Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About (3 page)

Margret and I are going up a mountain, side by side, on a drag lift in Germany. The white noise of the snow under our skis is the only sound until Margret begins to speak.

Margret – 'This woman – "Hannah", is it? – what's she like?'

Mil – 'She seems OK.'

Margret – 'How old is she.'

Mil – 'About thirty, I think.'

Margret – 'What colour is her hair?'

Mil – 'Black.'

Margret – 'Does she smoke?'

Mil – 'Yes.'

Margret – 'YOU WANT TO SLEEP WITH HER, DON'T YOU?'

Perfectly put into practice there, you can see, Sherlock Holmes's rule that, "Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable
must
be the truth."

'I'm nearly there.' Yeah. Right.

I came home from work on Friday and, as I wearily opened the door into the house, Second Born, Peter 
^[2]
, heard me entering and poked his head out of the living room.

'Hello, Papa – I've missed you,' he shouts. From within the living room Margret's voice calls out to him 'No you haven't, Peter.'

You're all up for testifying for me in court, right?

OK, you tell me whether I'm wrong to be starting to get seriously worried about this. OK?
You tell me
. I shuffled out of bed into the bathroom this morning to have a shower. I took my clothes off, innocently pulled back the shower curtain and
this
is what I saw. (Fortunately, the digital camera – 'For me? I see – for
me
, is it?' – I bought for Margret this Christmas was just in the other room to provide photographic proof. Because I know you all think I make this stuff up. Damn you.) Now, tell me, is Margret placing it there the act of a rational human being?

You know what I think? I think she's having an affair with it. That's exactly the shudder of realisation I felt as I pulled back the shower curtain. I mean, it's not like the clues weren't there, is it? I can perfectly picture myself unexpectedly coming home early from work one day, walking into the bedroom and, with a cold slap of shock, discovering them in bed together – underwear and foliage flung carelessly across the floor by their impatient passion. 'You! Of course – what a
fool
I've been!'

I know from the emails I get that a fair number of you are holed up in Wyoming basements surrounded by automatic weapons, livestock and racks of cassettes filled with analysis of the Book of Revelations you've recorded off talk radio. If you have a moment, go and look in your freezer.
That's
 how Margret stocks our freezer too. She doesn't buy one of anything. She waits until she finds it, 'Buy Two – Get One Free,' and then she buys nine. Moreover, she can't manage to suppress an indulgent smile – as though I'm a father telling my teenage daughter that her skirt might give boys all the wrong signals – when I suggest that checking to see how full the freezer is before she starts buying extra stuff for it might be a good idea. Beyond the simply obvious – they'll have terraformed Mars before our family runs out of oven chips, for example – there is another consequence of this. The sheer volume of food that needs to be crammed into the freezer means it's only possible at all because Margret employs two ruses.

The first is brute force. Basically, she just hammers things into the drawers with the heel of her shoe. Which works, but at the expense of horrifically deforming whatever she's storing. We're all used to this now, naturally. Jonathan pretty much expects his turkey dinosaurs to be a collection of misshapen body parts: they're turkey dinosaurs, as modelled on the scenes of carnage the day after the comet hit Earth. It really only becomes an issue when he has friends round, asks them if they'd like an Cornetto ice cream and is then bemused by their expression of stark horror when he returns holding something that looks like it's been trampled by horses.

