The To-Do List

by Mike Gayle

  ‘Mr Gayle.’ ‘John’ sounded distinctly ruffled. ‘Did you say you were recording this conversation?’

  ‘What if I am? You are too, aren’t you? There’s that long speech before you pick up saying that you record calls for “training purposes”.’

  ‘Mr Gayle,’ he said forcefully, ‘could you please answer my question: are you recording this conversation?’

  I could tell from the severity in his voice that he wasn’t going to let it go and I was so annoyed that I wasn’t going to let it go either.

  ‘For the sake of argument, let’s just say that I am recording this telephone conversation. What exactly are you going to do about it?’

  ‘Mr Gayle, if you are recording this conversation then I will have to terminate this call immediately.’ He put the phone down on me.

  The sound and fury of a thousand and one expletives being released in one almighty roar quickly brought my wife rushing up the stairs to see who or what had died.

  ‘What’s the matter, babe?’

  ‘They’ve just put the phone down on me!’ I raged.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Some bloke in Mumbai!’

  ‘Why were you calling some bloke in Mumbai?’

  ‘I wasn’t. I was calling AOL and I got put through to some bloke in Mumbai.’

  ‘Why did he put the phone down on you?’

  ‘Because I told him I was recording the call.’

  Claire looked puzzled. ‘Why were you recording the call?’

  ‘I wasn’t, I was just pretending so that the bloke at the other end of the line would stop trying to make me do things to my computer that I’d already done.’

  ‘But I thought you were trying to leave them anyway?’ reasoned Claire. ‘Why would you even be trying to fix the problem?’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ I spluttered. ‘But they’ll soon find out what the point is when I call them back!’

  ‘Why don’t you wait until you’re a little calmer?’

  ‘Because I don’t want to be calm! I’ve just had the phone put down on me! Have you any idea how outrageous that is? What kind of world do we live in where people can put phones down on other people just because they’re recording phone calls? This isn’t Communist-era eastern Germany you know? I’ve got rights! This is England!’

  ‘But they’re in Mumbai,’ sighed Claire, giving me a roll of the eyes quickly followed by a ‘This-will-all-end-in-tears’ headshake. ‘Look, I don’t care what you do. But try to keep the noise down and remember that if our daughter starts cursing like a sailor any time soon, having AOL put the phone down on you will definitely be the least of your problems.’

  As I picked up the phone and mentally prepared myself to give ‘John’ or whomever else they put on the line a piece of my mind I began to feel guilty. After all, this wasn’t Mumbai ‘John’s’ fault at all. He was probably just some student trying to make a bit of money in his spare time so that he could go out for a drink with his mates. He couldn’t help having to stick to AOL’s rage-inducing script. His bosses were probably listening in to make sure he didn’t deviate. He more than likely found the situation just as frustrating as I did and was probably dying to say: ‘Look, mate, I feel your pain but my hands are tied.’

  With all this in mind, I told myself that whatever happened I was going to stay calm.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Gayle, you’re through to AOL and you’re talking to “Paul”, how may I help you today?’

  ‘Hello, “Paul”,’ I began calmly. ‘First off I’d like to say that I genuinely hope you’re having a good afternoon yourself and secondly I’d—’

  ‘Mr Gayle,’ said ‘Paul’ talking over me, ‘before I can help you with your query this evening can I ask are you recording this conversation?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mr Gayle,’ repeated ‘Paul’ coolly. ‘According to your notes you are recording telephone conversations. Is this true?’

  I couldn’t believe it! ‘John’ had flagged me up on the AOL database as being ‘someone who records phone calls’!

  ‘I’m what?’ I feigned outrage.

  ‘Mr Gayle, according to your notes on the system you are recording telephone conversations. Is this true?’

