Tangents, vol 1

by Rae Agatha

  Two months later, Greg Jackson and his son Jamie were at the station, checking things out during shift change. Dan and Meg, were coming in for the afternoon shift. His son, Jamie, came, too. Dan had never seen him before, but Meg sometimes told him that Jamie would appear at the station and Greg would allow him to fill up his car for half the price, something that everyone working at the station thought was outrageous. But he was the boss and it was his kid, so what could you do? Dan was already dressed up for work and was putting the goods on the shelves, when Jamie walked inside and started talking to his father. The voice! Dan would have recognized that voice anywhere. And, wait, what did Meg once say? That the young Jackson wouldn’t come too often as he was living in Liverpool?! Son of a bitch!

  Dan immediately got up and walked toward Jamie.

  “You!” He shouted and pointed at him.

  Jamie turned around and looked at him surprised. “Me?”

  “Yeah, you,” Dan repeated, grabbed Jamie by the collar and started shaking him. “You lying son of a bitch! You tricked me, you took my money!” He was hissing through his teeth.

  “Who the fuck are you?!” Jamie shouted shocked and scared.

  “What, don’t you recognize my voice? Mr. EDUCATIO! Goddamn it!” Dan pushed Jamie into the shelves he’d been stocking with snacks. The packages of peanuts and cans of soda scattered on the floor. Meg charged out of the changing room and ran toward Dan. Greg ran out of his office and grabbed Salinger.

  “What the hell are you doing!?” he shouted.

  Dan freed himself from Greg’s grip and was looking at both of them, breathing heavily. He brushed his hair off his forehead and watched Jamie standing up. Three clients inside the gas station left the place in a hurry.

  “You gave me the leaflet,” he pointed at Greg. “You knew scam, that Jamie was cheating people, admit it, damn it!”

  “Calm down, Dan, these are very serious accusations,“ Greg said.

  “You bet they are, because your son is a cheater, he’s stealing people’s money!”

  “Hey, you signed the contract, I provided you with the materials,” Jamie said.

  “Jamie, shut up,” Greg hissed.

  “It doesn’t matter Dad, he knows,” he replied while tidying his coat.

  “Dan, you’re fired, pack your things and leave,” Greg said.

  Dan stared at him, not believing what was happening. “I’m fired? After working here for over three years you’re firing me because your son’s a thief? And so are you, damn it, you gave me the bloody leaflet!”

  “Maybe we should all calm down,” Meg said.

  “Nobody needs to calm down, Dan needs to leave,” Greg said. He came closer to him, looked at him angrily and said, “I suggest you pack your things, leave and never come back, unless you want me to call the police and press charges against you for assaulting my son.”

  “You’d do it for him? What is he, five?” Dan puffed angrily.

  He sighed with disbelief, looked at Jamie and saw his eyes – he was triumphing over him. Salinger rubbed his face, turned around and silently went to the changing room.

  III

  Dan couldn’t find a job for over two months. His parents were furious, Meg was disappointed with his impulsive reaction and he couldn’t help but feel like a complete jerk whose only fault was having dreams he wanted to pursue, plans he wanted to achieve.

  Finally, his friend Jimmy told him about jobs available in a shipyard in Norway. It was a well-paid physically demanding job but he was going and asked Dan if he was interested in going with him. Jimmy knew that Salinger needed a job pretty badly, and even though Dan initially thought no, he decided to talk to Meg about it.

  The problem with the job was that if he wanted to go, and if he got hired, he would have to sign a contract for two years and he would only have about a month of leave for each year. Meaning that it would be difficult for him to be in London more often than for Christmas, one longer period of time and in a case of some family emergency. Fortunately, it was possible to take someone with him, he would only need to sign up for a room for two people in the hotel for workers, which would become his new home.

  To Dan’s amazement, Meg told him he should go, even before he mentioned she could go there with him. Surprised a bit he told her he didn’t want to leave her for such a long time, and she replied he needed to be more mature than that. Meg said that with him not having a job, they wouldn’t be able to rent any apartment anytime soon, that he needed to support his family, that she wanted to look for another job than the gas station but with him being unemployed, she couldn’t risk leaving the job she had.

  Dan told her it was possible for her to go with him, that the company hiring people to work in the shipyard was willing to allow the workers to bring one more person with them. Meg, surprised, told him she couldn’t imagine leaving her friends and family. Dan replied he was going to have a problem with that, too, but on the other hand, what was there that kept them tied to London?

  They could make new friends in Norway, they could support their families much better with the Norwegian salary, and both of their parents could count on Dan’s and Meg’s siblings, not to mention they would be close enough to come to England within an hour, maximum two should anything bad happened. Meg then said, she couldn’t go because she didn’t speak Norwegian. As if Dan was a master in that field. The shipyard owner offered a course of basic Norwegian for everyone who got the job. She still did not want to go.

