It's Not Me, It's You

by Jon Richardson

  She is the trail of breadcrumbs leading me away from the witch’s house; she is the future spent picnicking in our garden rather than eating off my lap in the back of my car. Right now she is the only positive train of thought in my mind and perhaps the pressure of not wanting to lose such a precious commodity is the reason I haven’t yet texted her since she first gave me her number almost a week ago.

  Sitting now on the end of my bed looking down at the eleven digits she scribbled on the top of my bill, I feel the same distress and trepidation that a mother looking down at the eleven digits on her newborn baby must feel. She works at a local carvery and we have been flirting quite successfully for a number of months now, a position in which I am entirely comfortable to stay. Most Sundays I go there for my dinner and our conversation flows easily in allotted ninety-second portions between courses and we both laugh a great deal. Following an early and amusing misunderstanding in which she mistook tomato-sauce stains for blood, I have been maintaining the pretence that I am a travelling hitman and she has continued to giggle as if this is the funniest thing she could ever imagine.

  When she laughs, all the cynicism I maintain in my professional life disappears and for that brief second it seems inconceivable that we could live any way but happily ever after. Her smile is truly wonderful and I am starting to think (in fact I am certain) that seeing her smile is the real reason I go to eat there once a week, and not for the chewy, grey meat and brutally overcooked broccoli whose florets could be rung out like a wet sponge.

  Last Sunday was no exception and I ate an early lunch before driving to that night’s show on the south coast, but what changed from our normal routine was that, after I paid, she brought back my change and receipt, upon which was written the words:

  Next time you’re in the area for ‘business’ why don’t we both eat some food somewhere, rather than me just watching and bringing drinks? x

  Business is what I call my killings, so that is a funny joke on her part and she has successfully avoided falling into the trap of using ‘your’ instead of ‘you’re’, which is, if not an immediate red-card offence, certainly a yellow with a strong talking-to. I am in no doubt that if you use the term ‘luv’ in a letter or text message then you are incapable of truly understanding the emotion. Artists have not pored over heartache and unrequited sentimentality for years so that our generation could decide that four letters is simply one too many to express how we feel.

  I have always thought that ‘unrequited’ is such a clinical and ugly word. Portraying none of its ability to devastate and define a person’s life, it sounds rather more like the sort of word that should only ever be used by accountants and financiers. ‘Looking over your figures from the fiscal year 2009 to 2010 I note that there was an unaccounted-for fluctuation in your unrequited assets. Could you tell me why this was?’

  Getting the number and watching her blush as she gave it to me stirred up emotions I have successfully repressed for the last eight years: a flushed face, electric nervous excitement, a slight need for a wee and everything else. This should all have been a good thing, I know, and would be considered to be nothing less by most sane people. A girl I like has shown that she likes me back – bingo. To me, however, it potentially represents the end of the only perfect stage of our relationship. No longer can we just go on flirting and both imagining the other to be all that is missing from our lives; now my hand has been forced, the beehive has been punched square in the face and things are going to change, most likely for the worse. The more time she spends with me, the more she will come to realise that I am actually quite a tedious man, difficult to spend time with, and eventually I will lose the one thing I look forward to each week – our Sunday flirtation.

  The sad fact is that I will lose that privilege whether I choose to meet up with her or not, as the other option is to not phone her, never go back to the restaurant and eventually move away to avoid an embarrassing encounter with her and a new boyfriend in the street. But I’m not going to phone anyway, I am going to send a text. I am going to, because I really like her and I need to realise that this is a good thing. So I will text her. Soon.

  I want it to be known that in no way am I maintaining any time between receiving her number and getting in contact because I think it will make me look cool; far from it – I would have called her from the car park of the restaurant if I thought I could have found the right words. Clearly it is probably a little late for a man who dines alone every Sunday in a crummy carvery to play the cool card, so the plucky loser card is the only one I have left. All week I have been arguing with myself over what to say and have already deleted several drafts of the message that seemed either not funny enough, ‘funny but trying too hard to be funny’ or didn’t successfully convey how keen I am on her. The first drafts went roughly like this:

  Hey Gemma. Hope the rest of your shift went quickly. I’d love to go for some food at some point. Do you have anywhere in particular in mind? J

  By abbreviating my name from Jon to just ‘J’ I think I was hoping to add some informality to proceedings but then decided I was just being too vague and making myself sound like a member of a shit boy band. It also occurred to me that she could have given her number out several times this week, to a James, a Joe and a Jeremy as well as to me. Nothing would crush my early affections like a reply that read, ‘Excuse me, but who is this?’ Urgh. I shudder just to think of it. Referring to her job also seemed somehow disingenuous. I want her to know that I consider her to be more than a waitress to me. Deleted. The second batch of text were as follows:

  Hello! I’d love to take you for dinner at some point, when is good for you? Jon (P.S. Do you know what gets blood out of cashmere?) x

  The x always got deleted straight away – what was I trying to pull off there? Next in line for the cull was the exclamation mark at the beginning, which made it seem as though I was shouting at the poor girl like a lunatic through a bus window. The blooded cashmere line was supposed to be a joke, but what if she didn’t get it? Well then, I suppose she isn’t right for me if she doesn’t get my crappy jokes, since that is (unfortunately) a large part of who I am. ‘Take you for dinner’ also seemed a bit domineering. Perhaps she likes to pay half?

