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up. I’m knackered and I just want to sit down with you for a little while. I’ve been looking forward to this all day.’ I sighed.
‘I know you don’t mean anything by it. That’s the problem.’
‘Jack! Please don’t be a dick about it?’
Jack rubbed his face with his hands. ‘I’m pretty sure if you’d just spent an hour on a boring chore you’d be delighted to hear me calling you a dick.’
‘I didn’t call you a dick! And I thought you liked washing up.’
Jack almost laughed. ‘I don’t like washing up! This isn’t the hugest flat in the entire world, and I like living in a clean and tidy house, so I make sure there’s not dirty laundry and dirty plates and dirty cutlery piled up everywhere! It’s hardly a disorder. So no, I don’t like washing up. I just understand that it needs to be done, and that, unlike some people, I don’t have a magical fairy who comes and does it all while I sit on the sofa and reflect on my day.’
‘Please, I’m sorry,’ I said, feeling sick at how this argument was rolling out of my reach. ‘Didn’t we say we wouldn’t still bicker about chores once we were married?’ I didn’t want to get into a lifetime habit of debating my teabags being dumped in the sink.
‘No one’s waved a wand to make housework go away, Zo. It still needs to be done. It just depends on how much you’re willing to pay attention to that. Because I hate living in a pigsty.’
‘Our flat is always tidy! It’s never a pigsty!’
‘Because I never let it get that bad!’
‘We can’t keep arguing about this for the rest of our lives!’ I yelled.
Neither of us said anything, letting my last comment echo around us.
‘Right,’ Jack said, washing up my spoon. ‘I’m actually pretty tired so I’m going to go to bed now. Are you coming?’
‘I … I need a bit of time to unwind. I’ve only just got in.’
I ended up washing my hair and watching four hours of American sitcoms until my eyes were itching and my mouth was dry.
Another magnificent evening, Zoe. Really well played.
* * *
When I got into school the next morning, Benni was hovering around my desk.
‘Hello, darling. I was just scribbling you a note – it’s that fun time of year, updating all our details for the council’s records!’
‘Oh no, and I didn’t even get you a card.’
‘All you need to do is log in with your work email and make sure everything’s up to date. Yay! Thanks, darling. And … pub after work? Gina’s taking the boys to the theatre. Or—’
‘Don’t.’ I narrowed my eyes at her.
‘I was going to say have you got too much on here, but clearly there’s something else going on. Pub it is,’ she announced before hurrying off.
I decided to get Benni’s request out of the way before I got sucked into the school day. It was simple enough: just as Benni had said, I just had to make sure all my personal and health details were up to date. Name – yes, goddammit, Zoe Lewis – date of birth, National Insurance number, blah blah blah. Oh. ‘Cohabiting’ now needed to become ‘Married’, so I unchecked the cohabiting box, and ticked the married box. Suddenly, half the options on screen were greyed out, and other options popped up below them. What the hell? The whole section on hobbies and interests had become unclickable, but another section had popped up asking how many dependants lived with me. Had I somehow slipped back to 1954? I unclicked ‘Married’ and the boxes ungreyed. Click again, greyed. Married life: children, dinner parties full of painful pointed subtext, the closing in on your inevitable death. Unmarried? You’re probably just into scuba diving, mountain climbing and retaining your will to live. I clicked, unclicked. Clicked. Unclicked. Clicked. Unclicked. All the while watching my options fade in and out.
After a while I realised Benni had come back and was watching over my shoulder.
‘Is someone having an existential crisis?’ I raised a horror-filled face to her as she shook her head in sympathy. ‘You should try telling these things that you’re a female and so is your wife.’
I laughed a little. ‘It isn’t just me, is it?’
She bent forwards and looked closer at the screen, clicking and unclicking as I had. She laughed too. ‘Bloody hell, that is a bit on the nose, isn’t it? I reckon some bitter programmer’s having a small dig. It’ll probably be all over social media in the next half hour. Now, in the meantime, just tell them you’re not dead yet and we’ll leave it at that, ok?’
She watched me send off my details – including a checked ‘Married’ box – and led me into her office for some actual curriculum talk. We had a new exam board and a whole range of different topics to cover in our upcoming parents’ evenings. For the next forty-five minutes, I managed to focus on what she was saying, making notes, and asking questions. But in another part of my brain, I was still simmering, perhaps more than I would have done if I’d not found out the night before that I hadn’t been invited to someone’s weekend away in Ibiza because they’d assumed I wouldn’t go as a newlywed. Sorry!!! she’d texted, I thought you’d want to be with new hubby at the mo ;).
I just … I didn’t understand. It was a choice, wasn’t it? I might know a few people who’d changed their names to match their husband’s when they’d got married, but I didn’t know a single person who’d become a full-blown housebound Stepford Wife. I still dressed the same, I still did the same job. I even had the same friends – or so I thought. It seemed that assumptions would just be made no matter what I said or did, all because I’d signed that piece of paper agreeing to marry Jack.
After the meeting with Benni, I tried to focus for the rest of the day, working through lunch to get my head around the curriculum I’d be explaining to some of our more difficult parents, and to keep myself distracted. By seven thirty, I was starving, and very, very ready to leave.
‘Right!’ said Benni, as I stood in her office doorway. She slammed her laptop shut. ‘Let’s all go and right some wrongs.’
I didn’t stay long – Benni and I only managed to right three wrongs each (if you count ‘wrongs’ as ‘delicious and very strong cocktails’) – and left her, along with Miks, his girlfriend from the English department, and a large bottle of wine, so I could get back to have dinner with Jack, having not seen him much for a few days due to our criss-crossing work schedules.
At just after eight, I had my head, slightly dizzily, in the fridge when Jack came out of the shower.
‘What do you fancy?’ I called through to him.
‘Don’t worry about me, I’m out tonight, remember?’
I didn’t remember. ‘Whereabouts?’
‘Don’t know yet. Just out with friends.’ Immediately, my hackles were up.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I knew I shouldn’t pick a fight, but I needed a way to vent my disappointment at an evening spent apart yet again.
‘I did. Last week. I didn’t realise I needed written permission. I’m just out with Iffy and people.’
‘People? And Iffy who you saw yesterday?’
‘Yeah, people. And yeah, Iffy. I know I saw him yesterday, but it’s a group of us and we’ve had tonight in the diary for ages.’
Hearing myself, I couldn’t help but think of what Jack might be saying about us when they did hang out.
‘So do these people have names?’ I realised I was slurring slightly.
‘Well, this is a delightful conversation.’