This is the Life

by Joseph O'Neill

  Unfortunately, not everything ended there. For a while I went about my work with reasonable efficiency, but then, as I have said, things took a turn for the worse. First of all, lethargy crept in. All day I would trudge around the office in a state of exhaustion and apathy, struggling to fight off sleep at my desk. Then, in the evening, when I returned to my flat, I would be restless. I would sit down on the sofa to read and end up by throwing down the book or newspaper in irritation; television became unwatchable, and the nights – the nights became an ordeal of insomnia. Insomnia! What an affliction! In the middle of the night I would look over the edge of my bed at my radio-dock and calculate with horror that, even if I fell asleep immediately, I would get at most three hours’ sleep. For feverish hours I smouldered in my bed until, at last, I heard the birds singing outside and saw the curtain lighten with the dawn. And while I steamed under my duvet, my imagination, too, would start overheating. In my terrible half-sleep, vague fantasies and wild notions would take hold of my fuming brain, exhausting and distressing reveries populated by Donovan and Mr Donovan, by Arabella and Susan and Oliver Owen. And so it went on, this awful pattern of sleepless nights and listless days.

  It did not take me long to work out something about what was going on: I may be uncomprehending but I am not stupid. I knew what the trouble was – Donovan. I had tried to forget about him, to put the whole thing behind me, but I had been unable to. I thought that time would clarify, I thought that time would heal. But I was wrong, time did nothing of the sort. Time stood still, time took time off, so that weeks later nothing had moved on, and I was still asking myself, Why had Donovan burned the book? What had led him to it? Arabella? His father? His divorce? Something else? Something had gone on, something big – but what? What had gone on?

  I could not work it out. I had clues to work on, I had strands – I had Donovan’s breakdown, his break-up, his journal, the introduction to his new book, I had my researches, I had Donovan senior, I had the sudden divorce – but they had me tied up in knots. My leads led me nowhere. And there was something else: surely it could not end this way? What about all that momentum I had discerned, that inexorable drama? What had happened to that? Was it all to come to this – to nothing?

  No, I decided. It was impossible that the Donovan adventure could just dematerialize. I had missed what had really happened, somewhere along the line I had missed a trick. And it was at that point that I decided to straighten things out once and for all, that I picked up my pen and embarked on this narrative. I would set it all out clearly, I determined. I would replay it. That would be enough – was not description supposed to be revelation? – to pick out whatever it was that I had missed. That should do it, I thought.

  So, here I am then. It is 9 July 1989, and I have done what I set out to do. I have looked back on the last year and related everything there was to it. All the facts of the matter have been set out and now, at last, I am in a position to understand what has been going on. Now all I have to do is read carefully what I have written and, if everything goes according to plan, hey presto – all, or at least enough, will be revealed.

  EIGHTEEN

  I read everything that I had written, every word; and then I read it again, carefully, like a lawyer, satisfying myself that nothing had escaped me. I read the small print and I read between the lines. Then I closed my eyes, sat back in my chair, and waited. I waited for revelations, dénouements, clarifications, answers.

  Nothing happened.

  Imagine watching a film on television, a thriller maybe, something which really has you riveted to your sofa. The final reel is approaching, and the action is on the point of that tangy resolution you get in the best films. Out of the blue, your screen goes snowy. So you follow your usual routine: you bang the television, you check the aerial, you fine-tune the channel. You do everything you have always done. Then excitedly you resume your position on the sofa – there is still time to catch the ending – and hit the on button. More snow.

  Imagine the fury that you feel at that fraudulent moment: that is how I felt. Cheated. All that writing, all that time off work, all for nothing.

  I smoked an angry cigarette. Then I resolutely got to my feet. The time had come for action. If answers were not going to surface, then I would have to retrieve them myself. I knew how to get at them, with that sharp little screwdriver of a query, Why? It was time to go into the geneses, rationales and determinants of what had happened, to look at causes, not effects. It was time to open up the television.

