It's Not Me, It's You

by Jon Richardson

  Sitting there on a slightly cold but not unpleasant afternoon helps me confirm that you do have to come away from people in order to think clearly about more important things. There on my rock I can take stock of where I am, how I have arrived here and where I am heading next – the bigger picture. To me, people are like the rocks that would break up the flow of the river. They burst into your life and impede your progress. There are relationships to maintain, bills to pay, there is work to do and fun to have before you can carry on with your journey.

  A select few will leave the spot they are in when you arrive and travel along with you a part of the way. It may seem, for a while at least, that your trip is no longer one that need be made alone. But no sooner have you become accustomed to their company, then they will get caught up on something, flow down a different channel or just break apart and disappear altogether and you will once again be alone, having now forgotten how you ever had the strength to travel alone in the first place.

  If I am not careful my entire life is going to have passed me by without me having given enough thought to where I am heading. For me there will be no starting again; my final destination will be precisely that, so it would make sense to go to my rock more often, and make time to think. It’s not that I am terribly unhappy – in fact my life is extremely comfortable – it’s just that it is when things seem most comfortable that I am most apprehensive, because in comfort, mistakes are made. I liken life to being on a moving walkway at an airport, as soon as you place your first step on its surface you have yielded all control over your destination – it is marked out ahead of you.

  Please hold on to the handrail.

  What if you suddenly decide you want to get off? What if you see your gate going past and realise you have made a mistake? Too late. You think:

  I reckon if I turned around and ran I could move backwards and make it back to where I started … and there are so many people behind me. They will stare and tut and laugh. At best I will succeed only in maintaining my current position, just beyond where I want to be, but close enough to see what I am missing out on.

  Balding men in their sixties who drive convertible sports cars with the roof down in bad weather, women in their fifties who wear too much make-up and too little of everything else in clubs and bars on Wednesday nights, people in their twenties who put off getting jobs and stay at their parents’ home all day watching children’s television and eating crisps; they are all running backwards along the walkway and we are all laughing at them.

  In my head I unwrap my sandwiches, tear off a piece of crust and drop it into the river, watching it as a parent watches a child taking its first faltering steps. As if immediately overwhelmed by its newfound independence it travels at first only along the water’s edge and is pulled into a rock pool by the side, where it swirls round and round, seemingly trying desperately to cling to the back wall. I can almost hear its screams. After a while it is thrown back out and is carried away down river, oblivious of what lies ahead and powerless to struggle against the current. Ham and mustard, if anyone is interested.

  But I am not there now – I am in a service-station car park taking deep breaths and trying to calm myself down for having missed something far less beautiful than a sunset but somehow no less important. What an idiot I am.

  Gemma represents something more meaningful which I hope will allow me to forget about this sort of thing entirely. If there were someone here I cared about then perhaps none of the other stuff would matter – the order of my coat hangers, the last mouthful of my breakfast, the display on my dashboard. I need some perspective. Nobody has died – there is no prize for seeing your dashboard display at 50,000 miles.

  For now though, even thinking about it while trying to calm myself down annoys me. I might never get to see that again.

  The way some people feel about birdwatching, I feel about round numbers. Missing the 50k makes me feel as though I were on a birdwatching weekend and as I bent down to tie up my shoelaces a golden eagle flew over me with a dodo in its claws screeching the Macarena. There is only achievement – tasks completed properly or otherwise. I have failed to execute this journey properly and there is a price to be paid.

  Closing the door of my car and locking it behind me (this time in silence, I am too angry for silly sentences now), I head indoors to the cafeteria. The chattering ladies behind the service-station counter bring me back once again to the time when I worked as a hotel breakfast cook as a student and I had my first lesson in how incapable I would be in life at maintaining what other people seem able to do easily for hours, namely talking crap. As if a bolt of conversation provides a shock as strong as that from a defibrillator and following the zombified journey into work, on arrival the people in the suits and uniforms perk up at the prospect of a chat about last night’s telly. I would arrive at work and maintain roughly the same stony-faced outlook throughout the morning, while all around me cackles and howls from the mouths of waiting and reception staff bounced off the walls and battered me senseless.

