Letting go

“Jesus, I can’t believe it.” I said. “That shirt must be twelve years old.”

There was a pause and we looked at it there on the bed, on top of a heap of clothes, crumpled and sad.

It was my own fault for pushing my wife. A terrible hoarder, she keeps things long after the reason to keep them has gone, after the memory of what that reason was has long since disappeared. At the bottom of cupboards, in carrier bags hidden behind doors, in piles, on piles and under piles are things we do not need but never throw away. Our wardrobe still contains the suit jacket she wore on our wedding day, a beautiful pale blue herringbone, marred by a blob of jus from our first dinner as a married couple. We never got rid of the stain and she never got rid of the jacket, and after a few years I gave up asking her to. Recently I decided to lead by example and that’s how I ended up, late on a Sunday night (I always do these things late at night, when right-minded people are going to bed) looking at clothes I no longer wear and deciding what could go to the charity shop.

The early stages of the process were painless – work shirts that had never seemed like a good idea, not even at the time, Seventies patterns which were dated from the moment I got them home and soft, floppy collars that were more relaxed than I wanted to be in the office. Some were mistakes I didn’t realise until later – shirts that look respectable in the packaging but hate the iron more than I do, where after five minutes sitting on a bus you look as if you’ve slept in them. And then of course there were the t-shirts of yesteryear - some that had got a little too unforgiving, some that had got far too forgiving and some that just had slogans I couldn’t mean any more.

Then I got to the twelve year old shirt and, for the first time, I stopped.

“I remember buying this. I was living in Nottingham, and I went to a very cool clothes shop called Ark – I think it’s still there – with Dave. ‘Are you sure, mate?’ he said to me. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you usually wear.’ And I was so proud of it! It was forty pounds, I’d never spent that much on a shirt before, and it was by Mambo, and they were quite cool back in those days. This was the Nineties, remember.”

“It’s hard to believe, looking at it now.” said Kelly, and I had to admit she had a point. The rough check pattern had once been crisp and the dark blues used to sing, but now the colours had faded and the fabric seemed worn and waffly. Scrunched up in a ball it seemed like so much less than the shirt I’d worn on so many fantastic evenings in the old days, when I’d been someone else. Of course, back then I had dressed like someone who was far bigger than me and the shirt hung off me far too much, but back then I didn’t know anyone who would tell me that kind of thing. On the most recent times I’d worn the shirt it had felt a little tight and I know I wasn’t imagining it, because I have someone who tells me that kind of thing now.

I have a picture in the photo album where I’m wearing that shirt. It’s the summer of 1999 and I’m sitting in the back garden of my girlfriend’s dad’s house with my mother. It was somebody’s birthday party. I look so thin, shaven-headed, in this huge check shirt, only just turned twenty-five with no idea what the next twelve years have in store. They had put up a marquee and a DJ was in there, and he played Every Morning by Sugar Ray and You Get What You Give by the New Radicals, because it was the summer of 1999 and Mambo was a fashionable brand and I lived on another planet.

I looked at the shirt again. I knew that it was just an object, and that my memories were my memories, and that they would survive whether I put the shirt in the plastic bag or burned it out the back or buried it in the centre of the earth. So why did I feel sad about giving it away?

“It’s not in bad nick, you know. Don’t you think it has another couple of years in it?”

My wife smiled at me, because she knows as well as anybody that this sort of thing is difficult.

“No, let it go. Look at it, it’s not even all the same colour any more.”

“Look, only there’s only one shirt left. Do you remember how we bought this one?”

“How could I forget? We went to the shop and it was on a dummy perched above the escalator, and it was the only one in the whole store. You wanted to give up and leave it but I insisted on asking, so they got the dummy down and took the shirt off and it was exactly your size.”

“And you said it was an omen.”

“It was!”

