie-ins. I hadn’t painted the bathroom, the horrible old bathroom with its horrible old paint. I had painted the nursery, but badly. The birthing pool was the least of my worries. Except, it wasn’t.

It took forty minutes to inflate the pool, during which time the foot pump and I fell out on several occasions. I twisted one ankle and had room spin twice. Shouldn’t have had the whisky. It took another ninety minutes to fill the pool with water using a complicated, improvised, ever-so-slightly panicky siphoning system I devised with the garden hose, a colander, a plastic bag and the bath. Why hadn’t I worked this all out earlier? Idiot, idiot, idiot.

The leak was discovered at approximately 0400 hours, long after the helpline at Aquasqueeze Ltd had closed. Mind you, they were probably closed for the entirety of the Christmas period, anyway. That’s the trend these days, isn’t it? No one’s going to turn up for work at a birthing pool company on New Year’s Eve, even though it’s a Monday. Even though people still might be giving birth. That would be far too much to expect, now wouldn’t it?

Only once the pool was full did the pressure begin to force water through the until-then-unnoticeable tear right at the base. From then on, it was like a crack in a dam in a 1970s disaster movie. It got bigger and bigger and bigger. I was already too tired and dehydrated to cry proper tears, and Isabel and the midwife were too busy doing grim things in the front room to notice.

I put a finger over the hole and looked around the dining room. Why we had decided that Isabel should give birth in the dining room and not somewhere one might find the necessary equipment to mend a leak, I have no idea. Next time, we’re doing it in the garden shed. Plenty of appropriate mending equipment in there. Back in the dining room, all I could reach was masking tape. Masking tape is porous, but it bought me enough time to find the Sellotape. Which bought me enough time to explain to Isabel, between contractions, that the pool was ready, but that she couldn’t bounce around in it or anything because, well, it was a touch, erm, faulty, darling…

She didn’t like this idea.

‘I told you we should check the effing pool out before I—bbleeeaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhh’.

There are at least some advantages to regular strong contractions. You can only get shouted at for the ever-decreasing periods in between.

7 a.m. Six centimetres dilated. Could it go any slower?

10 a.m. Seven centimetres. But maybe still six because things are getting a bit swollen down there.

‘Keep going, darling, you’re doing wonderfully,’ I told her, while reflecting that God really could pick up a bit more support if he answered the odd agnostic’s desperate prayer every now and again.

By midday, we were on to our third midwife and the pool was starting to sag. Sellotape can only go so far.

By 4 p.m., I had given up trying to keep the water in the sagging pool at a comfortable temperature because Isabel was now roaming around the house like an injured animal. Absolutely no point sitting in the dining room with a thermometer and a kettle when your wife is in a dark corner of the bedroom growling at anyone who tries to offer her a biscuit. And then it was 10 p.m., and the two latest midwives had decided that she was eight centimetres, but Isabel had had enough.

‘I’ve had enough,’ she said quietly and I had to look away because I didn’t want her to see how frightened I was.

So we went to the hospital…her in an ambulance with blue flashing lights and everything, me following in the Skoda without blue flashing lights, the baby bag, a change of clothes or anything. Idiot.

Drugs, gas and air, epidurals, something that sounded like Sanatogen, more slow progress, baby in distress, mother in distress, me shaking my fist at bloody non-existent God for the ridiculous, stupid, impossible nature of childbirth. And then, suddenly, at 5 a.m., I hear the phrase ‘fetal distress’. Isabel is barely conscious. The bump is in trouble.

‘We have to get this baby out. You’ve been going long enough, dear,’ said a no-nonsense midwife with arms like beanbags. And Isabel burst into tears of sheer exhaustion and resignation.

I can’t remember much about the Caesarean, except that it was quick and there were slurping noises like when you’re at the dentist and the assistant sticks the vacuum cleaner down the back of your mouth and you try to keep it away from your epiglottis because you were already very close to gagging but she’s not paying attention because it’s almost lunch and she’s bored, and, oops, a little bit of breakfast has come up and now the dentist doesn’t like you, which is annoying because it wasn’t your fault, it was the bored assistant’s.

At the point of incision, Isabel had to tell me to stop squeezing her hand so hard because it was hurting. Then the doctor made a joke and I made a joke and Isabel had to tell us all to stop joking. ‘Gallows humour,’ I said and immediately regretted it. Three or four seconds or minutes or hours later, there was a piercing, gurgly scream from behind the turquoise curtain: our boy, beautiful, grumpy from all his efforts to escape Isabel. My turn to burst into tears.

