Mr. Commitment Read Online Free PDF Page B

truly lost it.
    Now Dan might be a lot of things, but he wasn’t so stupid that he couldn’t see this coming. Although he never admitted to it, it was my belief that this was his way of forcing the issue and letting Meena know that he didn’t want to live with her anymore. My guess was that he wanted his old life back and he wanted it back now. I think he was banking on my presence in the flat tempering Meena’s outburst, thus making the transition from relationship to non-relationship as trauma-free an experience as possible. Best-laid plans of mice and men and all that. It was not to be.
    “It’s not you, it’s me,” explained Dan, after a five-minute dressing-down in which Meena not only failed to hold back for fear of embarrassing me, but also revealed some information about Dan’s sub-duvet activities that I think both of us wished she’d kept to herself.
    “Of course it’s you,” said Meena defiantly. “There’s only room for one selfish, self-centered, egotistical, monomaniac, commitment-phobic bath dodger in this relationship, and that’s you.”
    “Bath dodger?”
    “Bath dodger.”
    “Who are you calling a bath dodger?”
    “You, you filthy dirty bath dodger!”
    “I had a bath,” protested Dan.
    “When did you have a bath?” She reached into her handbag, took out her pocket diary and read from it. “ ‘Tuesday fourteenth, Dan has not had a bath. Wednesday fifteenth, still no Dan bath.’ Do I need to carry on?”
    “You’ve been keeping a note of how often I wash?” said Dan incredulously.
    “Yes,” she snapped. “I’ve also got documentary evidence to the fact that you haven’t touched the vacuum cleaner in three months, you’ve not washed the bathroom sink in weeks and”—she checked her diary for this one—“right now you’re wearing a pair of boxer shorts that you’ve had on for two days in a row.”
    “Two days?” Dan, much to his shame had no answer to this one. “Time flies, eh?” And then he said something that took me completely by surprise. “Listen, Meena,” he said, “I’m sorry. I can change.”
    “Pants or personality?”
    “Personality,” he said sheepishly.
    This was very un-Dan. Very uncool. He normally had his goodbye speeches down pat, a throwback to his days at drama college. He was wavering. I think he was unsure if he really did want to split up with Meena or whether now that he’d finally realized that if he pushed hard enough Meena would eventually push back, he wanted her more than ever. But it was too late and he knew that.
    “Dan, you’ll never change,” spat Meena furiously. “You are you and that’s all there is to it. You leave everything to me and expect me to run around after you like you’re some sort of naughty schoolboy. I am not your mother! We’ve been together since we left college six years ago. We’ve been living together for just five months of those six years and it seems to me that as soon as we moved in you gave up on us. You used to be so sweet, Dan, you used to try and impress me . . . you even used to take a shower every day when we first met! What happened? Why did you give up? I’ll tell you why. You gave up because you’re lazy and selfish and think that I was put on this earth to please you. Well, I wasn’t, okay? It’s over, Dan. We’re finished.”
    Dan didn’t say a word. It was almost like he was in a trance, trapped in his subconscious weighing up the current situation on his internal scales of justice. On the one side was his pride, and on the other his love for Meena. Whatever the result, in the end he decided to bail out—to try and save what was left of his dignity.
    “Hang on,” said Dan, regaining his confidence. “You’re leaving me? I’m the one who said, ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’ I’m leaving you, okay?”
    “You’re damned right you’re leaving me,” said Meena. “I spent months looking for this flat to rent and I want you out of it now!”
    “Now?”
    “No,