Map Reading For
Couples
by Simon Hodgson
My wife
Fitzsimmons has incredible geographical instincts.
We could be walking around the minotaur’s
labyrinth with snargling noises yards behind us
and she’d still say, “I think it’s
round this corner then on the left.” And
we’d escape through the door just as the
beast came whiffling and hurring around the bend.
Put the girl
in a car though, and she couldn’t find her
way out of a parking space. We drove up to
Mendocino last month. Out of the city, across the
Golden Gate, up highway 101. I’d planned to
stop off in Rohnert Park.
“How long
before we get there,” I ask Fitzsimmons.
“How
should I know,” she says, the road atlas
draped carelessly across her lap.
“Well,
you could look at the map and see what the next
junction is.”
“Alright,”
she says, “it’s ten minutes.”
“You’ve
just made that up.”
“No I
haven’t,” she says, closing both the
atlas and the conversation.
Fitzsimmons
believes that the passenger’s job is to look
pretty, look out of the window and occasionally
change CD. I try imagining the two of us on the
Paris-Dakar Rally, with her waving at Bedouin
warriors as they aim rocket-launchers at us.
Or Fitzsimmons
as navigator to Magellan. As the eminent
Portuguese captain approaches the straits which
will make him famous, a critical moment in a
voyage which has already taken several weeks and
claimed three lives. He turns to his trusted
navigator, who is stretched in a hammock
observing a low-flying albatross. “Where are
we, Doņa Fitzsimmons?” asks Magellan.
“How should I know?” says the navigator
as she reaches languidly for her second rum punch.
Five miles
nearer Rohnert Park, I tried again and explained
that it might be useful to know the distance, so
we could work out whether the petrol would last.
“Okay,”
says Fitzsimmons, opening the roadmap with a
little look across to me. “Uh, where are we
again?”
“Rohnert
Park.”
“Right.
And what was the last junction?”
Once we’ve
established that we’re travelling north and
that we’re married, Fitzsimmons finds the
right page.
“Okay, so
you’ve got about this much to go,” she
says, holding her thumb and finger an inch apart.
I take my eyes
off Highway 101 for long enough to both raise and
lower my eyebrows at her.
“Use the
scale.”
“The what?”
“The
scale, find out what the map scale is.”
“There
isn’t one,” she says shortly.
“In the
bottom left corner.”
“Oh, that.
I don’t do it like that.”
‘I
don’t do it like that,’ I say in my
head. Only, I’m so appalled by the remark
that it comes out aloud. Fitzsimmons gives me a
look as if to say What? Then follows it by saying,
“It
doesn’t matter. We’ll get there in the
end.”
Get where?
Mendocino or mental breakdown, it’s all the
same to the mini Magellan beside me, who’s
now looking out of the window again.
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