Tim Connor Hits Trouble

by Frank Lankaster

  Erica? If he was honest with himself his relationship with Erica had been unsettling him for some weeks. It was stalled at half-in/half-out. He was convinced that they were more than just a pair of hedonists, but there was no developing sense of secure belonging, just fleeting moments of reaching out for each other. Of course Erica had Rachel, or, he assumed she had. Perhaps he really was on his own.

  Stability! Security! He surprised himself. He was slightly embarrassed. He rarely thought much about security, or not for long. In his twenties and early thirties he had thrived on excitement and risk. With Gina he happened upon stability and security without conscious effort or even much awareness that he’d found them. Until their destabilising crises he had never given much thought to ontological security. But he was thinking about it now. Was he insecure? It was a novel thought. Or lonely? An equally disconcerting notion.

  Lost in himself he had wandered into an unfamiliar part of the town. It was clearly not a wealthy area, the terraced houses built of plain but functional London brick reminded him of the old working class houses of the north. A small church caught his attention, the kind of place he would normally not give a second glance to, if he registered it at all. It was a squat building with mottled walls and a small, white stone steeple with a plain iron cross. Two narrow windows and a dark wooden door with a black painted handle and hinges punctuated its front wall. It bore little resemblance to the big, ornate Catholic churches of his childhood, other than both offered space for reflection.

  On impulse, he reached out and grasped the door handle. The door was shut solid.

  He turned away, more disappointed than he could explain.

  As he walked on he heard the crash of a bolt and the heavy sound of the door being dragged open.

  He swung round.

  ‘What can I do for you? Are you looking for something?’ It was a middle aged, informally dressed man whose profession was only apparent from the clerical collar he was wearing.

  The man’s friendly demeanour encouraged Tim to talk.’

  ‘I don’t know that you can do much for me. On a whim, I was going to pop into your church. I think I might have been about to reflect for a few minutes. Praying is not really my thing.’

  ‘Perhaps not but it is mine. Come in for a moment.’

  ‘I don’t want to take up your time.’

  ‘No problem, I was about to take a few minutes break from composing my next talk.’

  Tim followed the pastor through the simply laid-out church, into what looked like a small assembly room. An oval table with perhaps a dozen or so chairs tucked in around it dominated the room. There was a smaller table at the far end with a kettle and some crockery on it.

  ‘Take a seat. My name is Thomas, by the way. But please call me Tom. I’m the one-man band around here. In fact I’m also pastor to another small church in Woodham. The way we’re heading we’re soon going to have more churches than clergy.’

  ‘Hi. I’m Tim, Tim Connor.’

  ‘Good to meet you Tim. You look a bit down. Why don’t we talk a little?’

  ‘I am a bit down but it’s under control Tom.’

  ‘Can I get you a drink? Tea or coffee?’ offered Tom.

  ‘Tea please.’

  ‘Me too, tea for the tiller-man as someone once said.’

  ‘Donavan, maybe.’

  ‘Could be. It certainly wasn’t Cliff Richard.’

  The two of them chatted as Tom made the drinks. Tim decided that this was as good a place as any and better than most to air his feeling. Tom listened but said almost nothing until Tim had finished.

  ‘Tim you sound like a decent man and far too sensible to expect me to produce some sacred alchemy to solve your problems. But praying is like talking you know, as you and I have been doing. You can believe you’re talking to God, your dead relatives, or into the void. Whatever or whoever else, you’re certainly talking to yourself. It can bring some emotional comfort and maybe even some answers. A lot of people like to pray together but that’s not necessary. But if you pray on your own don’t count on hearing a responding voice. I don’t myself.’

  Tim smiled at Tom’s idiosyncratic take on praying.

  ‘Thanks. It’s some time since I heard a sermon.’

  ‘I wouldn’t call that a sermon. Anyway, sermon or not it will have to stop there. I have to go off to Woodham,’ he paused. ‘Oh, just one more thing. I’ve read that praying, especially with others, can help you live longer.’

