Every morning, I go to the café at the end of the road and the man behind the counter tells me that he can’t stand me.
He has all kinds of reasons. For starters, he doesn’t like my outfit; my trousers are too short for his liking (something which hasn’t escaped my notice, believe me). I should get some new ones, but department stores make me nervous. I’m putting it off until a quiet weekend, or a Sunday morning when nobody is around. He finds my shirts cheap and nasty – no argument there, because they are. I’ve never had the time for ironing. He doesn’t like the way I ask for my coffee (always latte, skinny milk, no sugar). Now that is something I can’t help; I’ve got the kind of voice which makes questions sound like statements. A lot of people have told me that. If I had to guess, I’d say that it’s because I pretty much always know what the answer is going to be. It’s beyond my control, it’s just how I was made; people tell me things. They tell me everything.
It isn’t just my clothes with the man behind the counter though, it’s more than that. “The man behind the counter”, listen to me; if it was a proper café, or a proper machine, or my drink had ever tasted half decent in the last two years I suppose I’d call him a barista, but they’re not and he’s not and that’s that. He reckons that something went wrong when everything was being handed out, because he knows he’s better than me. He should be the one placing the orders and I should be the one on the other side, frothing the milk – which I’d do better than him, we have a machine at home – tamping the coffee, measuring things out. I like making coffee at home. The noises, the gurgling and gushing, take my mind off things.
If he was the one placing the order, it wouldn’t be a latte. He likes a mocha with two sugars, a triple shot of espresso and lots of squirty cream on top so it looks like an ice cream sundae – I know that, because he told me once. The radio on top of the counter was playing something upbeat and tiresome, and I wished it was just a bit louder, loud enough that I could tune him out. He told me that he couldn’t understand why anybody would drink the muck I order. He always looks like he’s been two days without shaving, and I see him every weekday. I don’t understand how he manages that. Some people are just like that, I guess, like Don at work. He comes in clean-shaven and he almost has a beard by half-three. Don’s one of my favourites – he doesn’t tell me much. It’s because he doesn’t have a lot to tell, but I like that; usually it doesn’t stop people.
The man behind the counter at the café doesn’t like his job, really doesn’t like it. He tells me that all the time. I have to say I can understand; I’d go insane if I had to listen to all those people, day in day out, every day. Half of them don’t know what they want and the other half just kid themselves that they do, and they’re always wrong. Fucking morons. I wouldn’t want a job doling out disappointment to others, I have enough trouble managing my own. But as far as he’s concerned, I wouldn’t know about that. He tells me that it’s okay for me with my cushy desk job and my incredible salary and my studenty lifestyle. He’s the kind of person that spits out the word “student” like it’s right up there with sex offender.
He couldn’t be much more wrong about me if he tried. My job entails chasing people for payment on orders, filling out forms and sending back forms that haven’t been filled out properly. It involves as little human contact as I can get away with. I deliberately picked it for that reason. Even my desk, in a room away from the main open-plan bedlam, has been carefully selected. My shared house hasn’t been vacuumed in months and I’m only there because I couldn’t find anywhere with a cheaper rent and because there’s nobody living there who I actively want to kill. That’s progress, actually. Alex hasn’t bought toilet roll in as long as any of us can remember, so now I buy my own – the good stuff, because I have standards – and I hide it in my bedside table. Every night, I sneak to the toilet with my own stash and when I’m finished I take it back to my bedroom, and it’s going to carry on like this until Alex puts his hand in his pocket. Which means it’s going to carry on forever; Alex told me once that he doesn’t care because he knows that if he waits long enough Steph will crack and go to the corner shop.
I could mention all of these things to the man behind the counter and explain how lucky he really is, the grass is always greener, blah blah blah, but I don’t. I never have much time to tell people anything, because I’m always too busy being told. Besides, I don’t like him. I don’t like a lot of people though, it’s hardly like he’s special.
He told me once about his unfinished novel, and it was all I could do not to laugh there and then. A novel! I bet it’s shit.
When people tell you things non-stop, you get tired of them very quickly. I wonder if people realise that. That’s why I like taking the Tube to work – you don’t often see the same people on there twice. Meeting people once is usually more than enough for me. The only thing that gets me through my commute is knowing that the faces change every day – and even that doesn’t help as much as it should, because the stories are always the same. The guy in the corner tells me that he fancies the blonde standing by the doors, one hand holding the rail, the other gripping a paperback. She doesn’t register the guy in the corner at all; I’m not sure how she could be less interested in him. Instead, she tells me she’s bored with the book. It’s not one I plan to read, she has carefully selected it to improve herself and look intellectual on public transport, and I doubt she’ll get past the hundredth page. Anyway, I don’t read much. I can’t manage that level of concentration. She doesn’t tell me any more about the book, instead she goes on about how worried she is about her mum. She goes in for her operation on Friday.
