Love and Other Near Death Experiences

by Mil Millington

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

A fantastically funny, bittersweet story of second guesses and second chances.

Rob Garland is getting married in two months. Oddly, however, this is the least of his problems. More vexing than the seating arrangements, the choice of wedding stationery - more even that the savagely obscene expense of everything - is the fact that Rob should be dead: and he knows it.

Faced with an ultimatum from his girlfriend to either sort himself out, or call the wedding (and the whole relationship) off, he sets about trying to come to terms with how it is that, somehow, he's still inexplicably breathing. After pouring his heart out to the listeners on his late-night radio jazz show, he soon finds himself teamed up with others who really ought not to be alive, but who - for random, meaningless and, frankly, stupid reasons - unaccountably are. And that's when things become yet more worrying: because it turns out that their search to understand why they've each remained oddly alive might very well end up killing them all.

Love, death, religious beliefs, existential angst - Love and Other Near-Death Experiences is a jack-knifing comedy about those things which should be no laughing matter.

Release date: October 6, 2011

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 352

Sample

‘Silver or gold?’

‘Silver,’ I replied. ‘Or gold.’ I peered hard at the samples in the catalogue again. ‘Or silver.’

‘Which?’ asked Jo.

‘Which do you like?’

She sighed. ‘I want to know which lettering you like. I’m not sure.’

‘Me neither.’

‘Come on, Rob, I can’t do this all on my own.’

I peered even harder at the catalogue of wedding stationery.

Why did we need to have place cards printed for the guests at all? Couldn’t we just use Post-its or something? Or even let people sit wherever they felt like. I understood that the heel of hundreds of years of finicky tradition was on our throats at the church (put an aunt in the wrong pew and the whole place might explode into a brutal chaos of arguments, jostling and unfathomable hats), but the reception didn’t need to be so tightly policed, did it? We didn’t need to decide about every single detail of every single thing, surely?

‘Couldn’t we just use …?’ I began. Jo’s eyebrows climbed higher and higher up her forehead as she waited for me to complete the sentence; finally, they reached an elevation that seemed to say, ‘If the next word out of your mouth is “Post-its”, then you’ll die where you’re sitting.’ I waggled my hands about a bit. ‘… ushers?’

‘For God’s sake, Rob – be serious.’

I imagined my face looked pretty serious already, but, for Jo’s sake, I took a shot at getting it to look more serious still.

‘This is the biggest day of our lives, babe,’ she went on. ‘Everything should be perfect – we won’t get a second chance if we get it wrong. Let’s get everything sorted in good time so there are no last-minute panics.’

‘It’s only just October. We’ve got nearly another three months yet. I mean, we could panic six weeks from now and it’d still be OK, wouldn’t it? It wouldn’t be anywhere near the last minute, even then.’

‘Silver or gold, Rob?’

‘Ohhhh, I—’

‘Just say which one you like best.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You must know.’

‘Why? Why must I know? You don’t.’

‘I do. I know which one I like best. I simply want to see if you like that one best too.’

‘I’m easy. Let’s just have the one you want.’

‘But I want to have one we both like.’

‘Well, which do you like?’

‘I like them both.’ She shrugged. ‘But I prefer the silver.’

‘Phew.’ I relaxed. ‘Me too.’

‘Do you? The silver? God – why?’

‘What? What do you mean, “Why?” The same reason that you like it, I suppose.’

‘I don’t like it. It’s awful. I like the gold.’

‘But you just said you liked the silver.’

‘I was testing you.’

‘Testing me? Why would you test me? Why would anybody do that? Why would anybody test someone over the colour of the lettering on a wedding-reception place card?’

‘Because I wanted to see if you liked the same thing, or if you were just going along with what I wanted.’

‘What does it matter? What … hold on – why did you say “Silver”, then? How did you know that to “test” me, you’d need to pick silver?’

‘Oh, it’s obvious. I know you, babe – I knew you’d prefer the silver.’

‘Christ all shitting mighty! So you knew what you wanted, and you knew what I wanted too – and yet we’ve still been sitting here for the last thousand years having this discussion. Why are we having this discussion?’

‘Because I want to discuss the wedding with you: it’s our wedding. When two people are getting married, they should both be sure about everything, shouldn’t they?’

‘Jesus.’ I closed my eyes and slapped myself on the forehead: astonished at how, despite my best efforts, I was unable to escape this conversation. A decision that I – that even I – hadn’t seen coming, now had me in its jaws and wouldn’t let go. ‘Jesus.’

