by Mike Gayle
‘Yeah. That’d be nice.’
‘Well, I’d better be going, son. Take care and have a lovely birthday.’
‘Yes, Gran, I will.’
‘Oooh, before I forget I must tell you that your card will be late. I was trying to phone your mother all day yesterday to get your address. I’ve missed last post now anyway. It’ll get there by Tuesday. Never mind, eh? Better late than never.’
‘Yes, Gran. Better late than never.’ I glanced across the room at the card she had sent which was perched on top of my hi-fi. Perhaps she was going senile after all.
As I put the phone down wondering what exactly to do with the lifetime’s supply of Kendal Mint Cake she was sure to purchase, I realised that my spaghetti hoops were burning. The reason why I’d suddenly recalled my dinner was that the smoke currently working its way under the kitchen door had already reached the smoke alarm, which was now belting out the mother of all high-pitched screams. I’d been in the flat five days and already heard it six times. It was far too sensitive; let toast crispen a little too much and on came the siren. Once this happened, the whole household played the I’d-rather-burn-to-death-than-leave-my-poxy-studio-flat-and-turn-off-the-alarm game of endurance. The rules were simple, if a little cavalier: see how long you can stand the alarm before you’re compelled to get out of bed and turn it off at the control box on the ground floor. There were six residents in the house – I’d done it once, the residents of the two ground floor flats had done it twice each and the old man on the top floor had done it once. The man at number four on my landing, and the woman at number six on the top floor, hadn’t done it at all, which to my mind either meant that they were deaf or took the playing of bloody-minded Russian Roulette-style games very seriously.
In spite of the noise, the problem at hand still had to be dealt with – the burning spaghetti hoops. Opening the door to the kitchen fully, I half expected to be faced by a scene from The Towering Inferno and was pleasantly surprised merely to choke violently on thick black smoke. My eyes began to water almost immediately; I shut them tightly, reached out to the cooker controls and turned off the ring. Using a souvenir Bournemouth tea towel of my mother’s, I carefully manoeuvred the saucepan out of the kitchen, opened the window in the main room and laid it to rest on the sill outside, closing the window behind it. There was nowhere for the smoke to escape to now, it lingered in the flat like one of those ridiculously foggy evenings in the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films. It was time for another walk.
As I reached the front door, the woman from downstairs came out of her flat, dressed in a white towelling dressing gown and huge Garfield slippers, a black cloud of pure annoyance hanging over her head like a garland of hateful intent. Standing on the tips of her toes – poor Garfield’s head squished unhappily against the grime-laden carpet – she attempted to press the reset button on the control box. I smiled at her in a neighbourly fashion. She scowled back. Within seconds of reaching the garden gate, the alarm stopped.
It was raining again. Archway looked more miserable than usual, all its colour had drained away, leaving only shades of grey and dog poo brown. I pulled my neck as far as I could into the collar of my coat (which still smelt) and headed in the direction of the newsagent’s up the road.
The newsagent’s on Holloway Road was owned by an old Italian woman with white hair and skin like a barbecued chicken. According to the sign on the door her sons were also involved in the operation, but as I’d never seen them, I couldn’t exactly confirm this. My problem with her, and the reason she was on my mental hit-list (sandwiched in the lower ranks between my bank manager and Foster menswear) was that she had the kind of attitude problem Mussolini would’ve been proud of. Every morning that I’d gone into her shop she’d been umbilically attached to a pay-phone on the counter, wilfully ignoring customers until an appropriate pause in her conversation, which as I’d found on Tuesday could be anything up to six minutes. I hated that woman, and still fuelled with Simon-inspired bitterness, reasoned that now was a particularly good time to exact revenge.
