TWO FUCK PARS

 

I

“How old was Emily when you left?” I ask.
  “She was about one and a half,” she replies. “We just didn’t want her going to school round there, really.”
  “How did you find it, moving down here?” I have this thing where it always feels like I’m interrogating people when I have conversations with them. Maybe that’s why it makes me feel uncomfortable. Maybe it’s because they never seem to ask me any questions in return. I wonder why they never ask me any questions in return. I mean, it would have been the easiest thing in the world for her to have asked me how old my daughter had been when we did the same thing that she did when her daughter was about one and a half.
  “It was weird,” she replies. “It’s a bit of a culture shock. The place where I worked before was very diverse, and here everyone’s white, and not just white but British white, like, literally everyone.”
  “I know,” I say, “and everyone’s called Oliver or Charlie or Alfie, or...” I pause to think of a girl’s name, “Emily.”
  The conversation moves on quickly but I have a sensation like spilling a glass of water all over something in my mind. ‘Emily’ is her daughter’s name. I just basically said that her daughter’s name is really common, to the point of tedious ubiquity. There is no recognition in her face, not that I notice anyway, but she must see the realisation in mine. The way my smile drops for a moment, or I appear lost in thought, like I’ve just remembered forgetting something important, or that I’ve left something on I should have turned off. 
  I keep the conversation flowing at pace in the hope that the steady accumulation of words will fall like snowflakes on the driveway of her mind, stopping her from manoeuvring the car of reflection from the garage of memory and driving off down the road of judgement, but I have no idea whether my attempt at distraction is successful or not, and I just have to accept that I will probably never know.

II

“One thing I noticed when we moved down,” I say, “is that everyone here is obsessed with parking.”
  “Yeah,” she says, laughing in agreement, “it’s true.”
  I launch into an anecdote.
  “Our neighbour,” I begin, “has a driveway and so he has a dropped kerb, and he’s totally obsessed with people parking over his dropped kerb, even if it’s just a few centimetres, which I did the other day, and I came out to my car in the morning, and he’d put a little note detailing the law and regulations surrounding dropped kerb parking, that he’d obviously printed off from some website or other, into a little blue cellophane bag and left it on my windscreen.”
  She nods and smiles, encouraging me to continue. 
  “I just think it’s really sad,” I say, “that these people obviously have nothing else going on in their lives, that their lives are just so empty, that they have nothing better to do than put little notes on people’s windscreens. Like they have nothing else in their lives to focus on. It’s just sad.”
  It’s one of those conversations that is really just an exchange of anecdotes. It’s like an anecdote relay and so she takes the baton.
  “Well, we’ve had trouble with our neighbour too,” she says. And she explains the situation. They live in a cul-de-sac – her and her husband and their children – and if their neighbour parks on the road it makes it really difficult to get out of their driveway and one day he parked on the road and they had great difficulty getting out of their driveway and her husband left a note – a polite note – on their car just asking them not to park on the road because it made it really difficult for them to get out of their driveway and the guy – the neighbour – came round and went mental at her husband and now won’t talk to either of them or even look at them when they pass in the street and it takes a while but I think oh my god have I done it again have I done another fuck par it takes a while because I have to try and work it out is she in her story like my neighbour in my story or is her neighbour in her story like my neighbour in my story and I conclude that her story is maybe a little more ambiguous than my story but it could easily be inferred that she in her story is definitely like my neighbour in my story and I think fuck i’ve done it again another fuck par i’ve basically just implied that her life is sad and empty and that she has nothing else to focus on other than where her neighbours park their fucking cars and the more i think about it the more i decide that there is no fucking way that any other interpretation is even possible let alone likely and i wonder why it is that i am constantly fuck parring in this way and conclude that the reason is my pathetic attempts to amuse people or make them laugh or appear interesting or amusing to other people and that this is really the root of my fuck pars and maybe the root of other things too and that maybe that is why important people like managers and politicians and pop stars are so serious all the time because maybe theyve already learned this lesson or maybe just instinctively knew it without needing to learn it and it’s not worth the risk of offending or upsetting anyone and so why even take the chance of trying to be amusing or funny or even interesting if theres even a small chance of offending or upsetting someone its just too much of a risk and its not worth it so whyfuckingbother