Infidelity for Beginners Read online

  Infidelity For Beginners

  by Danny King

  e_5

  You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. You may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?” – ‘Once in a Lifetime’, Talking Heads

  Chapter 1. We’re Not Exactly Curing Cancer Here

  “… so you see we’re having to check overheads in every department. Advertising and Editorial are undergoing exactly the same reviews so don’t feel you’re being penalised or being picked on because it’s a company-wide review. It’s just the state of the current economic climate I’m afraid. It’s changing week by week so we’ve got to pre-empt and adapt if we want to continue to survive when so many titles are going to the wall.”

  Christ I wanted a fag.

  Some people can do that to you; make you want a fag. It doesn’t even matter if you’ve never even smoked before. Five minutes of listening to them waffle on and you’re ready to start.

  I wanted a fag. I wanted a big, fat, juicy fag.

  I wanted to light one end, suck hard on the other and then blow a enormous cloud of hot blue smoke right into Norman’s face (and possibly follow it up with a blur of whirling fists).

  Check overheads? Current climate? Pre-empt and adapt? All he needed was to call it a challenge and he would’ve had Bingo.

  “… and of course nothing like this is ever easy, but I know you’ll give it your best shot and see this as a challenge…” There you go a full house and he’d only been speaking for three minutes. Not too shabby by anyone’s standards.

  Out of sheer desperation my eyes drifted around his desk and latched onto the oh so familiar photograph of Norman’s never-changing wife. Like Norman’s namesake from Cheers no one had ever seen his wife, word around the office was that she didn’t actually exist, the picture had simply come with the frame. I could quite believe it and even made a point of looking out for her whenever I passed Prontaprint or Snappy Snaps.

  “… and this goes right across the board, be merciless, be tough, be decisive…”

  Back to the fags. Like I said, I would’ve loved one but I couldn’t. And not just because we weren’t allowed to smoke at work any more or because Norman would’ve frowned upon it or because the shop across the road didn’t sell them but because I’d given up six months ago; six months, several days and a few minutes in fact. Fantastic. How great was that? I’d smoked for fourteen glorious years and had enjoyed a modest but regular ten-a-day habit but suddenly all that was behind me. I was a non-smoker once more.

  A clean living, non-polluting, fresh air breathing, grown-up, healthy non-smoker. And I would’ve happily killed every other non-smoker in Britain and climbed across their clean, healthy, cancer-free bodies just to have had one last drag. One tiny, measly, nicotine-packed, deadly, yet delicious drag. God, I would’ve loved that.

  But I couldn’t. Because I was a non-smoker again. And non-smokers weren’t allowed to smoke. And that was all there was to it.

  Somebody had once told me that it got easier with time and like an idiot I had believed them, but it didn’t. Or at least, it hadn’t. I still wanted one in the morning after my first cup of tea. I wanted one in the car on my way to work. I wanted one during my lunch break and then again at about four. I wanted one at about six on my way home from work. And I wanted a couple in the evening when I sat in my comfortable armchair after dinner and watched a load of rubbish on the telly.

  I wanted a cigarette all of these times, every day and more, but most of all I wanted one right now.

  “… because that’s what being a team player is all about. Are you a team player Andrew? Andrew?”

  And perhaps a massive belt of scotch too.

  That was something else I was having to cut back on. Alcohol.

  I guess it’s the same for everyone in their thirties. You cut back and quit, reduce and rethink. I’d spent most of my twenties eating, drinking and smoking whatever had tasted nice to eat, drink and smoke and told myself I’d sort it all out when I got to my thirties. Except who knew how quickly they’d come around?

  Don’t get me wrong, I’d never been an enormous booze-crazy pill-head like some blokes like to boast they were, but then again by that same token I hadn’t exactly been good to myself. I’d enjoyed fry-ups for lunch, chips for dinner, beer in the evenings and fags in-between and had basked in the knowledge that I knew something every jogger in the park didn’t – that they were idiots.

  I’d been the fittest I was ever going to be in my life and I’d taken it all for granted.

  But then I guess most people do when they’re young.

  Most of us look after our cars better than we do our bodies. My friend Tom bought a new car recently and wouldn’t smoke or even pick-up smelly food in it. It was okay for him to constantly stink of fags and battered sausages himself, but he didn’t want the same fate to befall his beloved Volkswagen. Every Sunday he’d be out in the street with the turtle wax buffeting it up to a fine shine and he even missed a medical one time in favour of getting a knocking checked out underneath his bonnet. It’s something he still brags about today, but I wonder how much he’ll be bragging when that knocking moves to his chest.

  Like I say, when you’re in your twenties you don’t really worry about these things because time’s on your side. Heart attack territory is still way off in the distance and the effects of a night’s heavy drinking can easily be put right by another night’s heavy drinking. It’s all a bit of a laugh.

  And then one day you wake up, slide your feet into a slightly worn pair of carpet slippers and find a load of birthday cards on the door mat downstairs.

  Your hangover lasts a little longer into the weekend, your dinner wipes you out, every ache is terminal cancer and you’re absolutely knackered all of the time.

  You’re thirty.

