Wake Up Happy Every Day

by Stephen May

  But now when I myself am running, jumping, skipping, jabbing, bobbing, weaving, squatting, pulling, pushing, pressing, lifting and stretching a lot of the time – and then resting – I find I’m becoming increasingly tolerant of sport. Especially American sport. Everything about sport here is such a big production. The plays, the uniforms, the commentary, the ad breaks. To watch American sport is to see the way the whole empire thinks and moves. Want to know about American morality? American politics? American business? Watch baseball.

  Right now I’m not watching baseball. I’m half-watching the group stages of the Beach Volleyball World Cup but not thinking about sport, morality, politics or business. I’m thinking about love and I’m thinking about railways. They go together, don’t they? Specifically, I’m thinking about InterRail and I’m thinking about my first big love. Unrequited naturally. I’m thinking about Caroline Dawson. Lorna’s mum.

  In 1985 a hundred quid would buy you a rail ticket that gave you a month’s unlimited travel on Europe’s rail network. It was the summer after our first year at the college, I had some money saved from the job at the card place, Russell had his student overdraft facility, and we both had a burning desire to be somewhere that wasn’t Bedford. In particular I had a burning desire to be somewhere where my dad wasn’t.

  It would be fair to say that me and my father have never got on. I worshipped him as a kid, but he wasn’t very good at hiding his disappointment in me. I was a shy and nervous child and my dad didn’t really do shy or nervous. Didn’t get it. My dad could get by in any of half a dozen different languages. See him in an Indian restaurant and he’d be doing banter with the waiters in confident Bengali. We were always getting extra side dishes.

  He’d give it a go in Santanello’s pizzeria too, serenading the harassed waitresses in booming sing-song cod-Italian. Like he was in an opera called Mr Fisher Orders A Margherita. Prepared to embarrass us all for extra garlic bread. The language of Shy, however, the dialect of Nervous, these were tongues he didn’t speak and wasn’t about to attempt.

  So, yep, when I was a little boy he was away a lot and I used to miss him and then he’d come back and I used to get nostalgic for the ache of missing him. Of course I couldn’t articulate it like this then. Then, I was just confused. And, later, when I was an adolescent, he wasn’t away so much and he and his opinions took up every corner of the house. I kept bumping into his views on the EEC, or the miners. Tripping over his thoughts about Northern Ireland or lenient judges in the hallway. Squeezing past his position on the miners’ strike or modern pop music on the stairs.

  A very tidy man in most ways, he scattered his attitudes, positions and sentiments like a careless picnicker scatters crisp packets. And in the end all this litter spoilt the view.

  So when Russell suggests going to Greece by way of Amsterdam, Munich, Vienna, Belgrade, and more or less every other major rail terminus in Europe, I jump at it. Of course, it isn’t just about my dad, there is the hope of adventures too. I’m twenty after all. God knows I’m ready for some.

  They don’t even have to be big adventures. Athletic Swedish adventures. Severe German adventures. Moody French adventures. Breezy Australian adventures. Generous Dutch adventures. The pale fire of a Scottish adventure. Even a nerdy English adventure maybe. An adventure whose drama is hidden behind librarian specs and a liking for Virginia Woolf. That’ll be OK. That’ll be a big enough adventure for me. A sound return on my investment. And I’m hoping my own complete fluency in Shy will eventually count for something, somewhere. Get me into a tight spot or two. Perhaps abroad, talking books with serious girls, Shy could translate as Enigmatic.

  And it is true that there are a lot of girl-shaped adventures. They just don’t happen to me.

  We could call that InterRail tour ‘Confessions of a Wingman’. And I’m not even a wingman to a real, live flesh-and-blood human being. I’m wingman to a haircut. I get to watch as Russell’s Duran Duran hair woos and wins backpacking girls in sad cafes right across Europe. My role turns out to be to make Russell and his hair seem less threatening, more normal. To sit and radiate comforting ordinariness, making small talk with the companions of the girls Russell’s hair is doing its number on.