I look at it, a light blue short-sleeved shirt with a combination of flowers and stripes. Some of my friends had never liked it, which because I’m stubborn had only made me like it more. I’d bought it before we went away on holiday to Canada in our first year of marriage, and it had fitted me perfectly. Being married, for me at least, means that I buy clothes that fit.

“This is the shirt I left in the wardrobe of that bed and breakfast in Montreal, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s the one. And you were convinced that all was lost and you’d never see it again. You didn’t stop going on about it. So I just mailed the couple that ran the B&B and they sent it by airmail, and they never even charged us.”

“And it’s the shirt I was wearing when I had that accident in Cal Pep, isn’t it?”

“The very same.”

Cal Pep is a magnificent restaurant in Barcelona where you sit at the bar and they don’t take orders, they just keep cooking in front of you and bringing plate after plate of seafood until you’re full. I was wearing the light blue floral shirt and wrestling, with no small degree of ineptitude, with some kind of clam when it opened and sprayed tomato sauce all over me. The surface area which that tiny clam managed to cover had to be seen to be believed.

“That was dreadful. I had to go back to the hotel room smelling of seafood.”

“You looked like you’d been shot! It was so funny.”

We soaked the shirt in cold water overnight, and I complained that everything was ruined and the stain would never come out. She told me not to be so stupid and that there was nothing that could go wrong that we couldn’t fix together. And that shirt and that story are emblematic of a conversation I expect we will continue to have, in one shape or another, for the rest of our lives.

“That was a lovely holiday, wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

I remember how we went to the rooftop terrace of the hotel, and she relaxed in the jacuzzi while I sat on a sunbed, reading an autobiography and smoking a cigar. I remember the smoke disappearing into the Barcelona skyline, and the traffic glinting in the sun on the roads below. I remember the shirt, soaking in cold water in the bath, waiting to prove me wrong. And there it was on the bed five years later, the last garment in the pile, rescued from Montreal, miraculously free of stains, ready to be disposed of. I thought to myself that the nicest thing about inanimate objects is the stories they accidentally become receptacles for.

And then I thought that I’m wrong, because it’s always been me. I’ve always been the receptacle for all those stories. Even so, I couldn’t help myself.

“Can’t I just keep this one?”

“Of course you can. I think you should.”

Barry

Iain and I have sat next to each other at work for over three years now, and I realised the other day that it’s one of the longest relationships I’ve ever had. Much like a marriage, there’s something comfortable about knowing his foibles and routines – his propensity for having clementines after lunch every afternoon for instance, or the way he guffaws at the Reading Post website while he eats them.

I particularly like the way he perks up whenever an attractive woman walks past his desk. Once, several months back, a rather fetching lady crossed his field of vision and I caught him – and he’s usually so subtle – gawping at her, much in the style of Kenneth Connor in the Carry On Films. There was a pause for a moment, and then my instant messenger flashed with a message from him (we always chat on IM, even though we sit next to each other). I’d break her back was all it said. From that, I deduced that Iain must have been without for a few weeks, and I briefly considered taking him to the vet and getting him seen to; maybe it’s not like a marriage after all.

Iain does like a good rant. He swears at his computer all the time – either it’s going too slow or too fast, or it isn’t doing what he wants it to. None of our computers work as fast as our brains, to the extent where we’ve started to suspect that they are built to accommodate the idiots we find ourselves surrounded by. But none of it’s for show, it’s just what he’s like; one time I came in early to find Iain at his desk, the only person in our area, in the middle of a tirade directed at his recalcitrant mouse. Iain bangs his mouse on the desk a lot - I think it might be the only thing that stops him from banging his fist on the desk a lot.

Yet whenever I have a problem with my computer I call Iain over for help and advice, he stands over me and everything works without any problems. I think he missed his vocation in life; he should have worked in IT. Everything seems to magically function better with Iain around – even me. He’s one of life’s eternal dads: patient, capable, yet always on the brink of exasperation. When he says “bloody” he sounds like Prince Philip, and you can imagine him as a very posh old man, instead of the very posh younger man he is. But at the same time he’s every bit as childish and puerile as me, and I’m very lucky that through a series of coincidences we’ve shared a workspace for so long.