  Tim looked at Tom quizzically.

  ‘Is that true? I’m always reading about things that will help you to live longer, even half a glass of wine a day according to one expert.’

  ‘That sounds frustrating, I prefer half a bottle myself. But prayer? Maybe… I have noticed that most of my parishioners live to a ripe old age.’

  ‘I see. I’ll bear it in mind.’

  Both men looked at their watches. Time was up.

  Thomas saw Tim to the door. They shook hands and said goodbye with neither feeling the need to suggest a further meeting. Why try to improve on serendipity? A one-off chance meeting was enough, although what it was enough for Tim was not sure. A few yards on from the church Tim turned round intending to give a friendly wave. But noiselessly the pastor had gone.

  Tim continued on his way, still in reflective and unhurried mood. Dusk had fallen by the time he reached his car and he drove steadily across country without making a stop. Back home, he went to bed in better spirits than he could account for.

  Chapter 29

  It’s Staring You in the Face

  Tim unravelled from his sprawl on the couch to search for the remote. He had no wish to watch the same cycle of news items repeated again, and again. After scouting around for a few seconds the elusive piece of equipment caught his eye. It was deeply embedded in the cushion he had been sitting on. Annoyed, he picked it up and squeezed hard on the off button. There was a flash, a moment of darkness and the television resettled to another channel. He resisted an impulse to launch a karate attack at the insouciant piece of equipment. Revenge against a machine only hurts oneself: injury to insult. Regaining his calm, he pressed the button again more carefully. This time the set clicked off. The silence was welcome. Life across the world seemed no more cheerful than his own: corrupt politicians, a government swamped by financial crisis, a train crash in Pakistan, and Liverpool out of the Champions League for another year. Not a chink of light anywhere. Minor earthquake in Blackpool, nobody injured, was the good news.

  He regarded keeping up with the news as part of his job. Usually the news didn’t much affect his mood, one way or the other: mostly it was selectively bad, but he didn’t take it personally. Apart from his on-going project with Henry of global utopia, there was little he could do about the state of the world other than vote conscientiously and protest against the more iniquitous cock-ups and self-seeking of the great and good. The arrival on the internet of petition-protest groups like 38 Degrees and UK-UNCUT had made a level of political participation easier, although clicking a ‘yes box’ didn’t carry the same virtuous charge as joining a street protest.

  Still, the world, the universe and whatever else aside, he was feeling the need to get a better grip on his own life. He had learnt as a child to believe that individuals should take responsibility for themselves: for good or bad you make your own choices, his mother repeatedly insisted, and you live with the consequences. As with all her advice this was framed in terms of her earnest, guilt-driven Catholicism. Quite early in his childhood his own understanding of free will and circumstance had become more secular than his parent’s and as he grew up he began to buy her books with titles such as The Power of Positive Thinking and Your Life in Your Own Hands. There was nothing patronising about this; the books provided grist for a lively dialogue between the two of them and helped to keep Theresa sharp. She read the books or parts of them though regarding them as cheap change in comparison to ‘the truths’ of her religion. Tim was unsure whether his own stron
g will, bordering at times on wilfulness, came from nature or nurture but he continued to believe that he could achieve some control over his life, despite the play of chance and the unpredictable intentions and interventions of others.

  Before he could get the desired grip on things, he needed to sort out exactly what was bugging him. He could switch off to the state of the world, but not to the state of self. In that respect meditation had never quite worked for him. He had never got past the stage in which random thoughts block the arrival of a state of total suchness, if, indeed, that was what did come next. The transcendence of the Buddha was far beyond his experience: unless being stoned was some kind of counterfeit enlightenment. He was residually pious enough to doubt that. His was the oyster of the still irritant grain of sand, not that of the pearl of wise acceptance. Still, he understood enough about the workings of his psyche to realise that personal troubles often lurked behind his moods of philosophical angst. He felt a nagging need to disentangle the threads of his anxiety. He was determined not to rush. It was as though for the previous nine months he had been living out a script, that everything, even the seemingly spontaneous and pleasurable, had been pre-determined. Despite all his frenetic action – the intense work, domestic commitments and upheavals, the sexual adventures – he felt he was driven, not the driver. Odd that the more he rushed, the less he felt in control. A familiar image returned to mind: banging heads, brick walls and it being good when you stop. He needed more than head-banging; what was missing was a gentler counterpoint to the arrhythmic beat of his life.