As usual, she was behind the counter, and as usual she was talking very loudly into the pay-phone, every now and again repeating the same word in Italian, while shaking her head emphatically. No one else was in the shop. It was just the two of us. Italian Granny Vs William The English Teacher. Ding! Ding! Round one. I don’t know what came over me but I secreted two Yorkie bars, a pack of Rolos and a copy of Cosmopolitan into my overcoat pocket and walked out without paying, not even bothering to pretend that I couldn’t see the item I’d wanted to purchase. Though she didn’t look up from her perch as I made my way to the door, this didn’t stop me, once outside, from running like the proverbial clappers all the way to the flat, imagining that she’d suddenly realised my crime and stopped her conversation mid-sentence, in order to summon her sons to stab me to death because the honour of their family name was at stake.
I hadn’t shop-lifted sweets in over sixteen years. Not since Simon and I had grabbed a handful of fizz bombs each from the newsagent’s around the corner from our junior school, and stuffed them down the front of our trousers, reasoning that should we ever get caught, the police would never think of looking there. It felt good to have a bit of raw excitement in my life again, a bit of cut and thrust, a bit of living life by the seat of my pants. Stealing a pack of Rolos wasn’t quite Raffles’ standard, but I was happy nonetheless. The important thing was that I’d got one up on Crusty Old Italian Woman. 1–0 to me.
Back at the flat most of the smoke had managed to escape to the place where smoke goes to die. I checked the answering machine (no messages), and took a look at the spaghetti hoops on the window ledge. The saucepan had stopped smoking now. Not all the spaghetti hoops had died in the fire, there were a number of survivors floating on a sea of ruby sludge. I dipped my fingers in to taste a mouthful. They were cold and wet with rain rather than tomato sauce, but as long as the carbonised seam of hoops underneath remained undisturbed, they didn’t taste too horrific. The saucepan on the other hand was knackered, which was unfortunate, as I’d ‘borrowed’ it from a set of three, against my mother’s express wishes. I ate the Rolos and Yorkie too and then felt sick and sorry for myself.
I searched for the phone, called Alice’s number again and left another message telling her to call me as soon as she got back in even if it was 3.00 a.m. because it was an emergency.
I turned on the TV, an action which I’d been trying my very best to avoid all week. As much as I loved to watch TV, the very thought of wasting hours doing it made me feel sadder and even more desperate, as if I were giving in to becoming a total loser without a fight. My mum had bought the portable TV for me as an early birthday present before I went to university. She’d said, and I quote: ‘It’ll be like a friend. Something on in the background in case things seem a bit empty.’ It was a nice thing for her to say but ever since I’d been terrified that, if I wasn’t careful, the day would come when I really would consider the TV to be my friend.
There was nothing on anyway. I flicked across the channels waiting for something good to happen. Sport, something about art history, news, horse racing and a nappy ad. Desperate, I decided to look for amusement elsewhere, but left it on in the background while I composed another letter to the bank:
Dear Sir,
I am writing to you to explain my current financial position. I have just started a job teaching in London. Due to the expense of moving to the capital and the fact that I will not be paid until the end of September, I would be very grateful if you would further extend my overdraft by £500 until the end of November.
Sincerely
William Kelly.
As I put the full stop after the ‘y’ in Kelly, and wondered if it actually warranted a full stop, I glanced up at the TV and then scanned the room searching for confirmation of what I was feeling. I returned my eyes to the page, having found my answer. I was bored. When I was small and I used to tell my dad I was bored, he’d tell me that one
day I’d find out what boredom was really about and then I’d be sorry. At that moment, sitting there in the flat, with the will to do anything at all almost crushed out of my body, I realised that I’d finally found out what it was like to be bored and I was really sorry. When I was bored as a kid, I had a whole lifetime ahead of me. I could easily afford to spend a few years here or there doing Nothing. But now, with a twenty-sixth birthday looming in the background, I no longer had time to waste that wouldn’t come back to haunt me, as those two years on the dole did every time I heard about someone from my degree course getting a job writing on Empire, earning over £30,000 pa, or simply getting a life.
