Chapter 2: Mosque you bring this up?

Kelly was very quiet on the ride home, but fortunately (and I use the word fortunately as in: ‘I have learned to live with this as a project in personal growth’) my driver, Ali, has absolutely no problems filling a gap in any conversation. Even when no actual conversation is presently occurring.

Kate texted with Melody about the contents of our fridge, so I could prepare a shopping list. Okay, so I’m now officially a guy who pulls up at a Waitrose in a chauffeur driven car, but then I buy groceries and cook fresh meals for my family, so I think that evens out. And only yesterday I had been on the Piccadilly line, stuck between a man tuning a guitar and a young lady who was on the phone and whispering to all her friends she was sat next to Carstairs for seven stops. Life has a way of balancing these things out.

Kelly stayed in the car, because if the two of us show up anywhere together it’s suddenly a state visit. They know me at that Waitrose by now. The regulars just nod, which is bad enough. I have to keep track of who I’ve nodded back to, you see. On a busy Saturday I’m like one of those bobble head dogs on a pauper’s dashboard.

Mel opened the door to us, with Edwin on her arm. We all crowded around them, which made Edwin so happy he shat himself then and there. It might have been happenstance, though. Probably was. He does that a lot.

“Duty calls,” sighed Melody. “You guys get started on dinner. Come on, Poopmeister!”

“I’ll help,” I said. It’s amazing how you can get used to baby poop. Spotting a dog turd could put me off my lunch not that long ago. Now I’ve been known to walk around with a used diaper in the pockets of my house coat. It was the same when I was looking after young Kate, but a year or two after she was toilet trained this super power disappeared.

“I’ll do it,” said Kelly, speaking rather softly. “I know this dish. Well, most of it.”

“I’ll help,” said Kate, which freed me up to join Melody. If you have a kid, changing a dirty diaper counts as quality time. Really, it does. Fucking is right off the table until he goes to school, kissing isn’t nearly as nice when one of you almost literally rotates her ears like a bat who’s jacking off before his wife gets home, to make sure Edwin isn’t crying, and Mel was usually in bed by eight. I don’t know how men manage who’ve not got a live-in sister with whom they have an incestuous relationship, I really don’t. Can’t be easy.

“How was your day?” asked Melody, mechanically going through the routine of undressing Edwin. The little guy liked to put up a fight when that happens, but he didn’t stand a chance. She had him pinned down, in the most loving way possible, on his changing bed. We were like a practiced surgical team. I’m pretty sure the pair of us could put a diaper on a coked up grizzly, and rub his balls with ointment for an encore.

“I’ve had better. My department acted weird to a potential hire and scared her off. And Kelly and I had an incident.”

“Oh?” said Mel, handing me a fouled diaper that I neatly wrapped up with its own stickers, or whatever those velcro-y flaps are called. I’d done that a few hundred times by now. This one I disposed of right away, rather than taking it on a grand tour of Casa Carstairs in my pocket.

“She got tired of waiting so she came in, insisted we kiss and then rubbed her ... what do you call girl-cum, anyway?”

“WHAT?! Who cares, go on!”

“Well, she pretended I had something on my lip and rubbed her ... vaginal secretions, is that it?”

“DON’T CARE! Go on! Gimme a new pack of wipes, I’m fresh out.”

“She rubbed that on my lip. For the pheromones. And then Kate barged in and put a stop to it. I’ll put wipes on the list, this is the last pack.”

“Thanks. Hand me a onesie?”

“Blue?”

“White. Okay, so what happened?”

“Well, we did kiss. To break the ice. And I didn’t catch on to what she was doing.”

“No, why would you?” snorted Mel. “That girl could sell your kidneys during a bus ride and you wouldn’t suspect a thing. So how was it? The kissing, I mean?”

“Uhm ... I don’t remember much about it. Because I was in a state of panic, I guess. I just remember my teeth touching her tongue and her pulling me towards her.”

