Chapter Fifteen
Assembling an Apology
As I had done the previous night, Barry slipped away in the night. Did he do it out of shame or did what I say scare him? It scared me. I hope he’s on a train bound north. I hope two boys can have their dad again.
Sitting on the floor, by John and the babies, I have my morning drink and finish off the last of Hannah’s homemade fairy cakes; it’s not a morning for cereal or toast. John has gone from feral to friendly with the greatest of ease since the kids were born; you would think she would get wilder and more vicious than ever now she has a litter to protect. She must just sense that all I want to do is help. She is so vulnerable, no daddy cat to help bring home the food, or help ward off predators. No worries, John, I’ll be the daddy cat. And then I feel something in the deep, thick ginger fur of John’s neck; something I’ve never noticed before - a collar. It has a little metal tag, gold in colour, and it says her name is Mary.
“Well, look at that, the cat world just got three new messiahs. How about names? Ok, little ginge is going to have to be Jesus, so I guess that makes you two Christ and the Holy Ghost. We’ll call you HG for short.”
My attempt at humour is to counter my sudden feelings of sadness. The tag also has a number on it, meaning either John, sorry Mary, is a sorely missed family pet or a moggy that has been cast aside? Only way to know is to call the number. I’m not going to though, she’s happy right here and it wouldn’t be good for the kittens. I repeat my justifications for keeping John over and over in my head as I hold the collar, now removed, and stare at the phone number.
I picture a little girl, Hannah’s age looking out of a window crying for her big fat ginger kitty. The image is something out of Dickens done by Disney. More chance of it being a rotten family with more kids than they can feed and pets, too. I bet they haven’t even noticed she’s gone. So, make the call. Either Mary will go back to the little girl who loves her or the baby factory will tell me to shove the cat up my arse.
I pick up the phone and start dialling a number, but it’s not the one on the tag. I’m calling Jenny; her number is still written on a tatty piece of brown paper by my phone. Today’s a day I right a few wrongs and Mary’s can wait a little longer. She doesn’t answer and it goes to voicemail, so I ring again and again I get voicemail. The third time it doesn’t even ring, it just goes straight to voicemail. She’s there, she’s holding the phone in her hand, she sees my name flash up and she’s ignoring the call. But I know where she is, it’s too early to be out and about and, I take it, with a reputation for being a ‘dick tease’, not my words, I doubt she’ll be at some bloke’s flat. God, I sound like a stalker. I’d better shake that attitude before I get there or else this will turn into a police matter.
I am not much good with directions, when people shout all that ‘Left at the chip shop, third right by the house with the blue gate and then keep going till you see it, then turn left’. I take none of it in. If I’m taken somewhere by car and pay attention to every street sign and every turn that is taken I’m still lost when I get there. But I’m a walker, one of them pesky pedestrians, which means when I travel by foot I know how to get back and how to return.
“Can I help you, mate?” A white guy with dyed blonde dreadlocks shouts out to me as I make my way through what I have now decided is definitely some kind of squatter’s palace.
“Nope, I know where I’m headed.”
Up the stairs and past the place where the two young lovers had put on their show. Oh God, there is a used condom on the floor! Part of me is happy they aren’t breeding; however, that part is overwhelmed with repulsion at spying a love balloon discarded, yet still left on public display. I bang on Jenny’s door.
“Hey, Jenny! Please open the door. I’ve only come back to…”
“She’s not in man.” The white Rasta, looking like Bob Marley’s ghost, stands at the bottom of the stairs.
“I know she’s here and you’re just trying to help, but…”
“Really man, she’s not in.”
I turn back to the door. “Jenny, please, I’m a dick and I’m sorry, I don’t want anything I just want to say…”
“Dude! She’s not here. Look at the scarf on the handle.” The scarf he is referring to is a semi-transparent purple neckerchief; it hangs loose from the door handle of Jenny’s room.
“If she’s in the scarf is caught in the door. Is the scarf caught in the door?”
“No.”
“Then she’s not home.”
“Where is she?”
“Don’t know, boyfriends?”
“She has a boyfriend?”
Bob, who turned out to be a fairly good sort of chap and was actually called Sam, made me a drink. He said it was tea but it was like no tea I’ve ever drunk before. Of course that means very little; I may see myself as an avid tea drinker but to call myself a connoisseur would be false. To drink large volumes of wine does not make you a wine connoisseur it makes you a wino. He also offers me some pot brownies, which I decline. Sam is a third year art student and takes no time at all to drive the conversation to an explanation of his art.
