Saturday, March 04, 2006

A Motion at Dawn

At five o’clock this morning there was a sudden commotion in our bed.

‘Oy veh,’ Tamara sighed quite noisily. If that was not sufficient to wake Marcus up, the punch on the shoulder certainly was.

Instantly with the reflexes of a trained commando, and the speed of a jungle cat, Marcus was awake, sitting up and ready for anything.

‘What… What… What the hell is the matter?’ was his perplexed reaction.

‘I’ve got a great idea! I’ve been awake for two hours thinking,’ Tamara’s overly loud voice was aimed directly at Marcus’s ear - not entirely uncharacteristic of her early morning symposiums.

‘Leave me alone, write it down and we’ll have a meeting about it later.’ He rolled over and tried to pretend it this wasn’t happening, instantly beginning to snore to keep Tamara away.

Fairly useless defence. Tamara cannot be stopped in full flow. She jumped on top of him, ‘Marcus you have to hear this!’

‘No, I don’t!’ he complained. ‘There’s nothing in our marital contract that says I have to listen to you at… what’s the time?’

‘Fivish’ Tamara whispered in a subdued and semi-apologetic manner.

‘Goodnight! Go back to your side, and just leave me alone!’ Marcus hated being woken in the middle of the night and had no sympathy or desire to show empathy - just a need to get back to his dreams. Tamara pressed closer and stroked him on the back of his neck.

‘That won’t work either, you won’t get around me that way.’

This wasn’t true. She always got round him that way.

‘Marcus, just listen for two minutes!’

‘No go away!’ Marcus asserted. Tamara could never explain anything in just two minutes. She had a head crammed with lengthy and complex accounts for everything. You should hear her discussing the relative merits of home-made chicken soup versus the shop stuff. She knows the precise attributes of all commercially-made chicken soup within a 50 mile radius of our house.

The truth was that Marcus knew from the moment she woke him up that there was no going back to sleep. Too many years together, too many sleepless nights filled with Tamara’s ‘good ideas’. He pushed her off, sat up submissively, and said - ‘Go on, get it over with.’

Exactly two hours later, after what might be called a right ‘bull and cow’, during which Tamara even turned her back on him at least twice, Marcus condescendingly conceded that it was possibly the best idea she had ever had.

One of the problems of working with one’s spouse is that one of the two of you ends up sleeping with the boss. The question is: who is sleeping with whom?

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