  Something was strange about her behavior and Dan began to worry she was thinking of leaving him and perhaps his possible job emigration might prove to be a good opportunity for her to start a relationship with someone else. He confronted her about it, but she wholeheartedly denied it, saying she was only worried about him, about his well-being and that she would wait for him and visit him as often as she was able to.

  After thinking about it for some time, Dan called Jimmy saying he’d like to try. He had a physical and some medical tests, had good results and was accepted. He had two weeks to get ready and for the first time he felt his parents were proud of him, they finally had a feeling he was doing something serious, something that would allow him to stand on his feet (and help them), a job with a meaning. A job with a purpose.

  Dan tried to spend as much time with Meg as possible, they went camping for a week, then did all the shopping for what he needed together. Finally, after a teary good-bye, Dan and Jimmy left for Norway. The two weeks he had spent with Meg were the very last moments he got to spend with her as his girlfriend.

  At first, he called and wrote letters, and she would write him back, but after a while, more or less six months after he had left, Meg called him at his hotel room and told him it was over, that she met someone else, that she wanted to move on and thus he should as well. He had to admit he wasn’t entirely shocked, he’d had a feeling she was drifting away from him, and he blamed himself for that. Felt like a loser with no future who had some dreams with no possibility of realization. What woman would wait? She probably found herself someone more reliable, someone to start a family with.

  As much as he tried to rationalize what happened, he felt his heart tearing apart and he had to take two days off from work; he knew it wouldn’t be possible for him to focus on the job. He felt bitter when he recalled how he was considering proposing to Meg and how he postponed it for the “better” times to come and he felt angry when he recalled how she denied she was thinking of leaving him. He felt purposeless when he thought about going home for Christmas. It hurt, stung horribly. He wanted to know who she had left him for. He deserved to know.

  In December, Dan returned to London for ten days to spend the holidays with his family and friends and during a New Year’s Eve party, he found out that Meg left him for Peter. It wasn’t even very surprising; the fact that their friends had known something was going on a few months before Dan even left for Norway was far more devastating.People kept on saying they didn’t want to hurt him and most of them
simply thought that whatever was going on between Dan and Meg was their business only. While it felt good knowing he had such decent friends, it would have felt better if they’d been a bit more honest, though. It made Dan feel like an idiot. He’d been engaged in the relationship that was going nowhere and everyone among their common friends had already known about it, leaving him naive and keeping him totally in the dark. Dan wanted to meet with Meg, ask her some questions, he needed a closure, but it turned out she’d moved to the States with Peter and had been living there since November.

  He thought it was all done, but, to his surprise, he met Meg on the airport when he was buying himself a coffee. She was sitting in the café, alone, reading a newspaper. Dan looked around, he wanted to make sure he didn’t see Peter anywhere around, and, with his heart pounding, he came closer to her table. Meg lazily looked up and had no idea what to say when she spotted him. She closed the newspaper and put it away.

  “May I join you?” Dan asked.

  “Of course,” she replied and sat straight on her chair, she was visibly tense, had no idea how to behave; the situation was obviously uncomfortable for her.

  “I’m sorry I’m even bothering you, Meg, it’s a total coincidence. I’m waiting here for my flight to Norway, it just happened,” he said and put his hand on his chest in assuring gesture.

  “No, it’s okay, no problem,” she replied. “I – I’m waiting for my flight to San Francisco.”

  “This is where you live now?”

  “Y – yes. I moved there in November.”

  “With Peter?”

  “With Peter,” she bit her lower lip a little bit. “He has family there and they helped him find a job – Dan, I’m so sorry it all turned out that way.”

  “Well, guess I kind of deserved it, I wasn’t the right person to plan a stable relationship with, was I?” He sat down opposite to her.

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said.

  “No, it’s okay, Meg, I’ve had some time to think it all through. I know where you’re coming from, although I thought we had something special. I mean we were together for a year and a half.”

  “It’s not that long, a year and a half. We have no kids, had no perspectives, we’re still young, Dan, I thought it was the best time to look for - other possibilities, to look for something better for both of us.”

  Dan snorted. “I was thinking of proposing to you, shortly after I had taken that final test in the ghost school,” he said and drank some of his coffee. “When it all turned out to be a scam, I decided to postpone that step, to wait for better times.”

  Meg didn’t reply, she just looked at him.

  “How long did you know?” He asked.

  Meg sighed, “Does it really matter?”

  “To me, yes. Did you know before I left to Norway?”

  She was clearly reluctant to answer, which only proved to Dan that yes, she’d known. However, he wanted her to say it out loud, seeing her feeling uneasy, was surprisingly pleasant for him.

  “I knew around the time you lost it at the gas station, okay? I was thinking of leaving you around that time, but,” she leaned on the chair and folded her arms, “I felt sorry for you, you just found out you were deceived by that company, then you lost your job, then you couldn’t find a new one. I mean you were going through some really difficult things, I didn’t have the heart to tell you I was leaving.”

