Inconceivable Page 2

  What he dresses up as self-doubt and humility is actually frustrated arrogance. He only gets depressed about himself because he doesn’t write any more. But it’s becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. He says he can’t write, so he doesn’t write. It’s as simple as that. I told him he’d get a lot further as a writer if he spent less time moaning about it and more time doing it. To which he said he’d like to but that I was taking up all his spare time making him write a stupid book of letters to himself. Which is just ridiculous. At least I’ve made him write something, as opposed to nothing, which is what he usually writes. Actually, I think it might do him good as a writer to get in touch with his feelings occasionally. All he seems to do as a commissioning editor at the BBC is encourage people to write ever ruder jokes. This must surely eventually coarsen his creative soul.

  Anyway, he didn’t answer that because he knew I was right. He just snorted unpleasantly and now there’s an atmosphere.

  It’s all very well her telling me to write. I can’t bloody write. I’m a creativity-free zone. The only thing about me less fertile than my imagination is my bollocks. She is wrong about my attitude to kids, though. Of course I want children. Well, I think I do. There’s been so much angst surrounding the subject for so long now that I’ve forgotten what I originally felt. But I’m sure that if I do want children it’s because I love Lucy. That’s the only way I can think about it. If I try to think of kids in the abstract I very quickly come up against no sleep and vomit in my personal stereo.

  Having kids seems to me like the end of life as I know it, and I like life as I know it. I like to work, I like to drink, I like to sleep in and have clothes and furniture with no dribble and sick on them. Viewed dispassionately, I’m not keen on the idea of having children at all and I’m not going to lie to Lucy about it no matter what a cold, heartless shit she thinks that makes me.

  Kids, however, as a part of Lucy, as an extension and expression of our love, I can relate to, and if it happened I’d be delighted.

  No, I’d be more than delighted, I’d be in heaven. It would be the greatest thing in the world, but if it doesn’t happen it doesn’t.

  That’s how I see it. If we have children it will be another part of us, of our love. If we don’t, then we’ll still have us. Our love will be no less whole. I don’t want to get soppy here, but it’s how I feel.

  I’ve just said all this to Lucy and she went all teary again, which at first made me think I’d won her over but it turned out that she was crying because she thinks I’ve already resigned myself to not having kids and that we’re going to end up sad, bitter and unfulfilled and destined to a pathetic, lonely old age.

  Spotlight

  Dearest Pen Pal,

  I was talking to Drusilla today at work. Sheila (my boss, the one who told me to write to you) had rushed out of the office (she’d heard there was a bloke on Oxford Street selling dodgy fags at a pound a box), so Joanna and I were being slack. In fact we were playing the

  game, which is great fun. What you do is you get the Actor’s Spotlight (which is a book full of photographs of actors) and open it at random. Whoever you pick on, you have to sleep with. Not actually, obviously, but just as a thought.

  I’d just been landed with Sir Ian McKellen and was rather thinking that I had my work cut out there when Drusilla popped in. Drusilla is an actress, hence her connection to herbal and fruit teabags is almost mystical. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her when her hand has not been jiggling a little string over a cup of hot water. She’s convinced that I only have to get the right combination of herbal teabags and I shall instantly have triplets.

  I’m not sure. Fruit-flavoured teabags are a mystery to me because they’re not fruit-flavoured at all. They smell of fruit, but quite frankly they taste of bugger-all. The strange thing is, no matter how much I know this to be a fact, I’m always disappointed. You get that terrific whiff of blackcurrant, or orange and ginger and you think ‘Surely this time the goods will be delivered.’ But no. Yet another mug of hot coloured water to nurse till it goes cold.

