StrangeReality

Another joyous Sunday. I really have to quit drinking, permanently. I go back to work on Wednesday after several weeks off sick due to non-specific anxiety, not helped by my chronic over-drinking. I say ‘chronic over-drinking’ rather than alcoholism, not out of coyness but because I believe a true alcoholic is somebody who requires the substance at all times of the day. Me, I require it only in the evenings and late at night, when time expands around me, and the emptiness of my life looms huge, too huge to withstand without the numbing effects of booze. It all started 11 years ago, when one of my uncles died (note: he did not ‘pass away’, he died). This uncle, a paper millionaire, left me £1000 in his will. I remember going to the bank to withdraw the cash, and receiving a wad of £50 notes. I went straight from the bank to the nearest supermarket, and treated myself to a bottle of whisky. Just to mark the occasion, I told myself. The girl at the checkout looked at my £50 note, looked at me, took in my generally dishevelled appearance, and called for the store manager. He asked me where I had got the £50 note and I said: “From a bank.” He nodded and bade me wait while he checked some things out. He went into his office and didn’t come back for twenty minutes. Obviously, he was on the phone to the police, checking serial numbers and the like. I stood there, slightly back from the checkout, where other customers continued to be processed (and gave me curious, fleeting looks). The store manager came back and nodded at me and I left the supermarket with my celebratory bottle of whisky. I ended up drinking most of that £1000, and indeed much of the money I have had since. And yet prior to getting the £1000, and prior to resuming working for a living, I had always lamented my lack of money with which to do things - if I had money, I used to tell myself, I would do great things; I would go to live in Prague, Paris, Paraguay; I would write, and meet wild-haired beautiful women, and stand at windows in my shirtsleeves, at sunset. That kind of thing. Instead, I have all but drunk myself into oblivion, and I remain not only in the city where I was born and grew up, but in the same house as well. And time, inhuman time, is moving on.

One of my cousins is married to a man named Brian, whom I first met on their wedding day about 10 years ago. Brian was a squat, burly man with considerable baldness and a huge fluffy black moustache perched under his nose. I never saw Brian after the wedding day for many years. Then, about 5 years ago, I met him walking out of a local chip shop. The intervening years had hardly changed him, I thought: the same squat burliness, the same dramatically shiny bald head, the same Freddy Mercuryesque black moustache. “Hello, Brian,” I said. Brian looked at me in apparent shock, said nothing, and walked past.

I was slightly puzzled. My family is a well-known one in the area, primarily due to my brothers’ youthful shenanigans, and on Brian’s wedding day we had all shared more than a pint or two. I recalled Brian, dressed in his best suit, grabbing me in a bear-hug and jokily trying to crush my ribs. But that was 5 years ago, and perhaps I’m not the most memorable person you could meet, so it was understandable, in a way, that Brian had now forgotten me.

Over the last 5 years, from the chip shop incident to the present day, I have seen Brian in the street on approximately 20 occasions. Each time, I have doggedly said: “Hello, Brian.” Or: “Brian, hi!” And so on. Each time, he has stared at me with a perfectly blank expression, and walked past. I’m not the kind of person to take offence at this kind of thing, so it didn’t bother me.

Today I got out of bed and went downstairs to the kitchen. My cousin was there, waiting for the kettle to boil. I had not seen her since the day she got married to Brian 10 years ago. (My family is much too large to be particularly close.) We said Hellos and caught up briefly on one another’s general health and so on. Then she said: “Brian’s in the front room.”

Right, I thought. I walked into the front room, and faced the man sitting in the armchair in the corner. He stood up. “Lord Strange!” he said with delight. “How the hell are you…”

I shook hands with Brian - the real Brian. For he was a completely different man from the man I’ve been saying Hello to in the street for the past 5 years. The same baldness, the same moustache, the same squat physique - but a different man.

So now I’m wondering about this man whom I have frequently greeted, and hailed as ‘Brian’. What must he think? Does he tell all of his friends: “Some weird bloke keeps saying ‘Hello, Brian’ to me in the street”?

If or when I encounter him again, that Brian lookalike, what will I do? I will have to ignore him from now on. And he will perhaps be puzzled, or even a little hurt, that I have stopped saying “Hello, Brian” to him. How will I conduct myself - what would my demeanour be? Will I meet the Brian-a-like’s eyes, and then stonily look away, maintaining silence? I can’t see myself being able to carry that off. Therefore, just to avoid this awkwardness, I may have to carry on saying Hello to the bogus Brian. And people wonder why I am always so tense.

