Mr. Commitment Read online

  Our plan for the afternoon revolved around us finding a patch of grass to sit on, earnestly reading the various sections of Charlie’s Sunday newspaper and then discussing any current events that caught our eye—just like we’d always imagined proper adults did. In reality, however, I knew we wouldn’t do any of these things, because it was such a beautiful day and all we really wanted to do was lie down on the warm grass, stare at the sky and drink the bottle of wine we’d brought with us.

  Walking through the iron gates of the park, Charlie and Vernie decided to race each other to the benches in the open space in the middle of the woods. Laughing maniacally, they grabbed at each other’s clothing as they tried to stop each other from getting ahead. Mel and I, still digesting our pub lunch, opted to follow them at a far gentler pace.

  There was a new seriousness about the two of us, as if the people we had been before our engagement were becoming more and more like distant relatives. Family and friends’ responses to us had changed almost overnight—suddenly I was an adult; I was respectable. In recent weeks we’d driven to Southampton to see Mel’s mum and dad and taken them out for dinner; my mum had come down to London specifically to see us both and had stayed the whole weekend at Mel’s; and we’d seen more of Mark and Julie than ever. Without fail everyone would mention our “wonderful new life together” as if our old life together had been a complete waste of time. It was hard not to feel nostalgic for the old days when we just “were.”

  As we ambled along, we were drawn to the sounds coming from the adventure playground in the middle of the woods. We stood by the wire fence looking in. The climbing frames, swings and slides—in vibrant shades of red, yellow and blue—were a heaving, screaming mass of kids, like ants crawling over lollypop sticks in summer. Their parents watched enthralled at how much fun these small people could have without the aid of artificial stimulants. The noise was incredible, their Lilliputian voices communicating overwhelming joy and on occasion individual sorrow. A small boy in red dungarees tripped over whilst racing his friends to the slide and immediately burst into tears. Like a one-man ER his dad scooped him up into his arms and gave him a huge hug. Within seconds the tragedy was over and the boy was back with his friends again racing toward the slide. The whole scene reminded me of when I was small and my mum would take me and Vernie to the park. I’d always insist that Mum play football with me, and to her credit she did. She was terrible of course—it’s impossible to be a good goalkeeper in high heels—but at least she tried.

  Mel nudged me gently on the shoulder, rousing me from my reminiscences. She took my hand and squeezed it gently. “Duffy?”

  “Yeah,” I said breezily.

  “You were somewhere else.”

  “I know,” I said and kissed her.

  Reaching up she put a warm hand on either side of my face, pulled me toward her and placed her lips firmly on mine. “We’re getting married,” she said excitedly.

  “Yeah, we are.” Holding her hand in my own I absentmindedly rotated the engagement ring I’d bought her. It was a white gold band with a single sapphire. It wasn’t particularly expensive compared to the meteorite-sized rock arrangement Mark had commissioned for his engagement ring to Julie, but Mel seemed genuinely to love it.

  “Do you think we know enough about each other?” she asked wistfully.

  “Yeah, of course,” I replied. “What I don’t know about you I could write on the back of a stamp. I’d need very small handwriting, mind you.”

  She punched me in the arm playfully. “Are you saying that just to shut me up?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  She took a moment to collect her thoughts. “So we agree on all the important things that future husbands and wives should agree on?”

  “What like?” I said, sitting down on a patch of grass and pulling her down after me. “Who’s going to do the cooking? Who’s going to do the washing up?”

  She shuffled herself round on her bum so that she could rest her head on my lap. “Yeah, I suppose.”

  “I’ll do the cooking. You do the washing up. I’m a dab hand with the microwave, as you know. But as for DIY jobs around the flat—I think we’ll get a man in.” I looked across to the playground to watch the kids again. A little girl, roughly six years old, was sauntering aimlessly, arms outstretched in front of her with a yellow plastic bucket on her head.