I changed channels. The walls of the flat were far more interesting than what was happening on screen, so it was there my eyes lingered, soaking up the years of desperation caked on to the wallpaper, before finally coming to rest on Aggi’s defaced photograph. Crawling underneath the duvet, shedding trousers and socks on my journey to the pillow, I settled in bed. And there I lay, not thinking about anything at all, for quite a long time.
6.34 P.M.
In the right-hand corner of the room, just above the curtains, a cobweb caught my attention as a steady draught whistling its way through the poorly-constructed window frame tried its best to dislodge it from the wall. It looked a bit flimsy, as though it existed for decorative rather than practical purposes. Whichever spider had created this silken trap I decided was going to go hungry because no self-respecting house fly was going to be caught in a web as crap as this one. Even Mother Nature it seemed was capable of creating creatures as lazy, apathetic and half-hearted as me.
The telephone rang, preventing me from taking thoughts of spiders, flies and cobwebs any further. It rang three or four times before I climbed out of bed to answer it, as I was busy working out the odds of who it might be:
Aggi (1000–1)
Alice (5–1)
Kate (3–1)
Martina (2–1, odds on favourite)
‘Hi, it’s me.’
‘Hi,’ I replied, ashamed that in spite of myself I’d still backed the rank outsider. ‘What’ve you been up to?’
‘Nothing,’ replied Kate. ‘How about you?’
I recalled my promise to phone her back and considered feeling guilty, but then it occurred to me that she had phoned me in spite of my non-action. Kate actually wanted to talk to me. I instantly felt more relaxed. In the distance I could hear the siren of a police car.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t call back when I said I would. I fell asleep.’
‘I love sleeping,’ said Kat`e. ‘It’s kind of a hobby of mine.’
She gave a little laugh and I joined her, but whereas hers was joyous and summery, mine was nervous and shifty because I’d been busy wondering whether she slept naked or not.
‘What are you doing tonight?’
‘Nothing,’ replied Kate. ‘I’ve got no money. Anyway I don’t fancy going out. I thought I might stay in and watch TV.’
‘Good idea,’ I said, nodding needlessly.
‘What’s on?’
I located the remote control hiding under a pair of grey M&S pants. The red light on the front of the TV flickered momentarily, and there before me was an episode of Dad’s Army. I relayed this information to Kate and together we watched in silence; she in Brighton, I in London, unified by the wonder of television. Private Pike was on top of a huge pile of furniture on the back of a lorry next to a telegraph pole. As far as I could work out there was a bomb lodged up there and it was his job to get it down.
‘I love Dad’s Army,’ I said quietly, half hoping that she wouldn’t hear me.
‘Yeah,’ said Kate. ‘It really makes me laugh.’
We sat in silence (apart from occasional laughter) watching Private Pike get stuck up the telegraph pole, and Captain Mainwaring’s attempts to extricate him from this situation. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence at all. I felt as close to her as if she had been sitting on the bed next to me, absent-mindedly offering me crisps from a packet of cheese and onion, with her head resting on my shoulder, happy to be doing something as mundane as watching TV.
‘What else is on?’ asked Kate after a while.
Switching channels, I discovered a documentary on BBC2, about hi-tec thieves stealing computer chips from companies in Silicone Valley and was instantly drawn in. Excitedly I told Kate to turn over and join me and in the following quarter of an hour we learned about the Mafia’s involvement in the multi-billion dollar black market in stolen chips. Kate wasn’t half as interested in the programme as I was, and despite wanting to return to Dad’s Army almost immediately, she continued watching BBC2 for my sake. I was touched. Eventually (once the micro-chip programme had finished), we switched over to Channel Four because the news was on ITV and neither of us considered news entertainment, which was all we were looking for. While a car advert played, Kate and I tried to think of as many ridiculous names for cars as we could in a minute. Our top three were:
The Nissan Nipple.
The Vauxhall Prostate.
The Ford Oooh!.
