Turning Thirty

by Mike Gayle

  forty-one

  To:

  crazedelaine@hotpr.com

  From:

  mattb@c-tec.national.com

  Subject:

  ?

  Dear Elaine

  It’s two o’clock in the morning here in Birmingham and I can’t sleep. I’ve just had the weirdest few hours of my entire life. Over this last couple of days I’ve been doing the catching up with old friends I told you about. I’ve spoken to Katrina and Bev on the phone and today (well, yesterday now, I suppose), I went to see my old mate Pete up in Manchester. I came home thinking that everything was okay, that my life was sorted.

  Anyway, there I am, a little bit drunk, a little bit cheery, when my mum tells me she’s got some bad news for me. I can’t remember exactly what her words were but the long and short of it was that my friend Elliot was dead . . . or, to be more accurate, had died two years ago. You see, I’d called Elliot’s parents’ house yesterday morning and left a message on their machine, explaining who I was, and asking them if they’d give me a ring with his number. While I’d been up in Manchester Elliot’s mum had returned my call and told my mum the news.

  Apparently Elliot had been driving from Leeds to a club in Liverpool two years ago last December when the car he and his girlfriend were in collided head on with a lorry. Elliot’s girlfriend had been killed instantly but Elliot didn’t die until a week later. They were both twenty-seven. Only close friends and family had been invited to the funeral and, given that none of us had actually seen or spoken to Elliot in a long while, that hadn’t included us. I feel weird. I don’t know what it is I should be feeling but whatever it is it’s not there.

  Matt xxx

  forty-two

  After I e-mailed Elaine, I attempted to go to sleep. But I couldn’t drop off. Instead, lying on my bed, looking at the ceiling, I tried to recall the exact point at which we’d all stopped being friends but I couldn’t do it because it had never been that clear-cut. After a few moments I tried to recall the point at which we’d all stopped putting the required effort into our various friendships and that was a lot easier. It was the moment we had all moved away from each other. That was the real test of friendship – geography. This made me feel both sad and guilty. The times I’d shared with them all were supposed to have been some of the best of my life and it seemed like a really poor show that we’d given up some of the best friendships we would ever have just because we no longer lived in the same city. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe we’d just outgrown each other. That was pretty much the last thing I can remember thinking that night, apart from, of course, the hours and hours of musings about my own mortality. My thoughts were centred on the three big questions of life: ‘Where am I going?’, ‘What am I doing?’ and ‘What’s it all about, Alfie?’ They were hardly original to say the least, and as such, they’re probably best left in my head. I did however manage some sleep eventually but woke up at about six thirty to hear the phone ringing. I slipped out of bed, went downstairs and answered it.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Matt, it’s me.’

  It was Elaine.

  ‘Who is it?’ whispered my mum, from the top of the stairs. She was in her dressing-gown and had her rollers in.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I replied. ‘It’s for me.’ I didn’t want to tell her it was Elaine. I didn’t want to get her hopes up. ‘I’ll try and keep the noise down, okay?’ She disappeared, leaving me alone.

  ‘Hey,’ I said softly, into the phone, ‘how are you? It must be – what? – one thirty a.m. with you. What are you doing?’

  ‘I was working late at the office when I got your e-mail about your friend Elliot. I wanted to call you straight away but I figured your folks would be in bed and I didn’t want to wake them. I remembered they were early risers from the time they came over to stay with us so I came home and waited up so I could speak to you. Anyway, how are you? How are you coping?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘It feels a little weird but I’m fine.’

  ‘You don’t sound fine at all, Matt.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Did you sleep okay?’

  ‘No, not really.’ I thought for a moment. ‘I’m going to say something, but I’m only going to say it to you because I know you’ll get it. But the really shocking thing about this is how not shocked I am by the news. Elliot was a good friend. Okay, I hadn’t seen him for a long while but surely I should feel something . . . something more.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Elaine. ‘For you to really feel a loss you need to have a great big hole ripped in your life. A hole so big that no matter what you throw into it, no matter how much you try and fill it up with other stuff, it’ll still be a huge hole. When you were friends and you all hung out together, and you saw each other every day, that’s when he would’ve left a hole and you would’ve felt something more. But the reality is that you haven’t had that kind of friendship in a long time. Which is okay, it happens all the time. The only bad thing is, when things like this happen, you don’t miss the person you’ve lost because you got over losing them a long time ago. What you miss is the hole they should’ve left.’

  Though part of me wanted to shout ‘psychobabble’ and ‘nonsense’, I could see that Elaine had a point; the reason why I couldn’t feel the loss of my friend was because I had already lost him and hadn’t even noticed.

  Elaine and I spoke for nearly an hour. I didn’t want to talk about Elliot any more and she knew that, so instead we talked about all the other things in our lives: the apartment and my parents’ house; US TV and UK TV; Elaine’s spider plants and my parents’ gardening habits; her Visa bills and my savings accounts; what it was like living with Sara and what it was like living with my parents; life at work and life not working; and, finally, how much she missed me and how much I missed her.

  forty-three

  ‘Is this it?’ said Gershwin.

  ‘I think so,’ said Ginny.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘So what do we do now?’