The second point is that she only has any chance whatsoever of jamming all the things in if she throws away the cardboard boxes in which everything's packed. The boxes which, of course, bear the cooking instructions. Now, I know you're not going to believe this, but I'm just the tiniest bit anal. No, no, really – it's true. Anyway, one of the symptoms of this – very slight – finickiness on my part is that if the instructions say, 'Pre-heat the oven. Cook at Gas Mark 7 for 23 minutes. Turn once at 13 minutes,' then that –
precisely that
– is what I do. And I become rather agitated if anything prevents this. (A regular argument we have springs from my setting the oven timer for, say, 7 minutes then going into the living room and pacing backwards and forwards, additionally checking my watch, while I wait. At about 9 minutes, and still not having heard the beeper go off, my crackling nerves will take me into the kitchen, where I'll find Margret has reset the timer to 45 minutes because she's using it to time some glue drying or something. A discussion will follow.) Not having any cooking instructions leaves me in a fearful swirl of uncertainty. Even worse is when Margret decides the cooking instructions are vital, so she'll cut them out, and throw them into the freezer as she's loading it. I'll find them some years later. There's no clue as to what they belong to, of course. I'm merely left there with my shaking hands holding a slip of cardboard that has instructions ending with – in bold – '
Leave to stand for two minutes before serving
,' and not the smallest idea what it's referring to. I'd be happier, quite frankly, if it read, '
There is a bomb somewhere in your house
.'

So anyway, I came downstairs at lunchtime on Saturday and saw that the oven was on. Margret, in a worrying development, was cooking something.

'What's in there?' I ask, as off-handedly as the situation allows.

'Your pizza.'

I make a lunge for the oven door. Margret becomes bellicose.

'I
can
cook a frozen pizza, you know?'

'No, it's not that,' I bluff, 'I just want to add some extra ham. They never use enough ham.'

Margret taking on a frozen pizza is a chilling enough prospect under any circumstances, but when you remember she's flying blind here – no cardboard box bearing cooking instructions to light the way – well, I'm sure you can imagine my terror. I take the pizza from the oven. I add extra ham. I return the pizza to the oven.

On a whim, I amend Margret's arrangement by removing the polystyrene base from under the pizza before continuing to cook it.

I tend to get quite a few men writing to me saying, 'Think
your
 girlfriend's a nightmare, well mine's worse.' Now, this always surprises me. First of all, I wasn't aware that I was giving the impression that Margret is something of a trial to live with. I'm here merely stating the facts, without bias or embellishment: a simple camera pointed at the scene, recording it with complete neutrality. I am, frankly, shocked and disturbed that anyone might think I'm here to make the case that my girlfriend is, say, as mad as an eel.

What surprises me more about the emails I get from these men, however, is that they can in any way believe their situations are similar to mine. Yes, of course, sometimes you'll be sitting in McDonald's and your girlfriend will say, 'You just
deliberately
dropped that napkin so you could look up the skirt of the woman over there, didn't you?' – everyone's had that conversation and it's perfectly healthy. There'll be some loud, German invective, a degree of storming out, perhaps mayonnaise may get thrown at some point – we've all been there. The crucial thing to keep in mind about Margret, though, is that she is playing by rules no one else understands. Every exchange with Margret holds the potential to result in my spending several weeks in traction. There is no way of judging which will and which won't, because the laws that govern her thought processes have resisted all my analysis. Not even the tiniest thing can be taken for granted, because it assumes one knows how Margret's head works. The proof is in the details, not the broad sweeps, so let me illustrate the, 'Do not fall into the trap of believing you exist in the same universe,' idea by the smallest moment, on the unremarkable Saturday that has just past. We are sitting together on the sofa. I say

'Brrrr – I'm cold.'

Margret replies

'Where?'

Our sink is blue and we're not talking about it. It happened over a week ago; I was leaning over the sink, brushing my teeth, when I noticed that there was a sort of lazuline patina that had seeped over most of the surface. Margret hasn't mentioned anything about this. Why she hasn't is that she's obviously tried to clean the sink with, well, I don't know, some fluid used for stripping entrenched cerriped colonies from the hulls of submarines or something (they were probably offering three bottles of the stuff for the price of two at Aldi). She is waiting for me to mention it. But I am a wily fox, and will be doing nothing of the sort. I'm no wet-behind-the-ears, naive youth anymore, not by a looooong way, and I can perfectly see the spiked pit the seemingly innocent words, 'Did you know the sink's blue' are covering. It would go –
precisely
– like this:

You see what she did there? Now I'm facing a whole day of 'When did you last…?' Well, not this canny fellow – not this time, my friends.

