by Various
I put the CD cover in a paper bag and give it to Trick as I slip the disc under my shirt, where it lies cool and smooth against my skin. When I get back to Banana House I’ll return it to Sandra’s music collection.
Like she said, Carol King is her hands-down favourite singer.
7
Dear
Josie Henley-Einion
Author
Josie Henley-Einion grew up in the Midlands and attended Bangor University in North Wales, studying Psychology and Linguistics. From 2002 to 2005, Josie studied for Manchester Metropolitan University’s online MA in Creative Writing, during which her debut novel Silence (Legend Press, 2008) was written. Josie now lives in Cardiff, South Wales, with her civil partner Alys, their son and a host of furry friends. Her short stories have been published in Seven Days and Eight Hours (Legend Press).
Dear,
I’m writing this letter to you on the train out to a conference. I like trains because I can read or write and don’t get as sick. The bus is cheaper but all I do is sleep and still don’t feel rested. There is much more to see from a train window. Outside of a bus there are simply miles of motorway embankments and other vehicles, the hypnotising stretch of white lines. In contrast, railway tracks follow fields and rivers, nestling up to private back gardens. From here I can see inside someone else’s life, from the rubber gloves on a windowsill to the cat warming itself on a shed roof.
The difference in price doesn’t bother me, as I’ll be claiming expenses for the fare. I’m supposed to be working so here I am on the train with my laptop being very busy and important.
Of course I’m not working. I’ve looked over the presentation but I’ve rehearsed it so much already that I’m bored with it. I hope I can maintain a level of interest so I don’t put my audience to sleep! That would be quite ironic given the subject matter. I know that my voice can have a soporific effect because I see the undergrads’ eyes glaze over during tutorials. Or that might be too many late nights; too much alcohol and sex.
Do you remember that? They say that if you remember the Sixties then you weren’t there. I feel the same about being an undergrad. It feels like a lifetime ago. It actually is a lifetime ago! The students I teach now weren’t even born when I was their age. In another reality, they could be my sons and daughters. Doesn’t bear thinking about. They have no concept of student grants or life without computers. I’m sure some of them have not been to the stacks, at least not to look anything up. I’ve heard that people go there for sex because they get more privacy than in halls.
Whenever I think about our time back then, I remember the half pints of milk hanging out of windows in plastic bags, the smoky basement bar where you could walk right past someone without noticing them, that coveted end seat next to the pillar in the main lecture theatre where you could sleep propped up. I remember you in your pulling jeans and me trying to keep track of the endless stream of hopefuls beating down your door. It’s a world away from today’s micro-managed career students. Or is it? Is it just the surface that is different and deep down it’s all the same? Same coffee and cramming, same sweaty socks and sex.
There I go again. That’s the third time I’ve mentioned student sex. I’m appalled with myself, really. I wonder if it’s got something to do with turning forty. I’m starting to feel as if I’ve missed the shiny boat and it’s already pulling into harbour for the next cruise and all I’m left is a leaky old rowing boat. Excuse the analogy. Probably something Freudian there.
I do love my analogies. Like this journey which could be seen as a state between states, in comparison to a dream state. I am neither here nor there but somewhere in between, ever in motion yet remaining still. It is the paradox of travelling at high speed. How surprised the Victorians were that their lungs did not explode when their trains exceeded twenty miles per hour! I am rather glad of that, or this journey would take the full day. As it is, two hours is long enough for my comfort.
I’m feeling quite uneasy on this seat. Slightly on edge like a bed of nails. I think that my bones have lost their youthful springiness and become hard and unresponsive, like the body they’re encased in. Sometimes if I sit for too long in the same position it feels as if I’d have to break something to straighten it all out. My joints crackle as if they’ve grown a layer of barnacles. God I’m not that old, surely!
The reason I’m writing this is that I’ve been mulling over what you said the other day. Well, ‘mulling’ is probably an understatement. Obsessing could go some way to describing it. You asked me, albeit in a joking way, why it was that I’d never found love. You listed all of your failed relationships, which took some time I have to say and even included people I hadn’t known about, and said that you thought I was lucky. I almost choked on my sushi. Do you remember this conversation? We were a tad drunk and it was late. It was never mentioned the next morning so I wonder if you remember. But you’d obviously been thinking about it or you wouldn’t have brought it up.
I gave you an evasive answer at the time, I seem to recall. About how it is better to have loved and lost and all that, then changed the subject. Covered my embarrassment by cleaning up the spilled rice. I was shaken to realise that you think I’ve never found love. I had thought that it was patently bloody obvious who I loved and that you had avoided noticing. I didn’t tell you the truth. Could not have looked you in the eye and told you that the truth is I’ve been in love with the same person for twenty years or so. For one thing you’d have asked me to name the person.
Letters are different. I don’t have to worry that you’ll interrupt before I can get it all out. And I can re-read and rewrite to be sure I’ve said what I want to say before posting. I always found writing an easier method of communication than talking.
