by Danny King
Our MD had decided it would be fun to have it on January 13th to give us a bit of a treat in what was traditionally a rather depressing month, though cynics might’ve raised an eyebrow and wondered how much Joe Bananas cost to hire in January compared to December. Either way, no matter how much tinsel Godfrey ripped down we hadn’t got rid of it yet.
Another constant reminder of Christmas was Elenor’s endless partying stories. She’d sung her own praises all morning down the telephone to whomever she could think to call and now it was my turn to get chapter and verse. They were pretty tedious, naturally, but I found myself hanging on her every word. It helped that she’d come around and sat in my cubicle, twisting gently in the swivel chair a mere two feet from mine and pulling down the hem of her tight lycra skirt every time it threatened to divulge its secrets.
“It was amazing,” she laughed, at something that sounded an amazingly long way away from amazing. “I mean, we must have been mad. How can you drink eight jelly shots?”
“I don’t know, one after the other?” Godfrey suggested from the other side of the partition, having been subjected to the same anecdotes as me, only with none of the knee entertainment to keep him interested.
That was the thing about Elenor’s stories. Up close and personal they were strangely enchanting. Move them back a few feet and point them at someone else and they lost all their appeal.
“What’s the matter Godfrey, stay in on New Year’s Eve with Casablanca and a bottle of red wine again?” Elenor asked, slapping the smirk clean off his face. Godfrey stared at her in stunned outrage, before throwing himself back into his window-scraping. “Ooops, I seem to have touched a nerve,” Elenor winked, making me feel rather grubby at being party to such an obvious betrayal of trust.
Still, this tiny little triumph had Elenor positively glowing and her rays were giving me goosebumps all over.
“Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah, well, me and Stacey were the last to leave and still dancing our heads off when all the lights came on. It was absolutely mental and the nightclub owner thought we were off our head so he asked if we wanted to stay behind and party with the crew. And these guys really knew how to party, if you know what I mean?” she giggled. I didn’t, so I took that to mean her and Stacey got bummed by a load of off-duty bouncers. “God it was mad,” she squealed.
“I had a fairly quiet one myself,” I told her. “Me and Sally…”
“Oh you should’ve come up to Croydon, you would’ve loved it, it was wicked,” she enthused. “Just wait till you see me at the Christmas party, then you’ll see what I’m really like.”
As it happened, I already knew what she was really like and told her I probably wouldn’t be going to the Christmas party. Elenor looked at me as if I’d just told her I worked here for free.
“Yeah, right,” she said after a moment. “Me neither.”
“No, seriously I probably won’t.”
“Of course you are.”
“No, genuinely, I’m seriously not,” I insisted.
Elenor pulled this one apart and tried to work out what I was saying, so I reiterated that I wasn’t joking. This wasn’t a joke. I was being serious.
Her expression changed from one of scepticism to outright abhorrence.
“Why the fuck not?” she finally asked.
“Well, for one thing, I don’t want a Christmas party in the middle of January. Christmas is over. I just want to get on with it, not spend the whole year walking around in a paper hat looking for the back of a conga to grab hold of.”
“It’s free drink isn’t it, what’s up with you?” Elenor asked.
“What, in this company. Not likely. I think we had a free bar until nine o’clock last year then it was normal prices.”
“Half eight,” Godfrey corrected me.
“Well that’s alright, you can get well pissed in a couple of hours and spend the rest of the night dancing your arse off,” Elenor said, swinging her shoulders and waving her arms above her head as she swivelled in her seat to some funky, silent beat.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Why not, what’s the matter with you? Don’t be boring or you’ll end up turning into Godfrey?” she said, catching the full force of Godfrey’s glare. “Go on, come to the party,” she demanded. “It’ll be fun.”
I couldn’t work out why she was so bothered about what I did or didn’t do. I mean, what difference did it make to her whether I went to this party or not? There’d still be the same amount of booze and food and music and enforced jollity no matter what I did, so why did she need me?
“Go on, we’ll have fun,” she said, and I couldn’t help but notice how “it’ll be fun” had suddenly changed to “we’ll have fun”.
“I can’t. Besides I live all the way down in Camberley, so I couldn’t drink anyway,” I told her.
“You could get a hotel room,” she suggested, looking me straight in the eye and giving me an unexpected hot flush.
I could feel my face burning and my heart thumping heavily inside my chest but Elenor continued to hold my stare. What exactly was she suggesting? Did I have this right, or were my wires more crossed than Albanian Telecom’s? No, it couldn’t be. All Elenor was doing was suggesting a solution to me not being able to drink. That’s all. If it had been Godfrey or Tom who’d suggested it, would I have read them the same way and assumed they’d been planning on bunking with me and planting kisses up and down the length of my sweaty, naked body all night long?
Possibly…
… if they’d been leaning as close to me as Elenor had. Close enough that I could see down their tops and smell their hot sweet breath on my face.
