Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About (6 page)

The other day someone asked me, 'Is there anything you and Margret
don't
argue about?'

I stared up at the ceiling and patted my lips with my index finger, thoughtfully. A clock ticked. It snowed. The light began to fade. Eventually, I had to go out to buy more milk.

However, just when I was about to give up and resign myself to addressing another one of the backlog of thoughts I have to deal with, I light-bulbed, 'Ah-ha! Money! We don't argue about money!' and was tremendously pleased with myself for the five or six seconds it took to realise that this was demonstrably untrue. Oh, we don't have the standard, 'What the hell are you doing? We're behind on the mortgage and you've gone out and spent all our money on beer!' rows. In fact, Margret doesn't drink all that much nowadays. We have, however, found others.

One of them flows from the fact that Margret asks me how much everything I've bought for myself has cost. Now, I'm not one for the high life: I don't own a car, I'm not interested in holidays in the sun, my favourite meal is a Pot Noodle and the leather jacket I'm currently wearing I bought while I was still in the Sixth Form.

(All this doesn't make me bohemian and fascinating, by the way; people don't happen upon me and exclaim to each other, 'My! Imagine how intriguing he must be
on the inside
.' That kind of thing only happens in movies. In real life… well. Well, I was walking through the city centre a while ago and Margret called me on my mobile. With all the noise of people and traffic, it was hard to hear so I sat down with my back against the wall of McDonald's, bowed my head and, with the phone in one of them, cupped my hands over my ears to try and listen properly. As I sat there – I
swear
to you this is true – someone who was walking past looked down at me and threw change. But anyway, back to the point…)

So, I'm hardly what you'd call extravagant. Sometimes, however, very, very practical demands mean I need to buy a digital camera, say, or another guitar. I'll try and sneak it into the house (Margret will discover it eventually, of course, and say, 'Where did
this
come from?' but I'll be able to reply, 'Oh, I've had that for
ages
,' which – one day, I'm sure – will be the end of the discussion), but often I'll get caught.

'How much did that cost?'

'It was on offer.'

'For how much… I'm just
asking
.'

'Look – it has a built-in clock!'

She simply won't give in until she's made me feel like she and the children have looked up from their eighth consecutive meal of lard to see me stride in with a handful of magic beans. But recently the shoe swapped feet. Margret bought a sideboard. A second-hand sideboard that cost
at least
twice what I'd ever pay for a graphics accelerator card for my PC.

'How much did that cost?' I asked.

'It's an antique. Well… not a proper antique. But I think it was made in Poland.'

'Uh-huh.'

I take the moral high ground. From where I purchase the Buffy Series 3 DVD set. Outrageously expensive, yes, but a thing that, under the circumstances, I am not at all afraid to reveal to Margret. (I revealed it via the column I write in The Guardian, knowing she couldn't say anything because of the sideboard.) (Surprisingly, I was wrong.)

The other money-related argument is about cash. That's
cash
, specifically. Despite the fact that Margret's earning power is comfortably twice mine, she
never
has any cash. If you can conveniently pay by cheque or credit card, that's fine, but otherwise it's, 'Miiiiiiiil – have you got any cash? Only, I haven't and I need to go to the hairdresser's/pay a builder/have The Mob carry out a hit for me.' Every time – Every. Time. – I go to the cashpoint she'll appear within minutes with her nose wrinkled up pleading, 'Got any cash?' I'm just a courier; cash is only ever in my wallet for the walk back home from the bank – I think that the second I key my PIN number into the ATM machine it texts her phone. The result of this is that now
I
never have any cash, because Margret has it. Except, she doesn't. Margret is chronically cashless to the size of
two people
.