  He decided to take Pastor Tom’s advice and pause for an internal dialogue, a chat with himself. As aids to cogitation, he got a beer from the fridge and rolled himself a joint. He stretched out again on the couch, head propped up on a cushion at one end, legs dangling off at the other. He suspected he knew what was troubling him but he allowed his mind to choose its own direction of travel.

  He took a thoughtful drag on the joint, followed by a pleasantly rehydrating mouthful of ale. As he mellowed his mood began to shift. At the edge of his awareness, shadowy images and notions were beginning to take shape. He closed his eyes and took another slow pull. He began to sense that out of the maelstrom of his ‘problems’ he could draw new energy and fashion a way forward. All people dream, but they do not dream equally, some seek to live out their dreams in the light of day. And when Tim dreamed he dreamed big – of beautiful women and of saving the world. This time it was the women.

  To put it at its most expansive – and he had begun to feel expansive - there were three intelligent and beautiful women in his life, all in their early to mid thirties: Gina, Aisha and Erica. Slowly… slowly he was coming to terms with what each of them meant to him and he to them. His difficulty in getting there was emotional, not intellectual. He still hadn’t fully caught up with the fact that two of these women seemed to be out of his reach. In his guts and gonads he had not accepted what he knew to be true: a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction. Rationally he understood that his relationship with Gina as a partner was over. He was ninety nine per cent sure of that. He had just been told so in no uncertain terms. And even before she announced her intention to marry Rupert, she had not wavered in her loyalty to her new partner. He believed now that he had lost any chance of reconciliation, not because of his infidelity but by choosing deception rather than truth. He had felt remorse, but lacked the honesty and humility to express it to Gina. It was not so much that he obdurately didn’t ‘do’ humility as that it had simply never occurred to him to ‘do’ it: he lacked practice. By the time he had almost got hold of the notion, the right moment, if there was one, had gone.

  Gina had finally cut the knot. For months a sense of loss would sometimes invade him. The thought of it dizzied him, the chasm where their life together had been. He would always love her. But love, their love, was not what their lives would now be about. What was left to them was shared responsibility for a child. Yet love lost or unwanted is not the end of love. It takes refuge until its time comes again. Even if you lose your love and don’t know what to do, the memory of love will see you through. He was not so sure.

  Aisha? Other than in his own imaginings and, so he liked to think, in hers, they had kept love at bay, apart from a single hello-goodbye moment: a few seconds of time out of time. And there were compelling reasons to do so. But for now he was allowing himself to think in ideal, ‘what if’ terms, to dream in a realm of free choice in which there were no consequences. A flâneur of fantasies.

  Supposing Aisha was available, how much would he want her? More than Erica? He could not say that. He would not say that. Thinking in this way would plunge him into the cruellest of crosscurrents. He was almost glad that in reality Aisha was unattainable. He was no ritual respecter of conventional constraints but he had come to recognise the damage that the careless indulgence of desire can cause. Aisha should be protected. He had promised himself to do that: not out of convention but because… for her. The Great Protector.