  Finances aside, the fact that she initiated the whole thing by giving me her number means I suppose that she is taking me out for dinner, and I am just going along with the whole thing. Why can’t it just be the last century in which we could have liked each other from afar for a few years before an etiquette breakdown at a dance involving incorrect consumption of a vol-auvent meant we could never be seen together again and one of us died of something horrific a few years later?

  Curiously this is always my ideal relationship scenario – the fleeting, unfulfilled passion with none of the reality of life, in which we may steal a few short moments of happiness in our achingly brief encounter. The reality of life is proving to be more and more over-rated to me and perhaps to others, too. This may explain why in most UK homes, living room seating points towards the plasma screen in the corner rather than the room’s other occupants. Which reminds me – someone is stealing my TV. I definitely left the pissing door unlocked. I’ll text her later.

  19.54

  FIESTA TIME

  Saturday night, I feel the air is getting hot. Steam is fogging the windows and the air is damp and close and stings my nostrils. Unlike for Whigfield, it isn’t the heat rising from writhing bodies in a dark and sexy club I can feel, but the steam from the tray of hot chips I am eating off the back of a road atlas settled on my chest in my battered old Ford Fiesta, secluded behind a wall in a car park at the back of a theatre in Bradford. Nobody can see me inelegantly stuffing my face, with my seat reclined so far back that my eyes are level with my steering wheel, but looking out I am able to spy on all the revellers staggering into town on their hunt for what used to be love but now is nothing more than a night of grotesque exchanging of bodily fluids designed to cushion the impact of a lonely trawl thr
ough from Monday to Friday.

  In spite of the drizzle, people are heading out in their finest weekend livery, hair washed and nails clipped, with good intentions I am sure, but secretly knowing (but never admitting to themselves) that they will more than likely be going home with someone they don’t really find attractive, whose breath is a little meatier than they would like and who they will probably never again speak to beyond tomorrow morning’s awkward pillow banter. This is a world I have gladly left behind me. It isn’t that my current lifestyle choice is perfect, by any means, but I never feel better about the decisions I have made than now, hiding in my car before going to do my gig, watching the animals escaped from the zoo.

  My rudimentary understanding of the dating techniques of prehistoric man, though I freely admit they may be too heavily influenced by cartoonists, are that he would simply beat a woman over the head and drag her back to his cave when the mood took him. I can’t see that all that much has changed. Here, at what for us is the end of our supposed evolution, we use alcohol to drug the senses instead of physical violence, but we still call it ‘going clubbing’. Young girls stagger around in heels so impractical as to render them useless in terms of the basic function of a shoe, as gracelessly as baby seals on the Canadian Gulf. The ‘music’ from the club behind the theatre in which I am to perform is also a violent attack on the tranquillity I crave.

  While I recognise that female company is nice, I refuse to believe that clubbing is how people are supposed to meet to establish relationships on a level far beyond what we consider to be a norm in modern society. I think I would have been far better suited to living some time in the 1940s, just after the war perhaps. Spirits high, a statistical advantage for a man looking to find a woman and a healthy dose of stuffiness and formality to add to any social occasion.

  Were Gemma and I to have met one another under such conditions as those before me now, and were we to get married and have children, how could I possibly explain this to our grandchildren when they ask how granny and granddad got together? Gathered round the hearth on a wet Sunday afternoon, the children’s big round eyes staring up at me as I switch off the Grand Prix and begin my tale:

  ‘Well, young Sally! Granny and I were out at a nightclub, absolutely shitfaced I hasten to add’ [cheeky giggle and look at Gran who is playing her now antiquated Nintendo DS in the corner, knitting having become extinct long ago], when our two friends at the time starting copping off with one another.

  ‘Well as you can imagine this put Granny and I in a quite sticky social situation – as we’ve barely said two words to one another – but this was the new millennium and we weren’t going to let that bother us! So … we downed another bottle of Blue Generic Alcohol each and headed back to ours for some old-fashioned sexual intercourse. I was too drunk to use a condom and she was too drunk to care and that’s how your mummy was born!

  ‘We’ve been together ever since, because financially it made more sense for us to get family benefits than for me to have to pay child benefit and work, and although really we resent each other terribly and spend most of our days fantasising about the lives we could have led apart, we’re now terrified of the alternative and too afraid of dying alone to think about change. OK, love? Stop crying and climb into your purpose-built three-dimensional entertainment unit.’

  Perhaps this is how all our grandparents got together, but when asked they simply concoct lies about barn dances and having to be home before eleven to avoid a good hiding in order to save face. I probably have to stop thinking about things in terms of how they will look years down the line, or at least I am frequently told that I have to, but that just feels like admitting defeat.