  Or more likely thirty-five.

  See, unhealthy living is a heavy old juggernaut to arrest and it ploughs on well into your thirties before you’re finally able to get it under control. And what fun it is when you do. I had been on ten fags a day, but now I was on five portions of fruit, two litres of water, thirty minutes of exercise, eight hours of sleep and a couple of minutes of flossing. If that wasn’t enough to make a man want to get out of bed in the mornings I didn’t know what was.

  I’m not the first guy to moan about these things and I don’t suppose I’ll be the last.

  I just wanted a fag that was all.

  “… so it’s over to you. Make this your number one priority. Go away and take a good hard look at your figures. Get them down on paper and dissect them until you’re down to the bare bones then rebuild them from scratch. I’ll want to see justification for the absolutes and alternative solutions for all your other outgoings. Remember, lean and efficient. Make those your watch words and you’ll have a very happy publisher on your hands indeed,” Norman said, then sat back, folded his arms and took a great big dump in his pants. At least, that’s what it looked like he did from where I was sitting. He was smiling to himself about something and as I’d heard nothing in the last seven minutes that could’ve possibly caused him to smile, by the process of elimination it had to be the only explanation. Alas I didn’t have time to ponder this further as he seemed to be waiting for some sort of a response from me.

  Now, given the choice, I would’ve loved to have seen him prostrate on the floor, with his hands over his ears, wailing like a little girl and utterly broken as a man, but unfortunately my publisher’s happiness and the easiness of my working days were index-linked. So I pretended I liked the sound of everything he’d just said and promised prompt action on any number of fronts. This made Norman smile even harder so I made my excuses and got back to my desk before we starte
d ripping the shirts from each other’s backs.

  “Lean and efficient,” he’d said, although as everyone knew this just meant cost cutting. Why then hadn’t Norman just said “cost cutting” and saved all the yadda-yadda-yadda?

  Simple, Norman liked Norman. He liked his meetings, he liked sounding important at them. He liked wearing a tie and having to put on cufflinks in morning. He liked big words. He liked new words. He liked having a company car. And he liked having the biggest office in the building.

  Most of all though, he liked having a staff to share his big new words with.

  Don’t get me wrong Norman wasn’t a bad man by any stretch of the imagination. He’d never been horrible to me or to anyone else for that matter. He always remembered everyone’s birthday and never seemed too upset when nobody remembered his. He bought flowers for all the secretaries at Christmas and this year even caught everyone on the hop when he left early on the Friday before the Bank Holiday and said we could all go home too. At least ten of us overtook him on the stairs on the way out.

  He did all of these things and more, and yet still it wasn’t enough because nobody really liked him.

  I couldn’t tell you why. I couldn’t even tell you why I didn’t like him. I just didn’t. Perhaps it was because he was in charge and got paid more than me and he’d never once apologised for it. Or perhaps it was because he liked to stick his nose into places he didn’t need to stick his nose into and this would always stir up the waters. Either way, he was a fairly uninspiring cricket of a man with files for friends and too much time on his hands. Somebody should’ve probably taken him out to lunch and talked to him for as long as they could’ve on as many subjects as they could’ve just to prove to him there was more to life than work, but that would’ve meant spending a whole lunchtime with Norman and who could be arsed with that?

  Not me.

  So I didn’t.

  And neither did anyone else either.

  About the only time I ever really spoke with Norman was when he’d either wander by my cubicle or call me into his office to share a few thoughts on improving the way we did things around here. Naturally, these thoughts would almost always ruin what was left of my day and make getting out of bed the following morning even harder to bear, but this never seemed to faze Norman. He just kept them coming.

  His latest idea was a complete break down of my annual budget and a whole justification for each and every individual expense. Where were we getting our pictures from? Could we get them anywhere cheaper? Would it cost less in the short/long term to hire photographers/become photographers ourselves? If not, then okay, but at least we’d looked into these things.

  Naturally he wanted all of this in a full glossy presentational report, with coloured pie charts, 3-D graphics, pull-out statistics and cover-mounted free stickers, but just pulling out the costings and compiling the figures for the last year would take a whole day or two. Arguing the case for each and suggesting possible cheaper alternatives would really put the tin hat on it.

  What an utter ball ache.

  I hadn’t even got back to my desk and already I could feel my shoulders sagging with despair as my self-respect packed its bags to leave for the rest of the week. That chap took more time off than the rest of my staff put together.

  I slumped into my chair and wondered if I should start right away, but decided I couldn’t face it. There was no sense going at it half-cocked, not when I was in this frame of mind, so I file Norman’s report in the “crap I’ll confront later when I can face it” corner of my brain and spent the next few minutes picking my teeth instead.

  Luckily, there was no rush.

  Oh it might’ve seemed like Norman was in a hurry to get things moving but you should never go by other people’s time scales. People always ask for everything to be done right away but that’s just their way of ensuring they get done eventually. Ask any bin man when he’d like your rubbish out front and you wouldn’t be able to get to the shops and back for wheelie bins on the pavement all year round.

