It is early on Friday afternoon, and my wife and I are somewhere on the M5, heading for a weekend away in Devon. The dog is on the back seat. Traffic is light, and we are about an hour from our destination.
“Can we please have that thing?” my wife says.
“What thing?” I say.
“The thing we had last time,” she says.
I realise that she is referring to a series of university lectures about the history of civilisation, 23 hours’ worth, which was at some point downloaded on to my laptop by one of my sons and has since migrated to my phone.
“Last time you said it was boring and stupid,” I say.
“I’m driving and it’s what I want,” she says.
I plug my phone into the car, and press play. A man starts talking about life in ancient Egypt, which sounds horrible. The lecture finishes with a round of applause, and another begins immediately. We exit the motorway on to an A road. The dog begins to whimper in anticipation, nose pressed to the window.
“Nearly there,” I say.
Ten minutes later we leave the A road and drive through a village. On the far side my wife makes a sharp right on to a narrow lane flanked by towering hedgerows. After a mile or so, tufts of spiky grass start to poke up through the cracked crown of the road surface. The lecturer speaks of the earliest settlements of the Nile delta.
At the top of the road ahead of us, an oncoming van appears. My wife slows. The van approaches. A car crests the hill behind the van. Then another. We come to a stop.
“What now?” my wife says.
“It has to be you,” I say. “He’s got two cars behind him.”
“I’m shit at backing up,” she says.
“Nevertheless,” I say. She puts the car in reverse and inches backwards. The van presses forward.
“How far do I have to go?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say.
After about 20 metres, our right tail-light crunches gently into the hedge.
“Christ!” my wife screams.
“Straighten the wheel a bit,” I say.
“Shut up!” she says.
“You’ve got room on my side,” I say.
“Idiot,” she says. The dog whimpers. The car inches back. No passing place presents itself.
“Here?” my wife says.
“Not wide enough,” I say.
“I hate this,” she says.
“Then switch seats and let me do it,” I say.
“I can’t,” she says. “It’s too embarrassing. Here?”
“Not wide enough,” I say. “You might have to go all the way back to the main road.”
At the bottom of the hill, the road bends blindly. As my wife edges round the corner the van presses impatiently. The dog whines. Our left tail-light grazes the hedge.
“It’s actually easier if you turn and look through the window,” I say.
My wife slams the car into park, hoiks up the handbrake and unleashes a string of obscenities at such a volume the dog begins to shake. I am obliged to retreat to a quiet place inside my head. In the distance I can hear a man talking about the dependency of Egyptian agriculture on the annual inundation season. Interesting, I think.
“Fine then, you fucking do it!” my wife screams. When she opens her door, the dog jumps out and runs off. I stare up at the looming windscreen of the van, which reflects the cloudy afternoon sky.
It seems like a very long time before the dog is retrieved and I have climbed into the driver’s seat and reversed a further half mile, sweat trickling down the backs of my ears, before a gate finally appears in the hedge, affording enough room for the faceless van driver to squeeze past. The other two cars follow; each driver pausing to look in at me, the source of a long and mysterious delay to their journeys.
We make it over the top of the hill without speaking, and take the next left.
“I got rattled,” my wife says.
“I know,” I say.
In the long silence that follows, the lecturer informs us that the archaeological record suggests that in ancient Egypt most marriages were probably consensual.