“It’s not really art, it’s like medication.”
“How so?”
“Well, I wanted to be a photographer, but it made me insane. A camera can only take a picture of what is there and I saw so much more.”
He goes on to explain that when he develops the photographs he cries, mourning the loss of the images he’s seen through the viewfinder. He begins ripping up the photos of his failure; failure to make the camera capture what his eyes have seen. But then he sees it; two torn pictures from different photographs but of the same scene. They lay next to each other and suddenly his visions come back to him.
“Don’t you see?” he calls out, as he taps on one of his pieces.
“A photo captures a moment, but I capture all the moments.”
“By using all the photographs?”
“Correct. And one day I’m going to capture the world.”
“And this is medication; you are still taking your real medication, aren’t you?”
“It’s medicine because it’s the thing that makes my life bearable. What makes your life bearable?”
“I would have normally told you that my life isn’t bearable.”
“But?”
“Something changed.”
A thought then passes through my mind. What is the purpose of the scarf on the door handle? Who’s it for? A boyfriend? I don’t buy the boyfriend excuse. If I were a fling she’d have had sex with me; that’s what a fling is, though she could have gotten cold feet. No, if she had a boyfriend why would she have paraded me through this place?
“What’s the point of the scarf on the door?”
“Oh, err… it’s to let us know if she’s in.”
“You can’t knock?”
“Yeah, it’s so no one goes barging into her room when she’s in, in case she’s not dressed or sleeping or whatever. If the scarf’s caught in the door, we don’t just walk in.”
“And there’s no lock on the door?”
“Right.”
“So why didn’t you just tell me to look inside? Then I’d see she wasn’t in. Why go into the whole scarf nonsense?”
“Because… I don’t know who you are.”
“Then tell me to leave, don’t make me a tea.”
“Maybe you should leave, man.”
“She’s in, isn’t she?”
“Yes, I’m in you psycho.” A girl’s voice floats in from off the stairs - her voice. I move quickly to the origins of the voice. Not a run, not a jog, more of a walk with a sprinkle of haste. Jenny sits on the top step. I shudder at the thought of her being in such a close proximity to the used durex. She wants to be mad but I give her the puppy dog eyes; at least that’s what I’m trying to do, no real way of knowing if I’m pulling it off. She stands and motions for me to follow her into her room. I must have pulled off the puppy dog eyes or something equally
as adorable.
And so I’m back in the room of false memories, sugar coated past events, three cheers for younger days. Yeah, like they were any better; in their youth everyone can recall someone, with a year or two over them, spouting the wisdom that comes with age. Talking down to you like you were a complete moron and this is because you were a complete moron and they know because they were the same moron many moons ago. As I get older I’m beginning to feel that same urge to slap the young about a bit, as I watch their first intellectual steps out of the primordial soup. Alight with their first ideas, and being their first ideas there’s nothing to compare and contrast them with; thus those thoughts become the gospel truth. They’ve done it, they’ve done what no generation before them could do; they have worked out the meaning to it all. But of course they haven’t, the answers they have found are the same stupid notions that the generation prior to them came up with and soon they will find that those answers just lead to more questions. But this is the way things have to be; the stumbling steps, the mumbling words, the rumbling stomachs, oh the blissful ignorance of youth. We need these failures to gain the wisdom we so crave. We may cringe at some past acts that have been less than perfect and we may wish to erase them out of our timeline, but then we would all end up lying in our death beds, our old, weathered faces staring up at the ceiling, having never lived a single moment and being as dumb as a pile of rocks. Because wisdom is a bi-product of life’s fuck-ups, the wise are merely just the masters of the fuck-ups and as the many years have passed them by, they have learned not to repeat the same fuck-ups. I guess I’m not so wise; I pretty much repeated my fuck-ups letter for letter.
“I just wanted to say...”
What did I want to say? I’m sorry? I said sorry to the door and as it turns out she was behind that door, so have I not done this? Is my duty not done? If indeed I had any obligation? I look around the room again, this time in the day light. It really is a sorry sight to see the room so unchanged; there have to be differences but I am at a loss to find one. The bed sheets, they are the only thing and in truth I am not really that confident that they aren’t the same sheets, it’s more just hoping. Some of the posters have faded from sun damage, her Shining ‘Here’s Johnny!’ poster taking the biggest hit; its dark red writing now a faint orange. I do still feel sorry, not about the hurtful remarks I made but because I can see that Jenny is the pensioner lying on her deathbed with no life to speak of, just a museum to a youth unlived. People claim to want their youth back, those carefree days. I think if they were to look upon this and see Jenny Weir, a girl stuck in time, they may conclude that getting old is a small price to pay for the expanding of one’s horizons.