  I looked down at Mel under the cover of my sunglasses. An expression of deepest deliberation animated her face. She was waiting for me to ask what was on her mind. I let the silence live a little longer. She sighed heavily to get my attention. I kissed her. “You’ve got something on your mind, haven’t you?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head playfully. She took off her sunglasses and lay them on the grass next to her.

  “Okay, then.” I returned to playground watching. Another little girl wearing what must have been the brightest orange tights that have ever existed was racing around the edge of the playground shouting out how many laps she’d done every time she passed her dad.

  Mel sighed again heavily. “Do you ever think about . . . oh . . . forget it.”

  I lifted my sunglasses on top of my head and made eye contact with her briefly. “What is it that you want me to think about?”

  “Come on, we’re going for a walk,” said Mel, standing up. I stood up and she put her arm through mine and led me on a walk around the playground. “Duffy, do you ever think about . . . you know . . .”

  “Watching TV uninterrupted? I dream about that . . .”

  “No.”

  “Why I’m marrying a mad woman?”

  “Don’t push it.”

  “What is it that you want me to think about? C’mon, just spit it out. It can’t be that bad.”

  She came to a halt, her face half hidden by the shade of an oak tree. “Children,” she said firmly.

  “Children?” I repeated needlessly.

  “Yes, children. Do you ever think about us having children?”

  “No,” I said almost under my breath. Suddenly all the kids in the playground became sinister and creepy—they still had the same bodies, but all the boys looked like me and all the girls like Mel. Little people with big people’s heads on. It was very disturbing.

  “Don’t you ever think about kids?”

  I refused to look at her while we were having this conversation. I knew that if I locked eyes with her she’d suck me into yet another debate in which I’d come off worse. “I think about kids about as often as I think about how nice it would be to set fire to all my savings, scratch my furniture, wear patches of sick on my suits as a fashion statement and invite unemployed psychopathic dwarves to share my life.”

  “That’s exactly the sort of thing that Charlie said,” replied Mel.

  I finally looked at her and smiled. “You’ve been talking about having kids with Charlie?”

  “No,” Mel said impatiently. “Vernie and Charlie have been talking about having kids for the past few months. Or rather in the case of Charlie—not talking about having kids.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Vernie told me.”

  “How come I don’t know this?”

  “Because all you and Charlie ever talk about is TV and sports. You never talk about anything that’s even vaguely important.”

  “Now hang on,” I protested. “That’s not true. Why, over lunch we talked about . . .” I mentally flicked through the list of topics: yesterday’s football results, ten reasons why Roger Moore was a better Bond than Sean Connery (we only came up with eight) and the various pros and cons of Dan’s new haircut (pro: it made him look younger; con: it made him look stupid). I changed subjects. “Vernie wants kids? What for?”

  “You say ‘what for’ as if children shouldn’t exist unless there’s a logical reason for it, like . . . I don’t know, you needed someone to wash the car for free.”

  “I’ll grant you that’s a reaso
n . . .” I smiled. “What did Charlie say, then?”

  “Vernie keeps bringing up the subject and he continually changes it. He says he’s not ready, but I think he’s just being really selfish.”

  “He’s not being selfish,” I said, defending Charlie’s integrity. “He’s just thinking things through logically. That’s what we men do. We think, we ponder, we mull and then we think and ponder and mull some more and then—”

  “They’ve been together seven years!” interrupted Mel. “They’ve been married for four of those . . .”

  “Exactly,” I countered. “So why change a winning formula?”

  Right at that moment Mel and I simultaneously turned to the adventure playground and watched as a small boy handed his mother a bunch of dandelions. I wasn’t sure, but it looked as though this tiny gesture of love had moved his mother to tears.

  Mel was momentarily silent. “So you don’t want kids either.”

  A sudden nausea came over me as I put two and two together and made five. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  “You must be joking!” exclaimed Mel, horrified. “Of course not.”

  “Okay,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “It’s not like I don’t want kids. It’s just that I’m sure they’d be a good idea one day, but not right now.” I squeezed her arm affectionately. “You’ve got your career. I’ve got my stand-up. There’s plenty of time for that sort of thing.”