And that was forty-three minutes ago. Now I am lying in a bush and an old lady is prodding me with her Zimmer frame and I’m laughing and crying at the same time.

I phone the families. They are equally pleased that we are all alive.

Isabel’s dad says, ‘Bloody home births. Bloody ridiculous. This isn’t the Crimean War.’ And I have to explain, not for the first time, that these days women are empowered to make choices and that Isabel didn’t want to give birth in hospital. He points out that she did in the end. I point out that he’s right and I don’t care…the main thing is that everyone’s alive and he is now a grandfather.

‘A grandfather? Yes, I suppose I am,’ he replies more warmly. ‘About time, too. I was beginning to think Isabel was past it. Everyone leaves it so late these days. I mean, in my day, you got married and you got on with it. None of this work–life balance nonsense. As slow as a giant panda, but you got there in the end. Well done, my boy.’

I then have the same conversation with Dad before he puts on Mum, who is immediately hysterical and then tells me her birth story, which I’ve heard a thousand times before and don’t want to hear this morning. Not now that I have my own which is just as gory.

‘I have to go, Mum. I need to check on Isabel and the bump.’

‘You can’t call him “the bump” any more. Doesn’t he have a name? Please tell me you’ve decided on a name. Please tell me it’s not something trendy.’

‘Not quite. But you’ll be the first to know.’

THE HORROR OF NAMING A CHILD

There is much responsibility attached to having a baby. This much we know. But by far the worst aspect of it is giving the child a name, particularly if it’s a girl. Every girl’s name that Isabel thought was sweet was a porn name. Chloe. Jessica. Ella. We may as well just call her Pamela. Or Paris.

‘What about Sarah?’ Isabel had suggested, reasonably.

‘No, I snogged a girl called Sarah. We were only fourteen and she let me touch her breast. Not appropriate.’

‘What about Susannah?’

‘Everyone snogged Susannah.’

‘Maybe you could give me a list of girls’ names that have no sexual connotations for you.’

‘Okay, Beatrice.’ Because Isabel isn’t the only one who can make reasonable suggestions.

‘Beatrice?!’

‘Yes, or Bea for short.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

This went on for months and all we agreed on was that we shouldn’t go for an ‘interesting name’, like Apple, Moon Unit or Prince Michael II. You are not, as the axiom goes, more interesting because your children have interesting names.

‘What about Electra?’ she suggested while we were failing to choose a pram at John Lewis.

‘Are you making these preposterous suggestions simply so I have to say no a lot so that when I make sensible suggestions in return – like Mildred – and you say no, you don’t appear unreasonable?’

‘Electra was my grandmother’s name.’

I only realised she was joking when we got back to the car. You can lose your sense of humour with the whole girls’ names fandango.

On boys’ names, we had narrowed it down to thirty. My favourite was George, but because her favourite was Albert, which is French and makes me think of pierced foreskins, I had to agree that we would cancel out favourites. Next was my Kit (after the car in Knight Rider, thereby guaranteeing my unborn child a life of success and coolness of which I could only ever have dreamed), knocked out by her Finbar. Neo and Ralph went the same way, but for a long time we found common ground on Elijah.

‘Elijah,’ I had announced proudly to Johnson in the pub. ‘Elijah Walker.’

He’d looked at me coldly, looked at his pint forlornly and said, ‘Poor kid. Poor, poor kid, with his poncey parents and his ridiculous name that will follow him through life ruining any chance he ever had of not being judged. Another pint?’

That left us with deadlock, so we decided to put the whole terrible matter on hold until nearer the time. And then we got nearer the time and were no closer to resolution. Then the time came and went. And now we are the proud owners of an unnamed child and the grandparents are appalled.

Back in the ward, Isabel is sleeping. So is Bump. Ahhh, they are so sweet. Look at him with his little head. His tiny little head. Is it too little? It looks very small. So do his arms. His arms are too short. Oh, God, a short-armed son. Didn’t Hitler go off the rails because of his short arms? I can’t remember. I’m so tired.

‘Darling, you’re hurting my stomach.’