  And it absolutely must be the hair that does the wooing because the 1985 vintage Russell Knox has a very limited supply of chat. Some very ropey material. In the shopping mall of banter Russell’s is very definitely a Soviet-era store. Not much in the way of choice and all of it packaged in a stark, brutalistic style. All he stocks is heavy-handed piss-taking, mainly of me, but also of the accent and perceived national characteristics of whichever country the adventures come from. So the Scottish girls are miserly, the Australian girls are uncouth, the German girls are efficiently authoritarian, the Swedish girls are efficiently promiscuous and so on.

  And yes, he gets told to fuck right off. Maybe twice this happens. He even gets laid out rather than laid by one Aussie girl rebutting her own resemblence to national stereotype in somewhat ambiguous style. But mostly it gets him where he wants to go.

  And yes, I know it wasn’t just the hair really. It was also the insanely unjustified self-confidence, though one of the girls did tell me it was also the dreamy curl of the eyelashes. But no one fucks someone just because they have nice eyelashes do they? Maybe they do. Or maybe they did then.

  Lorna Dawson might not be the only child Russell has. There could be other kids from other girls seduced by peacocky hair, bad jokes, and those goddamn eyelashes. And if there are other progeny, there’s a good chance they’ll all be beautiful and all filled with the restless light of the driven and dissatisfied.

  And I think about Lorna’s mum. The quiet and lovely Caroline. The girl Russell’s Casanova hair left behind on the platform at Bedford Midland.

  I met her first. A course on the romantics. Blake, Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Shelleys – all of them recollecting experience in tranquillity, defecating into pure transparency. Generally laying down the blueprint for every scene that came after. All the white ones anyway.

  The alliances, the betrayals, the grand statements and gestures. The adventurous, incestuous sex. You Young British Artists, you neo-folk kids, you Brit-poppers, you grungers, you punks, you angry young men, you Beatniks, you Bloomsburys, you pre-Raphaelites, all you brotherhoods, all you movements – you owe all your attitudes and ways of carrying on to the guys with the daffodils and the sick roses.

  That was the sort of thing Caroline would say as we sat on plastic orange seats in the refectory after class. And then Russell would join us and she would shut up, stop being interesting and entertaining and knowledgeable and instead look at him – at his eyelashes and hair – while he spoke. And I would sit and say not very much and concentrate on watching her watching him. I would watch the truth behind the word ‘crush’. A person bewitched in this kind of a way becomes so much less than they are, so much less than they could be. Flattened. Squashed. Crushed.

  Caroline. She liked her beer in pints. She could play a mean game of pool. She could play piano. She could roll a fag with one hand. And her major was in modern languages – just think how huffy the Shelleys would have been if they’d known they were only a minor – and she would have been hugely helpful with the many bitte, wo ist das bahnhof-type situations we found ourselves in that summer.

  Taking Caroline along might have negated the mesmerising effects of the hair I suppose. There was a chance those beguiling eyelashes would have had their style cramped. Even the Swedish girls don’t usually like getting off with someone while their regular girlfriend is watching.

  And when we come back for our final year Caroline has left. Dropped out to do some paralegal thing in London. She doesn’t leave me her address.

  I often wonder about her over the years, but Russell just shrugs when I mention her. Easy come, easy go he says, but he really liked her. I know he did. Everyone did. She was a bit like Sarah in that way actually. They looked a bit the same too. Pale, freckled
, clear-eyed. Sometimes caught smiling at secret jokes that they won’t ever tell.

  Yes, Caroline Dawson, she would be the kind of girl to keep a pregnancy quiet. A good sport.

  I’m trying to think if there was any time after that InterRail trip when I actually liked Russell. I’m thinking maybe there wasn’t, not really.

  And then I wonder if maybe I need an eyelash architect. I don’t want to be undone by a detail like that. Tripped up at JFK because my eyes don’t look sad and soulful enough. That would be shit.

  A latte-coloured supermodel spikes the volleyball over the net and directly into the face of one of her opponents, who falls to the sand. The crowd roar approval.

