It is Sunday, and our friend Juliet has come round for lunch. My wife and Juliet are talking about a mutual acquaintance, someone I’ve never heard of.
“I met her years ago in a playground,” my wife tells Juliet. “I was all alone with a baby, nine months pregnant, and quietly weeping to myself.”
“When was this?” I ask. “Where was I?”
“And she came up to me and asked what was wrong,” my wife says.
“She’s very empathetic,” Juliet says.
“And I said, I’m all alone and my husband called me last night at three in the morning to say he’d been flipped by a prostitute.”
Juliet looks at me. I look at my wife.
“That did not happen,” I say.
“Do I mean flipped?” my wife says.
“Clipped,” Juliet says. “Or rolled.”
“There are no sex workers in this story,” I say. “And you need to stop telling it that way.”
“You tell it, then,” my wife says.
I begin a long and complicated tale about going to a wedding in Austria on my own, because my wife was too pregnant to fly. The wedding, I say, took place in a remote mountain village, in a real castle. My story is true, but as I tell it I realise that many parts of it sound made up.
“So I fell in with a group of, um… I can only describe them as foresters,” I say.
“OK,” Juliet says.
“They had these peaked caps with feathers in them,” I say.
I explain that when I returned to my hotel after leaving the foresters, I found a man with an eyepatch pestering a woman who was trying to get to her room. They were both, I assumed, fellow wedding guests.
“He was very drunk,” I say, “so I took him by the arm and led him back outside.”
“I forgot,” my wife says. “In his version, he’s the hero.”
“Once outside,” I say, “he became unruly. He ended up lying in the road on his back. He was wearing some kind of uniform made of boiled wool, and he had an actual eyepatch.”
“You don’t have to sell me the eyepatch,” Juliet says.
“So, he’s lying in the road,” I continue, “and he’s shouting, ‘Take me to a brothel!’”
“Which is where you got flipped,” my wife says.
“I explained that I was from out of town,” I say, “and didn’t know where the good brothels were.”
“You’re in a difficult position,” Juliet says.
“Exactly,” I say. “I can’t leave him in the road.”
“So what happened?” my wife asks.
“Eventually some other wedding guests turned up,” I say. “They seemed to know the man with the eyepatch.”
“And you all went to a brothel, and you got flipped. The end,” my wife says.
“No,” I say. “We took him to an ordinary nightclub in a dingy basement, where the man with the eyepatch continued to behave erratically, and where I was relieved of my wallet by persons unknown.”
“Huh,” my wife says, refilling her wine glass.
“Or I may have just lost it,” I say. “Who knows? But I do admit I made the tactical mistake of ringing my heavily pregnant wife at three in the morning to try to make my problem her problem.”
“Drunk, and crying,” my wife says.
“A bit tearful, maybe,” I say. “I don’t remember that part very well.”
There is a brief silence. I look at my wife, my wife looks at Juliet and Juliet looks at me.
“The version with the prostitute is better,” Juliet says. “You need to put her back in.”
“Don’t worry, I will,” my wife says.