‘What? Who? How? Oh, God. I’m sorry.’ I had nodded off on the chair and slumped forward on to the recently dissected stomach of my wife. ‘I’m so, so, so, so, so sorry. Are you okay? Should I get the doctor? Shall I press that emergency button?’

‘It’s fine. I’m fine. Look at your beautiful son’.

And there he is, looking straight at me. Possibly. Hard to tell, though. He has a glazed expression. He looks a bit dopey. Oh, God, is he simple? Will he still be living with us when he is forty, in an anorak, untouched by women, untroubled by a career, enthused by nothing but trains and their sequential numbering system. Oh, God.

He hiccups and there is a flicker of alertness. No, it’s fine. Everything is fine. And we are all alive. ‘I love you, darling. Happy new year.’

‘Darling? Darling? DARLING!’

‘What? What happened?’

‘You fell on my stomach again.’

‘Oh, God. I’m so, so, so, so—’

‘Why don’t you go home, have a rest, get the bag of things I told you not to forget last night and come back? Bump and I will be fine.’

She’s right. I must stop falling on her recently severed stomach. I must go home and hunter-gather. I shall return in no more than two hours with clothes and Innocent smoothies and flowers. A thousand flowers for my amazing wife. Fear not.

And I was gone.

Our front door. I’m standing looking at our front door. Marvelling at it, at its familiarity. It looks the same, but everything is different. This house is now a family house. My family will live here. Nothing will ever be the same again. The thought – combined with a new wave of tiredness and hunger – overwhelms me. I can hardly find the energy to fumble through my coat pocket for the keys.

Inside, it’s Reservoir Dogs, the leftovers. There’s the birthing pool, its water congealing nicely. I take a closer look and remember the moment, the very specific moment, when the pregnancy ceased to be fun.

THE SPECIFIC MOMENT WHEN HAVING A BABY CEASED TO BE FUN

October 27. 10.44 a.m. Second baby-group meeting. Isabel was excited but nervous. I was nervous but excited. We were running through the list of things we’d need for the birth: the nappies, the breast pads, the wet wipes, the snacks for daddy, the sanitary towels, the pumps, the nozzles, the pointless homoeopathic pills and the million other items that were all absolutely essential if things were to go smoothly. The longer the list went on, the less excited and more nervous Isabel looked and the more strongly I felt like hugging her and telling her everything would be all right, list or no list. Hugging didn’t seem appropriate, so I gripped her hand and gave her a reassuring smile. She smiled back and if, at that second, a lion had jumped over the hedge and attacked her, I would have fought it off with my bare hands. Or at least had a jolly good go. I felt like I would do anything to protect her, anything at all.

But then we got to the very last item: an old sieve.

That’s what it said. Not simply, ‘Sieve’, but ‘Old sieve’.

‘Why old?’ asked one of the more inquisitive mothers-to-be.

‘Because you don’t want to use your newest sieve to get all the bits out of the birthing pool, do you?’ came the matter-of-fact reply. And in that instant, I didn’t feel like everything was going to be all right and I didn’t feel like I could protect Isabel from anything at all. I wanted to smile and shrug calmly at my wonderful, brave, nervous, pregnant wife – but I couldn’t. I needed fresh air. It wasn’t so much that I was squeamish about bits in a birthing pool. It was more that it was going to happen to Isabel, and there was nothing we could do about it. In fact, it was normal. Having an old sieve on a list of things you need for a water birth was normal.

‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ she asked during the break. ‘You look a bit pale.’

‘I’m fine. Absolutely fine. Just a bit airless in here.’

That is all over now. Now we are postnatal. We are, as I have mentioned, all alive. And now I am here, looking at the birthing pool that never was, thinking about the old sieve we never needed. I make my way upstairs, finding more detritus of the previous two nights: half-drunk cups of camomile tea (‘It’s making me feel sick’), wet flannels (‘Get that flannel away from me’), massage oil (‘Stop rubbing me’), CDs of whale music (‘William, will you turn that racket off? I already feel bloated enough without having to listen to the mating rituals of a blue whale’). In the bedroom, I find the bed. Which I shall just lie in briefly. Forty winks, as instructed. That is all…

Wednesday 2 January

‘I can’t believe you left us for a whole day. I’m still wearing the same nightdress I came to the hospital in. I’ve had to borrow some sanitary towels from the nurse.’