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  Ah, Sarah’s employing the four most loaded words you can have in a long-term relationship.

  I counter them with the three most important.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘No, really. What are you thinking.’

  ‘No, it really doesn’t matter.’

  And on we go like that for quite an irritating while before I cobble something together that I can share.

  ‘You really want to know? I’m thinking that we’ve all this money but we don’t seem to be having much fun yet.’

  On the screen the supermodel scores another devastating point and high fives various other beauties. This is Brazil versus Switzerland and the Swiss look dejected. Not much of the spirit of William Tell about them. But then they don’t even have beaches. They’re very much the underdogs here. They shouldn’t feel bad. And the Brazilians own this sport. Brazil is on the way up generally. If you want to see what the new world order will look like don’t watch baseball, watch beach volleyball. The girls are in, the men are out. The northern hemisphere is done: the south is rising.

  There is a pause, and then Sarah says, ‘No, we’re not exactly having fun. We’re not exactly happy, but at least we’re miserable in comfort.’

  I smile at this but tell her that I’m not all that comfortable actually. Not really. I hurt and I’m hungry.

  ‘Well, maybe we should start the big trip,’ she says. ‘Maybe you’ve done enough. But I was thinking we might start in England, if you didn’t mind.’

  England? That grey and sodden place? That cantankerous old git that keeps moaning on about the good old days? Yes. Yes please. Let’s go there.

  Sarah says, ‘I miss it. I miss my family. I miss our friends. Just a couple of days and then we’ll go anywhere else you like. It’s just that Mum worries about me. I’d like to reassure her.’

  ‘All mums worry, don’t they? If they’re doing their job properly, I mean.’

  ‘I guess. But she wants to see her granddaughter too.’

  Yeah of course she does. And who are we to stop her?

  It occurs to me that I should feel quintessentially Californian now, in a way. I’ve reinvented myself. Hell, I’ve even had work done. I push my hand through my hair. Feels good. More than this, it really does feel real. Even better than the real thing. I should love it here now, but I don’t. I feel like I’m in a prison. A sunshiny prison and there’s the Russell problem, the way he’s in the walls somehow. In the very air con. But then maybe he’ll always be with us now. Wherever we go.

  The big problem is Scarlett. I know we’re both worried about moving her.

  I’m the one to actually say it. ‘What about Scarlett?’

  And Sarah says, ‘I know. All this – it was for Scarlett. But . . .’ She leaves the sentence hanging, she chews her lip.

  ‘And it’s sort of working, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘I mean, look how happy she is. And she’s speaking, Sarah. She’s flipping well talking.’

  ‘She’s said the word badass.’

  ‘And awesome. And oh my actual god. You can get a long way on that. Especially here. If she learns to say dude and what the fuck she’ll have the entire vocabulary of a typical American teenager. She’ll be a straight-A.’

  Sarah doesn’t laugh. Why should she? Because it’s not really true, is it? In truth I find American youth incredibly articulate when they want to be, though I only have Mary to go on. Oh, and reruns of golden-age comedies like Happy Days and Saved By The Bell, both of which are secret pleasures when I come back knackered after a workout and there’s no decent sport on TV.

  Now Sarah says, ‘You don’t worry that she’s liking it a bit too much? That she’s getting too attached to Mary and she won’t be able to cope without her? You know when we move on, or when Mary does.’

  And I have thought about this. Scarlett is growing obsessed with Mary. She wants to be her. Sarah has been buying her tons of new stuff, just as she said she would, and yet we find Scarlett shuffling around in Mary’s cast-off pumps, carrying her old purse, cramming paperclips in her mouth to try and replicate her babysitter’s dental scaffolding. Walking around with her ukulele the way she used to go around with Spot the Dog. Mary is Scarlett’s role model. Her mentor.

  ‘It’s hard to know the best thing, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘But you’re sure leaving here is the best thing?’

  ‘Of course I’m not sure,’ Sarah says. ‘Only idiots are sure and certain about things. Look at Russell.’

