Free Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About by Mil Millington Page B

Pavlovian.
    Her 'Do the hoovering' had been followed by the clunk of the front door, the soft rumble of the car pulling away and then nothing but a silence in which I sat, pensive.
    I glanced around. OK, the carpets weren't
immaculate
, that was true. They were hardly in such a condition as to demand a hoovering, though. There's a clear point at which a carpet is ready for hoovering, in my opinion, and that point is "when it's crunchy". Even then, it's not what you'd call vital. In lots of the places I've lived, especially as a student, we never had a hoover at all. Sometimes, yes, walking across the landing required snow shoes – but no one ever died or anything. I glanced around some more.
     
    A few hours later, Margret returns.
     
    After unloading around seventy-five new plants from the car, she hunts me down; finding me, by a fluke, sitting in front of the computer.
    'Have you hoovered?' she asks, her tone swaying unsurely between conversational and murderous.
    'What do you think?' I reply. (Cleverly, here, I'm indignant yet inscrutable – only my disdain for the question is clear; I provide no clue at all of the answer to it.)
    'Have you? Or not?'
    'Well, what does it look like?'
    'Just tell me whether you've hoovered.'
    'No. That's not the point.'
    'What? It's
completely
the point.'
    'No, it isn't. You thought the house needed hoovering. If you think it looks OK now, then you're happy, right? Whether I've hoovered or not.'
    'And what if I
don't
think it looks OK?' She pauses for a moment, then adds, 'Or if I smash your laptop to pieces with a tyre jack?'
    'If I've hoovered, and you still think it doesn't look hoovered… then there's no point my hoovering, is there? Ever again.'
    There's a degree of glaring goes on here, but I hold my nerve and continue. 'The only other possibility, as far as I can see, is that you simply can't tell whether I've hoovered or not. And, if you can't tell, then it doesn't matter – in any real sense – whether I've
done
it or not, does it?' I've one more card to play, but it's a great one. 'That is, not unless the thing that concerns you isn't whether the house has been hoovered, but only whether I've been sitting here enjoying myself all this time rather than slogging around with a vacuum cleaner. But I'm
sure
that's not it. I mean, you'd be happy for me to sit here idle for as long as I want, wouldn't you, if there's no need for me not to? It's about the hoovering, not about my sitting here idle, isn't it?'
    Margret just stares at me.
    I am triumphant. A choir sings. Cherubs circle my head, scattering petals. Shafts of golden light fan out from behind me. It's an intoxicating three seconds.
     
    'Clean out the fridge,' says Margret.

89
    Before I start, I feel I ought to mention how sad it is that the Texan readers are no longer with us. As you know, the notoriously irresponsible Supreme Court has seen fit to tear down the safety barrier protecting society and thus Texas is now like a ghost state. Machinery lies idle; offices are silent; the streets of Dallas shimmer motionless in the summer sun. No one goes to work nor chats with friends nor watches television nor even browses the Internet. Because, whooping atavistically that the police are now powerless to stop them, the entire population of Texas has, since last week, been ceaselessly engaged in endless consensual homosexual sex in private so as to bring about the extinction of the vital institution of marriage.
    Oh, and let me make it clear that I'm not just some dull-witted, homophobic idiot here by saying, «it's the children I'm concerned about».
    But anyway – my girlfriend is always trying to take photos of me naked.
    I don't mean that
she
walks around naked (though, God knows, that's true too), I mean that she keeps trying to take photos of me when
I'm
naked. Now, I'm sure that all the women reading this are thinking, 'Well, that's reasonable, Mil. You do, after all, have a languorous sex appeal that frightens and yet,