  ‘Now, hang on a second, mate!’ I felt myself lose all sense of proportion. ‘You can put a note on your system saying “Mr Gayle is recording phone calls”, but you can’t manage to put a note on the system that says, “Please don’t wind Mr Gayle up any more because he’s called on three separate occasions and already we’ve made him jump three times through the same hoops like some kind of performing monkey!” ’

  ‘Paul’ was unmoved. ‘Mr Gayle, I must repeat: are you recording this telephone conversation?’

  I opened my mouth hoping that some manner of cleverness would leap from my lips but to no avail. Not only did I know that ‘Paul’ would put the phone down if I said yes but I knew ‘Paul’ knew that I knew too and, unless I was prepared to just keep phoning AOL’s Mumbai base only to have them put the phone down, I was going to have to give in at some point.

  ‘No,’ I replied weary and broken. ‘No, I am not recording this call.’

  There was a long silence. Probably just enough time for ‘Paul’ to cover the mouthpiece, punch the air in victory and then high-five ‘Steve’, ‘Jason’, ‘Robert’, ‘Andy’, ‘Mark’, and ‘John’.

  ‘That is good to hear, Mr Gayle,’ said ‘Paul’. ‘Now, how exactly may I help you this evening?’

  The upside of my encounter with AOL was that having wasted the best part of a whole afternoon battling its Mumbai-based Outpost of Evil in an effort to fix a software problem that I didn’t want rectified in order to have an excuse to get rid of a service that I no longer needed, I failed to experience even a shred of guilt when I reached the point in my conversation with ‘Paul’ when I got to tell him that I wanted to leave. That said, the little screen that shows the duration of the last phone call revealed that my battle with AOL had wasted forty-seven minutes of life that I was never going to get back, time that could have been better spent writing my novel, playing with my kids or simply staring into space. I may have earned another tick, but it had been hard won.

  That evening, as we were sitting down to watch TV, Claire turned to me and smiled. ‘It’s a good thing, this list of yours.’

  I was surprised. Since my encounter with AOL I had started to think that it was a huge pain in the backside.

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘Absolutely. I think it’s brilliant. You’re getting things done and making things happen. Just think about it: that’s the best part of £120 a year that you’ve saved by leaving AOL. You might not have gone about it the right way but it’s definitely a result.’ Claire stifled a huge yawn. ‘Anyway, so what’s next, List Master? Learning to play tennis? Kissing the Blarney stone? Writing a letter of complaint to Tony Blair about the missing bin from outside the newsagent at the top of the road?’

  ‘None of those things are even on the List, babe, let alone ear-marked for my next big tick-off.’

  ‘So what is your next big “tick-off”?’ said Claire, clearly amused by my growing List-inspired vocabulary.

  ‘Something I’ve had on my mind for quite a while now.’ I stifled a huge yawn of my own, ‘Items 42 to 50: “Catch up with lost friends because you know what? They used to be great friends”.’

  Chapter 10: ‘Catch up with lost friends because you know what? They used to be great friends.’

  My list of lost friends was long. Very long. It included every kind of lost friend imaginable: Ian and Scott (rubbish summer job lost friends); Monica and Paige (over-worked and under-paid bar working lost friends); Jane, Mia and Simon (camping holiday in Anglesey lost friends); Sarah, Alex and Maria (working on teen magazine lost friends); Sam, Richard and Tall Mike (lost friends inherited from other lost friends); Emma, Jo, Anthony and Alison (university lost friends); Cath, Susie and Sarah (sixth-form lost friends); Mick, Mark and Simon (sec
ondary-school lost friends) and Lisa, Steve and Jen (early days in London lost friends).

  I decided to start with the easy ones: those with email addresses. This still left an awful lot of work to do, as the last time I saw some of these people, email had yet to be invented. I began to try to type a suitable message but found myself stuck. What exactly was I supposed to say to people that I hadn’t spoken to in years? And what reason was I going to give for contacting them now? Would they be pleased that they were on my 1,277-item-long To-Do List, or would they be vaguely insulted? I decided to put the question to Claire, who was usually pretty good at working out whether or not I was insulting people.

