by Mike Gayle
That’s why turning forty is such an absolute kick in the crotch. It means you finally have to put your house in order, get your act together and pull your finger out from wherever it’s been hiding. It’s like when you’re a kid and you’re pulling faces out of the car window and your dad tells you that if the wind changes you’ll stick like that. That’s what turning forty is: the point at which the wind changes. The point at which you’ll be stuck for good with a complete mess of a life if you don’t get all your ducks in a row, and preferably have them tucked away in your shed for safe keeping.
The guys from Gregson’s worked hard all afternoon and soon a job that would have taken me an eternity was finished and I was asked to give it the once-over.
I hadn’t got a clue what I was supposed to be looking for but I couldn’t let them know that and so I gave them my best ‘bloke face’ (showing neither approval or displeasure) and opened doors, checked windows and jumped on the spot in the corners but honestly, all I wanted to do was get myself a chair, put it inside and spend the rest of the day inhaling that great fresh wood smell.
I allowed my bloke face to break into a grin. ‘A job well done, guys.’
‘It’ll need another coat of preservative straight away and regular coating once a year to keep it in top condition,’ said the head workman.
‘Goes without saying,’ I replied.
‘And just keep an eye on the roof felt,’ he added. ‘It’s guaranteed for ten years so if you do have any problems call us and we’ll get it sorted.’
As the workmen collected their tools and saw themselves off the premises I remained at the top of the garden drooling over my shed. Now I’d got it I couldn’t wait to fill it up with the kind of useless ephemera that used to occupy my dad’s: rusting push lawn mowers, pristine Flymos, Black and Decker workmates, the constituent parts of dilapidated rabbit hutches, plastic ice-cream tubs overflowing with screws, nuts and bolts, open jars half filled with turpentine and paintbrushes and, of course, the icing on the cake, multiple kids’ bikes all with flat tyres.
A noise from behind me alerted me to the fact that I was no longer alone. I turned to see that Lauren had joined me. As befitting the weather she was dressed in a lightweight jacket and jeans. She looked beautiful and I wanted her to want to come closer and kiss me but she didn’t move.
‘So is this it?’
I nodded. ‘What do you think?’
‘It looks nice,’ she said unconvincingly (I was well aware of Lauren’s true feelings about my shed but at this point it was all water off a duck’s back). She drew a deep breath and added quickly, ‘Can you spare a minute? I just need a word with you about something.’
‘Can it wait?’ I kept my eyes firmly on the shed, ‘I really want to get the shed organised.’
‘Oh, come on Matt, it’s just a shed.’
‘Not to me, OK?’
She put a hand on my arm.
‘But I really need to talk to you.’
‘And like I said, now is not a good time.’
‘Just a few moments.’
‘I’m busy.’
‘Matt!’
She was crying now but I still didn’t turn round.
‘We need to talk, Matt, we need to talk right now! Can’t you see it? Can’t you see that I don’t love you any more?’
I finally allowed my gaze to shift to her tear-streaked face.
‘Of course I can. What do you think I am, blind?’
‘Then why didn’t you say something?’
I looked at my shed, and then back at Lauren and without another word I headed back indoors.
3
Lauren and I met in Australia eight years ago. Our meeting had followed on from what I can only describe as a period of extreme transition which had begun when I’d split up with my live-in girlfriend, Elaine, while living in New York. Thousands of miles from home, with a thirtieth birthday looming, I’d packed my bags and bought a one-way ticket back to the UK.
Safe in the arms of friends and family in Birmingham I set about trying to turn thirty without losing the plot. And it worked, up to a point. Although there was a major complication where I briefly mistook the hazy warmth of nostalgia for something more, thankfully everything came good in the end. Fresh to thirtydom, I embarked on a new chapter of both my professional and personal life in Oz; and as most of my contemporaries were settling down and starting families I opted instead to get to the top of my game. I’d always worked hard but suddenly I upped a gear, always the first to arrive in the mornings and regularly working late in the evenings. When it came to weekends I spent more time in the office than anywhere else. In short I became a workaholic but as it was the only thing that seemed to give my life meaning I decided that the best thing I could do was just go with it. My increased work ethic did not go unnoticed and not only did I get paid very well, but I also climbed up the career ladder very quickly indeed.
One night a group of colleagues and the strategic business consultants with whom we’d been locked in a conference room for the best part of the day suggested that we all go for a wind-down at a bar near our office. Tempted as I was to say, ‘Actually, I think I might stay here and go through these development reports,’ I found myself saying, ‘Yeah, fine. I could do with a break.’ It’s a good job I did, because that was the night I met Lauren.
‘Rumour has it you’re the hardest-working employee at the company,’ she said, taking a seat next to mine. Her accent was English, Home Counties to be exact, which wasn’t that much of a surprise given the international make-up of companies like Benson-Lawless.
‘And you are?’ I hadn’t meant to sound abrupt. I was genuinely interested. The Benson-Lawless people had been coming into our offices for months for various meetings and consultations and I’d never had a conversation with one of them that wasn’t work-related.
‘Lauren Murray, strategic analyst for Benson-Lawless.’ We shook hands and although her grip was firm her hands were soft. For some reason this took me by surprise.