“Okay, so did you fight? After?”

“No. We’re ignoring it for now. Kate tricked me into leaving the room for a while and put the fear of God in her. Oh, and she had taken her knickers off when I left the office to get her some water. Nearly forgot about that.”

Mel shook her head.

“Poor thing. She must be gagging for it. Oh bloody hell, I misaligned the sodding buttons again! You never notice until you’ve done ten! Why don’t they make these things in velcro! Oh Edwin, mommy isn’t mad at you! No she isn’t! No she isn’t!”

Edwin didn’t believe her. Besides, it was half past six. Babies are generally tired and cranky at that time. Mind you, so am I. I’m just more practiced at hiding it.

“Well, have a chat with her. You have been putting it off,” said Mel, when Edwin had calmed down again.

“Yeah ... I figured it would happen when we start shooting the documentary. We’ll be away from home for a few nights, staying in fancy hotels or even in the castles themselves.”

“That’s romantic,” said Mel, smiling, as she picked up Edwin. She always forgets to wash her hands, as if baby poop is somehow sterile or something. I just pointed at the tap. She sighed and then managed to wash her hands while holding Edwin, which is no mean feat.

“Yeah, but that’s months from now. So I guess I’m going to have to bite the bullet.”

“Oh, poor you! How awful, having to deflower a pretty young girl who adores you! You know, it’s a good thing I’ve gone through the agony of childbirth, so I have at least some idea of the burdens you carry in life. That towel goes in the wash, right now. No, white! Just because there’s some embroidery on it doesn’t mean it goes in with coloureds! Men...”

You may wonder why my wife has such a cavalier attitude about me sleeping with other women. To tell you the truth: I often wonder about that myself. Most women seem to think that marriage is a legal pathway to taking someone as a sexual hostage, with no obligation towards their mental and physical wellbeing. The privilege of wearing a ring is supposed to keep you happy until death do you part. That had certainly been the attitude of my first wife, Monique. She had been a lot more forthcoming at first, right up to the point where she became Mrs. van de Casteele. There’s a reason some men prefer the tactic of ‘treating them mean to keep them keen.’ Or that other bullet point on the misogynist’s charter: ‘Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?’

I don’t believe in that. When I love someone, I want to help make every dream they have come true. I’m essentially an old-fashioned guy, who would like to spend his life with one woman until we’re both old and grey and can’t do much more but sit hand in hand, grinning like idiots as we think back to all the stuff we got up to when we still could. And then one of us would die and the other one would follow just days later, thinking: ‘There’s no longer any point.’ Call it romantic, call it stupid, I don’t care. That’s just what I always pictured when I thought of my life. That I ended up living the life of an incestuous bigamist is entirely accidental. Though it has it moments, I’ll grant you.

Without going over the whole story, which I have done elsewhere and in great detail, let’s just say that Melody once made a choice to share me with Kate, rather than doing without me. I don’t see that as a license to misbehave, but I did have some catching up to do after a forty year long dry spell, so she cuts me a lot of slack. An awful lot of slack, of which I try to use as little as I can. That’s why I don’t sneak around behind her back and I honour the one promise she made me do, which is to always use condoms.

“I can manage from here, go and help Kelly,” said Melody, hoisting Edwin into a new outfit, his fourth of the day. Lady Gaga doesn’t change her appearance as often as he does. Mel orders a lot of stuff from China, which arrives in grey plastic bags or tiny cardboard boxes. I have once suggested that a seven dollar Santa outfit, even if only for an infant, cannot possibly have been produced without exploiting at least the person who has sewn it together, but her answer to that is simply that the same is likely true for a fifty dollar outfit. Melody knows what being poor is like. Not having a job at all is worse, she says. As an extremely privileged white guy, I find it best not to argue with her.

I went downstairs and joined Kelly in the kitchen. Kate was on the sofa, pounding the life out of a laptop. We find it is better if Kate doesn’t try to help people in the kitchen, although I’ve been teaching her a few basics. And so I found Kelly there, dutifully washing and chopping up vegetables.

