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.