If I'm sitting on the sofa reading a book and Margret enters the room she will say this: 'What are you doing?' If I'm peeling potatoes in the kitchen when she happens upon me, or pushing batteries into one of the children's extensive range of screeching toys, or writing on the side of a video cassette I've just pulled out of the recorder, the same thing: 'What are you doing?' I mean, a fellow likes to feel he's a bit enigmatic now and then, a tad mysterious and deep, but how can a person see me, for example, screwing a new bulb into a light fitting and
not be able to see immediately and with huge, reverberating, chill clarity precisely what it is that I'm doing
? It's like living with Mork. It's not even as if I can use these moments to exercise my impressively sardonic (yet, at the same time, profoundly attractive and alluring in a deeply sexual way) wit either. Because, as previously mentioned, Margret regards large sections of what we on Earth call humour as nothing but shameless mendacity.

Margret
[spotting Mil picking with his fingernail at the goo left on a CD case by the price label]
: 'What are you doing?'

Mil: 'I'm talking to Mark using Morse code – he's at home right now holding one of his CD cases, picking up the vibrations I'm making.'

Margret: 'No you're not, you liar. You're lying. Why do you always lie? You liar.'

Mil: 'It works by resonance. You just have to practise for a bit to be able feel the plastic quivering – go over and get that Black Grape case, press it on to your nose, and we'll see if you can pick up anything.'

(There's the briefest flicker of indecision in her eyes; offering me, for one tantalising moment, the possibility that I'm going to spend the next ten minutes – 'What about
this
, then? Press it on your face harder.' – having quite simply the best of times… but then she grunts.)

Margret: 'Liar. You're just a liar.'

Mostly, however, we've got it smooth and efficient now. We don't have to think. She says, 'What are you doing?', I peer at her with irritation and expel air, we go on about our business. This morning, though, she came upstairs to the attic here while I was sitting in front of the computer doing some work on the net.

'What are you doing?' she asks.

Trying to concentrate on something, distracted and harassed, I reply with some degree of acerbic aggravation.

'What does it
look
like I'm doing?'

There's a beat, during which we hold each others eyes, unblinking.

It's immediately after this beat has passed that I realise I'm wearing no trousers.

There is, it's opulently redundant of me to add, a perfectly reasonable and innocuous explanation for why I'm browsing the web alone in my attic with no trousers on, but you're all busy people and I know you have neither the inclination nor the time to waste hearing it. As an image, however, it did rather undercut my sarcasm. Margret – in a brutally savage reversal of tactics – didn't speak. She merely raised her eyebrows and there, revealed, was a face that read, 'I have been waiting thirteen years for
this
moment.'

I was watching
Mission Impossible
and it was making me uneasy. Tom Cruise was doing something – infiltrating, probably, you know what he's like – and he was continuously describing the situation to his distant support buddies via his headset radio. For a while, I naturally assumed that it was simply Tom Cruise's big nose that was unsettling me and tried, using soothing visualisations and breathing exercises, to move myself, mentally, to a place where it wasn't an issue. But then – the realisation freezing my arm and abruptly halting a crisp's journey from bag to mouth – I had a small epiphany: 'Lawks,' I thought, 'This is my girlfriend.'

She does this all the time. 'Get some eggs from the fridge… here's the butter… and now a frying pan… What's in the cupboard? OK, we've got oregano… some basil… I'll go for the mixed herbs… Now I need some scissors…'
Who is she talking to?
It's certainly not me: for one thing, I can see what she's doing – and, further, am not interested – and for another, I sometimes hear her doing this while she's alone in a room in another part of the house. And – though, admittedly, there's often a huge temptation to think she functions like this – I don't believe it's because she simply has no idea what she's going to do until it's actually occurring and I'm merely listening to her keeping her mind informed about what it is that her body appears to be doing right now. Sometimes we'll be sitting down watching TV and she'll get up and say, 'I'm going to the toilet.' Why would anyone say that? Does she think I'm keeping a log for research purposes? Is she intimating that she needs help? Does she have reason to expect that she may be abducted halfway up the stairs and thus wants me to at least be able to tell the police, 'Well, the last time I saw her I know she was on her way to the toilet.'
What
?

Surely, it can only be that she's an undercover member of the M.I. team. Every time a van is parked near our house now, I imagine Ving Rhames is in it; 'OK, the toilet's at the top of the stairs – it's unguarded, but has a slightly bent hinge…'

Oh, and the first person to say, 'Well, if she's doing an impossible mission, then that'd be 'living with you
'
, Mil, wouldn't it?' gets a very slow handclap, OK?