“Hi. Could you do the meat and the salad dressing?” she asked, wiping her brow with her sleeve.

“Sure. In fact, I can take it from here, sweetheart. You haven’t been on Facebook for at least ten minutes, we wouldn’t want them to sound the alarm and get swatted.”

She didn’t move, but stood at the worktop and kept dicing celery stalks.

“Kelly? I’ll do it. You can...”

She turned to face me, wiping her brow again.

“Look, exactly how much trouble am I in? Because I don’t know how to handle this. I just...”

I gently reached for the hand that held a cutting knife and took it from her.

“You are not in any kind of trouble, sweetheart.”

“No, I get that you won’t hit me or anything,” she said, impatiently, “ ... but now it’s not going to happen, right? As in, like, ever. Because of what I did!”

“Come here,” I said, opening my arms. She shuffled forward, as we were already so close together she couldn’t take a full step. Our kitchen felt tiny compared to the one we had in Los Angeles, but it was very practical. No ‘kitchen island’, which is more often than not just a place to keep stuff you shouldn’t have bought to begin with, no ‘breakfast bar’ because eating breakfast whilst seated on bar stools is just horrid, and no monstrous stand-alone refrigerator the size of a panic room. Oh and no stainless steel panels either because if you actually cook anywhere near them, they don’t half get nasty. Tiles will do, thanks.

“Kelly, listen. I’m not angry. You’ve always been very clear about what you want and I did promise.”

“Yeah, but ... I did that thing...” she said, and she shivered as she thought back to it. “And I more or less forced you to kiss me. I was just...”

“Kelly, no amount of hormones or pheromones is going to make me do something that, deep down, I don’t want to do. It’s not as if you roofied me. You just tried to get me in the mood. We’ll do it. Soon. But I want to make it special for you and I’m finding it difficult to plan for that. We can’t really go anywhere together without causing a stampede, but I’d like to give you a proper date. Dinner. Dancing, or something else. Taking our time.”

“That’s nice. But I understand how that’s a problem for us. Everyone is always watching. So I’m okay with just holing up in a hotel and doing it.”

“But I’m not. I need to get used to the idea. I can’t just take you somewhere and strip off. I have to learn to see you differently, or it will just be something mechanical that I need to get done. And you already know about the mechanical part, anyway.”

The particular mechanical part she used was a big, black dildo that had once hit me in the face when I yanked out a drawer in which it was stuck to the bottom. My memory is probably playing a trick on me, but I can’t help thinking about the titular monster from Alien: a shiny, dripping, black creature lurking in the dark. I was pretty sure it was still hiding in my house somewhere, but I assumed Kate had taken care of it for her so I wouldn’t stumble across it whilst looking for rechargeable batteries or sticky tape.

“Martin, listen to me: I don’t want a big date. Please don’t make me sit through a three hour opera and a two hour dinner before you’re going to...”

She looked around, as if anyone might be eavesdropping.

“ ... fuck me. That’s torture! And besides, I don’t want to eat just before we do it.”

“Why not?!”

She gave me an exasperated look.

“Because two hours after I eat, stuff starts coming out of my stoma, regular as clockwork. Which is exactly when we’re doing it, assuming you’re not going to have your way with me on the dinner table. I’d prefer to be able to fast for a few hours, so I can just put a sticker on the hole and not have to worry about it, rather than have the bag in place!”

“Oh! I ... never thought of that.”

“Well, I have. If I don’t have to wear the bag, we can have a shower first. Or get in a Jacuzzi. So if it were up to me we’d do it in the afternoon and then have dinner to recover.”

“Recover? What the hell do you think is going to happen?”

“A lot, hopefully. I have quite a list on my phone. With links to videos. Can we set aside, say, four hours? So we can have a bath together, maybe massage each other...”