  Then, almost as soon as I had made that determination, I became discouraged. There was no point in fooling myself any further, this why business was clearly not my strength. My knowledge of psychology and the inward workings of humans was on a par with my knowledge of television interiors, and the mysteries of the Donovan story loomed before me like an electronic thicket of encoders, circuits and image orthicons. I was out of my depth. Why Donovan had married Arabella, why she had left him, why he had suddenly acceded to the divorce – I passed on those questions. Donovan’s dumbstruck collapse in court – what was I supposed to do about that, look it up in medical text-books? Look under a for aphony? What about the last time I saw him, on the golf course, the time he wept: who did I call in on that one? Why he burned his book? How should I know? Why should I know?

  Yes, this is the problem with whys: ask why once and you never stop asking why. Why this always leads to why that, and everything unscrews and comes apart. This is exactly what happened that day. I fell into a line of questioning which dismantled everything: why was it I was so hung up on Donovan? What skin was it off my nose what happened to him? Why was I unable to work any more? Why – really – was I writing this stuff? It did not end there (as I have said, it is a slippery slope) – why had the fates conspired to deprive me of my tenancy at 6 Essex Court? Why was I a solicitor? Why should I care about my career? Why should I care about anything any more?

  I could not see what was going on any more. My mind started blooping and rolling, like a man lost in a cathode-ray blizzard. I lost the picture completely.

  Suddenly I felt terrible.

  Then the telephone sounded (I had just put it back on its hook) and when I picked it up I uttered my first word for a week and a half.

  ‘Hello?’ I said.

  ‘Thank God you’re in,’ a female voice said.

  The last time I had spoken to Susan Northey was – let me work this out – 22 November 1988.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she said impatiently. ‘You’ve had everybody worried.’

  ‘Susan,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

  Susan said, ‘I got a phone call this morning from your secretary – Jane? They’re trying to get hold of you at work. She thought maybe I knew where you were. She told me you’d gone off on some frolic with a woman.’

  ‘It’s June,’ I said. ‘Not Jane, June.’

  Susan said, ‘You’re wanted at work, Jimmy.’ She paused. ‘Jimmy?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know,’ I said.

  Susan waited before speaking again. Then she said, ‘Look, are you all right?’

  I reassured her that I was. ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m in good shape. How about you? How are you, Suzy?’

  Susan sounded decisive. ‘Look, stay there, I’m on my way.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Really, I’m fine. I’m just getting away from things for a while, that’s all. Don’t worry about it.’

  Susan hung up half-way through my protests.

  I did not want to see Susan, not right at that moment. She would demand explanations from me and what was I going to tell her? Also, I had just finished reading these pages and – I have admitted it – I was in a bad way. It was not easy, re-living those ups and downs, those hopes dashed left, right and centre. It had pretty much wiped me out. I was in no mood for company.

  Later, the door-buzzer rang. I stayed put on the sofa. Then the buzzer sounded again and I dragged myself to my feet. Through the spy-hol
e I saw a gigantic face: Susan.

  When I opened the door I stood around uncertainly – what was I supposed to do, give her a kiss?

  Susan walked past me into the living-room. ‘My God,’ she said. She gesticulated at the mess. ‘What’s all this about?’

  I went to make coffee. From the kitchen I could see through to the living-room. Susan was doing some tidying up. She had opened a window and now was plumping up cushions, emptying ashtrays and picking up, with the very tips of her fingers, buckets of chicken bones, pizza cartons and silver curry containers. I felt a dull glow of affection. Susan.

  ‘Jimmy,’ Susan said softly after we had sat in silence for a moment, drinks in hand. ‘What’s the matter? Hmm? What’s the matter?’

  ‘It’s nothing, Suzy,’ I said. ‘It’s just that …’ I discontinued my sentence. I was exhausted, I just could not come out with the words.

  ‘Tell me, Jimmy.’ She was still looking at me with her bright grey eyes. ‘Tell me,’ she whispered.

