Cracks and flaws

“I’m sorry if I’ve been a bit distant.” he tells me as we get ready to go into the meeting room. “I’ve been having some personal problems.”

I never know how to respond when people say this. Are you meant to ask? Say nothing? Is it an invitation to show an interest, or a get out of jail free card? Modern life can be complicated; I have personal problems all the time, but I don’t mention them. Perhaps I should:

Sorry I didn’t respond to that mail, but sometimes I have trouble being happy and yesterday was one of them.

Ah, the mistake in the spreadsheet. My apologies. It’s just that I’m not currently on speaking terms with my mother and I’m trying to decide how to reply to her latest email.

I should have picked up on that point in your voicemail, but you caught me on a day when I’d really rather not be here. I looked across at the trees waving in the wind, and paying attention to you was the last thing on my mind. Maybe if you’d been attractive, it would have been different.

Back in the present, I feel like I ought to say something.

“I’m sorry to hear that. Nothing serious, I hope?”

“It’s marital issues.”

I don’t know him at all well, so I’m very surprised to hear that. He’s always so bland and professional. Marital issues: he almost says it as if he’s having a setback in a project that isn’t going well, like it’s a problem that he could brainstorm his way out of. It sounds so incongruous; work is nothing like life after all, or at least mine isn’t. Arguments and fallings out escalate in an altogether more unpleasant way outside the office. You can’t solve them with whiteboards and slide packs, and you can’t hand them to someone else to deal with. In the end, it comes down to the two of you in a room, trying to sort things out.

We walk down the corridor to the kitchen to get a coffee. What must drive someone to the extent where they tell something like that to a complete stranger? How bad must things be before a tiny piece of someone’s inner life sticks out and is visible?

“That sounds awful. I really hope you can sort it out, because that’s the worst thing in the world. I’d be absolutely lost without my wife.”

And there, without me planning it, a tiny piece of my inner life is poking through the surface too, an emotional hernia, a sign of weakness. I wish it sounded anywhere near as comforting or sympathetic said out loud as it had in my mind. In theory it was supportive, in practice it reeks of rather you than me.

“That’s why I took a day off last week at short notice. Some stuff to work through.”

He always looks so dapper, I realise. Always a tie, knotted just so. Beautiful shirts and cufflinks that match them – proper cufflinks, not novelty jobs. I think about him making all that effort every day, having all that trouble at home, and I don’t know what I can say to him. There’s something so sad about the contrast between his exterior and interior, something nobody else round the table is going to see but me.

At that moment, I don’t feel like an employee, or a customer, or a teammate, or a manager. I feel like a human, and I know this is neither the time nor the place for that. But then the conversation is drowned out by the silence. Instead, I hear the repetitive tinkle of my spoon crashing against the side of the mug, the damp thud of the teabag in the bin, the deafening sound of the fridge door closing. We walk in silence down the corridor to the room. I have to tell him off for a lot of things he hasn’t done, and I don’t know how or whether to pull my punches.

Later on, business concluded, we stand in the car park and shake hands. I tell him to have a safe journey home, something I always seem to say to people when they leave the office. Like everything I’ve said today, it doesn’t sound right somehow. Does it still feel like home to him?

“Thanks for listening.” he says.

I don’t feel like I did, but perhaps it was enough. Perhaps it was just a small piece of kindness he wasn’t expecting that day.

“Please, don’t worry. Like I said, I feel for you. Some things are much more important than work.”

“I don’t think it was even an affair.” he says. Again, I am struck that some people just tell me things – on the bus, at parties, at times like this. Sometimes that might say something about me, but a lot of the time it probably says something about them. On this occasion, I imagine it’s the latter. “She says it was just a one night thing, and I believe her.”

“Oh. I’m so sorry.”

He gives me a rueful smile, a heartbreaking smile. I don’t know why, but I doubt we will talk like this the next time we meet. He will have got things under control and he will be corporate again. We both will be. That’s almost as sad in itself as the conversation we are having now.

“She was forty this year. We’ve been married for twenty years. It’s just… you know?”

I don’t. When I turn forty my wife and I will have clocked up just over a decade. And I don’t have children, have never had to reconcile myself to the fact that one day, out of nowhere, I might have more than one human being that I love more than life itself.

“I guess I can imagine.”