Sally’s Diary: January 7th
I think the first of my New Year’s resolution is paying off. Andrew’s chipper as a woodchuck with a fresh pile of logs and we haven’t had a single row all year. Not even a squabble. Predictably, he’s joined the gym again, though he’s let me off this year and reckons he’s happy going by himself. Tonight’s his first night so he’s out of my hair for the evening – and Celebrity Big Brother’s back on at nine! No, I mustn’t. I did promise myself. But then, I’ve been working all week and January’s such a depressing month that you have to allow yourself some little rewards, don’t you? Andrew’s got his Christmas party next week and he says he might go after all, so I should have something to look forward to, surely? I guess it would be okay if I just watched the Friday episodes and didn’t have any chocolate. But then, how can you watch Celebrity Big Brother without chocolate? Hmm, I fear my second and third New Year’s resolutions are coming unstuck at the seams. Still, at least I still have the first. And out of the three, happiness, chocolate and Big Brother, I’d say that happiness is definitely the most important one.
Chapter 7. The End of Forever
I was thinking about time again. I don’t know if this is a proper theory but I’m not sure that time is linear. Do you know what I mean? I’ll try and explain. See, when most people think of time, they think of it as just one constant, continuous… erm, well, for want of a better word, thing. It started at the beginning of the universe and will run in a straight line at a set speed until the end of forever – if there is such a thing as the end of forever. And then you’ve got us and we are simply somewhere along that straight line, as was Churchill, Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Joe Bloggs, caveman Ug and that chicken I had for dinner last night. Only they’ve all had their time and no longer exist.
Or do they?
I mean, just because they don’t exist in my time any more, might they still exist in their own? Not every creature on God’s sunny Earth looks at the clock in the morning through my eyes so it might be possible.
See, just because it’s half past ten on a Monday morning, January 10th, early in the 21st Century, today’s a bit cloudy and Godfrey’s off sick again where I am, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s half past ten, Monday January 10th for everyone, does it? As far as caveman Ug’s concerned, it’s probably a
sunny day somewhere in the Stone Age and he’s just broken the tip off his spear chucking it at a wall painting of an elephant again. He doesn’t know me and I don’t know him, so why should time be measured from my perspective?
Let me put it another way; Shakespeare doesn’t know he’s dead. Just as Space Captain Jack Laser from the future doesn’t know he hasn’t been born yet. Just as I didn’t know I hadn’t been born yet in Shakespeare’s time, and probably won’t know I’m dead when Jack Laser’s buzzing around space battling face huggers.
All I can see is the window of my own life.
So, since I was born I’ve seen thirty five years so far, so if it’s the same for Mr Shakespeare, then surely it follows that for him it’s only 1599, Queen Elizabeth is still on the throne and he’s looking through a big pot of red quills and wondering where all his black ones keep getting to.
But what if our windows didn’t reflect on a single linear time line? What if there were an infinitive number of time lines all side by side, and each of them simply stretched as far as each of our own individual lives? Would it then be possible to jump from line to line? Will I still exist as a thirty-five year-old in my own time line in the future? Or do we just go around and around? The moment we die, we’re born again at the beginning? For all eternity?
I didn’t know. But I bet whatever the answer is, it’s a lot more complicated than I could’ve ever got my head around.
Also I bet we never find out, just as Shakespeare and Churchill and Ug never found out.
Perhaps you just have to do the best you can with your life and live for the moment, because the moment is so fleeting that it’s gone and history before you even realise it.
I looked back along my own particular time line and wondered how much of it I was happy with. Not as much as I should’ve been I concluded. But then, wasn’t that the same for everyone? Okay, so I didn’t have a bad life, so there wasn’t really anything that wrong with me. I wasn’t ill, I wasn’t disabled, I wasn’t illiterate or destitute or homeless. I wasn’t hooked on heroin, struggling to raise five kids single-handedly, mourning the loss of a murdered loved one or trapped on a downed submarine fighting off mysterious deep water aliens with dwindling ammunition. Though that last one might’ve been good…
“Nolan, we’ve got to go! They’re breaking in through the hull again!”
“You go. I’m staying!”
“Don’t be a fool, they’ll eat you alive just like they did the rest of the crew.”
“I said I’m staying Tom, now get the hell out of here. Go on, go.”
“It’s too late, they’re through. Oh Christ no!”
“Open fire!”
“Lend us a fiver.”
“What?”
“I forgot my wallet and I want to get a bacon sandwich off the sandwich man.”
Tom’s torn and blood streaked submariner’s uniform had morphed into his favourite I drink therefore I am… drunk! T-shirt and the navigation console we’d leapt behind to dodge the merciless slashing bio-mechanical claws was now my cubicle again.
“A fiver?”
“Actually make that a tenner. I think I’ll have a couple of pints at lunchtime. You’re up for a drink aren’t you?”
“It’s Monday.”
“All the more reason.”
“No, I’ve got to do Norman’s bleeding report.”
“What, you still haven’t done it?”
“I’ve been busy.”
Tom looked at the doodles of cavemen, time lines, monsters and cigarettes that were dotted around my desk and said he could see that for himself.
“Here, take this,” I said, pulling out my wallet and handing him a twenty. “You’ll have to give me the change, it’s all I’ve got.”
“Fucking sandwich man’s going to love me giving him a twenty,” Tom frowned.