When I opened my eyes again, Jo was looking down at the catalogue far too intensely, even for her. She’d tilted her head so that curtains of gently layered, mousy-blonde hair had fallen forward to cover her face: she was hiding in her bob. I let out a long sigh.

‘I’m sorry. It’s just, you know … Jesus.’

‘I … It’s not just about the lettering, Rob. I thought that doing it might help too.’

‘Help?’

‘You know, babe.’ She looked up and laid her hand on my leg. ‘Help you.’

‘What are you talking about?’

I knew what she was talking about.

‘Just,’ she said, ‘that … well, that it’d help you to work your way back up. Like lifting weights or something. You begin with light things and it builds up your strength; then you can move on to the heavier stuff. And so on.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

I knew what she was talking about.

‘I thought it might help if you … oh, I don’t know. If you “eased yourself in” with some unimportant decisions.’

‘There are no unimportant decisions. How many times do I have to explain this? That’s the whole bleeding point – there are no unimportant decisions.’ Already, I could feel myself getting angry.

‘Right … So we’ll go with the gold, then,’ Jo said, after sitting there for a few moments of watching me try to get my breathing under control. ‘The gold.’ She grinned. ‘I don’t suppose you’d like to pick a font?’

‘You sod.’ I laughed, and it washed some of the tension from me.

Jo put down the stationery catalogue, and picked up a different catalogue. Jo had an impossibly extensive collection of catalogues.

‘Have you spoken to Pete?’ she asked, glancing through the pages. (They turned slowly – regally – each heavy leaf causing a slight breeze. I didn’t need to look inside; just the sound of the pages moving told me that whatever was on them was damagingly expensive.)

‘Yeah, you know I have. We went out for a beer last night.’

‘Tch – I don’t mean have you spoken to him generally, you fool; I mean have you spoken to him about the hotel?’

‘About … the … hotel …’

‘About asking the hotel if they could fit another two tables in the reception room.’

‘Oh, right, about that …’

‘Have you?’

‘No.’

‘Rob.’

‘I forgot, OK? We had other stuff to talk about; I got side-tracked.’

‘What other stuff?’ Jo prodded me with a pair of light-blue eyes that she kept in her head for this purpose.

‘Um … well, the beer was a bit suspect, for a start – I remember we had a long debate about whether the barrel needed changing.’ Jo looked like she didn’t quite grasp how this debate could be devilishly complex enough to occupy most of an evening. Jo didn’t spend nearly enough time in pubs. ‘Anyway, you could call the hotel and ask yourself.’

‘I don’t want to step on Pete’s toes – dealing with paying the people at the reception venue is one of the best man’s jobs.’ She nodded reverently towards the mantelpiece. On there was our copy of Arranging Your Wedding, lying where it could be referred to at any time, day or night. It contained a ruthlessly comprehensive list of what had to be done, and who had to do it. To overlook or (unthinkably worse) ignore the edicts of Arranging Your Wedding was not simply careless, it was indecent – your own outraged guests would stone you to death; I had little doubt about that.

‘Ha!’ I replied. ‘Don’t worry about his toes. Pete would gladly offer up the whole of both of his feet for stamping on here. Trust me – you go ahead and call the hotel.’

Poor Pete. Asking someone to be your best man is rather like letting a mate know that you think he is admirably resilient by abruptly pushing him down some stairs. Yes, it signifies that you regard him as a good friend and also think he’s competent and reliable, but it does so by giving him an utterly miserable pile of work to do (the ‘Best Man’s Responsibilities’ section in Arranging Your Wedding dwarfs most of the others). Worse still, you’re compelling him to give a best man’s speech: little can match the misery of knowing you have to give a best man’s speech. It’s a gold star by the male character that the tradition has been endured all this time – imagine the fuss if a woman were told that, just because she happens to be the bride’s friend, she has to stand up in front of a room packed with people – at least half of whom are complete strangers – and give a speech in which she’s expected by everyone to be funny, and original, and risqué – but not so much as to cause offence – and to reveal something embarrassing about the bridegroom – but not too embarrassing; something just embarrassing enough – and then to end on a wonderfully touching note.

