An Idiot in Marriage Read online

  I’m not saying that my three-week bout of severe constipation was like giving birth, but there were a lot of similarities. There was also some blood at the end of it, although considerably less than what had just plopped out of my wife.

  The nurse had my baby in her arms, wrapped in a blanket, his alien features hidden. She was chatting to him, uttering soft and soothing words. He was still screaming.

  “You’re so lovely, aren’t you?” she said in a saintly whisper, rocking him back and forth. “So, so beautiful.”

  All babies are ugly. I like kids, don’t get me wrong. They can be cute, amusing, but it usually takes a year or two for that cuteness to develop. At birth, pretty much all babies look alike: they’re small, blue, slime-coated creatures with squinted eyes and wrinkled skin. They say that the reason humans are so attracted to bunnies, kittens, and puppies is because they see their own babies in them. They look at their big eyes and small heads, think of babies, and then the protective instinct kicks in. I say give me puppies, kittens, and bunnies any day.

  The nurse smiled at me and then back at the child whose cries seemed to be subsiding somewhat. “There we go,” she told him, stroking a finger across his cheek. “Nothing to worry about. You’re out now, welcome to the big wide world.”

  He started crying again. Those words would have made me cry, too. The poor bastard had been kicking back for nine months in a warm and cozy spot where he was drip-fed everything he could ever need and had nothing to do all day but sleep and dream. Now he had been introduced to a cruel and cold world where, over the course of a few years, he would suffer the indignity of pissing on himself, having his ass wiped, and not being taken seriously as he tried his best to learn the language. Once school started, he would be forced into a regime of mandatory learning, bullying, and peer pressure, topped off by puberty, at which point he would become a raging mass of sexual desire and hand cream, followed by rejections from every girl he liked and erections at inopportune moments.

  Or maybe that was just me. Maybe life would be easier for him.

  The nurse was back to coddling him, back to stroking his blue, slimy cheek and staring lovingly into his eyes. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to calm him down or if she was getting ready to steal him. “You look just like your father.”

  “I hope you’re fucking joking.”

  “Kieran!”

  I turned from my wife, her face red, flustered, sweaty, and annoyed, back to the nurse, who looked slightly bemused as she held my son in her arms.

  “Sorry,” I said with an impish smile.

  The nurse walked around the bed with the demon child in her arms. It was screaming constantly, barely stopping for breath. My mother said that I cried a lot as a baby. She said when the nurse first gave me to my dad, I screamed the hospital down and he asked for a refund. He was joking, but I could see where he was coming from.

  I didn’t want to hold him. He was small, fragile, breakable, and he seemed pissed off. I didn’t want to add to that. But I also didn’t want to displease anyone. Lizzie was glaring at me, and the doctor and nurses were looking on expectantly. There were half-smiles on their faces, stuck in transition, prepared to go either way.

  I swallowed thickly, held out my arms, and waited for him to drop into them. I was so expecting him to be placed in my outstretched arms that I actually felt some weight on them and I thought he was there, but it turned out my brain was just fucking with me. When I opened my eyes, about to say how light he was and how much easier it was than I thought it would be—as if holding a baby was something to be proud of—I saw that they were still looking at me, their half-smiles now transitioned into bewilderment.

  “What?” I said.

  “He’s your baby,” Lizzie barked, angered by my unwillingness to hold him.

  “I know that,” I said with a nod. “We’ve been through this. That was what all the screaming was about. I put my ‘dirty penis’ inside you and should have ‘stayed the hell away’ from you.”

  Lizzie looked embarrassed. “Sorry about that. I was caught up in the moment.”

  “It’s okay, I was actually turned on a little.”

  The lack of sleep really was doing something to my brain. “I’m so sorry,” I told the waiting nurses, before adding, “but I’m sure you’ve heard worse. And it’s not like I should be embarrassed, is it? I mean, you know babies aren’t delivered by storks, you know what went down nine months ago, and you—” I smiled at the doctor “—you were staring at my wife’s vagina for an hour.“

  “Kieran!”

  She usually stops me long before then, but she’d also had a long day. She was probably just as tired as I was.

  “Are you going to hold him now?”

  “Do I have to?”

  I could see she wanted to kick me at that point, but the glare she gave me was enough.

  “I mean, yes, of course I do.”

  I took the initiative and retrieved the child from the nurse’s arms. I would like to say that at that moment I fell in love, and that all my problems melted away, but the only thing swimming though my head was how he looked like the chest-ripper from Alien. I did relax with him in my arms, though, and as I sat down on the edge of the bed and took some weight off, and as the baby stopped his high-pitched wailing, I felt a gentle euphoria wash over me. It was over, Lizzie was okay, and the baby, my son, was also okay.

  “So, have you two thought of any names yet?” the nurse asked.

  I nodded. “I quite like the name Ezra.”

  “We’re not calling him Ezra,” Lizzie said sternly.

  “Keanu?”

  “Hell no.”

  I turned to the nurse. “We haven’t decided yet.”

  “But I quite like the name Ben,” Lizzie added.