‘I’m so, so, so, so, so, so, so sorry. I got home. I had a quick lie-down. The phone was still unplugged from when you told me to unplug that (“fucking”) phone. Then it was 11 p.m. I called the hospital. They said you were asleep. I called your mobile. It was off. I’m here now. I’m so sorry. Look, I bought a cranberry, yumberry and blackcurrant smoothie. It’s very high in vitamin C.’

‘Thanks. Now, go and change Jacob’s nappy.’

‘Jacob?’

‘Yes, he’s called Jacob. I had to call him something because the midwives were about to call social services and report us for neglect. You had gone AWOL. So I decided on Jacob. We can always change it later.’

Ahh, the old we-can-always-change-it-later trick. Isabel has been using this all year. We can’t agree on a colour to paint the baby’s room. I want a good, honest, sensible yellow. She wants a pinky-white, which is ridiculous if it’s a boy, but she says, on the contrary, it’s perfect because she intends for our child to have a non-gender-specific upbringing. Halfway through the standoff, she paints it pink while I’m at work. I come home and look angry. She says, ‘We can always change it later.’ Kapow!

Also while I’m at work, she pays a proper handyman to come round and hang pictures where I don’t want them on the grounds that we’ve been in this house for over a year and she’s tired of looking at bare walls. The same happens with the placing of plant pots, the reorganisation of the kitchen and the moving of all my clothes to the bottom drawer of the small cupboard in the spare room (to make room for all the cloth nappies). But it’s okay, we can always change it later…

We will never change it later. We could barely be bothered to change it in the first place.

This is fine when it comes to the feng shui-ing of a living room or the buying of a girly tree for the front garden, but not so fine for the naming of a first-born.

Jacob.

I’m not sure. I knew someone at university called Jacob. Did philosophy. Smoked drugs. Now lives on a beach in Bali. How much of that is because his parents called him Jacob?

It does have a ring to it, though. Jacob Walker. You probably wouldn’t get an astronaut called Jacob Walker, but equally, you wouldn’t get a shoplifter. It didn’t sound prime ministerial, but there was a certain gravitas. Broadsheet newspaper editor, perhaps. Barrister. Surgeon. Discoverer of (a) the cure for old age, (b) life in another solar system or (c) the ark of the covenant. If they haven’t discovered that already. I can’t remem—

‘William! The nappy.’

THE DADDY NAPPY

Well, I missed that one. We had given over ten minutes of the prenatal classes to the treacly first nappy. Turns out I could have skipped that bit on account of having rather tactically skipped the whole of day one. I got day-two nappy instead and, frankly, I don’t see what all the fuss is about. It went absolutely fine until Jacob (see, I’m already calling him that) decided to have a wee the second, the very second, I’d finished cleaning him up. No drama. I changed him again – and that was less fine because he was screaming. And the screaming is very hard to cope with when you’re trying to work out which way around the nappy stickers go and how you wipe the poo off without getting it on the (pink, why is it pink?) babygro. Still, the smell was bearable, the trauma minimal. All trauma will appear minimal now that I have witnessed the miracle of childbirth.

Thursday 3 January

One more night in hospital on account of the whole dissection thing. This has worked out very well. Now that I have slept – and we have put the whole missing-the-first-day-with-Jacob debacle behind us – I am finding the routine of being a new dad quite acceptable. Wake up, drive to hospital, fuss over amazing mother of my child for a few hours, marvel pathetically every time child moves (‘Look, look, look, he moved his hand, ahhhhhh’), go home, watch DVDs, drink beer, watch more DVDs, go to bed.

Today, we introduced Jacob to both sets of grandparents. We had to prise him from the claws of both mums, but other than that – and a slightly disgusting moment when Jacob tried to suckle Isabel’s mum and Isabel’s dad said, ‘Hang on now, old chap, there’s only one of us allowed to sup at that particular cup these days’ – everything went smoothly.

Until the flowers arrived from Alex, Isabel’s best friend.

WHY ALEX IS STILL ISABEL’S BEST FRIEND

Alex very nearly ruined my marriage. He spent the first year of it spying on us and trying to break us up. He gate-crashed our romantic weekend away. He faked photographs of me having sex with my ex-girlfriend, Saskia (the Destroyer of Relationships). Worst of all, he found out I was getting Isabel’s parents some cheese knives for Christmas and he got them better ones. How could anyone be so devious?