When you were backpacking in India and I was researching mice in mazes, I loved the letters we sent to each other. I still have yours in my bedroom. I wonder if you still have mine. It might be interesting to read them again. Did I go on an awful lot about the mice and the mazes? You were very eloquent about the hostels you stayed in and the people you met. You never spared me details of your conquests.
We see each other so often these days that it seems daft to write, apart from the occasional email. I wonder how many people do write to each other in that way anymore? I know this isn’t really the same because I’m doing this on the computer and can edit, but even so a proper letter is better than a few lines of txtspk, is it not?
I’m going off on a tangent I know. This is what I do isn’t it? Avoid answering. The question was about love. It is a sticky subject though. It takes a long time to disentangle feelings and work out whether it is love or lust. And if it is love, what sort of love. Is it the same for you? I mean, I don’t mean to be rude but your relationships seem to be the ‘dive in anyway’ type. From the outside at least. Perhaps you simply process your feelings quicker than I do.
That is the big difference between us, and maybe why I prefer letters to talking. You are the veritable image of the extreme left brain whereas I’m the extreme right brain. I sometimes wonder how we ever managed to be friends. You, so open with your heart on your sleeve, forever giving it to strangers. You say that I’m unemotional, that I’m too analytical and don’t allow myself to feel: in essence that I have no feelings.
I realise that I’ve just been extremely analytical, but I have to tell you that I do feel. I feel so much.
When you talk to me about a new lover and I sit there with a fixed smile, inside I’m dying. Your words are a line of Riverdance, clogs and all, with you as Michael Flatley trampling over my non-existent feelings, beating them into the floor in time to the music of your exuberance.
Sometimes I feel so much that I have to lie down or I might fall off the wall of emotion. The world collapses inwards with no structure – nothing concrete. It is like looking down and feeling the dizziness of vertigo as great waves of passion crash over me from no apparent source. Perhaps this is why I appear unemotional: because I compar
tmentalise and control it. Otherwise I would be overcome and unable to function. Therefore I exist in a continual state of anxiety as I keep the feelings at bay and concentrate on walking a tightrope over the abyss. This is why I prefer mazes and equations to people. Even mice are tricksters with their random twitchings. So it is not that I am unfeeling, but maybe too feeling?
I can count my friends on one finger. How is it that I am friends with you when this is how I feel? I wonder whether I live a vicarious emotional life through you. You appear to have enough expression of feeling for both of us. Although I have but one friend, my friendship has never waned in all these years.
You come and go like the seasons. Each time a new lover appears, you’re off for the weeks, months or years it takes for boredom to set in. Even with both sexes to choose from in your voraciousness, you still manage to endure an occasional fallow period.
I’m the perennial, always sitting and waiting for you to come trawling back with your tale of woe and yet more debts and more children. It never ceases to amaze me how easily you sprout children, like a budding hydra, as if no other person were needed. And they stumble in your wake, wide eyed and worshipping.
I wonder if that’s how you see me: as one of your disciples. I have wished for so long that I could be more than this. Every time you’re single we get closer and I work myself up to telling you but I’m never quite daring enough. The biggest worry of course is that you’ll reject me, laugh or patronisingly turn me down and then we’d drift apart again, and you would always be uncomfortable in my presence. I’d lose you as a friend. That friendship is more important to me than anything I might imagine could pass between us as love.
I may have to delete the above few paragraphs before I send this. I’ve been a coward for so long, what makes me brave now? Sitting on a train watching the fields and bizarre station names going past, I’m distanced from you enough to say the things that I can’t say to your face. What is it about a journey that makes me so introspective? It might be the rumbling feelings of movement, vibrating through my body and jiggling it all up, unsettling the thoughts that have been contained, like bubbles in a vial of liquid.
It might be the isolation, the lack of eye contact with my fellow passengers who seem afraid that I’m a murderer or rapist or something worse like an evangelist who will collar and regale them with revelations from my particular personal philosophy. It might simply be the absence of anything else to do. Travelling is all about the wait.
I remember that time in the airport when we were checking in two hours early and I complained about how that was longer than the flight time. I joked that in the future when the instant transportation device had been invented, it would not cut down the journey time because one would still have to queue up, go through the equivalent of customs checks and baggage handling, all the related paraphernalia.
I started getting excited by the idea that I’d come up with a brilliant plot for a short story. You told me that it had already been done by Arthur C. Clark. You didn’t even look up from your novel to say it. If you had, then you might have seen my expression deflating. You would have your evidence that I do indeed have feelings. Perhaps all this time you’ve been running a randomised control trial on the question of whether my feelings exist.
I’m getting out at the next stop now so had better flick this off and have my bag ready. I’ll write more from the conference centre.
Dear,
I’m now at the conference. It’s very interesting so far. It’s great to see the people from France. Sleep research is big over there! We’ve been allocated our rooms and we’re going to have an introductions session quite soon so we can get networking. They say that in conferences, the networking is the most beneficial part. I am really looking forward to the keynote speech tonight, though. He is an eminent researcher and has been working on sleep and dreaming for years. He even knew the bloke who studied the sleepwalking cats!