  And it’s true. Russell was always more or less doubt-free. It’s one of the things people liked about him. And not just girls. It was how he got people to do stuff for him. He always seemed certain of the direction of travel. People crave certainty and love those who seem to have it. Surprising when you think how those people have screwed it up for the rest of us over the centuries. The history of certainty is the history of genocide. Doubt has, on the whole, been involved in far less mass murder. Far fewer pogroms. Doubt may not get you very far, but sometimes here is the best place to be anyway. I don’t understand why more people don’t embrace doubt, when it generally works so much better than the alternative.

  And so many good things turn out to be the result of accidents or mistakes. Penicillin and Cadbury flakes. Kelloggs cornflakes and Post-it notes. America itself is an accident. The result of an idiot thinking he’d discovered a short cut to Samarkand. While nuclear weapons are the product of brainboxy doubt-free kids conducting successful science experiments.

  Yes, fucking up often turns out to be the best thing long term. We should all of us be more relaxed about mistakes I think. Mistakes often save us from something worse. Often much, much worse.

  The power of doubt and the virtue of fucking up. I can’t believe no great religions have been founded on these precepts. If I wasn’t minted already, maybe that’s what I could have done. Started the Church of Self-Doubt and the Immaculate Mistake. Maybe I’d have got a little business start-up loan from the government.

  So I have my doubts about going, and I have my doubts about staying, but I do know I want to get away from this house. This place that refuses to become a home, this building which I am convinced despises me.

  My phone chirrups. These days I have the best phone money can buy. Sarah and Jesus took a long time choosing it. I’m told it does a lot of things. You could, if you wanted, make a blockbuster movie with it. Really. On this phone you could write it, shoot it, edit it, compose and record the score and finally project it in shinier than life widescreen gorgeousness at the nearest wall. You could dub it into any major language and several of the minor ones. You could work out the budgets on it. Draw up all the contracts on it, find the private cellphone numbers of your chosen Hollywood stars on it. People have.

  And you could, if you wanted, snooze on your flight to the premiere at Cannes, knowing that the phone could land the plane should the pilot have a heart attack.

  Everything is on your phone now. No need even for the ancient clutter of desktop or laptop. And this despite the fact that we all of us know that our hard drives aren’t safe. That at some point in the nearish future a hard, driven soldier in a crack Chinese Special Cyber-Ops Squad is going to stab a finger at his own Smartphone screen and wipe all our information about everything in less than a nan
osecond.

  Or the Taliban will shoot down a satellite with a well-directed beam from a laser-pen, causing a lot more havoc than 9/11. Planes into buildings? No, no my friend – so crass, so old, so vulgar, so noughties. Not like a nice clean utterly contemporary blue screen of death.

  Or maybe it’ll be an anti-climactic ending. Maybe it’ll just be the bathos of Microsoft and Google finally overreaching themselves and everything from birth registration to death certificate via school reports, medical records, bank statements, payslips, driving licences, and criminal convictions will simply vanish. Not to mention books, plays, films, parish council minutes – the whole history of human record-keeping and communication will be deleted into nothingness. Upgraded into a black hole from where no amount of system restore will bring it back.

  We all know this, which is why Parliament even now keeps a copy of all its laws on vellum. When it comes to the laws of the land not even paper is trusted to last long enough, but for everything else there is chip and there is pin. The handy little plastic smart thingamajigs with screens to touch and buttons to press. As a species we like pressing buttons. We like touching things. We’re good at it.

  But as a species we’re also careless, sloppy.

  So it might, in the end, be a pushed button that brings about the end of the world. Just as we knew it would be. But it turns out it won’t be the big red one of cold-war nightmares – nothing as dramatic as that – instead it might be a chirpy wee graphic of a button that gets accidentally sat on in a works canteen in a light industrial unit somewhere on the edge of Shenzhen. It won’t be Dr Strangelove that finishes us off, it’ll be a sleepy, overworked geek trying to archive the history of porn on his new tablet during the long, lonely nightshift. We’ll be undone by a pocket call.