after hearing her offspring having a good old giggle at the naked lady on the television. Again, this is not my fault. Why doesn’t she just take her kid to the park, instead of sticking it in front of a box all morning? I have a feeling they won’t let me send a letter back saying that. And even though José knows it has nothing to do with me, you can bet he is damn well telling anybody who will listen back at the office that it is, because I am the person who doesn’t happen to be there. I am the one out, on his orders, photographing an old bird in smog.
‘Phil, I’m coming back. Don’t worry about it, it’s nothing to do with us.’
‘One last thing.’
‘What?’ Surely nothing else can be wrong.
‘Charlie called.’ I catch the tone of his voice, but ignore it. I am more surprised than anything. Charlie doesn’t call my work any more.
‘Really? Charlie? What did he want?’
‘I don’t know, but he sounded weird. I answered the phone, and he asked me if I was you. Obviously I said no, and he hung up.’
‘That’s not weird, Phil, that’s just him,’ I say. Obviously he doesn’t even recognize my voice any more.
‘Yeah, but he sounded really strange, like he was upset or something.’
‘It’s probably just the coke,’ I say, and hang up. I don’t even know if he still does it. I know he was doing a lot, a couple of months ago. I’ve stopped asking now.
I go over to Charlie’s apartment early, just to get away from José, who is making vaguely disguised accusations in my direction about ‘Badgergate’, as it has already become known by the time I get back to the office. Charlie lives in East London. We live on opposite sides of town – Charlie in his urban wasteland outer and minimalism inner on one side, and me amongst the trees and families and pubs with gardens, on the other.
If I lived with him, I’d have to see him shagging other women, and that might force me to confront things. I wouldn’t be able to ignore an orgasm in our bed.
I wonder at what point love became so trivial. I wonder when I began to deride my heart, instead of feeding it, when I decided it didn’t matter and wrote it off. I wonder when the loneliness and despair became almost laughable. I wonder when we learnt to dismiss the pathetic who went back again and again to have their hearts trampled on. I wonder when they became ‘pathetic’.
When romance does break through all the walls these days, it leaves me in tears. If people sing in tune, or run the marathon, or exemplify any kind of harmony or commitment it leaves me crying, in private of course. Because these are the things my life lacks, and I cry that I wasn’t more careful to hold onto them.
I wonder why starvation, or racism, are so much more weighty issues, so much less pathetic than the emotional heartburn caused by the one you love trampling all over your feelings, and your heart. Why is this not deemed just as bad as an earthquake? Sure it affects just you, and not ten thousand people, but you can bet your life there is more than one person in the world at any given moment feeling like their world has ended, because they have been unbearably hurt by the one they love. There must be at least ten thousand at any one time. An earthquake for every day of the year. We are told to spend our whole lives looking for real love, and then if we find it and lose it again, we are supposed to underplay it, pull ourselves together, and get on with life.
When did love become a joke?
When did I?
I was at university in America for a year, the autumn of 1995 to the summer of 1996, and so was Charlie, but we were from different universities back home in Britain. I had to walk through the quad to get to most of my lectures – a huge rectangle of grass and crossing paths, of students with backpacks, and haggy-sac games, flicking tiny bean bags off their feet and ankles and heads and shoulders, and smelling of illegal substances and youth. Massive trees spotlighting the season, framing buildings that seemed older than everything else in town. The library was at one end and the theatre at the other, where I had seen a particularly gratuitous performance of Hair, students making a big deal of being naked, to prove that being naked wasn’t a big deal. On either side were the humanities buildings – the science buildings were off to one side, supposedly in case of explosions, but mostly because science students don’t mesh well with other students, and there would be too much bullying between lectures.
The day Charlie and I met had been eventful. It was November, and freezing outside. The weather in Urbana-Champaign was a curious set of extremes; ninety percent humidity in the summer – asthmatics didn’t make it through July – and minus forty in the winter, when the wind chill could freeze up the water in your eyes given two minutes. And either side, in spring and fall, were the tornadoes – green silent skies before a killer wind whipped through town. I strongly believe in the effect of the weather. It makes you do things you normally wouldn’t, it’s the backdrop to all our greatest dramas. More than anything it affects the moods. Bad things shouldn’t happen on sunny days, it’s confusing.
It was an exchange year, with an American student who got to be conscientious in England while I pissed it up in Illinois for three terms. The only downside was that I had to stay in university accommodation, which meant sharing a room with a complete stranger.
And my roommate was trained to kill. This was the thought most prevalent in my mind early on the day I met Charlie. Her face, contorting with rage, her mouth screaming random obscenities, and she was trained to kill: not just chickens after two days of starvation in some mosquito swarm of a jungle, but real people, actual humans, in battle. She had spent two years in the American Army Reserves, and they let her have a knife, and probably a gun, which she had no doubt stolen and kept. She was trained to kill, and in the process of throwing my stuff around the room, beating my bed with her pillow, twisting and snarling at me, and screaming abuse. This was not the first time, but certainly I had never actually feared for my life before. Trained in the art of slitting a man’s throat in the dead of night, and she was very much pissed off with me. I knew for a fact that she was seeing a counsellor. My roommate, Joleen, mentally, medically unstable, able to slit my throat, and barely two feet away from me. The last time she was mad, which wasn’t even this mad, I had been nearer to the door. But on this particular day, I was practically pinned against my debunked bunk bed, while she held the sides of her head, palms wide, pressing her temples, as if the pain wouldn’t stop, as if the voices wouldn’t stop. Did she hear voices? I’m not sure, but I would never bet against it. J. Edgar Hoover? Probably. He was a psychopath in women’s clothing as well. Like attracts like they say.
Joleen turned to face me, and started screaming. I was petrified.
‘You fucking bitch, you are like a dog on the street, I have less respect for you than a fucking dog on the street, you fucking piece of shit, you fucking bitch.’
She was pretty much repeating this over and over. I don’t know what the voices in her head were telling her, but they were anti-me, that much I deduced.
‘Joleen, simmer down and at least tell me what I have done!’
I tried desperately to keep the situation reasonably calm – no rising to the bait and feeding her fury. I felt it was important not to make direct eye contact with a psychotic, so I looked at her forehead with one eye, while sizing up the door with the other.
‘You
