A couple of weeks after Jess’s Jerry Springer show, I read some notes I’d made during that two-day period. It wouldn’t be true to say that I’d been so drunk I’d forgotten I’d ever made them, and in any case they’d been lying around the flat in plain view. But it was a fortnight before I possessed enough courage to read them, and once I’d done so, I was almost compelled to draw the curtains and reach for the Glenmorangie once again.
The object of the exercise was to analyse, with the only head I have available to me, why I had behaved so absurdly that afternoon, and to list all possible responses to that behaviour. To give my head its due—to be fair to the lad, as sports pundits would say—it was at least capable of recognizing that the behaviour had been absurd. It just wasn’t capable of doing very much about it. Are all heads like this, or is it just mine?
Anyway, on the backs of several unopened envelopes, mostly bills, there was depressingly conclusive evidence of the circularity of human behaviour. “WHY HORRIBLE TO NURSE?” I had written. And then, underneath:
1) ARSEHOLE? HIM? ME?
2) HITTING ON PENNY?
3) GOOD-LOOKING AND YOUNG-PISSED ME OFF?
4) ANNOYED BY PEOPLE.
This last explanation, which may have meant something brilliantly precise when I hit on it, now seemed startlingly candid in its vagueness.
On another envelope, I had scrawled “COURSES OF ACTION”
(and please note, by the way, the switch from numbers to letters, a switch presumably meant to indicate the scientific nature of the work):
a) KILL MYSELF?
b) ASK Maureen NOT TO USE THAT NURSE ANY MORE
c) DON’T
And “C stopped there, either because I fell into a stupor at that point, or because “Don’t” was a concise way of expressing a profound solution to all my problems. Think about it: how much better things would be for me if I didn’t, wouldn’t and never had.
Neither envelope inspired much confidence in my powers of cogitation. I could see that they had both been written by the man who had recently wanted to tell a select group of people—a group that included his own young daughters—that all male nurses were effeminate and self-righteous: the word “ARSEHOLE” would surely provide a forensic psychologist with all the evidence required for that deduction. And similarly, the man who had spent some of New Year’s Eve trying to work out whether to jump from the roof of a tower-block was exactly the sort of man who might jot down “KILL MYSELF?” in a Things To Do list. If thinking inside the box were an Olympic sport, I would have won more gold medals than Carl Lewis.
Quite clearly, I needed two heads, two heads being better than one and all that. One would have to be the old one, just because the old one knows people’s names and phone numbers, and which breakfast cereal I prefer, and so on; the second one would be able to observe and interpret the behaviour of the first, in the manner of a television wildlife expert. Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dilling your own telephone number on your own telephone: either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system.
It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that other people have heads, and that any one of these heads would do a better job of explaining what the purpose of my explosion might have been. This, I supposed, was why people persisted with the whole notion of friends. I seemed to have lost all mine around the time I went to prison, but I knew plenty of people who’d be prepared to tell me what they thought of me. In fact, it seemed that my propensity for letting people down and alienating them would actually serve me in good stead here. Friends and lovers might try to throw a kindly light on the episode, but because I had only ex-friends and ex-lovers, I was ideally placed. I only really knew people who would give it to me with both barrels.
I knew where to start, too. Indeed, so successful was my first phone call that I didn’t really need to speak to anyone else. My ex-wife was perfect—direct, articulate and clear-sighted—and I actually ended up feeling sorry for people living with someone who loved them, when not living with someone who loathed you was so obviously the way to go. When you have a Cindy in your life, there aren’t even any pleasantries to wade through: there are only unpleasantries, and unpleasantries are an essential part of the learning process.
“Where have you been?”
“At home. Drunk.”
“Have you listened to your messages?”
“No. Why?”
“Oh, I just left you a few thoughts about the other afternoon.”
“Ah, now, you see that’s exactly what I wanted to talk about. What do you think it was all about?”
“Well, you’re unbalanced, aren’t you? Unbalanced and poisonous. An unbalanced, poisonous tosser.”
This was a good start, I felt, but it lacked focus.
“Listen, I appreciate what you’re saying, and I don’t want to appear rude, but the unbalanced tosser part I find less interesting than the poisonous part. Could you talk more about that?”
“Maybe you should pay someone to do this,” said Cindy.
“You mean a therapist?”
She snorted. “A therapist? No, I was thinking more of one of those women who will pee all over you if you pay her enough. Isn’t that what you want?”
I thought about this. I didn’t want to dismiss anything out of hand.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s never appealed before.”
“I was speaking metaphorically.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t really understand.”
“You clearly feel so awful about yourself that you don’t mind being abused. Isn’t that their problem?”
“Whose problem?”
“These men who need women to… Never mind.”
I was dimly beginning to perceive what she was driving at. It was true that being called names felt good. Or rather, it felt appropriate.
“You know why you turned on that poor guy, don’t you?”
“No! You see, that’s precisely why I called you.”
If Cindy had known how much damage she could have done by stopping right there, the temptation would have been too much for her. Luckily, though, Cindy was determined to go all the way.
“I mean, he was fifteen years younger than you, and much better-looking. But it wasn’t that. He’d done more with his life that afternoon than you’ve ever done with yours.”
Yes! Yes!
“You ponce around on television and screw schoolgirls, and he pushes disabled kids around in a wheelchair, probably for the minimum wage. It’s no wonder Penny wanted to chat him up. For her, it was the moral equivalent of going from Frankenstein’s monster to Brad Pitt.”
“Thank you. That’s great.”
“Don’t you dare put the phone down on me. I’ve only just started. I’ve got twelve years’ worth of this stuff.”
“Oh, I’ll be back for more, I promise. But that’s plenty to be going on with.”
You see? Ex-wives: really, everybody should have at least one.
Maureen
I feel a bit daft explaining what happened at the end of the intervention day, because it all sounds like too much of a coincidence. But I think it probably only sounds like a coincidence to me. I know I said before that I’m learning to feel the weight of things, which means learning what to say and what not to say in case you make people feel badly for you. So if I say that nothing happened in my life before I met the others, I don’t want to make it sound as though I’m grumbling. It was just how things were. If you spend all your time in a very quiet room and someone comes up behind you and says “Boo!”, you jump. If you spend all your time with short people, and you see a six-foot-tall policeman, he looks like a giant. And if nothing happens and then something happens, then the something seems to be peculiar, almost like an Act of God. The nothingness stretches the something, the happening, out of shape.