Читать книгу The Men Commandments - Christian O’Connell - Страница 41

I have a friend who is a former Royal Marine Commando, now working as a bodyguard in Afghanistan. A tough guy. Last year, after coming home from a three-month spell away, we went out for drinks. Much later, he was dropped off at home, takeaway Chinese in hand, which he duly ate while his wife was sleeping peacefully upstairs.

Sadly my friend was in a rather confused state (maybe post-traumatic stress disorder, or possibly that extra Stella) and, seeking something to wipe his dirty Chinese sweet and sour hands on, mistook his wife’s newly purchased white jacket for a tea towel. In the morning he was awoken by a blood-curdling cry to rival anything he had faced in Afghanistan or Iraq from the mullahs. He had a fear like he had never known before. The immediate discussion of course centred on why whenever he saw his mates he ‘needed to get in such a terrible state’.

I remember meeting up with my best mate Phil and returning home slightly the worse for wear. Putting on all the lights in every single room, I then started to cook. Men often like to cook when drunk. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that a drunken guy with the munchies started the Great Fire of London in 1666.

As I was throwing random ingredients into a pan, which I then planned to put between two slices of bread, my lovely wife was upstairs asking in strong Anglo-Saxon terms what was going on and could I just ‘get the fuck to bed’. Why don’t women just say what they mean?

Feeling a bit sorry for myself, I went and chatted to my dog Digby, who has never used language like that and doesn’t judge me. (Dogs don’t – that’s why they are man’s best friend. Cats are judgemental little shits.) And as I was chatting to him, I was struck by how warm and cosy his dog bed was.

The next thing I remember is seeing daylight and my wife towering over me in her dressing gown. Digby was on the other side of the room looking at me as disapprovingly as a little dog (not too little, though – no man should own a small yappy dog) can. Digby wasn’t happy.

And it’s not just because a few weeks earlier I let my wife get his balls cut off. I picked him up from the vet’s and the look in his eyes will stay with me for ever. It wasn’t just the pain and disappointment that any man could do this to another man, all be it a man-dog. It was as if he was saying, ‘It could be you next.’ My wife said getting him done would calm him down, and stop him having sex with any passing dog and urinating on the furniture. My God, I suddenly realised, she wants MY balls removed, she wants my sacred man purse lopped off. To control me; to stop me urinating on the couch (which was an accident).

Think about it. What woman wouldn’t want their man neutered? I bet there are back-street man-neutering clinics springing up all over the place right now. An illicit underground network. Run by man-hating women using very rusty implements. With little or no anaesthetic. This explains those too-good-to-be-true men you hear all about from your wife.

‘Well, Gill’s husband loves going clothes shopping with her and picking out new curtains.’

He’s been neutered. You see the neutered men every Saturday limping a few feet behind their women in shopping centres. Thousand-yard stares. I’ve stumbled on a big global conspiracy here. I bet Bill Clinton has been neutered by now. Just look at the poor fella. That Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced New York governor caught using prostitutes (at least, unlike our feckless MPs, he didn’t claim it on his expenses), was probably neutered the moment that public apology was done.

No, the real reason Digby is on my wife’s side is that I had slept in his bed that night. A dog bed. That really stinks. The sight that greeted my wife was of a pissed-off-looking dog and my head and shoulders in the dog basket, with the rest of me a tangled heap looking as if I had fallen from a great height. All the lights were still on and for some reason there were spaghetti hoops in my hands.

‘Nice seeing your mates again?’