  ‘Just tell them that you were thinking about them and want to say hello and hope that they’re well.’ I stood slack jawed in awe at how easy women find anything to do with relationships.

  ‘You’re right,’ I replied. ‘That’s exactly the thing to do.’

  Inspired, I wrote the following email and sent it to everyone that I had addresses for:

  Dear [insert name of missing person here], It’s me, Mike Gayle, I was thinking about you recently and how ace you are and so I thought I’d just drop you a line to say, ‘Hello!’ Hope you’re well and would love to hear your news.

  All the best,

  Mike x

  I sent this to five out of the twenty-six lost friends and for a moment or two felt really good about myself. Then four of the five messages were immediately bounced straight back. It was disheartening to say the least. To put it bluntly I was stuffed and I was about to embrace failure when an idea hit me. This was the age of social networking and what better way to catch up with old friends than to join every single social networking website on the internet? So that was what I did. I joined Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friends Reunited, Blogger, WAYN and even ancestry.co.uk and hoped against hope that at least a few of them would be on there. Sure enough I got lucky. Within an hour of joining MySpace I found four different old friends, and a few hours after joining Facebook I found another six, which given that neither website had even existed when I first became friends with these people made me feel really old. Gathering my wits about me, I copied and pasted my original email into messages to all those whose profiles I’d managed to locate, pressed send, then crossed my fingers and waited. Ten minutes later I got my first reply.

  I first met Sam in the autumn of 1992. Having just graduated that summer and moved back home to Birmingham I’d been feeling a bit lost without the security of university life with its easygoing daily structure of lectures and nightly array of readily available social activities. Though most of my Birmingham friends had moved on, the few that remained did so because this was the town that they had moved to for university and had now adopted as their own. Out in Moseley one Saturday night with my friend Monica, I was introduced to Sam. Sam had long straight shoulder-length auburn hair, grey-green eyes and a cheeky smile that seemed even cheekier once she started talking with her broad Yorkshire accent. Though she dressed like a student (in all the time I knew her I don’t think I ever saw her wear anything other than jeans or cords) she actually worked for the local dole office and had moved down to Birmingham from Keighley a few years earlier to be with her boyfriend.

  I can’t really remember what we talked about although I suspect that at some point we must have discussed the fact that she came from Keighley because I’d visited Brontë country with a couple of university mates only a few months before and had walked all the way from Keighley to Top Withens which was supposed to be the location of the main house in Wuthering Heights. I used to like to think the fact that I had ticked Wuthering Heights off my To-Do List of places to visit marked me out as some kind of literary romantic but I suspect that it actually marked me out as someone who needed to get out more.

  After the pub we all went to a nightclub called Snobs, but then Monica had some kind of melt-down to do with her boyfriend so Sam and I spent the evening hanging out together. Sometime in the early hours of Sunday morning most of the group left but Sam and I decided to go for a walk at about three in the morning. We were both tired and more than a bit cold but we headed to Cannon Hill Park and ended up sitting on the swings talking about everything and nothing as though we’d known each other forever. From that moment onwards we were firm friends.

  Sam’s message to me via Facebook perfectly captured the essence of the person I knew back then.

  It’s you! How are you? I’ve been hoping that one day you’d pop out of the woodwork! I’m well, thanks, living in Leeds, working in IT and driving a Ford Fiesta! Still like good music though. Tell me your news! Seethee, Sam x

  Though it was short it was both warm and funny (I particularly liked that word ‘seethee’ as though she were an eighty-year-old Yorkshireman). I replied outlining everything that had happened to me since we had last seen each other (the best part of fourteen years ago) and suggested that we meet up. Within a few minutes I received the following message:

  Would absolutely love it if you came up to see me! How long has it been? Feels like forever. Whatever day you fancy just let me know and I’ll book the day off work and cancel my spin class (I go most days after work). Give my love to your Missus and your very, very, very cute kids! Sam x

  A short flurry of emails later we’d arranged a date.

