We had a deal: she wouldn’t tell you about my invisible pet dinosaur, and I wouldn’t tell you she was born a man.
I guess that deal’s blown out of the water, so anything goes now. Not that I’m upset about her
guest blog! I laughed, I wept, I hurled, but most of all I was just impressed that she managed to stick to the English language.
Because speech is a thing that my beloved has trouble with. God knows, she tries. You can’t say she’s not giving it her best effort. She’s a sensitive soul, and I suspect she feels deeply for those poor people who are struck dumb, so she’s doing her utmost to say all the things they want to say. All of them. All of the time. Thankfully she’s got a special way to stop my ears from melting in the onslaught, which is to give me regular “wet willies”, interspersed with loving smacks around the head.
Even performing the wet willy doesn’t silence her. In fact I think her record for being quiet is about as long as it takes her to take a breath, and even sleep isn’t enough to stop her completely. Her nighttime blabbering would keep me awake if it wasn’t for the fact I’m usually already awake because of her mattress fascism.
What, you may ask, is mattress fascism? I’ll tell you. When I first moved out of my parents’ home I got a double bed, thinking that I might lure women into it (I didn’t). But when I eventually did get somebody drunk enough to get in my bed, I realised a double bed isn’t big enough: I’m a stocky fella, and it’s hard to fit a normal-sized woman into my bed with me. So a year or two later I got a king sized, and that seemed to solve the problem. The lucky lady had enough room to sleep off her shame, and I had enough room to sleep off my smugness, and everybody was happy apart from the poor girl who’d just experienced me in the nude.
But the size of bed makes no difference to my little angel, because my little angel is a mattress fascist. She’s determined to invade and take over every inch of the bed, regardless of who it belongs to, and is quite prepared to employ magic to ensure it happens.
Within 30 seconds of lights-out she does something I thought was impossible: she rolls clockwise to wrap herself in the entire duvet, leaving none at all for me; and she simultaneously rolls anticlockwise across the bed, shoving me into a 4-inch wide strip down the edge of the mattress. How can she rotate in both directions at once? Clearly she’s a witch.
Burn the witch!
Her sex face. You can see why I prefer doggy style.
(I could take her into the back garden and burn her with the leaves, although with her skin colour – slightly paler than an albino polo mint – just sending her outside on a sunny day would do the trick, and nobody has to tell the police. Deal?)
So I can look over the body of my beautiful, comely, sweetly-sleeping mattress fascist, and see acres of empty bed, inviting and cool and spacious… and utterly unavailable to me. I’m trapped in the nocturnal equivalent of Gaza, and she’s blockading my sleep. Can’t Kofi Annan do anything about this?
And then the gibbering begins. I’ll be lying there, wide awake, being baked by her hot body (in both senses) squeezing me off the edge of the mattress, and feeling utterly oppressed in my own bed; and she’ll suddenly announce, “motorbike underfelt carnival handbag”, like it’s the beginning of a lecture, and then fart, hit me with her hair, and snore loudly.
I just ignore it now, but the first few times I thought the gibberish meant something. It’s understandable that I would: she’s almost as nonsensical when she’s awake, and half of our time together is taken up by me wrestling with the mangled syntax she hurls at me. (The other half is spent simply wrestling).
You see, she does terrible, terrible things to the English language. Perhaps it’s because she’s a Celt. She was born over here, in leafy, moneyed Cheshire, where she learned to kill foxes, shoot guns and speak in a nice, if highly creative way. But she could barely be more Irish if you found her eating mud in a bog in Donegal with a pig under her arm.
She has that lovely Irish skin too: it’s the colour of the stuff that peels of the bottom of my feet after I’ve spent too long in the bath. And there’s the Irish hair, which responds pretty well to a severe industrial ironing every couple of hours, but left to its own devices manages to look like it was dragged through a hedge and look like the hedge it was dragged through. Clever trick that.
So English might be her mother tongue, but I doubt it’s her grandmother tongue, and in her case her ancestry is taking over her glottis. Throwing caution to the wind, she’s running (with scissors) through the dictionary, cutting-and-pasting as she goes. As a result, she manages to inventerise wordments at every juncticle, like Stanley Unwin after a few too many sherrys, deepjoy.