We have much the same conversations every week, but that’s fine. They punctuate the five days we spend together and help to give them structure. We find we need that, too, in light of the changes. Phil is leaving soon, for a new job in our bigger, uglier building down the road. We talk about clubbing together and buying him a Fleshlight as a leaving present, and he knows me well enough to laugh but not well enough to realise that I’m not really joking. I move some things in my calendar so I can make his leaving do, because I already know I’ll miss him.

Gemma is long gone, though even months after she left I still find I look up when I see a figure heading towards her desk or think of something to send her in an IM before I realise she’s no longer here. We swap occasional mails and talk about meeting up, but her diary’s very full - I’m told a date has been fixed for January, though I half expect her to cancel about a week ahead of time. I heard second-hand about Gemma’s engagement in Edinburgh, saw people congratulating her on Facebook and thought A few months ago we would have been among the first to know. We would have seen the ring. This would have occupied us at lunchtimes for weeks. Now it is often just Iain and me at lunch. He has a round of sandwiches, a cereal bar and a packet of Frazzles every day, and every day I envy his Frazzles even though nothing is stopping me from buying some myself.

One conversation which is a good barometer of how the week is going starts like this: “What are you up to this weekend?” On a good week, when the work comes in quickly and isn’t too unpleasant and you’re out and about in meetings it can be Friday afternoon before you realise that you’ll soon be at home and free of the ring of the phone and the bold print of an incoming email. On a bad week your mind turns to the subject of two days off very soon. I think our personal record is Monday afternoon, and it wasn’t that long ago.

It’s funny; Iain and I are the same age, with roughly the same views on a lot of things. We both have the same view of what constitutes “working hard enough”. We both like toilet humour and terrible puns. We share an interest in indoor ornithology. And yet our weekends couldn’t be more different; his, planned for him by his wife, seem to involve trips to petting zoos or farms, days out and fun excursions, occasional forays into the centre of town (always described as if it is a dangerous, crowded place). Iain does not control his diary and seems no less happy for that – and I suspect many married men are like this, delegating the logistics to their other half and going wherever the calendar tells them to go. I on the other hand just do what I like, slouch into town if I want, loaf around the flat all day, eat out all the time. On Monday mornings when we have the conversation we always have, the one that starts “How was your weekend?” I often wonder what it must be like to have a life like Iain’s.

It was one of Iain’s more unconventional weekends that got me in trouble a while ago.

“You’re on leave in a couple of weekends’ time, doing anything nice?”

“We’re all off to Scotland.” he said. Another endearing thing about Iain is that he believes himself to be Scottish in the absence of any proof – birthplace, accent, cautious financial outlook – to the contrary. “We’re going to visit my brother’s soon to be ex wife.”

“That’s a bit unusual, isn’t it?”

“Not at all.” said Iain, in a rather frosty and defensive way which suggested that he knew perfectly well that it was. “It wasn't an acrimonious split, and she said she’d like to stay friends.”

“Oh.” I said. One thing I love about the word “oh” is that if you say it right, it can mean or suggest all manner of things but that technically, you haven’t said any of them. On this occasion, I meant it to say My, aren’t you modern? I like to think the dubious look I got from Iain meant that I had succeeded.

“So she’s booked a cottage and invited loads of her friends to stay. We’re going up with the kids, and there will be other people there at the same time. I’m really looking forward to it.”

“Is your brother going to be there?”

Sometimes I think Iain should just adopt a continuous frown whenever he’s speaking to me, only stopping when I say something that cheers him up. I suspect it might save him time and effort.

“No, don’t be ridiculous.”

“Oh.” I said.

“It’s a lovely cottage, I’ve seen pictures on the internet – it’s got all mod cons. It’s got a games room and everything.”