  Drusilla recently played a mad mystic in an episode of

  Casualty and I’m here to tell you that she was typecast. We’d hoped that it might turn into a semi-regular but sadly it was not to be. Shame. I think Casualty could do with a witch in it. Anyway, the point is that Drusilla has got very interested in my fears about being barren and is convinced that the answer lies in the runes. She’s been reading up on some ancient Druid-like fertility rites or other and came in today waving a crystal about. She says that Western society is the only society which has dispensed with its fertility rites and the only society in which the birth rate is falling. ‘Hallo-o,’ she said. ‘Obvious connection, I think.’ Then she suggested an impromptu fertility ceremony.

  Well, I knew she was mad, but this took even me aback. Unbelievably, she wanted me to lie on the floor while she and Joanna squatted over me. I swear I’m not making this up. Then she wanted us all to make some sort of appalling vaginal symbol with our thumbs and forefingers. Whilst doing this we had to chant the words ‘womb’ and ‘flow’ in low rich tones so that the sounds reverberated deep within us.

  Well, I ask you. The whole idea was absolutely absurd and I said so.

  Let me tell you I felt a right fool when Sheila came back with her fags and found us.

  If Restricted Bonking Month works and I do finally get pregnant, Drusilla will of course claim victory for her fertility ritual, but I shan’t mind. I’m that desperate I’d give credit to the fairies at the bottom of the garden.

  Dear Book,

  Lucy decided that the optimum moment of Restricted Bonking Month had arrived during lunch. My lunch, not hers. She wasn’t there, she was at home surrounded by calendars, thermometers, red felt-tip pens and urine. I was lunching at One Nine Oh (so called because it’s situated at 190 Ladbroke Park Gate brilliant, eh)? One Nine Oh is something of a media haunt and I often lunch there in my capacity as one of the BBC’s most senior and experienced lunch eaters.

  My guests were Dog and Fish, a comic double act who seem to be doing quite well on the circuit at the moment. They are two Oxbridge graduates who are of the opinion that current comedy is ‘completely crap and useless’ and what we need is a new, post- comedy comedy. Basically, they want to do for the comic sketch what Techno did for the tune. I asked if that meant you had to be out of your head on drugs to enjoy it and they grinned knowingly and said that, ‘Yeah, it would help.’ I saw their act in Edinburgh and think they’re truly and deeply awful in a very real sense.

  Time Out, however, says that they are important and mould- breaking (no mention of funny, but that would be selling out), so the BBC must of course beat a path to their door. If for no other reason than that if we don’t Channel Four will get them and yet again look more hip than us.

  They told me that they wanted to do a post-modern docusoap sitcom. The idea being that we supply them with cameras and a crew and that they record their lives. Each week they’ll present us with a half-hour of the best bits plus a four-hour version to run through the night ‘for the real Dog-geeks and Fish-heads’, they said, ‘the real post-comedy comedy nutters’. They claim that by this means they’ll cut out all that false crap which TV comedy normally gets bogged down in, like scripts and jokes and acting in an amusing manner, and get straight to the raw improvisational bones of their genius.

  ‘Basically, we’re talking about existentialism with knob gags,’ is how Fish put it.

  Sometimes the irony of my job strikes me quite forcefully. I mean, when I was younger all I ever wanted to do with my life was write comic scripts. Now what I do with my life is commission other people to do it. People whom I have to admit I don’t normally think much of. That’s my tragedy. I mustn’t complain, though. I get to eat a lot of excellent lunch.

  Anyway. Lucy’s call came along with the starters. Finally, it seemed, after days of intense numbercrunching, the ovulation result had come up and we were on. By a curious coi
ncidence I’d ordered Oeufs Benedict to begin my meal. Her eggs were ready at exactly the same time as mine.

  I hate mobiles but Lucy had made me buy one for just such a circumstance as this. I’m going to have to work out the volume control, though, because unless I’m being paranoid her voice seemed to be being broadcast through the restaurant PA.

  ‘Sam, I think I’m ovulating. Come home and fuck me now.’

  Well, people may have heard and they may not have heard, but either way they could not have helped but hear my reply, which was intended to be in a whisper but emerged as a sort of loud gasp.

