We’d rowed again. Me and the wife. And as usual it was about something as trivial as the distant stars – maybe even more so. Don’t even remember what we were arguing about, to be honest.
Actually that’s a lie. Saying “I don’t even remember” something, that’s just a way of showing how trivial it is. But I do remember, clear as glass. As the motor of my car revs angrily, the subject of the row is swirling violently around in my head, like a grey, steel tidal wave, made of water that just won’t evaporate.
TV. The damn television had started this chain of events, in which I was now driving alone away from my home to God only knew where. But yeah, I’d wanted to watch the cricket – I’d been watching the test all day and it was just coming to an end – when my wife marched in and told me Emily (that’s my daughter) needed to watch a programme for Modern Studies homework. Well, couldn’t we just tape it? Apparently not. Apparently, because I was watching a Sky channel, and Emily’s programme was on a Sky channel, we couldn’t watch one Sky channel and tape another at the same time.
“Tough,” I said. I turned towards my wife and daughter, and for a brief second they seemed to transform – wiry brown hair sprouted all over their faces, like dry sunburnt grass, and their faces became apelike, the bottom of their faces swelling, and I could almost see them beating their chests and hear them “oo-oo-aa-aa”-ing. I continued: “I’m tired and grouchy, and I want to see the end of the cricket, all right?”
But my wife wasn’t finished.
“Tired and grouchy?” she screeched, a bit like a cat when you stand on its tail. “I’ve been working all day, while you’ve been sat here watching TV in your pyjamas! How the hell can you be tired and grouchy? You’ve done nothing all day! You with your ‘sick leave’!” she added with a bit of a sneer.
Obviously, I took offence at the sly jibe towards my illness, and her distinct unreasonableness generally, and the argument simply escalated, getting pettier and pettier, until it finished:
“You refuse to even do the simplest things for me; you wouldn’t even switch the oven on when I called on Thursday so that it was ready to cook by the time I got back! You knew I was in a rush that night! You knew that!” she yelled.
Emily by this point had long departed the sitting room.
“I forgot!” I tried to explain.
“You always forget! You’re just lazy! You knew I was in a rush!”
Oh, her “you knew’s”, they were annoying. Listening to my wife arguing was like listening to a dog whining annoyingly – and then – as she always does – she sticks a “you knew” in there and her whining reaches a sort of ultrasonic, dog-whistle level, becoming truly painful on the ears when it had previously been merely irritating.
So at that point I stormed out to the bedroom, changing out of my pyjamas into normal clothes, and then after descending the stairs, making a big fuss about taking my coat and scarf off of the hooks by the front door and putting both items on. My wife simply stood, pale, in the sitting room doorway, arms folded, lips pursed, sealed like an envelope. And that was that. I got in my car, started the engine, and drove off, my hope being that a good drive would calm my anger. For God’s sake, it was only cricket!
Now, here I am, pulling into a restaurant car park. It’s going to have to be a meal for one. Yippee. But then I think to myself … this is freedom, isn’t it? My first taste of freedom for an extremely long time. I should enjoy it while it lasts, and I certainly deserve it, having to put up with all the stupid, niggling, wriggling little monkey arguments in my home. Everyone’s at it, even the three year-old boy (my son, Harry)! I’m fed up of being tied down to such a bunch of moaning whinging whining monkeys. It was different when I was young, I sure know that much. Our (me and my brother’s) father only had good things to say about us when we were kids, and he and my mother never bickered, and she always had breakfast and a have-a-good-day-at-school kiss ready for us in the morning, and me and my brother tried hard at school and got good grades, and we were more of a traditional family, all our square meals eaten together at the dining table, with no television distracting us, and we could actually communicate and chat about how our respective days went.
But my family – they wouldn’t know a pleasant normal family conversation if it beat them across the head with a DVD player. My wife moans and moans, always worrying, worrying about money, worrying about Emily, worrying about Harry, worry about my fathering of Emily and Harry, worrying about Emily’s treatment of Harry, worrying about if she under-mollycoddles Harry or over-mollycoddles Emily, my God, even worrying about Christmas. As if a slightly lacklustre turkey or present or tree will ruin yuletide festivities worldwide. I’m fed up.
“How many for?” said the waiter politely at the front door of the restaurant.
“One please,” I said, thinking this a little obvious.
I got seated and ordered some onion rings for a starter. My mind wandered to the fact that I had had nearly three weeks off work this month. You see, I work for an insurance firm, which is really quite tedious. We spend our time ripping people off. I’d had some back trouble, so my doctor had given me a sick line, and I’d got two weeks off on sick leave.
At the end of two weeks, the firm called. Now I’ve always found the old saying “Honesty is the best policy” to be rather impractical. My back was perfectly fine, but I managed to blag another week’s extension on my leave from the doctor, which I’m sure disgruntled the firm but to be honest, I couldn’t care less. To be honest, I was never that good at being honest.