“We’ve talked everything through – more than I thought we would. I mean, she says she still loves me. I think you just take things for granted, and you – well, we – didn’t spend enough time together. It gets so difficult, there’s so much going on, and work as well. I think we need to try and get away more, book some hotels, get to know each other again.”

I don’t envy him that task. I suspect there are all sorts of unpleasant things he is going to get to know before he and his wife get to know one another.

“I’m sure that if both of you want to make things right then you can.”

As I watch him trudge to his car, I wonder whether it sounds different when you mean it. I do believe it’s true, but it still sounds trite hanging in the space between where we stood, like well-meaning fog. Nothing I’ve said has come out right today, despite my very best intentions. Sweep all those words away and all you’re left with is the truth: rather you than me.

The second thing I do when I get to my desk is look around me at everybody I can see. They are all being grown-ups, managing things, changing things, fixing things, complaining about things, presenting their best and most brilliant surfaces to everybody around them. And yet I think I know that beneath all that are cracks and flaws, failings and failures.

For instance, I know that the pretty girl with the jet black asymmetric hair and heavy-rimmed spectacles used to live with someone who worked in our post room, until he slept around and she had to chuck him out. I know that the man over there made a pass at the woman over there, even though both of them are with somebody else. She turned him down, and now everyone knows about it. I know that the man over by the corner got drunk at a party once and told a friend of mine that he had married the wrong woman.

There seem to be a lot of wrong women out there, and no doubt plenty of wrong men too. What happens to the right ones, do they all manage to find someone who’s right for them? Or are they at another party having the same conversation with someone else? I spend a few minutes wondering whether I could find everything that’s wrong with this picture, if I looked hard enough, and then it’s time to get back to work.

But that’s the second thing; the first thing I do when I get back to my desk is to mail my wife. She’s forty in a few years’ time. I don’t want her feeling taken for granted.

On the platform

At Derby, Phil, Carla and I sit on the municipal-looking steel bench and we wait for something to happen, though I know it won’t. We have half an hour to kill, in a town where any time you spent would be a waste. The train station looks more like an airport, all bland concrete and metal rather than the Victorian iron and glass that I love. It is the kind of place where everything you can see is a different shade of no colour at all, except the bright neon yellow handles of Carla’s overnight bag and the blue pattern of my shirt.

The view behind the platform is an uneasy mixture of handsome old factories, long since turned to another use, and hideous new technical colleges. I suppose it’s what ignorant people like to describe as regeneration. We take in the vista, a slowly unfolding nothing. No cars go by on the roads beyond, no people walk past us. It’s as if nobody lives here on this hot weekday afternoon and we share a bench in silence, hands hugging our coffee cups, as we wait in a not-quite-silence which is not quite companionable. Phil and I, up since five in the morning for what has turned out to be a pointless meeting, are both too exhausted to attempt anything but the kind of conversation you have when you’re going through the motions.

“Derby’s minging, isn’t it?” he says.

It seems so true, so close to a rhetorical question, that it takes me a full minute to decide whether it requires a response at all.

“Yes. It’s not the most beautiful place in the world.”

We were both a lot more lively when the day began, chuckling with the absurdity of being up so early, a little high on sleep deprivation. We laughed at the weirdos at the next table, swapped iPods and played each other music, discussed the merits of the bands in his copy of Metal Hammer. “This is the shittest road trip ever” he said to me, somewhere near Burton-upon-Trent, but I knew he didn’t really mean it.

“Jesus, that must be the dullest branch of Argos ever.” he'd said, as the train slipped past a huge windowless structure topped with a solitary logo.

“Phil, that’s a warehouse.”

Sitting on the platform, some way through another long and awkward pause, I think that we could be in a western, if only there was a tumbleweed to liven matters up.

“I like this coffee.” says Phil. “I wouldn’t normally bother with Costa.”

“No, Costa’s not bad.”

If he carries on in this vein, I decide that I’ll just stop responding. It’s nothing personal, I’m just too worn out to pretend. At this point though Carla, who eschewed the delights of the early morning train in favour of spending the night before the meeting in a nearby hotel, starts to talk; about work, about her night in the pub, about her hangover, about work again. Phil and I make eye contact and both of us know that now that the seal is broken she is unlikely to stop until we part company at the other end of the line. Carla sits next to Phil back in the office, and she talks to him most of the time. Usually it’s about work-related matters; stuff she doesn’t like and can’t change, as if he can do anything about them, as if he cares. Neither of those things is true. When she isn’t talking about work, she’s talking about her dogs. We have all tuned Carla out far too often to know how many dogs she has, or their names, but we know she likes dogs.