As it happens, taking the poisoned chalice of being my best man was an act of even greater than usual nobility where Pete was concerned, because Pete and Jo had been engaged at one point. Oh, it was quite a time ago now – they’d split up well before Jo and I became an item – and I’m not suggesting that Pete still carried a torch for her or anything like that. No, I’m not worried that he’ll break down in the middle of the speech sobbing, ‘It should have been me, Rob – it should have been me!’ (In fact, when I first started seeing Jo, I rather sheepishly asked Pete if he was OK with it. I didn’t really want to ask, to be honest – I’d have preferred to avoid the embarrassment I knew we’d both feel because of my raising the subject – but Jo had insisted I do it, so that she wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. Anyway, he put my mind at rest by the traditional method of (a) saying, ‘What’s it’s got to do with me? We’re not together any more. You are such a poncey twat, Garland,’ (b) our both then getting so pissed that I woke up in a bus shelter, surrounded by Monday-morning commuters, and in a sexually compromising position with a set of temporary traffic lights, and (c) never mentioning it again.) I mean that he can’t help but be aware that, if things had gone a little differently, I’d have been the poor bastard doing the best man’s job for him.

Hmm … if things had gone a little differently. Now there’s a phrase.

Jo gave me one of her looks.

‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll give Pete a call.’

‘When?’

‘Later.’

‘Why not now?’

‘OK, I’ll do it now.’

‘Right.’

‘Right … Mind you …’

‘Erghhh.’

‘No – listen – no, it’s teatime, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Pete’s probably only just got in from work – all tired and sweaty from brutalising sickly English schoolchildren. It’s not really fair to dump another job on him when he’s barely got through the door, is it?’

‘OK. You’re probably right, there.’

‘Am I? Or do you …?’

‘You’re right, there, Rob.’

‘OK. Sorry.’

‘Call him later, babe … but call him tonight, yes?’

‘Yes, I’ll call him tonight.’

I sat in the spare room and looked at my mobile phone. I’d been up there for three hours now. Jo had remained downstairs after tea to, oh, perhaps – and I’m guessing here, admittedly – ‘go through catalogues’, and I’d come up to the spare room to ‘sort out some music for the show tonight’. In fact, I wasn’t choosing music at all; I was just aimlessly sifting through the CDs. Keith, my producer, would have got a playlist together, so there was no need for me to pick tracks. Still, I used to pick them anyway; I’d infuriate him by arriving at the last moment and rewriting his list – enthusiastically inserting songs from my jagged carrier bag full of CDs. Now, I didn’t. Now, I just turned up at the studio and played whatever he’d chosen. Now, I came up to the spare room each weekday evening and moved the CDs through my hands in nothing more, or less, than an unthinking, soothing rhythm – like rosary beads.

I scrolled through the phone book on my mobile. There was Pete’s entry: a key press away. He could be out jogging, though. Pete wasn’t mad, you understand – it was simply that he was a sports teacher. So, he pretty much had to exercise, attend a gym and so on; I wouldn’t like you to think that Pete was the kind of person who jogged for fun. Anyway, I knew he went for a run of an evening, and that he took his mobile phone with him. Suppose my ringing his number alerted a group of thugs to the fact that Pete was carrying it. It was dark, and Pete – though an athletic six foot two – could well be near-exhausted from his run. He’d be alone and possibly in a secluded area of the park too. Hitting the speed dial now might make him a target for a mugging. If I carefully pressed the individual numbers, however, that could allow enough time for Pete to be out of earshot, and thus out of danger, before his phone rang. Or perhaps that would place him in danger instead. Perhaps the group of predatory crackheads lay farther along his path. If I used his phone book entry right now, we’d have finished talking, and he’d have put his mobile back out of sight before he reached the brooding, bellicose junkies … but slow, methodical, manual dialling on my part would mean it was still temptingly in his hand as he passed the drug-addled, disaffected motorcycle gang with their Stanley knives and make-shift iron-railing spears.

How did I know which was right? How do you ever know which apparently trivial decision will remain trivial if you go one way, but will lead to unimaginable horror if you go the other? What are the rules?

‘Bye!’ I shouted, as I began to leave for the radio station.

‘Hey – don’t I get a kiss?’ Jo called back from the living room.

I dashed in – glancing obviously at my watch – and tagged her lips with mine before heading once again towards the door.

‘Did you phone Pete?’ she called to my fleeing back.

‘Mmmrrrrnnommm,’ I replied, reassuringly.

