“It was amazing,” she laughed, at something that sounded an
amazingly long way away from amazing. “I mean, we must have been mad. How can
you drink eight jelly shots?”
“I don’t know, one after the other?” Godfrey suggested from
the other side of the partition, having been subjected to the same anecdotes as
me, only with none of the knee entertainment to keep him interested.
That was the thing about Elenor’s stories. Up close and
personal they were strangely enchanting. Move them back a few feet and point
them at someone else and they lost all their appeal.
“What’s the matter Godfrey, stay in on New Year’s Eve with
Casablanca
and a bottle of red wine
again?” Elenor asked, slapping the smirk clean off his face. Godfrey stared at
her in stunned outrage, before throwing himself back into his window-scraping.
“Ooops, I seem to have touched a nerve,” Elenor winked, making me feel rather
grubby at being party to such an obvious betrayal of trust.
Still, this tiny little triumph had Elenor positively
glowing and her rays were giving me goosebumps all over.
“Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah, well, me and Stacey were
the last to leave and still dancing our heads off when all the lights came on.
It was absolutely mental and the nightclub owner thought we were off our head
so he asked if we wanted to stay behind and party with the crew. And these guys
really knew how to party, if you know what I mean?” she giggled. I didn’t, so I
took that to mean her and Stacey got bummed by a load of off-duty bouncers.
“God it was mad,” she squealed.
“I had a fairly quiet one myself,” I told her. “Me and
Sally…”
“Oh you should’ve come up to Croydon, you would’ve loved it,
it was wicked,” she enthused. “Just wait till you see me at the Christmas
party, then you’ll see what I’m really like.”
As it happened, I already knew what she was really like and
told her I probably wouldn’t be going to the Christmas party. Elenor looked at
me as if I’d just told her I worked here for free.
“Yeah, right,” she said after a moment. “
Me neither
.”
“No, seriously I probably won’t.”
“Of course you are.”
“No, genuinely, I’m seriously not,” I insisted.
Elenor pulled this one apart and tried to work out what I
was saying, so I reiterated that I wasn’t joking. This wasn’t a joke. I was
being serious.
Her expression changed from one of scepticism to outright
abhorrence.
“Why the fuck not?” she finally asked.
“Well, for one thing, I don’t want a Christmas party in the
middle of January. Christmas is over. I just want to get on with it, not spend
the whole year walking around in a paper hat looking for the back of a conga to
grab hold of.”
“It’s free drink isn’t it, what’s up with you?” Elenor
asked.
“What, in this company. Not likely. I think we had a free
bar until nine o’clock last year then it was normal prices.”
“Half eight,” Godfrey corrected me.
“Well that’s alright, you can get well pissed in a couple of
hours and spend the rest of the night dancing your arse off,” Elenor said,
swinging her shoulders and waving her arms above her head as she swivelled in
her seat to some funky, silent beat.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Why not, what’s the matter with you? Don’t be boring or
you’ll end up turning into Godfrey?” she said, catching the full force of
Godfrey’s glare. “Go on, come to the party,” she demanded. “It’ll be fun.”
I couldn’t work out why she was so bothered about what I did
or didn’t do. I mean, what difference did it make to her whether I went to this
party or not? There’d still be the same amount of booze and food and music and
enforced jollity no matter what I did, so why did she need me?
“Go on, we’ll have fun,” she said, and I couldn’t help but
notice how “
it’ll
be fun” had
suddenly changed to “
we’ll
have fun”.
“I can’t. Besides I live all the way down in Camberley, so I
couldn’t drink anyway,” I told her.
“You could get a hotel room,” she suggested, looking me
straight in the eye and giving me an unexpected hot flush.
I could feel my face burning and my heart thumping heavily
inside my chest but Elenor continued to hold my stare. What exactly was she
suggesting? Did I have this right, or were my wires more crossed than Albanian
Telecom’s? No, it couldn’t be. All Elenor was doing was suggesting a solution
to me not being able to drink. That’s all. If it had been Godfrey or Tom who’d
suggested it, would I have read them the same way and assumed they’d been
planning on bunking with me and planting kisses up and down the length of my
sweaty, naked body all night long?
