Self-help

1994

The envelopes started arriving at my house that summer, A4 brown rectangles packed to bursting point with paper and good intentions. I think they turned up about once every week, and their thud on the doormat was about the only noise those mornings, interrupting my lie-ins. I was back in Reading for the long break between my second and third years at university at the time, with nothing much to do except avoiding anything looking like hard work. It was a stretch at home before the home stretch.

I only had to look at the spidery scrawl on the front to know they were from Anna. We’d split up at the start of the holidays, for reasons I can no longer remember. I may not have even known them at the time; I certainly couldn’t have told you which breakup this was, because we’d done it so often. We could break up over a meal, over an evening, over something one of us had or hadn’t said, over a weekend. I’d lost count a long time before that, and so had everybody else. The first time we parted, some of my friends told me that I was better off without her. The second time, they waited a week and then took their chances. The retraction came soon after. After the third time they gave up offering their consolations and just ringed a date in their mental calendars. If they’re not back together by then, maybe I’ll say something.

This was our longest break up, and it stretched across that summer like a hit single that’s number one for months. It coloured everything; I couldn’t buy a paper, eat an ice cream or walk the dog without knowing that I was single. At first the melody was new and exciting, the novelty value of being free of recriminations was quite something. I even found myself wondering if it was time for my story to have other characters in it. On long sun-bleached evenings on the benches outside the Bull And Chequers, sinking lagers with my friends, I may even have looked around for candidates, though I didn’t try that hard. But like that hit single, several weeks down the line I was tired of the tune. It would have been nice to read a book, sit in the library, take the train to visit my friends without hearing it all the time.

The envelopes started to arrive just at the point that I’d had enough.

I opened the first one, working out from the size and heft of the contents that it was far longer than any letter she had ever written me. It had always been a bone of contention, because back then I was so insecure that I thought an eight page letter meant somebody loved you twice as much as a four page letter did. I still remember the flimsy pale blue aerogrammes she sent me from Burma, one every couple of days, and how much work that must have involved when she was supposed to be out there, on riverboats and in temples, experiencing all that differentness. But somehow it wasn’t enough for me. With hindsight I can see what I couldn’t see then; that nothing ever was.

I remember how proud I was of being the only person who could read her handwriting. I mistakenly thought that meant I understood her.

Inside was a sheaf of neat white pages, no folding, no creases. It took a second for me to register that most of the writing on them was in a typeface and it wasn’t by her. As I flicked through and saw handwritten scribbles in the margins in the jagged handwriting, more masculine than mine, I put the pieces together and realised what had happened. Spending the summer in her father’s flat in Maida Vale, she passed her days walking to Paddington Library, photocopying huge swathes of self-help books and, sitting there in the quiet surrounded by all the pensioners of West London, annotating them before sending them to me. In a summer when we should have been taking life by the scruff of the neck, she had even less to occupy her time than I did. She had run out of words to illustrate my failings, and how angry she was with me, so she’d resorted to using someone else’s.

My correspondence course lasted several weeks and I found out a lot about myself, because she didn’t stint on detail. Idly flicking through the pages, in the break between This Morning and Neighbours, in the last gasp of not having to worry about the future, I didn’t even stop to wonder why I was still paying attention. But pay attention I did, and over the course of a number of meticulously sourced and personally tailored modules I discovered all sorts of things; that I was bad at communicating, that I was nowhere near understanding enough, that I had unrealistic expectations and that I didn’t like myself very much.

I learned the first three things on that list by rote, by reading the text and reading the comments and memorising what I’d been told. I don’t know, even now, if I ever truly believed it or if I just wanted to change the record. I told her I’d read them, I told her she was right, I took the train down to Paddington to see her and we got back together. The relationship lasted less than six more months after that, and I only learned the last thing on that list the hard way, right at the end.

I should, of course, have figured it out from the fact that I touched those photocopied pages at all.