  Gemma would certainly be somewhat intimidated if she knew that a man who hadn’t so much as sent her a text message yet had already broken the hearts of her grandchildren. This is my instinctive reaction, to allow the fact that Gemma and I might not have the chance of being together for the rest of our lives to be an excuse not to act in the short term. If I think we are going to break up at some point then I don’t want to even get together. If I told you before a game of football that you would have the best game of your entire life, score the most amazing goal ever seen in amateur football, but in the 89th minute you would suffer a horrendous leg break that might end your football career altogether, would you still play? Of course not, so I’m right then. My fondness for her now is no guarantee of long-term survival. I told my last girlfriend I was in love with her, and I meant it too. I am not in love with her any more, so I have to conclude that my feelings were temporary and I am fickle. The only honest answer when someone asks you if you love them is ‘at the moment, yes’, but try saying that without getting a kick in the chaps.

  It is the sheer number of bodies swarming outside the club that strikes me. In much the same way that being in traffic on a motorway reminds me of how many cars must be on all the roads of the world at that point, spewing their noxious gases skyward, looking at this nightclub queue outside a grotty venue in Bradford makes me doubt the likelihood of any of us finding ‘the one’ if they do exist. There are simply too many people in the way. How am I to believe Gemma is Miss Right when there are millions upon millions of possible Miss Wrongs to check first?

  In the long ago past, there would have been a choice of only two mates in a village. If a member of the opposite sex was roughly your age and unwed, you two would be together, end of story. These days, with the advent of internet dating, one could easily believe that ‘the one’ for you lives on a remote farm in Papua New Guinea. Good luck finding them! It is said that there is someone out there for each of us, and I would hope that anyone who has walked through a town centre on a Saturday night would agree with me that this is indeed a crying shame. Some people need to be told that they need to polish up their act before they can find an audience for it.

  I am most jealous when I see people who have found a way of sharing an unadulterated happiness in circumstances I could not tolerate. Hideous drunkards, scoffing ambiguous meats from a polystyrene tray in grotty, wet town centres, hand in hand and exchanging passionate kisses every twenty yards, are experiencing a happiness beyond judgement or self-awareness that I will simply never know. My mind turns to one such couple, witnessed walking home along a quiet street in Brighton one night, and utterly unaware of my presence behind them. Both smelled equally as bad as each other, were equally drunk and so were equally enraptured by the other.

  ‘When we get home … hic … burp …’ began the gentleman to his beloved, stumbling in a different direction with each word – the words came one by one, not flowing like liquid but cascading out of his mouth like glasses sliding off a wonky table and smashing on to the floor. ‘When we get … home … I’m gonna put you on that kitchen floor … and sp*nk all over ya!’

  As another small part of me died inside, she giggled erotically and turned away from her trough of recently grilled animal carcass with lashings of chilli sauce to kiss him in the facial region.

  Perhaps that’s what women like, I thought. Perhaps I should be threatening to do that to someone. But in a food preparation area? Never.

  The memory is enough to put me off the thought of ever being romantically involved with anyone ever again. As a football fan I feel as though I bear a responsibility for the misdemeanours of the players who represent the sport I love. Equally, by continuing my search for the woman of my dreams, I endorse this kind of behaviour. Staying single is my way of rejecting the whole charade, of somehow elevating myself above sexual deviance, above deception and heartbreak.

  Besides, a thought has begun to germinate in the back of my mind for which staying single is not just the sad condition of my existence but might conceivably be a positive bonus – no, more than that, the necessary requirement … you could almost say the unique selling point.

  Maybe, just maybe, there’s a book in all this.

  Maybe I can persuade a publisher that the very real issues that beset my life, my unbearable, dep
lorable perfectionism, my militantly negative tendencies, which are already an apparently endless source of the material that feeds my stand-up act, could also be harnessed into service in writing a book about the Unbearable Darkness Of My Being, the impossibility of my finding true love and the reason why I’m still irredeemably single.

  The problem with that idea of course is Gemma. If by some miracle I were to start seeing her, form a relationship and make it work, I would be quite unable to stand by the authenticity of my ‘single and impossible’ status. If I were to fulfil my dreams of becoming a writer, specialising in the area in which I am uniquely qualified to write, I would have to forfeit any chance of happiness with Gemma.

  Yet the only way I could test this contradiction would be by pursuing both goals. It is of course quite possible that I might not get either the girl or the book contract, but it is quite clear that if I were to find true love, or any kind of love, my credibility as someone for whom happiness with another is impossible would be blown and I’d have to pay back my advance, which by now in my mind I have already spent on buying myself a secret pied à terre hidden away somewhere in the Lake District where my legions of adoring fans and readers could not possibly find me.

  This obviously needs a little more thinking about. I jot a few notes in my diary and think about mailing a proposal to my agent.

  As I step out of the car to walk across to the theatre, I press the button on my key and the door locks pleasingly with a sound of sliding metal followed by a thud. I say aloud:

  ‘Jon Richardson is locking his car to prevent the rutting beasts from breaking into his car and stealing his Pot Noodles.’

  I turn away and notice a man parked alongside me, staring up in disbelief at the antics of the weirdo who commentates on his entire life as if it were a football match. I guess I won’t be forgetting whether or not I have locked the door on this occasion.