My wife’s phone rings. She puts it to her ear and begins her narration. “I’m in a taxi with my husband,” she says. “We’re not speaking.”
Eight hours before this moment, I make a conscious decision to suck all the joy out of our marriage, because my new white shirt has gone blue in the wash. “I’ve worn it twice,” I say.
“Do your own fucking wash,” my wife says.
I don’t say anything. But I think: I did. Between the two times that I wore it, I managed to supervise the shirt’s passage from washer to dryer precisely once. But this morning I was not fast enough, and you snatched it up and put it in with a load of dark blue clothes, because you hate me.
“It’s a shirt,” my wife says. “Get over it.”
I don’t say anything. But I think: you’re right. It’s just a shirt I bought online because I had a voucher. I liked it because all my other white shirts have been repeatedly worn to school by my children, and as a consequence are threadbare and linty grey, with cocks drawn in Biro on the cuffs. And it’s still a good shirt, if you like blue.
“So you’re not speaking now, is that it?” my wife says.
I don’t say anything. But I think: you know what? I’m going to buy a new white shirt online. I’m going to wear it once and then throw it out of the window. Then I will buy another. I will bankrupt us buying my disposable white shirts.
Six hours into my silence, my wife finds me in the kitchen. “You know it’s cage fighting tonight,” she says.
“Uh-huh,” I say. “Wait, what?”
Two hours later, we are in a taxi and my wife is on her phone. “No, we got invited by someone who knows someone,” she says. “And he’s angry because he forgot I told him about it a week ago.”
I don’t say anything. But I think: you didn’t tell me.
“I have no idea,” my wife says. “But I’ve worn dark clothes in case I get spattered in blood.”
I don’t say anything. But I think: I own the perfect shirt for this sort of evening.
“Is this like going to a dog fight?” my wife asks.
Twenty minutes later, I am drinking a £5 beer and scanning the crowd around the empty fighting cage. I see a number of hipsters with bushy beards. Perhaps, I think, they are here to enjoy cage fighting ironically. Perhaps I could enjoy it ironically.
An hour later, my wife is having a selfie taken with a cage fighter called Paddy the Baddy. She is enjoying herself immensely and unironically. I still don’t know what I think about cage fighting, which was far less brutal than I’d imagined. I decide not to be disappointed with myself for being insufficiently disgusted by it.
Half an hour later, we are having a drink with a cage fighting promoter, a serious man in a sober suit.
“It’s my first time at the cage fighting,” I say.
“We don’t really like the term cage fighting,” he says.
I don’t say anything, but I think: there’s a huge cage with people fighting in it.
Half an hour later, we are in another taxi, heading home. Our driver tells us that he used to be a cage fighter. “Two years,” he says. “But my family made me quit when I broke my ankle.”
“It wasn’t what I thought it was going to be like at all,” my wife says.
I don’t say anything, because I am reading an email telling me that my new white shirt has been dispatched.