‘What?’ she queried – she was still in the living room, though, and I was in the hallway now. I could pretend I hadn’t heard that. It’s part of Common Law or something: a traditional thing – like the police not being able to try you for the same murder twice, say. If you’ve managed to put a door between you, or you have a tap running, or the TV is on, or you’re reading something, then you can say you didn’t hear. Everyone accepts that. And I was in the hallway now.

‘What?’ she repeated – suddenly standing a few feet behind me in the hallway too; getting there before I’d managed even to open the front door properly. Christ, but she was nippy across a living room when she wanted to be.

‘I … erm …’

‘Rob.’

‘I meant to, Jo, honestly. I wanted to but …’

‘Did you? Did you really want to?’

‘Yes. Of course. Look – I’ve got to go—’

‘No, stay here. We need to talk about this.’

‘I can’t, I have to get to work.’

‘This is important, Rob.’

‘If it’s important, then it’ll still be important tomorrow morning.’

‘I need to get this sorted out now.’

‘I need to leave for work now. Whatever you want to talk about we can talk about later, but the radio station can’t just casually start my show an hour late because I was talking to my girlfriend in the hallway.’

‘Five minutes. That’s all it’ll take.’

‘It’s never five minutes.’

‘What isn’t? You don’t know what it is.’

‘But I know it’s “five minutes” – and I know that whatever you introduce with the words “five minutes” never comes in at under an hour.’

‘OK – just go then! Just piss off and do your show!’ She turned around and stomped back into the living room.

Awww – crap. Now we’d crossed a line. If it had reached the point where she’d told me to go, then I’d genuinely be in the shit if I went. I blew out a lungful of defeated air and shuffled into the living room after her.

She sat on the sofa and ignored me, flicking through a magazine so viciously that she was slapping the pages rather than turning them.

‘What is it?’ I asked, wearily.

She continued to ignore me.

‘OK,’ I sighed. ‘If you won’t tell me what the problem is, then there’s no point my being late for work.’ I turned and began to go back to the front door. ‘I’ll see you tomorr—’

‘Do you still want to go ahead with it?’

Damn. Perfect brinkmanship. It was undoubtedly right on the edge, but my trailing heel was just her side of the door frame, and I was, in any case, still talking (which meant I accepted we were still within talking range). She’d got me.

‘Go ahead with what?’ I replied, leaning back into the room.

‘You know. Go ahead with the wedding.’

‘When have I ever said that I didn’t want to go ahead with the wedding?’

‘Maybe you’re scared to. Or, um … embarrassed. Maybe you think that you’re obliged to go through with it now; that you’ve had second thoughts, but it’s too late to back out.’

‘Tch.’

‘Maybe the reality of it is finally dawning on you, and you’re frightened of commitment.’

‘Frightened of commitment? Oh, please. Did your brain just get replaced by a Cosmo test?’

‘Some men are.’

‘One in ten million – all the rest aren’t “scared of commitment”; they simply don’t want to commit to a particular woman … and it just happens to be the particular one who’s filling in the test.’

‘You haven’t said, “No”.’

‘OK. “No. I am not scared of commitment.”’

‘You haven’t said that you still want to get married.’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. “I still want to get married.” Satisfied?’

Jo had put the magazine aside. She looked down at her hands and began to turn her engagement ring round and round on her finger. ‘People fake madness to get out of the army.’

‘Is being married to you going to be like a war? Because, if it’s not, then every single bit of that sentence is nonsense. I’m not trying to get out of anything, I’m not faking anything … and I’m not mad.’

‘I didn’t mean exactly—’

‘I’m not.’

(I’m not. Honestly.)

‘Not completely raving – you know that’s not what I meant …’

‘Oh, I see … Only a partial lunatic. Well, why didn’t you just say that? Yes, of course, I’m thirty-or-so per cent deranged, but—’

‘You’re …’

‘Yes?’ (I challenged her with great bravado.)

‘You’re … not like you were.’ (And got what I deserved.)

I ran my thumb along the edge of the door frame, scarring the wood with my nail. The room seemed tight, as though the air in it had hardened around me like a constricting skin: I felt shrink-wrapped.

‘I see things now,’ I replied – quietly, but with a good deal of passion. ‘Things I didn’t see before – things most people tune out to protect themselves.’

‘There you go, babe. That’s what I mean. Who says stuff like that?’ She counted off on her fingers. ‘Mad people, Stephen King characters … who else?’

‘People who see things say it. What am I supposed to do? I’ve discovered something.’

‘Something good?’

‘That’s not the point. Should Captain Cook have kept quiet about finding Australia because we’ve ended up with Russell Crowe?’

