Naked Determination

It is a new year. A lot of new things for me in this new year. A new office at work (same size, same view but more cluttered). A new global emperor. And a new house! Well…I have moved into my girlfriends house, so also a whole new world of things to fight about. In fact, the very act of moving in prompted a little fight. I say little because I expect bigger things in life, fights included.

So I move in, and by this I mean I take all my clothes, books and electronic gadgets out of her car and dump them on her kitchen floor, just through the front door. And there it all sat for days, festering a wound in my dear baby’s patience. I was too overcome by triumph to move it any further at all since it took such conviction and fortitude of mind to get it as far as that. It is like when you do the shopping for the month – which is a small palace coup in my world – and you can’t find the strength in you to pack it away into all the cupboards because you think you have come far enough anyway because the food is – at the end of the day (as they say on South African talk radio) – in the kitchen after all.

But then came Happy, who spelt trouble for me and my intransigence. Due on the Monday morning, this qualified engineer from Zimbabwe is Mr handyman-cheap-labour and was asked to rip apart the kitchen floor and put down new tiles. But there lay my belongings in the way, in all their cluttered glory. Before my darling girlfriend went to bed on the Sunday night before she cooed every so seductively into my ear “Don’t forget to pack your stuff into the spare room to make room for Happy”. At that moment I had every intention of lugging my mesh of shirts, USB cables and books into the spare room. But then I realized that I had a stack of music cd’s to rip to my computer and all that concomitant ‘Find Album Info’ to download. That kept me busy until the small hours of the morning and left me in no condition to begin menial labours.

Monday morning came crashing into the bedroom with blinding rays of light through the curtain slits and howling alarm clocks to the background din of automobile traffic marching in file to the cities belly. We both woke up with a start and struggled to find our screaming phones on alarm. Out we jumped, quite or completely naked, and traced the source of the squealing machines. Mine was in a hidden pocket of a pair of shorts under a heap of like-coloured clothing. The effort to find it left me with such a sense of injustice I was obliged to get back into bed. And so back into bed I went. But not for the girlfriend. No. She, I could see by peeping from behind the duvet, was charging up and down the house without any clothes on (her alarm phone was certainly off at this point). I imagined at first that she had suddenly remembered to file her tax returns on-line (I don’t earn enough money to suffer such a burden). Only then I realized what the cause of her labour was. She was carrying my mesh of computer equipment and clothes to the spare room. She was making way for Happy, as I should have done the night before!

This was bad. This was really bad. That she had not even reprimanded me for my sloven behaviour of the night before was testament to how upset she was with me. I saw her again, just then, darting through the corridor with a computer monitor heavy in her embrace, a scowl on her face and not a garment on her body. What was I to do? I thought I had better redeem myself preemptively, else her retribution would be exact and long lasting. Maybe a whole week of disinterest in me and sulking or worse still an extensive day visit to the garden shop warehouse as punishment. I had to brain-storm, early in the day as it was. And brain storm I did. I had an I idea. If I too, I thought, should take as quickly and as thoughtlessly to a labour in the house as she had just done, and show myself to be equal to it, whatever errands the house threw up and be resigned to complete it, I might escape my fate. So I took off my remaining underwear and began to make the bed and make it with alacrity. I threw pillows about the room and flapped the bed sheets until they snapped. I spread the duvet, opened the curtains, packed away the soiled clothes and filed her bounty of shoes into the cupboard neatly. The bedroom was transformed into a leaf from House & Home magazine. I then went on to the offensive and put out the towels for the morning shower and turned on the kettle.

“Oh baby!” she chirped to me as she came into the room. As she did a smile washed away her short lived affliction of the face. I had escaped. But only just. There will be other tests. There will be dishes to wash before bedtime (for instance, NOW) and a car to park in the garage before sunset. My friends the road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one breakup. But, my friends, I had never been more hopeful than I was that morning that WE WILL GET THERE.