“Yeah, okay, I get it! We need to plan this. And we will, but not just now. Besides, I’m still not fully healthy. Can you give me at least another week or two? I’m still getting physio!”

“Two weeks? I should be so lucky,” she grinned. “Okay, I’ll wait. But just remember I’d like a few hours heads-up. So I can look my best for you and prepare.”

“Kelly, you always look lovely.”

I’d have given her a proper kiss there and then, but Kate messed that up for her by bellowing from the living room:

“Okay en nou nokken met dat geflikflooi want ik rammel van de honger!”

(Cut the smooching because I am starving.)

“What is keflickfloy?” giggled Kelly, as she let go of me and turned back to the worktop.

“Uhm ... smooching? Cuddling? Something like that.”

Dinner turned out well, but then I’ve got the hang of it by now. Edwin had his own place at the table and wolfed down every teaspoon of blended vegetable and meat puree we offered. Mel and I have argued about the merits of store-bought baby food. You know how young mothers can be made to believe practically anything, simply by triggering their protective instincts? The debate on vaccination and autism is a good example, but you can use fear to sell them just about anything and I found out at my cost that Melody had come to believe that the producers of baby food and formula were essentially the devil’s emissary, part of a global cabal of poisoners.

I won’t repeat all the madness, but I refuse to believe that the good people at Ella’s Kitchen, Goo Goo Gourmet and Nutricia (that last one is a Dutch brand, the one Kate and I grew up on) are wilfully planning to make infants addicted to their jars of greenish goo by cramming in sugar. I’m fully prepared to believe they have some nasty marketing tricks up their sleeves, but they’ve been making baby food for ages and if they were stone cold murderers we’d have known by now. An offshoot of this debate in the world of grownups is a mistrust against canned vegetables: no, they’re not inferior. Most canned food is processed hours after harvesting, locking in all the nutrients, whereas your beans or lettuce might have spent a full week decomposing in various cooling cells until they get to your plate.

Anyway, Melody firmly believed these convenient glass jars were some sort of poison. One memorable exchange in the supermarket:

“LOOK AT THIS! FORTY PERCENT SUGAR!”

“Yes. It’s apple, pear and mango. I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t any sugar in it. And I certainly wouldn’t want to eat it. It’d be nothing but cellulose.”

“They boil this shit for hours, you know!”

“No, they pasteurise it for about ninety seconds. I bet there’s a lot more vitamins in that jar than in a four day old peach we got at the weekly shop.”

“Edwin should only ever eat fresh food!”

“That’s fine, but it’s Muggins here who has to cook it, isn’t it? Am I now going to have to prepare breakfast and lunch for him as well? I’m not saying it’s all he should eat, but just be grateful we have this available to us. Our grandparents didn’t.”

We rarely have arguments, Mel and I. But we were both continually exhausted. Yes, we had Kate and even Kelly around to help us, but Edwin was our kid and we did the bulk of the nappies and the feeding and the nightly walkabouts when he couldn’t sleep because shards of enamel were tearing through his gums. We hadn’t had proper sex in ages, Mel hated the way her breasts began to look, I can’t go anywhere without weird and deeply disturbing shit happening and even though we were rich and surrounded by loving people who were always ready to help, having a child had come at a cost. It has its moments, glorious moments you wouldn’t miss for the world, but there were plenty of times where Mel preferred not to be in the same room as me and I in turn had the words ‘You know, there are plenty of women who CAN be civil to me, who I can go and visit right now!’ at the tip of my tongue more than once. And God help me, but I once considered breaking a jar of pickles on her head. I was just so fucking TIRED, you see. Not that that’s any excuse, obviously. We had a talk about it and it turned out she had considered ramming a carving knife through my throat at that same moment. That’s when we left Mrs. Newman in charge of Edwin for the night and holed up in a hotel, just the two of us. The next day my lips were sore from kissing her all over.