‘This is worse than Russell Crowe, Rob.’

‘Well – now you’re just talking nonsense … And, anyway, it’s irrelevant; because you can’t unknow a thing once you know it.’

‘You could see someone.’ I noted that, tellingly, she couldn’t look me in the eye as she said this. She raised her head. ‘You could talk to someone.’ Jesus, she could look me in the eye as she said it. That was even worse. ‘A therapist or something.’

‘I do not need to see a therapist.’

‘You can’t function.’

‘I can.’

She stared at me.

I made a vastly exaggerated ‘What?’ expression. And then jogged on the spot while sweeping the tips of my index fingers out to the side, then in to my nipples, then out, then up to my nose, then back around again. That showed her. I came to a halt and flung my arms wide, triumphantly.

‘I have a number you can ring,’ she said.

I exhaled heavily and let my head drop.

‘My mum gave it to me.’

‘You’ve been telling your mum I’m mad?’ I asked, not very quietly.

‘I didn’t say that. I just said I thought—’

‘Did anyone use the word “mad”?’

‘I—’

‘Did anyone use the word “mad”?’

‘Maybe. OK? Maybe Mrs Williams or someone used it but—’

‘Mrs Williams?’

‘What?’

‘What was Mrs Williams doing there?’

‘She’d come with Susan and Pam and Aunty Barbara – we were discussing the wedding.’

‘Jesus.’

‘What now?’

‘Why don’t you just do a “Rob’s Barking” poster campaign?’

‘It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.’

‘I’m not embarrassed – I’m bleeding astounded. I can’t believe that you’ve gone around telling your friends and family that I’m mad.’

‘Christ!’ Jo stood up. ‘I didn’t need to tell them that you’re mad!’ She sat down again abruptly, lowered her voice, and waggled her finger in the air. ‘Not that you are mad, obviously … I meant I didn’t need to tell them that you needed a little help.’

‘I don’t need “help”.’

‘You lock up, Rob.’

‘Not all the time.’

‘What about yesterday when you stood in Safeway until all the ice cream had melted in the shopping bags because you couldn’t decide which door to leave by?’

‘OK. That was a time I did lock up a bit, yes. I admit that.’

‘I still can’t get the stains out of the cushion covers you bought.’

‘Hey – you wanted raspberry ripple, so don’t blame me for that.’

She began to fiddle with her ring again.

‘Rob …’ She sighed. ‘Look – Rob – this is either some kind of subconscious thing – your way of dragging your feet because you don’t want to get married anymore – or it’s got nothing at all to do with the wedding.’

‘You know it hasn’t. You know what it’s to do with.’

‘OK, OK. Well, if it really isn’t a sign that you don’t want to marry me, then you need to deal with it … or I’m not sure I can marry you.’

She looked up at me. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘I love you, Rob, but we can’t go on like this. I’ve waited – hoping things would improve if I gave you time – and I’ve tried to help you get over it too. But it’s not getting any better, is it?’

‘I …’

No – still nothing there.

‘If you love me, Rob, you’ll do something. Do something. You’re ill. And, before we can go ahead with something as important as getting married, you need to get well.’

I looked down and spoke very quietly.

‘I’m not ill … I just see things.’

I’m not sure where to start. And that’s part of it, you see – where do you start? What moment do you choose? How can you possibly know where the start is? Ffffff … OK, I suppose – just to keep things manageable – I’ll start at the point where I didn’t buy a hotdog.

I’m very fond of the hotdogs you get from those mobile street stalls, and often buy one if I’m passing. I regard them as part food, part heroic trial of one’s mental toughness. They taste great. The task is to focus only on how great they taste: exclude the weak, cowardly thoughts about their being sold to you by someone you’d probably be uncomfortable sitting next to on a train, or that the ‘meat’ in them was surely gathered by blasting the most stubbornly adhesive matter from the bones of animals using high-power water jets; jets wielded, moreover, by the calibre of individual who’d want to do that for a living. It’s a test of will.

Except on this day, I didn’t buy a hotdog. I almost did. As I was walking through town, I saw the hotdog stand and went over to it, fully intending to buy a hotdog, but an instant before I got there a bunch of football fans slipped in just ahead of me. If any one of the four of them had delayed the others – checking he had his ticket, pausing to call goodbye to his girlfriend, hesitating when crossing the road – by even a single second then they wouldn’t have got there first. If their team hadn’t been playing in the city that week, they wouldn’t have been there at all. (I don’t follow football – because I’m not an idiot – but I’m sure the circumstances that led to their team being there on that Saturday were pretty complex and uncertain.)