I had assumed the answer was simple enough: he loved her, she didn’t love him, he turned into a nutter. But after the dust had settled, after Isabel and I had repaired the damage he had done, after he had cried a lot and begged for forgiveness, it became clear that it wasn’t quite so simple after all.

‘Isabel. William. I have something else to tell you.’

You’re moving to Indonesia? You’re becoming a Trappist monk? You’re—

‘I’m gay and I’m in love with an interior designer called Geoff.’

I don’t know why we were even still talking to him at all, let alone talking to him about this exciting new revelation, a revelation which, frankly, if he’d revealed it to himself a bit earlier, could have saved us all an awful lot of hassle.

‘Wow,’ exclaimed Isabel charitably.

‘Couldn’t you have worked that out a bit earlier?’ I asked as patiently as possible.

‘I know. I’m so sorry. I always knew deep down. You just do, don’t you? But I was too frightened to admit it to myself, let alone to anyone else. I think that’s why I spent all my time chasing a woman I knew I could never be with.’

‘And hiding a camera in her bedside lamp.’

‘Yes, well, I was in denial. And denial led to confusion. And obsession. And…’

‘And psychotic behaviour?’ I was only trying to help him finish his train of thought, but Isabel gave me a look. Despite everything, Alex was still her friend and she would still support him, a fact which I found intensely annoying. Given the lengths to which he had gone to spoil our wedded bliss, announcing he was gay was about the only way he could insinuate himself back into Isabel’s affections. Which is exactly what happened. He went from, ‘Sorry for nearly ruining your lives’ to ‘I can’t wait for you to meet Geoff, you’re going to love him’ in the space of five minutes.

A week after that, contrary to Alex’s prediction, I found that I didn’t love Geoff. Geoff loved the sound of his own voice too much for there to be room for any other love. ‘William. Hi. Heard a lot about—Blimey, I hope that rug was a present, or are you being ironic? Maybe the latter, I’ve heard you’re quite dry and, my God, what a bold statement you’re making putting that picture against that wallpaper. Bravo. Anyway, sorry, where was I? So good to meet you. I was thinking on the way here that—’

The only time anyone else could speak was when he had food in his mouth. The rest of the time, he monopolised the conversation with long, fanciful stories about how brilliant he was and how awful everyone else’s taste in home furnishings was. I don’t know why he thinks he’s so brilliant. He’s only an interior designer who was on daytime television once.

‘You know, he used to be on television?’ whispered Alex when Geoff gave us all a break by going to the toilet. ‘And he wants me to work with him. He loves my style. He thinks I could be an interior designer, too. Isn’t that exciting?’

‘Yes.’

No.

So now Alex is back in our lives. He has chucked in his old pretentious job and got a new pretentious job. He is now an interior designer. And we have to have dinner with them at their annoyingly designed flat. And they have to come to dinner and make annoying comments about our normally designed house.

And, clearly, he still can’t help upstaging me on the present front. First cheese knives. Now flowers. His bunch would embarrass the head gardener at Kew.

‘Isabel, I thought you disapproved of out-of-season flowers. Because of the food miles, or whatever it is.’

‘Yes, but aren’t they beautiful?’

Friday 4 January

The baby seat. My God, the baby seat. Even when I’d read the instructions (birthing pool: lesson learned), in four languages, I still couldn’t work it out. You have to feed the seat belt through several different holes, loops and clips, all at the pace of a snail to prevent the very touchy seat belt from locking up. If there are any slight twists or kinks in the seat belt, YOUR BABY WILL DIE. You have to get a floaty orange thing lined up with another floaty orange thing, or YOUR BABY WILL DIE. Even though the orange thing is a sort of spirit level and it only lines up when our car is on the road, not the drive. You must then clip one clip into another clip, even though the clips don’t reach one another, or YOUR BABY WILL DIE. If the air bags go off, YOUR BABY WILL DIE. If you have the headrest angled wrong, YOUR BABY WILL DIE. If you don’t follow points 1 to 97 of the health and safety section of the policy document of the car seat, you will be a child killer.

Before leaving for the hospital, I managed to get the seat into the car in a relatively non-lethal way. It took twenty-five minutes and an awful lot of swearing, but I did it. As long as I put it in when the car was on the road, not the drive, it was safe. But when I got to the hospital, they wouldn’t let us carry Jacob out in our arms – against health and safety regulations. So I had to unravel the seat, bring it into the hospital, put Jacob in it, take it and him back to the car and then tell the hardcore hospital traffic warden to back off because, even though I was in a ten-minute loading bay, I was dealing with baby seats as well as a baby and would be more than ten minutes. The traffic warden backed off.