The other possibility is that she's simply talking to the air. 'But that,' you say, 'would make her mad.' Yet, isn't there an idea that everything – water, rocks, fire, etc. – has a spirit, that
everything
is, in some way, 'alive'? Isn't that believed by some people? 'Yes,' you say, 'mad people.' Well, I certainly can't argue with you there (and don't wish to debate the theory with any Californians who are reading either, thanks), but I raise it as a possibility. Because, if we're looking for a mystic answer, she certainly regards the television as the Magic Box Full Of Tiny People Who Can Hear Her. If an actress says – as actresses seem highly prone to – 'I'm just going down into the cellar,' she'll often call out to her, 'Don't go down into the cellar!' Or she'll offer lengthy and detailed personal advice: 'No, don't send him that letter. He's just using you. Leave him and go back to Brian.'

I can watch a film many times. Margret thinks watching a film more than once (even worse – buying the DVD so that I can watch it whenever I want) is, well, I'm not sure there's a word to describe it. If she discovers me watching a film, says, 'Haven't you already seen this?' and I reply, 'Yes,' and continue to watch, she looks at me like I'd just confessed to being sexually aroused by livestock. A swirling mixture of incomprehension, contempt and with just a hint of, 'I
knew
it…' I realise now that this might be because she doesn't feel she's watching a film, but rather guiding the Tiny People through actual ordeals – a strain she doesn't want to have to endure twice.

I've tried telling her that TV doesn't work like that. That the people are just actors. But she just doesn't seem to get it. She throws back some nonsense about me compulsively sitting there, flooded with adrenaline, barking out the answers when University Challenge is on – clearly unaware that this is
exactly
what has made humankind so successful: the desire to test oneself against oceans, mountains, one's own deepest fears, or a selection of general knowledge questions. More disastrously, she also completely misses the point and starts going on about me shouting at the tennis on television or something. Incredibly, it seems she's unable to see the difference between her talking to actors, recorded on film, and my shouting, 'Go down the line!' while watching the television broadcast of a
live
match when, of course, in those circumstances there really is the possibility of my altering the course of play by vocalizing the sheer focussed power of my will. She still has an awful lot to learn about science, I'm afraid.

Margret was away with her friends the other weekend. It was a hen party thing. I hesitate to mention that, as English women on hen nights are quite the most repellent spectacle it's possible to encounter – if we happen across a group of hen night women when we're out together, Margret will invariably point at them and dare me to defend a culture that has incubated such an embarrassment. So, let me stress that, though it was
technically
 a hen weekend, it wasn't the whooping, cackling, "Look! We have a huge inflatable penis and an openly desperate desire to have you think we're fearless unfettered rebels so don't let the fact that we clearly all work at a local building society and are trying
way
 too hard!" kind of affair that you'll often see congoing through Brannigans in ill-advised skirts. It was still hen, though, there's no escaping that. I stayed here with the kids; if they asked where she was, I had planned – to avoid inflicting on them the psychological damage of knowing their mother was at a hen weekend – to say that she was simply away serving a short sentence for shoplifting.

Before she went, she asked me to record a couple of gardening programmes that were going to be on the TV. The first night she was there she rang me. She'd had a row with some bloke in a bar. He'd apparently pinched her bottom and then, when she responded, um, 'unfavourably' to this, had tried to smooth the waters by saying he couldn't resist as she was the best looking woman there – a point which Margret found really quite an insufficient reason for being pinched by somebody; she expressed this concept to him. Now, as I was a good two-hundred miles away and, in any case, had a big pile of ironing to do, there wasn't really very much I could do to support her. I did think of demonstrating that I shared her contempt for him by pointing out that the bloke was clearly also a calculating liar: 'There's no way you could have been the best looking woman there – I mean, what about Jo, just for a start?' Some tiny alarm rang deep in my head, however, and told me that not saying this would work out better for me in the long run. She continued to talk for a while, and finished by reminding me to video the gardening programmes.