It's Not Me, It's You

by Jon Richardson

  * * *

  Perhaps I can still use the old ‘zoom’ method to make myself feel better. I start in the bathroom and then cover the hallway, then the kitchen and lounge and then I can’t cope because there is already too much mess.

  It isn’t long before I notice I can hear the clock ticking in the hallway and I know that nothing can stop time from moving on. I have to ‘man up’ as the Americans call it. No one is going to do it for me so if I just run around frantically for five minutes and try not to get distracted I can put everything back into place.

  Folding the towel neatly and placing it back on the hanger, on my way out of the bathroom I grab a handful of clothes from the laundry basket. There might be some white stuff in there but in all honesty it doesn’t matter what the colours are since I haven’t bought any new clothes in so long that there is no chance of any colours running anyway.

  I head into the kitchen and put them in the machine with a tablet from under the sink and switch it on for a thirty-degree quick wash. While in the kitchen I wash the few remaining items on the side and place them on the drainer. I sprint into the living room and move the table back where it was and just put the hoover away without finishing the job – that will have to wait until later; the place is relatively dust free anyway.

  Then I go downstairs to put the recycling out for the morning with the rubbish bag and the spider is gone. I stupidly pretend it doesn’t bother me but since there is no one around to notice this show of bravado, I might as well just admit that this will also keep me awake tonight.

  When I come back in I lock the door and feel satisfied that sooner or later everything looks to be in shape. Everything seems to be finished.

  You poured all the water away, but the bubbles are still there.

  There is always something else to worry about.

  I wonder what it would be like if there were actually nothing left to finish and realise that in a perverse way I am happiest when furthest from completion. When there is so much to be done, so much tidying to do at home and in my mind, I have no option but to knuckle down and get on with it, and the results of my efforts are quickly visible. The closer I get to finishing, the more vague the work becomes and actually it becomes a question of maintaining what you have rather than bettering things. Maintaining perfection is an impossible battle. This is why I haven’t let myself enter into a relationship for eight years, so that there is always a glass on the sideboard. Maybe I am afraid that when I get everything I want I will just disappear, like a computer game that has been finished, or worse still I will have a life so perfect that the future can only mean heading downhill and losing the things I care for.

  On my way out of the kitchen, the bubbles now rinsed away and everything seeming complete, I pull the bookcase that stands against the wall down behind me, so it crashes against the floor, spilling its contents everywhere and gouging deep lines out of the plaster-board walls behind it.

  Without stopping or turning around to look at the damage, moving silently as I do so, I kick the nest of tables back towards the kitchen, the lamp goes flying and the TV guide flops down on to the floor. It all feels so good that I start laughing until I collapse backwards on to the floor with a huge sigh of relief.

  While I am lying on my back, there is a knock at the door but I ignore it. I know they know I am here, but I also know they won’t do anything but leave.

  Is it her? Is it Gemma? Nonsense – she doesn’t know where I live.

  What the fuck did you do all that for?

  I am my own boss. Don’t worry about the mess – I’ll sort that out tomorrow. Put it on the list. I think I need to get out of the house for a while. Why hasn’t she texted me back? And why haven’t I heard from my agent?

  Spoon, jar … jar, spoon. Girl, book … book, girl. Probably best to get out of the house for a while. Some exercise, perhaps?

  13.24

  GYM’LL FIX IT

  A few paces before I reach the door to my local gym, I get my membership card ready in advance to prevent any awkward fumbling in the foyer in front of the attractive girl who usually lurks by the reception. Even such a small task as this is made easier by systems that have been put in place and perfected over many years. My wallet is always kept in my right trouser pocket (keys in the left, phone in the back left-hand pocket except when an inside jacket pocket is available). A black leather wallet, plain and simple but beginning to show signs of wear and tear now, though not quite time for an upgrade.

  Once inside the wallet, it opens to reveal those cards which are intended for use on a more-or-less daily basis: debit card and gym-membership card. To the left, behind a little clear plastic window, is my driver’s licence. The right-hand section lifts up to reveal less important cards, such as my store reward cards.

  I have one such card for each major supermarket chain, which I am quite sure would enrage conspiracy theorists. I hear people complaining that these cards are simply a way for the supermarkets to ‘get to know what I buy and when I buy it’. Well, jolly good then! I dream of a day when I can walk into a shop, swipe a card on entry and be told exactly what I need, what else is on offer and what treats I might like based on recent trends. If that increases their profits then so be it, so long as it reduces the time I spend traipsing back up and down the same aisles looking for things and as long as it means I have one fewer list to write in an average week. Kudos to the store loyalty card.

  In a concealed section at the back of my wallet I keep one ten-pound note and one ten-euro note, in case of emergencies. I used to keep a condom in here, but I got so tired of transferring the same one across each time I bought a new wallet that the gesture began to depress me too much, in much the same way that it might upset disabled people if wheelchairs had a compartment for storing skis. How could it be long enough to perish leather since I last had call to use this condom? As a man I am required to carry a condom with me at all times, as if the possibility for sex could occur at any moment and with little or no warning. You think you are just nipping to the shop for some bread, but really should accept that you are probably going to end up sleeping with the girl on the checkout and maybe someone else too. Best always to travel tooled up.

