The Difference Between You and Me

by Celia Hayes

  Having regained control of my present, I leave the coffee shop where I’d stopped for a cup of tea and go in search of my car.

  I find it almost immediately.

  A little further on, a man in his thirties is waiting for me. He has a sign in his hands with my surname written on it in pen and is studying the passers-by, trying to figure out which of them I might be.

  “Good morning.”

  I walk over to him, dragging my trolley and carefully avoiding shaking his hand.

  “Mrs Watts,” he welcomes me, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

  “Miss,” I correct him, annoyed.

  “Excuse me,” he smiles affably. “Did you have a good trip?”

  “Not bad.”

  “Ah… of course.”

  Realizing that I’m in no mood for talking, he rapidly passes me the keys, documents and insurance. He gives me time to put everything in my bag, and then he takes a few steps towards the parking lot, indicating the car. “There’s a full tank, as you asked. I hope it is to your liking.”

  “I imagine it will be,” I reply, completely indifferent. I’m one of those people who, when it comes to cars, asks the following questions: has it got four wheels? Does it go? Does it stop? Okay, it’s the car of my dreams!

  “Would you give me a hand?” I ask, pointing to my luggage.

  “Of course,” he replies, obsequiously. “Give it here.”

  I watch him putting everything into the boot without being able to help arching my eyebrows, then I say ‘goodbye’ and, switching on the stereo, set off on my journey towards Turriff. It’s drizzling lightly, but it doesn’t look like anything too alarming. I’m confident I’ll be able to get to my destination and leave the storm behind me.

  The flood came upon the earth […] And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven,

  were covered.

  The further away I got from Aberdeen, the more the landscape looked like a Flemish seascape. You know those awful paintings where you see some unfortunate lopsided sailing ship teetering amongst the high waves while around it all hell breaks loose? It’s always the same in every single one of them: you can recognize them from those blurry dots clinging onto the rigging, the only survivors of a crew fallen prey to the sadism of painters looking for cheap thrills. Well, right now I feel like one of those blurry dots. Only I’m tied to the steering wheel of a Toyota while pouring rain chucks foliage and mud between the crazed wipers. I’d much rather not be spending my time thinking about frightening lines from the Book of Genesis, but considering I appear to have ended up in The Day After Tomorrow, it’s already something if I haven’t had a nervous breakdown.

  I can’t see anything. Absolutely nothing. If it weren’t for the now continuous flashes of lightning, I wouldn’t even be able to make out the white lines at the side of the road. I proceed almost at a walking pace for half an hour, convinced that there’s no point just pulling over and hoping the rain will stop.

  “At the next crossroads, turn right,” suggests the navigator.

  I figure that it must be a sign of my imminent arrival in town, so I ignore my inherent dislike of the thing and say, “Okay, lead on!”

  “At the next crossroads, turn right.”

  “What is it, don’t you trust me?”

  Maybe I’ve hurt its feelings, because it immediately stops giving me directions and starts making weird sounds, while the display shows the image of an hourglass.

  “Re-calculating route. Just a second. Re-calculating route,” it starts buzzing in my ears, but nothing else happens.

  “What the…?!” I shout at it angrily, giving it a thump. “Will you come back to life, you bloody thing?!”

  Sometimes, even the most sophisticated electronic devices surrender to the logic of violence, and, in fact, it immediately stops its buzzing and says, “There’s a faster route – would you like to change?”

  You never recognize – or rather, you always recognize them too late – those moments when you unwittingly throw away days, months or even years of psychoanalysis.

  In my naïvety, what do the digital map on the screen showing a strange dirt road hidden in the trees and the fact that I’m convinced anything that beeps must be smarter than me convince me to do? To head off on this exciting new adventure, of course!

  No, I’m not going to lose my temper without a good reason!

  You know in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast when Belle’s father finds himself at a crossroads when he’s trying to get to the market to show off his inventions? One of the roads obviously leads into the kingdom of the damned and the other is a pretty country lane that opens onto a lovely daisy field, and he ends up choosing the first and finds himself stuck in the beast’s dungeons. Well, what do I do? I take the dirt road and find myself stuck with a flat tyre and the absolute certainty that I’ve just sent part of my brilliant schedule up in smoke.

  And then? And then there’s the phone call to the AA, the nerve-wracking wait, the arrival of the breakdown van, my emotional incontinence and desperate pleas not to be abandoned in the bog, and finally, three hundred pounds later, arrival in what looks like a cross between Heidi’s mountains and Bilbo Baggins’ Shire.

  Three words to describe how I’m feeling?

  Miserable.

  Hysterical.

  Furious.

  Chapter 7

  The Three-point Theorem of Singledom

  “Hi, do you need anything?”

  “Yes, but not you – you don’t have it and you can’t provide it. And I’m afraid our conversation is suffering the effects of my inability to pretend to be interested in your proposal for the evening”

  “You could have just said ‘No’.”

  The first creaky sign I come across is that of a small pub, and I barge inside, pulling off my soaking trench coat with about as much grace as King Kong.

  Slamming the door behind me, I go over to the bar at the back and dump my dripping coat on a stool.