“Her fucking dogs.” Phil says to me sometimes. “It’s worse than hearing someone talk about their kids.”

I look at Carla, waving her hands around, in full flow, and I know she has no idea that neither of us is really listening. Then I wonder who I might be a Carla to. It’s a subject far too close to home, and so I try to focus on something else. That something else turns out to be the horizon, and it’s still ugly.

I find myself thinking of a story which sums up so much about Phil. We went out for a team social several years ago, and we wound up in an unremarkable Italian restaurant, all dark wood furniture and cheerful (if inauthentic) Polish waitresses. We were getting to decision time, poring over our menus, when Phil – a few drinks to the good by this stage – decided to hold forth.

“Look at this. Italian burger with mozzarella and pesto. Jesus. What’s Italian about a burger? Nothing, that’s what. What kind of knob goes to an Italian restaurant and orders the burger? That’s just fucking ridiculous.”

As I recall we all agreed with Phil, because he was rather loud and very animated, although in truth none of us had strong opinions on the subject, mainly because we hadn’t given it any thought up to that point. Shortly afterwards, the prettiest of the inauthentic Polish waitresses came to take our order.

“I’ll have the Italian burger.” said Phil, to everyone’s disbelief.

“Why did you order that?”

“I just fancied a burger, okay? Get off my case, for Christ’s sake.”

When it turned up I thought it looked pleasant enough, and Phil didn’t waste any time tucking into it. Afterwards, we all shared that awkward moment when your empty plate has been in front of you a little too long without anybody coming to take it away, a moment I have always hated.

“How was your burger, Phil?”

“It was awful. I should have known. Jesus, what kind of tool orders the fucking burger? I never learn.”

I think that tells you a lot of what you need to know about Phil. He’s a man who expects to hate things and does them anyway because, in some ways at least, being right is more important than being happy. You might not remember that fleeting feeling of happiness, but you will always know you were right. And as I think that, sitting on the platform, Carla’s repetitive drone relegated to the background, I have the unpleasant realisation that he and I aren’t too different in that respect, which is my cue to stare at the horizon again.

That afternoon, as most afternoons, the world is divided up into things I know and things that I don’t. I know that Derby is a horrible place, and that if we had to wait here any longer I would go mad. But I don’t know yet, for instance, that I will wind up squashed next to an indomitable black woman in oversized designer glasses who is on a mission to batter my elbow with her five-day old copy of the Metro. I don’t know that she will talk to herself loudly (I’ve got a text. Who’s it from? Let’s read the text) like she’s trying to drown out other voices that I can’t hear, or in the forlorn hope that somebody will join in.

I know that no train could come for us quick enough, but I don’t know that when it does the carriage will be unbearably hot and I will press myself up against the cool window like a dog in a hot car, watching the tracks and the warehouses, the out of town supermarkets and car parks and graffiti-covered bridges rattle by me, stippled by the sunlight, in a constant loop like the inside of a zoetrope.

I will say this, though. As the train snakes into view on the horizon and we pick up our bags and walk forward to the edge of our platform on the edge of nowhere, I know one thing as surely as I know anything at all. When we get on board, Phil will take the seat next to Carla and they will talk about work, all the way home.

100 Words: Tea

They punctuate each Sunday. The first one in bed, when I’m still groggy. The afternoon one as we look through the window at the weekend world outside. The very last, carried down the hall before the lights go off.

The big hand’s how long it takes her to finish, a half-gasp, half-sigh after every mouthful, still piping hot.

The little hand’s how long it takes me. I like to wait - when it’s lukewarm I down it in one go.

My flat’s full of clocks; flip clocks, digital clocks, several in every room. But round here we measure time in cups.

100 Words: l'esprit d'escalier

We understood what l’esprit d’escalier was at school, before we learned much French, because of Michael’s socks.

In the changing room after our latest medley of athletic mediocrity, they were criticised by someone who knew better than us (back then, that could have been anyone).

“Your socks are square.”

The retort came to Michael as we unlocked our bikes, our lessons over: They’re not square, they’re sock-shaped.

He was so proud, we couldn’t bear to tell him it wasn’t very good.

The French have no phrase for a disappointing comeback after the event, but we did, because of Michael’s socks.