CANYON

I was living between two homes, my parents’ and my wife and kids’, and so, really, living nowhere as a result. “You’re living a kind of nomadic life,” mother observed. “Yeah,” I said, “I quite like it.” I don’t know why I felt the need to lie, but I did. Maybe I thought it was cool to like living nowhere. But the truth was that I had reached a time of life when all I really wanted to do was sit in a room on my own, doing the little things I like to do, and I had no desire to make idle chit chat with people or listen to mother’s complaints about her friend from the church group who refused to do her fair share of the driving. I felt sorry for that friend and I felt sorry for myself. And the only consolation was that I’d always liked feeling sorry for myself.

I had this idea that maybe I should start playing snooker. I always liked snooker clubs when I was younger and they existed in my mind as netherworlds of the soul where anything could happen, but nothing ever did. There is only one snooker club in town so I call brother and arrange to meet there. I fill out the membership form and hand it to the woman behind the bar. She looks at my name on the form. “I used to hang out with you when we were kids,” she says. Things like this happen in small towns. You want to remain anonymous but you can’t. “Your dad’s a lawyer, right?” “Yeah, that’s right,” I say. “What’s your name?” She tells me. I don’t recognise her or her name. “I can’t remember much from those days,” I say. “Too much cheap cider.” “Yeah,” she says, “kids today don’t know what they’re missing out on.” All the reports say kids today are taking fewer drugs and having less sex. That’s what they’re missing out on then: drugs and sex. And snooker, judging by the age of most of the people here, who all look kind of middle-aged. Like me, although I don’t really think of myself as middle-aged. I still think I’m young. I think I’ll always think of myself as young even when I’m dying. I’m just kind of young at heart, I guess. “Have you got any tables free this evening?” I say. “No, I’m fully booked until about ten tonight. Midweek is always really busy here. It’s quieter at the weekends.” Nevertheless, I pay the membership fee and sit down without a drink waiting for brother to arrive, which he soon does. We decide to go to the pub next door. They have a pool table so we play a couple of games. It’s Free Pool Tuesday, but by the time we find out we’ve already paid, and so gain no advantage. Things Can Only Get Better is blasting out of some speakers, its naïve optimism now beginning to look, thirty years later, like thoughtless negligence. Things didn’t get better. Instead they just keep getter worse and worse. “I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” I say. I keep missing easy shots. “I don’t think your heart’s in it,” says brother. “I've driven past this place a hundred times,” I say, “but I’ve never been inside before.” A dog does a shit in the corner of the room. “Sorry,” says a drunk woman, “I’m training it.” I’ve had a headache for three days by this point. “It stinks,” I say. “Let’s go.”

Mother wanted to talk to me about the butter dish. I’d left “crumbs” in it. And coffee grains in the sink. And fingerprints on the fridge. I had my own butter dish now, she explained. “You’ll see which one is yours,” she said. I looked. Mine had crumbs in it. I was staying with mother while wife and I took some time out from the crumbling ruins of our marriage. “I think this arrangement,” I said, “could last indefinitely.”

We get up early to watch the sunrise at the castle, but it’s cloudy and we can’t see the sun. It’s the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. I wear my poncho as I always do when channelling my inner hippy. Wife complains of feeling sick. “Are you all right?” says J___. “Yeah,” says wife, “I’m OK. Daddy’s poncho just made my tummy go funny.”

The longest night of the year

Mother doesn’t think she’s going to like the new vicar. “Apparently,” she says, “he wants to turn the church into some sort of café, with croissants and coffee.” “That doesn’t sound too bad,” I say. “Don’t you like croissants?” “If I want croissants,” says mother, “I’ll go to a café. When I go to church I just want The Message. I don’t want all that other stuff. It just dilutes The Message.”

I’m in a state of deep confusion. Like I’m trying to find my way through a dark and tangled forest, like I don’t even know if there is a way through and I’m just taking it one step at a time. Wife wants clarity, but the only clarity I can offer is confusion.

Mother has now decided she doesn’t like animals. “I just don’t like them,” she explains. “I think they’re selfish.”

The smell of other people’s eggs is disgusting.

Idea for a t-shirt: Sometimes I just drive around listening to tapes.

Unable to find my camera, I think: Do I really need any more photos of the sea?

I must, I think, take my kids to the tree I used to climb when I was a kid.

“Are you going to go to the Grand Canyon?” one woman asks another this morning in a coffee shop.

I imagine that our lives are a tangle of cables and I’m just trying to disentangle them all, and I picture death as a huge canyon and I think that maybe it would be good for me to spend some time looking into it. Contemplating it.