Possibly…
… if they’d been leaning as close to me as Elenor had. Close
enough that I could see down their tops and smell their hot sweet breath on my
face.
I think the first of my New Year’s
resolution is paying off. Andrew’s chipper as a woodchuck with a fresh pile of
logs and we haven’t had a single row all year. Not even a squabble.
Predictably, he’s joined the gym again, though he’s let me off this year and
reckons he’s happy going by himself. Tonight’s his first night so he’s out of
my hair for the evening – and
Celebrity
Big Brother
’s back on at nine! No, I mustn’t. I did promise myself. But
then, I’ve been working all week and January’s such a depressing month that you
have to allow yourself some little rewards, don’t you? Andrew’s got his
Christmas party next week and he says he might go after all, so I should have
something to look forward to, surely? I guess it would be okay if I just watched
the Friday episodes and didn’t have any chocolate. But then, how can you watch
Celebrity Big Brother
without chocolate?
Hmm, I fear my second and third New Year’s resolutions are coming unstuck at
the seams. Still, at least I still have the first. And out of the three,
happiness, chocolate and
Big Brother
,
I’d say that happiness is definitely the most important one.
I was thinking about time again. I
don’t know if this is a proper theory but I’m not sure that time is linear. Do
you know what I mean? I’ll try and explain. See, when most people think of
time, they think of it as just one constant, continuous… erm, well, for want of
a better word, thing. It started at the beginning of the universe and will run
in a straight line at a set speed until the end of forever – if there is
such a thing as the end of forever. And then you’ve got us and we are simply
somewhere along that straight line, as was Churchill, Shakespeare, Julius
Caesar, Joe Bloggs, caveman Ug and that chicken I had for dinner last night.
Only they’ve all had their time and no longer exist.
Or do they?
I mean, just because they don’t exist in my time any more,
might they still exist in their own? Not every creature on God’s sunny Earth
looks at the clock in the morning through my eyes so it might be possible.
See, just because it’s half past ten on a Monday morning,
January 10th, early in the 21st Century, today’s a bit cloudy and Godfrey’s off
sick again where I am, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s half past ten,
Monday January 10th for everyone, does it? As far as caveman Ug’s concerned,
it’s probably a sunny day somewhere in the Stone Age and he’s just broken the
tip off his spear chucking it at a wall painting of an elephant again. He
doesn’t know me and I don’t know him, so why should time be measured from my
perspective?
Let me put it another way; Shakespeare doesn’t know he’s
dead. Just as Space Captain Jack Laser from the future doesn’t know he hasn’t
been born yet. Just as I didn’t know I hadn’t been born yet in Shakespeare’s
time, and probably won’t know I’m dead when Jack Laser’s buzzing around space
battling face huggers.
All I can see is the window of my own life.
So, since I was born I’ve seen thirty five years so far, so
if it’s the same for Mr Shakespeare, then surely it follows that for him it’s
only 1599, Queen Elizabeth is still on the throne and he’s looking through a
big pot of red quills and wondering where all his black ones keep getting to.
But what if our windows didn’t reflect on a single linear
time line? What if there were an infinitive number of time lines all side by
side, and each of them simply stretched as far as each of our own individual
lives? Would it then be possible to jump from line to line? Will I still exist
as a thirty-five year-old in my own time line in the future? Or do we just go
around and around? The moment we die, we’re born again at the beginning? For
all eternity?
I didn’t know. But I bet whatever the answer is, it’s a lot
more complicated than I could’ve ever got my head around.
Also I bet we never find out, just as Shakespeare and
Churchill and Ug never found out.
Perhaps you just have to do the best you can with your life
and live for the moment, because the moment is so fleeting that it’s gone and
history before you even realise it.
I looked back along my own particular time line and wondered
how much of it I was happy with. Not as much as I should’ve been I concluded.