‘Nice to meet you Lauren,’ I replied, ‘and yes, I can confirm that rumour.’ ‘You don’t think much of us do you?’ she asked, scrutinising my face. ‘You think consultants are a waste of time.’
‘Glorified accountants billing us at a thousand dollars an hour to tell us what we already know in a way that we can’t understand? I don’t think you’re a waste of time, I think you’re geniuses. I just wish I could get paid as much for doing so little.’
It was a bit of a gamble, insulting her like that, but whether it was the beer, or the tiredness, throwing caution to the wind seemed to be the order of the day.
‘Do you smoke?’ she asked, reaching into her bag.
‘No, but I’m told I’m good company by those who do.’
Lauren arched her left eyebrow coolly. ‘Is that so, Mr Beckford? Well, I think I’ll be the judge of that.’
We made our way to the outside terrace where half a dozen other smokers were huddled under a canvas canopy.
‘So what brought you to Oz?’ she asked, grinning, as she drew deeply on her cigarette, sending a plume of bluish smoke into the air.
‘Take a guess.’
‘A girl,’ she replied. ‘You look like the kind of guy that would move continents to woo a lady.’
‘Wrong,’ I replied. ‘It was work, although to be fair a girl was sort of in the mix too but not in the way you’re thinking.’
‘Was she nice?’
‘She was the best.’
‘Do you always speak so highly of your exes?’
‘Only the good ones.’
‘Well, that would rule me out,’ she said playfully. ‘No ex of mine has ever had a good word to say about me.’
‘Maybe you’ve been going out with the wrong guys. If you’d dated me and we’d split up I’m pretty sure I’d find something good to say. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’d be devastated that it was over, and I’d do everything I could to get you back but I don’t see why I wouldn’t be able t
o sing your praises to some pretty girl outside a bar one day.’
‘What exactly would you say to this,’ she paused and raised that eyebrow again, ‘pretty girl outside a bar?’
‘Well, Lauren,’ I replied, ‘I’d say how you were always great fun to be around and to illustrate the point I’d tell her about that great weekend we had when I took you scuba-diving on the Great Barrier Reef.’
Lauren laughed. ‘I was great, wasn’t I? None of your friends’ girlfriends were interested in diving but I had a go even though it wasn’t my usual thing.’
‘That’s right,’ I replied, ‘I was so proud of you and all my mates were really impressed.’
‘And how about that night we both got crazy drunk and ended up gate-crashing a karaoke party in that Cantonese restaurant? I couldn’t get the microphone out of your grip! It was like power ballad after power ballad, all the greats: Benatar, Turner, Tyler! You slayed them all!’
‘I was on form that night,’ I said as Lauren beamed a killer smile in my direction. Wide, mischievous and steeped in suggestion, it confirmed that a connection had been made.
Cigarette over, we returned inside and I offered to get her another drink but at the bar I got sucked into a conversation with my boss that proved impossible to escape until he’d finished. By the time I managed to break away and get served at the bar Lauren had inevitably been sucked into a conversation of equally epic proportions with her own boss and with two drinks in my hand and an ache in my heart it felt like our moment was over. However at the end of the night as colleagues were finishing off drinks and calling cabs, she came over and said: ‘For what it’s worth, it was fun being your ex. I hope you’ll always speak fondly of me.’
‘It’s a promise,’ I said, ‘but how will you speak of me?’
She pulled a goofy face, screwing up her eyes and flaring her nostrils, but she still looked good enough to eat. ‘It goes without saying that I’ll trash you like all the rest of my no-good exes. If you really were that good, then why did it all come to an end? I guarantee you were to blame.’
‘Of course it was my fault,’ I replied, ‘the ends of relationships are always my fault even when they aren’t. But if I’m going to get trashed for being a rubbish boyfriend in the end I think you should give me a shot at a decent beginning. I don’t know whether you remember the early days of me and you but they were pretty legendary.’
‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘your beginnings were pretty legendary. How could I say no?’
That weekend I took her to a new sushi bar in Kings Cross and twelve hours later, as I watched her leave my quayside apartment building, I knew that I’d finally found someone I’d love more than work. I proposed to her on our sixth date, she said yes on our seventh, and by our eighth we were making plans for me to sell my apartment, return to the UK, buy a place in London and get married. Our future shone before us like a beacon in the night sky. Everything was going to be OK.
4
Although in the end it took us three years to leave Australia it didn’t take too long at all for me to find a new job once we were in the UK. Lauren was ridiculously proud of me when after only a few weeks I landed a contracting position in Milton Keynes, which paid well but bored me senseless. But when a year later I was headhunted by a big-name recruitment firm for a great job that paid crazy money she was absolutely ecstatic. Suddenly we could afford to buy a house instead of rent, and all the dreams that we had back in Oz looked like they were about to come true.
The position they wanted me to fill was similar to the one I had had in Sydney but on an international basis, so instead of spending Monday to Friday overseeing teams across a single country, I would be visiting offices across Europe and Asia. I’d also be working with the sales director to bring in new business from around the globe. As far as my career went it was a very big deal indeed and seemed to be the ultimate pay-off for all the personal sacrifices I’d made over the years. The package they were offering was bigger and better than anything I had ever enjoyed; the perks were lavish; and the the future prospects (‘we’d be looking to make you a director within five years’) were everything I’d ever wanted.
