Page 6 of Seven Rules for a Perfect Marriage

‘You didn’t?’ I ask, trying to work out how she could possibly be upset with me when we’ve just put on a storming performance.

‘The only thing I asked you to do for today was to write a speech.’

‘I did write a speech.’

She gives me an icy look. ‘No. You repeated your speech from our wedding.’

‘People seemed to like it,’ I protest.

‘But that was supposed to be special. Private. Not something you trot out at events.’

I can’t hide my look of surprise. For some reason, I couldn’t say why, this irks me. Actually, it does more than irk me. It makes me angry, something that whenever possible I try to repress, lest I give into it and never stop shouting. If I get it wrong even when I get it right, then honestly, what’s the point in trying?

‘You’ve got quite a nerve talking about integrity, let alone lecturing me about trying to keep things private,’ I snap.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You’d share our bowel movements if it was going to get us more followers.’

She gives me a look which I think is supposed to convey disappointment. Time was, I would have done anything to make that look disappear, to have her approve of me again. But since we’ve been in full Seven Rules territory, spending every day together writing, editing, rewriting, and thenevery minute together promoting the thing, it seems like her disappointment has become an increasingly constant companion of mine. We do an event and I answer a question wrong. She asks me to take a picture of her and then groans at the image. I turn the air con up too much at the hotels we stay in or I pack the wrong things to wear. I hum too loudly when I’m getting ready, fall asleep reading and leave the light on, have holes in my socks, still wear a pair of pants with Scottie dogs on them that I bought in 2008, the list goes on. And on. And on. And the volume of the criticism is such that I’m increasingly less inclined to care. She picks her phone back up and returns to editing the picture of us, my arm around her waist, her eyes cast lovingly up at me. We don’t speak for the rest of the journey.

When we get home, Jess puts a sheet mask on her face which makes her look like a burn victim. She spends the evening watching something brain-rotting on the massive TV while I wander around the kitchen looking for something I can meaningfully contribute. But it’s all clean and ordered by the sweet Eastern European woman who comes twice a week. I pick up books and try reading them, I scan theNew York Times, and eventually, when the silence and the boredom and the atmosphere in the house is too much for me to tolerate, I retreat to bed on the pretence of wanting an early night.

‘Good idea,’ Jessica says, clearly pleased that I’m going to piss off and stop wandering aimlessly around the house. ‘The car’s coming at five-fifteen tomorrow morning. It’s literally just the breakfast TV show, and then the residential retreat, and then we’re done with publicity for the book and we can go back to our normal life. Okay?’

I pause for a fraction of a second, wondering if this might be the moment to tell her that I’ve been thinking about emailing my old boss and asking about getting my old job back. She notes my hesitation and misreads it. ‘It’sMorning Chattomorrow,’ she tells me.

‘I know,’ I snap, harsher than intended. I don’t want to snap at her, I’ve just never been tired like this. Back when I worked as a producer, I’d happily work the night shift and then stay into the morning to work on the show for the next day. Maybe it’s getting older, but I’ve never felt drained like this before. Obviously I can’t tell Jess this, because she’ll make some comment about this not exactly being another day down the coal mines.

‘You didn’t know about the bookshop today, so forgive me for assuming—’

‘I’m going to bed, I really don’t feel like doing this,’ I explain.

‘I don’t think just walking out—’

‘Rule one.’ I cut her off, realising that I’ve got a trump card to play. ‘Don’t stay up arguing.’ And before she can mount a calm and reasonable complaint about me pettily citing the rules, I’ve closed the door behind me and I’m standing in the hall, wondering why I spend so much of my time being pretty bloody horrible to someone I love. In a couple of weeks’ time all this book stuff will be over, and we’ll be able to get back on an even keel, and honestly it won’t be a moment too soon. I’ve been living for the moment that this mad good fortune, and the not-insubstantial money it brought with it, can buy us some peace. A morning drinking coffee in bed with Jess, a long walk and a pub lunch at the expensive place with the decent roast, ashared crossword and a bottle of wine. All the stuff which makes us perfect together.

The First Fight

Jack

From the moment that Jessica gave me her email address, I haven’t stopped thinking about her. Every time my mind isn’t occupied by something else, and often when it should be, my imagination drifts to her standing in the street outside the exam room, a halo of red-gold frizz against the sun, agonisingly beautiful in a short silk skirt printed with little elephants and a white T-shirt which left a band of skin exposed below her navel. Fortunately this fixation is just about permissible, because Jessica Richards is still very much in my life.

I’ve spent the last eleven months living in Oxford. She’s been home in Surrey. So we’ve emailed each other every single day for a year. We’ve tried to meet up before, but her mum has been so ill that leaving her wasn’t an option. A few weeks ago, I walked over to the college IT room to start on an essay and I had an email from her, telling me that she wanted to come and see me.I’d like a change of scene, she wrote.I just want to do something fun. I want to feel normal.

So it has become my sole mission in life to make sure that I deliver something fun, and something normal. But I’ve already hit a stumbling block: the sleeping arrangements.

Because I’m doing my master’s, I don’t live in one of the colleges – instead I’ve got a double bed in a shared house on ShipStreet. It’s nice. Central. But it’s not huge, and there isn’t a sofa. In films, whenever a man and a woman are forced to share a bedroom, the man gallantly says ‘I’ll take the sofa’ and then somehow their sexual tension is so magically palpable that they just end up having sex anyway. I don’t have a sofa, not in my room and not in the house – the landlord sacrificed the living room to make more money off another bedroom. So, I’m going to have to sleep on the floor. But if I’m going to sleep on the floor, then really I need an air mattress because the floor is covered with that sort of hard plastic carpet that they put down in primary schools, presumably because while it is technically a carpet, it’s very easy to clean if someone is sick on it. To be honest, it’s probably on the floor of this student house for the same reason. So in a non-bed-sharing timeline, the air mattress is essential. The question is when to inflate it.

Blowing up the aforementioned air mattress means plugging in the pump, and then waiting what would inevitably feel like thirty-five minutes for it to inflate. It’s about as awkward of a moment as you can create, and if I’ve screwed up the date so badly that she definitely doesn’t want to have sex with me, I think watching this air mattress inflate might actually finish me off.

I could pre-inflate it, of course. But then when she arrives, she’ll see it, and either think that I don’t want to have sex with her (about which she would be very, very wrong) or that I’m such a colossal loser I couldn’t even bet on myself persuading her to sleep with me.

There’s also another minor detail, which is that I haven’t actually fully, technically, completely, had sex before. So it’s possible that I’m using the air mattress as a bit of a distraction from my embarrassing status as a 22-year-old virgin.

I’m standing over the uninflated mattress when the doorbell rings. I don’t move; it’ll just be Claude’s Amazon delivery of protein powder. When I’d told him that I thought Amazon onlydid books, he’d laughed for about half an hour. The bell rings again and I sigh in frustration. Clearly, no one in this house realises that I am wrestling with the single most important decision anyone has ever made. I go downstairs, still in my school PE shorts and KONY 2012 T-shirt, and throw the door open. But standing on the doorstep isn’t a delivery driver. It’s a girl. A woman. A person somewhere between girl and woman. She’s got green eyes and red hair and she looks so beautiful, so glamorous and so familiar that for a second I think she must be famous.

‘I got an earlier train,’ she says. ‘And then I realised that was probably really inconvenient and really rude, but I was already on my way here, so I just—’

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