But then, wasn’t that the same for everyone? Okay, so I didn’t have a bad life,
so there wasn’t really anything that wrong with me. I wasn’t ill, I wasn’t
disabled, I wasn’t illiterate or destitute or homeless. I wasn’t hooked on
heroin, struggling to raise five kids single-handedly, mourning the loss of a
murdered loved one or trapped on a downed submarine fighting off mysterious
deep water aliens with dwindling ammunition. Though that last one might’ve been
good…
“Nolan, we’ve got to
go! They’re breaking in through the hull again!”
“You go. I’m staying!”
“Don’t be a fool,
they’ll eat you alive just like they did the rest of the crew.”
“I said I’m staying
Tom, now get the hell out of here. Go on, go.”
“It’s too late,
they’re through. Oh Christ no!”
“Open fire!”
“Lend us a fiver.”
“What?”
“I forgot my wallet and I want to get a bacon sandwich off
the sandwich man.”
Tom’s torn and blood streaked submariner’s uniform had
morphed into his favourite
I drink
therefore I am… drunk!
T-shirt and the navigation console we’d leapt behind
to dodge the merciless slashing bio-mechanical claws was now my cubicle again.
“A fiver?”
“Actually make that a tenner. I think I’ll have a couple of
pints at lunchtime. You’re up for a drink aren’t you?”
“It’s Monday.”
“All the more reason.”
“No, I’ve got to do Norman’s bleeding report.”
“What, you still haven’t done it?”
“I’ve been busy.”
Tom looked at the doodles of cavemen, time lines, monsters
and cigarettes that were dotted around my desk and said he could see that for
himself.
“Here, take this,” I said, pulling out my wallet and handing
him a twenty. “You’ll have to give me the change, it’s all I’ve got.”
“Fucking sandwich man’s going to love me giving him a
twenty,” Tom frowned.
“Well what’s he want, the exact change all the time? Hasn’t
he ever heard of going to the bank?”
“You want anything?”
“No, just my change.”
“I’ll see what I can do. Oh, and give us a look at your
Guardian
too?”
“You want the paper or just the jobs bit?”
“Jobs. Anything in it?”
“Yeah, half the ink from my red pen. You have a go.”
“Ta.”
Tom retreated to his desk with my twenty and my Guardian and
waited for ‘sandwich man’ to arrive.
The deep water aliens were patrolling the bottom of the sea
again, but I’d escaped back to Croydon and was once again wondering where it
had all gone wrong? Well to be honest, it hadn’t, so why the hell did I feel so
disillusioned on an almost daily basis? I didn’t know. There was nothing I
could really put my finger on so I decided to spend a little more time looking
for answers.
My childhood had been okay. A bit boring and uneventful
perhaps but I couldn’t remember ever being truly unhappy – except when we
had to have our cat put down. I hadn’t been bullied, and I hadn’t been
deprived. My parents were still together and no over-friendly ice cream men had
ever managed to get me into the backs of their vans so I had no grounds for complaint.
But then by that same token, I couldn’t remember anything
amazing happening either.
I’d never really been good or interested in anything, except
perhaps art, but I’d never been encouraged to pursue it. My parents were pretty
much straight down the line as far as parenting was concerned. As long as we
washed our necks, went to school, did our homework and went to bed when we were
told to, they were happy to get on with their lives and let us get on with
ours. We all had dinners together and all watched the same programmes on the
telly but then only one cook in the house and four channels on the TV couldn’t
help but bring a family together.
Okay so my childhood wasn’t all cuddles and kisses and trips
to Alton Towers. Who cares? Most people’s weren’t, so I wound the tape forwards
a few years and checked over my adolescence, but there was nothing to write
home about there either so I wound it forwards some more.
University I’d liked.
This had actually come as something of a surprise to me, as
I hadn’t expected to like it. See, for me (and my brother) university was
always just something we’d been expected to go to when we’d finished school. We
had no say in it and didn’t even realise there was an alternative. We just had
to get our A Levels and go. In all honesty, I’d just expected it to be another
form of school but on arriving, I found it had something that school didn’t
– absolutely no sign of my parents.