Todd saw the bus coming. On time, thank God. He came out of the shelter and raised his hand. The man gave no sign of moving.
‘Here it is then,’ Todd said. The snow was heavier now, thick bursts whisking in the wind like egg white.
The bus pulled up. Still the man didn’t move.
‘Are ye comin?’ Todd called above the engine’s din. ‘There’s no anither yin for an oor.’
The man scowled, a look of pure hatred.
Todd shook his head. ‘Suit yersel,’ he said, and stepped onto the bus. ‘Christ, it’s cauld oot there,’ he said.
‘Whit aboot yer pal?’ the driver asked.
The man was shaking his fist at the sky. Snow boiled around him. He seemed to be in the middle of his own personal storm.
‘Just go,’ Todd said, as if he had the authority. The door hissed shut.
25 March
Craig
I was scraping a living in those days. I had a job in a warehouse, on the back shift. The wage covered my rent and a few drinks, that was it. I don’t remember eating much. I was thin as a whip, strong, hungry. My whole life fitted into four plastic bags.
There were eight of us in a three-bedroom flat. My room was the kitchen. When everyone else had gone to bed I put a mattress on the floor and that was me. In the morning people stepped around the mattress to get their breakfasts. It wasn’t ideal.
Then someone left and I moved into one of the bedrooms. It cost an extra fiver a week but for that I got a bed I could go to when I liked. I was sharing with a guy called Craig.
Craig was a lump of lard. He was supposed to be at college but all he did was watch TV and eat junk food. I certainly never caught him reading a book.
The first morning, Craig’s alarm went off. It played ‘Yankee Doodle’ on repeat. The third time through I advised him to hit it, before I hit him. After that, nothing happened.
It was still dark.
‘What time is it, Craig?’
‘Six o’clock.’
‘What are you getting up now for?’
‘I’m not.’
‘So why did your alarm go off ?’
‘I like to wake up early.’
‘What for?’
‘So I can think.’
‘What about?’
‘Stuff. What I’m going to do today.’
‘That’ll be fuck all then.’ I thumped the pillow, turned over.
Craig started snoring. He’d been doing it all night.
I got out of bed, crossed the room and ripped the covers off him. ‘Get the fuck out of there,’ I said.
He went into the foetal position. ‘It’s cold,’ he whined.
‘I’m going to count to three.’
He rolled off the bed, grabbed the duvet and fled.
I lay for another hour, but it was hopeless. I got up and made a coffee. When I went into the living-room Craig was on the sofa under his duvet, snoring again.
I moved out a week later. It was either that or the jail for murder.
26 March
Red Sauce
The phone rang just as she’d got the children to the table.
‘Stay there,’ she said. ‘I’ll be with you in one second.’
‘No you won’t,’ Chelsea said.
It was a recorded message about mis-sold insurance. She hung up and went back to the kitchen. She counted out the fish fingers, four each, the less brown ones for Sam.
‘Who was that?’ Chelsea said.
‘Wrong number.’ She couldn’t be bothered explaining.
‘What’s a wrong number?’ Sam asked.
‘It’s when someone phones someone but they make a mistake and get someone they didn’t mean to.’
‘That was a lie,’ Chelsea said.
‘What was?’ She put peas on Chelsea’s plate and baked beans on Sam’s because if you put peas on his he wouldn’t eat anything else they’d touched, which would be everything.
‘You couldn’t have been. You hadn’t even gone by then.’
‘What are you talking about, Chelsea?’
‘You said you’d be with us in one second but you already were with us and you couldn’t get away and come back that fast. So it was a lie.’
‘It wasn’t a lie, it was an expression. It meant I’d be back very quickly.’
‘But you didn’t know that. You didn’t know it was a wrong number. It might have been Harry.’
‘It wasn’t Harry.’
‘But it might have been and then you’d have been away for hours.’
She slid oven chips from the baking tray onto the plates.
‘No I wouldn’t.’