My presentation is scheduled for the first session tomorrow morning. So I won’t be drinking tonight. I’m quite hungry. We had coffee available when we arrived but the dinner is scheduled for at least an hour after I usually eat. You will laugh I know but I’m a creature of habit and my stomach is rumbling. I did not think to bring anything to snack on. I’m not used to waiting for someone else to serve the food. My own culinary skills have been sharpening lately, as my new set of sushi knives will contest.
I hope you enjoy your night out tonight. I am thinking of you getting yourself ready to hit the clubs. I hope they have been warned! I have to go and hob-knob now. Probably won’t have time to write much this weekend but I will hopefully write more on the train on the way home.
Dear,
It’s all going on in the bar. I’ve done all the networking I can do and it’s actually got to the flirting stage now, so I’ve left them to it. It does nothing for me except make me feel old. I did drink some wine with dinner even though I kept saying that I wasn’t going to and now I’ve got a whisky to help me sleep.
Being a sleep researcher and knowing that alcohol has a detrimental effect on sleep patterns does not stop me from believing in that old adage for myself. I am not nervous about the presentation tomorrow but somehow I feel on edge.
I have to relate to you an incident that took place this evening. It was quite unnerving and one of the reasons that I have come upstairs early. I was talking to one of my fellow researchers. We have been working on the sleep and memory project for some time but have never had a personal conversation. I had thought that she was like me, someone who preferred to keep private life and work life separate.
We were chatting about the project. You remember I told you about the tabletop mazes, adapted from my PhD all those years ago in fact! I built the main board with slots so that the maze pattern could be altered with the walls being interchanged. This was the basis of it originally when it was simply training and reinforcement, for operant conditioning. This year I’ve been measuring the impact of sleep on the training, in other words whether more sleep makes for better learning. My colleague has been studying the dreaming side of it, although when it comes to mice we cannot say that they are dreaming: only describe the REM sleep pattern. This in essence has been our debate all along, and in the bar she attempted to draw some of the other delegates over to her side.
The discussion was lively but I believe that I held my position well. I am essentially a pragmatist. I do not believe that it is possible to study something that cannot be observed. Dreams are subjective and the experience degrades on the moment of waking, perhaps before. The conscious mind translates whatever nonsense has emerged during sleep and fits it into a narrative format so that the true random form has been disguised.
My colleague’s argument is that it is the dreaming itself (or for mice, their REM sleep) that influences learning, measured by performance on retest of a task. I hold that it is sleep only and nothing else can be inferred.
We have had this debate several times, however this is the first time it has occurred in front of an alcohol fuelled audience, where I was forced to shout to make my voice heard. This aspect was not what unnerved me; in fact I was quite exhilarated and poured myself another glass of wine as the conversation drifted towards the German contingency’s work.
That was when my heretofore professional colleague turned to me and murmured, “You’re knocking it back a bit tonight, aren’t you?” I sputtered a little, perhaps, from the shock but did not reply.
She did not take the hint from my silence but continued in a similar over-familiar vein. I wonder if she had had rather too much herself. She began to relate several minor incidents with other staff in the department, to which I only half listened as I cautiously sipped my wine. Somewhere amongst this rambling thread, she mentioned the ‘milk thief’. This is an ongoing situation and notices have been placed in the departmental kitchen.
I think that I may have sighed at this point because she stopped short and looked at me. “Well I suppose you’re above a
ll that, are you?” she asked, not too politely.
I replied that I did think it rather childish at which point she bristled and I half expected a tirade against my own person. However, a strange thing happened.
She smiled quite deliberately and put her hand on my knee, leaning forward and displaying ample cleavage, which I suppose was intentional or perhaps she was more inebriated than I had thought. I jolted backwards, spilling my drink slightly.
“You need to loosen up,” she said and brought her chair closer to mine.
I bit back the ready reply that indeed I did need to loosen my collar slightly and preferably well away from her. Again she missed the hint that my rigid body should have given that this situation was entirely unwelcome. Instead, her hand moved further up my leg and with her face close to mine she whispered some additional thoughts, which I was far too flustered to hear. I believe that she may have been inviting me to her room (which is unfortunately just next to mine).
By this time I had broken into a sweat and stood abruptly. I ‘knocked back’ my wine and this is the point at which I ordered the whisky. I was in half a mind to take her up on the offer and would need all the courage I could get. I do wonder whether I may rely a little more heavily on alcohol than I should. All to no avail, however, as I think that she had taken my dithering for a rejection. When I turned back I saw that her attention had diverted towards another professor.
Relief and disappointment, unlikely bedfellows that they are, clinked together like the ice in my glass. I stood for a moment quite undecided, but before someone else could accost me, I felt that this would be an appropriate moment to sneak upstairs.
I walked up the back stairwell and along a deserted corridor to this room, in a rather chilly wing of the conference centre, all the while berating myself for a coward and thinking of how you would laugh at my predicament. I wondered what you would have done in that situation. Oh, I’m sure that you could very easily have slipped inside her room and warmed it up for her. I pause for a moment as I imagine the scene, but the image blurs once you are behind the door.