  It was just after midday on the following Sunday morning and the three of us were standing in the middle of Lodge Hill cemetery on the other side of the city. I’d called Gershwin and Ginny as soon as I could after hearing the news about Elliot, which for Gershwin had been just after I’d spoken to Elaine. Although initially shocked he was stoical about it. He asked the details and didn’t say a great deal more. Knowing Gershwin as I did, this didn’t mean he didn’t care. All it meant was that he didn’t know what to say and, rather than say something stupid or clichéd, he preferred to keep quiet. I didn’t like the idea of calling Ginny at work so I left it until early evening. Her reaction was similar to Gershwin’s, in as much as there were no tears and much silence. I also called Bev, Katrina and Pete, who evinced shock and an uncomfortable silence.

  My own feelings however changed from minute to minute but I was now certain that Elaine’s ‘hole’ theory had hit the nail on the head. To compensate, I spent a long time thinking of the Elliot I’d known at school as he was the Elliot I knew best, and the one I wanted to miss most. He’d always been a bit of an entrepreneur even when we were kids. He’d do things like get his dad to buy a load of Return of the Jedi stickers from a discount club they belonged to and then bring them into school and sell them at a profit. Once he even got his older brother to buy him copies of soft-porn mags like Men Only, Razzle and Escort, which he cut up and sold page by page to boys in the lower years, which earned him far more than he’d paid for them. One year, just after his twelfth birthday, he brought in his favourite present – a hand-held version of the arcade game, Defender, and hired it out at twenty pence a go. That was Elliot.

  I agreed to meet Ginny and Gershwin that evening in the Kings Arms, and we spent the whole night talking about how we felt we should do something for Elliot. Eventually we came up with the idea of paying our respects to him at the cemetery, albeit a little late. We thought that would have made him smile a bit – the three of us being three years
late for his funeral.

  The next day we clubbed together to buy some flowers – it felt a bit churlish to arrive empty-handed, like visiting someone in hospital without a bottle of Lucozade or same grapes – and at the florist’s we’d bickered because none of us could decide which flowers Elliot would have liked. For some reason, I wanted to get him something long, purple and sort of velvety-looking. Gershwin wanted roses and Ginny a bunch of yellow and white flowers that had a funny name. In the end Ginny said she didn’t mind what we bought because she didn’t think the point of this was to argue about flowers, but Gershwin said we weren’t arguing about flowers, we were just trying to make ourselves feel crap. In the end we each bought the flowers we liked and had them all bundled together. Then Ginny drove us to the cemetery in her ancient marine blue Fiat Panda.

  No one answered me when I asked, ‘What do we do now?’ Instead we stood around the grey marble headstone and stared, focusing our attention on it. ‘This is so very, very weird,’ I whispered, breaking the silence.

  ‘I know,’ responded Ginny.

  ‘It’s hard to believe this has happened,’ said Gershwin.

  ‘Why?’ asked Ginny. We both looked at her. ‘I mean, it happens all the time, every day. What makes us think we’re so special that things like this are never going to touch us?’

  ‘I don’t think Gershwin was trying to say that we’re special,’ I said. ‘I just think he was trying to say that, well, you always sort of assume that everything’s always going to carry on the same. That nothing ever changes, even though you know it does. It’s just human nature, I suppose.’ I was losing confidence in my big speech. ‘Don’t you think that’s the way it is, Gershwin?’

  Gershwin just shrugged and said, ‘Let’s go to the pub.’

  And that’s what we did. We left the flowers by the grave, got back in the car, went to the Kings Arms and held an impromptu wake.

  forty-four

  ‘What’s my favourite Elliot story?’ said Gershwin, in response to Ginny’s question. ‘Give me a few seconds and I’ll come up with one.’

  We were sitting in the lounge of the Kings Arms, at the same table we’d occupied on Gershwin’s birthday – possibly even in the same seats – and we’d been drinking and talking in a random way about nothing much for a couple of hours until Ginny upped the conversational stakes.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ said Gershwin. ‘Once when he and I were walking along King’s Heath Street a huge kid from another school bumped into him on purpose. Elliot didn’t look at him. Then the kid came from behind and pushed him and said something schoolboyish like, “Do you want to fight?” and Elliot just looked at him and said, “Why?” like he really wanted to know the answer. It was a stroke of brilliance. It totally threw this kid. All he wanted to do was show off to his mates how hard he was and Elliot wanted a discussion with him about his motivation towards violence. He still got a punch in the mouth but that moment when the kid looked all confused because Elliot hadn’t reacted how he’d wanted was perfect.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Ginny. ‘My turn. It’s not a story as such, it’s my favourite image of him. D’you remember that dark pinstripe second-hand suit he bought from Oxfam and insisted on wearing to my eighteenth?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Gershwin. ‘He used to wear it with his trainers. He thought he looked really cool. We all thought he looked insane.’

  I took my turn. ‘I remember a time when Elliot and I were in a chemistry lesson, we must’ve been thirteen or fourteen, and Philip Jones was being his usual pleasant self going round kicking people’s bags around the room and he kicked Elliot’s.’