‘You would and our tea would have got cold or gone on fire.’
‘Can I get red sauce?’ Sam said.
‘You’ve got baked-bean sauce,’ she told him.
‘That’s not red, it’s orange,’ Chelsea said.
‘It’s tomato. It’s the same thing.’
‘That’s another lie,’ Chelsea said.
She slammed the tray on the hob. In the tiny room it sounded very loud.
‘That’s enough, Chelsea. I don’t lie to you. I never lie to you. Don’t you dare say I do.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I should think so. Eat your tea.’
The phone rang again. She made herself not go for it. The children didn’t eat, waiting for her to move. Eventually it stopped.
‘Was that a wrong number too?’ Sam said.
‘No,’ she said. She started to cry.
27 March
Hypnophobia
Awake isn’t good. Awake is almost as terrifying as not being. The world is full of anxieties. Traffic, weather, electricity, gas, food, disease, dogs. People (dealing with them). Work (if he ever has any again). Sex (ditto). Religion (ditto). What hope do you have, really, if you think about it? And that’s the thing: other people can shut off the possibilities. Not him. It drains him. He looks out of the window at the wind whipping the naked trees, the rubbish blowing down the street, and he sees danger everywhere. Being inside, door locked, windows closed, basic food in fridge, is better than being out. Not good, but better.
It’s when he starts to succumb, the weariness narrowing and blurring his vision like a screen closing down, that the real fear kicks in. That other zone looms, where what little control, what vague belief he has in being able to keep stuff at bay, disappears. He can’t go there. Mustn’t. Never lies down on the bed nowadays. Bed is a place of terror, not of safety and comfort. He sits in the armchair, television on – thank God for 24-hour TV – and treads around the edges of sleep. A combination of the TV sounds and his own fear brings him back every time. No wonder he can’t hold down a job. Staying awake is a full-time occupation.
Anything can happen if you go there. You can choke, burn, the building might collapse, war break out, anything, and it’s no good saying the chances of any of this are infinitesimally small. The point is being asleep and not knowing. The point is not waking up again. Ever.
How do people trust sleep? Believe that they’ll come back? Because the odds against doing that shorten every time. One day you won’t. You’ll go into the zone and that will be it. Over. Lost for ever. That’s what sleep is. Permanent loss. You won’t even know you’ve gone. It is too horrible to contemplate.
His head jerks again, returning him to full consciousness. He is utterly exhausted. But he’s back, he’s put a foot in and come back. So long as he can keep doing that he’ll be okay.
28 March
Indian Country
You forget more than you retain, and that’s the truth. Great desert stretches of time, and memories blowing across them like tumbleweed. Or maybe the tumbleweed bumps up against an old tree, a fencepost, a ruined homestead, and that’s the memory. I’m thinking of a night in Arizona, nearly forty years ago. I don’t know why I still feel it because it was nothing really, it wasn’t the Grand Canyon or Monument Valley or any of those magnificent places, it was the very opposite of magnific
ent, but I do, I feel it.
I was in a sleeping-bag on hard, unforgiving clay, under some scrubby, spiky bushes and the night sky’s dome, black studded with silver. The moon glowed like a spotlight. It was high summer, but the nights were chilly. Fifty yards away was a highway, with trucks going by in both directions. In the intervals you could almost imagine yourself alone.
‘We’re not the first happy campers here,’ said Frank, six feet away. ‘There’s a collection of beer bottles by my feet.’
There were other signs too – cigarette butts, and a single, tattered, canvas gym shoe. Old-fashioned, not like a modern sports shoe. It could have been there a month, or a decade.
‘This is Indian country,’ I said.
I don’t recall, now, how we’d got there. We were miles from any town. Whoever had given us our last ride of the day must have turned off the highway, heading for a ranch or homestead. In the morning we’d walk the fifty yards and start hitching again, before the sun was high.
‘So am I supposed to panic or what?’ Frank said.