  So when Norman said, “Make this your number one priority,” you have to bear in mind the times we live in and the changing use of language. There’s a lot more interpretation these days than there was a century ago. We can’t take everything as literal.

  For example the following is a short list of my priorities:

  Stay alive

  Gather food

  Maintain a shelter

  Look after my wife

  Look after my health

  Check Lottery numbers every Saturday and Wednesday

  As important as it was, I couldn’t see myself downgrading any of those priorities in favour of compiling a report on the annual costings of a rather poorly performing caravan magazine. Yes, that’s what I do for a living. I’m the editor of Caravan Enthusiast, a spectacularly unpopular monthly magazine that covered every conceivable mind-numbing aspect of a dying pursuit. And it couldn’t die fast enough as far as I was concerned. I hated them. It’s funny, I never used to before I worked on the magazine but then I guess ten years of writing reports on awnings can do that to a man.

  God I was bored.

  And not just bored, I was frustrated.

  When you work somewhere, the importance of the thing you’re working on is always exaggerated beyond all proportion. Just take all that throwaway crap that gets stuffed through our letterboxes every day of the week for example. Flyers, junk mail, loan offers, take-away menus, cab company cards and occasionally, if you’re lucky, a free individual packet of washing-up liquid you can stash under your sink in case of an emergency. Somewhere in the world there were people whose days were dedicated to producing this stuff. Can you imagine that? All that crappy, unimportant, nuisance litter that forces you to stoop unnecessarily in the mornings and fills, on average, two extra bin liners per person per year, was actually the focus of some people’s working lives. Printers, designers, advertisers, marketeers and their minions. How the hell were we meant to progress as a society with this all going on? Pardon me if I’m wrong but I thought we were all meant to be living on the moon and going to work on jet packs by the year 2000. I specifically remember all that stuff on Tomorrow’s World; jet packs, robot best friends and a couple of coloured tablets for Sunday lunch. What the hell had happened to that lot? Were we all lied to or did the world just get sidetracked keeping me informed about all the latest Pizza Hut deals?

  What am I talking about? I don’t know. I guess I’m just bitter and depressed because it had finally sunk in that life was really pretty unimportant. Or at least mine was.

  Yeah sure some people were out there somewhere making startling breakthroughs with cancer research, stem cells, nuclear fusion, artificial intelligence, space exploration and, of course, rocket science but most of us were just cluttering up the world with crap and annoying everyone else.

  Caravans? I mean, seriously, caravans!

  Caravans were things people attached to the backs of their cars once a year so that they could drive down to the seaside and stay in a field. They were cramped, ungainly, lightweight, rickety and cold, and they cost about as much to hire for a week as seven days stay in a rather nice B&B. Though of course, these were just the ones that people attached to the backs of their cars. There were plenty of caravans in the world that never actually went anywhere. They simply rolled out of the factory, found a nice little patch of grass in Weston-Super-Mare and sat there and rusted for the next thirty years.

  Like I said, I wasn’t against them before I started in this job, but seven years of having to deal with people who thought they were the most precious things on earth, that’s what did it for me. Caravan manufacturers, caravan retailers, caravan park owners, and most despicable of all, Caravan Club members.

  I wanted the grab each of these cretins by the scruff of the neck every time they phoned to complain about some little mistake we’d printed and drag them off to the nearest paediatric ward and continuously slap them until they were prepared to admit that car
avans were simply the things they attached to the backs of their cars to go on holiday in.

  I wanted to, but I couldn’t, because I was the editor of Caravan Enthusiast, and as the editor of Caravan Enthusiast, I couldn’t very well go around beating up my readership, not if I wanted to continue to gather food, maintain a shelter, look after my wife and buy lottery tickets every Saturday and Wednesday. It simply wasn’t possible to do both.

  In the years gone by I’d been able to take out some of these frustrations on a few strategically timed cigarettes but I couldn’t even do this any more.

  All I had was my job.

  My insignificant, boring, tedious, crappy, little job.

  And my report too.

  God, I wanted a fag.

  Sally's Diary: November 22nd

  Andrew came home cursing Norman again. I don’t know why he works himself up so much. It’s actually quite embarrassing to watch. Also, I can never work out what’s so bad about Norman. He doesn’t sound too terrible to me and certainly doesn’t seem to justify the names Andrew reserves for him. I’ve tried to pin Andrew down on this point but he just gets annoyed and tells me I don’t understand. And he’s right, I don’t. I don’t understand at all. From what I can gather Norman’s latest crime is to ask Andrew to draw up a plan of the budget and shave off a little here and there. That doesn’t sound too unreasonable to me. After all Norman is Andrew’s boss. He is entitled to ask Andrew to do stuff every now and again, isn’t he? What does Andrew expect? It’s not like he’s asked him to work late or take a pay cut or sit on his knee and suck him off. All he’s asked him to do is compile a few numbers and write up a report.

  To be honest, I think anything you’re asked to do (within reason) during working hours is fair enough. It would be different if Andrew worked in a nineteenth century cotton mill and he was expected to crawl into the machinery to extract his colleagues’ hands whenever they clogged up in the gears, but he doesn’t.

  Andrew works in publishing. How terrible can it be?