Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About (10 page)

There's a degree of glaring goes on here, but I hold my nerve and continue. 'The only other possibility, as far as I can see, is that you simply can't tell whether I've hoovered or not. And, if you can't tell, then it doesn't matter – in any real sense – whether I've
done
it or not, does it?' I've one more card to play, but it's a great one. 'That is, not unless the thing that concerns you isn't whether the house has been hoovered, but only whether I've been sitting here enjoying myself all this time rather than slogging around with a vacuum cleaner. But I'm
sure
that's not it. I mean, you'd be happy for me to sit here idle for as long as I want, wouldn't you, if there's no need for me not to? It's about the hoovering, not about my sitting here idle, isn't it?'

Margret just stares at me.

I am triumphant. A choir sings. Cherubs circle my head, scattering petals. Shafts of golden light fan out from behind me. It's an intoxicating three seconds.

'Clean out the fridge,' says Margret.

Before I start, I feel I ought to mention how sad it is that the Texan readers are no longer with us. As you know, the notoriously irresponsible Supreme Court has seen fit to tear down the safety barrier protecting society and thus Texas is now like a ghost state. Machinery lies idle; offices are silent; the streets of Dallas shimmer motionless in the summer sun. No one goes to work nor chats with friends nor watches television nor even browses the Internet. Because, whooping atavistically that the police are now powerless to stop them, the entire population of Texas has, since last week, been ceaselessly engaged in endless consensual homosexual sex in private so as to bring about the extinction of the vital institution of marriage.

Oh, and let me make it clear that I'm not just some dull-witted, homophobic idiot here by saying, «it's the children I'm concerned about».

But anyway – my girlfriend is always trying to take photos of me naked.

I don't mean that
she
walks around naked (though, God knows, that's true too), I mean that she keeps trying to take photos of me when
I'm
naked. Now, I'm sure that all the women reading this are thinking, 'Well, that's reasonable, Mil. You do, after all, have a languorous sex appeal that frightens and yet, somehow, still enthrals me – and your body would clearly have been immortalised in marble many times by now were this ancient Greece.' Also, quite possibly, a fair few of the men are quietly turning pictures of their wives face down on their desks, biting their lips and secretly wishing, 'Oh… if
only
Mil and I were in Texas…' But I have to tell you that you're mistaken. Incredible though it may seem, in the flesh I'm cadaverous to the extent of almost appearing to be on the point of actual disintegration – becoming sexually aroused by the sight of me naked is a form of paraphilia. So why does Margret, say, keep lunging into the room with a camera when I'm in the bath? The answer, of course – for those of you who apparently must have dropped into this page from nowhere about five sentences ago and have thus read not a single one of the previous entries – is that Margret is some kind of lunatic.

Cut to: The back garden of our house. It's one of the three days a year in England when it's not raining and thus a Super Soaker water fight has broken out between First Born/Second Born and me: a full-on and appallingly ruthless conflict which I'm ashamed to say I provoked. First Born – having five years more tactical experience than his brother – is organising their attacks in such a way as to turn Second Born into his shield. I, however, have the advantages both of height and of preparedness (having surreptitiously arranged a series of barricaded, defensible positions before strolling over to First Born, casually saying, 'Guess what?' and then immediately shooting him in the back on the head from eighteen inches away – a slightly ungentlemanly tactic that gave me an early advantage, but which means I now dare not allow them to take me alive). Anyway, in a turn of events that no one could have foreseen, thirty minutes later all three of us are utterly, utterly sodden. Squelching is a phase looked back on with misty affection; everything we have on is now so saturated it permanently streams water from every trailing edge. To avoid flooding the house, I hang the children's clothes over the line and then send them inside to find some fresh ones and think about the important lesson I've taught them this day. After that, I also strip off and (Poof! – like the shopkeeper in Mr Benn) Margret appears with a camera. Fortunately, I've still got my underpants on, but – unfortunately – they are soaked and clinging and are doing obscenely little to preserve my modesty. 'Standing in the back garden in nothing but dripping wet underpants' is never going to be a particularly good look, is it? But it doesn't affect Margret, who snaps away excitedly until I manage to escape her probing lens by running off into the house.