The film Moulin Rouge was on TV tonight. A few years ago when it first came out on DVD a female friend made me sit and watch it with her all the way through until about 4 in the morning. I had designs on that female friend. Halfway through the film, she stretched out on the sofa we were both sitting on, and laid her legs across my lap. I froze. I looked around, hoping to see a lascivious leer on the young lady’s face pointed in my direction - but she was still watching the film, and yawning hugely. She was only relaxing in what was her own flat, after all. I suppose I should congratulate myself that she felt comfortable enough with me to engage in such bodily contact without fear of being ravished; or perhaps I should be chiding myself for not having instantly run a hand up her plump thigh and -

Ahem. Anyway, the film Moulin Rouge was on TV tonight. The football highlights were on BBC1 at the same time, so I watched bits of the film and bits of the football, flicking back and forth. (Got my masculine credentials in there.) I don’t know what to say about Moulin Rouge - a postmodern masterpiece, or a sentimental confusing mess? And Ewan McGregor - close your mouth a bit when you’re singing, will you? In fact, close it all the way. I can sing better than you, Ewan. And I can’t sing. In fact, my pillow can sing better than you. And it’s a pillow.

It must have been Nicole Kidman, then, who tempted me back (although I will admit that some of the musical set pieces were spectacular and worth the notional admission money on their own). I have, erm, liked Nicole Kidman ever since I saw her in one of her earliest films. Featuring a cast of three - Nicole, Sam Neill, and Billy Zane - it was called Dead Calm, and was about a married couple out on their yacht who rescue a stranded sailor. The stranded sailor, played by Billy Zane, turned out to be a nutter, of course (there would’ve been no film otherwise), and much ‘taut psychological drama’ ensued.

It’s possible that in Moulin Rouge she looks better than she has ever done or ever will do again. Watching her, I was reminded of a dream I had several years ago. It featured Ms Kidman, of course, and it was disappointingly unerotic. The dream’s main plot seemed to be that Nicole Kidman was madly, crazily in love with me (and I, naturally, with she), and she was coming to my terraced house in a big white limousine to rescue me from my humdrum life. In the dream, I waited at my front door, my heart filling up with my dream-love for Nicole; I couldn’t quite believe what was happening, that she would really come, that I was about to be rescued. (Don’t bother leaving any notes psychoanalysing me: I already know.) The white limousine arrived and the door swung open… and out stepped Nicole. She waved at me. I remember vividly how the sun shone on her red hair. I raised my arm to wave back, and stepped forward - and I woke up.

Now here’s the thing. Some dreams are so vivid and frankly emotional that their themes and images linger after wakening. I remember sitting up in my bed and looking around my familiar room, and continuing to believe that Nicole Kidman was coming to collect me and take me away. This state persisted for several minutes, and then - like a switch being flicked - the dream totally evaporated and the real world, along with myself, came flooding back in.

I have been off work sick for several weeks now, and today I was called to a meeting with my manager. My boss was in the meeting room when I eventually entered. She’s the kind of woman who probably eats testicles on toast for breakfast, so I was a little apprehensive. But she was in an all-loving Earth Mother mood today, as it turned out. The meeting lasted one hour and toward the end she asked me when I would be coming back to work. I said: “Maybe Monday,” which sounds like the title of a song or film, now that I come to type it. A bad song or film. My boss smiled like an angel. She said: “I think you should take more time before coming back…” She just about ordered me to take another two weeks off work. At the end of the meeting I could hardly keep the smile off my face. “Do you want a lift home?” she asked me at the door. I said no thanks. I’d be fine.

I walked up the road to catch the bus back into town. While I waited at the bus stop I smoked a cigarette and looked out across the fields. When I got into town I walked around for a while, and then I went home. Before entering the house I stopped at the local supermarket. I bought a bottle of vodka and a four-pack of Guinness. There was a piece of music playing over the PA system: Red Red Wine.

I am the most lazy, apathetic, unmotivated person who exists. For the best part of 15 years I have been promising myself that I will really start to get my act together soon, and sort myself out, and get something done, et cetera. Each new day comes and, whatever else I do, I do not get anything done. I admit that I despair of life. And I mean ‘despair’ in every sense, including the religious sense. Despair, religiously understood, is a condition of sincerely acknowledging to oneself that the situation is hopeless and there is no chance of anything good happening. But religious despair includes the possibility of salvation through divine grace, which appears at the eleventh hour when all hope has truly been lost. However, I am not religious…

I despair of life and I do not hope for rescue. It is a peculiar state to be in, this limbo between life and death. To distract myself from and numb the horror (frankly), I drink alcohol, I smoke cigarettes, I play computer games, I ‘surf’ the ‘internet’. Yet I cannot evade the reality of the situation - the evidence is all around me. I possess around 400 books collected over many years when there was still hope for me. I used to relish nothing more than communing with the pages of the world’s greatest novelists, essayists, philosophers, and poets. For several years now, those books have gathered dust. I have just gone over to my bookcase and retrieved an old favourite, W H Auden’s Selected Poems (the maroon-covered Faber and Faber edition). In Under Sirius, Auden wrote:

The heather lies limp and dead/On the mountain, the baltering torrent/Shrunk to a soodling thread;/Rusty the spears of the legion, unshaven its captain.

