It's Not Me, It's You

by Jon Richardson

  SUNDAY

  07.58

  QUEASY LIKE A SUNDAY MORNING

  Any second … now? No. I am a ‘mourning person’. Not because anybody close to me has recently passed away, but because I use that term to describe my demeanour at daybreak and as a way of separating myself from what are known as ‘morning people’ – those high-functioning, grinning morons who skip out of their beds and pounce at the dawn as eagerly and as energetically as a young puppy greets a hanging shoelace.

  My mornings are (with the exception of Christmas Day) dark and sombre affairs, spent grieving for the sleep of which I have been robbed; morning is when blades of daylight hack viciously at the dreams that have kept you company throughout the night. Avoiding breakfast in here is not an option; she will know I have come back and will use my indolence as further ammunition to hate me, but right now toast and coffee seems a pathetic defence against everything the world has in store. It doesn’t help that I have a hangover.

  It’s the morning after to end all others: Sunday. Where yesterday I could sit in my car and feel superior to those single people driven to the streets to find love in alleyways and behind skips, this morning paints an altogether different view of what it is to be in a relationship. Sundays are for the happy few who believe themselves to have found that person; whether it turns out that they are right or wrong, this morning it is enough simply to believe. A bed and breakfast brings all the discomfort of waking up in someone else’s house, but with none of the fond memories of conquest of the night before. All around the country I imagine couples who are now being woken up by energetic children keen to start the day. Some will spend all morning in bed listening to Radio 4 – the omnibus edition of The Archers, followed by Desert Island Discs. Others will be heading out to their favourite café to enjoy breakfast over a newspaper before a walk home through the park. This is an idealised version of what it is to wake up in a relationship, of course, but today I feel like chasing ideals and pitying myself – such is my own Sunday routine! All the sense of isolation of being stuck on a desert island but without the delusion that anyone cares enough to ask after me, let alone what records I would take along. Although this morning feels different for two very clear reasons: one of which is Gemma and the other is the noise from next door.

  Any second … now? No.

  I have been staring at the clock and trying to predict when the numbers will change for the last six minutes without success. The digital time display reads 07:58 but, I realise, with no curves. An 8 is supposed to be a round number, smooth and squidgy.

  Two fat ladies. 88.

  But somehow these ladies have been mutated into a form where their sides are now pressed flat and yet still I understand them to be women. My mind conjures an image of two enormous Beryl Cook-style women, dressed in blue polka-dot dresses, and stuck in individual phone boxes. The frame of the door forms the digital number eight in my mind and the flesh of the women is pressed hard up against the glass; there is no space to breathe inside and their faces are filled with alarm.

  How can I never have called into question before the ability of seven small lines to express numbers like 0 and 8 accurately, and who was so arrogant as to have come up with the idea in the first place? Then I start to wonder how my mind can have wandered so far from anything important to this trivial nonsense, so early?

  Across the room on the desk sits a neatly scribed ‘To do’ list for the day and item number one ‘Wake up’ is waiting to be ticked off with a big fat swipe of the marker pen. Of course I don’t think waking up is anything to be proud of – in fact it is the very least I expect from each day of my life, but I put it on the list simply so that before I am even out of bed I have achieved a goal and can bathe in the appropriate sense of self-satisfaction. The very opening of my eyes ceases to be a mere inevitability and becomes one less thing that has to be done before I can slip back into my cocoon at night. However, there is a slight risk that by marking getting up as an achievement I am somewhat tempting fate. It would be sad enough for a family member to come across my body in a state of eternal slumber without them then having to go to my desk and see that my death was not only a tragedy but also a failure to execute a seemingly simple task.

  Tsk! He couldn’t even manage to get up. Pretty pathetic really. And now I suppose Muggins here will have to plan his funeral on top of everything else I have to do!

  In one minute the alarm clock over my right shoulder will burst into life, giving me a further one minute to adjust my thoughts before getting out of bed at exactly eight o’clock and heading downstairs for an awkward communal breakfast. Most people think that when they set their alarm for eight o’clock, they ‘get up at eight’, but you don’t – you get up after eight; you get up late without even knowing it. If you do not begin the day right on schedule, how can you possibly hope to cope adequately with the rest of it, playing catch up as you are?

  This morning, as it happens, I do not need my premature alarm nor my one minute’s grace as I have already been awake long enough to watch the last seven minutes slip by without incident. A couple of cars have passed by me on the street outside, their lights breaking through the gaps in the slats of the window blind and dragging a neat linear pattern across the wall from the far right-hand side of the room towards the left, fading almost completely by the time it reaches my face in the dead centre.

  The reason I woke up, or rather was woken up, seven minutes early is the noise coming from the wall behind me. Whoever is sharing the room next door, they are already arguing, somewhere about four feet behind my head, their own miserable bed mirroring my own ‘half-filled’ double behind the thin plasterboard walls. Who knows what started it this morning? Some flatulence perhaps, a missile launched from the land of nod against enemy territory? Direct hit, sir! She’ll not recover from that blow!

