Matt Rudd - William’s Progress

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.’

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.

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.

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?’

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.