by Liam Livings
“It’s my programmes. It’s a reward for the job applications. Once I’ve done three or four, I sit and watch my programmes. With a glass of milk and some cookies.”
“That’s lunch, is it?”
“Some days it is.”
“These are ancient, where are you watching them? And why are they in this order? Look, there’s a number next to each one.”
“That’s the order they’re on, and the number is the channel I turn to, so I can seamlessly go from one to another.” Saying it out loud made me cringe.
“This adds up to three hours. You sit here and watch all these repeats every day, in this order?”
“Yes. Have you ever been job-hunting for a prolonged period of time?”
“You know I have.” She clapped her hands. “Right. Shower, dress and we’re going for a walk.”
I dressed while Amy shouted from the living room for me to hurry up.
I walked in to meet her.
She looked me up and down. “That’s better. I hardly recognised you before. Remember these? They’re called clothes. They are what people wear during the day. What you were wearing is for night-time. That’s when the sun has gone down and the sky is dark.”
“Yes, yes, I get your point.”
She leant towards me. “Thank God your breath’s better, and you smell of shower gel and not… man body.” She ushered me out of the flat. “This is sunlight, and that is the sky. Remember those things?”
“All right, all right, you’ve made your point very well.”
We walked towards the park, chatting about how well Bobby had settled in, and about porn-stash-gate too.
Amy said, “I think you’ve given yourself unrealistic expectations about what it would be like to live with a boyfriend. Unrealistic about having a boyfriend, full stop, never mind living with him.”
“I just wanted it to be… right… proper… how it’s meant to be. And the exotic film thing caught me out.”
“But how did you find it, having a boyfriend, before you lived together? Did that live up to what you’d expected?”
“I didn’t really know what to expect. One minute we were having a drink, then we were having sex, and then we did it again, and again. And we started seeing each other between the sex, and I looked up, and there we were, boyfriends.” I paused to sit on a bench near where we’d walked. “Is it bad that I still think about that other bloke? The one who was amazing, then disappeared? Even though I’ve been with Bobby for ages.”
“Is this the guy who disappeared, and who you’ve not heard from since you had the night?”
I nodded.
“So he’s treating you really well, isn’t he?”
“Fair point. And he did give us his blessing.”
“Did he? Mystery man said fill your boots with Bobby?”
“More or less.”
“So fill them. Enjoy it. You are enjoying living with him, aren’t you?”
“I am. It’s not quite like what I imagined, but yes. He makes me happy. We get on. We laugh. We shag like rabbits.”
“Well, then. Be happy, for goodness’ sake.”
I took a deep breath. Could I tell her about who Sky really was? Could I tell her about the Australian temp? Would she believe me? Of everyone I knew, she was most likely to believe it. She was the one who’d told me the popular theory about guardian angels in the first place. “I’ve not seen any white feathers lately.”
“That’s a shame. You’ve got quite a collection, haven’t you?”
“You know the Sky man I had the night with?”
“I’m aware of his work. Yes.”
“You know I’m not one for all this crystals, chi, ley lines, and reiki business, don’t you?”
“You’re not as receptive to these new ways of thinking. I’m aware of this.”
“What would you say if I told you Sky was my guardian angel?”
“I’d probably say ‘Are you on drugs?’”
I pulled her towards me so that we were facing one another straight on. “Sky is my guardian angel. I’ve seen him.” Then I told her all about the times I’d seen him but couldn’t touch him. I even went over the handbook stuff and the sabbaticals, as well as The Higher Ones.
“It’s a fairly elaborate fantasy, I’ll give you that.” She paused, thinking about what I’d just said. “You swear on your mum’s life you’re not winding me up?”
I put my hand on my heart and swore.
She let out a little scream, then said, “This is amazing. Is it just this Sky one you’ve seen, or did you meet any of these Higher Ones? Do you think he could introduce me to mine? I’ve always wanted to speak to the person who’s in charge of my destiny. Compare notes with her.”
“I don’t know about yours. Not The Higher Ones either, but I did meet an Australian temp called Kylie.”
“You did what? When was this? Why didn’t you tell me? I knew all that science was just for show. I knew it was all about the other, more important invisible forces all around us. Wait till I tell Pat at work. She’ll freak out.”
“You can’t tell anyone, especially not Pat. I don’t even think I’m meant to tell you, really. But I had to talk to someone. I feel I can’t get on with my life like I used to, because now I know.”
“You’ve got this angel looking after you?”
“Not exactly.” So I told her about Kylie, the half-arsed temp guardian angel doing the bare minimum, except keeping me alive basically.
She listened, and when I finished asked, “So let me get this straight: you’re worried that the way things are going with Bobby, is due to this temp not really putting much effort into minding you, and that your actual destiny isn’t Bobby? Is that it?”
“In a nutshell, yep.”
“And I thought I was loopy with all this shit. Richard, you’ve got to get on and live your life. You can’t go around making or not making decisions based on whether you think you’ve got someone looking after you or not. That’s only a hop, skip, and a jump away from the nuthouse, trust me.”