Our sink is blue and we're not talking about it.

Because of my selfless desire to further the vocabulary of medical science, it would delight me to the toes if everyone could adopt the use of the phrase 'Margret's Syndrome'. This affliction being used to signify a condition characterised by a profound and chronic 'point blindness'. Allow me to give you a case study for diagnostic purposes:

I bought a mobile phone the other day. Yes, I'm aware that this revokes my human rights and I won't disgust you further by attempting any kind of wheedling justification. We all become what we hate (raising the disturbing possibility that one morning I'll awake to discover I'm Andie MacDowell, but let's avoid looking there) and so I've naturally mutated in that direction. Anyway, I spent the best part of an afternoon entering the names and numbers of people I know into the internal address book via the phone's keypad – an activity that's roughly as much fun as performing emergency dental surgery on yourself. The picosecond I'd finished, Margret walked into the room and said, 'Let's have a look at your phone.'

'Don't touch
anything
,' I replied with sombre gravity.

About two minutes later, when I returned from the kitchen with a cup of tea, Margret glanced up at me and chattily asked, 'Can you get back things that you've deleted?'

My lips became the thinnest of lines.

Margret doesn't know
what
she's deleted, but does offer the solution, 'Tsk – you'll find out eventually if it's important.' I have to admit that this phrase would be rather good to recite repeatedly, singsong fashion, as I danced around a swirling bonfire in the centre of which Margret was staked. Now, had we handed out a simple questionnaire to the population of the Earth, almost everyone would have replied that the point –
the point
– of the argument that was now racing through volume levels was that Margret had deleted something, without even knowing what it was, after I'd spent hours setting up the phone and had specifically said not to touch anything. Margret's assessment, however, was this:

'You know what the trouble is? You're a gadget freak.'

Last Friday was Margret's birthday. I bought her this oriental, geisha-style pyjama thing (Margret – 'Hey! I could have a go at that massage they do; I could jump on your back.' Me –
'Walk
, they
walk
 on your back.' Close call there.) while I was down in London. She liked it. Simple. Clearly, I've been a fool and all I needed to do to get Margret a present she likes was make sure I asked nearly every single woman who works for The Guardian newspaper what the hell I should buy. It wasn't her favourite birthday present, though, not by a long way. There were almost tears of delight when her best friend turned up at the birthday party and surprised her with two bags full of horse manure. I mean, it seems so obvious now, of course.

The Terror Of Lids: Yes, the rewards are high, but it's a game where the price of defeat is savage. Sometimes Margret, after grunting with it herself for a collection of 'hnggh's, will hand me a bottle or a jar that has a screw top along with an impatient, 'Open that for me.' If the gods lie content in the skies above England at that moment, then what follows is a rapid flick of my wrist, a delightful 'click-fshhhh' gasp of surrender, and my handing the thing back to her FEELING LIKE A HERO OF NORSE LEGEND. Generally, though, what happens is that I strain for a while and strip the skin off the palm of my hands. Then I wrap the lid in a tea towel and strain some more to equal effect. At this point I'm on to using the jamb of the door as a vice to hold the lid while I twist at the container; Margret will be saying, 'Give it back here, you'll wreck the door,' and I'll be swearing and twisting and saying, 'I'll repaint that bit in a minute.' The fear is upon me. If it's a fizzy thing, you can sometimes puncture the lid to relieve the pressure and then get it open, but you're not often that lucky. 'Give it back,' Margret repeats, reaching around me, trying to take the item from my hands. I swivel away – 'Just a minute' – and desperately twist at the lid again, now not even attempting not to squint up my face as I do so. At last, though, Margret will manage to get the thing back. This is the darkest moment. If she tries again and it remains fastened, then I am saved. 'It's just
completely
 stuck,' I'll say, 'It is. Stop trying now. Stop. Stop it.' However, there are times – and my stomach chills now, even as I write this – when she gets it back and, with one last satanic effort, manages to spin the lid free. A slight smile takes up home on her face.