ELEPHANT

I’m the crazy person in the room. Like the character John Givings in Revolutionary Road.

My toe was poking through a hole in my sock, like the first shoots of spring.

Spring

Today I stole a packet of the Florentines that wife likes and some frozen bao buns, which the kids are going to have for dinner this evening. I’ll be damned if we’re going to go without the little things we like just because I don’t have a job any more.

People don’t even ask me how I am any longer, because they think they know the answer. ‘Not good’ is the answer they think they know. And they’re not wrong.

People ask me about my medication, like it’s some kind of guide dog for the blind, and say things like, “When I spoke to you on the phone yesterday, you seemed OK.”

I thought I had a plan. I was going to be happy. I would work at cleaning the beaches over the summer, and then I’d get a job at the girls’ school. When I could no longer handle teaching I’d live out my days as a bus driver. But when I told wife I had an interview to clean the beaches she started deep breathing while stirring the tomato sauce and when I told her I was going to apply for a job at the girls’ school she said, “Why?”, and my plans started crumbling like an old biscuit.

Son just came along and cleared a space on the table. Some stuff fell on the floor. He just looked at me and shrugged his shoulders.

Stuff on the floor

Now he’s playing with his space-themed Lego, talking to himself in that sing-song voice he uses when deep in play. “Why’s there an anchor on the moon?” he says. “Good question,” I reply absently, while writing the first paragraphs of a new thing called ELEPHANT.

Today I stole some frozen chips. I had some potatoes in the fridge, but I just couldn’t face the thought of cutting them up and drizzling over the oil and the salt and pepper. Much easier to just open the packet and bung them in the oven.

When I had Covid recently, there was one excruciatingly blissful evening when I thought there might be a chance that I was dying. I was listening to a Radio Four show about last interviews. The final interviews that a clutch of writers had given before dying. And I wondered what, if anything, I would have to say on my deathbed.

“Don’t you think I look good in this hat?” I said. I had put on son’s woolly hat and thought I looked good in it. No one answered. They were all purposefully ignoring me. “Don’t you think I look good in this hat?” I asked again. No one answered. “Doesn’t anyone want to talk about me?” I said. “That’s all you ever want to talk about,” said wife. “Well,” I said, “I just feel that it’s the only subject on which I can speak with any authority.”

The laundrette slowly emptied until it was just me and an old woman dressed in a red coat, black trousers and red shoes, sitting there in the laundrette. I had just started reading SUICIDE by Édouard Levé. I looked around to see how long the tumble dryer had left. It was then I realised that none of the other machines were on. The old woman had no laundry.

No laundry

I saw a man walking down the street carrying a loaf of white bread and a box of eggs. No bag. Just the two items. And there was something about his carrying of the items without a bag that seemed to me a kind of nakedness, for a person’s culinary choices to be exposed in such a way. Watching him I almost knew exactly what he might be cooking when he got home. Eggs on toast? Scrambled eggs? Eggs and soldiers, as they say? A fried egg sandwich? Some combination of eggs and bread, at any rate. That much I knew.

“I wonder what it feels like to die,” said R____ when we got home. “Quite extreme, I imagine,” he said, answering his own thought.

Today I stole some paracetamol, some ibuprofen and some anti-viral cold sore cream from a B____ in Fakenham. I was holding them in my hand as I paid for something else. I’m getting good at this, I thought as I walked out of the store.

I felt like crying today for no apparent reason. And did cry a little while listening to Kate Bush in the car park at the supermarket. The headaches are getting worse. During a conversation I completely forgot what I had said moments before. I got a little high for the first time in a good while. I became very shaky when I undressed to have a shower and my whole body tensed right up. 

“You underestimate yourself,” said father, as we sat watching a man practise roller skating back and forth along the prom. Yes, I thought, you are right. I do underestimate myself. But the trouble is I also overestimate myself.

Sometimes I have to check my face to see if I’m wearing my glasses.

We watched the sun set and then the moon started setting, and for a while there it just felt like everything was setting, and all we could think was, “What’s next? What the hell is going to set next?”

Endings are kind of ridiculous. You kind of feel that you always have to have someone dying or being shot, or learning a lesson, or facing the rightful consequences of their actions. But life doesn’t work like that. Life just goes on. Life goes on. There’s nothing more banal. Just going on and on. An old couple buying corned beef at the supermarket. A squirrel running up a tree. Rain pouring. Emptying the bins. 

I stole a blue glow stick from a church and it felt good.

The new medication doesn’t seem to be working, in case you were wondering.