Putting a baby-filled baby seat into a car is much harder than putting an empty seat in. Eventually, I gave up. I told Isabel, sitting in considerable pain in the front seat, that all was well, smiled at Jacob, cursed the fact that Alex’s flowers had to be brought down to the car in two separate journeys, then drove all the way home at no more than four miles per hour so that OUR BABY WOULD NOT DIE.

Ahhh, home. Start of the babymoon. We are all alive. We are all at home. None of us appear to have contracted a hospital superbug. Although I can no longer get away with watching DVDs or drinking beer, I am feeling very, very happy – as happy as someone who thought everyone was going to die and then found out they weren’t. As long as I don’t make Isabel laugh at all in the next two weeks (her stitches forbid it) and as long as we never want to drive anywhere ever again with Jacob, we will be fine.

Saturday 5 January

Well, that was interesting. I think I slept about nine minutes in total. In one-minute bursts. Jacob was in a crib next to the bed. He didn’t like that, so Isabel brought him into the bed. Co-sleeping, they call it. By the time I came to bed (very late, after trying to recover from eight hours of constant waitering), Isabel was fast asleep and Jacob was in the middle of the bed stretched out in a star shape.

He looked very, very small. Easily squashable. Isabel says that a parent, so long as he or she is sober, is perfectly in tune with his or her baby and wouldn’t squash it in a million years. She’s read that in a book. But in the small hours, with Jacob snuffling away next to me, a half-remembered horror story about a giant panda squashing its offspring creeps into my head. I think it was a panda, but it could have been a Glaswegian. No, it was definitely a giant panda.

So I lay there trying to work out if giant pandas aren’t comparable because they are animals, not half as intelligent as humans, and they have the sort of fur that would easily suffocate their offspring. Or if they are comparable because even if they aren’t as intelligent, they’re probably more in tune with their instincts than we are. And one of their instincts is bound to be, ‘Don’t crush your offspring.’

Every time I succeeded in rationalising the giant-panda issue and began to nod off, Jacob would emit what sounded an awful lot like a final death rattle. Then he would stop breathing. I would pull up the blind so the streetlight would illuminate his face. I would peer at him closely, listening for signs of life. There would be none. Was he going blue? Were his tiny lungs packing in? Should I not be reacting? React, man, react! This child, this poor helpless child, is dying of some rare and undetected condition and you’re not reacting! And then a millisecond before I started shaking Isabel awake, he would make another gurgling noise, as if back from the brink, and carry on breathing.

An hour of giant-panda analysis would pass before I felt even remotely calm enough to nod off again.

Another death rattle.

And repeat.

Until 6 a.m. when he wakes up and looks at me. Or looks in my general direction. I put my finger into his wrinkly little hand for reassurance and he grips it tightly. I know in that moment that I will do anything for Jacob for ever…sleep permitting.

Sunday 6 January

7 a.m. Breakfast in bed for Isabel, who is in a lot of pain but pretending that she isn’t to make me feel better. I ask her if she can remember anything about the sleeping habits of giant pandas and she starts laughing and then shouts at me for making her laugh, which was the last thing I was trying to do, what with her liable to split open at any second. Which I tell her and that makes her laugh again and so I get shouted at again. As punishment, I spend the day slogging around getting this and that for Isabel. Another night of total sleep deprivation.

Monday 7 January

‘This is why Ali and I never had kids,’ says Johnson, my second-best friend, when he phones to apologise for not sending flowers – even though Ali actually had.

‘I thought it was because you didn’t want to risk having a girl because girls are manipulative and controlling and you have enough of that in your life already?’

‘Yes, that as well. But mainly because you don’t sleep for years and you become a domestic slave. I’m delighted for you, of course. You ignored my advice about marriage and now you’ve ignored my advice about procreation. You have no one to blame but yourself, and I shall enjoy seeing you fall to pieces over the next few months. Pub tonight?’

‘No.’

‘Thought as much.’