  I can never understand what people are talking about in the morning. They talked last night before they went to bed, and absolutely nothing has happened in the mean time, so what can they be saying? These aren’t the noises of people laughing about a ridiculous dream one of them had; they are bickering about something, a baton of misery they picked up as soon as they woke up and which they will pass between each other throughout the day.

  This argument certainly started off big, with both sides exchanging fire. Her voice now comes through the wall more clearly, but less regularly, whereas his emits a constant droning sound. It sounds as though a big fat bluebottle, about the size of a regulation football, is stuck in the wall space between our two rooms and every few seconds it roars into action trying to escape, beating its wings furiously, before wearing itself out and resting before another charge. These sorts of big rows usually end fairly quickly, in my experience. There is pure hatred in these exchanges, raw fury being launched from both sides.

  Some rows grow gently from little seedlings of hate, most often when one partner has woken up in a bad mood and the other will not accept that there is no discernible reason for this. If there is anything guaranteed to put someone into a very bad mood it is being asked constantly why they are in a bad mood, when they don’t even know themselves. It is a basic human right to be allowed to be grumpy every now and again and woe betide anyone who tries to take that away from someone or give it implied meaning.

  ‘Buzz buzz buzz?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Buzz buzz buzz?’

  ‘Nothing. Shut up.’

  ‘Buzz? Buzz it me? It’s me, buzzn’t it?’

  More silence.

  ‘BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ! BUZZ BUZZITY BUZZ FUCKING BUZZ!’

  ‘YES! ALRIGHT? Yes! NOW it is you! Fuck off and leave me alone you giant pain in the arse!’

  Proof, if it were needed, that a problem shared is not, in fact, a problem halved, but a problem doubled: one of us had a problem, we have spoken about it … and now two of us have a problem! Two is always twice as big as one; it is a mathematical fact and I know that because I love maths. Maths is clean and constant, maths is r
eliable, maths has rules that allow us to work things out. Maths is a simple matter of right and wrong. Maths does not have moods. Two plus two will never wake up in a shitty mood and decide to be five just to upset all the other numbers. Nice and clean. Some numbers are better than others, obviously. Even numbers are better than odd, excepting multiples of five, which should be used whenever altering the volume control on a television. No television should ever have to suffer the ignominy of being left at volume thirteen. It makes me shudder just to think of it.

  I do not subscribe to the view that it is best to talk about problems; like a fine whisky they should be bottled up and saved for later when they have had time to mature and develop. I might feel differently if I thought people discussed problems for the reason stated (in other words, to find a solution) but they don’t really. What people really want when they talk about a problem is some sympathy. They want brows to be furrowed in front of them, and cooing noises to be made in their ear whilst their arms are stroked, because they have been led to believe that this is helpful, when really it isn’t.

  People on their own learn to deal with problems because they have to, in the same way that they learn to get rid of spiders because no one else is going to do it for them. You can scream and yell as much as you like but the spiders do not understand. It used to be that when I saw a spider in my bedroom I would go and sleep in another room … until I saw a spider in there too. Living in a two-bedroom flat, there really aren’t all that many options for relocation so my options were either to move to a mansion with six hundred bedrooms or learn to get rid of spiders. Fears and phobias are for those who can afford them, like fancy cars; the rest of us must get on with life.

  I suppose Gemma could be good with spiders: she might have a no-nonsense, robust approach to all things great and small, from insects, wasps and flies to Rottweilers and giraffes, crushing snails under her boots and drowning slugs in salt and Guinness. I would like to think I am comfortable enough with my masculinity not to feel somewhat undermined by having my spider extraction done by my girlfriend, but I think deep down I probably would. Would it be any better if she were an extreme arachnophobiac? In which case I could be spending the rest of my life walking ahead of her, clearing her path like a minesweeper, or getting up in the middle of the night to hold her hand when she needs to go and pee, guiding her gingerly to the loo just in case a tarantula is sitting at the bottom of the pedestal.

  I would liken someone in a relationship discussing an external problem to a child whose excitement to run everywhere has led them to fall over. When young children fall over, there is a misconception that they start to cry immediately, but this isn’t really the case. What happens first of all is a period of quiet assessment, where no pain exists but only the cold, hard facts.

  I was standing upright and moving forward … and now I have a faceful of carpet. Hmm, how curious?

  Most of the time, children left to their own devices will simply accept that this chain of events could not be understood by even the most advanced scientific minds and get up and continue with their play. However, when a concerned parent is nearby and this thinking time is interrupted by cries of concern, the child will conclude that a problem beyond his comprehension has occurred and only then, when the pain has been validated by an adult, will they start to cry.

  I must be in pain! If I cry now then I will get cuddled and kissed and given ice-cream.

  Adults are really not so different.

  Any second … now? No.

  Finally some silence from next door. A stalemate has been reached, and with it ends another period of time in which two people, supposedly in love, have done nothing but pick faults in one another:

  You snore too much.

  You fart in your sleep.

  You make shit cups of tea.

  You hate my mother.

  You, you, you!

