33
Wherever I'm standing is where Margret needs to be standing, and vice versa. Doesn't matter where we are — the kitchen, the bathroom, Scotland — we each infuriatingly occupy the space where the other one wants to be, urgently. Over the years we've developed signals for this situation. Mine is to stand behind her and mutter under my breath. Margret's is to shoulder-charge me out of the way.
34
Margret flooded the kitchen last week. Turned the taps on, put the plug in the sink, and utterly forgot about it (because she'd come upstairs and we'd got involved in an unrelated argument). She goes back downstairs, opens the door and — whoosh — it's Sea World. The interesting thing about this is, if I'd flooded the kitchen, it would have been a bellowing, 'You've flooded the kitchen, you idiot!' and then she'd have done that thing where I curl up in a ball, trying to protect my head, and she kicks me repeatedly in the kidneys. As it was, however, there's a shout, I run downstairs and stand for a beat in the doorway — taking in the scene, waves lapping gently at my ankles — and she turns round and roars, 'Well, help me then — can't you see i've flooded the kitchen, you idiot?'
35
There are certain verbal shortcuts to a lot of our arguments. Sure, we could ease into things, build up momentum slowly, but that's so wasteful when you can fit in three arguments in the time the slow-burn approach would take to brew only one. So, we often favour more of a dragster-style, zero-to-argument in 1 second approach. Thus, over the years, ways of ensuring a spitting, scratching row with just one sentence have been polished to a high shine.
For example, Margret once said to me, 'Am I your favourite woman in the world?' The world? I mean, really.
Other times she'll lay mines so we can explode into an argument later with the minimum amount of run-up. She'll go out and, over her shoulder as she closes the door, call, 'You can vacuum the house if you want.' I'll settle down on the computer for a couple of hours. When she returns she'll stomp up the stairs, crash open the door and growl, 'Why didn't you vacuum the house?' I, naturally, will reply, 'You said I could if I wanted to. And, after thinking about it, I decided I didn't. Obviously, it wasn't a decision I took lightly…' and we're already there.
Another dead cert is when I can't find something — the TV Guide, a shirt, my elastic band rifle, whatever, it doesn't matter — and the exchange goes:
'Gretch? Have you seen my sunglasses?'
'Have you looked for them?'
(Oooooooo, I, it, when, argggh! My teeth are gritted just typing that.)
Margret, of course, has done the ultimate and discovered a way of ensuring an argument using no words at all. The technique is this: She'll have one of her friends round and they'll be chatting away animatedly in the living room — until I happen to walk in, at which point Margret will abruptly and conspicuously stop what she's saying, mid-sentence… Yep, one of us is going to be sleeping in the spare room tonight.
36
Margret's four-hundred-and-fifty-second most annoying habit is to stealthily turn off the central heating (then light the gas fire in the room she's in, natch). I'll suddenly notice that, sitting typing at the keyboard, I can see my own breath while from the bedroom one of the kids will call out, 'Papa, I can't feel my legs…' And I'll shiver down the stairs to find the central heating set to 'Summer/Hypothermia/Cryogenic Suspension,' and Margret in the living room watching the TV in a door frame warping furnace.
37
A Few Concepts Margret Continues To Have Trouble Assimilating:
1. It's possible to stop buying plants.
2. Can you please leave me alone, I'm on the lavatory.
3. Ikea is just another shop.
4. I asked you if you wanted any, I asked you — now stop eating it off my plate.
5. One may have a thought and not say it. This does not make me insular, it merely separates me from you and that mad woman who's always shouting at the pigeons outside the supermarket.
6. They're just nail clippings. Nail clippings must be the most inert thing on the planet, how can anyone seriously have a problem with nail clippings? You might as well freak out with, 'Bleuuuurrggh — helium!' Really — just get a hold of yourself. So you've walked barefoot across the bathroom and you find this has resulted in a nail clipping or two sticking to the bottom of your foot; well, simply brush them off into the bin — they're just nail clippings.
38
Just for reference; if Margret returns from having her hair cut and says, 'What do you think?' and you reply, 'I'd love you whatever your hair was like,' well, that's very much The Wrong Answer, OK?
39
'Get your hands off me — you're freezing.'
A thing happend...
A thing happened at this point that nearly stopped me ever updating this page again. You can read about it by clicking your mouse on the words you are now reading.
Yes, these words, you fool.
40
You may remember that one of the manifestations of Margret's basket of madnesses is an urge to fill our house with an internal Vietnam of plants. A compulsive disorder whose origins I can't even guess at.
On an unrelated note, we just got back from staying with Margret's folks in Germany. This is a picture I took, representatively, of the top of the stairs at their house:
Yes. It. Is.
41
If you've clicked on the 'Why I nearly stopped updating' link above, you'll know who Hannah is. But, of course, you won't have clicked on it because you felt it was too much of an effort, you Child Of The Internet, you. So, let me tell you Hannah is someone with whom I recently started to work — remotely, I've met her in person once, for about ninety minutes. You now have all the information you need. Phone me, I'll come round and scroll for you too, OK?
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."
42
'I'm nearly there.' Yeah. Right.
43
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?
44
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 bee
n!'
45
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.
46
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?'
47
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:
Me: Did you know the sink's blue?
Margret: Yes. I did. I used a jungle exfoliant produced by the Taiwanese military to clean it, and it discoloured the surface.
Me: Oooooooo. K.
Margret: Well maybe, just maybe, if you cleaned the sink once in a while…
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.
48
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 finishe
d, 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:
Things my girlfriend and I have argued about (online version) Page 2