Mr. Commitment by Mike Gayle

in the car as though repelled by an invisible force field. I didn’t understand the concept of shopping for home furnishings at all. To me a chair was a chair. A table was a table. Curtains were curtains. But to Mel these things took on a mysterious significance which I couldn’t begin to comprehend. To her a chair wasn’t a chair unless it was a set of six and matched the napkins. A table wasn’t a table unless it was large enough to seat six to eight people at a dinner party. Curtains weren’t just curtains, they were the critical focal point of a room. “Make a mistake with your curtains,” she once informed Nosferatu, “and you might as well give up altogether.”
    My heart sank the moment we arrived at Ikea. Such was the allure of home furnishings, that like salmon in search of their spawning ground, teeming multitudes of Proper Couples had felt the mysterious urge to come here. We queued for ten minutes just to get into the car park. After that we had to drive around like buzzards circling wounded antelope in search of the last parking space in the Western Hemisphere. Still, there were brief moments of satisfaction to be had. I spotted a parking space only seconds before a couple in a Vauxhall Tigra; the race was on but even in Mel’s 2CV there was no way they could beat me. As I eased into the space and checked the rearview mirror to gloat, I was just in time to see the male driver of the Vauxhall Tigra being harangued by his other half for not being quick enough off the mark.
    “What are we doing here, Mel?” I whined miserably, as we came through the electronic doors and she put one of those huge shapeless yellow bags on her shoulder. I’d meant the question metaphysically rather than literally.
    “Shopping, stupid,” joked Mel, choosing to take my words at face value.
    This one sentence said more about the gap in understanding between Mel and me than anything else in our lives. This was different. This was innate. Shopping to her wasn’t a means to an end—it was an end in itself. She was on a spiritual journey, searching for that elusive something or somethings that would help her to make sense of the world and her place in it. Why she needed me to join her on this journey I failed to understand, but I
was
there, and we
were
getting married so I opted to make the most of it.
    Within minutes Mel had a look of postcoital bliss over her face as she glided from sofa to armchair to futon and back again, casually stroking their material as if they were fondly remembered lovers.
    “So what do you think?”
    She was now pointing to a beige object of roughly the same dimensions as the lifts we had at work. By the look on her face I gathered she’d been in conversation with me about this item of furniture for some time. To have admitted my folly would’ve been, well, sheer folly. So I bluffed.
    “It’s nice.”
    She gave me The Look.
    “What have I said?”
    Silence.
    “What have I said?”
    “You know,” she said, barely moving her lips.
    “What?”
    Silence.
    “What?”
    “Saying it’s ‘nice’ like that. I’m not stupid, Duffy. If you didn’t want to come why are you here? Can’t you just make the effort this one time?”
    “What’s wrong with it being a ‘nice’ wardrobe? It is a ‘nice’ wardrobe. It’s pleasant, agreeable, congenial and pleasing to the eye.” I stepped forward and ran my fingers along its surface, attempting to empathize. “Smooth.”
    A smile gradually cracked across her face, which eventually manifested itself into a toothy grin. I’d won her back from the edge of an argument, which was no mean feat. I gave myself a pat on the back as if I’d just defused the timer on six tonnes of plastic explosive.
    “I think it would look great in our bedroom,” said Mel, still examining the wardrobe. Mel had been talking about “our” bedroom for a while now. She wanted to hand in her notice on her Clapham flat and move in with me and Dan so we could save up enough