“But you were the one who told me about the guardian angels in the first place, and now what? You’re saying they don’t exist?”
“All I’m saying is you don’t need to go telling everyone about seeing angels—and two different ones as you claim. Even I think that’s a bit… much. I think what you need is to get out of the flat a bit more to meet some people, interact a bit with other human beings. ’Cause if you carry on like this, you’re never gonna get a job, I’m telling you. Ain’t nobody got time for that!”
Well, that told me.
We walked back, not saying much, except for me promising I’d get dressed every morning, and wash, and leave the house for at least an hour every day.
“And you said he’d given you his blessing, that he’d understood you couldn’t be together, so he said you should be with Bobby.” She pulled my face towards her. “Did he say that?”
“He did.”
“Well, then.”
She kissed me and left.
Well, then, indeed.
Chapter 20
Amy and I sat in a café round the corner from her office, having just ordered toasted sandwiches with white sliced bread and stringy cheese.
“Probably right, babes.” She took a mouthful of the cheese-and-ham toastie, which the waiter had just dropped off. “Delicious. I always forget how nice evil white bread is. It’s just so much more… comforting than that wholewheat, healthy stuff.”
“I know. That’s why I don’t have it. Penance bread, that’s what that is.”
“How many applications are you doing a day?”
“I spend the morning, say from nine to one, doing them: looking through websites, calling agencies, that sort of thing. Then I have lunch, and I can’t bear it any longer. I literally feel part of my soul leaving my body through my ears. It’s like it drips out every day I carry on with this process.”
“Dramatic, much, Richard?”
“You have no
idea.”
“And then what do you do with yourself for the rest of the day?”
“The flat’s immaculate—you should see it. You’d learn a bit from that, actually. You and all your organic, free-range, all-natural cleaning products. Your place could do with a good squirt of bleach, last time I visited.”
“Cheeky! You leaving the flat still, getting fresh air? Not just sitting on the sofa, vegetating and stewing about you and Bobby and all the problems that creates in your head?”
“Every day I have a walk, at least around the block. Most of the time, farther. Once a week I nip round Mum’s, see how she’s getting on. She’s back cooking her own food now. Told me if she ate one more ‘Go On, Treat Yourself’ ready meal, she would throw it out the window. Even Sandra Next Door couldn’t stop her making her own food again.”
“Back to her usual self, is she?”
“She made a three-course lunch last week. I could hardly walk to the bus stop to get home.”
“When you’re not being force-fed by your mum or walking around the block, what do you do until Bobby comes home?”
“Watch TV. Sit on the sofa. Think about my life, the universe, my relationship. Everything, really”
“As I suspected.” She looked at my plate, at my half-eaten toastie. “You gonna finish that?”
“Not hungry. Go on, have it.” I pushed the plate to her side of the table.
“What’s wrong, Richard? Really, what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t want to come across like I’m complaining all the time. I know inside that I’m very lucky. That him living with me is what we wanted, and it did come along at the right time. But I can’t shake this feeling that I don’t understand why he’s living with me. Why would anyone want to live with me when no one wants to employ me?”
“Ah, so that’s what this is about.”
“Sometimes after I’ve done the job-hunting for the day, I just sit on the sofa and cry quietly to myself. I can’t put my finger on what I’m crying about. I have this sense of dread, but about what, I’m not sure. I think part of it is that I dread this will be my life for the foreseeable future. That this is it.”
“You not having a job and you being a boyfriend are nothing to do with each other. Two completely different concepts. You have to get that clear in your head, babe.”
“Imagine how it feels getting rejection letters or emails one after another, week in, week out. Imagine how that makes you feel.” I wiped my eye on my sleeve. “He says he loves me. He tells me all the time.” I gestured to myself. “So why am I crying so much?”
“It’s nothing to do with you and Bobby. He’s basically the perfect boyfriend, and you’re happy with him, aren’t you?”
I nodded. “I need him here, because without him, I’d see no one, talk to no one. I think without knowing he’s coming home every night I would just fall apart and stop everything you told me to do each day. There’d be no point. But as well as that, I can’t shake this feeling of dread, and I can’t breathe some days.”
“Shall we go?” Amy asked, putting money on the table.
“Can we walk around a bit, or do you have to get back to work?”
“Walking’s good. I’ve got time for walking with you, Richard.”
We left, and she led me around the streets. The rhythm of our feet against the pavement gave me some comfort. “I enjoy living together. I look forward to him coming home. It’s only some days—the days when all I can see is this forever, when I can hardly get out of bed once he’s gone to work. Those are the days when I just want to pull myself under the duvet and stay in bed all day long. Then I feel like my whole life is smothering me, squashing me against the sides until I can’t breathe.”
“Have you told him any of this?”
“I don’t really know what’s wrong, and it’s nothing to do with him, so I’ve kept it to myself. Didn’t want to scare him off, make him think I’m a total loon.”
