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.