If I could be bothered to, I would type out the full text of the poem, whose major theme is ‘those who refused their chance’, i.e. those who could have accomplished something, but who couldn’t really be bothered to... (If you want to look up the full text of the poem on the internet, I wish you better luck than I had.)

Perhaps a solution would be to clear my house of all literary materials, sending my precious books off to a second-hand shop, and throwing myself into my work - that’s my regular, daily, paid, office work - and possibly making it to management level by the time I’m 40. Oh dear God no. Just typing this paragraph has made me feel like cutting my throat.

So there is nothing to be done. And I am in despair.

As a hypochondriac there are some things that simply should not happen to me, things that I shouldn’t hear about, for my own good. Wandering the local area today, like the pale living ghost that I am, I dropped into the local library. It was force of habit, rather than any actual desire to look at a book, that sent me in there. I got two paces inside the door when a familiar voice said: “Lord Strange!” I stopped, thinking that the voice was inside my head, and that I had finally, irrevocably, gone insane. Then I looked around. Over in a corner, perched at a computer, was Derek. I think I have spoken about Derek before, but I’m not sure that I called him Derek when I spoke about him before. Derek (not his real name) is a year or two younger than me. He lives a few streets away and he goes to watch the city’s football team play in every home game. Many years ago as teenagers we were both part of a group of friends that commonly went out on the town, drank beer in copious amounts, attracted and repelled girls, and all the rest of it. That group of friends has long since dispersed, each member pursuing his own particular destiny. Of them all - and there were roughly 8 of us - only Derek and myself were still living in the area. (In my case, still living in the same house as back then.) We encounter one another occasionally, Derek and I, and he often suggests that we go out drinking some night soon, and I always kill the idea stone dead. Today in the library I approached Derek at the computer and said: “How’s it going?” We spoke at a normal volume, despite it being a library. That’s how it is these days: you can talk loudly, and even make and receive mobile phone calls, whilst in libraries. I remember the time when it was frowned-upon even to whisper in a library. Derek said: “I’ve just got out of hospital.” I asked him what was wrong and Derek said: “Meningitis.” I backed away a step or two, mock-feigning apprehension, and saying: “Get away from me!” in a would-be jaunty tone of voice. I say ‘mock-feigning’ and ‘would-be jaunty’ because, although I was giving the appearance of humorous fear of Derek’s meningitis, in fact I was actually fearful. Hence the mock-feigning, and the would-be jauntiness. Derek had literally only just got out of hospital, where he was confined to an isolation room for the past week. He held up his wrist and showed me the hospital nametag that he still wore. Derek described how he endured a slight headache and stiff neck for a few days, and then became averse to bright lights and developed a rash across his chest. His doctor sent him straight to hospital in an ambulance when Derek presented himself at the surgery last Tuesday. I listened to all of this with genuine fascination and a mounting sense of dread. Despite the hospital being no doubt sure that Derek was free of the infection, I was certain that I would inevitably succumb to meningitis, just by standing there and talking to Derek, as if by magic. And sitting here now, with a slight tickle in my throat, I do still fear the worst. I said goodbye to Derek and left the library. Outside it was cold and raining; a strong wind whipped the rain into my face.

So I didn’t go to work today. I got out of bed all right, at the usual time of 6:00 a.m. - an occasion that will never cease to pain me, even if I stay in this job for another 30 years. Which is unlikely, given the present situation. I’d had only two hours’ sleep. I had lain awake until 4:00 a.m., staring at a ceiling lit up by passing cars’ headlights, and listening to a nearby construction site’s guard dog barking, mournfully, in the distance. Surprisingly, at 6:00 it felt as though I’d had a full night’s sleep. I got dressed in my office finery and headed for the bus stop without sensing even a tremor of the rebellion to come.

Halfway into town was when the thought first occurred to me: Why not call in sick again? You could do with some more time off… I looked around me at the other early-morning commuters. Their faces were turned either to the front or out of their windows. Some had newspapers in front of them, held up at head-height like paper shields. Others were plugged into Walkmans (I will always call portable music players Walkmans in the same way that many elderly people will always call the radio the ‘wireless’). Everybody’s head, neck, and shoulders bobbed and tilted with the motion of the bus as it turned around corners, and braked, and accelerated. I thought: You are one of these people. There is nothing to be done.