“Is there a hot tub?” I said. Iain didn’t seem very impressed by this.

“Yes there’s a hot tub.”

“Oh.”

I meant that “Oh” to convey something like I imagine you’ll all end up in that hot tub like some kind of debauched swinging party, I know what you posh types are like, it’ll be “White Mischief” all over again, though I slightly blotted my copybook by then saying all that out loud.

“Anyway, she has a new boyfriend now and he’ll be there too.”

“A new man? How did she meet him?”

“Well, he’s known her for bloody ages.” said Iain. The bloody sounded remarkably like Prince Philip. “They were friends years and years ago, when she was first dating my brother, and we think he’s held a candle for her for years.”

We’ve all met men like this – the perpetual understudy, waiting for the situation to become vacant. Hoping against hope that the woman you want will go for coffee with you and complain about her useless, feckless boyfriend, daydreaming that one day she will realise what terrible life choices she has made. When I say “we’ve all met men like this” what I really mean is “we’ve all been men like this”. Or – more honestly – I mean “I’ve been a man like this”. I was secretly quite impressed by the persistence of Iain’s soon-to-be-ex-sister-in-law’s (someone really should think of a more elegant word for that) suitor. How many people’s lonely pursuit ends in success? And isn’t there always a risk that, like Gordon Brown, you’ll covet the top job for years only to discover that you’re rubbish at it?

“And he finally got the girl, did he? Hats off to him. What’s his name?”

“Barry.” said Iain, with a facial expression that seemed to say Go on, make something of it.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. His name’s Barry.” Iain’s expression was unreadable now, not one I had ever seen before. It could have been irritation, trepidation or amusement. It never occurred to me that if I could work that sort of thing out I would have far better people skills.

“You have got to be joking. Barry? You have a friend called Barry? But you’re posh! All your friends are posh! You have friends called Bunty and Biffy and Timmo! You know Tobys and Tarquins! How could anybody take a Barry seriously in those circumstances? I could imagine it if, maybe, he was called Barrington but Barry? You don’t get posh Barries. Name me one posh Barry, I challenge you. You can’t do it, can you? Because I’m thinking about it and all I can summon up is the fat car salesman from EastEnders.”

I’m afraid I may have carried on in this vein for several minutes more; once you start me off it’s very hard to stop me, especially when I’m on my soapbox and finding myself amusing. Iain just looked on, still impossible to figure out. He looked as if he both wanted me to stop and wanted me to carry on. Not that I was paying him that much attention by then, maybe if I had been it wouldn’t have been so disastrous.

“I happen to think Barry is a perfectly nice name.” said Iain.

The signs were all there, and they all said “TURN BACK”. Nevertheless, my conversational juggernaut crashed through the barrier and continued towards the abyss.

“And another thing. How could you possibly date a man called Barry? Just imagine saying I love you Barry. I love you so much You just couldn’t. There aren’t any pop songs about people called Barry. You wouldn’t call a romantic hero Barry. And that’s just romance, imagine when you get to the bedroom. Fuck me Barry. Do it to me Barry. Oh Barry, that feels so good. More, Barry, more. Oh Barry, I want you. Again. Again.”

By the time I had run out of things to say I had sort of lost track of time, but I did have a sneaking suspicion that my voice had got progressively louder as my monologue had gathered momentum. Iain just gave me another curious look and said “He’s a very nice chap. Now let’s get back to work.”

Back at my desk, my IM flashed with a message from Iain. Nothing unusual there, after all we talk all the time on IM even though we sit next to each other. It’s like a marriage, you see.

IAIN: Do you remember the guy in the audit department that sits next to me?

ME: Yes. Why?

