5

Tuesday seems moderately fucked by ten.

I meant to get up five minutes earlier this morning to iron my shirt, but I only remembered when I was on the bus. I’m sure Hillary noticed, said nothing, looked a little sad for me. And I’m also sure she’s worried I’m about to sink anything I’m working on through rampant inattention. At least, if she’s half the manager I think she is, she’s very worried.

Worried about deals going down the tubes, calls from Sydney, New York, Singapore. All trails leading back, inexorably, to my office. And Hillary up on the next floor, trying to put it all into perspective for the state manager, Barry Greatorex, who is not a man we like to deal with at the best of times. And the best of times came and went a while ago.

I meet Jeff for coffee at twelve-thirty. We meet for coffee, not for lunch, as Jeff makes his lunch every day. He is sufficiently fond of money that he is rarely inclined to spend it, and in fact makes lunch every day for both himself and Sally. Sal, I know, on occasions dumps hers in the bin and goes out with friends, but I’m sworn to secrecy.

I do not make lunch. This means I am left with all the possibilities of the coffee shop, and today I go for a big piece of cheesecake. Jeff looks at this unnecessarily disparagingly and tells me how easy it is to get a roll together.

I eat the first mouthful. What does he think I am? I can’t even iron my shirt. A roll takes ingredients. Ingredients take planning. You have to be on top of your whole week before you can get a roll together. What does he expect of me?

Looking cheery today, he says. Looking as though we dressed in the dark in a very crumpled place again.

I dress for comfort.

And don’t you look comfortable. All the contentment of a man with Steelo underpants.

What, they’re showing?

Peeping out under the hair shirt.

What a life. What a fucking life.

A life of quality.

A life that can be appropriately defined by the least attractive of undergarments. This is what I’m destined for?

There’s that negative self-talk again. It’ll do you no good.

Good? What’s good?

Good might be what happens next. Give it a chance. Don’t condemn yourself to a life of punishing undergarments. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out. It might next time. It might not too. You won’t know till it happens and that’s the way it goes.

But how do I know?

You don’t. It’s always a risk. And when you’re ready to take the risk, you’ll take it.

I can hear what he’s saying, but what am I supposed to do? What course of action does this give me? He’s sitting there, nonchalantly offering me bagfuls of nothing, like some Zen philosopher. The world’s most contented man, telling me about risk, and I’ve never met anyone less likely to take one.

Look, he’s saying, you and Anna. There were things there that worked, but you were also very different, and maybe she just decided that it wasn’t right for her.

What do you mean? What do you mean different?

What? You’re going to try to tell me now that you were the same? You and Anna? What about the dry sink thing?

You always mention the dry sink thing.

It’s a very good example. I don’t have to list a hundred and one differences, I just have to give examples. And the dry sink thing just happens to be a very good example.

The dry sink thing

I should have known it wouldn’t work out with Anna from the day we moved in together. We washed a lot of plates that had been wrapped in newspaper for the move and she told me, ‘If there’s one thing I have to have it’s a dry sink’. This is most significant as an example of difference as, until that moment, I was totally unaware of the dry sink concept. I think, if she’d even said, ‘If there’s one thing I have to have it’s an antimacassar on every seat’, or a gerbora in the bathroom, or even a gerbil in the bedroom, things would have been okay. But once the importance of a dry sink had been stressed to me, I had no excuses. If the sink wasn’t dry, it quickly became apparent whose fault it was. And it was highly unlikely that it would ever be Anna Hiller’s, as she was the one with the dry sink thing, and with the little towel on a nearby peg, especially for sink drying. We argued and I called her unreasonable and uncompromising and this didn’t go down well. She said, ‘Is it such a big deal? Such a big deal that you won’t take the trouble to remember to do this little thing for me?’ So ultimately I had a choice, and I chose to remember and to dry, and Anna was happy.

Jeff’s not talking about dry sinks. He’s talking about compromise and surrender and compatibility. He’s saying, and I know this because he’s said it before, that if you start giving in entirely when it comes to bizarre things like dry sinks, in the end there’ll be nothing of you left. And it’s true.

We’d go to friends’ houses, Jeff and Sal’s even, and I’d notice the sink wasn’t dry, and I’d want to give it a bit of a going over before there were any problems. Wet sinks, sinks with huge, bulging, ugly globs of tap water sitting on them, came to mean trouble, even though Anna didn’t care about other people’s sinks. Once she even took me aside and said, Look, I know we like dry sinks, but in other people’s houses it’s up to them, okay? I’ve never told Jeff this, partly because it was his house, and partly because it would give him a triumphant new dimension to his favourite example of incompatibility, control and the loss of the self.

So now I live in a house with a wet sink, and I’m coming to terms with it.

Later, back at work, I’m still reconstructing the past. Still wondering if I’d done things slightly differently, would we still be together? This direction of thought does not impress Jeff. He sees it as counterproductive. He may be right, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. Some days, everywhere I look I see her face. Jeff’s a great theorist, life, tennis, whatever. A great theorist, but sometimes I think he hasn’t a clue. Sometimes when I’m deep down in the middle of all of this it just isn’t possible to use any of his irrefutable logic to dig myself out. I’m probably the greatest frustration in his comfortable life and I think we both have the same sickening feeling that I’m not about to make it easy for him.

Most days I come up with some new idea. Something I need to call Anna about right at that instant and tell her, just in case it makes the difference. There was a time when I even thought it was the sink. For several days I wanted to call her and tell her I’d keep the sink dry forever, even when I was using it, if necessary. I think I’m over that now.

But I keep rebuilding the past in all kinds of different ways, and she’s been demonised and deified and re-interpreted so many times that I really have no idea what she was like any more.

Sometimes I have no idea what I’m like any more. Some days it seems I only have a past, and at the end of the past I was set adrift somewhere, on some terrible flat sea that seems to go on and on without interruption.

One day I told Jeff this, or something like it, and he said I would begin to make progress when I stopped constructing my lot in terms of crappy metaphors, and thought about mastering one or two everyday practicalities again.

He doesn’t understand that some days practicalities are quite foreign to me, and I’m much more at home in a world described only in terms of the crappiest metaphors possible.