by James Birk
Chapter 2
The waitress looked confused.
‘But you could have a free cup of tea with the breakfast. I’ll have to charge you extra for a pot of tea.’
Rob’s genial nature prevented him from showing his irritation, but I could see it bubbling below the surface.
‘I know, but I’d prefer to have a pot of tea and pay the extra,’ he replied, ‘but I’ll have an orange juice as well and that way I still get my free drink, don’t I?’
The waitress accepted this logic reluctantly and summed up the order for us.
‘So that’s three breakfasts, one with tea, one with coffee and one with orange juice and a pot of tea extra.’
‘That’s right,’ I said smiling, partly out of good manners and partly because she was actually very attractive.
She wandered away still shaking her head.
‘You and your bloody tea,’ laughed Dave.
‘I don’t know why they always find it so difficult,’ grumbled Rob, ‘they make such crap tea here, at least with a pot I get to regulate how strong it is and how much milk I put in.’
‘Yes but the cup of tea is free,’ I said in mock earnestness, ‘are you some kind of an idiot? It’s free!’
‘I don’t mind the tea,’ said Dave, ‘As long as it’s warm and wet, I’m happy enough.’
Rob and I both chimed in with the inevitable innuendos which kept us amused for a few moments. Dave made a grab for Rob’s paper which was lying unread on the table. As well as upsetting waitresses with his pedantic tea drinking habits, another Sunday breakfast routine of Rob’s was to buy a newspaper and then not bother reading it. Often it was a left-wing broadsheet but that Sunday he’d gone for the local tabloid ‘Wales on Sunday’ because he didn’t have enough change in his pocket for the broadsheet and he didn’t want to break a note. Happily it was Dave’s Sunday rag of choice because it was the only newspaper that gave Cardiff City a significant number of column inches; he’d rarely got that level of journalistic commitment to Welsh sporting endeavours since his job had forced him to move to Birmingham. The upside of earning a lot more money than Rob and I put together had done little to ease his apparent suffering at being so far away from his beloved Bluebirds.
He quickly found the football results.
‘Bloody Hell,’ he sighed, ‘we lost 2-1 to West Brom.’
‘Still got a shot at the play-offs,’ I pointed out, drawing on my limited sporting knowledge.
‘Yeah but we’ll screw it up,’ he lamented, ‘We always bloody do.’
The attractive, although possibly-slightly-too-young-on-reflection, waitress delivered our breakfasts complete with the extra pot of tea for Rob, for which she gave him a baffled shake of the head as she placed it in front of him. We got stuck in.
There was something magical about our morning-after breakfast routine that often, in my view at least, bettered the nights out that preceded them. I could see myself sitting down to a greasy fry-up with my long term drinking buddies long after we’d given up our nights on the town, which in any case were becoming less and less frequent as we aged. Not that the night that had come before this particular breakfast had been especially bad. Indeed it had probably been one of the better efforts in recent memories (although my memories were a little hazy about certain parts of it). For starters, there had actually been a reason to be drinking excessively. My twenty-ninth birthday to be precise, which was a reason for either celebration or sorrow-drowning depending on the way you view things. I was now into the final year of my twenties, which made me somewhat reflective. In a year’s time I would be thirty, which seemed like a milestone age if ever there was one. Certainly I hadn’t envisaged myself as still being single when I was twenty-nine, and if I was still single I had expected it to be because I’d become ridiculously wealthy, possibly famous, and I’d chosen a playboy lifestyle, philandering my way from one exotic beauty to another. I had anticipated having travelled around the world and having experienced new cultures, but apart from one attempt at organising a back-packing holiday around Europe five years earlier, which petered out when I couldn’t get anyone to agree to go with me and I realised that I was both too scared and too poor to attempt the trip on my own, the most I had ever travelled was the odd weekend to visit Dave in the West Midlands, which was always a laugh, but not exactly up there with the great voyages of the modern age. That training day with Roberto (who had actually since left FFS to concentrate on ice-sculpting full time) was now six months ago but the bitter taste of having accomplished nothing with my life had returned thanks to the annual reminder that I was getting older. Maybe my best days were already behind me.
The night itself had been a pretty good one. We hadn’t exactly painted the town red but it was almost a throwback to the decadent days of our youth. There had been a lot of drinking, I had knocked back a lot more alcohol than anyone should really be able to consume and was certainly in breach of current government guidelines. There had been a lot of ill-advised and uncoordinated dancing. There had even been a bit of snogging, which to be honest had been a rarity in recent years, especially since both of my ‘wing men’ were in long term relationships and I was the only one ‘on the pull’. I’d never been much good at chatting girls up. In a state of sobriety I was generally too nervous and although my inhibitions certainly disappeared after a few drinks, so did any sense of appropriate conversation and my best lines usually resulted in putting off even girls that might actually have been interested before I opened my mouth. So a bit of snogging on my twenty-ninth birthday had certainly been a result. I hadn’t managed to secure a phone number though so I was to be spared the awkward follow-up date where I discovered that I had no interest in the girl in question, or worse, she had no interest in me. We had completed the night with a messy kebab on the way home and some overly loud singing. To all intents and purposes it was as if I was celebrating my twentieth birthday again.
Except that it wasn’t. For starters my hangovers weren’t nearly so bad back then. I used to be able to drink enough to floor a small elephant on a Friday night and I’d be back out on Saturday doing exactly the same thing. By the age of twenty-eight my binge drinking was a far less regular affair, not least because of a lack of ‘drinking buddies’. And what had happened to all my friends? Rob was still an ever present figure in my life, but we tended to meet for an after work drink in ‘old men’ pubs, which was a far cry from the days we used to knock back tequilas in the casino that we had only joined so we could carry on imbibing past the closing time of the other licenced establishments.