Does she ever bore herself, the way she’s boring me? I doubt the guy in the corner would fancy her much longer, if she told him half of what I’ve heard.
And then there’s the stocky man in tracksuit trousers and a paint-spattered t-shirt pretending to read the Metro (does anyone do anything but pretend to read it?) Oh my god, he comes out with such racist, racist hate. He rants away and nobody looks except me. In the early days I used to give a hard stare to guys like him: Look at yourself, it was meant to say, do you have any idea what you sound like? It didn’t last long though – they’re not mind readers, after all – so nowadays I just look embarrassed, peering at the names at intervals on the red stripe of the Central Line and acting like he isn’t there. I wish everybody on this train would just shut up.
At the other end, when I get to my stop, walking past the beggar is the worst thing about my morning. There are about half a dozen different ways to get from the Tube station to the office – past branches of Prêt and Eat full of hungry, disgruntled workers talking to someone for the first time that day, asking for a coffee the way I asked for mine an hour ago, or along side streets swathed in shadows, past the backs of buildings and the entrances nobody uses – but they all end up going past her and I can’t stand it.
Her face is creased, her body almost skeletal and her clothes worn and tatty. She smells terrible, and she could be thirty or fifty and I wouldn’t know. She just says “Spare any change?” to everyone, I know that, and yet every time I walk past her she stares up into my eyes, though I try to look away, and tells me the rest. She tells me about how her husband hit her, how he lost his job and how one day he just left. She tells me where she slept last night – or where she didn’t – and she tells me that she never knows where she will sleep tonight, or whether it will be the last night. She tells that every time she goes to sleep she doesn’t expect to wake up. The thing I really hate, the thing that makes me feel uncomfortable inside, is when she tells me that she’s cold; she’s been telling me that for months. I hear it all, every single word, and I wonder why I even bother wearing these headphones.
Things are better when I get to the revolving doors of the office. The woman on reception is worried that I’ve looked ill these last few days, but I swipe my pass at the turnstile, take the lift to the fourth floor and try to make my way to my desk without speaking to anyone. It’s been hard work finding a job I could stomach, and this one is close enough to ticking the boxes that I’ll tolerate the café and the Tube and the woman shivering outside, close to the front doors. I still don’t know why the police haven’t moved her on. I get to do nearly everything by email. Phone calls are few and far between, face to face meetings are almost non-existent and my boss is based in another office, so I don’t have to see her. My one-to-ones don’t happen and my performance reviews, once every six months, are a cursory chat over a second-rate video conference link. Mentally, I’m hardly there, but neither is she so it doesn’t matter (I met her once. She told me she didn’t much care if it never happened again.)
From my seat I can see out of the window into mid-air. Unless the window-cleaners are working on the office across the street, I can’t see anything at all, which is perfect. I sometimes see them up there and envy them their job, but that kind of job is always thick with camaraderie, and I don’t do camaraderie. I’m lucky – my office is cut off from the main area by a pair of double doors, and they’re like a lifeline for me. Nobody wants to work in my area. They call it “the library”, and they find me strange. I’ve learned not to take anything personally and I never say anything about it. What’s the point? People are all too busy telling you things to try listening anyway.
The funny thing is that if I wanted to, I could be so good at so many things. When people tell you as much as they tell me, you can do whatever you want. I could lead hostage negotiations, close deals, counsel couples. I could interview celebrities, or help with murder investigations. I’m sure there are other jobs. But I don’t want any of them, because I wish it wasn’t this way. You have absolutely no idea, I know that for a fact because this would never occur to any of you. If you knew, you’d call me the luckiest man in the world - but you’d be dead wrong like you’re wrong about everything else. That’s why people give me a headache. That’s why I don’t want anything to do with the lot of you.
If you want to imagine what it’s like to be me, follow me through the double doors into the main section of the office. Dozens and dozens of desks, all in an orderly formation, each with an occupant tapping away on their keyboard sending their futile mails, each moving their pointless mouse. Some of the people have a photo up, just to prove how human they are, how different. Some of them might have a cartoon stuck to their monitor, to show everyone that they have a sense of humour. Some of them swear, just so everyone knows they’re not like the others - irreverent, not corporate. They might be the ones I dislike the most. No, dislike’s the wrong word; they bore me. It’s all so boring.
Come with me, stand right in the middle. Next, I want you to imagine that you can read every single Instant Messenger conversation being sent by every single one. Can you do that? Imagine. Every single piece of gossip, every single complaint, every single suggestion that it’s time for a coffee, every single time a hot girl walks by. Every single piece of flirting, successful and unsuccessful, every single complaint about every single half-arsed piece of work someone gets asked to do. Every crappy escalation, every stroppy customer, every single piece of surfing people do because they don’t like the shit on their to do list. Is your brain up to imagining that? The noise? The fun, the gloom, the frustration. Thank fuck it’s nearly the weekend. Look at her tits today. This conference call is doing my head in. Don’t make me go and talk to the geek in The Library. Have you seen that email? What a loser. Every ROFL, every LOL, every fucking winking smiley. How long would you last, in that room?
