conversations with hardyman
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Hardyman was no less talkative, but he was lacking his usual ebullience. The words flowed, but they were tired. Pitt hadn’t seen Hardyman like this before and did not know how to drag him out of the mood. Instead, he slumped into it with him. The two men dark and brooding, expecting the worst.
‘It’s not like things were actually better sixty years ago,’ said Hardyman. ‘Just because everyone on the BBC spoke like the Queen, didn’t mean that the human race wasn’t as God-awful as it is now.’
It’s supposed to be me who thinks like that, thought Pitt. In the face of Hardyman’s gloom, Pitt was talking even less than normal. Said nothing.
‘The new technologies, all this shit,’ said Hardyman. ‘Sometimes, it just gets too much. Sometimes, I think how great it would be if it was the 1950s. They were a reasonably civilised society, but without so much of the crap we have to put up with now. Then you realise that that kind of thinking is delusional. People got murdered back then, people were selfish. We, you know, people, we all hark back to old times, as if things were automatically better then. The Victorians, for instance. We imagine manners and decent behaviour, and people who knew how to hold a fork. But everywhere smelled of shit, women were treated like shit, the roads were shit, the people were shit, and the government were happily slaughtering indigenous peoples around the world in our name. It really pisses me off when people go on about how shit society is at the moment. It’s always been shit.’
Pitt could have laughed, but Hardyman’s mood somehow dictated that his incoherent diatribe was completely devoid of humour.
‘But just because it’s always been shit, doesn’t mean that it’s not shit now, and doesn’t mean that it’s all right that it’s shit. We can’t say, well, sure it’s shit, but you know what, it was shit sixty years ago ‘n’ all, so what do you expect? We’re supposed to evolve. Not just, you know, species, it’s not just physiologically that we’re supposed to evolve, but as a society. But what have we become? A collective of fat, politically correct, incoherent, fame junkies. You’re right not to go for the TV documentary thing. Holy crap, but that’s what we’ve become. There’s this incredible universe out there, a world and a galaxy filled with the most remarkable and interesting things, and we spend our lives reading the Daily Express and watching absurd reality TV shows, and voting on which stupid young girl can sing better than the next stupid young girl, and using phrases like corporate responsibility and strategic solutions. Life hasn’t become style over substance, because that implies some level of substance. It’s all style, and a horrible style at that, and what people think, and selfishness. And when did it become all right to cry all the time? You turn on the TV and some bastard’s sobbing dramatically because their carrots haven’t come on the way they were hoping. Why is that all right? Why is it that people want to watch that? Why do you want to watch people crying because their soufflé didn’t rise? What is that all about?’
Pitt didn’t have the answers to any of these questions. He’d had thoughts like this years and years earlier. It had seemed a long time ago that he had become so disillusioned by society; a long time since he had switched off and retreated into his own world. So he did not know that people cried daily on television over the most absurdly trivial nonsense. He had some idea that the newspapers still reported bad news with glee, intent on making their readers as miserable as possible, intent on drumming into them how bad their lives were, but not the full horror of the daily discourse on gloom. And he didn’t know that you could get a life coach or that there were no problems only solutions. Pitt had retreated from life so long ago, and had missed so much. A blissful ignorance.
‘Misery memoirs!’ said Hardyman, smiling in a bemused fashion.
‘What?’
‘People write them. I mean, that’s fair enough. You’ve had a miserable life. You got locked in the cellar by your mum or you got shagged by your dad, fair enough. Write about it, exorcise your ghost. But who, in the name of God, wants to read that shit? But you go into a bookshop, and there are sections, there are whole bloody sections devoted to this stuff. It says it at the top of the shelf: “Misery Memoirs”, or “Books By People Who Are Miserable For People Who Are Miserable”. Why is that?’
Pitt lifted his glass to his lips and shook his head with an imperceptible movement. It was like looking in the mirror. Except Pitt rarely expressed these feelings of disillusion with society. They were obvious to anyone that spent any time with him, obvious that he had turned his back on society and retreated within, but his retreat had been quiet and insular; there had been no scorched earth laid against the detritus of human life around him. He had walked away and buried his head in the sand of his own life.
It was peculiar and uncomfortable to watch Hardyman so unexpectedly rage against humanity, peculiar and uncomfortable for Pitt to feel himself unable to talk to him about it, to try and get to the bottom of this new anti-social attitude.
Pitt left that lunchtime hoping that, the next time they met, Hardyman would be returned to normal, laughing at the world, enjoying Pitt’s annoyance at it; and, if Hardyman had not changed back to his old self, Pitt determined that he would get to the bottom of his friend’s abrupt mood swing and descent into the oblivion of ill-humour at the world.
He never saw Hardyman again.