Imagine, if you will, the daily routine of a tortoise in winter: every day you wake up under the dog’s bed and set off on a series of clockwise laps around a large kitchen table.
Your visual field is wide but not very high – if the known universe has a ceiling, you have never seen it. The first three laps are flat and featureless, perfect repetitions of a cycle. But on the fourth lap half an apple suddenly appears, lying cut side up. How serendipitous! You think: I should probably eat that while I’m here, for who knows when I will next come across another … Wait, is that a grape rolling by in the distance?
I’m sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, reading headlines and listening to the rhythmic thunk of the tortoise circling, followed by a pause when he finds the apple I left in his path, then more thunking, and then another pause for the grape.
After a few moments of silence I experience an unpleasant but familiar sensation: a spreading pool of tortoise piss reaching the edge of my sock.
“Ugh,” I say, lifting my foot.
“Fucking tortoise,” my wife says, entering the room, scooping him up and putting him outside the back door.
“It’s too cold,” I say.
“It’s not too cold,” she says. “It’s sunny.”
“But it will be too cold when the sun goes down,” I say, “and then I’ll have to find him in the dark.”
“That’s right,” my wife says. “You have one job.”
“Bins,” I say, holding up two fingers.
“Fine, you have two jobs.”
“Then there’s my actual job,” I say.
“And when were you thinking of making a start on that?” my wife says.
“Right now,” I say, standing and closing my laptop.
“Aren’t you going to clean this up first?” she says, pointing at the puddle of piss extending under the table.
I say nothing, but I think: that’s four jobs.
On the way to my office shed I see the tortoise on wet grass in the shadow of the house, looking glum. But when I next look up, he has disappeared.
I am hard at work when my wife opens my office door 20 minutes later – I saw her coming in time to put down my banjo and open my laptop.
“Yes?” I say, typing nonsense. “Can I help you?”
“Actually would you mind working in the house for a bit?” she says. “I’ve got to go out and there’s an important package about to be delivered.”
I stop typing and spin my chair round to face her, arms folded.
“How the tables have turned,” I say.
“Please,” she says.
“An important package, you say?”
“It’s a new radiator,” she says. “For the bathroom.”
We once tried to solve this problem by installing a second wireless doorbell in my office, but it didn’t work out. It turns out many delivery people, when faced with two doorbells, will choose to knock.
“Fine,” I say, following my wife back to the house.
The radiator arrives about 15 minutes later, but I decided not to go back to my office, because it’s warmer in the kitchen and it’s only an hour until lunch. Later that evening my wife enters the living room while I am watching the news.
“I’m hungry,” she says.
“I’ll start cooking in a minute,” I say, thinking: how many jobs is that? Five? Six?
After supper a small dispute about what to watch on TV is settled by watching what my wife wants to watch – a film she abandons three-quarters of the way through.
“I’m going to bed,” she says.
“Now?” I say.
“I’ve had a very busy day,” she says, watching me to see if I dare to say the same.
“No comment,” I say.
I stay to the end of the film, then turn off all the lights and head upstairs, where my wife is reading in bed. I remove one sock, then the other, while she watches me.
“Did you do the bins?” she says. I put my socks back on.
The path to the kerb is piled with construction waste from the ripped-out bathroom, so I have to move the car out of the drive to get the bins to the street. I think: why does life have be so hard?
Back upstairs I get undressed, brush my teeth, climb into bed and close my eyes. A minute later, when my wife turns out her reading lamp, my eyes snap open in the dark and I think: fucking tortoise.
