MindReader and I carved a pumpkin.
Because we are a COUPLE 
.
I have an exam in less than 12 hours which involves CALCULATIONS!
“What should I do what should I do what should I do,” I chunter into MindReader’s ear. Whilst dressed as Tinkerbell. At a party.
“What what what?” he says.
“Should I take my pill at 10 or 11pm?”
“What time do you normally take it?”
“11.”
“11 then,” he says, his expression neutral. Although he is wearing a red feather around his head (did Peter Pan wear an Indian headband anyone?)
“But the CLOCKS GO BACK,” I hiss, MindReader probably not realising what an issue this is.
There is the recognition I love so well.
“I see,” he says, his face melting into a smile. “Take it at 11 anyway,” he says, patting my knee.
“But – that’s either an hour early or an hour late!”
“Yes. But it doesn’t really matter does it?”
“I wonder how many people have got pregnant because the clocks went back?” I say, imagining the horror.
“I’d go for none.”
More honest (beware: long!)
At first I thought it might be infatuation.
I was obsessed with his bum, and the way his shoulders curved when he walked. I noted his blond eyebrows, lopsided smile, the way he bit his lip sometimes when he would look at me across a room and I would suspect he was thinking about me.
I didn’t feel any of the empathy I felt for Mike. I remember the first twinges of that with Mike; one night us and our housemates all cooked, pizza and garlic doughballs, and Mike stood on one. The garlic spurted all over his socks and he looked so embarrassed as he tried to clean it up that I cried. We forever called it my irrational doughball moment but it was pure empathy.
I thought it might not be like that with MindReader. For it was so soon and so sudden and Mike was so in the forefront of my brain that he was often all I could talk about. I thought the 5 hour long phone calls with MindReader, the hours lingering on platforms of Birmingham New Station Station only pointed to some obsession that I had to get out of my system.
It didn’t change in an instant; these things never do.
I started to notice the way he listened. Not just when I ranted and moaned about work, law, housemates, but when I didn’t realise he was listening. So he would surprise me with things he knew I liked, mannerisms I didn’t know I had, and he tapped into my deepest neuroses so fast that I found myself telling him things only a few select others know, and found he knew exactly how to respond even if it was with constant reassurances that I did not have alopaecia and that the world wasn’t going to end.
I noticed his delight in me. In psychotic moments and blonde moments, and spider moments, he smiles, only half his mouth curving up sarcastically. He delights in my obsession with music lyrics, listing my top five everything, even, he says, at 4 in the morning in Stanstead airport. It is amusing to him how messy I am, how I warn him I will never be tidy. He understands my disgust at poncy rich people, and my ultimate desire to be just like those pashmina-wearing-M&S-shopping types. He knows to not ask me to watch him play football as his friends would call me a WAG, yet would not be surprised if it was my life ambition.
He wants to know everything, and his insistence is often overwhelming.
He nests with me; fluffing pillows and turning the heating up and watching movies. He likes late-night coffee, always with chocolate, because it doesn’t give him palpitations like it does me. He is, I joke, a football thug, a sports enthusiast. But, he cooks, tasting herbs grown in his garden, says things like bok soi like they are every day words. He says he is a-party-political, yet has a degree in it and can shoot my arguments down in seconds, without thought. And yet, he can do that ridiculous Ali-G wrist snapping thing with his hand, which suggests he taught himself how.
He is fashionable. He talks about what goes with what, and wears ridiculous stripey tops which I maintain are slightly camp.
We do not talk about law that much; it is not something I feel we have in common because I have sold my soul to a corporate firm and he has not. However when we do it is strangely in depth, political, where he thinks it’s all going. And random – in between a starter and a main, whilst he was fixing my lightbulb.
He’s well travelled. All over Europe in 5 weeks, right to the hardests parts like Belgrade. He often starts anecdotes with In Macedonia, and yet, the stories are more often about how he overpaid for a towel or what the train station looked like.
His hair goes curly at his neck when it gets too long, and his freckles all multiply together in the sun.
His bag strap broke last week, and he looked so poor and hard working in his big duffel coat that I cried.
Never have I had to use dictionary.com so much for a blog entry
“It would have to be a church with just the one aisle,” L says. “My church at home has two and it’s confusing.”