  ‘Did you watch Nigella last night? I’m going to do that Moroccan salad this weekend. I don’t know how she isn’t five hundred stone with all that food she sneaks down to munch on in the middle of the night!’

  ‘I know! And did you seeeeeeee the size of her pantry!’ Then, the next five minutes were spent giggling at the fact that someone misheard and thought they were talking about the size of her panties. By the time they had all got their breath back it would be time for a cup of tea and a collective harmonious sighing session, like a flock of brooding pigeons, which is a clandestine way of saying, ‘Can you believe we get paid for this? What are we like? Oh, it’s too much!’

  I quite agree. It is as if Britain is filled with conversational diabetics, and knowing that they will be deprived of their supply for eight hours overnight they have a huge booster shot of inane chat before they leave and a life-saving top-up burst on the following mornings. I can only assume that once they left the hotel they didn’t speak to anyone all night, sitting in silence like monks in front of Strictly Come Celebrity Dog Training on Ice. I’m sure they all thought I was rude, a pompous student too good to talk to ordinary folk, but it wasn’t like that.

  It had nothing to do with class or intellect – I just didn’t know what to say. I once had an opinion on a programme I had seen, in which Nigella talked us through how to prepare a ‘chip butty’, but someone spoke in the gap I was waiting for and so I was left waiting at the junction with my indicators on. I wished I could have been a part of it and I wish to this day that I had the capability to pass the time of day with someone at a bus stop, talking about everything and nothing at the same time, but the truth is that I could no sooner execute a session of pleasant small talk than I could sit down and play a game of chess with a grandmaster. It is a skill I have never been taught. The banter flies equally rapidly behind the counter here, much faster than the movement of meals over it, at any rate.

  It has not escaped my notice that I have ended up in a profession that means I never have to deal with small talk or conversation of any type. Although at gigs I technically work with hundreds of people at a time, everyone but myself is required by etiquette to remain mute throughout the performance. Any interjection is filed as ‘a heckle’, an aggressive gesture which demands that I make an insinuation about the originator’s mother to maintain my control of the room. It is not a sign of decent social awareness to be capable of speaking without interruption or validation for an hour at a time and so in a sense I can convince myself that all stand-up comedians are equally as screwed up as I am.

  I order a latte and grab a packet of biscuits from by the till and this time find a perfectly uncluttered table affording me an unobstructed view of the other customers – behind me I can see out onto the motorway itself. Once seated, I scan the room and engage in my hobby of making value judgements about other customers. There are plenty of travelling families in here who look as though they hate one another. I wonder if t
he parents’ happiness was ever so complete that they felt they had to have a new life to share it with, or did they simply have kids to take the focus away from what went wrong?

  We all love to stare at people. There is no malice in it, but so much that can be learned by looking at someone for slightly too long, by breaking the ‘occasional glancing rule’ with which we all secretly comply. We are taught that it is rude to stare, so we have come to look at people very superficially. Nevertheless it can be exciting to get to stare at someone without their knowledge, to look at the expressions they pull when they talk and all the things that tell us the truth about people.

  I am momentarily distracted as I hear a female voice nearby, a voice belonging to a woman in her forties or fifties, saying aloud, ‘That’s crazy, man!’ It doesn’t befit a woman of her age and I cannot help but make all sort of assumptions about this woman as a result of her use of language. Most of these assumptions are probably entirely unfair – maybe she intended the expression ironically having heard her children using it – but I cannot help myself.

