I showed my friend a picture of my toe

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YESTERDAY my wife pointed down at my foot and said, “Your toe nail’s torn through the end of your sock!” She has commented on my toe nails a lot over the years, about how I don’t cut them often enough, and how they get sharp and scratch her when we’re asleep in bed. She even has a phrase she likes to use to signal when she wants to moralise about my toe nails: “Britain’s got talons,” which is a threefold reference, first to the idea that my toe nails are similar to the long nails you find on birds of prey and other things that should be kept away from soft furnishings, second to the fact that I’m British, and third to the popular TV talent show that has a similar name, for which I assume she thinks my toe nails would make me a suitable contestant.

Feeling hard done by, given that it’s not the first time she’s pulled me up on it, I took a picture of my toenail before I set off to meet Earl, thinking that he would be real and tell me how it is. But Earl just looked at the picture, at my face, back at the picture, and didn’t say anything. He took out his tobacco and started rolling. We’ve been friends since school and it was the first time I’d ever showed him a photo of one of my body parts. It was an awkward thing now that I think about it, asking him to lean in close to me and look at what he probably thought would be a video of a plane crash or a goal from the weekend’s football. Why was he being asked to look at his mate’s toenail? It was a good question that hung unanswered in the air.

I went to Tesco to pick up some spinach and a man held the door open for me. It made me feel like he was someone I could show a toenail picture to without upset. I waited by the satsumas while he surveyed the newspaper display, and it occurred to me that I could gauge his openness to my toenail picture based on the paper he bought. If he went for a broadsheet, my guess was that he’d brush me off as if in a hurry to get to work. If it was a red top then he’d probably tell me to fuck off. I was really hoping that he would go for one with a lifestyle supplement. Suddenly a shopkeeper asked tersely what I was doing, and I decided it was best to leave without speaking to anyone on that occasion. I only realised on my way out that I’d not picked up the spinach.

In the evening I still hadn’t trimmed my toenails by the time my wife’s parents arrived for dinner. I’d gotten caught up installing some new anti-virus software. But quite honestly I was also still feeling defiant about my toenail—or anybody’s toenail for that matter—not being an issue. When I tried to raise the subject at dinner, my wife kicked me under the table, digging her foot into my shin. Rather than stopping mid-sentence and leaving my in-laws confused, I saw a way to broach the toenail topic in a more playful way, remarking that if my wife’d had sharper toenails, she would have had a better shot at shutting me up. Everybody laughed, including my wife, who cleared the table together with her dad, both of them disappearing into the kitchen, leaving me and her mum to finish the tiramisu.

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