The problem now is that I’m so tired, I’m worried that if I do manage to nod off, I’ll sleep so deeply that I wouldn’t have any anti-child-crushing instinct. Isabel says this is nonsense. I point out the case of the panda. She says this is nonsense: I am not a giant panda. On the plus side, she and Jacob are sleeping brilliantly and I only have two more weeks of paternity leave before I, too, can sleep brilliantly, back at my desk.

Tuesday 8 January

I love Jacob. I really do. But he’s so very, very small and fragile. Because of the whole stomach-slicing style of birth, Isabel can’t carry him around easily. So I have to. Every time I take him up or down the stairs, I have resolved in my mind that if I slip, I will cushion him, rather than put my own arms out to break the fall. I may kill myself, but Jacob will survive. This is what I am prepared to do.

At lunch, which I have made because Isabel still can’t do very much in the way of chores and because she seems to spend most of the day breast-feeding, I sit watching my pasta get cold because I am holding Jacob. Every time I put him down, he cries.

‘He needs a feed,’ I say hopefully.

‘I fed him five minutes ago. I’ll take him in a second. And anyway, you can hold him with one hand and eat with the other.’ Isabel is way ahead of the curve on this whole parenting thing. Despite being sore, tired, pale and red-nippled, she is already putting things into perspective, behaving rationally, becoming supermum.

‘No, I can’t. I might drop him.’ I’m not quite there yet.

‘No, you won’t. Just relax.’

So I relax, take a mouthful of pasta and Jacob’s head lolls unexpectedly, striking the edge of the table. It takes ten minutes for him to stop crying. It takes ten hours for me to stop freaking out at my own stupid stupidity. Isabel says it’s only a little bump. I say he could have been killed. And even if it is only a little bump, he still has a bruise.

And the health visitor is coming tomorrow.

Wednesday 9 January

The health visit is compulsory. Society does not allow people to vanish into domestic anonymity without first double-checking that they are not doing horrible things to their newborn children.

This is unfortunate because the bruise looks epic this morning. It looks like I’ve punched him. I look like a heroin addict because I haven’t slept for three nights. We will be flagged as an abusive family. Jacob will be taken away from us and raised by horribly strict foster parents who, at least, will never try to stuff their faces with pasta while holding an eight-day-old infant. Years from now, Jacob and I will be reunited, perhaps on a television show presented by Esther Rantzen. And I will try to explain that I hadn’t meant to bang his head on the table, I just hadn’t realised how floppy a newborn child’s head could be. And the crowd will boo. And Jacob will tell Esther how, despite his strict Christian upbringing, he finds it hard to forgive me.

‘Morning. I’m the health visitor.’

‘Morning. Hi. Come in, come in. How are you? Can I get you a cup of tea? Or something stronger? No. Silly. Of course not. Don’t know what I’m saying. Tea? Yes, right away. Isabel and Jacob are in the front room. Okay. Fine. Right. Okay.’

Brilliant. The same guilty ramblings I spout when I’m going through customs. Which is why I always get searched. And now why this health visitor is going to take Jacob away from us.

‘Here’s your tea. Hahahaha. Can’t remember if you said white. Or black. So I’ve brought both. I mean milk. I’ve brought milk.’

Calm down, you idiot.

The health visitor tells Isabel that she shouldn’t co-sleep. It’s dangerous.

Isabel tells the health visitor that it isn’t and that it’s up to her how she raises her own child.

The health visitor makes a note.

This is going badly. I explain, apropos of nothing, that the bruise was an accident. She makes another note. Isabel rolls her eyes really theatrically at me, as if to say, ‘Why on earth have you mentioned the bruise?’ I throw back a ‘What?!’ face, as if to say, ‘What?!’ The health visitor makes another note, so I pretend I have some e-mails to answer.

Ten minutes later, the coast is clear and Isabel reveals that the woman asked if I was abusing her. Apparently, they have to ask. Apparently, Isabel saw it as a good opportunity to make a joke about our marriage. ‘Only mentally’ she had answered, laughing. And instead of laughing, the health visitor had made another note.

Saturday 12 January

I think we have a routine. Bed at 8 p.m. Awake at 5.30 a.m. Naps at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. This is fine. This is survival, at least. And Isabel and Jacob seem to be sleeping rather beautifully together. I know this because I still can’t relax. It’s not just the whole panda thing; it’s the responsibility. The sheer mind-blowing responsibility of having a baby totally dependent on you. Well, us. Well, her. But at least we have a routine.