  I looked at Susan. Perhaps I had not properly appreciated her, I thought. Perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, I would see her in a new light. So I looked at her again.

  There was nothing new there. It is true that, sitting next to me for the first time in seven months, she had a sheen and freshness about her. But otherwise she looked just the same to me. She looked just as she had always done. She sat there with her serious grey eyes, giving off the same old sad, brave emanations.

  ‘I’ve been working too hard,’ I said. ‘I just needed a bit of time off. Suzy, it’s that simple. There’s nothing funny going on – I’m not having an affair or a nervous breakdown or anything. I don’t know what they’re getting so worked up about at the office.’

  She looked at me sceptically – and tenderly. She was not sitting very far away from me on the sofa. I sensed her breathing body near by, within range of my arms.

  I said, ‘Shouldn’t you be back at work now?’

  At that moment a breeze snared up the curtain in the open window and Susan stood up to free it. While she did this she explained that she had taken the afternoon off. Although she was still at the office equipment company in Hounslow, they had promoted her, so now she worked flexihours. She could come and go pretty much as she pleased. Even so, she told me, she was trying to get away. She would be looking for something new in the autumn round of jobs. Maybe something in advertising, or PR. What did I think?

  I was happy that the conversation had taken this turn. That sounded promising, I said. Her new seniority would stand her in good stead on the job market, I said.

  ‘I definitely want something else by the new year,’ Susan said. ‘I want to start the nineties on a good note.’ She crunched a crisp – I had brought out a bowl of crisps and a pack of beers – and said, after a pause, ‘You know, it’s funny, isn’t it, how little fuss they’re making about the eighties coming to an end. You wouldn’t think we were coming up to the end of a decade. A decade, Jimmy! You’d have thought there’d be a bigger fuss about it.’

  Yes, it was funny, I said.

  Susan, I thought once more, this time tiredly. Susan.

  ‘I wonder what they’ll call the eighties? It won’t be easy, finding something to call the eighties,’ Susan said. We stopped to think about it but neither of us could come up with the word to encapsulate the decade. ‘It’s sad, isn’t it Jimmy,’ she said with a bright, dolorous smile: ‘Another ten years, gone.’

  Yes, it is, Suzy, I said. What a pair we made, I thought.

  Then, in a strangely matter-of-fact way, Suzy kicked off her shoes and moved over and took hold of me. She burrowed into my body, hooped her arms around my chest and awkwardly tucked her head under my chin. I was taken aback. We were in the middle of a normal conversation and suddenly here she was, embracing me. I had not seen it coming at all. I thought that she was leaning over to help herself to another beer.

  For a while I reciprocated. I squeezed her lumpy little body against mine and let her nestle her face against my shoulder. And while she pressed her short arms around me I hugged her gently: you have to be careful with Susan, she has these collapsible shoulders, and when you hold her tightly it feels as though you are folding her in half. But then, after a little while, I let her go. To be truthful, I simply did not feel like indulging in anything physical. This was not Susan’s fault – it was nothing personal – it was simply that that afternoon I was not in the mood for any kind of hanky-panky or for anything lovey-dovey. Can I be blamed? Here she was, uninvited, expecting me to pick up as though seven months ago was yesterday and nothing had happened in the interim. Also – this has to be said – she was making a spectacle of herself. What kind of woman would want to have anything to do with someone like me, in my state? It was all too desperate.

  I slid out of her hands and cracked open a beer. I said nothing. Then I looked around at the squalid room, at the cloud of bugs hovering under the ceiling lamp and the trash of meals brimming from bin-liners and the beer mugs choked with ashy butts and Susan next to me with a hole in her brown tights and a susceptible expression, and I only just suppressed the urge to cry out, Get out! Get out of here!

  Susan moved still closer to me on the sofa. I sensed her chunky knee resting against mine and her arm coming around again. ‘Jimmy Jones,’ she said.