  “So, if I hadn’t left for Norway, how long would you have acted as if nothing was going on?”

  “Not long. It was becoming unbearable. That last two weeks before you left, the camping, that was my way of saying good-bye,” she added quietly.

  Dan sat looking at her and it occurred to him that he couldn’t even feel angry. He felt sorry that a very important part of his life, something he had always thought was one of the brightest things that had happened to him, slipped through his fingers and he hadn’t seen it, he had no clue it was about to happen. Was he that much focused on his problems or was she so good at hiding everything?

  “I’ve got to go, Dan, my boarding starts in about half an hour,” she got up.

  He stood up as well, “No, of course.”

  “So, good luck, and I mean it,” she said and reached her hand.

  Dan looked at her, hesitated for a moment, and then hugged her. She was resistant at first, but she finally hugged him back. He knew this was the very last intimate gesture he would share with her and as he realized it, he felt he was about to cry, so he just hugged her tight, kissed her cheek and whispered in her ear, “Be safe, Meg. Thank you for everything.”

  She looked at him and he saw her eyes were moist, too. It made him feel good knowing the situation was at least a bit emotional for her as well. That was the closure he needed, now he knew she really did love him once.

  Meg left the café, headed toward the gates and that was the last time Dan had ever seen her and spoken to her.

  When Dan’s contract with the Norwegian shipyard was almost up, he was seriously thinking of staying there longer, perhaps look for a different job, or maybe sign one more contract with the shipyard. The two years spent in Mandal allowed him to make new friends, both among the co-workers and the people living in town, he learned basic Norwegian and saved enough of money to live entirely on his own once back in London. As it turned out, the decision whether to stay or go home, wasn’t to be made by him – three days before his contract was to be expired, Dan’s mom called him and told him his father had passed away. He had a heart attack, it was massive, and the doctors hadn’t been able to save him. Dan knew he had to go back; his mother and sister needed him.

  IV

  He bought a small apartment three blocks away from his family home, in order to be close to them. He knew he had to find a job otherwise all the money he had saved would disappear within months, but had absolutely no idea what to look for; in what field, in what area.

  During that time Dan renewed some old friendships and was quite regularly meeting with those he used to hang out with. There was no pub in the neighborhood they wouldn’t visit, some of them on a regular basis. For the first time in years, perhaps for the first time in his life, he was free; he felt financially secure, he had his own place to live, no strings attached, no kids, no girlfriend, and no regular job that forced him to wake up early in the morning. He was twenty-five and he was living. Dan scored a few one-night stands, and usually came back home so late it was difficult to say whether it was still night or early morning and he was regularly hung-over.

  Dan saw Kate in one of the pubs he most often went to with his friends. She was sitting by the bar, alone, drinking a mojito through a straw. Dan spotted her from the corner of the room and, for some reason, couldn’t take his eyes off her. First of all, she looked great she was wearing a tight mini skirt, a sleeveless top with some silver sequins, and a royal blue denim jacket. She was sitting with her legs crossed, slowly smoking a cigarette and glancing at the TV hung in the corner of the ceiling. Dan paid attention to her, because he had a feeling she was lonely, that there was something sad about her. In a pub with everyone drinking, laughing and singing to the music, she stood out so much, he was kind of mesmerized. He couldn’t explain it, but he felt an impulse to go and talk to her, cheer her up a bit, show her some interest so that she wouldn’t be so alone anymore. Dan took his pint and walked toward the bar. He stepped closer to the seat right next to her, touched her shoulder and asked:

  “Is this seat taken?”

  She turned around, looked at him a bit surprised, took the cigarette out of her mouth and replied, “No, go ahead.”

  “I’m Dan,” he said when he sat and reached out his hand toward her.

  “Kate,” she said and shook his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  “So, are you waiting here for someone? I saw you from my table, you seem pretty lonely here,” Dan said and smiled friendly.

  “I was waiting, but he never showed up,” Kate said and inhaled the cigarette.

  “He st
ood you up?”

  “Apparently,” she nodded and flicked the cigarette.

  “Moron,” Dan said.

  “Well, what can you do,” she agreed and shrugged her shoulders.

  He was looking at her and there was something about Kate that did not allow him to take his eyes off her. She was really pretty, she had amazing blue eyes, her hair was beautiful, thick, brown, tied in a bit careless bun. As irrational as it seemed, Dan felt somehow connected to her, fascinated with her.

  “So, listen, if you have no other plans, perhaps you’d like to join me and the gang over there?” He asked and pointed at the loud table in the corner of the room.

  Kate looked at them, looked at him, scrunched her cigarette in an ashtray and replied, “Okay,” she puffed the smoke through her nose, “let’s go.”