  “I wasn’t talking about right now,” said Mel emphatically.

  “Good,” I replied, hoping to put a full stop to the conversation. I tried to change subjects. “What do you fancy doing tonight?”

  She ignored me. She wasn’t going to let it lie. “So when?”

  “When?”

  “When.”

  “When?”

  “Are you just going to keep repeating everything I say? Because if you are I will be forced to kill you while you’re asleep and plead diminished responsibility. Twelve months on probation for manslaughter and I’ll be a free woman, and you won’t be so annoyingly smug.”

  “Smug?”

  “Go on, say it one more time, I dare you!”

  “I dunno,” I said disdainfully. “Four years? Five years? It’s hard to say. It’s a big enough step getting . . .” My words trailed off as I realized a little bit too late that finishing my sentence wouldn’t be the smartest move in the world. “Let’s drop it, eh?”

  “Carry on,” she said indignantly. “It’s a big enough step getting . . .”

  “Okay,” I said, no longer able to put up resistance. “When did you have them in mind?”

  Mel wouldn’t say at first, but I coaxed her gently to tell me, even though I didn’t really want to know. I just wanted us to get on well together. I didn’t want to have an argument or talk about children we couldn’t afford and that fifty percent of us weren’t in favor of. It was the expression on her face that gave the game away. She looked embarrassed and uncomfortable. Together with her silence this was a bad sign. A terrible sign. The sign of the devil. In Mel’s facial lexicon this meant “I’ve been thinking about babies for a while and I think I’d like them quite soon but I’m embarrassed because I don’t want you to think that I’m behaving like ‘a woman.’ ”

  “Oh, Mel,” I said mournfully.

  “Don’t you ‘oh, Mel’ me! Since Vernie’s been going on about babies morning, noon and night these past months, they’ve been on my mind. It’s not about hormones. It’s not about feeling maternal. It’s about me and what I want from life. It’s not a crime to think about the future, Duffy. I know to you it’s the biggest crime in the world, but I’ve got a news flash for you—real people think about the future every day. I’m thinking about my future and your future—our future, to be exact. I’m not talking about having them right now. I’m just talking about them, okay?”

  “What’s it called?” I countered.

  This time she avoided my gaze. She pretended not to know what I was talking about, but it was my turn not to let it lie. “Okay,” she said resignedly, “so I did imagine our baby. That’s not a crime either. We called her Ella. After Ella Fitzgerald.”

  “Ella’s a nice name,” I said. “We’ll have a baby one day. But not yet. And when we do we’ll call it Ella. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  With this sorted, Mel fell strangely silent, and so I gave her a hug because I think we both saw that this one was a draw, and we made our way to join Charlie and Vernie.

  Later, having lain in the sun all afternoon, using the various sections of Sunday newspaper for nothing other than shading our heads, the four of us walked back through the woods. Vernie and Mel peeled off after a few minutes, hastened by the need to go to the loo, leaving me and Charlie to lag behind and talk about the sort of stuff Mel accused us of not talking about.

  “Mel says that Vernie wants kids.”

  “Oh, yeah, who with?” Charlie laughed. His smile soon evaporated, to be replaced with a kind of philosophical grimace. “Yeah, it’s true.” He shrugged. “She’s been on about it for ages. I don’t know how I’m going to get out of this one.”

  “You never know,” I said encouragingly, “you might have a low sperm count.”

  “I’d be surprised if any of the little fellas could count,” said Charlie feebly. “Although they’re bound to be reasonably intelligent, if their manufacturer is anything to go by.”

  “Mel was asking me about kids too,” I said. “I don’t think she was serious, though. Merely speculating, if you get my meaning. I don’t quite understand why me and her have got to talk about babies just because you and Vernie are in discussions.”

  “Women like doing things in pairs, don’t they?” said Charlie, only half joking. “Going to the loo in nightclubs, supermarket shopping, buying shoes—”

  “No,” I interrupted. “Mel always buys her shoes on her own. Too many opinions cloud her thought processes apparently. That said, she still buys shoes that are half a size too small in the hope that she’ll be able to squeeze into them, but at least they’re always the right color and style.”