‘I’m just saying. The Navajo reservation isn’t far up the road. Some Navajo guys were probably trying to get home and stopped here for the night, same as us.’
‘So long as there’s no snakes,’ Frank said.
‘There’s bound to be snakes,’ I said. ‘Zip up tight.’
I always sympathised with the Indians in Westerns, always wanted them to win.
A truck approached, roared by, faded.
There was no give in the ground. We were both filthy from days of travel. We had no money. It felt good. That’s what I remember.
29 March
Noir
Sometimes he felt he could live permanently in a hotel, like someone in a 1950s American movie: a detective, or a man the police might be looking for. Something about the idea of living like that appealed to him, something about coming and going at odd times of the day or night, eating in diners or drinking alone in dingy bars where other men also drank alone. The hotel room would be clean but simple, sparsely furnished, with a hard bed and a closet where his suits and shirts would hang. The hotel lobby and reception would be seedier, a little tired and faded, and the proprietor, a woman in her fifties, would be tired and faded too, a woman who had seen better days, and who was sustained by memories from those days. She and he would understand each other, she would know he always paid his rent and he on the other hand could tell her things she’d keep to herself, but then again there was a line they would both know not to cross. The hotel wouldn’t offer much comfort, it was in the wrong part of the wrong town for that, but it would provide a man like him with what he needed, a place he couldn’t call his own.
Whenever he stayed in a hotel in a big city, or just in a town he didn’t know well, his imagination would run along these lines. People hardly noticed him, he had a boring job in a boring business, but this meant he had to go away sometimes, and he could make something of that. He and his wife didn’t have much left to say to each other, so it was hardly surprising that when he was away he fantasised. He chatted up the receptionist without intending or expecting anything to come of it, and nothing did; he walked the familiar, unfamiliar streets, he stopped in a dull little bar for a whisky and felt conspiratorial. It was as if he were waiting for somebody, as if he were caught up in something mysterious and potentially dangerous, the kind of thing that was never, in his life, actually going to happen.
30 March
Hotel
‘Do people still do this?’ she said. ‘Have affairs in hotels in the middle of the afternoon?’
‘We’re doing it.’
‘Yes. But it seems … I don’t know … it doesn’t feel real.’
He laughed. ‘It felt real enough just now, didn’t it?’
She laughed too. ‘Of course.’ But that wasn’t what she meant.
While he was in the shower she dressed, then went to the window and drew back the curtains. She did this surreptitiously, not making herself too visible even though no one could possibly know she was there, no one who might recognise her would be down in the street looking up accusingly or in surprise. And so it was: the street was deserted. It was a grey, nondescript view, which in a week or a month she would struggle to recall. Unless they came back, but they wouldn’t, not to this hotel. If they came here again the excitement, the pleasure, which had been real enough, would not return with them. She felt this very strongly.
There was a block of flats, a terrace of identical houses, a brick-built factory or warehouse where nothing seemed to be going on. There were trees in a tiny park with railings, a bench and flowerbeds. A woman she’d not noticed at first was on the bench, while a small white dog sniffed the flower-beds and the sad patch of grass they surrounded.
This is nowhere, she thought. I’m looking at one of those empty, vague, precise, dreamlike scenes painted by … but she couldn’t remember the artist’s name. It will never look like this again, she thought, because I won’t be here to see it.
The shower stopped. She heard him whistling. He was trying too hard to whistle tunelessly. It might have been endearing but she thought it ludicrous. He would know she was listening and would be assessing, wrongly, the effect his unmusical whistling was having. She considered leaving right then, before he came back into the room, but she didn’t go. She stayed at the window, watching the white dog and the woman on the bench. She thought they must belong to each other, but she could not definitely conclude that this was so.
