The registrar opened a screen and clicked and typed her way down a list of questions. I was ‘giving notice’ of our intention to be married after a statutory 15 days had passed. It was the day before Christmas Eve.
‘Has either of you been married before?’ she said. (She was tired and distracted. So many elderly people had died in this recent cold snap, she’d told me earlier, she was run off her feet.)
‘No,’ I said.
‘Your partner’s full name?’ she said, fingering her mouse. For a split second, before it came to me, my mind was a blank. The registrar eyed me speculatively as she touch-typed.
‘And her date of birth?’
Cow Girl was Pisces, I knew that much. I knew because I’d checked in an astrology book to see whether Pisces women are compatible with Aquarian men. (It’s a recipe for disaster, apparently.) I picked a date in March at random.
‘And do you have £33.50 with you?’ she said. ‘I do,’ I said.
She oscillated the mouse and settled the cursor on the completion button. Before she made the final click, she looked at me, her face wearied by death, and said kindly, ‘You’re both sure you want to go ahead with this?’
I stared at the carpet.
Nearly 600 emails had passed between us, 400 before we’d seen each other. We’d met three times, each time at the same spa hotel. Before our first meeting, I’d told her to feel free to straighten me out with criticism. I’d been on my own for too long, I said, and might not be entirely fit for purpose. But I hadn’t expected the litany of complaint and derision which followed, and which intensified on each subsequent occasion.
Bed was fine. No complaints there. Well, there was one thing, actually. My kissing technique was rubbish. ‘No tongues!’ she’d exclaim crossly, even when she was tied up. And why did both my public and private kisses always have to culminate in a mauling frenzy? We weren’t teenagers, were we?
But when we were up, dressed, and out and about, everything about me annoyed her. I had to start a list and keep a pen handy. I smell — usually of body odour, though occasionally of chip fat. That was top of the list. I’m deaf and blind. I can’t remember anything. I’m lazy. I lack ambition. My jeans are too short. I need a haircut. I talk too much. I talk too little.
At breakfast at the hotel one morning, I’d strolled back to the table from the buffet with a mini-croissant sticking out of my gob. She didn’t like that. That went straight on the list. And there is that silly little dance that I do when I see her — think Hitler’s jig outside the railway carriage in France in 1940. That’s on there. Then she didn’t like the way I greeted the women on the reception desk. My voice was too high-pitched, she said. It had made her cringe with embarrassment. So that’s on there, too.
When I asked her why the criticism was so biting, she said it was because of her disappointment at the difference between my writing voice in the emails, which she’d loved, and my real self, which she liked hardly at all. I was rougher than she’d imagined. She’d pictured someone more civilised and articulate.
I looked at the carpet and thought about the list of criticisms I’d started about Cow Girl. A mild objection to her using my electric toothbrush to clean out her navel was all I had written down so far. Oh, and the bloody cats, Bobby and Sammy. Bobby Cuddles and Sammy Jack are Cow Girl’s sun, moon and stars. She has a selection of clips on her mobile phone of Sammy and Bobby play-fighting, or of her disembodied hand tickling Bobby’s tummy. (Sammy doesn’t like having his tummy tickled quite so much.) She’s played some of them to me in bed. When we are living together, she says, I’ll be able to tickle Bobby’s tummy too. If we go through with it, I expect her ‘boys’ will be there at the marriage ceremony, cradled in her muscular lap-swimmer’s arms.
Finally, the one and only Sufi proverb I know entered my mind. It says: If two horses come galloping by, the first called Happiness, the second called Unhappiness, why not leap on to the back of the latter?
I looked up at the registrar’s exhausted face. ‘No, I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘But what the hell.’
She clicked the mouse. My notice was given. ‘That’ll be £33.50, then,’ she said.
Comments