  It wasn’t easy. Aisha was a sensitive and delightful, as well as a beautiful woman. So! She was no more accessible to him than other women in her situation. Get used to it! Had he become unhinged by his sudden ejection back into life as a single man? Did he imagine that every attractive woman was the legitimate object of his… of his what? Lust? Ego? No, he did not want to go the way of a middle-aged Lothario. He took a deep drag on the joint, again washing away the dryness in his mouth with a long draft of beer. He sucked on his tongue thoughtfully, his mood of self-rebuke softening. Of course Aisha was not ‘every’ woman, she was a woman he was close to and… what were his feelings? Supposing… He let out a low guttural growl of frustration. He was going round in circles, not to mention in psychoanalytic clichés. He had set up a pointless hypothetical situation. Forget it. In the non-ideal world of real consequences he had no intention of riding roughshod over Aisha’s life – her family, her child. You can’t always get what you want. And sometimes you should not try. He remembered now, you can choose not to do, as well as to do. Like Gina, Aisha had made her choice: ‘in some other lifetime.’ What right did his charm and lust have against such purity of the mind and heart?

  Now he came to the crux of his problem. It was Erica. It was himself. Or rather it was his uncertainty about Erica’s feelings for him and his confused feelings about her. That, he conceded, amounted to an uncertain and confused relationship. His deepening feelings for her were fraught with a sense that she had locked him into a narrow role in her well-ordered life. In flashes of paranoia he wondered whether sexual gratification on tap was all she wanted from him: controlling him for her pleasure whilst keeping him at an emotional distance. Why would she need or want to do that? But was this also what he wanted? Their relationship was fun, more than that, it was pure, exquisite sensuality but was it enough? Was that it? Control freak meets freewheeling hedonist. In the end I know, I’m just a gigolo, life will go on without me.

  He could be wrong about the whole thing. He wanted to be. There were hints, long moments even, when it seemed that they were on the edge of something reassuringly ordinary and blissfully un-dramatic: perhaps a stable, loving relationship. That was the point; he wasn’t sure what Erica did want from him. Much of the time it felt like they inhabited separate plastic bubbles. Occasionally, usually at Erica’s say-so, they would burst out and come together in frenzied delight. Then, usually sooner rather than later they returned to their bubbles. True, there had been emotional breakthroughs, real enough at the time but not sustained. Once the period of closeness had passed, they reverted to the usual routine: ‘wham, bang thank you man.’ And during the in-between times at work or in social situations their relationship went unacknowledged by others and by themselves.

  Tim’s reverie had bought him to the realisation that it was time to put his relationship with Erica to the test. How, he was not yet sure. It was a risk. If Erica rejected his move the whole theatrical fabric of their relationship might implode.
Was it worth the risk? He did not even consider the question.

  The drifting was over. It was time for action. You can only dream for so long. Then events take over. You either make things happen or things happen to you. He stubbed out the remainder of the joint and drained the bottle of beer. He checked his watch. It was seven o’clock. The chances were that Erica was at home. He would surprise her. As high as a kite and still on the way up he decided to break out of his habitually laid-back, understated self. He brought up Erica’s number on his mobile and pressed connect. The call was answered almost immediately.

  ‘Hi Tim. I can see it’s you. How are you, lovely man?’

  ‘Fine. And yourself?’

  ‘Ok, missing you, though.’

  This had started well. But it hit Tim that a phone call was not the best way to say what he had in mind: especially as he wasn’t yet quite sure exactly what that was. Face-to-face with Erica he would find inspiration. For now he improvised.

  ‘Erica, I’ve been thinking about us. I know we’re both incredibly busy but we never seem to spend more than a day and a night together, usually just a night. Let’s sort out some serious time together. How about going away together for a weekend, preferably next weekend?’

  There was a pause.

  ‘We can do that. Next weekend is fine as it happens. I might have to take some work with me but otherwise I’m free.’

  ‘Great.’ This really was going well.

  ‘Have you any ideas about where we should go?’ asked Erica.

  So far Tim hadn’t thought of anywhere but inspiration struck.

  ‘Bognor.’

  ‘Bognor?’

  ‘Yes Bognor Regis. I have a friend there. He has his own house, lives on his own. I used to share digs with him at university.’