ONE DAY(123)

‘ . . . and Iran? And China and Russia and North Korea and Saudi Arabia! You can’t protest against everyone.’

‘Why not? You used to!’

‘That’s beside the point!’

‘Is it? When I first knew you, all you did was boycott things. You couldn’t eat a bloody Mars Bar without a lecture on personal responsibility. It’s not my fault you’ve become complacent . . .’

He returned to his ridiculous sports news with a little self-satisfied smirk, and Emma felt her face beginning to redden. ‘I have not become . . . Don’t change the subject! The point is, it’s ridiculous to claim that this war is about human rights, or WMDs or anything like that. It’s about one thing and one thing only . . .’

He groaned. It was inevitable now: she was going to say ‘oil’. Please, please don’t say ‘oil’ . . .

‘ . . . nothing to do with human rights. It’s entirely to do with oil!’

‘Well isn’t that a pretty good reason?’ he said, standing and deliberately scraping his chair. ‘Or don’t you use oil, Em?’

As last words go, he felt this was pretty effective, but it was hard to walk away from an argument in this bachelor flat that suddenly felt too small, cluttered and scuffed. Certainly Emma wasn’t going to let a fatuous remark like that go unanswered. She followed him into the hall, but he was waiting for her, turning on her with a ferocity that unsettled them both.

‘I tell you what this is really about. You’ve had your period and you’re angry about it and you’re taking it out on me! Well I don’t like being harangued while I’m trying to eat my breakfast!’

‘I’m not haranguing you—’

‘Arguing then—’

‘We’re not arguing, we’re discussing—’

‘Are we? Because I’m arguing—’

‘Calm down, Dex—’

‘The war wasn’t my idea, Em! I didn’t order the invasion, and I’m sorry, but I don’t feel as strongly about it as you do. Maybe I should, maybe I will, but I don’t. I don’t know why, maybe I’m too stupid or something—’

Emma looked startled. ‘Where did that come from? I didn’t say you were—?’

‘But you treat me like I am. Or like I’m this right-wing nut because I don’t spout platitudes about The War. I swear, if I sit at one more dinner party and hear someone say “It’s all about the oil”! Maybe it is, so what? Either protest about that, or stop using oil or accept it and shut the f*ck up!’

‘Don’t you dare tell me to—’

‘I wasn’t! I wasn’t talking to . . . oh, forget it.’

He squeezed past that bloody bike of hers, cluttering up his hallway, and into the bedroom. The blinds were still drawn, the bed unmade, damp towels on the floor, the room smelling of their bodies from the night before. He began searching for his keys in the gloom. Emma watched him from the doorway, with that look of maddening concern, and he kept his eyes averted.

‘Why are you so embarrassed about discussing politics?’ she said calmly, as if he were a child having a tantrum.

‘I’m not embarrassed, I’m just . . . bored.’ He was searching through the laundry basket, pulling out discarded clothes, checking trouser pockets for keys. ‘I find politics boring – there, I’ve said it now. It’s out!’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really.’

‘Even at University?’

‘Especially there! I just pretended I didn’t because it was the thing to do. I used to sit there at two in the morning listening to Joni Mitchell while some clown banged on about apartheid, or nuclear disarmament or the objectification of women and I used to think, f*ck, this is boring, can’t we talk about, I don’t know, family or music or sex or something, people or something—’

‘But politics is people!’

‘What does that mean, Em? It’s meaningless, it’s just something to say—’

‘It means we talked about a lot of things!’

‘Did we? All I remember about those golden days is a lot of people showing-off, men mostly, banging on about feminism so that they could get into some girl’s knickers. Stating the bleeding obvious; isn’t that Mr Mandela nice and isn’t nuclear war nasty and isn’t it rotten that some people don’t have enough to eat—’

‘And that’s not what people said!’

‘—it’s exactly the same now, except the bleeding obvious has changed. Now it’s global warming and hasn’t Blair sold out!’

‘You don’t agree?’

‘I do agree! I do! I just think it would be refreshing to hear someone we know, one single person, say Bush can’t be all that stupid and thank God someone’s standing up to this fascist dictator and by the way I love my big car. Because they’d be wrong, but at least there’d be something to talk about! At least they wouldn’t be patting themselves on the back, at least it would make a change from WMDs and schools and f*cking house prices.’

‘Hey, you talk about house prices too!’

‘I know! And I f*cking bore myself too!’ His shout echoed as he flung yesterday’s clothes against the wall, and then they both stood there in the gloomy bedroom, the blinds still down, the stale bed unmade.