So far, then, pretty much an average run of events.

But, about two weeks later, I'm lying on the sofa and Margret glides into the room. She is grinning broadly, so I know that, whatever's going on, something has happened that's going to depress me.

She hands me a letter. It's from the company who develop her photographs and it apologises that, due to some internal mix-up, the pictures have accidentally been
sent out to someone else
: they are attempting to track them down.

While I try to make myself breathe, Margret sits down by me and argues the case for this being the funniest thing in the history of the world.

If there's a disagreement in a relationship you should bring it out into the open: discuss the problem and how you both feel about it, reach an understanding – through compromise and negotiation – and thus resolve it so it will never be an issue again.

Ha! People actually say stuff like that, you know? Get
paid
to say stuff like that, in fact. Presumably their thinking is, 'Hey – it always works on The Cosby Show.'

Well, I have far more respect for the honest intensity of Margret's feelings than to think I could ever sing them to sleep with the shrill, monotonous voice of Reason and, for my part, I'm well aware that 'compromise' is nothing but Machiavellian shorthand for my cleaning the toilet sometimes. No, a good argument is immortal. Something to be dug up time and time again over the years. Something to be practised, embellished and refined. (What if the first two people who ever played chess said, 'Well, white won… no point ever doing this again,' eh?) Not only is this the way real life works, it's also a moral responsibility.

We have a disposable society; a society addicted to faddism, transience and waste. Do you think that couples in small, poor, sub-Saharan villages are constantly fed with new things to argue about? No television. No car. No bathroom. No .mp3 player that, yes, I
do
mean I "needed" it, actually – it's a removable media storage device, so I can use it for transferring important files – and it was on offer, very cheap… very cheap… "very" "cheap", OK? No, not £5 – don't be stupid; it's 128MB, flash-upgradeable and multi-file format – how could you possibly get an .mp3 player like that for £5? Yes, more than £5… yes, less than £500. No, no – oh no you don't. I'm not going to tell you whether it was more or less than
that
. Well, because, if I keep answering 'more than or less than' questions then eventually you'll get the exact figure, won't you? Doing that is effectively my simply telling you the price of it, and I am
not
going to do that because, as I've said, that is
not the issue
. No, it isn't. No – it
isn't
. Now, that's just insane – what do you mean "hiding it from" you? That's… I was
not…
I was simply keeping it there so it didn't get damaged, that's all… I don't know – a few weeks, maybe… I can't remember – "a few weeks", that's all I… I am
not
going to say whether it was more or less than that, so you can stop asking, OK? It's a removable media storage device that I bought so I can transfer important files and… like, say, drivers and work data and… well, yes, it's got nothing but Nickelback on it
now
– that's
not the issue
. God damn it! See, I
knew
you'd be like this, that's precisely why I… No… No, I wasn't going to say "why I hid it"… I wasn't… I
wasn't
… I was going to say… that's… precisely… why I love you…. See? I say I love you and you say I'm a lying git – I just can't win, can I?

No.

The couples in our small, poor, sub-Saharan villages aren't.

It's time we accepted that we are a very privileged minority, and throughout most of the world people have to adapt to their environments and recycle: in parts of Asia couples have as little as three distinct subjects to argue about per year, and yet somehow manage to row just as much as the Baltimore wife who can draw on such elaborate luxuries as 'an underlying feeling of nonspecific dissatisfaction which is somehow made all the more bitter on the tongue by the objective all-round and comprehensive good fortune of her life' and her husband who's been wondering whether he could pass it off as a joke if she explodes when he suggests they might try a threesome with this woman he's met in an AOL chat room. Thus, my friends, as a
display of solidarity
with those on our planet who are less fortunate than us, we are absolutely compelled to repeat arguments over and over again. If ever you are tempted to resolve a long-term disagreement, just picture your mother chiding you at meal times and remember: "There are people in Africa who'd be glad of that."