Dave coming to town usually meant a bigger effort on our part, but I suspected that was partially because his visits were infrequent and I had no doubt that he too was far less of a party animal when he wasn’t with us. And what had happened to the other boys? Once upon a time there had been quite a few of us. But where were Barry, Kev, Will, Nick, and Jonesy now? I honestly had no idea. Well Nick was married with two kids and living in the Valleys and I remembered hearing Kev was now a banker or something similar, earning big money in London. As for the others I had no idea. They may have still been living in Cardiff for all I knew; possibly around the corner from me. But as the years had gone by, particularly since finishing university, they had drifted slowly out of my life and I’d found no reason to replace them. So, at the age of twenty-nine, the only friends I really had were sitting with me, eating breakfast in our favourite greasy spoon. Of course I knew other people, through work and the like, but it felt like my days of actively making friends had gone. My social circle had steadily decreased and I had done nothing about it, at least in part because I didn’t really want to. My days of being a ‘lad’ had more or less come to an end. It felt appropriate. The trouble was I didn’t have anything to fill the void that was now opening up.
I awoke from my reverie and suddenly felt the need to share this growing feeling of emptiness with my friends. But I wasn’t sure how to express it in a way that they would understand.<
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‘I think I need to start doing some sort of sport,’ I said between mouthfuls of black pudding and fried bread.
‘I know what you mean, I’ve been meaning to get into shape’ nodded Dave, ‘Actually I started playing five-aside with a few of the guys at work recently. It’s a good way of blowing off some steam without getting smashed all the time’
Interesting, I thought, but I’d never been much good at football and I couldn’t see it being a solution.
‘You’re welcome to join me for a game of squash some time,’ offered Rob.
But Rob had always been pretty fit and coordinated and enthusiastic about sport, whereas I was generally more renowned for being slovenly, maladroit and apathetic, and I didn’t think getting hammered at a racket sport I had never even played before, was the best way to boost my self-esteem and ignite my renaissance as a fit, healthy and useful member of society.
‘Yeah, maybe,’ I pondered, ‘I need to do something though. At the moment it seems like drinking is the only thing I’m any good at.’
‘To be honest mate, you’re not even that good at that.’ provoked Dave.
‘I can still drink you under the table,’ I retorted, ‘I wasn’t the one who switched to halves at nine thirty.’
‘Yeah but that’s just because you’re a fat bastard,’ laughed Dave.
You could always rely on your mates to make you feel better, I reflected.
After we had all finished our breakfast we went back to Rob’s flat to continue the recovery. In a couple of hours, Dave would be on his way back to Birmingham, possibly after making a pit stop en route to see his mum and Rob would be spending the day with his girlfriend. I would be on my own, nursing my hangover while nostalgically watching eighties films on a portable TV alone in my flat. However for the next ninety minutes or so I would be with my mates watching Sunday morning television, almost as if we were all still flatmates back in university. There was the inevitable youth programming on Channel Four, that we watched out of habit, because it didn’t really require any effort and also because there were pretty people on the screen. There was a commercial break and Rob got up to make us a cup of ‘proper tea’ and Dave went to the toilet.
Even though I had no real objection to continuing the trivial nonsense that we were watching, I took the opportunity to switch the channel. Suddenly the screen was full of people running. Not athletes, but normal people running. Most were wearing the sort of paraphernalia that you would associate with a sporting activity (shorts, vests and the like) but there were also people dressed up like superheroes or wearing huge animal costumes as if they were mascots at a football game. The commentators were explaining the intricacies of the route and extoling the virtues of the event that was taking place. Occasionally the footage would switch from the global images of the masses running to a breathless interview with a soap star or celebrity chef who would explain what charity they were running for and how much money they were hoping to raise.
And so it was that after more years than I could even guess at, I was reintroduced to the London Marathon.
I hadn’t watched any coverage of this mass-participation event since I was a child, when my dad, an armchair fan of all sports, had avidly viewed it.
I was transfixed. The sheer volume of people taking part was astounding and all of them were raising money for good causes and pushing the boundaries of their own achievement. And then they interviewed an old man. A proper old man he was, in his seventies, and he was running the London Marathon to raise money for a leukaemia charity, after losing his granddaughter to that awful disease. There flashed a picture of his granddaughter onto the screen during the interview and suddenly I felt incredibly moved and tearful and also incredibly guilty. Here was I sat inactive on my best mate’s sofa on a Sunday morning, struggling to move without feeling nauseous, a result of my own hedonistic and frankly irresponsible behaviour the night before. The following day I’d be heading into an office to do a job I found uninspiring and boring, to go through the motions for five dreary days until the following weekend when once again I would go out and drink if I could find anyone to drink with, or else I would stay in and eat takeaway food in front of vacuous television programmes that I didn’t even enjoy, and this because, I really, genuinely couldn’t think of anything better to do. I was nearly thirty years old and what did I have to show for my efforts – a job I hated, a love life that was, in the kindest of terms, dormant, and a lifestyle that I didn’t need medical training to realise was slowly killing me.
It was time for a change, and the omniscient medium of television had shown me the way.
‘I’m doing that next year!’ I announced to my friends who had returned to the room, ‘I’m running the London Marathon!’
There was a pause before Dave and Rob both fell about in helpless laughter.