Still, common sense always prevailed (or Kate yelled at us, which also helped) and all major battles had been fought. Baby food from jars and pouches was allowed, as long as it was from obscure and insanely expensive organic brands and not ‘big babyfood’. Because, as I say, you can make young mothers believe anything. And you can make young, or in my case middle-aged dads give in to anything, just to make the arguing stop. And that’s why Edwin got homeopathic droplets for his teething pains, until Mel’s back was turned and Kate or I could give him some baby Ibuprofen. Which, as young mothers everywhere will tell you, is basically black tar heroin distributed by Satan Inc.

“So other than being groped by Kelly, how was your day?” asked Mel, once we were at the dinner table. Mel didn’t get around much these days and was keen on any sort of news from the outside world. She winked at Kelly, to take the edge off her blunt question.

“You said something about your IT guys being weird?”

“Yup. I had a candidate for a job opening come in for an interview. She broke her shoe on our front doorstep, then she nearly had a stroke when she found out she was interviewing with Carstairs and to top it all off my gaggle of nerds scared her off by asking her trick questions when I brought her in to meet them.”

“Nerds are a gaggle then, are they?” giggled Kate.

“I thought nerds were a rabble,” said Kelly.

“That’s butterflies. Nerds are a gaggle,” said Mel, taking my side in this nonsense. “Go on? Did you offer her the job?”

“Well, I practically had. And then she bolted. Can’t say as I blamed her. At least she got some nice shoes out of it. Caroline sent over some ... Lobotomies, I think they’re called. What? Oh, Louboutins. Like I care. Shame to lose her, though. Very keen to learn, that one. And the team could do with some female guidance. Have someone show them how real people behave.”

“Muslim girl, I was told,” said Kate, helping herself to thirds. Seriously, I think the girl has a miniature black hole inside her. There’s no other explanation.

“Yes. Well, she wears a headscarf. Other than that, no problem. Shakes hands, makes jokes. And not really a girl. She has two boys, six and eight. An experienced mother. Just the sort of person you need to bring some order and civility to the department.”

“Yeah, but...” said Kate, miming a face mask.

“It wasn’t a full burka, just a headscarf! Looked very presentable. And anyway, we don’t butcher all that many pigs at Keller & Fox. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have been an issue.”

Kate shrugged.

“Well, she’s gone now. Speaking of Muslims ... That building at the end of Chatsworth Road. The one next to St. Augustine’s Priory? They’re going to tear that down.”

“Good thing, too. Bloody eyesore,” I said.

Some hideous brick carbuncle stood prominently at one end of an intersection, a part of an extension to the priory that had never been completed. The priory was a Catholic school for girls nowadays. Kate called it the Virgin Megastore, but I’m pretty sure she stole that joke.

“They’re going to build a mosque. I just read in the local paper planning permission was granted,” said Kate.

“Oh great, that’s all we need,” sighed Mel. Kelly gave a disapproving grunt as well.

“Yes, I’m sure our lives will be greatly affected by a mosque 500 feet from our house,” I scoffed. “We won’t even be able to see it.” Which was probably a good thing, because they tend to be a bit garish, don’t they? Mosques, I mean. Not Muslims. ‘Must blend in with the local environment’ seems not be be a high priority when it comes to mosques. But then, the UK is littered with absolutely hideous buildings. Yes, there are many fantastic structures old and new, but left to their own devices most Brits will cheerfully build something that a Belgian farmer wouldn’t use to house sheep. In fact, the house I lived in right now was so ugly I would have sued for damages if it had been built adjacent to my villa in The Netherlands. It’s hard to put into words, but anyone who hasn’t grown up in the UK will be able to back me up: the Brits have incredibly low standards when it comes to the outside of their houses. They either live in the quaintest, most picturesque cottages you can imagine, or it’s a concrete ossuary with a satellite dish. There’s not much middle ground.

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This Is Your Carstairs Speaking

Ron Dudderie

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