31 March
Justice
Ye want tae seen it, man. This suit gets oan the bus, looks like a lawyer or somethin, but he’s big, ken, ye widna mess wi him. He’s goat wan o thae suitcases like a dug on a lead, and he pits it in the luggage rack and he comes and sits doon at the back. And we’re headin up the toon and the bus comes tae a stoap, folk are gettin aff and suddenly the guy’s chairgin doon the bus like a fuckin bull, yellin at the driver tae haud the door. So whit it is is this boay’s liftit the suitcase and he’s awa aff the bus wi it, but the driver hauds the door and the guy’s oot efter him. Well, the boay hisnae goat a chance, has he, he’s jist a wee skinny lad, a junkie, he mustae thoaht there wis somethin in the case worth chancin it for, ken, but it’s that heavy the big man catches him efter aboot twenty yairds, he grabs the case wi wan haun and the boay wi the ither, then he draps the case and whacks the boay right in the mooth. And the driver’s pulled up alangside so’s we can aw see, and folk are gaun, well, that’s whit ye get, and the guy hits him again, jist melts him, but he keeps at it, doof, doof, doof, and noo folk are gaun ooh and ah and driver, tell him tae stoap, I mean it wis brutal, man. So the driver shouts at him, that’s enough, pal, eh? and the guy looks up, there’s blood aw ower the junkie’s face, and he lands wan mair punch oan him, probly broke his fuckin nose, then he picks up the suitcase and gets back oan the bus. I’ll decide when it’s enough, he says tae the driver, and he pits the case back in the luggage rack and gies the haill bus a stare, then he comes and sits in the same seat again. See at the next stoap, jist aboot everybody except me goat aff, and we wurnae even up the toon yet. Tellin ye, man, it wis mental, ye want tae seen it.
APRIL
1 April
The Eejit
Jack was fed up with everybody thinking him foolish, so he went to the village schoolhouse and said to the dominie,* ‘Will ye gie me an education so I’m no an eejit ony mair?’
The dominie looks Jack up and down. ‘Even I cannot do that, boy,’ he says, ‘but come in and sit at the back of the class and see what you’re missing.’ So Jack goes in and the lesson continues.
The dominie is chanting numbers and the bairns are chanting them back. What a daft cairry-on, thinks Jack. There’s a big craw sitting on a branch by the window. ‘Caw, caw, caw!’ says the craw. ‘Caw, caw, caw!’ says Jack. And soon they’re newsing away fine till the dominie bangs his desk lid and tells Jack he’s an eejit for not paying attention. (Actually he says ‘idiot’ but Jack kens what he means.
)
‘I wis peyin attention,’ says Jack. ‘I wis peyin attention tae the craw.’
Then the dominie has the bairns open their books and read aloud, going round the class. Jack has never heard a more boring story in his life. He dozes off. The next thing, the dominie is banging his desk and telling him he’s an eejit for not staying awake. Then the dominie starts asking the bairns questions about the story, and if the answer’s right nothing happens, but if the answer’s wrong the dominie calls the bairn out and belts his hand with a leather strap. Then the dominie asks Jack a question. He hasn’t a clue what to say because the story was that boring, so he decides to say nothing.
‘Are you deaf, boy?’ the dominie yells.
‘Naw, I’m no deif,’ Jack says, ‘and that’s the right answer so ye’d better no belt me for it.’
‘That’s impertinence, boy. Come out here and take your punishment like the rest.’
‘I’ll come oot,’ says Jack, ‘but I’m warnin ye, if ye hit me wi yon thing I’ll hit ye back.’
‘I’ll not have that kind of talk in my school,’ says the dominie. ‘There’s the door.’
‘I’m on ma wey,’ says Jack. ‘Ma name’s Jack, and if that’s an education, I’d rather be an eejit.’
2 April
Spare
‘It’s simply not fair,’ the Minister said. ‘Here we have an elderly lady, a widow, and because she can no longer look after herself, the family home has to be sold to pay for her care. That precious place with all its memories, which she had intended her children to inherit, is going to have to be disposed of. It’s wrong, and that’s why we are doing something about it. In future the maximum that lady will have to pay for her care is £75,000.’
It was an emotional interview. He left the studio with tears in his eyes.
365 Page 11