  … And yet, curiously, when they eventually accept that their relationship has no future or, more to the point, one of them accepts the fact and the other is forced to go along with it (the true definition of breaking up by mutual agreement – ‘she told me it was over and I agreed, eventually’), they will say earnestly to the other, whilst maintaining full eye-contact with head tilt and eyebrows raised in mock sympathy:

  ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’

  Who was it that first thought that this was a kinder way of telling someone that a relationship had no future? Of course I can see the logic, attempting as it does to sugar the pill by implying that you did nothing wrong and the end of our relationship is purely down to me.

  ‘I am a fool to myself, I don’t deserve love, blah blah blah … now get out and come back for your shitty stuff when I’m not here.’

  Well, it doesn’t help. Especially not if the ‘you’ in question is still madly in love with the ‘me’. I can change me, tell me that I’m the problem for God’s sake, tell me exactly what it is about me and I will do what I can to change … but to change you? I can’t. Word it how you will, but what you always mean is ‘I don’t love you any more and you can cry as much as you like but there isn’t a thing you can do to change the fact.’

  The temptation here is to believe that this is somehow a uniquely British trait, slaves to our manners as we are, but I suspect it is more global. Most people begin a complaint with, ‘I’m sorry but …’ or they point out that someone is in the way with a very polite, ‘Sorry, could I just squeeze past you there?’ when what they really mean is, ‘Get out of the aisle of the train you lardy piece of shit!’ People always think they are helping by shifting blame and playing down problems but in truth the fairer way of dealing with things is to point out exactly what someone has done wrong and give them a chance of finding happiness elsewhere by correcting themselves and finding someone else.

  How is a man who burps the words ‘I love you’ and thinks that body odour is attractive to women ever going to improve himself if he is constantly told that he has done nothing wrong? It would be much better for Barbie to say, ‘Listen Ken, it’s not me, it’s you. You stink.’

  The whole relationship game is riddled with lies and half-truths and I don’t regret leaving it behind at all. Much.

  But on the upside, the ‘fuck-you’s and the ‘you-always-do-this’es from next door help to remind me of why I live the way I do and leave me with an (admittedly unpleasant) self-satisfied grin on my face. This is what they would have waiting for me, the people who sneer at me as I eat my dinners alone, the friends and colleagues who pry into my social life to see if they can’t enliven their own stagnant relationships by seeking to set me up with one of their plucky, ever-cheerful friends who ‘just hasn’t met the right one yet’. They never tell you the truth about the person they want you to meet, but like car-sales people and estate agents they give you a potted history of all the best parts without warning you of the dry rot, the damage beneath the surface that is apt to come to the surface once the warranty period is over. Equally I can be sure that I have been misrepresented on the other side, so at least we can both spend our dinner in disappointed silence without one party feeling more aggrieved than the other.

  Oh, he told you I was handsome did he? Ah, well I can only apologise. If I’m honest, I look roughly like this, most of the time, in fact this is me making an effort!

  But once again, honesty is rejected as the best policy and replaced with play-acting and pointless platitudes. No one is honest with someone they find attractive because you would much rather someone loved a character being played by you, than for them not to love the real you.

  And so back to Gemma, beautiful but increasingly forgetful of my existence Gemma.

  When I hear the couple next door arguing, the voices I hear are mine and hers, ten years down the line. The question is whether I am being unduly negative or whether or not I am preparing for the inevitable. Of course I yearn to roll over in my bed and meet the eyes of someone whose beauty makes everything else in the world seem insignificant and have them smile back
at me. I’d love to win the lottery too, but I don’t bother buying a ticket any more because the odds seem stacked too heavily against me. Of course I might win a tenner every now and again, but who wants to spend the rest of their life living off the interest from ten pounds?

  Staying single is simply a matter of playing the odds. In all my life, including my family, friends, the families of my friends and so on, I would say that I am aware of one couple who have been together all their lives and who I am almost certain are happier for it. Just one. The rest consists of relationships which have not yet had the chance to fail, couples who have stayed together against their will through obligation or responsibility or those who consider the back and forth of rowing and making up to be a sign of a passionate relationship. I would think that if you cannot get along with the person you live with at least most of the time, then there is probably some sort of problem.

  My moods are down to me. When I am upset, it is because of something I have done and I can trace its origins back as far as I need to and then deal with it however I deem appropriate. When I need fresh air, I go out. When I need to get drunk, I drink. When I need a hug, I man up! Or else I wear a T-shirt that is slightly too small for me – the effect is the same. It certainly puts the musclemen I see in my gym, parading up and down in front of the mirror, into place when you consider that the real reason they are bursting out of their vests may simply be because they are imagining it is their mother’s arms around them.

  Dependence on others is a weakness, plain and simple. This military outlook has become a defence mechanism, a necessary response to a world that is constantly telling me that I am wrong in the way I choose to live my life. Sitcom and film storylines revolve around people my age looking for love, twofor-one offers in shops encourage family-size consumption and governments offer tax breaks to people who marry and have children (despite the fact that people in relationships already get everything half price). The tax breaks should be given to people like me, so that we can buy more DVDs and bottles of wine and forget our problems for two hours a night.