Things my girlfriend and I have argued about (online version)

by Mil Millington

  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.'

  67

  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.'

  "Margret, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to wander around constantly articulating precisely what it is that you're doing at that moment, as though relaying it to an unseen control team somewhere. Possibly, on an alien mother ship, secretly orbiting the Earth. For example."

  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?

  68

  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.

  69

  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.

  The next day, right on cue, I forgot to video the gardening programmes.

  I can't quite convey to you the icing I felt on my skin and the claustrophobic tightening of my chest that occurred when I idly glanced down at the clock on my taskbar and realised I'd forgotten to record them. I know you think I should have set the timer on the VCR, but I deliberately didn't. The timer on our VCR has poor self-discipline and vague life goals and will often fail to work, just for kicks. So, rather than risk giving the job to a recidivist video recorder, I decided it was far safer to do it manually. And to fill in the time until that point by going up on the computer, entering 'Fairuza Balk' in Google and, you know, just seeing where that led. It was obvious I was going to have to tell Margret what had happened and — although it was just 'one of those things', for which no one was really to blame — I knew very soon, and with a clarity of understanding that bordered on the spiritual, that the best time at which to inform her about the situation was while she was still two-hundred miles away from me. Therefore, I immediately texted her mobile — knowing she wouldn't have it switched on, because she never has it switched on, but that she'd see it before too long. Only, the second I'd sent the message, I began to worry. I'd assumed that letting her know now would give her a chance to cool down before she returned. But, equally likely, it would just give her a chance to work up a head of steam. And, if Margret's playing a, 'The trouble with Mil is…' riff, then the very worst place to ensure that it doesn't build and build is in the company of a load of exclusively female friends on a hen night. And she was in Manchester. Manchester. She was going to come back after a day and a half of, "…well, it's not for me to say, Margret, but if I were going out with Mil, then…", wired on crack, and carrying an Uzi.

  That night, I slept under the children's bed.

  70

  We had an earthquake here the other week. Surprisingly, I'm not being metaphorical. I mean we had an actual earthquake: in the geological rather than the emotional sense. It happened at about one o'clock in the morning, we were pretty close to the epicentre, and it was 4.8 on the Richter scale. Now, I'm depressingly aware that all you Californians are right now glancing up from your crystals and pausing mid-mantra to snort, '4.8? Poh. That's not an earthquake, that's just someone slamming a door.' Well, yes, I suppose it's all relative, but here in England where tectonics is less brash and showy, 4.8 is easily vulgar enough to stand out.

  The important thing is that just before 1 A.M. the whole house shook. Naturally, this woke us up. Cupboards rattled and banged, furniture shivered across the floor, the bed struggled like it was possessed by the spirit of a wild animal that was trying to get out. The instant it ended, Margret's freshly woken face slid in front of me. Her voice irritated and her eyes accusatively thin, she hissed, 'Was that you?'

  71

  I better note this down before I forget it again. I was reminded of it last week — apologies if you were around at the point when my memory was jogged but, before you start whining that you've heard me mention this observation already, may I just point out that anyone who's sitting around watching daytime TV probably oughtn't to get too captious, eh? So, Margret and I were having an argument (you'd think I'd have a shortcut key for that sentence by now, wouldn't you?). I can't remember what we were arguing about, but that doesn't matter here because in today's lesson we're focusing on style, not content. Say we were arguing about, oh, lettuce (even if we weren't, it's surely only a matter of time):

  Margret: You haven't washed all the lettuce.

  Mil: I've washed the bits I'm going to eat.

  Margret: And left the rest for me to wash.

  Mil: If you wash it all, it goes off quicker.

  Margret: So, we'll eat it quicker, then.

  Mil: I don't want to eat it quicker.

  Margret: But I do.

  Mil: Then wash it yourself if you're so bloody desperate to gorge on lettuce. What am I? Your official Lettuce Washer?

  Margret: My last boyfriend was taller than you.

  Etc.

  Fairly standard stuff, clearly, but what you need to realise is something that I can't get across on the page. It's that, as the exchanges switched backwards and forwards between us, there was a kind of bidding war going on with the pitch. It's not just that each one of us upped the volume a little for our turn, but that we also changed the tone by raising our voices so that our reply was about a fifth higher than the one that the other person had just used. It was like two Mariah Careys facing off — pretty quickly, we were having an argument that only dogs could hear.

  I've noticed that this often happens, and I reckon Margret secretly initiates it as a ploy. She raises her pitch, subconsciously luring me to respond. It's tactical. She knows it increases her chances of winning the argument because — when I come to deliver the final, logical coup de grace with great imperiousness and gravitas — I discover I'm doing so in the voice of Jimmy Somerville.

  72

  Margret bought a jacket. The purpose of this jacket, its raison d'etre, was not to provide warmth or woo the eyes or give employment to jacket makers. The purpose of this jacket was to demonstrate to me my place in the world. To provide a medium through which I might gain knowledge — much like the rustling of the leaves at the Oracle of Dodona being a means for discovering the will of Zeus. Only, you know, except with lots more polyester. Margret bought this jacket and placed it on a hanger in the hallway. Later that day, when she judged I had approximately 1,285 things I'd rather be doing, she commanded me to view it.

  She takes it down from the hanger, puts it on and says, 'What do you think?'

  'Well,' I say, 'if you like it…'

  I hear the fire alarm go off and briefly glance up the stairs before realising that the noise is actually in my head.

  'What's wrong with it?' asks Margret. Somewhat challengingly.

  'Oh, you know, nothing in particular,' I shrug. This is factually correct. It is a comprehensively appalling jacket; no particular aspect of its extensive dreadfulness stands out as especially distressing.

  'What… is wrong… with it,' Margret replies, filling in the spaces with facial expressions.

  'Um, well, it's shapeless.'

  'No, it isn't.'

  'OK, then, it's cylinder-shaped. Which is not a good shape. For a jacket.'

  'I like the shape.'

  'Fair enough. Right, I'm going…'

  'What else?'

  'Did I say there was…'

  'What else?'

  'The material is unpleasant.'

  'No it's not.'

  'And the pattern is awful.'

  'The pattern's nice.'

  'And it doesn't appear to fit properly — look at the arms.'

  'That's how it's supposed to fit.'

  'Fair enough, then.'

  'I like it. I'm going to wear it always.''

  'OK.'

  She places it back on the hanger, lets me know I'm a fool and we go on about our business.

  The next day Margret's friend calls round to drop something off quickly. She drops it off (quickly), they (quickly)
talk for four and a half hours, and then she has to dash. Coincidentally, I'm coming down the stairs when Margret is seeing her out. As Margret is by the door she says to her, 'Oh, look, I bought a new jacket. What do you think?'

  'Well,' the friend replies, 'if you like it…'

  Margret returns the jacket to the shop, immediately.

  Immediately.

  73

  Margret: 'Mmm… Is anything in the world better than the feel of fresh bed sheets?'

  Mil: 'Yes.'

  74

  Do you remember the thing about 'Shut up'? It's not on this page anymore but, if you're an old-timer (or, I suppose, on the Mailing List and have read through the stuff that's no longer here) you might recall it. Well, she's sort of at it again.

  I was looking for something that should have been somewhere, and wasn't. I asked Margret where it was, and she said, 'It's in the bedroom.'

  'No, it isn't,' I replied — having just come from searching in the bedroom for about ten increasingly tantrumy minutes.

  'Yes, it is,' she repeated.

  'It's not. I've looked there.'

  An expression of amused indulgence came over her face the subtleties of which I can't quite convey, so I'll have to make do with the description of it as, 'absolutely bleeding infuriating.'