What a stupid question. Of course I did, he was in every day. In his mid-forties, friendly, walks with a limp. Sometimes comes to the kitchen with us on our coffee breaks. Has a Brentford F.C. mug which never looks one hundred per cent clean. Has kids from a previous marriage and a new girlfriend. If I turned to my left and craned over Iain’s shoulder I could see him, tapping away at a complicated spreadsheet. How on earth could I forget him, had Iain taken leave of his senses?

Tap tap tap. Smirk smirk smirk. Then another flash.

IAIN: What’s his name again?

ME: Oh.

Old boys

I am always late for everything. Dave, by contrast, is always early; early arriving for things and early leaving, early to bed, early to rise. When he comes to visit me he texts me at 10am saying “I’m here” while I lie in bed contemplating a shower, wondering how long it will take me to run the hoover round and make up the spare bed. The next day, he rises at seven (old habits die hard, and they can’t be broken just because it’s the weekend) and lets himself out. By the time I wake up he’s long gone and usually back home, with the solitary exception of the time he locked himself in my bathroom by accident.

So it’s no surprise when I make my way to the train station, all packed for the holiday, juggling a wheelie case in one hand and a polystyrene tray filled with coffee cups, sugar and stirrers in the other (a peace offering, to say Sorry I’m late, again) to find him already there, sitting in the departure lounge, bag all packed, tickets all bought, not quite out of patience but nearly there.

He looks thinner than I remember; diagnosed with high cholesterol like me, his doctor didn’t offer him a pharmaceutical easy way out the way mine did, and he’s been on a fun free diet for months. It shows. I think he’s thinner than he was when we were at university together. This rankles with me, because I am meant to be the one who’s lost weight. But there are consolations: early to bed, early to rise, no cheese – if that was my life I don’t know how I would cope. But then Dave loves his little boy, and I couldn’t cope with parenthood either.

Funny how we are so similar in so many ways, but the fundamentals of our lives are very different. I don’t know what the pair of feckless nineteen year olds we used to be would have said, if you had told them that almost twenty years later they would be going on holiday together, sharing a hotel room, drinking in the sunshine and talking about their respective ailments. Even back then I had ailments, I was a trendsetter in that respect. “Mate, it’s just a headache” he used to tell me. “You haven’t got cancer.”

Our holidays are often nearly scuppered by a last minute health scare. A few years back his son came down with chickenpox and we had a nerve-wracking run-up to our departure date, waiting to see if his wife would get it too leaving him stranded at home. This time the days leading up to our trip have been marred by Dave’s bout with explosive diarrhoea, something he tells me all about - in far more detail than I needed to know - as the coach trundles down the motorway. As he does so, the informative screen at the front tells me that we’re passing Windsor Castle, and that it’s the largest inhabited castle in Europe. I make a mental note never to tell anybody that fact at parties. I make a second mental note that there are very few people you can discuss your bowel movements with. Perhaps that’s what friendship is; it’s as good a definition as any.

“We’re going to be sharing a bedroom and bathroom for five days.” I tell him. “So I think we need to lay down some ground rules. No wanking. Not even in the bathroom. Not even in the shower.”

“Trust me, it’s going to be preferable to the stuff I’ve been producing in the bathroom over the past few days. Ebony or ivory – take your choice.”

This turn of phrase, I realise, is one of the reasons why I love him.

In the airport, we do all the things we always do before going on holiday. We hand over our cases and swear faithfully that we’ve packed them ourselves. I want to say “I packed it myself, but my wife printed off a checklist for me because she knows that without her I’m hopeless” but I don’t, because I want total strangers to retain a modicum of respect for me. We fold our coats into plastic tubs and watch them go through the x-ray machine, awkwardly putting on our belts when we get to the other side. That’s usually the point when I realise that it’s real and I’m going away, that soon we will be in the air and all this will just be a dot on a map, growing increasingly distant.

