Good Husband Material. Trisha Ashley

      Fergal: February 1999

       ‘ROCKER IN UNFROCKED NUN SHOCK!

       Does Rocking Rocco have dirty habits?’

       Sun

      Our publicity’s always been outrageous. That first tour in America, after I found out about Tish seeing someone else, I did everything they said I did and more. We all did. That’s probably what sobered me – realising my younger brother Carlo, also in the band, was going to Hell with me.

      Hywel, our manager, who also does our publicity, played up on the wild image from the beginning and made it part of our hype, and on the whole we all still go along with it even if in real life we’re pretty sober types now.

      But sometimes Hywel goes just that little bit too far.

      At that photo shoot in Rome he really excelled himself, plumbing whole new depths of taste, and it took him some very fast talking and more than a few lire to get me out of gaol after that set-up with the nuns and the fountain.

      Of course, they weren’t real nuns, and yes, they did have dirty habits. (I’m going to sock the next person who asks me that.) Perhaps that’s why they all jumped into the fountain with me.

      It was supposed to be a reversal of the wet T-shirt shoot – me in the fountain wearing clinging wet clothes – only I ended up wearing six wet nuns.

      Do you know what nuns wear under their habits?

      Neither do I, but I know what these street-scrapings were wearing under theirs, and it’s what the Scotsman’s supposed to wear under his kilt. Nothing.

      Ma was a bit upset about it all, and half my Italian relatives weren’t speaking to me, so I told Hywel if he didn’t cool it down I’d be looking for a new manager.

      Ma knows Carlo and I aren’t as bad as we’re painted, but it doesn’t mean she doesn’t get hurt by seeing all this sex ’n’ drugs ’n’ rock ’n’ roll publicity about her sons.

      The rumour that quickly spread that I’d engaged in sexual misconduct with one (or even several) of the ‘nuns’ in the fountain particularly upset her, but Hy swore he’d had nothing to do with that.

      And just think a minute – was it likely? That water was ball-shrivellingly cold, even if I’d had the urge, which I certainly didn’t.

      What I’ve never understood is why sexual misconduct is so irresistible to a lot of women?

      You wouldn’t believe the mail I got.

       Chapter 5: The Bourgeois Bitch

      After our brief debauch at Mother’s we resumed our back-breaking toil until James returned to work.

      ‘It’s all right for some people who can stay at home all day doing nothing,’ he grumbled at breakfast, before setting off for his office.

      This was, as usual, a full cooked breakfast prepared by Yours Truly. It’s amazing really that, if carried out by mere wives, cooking isn’t real work, nor is laundering, nor cleaning, nor painting and decorating, gardening, childcare, shopping or … well, ad infinitum.

      Why isn’t there a minimum wage for housewives? Or a maximum working week?

      So it was with something of a snap that I said, ‘I’ve already told you, James, that after this week spent finishing off jobs around the house I’ll be writing every morning and most afternoons, so I will in fact be working harder than ever.’

      His expression remained disgruntled, since, in his opinion, a nice safe job should be seamlessly followed at the right time by a nice safe pregnancy.

      I decided that this was not the moment to inform him that I forgot to take my pill for a couple of days in the bustle of moving and haven’t bothered since. You really never know how these things are going to affect men.

      It could spur him on (but I don’t want to get pregnant too soon) or put him off, so I need to invest in some other form of contraception, though all the alternatives are revolting. But if I conceive I’d like it to be a conscious decision, not a sort of Russian roulette.

      I must register with a female doctor locally too. I’m not having some man examining my credentials. What good would that do if I get pregnant? His only experience would be from books and we all know that they inform medical students that women feel no pain between the knees and the navel.

       Mal de merde.

      ‘… charity work,’ James was saying. ‘Are you listening?’

      ‘What?’ I said hastily, sitting up.

      ‘Noelle doesn’t go out to work, but she runs a charity and is a Hospital Visitor.’

      ‘Like being visited by the Angel of Death,’ I shuddered, conjuring up the awful vision of the severely tailored wife of one of James’s drinking acquaintances (otherwise known as ‘friends’).

      ‘That isn’t funny,’ he said stiffly.

      ‘It wasn’t meant to be,’ I assured him. ‘Besides, if you think I should be out there doing charity work, I can tell you now that the only charity I’m interested in right now is the Make Tish Drew a Rich and Famous Author Society.’

      ‘I know you aren’t serious. When you find how much time you have on your hands you might like to ring Noelle up for a chat.’

      Time on my hands? The man is mad! But then, I’ve never managed to convince him that writing is serious work and not some dubious hobby that got out of hand, like the patchwork and leaves, and once he gets an idea into his head it’s set there for all time like a fly in amber. Writing is my career.

      He says I’m only an author with a little ‘a’ because I write short romantic novels. I suspect he thinks you have to be a man to be a real Author, an attitude he only allowed to come out of hiding after we were married, when he seemed to think I wouldn’t need to write any more.

      I discovered I had the knack of writing romances in my last year of university, after comfort-reading so many other people’s (the literary equivalent of a Mars bar), where the hero wasn’t quite right, and certainly didn’t suffer enough before the heroine relented and let him marry her.

      Fergal Rocco may have been too much for one woman, but he provides a rich vein to draw on: distilled essence of sex appeal. Just as well James has never read any of my novels! I may be a sort of literary vampire, but Fergal owes it to me after treating me like that, and anyway, slapping a series of his clones into shape is rather fun.

      My pen name is Marian Plentifold and I’ve been turning out two novels a year ever since college. James annoyingly refers to the money I make from them as ‘your pin money’ and doesn’t like me to tell anyone about them because of their being romance. But I’d like to tell everyone, and anyway, Mother knows, which is the same thing.

      Funnily enough, he made no objection when I had poetry published, probably because no one he knew read that sort of magazine. (Sometimes I suspect that only poets and aspiring poets read them: all very incestuous.)

      He might be a bit jealous, too, since he has trouble signing his name on documents, and reads James Bond. Impure escapism.

      He’s unfortunately not much of a New Man (more of an Old Man lately) and the only help he really gives me is to do the weekly large shop at the supermarket.

      I was glad when he’d gone, so I could savour the feeling of being alone in the cottage, now looking amazingly different – light and spacious, with stripped and sealed mellow golden-yellow floors and freshly painted walls and paintwork. Once all my brightly coloured vases, bowls, patchwork cushions and throws are scattered about, it will look a lot livelier. And a basket or two of leaves, and later some bright rugs …

      It’s