  I now keep foreign currency in my wallet because sadly it seems to me far more likely that I might suddenly wake up in the centre of Europe without knowing how I got there than that I might end up with a woman in some kind of sexual scenario. I think even describing the occasion as a sexual scenario shows why I don’t end up in them more often.

  I lack the lingo and the physical presence for generating sexual attraction and nowhere is that more apparent than in my gym. In the three years I have been (irregularly) coming here I have seen men who to begin with were the same size as me but who, through their dedication and love of lifting things above their head, have grown twice as tall and three times as wide as they were.

  I, however, seem to be staying roughly the same shape, a kind of pasty white, flat-chested hobbit with sunken shoulders and bad posture. On each flank there is a little promontory of podge above each hip. A wife or significant other would refer to these as love handles, but being as I am single they are simply handles – and handles that somehow make it far less likely that you will be picked up easily.

  I like to keep fit simply because I know that when it gets dark and I am climbing into bed my thoughts become negative enough without hating the body that is exposed when I undress. I don’t like my face and I don’t like my brain but I don’t see that I can do anything about them. However, when I start to put on weight and a paunch develops ahead of me, I see a situation that could be resolved by effort and determination alone and that makes it inexcusable.

  It would be easier if supermarkets would cater more for those of us who live alone. It is all too easy now to buy larger and larger packs of food and get them at any time too, since the supermarkets are open twenty-four hours a day – except on Sundays, where God asserts his power by insisting that, despite whatever ch
arity work we might do in our own time, if we buy a courgette after 4pm on the Holy Day we will burn for all eternity in the fires of Hell (though the fact that when I lean forward while driving my belly has started to push me backwards suggests that courgettes are not the most frequent item on my shopping list).

  Perhaps my loyalty-card statement would reveal a few too many deep-pan pizzas and not quite enough oranges and lemons. I am not fat by any stretch of the imagination, but punish myself for any physical imperfection because I have no excuse for it. I do not work gruellingly long hours and I am not chained to a desk; my weight fluctuates simply because at times I can be very lazy.

  There are days when I can sleep until lunchtime, spend the afternoon on the couch and still sleep soundly that night. I have to fight to remind myself that advances in medicine mean it is more than possible that my heart will go on beating well into my eighties and possibly beyond, and I do not want my body to have given up the ghost while my mind remains active. This seems a very clinical reason to exercise. I hope the receptionist isn’t the attractive girl. I hope it isn’t, but I am almost certain that it will be.

  It is.

  She looks up, half-recognises me and smiles sweetly. She doesn’t know who I am, but she knows that she occasionally sees me and this means we are supposed to speak in a tone which suggests personal intimacy, but we are not to exchange any private information.

  ‘Hiya! You alright?’

  ‘Yes, thanks. You?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  And so ends the longest period of chat I will have with anyone in Swindon today. This is the conversation I have each time I arrive at my gym, without exception. The same words, mumbled in the same tone, at the same speed and with the same lack of genuine care. The smile disappears as quickly as it arrived and she then looks back down at her computer screen. Classic banter!

  I am not sure which I find more depressing, the synthetic three-line chorus of the gym receptionist or the overbearing catalogue of inane questions of what you would call ‘a genuine people person’. I am left annoyed and slightly hurt by the fact that this girl doesn’t actually care how I am, nor would she notice if I never came through the sliding glass doors ever again, but would gladly settle for this conversation in place of a barrage of questions from a server whose eyes beg you not to leave their shop. Were there any chance of an interesting conversation with someone who is scanning your items in a supermarket, for example, I would be delighted to chat, but there so rarely is.

  ‘So … (BEEP) Do you think politicians (BEEP) can really make a difference or (BEEP) are the new generation of career politicians (BEEP) just power-hungry money grabbers? These pizzas are on three-for-two by the way – I’ll get Sharon to run over and get you another one, chunky.’

  On the few occasions on which I have found myself trying to instigate some chat, I have seemed to drastically over-estimate the sense of humour of the person I am talking to and ended up offending them in some way. Once while buying my food for the week the cashier told me that the price would be £23.17 before changing her answer to ‘Sorry – £32.17’.

  ‘That’s pretty hefty inflation,’ I wittily retorted. ‘Bloody Tories!’

  The expression on her face couldn’t have shown more surprise if she had looked up to find that I was driving straight towards her at sixty miles per hour in a two-tonne truck. In general, most of my acerbic political satire at the checkout of my local supermarket falls on deaf ears. Another tip would be that if you ask how long someone has been running their shop, and they reply ‘a decade’, your next comment should not be, ‘What did you just call me?’