  I’m in a foul mood.

  Foul.

  What I need is a camomile, my smartphone and a bathroom. Not necessarily in that order. What I get, however, is the bemused smile of a barman who seems to have come straight from a rock concert. As soon as he sees me enter, he abandons the customer he was chatting to, rests both elbows on the bar and gives me both barrels of his most successful ‘look at these dimples’ pulling face.

  “Forget your umbrella?” he asks, dazzling me with the headlights that he has instead of eyes.

  I give him a quick look over, purely for data collection purposes, and find myself facing a guy in his thirties, clearly obsessed with weight training and suffering from an inexcusable fondness for faded t-shirts and low-waisted jeans.

  Almost rudely, I pull my phone out of my bag and reply sarcastically, “No, I was just checking how the material held up to low temperatures.”

  Meanwhile, I notice that the clock on the display is telling me that it’s already past nine and I realize that I’m terribly late and have forgotten to notify the agency that I’m here. Having quickly put the dampers on this pathetic attempt at socialising, I rapidly scroll down the address book in search of the estate agent’s number and the number of the person there that I’ve been dealing with up until now.

  “Looks like it held up pretty well,” says the bartender to annoy me, looking at my clothes with a mischievous look.

  “What?”

  “Your dress,” he says, his face cracking into a smile. “Looks like it held up pretty well.”

  I lose my temper.

  “Okay… Look, I’m sure that you have a reputation as a playboy to maintain and I can assure you that I very much liked that thing you did with your eyebrow. Very George Clooney. Really. But let’s be reasonable; it’s late, I’m wet and I’ve got at least three good reasons for contemplating suicide and I can’t imagine any significant improvements in the near future. So do you think there’s any chance that you
could skip a couple of bits of your Sunday Casanova routine and get straight to the part where you pour me some of that wonderful coffee I can see behind you?” I ask, giving him a hopeful smile.

  He stands there in astonishment.

  “I would be really grateful,” I add, batting my Maybelline Rocket Volume Express eyelashes.

  Behind my back I hear a giggle, which turns into a cough as soon as he turns to give the culprit a murderous glare.

  “Sure,” is all he says to me, a sulky expression on his face, as he fills a cup, his pride clearly hurt. When he finishes, he passes it to me, and I, glad that we have finally reached the end of the little scene, thank him cordially and choose a table, taking my bag, case and coat with me.

  “Morgan? Can you hear me?”

  After the phone has rung a dozen times, he finally manages to answer. He sounds sleepy. “Yes, I’ve arrived. Yes, I know,” I reply briskly to his many questions. I glance out of the window next to me and see that it’s still raining. The streets are deserted and the pavements are covered in puddles – and I’m on foot. The car is being repaired and will not be ready tonight. I’m afraid that he’ll have to get into a pair of wellies and come and save me.

  “At the moment I’m in a pub. I’ve just arrived. No, they’ve guaranteed that the car will be ready some time tomorrow. No, I haven’t contacted him yet,” I say, running my fingers through my hair. Morgan pauses for a few seconds while I explain the dynamics of the accident and realizes pretty quickly that he’s going to be forced to do a couple of hours of overtime. Luckily, he doesn’t seem too bothered. Quite the contrary, he turns out to be extremely friendly, informing me that he’ll be there in fifteen minutes at the most.

  “Great, I’ll wait here,” I say. “Please try and be as quick as you can, it’s already very late.”

  When I’ve hung up, all I can do is try to become familiar with my new surroundings. Looking around, I notice the two customers I saw earlier, who are still at the counter, drinking beer and watching a basketball game. A little further away are two couples. They’re conversing cheerfully over a cheeseburger. Besides them, there’s a bunch of guys at the pool table. They’re making a lot of noise and I’m sceptical that they’re actually old enough to be allowed to drink those Rum and Cokes they’ve bought. The only one missing is the bartender. I find him more or less where I had left him, washing a large glass. The strange thing is that I find him staring at me. I don’t know why, but it makes me feel momentarily uncomfortable, so I look elsewhere and finish off what remains of my coffee with ostentatious indifference.

  To kill the time I take my smartphone and lose myself in a stupid concentration game I downloaded the other day.

  “No… don’t fall!” I moan as I try to keep the four little pigs on the screen in a pile.

  The minutes pass, and I’m miles away until a sudden thud brings me back to reality. Startled, I lift my wide-eyed gaze to see what’s causing the noise and who do I find right in front of me? Him again! The bartender. He’s sat at my table without even asking permission, bringing with him a pint of beer and a bowl of crisps. Utterly unable to tell the difference between being welcoming and harassment, he pushes the bowl towards me and downs half a pint, his eyes never leaving my face.

  How about this guy!

  “Something wrong?” I ask, shaking my head uncomprehendingly.

  “Are you always like this?” he asks.

  I don’t think he wants to argue. He looks relaxed. “Like what?”

  “Unfriendly.” And, although he sounds serious, his eyes shine with amusement.

  He’s undoubtedly good looking and he must know it.

  He’s probably wondering why I didn’t faint at his feet and fall helplessly onto the pile of women already there.