“I think you’re overthinking all this. You’re worrying about things which aren’t even things yet. You’re sitting alone at home, thinking about things that may happen, but probably won’t. You need to stop stewing in your own juices and concentrate on moving forward, on getting the interview, having a walk, seeing the beauty of nature, breathing in the outside air, and reminding yourself that although you’re unemployed, you are still alive and you have someone who loves you. He’s got your best interests at heart, from what you’ve said. He’s your very own Milk Tray man. And let’s not forget this whole relationship—monogamy—is new to him too. You’ve both got your training wheels on for relationships, but you’re wobbling a bit more because you have more time to think, because you don’t have a job.” She kissed my cheek and hugged me. “This is me. I’ve got to get back. Call me, okay? If you’re climbing the walls all alone, just call me. Go for a walk. Read a book. Write someone an email. Reach out to another human being. Don’t just sit and stew in your own juices. Okay?”
“Okay.” I waved as she disappeared into the building in front of us.
I walked the six miles home from Amy’s office, back to my little corner of North London, listening to my footsteps on the pavement all the way and trying not to become too caught up in my own thoughts. I tried to notice my surroundings, to take in the beauty all around me: the blueness of the sky, the whiteness of the clouds, the cold wind on my face.
I arrived home almost two hours later, exhausted, physically tired rather than mentally exhausted for the first time since I had been fired at the bank.
As I walked upstairs to my flat, I found a perfect large show-condition feather on one of the steps straight in front of me. I looked around for any other stray feathers, any pillows or duvets dumped in the stairwell, but nothing. I picked the feather up, and saw a little silver metal capsule attached by a white ribbon. Really? What next? A white rabbit and a cake that read “Eat Me”?
I unscrewed the capsule and unrolled the tiny piece of paper. It read I’m sorry.
I looked around the stairwell for any other clues. No more feathers, no more little capsules, nothing. “Really? This isn’t the bloody Crystal Maze. What am I meant to do with this?”
No response, except a neighbour’s footsteps approaching from a floor above. I nodded and smiled half-heartedly as the neighbour passed.
Once they’d left, I put the feather and note in my pocket and continued upstairs to my flat. There I put the feather in the glass with the others. The metal capsule made a tinkling noise as it hit the bottom of the glass.
Chapter 21
And then one day, I noticed I was enjoying living with Bobby. I couldn’t pinpoint the exact day, week, and month it changed, but one morning, as he left for work, I kissed him at the door, handed him his jacket and packed lunch, then walked to the spare room for a morning’s job searching, and I thought this is fun, I could get used to this.
It was a bit like how the seasons change. One day it’s summer and you’re having a barbecue in the garden, trying out your flip-flops. Then it’s autumn, which, on the first day of the season—September in my book—is no different from summer. No cracks in the sky, no lack of sun, nothing really to report as a difference from August on the first day of September. But one morning you’re putting on a jumper, and you think you’ll grab your denim jacket for your walk today, not just a little T-shirt, and then you’re grabbing a scarf, and summer’s well gone, and you’re fully into autumn.
It was like that with Bobby and me. Maybe he did back off on the smothering “I love you,” “how’s your day,” “let’s see what you’ve been up to,” or maybe I just realised it was meant with no malice, with nothing behind it.
One morning I collected washing to put in the machine and smiled as I picked up his dirty clothes from the corner of our bedroom where he’d stepped out of them before climbing into bed, deliciously naked, the night before. I smelt his clothes, and they oozed of him, of his odour, and I remembered how we’d had a quick kiss an
d a quick fumble the night before, realising we were both naked in bed together. Not a full-on, big-performance sex session, but a quick squirt and kiss before sleep. And I now had that on tap, whenever I wanted it. We had lain like spoons in the bed, him stroking my belly button as he lay behind me, and he had said, “You will find something, I know you will. Someone will want to give you a job as much as I want to love you.” And he had kissed my shoulder, then we had both fallen asleep.
When I didn’t worry about everything—that big amorphous mass of worries that I couldn’t quite articulate—I realised how happy I was, living with Bobby, every day.
He made me laugh; he made me smile. Sometimes I laughed so much, I couldn’t get my breath. One day, we stumbled across some videos of Tommy Cooper on the Internet, and Bobby started to do his impression of the comedian. It was so realistic—the voice, the movements, and he even made up some of his own jokes in the style of Cooper—and we spent the whole afternoon laughing together. Bobby walked into the room with a wastepaper basket on his head like the comedian’s famous fez, and we both dissolved in laughter.
When I tried to tell Amy about how funny it was, she just blinked and said maybe it was one of those things where you had to be there. From a distance, with the benefit of hindsight, she was right, but at the time it felt like the funniest thing in the world.
I was now one of those people who had in-jokes with their partner. I had turned into one of those people. The people who would make a comment at a table of friends, laugh uproariously, and then look at the table, saying, “Sorry, private joke,” to a sea of bemused faces. That was the person I had become with Bobby. And I loved it. I enjoyed having our own little private comedy starring only us two. There was something magical about the way we made each other laugh—about nothing in particular, quite often—which I’d never experienced before.
One day I woke and I didn’t have the dread, which had woken with me for the last few weeks. I sat at my laptop, looking at jobs, and didn’t dread something, anything, everything. Instead I smiled and thought about Bobby coming home that night.