  “Well, you get my drift.”

  We stopped and stood out of the way while a jogger holding a tangle of dog leads raced past us down the hill followed by three Highland terriers.

  “Do you think you’ll give in?” I said, once the last of the dogs had passed.

  “I don’t know,” said Charlie. “I mean, it’s not like I don’t want to have kids: a little girl to play footie with, a little boy to hate me when he’s a teenager, but you know . . .” His answer trailed off. I nodded sympathetically. “Thing is, the minute we have kids that’ll be it—everything will change. Nothing will be the same. No more just the two of us. No more throwing a couple of bags into the back of the car and clearing off somewhere for the weekend. No more sitting in the Haversham with you and Dan. No more . . . I don’t know . . . no more fun. It’ll be nappies and feeding times . . . and breast pumps . . . and bright green baby poo . . . and getting up in the middle of the night . . . and baby seats . . . and my mum and dad coming to see us every other weekend . . . and pushchairs . . . and then one day she’ll want another baby because one’s never enough.”

  “I see what you mean,” I said weakly, still somewhat shaken by the thought of bright green baby poo.

  “Do you?” said Charlie skeptically. “Because I’m not sure I do. I think they’re just a big bunch of excuses. I think at the end of the day if I’m truthful I have to say that I’m just absolutely terrified by the thought of being a dad. I’m not ready.”

  “I suppose it’s a bit like how sometimes I don’t feel I’m ready to be a husband,” I added helpfully. I thought about Dan and his denial over Meena and the wedding invitation. “And not altogether dissimilar to how Dan isn’t ready to be a dad, a husband or even a boyfriend.”

  “When do you think we’ll be ready?” said Charlie.

  Simultaneously we looked at each other, shrugged a simple “Dunno” and ran up the hill
to catch up with Mel and Vernie.

  For days after my conversation with Charlie I couldn’t shake the feeling that he, Dan and I were some sort of metaphor for every malaise that had ever affected the modern male. It would only be a matter of time before the women in our lives swapped our real names for American Indian ones: He-whose-sperm-is-his-own; He-who-must-be-single; and He-who-loves-his-girlfriend-but-is-scared-of-marriage.

  It really was only a matter of time.

  Nice use of light

  It was the following weekend and I was just coming to the end of a fifteen-minute set at the Giggle Club—aka the downstairs bar of the Amber Tavern in Islington. Even though I’d only been the second comedian on that evening, the crowd had liked my regular material enough for me to experiment with some new stuff that I’d written on the way over on the bus that night. This, I thought, as I thanked the crowd for being a wonderful audience and walked offstage, has been a very good night.

  As the compère came on and announced a ten-minute interval I sat down at the back of the room and caught up on the comedy-circuit gossip with Steve and Alison, the Giggle Club’s promoters, and Craig, Lisa and Jim, the other comedians on tonight’s bill. Still buzzing from the response of the audience, I very nobly offered to get a round in for everyone. Big mistake. They all said yes. So I took their orders, tried not to cry at the thought of how much this was all going to cost me and disappeared to the upstairs bar. Just as I was about to order the first drink, someone tapped me lightly on the shoulder.

  “Ben Duffy?” I turned around to see a woman standing behind me. “I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your set. You were brilliant.”

  Even at this incredibly low level of comedy, it was possible to get the occasional groupie. Not that I’d ever had one. There was no way, however, even in my wildest dreams, that this woman was a groupie. Behind her black oval spectacles—the type hideously beautiful people wear to tone down the effect their visage has on mere mortals—was a pair of deep brown perfectly proportioned eyes. Her waves of thick black hair were tied back from a face so flawlessly perfect it felt rude not to stare. She was dressed casually in jeans, trainers, a cream skinny-rib polo neck and denim jacket. The whole look made her stand out a mile from the pub’s mixture of students and professional Islingtonians. It said, “I know who I am—I am beautiful.”