mood and I know neither is available. I have other buddies but they are either friends Adam and I share (and therefore not useful when I want to let off steam about his inability to grow up and commit) or they are my good- time-only friends (also not useful when I’m steaming).
Jess is on her date and Lisa can never do a spur-of-the-moment night out. She has two kids under the age of three. A night out requires a serious time-line leading up to the occasion and military precision planning on the actual night. She grumbles about the lack of spontaneity in her life but Jess and I refuse to take her grumbles seriously; we both
So, it’s a night in the flat with just the washing up to keep me company – the flat that epitomizes all that is wrong with where I am at, just one week before my thirtieth birthday. Great.
Jess and I have tried to make the flat as stylish as possible on our limited budgets. We regularly visit Ikea and we’re forever lighting scented candles that we buy from the supermarket. However, all our good work can be undone in a matter of minutes if Adam is left unsupervised – in many ways he’s a lot like a Labrador puppy. Because he, and many of his mates, work nights they often waste away a day hanging around our flat. When Jess and I leave for work the place usually looks reasonably smart. Not posh, I realize, but clean and tidy. When we come home it looks like a particularly vicious hurricane has dashed through.
Today the place looks especially squalid. The curtains are drawn even though it’s a bright summer evening. My guess is that Adam and his mates have been watching DVDs all day. A guess that is confirmed when I find several discs flung across the floor, giving the flat the appearance of a bad dose of chicken pox. There is a collection of beer cans abandoned on every available surface. Most of the cans have stubbed-out fag ends precariously balanced on top, which I hate because our flat is supposed to be a non-smoking space. The scatter cushions have been well and truly scattered in messy heaps on the floor (men just don’t get it – cushions are not to be used, they’re for decoration) and I’m annoyed to notice
I draw back the curtains, fling open the window and start to gather up the empty cans and cups. I work efficiently, as irritation often makes me noticeably more competent. Ben has commented that I pull together the most beautiful bouquets just after I’ve had to deal with a particularly tetchy customer. ‘Darling, temper works so well for you. You are a true artist and these lilies are your brushes; this vase your canvas.’ (Ben honestly believes he’s a secret love great-grandchild of Oscar Wilde.) I throw the trainers to the back of Adam’s wardrobe, I put the soiled cushion cover in the wash basket and while I’m there I sort out a quick load of darks and pop a wash on. I wipe surfaces, dust and drag out the vacuum cleaner. It is only once the room is shiny and clean that I allow myself a glass of wine. I think a large one is required.
I carry the goldfish-bowl-size glass of Chardonnay back into the sitting-room, plonk myself on the settee and start to flick through the TV channels. Annoyingly (and predictably, considering my tense mood) nothing grabs my attention. Maybe some music will help. I flick through my CDs. As I’ve confessed, my tastes are mainstream and my CD collection is probably identical to tens of thousands of other women, my age, up and down the
I opt to listen to one of Scottie Taylor’s CDs. Scottie Taylor is, in my opinion, the greatest entertainer Britain has produced ever, and the biggest pop phenomenon we’ve had since the Beatles. I’d never dare make huge sweeping statements about anything to do with the pop industry in front of Adam but I’m on fairly solid ground with this one. For one, Adam is not here (which is why I’ve been driven to drink and the imaginary arms of Scottie Taylor), and for two, this opinion is pretty much accepted as fact. You could ask any woman in Britain, aged between fifteen and fifty, and she’d agree.
Scottie is the man every woman wants to fix and fuck.
He’s an incredibly talented songwriter and vocalist but besides that he’s needy, sexy, beautiful and has the most filthy grin in history. Despite sleeping with pretty much every gorgeous woman in the pop world, plus a fair number of models and film stars, he is resolutely single and as such the perfect fantasy man. Just what I need right now to ease the tedium of being ignored by Adam.
I put on his latest CD and turn the volume up high.
The thing is, it can go either way with music. Sometimes it’s life-affirming and uplifting; other times it can plunge
The hardest thing to bear about my live-in relationship with Adam is not the mess he makes, or the unsociable hours he works, or his lack of focus on his career. The hardest thing is I love him and I have to wonder, does he still love me? That’s why I’m often grumpy and bored. I don’t feel special. I think there’s a serious danger that our love has made a dash for the door. I sometimes think Adam and I are more used to each other than mad about each other. How depressing. The orange glow of an August sunset fills the room with a pale amber hue and yet I feel distinct shivers scuttle up and down my spine.
2. Fern
I can’t help thinking that if Adam loved me as much as I love him, or as much as he used to, or as much as I want him to, or whatever, then things would be different. Things would feel more exquisitely special, distinctly not ordinary. Plus he’d follow basic instructions. I mean he’d stay in on the one night of the week that I ask him to, wouldn’t he? He’d occasionally squirt a bit of Fairy liquid over the dishes in the sink or put his smelly trainers in the wardrobe, wouldn’t he? He’d ask me to marry him.
Wouldn’t he?
There, I’ve said it. It’s out there. I am that pathetic, that old-fashioned, that un-liberated. I want the man I love, who I’ve been with for four years, to ask me to marry him. Tell me, ladies and gentlemen, am I so unreasonable?
Part of me is ashamed that after everything the bra-burning brigade did on behalf of my sex, I still can’t shift the secret belief that if Adam proposed my life would be somehow more luminous, glorious and triumphant than it currently is. I know, I know, it’s an illogical thought. Since his inadequacies are stacking up like the interest on a credit card in January, it does not make sense that I want to shackle myself to him on a permanent basis. The fact that I am irritated he no longer looks me in the eye when he’s talking to me (what am I on about? He rarely
No matter how annoying Adam can be I find I am irrationally besieged by a belief (which grips me with the same severity as religious doctrine grabs some folk) that marrying him will somehow change things for the better between us.
I know, I know. Once again the facts would point in another direction. I’ve never met a woman who can, hand on heart, say this is the case. The vast majority of women insinuate (or openly state depending on their level of inebriation) that marriage only leads to a deepening of cracks in a relationship. Where there was a hairline fracture, throw in a dozen years of matrimony and you find an enormous chasm, a veritable gulf. Even the very happily married tend to look back fondly at the days gone by, the days of dating, when the most monumental decision a couple ever have to make is which movie to see – as opposed to endlessly debating domestic dross. Can we afford a new mattress? Is it worth insuring the house contents? Is it stupidly irresponsible to go with the quote from the
And yet I want a proposal.
I think I need to make it clear at this point that I am not one of those women who always wanted to get married. As a child I owned Airhostess Barbie, not Bridal Barbie. I had no ambitions to endlessly re-enact a marriage between said doll and her eunuch boyfriend, Ken. Nor did I dance around the kitchen with a tea towel tied to my head and a sheet around my waist singing ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’ (although my older sister Fiona did this until she was about fifteen). In fact I spent most of my late teens and early twenties avoiding any sort of proper relationship. I thought a guy was being unreasonably controlling and presumptuous if he insisted on knowing my surname before making a dishonest woman of me. I was a good-time girl rather than a good girl. I never bought into the nonsense that sex was in any way tied up with responsibility, disgrace, doubt, guilt or even love. As far as I was concerned sex was all about hedonistic pleasure and fun – lots and lots of fun. I suppose sexist propaganda would have it that I ought to hang my head in shame, wear sackcloth and frequently beat myself rather than own up to the fact that in my past I’ve rarely dignified any relationship with longevity. But I won’t. I can’t be that much of a hypocrite.