I may be painting her in a bad light, and I realise this might all sound a bit mean-spirited. But it’s not: she’s actually rather lovely, but in ways that it’s very hard to make any sense of. Examples:
- She recently spent half an hour loudly performing whale-song to my scrotum, in the belief it might make it go smooth. It didn’t, I just laughed so much I wet the bed.
- She lured me into a long confusing discussion about whether it’s possible to smash two ducks together in a vast underground accelerator, at close to the speed of light, in the hope that the collision will produce a high-energy chaffinch.
- She has an odd habit of licking the inside my nostril or, for variety, putting my whole nose in her mouth and blowing until I emit a strangled parp like a tuba being raped. That’s normal, isn’t it? Isn’t it?
- Alarmingly, this future primary-school teacher, who is sensitive to the needs and concerns of our nation’s young, responded to my taunt that she was born a man by shouting “Yeah, and my dick’s bigger than yours too” in front of several 8 year olds.
I believe her about her dick, but my tits are bigger than hers, so it’s swings and roundabouts.
Lots of things about her are quite male, actually. She’s got quite a blokey brain, and surprises me with her knowledge of carburetors, her sense of direction, her hairy back, and her charming habit of lifting one cheek and gurning when she farts, which is often. And then she laughs like a drain, and smells like one too.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s a lovely bottom. It’s got the kind of tiny, imperceptible bouncy wobble that makes my mouth dry up and my nether-regions spasm, and she oscillates it beautifully every time she walks away to commit chemical atrocities in my spare bathroom. It wasn’t a spare bathroom until she started using it, but now I dursn’t go in there for any money. I call the hallway leading to that bathroom “Chemical Alley”.
So there’s a permanent “no naked flames” rule near her, in case you ignite something noxious and burn off her… I was going to say “her eyebrows”, but that’s not quite right. “Her unibrow” is a better expression. Because the other thing about her which makes me think she’s a man – specifically Liam Gallagher – is her solitary eyebrow. It’s like Groucho Marx’s moustache has taken residence on her forehead. She’s getting a strimmer for Christmas.
I’m aware that some people who read this blog are my friends, and are probably concerned for my wellbeing at this stage. I’ve just described a possibly mental, definitely violent, crypto-transvestite fascist furball, who is in control of deadly recto-biological weaponry and knows where I sleep (because she’s the border guard). Not only that, she’s half my age, half my size, twice my speed and twice my kidneys; and as a resident of one of the wealthiest towns in Britain she’s got ample experience of shooting peasants and hunting foxes (and ladies, I’m one foxy peasant, ding-dong). So there’s very little chance of me getting away from her if she chooses to attack.
Me, on date night.
But rest easy, friends: she chooses to attack almost hourly, and so far I’ve survived. Even when she’s being loving and gentle, it somehow often leads to a painful knee to the dangleberries, a bite on the face, a blizzard of tickling and being flicked on the head, or a thorough test of whether it hurts more to be punched in the kidney or in the place where my other kidney used to be. I put it down to her having an enquiring mind, and a penchant for bloodthirsty experimentation.
Example: during a recent motorway trip, she decided to show her affection by squeezing my head as I drove, and in doing so managed to shove her thumb under my eyelid, leaving me blind at 70mph in heavy traffic. This is normal for us. This is every day.
Any trip with her in a car is a risky enterprise, because when she’s not blinding me she subjects me to a torrent of pokes, kicks, tickles, bites to the shoulder and head, and drooling tongues shoved in my ear. Not in a sexual way either: just to annoy me.
So I’m wondering if we’re in love, or in a war. It could be either, but it’s probably both. I’m only telling you this stuff in case I’m found dead one morning: the chances are, it was an accident, but no coroner would come to that conclusion if they found me battered and blinded, with my head covered in bites, freezing in my own bed, and possibly with a thing inserted in my bum and abusive notes left on my bedside table. For the record: all of that is perfectly normal and above-board.
Consider this a legal statement, because when she reads this I suspect I’ll need one.