  Then I see a woman who leaves me utterly transfixed, sitting a few tables away and staring out of the window. Leaning back against her chair, her legs slightly bowed, sits a middle-aged woman, attractive for her age, perhaps because of her age, her eyes full of history and emotion. They stare off into the distance as if she is trying to will her body to lift itself and fly at great speed towards the horizon, towards the unknown. She does not look at me, she does not look at anyone; she does not even look down at the coffee she occasionally fumbles for and sips gently. Her features are as if set in stone, eyebrows and lips are pinned still by the fantasy in her mind. Her nostrils flare gently with each breath; she blinks in spite of herself.

  I can see that this is a perfect moment in an otherwise tumultuous day/week/year, the sun breaking through the cloud, and feel glad that I am living it vicariously through her. In her head I imagine the air here smells like a newly extinguished candle, a warm fire is crackling nearby and the drink she savours is the finest mulled wine.

  I want her to stay that way for ever, but she snaps out of her mood violently as the phone on the table kicks into life. Lights flash, a tinny jingle plays and its vibrations propel it across the table with a noise like an angry bee breaking wind.

  ‘I’m in the restaurant. Yes. Up the stairs … Oh, sorry. No, I thought we said we’d meet here … OK. Sorry. OK, I’ll wait here. Shall I get you a …?’

  She puts the phone down on the table and now sits bolt upright glancing routinely over her shoulders at the door until the man she has been waiting for arrives. A tall, well-built man with crew-cut hair, which is greying around the temples, comes in wearing a denim jacket over a white T-shirt tucked over his belly and into a pair of faded jeans. His face is etched with rage and the veins on his temples look fit to burst. Without thinking she stands as he comes in.

  ‘I been outside the bogs for fifteen fucking minutes, you dozy cunt.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I thought we’d agreed to meet here.’

  ‘Well, we fucking didn’t, or else I would’ve fucking been here wouldn’t I? Drinking coffee and enjoying myself instead of standing by the shitters like a fucking perverted prick.’

  ‘I’m sorry, do you want a drink?’

  ‘No. You’ve pissed me off now. You always fucking do this.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says for the third time. I can understand now the fear in her eyes, why she longed for the horizon, why she so treasured that silent moment in heaven. How quickly the best things die.

  ‘I don’t fucking neeeeed your apology,’ he growls. ‘Drink up so we can get back on the fucking road.’

  ‘Please. Calm down,’ she implores.

  He stares at her for an uncomfortable amount of time. After a moment she concedes and stares down into her drink, defeated once more and left wondering what kind of evening awaits her.

  I think of shouting over, ‘Do you know what I don’t need? I don’t need you bringing your prehistoric coping strategies into my life. Your pathetic aggression at the fact that the world has moved on without you and being a tattooed prick with dirt under his fingernails is no longer enough to get what you want.’

  But I say nothing, because I am terrified of confrontation. This woman clearly needs help, I think, or does she? Should I try to protect her? In all likelihood she wouldn’t thank me for it. She made her choice. Twenty years ago there was probably a man who loved her, a quiet, unassuming, average-looking man who loved her so much that she lost respect for him. He was overlooked in favour of this piece of shit with a pulse, whose arrogant self-confidence seemed so secure, so exciting to be around. Fuck her, actually. Fuck everyone who thinks they are stuck with the wrong choices they made

  – myself included. When the foundations of your house are rotten, you do not paint your living room.

  It dawns on me that all people come to take comfort for granted and problems represent the potential for improvement. Once you have achieved your goal of a garden with the greenest grass, all that remains is a shit view. Women do not inherently love bastards, as the saying goes, but know that bastards leave themselves the most room to manoeuvre. If you regularly berate your wife, steal money from her purse and prevent her from seeing her friends then she is bound to be delighted the one day you make her toast in the morning.

  ‘Steve’s really trying’, she will tell her mum on the phone that night. ‘I think we’re going to be OK!’