We look round the duty free and I spray my wrist with fragrances I have no intention of buying. We grab a bite in an Italian restaurant and talk about plans for our destination – where we’ll go, what we’ll eat, what we both want to see. What Dave doesn’t necessarily realise is that I’ve been on my own for half a week, the flat full of absences. Her books, unread on the bedside table. Her clothes, not yet taken down, hanging on the clothes horse. Her pile of CDs next to the sofa, never tidied away. Everything I see has reminded me of everything I can’t see, and the silence at night and in the morning is something I cannot make myself like. And so seeing Dave, and knowing that we will be like an old married couple for the next five days, makes me happier than he knows. If he wants to describe his toilet habits in detail, I for one am happy to let him.

“The worst thing is that I’m on Imodium” he tells me, fortunately after we’ve finished eating.

“Why is that bad exactly?”

“Because it’s feast or famine. Eventually I’ll go to the toilet and then it will play havoc with my haemorrhoids.”

Ah, the perennial topic of Dave’s piles. I remember the first time he told me about them - we were sitting outside the café in the sunshine, and I reassured him because I knew exactly what he was talking about. I never used to; piles were always a source of hilarity, something that happened to other people. I remember the time I went to visit my dad and found a shopping list written on the whiteboard in his study: Bread, milk, Anusol. I distinctly recall sniggering about it. I remember, too, that when I was much younger my friend Dan suffered with them and when we all took the piss out of him he turned to me once and said “What you don’t understand is that there are two kinds of people; people who’ve had piles, and people who will have piles one day.” If I was still in touch with Dan, I would probably tell him he was right.

The thing I could never get over about having piles is that moment when, after straining in agony on the porcelain, you look down into the toilet bowl. Based on the ordeal you’ve just gone through, you fully expect to see a bunch of rusty keys clanking in the water but instead, it just looks like the product of any normal visit to the lavatory. There aren’t even serrated edges. I remember telling Dave this when he first complained to me about having piles.

“I told my doctor that thing you’d said about the rusty keys.” says Dave as our minibus scuttles across the tarmac to our waiting plane.

“Really?”

“Yes. He laughed like a drain. ‘I’ll use that when I talk to patients’, he said.”

“Charming. Haven’t you brought any, you know…”

“…Arse bullets? Yes, of course I have. I just hope I don’t have to use them.”

I know that Dave’s bag contains suppositories and enough Gaviscon to fill a bath. I know that I have cholesterol pills, and pills for my acid reflux, and Gaviscon tablets, and painkillers, and Nytol in case I can’t sleep because my acid reflux gets bad and I worry that I’m going to die before I wake up. I know that we are the youngest looking old people on this or any minibus. I know I can tell him that I worry, because I know he will understand.

“I told Andrea that we’re going to be wandering round Lisbon like two old men, complaining about all our ailments. She was so sweet. ‘But you won’t look old’, she said to me.”

That’s very kind of her, and it may have something to do with the fact that I haven’t seen her in ages.

“You know what the worst thing about piles is?” I say.

“No, what’s that?”

“It’s the packaging for Preparation H. If you look on the tube, in big letters, it says Three way action. Honestly, it does. Look at me: I’m 37 years old and my only chance of three way action is sticking ointment up my arse.”

Dave laughs. Even after nearly twenty years, it still feels like an achievement when I get a laugh out of him. I know he feels exactly the same.

“Shit, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Just out of interest, how bad was your diarrhoea?”

“Put it this way.” he says as the minibus comes to a halt and the double doors crank open. “There was one point at the weekend when I could have jetwashed an entire patio.”

I get that feeling of revulsion and pride again. Dave will start getting jittery soon; he’s scared of flying, an irrational fear which has got worse as he’s got older. I in turn am working on an equally irrational fear of having a heart attack while the aircraft is in mid-air (it’s not enough to die in a screaming fireball along with all the other passengers, I have to be special). We haul our hand luggage and our neuroses up the steps – I don’t really know which weighs more - and prepare to board the plane.

I stop at the top, fish out my boarding pass and I think to myself My, what a wild week we’re going to have.