Of course there was something to be done, something that could be done, at least temporarily, if I had the courage to do it. And courage would be necessary, given the context. In recent times I have had 5 weeks off sick due to a vaguely-defined ‘anxiety’ ailment. To call the office once again this morning and tell them that I would not be coming in due to this…

When I got off the bus in town I decided to give myself some time to think about it. I deliberately missed the staff minibus, and went to McDonald’s. I bought a sausage and egg muffin, orange juice, tea. I sat down on one of the bench seats - the kind that would seat about 6 people, and has two tables in front of it. The muffin was delicious, you will be pleased to hear. After a few minutes an old man wobbled up and sat down on the other end of the long bench seat. He wheezed and trembled and smelt faintly of dust. I was irritated: he was breaking one of the oldest human conventions there is. We were the only customers in McDonald’s. He was not respecting my space. He laid out on his table the following items: two tabloid newspapers, a breakfast tray that contained only tea, and, bizarrely, an unwrapped head of cabbage. It looked fresh as well. What he was doing with a plump green cabbage at 7:00 a.m. was unclear and remains a mystery. I finished my muffin and gulped my orange juice and stirred my tea. It was 7:15. I had about half an hour to make up my mind what I was going to do. 7:45 would be the cut-off point - the point of no return.

As I got up to leave, another old man, this one even older and wobblier, approached the bench seat, and sat down next to the other old man. The two men exchanged familiar and friendly Good Mornings, and each opened up a newspaper and began to smalltalk about the day’s news. I understood that they must be friends who met up regularly at McDonald’s in the mornings, and that the bench seat was their regular spot, their own cherished nook in a world that must appal them (show me an old person who is not appalled, almost all of the time, by ‘the world today’). I dropped my litter in the bin and pushed through the heavy glass doors to the street outside.

The city was slowly coming to life. I lit a cigarette and walked in the direction of the taxi rank. I was thinking, thinking, thinking. I finished the cigarette, and thought: Right. Go to work. I took a step in the direction of the nearest taxi. I could not take another. I moved back, and sat on a low brick wall outside a clothes shop. Ten minutes passed. I looked like just another worker, waiting for a bus. Increasing numbers of people passed back and forth, most of them giving me the usual cursory, blank inspections. Another ten minutes. I lit another cigarette. At this point, one of the passers-by, making a break with custom, stopped in front of me. She was a woman in late middle-age with long platinum-blonde braids down to her waist. She was dressed very oddly, in brightly-coloured scarves and dungarees, and her face was a galaxy of weathered wrinkles. When she spoke her accent was sort of Irish, and sort of West Country (a region of England where the accent, even today, remains similar to the common English accent of the 16^th Century from which today‘s Irish and North American accents are descended). She was a gypsy, in other words. I am always polite to gypsies, mainly due to familial sentimentality: one set of my great-grandparents were proper Irish gypsies (‘tinkers’), who lived in a painted caravan in a succession of fields, and whose dark-eyed appearance in a very grainy and very old photograph (or daguerreotype) haunted part of my childhood. The platinum-blonde gypsy in front of me this morning pointed animatedly at the window of the clothes shop. She had something on her mind, something about contemporary fashion trends, I think, that she badly wanted to convey to me. I smoked my cigarette and nodded and smiled, and laughed when her verbal tone seemed to demand it. Her wrinkles were prodigious: wrinkles within wrinkles within wrinkles. She wheeled away and disappeared among the crowd. I watched her go. I had not understood a single word she’d said.

It was time. The taxi was waiting. I had to get into it now if I wanted to be on time for work. I looked around. Imagine any generic rush-hour city scene: there it was in front of me. I looked at the ground. I seemed to hear a voice inside my head: You are not one of them. There was nothing grandiose or conceited about the insight. It was just a simple fact, like the colour of my hair or my shoe size. I waited another ten minutes and then called the office on my mobile phone. As expected, there were no managers in the office yet. I left a message with Jason, one of my colleagues who, I sense, may be the most pissed off with me. (Any one person’s absence, you see, proportionally increases everybody else’s workload.) After I’d given him my spiel, he said something very strange. He said: “Is there anything you want to tell me?” I said: “No.” I could not understand why he asked me that, what he might have meant. My star is falling at that place: perhaps the question was thematically related to that? I don’t know. I told Jason that I would be getting a sick note from my doctor, yes another one, and would send it in later this week. I cut off the connection and looked up at the sky and felt totally free.