I am in the pub with Very Old Housemates and I am definitely NOT Talking About Weddings and Being Girly.
“Mine does at home, too,” A says, lining the beer mats up on the table. “It has the bit with the nave,and then – “
She pauses and looks at me. “That’s the main bit, Billygean,” she says.
“Thanks,” I say, pleased of the idiot-proofing. “Isn’t a nave something else…?”
“A knave with a K is,” A says. “You know,” she says, singing, much to the disgusted looks of pub onlookers, “A kestrel for a knave…”
I stare, completely baffled. “Thanks, that’s really helpful,” I say.
“Thought so.”
Will I always be the disorganised counterpart in any relationship?
I stretch languidly under the duvet. It is 7:30am.
MindReader pulls a shirt over his head. And then a jumper. He looks rather gorgeous.
“I’ve not seen you in your work clothes before,” I say, acutely aware I slept in a food-stained hoody.
“No?” he says, rubbing gel through his blond hair.
“No,” I say, sitting up and shamelessly admiring him.
He catches me and laughs, the smile lines deep around his mouth.
“Come back to bed,” I say. “It’s so warm…”
“No, we have to go,” he says, checking his watch. “You have 11 minutes or you won’t get a lift to the train station.”
I sigh and fall back onto his pillows.
“I’m going to make coffee,” he says. “Meet me downstairs in 5 minutes?”
“Why?” I say.
“Because we have to leave and that’s where the door is.”
Twins
“So how was your weekend?” Doctor-Sister says to me on the phone in our separate baths, as usual.
“Good,” I say. “Saw Othello on Friday night, went to pub Saturday and MindReader took me to Ikea on Sunday!”
“Ooh,” she says. “Buy anything nice?”
“Yes. Something WONDERFUL.”
“Go on.”
“It’s a wooden picture frame with three lions inside! I saw it and had to have it. And it was only twenty quid. It’s just like your monkey one,” I garble. “I told MindReader I would be just like you and Sister’s Husband with my modern animal pictures everywhere!”
Doctor-Sister goes very quiet. “Is it three lion heads in a row?” she says.
“Yes.”
“Is one of them upside down?”
“Yes.”
“Billygean,” she says. “I own that!”
“Oh!”
Suddenly my statement of being just like her has a creepy edge to it.
And then I remember -
“You know the photographer?”
“Mattias Klum?” she says. And then pauses. And then – “did you think that was the Latin for lion, too?”
“Yes!”
One of my biggest regrets about my last crisis was not blogging it. So here goes.
“I think,” I say, my voice small, “that I need to move home again.”
MadFather is absolute non-judgement as we drive through the night, my stuff packed all around us. Indeed, instead of talking, he fills the car with music, hands me his hankerchief.
The drive is so familiar to me, my hands in knots, watching my phone, my mind going over and over decisions I’ve had to make, that I almost cringe. Was it really 6 months ago that I made this same, shameful drive home, to my Dad’s where it’s safe?
The first night was nothing like this one. That night, on the way home for Easter, the rain was black, and the garden smelt damp and fresh as I got out of the car, but my mind was lifted, knowing somewhere in me that breaking up with Mike was the right thing to do.
It was the second drive, a mere three weeks later, that was so painful. The sun was shining, ice creams melting in the back of the car as I’d stuffed my Birmingham freezer ready for the exam period. And suddenly, I had to move out. Mostly through my fault, through liking – indeed, unable to contain myself – someone too soon, for being too blatant, for not changing my email password, perhaps. But also through his fault: for not realising what his aggression did to me, his anguish, for not simply leaving me alone.
And this drive, although raining and dark, is much more like that one. The housemates took the decision to heart. As, I suppose, anyone would. But that didn’t stop their words cutting me like knives.
I thought I understood people.
I don’t.
More pedantic than me
MindReader nudges my arm as we climb the industrial-looking stairs in the law school. The fire alarm is ringing incessantly. This bothers me less than you would think because a) it got me out of interviewing and b) I got to see MindReader for five minutes, which is quite a lot by our standards.
“Look,” he says, gesturing to the wall.
There is a switch. And a light.
The sign under the light says:
“If pushed, the button will come on for a reasonable amount of time (not long)”
He smiles down at me. “You know you’re in law school, don’t you?”
