chapter twenty-seven

The Question

I have no life.

It’s official. I have no life, I am merely living vicariously through other people.

Take, for example, Mel and Claudine’s drama. They were actively avoiding each other. Even in the Senior Common Room, when one entered, the other one left. They’d got an official face on it, of course. A ‘hi’ face that told the world that they’re both so busy they haven’t got time for each other. While everyone we worked with believed that, I knew the real story.

I, for example, happened to know that they’d once been more than friends. And I also knew that the lamppost Mel walked into that caused his bruise happened to be five foot eight, with black hair and a surprisingly strong right-hook for her slender frame. She was also very angry at the time. (I noticed no one sat him down and asked him if he was being abused. They all believed his heinous lie without a second thought.)

The most unsettling thing about the Mel and Claudine story was, though, I didn’t just know their story. I was their story. I was part of their drama and I experienced their emotions. What they felt, I felt. It was my seventh sense magnified.

I was Mel, in love with someone who wouldn’t leave her partner for me. Clinging to the hope that one day she’d wake up and see sense. I was Claudine, convinced that I could be in love with two men at once and almost breaking my heart to try to reconcile that. I was both people, knowing how I felt, suspecting how the other felt, not really knowing what I should do.

But the seventh sense didn’t end there. Not by a long shot.

I was also Ed. Rushing into something because she really was The One. I had no fear, no doubt, no indecision. All I knew was, when I left her place to return to mine, I felt as though I’d left my arm behind and needed to go back and collect it. And, within seconds of shutting my front door, she was calling me, begging me to come back because there was an Ed-shaped hole in her life. I’d never known anything so easy, passionate, comforting, so right.

I was Gwen. Suddenly dissatisfied with everything. It wasn’t just the demon year group any more. Every year group wound me up. Every lecture rankled me. I smoked more and more, trying to push down this feeling of powerlessness; this knowledge that I’d chosen this path and I was going to be doing this hideous thing called lecturing for the rest of my days.

I was Jake, scowling now about what Ed was doing with his life. Scared that he was doing the wrong thing. Worried my best mate was about to do something monumentally stupid, something he couldn’t go back on. And under it, really scowling about the twat who was meant to be my friend but used me for sex then treated me like dirt when I told him how I felt. I was also jealous. How come Ed got it right and I got it so wrong? Robyn was a stuck-up tart, The Git was meant to be my friend, but Ed was happy, I’d been used.

I was Craig, in desperate need of a reality check on my feelings about the ex I can’t stop sleeping with. She winds me up, she’s a bit of a psycho, but nowadays she’s the one person I want to spend all my time with. I can’t possibly love her, could I?

And then, of course, there were the students. Constantly trailing to the door of my shared office, pouring their hearts out. Not that I was their tutor. Just, it seemed, available. Did I have such an eventful life as a student? I’d often wonder as another student poured out a plot more complicated than anything I saw on Sunset Beach. There was something very disconcerting and disturbing about standing in front of a group of people and knowing who’d shagged who, who’d screwed over who, who really hated who. The students spent so much time pouring their hearts out in my office that whenever there was a knock on the door these days Sally picked up her papers and cup and left because she knew the people wouldn’t be visiting her.

My brain, my heart, my time were crammed with people’s passions, loves, hopes, hates, sorrows, emotions. I had to keep track, remember who had told me what, who hadn’t told me what. What was told only after swearing me to secrecy, what I was supposed to pass on, but discreetly.

I wasn’t simply listening to problems and stories and lives, I was living them. At least, that’s how it felt. I felt it all. Not empathy. Actual feelings. The actual emotions. I ached when they ached; I vacillated when they vacillated; I loved when they loved. I’d had this before, only not as consistently like now.

Before, like with Ed, like with Trudy, like with Mel, like with the man who fancied Jess, it was periodic, the occasional sensation. Now, it’d got worse. Intensified, concentrated. Never-ending. When someone cried, I genuinely experienced those ripples of distress and teetered on the brink of tears myself. If someone told me of their joy, I felt my heart leap and do an excited jig. Like, I suppose, some men get sympathetic labour pains, I got sympathetic life experiences.

I felt all their joys, all their fears, all their upsets, as though I was doing the living myself.

And it was sucking the real life out of me. Even the unmitigated highs and joys of other people’s happiness didn’t make up for it. It wasn’t my happiness. I may as well have described my perfect birthday present, down to the Bagpuss wrapping paper, then watch someone else unwrap it without so much as a glance at the paper, then smile, say it’s lovely, then put it aside and never pick it up again. You were happy they had it, but you, sure as eggs is eggs and chocolate is chocolate, wanted it yourself. It was meant for you. Built for you. You deserved it, just as much as the person who had it. You’d appreciate it more, too.

All this emotion by proxy meant I hardly knew what I felt any more. If I felt any more. What did I have to feel about? Everyone else had the life, not me. I experienced the emotion, but I didn’t get closure. Didn’t get the end result when others got their problems sorted or they went back to the thing that made them ecstatic. I ran the race, but never finished and got my medal. I was constantly jumping from one race to another, running every race just as hard, but never finishing. The roads to hell, perhaps?

And it showed no sign of abating. I literally had no life. My only time alone were those moments I fell asleep and those moments when I woke up. In between, my mind was in constant motion. My mind was sampling everyone’s life, snatching titbits here and there until it was a constant soundtrack to my waking hours. Snatches and excerpts of other people’s experiences playing on loop in my head.

One night, at the end of May, I found myself outside Jess’s house. She was marking very important final year experimental reports, but let me in anyway.

I lay with my head on the kitchen table, crumbs from the sandwich she’d eaten earlier grinding into my right cheek.

‘Jess, you’ve got to help me,’ I said, staring forlornly at the side of the tea cup she’d placed in front of me.

‘I don’t know why everyone comes to tell me everything – good, bad or indifferent – or why I can’t say no, but I really think I’m going mad. What is it about me? Why me?’

Three days later, she had the answer.