From the business-class flights through to the car allowance that I splurged on the first of the two Porsches I ended up leasing, it was obvious to everyone in the industry that I had moved up a level and now that I was finally on my way to a directorship I drove myself harder than ever. Being away from home on weekdays was tough, but Lauren seemed to understand and when we were together we more than made up for it by treating ourselves to the best of everything, from Michelin-starred restaurants to extravagant luxury holidays that made friends green with envy. We were living the high life, or so it seemed, and I was convinced that the days of plenty would never cease.
The first sign that everything was not as it should be came two years into the job when I started getting chronic stomach pains. At first I ignored them, putting it down to indigestion, until one night while away on a four-day trip to Hong Kong I woke up in such agony that I had to ring down to reception and get them to call an ambulance.
Of course the job came with great health insurance and the hospital kept me in overnight but as I was due home the next day they simply made sure I was fit enough to fly home and advised me to see my own GP.
My GP referred me to a specialist who ordered a gastro-intestinal endoscopy, which revealed that I had a peptic ulcer. The consultant asked me lots of questions about diet, work and exercise and concluded that while work stress had not necessarily caused the problem, she didn’t doubt that it had been ‘a significant factor’ in aggravating the situation and suggested that I take a long holiday and perhaps consider a different career path.
In an attempt to show willing I compromised by finishing the course of medication she prescribed and booking a two-week five-star holiday to Antigua with Lauren. However once we got back to the UK it was business as usual.
A year on I was sitting in a sales meeting in Stockholm when I felt a blinding pain behind my left eye of such intensity that I had to leave the room. Twenty minutes and some strong painkillers later it was gone, so once again I dismissed it as ‘one of those things’, and carried on with my day. When it happened again though, a week later while I was in Oslo on business, and the week after that during a flight to Rome, and then two days later while Lauren and I were out for dinner with friends, Lauren insisted that I get it checked out.
‘I’ll make an appointment first thing Monday,’ I promised, then promptly forgot about it until a few months later in a meeting in Tokyo when a pain so debilitating shot through my head that the airport doctor forbade me from flying and sent me for an emergency CAT scan at a local hospital. Although the scan revealed nothing physically wrong the consultant commented that he had seen similar sets of symptoms many times before in what he called ‘chronic workaholics’ and attempted to sign me off work for three months.
Fearful that these illnesses meant that perhaps I wasn’t up to the job, after I returned from a long break in the Maldives I casually brought up the subject of health with a few colleagues over drinks in a hotel bar in Beijing where we were pitching for a new maintenance contract with one of the largest banks in southern China. Every single member of the team around the table had a stress-related story of their own, many of which made mine pale into insignificance. For every chronic stomach pain there was someone urinating blood, and for every tale of blinding headaches there was someone who had actually temporarily lost their sight and the ability to feel their legs. It would have been funny, like a twisted version of Monty Python’s two Yorkshiremen sketch, had they not been so deadly serious about it. ‘Bodies get stressed,’ explained my boss a few days later as we sat together in the executive lounge at Beijing airport waiting for the flight back to London, ‘but if you want to make the kind of money we do you just grit your teeth and get on with it.’
And so that’s exactly what I did: I got on with it, and for a long while I thought it actually
worked, but then Lauren told me that she didn’t love me any more, and that was pretty much the beginning of the end.
On the Monday after she officially ended our marriage I was up and out of the house for five in the morning to drive to Heathrow to catch the nine fifteen a.m. Qantas flight to Singapore. On my way I thought about the day ahead. I was heading out to pitch to a group of regional banks looking to upgrade their system software across all 158 of their branches. It would be a long, tedious day that would involve us talking shop for the entire flight, arriving late at night jet-lagged, grabbing a couple of hours’ sleep if we were lucky before spending the next day taking the company walkabout, sitting in on divisional meetings and eating more meals than our stomachs could bear before reaching the point of our visit: the sales pitch in which I would try and sell them three products that wouldn’t do the job in order to talk them into taking the one product that would but cost three times the amount they had budgeted.
Just thinking about this made me feel nauseous though I tried to take comfort in its predictability. But as I pulled up in the long-stay car park at Terminal Three, something weird happened. Out of nowhere my heart began pounding furiously, sweat started pouring off me and I could barely catch a breath. Convinced that I was having a heart attack all I could think was how much I didn’t want to die. I was too young. There was too much I hadn’t done. It wasn’t fair. This couldn’t be the way it was all going to end. Fumbling for my phone as I felt my chest getting tighter I frantically dialled Lauren’s number.
‘You need to come quick,’ I said between stifled breaths. ‘I don’t want to die alone in an airport car park.’
An ambulance arrived in a matter of minutes and before I really knew what was happening I was on my way to Hillingdon Hospital where I was scanned and checked by a number of doctors and nurses before being informed that although there was nothing physically wrong with me there was no doubt that what I had suffered was a somewhat extreme panic attack brought about by work-related stress.