“You just wanted to say?” Jenny lights a joint - oh God, that kiss was good, though. How about I tell her she was completely right, take a toke on that spliff and try to make out with her again?
“What happened, Jen?”
“What happened is, like all guys, you thought sex was a given.”
“Not that, what happened to you?”
“Nothing happened to me.”
“You haven’t changed. I’m in your flat and it feels like it’s the late nineties, but it can’t be because I’m in my thirties. I have a few grey hairs and I am feeling the beginnings of baldness upon me. Which is somewhat unfair as I have also noticed a sudden spurt of growth in the dark hair of my lower back.”
“What are you on about? Are you here to tell me you’re having a mid-life crisis?”
“No, but yes, that’s exactly what it is, yet I did the opposite. I dumped the younger woman to sleep with an old flame.”
“Old flame?”
“Thanks, thanks so much, I feel so much better. I was being an idiot that’s all. I was feeling old and saw a chance to recapture a stolen moment of my past and it has blown up in my face because it was stupid. But that’s ok, I’m allowed to be stupid.”
Jenny takes a long hard drag from her joint and rolls her eyes as I giggle to myself. I knew all along I was being foolish but now I see the catalyst; I’m getting old and like everyone else I don’t like it. Because getting old is a time for reflection and I haven’t done anything with the time I’ve had and there is so much that I could have done.
“We are fucking failures, Jenny!”
“Speak for yourself, dickhead.”
“No, I’m speaking for the both of us. Look at this place, you’re living like a student yet you’re five years older than me. And you know that life can be better than this, right?”
“I like it here. I don’t need all those…”
“Material things? That’s what you were going to say, right? What, like a bed with a base, a sofa with cushions? You don’t like it here, you feel safe here. There is a big difference, Jen.”
“Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“No one of any importance.” Spying the Acorn Archimedes, “And that’s my BBC computer.”
“What?”
“I’m not even going into it. You know it’s not yours and I paid money for it so I’m taking it.”
“Fine, take it and fucking leave. Now!” I take the cumbersome IT relic into my arms. Something about the fight - its tone, the atmosphere of it - makes me flash back to a memory of my parents fighting. My mum shouting and swearing at my dad, the divorce having given her back some strength and confidence, she took me into her arms and stormed out of my dad’s flat. Back in Jenny’s hovel of a dwelling, I inch towards the door.
“Oh, I’ll leave and you’ll cry, all alone and then you’ll call me. Even if it is just to shout at me, you’ll call ‘cause who else is there to call? Your squatter mates? Yeah, like you guys have loads in common. We’re fuck-ups together Jen, me and you are bound by idleness.”
Jenny grabs for a large purple bong, another one of the room’s timeless additions. How does a cheaply made, over used glass bong last over a decade? I don’t know but I guess all things have their time. Excalibur, its given name, crashes into the wall beside me.
“GET OUT, YOU TWAT!”
The metal pipe section ricochets off the wall and cracks me above my right eye. The pain feels hot and wet yet there seems to be no sign of blood and I make my exit before Jenny can find anything else to throw. I had noticed a couple of hot knives by the couch, when we were getting all hot and heavy the other night, and I don’t think she would have missed on her second throw. My Rasta tea-drinking buddy, Sam, is in the garden smoking from a hookah and taking photos of the exhaled smoke. I say goodbye, he looks over but says nothing. Maybe if he had spoken to me I’d feel bad about robbing his ziplocked bag of pot brownies on my way out of the house. He didn’t, so I don’t.
As soon as I get home I call the number on John’s golden tag.
“Sorry, the number you have called has not been recognised. Please hang up and try again.”
Hoorah! I get to keep my feral kitty and her litter of unholy bastards.
In my spare room I place the Acorn Archimedes at my unused workstation. Outside of this place it was a wondrous item, a nostalgic gem; here it is just another addition to my mausoleum. I sit back in my vintage red leather chair, I take in the vista of hoarded crap, and I see a desk meant for work with no work to be done. My happiness starts to wane; today’s checklist is complete and I sense the emptiness seeping in again.
British Winters Page 15