  ‘I remember this one,’ said Gershwin.

  ‘So Elliot said, “Right, that’s it,” and he got a fifty-pence piece, put it on the desk, picked it up with a pair of tongs and heated it up in a Bunsen burner flame until it glowed orange and then he dropped it on the floor next to Philip Jones’s bench and pretended that he’d lost some money. Jones, being the idiot that he was, yelled, “I’m having that,” pushed Elliot away and picked it up. You could smell the singed skin for days afterwards. He was away from school for a week after that. Mind you, he beat the living daylights out of Elliot when he came back.’

  ‘Elliot and I once got Gremlins II out on video,’ said Gershwin, ‘and we both thought it was the best thing ever. For days afterwards we’d just quote bits to each other in class and crack up in hysterics.’

  ‘D’you remember the time we all stayed in my mum’s caravan in Wales for the weekend?’ said Ginny. ‘The first night there you all went off to the woods in the middle of the night to try to scare yourselves witless. Elliot didn’t go because he said it was too cold and I didn’t go because I thought Mum would find out that boys were staying in the caravan with us. Elliot and I hadn’t really talked very much before that but I remember that after we’d drunk half a bottle each of Thunderbird we warmed to each other. I remember at one point we were talking about what we were going to do with the rest of our lives. I told him I was going to go travelling and end up living in Australia with a Mel Gibson lookalike called Brad. And he told me how he was going to be head of an international company and I said something like, “That’s so dull,” and he didn’t say anything, he just looked really hurt. Then he said that if he didn’t get to be head of an international company he’d like to be a wing-walker.’

  ‘A what ?’ I asked.

  ‘One of those people who strap themselves to the wings of biplanes that you see at aeronautical events. He said he saw one once when he was a kid and it looked really good fun. And then I looked at him and he looked at me, and then he just burst out laughing and said that he didn’t want to be the head of an international company or a wing-walker. He said, and I quote, “To be truthful, Gin, I’ll be happy if I’m still me.”’

  forty-five

  It was just coming up to three o’clock in the afternoon when we decided to leave the comfort of the Kings Arms and venture outside again.

  ‘I’ll give you a ring during the week,’ said Gershwin to me, as the three of us hovered on the pavement outside the entrance. He turned to Ginny. ‘And I’ll see you . . . whenever, I suppose.’

  Ginny gave an awkward half-smile in response and stretched out her arms to give him a hug. ‘Look after yourself,’ she said, squeezing him tightly.

  ‘You too,’ he said, and kissed her cheek lightly.

  With that he gave me a short wave and headed off down Moseley high street, leaving Ginny and me standing, wrapped in our own thoughts, for what felt like ages.

  ‘What are you doing now?’ asked Ginny, as it began to rain.

  ‘Nothing. What are you up to? Seeing Ian?’

  She looked up at me and stared right into my eyes, her face devoid of expression. ‘No. I’m doing nothing too.’

  ‘Fancy doing nothing together?’ I asked carefully. Even though our moods were sombre I wanted to make it clear that this wasn’t a come-on.

  ‘Yeah,’ she replied, nodding as if to acknowledge that this was about friendship, nothing more. She even took my arm, which she wouldn’t have done if anything else had been on the agenda. ‘Right now, Matt, that sounds like the best idea in the world.’

  Doing nothing ended up as doing something because Ginny recalled that she hadn’t done a weekly shop for over a month due to pressure of work and that the hour left before Safeway closed would be her only opportunity to get some food in for the next few days. Watching her armed with a trolley reminded me of Elaine. They both had the same inefficient shopping habits, like going up and down the same aisle three times, buying frozen items at the start of the trip instead of at the end and throwing things into the trolley because they liked the sound of them. (In this case Ginny bought a bottle of rose water because she thought it sounded nice and those edible silver balls you put on cakes and biscuits even though she said she didn’t bake.)

  Inevitably during the forty-two minutes we were there we bumped into two former schoolmates: David Kimble (the
n, the shortest boy in our year at school; now, no doubt the shortest lorry driver in the country) and Elizabeth Cowan (then, the girl most likely to be travel-sick for the rest of her life; now, a stewardess for Aer Lingus). Both were surprised to see me and Ginny together after all this time and, needless to say, both jumped to the wrong conclusion. Ginny and I made such clumsy attempts to deny it that it seemed as though we were still lying about our entanglement after all these years. Later, laden with shopping-bags, we made our way back to Ginny’s, and while she did some preparation for school the following day, I rustled up some pasta for us. After that we cracked open a bottle of wine, sat on her back doorstep and looked out into the garden, drinking and talking. We talked about old times, and then we talked about what we’d wanted to do with our lives back then, and we talked about what we were doing right now. Finally we talked about Elliot’s death and how it made us feel. It was an honest, frequently blunt conversation, the kind that could only have occurred between two people like us, old friends, former lovers: we had a long, entwined history that stretched so far into the past it seemed to have had no beginning – it just was. The mood now was less sombre, but more intimate, more reflective – exactly the kind of atmosphere in which anything could happen, but I knew nothing would. This wasn’t like the old days. Now every action had a consequence, and we knew it.