  I do miss having someone to laugh at my jokes, though, and as I have made clear the validation that Gemma’s laughter offers me is a large part of why I find her attractive. I think that’s why I subject anyone who has the misfortune to serve me in a shop to five minutes of my newest material each time I leave the house. Nothing makes you feel more pathetic than asking the manically depressed emo working on the tills at Boots if he has seen the latest Diet Coke advert, especially if is it 4.30 in the afternoon and those are the first words you have spoken that day.

  Walking away from the girl who has already forgotten I exist I pass through another set of doors and enter the locker room. I regularly smash records in the gym, but unfortunately the records broken are less likely to be my time for a ten-kilometre run and more likely to be the record for ‘droopiest set of testicles I ever want to see in the flesh’. It seems to be the rule that those with the least to be proud about are often the most willing to put themselves on display. What I am trying to say is that, while the Crown Jewels may be kept under lock and key away from prying eyes, PoundLand are quite happy to display their stock in a high street window.

  Thankfully on a Sunday afternoon, when most people are at home eating roast dinners and watching James Bond movies, the gym is quiet and the changing room is empty as I enter. I can hear a shower running in the back room but there is no one visible. I scan the lockers to locate my favourites.

  007 Taken. Always the first to go, ironically.

  077 Taken.

  100 Taken.

  207 Taken. This means that if I were to head back out into the car park, somewhere I would find a Peugeot 207 neatly reversed into its parking space, recently cleaned and with a tree-shaped air freshener hanging from the rear-view mirror. It’s not that I know this person specifically, but I can tell by their locker choice that they are like me. There are more of us than it seems – the people who live by rule and order – but we seldom speak of it.

  Lockers are very appealing to me, like little safety deposit boxes. I have always been pleased by my ability to shrink things down and feel oddly comfortable in small spaces. As a child I would climb into the airing cupboard and hide among the sheets and towels for hours and as recently as a few years ago, when the stresses of shared accommodation got me down, I would go and spend a night in my car to get away from the mess. My car is my own little mini-hotel.

  Synaesthesia is a condition which can mean (amongst other things) that when a ‘synaesthete’ hears a number, his or her mind conjures a very clear image for each one. Not as simply as a person who hears the number three will imagine a ‘3’, but a far more complex image with a distinct shape, colour and texture. This means that certain numbers can be perceived as more beautiful than others and in such a world phone numbers become much more than a series of digits – they can be vivid clashes of colours and moving shapes.

  I feel a jealousy deep within me that I will never have such a personal relationship with the numbers I encounter, but must make do instead with the basic comfort that is brought to me by multiples of five. It is a wonder to me what untapped resources lie within the human brain and furthermore what it is that opens up these avenues of thought that are ignored by most of us. Can willpower alone force the brain into extraordinary action? Do most of us fall short simply because we do not push ourselves far enough, content as we are to take the world at face value?

  Without even being aware of it, I seem to have changed into my running gear, folded my clothes neatly into locker 241 and closed the door. This is what ordinary people call ‘auto-pilot’ but I call ‘driving with your eyes closed’ because that’s more like what it is. It doesn’t mean that someone else is in charge and you can take a break; it means you switched off at random in the middle of an important task, with the likely result that an accident is imminent.

  One day I will enter autopilot whilst getting changed and snap out of it only in time to realise that I have taken all my clothes off, sealed them into my locker along with the key to the lock and headed up to the gym completely in the buff. I am glad to see that I have chosen a good locker for myself though, opting for 241 because it feels as though I am getting something for free.

  It’s a locker bogof, so to speak.

  I padlock it (whispering to myself, ‘Jon is locking his locker and getting two for one as well’) and head up to the gym, climbing onto a
treadmill over in the corner away from anyone else and away from the mirrors that seem to fixate them so much.

  Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the buffest of them all?

  Why it is you, oh fat-necked one … But Snow White split up with you when you were fifteen and her family

  eventually moved to Croydon. Do you really think you can get her back now, by lifting heavy things? Tut tut.

  It makes sense to me to select a locker whose number I am likely to remember. Who wouldn’t forget putting their things in locker 143? What a boring number. My love of individual numbers tends to have more to do with their neatness or the patterns they help create in my mind rather than any kind of synaesthesia.

  These are exactly the avenues of thought I am able to explore while I am running and I love poking my nose into every corner of them – this is the reason I make myself come here. When I run outside I enjoy the air and the scenery, but I find it hard to switch my brain off as easily as I can on a treadmill.

  Outside I can’t stop planning routes, looking out for cars, being self-conscious of my breathing and wondering whether I am frightening the old lady I am sprinting towards and hating myself for the possibility. Indoors there are no such problems, there is nothing to think of but putting one foot in front of the other and going on doing so for as long as possible.

  My still brain is jagged and messy and demands an answer for each question before it will let me move on to something else, but here things are fluid and soft and while the upper level of my thought is so focussed on breathing and getting oxygen to my muscles, the rest of it can wander wherever it pleases. Thoughts can mingle and combine to create new colours and new ideas altogether. It is as if rationality is what holds me captive and exercise and alcohol are the only ways to subdue it long enough for me to escape through an open window.