  It was just after eleven a.m. on the last Wednesday in January when I found myself standing in front of the departure board at Leeds railway station scanning the hundreds of faces milling around on the concourse. There were girls of every sort but not one matched the face that I had pictured in my head. Suddenly there she was: the long auburn air was now bobbed, the silver nose stud gone and her skinny frame, though fuller, was more healthy looking (this version of Sam didn’t look for a moment as though it survived on a diet of Silk Cut and microwave pizza rolls). The only thing that remained unchanged were the clothes (less obviously studenty but still recognisably Sam’s style), her smiling eyes and the filthy big grin. For a moment I was speechless because it really was the weirdest sensation to see someone whom you’d once seen practically every day for a year after a fourteen-year gap. I was expecting to see the Sam that I’d known then and though the person in front of me was vaguely like her, the resemblance was more that of an older, wiser sibling. What I looked like to her I had no idea but there was considerably more of me now than there had been back then. As for the way I was dressed (army jacket, jeans, trainers) I guessed I looked grown up but not exactly like a grown-up.

  As we walked along the street towards Leeds’s Corn Exchange for a coffee I commented on how the city had changed. As a student in Manchester I used to come here all the time for gigs or to see friends at the university and knew it quite well but the huge swathes of glass and steel were unfamiliar. Always keen to adopt a clumsy metaphor, I wondered whether Sam might see me in the same way.

  We wandered around various shops selling everything from Goth clubwear to comics before heading down to the café on the lower ground floor. As we waited for our drinks Sam filled in the gaps of how she had left Birmingham to go back to Yorkshire and how she ended up in IT support. She told me all about her house in a little village to the west of Leeds, how she’d given up smoking and got into Pilates. She told me she’d been seeing a guy for a while but wasn’t sure where it was going and that she might like to have kids one day if both the guy and the timing were right. Midway through an anecdote about a recent gig she paused as though she’d remembered something important, picked up her bag from the floor, and pulled out a large grey folder.

  ‘Have a look at this.’

  I opened the folder and a smile spread across my face. Inside were the letters that I’d sent to her when I’d first moved to London the summer after we became friends. The letters were filled with nonsense that at the time I thought was funny: drawings of stick men, detailed descriptions of things I’d eaten for breakfast and information leaflets for local swimming baths. At the bottom was something that really took me back: a homemade birt
hday card (from photocopied pictures from the Jamie Hewlett comic, Tank Girl) that I’d sent to Sam on her twentieth birthday.

  Sam grinned. ‘That is still one of the nicest cards I’ve ever had.’

  ‘Cheers,’ I said examining my handcrafted effort. ‘It took me forever to make but I remember really enjoying it. I miss doing stuff like that – making cards and mix-tapes and writing friends long letters – I miss doing things for no other reason than because they’re fun.’

  There was a bit of a silence and I wondered whether Sam had picked up on what I was trying to say: that as well as missing making stupid birthday cards I missed having a mate as good as her, but then the waitress arrived and we got distracted.

  ‘I’m definitely going to come and see you again, you know.’

  ‘Why? Are you thinking of leaving already?’

  ‘No,’ I laughed, ‘it’s just . . . it’s just . . . I dunno.’

  ‘It’s all right, I know what you mean. I was thinking the same thing: it seems pointless making so many good mates when you’re younger just to let them all go without putting up a fight.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I replied. ‘What I’m trying to say is let’s not leave it another fourteen years before we do this again.’

  On the 18.10 back to Birmingham New Street, squeezed in next to a plump business man with a bright red face and opposite a pair of students sharing iPod headphones, I reflected not only on the day but on the whole of this last month. From that momentous change of heart on New Year’s Eve I’d ticked off dozens of items from the To-Do List and moreover stuck to the plan for a whole month. Maybe this To-Do List wasn’t going to end up like every other here-today-gone-tomorrow whim of mine. Maybe this really was different.

  Excerpt from Mike’s To-Do-List Diary (Part 2)