  ‘Fuck you? I’m in a meeting.’

  Dog and Fish smiled broadly at this and I could tell that in the delicate dance of mutual respect I was losing ground somewhat.

  Thinking fast, I repeated what I’d said but with a different emphasis.

  ‘Fuck you! I’m in a meeting.’

  Dog and Fish laughed out loud at that and Lucy must have heard them because she absolutely made me promise not to tell them what she was phoning about. She thought they’d write a post- modern, après-comedy sketch about it. They wouldn’t, of course; the subject did not come within their frame of reference, the single and only thing of interest to Dog and Fish being Dog and Fish.

  It was all very well for Lucy to swear me to silence but she was also demanding that I jack in the lunch immediately and hurry home. It’s not an easy situation to think up a decent excuse for. I mean cancelling a meeting is easy. Anyone can cancel a meeting.

  People do it to me all the time. But attending a meeting, a meeting that has been set up for months and then suddenly getting an abrupt phonecall after which you leap up from the table and leave your busy and highly fashionable companions to dine alone, that requires an explanation. What do you say? All I could do was act casual and try to keep it ambiguous.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘My wife is ovulating and she wants seeing to.’

  Not great, but the best I could do at the time. In fact I think they thought it was a joke.

  ‘Nice one, geezer,’ they said and laughed in a grunty, cynical, fag-ashy kind of a way.

  I left a credit card number with the Maitre d’ to cover Dog and Fish’s lunch and grabbed a taxi. All the way home I tried to think erotic thoughts, knowing what would be required of me the moment I walked through the door.

  Sure enough, when I got home Lucy was already in bed. It’s all very well for her. Nobody minds at the agency if she skips a day.

  Most of her clients only do voiceover work anyway, which is all fixed fee. Personally I think that all Lucy and the other women in that agency do all day is gossip, but I’m not allowed to say that, of course.

  ‘Come on! Come on!’ she was shouting. ‘The pee traffic light is green! My temperature is optimum and all the little red dots have collided!! My eggs are done now! They’ll be hard boiled in a minute!’

  Oh, the pressure.

  Great steaming shitballs, I hate myself sometimes. All month I’d been wanting a shag and now of course I get stagefright. Well, who wouldn’t? It isn’t easy to get a hard-on when your partner is desperately staring at her watch and bleakly contemplating a lonely and emotionally unfulfilled life of childlessness ahead. An unkind God seemed suddenly to have replaced my dick with a small piece of warm, flesh-coloured plasticine. ‘Lifeless’ would have been a compliment. Lucy tried her best, of course, but it wasn’t much help. I knew that all she was thinking was, ‘Come on, get hard, you bastard. My eggs are on the turn.’

  We succeeded in the end. I managed to just about sustain a sort of semi-half-master until achieving a lacklustre orgasm. More of a boregasm really. Words cannot describe how annoyed with myself I was. I felt really unmanned and that I’d let Lucy down.

  She said it was all right, but without a great deal of conviction. I told her that I didn’t think I’d produced enough but she said it didn’t need much. ‘It’s quality, not quantity,’ she said, which was nice of her.

  Dear Penny It was Bonk Day today, the culmination of Restricted Bonking Month. This sort of thing is definitely not good for the sex life. I mean sex ought to be spontaneous and erotic, not contrived and mechanical, but what could I do? I needed servicing and there’s an end to it. I could see that Sam was a bit upset afterwards. I fear that he feels he’s being used like some kind of farmyard animal. Nothing more than a breeding stud, brutally milked for his sperm. Not that he was much of a stud today. Frankly, I’ve seen harder knobs on the door of a bouncy castle. For a minute there I thought he wasn’t going to pull it off. I used all my womanly wiles, even ‘going down’ on him as they say, something I’ve never been big on. Well, I’m just not very good at it, I never really know what to do. I mean you put it in your mouth, and then what? Chew? You certainly aren’t supposed to blow, despite the name of the exercise. Anyway, he did not respond at all well and it was marshmallow in a slot machine time, I’m afraid.