  This was one of the things that I had forgotten about being single – the T.T.S. (Three-point Theorem of Singledom).

  Theorem:

  Given a woman sitting alone at a table, the following conclusions may be drawn:

  a) She’s waiting for a man;

  b) She’s upset because a man has left her;

  c) She’s looking for a man.

  The possibility that the person in question simply wants to drink her coffee and read a book on her Kindle is not to be contemplated.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”

  “I’m just taking a break” he replies, munching on a couple of crisps.

  “And don’t you have anyone else to annoy?”

  “That would be Bart, but his wife’s just kicked him out of the house and I don’t want him asking me if he can kip at mine tonight.”

  Resigned to having to put up with his irksome company until Morgan’s arrival, I plunge my fingers into the bowl and comment half-heartedly, “Well I’m sorry to disappoint you, but that’s not a risk you’ll be running with me.”

  “Oh really? I can be very welcoming.”

  “Won’t work with me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you have nothing to offer me that I haven’t already seen, tried, assessed and catalogued under ‘W’ – that’s ‘W’ as in ‘Where did I put my car keys?’”

  “And if I was the one who wasn’t interested?”

  “You wouldn’t be here trying to bribe me with a ridiculous bowl of crisps.”

  “Would you rather have a hot dog?” he offers, struggling hard not to burst out laughing.

  Great! I’d been needing a bit of entertainment. Thank you, God – I’ll remember it next time the collection box comes round in church.

  “Is it so hard to believe that the idea of spending an hour in a grotty bedsit that stinks of beer with a stranger who doesn’t even know my name just doesn’t appeal?”

  “I don’t know. It’s never happened.”

  “What, ending up in a grotty bedsit that stinks of beer?”

  “No, it only lasting an hour,” he corrects me, letting his smile break through.

  “God, how depressing!” I say, pulling a note from my wallet and handing it to him. “I suppose that the next stage will be beating your chest with closed fists and shrieking like an orang-utan in heat. I’d stay to enjoy the show, but my lift is here and I have no intention of depriving the female gender of such a manly representative of the species. Great coffee. Keep the change. Good evening,” I say, and walk away towards the door, where I see the estate agent, a guy in his twenties, struggling to close his umbrella while peering around the room in search of me with an uncertain expression on his face.

  Chapter 8

  The One with the Rabbit and the Top Hat

  “Great, now I’m depressed!”

  “Don’t be like that! Try and look on the bright side!”

  “You’re right – tomorrow morning I’ll sue you for damages.”

  “Actually, come to think of it, a bit of healthy self-pity wouldn’t do you any harm.”

  After passing a several poorly lit streets, we reach a little square surrounded by terraced houses with a sad and abandoned appearance. I don’t know if it’s normal, but every single brick of that godforsaken hole seems to be shouting to me, “Run for it, before it’s too late!”

  If only I could…

  How miserable, there’s not a living soul in sight… Yes, I know it’s raining, but is it really possible that the only thing on the road apart from us is a bin lorry?

  A part of me wants to scream, but as usual, I hold my tongue and merely nod distractedly at Morgan’s small talk. He is attempting to make a dent in my evidently bad mood with a series of jokes from back when Noah was still a lad.

  Accompanied by yet another crash of thunder, we stop the car in front of twenty seven Gordon Road and make a dash for the porch. I’m not feeling very co-operative. As soon as he manages to get the door open, I leave Morgan at the entrance and dive inside in search of warmth. The corridor is dark, as is the rest of the house. The only source of light is a window hidden by a skeletal cheese plant, but the bluish light filtering through the c
urtains doesn’t allow me more than a dim view of a room piled high with junk. The thunder doesn’t make it look any less ominous.

  The shadows play over a cabinet stuffed with what look like ceramic dolls with demonic expressions, and to avoid looking at the sinister things I turn round to see what my companion is up to. When I see that he’s hysterically flicking the switch on the wall on and off to no avail, I realize that just maybe the electricity isn’t working.

  I look at him.

  I look at the ceiling.

  I look at the window in the distance, then, as if hypnotized, I look back at the dolls on the shelves.

  Brrr…

  “Morgan,” I say. “Do something immediately.”

  “There must be a problem with the fuse box. Could you hold my umbrella, please?”

  I take it from him and begin to tap my foot nervously on the ground, glaring at him.

  “Hmm… I should have a spare one,” he mumbles, searching in his pockets, before exclaiming enthusiastically, “Oh, here it is!” He holds a small flashlight in his chubby fingers with the satisfied expression of a primate discovering fire.

  Not at all impressed, I pour all my disappointment onto that insignificant object and it, obviously upset, stops working. “Oh, great! Why don’t we try the one with the rabbit and the top hat next? It might go a bit better…”

  “But… it doesn’t…” he splutters in embarrassment. “I don’t understand how it could have happened. It was new.” Unwilling to give in, he starts banging the torch against the wall, fiddling with the battery and waving it through the air, but after an endless series of failed attempts, he’s forced to admit defeat and puts it back into his coat pocket. “Never mind – come with me into the living room, Miss Watts, I’m sure we can find a couple of candles. This way, come on…” he repeats and leads me into the living room by the light of his mobile phone.