The ad break finished and the voice-over woman said something like, ‘And now for something completely different,’ in a soft Southern Counties accent she probably considered amusing. The credits for a TV show I’d never seen before came on. It was obviously some kind of fashion/music/style/youth-oriented programme because brightly coloured graphics were flashing up on the screen, battering my irises into submission in time to the thumping bass line of the theme tune. What it was called I never found out, because just as I was about to switch over to Noel’s House Party, I caught a glimpse of something on the screen that instantly crash-landed all feelings of contentment.
‘Dave Bloomfield!’ I screamed at the TV.
‘Who?’ said Kate.
‘The biggest tosser in the universe.’
Dave Bloomfield, aka ‘the biggest tosser in the universe’, I explained, was on my course at university. He was tall, half Spanish and a quarter Iroquois (so rumour had it), with hazel eyes and floppy, jet-black hair that made him look like some kind of Edwardian fop. He used to sit in the canteen on the top floor in the English Department reading the Guardian from cover to cover – always a sign of a tosser in the making – sipping black coffee and smoking filterless Camels. The female population of the department (lecturers included) doted on his every word, so much so that he even pulled and dumped Annette Francis, the most gorgeous creature on our course, a woman so aloof that the one occasion I plucked up the courage to talk to her by asking her the time, she point blank refused to tell me. Oh, and to make matters worse he got a first. Kate couldn’t quite understand why seeing an over-achieving former university colleague presenting his own TV show was winding me up so much and so I tried to explain.
‘Some things just come too easily for some people,’ I raged. ‘While the rest of us mere mortals have to make do, they get it all on a plate.’
I was surprised at my bitterness, particularly as I’d never harboured any urges to be a TV presenter. My problem with Dave Bloomfield was that he represented everything I hated about the successful: he was good-looking, clever, witty and, worst of all, motivated. Dave Bloomfield was everything I wasn’t. Dave Bloomfield was the anti-me.
I explained this to Kate. ‘It’s just like anti-matter and matter, if Dave and I ever meet again we’ll explode, killing thousands.’
Kate laughed. ‘You put yourself down too much. You know you can do whatever you want if you put your mind to it.’ She paused, as if thinking. ‘What do you want, Will? What do you really want to do with your life?’
I lay down on the bed and pulled the duvet over my legs. I hadn’t thought about what I wanted to do, in any serious manner, for such a long time that the answer didn’t come quite as speedily as I felt it should have.
‘I’d like to make films,’ I said with a lack of conviction. I was ashamed that I’d done so little to push myself in that direction. I once filled out, but never posted, an application
to Sheffield University for an MA in Film Production. It was still in the drawer of my desk at home.
‘Really?’ said Kate. ‘That’s brilliant. Why don’t you do it?’
‘Well, it’s not that easy, you see,’ I began. ‘You need money and you need to be in with the right people. It’s full of nepotism, the film business, and with my mum working at the retirement lodge and my dad doing whatever it is he does all day for the council, I can’t imagine that either of them can open the doors of Paramount for me.’
‘What about writing scripts?’ offered Kate. ‘Those don’t cost a thing and you could do them in your spare time. A mate of mine’s brother works on Coronation Street and his dad runs a chippy.’
I wasn’t encouraged. ‘I’ve enough problems teaching without trying to do anything in my spare time other than complain,’ I said, getting out of bed and finding a comfortable space to lie on the carpet. ‘Have you ever tried marking thirty poems on snowflakes? Believe me, if you had you’d be praying, just like I am, that global warming’s going to get a lot worse.’
I wondered whether my excuse sounded like an excuse.
‘That sounds like an excuse to me.’
I ignored her comment. ‘So what about you? What do you want to do?’
Taking a deep breath she told me how she had always wanted to be a nurse. That was one of the reasons (apart from her ex) she’d dropped out of university. She’d realised that her course was pointless and wanted to do something that would help people. In five months she’d be starting nursing college at a hospital in Brighton which was why she was currently languishing on Boots’ perfume counter. The more she spoke, the more I found myself admiring her spirited determination to lead a fruitful life and I even told her so. I think she might have blushed but I couldn’t be sure over the phone.
‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’ said Kate eventually.