2010

The friendly-looking red card had been sitting in the mailbox when I got home from work, saying they’d tried to deliver something to me but couldn’t because they needed a signature. For a week, I’d kept meaning to phone them to reschedule it, but was hampered by the fact that I couldn’t for the life of me remember what exactly I was arranging delivery of. That’s the problem with having a good memory, in my experience. Life, an intermittent thing of wonder for the absent-minded, contains far less pleasant surprises for the likes of us. You never forget that you’ve bought something fun online or find a stray ten pound note in a winter coat pocket on the first day after the seasons turn.

At first I thought I’d missed the boat and that it would be returned to the sender. I wasn’t too upset. I figured it was probably something official and inessential; a new debit card, some documentation about the pension I try not to think about or a tedious communiqué from work about terms and conditions. Whoever it was from, they’d just have to try again once they realised nobody was home. But then I had a peek on the back of the card and found out that I wasn’t too late. They were still keeping it for me, so on a Saturday morning we hopped into the car and headed out to collect my surprise package.

Driving seems to be one of the exceptions to the rule where going against the flow slows you down, and so we zipped through the streets, avoiding the route that goes past the children’s playground with the huge bright falsely cheerful murals and the pub on the corner that nobody can seem to make a go of. Instead we headed up the long hill, past the Brazilian café and the convenience stores, past the lovely flat with the terrible bathroom and the gorgeous house with no parking that we nearly bought instead of our home. The car shimmered through dozens of slightly different lives we almost lived.

We were making a beeline for the industrial estates, a place I try to avoid because they remind me of work. They were dreary enough during the week but even worse at weekends and going there was like attending the funeral of somebody you never liked in the first place. Further out still were the football stadium, the business park, the grimmest Holiday Inn in all of creation, but before that we reached the sorting office, with the weekend world dropping by in dribs and drabs. They were the exception rather than the rule; on the way out it felt like everybody else was going in the opposite direction, hurtling into town for appointments with lunch and shopping or to treat the kids to some uncomplicated crap in the multiplex at the very start of half-term.

I stepped inside and took my place in the queue behind a streak of people waiting patiently to pick up their presents to themselves. Santa sits behind a grille all year round handing out toys, gadgets and DVDs and he doesn’t seem to care much whether you’ve been a good child or not, provided you’ve got ID. When I got to the front, the surly man handed me an electronic device and a pointer. It was impossible to use it to produce anything even approximating to parody of my signature, but he was completely indifferent to that. Back in the car, I looked at my gift, a brown envelope, heavy, with thick contents. On the outside, it said it was from Amazon but still I couldn’t remember ordering it. There was a reassuring rasp as I pulled the tab to open it up, and I reached inside to liberate its contents. It was a book, large white words on the front cover proudly inciting me to Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway: the epitome of self-help, celebrating its twentieth anniversary.

I didn’t even need to look at the slip inside to know it was from my mother.

Unsolicited advice from her wasn't new, heaven knows, but the medium of internet shopping wasn’t one that she’d tried before, as far as I was aware. I showed it to Kelly and a flash of shared comprehension passed between us. It was nice to know we were in it together.

“You’re not going to read it, are you?”

“No. Would you?”

“No, probably not. We could drop it through her door if you want?”

I half-smiled, half-sighed, all at once.

“Let’s not, let’s just go home.”

I was thinking a lot of things as we pulled away from that grotty grotto in the middle of nowhere worth speaking of and made our way back to civilisation. I was thinking that I couldn’t believe we had wasted all that time driving to the crappest part of town to pick up a book I didn’t want and wouldn’t read from somebody I wasn’t speaking to making a point I didn’t want to hear. I was remembering the thud on my doormat all those years ago. I was thinking that sometimes it’s nice just to say no, and that sometimes saying no nicely just doesn’t work. I was thinking that sometimes there’s no point in saying anything at all.

I was thinking that sixteen years ago, if someone else had sent it to another me, I might have read that book.

Then I found myself thinking about the things that didn’t change. I was thinking that when you run out of words to say your last desperate attempt is to use someone else’s. And then I was thinking about the main lesson I learned back then, as clear as if that long but not forgotten summer was in front of me again with that relentless melody playing for weeks on end. Just because somebody can read your writing, it doesn’t mean that they understand you.