Now I want you to go one step further (this is the bit that will blow your mind). Imagine all the Instant Messenger conversations these people are only having with themselves. All the things they don’t tell anyone, the things they daren’t. Imagine reading all those things too, and tell me how that might feel. You can’t even begin to. You get better at shutting it off, at turning down the volume, but it never goes away and what you realise is how banal everybody is. How predictable, stupid and vain. Everyone has a book in them, they say – well, I’ve read everybody’s and the answer is they don’t. Or if they do, nobody should be made to turn the pages. Have a look at the first twenty and then stop bothering, because there’s nothing worthwhile in the rest.
You still don’t believe me? Look around you. Darren tells me he fancies Kirsty, who I happen to know has the hots for Steve. Steve’s married – married and bored. He tells me, and himself, that he’s happy but there was the night with the prostitute on the stag weekend in Tallinn that he’s trying to forget. For someone who’s trying to forget about it he doesn’t seem to stop going on about it. His wife was pregnant, and they weren’t getting on, and he was abroad, and it was five years ago, and so it really doesn’t matter, or so I’m told. Paul is looking for a new job, but he’s worried that eventually he’ll have to mention his prescription for antidepressants on an application form. Tony is waiting for the result of some tests, and he’s terrified. Penny is worried that nobody in the office notices her since she came back from maternity leave – which is reasonable, because nobody does (they didn’t before she went away on maternity leave, either; there was a general sense of surprise that she had a man at all. Darren thought she might be a lesbian). She works in HR, she has no people skills and she’s decided that the company made a big mistake taking me on. No, I never hear a thing about Penny - with the exception of Adam, who had a wet dream about her a week ago which horrified him. Yesterday he told me that he’d thought about it that morning while wanking in the shower. I didn’t want to know that – not about him, not about her.
Can you imagine being me? I have a headache by noon. I spend my lunch break at my desk, headphones on, playing Minesweeper. Something repetitive, something distracting. By four pm, all the painkillers in the world can’t help and five thirty can’t come quickly enough. That second sentiment is the only thing I have in common with everybody else in the building. The only one who’s different is Sinead. She started two weeks ago, straight out of university, tall, awkward-looking, short dark hair. Her suits are a bit too smart, like she bought them expecting a better job than this, before she knew what kind of a place it was. She doesn’t seem to have made a lot of friends yet, though the three guys in corporate finance already have a bet on which one of them she’ll sleep with first (the answer, I get the feeling, is none of them). When she looks at me I don’t know whether I like the expression that dances round her green eyes. I know there’s something different about you, she tells me, Perhaps I’ll find out what it is.
Believe me, I’d like to see her try.
There’s no way I can cope with the clamour of the rush hour home, so instead I wander through as many side streets as it takes, at right angles to the rest of the world, until I find a quiet unfashionable pub where I can sit on my own. I’m looking for the sort of place without hordes of smiling drinkers out on the pavement, smoking their cigarettes and consoling each other about the days they’ve had, the sort of crowd scene which any other passer-by would see as the perfect advert for London life. I am after a pub where the only people in there are disappointed, silent old men who have been there since noon, where the sun fails to shed light on anything inside, literal or figurative. The sort of pub where the barman sighs as he takes your order – just like this one does, as he tells me how bored he is that his life has come to this.
I ought to be doing something else – going out and getting laid, perhaps, but getting laid is too easy. I know – too easy, you wouldn’t believe it. I never understood what people said about the thrill of the chase until I realised that it was an experience I’ll never know. There’s no fun in foregone conclusions, good or bad, and all the times I’ve been out with women are exactly that. It’s a shame about your teeth. I don’t want to hear about your job. You talk about your family too much. Why do you never talk about your family? Kiss me. Not like that. I’d like you to stop now. I’ve been told every combination you could come up with, sometimes all in one night, but the worst thing is how much it ruins it all to know how things are going to end. When it goes badly, I can console myself that there’s nothing I could have done, when it goes well it doesn’t feel like an achievement. Or maybe it does, but it feels like something unearned. Everybody else gets the delight of working these things out as they go along, never realising that what they say or do is a blunder or a stroke of genius until many months later when they are having the final, sad conversation or popping the question, moving in together or drifting apart.
But I get a running commentary, and nobody wants a running commentary on this kind of thing.