So I’ve been sitting in front of the television complaining of imaginary back trouble for three weeks now – what a holiday! The only downside is that I don’t get this leave completely paid; it’s only half-pay after the first week. Bit of a nasty company policy, that, but what can you do?
My main course comes, and as I tuck into my steak and caramelised onions, I think that this steak is nowhere near as good as my mum used to make. It’s too tough, almost as if the restaurant don’t want you to eat it. The ones my mum used to make were so tender and juicy you could almost here them shout “Over here! Over here and eat me!”
Suddenly I’m sitting in my place at my family’s dining table forty years ago. Mother brings the dinner out and she places a steaming plate of steak, roast potatoes and carrots in front of me, wordlessly. The first thing my brother does is take one of my potatoes. My father is immediately on his feet –
“Give your brother his food back!” he yells at my brother. “What am I going to do with you? How old are you? You’re 12 for Christ’s sake! Grow up. You don’t take other peoples’ food, especially your own brother’s! Is that clear?”
“Ben did it to me yesterday!” my brother whines, red-faced. I’m Ben, by the way.
“I don’t want to hear it!” My father barks. Then quietly, as if to himself, he repeats: “What am I going to do with you?”
Mother gives Father a questioning look through narrowed eyes, full of reproach and annoyance. If she were to speak, I know it would sound a little like a dog whining. Father ignores her and switches the small black-and-white television on.
I suddenly came back to the present, staring at the practically untouched steak in front of me. The smell of meatiness and hot butter wafted into my nostrils, and it made me hungry. I ate some more, the chewing motion working my brain in the same way it worked my jaw, as I thoughtfully chewed the recollection I had just had and tried to savour its taste. I’m sure the memory had been embedded somewhere hidden, but completely intact, in my brain, like a priceless masterpiece in a locked safe for which I had suddenly remembered the combination. So basically, take back everything I said earlier about my family. We did bicker, and my father didn’t always have good things to say about us, and my mother could be catty, and my father had been known to switch the old television on while we were eating, mainly when he was irritated or bored with the conversation.
I cut into the centre of my steak and a stream of crimson-brown blood streamed out like a worm. I groaned. When you order well-cooked you get medium, I thought. When you order medium you get rare. I never had that problem with my mother’s steak. My mind crept back to the day I had just revisited forty odd years ago.
Black white and grey football players are running around the pitch on the television screen, and they seem to me to be running in fast-motion, in that old-fashioned comic way. I squint at the score. It’s England – two, West Germany – two, and extra time is starting. I remember that it’s the World Cup Final today, only fifty odd miles away in London, and the first time England have ever been in the final.
“David,” my Mother asks tentatively. “Could we perhaps watch my cooking programme? It’s just, I always watch it but I’ve missed it all week because of the damned World Cup.”
In my head, I scoff. Turn off the Final for a cooking show? Ridiculous! But my father does. He shrugs and changes the channel wordlessly.
I rocket back to the present. My steak was getting cold. My God! I’m on half-pay and I’m spending almost twenty quid on a fourteen-pound steak? I’m a pig! I’m an ape! My Father was willing to turn off the 1966 World Cup Final for my mother’s cooking programme, and yet I didn’t have the selflessness to turn off a cricket friendly for my own daughter’s education?
Bizarrely, my eyes fill up with tears. What am I doing here? I moaned earlier about my wife getting in a strop when it was only cricket, but who was the one who grabbed his coat, scarf and car keys and stormed out of his house? For a moment I saw that row from my wife’s point of view. She was staring incredulously at a large, overgrown ape in pyjamas, jumping around on its knuckles and screeching and beating its chest, screeching something about back pains. I groaned inwardly, a moment of ghastly realisation, the sudden impact of a spanner crashing into my head, the second where I realise what a great idiotic baboon I really am. I paid for my meal, left the restaurant, and started the car.
About fifteen minutes later I pulled into my home’s drive. My first taste of freedom was over. Thank God, because I felt more free here anyway. My daughter Emily was sitting on the sofa waiting for me; she looked exhausted.
“Daddy, you and mummy had a row,” she said, her lip trembling.
“I know,” I sighed. “She’s in the bedroom?”
Emily nodded. “What are you going to say to her?”
I smiled and sat next to her. “I’m going to tell her I was an idiot. Because I was.”
Emily giggled. “You definitely were!”
I raised my eyebrows, and she laughed again.
“Let’s get you to bed,” I said. We slowly climbed the stairs hand in hand.
My wife has a name by the way. I’ve been going along telling this little story without acknowledging my wife as anything other than “my wife”. But she deserves a far higher title than merely that of the wife of a foolish buffoon. She has her own name, her own identity, and she’s far more wonderful than me, and far more beautiful than anyone. She’s Rose. And she’s the most un-ape-like woman I know.