  It won’t be OK. At best you will break up the next time he shouts at you in the pub, or worse, and you will look back later on the years you wasted from which you cannot extract a single happy memory. Your chance of a better future is happening now, and it passes every moment you decide not to walk away; the worst that could happen is you stay with him for ever. You stay with him because you grow to pity him and see his aggression as a manifestation of his own unhappy upbringing.

  It ain’t his fault ma, it ain’t.

  Of course it is. Let him rot. But I’m not being fair, I’m just lashing out mentally at people who have done nothing wrong and are trying to deal with life the same way I am. I just hate the greyness of all this emotion; why can’t there just be a simple answer, like there is to most questions? Anger is clean, anger apportions blame and refuses to accept responsibility so it is a most appealing first response, but I don’t want to be angry – I want to be excited, I want to be oblivious to the people around me. Why did I even text Gemma if this future is what is waiting for us? Could I really ever become that man or is it stupid to even consider the possibility? Texting her was a selfish gesture borne out of my own frustrations at eating breakfast alone. She could at least have replied though.

  11.42

  BACK HOME

  Finishing the journey home in almost a daze, I pull into the maze of suburban cul-de-sacs which is the estate I live on. I did call in at the restaurant on the way home and parked up for a few minutes (probably nearer fifteen) to see if she was there. She wasn’t. I recognised one of the other waitresses and wondered whether or not she recognised me. If she had, then I suppose my being there might have looked a little less than sane, so I left again and finished the journey. I will have the rest of the day at home to have a quick tidy around and dry out a little. The rain has worsened and is now falling in heavy, fat droplets. As they hit my shirt they leave dark, thin slashes on the fabric like tiny knife holes.

  Would I be happy for Gemma to come here without my having tidied up especially first? Is it a display of effort or an attempt to create a false impression of myself. In any case, maybe instead of tidying up for Gemma’s potential visit I should mess things up a bit?

  Here you go darling, look at the dust on that! I thought you might like it … I haven’t flushed the toilet either in case that would make you feel uncomfortable.

  The modern reality is that if Gemma does come back here, it won’t be to run a finger across the top shelf of my bookcase to check for dust, but to be wowed by a n
ight of passionate lovemaking. Suffice to say I find it easier to please in the former regard than the latter. I suppose it is this fact that has always meant I was more popular with the parents of my girlfriends than with the girls themselves.

  Mothers were wowed by my cleanliness and consideration, by how polite I was and by the fact that I could cook. Fathers were glad that I was polite and followed football, but glad that I was no threat to their male dominance at home. I am not yet old enough for women to be impressed by their parents’ opinions of me and so washing-up after Sunday lunches and managing not to swear through a game of scrabble was time wasted.

  ‘You’ve got yourself a real keeper there, love,’ mothers would coo as I left.

  ‘I’ve got a slipper-wearing loser whose soul is at least twice the age of his meagre body,’ would be the unspoken response.

  I should have been stealing her away on a motorbike and telling her parents to piss off, I suppose, because that’s what being young is for. Women have a lifetime ahead of them to settle for someone safe and reliable.

  I turn the key in the lock and smile as it clicks open. I had locked the door after all, of course I had. I kick the door open with my toe and a warm gust of air rushes out to greet me with its arms outstretched. The specific combination of aromas assures me immediately that this is my home and there is no other like it. I allow myself to bathe in its familiarity briefly before stepping inside, out of the rain into the porch area. Welcome home.

  As I pull the UPVC door closed behind me the sound of the latch clicking into place sends a shiver of elation down my spine. Now I am safe. Now things are back on my terms. No one can look disapprovingly down on me in here, and there is no background music or shouting. I can ignore knocks at the door, unplug the telephone, draw the curtains and disappear for ever if I want to, or at least for the next few glorious hours. Beyond that and my silence would cause problems. People wouldn’t notice for a while after, but the peaceful tranquillity would be broken by my paranoid mind. I probably won’t want to disappear for ever, in fact, but that option should be available to all of us. That’s what home is: home is where no one can get you.