Would Sinead be different? I don’t know. When I talk to her, it’s almost like there is something she isn’t telling me, and that’s never happened before. But I know how these things end, and I know it’s pointless. I watch the couples sometimes, in busier pubs than this, and I know they are breaking up or getting together long before they do, long before they know it themselves. In some cases it’s obvious to everyone in the room, often it’s only obvious to me. They could save themselves so much time if they told each other what they’re telling me – but of course saving time isn’t what this is about. It’s about fun, the fun that they’re having and I’m not. I go up and get another pint, because the first one has gone down pretty fast, and that’s when my housemate Alex comes in.
Alex is my pub buddy – he works a little way across town, he’s easy to lure out for a drink after work and although he hates this kind of pub and isn’t sure what to make of me, he nearly always comes out these days. I like Alex, he’s the kind of guy most people would describe this way: you know where you are with him. Of course, that’s a cliché for me – I know where I am with everybody. But for me, it’s more about where you are than knowing where you are, and we’re in the pub, safe from the crowds outside shouting their hopes, their dreams, their commonplace preferences for soap operas and supermarkets and reality show contestants.
We normally sit at a table in the corner, a pint of cider for him, a pint of bitter for me, and a packet of crisps opened out in front of us. Alex reaches in with a hand like a claw, like one of those machines in amusement arcades that grabs for underwhelming prizes. Alex’s specialist subjects - which he talks about a lot - are West Ham United, his crappy job as a graphic designer, how Steph gets on his nerves with her holier than thou notes on the phone table and the Post-It note on her skimmed milk (which nobody would drink anyway), the gigs he wants to go to and his plans to get wasted at the weekend. He gave up asking me along months ago, though touchingly he’s still a bit disappointed.
Alex stopped coming out a few months back because of Chris, some girl he met at work. We didn’t see him around the house for ages, he was always staying at hers (somewhere more upmarket – Maida Vale or Swiss Cottage, I can’t remember where) and our paths never crossed. I met Chris once. She told me how filthy the living room was and that she planned never to visit the house again. Steph stopped writing the notes and didn’t feel the need to label her milk any more, and things were quieter for a while. And I would almost say I missed Alex, even if I didn’t miss hearing his masturbatory fantasies through the adjoining wall late at night (honestly, I’d sooner have heard him actually having sex), but then he came back and now he comes to the pub most days.
Alex’s specialist subjects are still West Ham United, his crappy job and Steph. But now when we sit down he spends all night telling me about Chris. About how she didn’t want to commit. About how they would go clubbing with her mates and he would want to go and she would want to stay. Go on then, go back to the flat, I’ll see you when I see you. He tells me about how they argued, and how she told him that enough was enough. I’m only twenty-three. I’m not old enough to be having this kind of conversation. It’s like you’re an old man these days. He tells me every word of their final, sad conversation and how they had sex for the last time. He tells me how he walked back into town, soaked from rain and wet from crying, and how now he’s just a failure in a shared house full of failures – with Steph the self-righteous virgin and me, and I’m just a freak and Steph’s just a freak and he’s no better. Last of all, he tells me all about how he finds himself taking the Tube to Warwick Avenue (it’s Warwick Avenue, I remember now) at weekends, sitting in a café, wishing he would bump into her again, walking slowly past her flat. All the time Alex tells me this he is talking about West Ham, his crappy job and Steph.
I don’t know why I do the next thing I do. I wish I knew someone like me, so they could tell me.
“You miss her, don’t you?”
It’s the oddest thing, sitting there listening to Alex – haltingly at first, and then more and more fluently – telling me things I already know. As he does, it strikes me that people have two voices; there’s the one they use, that everybody hears, and the one they don’t use, that only I can hear. And they always say different things. “Have a good day.” says the man in the café with the first, and Thank god you’re leaving with the second. “The coffee here is shit.” says Sinead with the first as we stand at the machine, and Why are you looking at me like that? What do you want? with the second. But both Alex’s voices are saying the same thing, and I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced that before. And the harmony – well, I’m not good at words for this sort of thing, but it’s beautiful. It’s the saddest melody, but the most beautiful sound. And we talk all evening like that, and get a kebab on the way home, and then there’s an awkward hug in the lounge when we say goodnight. He calls me “mate”.
I don’t know when I last hugged anyone, before that.
My favourite bit of the day is the last part, under the covers, 6 Music on my bedside radio. There are no people any more, just chatter and records that I can tune out any time I want to. I don’t know, based on the day I’ve had, if I’m changing. I don’t know why I said what I said to Alex; I’m not a people person, I’d rather not get involved. And I don’t understand what I felt on the way home, or in the lounge, and I don’t know whether tomorrow will be the same or different, or why I don’t have a headache now. I never remember my dreams anyway, and I know the moment I turn out the light I’ll fall asleep. I might as well do that now. It’s been such a long time since I was alone with my thoughts, just mine, only me, without all the other voices, that I wonder if I’d even recognise them anymore.
THE NEW, NOT SO NICE, ME.
6 hours ago
