Not been here for a while. Been a little busy, a little blocked. However; for some time, I’d been meaning to write something about how life folds in upon itself.
The reason for this is that in the last two years or so, my past has been like a mythical lizard-god, sloughing off the ocean floor under which it has lain for centuries, rising up from its rest and lumbering towards civilisation, there to wreak havoc and remind everybody exactly who and what it’s all about.
I’d kind of embraced, a long time ago, that there was a cut-off point, approximately twenty years ago, before which Almost Nothing Happened. School? Too long gone. School friends? Old work colleagues? Well, you swear blind you’ll be mates forever, but after a month or six they’re very much In The Past. If I’d wanted to stay in touch, I’d have stayed in touch. Others fade away, weekly meets become monthly become annually become ‘I really must get in touch with him/her’ become Gone Forever.
Admittedly, it’s difficult these days to leave people behind. Facebook’s a main culprit; one absently clicks the ‘Accept’ button and is forever seeing exactly what Former Work Colleague X had for lunch. Twitter’s probably worse, with its open-to-all attitude that allows anybody and their uncle to read what you’ve posted, without your permission or your knowledge. But that’s only for newer acquaintances. Old ones, ones from beyond the cut-off point, they’re gone, done, juvenilia…
…Except for the old school friend who phoned out of the blue a year or two back after over thirty years. And except for the old work colleague who recognised me, twenty years on, as I topped up my Oyster card at Blackhorse Lane tube, and who luckily now works for London Transport and so wears a name badge otherwise I wouldn’t have had a bloody clue. And except for the woman who just happened to be taking a friend’s photo when I arrived to see him and who turned out to be an old work colleague from nearly twenty-five years ago.
None of them expected, all of them welcome, all of them from a time so long ago it seems like someone else’s life, suddenly rushing up and handing to two entirely different people the realisation that they’re the same person, decades apart. All of them still in touch – with luck, though we’ll see what the passage of time brings.
There was another such person. She’d gone missing for about ten years when the phone rang and she told me we were going on holiday together. Which we did. And again the following year. The first of those holidays was the best I’d ever had, full of carefree, ridiculous, full-on childish behaviour, which is a good thing when you’re some way beyond being a child. Alright, at one point we almost died. And at another we honestly believed we were being driven out into the desert to be shot and left for the jackals. We got home alright though, didn’t we?
The second wasn’t so good: the place we were based at was n the middle of nowhere, the food was lousy and the weather was so hot that it played havoc with her diabetes (Type One, if you please. None of your namby-pamby ‘Ooh I’ve eaten too many McDonalds’ Type Two bollocks for her, oh no). Still a good time though, in spite of the horrendous, hypo-fuelled, no-testing-strips-left flight home during which she really didn’t look as if she’d make it.
In June, her sister contacted me through Facebook, asking for my phone number. You know what had happened. She’d gone to sleep, hadn’t woken up, laid undiscovered for days, until a local friend kicked down her door and found her.
In what had been her last few weeks she’d phoned me a hell of a lot. Too much, in fact. I’ll be honest: those calls I’d missed through not being in or just by not bothering to answer the phone, I’d stopped returning. She knew this. She said, in one of our last talks, that she felt she’d started stalking me and would be easing off a little. I laughed it off. I think, though, I was a little relieved. I don’t know how she felt things stood. I hope she didn’t think she’d become unwelcome.
Three days ago I pulled up her details on my mobile, took one last look at her photo – standing in a hotel lobby, one hand reaching up so she looked like she was swinging from the chandelier in the background – and deleted her. Then I went to my landline, listened again to her final message, from a couple days before she died:
“Hi. Don’t worry. It’s not important. Bye.”
Said goodbye. Pressed ‘Delete’.
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