“Well what’s he want, the exact change all the time? Hasn’t he ever heard of going to the bank?”
“You want anything?”
“No, just my change.”
“I’ll see what I can do. Oh, and give us a look at your Guardian too?”
“You want the paper or just the jobs bit?”
“Jobs. Anything in it?”
“Yeah, half the ink from my red pen. You have a go.”
“Ta.”
Tom retreated to his desk with my twenty and my Guardian and waited for ‘sandwich man’ to arrive.
The deep water aliens were patrolling the bottom of the sea again, but I’d escaped back to Croydon and was once again wondering where it had all gone wrong? Well to be honest, it hadn’t, so why the hell did I feel so disillusioned on an almost daily basis? I didn’t know. There was nothing I could really put my finger on so I decided to spend a little more time looking for answers.
My childhood had been okay. A bit boring and uneventful perhaps but I couldn’t remember ever being truly unhappy – except when we had to have our cat put down. I hadn’t been bullied, and I hadn’t been deprived. My parents were still together and no over-friendly ice cream men had ever managed to get me into the backs of their vans so I had no grounds for complaint.
But then by that same token, I couldn’t remember anything amazing happening either.
I’d never really been good or interested in anything, except perhaps art, but I’d never been encouraged to pursue it. My parents were pretty much straight down the line as far as parenting was concerned. As long as we washed our necks, went to school, did our homework and went to bed when we were told to, they were happy to get on with their lives and let us get on with ours. We all had dinners together and all watched the same programmes on the telly but then only one cook in the house and four channels on the TV couldn’t help but bring a family together.
Okay so my childhood wasn’t all cuddles and kisses and trips to Alton Towers. Who cares? Most people’s weren’t, so I wound the tape forwards a few years and checked over my adolescence, but there was nothing to write home about there either so I wound it forwards some more.
University I’d liked.
This had actually come as something of a surprise to me, as I hadn’t expected to like it. See, for me (and my brother) university was always just something we’d been expected to go to when we’d finished school. We had no say in it and didn’t even realise there was an alternative. We just had to get our A Levels and go. In all honesty, I’d just expected it to be another form of school but on arriving, I found it had something that school didn’t – absolutely no sign of my parents.
It also had girls, lots and lots of them.
Of course there’d been girls at my Secondary school, but by and large the really pretty ones had been as thick as two short planks and interested solely in blokes who dragged their brains around in their fists and got tattoos when they should’ve been getting GCSEs.
And those guys weren’t here either!
They were all still in that little town I’d left behind, laying bricks, getting drunk and biting each other’s ears off at closing time.
It was fantastic.
At university, I could suddenly drop my guard and stand out, and not worry about someone flushing the confident smile off my face as their mates threw my bag onto the roof of A Block. I was happy.
And things went from good to great in my second year.
A very pretty, funny, smart girl on the student paper amazingly didn’t throw up all over my shoes when I said hello to her, and soon I was saying hello to her all over campus.
Her name was Sally, and she left me excited, nervous, nauseous, humble, horny and ever so slightly disappointed with myself whenever I thought about her – which was all of the time.
My nausea quickly ballooned into a sickening ball of misery when I’d heard she’d agreed to go out with my so-called backstabbing Judas bastard of a best mate Tom, and I thought my whole soul would rip from my chest and run off down the road in floods of tears when I found out they’d spent the night together, but curiously something was up.
The student paper newsroom was suddenly a rather uncomfortable place to be, Sally and Tom turned carbon-based life-form on each other, and all at once she was available again. As I said earlier, I didn’t know what went on and didn’t really care. All I knew was Sally was available again and that was good enough for me.
I spent the next few days agonising over whether to charge in there like a preposterously eager rhinoceros before anyone else had the chance to or whether to sit back and play it cool. While I was weighing up my options, Sally called around and asked me if I wanted to go for a drink.
Yes. Yes I did. The answer to that question was yes.
I could scarcely believe my luck, though I quickly holstered my enthusiasm on the way down to the student union, reasoning that she was actually probably only asking me out as a friend, and not as a potential life partner, taking the pressure off the evening a tad. As it turned out, I was right, though this took none of the shine off the evening. It was a really lovely night and we enjoyed quite a few more like it until one morning, about two months down the line, I woke up with Sally’s head on my shoulder and everything had changed. We were no longer simply friends. We were boyfriend and girlfriend, and we ratified this shift in our relationship with three months of the most fantastic sex I’ve ever known. It was truly wonderful, and I knew at that moment she was the girl for me and that we were destined to be together forever, though I kept this to myself as I figured few things startled a girl quite like an untimely marriage proposal.
No, I bided my time, enjoyed what we had and made the most of the best girl in the world.
Without wishing to be crude, the sex couldn’t have come a moment too soon. I was pulling my hair out in lumps, and desiccating myself to a husk just thinking about Sally up in my room, though again this was something I kept to myself.
See the previous year I’d had an on-off-off-off-on-off-off-off relationship with a rather neurotic girl called Natalie who flitted between knocking on my door at midnight and calling me a bastard at all other times, but since the start of my second year I hadn’t had so much as a kiss off the cat.