  “Oh, what do you know, we’ve decided after all,” I told the nurse. “He’s going to be called Ben.”

  Lizzie had a few names in her head but had always insisted that she was going to go with what suited him when he came. She thought Ben was apt, and I had no idea why. I was just surprised she picked a human name.

  I did get some say in the naming process though and was told I could give him the middle name Ezra, only to watch her write Michael on the birth certificate.

  “What about Ezra?” I said, a little hurt.

  “That’s your middle name for him,” she told me. “That’s not his real middle name.”

  “Oh.” Because obviously that made sense.

  I’m calling the next kid Fred, I thought bitterly. Regardless of whether it’s boy or a girl. That’ll show her.

  2

  The Baby Tour

  By the time we took him home, Ben looked a little more human and a little less terrifying. He had lost all the goo. He was still a little wrinkly around the edges, but I get the same when I stay in the bath too long, and he’d been in the womb for nine months. He would straighten out in time.

  Lizzie had taken some time off from work. When I met her, she was a part-time art tutor at a psychiatric hospital—which I had discovered after running naked down the corridors of said psychiatric hospital—but soon afterward she was offered a full-time position at a local college. She still offered her time helping children with special needs and adults with mental illnesses, giving up her Saturdays to teach them art and other creative pursuits, but she would be focusing one hundred percent on Ben’s special needs for the next few months. And mine. Because I had also taken some time off work, by which I mean I had told her about accidentally robbing the newsstand and losing my job.

  The first few days were difficult and dramatic to say the least, and both of us were on edge constantly. Lizzie stripped me of most parental duties on the insistence that I was neither mature enough nor competent enough. But eventually she relented, letting me change his diaper unsupervised. Although she didn’t really have a choice. She needed to look after Ben and do the ironing. And while she didn’t trust me with heat or humans, she knew it had to be one or the other.

&
nbsp; I regretted her decision as much as she did. That was the first time I discovered the abhorrent marvel that is baby poop.

  I had shouted Lizzie in from the other room, and she came bundling in to see me standing over the diaper with a horrified look on my face. I had dropped it in shock and some of the contents had sprayed onto the carpet, but we had bigger things to worry about.

  She followed my finger and looked at the brimming diaper. “You realize that’s normal, right?”

  “Normal?” I spat, incredulous. “It’s fucking green. What have you been feeding him?”

  I lay Ben back onto the changing mat. He looked up at me and grinned, mocking my stupidity. He looked just like his mother.

  The demon child and his fluorescent excrement continued to demand our attention night and day. It’s amazing what such a small human can do to a pair of adults, and what the ablutions of said human can do to a home. Prior to Ben, I was of the belief that Febreze could fix everything. I can’t believe I was so naive.

  We got nearly two weeks of relative peace—if you don’t include the screaming and the insomnia —before Lizzie decided that it was time to show him off.

  “He’s not the Super Bowl,” I told her. “I don’t think they’ll be holding a parade for us.”

  “I know my parents,” she said. “Trust me, a parade is the least we can expect.”

  Two days of very little sleep had turned me into a depressed zombie. I had no idea how I was going to get through the next few months.

  “Do we have to show him to your parents?” I asked.

  “What do you think?”

  “That depends. If I think we should stay home, then can we stay home?”

  “No.”

  “Then of course we should let your parents see him.” She was taking advantage of my weakened state, but I was too weak to resist.

  It was as good of a time as any to let Ben know that he had two creepy, stuck-up grandparents who would make the next few years of his life an unbearable deluge of condescension. I was convinced that they had never seen a baby before, let alone would know how to deal with one. He didn’t work. He wasn’t educated. He wasn’t on speaking terms with his parents. Throw in an Adidas hoodie and he was everything they hated and everything they spent their days moaning about.

  Since our marriage, I had tried to avoid her parents as much as possible. We saw them on special occasions, but only when I wasn’t ill, working, or sleeping, which happened a lot. I had tried to be sociable with them in the past, especially with her dad, but it didn’t end well. I’d also had what I thought to be a special and private time with her mother, but that had turned into something else entirely.

  We had been drinking with her, a supposedly relaxed, laid-back night that I had spent on the edge of my seat, trying my best to suppress my farts and avoid saying anything stupid. Lizzie, content that I was behaving, left me alone with her as she walked to the shop to get more booze. I had spent the better part of forty-five minutes talking to her, doing my best to be polite and to treat her like a normal person, instead of the witch that she was. She seemed responsive and I even began to change my mind about her, only for her to tell Lizzie that I had spent the night trying to hit on her.

  “I told you he was a bad husband, I told you that you made a mistake.”

  Of course, she didn’t say any of this in front of me. She was subversive, devious. She was the devil in storebrand clothing.

  Luckily, Lizzie didn’t inherit any insanity from her parents. In fact, she’d gone out her way to try and be as little like them as possible. But she loved them and they were still alive, so we had to keep up appearances.

  “They are cooking dinner for us,” Lizzie announced. “I also said we would stay and watch their vacation videos.”