  It was all rather disheartening really, Penny. I mean I don’t aspire to being a sex bomb but a girl does rather hope to be able to provoke an erection in her husband. It was the pressure, of course. After all my calculations he knew he had to produce the goods. Difficult for him, I’m sure, but as a woman with feelings I do rather wish it hadn’t appeared quite such an ordeal.

  Anyway, long story short and all that, honour was satisfied. Sam says that all he can say is that if we do score this month the kid will be a strong swimmer because its dad certainly didn’t give it much of a start.

  When we’d finished he rushed off, of course. I asked him not to because I think it’s important to spend a bit of time together after sex or else it’s just sex, isn’t it? But Sam said he had to go back to work, which, considering he claims his job consists entirely of telling arseholes how clever they are, didn’t seem like much of an excuse to me. I told him that at times like these we should make an effort to concentrate on the emotional side of our relationship, otherwise our love life will be nothing more than a mechanical thing, devoid of sensuality and romance. He said, ‘Right, yes, romance, absolutely right,’ and left.

  When I got back to TV Centre there were three messages to ring Aiden Fumet, Dog and Fish’s manager. He’s also the manager of about sixteen other acts whom Time Out and the Guardian have sequentially announced as ‘quite simply the best in Britain today’. Aiden Fumet is a very aggressive man, which is all right in itself certain types of agent and manager have always been aggressive. What puts Fumet beyond even the most distant pale is that he is also self-righteous. He seems to see any failure on the part of the BBC to grant a series to any of his acts as evidence of a vicious conspiracy to deny the young people of Britain the cornedic nourishment for which their souls are clearly crying out. The idea that the BBC might think some of his acts less than good does not cross his mind.

  ‘What the fuck was that malarkey all about, then, Sam, dumping my boys at One Nine Oh?’ Fumet said when I called him back.

  ‘I’d better warn you now, mate, that Dog and Fish are one phonecall away from going to Channel Four. One fucking phonecall and they’re with Michael, OK? And the BBC can fuck off.’

  Well, I was in no mood for this. Normally I have to admit that I’m a bit of a pushover. To be honest, I just can’t be bothered to argue with these people. The worm, however, can turn and show his teeth (if worms have teeth) and a worm who has just been crap in bed with the wife he loves and who is counting on him to fill her up with sperm is likely to turn like a U-bend.

  ‘What is going on, Aiden, mate… ‘ and I commenced to give him the most exquisitely phrased bollocking of his entire life.

  Unfortunately it was all wasted because after he’d told me to fuck off he’d hung up.

  Later, I told Lucy about the whole incident over supper, and that led to a slight misunderstanding. She said that she was sorry about today, and I thought she meant she was sorry about me getting shat on by arrogant, no-talent twatheads. So I told her not to worry. I told her that it was my job. Well, it turned out that sh
e was actually talking about our lunchtime sex session.

  She’s been concerned that I might feel used ‘milked for my sperm like a farmyard animal’ was how she put it. So when I said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s my job,’ she thought I meant having sex with her was my job and said, ‘I hope you don’t see it as a job,’ in a very tart voice indeed. But I of course still thought she was talking about my work and therefore took her tart retort as a snide reference to the pathetically unfulfilling way I earn a living and said, ‘Yes, it’s a job, a bloody boring job. There’s certainly no satisfaction to be had in it.’

  Misunderstandings all round and quite an atmosphere had developed before we got it sorted out, after which I immediately put my foot in it again. Lucy remarked that this confusion perhaps indicated that we should be setting time aside to be tender and close with each other and communicate more. Well, I thought she was just trying to be nice to me, so I told her not to bother on my account as I wasn’t bothered either way. It turned out that she was actually appealing for a more tender and sensual attitude on my part, so me saying I wasn’t bothered was the worst thing I could have said.