  I could take no more. She was a nice girl, but I just could not take any more. I gripped her and pushed her away. ‘Look, don’t do that,’ I said. I hissed the words, I did not want to raise my voice. ‘I’m not in the mood. Can you understand that? I don’t feel like it.’ I sat on the edge of the sofa and drank down some more beer.

  She stiffened. I could feel her legs go taut as I looked down at the floor between my knees. After a moment of silence I threw her a quick, furtive glance. Her face was white.

  She had flown into a rage. She got to her feet and stood back. ‘You bastard,’ she whispered. ‘You think you’re the only bloody person in the world. You haven’t changed one bit. Have you ever stopped to think about how I might feel? About why I’m here?’ Suddenly she shouted, ‘Have you?’

  Then I shouted too. I shouted, ‘I don’t want to know! I didn’t bloody invite you here, did I! It’s over between us, Susan! Get that into your head!’

  She screamed, as her face turned patchy with tears, ‘Over? Over? What’s that supposed to mean?’

  I shouted. ‘Over! We’re finished!’

  She began sobbing but she still managed to cry out, ‘You’re so stupid! I’m never going to speak to you again!’

  Then she ran out of the house. She tried to slam the front door but it jammed on a pile of mail.

  I stayed where I was, breathing heavily.

  Then a draught made the curtain flap out of the window again and a door clacked shut and I remembered that the front door was still open. When I cleared away the post I saw that among it was a letter from Batstone Buckley Williams. I took it back into the living-room, took a slug of beer, and opened the envelope.

  Dear James,

  It has been decided to call a meeting of the partners to discuss your recent departure from, and performance and conduct at, work. It is only fair to warn you that some of the partners are minded to question your future at the firm. We would be glad to hear any representations that you may wish to make on your behalf. You will appreciate that it is with great regret that we find ourselves in this position. The meeting will take place on 12 July at 2.30.

  Yours sincerely,

  The Partners, Batstone Buckley Williams

  I finished my beer and switched on the television. Then I rang for a curry and, stretched out on the sofa, opened another can. Afterwards I drank more beer and watched more television until the moment came to haul myself to bed.

  In the morning, when I lay there under my duvet, I reviewed the situation. It did not look good; it looked as though everything was on the slide. Donovan and me, my thesis and me, Susan and me, Batstone Buckley Williams and me – it looked all over between all of u
s.

  There was something else. The luminosity seemed to have changed. Although a great beam of July daylight blazed down through the curtains like a spotlight, there was a terrible lack of illumination about the room. Later, outside, when I went to buy some beers and cigarettes, it was the same. This fierce gold was pouring down from every corner of the sky, yet nothing lit up.

  I went back to bed. Surely this could not be it. Surely things could not really be like this. Surely the clouds would pass.

  And yet the next day, Wednesday 12 July 1989, the day of the partners’ meeting, nothing had changed.

  I caught the tube to the office. I used to like taking the tube, it made me feel like a Londoner. London is a world-class city and I liked to think that something of its status rubbed off on its citizens. Also, by catching the tube I was chipping in, doing my bit for the city. Without people like me, underground travellers, London would not work. If the subsoil did not seethe with trains, did not suck in and circulate a huge population of its own, the superficial metropolis – the landmarks, double-decker buses, skyscrapers and fountain-filled squares – would grind to a halt. London’s heart is under its earth, and some days catching that Northern Line made me feel essential, like blood. I think that those days are over.

  Yesterday morning I was numb. I sat out the journey staring at the dark walls of the tunnel rushing by. I was not thinking of what lay ahead, and when I stepped from the elevator into the office it suddenly struck me where I was and I began shaking. But I walked steadily to my room, disregarding the looks I was getting from everybody. Thanks to June they probably thought that I had made a fool of myself over some woman. I did not care what they thought.

  My room had not changed. I had half-expected to come back to a transformation of sorts, but, no, everything had stayed just the way it was. Only the calendar had changed. Now it showed Vancouver in July – breakwaters, a beautiful ring of mountains.