  Life, it seemed, wasn’t going to get any easier. I’d been promised that a child would complete both mine and Lizzie’s life, but those same sadistic liars had then told me that I would need to wait a few years before I could settle into the routine of never sleeping, never eating, and never having sex. It wasn’t a routine I was keen to follow, but I didn’t have much say in the matter. I’d eaten nothing but fish sticks for two days, and it had been six months since we had done anything in bed that didn’t involve sleeping, gossiping, and, occasionally, farting and then forcing her head under the covers.

  “Where did they go?”

  “I told you,” Lizzie said, sounding frustrated, failing to realize that nothing anyone had told me over the last few weeks had sunk in. “They went to see where my mother grew up.”

  “I didn’t know they were letting tourists into hell these days.”

  “Hull,” Lizzie said, sounding annoyed.

  What’s the difference?

  “And why do we have to be subjected to their videos? What could they have possibly taken that would be of any interest to anyone ever?”

  The look she gave me didn’t go a long way to answering any of my questions, but it did suggest that if I didn’t stop asking them then I would regret it.

  “Okay, vacation videos it is,” I told her reluctantly. “But if I see any homemade porn on there, you’re disowning your parents and I’m committing suicide.”

  “Deal.”

  Lizzie’s mother had a big smile waiting for us, one stitched together with a combination of Valium, Prozac, and plastic surgery. “It’s so lovely to see you!”

  “Well, if it isn’t my favorite mother-in-law in the world!” Lies, lies, all lies. She was my only mother-in-law in the world, but she still wasn’t my favorite.

  We hugged. We kissed. I died a little inside.

  I gave Lizzie’s father a strong handshake and a nod. He preferred that. No talking, no theatrics. He hugged and kissed his daughter, of course, but he liked her.

  Dinner wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be. Ben took most of the attention, so no one noticed when I spilled wine on the floor or used a pristine white tablecloth to wipe gravy stains from my mouth. Such incidents would have caused problems in the past, so being able to get away with them made me feel invincible.

  That invincibility faded when the home videos began. They were a little inebriated by that point, and nothing alters the personalities of the upper middle class like copious amounts of alcohol. They spoke to me like I was a family member and not a vagrant who had just murdered their dog. It threw me off guard and for a moment I forgot I was in the devil’s domain talking to his underlings.

  “So, how’s the sex life now then, eh?” her father said jokingly, nudging me as he did so. “I bet you’re glad that has started again?”

  He made a face at Lizzie, showing her that he was trying his best to embarrass her. She rolled her eyes at him. I thought it was a little inappropriate, but I decided to play along regardless, not realizing that whatever they had going on was supposed to be just between the two of them.

  “I’m not touching that thing again,” I joked. “If you’d have seen what came out of it, you would know why. We’ll find a way, though.”

  I was laughing, but my comment was met with silence. It did occur to me that I had probably taken it too far, but I was uncomfortable, tipsy, and tired. It could have been worse.

  They averted their eyes. Her father cleared his throat and checked his watch. Sensing a need to make myself understood and to clear the air, a need that had never done me any favors in the past, I proceeded to jam my foot further into my mouth.

  “No, no, I didn’t mean anal.” I heard Lizzie groan and saw her bury her head in her arms, but I was determined to explain myself. “I just mean like, you know. Then again, I suppose if she wanted to…. I mean, I’m not going to force it up there or anything.”

  Her father quickly interjected. “I think we’ve heard enough.” He gave me a look of pure hatred, as though I were trying to disgust him and annoy him on purpose.

  “Are you sure? Because I wasn’t finished.”

  Okay, that was on purpose.

  “I think you should leave.
”

  Excellent!

  I shot to my feet and swooped in to take Ben from his grandmother’s lap, narrowly avoiding her horns on my way down. I then nodded to Lizzie and gave her a look that said, Hurry up; places to go, people to see, babies to show.

  My parents were next. By that time Ben was asleep, so they were getting the sloppy seconds. Luckily, they had already seen him in the hospital, a day after his birth. This was something Lizzie’s parents had refused to do, possibly because hospitals are too common for their tastes. Lizzie’s parents also lived further away, and she had warned me that if we didn’t go to see them then they might not get to see Ben during the first six months of his life.

  “They know where we live,” I had argued.

  “You know what they’re like—”

  Evil. Psychotic. Manipulative. Bat-shit crazy.

  “—they don’t like to impose.”

  “Ha!”

  She had glared at me.

  “Sorry.”

  “Anyway,” she had continued. “If we hadn’t gone to them, then they might not have seen him until the christening.”

  “And what about church?” I asked. “I mean, is she allowed?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  My mother did her best to subtly wake up the baby, after which she blamed his wakening on my father and then spent the next hour doting over him and pretending to try and rock him back to sleep, probably pinching him when no one was looking. She was a sweet woman with a lot of love to give, and she lived with my father, who didn’t really have any, so this was her only outlet.

  She unleashed an endless torrent of sweetness, with smiles, baby-talk, and cute names. My dad, on the other hand, sat on the other side of the room, only getting up once to hover over him and mumble, “He looks just like you, Kieran.”