I sighed, said, ‘Wankers’ to myself and, braving the injustice of it all with great elegance, waited behind them in what was, now (wankers), a queue. I glanced around absently while they individually and collectively struggled with the question of whether they wanted a hotdog or a burger. That’s when I noticed the discount shop just a few yards along. It was one of those places that doesn’t sell anything in particular, but rather sells pretty much everything, discounted. They had some towels in the window: three for a fiver. Yeah, I know, that’s what I thought. Can’t grumble at three for a fiver, can you? I mean, they’ll probably be rubbish, but at three for a fiver they’ll still be good value, right?

Now, I’m not the kind of bloke who’s always on the lookout for bargain house wares, I’m honestly not. But, just that morning, I’d thought, ‘We could do with some more towels,’ as I’d walked, dripping wet from the bleeding shower, around half the bleeding house, trying to find a bleeding towel. Even armed with that information, however, if I’d have been a second quicker to the hotdog stand, then I doubt that the towels would have caught me. They don’t like you going into shops when you’re eating a hotdog, so I’m sure that, had I seen the towels after buying one, I’d not have bothered hanging around until I’d finished it. Even if my attention had briefly flirted with failure and drifted away from the all-consuming taste of my hotdog enough to notice the towels at all, I’d have gone, ‘Oh, towels … Wow! Three for a fiver! I must tell Jo about that,’ and carried on walking. But, as it was, I was standing there separated from my hotdog by four morons who didn’t know what they wanted to eat, and so I left them to it, went into the shop, and bought some towels.

They were rubbish.

‘These are rubbish,’ said Jo.

I was, obviously, prepared for this. ‘They were only a fiver.’

‘You paid a fiver for these?’

‘I couldn’t find any towels this morning.’

‘What? Did you look in the towel drawer?’

(We had a ‘towel drawer’?)

‘Yes. Of course I did.’

‘No you didn’t.’

‘I did. There weren’t any there.’

Jo laughed. ‘Sure.’

‘There weren’t.’

‘Right. OK – let’s go upstairs now and you can show me how you looked.’

‘Don’t be childish. That’s not the issue anyway. We’re discussing these towels.’

‘Yes, we are. You’re taking them back to the shop.’

This suggestion was so preposterous that my voice instinctively went falsetto as I replied. ‘I can’t take them back to the shop.’

‘Take them back on Monday.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Yes you can.’

‘I can’t. I’m driving over to Sedgely to interview Billy “Lips” O’Connell on Monday.’

‘You’ll have plenty of time to take them back in the morning, before you go there.’

‘I can’t take them back – they were a fiver.’

‘So?’

‘So, how does it make me look if I kick up a fuss about some three-for-a-fiver towels?’

‘Make you look to who?’

‘To the woman in the shop. I’ll look like some penny-pinching git.’

‘What on earth does it matter what she thinks? And, anyway, do you imagine that right now she’s under the impression that you’re a sophisticated, independently wealthy playboy? Eh? On the evidence that you came into her shop and bought three towels for a fiver? You surely can’t be afraid that taking them back now will shatter her illusions.’

‘It’s embarrassing.’

‘It’s a fiver. Throwing away money is throwing away money, babe, it doesn’t matter how much it is. And, anyway, I’ve had my eye on some towels, as it happens – I spotted them in the Ikea catalogue. Nice towels. Made from proper material, and not covered with a pattern that requires their labels to include an epilepsy warning. We have enough towels to be going on with until I can get them. We do not need to spend five pounds on rubbish towels in the meantime. Take them back.’

‘I can’t take them back. It’s not just the money … they’re towels.’

Now Jo stared at me with an infuriatingly contrived expression of confusion. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘We haven’t used them.’

I sighed, explosively. ‘They’re towels.’

‘I know.’ The look on her face was holding fast. ‘So?’

‘Oh, come on – don’t take the piss, Jo. You know what I mean. No man would ever return towels. It’s bloody obvious to everyone – if I turn up holding a bag of towels and asking for my money back – that my girlfriend has made me do it. I might as well march in and announce, “Hello, everyone! Yes, that’s right: I’m whipped!”’

Jo roared with laughter. Even worse, she leaned forward and kissed me on the nose.

I gave her my most pleading eye. . .