Which brief preamble brings me to the point. I know I've mentioned Margret hoarding things before, but I was tidying up the other day and I found a whole
mass
of receipts. Receipts that are
years
old – and for things for which it makes no sense at all to keep the receipts. I mean, for God's sake, there was one for the admission to Anglesey Sea Zoo in 1998. Never mind the fact that she'd brought this the well over one-hunded-and-fifty miles back to our house, never mind that – that's in the past – let's just focus on what you could
possibly
do with a credit card receipt slip dating back to 1998. Are you
really
going to telephone Anglesey Sea Zoo and say, 'Hello. Look, I've been thinking about it for six years now, and I've finally decided that the tank of rays you had wasn't really all
that
impressive. I'd like a refund, please… Yes, I
do
have the receipt, in fact.'? Gah.

When you have two languages within a single relationship there are always going to be moments of unfortunateness. Such as the fact that, after she came to live in England, it took me about ten months of pointing out her error – time and time again – until Margret finally sorted out in her head which way round the meanings of 'orgasm' and 'orgy' were. Ten months, I may add, during which she made an
awful
 lot of friends. For my part… well – in German you often make a plural by adding 'en': ear/Ohr – ears/Ohren, re/files/04/31/43/f043143/public/Republik – republics/Republiken, etc. So, it's perfectly natural, then, that I would assume the plural of 'Bus' (bus) was 'Busen'. OK, so, yes 'Busen' does mean something else entirely – that is NOT MY FAULT.

However, there are times when, far from being assaulted by language-based misunderstandings, I actually close my eyes, knit my hands and call on a succession of gods to
pleeeeeease
make what I just heard be, genuinely and completely, simply an Anglo-German semantic quirk.

Would you like me to give you an example, or are you impatient to go straight to the Guestbook and write, "this is just, like, sad n stuff, like, y dont u just split up n stuff if u dont get along????????!!!!!!!!!!?!?!?!?! :-( ~~tammy~~ idaho"? Are you sure? Okey-dokey, let's do the example first, then.

I was in the kitchen the other day, making myself a cup of tea as a break from the intense and demanding effort of having worked on a script for a full forty minutes before my mind meandered away into counting the holes in the ventilation grille on the front of my computer, playing tunes by slapping the sides of my face while varying how open my mouth was and, ultimately and inevitably, wondering if Alyson Hannigan, wherever she was now, was naked. As I fished out the teabag and made one, final effort to come to a decision regarding the Alyson Hannigan thing, Margret returned home from work. She dumped various bits of her day about the place until she had only a carrier bag left. From this bag she pulled a plate of cold, cooked meat covered with cling film and moved over to put it in the fridge. Before she did so, however, she peeled back the film and folded a slice into her mouth. She offered me the plate – I took a slice too. She made to turn to the open fridge once more, but then offered me the plate again in a 'Before I put it away?' fashion. I took another slice. She then put the meat away and closed the fridge door. As I stood there chewing, she swept off towards the living room, saying – distractedly, without looking back – "Eat it whenever you fancy. It's Pam's husband."

Yes, you read that correctly.

Do you watch CSI at all? No? Well, in a nutshell, it's this: William L. Petersen does the wonderful Manhunter in 1986, has a miserable run for the next fourteen years, and then returns as the head of a Vegas-based Crime Scene Investigation unit with very watchable results. (One imagines his agent weeping tears of frustration throughout the latter part of the 80s and the whole of the 90s before leaping into the air in 2000, phoning his client at 2am and whooping, 'Bill! Bill! It's
forensics
, Bill!
That's
what we've been missing. I'm calling Jerry Bruckheimer
right now
.')

So anyway, in CSI you are presented with the aftermath of an incident and you have to identify the guilty party or parties. Are you up for trying this yourself? Now? OK, then.